After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama told us that the history was ending. A unique political and economic system would be imposed worldwide: the capitalist liberal democracy. The fall of Marxism, the democratization of Latin America and Eastern Europe, and the growing liberalization of China show him as being right. The particularities of large third world areas, particularly in Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia seemed to be just places where sooner or later these ideas will be implemented.
Al Qaeda's attack took a heavy blow to the international perception of this theory. Anti-democratic forces could carry out an attack to the economic and military center of the only superpower. History still has many lines to be written.
The conflict between the Arab world and the West has a long history. From the fall of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, Middle East was part of the booty to be distributed among the various powers of turn. Its political disintegration facilitated foreign powers to support governments suitable for their own interest. The creation of the State of Israel was the culmination of this intervention, depriving a whole nation from the birthplace of their parents.
The Arab reaction was often violent. Wars and terrorism culminated the separation of the West from the Arab world. Its rulers were perceived as tyrannical and corrupt, and its people as backward and barbaric. The terrorist attacks in the '72 Olympics, the aircraft hijackings and bombings in the next decade did not more to reinforce this image. The attacks on the Twin Towers were the final corollary of this confrontation of cultures. This vision was strongly supported by the media. There was no action movie, the 70s onwards, where the antagonist was not a cruel and sadistic Arabic. It isn’t a myth that media control by the Jewish community did much to reinforce this image, beyond the fact that the birth of the state of Israel was originated in terrorist acts as much or even crueler as those committed by Arabs. However, the media managed to put Israel in proximity to the values of West, as opposed to "others", in this case, the Arab world.
Many Protestant fundamentalist see the creation of the State of Israel as the fulfillment of biblical promises, providing religious support to an alliance between American conservatives and Zionism.
In this context, the turmoil in the Arab world produced, at least, perplexity in the Western world. Change movements in Tunisia and Egypt were led by young people who use Internet to communicate. There are no clear visible leaderships, but they are social movements in the purest sense of the word. Groups of incumbent opponents, like the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, are observers or, at best, partakers of events on which they don’t have any leadership.
The initial pro-establishment Tunisian French support, the fears expressed by the Israeli government about the possibility of a change of the government in Egypt, and the doubts of the entire international community to support Kaddafi’s opponents in Libya are examples of how difficult has been to the Western world to forget the archetypes and prejudices it has built on the Arab people.
The events are far from being consolidated. In Egypt, military have not yet delivered the power to a democratically elected Government. The Civil War in Libya was close to see the fall of opponents, prevented only by the effective intervention of the international coalition. The opposition in the wealthy Gulf countries and Syria are suffering strong repression by their governments, while the royal Saudi house buys the loyalty of his people with packages of billionaire subsidies. Yemen seems to follow the Egyptian model. We are in one of those rare moments when, as occurred in Latin America in the '80s, autocratic regimes throughout a whole region are falling like dominoes. But we know that in the best case, this leads to a large variety of scenarios. We cannot say that the democratic transition in Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Chile and Mexico have followed similar paths, but certainly in all Latin American countries the political situation has made significant progress over the last quarter-century.
Sooner or later people will discover in the Arab world, beyond the curiosity in the West about their customs and rites, communities with the same desire for freedom and prosperity that encourage all men. For the Arabs, success of their democracies can do much more for their historical claims than terrorism. The freedom flotilla that tried to take humanitarian aid to Gaza last year was a greater contribution in the struggle to regain usurped land to Palestinians than years of rockets and suicide bombings. The fight will be won in the field of values, when democracy and freedom consolidates in the Arab world, which may end up backing Fukuyama´s theory.
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