Speaker 1: Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show
Speaker 1: where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news.
Speaker 1: I'm Noah Feldman. This episode is going to be a
Speaker 1: little different from what we usually do here on Deep
Speaker 1: Background because it's going to involve a switchero. It's going
Speaker 1: to be a conversation between me and Jacob Weisberg. Jacob
Speaker 1: is the head of Pushkin Industries, which is the podcast
Speaker 1: production company that makes this show. He's also the person
Speaker 1: who had the idea for Deep Background in the first
Speaker 1: place and called me and said, hey, Noah, maybe you
Speaker 1: want to try a podcast. And the reason that I
Speaker 1: asked Jacob to come on the show and take my
Speaker 1: job is that the conversation we're going to have is
Speaker 1: about a new book that I've wrote that's being published
Speaker 1: today called The Arab Winter, A Tragedy. For those of
Speaker 1: you who've been writing in to say that it's time
Speaker 1: for us to add some non COVID topics alongside our
Speaker 1: COVID coverage, this one's for you, and I promised that
Speaker 1: we'll return to COVID coverage in our very next episode
Speaker 1: later this week. Jacob, thank you so much for coming
Speaker 1: to Deep Background. Well, Noah, thanks for inviting me to
Speaker 1: play you on your show for an episode. It's a
Speaker 1: tall order. And I also want to thank you for
Speaker 1: prompting me to read your new book, Or Winter, which
Speaker 1: I really enjoyed. I mean, it's a very short book,
Speaker 1: which made it easy, but it's so packed with ideas
Speaker 1: about what happened in the Arab Spring and challenging I
Speaker 1: guess the conventional wisdom that the Arab Spring was a
Speaker 1: complete disaster. Let's go back to the beginning. What was
Speaker 1: the Arab Spring? Where did it happen, Why did it happen?
Speaker 1: What was it? The Arab Spring was a kind of
Speaker 1: single episode that then read into a region wide contagion.
Speaker 1: But the contagion was, at least in the first instance,
Speaker 1: a really good one. It started in Tunisia, which is
Speaker 1: a tiny little country barely ten million people, and which
Speaker 1: is not usually thought of as hugely influential in the
Speaker 1: Middle East. In fact, most of the time, even most
Speaker 1: people in the Arab world never think about Tunisia at all.
Speaker 1: And what set it off initially was that a poor
Speaker 1: frustrated fruit seller who had been subject to abuse from
Speaker 1: government officials and whose money supply was running out killed
Speaker 1: himself in a very dramatic way. He set himself on fires,
Speaker 1: a horrible tragedy, and in response to the sense that
Speaker 1: he had quite literally ignited a sense of protest. Hundreds
Speaker 1: of thousands of Tunisians, ordinary Tunisians, from all different social classes,
Speaker 1: all different backgrounds, started going into the streets and protesting
Speaker 1: their governments, and they developed a couple of key slogans.
Speaker 1: The most famous of one was the people want the
Speaker 1: overthrow of the regime. And they chanted it, and they
Speaker 1: chanted it, and remarkably and incredibly, within a couple of weeks,
Speaker 1: the regime gave way and the guy who had been
Speaker 1: the dictator of the country for almost twenty years left
Speaker 1: the country, and suddenly people were realizing that they had
Speaker 1: the opportunity to remake their political system almost entirely. So
Speaker 1: that's how it started. But then if that be the
Speaker 1: only story would have been an incredible story. It would
Speaker 1: have been a huge success story of one tiny little country.
Speaker 1: But what happened is that it was contagious, and so
Speaker 1: what you got were what started as copycut demonstrations in
Speaker 1: much bigger and more consequential countries, most famously Egypt, and
Speaker 1: then in Egypt, the same story played out again, at
Speaker 1: least initially, and people were chanting the same chance, and
Speaker 1: they were watching each other on Arabic speaking satellite TV,
Speaker 1: so they knew what the other people were saying. In
Speaker 1: the other countries, each of these protests had some local flavor.
Speaker 1: They were substrating the name of their own dictator, but
Speaker 1: basically the script was repeated, and in Egypt it seemed
Speaker 1: to work too. The dictator left there too, and then
Speaker 1: it was tried in other countries as well, and so
Speaker 1: it was a kind of sweeping contagion of attempts at
Speaker 1: political self determination in a bunch of Arabic speaking countries.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about Egypt a little bit as the
Speaker 1: place where the Arab spring seemed to turn dramatically into
Speaker 1: what you call the Arab winter. You know, first you
Speaker 1: had this moment in Tarier Square where protesters were out
Speaker 1: demanding the end of the autocratic regime, democratic replacement, and
Speaker 1: they got it, they got the more Sea government elected.
