In egypt they started doingit. They got an elected government and then the same people, many but not all, the same numbers of people who had gone to the streets the first time went back into the streets and asked the army to come in but this time they werent asking the army to take away an undemocratic government,they were asking the army to take away a government that had been elected so the army did and the accomplishment was the end of democracy for at least a generation. Thats an autonomous act of a collective people, i argue, against democracy. To say we tried it, it didnt work, we dont like it. And thats another thing, we think democracy is that people put themselves in power and the people want to stay in power but thats not always true. People can put themselves in power and take themselves out of powerand thats what happens , i know thats a controversial claim but im curious to hear your thoughts about the mismatch question. Why it was that people didnt talk about democracy initially and in some ways they did manage to go down that route in my view because of the Global Financial crisis of 2008, the economy was in recession and of course that startedbecause of economic problems. It was not the first time in north africa in particular so when it happened and remember i had just moved to anchorage and started at harvard and i didnt think much of itexcept that it was another individual tragedy and then in a few weeks , president ben ali left and so people were not rejecting pretending to even fire the president , they were doing jobs for as you said for access to the job market and little by little of course as people continue to protest and protesting in the capital in particular expanded their vocabulary became more and more political but no one would have thought that they would have led and when people gathered in the capital in the center of tunis, nobody thought this would happen so people were a little bit stunned and when the morning came everybody was asking what are we going to do . And what has happened . I think what happened after is that some smart people and all political elites from legal spheres to intellectuals gathered. Some of them from the old opposition, some of them from the islamic tribes and some of them from the left and they decided to proceed with the transition that was initiated. So there was a series of compromise that there was also a strategy. And in particular a strategy from secular liberal elites who failed the transition in which the islamics would have to compromise. So the compromise was built from the beginning. Its not that tunisians are, not at all, its just that it was all done through thinking about how to force everybody to compromise and in particular through an electoral law thats forced all the different societies compromise and this was very well thought out. Id push back on the idea, youre probably tunisian so you have some pride so therefore you dont want to say that tunisians are special but i would want to make an argument about tunisian political culture. Thats been a little bit different from Egyptian Elite political culture. You see the seculars in indonesia wanted the islamists to compromise and thats certainly true but when they ran the election and the islamists won a plurality in the constituent assembly , a lot of secularists werevery nervous. There thinking these guys wont want to compromise and i was there or six times and i spent a lot of time with the islamists. They were the ones who were willing to talk to me fascinatingly, they the ones the ones going come hang out with us and they themselves were nervous that the secularists would try to use the apparatus of the state to arrest them and suppress them and throw them in prison so what happened in egypt is despite their electoral successes they ended up out of office, depressed, imprisoned and dead and the tunisian him islamists saw that coming and were concerned that it not happen to them so they were prepared to negotiate and the second release in tunisia were prepared to negotiate and everyone disrupted everyone so they knew nobody was coming to help them whereas in egypt you saw very different circumstances. Once the egyptian muslim brothers were in power they were not willing to bring in nonislamists in rule in the government they were paranoid with reason. But they were scared to the point where they said we won the election. They hadnt exactly one but were just going to force it and when time came for them to do their constitution in egypt they forced their constitution in three weeks, it took the tunisians almost 3 and a half years , it was a slaw long slow process of everyone negotiating. So i do think that continuity matters and matters that you have leadership on both sides in tunisia to say nothing of Civil Society and a lot of other features that tunisia had better circumstances to do. Now we moved to political islam and islamist movements. You also made an argument about the future of islamist movements or Democratic Political islam so i was interested to hear you about tunisia and perhaps also versus the radical islamic reprisals after 2015 and how this has led the arab spring in an entirely different direction. Yes so i think Political Climate is one of the central themes of the book and its one of the central themes ive been interested in my entire career and ive read a lot from your book and everything i read , i cite the things that you have written about this so i want to hear your views. Let me start by saying one thing both of us have argued is that the phrase political islam is a very broad phrase and incorporates a very big range of different perspectives and worldviews. As we both have experienced the frustration of trying to say that in audiences in france and the United States and its hard to get people to listen to that, even in the arab speaking world its hard to get people to listen to that point but the events show you the extraordinary range. You have everything from the tunisian islamists who were led by a selfdescribed liberal intellectual who many times as he was described by his opponents as a closet wouldbe , any dictator. And people like me were saying well, judging by what hes been writing for 25 years and thats not the case and they said thats what he was writing about now hes going to have power and he didnt become a dictator and in fact he presided over a series of compromises and eventually the transformation of his own party so it no longer even called itself and Islamist Party and now they say theyre founded on the explicit model of christian democratic parties in europe and the key event for that was that after major public protests that threaten the party, they said they would give up on their demands to put the word sharia in the constitution. And make sharia a basis for the tunisian government which i had said for many years was an irreducible demand for political islamists. I said that in one of my earlier books so thats the core constitutional strategy and they gave up on that strategy and that unsurprisingly as a right wing of the party was coming out led to the party losing its reason for being. It was no longer an islamic Democratic Party, it was something more banal from their perspective and more liberal from our perspective and then in egyptyou have the middle ground. You had a base camp of Muslim Brotherhood companies that had a range of different opinions but was not very nuanced, not very politically skilled or sophisticated. The party had intellectuals but they were excluded from the government part of the process. They had a disastrous thing happened a decade before when a bunch of the intellectual moderates and broken off to form their own party. Thats bad because then youve lost the kind of poor people who would have been the people getting compromise and they tried to run a democratic constitution but they just did it badly. And then at the other extreme you have the people who went to join the islamic state. They were not democrats in any sense, they were antidemocrats but they were also motivated by broadly speaking the old slogan that islam is the answer but the mode in which they did it was not the mode of the muslim brothers to say we want to be modern. They said we want to be the opposite, we want everything to follow the way of the prophet and his companion and we want to reconstitute a policy which they considered a utopia and we would consider a dystopia where they would use classical teachings ofislamic law that were probably never implemented in history the way that they did it. But which was in the book and thats what authorized the killing of in a sense civilians. It authorized sexual enslavement and rate of women who were neithermuslims nor people that the book might see. Some of the horrors of the modern world, some of the most horrifying things in their context that weve seen in the last half century. Maybe not in scale. There are worse in scale in rwanda and pull hot but in terms of the selfconsciousness of the horror, thats some pretty horrifying things all of which are identified as islamic and they were justified on those grounds so i see isis , the caliphate as trying to ask dan she had a version of islam as a politic. And my last point is all three of these models, the liberal model, the middleoftheroad model and the radical extreme model, they all failed one way or another. The caliphate failed because it was suppressed by the rest of the world. Something like that will not come back. But the brotherhood failed because they were not able to compromise and bring in other political actors and as for the nasser model i wouldnt say that party failed. It succeeded, it still participates but it lost its character as distinctively islamic democratic. It became something more feeling, i would rather see a liberal muslim party than islamic Muslim Democratic Party but from the standpoint of its hardcore supporters they gave up on one of the things that was definitional so i think political islam as we studied it for the last quarter century has changed and i think its not going to recover for a long time. Youll see Muslim Brotherhood parties in jordan and morocco where they work with the monarchy and their more normalized. Its not like the partyceased to exist but its not going to have the same kind of power or cohesion and no ones going to believe at the magic moment when arab countries democratize then the Muslim Brotherhood will come to power. The Muslim Brotherhood was saying that for a quartercentury and it was true. They did. From1990 algeria elections in till 2011 they were saying give us selections and were going to win and they got elections and they did win. They also lost in some elections. In tunisia the results are less important at various levels but also the financial level. This is also an important change, they win the first time and then they come back so power is important for them also to participate but i think it might be important also that all these three models arebeing discussed today in tunisia. Theyre being discussed from the ideological point of view and from the Strategic Point of view. That might also change the way people view those movements. And hopefully will vote or not vote for them in the future. What i see here that is importantwhen it comes to political islam is the opening up of the base about the ideas. It hasnt lasted very long in egypt. It hasnt happened in syria but it has happened in other spaces, not just tunisia but other spaces. The ideas are being discussed and im thinking algeria as well , lebanon. Although of course over there things are quite mixed. Take algeria which isin a complicated place right now on its own. At the very end of the book what happened there is after the arab spring it didnt happen until i was writing afterwards in the book, the book was done and going to press but of course their transition does not look like a transition of the tunisians , at least in the foreseeable future but imagine a scenario where there was greater powersharing and greater openness to democratic elections. Do you think a Muslim Brotherhood style party would have any chance . I dont think it would. And yet in 1990 and the algerians fought acivil war over it, that was where the islamists, that