Jared Cohen - The New Digital Age

Future revolutions will produce many celebrities, but this aspect of movement-making will retard the leadership development necessary to finish the job. Technology can help find the people with leadership skills—thinkers, intellectuals and others—but it cannot create them. Popular uprisings can overthrow dictators, but they’re successful afterward only if opposition forces have a good plan and can execute it. Otherwise the result is either a reconstitution of the old regime or a transition from a functioning regime to a failed state. Building a Facebook page does not constitute a plan; actual operational skills are what will carry a revolution to a successful conclusion.

The term “leaderless” has been used to describe the Arab Spring, by both observers and participants, but this is not quite accurate. True, in the day-to-day process of demonstrating it’s certainly possible to retain a decentralized command structure—safer too, since the regime cannot kill the movement by simply capturing the leaders. But over time, some sort of centralized authority must emerge if the movement is to have any direction. The rebel fighters who faced down Muammar Gadhafi for months were not a coherent army, but by February 27, 2011, within two weeks of the first public protests in Libya, they had formed the National Transitional Council (NTC) in Benghazi. Comprising prominent opposition figures, regime defectors, a former army official, academics, attorneys, politicians and business leaders, the NTC’s executive board functioned as an opposition government, negotiating with foreign countries and NATO officials in the fight against Gadhafi. The NTC’s chairman, Mahmoud Jibril, served as the country’s interim prime minister until late October 2011, shortly after Gadhafi was captured and killed.

In Tunisia, by contrast, the revolution occurred so quickly that there was no time to form an opposition government like the NTC. When President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali fled, the Tunisian state remained intact. Citizens continued to protest the government until all remaining members of Ben Ali’s Constitutional Democratic Rally party resigned and an interim government the masses deemed suitable was in place. Had government officials been less responsive to the population’s demands, launching crackdowns instead of reshuffling positions, Tunisia might have followed a very different and less stable path than it did. (Interestingly, many of the leaders elected in the October 2011 Tunisian elections were former political prisoners, who had a different and perhaps more personal level of credibility with the population than returning exiles.) Tunisia’s prime minister, Hamadi Jebali—himself a former political prisoner—told us that, in his view, the first post–Ben Ali regime minister of the interior ought to be a “victim of the ministry of the interior.” As such, he appointed to this position Ali Laârayedh, who under the previous regime spent fourteen years in prison, mostly in solitary confinement.

The downside of an acceleration in the pace of a movement is that organizations and their ideas, strategies and leaders have a far shorter gestation period. History suggests that opposition movements need time to develop, and that the checks and balances that shape an emergent movement ultimately produce a stronger and more capable one, with leaders who are more in tune with the population they intend to inspire. Consider the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa. During its decades of exile from the apartheid state, the organization went through multiple iterations, and the men who would go on to become South African presidents (Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma) all had time to build their reputations, credentials and networks while honing their operational skills. Likewise with Lech Walesa and his Solidarity trade union in Poland; a decade passed before Solidarity leaders could contest seats in parliament, and their victory paved the way for the fall of communism.

Most opposition groups spend years organizing, lobbying and cultivating leaders. We asked the former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who has met with and known almost every major revolutionary leader of the past forty years, what is lost when that timetable is advanced. “It is hard to imagine de Gaulles and Churchills appealing in the world of Facebook,” he said. In an age of hyper-connectivity, “I don’t see people willing to stand by themselves and to have the confidence to stand up alone.” Instead, a kind of “mad consensus” will drive the world and few people will be willing to openly oppose it, which is precisely the kind of risk that a leader must take. “Unique leadership is a human thing, and is not going to be produced by a mass social community,” Kissinger said.

Without statesmen and leaders, there won’t be enough qualified individuals to take a country forward, running the risk of replacing one form of autocracy with another. “The empowered citizen,” Kissinger said, “knows the technique of getting people to the square, but they don’t know what to do with them when they are in the square. They know even less of what to do with them when they have won.” These people can get easily marginalized, he explained, because their strategies lose effectiveness over time. “You can’t get people to the square twenty times a year. There is an objective limit, and no clear next phase.” And without a clear next phase, a movement is left to run on its own momentum, which inevitably runs out.

There are a number of activists on the street who, while critical of their own revolutions and follow-through, would take issue with Kissinger’s view. One such man is Mahmoud Salem, an Egyptian blogger turned activist, who became a spokesperson of sorts for his country’s 2011 revolution. Salem is highly critical of his fellow Egyptians for what he saw as an inability to move past the short-term goal of unseating Mubarak and opening the political system to competition; but his critique is one of Egypt, not of the revolutionary model for the new digital age. As he wrote in June 2012, just after Egypt’s first post-revolution presidential election, “If you are a revolutionary, show us your capabilities. Start something. Join a party. Build an institution. Solve a real problem. Do something except running around from demonstration to march to sit-in. This is not street work: real street work means moving the street, not moving in the street. Real street work means that the street you live in knows you and trusts you, and will move with you.” He exhorted street activists to participate in governance and in reforming the culture of corruption against which they protested. This means wearing seat belts, obeying traffic laws, enrolling in the police academy, running for parliament or holding local officials accountable for their actions.

Tina Rosenberg’s book Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World is yet another defense of what the crowd can achieve. By looking at the importance of human relationships in defining individual behavior and major social trends, she argues that revolutionaries can channel peer pressure to propel individuals and groups toward more desirable behaviors. Perhaps the most compelling evidence for what she describes as a “social cure” is found in the example of the Serbian activist group Otpor, which played a major role in ending Slobodan Milošević’s regime. She describes how the group used playful and flashy street theater, pranks, music, slogans and peaceful civil disobedience to break the culture of fear and helplessness. In cracking down on the group, the regime was revealed to be both brutal and at times foolish, and support for Otpor grew.

But more important than what groups like Otpor represent for the past is the role their leaders can play in the future. As Rosenberg points out in a powerful story of Serbian activists from the past training future activists around the world, successful revolutionaries must develop dual strategies for virtual and physical action. Without both, what’s left will be an oversupply of celebrities and coattail riders, and not enough trusted leaders. Historically, a prominent position implied a degree of public trust; with the exception of notorious political types like warlords or machine bosses, the visibility of high-profile leaders corresponded with the size of their support base. But in the future, this equation will be inverted: Prominence will come first and easily, and then a person will need to build tangible support, credentials and experience.