Speaker 1: And then people turned out in Terior Square again and
Speaker 1: demanded if it or the end of democracy? Why did
Speaker 1: that happen? And what do you make of it? These
Speaker 1: two events, which I called for short in the book
Speaker 1: Tarier one in Tarier two were bookends to a very
Speaker 1: very intense year and three quarters in which which a
Speaker 1: lot of things happened, some of which seemed to follow
Speaker 1: the correct way that we in democratic countries imagine things
Speaker 1: should go when a dictator comes down, and some of
Speaker 1: which went wildly the other way. So the first thing
Speaker 1: is that it took some time, but after the army
Speaker 1: had ordered the old dictator hosting Mubarak to leave, there
Speaker 1: eventually were big, pretty free public elections, and they were imaginations.
Speaker 1: Along the way. There was a question of who would
Speaker 1: be allowed to run for office, and could old regime
Speaker 1: people run for office, and what about members of the
Speaker 1: Muslim Brotherhood, which was the largest social slash political organization
Speaker 1: in the country. But ultimately there was an election. It
Speaker 1: was pretty free, and what happened is that the Brotherhood
Speaker 1: candidate won the presidency narrowly. The Brotherhood won a plurality,
Speaker 1: not a majority of but a plurality in parliamentary elections,
Speaker 1: and the Brotherhood won the chance to craft a new constitution.
Speaker 1: And that panicked a lot of people who were of
Speaker 1: what used to be called one person, one vote, one time,
Speaker 1: people who said, look if the Muslim Brotherhood writes the constitution,
Speaker 1: if they become the people who are the dominant political party,
Speaker 1: they're going to abolish democracy. Now, to be sure, that
Speaker 1: wasn't their claim. They said we're going to be democratic,
Speaker 1: We're going to write a constitution. But that was the
Speaker 1: word that a lot of people had, and slowly but surely,
Speaker 1: various things happened that left those folks more and more
Speaker 1: concerned and worried. But it was a very complicated dant.
Speaker 1: So you just give you the most prominent example. The
Speaker 1: Constitutional Court of Egypt, which was made up at the
Speaker 1: time still of people from the old regime, disbanded the legislature.
Speaker 1: It said the elections had been illegitimate, and it disbanded
Speaker 1: the legislature. That left Morsey, who was the newly elected president,
Speaker 1: in a position where he couldn't govern through the legislature.
Speaker 1: And so then his critics started saying, he's an autocrat,
Speaker 1: he's an autocratic, he's governing autocratically. Well, of course he
Speaker 1: was governing autocratically because there was no legislature, and there
Speaker 1: was a deep word they were going to do the
Speaker 1: same thing with a constitutional assembly and disbanded that too,
Speaker 1: and so the Muslim Brotherhood rammed through a constitution very
Speaker 1: very fast, without listening to dissenters, and Morsey himself, afraid
Speaker 1: that the Constitutional Court would block that, issued an edict
Speaker 1: where he said, nobody can put me out of office.
Speaker 1: The Constitutional Court can't put me out of office until
Speaker 1: the constitution is in place. Now, in practice, that was
Speaker 1: only going to be a week or two. But then
Speaker 1: his opponent said, look now he's made himself a dictator.
Speaker 1: And ultimately what that led to is that opponents of
Speaker 1: the Brotherhood and opponents of the regime came back into
Speaker 1: the streets and they replicated what they had done in
Speaker 1: January and February and March of twenty eleven, and they demanded,
Speaker 1: with the same slogans and the same chance, with a
Speaker 1: comparable number of people in the square, that the army
Speaker 1: get rid of the elected democratic president. And after some delay,
Speaker 1: the army did. And so what happened was that the
Speaker 1: first time they were getting rid of a dictator, the
Speaker 1: second time they were getting rid of the guy who
Speaker 1: had been elected president, and that led to the army
Speaker 1: taking over again, and that was the end of democracy
Speaker 1: in Egypt. So that's the real conundrum Noah, and you
Speaker 1: talk about this at the level of democratic theory and
Speaker 1: political philosophy. But can there be a democratic decision to
Speaker 1: eliminate democracy? And if so, why is a democratic decision
Speaker 1: to do that valid? I mean, by making such a decision,
Speaker 1: as it were democratically, you're invalidating the idea of the
Speaker 1: democratic decision should be the ones account. I agree with you.
Speaker 1: It's a super hard problem and I really struggled with it,
Speaker 1: and I try to show that struggle in the book
Speaker 1: and try to lay out both sides of the possible view.
Speaker 1: I mean, you could take the view I don't take this,
Speaker 1: but you could take the view that when the people
Speaker 1: with a capital P get together and demand democracy, that's legitimate.
Speaker 1: That's democratic because they're asking for democracy. But when the
Speaker 1: same people get together and say we don't want democracy anymore,
Speaker 1: we want to get rid of a democratic leader, it's undemocratic.
