Print 
PDFIs the same kind of wishful thinking that led some analysts to glibly explain Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century now distorting perceptions of the tumult in the Arab world?
“It should have been clear that the odds against the emergence of a democratic order in the foreseeable future in the Arab world were impossibly heavy,” the celebrated historian Walter Laqueur writes in World Affairs:
The lack of a democratic tradition, the great and growing influence of Islamism, the weakness of the secular forces and their disunity, overpopulation in a country like Egypt, the inherent poverty that made it so difficult to find work for the cohort of young people—given these and many other circumstances, only a miracle could have led the uprising of early 2011 toward a democratic order of sorts. True, political leaders have to be optimists in their speeches and approach; frequently they have to proceed on the assumption of the “as if.” But this should not turn into self-deception, and decision-makers must not base their policy on the occurrence of miracles.