was there Comingout Party and that was the where they said,turns out people will vote for us if theres free elections. You can argue that the arab spring started there in 1990 and 1991. But i think today they would have a constituency, not that they wouldnt win any seats in parliament. But perhaps not at the level of 91. When they formed the electoral competition. And this is something you see everywhere , that they win the first time and it is not the case afterwards. So political islam is one of my central themes in the book and another thing i want to hear what you think about is arab nationalism. And i say in the book that the two biggest puppets in modern middle eastern politics but certainly the last quarter century have been parent nationalism or more where arab nationalism and political islam and i think theyve both been changed and what i say about arab nationalism is on the one hand there is a panera cultural nation which is what explains why people in all these different countries, the circumstances were different were excited by each others movements for freedom and adopted the same slogan and engaged in together no nonarab country had a arab spring and nearly every arab country had some manifestation of the arab spring even though some governments quashed it very quickly so theres more of an arab nation and one might imaginebut i think internal National Level , the individual arab states are looking infinitely weaker to my mind then they looked before the arab spring. But maybe tony jet is a very unusual example as an outlier. In egypt you didnt have differentreligious denominations but you had different political orientations that split the country into an in syria you had religious denominations , and that was disastrous, it was enough to generate a civil war first in the iraqi civil war which itself was based on ethnic city and religious denomination so it seems like libya tried to do the trick with also some elements of that too but if you break thewhole idea of the arab nation and individual nationstate forms its been undercut and it used to look like lebanon was the outlier. Arab nations we are taught to believebelong to a nation and of course lebanon when they fight the civil war every three years so most of the countries in the region look more like lebanon. Do you think theres been a real change in this dimension or do you think this is more beforehand . I think youre right in the sense that the arab spring the homogeneity of those nations has been put into question and because of the conditions of authoritarians it has only worsened. And there is the violencealso in syria for instance. This questioning of homogeneity has taken very lethal forms whereas in tunisia because of the Democratic Party it has taken the form of polarization but polarization with democratic debates. So i think youre right, everywhere this homogeneity has disappeared. The dream of the homogenous nation as in a way been weakened but the outcome is very different because of the circumstances are very different. And so i agree on that with you. The question for me now when we think of the arab spring which has since fallen into winter isis it finished . Do you think of this arab winter as not interesting anymore, finished . Is this something that is closed or is this something that can be reborn into a Second Spring . I think a little bit of both. I used the term winteron purpose and i think its going to be a long winter. I think in syria , in egypt, i think in the countries that are torn by civil war still yemen and libya, i think it will be at least a generation before you are to see another attempt by a public that was really motivated to make meaningful and lasting change so in that sense i think we are in the long winter. But and its a significant but, this phenomenon of people organizing themselves and demanding change and in arabic speaking countries is with us to stay and its especially true at a moment where there is transition coming and regimes are vulnerable. Though that was in common in sudan recently and in algeria. Transition looming and of course that was also true in tunisia. It was also true in egypt. You had the old leader with a transition looming and you got a transition generated in part by the way the army and the Security Forces reacted to big uprisings. In syria, theyoung leader, no transition looming. Boom, no successful arab spring transition. Same in morocco, same in jordan. So i think in countries where theres this transitional issue , thats a possibility still but the thing is both sides have seen the movement so the people who go to the streets and call for change, they see the movie and they know they have to be careful but the military and Security Services also have seen the movie and they know what they can do is they can authorize a certain amount of transition. They can offer a certain amount of compromise and be ready when they come back and they reassert their power like they did in egypt so its both inspiring to me that people are still willing to do this even after the failure of the arab spring and i want to be realistic in saying i dont think were going to see Something Like the tunisian outcome in sudan or algeria and last but not least lebanon which they want to throw up their hands but in some ways its the most fascinating question in europe, here you have in the midst of a massive state crisis with the value of the lebanese currency crashing and people like savings going out the window. You had thishuge outpouring of public sentiment in the winter. Right around arab spring seasonal time. Which was january, you had people demanding change. But you had a Political Class that wasnt capable of doing anything in response and people were saying get rid of the whole Political Class, start again. Good idea but then you still maintain new Political Classes to step in so i see that as an example of where we are. The ideals of the arab spring are there and outof this winter there could be another spring and there will be seasons are cyclical but sometimes winter can last a long time and i see us in a potentially pretty long winter. Gr