Speaker 1: And in the end, I don't buy that. And the
Speaker 1: reason I don't buy it is that what makes the
Speaker 1: choice of democracy in their first place legitimate isn't that
Speaker 1: there's some fair process or fair procedure for democracy. I mean,
Speaker 1: what it really amounts to is a lot of people
Speaker 1: going to the public square and saying get rid of
Speaker 1: the dictator. And in Egypt, they didn't even say give
Speaker 1: us democracy. They just said get rid of the dictator.
Speaker 1: And then they held elections. And so what made that
Speaker 1: legitimate was that, in some sense, the Egyptian people as
Speaker 1: a collective were saying what they wanted, and they weren't
Speaker 1: doing a through a procedure, and you couldn't count them
Speaker 1: all up and figure out if they were a majority
Speaker 1: of the public, which of course they weren't. It was
Speaker 1: legitimate because it was an expression of genuine popular sentiment.
Speaker 1: And then when the same number of people or maybe
Speaker 1: even more do the same thing and call for the
Speaker 1: changing of the democratic system, they're not operating within the
Speaker 1: ordinary rules of democracy. But you have to believe. I
Speaker 1: think that what they're doing is just as legitimate as
Speaker 1: when people called to get rid of the dictator. Otherwise
Speaker 1: the first one isn't legitimate. I think whatever rules you
Speaker 1: apply to figure out whether the demand to get rid
Speaker 1: of a dictator is legitimate are going to give you
Speaker 1: the same result when people do the same thing to
Speaker 1: say they want to get rid of a government which
Speaker 1: was democratically elected. So you know, I think The upshot
Speaker 1: of that is that we forget that democracy is something
Speaker 1: that the people choose, and therefore democracy is something that
Speaker 1: people could choose not to choose. It's not inevitable, it's
Speaker 1: not necessary. It's not the only system of government that's
Speaker 1: fair or legitimate. But in advance of a legitimate constitutional
Speaker 1: system which lets people have votes with equal weight, you
Speaker 1: do have this problem of being back to you the
Speaker 1: general will. I mean, that's who constitutes the people and
Speaker 1: what determines which people and whose views predominate. We didn't
Speaker 1: count the people into rear square, and why, for that matter,
Speaker 1: should only people in Cairo and the nation's capital who
Speaker 1: have the ability to turn out in the biggest public
Speaker 1: square have a say in determining what the general will is.
Speaker 1: I totally agree, and you know, I try to use
Speaker 1: a thought experiment to get people to ask themselves what
Speaker 1: their own intuitions are about this. What I say is,
Speaker 1: think of what it felt like to you if you
Speaker 1: were watching when you saw people in dictatorships going out
Speaker 1: into the streets in hundreds of thousands and saying, you know,
Speaker 1: leave or we want the end of the regime, or
Speaker 1: you know, we demand social justice. What happened in Ukraine,
Speaker 1: or what happened in so many countries in Eastern Europe
Speaker 1: when authoritarian governments were brought down by public protests. Exactly
Speaker 1: in all of these places. You can ask yourself, what
Speaker 1: do you feel when you see on TV thousands or
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of people making this demand. And if
Speaker 1: you feel, and I think most people do, feel wow,
Speaker 1: you know, that's great, that's real. Those people are taking
Speaker 1: charge and the world should listen to them, then you
Speaker 1: share in some way the intuition I think that there
Speaker 1: is such a thing as a people which is capable
Speaker 1: of speaking for itself, even though in none of those
Speaker 1: cases is there a formal vote, is there a census,
Speaker 1: Are there districts with ballots? The whole apparatus that we
Speaker 1: associate with the democracy that's up and running only exists
Speaker 1: when a democracy is up and running. You know, at
Speaker 1: that initial moment of demand, there's something about the core
Speaker 1: collective political action of the people that's motivating people, and
Speaker 1: it's motivating us to think that that is legitimate and
Speaker 1: that is democratic. And that is hard because we're so
Speaker 1: used in thinking of democracy in terms of vote counts
Speaker 1: and districts, but democracy is more than that. It's bigger
Speaker 1: than that, and it's also much more vulnerable than just
Speaker 1: the kind of democracy that plays by the rules. Democracy
Speaker 1: doesn't always play by the rules. We'll be back in
Speaker 1: just a moment. The book seems to be very much
Speaker 1: an attempt to salvage something positive from the Arab Spring,
Speaker 1: and you focus a lot on this idea of these
Speaker 1: Arab countries taking political response ability for themselves the first
Speaker 1: time after centuries of imperialism and then these autocracies that
Speaker 1: gave the people no say You say, basically, you know,
Speaker 1: at least they're taking responsibility for their own destinies. And
Speaker 1: the really hopeful example you talk about is Tunisia, where
Speaker 1: you mentioned the Arab Spring began. You were involved in
Speaker 1: the effort at constitution writing there, giving some advice to
Speaker 1: the Constitutional Commission. Talk a little bit about both your
Speaker 1: experience and why Tunisia remains the one real bright spot
Speaker 1: to come out of the Arab Spring. So, yeah, I
Speaker 1: was very lucky. I was in Tuonesia's six times during
Speaker 1: the process of their constitutional negotiations, and partly because it
Speaker 1: was a small country with a relatively small political elite,
Speaker 1: partly because I kept on coming back. What began as
Speaker 1: an opportunity just to show up and learn turned into
Speaker 1: an opportunity to collaborate a little bit with people who
Speaker 1: are actually drafting the constitution. And you know, I and
Speaker 1: my research associate who went with me made I don't know,
Speaker 1: I think a couple of hundred suggestions, all of them
Speaker 1: at the request of people on the Constituent Assembly, and
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of them got incorporated into the constitution.
