In case you missed it, the Jordanian king has “sacked his entire government”:http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/meast/02/01/jordan.government/index.html?hpt=C1, and called on the newly appointed Prime Minister Marouf al-Bakhit to take “practical, swift and tangible steps to start a real political reform process … [and] bolster democracy” (quotes from the “NY Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/02/world/middleeast/02jordan.html?_r=1&hp.) There is of course a rich irony to ushering in democracy by having an autocrat unilaterally decide to change the government, but perhaps even more importantly we’ve seen this movie before and usually this isn’t how it ends. While I’m sure there are plenty of examples where this sort of thing is enough to ride out a wave of protest, this is again where the 1989 analogy may become helpful. My sense is that during the collapse of communism, the momentum as protest as spread from one country to another became so strong that these kind of half-baked measures — which only months earlier would have been a huge step forward – came to be seen as unacceptable precisely because other countries (Poland originally being a notable exception) were going all the way to open elections.
Thus again with the caveat that I know nothing about Jordanian politics, my suspicion is that the success of the King’s move today may actually be determined more on the streets of Cairo than Amman. It’s one thing for little Tunisia over in Northern Africa to throw out their leader; if the Egyptians bring down the Mubarak regime, it becomes more difficult to imagine that Jordan will settle for a new government installed by an old King.
One other quick point I want to make. My comments today and from last week (“here”:https://themonkeycage.org/2011/01/will_2011_be_1989.html and “here”:http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0111/48366.html) about the appropriateness of the 1989 analogy for understanding current events in the Middle East are intended to pertain solely to the question of whether regime _change_ will spread throughout the region in the manner that it _spread_ throughout East Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. I have not yet had anything to say about whether the types of regimes that could emerge _following_ regime change in the Middle East will look anything like the regimes that emerged in East Central Europe or the former Soviet Union. That is a separate and different – albeit interesting and important – discussion, and one on which I will have more to say shortly, as well as one on which I would welcome guest posts from regional specialists.