WHATEVER the form and content of a governmental system, its bottom line should say loud and clear that people matter. In reality, for any government, ordinary people should matter a lot more than those inhabiting the top class tiers. The poor and the vulnerable, the ordinary people, if you like, should be constantly under a government’s radar. In recent times repeatedly, the world stands as witness to the dire consequences of several governments’ neglect of their ordinary citizens. The Arab Spring was an answer to that neglect.

The Arab Spring represented not only a useful testimony of governments’ wrongs against their citizenry, but also the Arab Spring was triumphant as a rebellious response to governmental atrocities in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya.

Alterman (2011) noted that Tunisia was the spark that triggered the beginnings of the Arab Spring. And where Tunisia’s Zine el-Abidine Bin Ali’s fall from grace was not merely the removal of a dictator, but a political drama depicting that success would not come from repression (Alterman, 2011). The Arab Spring mainly at Tahrir Square in Egypt ended Mubarak’s military crackdown on civil liberties and other forms of decades of brutal repression. Qadhafi met his end in Libya’s Arab Spring and therefore was not as fortunate as Mubarak and Bin Ali.
The dawning of the Arab Spring in Tunisia in December 2010, and its incursion into Egypt and Libya breathed new hope and expectancy for democracy and freedom for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Arabs.
The people of Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya after being consumed in extreme poverty and repression with the active aid of the social media resisted these dictatorial regimes and gained ascendancy over them. But for a while after these Arab Spring victories, hope for democracy and freedom seems to remain a mere ‘hope’. Apparently, today, the Arab Spring has degenerated into an Arab Winter. Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya are now in turmoil.
Indeed, the West believes that this instability is due to the lack of a modern political culture to nurture democratic development. Tunisia which led the Middle East revolts just has an educated population with limited resources; and there is now a fierce battle for political power between Islamists and secularists, according to the Tunis Times.
Egypt has a promising civil society, political parties, a bureaucracy, and an army which according to Huntington (1968) are prerequisites for stability and development; note that events over the last few days in Egypt suggest otherwise. Libya has none of the Huntington political infrastructure that Egypt has, but the society is mired in instability.
You see, the Huntington formula for stability and development is Americanized, and may be unsuitable for transplantation in MENA. And the fact that existing governance institutions and other infrastructure predating the Arab Spring were retained after the Arab Spring successes means that the Arab Spring was not a revolution.
It was not because it did not replace the existing political and governance infrastructure. So none of these countries today is stable and moving in a progressively developmental fashion because they still utilize substantive pre-Arab Spring governance models.
Major players in the West, the U.S. and the European Union, were willing to continue supporting and influencing MENA after the Arab Spring because they reckon that changes in Heads of Government are irrelevant  provided that MENA retains the West’s neo-liberal strategy that includes promotion of democracy, and makes the following happen:
“The free flow of oil and gas, the movement of military/commercial traffic through the Suez Canal, commercial infrastructure construction contracts, the security of regional allies such as Israel, and cooperation on immigration, military, counter-terrorism and counter-proliferation issues all required the assistance of the very regimes that democracy promotion was aimed at (and would have undermined)” (Hassan, 2008). The West cares less about democracy in MENA than about getting MENA to meet its interests.
After the army removed former President Mohamed Mursi in Egypt a few days ago, President Obama issued a statement invoking U.S. concerns about the democratic process. He said that the U.S. is committed to democracy and that Egyptians will have to shape their own future.
Obama’s view that Egypt’s future is with its people is not real. U.S. aid plus the Bush doctrine will be movers and shakers to create a new Egypt. And it is not the U.S. that has to be committed to democracy for the good of Egypt. It is Egypt that has to be committed to democracy for its own good.