Speaker 1: I have no idea if they were incorporated because we
Speaker 1: recommended them or because they were just good ideas that
Speaker 1: everybody would have thought of. Any Way, you can never
Speaker 1: quite measure those things, and that's probably a good thing
Speaker 1: into their constitution. But yeah, I was very fortunate to
Speaker 1: be sitting there in the drafting rooms, in the Delicates
Speaker 1: dining rooms, and I got to observe up close and
Speaker 1: personal why their negotiation process worked when constitution negotiations didn't
Speaker 1: work in other countries. And the reason was that everybody
Speaker 1: in the room knew, no matter whether they liked each
Speaker 1: other or hated each other, and no matter how much
Speaker 1: they distrusted each other, and they did distrust each other,
Speaker 1: that no one was coming to save them, No one
Speaker 1: really cared enough about Tunisia to intervene in a big
Speaker 1: way in their constitutional process. The US wasn't coming to
Speaker 1: save them, you know, the European countries were not coming
Speaker 1: to save them. They were on their own. The other
Speaker 1: Arab countries weren't coming to save them, and so they
Speaker 1: had to compromise, and they compromised like crazy. All sides
Speaker 1: made compromises that their own political core supporters thought were
Speaker 1: terrible compromises, and they made them anyway. And I think
Speaker 1: that is really what got them ultimately through, and it's
Speaker 1: why they developed a consensus that enabled them to draft
Speaker 1: and successfully ratify a constitution. And just to add one
Speaker 1: more point to that, the thing that they realized is
Speaker 1: that a constitutional negotiation is by definition all about giving
Speaker 1: the other side more than it deserves. If you think, well,
Speaker 1: we've won a plurality or a majority, and so we're
Speaker 1: not going to give you what you want, your constitution
Speaker 1: will fail because if enough people are unhappy with a
Speaker 1: constitutional draft, then they'll go into the streets, they'll protest,
Speaker 1: they might even use violence, and then the whole constitutional
Speaker 1: deal will fall through, sort of like what happened ultimately
Speaker 1: in Iraq, where Sunnies were cut out of the constitutional process.
Speaker 1: They partly cut themselves out and then they just used violence,
Speaker 1: and that deeply under caught the constitution. So you have
Speaker 1: this one North African Arab country that has a functioning, effective,
Speaker 1: seemingly sustainable constitutional democratic system. Why aren't its neighbors and
Speaker 1: the other Arab countries looking at it and saying, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what we wanted, We want what they have. People
Speaker 1: in some of those countries did say that initially, as
Speaker 1: in Egypt, but then Egypt wasn't able to produce the
Speaker 1: kind of compromise and consensus that Tunisia did. So the
Speaker 1: elected government, the Muslim Brotherhood backed government, did not successfully
Speaker 1: compromise with secularists on the other side. They made some
Speaker 1: initial gestures in that direction, but they were paranoid, not
Speaker 1: without good reason, but they were paranoid that if they
Speaker 1: let in too many liberals they would undercut themselves. They
Speaker 1: were paranoid that if they let in too many of
Speaker 1: the old regime they would undercut themselves. So they actually
Speaker 1: tried to do it all without compromise, and that failed.
Speaker 1: They just couldn't get sufficient buy in. And in a
Speaker 1: much more extreme way, in Syria, What happened there is
Speaker 1: that we never even got to the moment of the
Speaker 1: formation of a new government because we never got the
Speaker 1: ultimate collapse of basharl Assad's regime because Asad fought back
Speaker 1: with violence, and instead of the protests which began pretty
Speaker 1: peacefully leading to regime change, they actually created circumstances where
Speaker 1: the government started a civil war. And once that started,
Speaker 1: people in lots of countries around the Arabic speaking world
Speaker 1: started saying, whoa wait a minute, the structure of our
Speaker 1: countries may not be capable of surviving regime change. And
Speaker 1: once people start thinking that and looking at worst case
Speaker 1: scenarios like civil war such as we also have in
Speaker 1: Libya and such as exists now in Yemen, both in
Speaker 1: the aftermath of the Arab Spring, that starts making people
Speaker 1: really think long and hard about whether it's worth it
Speaker 1: to try to stay in the streets and remove the regime.
Speaker 1: At the other end of the spectrum from Tunisia's liberal
Speaker 1: democratic state, you have of Isis's medieval theocratic state, and
Speaker 1: you say that that too was a product of the
Speaker 1: Arab Spring. In a strange way, why was Isis part
Speaker 1: of what came out of the original protests in Tunisia
Speaker 1: in two ways. The Arab Spring first of all, created
Speaker 1: the conditions for the civil war in Syria, which created
Speaker 1: a political vacuum, a power vacuum, which allowed isis to
Speaker 1: emerge and call itself a caliphate. So that was the
Speaker 1: first immediate way that the Arab Springs set the conditions
Speaker 1: for the emergence of the Islamic State. But the more
Speaker 1: profound similarity between the Islamic State and the peaceful uprisings
Speaker 1: is that the people who founded the Islamic State were
Speaker 1: aspiring to create a new form of political order which
Speaker 1: they themselves would control, where they would be sovereign, and
Speaker 1: in which they could effectuate a system of government that
Speaker 1: they believe. Now, what's sad, horrifying, and indeed tragic, and
Speaker 1: this is one of the reasons I call the book
Speaker 1: The Artwinter a tragedy, is that the form of government
Speaker 1: that the Islamic State supporters wanted was not utopian, although
Speaker 1: they thought it was utopian, but it was dystopian. It
Speaker 1: was the opposite. You know. It involved murder on a
Speaker 1: huge scale, It involved rape on a huge scale, forced
Speaker 1: sexual slavery, and for the people who were engaged in
Speaker 1: this movement, those were fulfillments and authentic manifestations they believed
Speaker 1: of Islamic tradition going back to the Middle Ages, which
Speaker 1: did exist on the books. If you read the classical
Speaker 1: Islamic legal sources from the Middle Ages, you do have
Speaker 1: tech saying, you know, you can do these things in wartime,
Speaker 1: but they were not practiced on a comparable scale to this,
Speaker 1: certainly in the Middle Ages. And also nobody's really tried
Speaker 1: in the Muslim world to govern in anything like this
Speaker 1: way in hundreds of years. So they were doing something
Speaker 1: that was a throwback, self conscious throwback, and it was
Speaker 1: worse than it ever had in fact been in history
Speaker 1: almost certainly. So it was horrifying and deeply deserved the
Speaker 1: condemnation that we've all given to it. And the world
Speaker 1: had to take action, slowly but surely to go and
Speaker 1: get rid of the Islamic state, and I'm super glad
Speaker 1: that they did get At the same time, we shouldn't
Speaker 1: forget that the folks who were doing this were engaged
Speaker 1: in the process of trying to self determine. They were
Speaker 1: just doing it in a way that turned out to
Speaker 1: be pretty evil. I mean, I was mystified as a
Speaker 1: lot of people were how this barbaric sort of cult,
Speaker 1: as it seemed, was attracting volunteers from all over the world,
Speaker 1: including from Western countries. In the thousands. You talk about
Speaker 1: it as a utopian revolutionary movement, but why was it
Speaker 1: that young people, including young women in many cases, went
Speaker 1: to join the Islamic State completely of their own volition.
Speaker 1: I really think it was the opportunity that they perceived
Speaker 1: to build something new, to build a new society, to
Speaker 1: build a utopian society on what they saw as a
Speaker 1: classically authentic Islamic model. In that sense, the Islamic State
Speaker 1: was really different from Alkaida. People did come from around
Speaker 1: the world to join Alkaida in much smaller numbers, but
Speaker 1: to join Alkaieda basically meant you were going to fight
Speaker 1: and probably die in the jihad. You weren't building something
Speaker 1: new for the most part, you were just trying to
Speaker 1: break something, namely what is imagined to be the occupation
Speaker 1: of Muslim lands by non Muslim invaders. In contrast, once
Speaker 1: the Islamic State was a caliphate, that it had territory,
Speaker 1: that it was building a society that was a chance
Speaker 1: for people to say much the way that young people
Speaker 1: from around the world wanted to go to Cuba after
Speaker 1: the Cuban Revolution, or some people from around the world
Speaker 1: wanted to go to Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. You say, well,
Speaker 1: here's a new world being created, and I want to
Speaker 1: be a part of that. And so they didn't come
Speaker 1: for the spectacular violence, but they also were willing to
Speaker 1: tolerate and participate in even that kind of violence, which
Speaker 1: also happens after other revolutions that partake of this kind
Speaker 1: of millennialist religious, revivalist, reformist idea. And they don't have
Speaker 1: to be religious. That could just be communism, which is
Speaker 1: itself a kind of religion. In a certain respect, people
Speaker 1: will do unbelievably radical things that are horrifying in circumstances
Speaker 1: like those when they feel that they're in a revolutionary moment,
Speaker 1: all bets are off. The end times in some way
Speaker 1: are there. And again it doesn't have to be end
Speaker 1: times in a religious sense. It could be that we're
Speaker 1: just creating a new society. And that's why a lot
Speaker 1: of revolutions end in brutal violence or entail a lot
Speaker 1: of brutal violence in their aftermath. And otherwise normal people
Speaker 1: will do abnormal things under those conditions. So your book
Speaker 1: with written pre pandemic, but obviously now all of these
Speaker 1: countries are having their varying experiences with COVID nineteen pandemic
Speaker 1: can either bond people to their government if a government
Speaker 1: seems to respond to it well, or can alienate people
Speaker 1: from their government if it handles it badly. What are
Speaker 1: we seeing in the countries you write about in the book,
Speaker 1: in Egypt and Syria and Tunisia, is there another Arab
Speaker 1: spring that could come out of the pandemic? So far,
Speaker 1: and knock on wood, COVID hasn't had the kind of
Speaker 1: transformative social impact in the former Arab Spring countries that
Speaker 1: it's had in Europe or in the United States or
Speaker 1: even in some Asian countries. And it's still too soon
Speaker 1: to know whether that's because there aren't that many cases
Speaker 1: or whether because the case it just aren't being recorded
Speaker 1: or acknowledged or recognized. So there's great worry, especially in
Speaker 1: Tunisia about whether the rapid economic decline that's going to
Speaker 1: hit Tunisia very hard. Tunisia is very dependent on tourism
Speaker 1: is going to destabilize the social fabric even further. And
Speaker 1: it remains to be seen whether autocracy is like those
Speaker 1: in Egypt are robust enough to withstand social pressure around that.
Speaker 1: Although I think they probably are. I think Egyptians have
Speaker 1: really learned the lesson that they can't get out and
Speaker 1: do it again. That said, you know, when I was
Speaker 1: just getting the book into press, there were two events
Speaker 1: in the Arabic speaking world that were weirdly like after
Speaker 1: images of the Arab Spring. There was a kind of
Speaker 1: Arab Spring like uprising in Algeria, which is extit Tunisia,
Speaker 1: and then there was a similar one simultaneously in Sudan.
Speaker 1: And in both cases they all knew about the Arab Spring.
Speaker 1: They were using somewhat similar slogans, they knew the script,
Speaker 1: and the dictators also knew the script, and in each
Speaker 1: case it led to some meaningful change in who was
Speaker 1: governing the country, But in neither case as it led
Speaker 1: to a fundamental transformation in the form of government. They're
Speaker 1: moving in both cases more slowly, there's more give and take,
Speaker 1: and although there are transitions in who's governing, there aren't
Speaker 1: fundamental societal transformations like we've seen in Tunisia. And what's
Speaker 1: fascinating about that is, on the one hand, it shows
Speaker 1: you that even though everyone's seeing the Arab Spring movie,
Speaker 1: it still has power. People are still looking to use
Speaker 1: those principles of self determination to change their lives. On
Speaker 1: the other hand, if the bad guys know that too,
Speaker 1: you know, the autocratic regimes, if you think they're the
Speaker 1: bad guys as I tend to, they also understand that
Speaker 1: they can give a little bit and then reconsolidate power.
Speaker 1: And so what that suggested me is, even though I
Speaker 1: think we're in a winter in the Arab world where
Speaker 1: we're not going to see huge or substantial transitions to
Speaker 1: self government in future years, there is always the possibility
Speaker 1: for spring to break out again, and we've seen that
Speaker 1: in a more limited way in those countries. And so
Speaker 1: that's one slightly less pessimistic conclusion. You know, we're in
Speaker 1: a winter, there is an Arab winter, but eventually seasons
Speaker 1: are cyclical and this winter will give rise to a
Speaker 1: new spring. Yeah, so what if you'll indult me as
Speaker 1: the temporary occupant of the Noah Feldman chair. I want
Speaker 1: to ask one to Noah Feldman questions, And the first
Speaker 1: is about the range of stuff you write about. Your
Speaker 1: previous book was a huge intellectual biography of James Madison,
Speaker 1: a wonderful book with seemingly very little to do with
Speaker 1: the Arabic linguistic analysis you do in the Air Winter.
Speaker 1: Your book before that was about US China relations. Now
Speaker 1: in the podcast world, we welcome polymaths like you. It's terrific.
Speaker 1: You can talk to anybody about anything. But in academia,
Speaker 1: don't they hate people like you? Well, I think hate
Speaker 1: might be strong. I think the way that academics usually
Speaker 1: express their disdain as they just don't read your book,
Speaker 1: And that's fair enough. I don't know that it's polymathic though.
Speaker 1: I mean for me, there is a central theme that
Speaker 1: runs through all of the books that I've written and
Speaker 1: a lot of my other work, and that is constitutions,
Speaker 1: the deep question being how to human beings get together
Speaker 1: to govern themselves when they pick the structures of how
Speaker 1: they're going to govern themselves, not just the day to
Speaker 1: day who's up who's down in partisan politics, but how
Speaker 1: are they going to organize power? And you know, my
Speaker 1: book about Madison was about the single greatest genius in
Speaker 1: the last five hundred years in the world on that question.
Speaker 1: So that was the central theme for me there and
Speaker 1: even when I was writing about the US and China.
Speaker 1: I wrote extensively about whether China was developing a set
Speaker 1: of constitutional norms with a new method for transitioning for
Speaker 1: government in and out, they would enable it to compete
Speaker 1: globally as a governing model with the United States. So
Speaker 1: that's the theme that's in all of the stuff that
Speaker 1: I write, and I try to hope that my colleagues
Speaker 1: will recognize that I do have that theme going, so
Speaker 1: they won't think that I'm too all over the place.
Speaker 1: And well, I guess. And my last question is sort
Speaker 1: of about your involvement and constitution making. In a way,
Speaker 1: here's this guy, Noah Feldman in Tunisia giving advice about
Speaker 1: how much Shariah should influence the writing of the constitution.
Speaker 1: And I do wonder about someone of Jewish heritage in
Speaker 1: this Islamic country and dealing with this topic generally, what's
Speaker 1: it like for you and what's it like for them?
Speaker 1: I know Tunisia is one of many North African countries
Speaker 1: that used to have a big Jewish population, doesn't anymore.
Speaker 1: Did they welcome you? My experience is it ninety nine
Speaker 1: percent of the time, nobody cares if you're Jewish. For
Speaker 1: the most part. On an ordinary basis, people don't think
Speaker 1: that religious background matters all that much. Your primary identity
Speaker 1: if you're there from abroad, is as an American. But
Speaker 1: that one percent can make a difference, and where it
Speaker 1: makes a difference is when things go south. So Saudi
Speaker 1: Arabian newspaper published a completely invented fictional article that basically
Speaker 1: made me into an international man of mystery, you know,
Speaker 1: a spy for Dick Cheney and a spy for the
Speaker 1: you know, Israeli intelligence, and attributed to me all kinds
Speaker 1: of travels and constitutional accomplishments all over the Arabic's being
Speaker 1: world Clinton hunters I'd never been to. And actually I
Speaker 1: got the Saudi paper with the help of a Saudi
Speaker 1: lawyer friend of mine, to actually retract the story, although
Speaker 1: I don't think it really made much difference. And then
Speaker 1: I didn't think about it much until my very last
Speaker 1: trip to Tunisia. And so I had this crazy experience
Speaker 1: of being in the Constituent Assembly watching the debates and
Speaker 1: ratification of the constitution and then hearing my name and
Speaker 1: there was a delegate from a very minor party who
Speaker 1: was just trying to make trouble for the various majority parties,
Speaker 1: and he brought up my name on the floor in
Speaker 1: order to criticize the parties I was working with, and
Speaker 1: basically repeated some version of this old idea that I
Speaker 1: was a spy of some kind. And I very quietly
Speaker 1: got up and walked out of the observation deck and
Speaker 1: headed for my car with my briefcase. But unfortunately, by
Speaker 1: the time I got out the door, you know, the
Speaker 1: press was out there. There was a gaggle and they
Speaker 1: were calling out to me and asking me if I
Speaker 1: was a spy. And I stopped and told them that
Speaker 1: I wasn't a spy, and you know, I headed for
Speaker 1: my car, and I went to my hotel and I
Speaker 1: packed my bag, and I, moving as slowly and calmly
Speaker 1: as I could, went to the airport and literally bought
Speaker 1: a ticket on the very first flight out of the country.
Speaker 1: It felt that threatening. It felt like it was not
Speaker 1: a good moment to be on national television being denounced
Speaker 1: as a Jewish slash Israeli. Obviously, I'm not Asraeli slash
Speaker 1: American spy, and I'm on a spy. And when I
Speaker 1: came home, I showed the video, which was then showed
Speaker 1: on national television to my kids, and I said, so,
Speaker 1: does it look like a plausible denial? And my son
Speaker 1: said to me, are you crazy? Like you look like
Speaker 1: a complete spy. You know, I realized there isn't any
Speaker 1: good way to deny being a spy. And then the
Speaker 1: last coda to it was on the evening news that
Speaker 1: night there was a debate about you know, was I
Speaker 1: a spy? Was I a perfectly normal guy who had
Speaker 1: been there six times helping out with a constitution. And
Speaker 1: it was an intense debate, and I was being defended
Speaker 1: by a really impressive woman who was a member of
Speaker 1: the Constituent Assembly, a young woman who belonged to the
Speaker 1: Islamist political party, you know, wearing it a job. And
Speaker 1: it got a little heated, and I sent the clip
Speaker 1: to my mother, who doesn't speak Arabic, and she said,
Speaker 1: oh my gosh, you know, like, is that person coming
Speaker 1: after you? And I said, no, you got it backwards.
Speaker 1: You know, the Islamist woman is the one saying, Felma
Speaker 1: is just a constitutional law professor who's been here a
Speaker 1: bunch of times to help out, and you know, this
Speaker 1: is completely paranoid and crazy. It was the secularists who
Speaker 1: were trying to embarrass the Islamists. So to me, the
Speaker 1: takeaway was there, in a democratic country, which Tunisia had
Speaker 1: become by then, you could actually have a public debate
Speaker 1: where someone from a major party with a political future
Speaker 1: would go on television and defend the Jewish American constitutional
Speaker 1: law professor and tell the people who were being paranoid
Speaker 1: and crazy, you're being paranoid and crazy. That could not
Speaker 1: have happened in any other Arabic speaking country in the
Speaker 1: modern period. So I walked away from mid feeling positive.
Speaker 1: And although I haven't been back to Tunisia since, I
Speaker 1: would happily go back now. I mean, Tunisia is a
Speaker 1: functioning democracy. It's not a paradise, but it is really
Speaker 1: a functioning democracy in the Middle East with good basic rights.
Speaker 1: And that's not nothing. That's an incredible accomplishment. You know,
Speaker 1: we're used to hearing people saying, oh, Israel is the
Speaker 1: only democracy in the Middle East. That's just not true.
Speaker 1: You know, Tunisia is a functioning democracy and it has
Speaker 1: been for some years now. And if the dominoes were
Speaker 1: to start falling back the other way, what would be next?
Speaker 1: I mean, what's the next country where you could imagine
Speaker 1: giving some behind the scenes advice about how to have
Speaker 1: a good constitution. I wish I could say, oh, I
Speaker 1: know where it'll be. You know, it'll be in Beirut,
Speaker 1: you know, or it'll be an Amman. I don't think
Speaker 1: it's as simple as that. There's a good reason for that,
Speaker 1: which is that, in the end, this is the central
Speaker 1: theme of the book, it's actually up to the people
Speaker 1: in these Arabic speaking countries to decide for themselves that
Speaker 1: they're ready to self govern. It's not something which an
Speaker 1: external actor can make happen. You know, the United States
Speaker 1: invaded Iraq, we help them draft a constitution, participated in that.
Speaker 1: It wasn't enough. In fact, we left Iroq worse off
Speaker 1: than we found it, which is a terrible moral responsibility
Speaker 1: that we have and that I feel my own proportionate
Speaker 1: share in because it wasn't chosen by them. They need
Speaker 1: to make that determination for themselves, and to me, that's
Speaker 1: the ultimate takeaway here. People will try. They may not
Speaker 1: succeed all the time, but that's also part of what
Speaker 1: makes the effort noble. You know, if you know you
Speaker 1: can succeed in doing something, it's nice that you're doing it.
Speaker 1: But it's not that noble to try. Nobility is where
Speaker 1: you take a major risk in life and you try
Speaker 1: to make something work and it can fail. And so
Speaker 1: to me, the fact that the Arab Spring failed to
Speaker 1: achieve its goals in a lot of places is not
Speaker 1: a reason to discount the nobility of the effort. It
Speaker 1: was still noble, and although the results were tragic in
Speaker 1: a lot of places, there's still Tunisia to remind you
Speaker 1: that they didn't have to end in tragedy. Well, no,
Speaker 1: I just want to end by recommending the book again.
Speaker 1: It is absolutely as interesting as you are talking about it.
Speaker 1: And I guess since the point where I get to
Speaker 1: say thank you for joining me on your show, thank
Speaker 1: you for joining me on my show, to be me
Speaker 1: on my show, I really appreciate it, Jacob, Thanks babe.
Speaker 1: Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our
Speaker 1: producer is Lydia Gencott, with research help from zooe Wynn.
Speaker 1: Mastering is by Jason Gambrel and Martin Gonzalez. Our showrunner
Speaker 1: is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed by Luis
Speaker 1: GERA special thanks to the Pushkin Brass Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg,
Speaker 1: and Mia Loebell. I'm Noah Feldman. I also write a
Speaker 1: regular column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at
Speaker 1: bloomberg dot com slash Feldman. Discover Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts,
Speaker 1: go to Bloomberg dot com slash Podcasts. You can follow
Speaker 1: me on Twitter at Noah har Feldman. This is deep
Speaker 1: background