I’ve been following the news of major political mobilization from the Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Lebanon, and now I see in Jordan too, with great interest.  Since I was an eyewitness to the changes in East Central Europe, participated a bit and thought and wrote about them during and after, I can’t help but think about comparisons and contrasts.  I think Roger Cohen’s piece drawing the comparison substitutes hope and dreams for careful analysis and is overly optimistic.   Rather for me the comparison leads to questions and concerns.

I wonder why the roundtables that were key to the transition in Central Europe, but also in South Africa and Latin America, and earlier in Spain, which provided a kind of special architecture for the transition from dictatorship to democracy, are not being discussed in Tunisia.

I wonder to what extent there exists in any of the countries the kind of social custom of pluralistic self organization which provided the micro infrastructure for the successful peaceful transition to democracy in Poland, what I call the politics of small things.

And tonight as I watch the dramatic video reports on television of the intensified protests in Cairo, with escalating violence, I worry not only about the frightening likelihood that by the time I wake up tomorrow, there may be massacres in the street ordered by the dictator in a last ditch attempt to stay in power.  I also worry what will happen when he is finally overthrown, and the protestors have their day.

I have no expertise in Egypt and its neighbors beyond what I read in the newspapers and in casual reading of magazine and journal articles.  I tend to think that the fear of the Muslim Brotherhood that the regime propagated has been self serving.  I don’t know how the Brotherhood will act or whether it will act only in one direction.  I worry about sectarian violence, about how changes in Egypt will affect other countries of the region and beyond.  I suspect that the measured and cautious approach of President Obama, supporting democratic rights without daring to say the “D – Word,” as Mark LeVine put it on the Aljazeera website, was motivated by such concerns.  Tonight Obama appeared overly cautious, but tomorrow his approach likely will change, and, in fact, he does underscore democratic ideals in his statement.

But this is not my major concern.  My concern is smaller in a sense.  I want to know what people are saying to each other on the streets of Tunis, Cairo, Beirut, Amman and Sanaa.  I know that they are saying “no” to the old regime, but worry that they haven’t developed a capacity to discuss among themselves what they favor, and haven’t developed the means to discuss among themselves alternative principles and compromises.  I examined this issue in a chapter of my book The Politics of Small Things, in which I demonstrate that because the Romanians could only say no, their post communist experience was particularly a tough one.  Because the experience of talking together beyond saying no was more limited in Czechoslovakia than in Poland, Poland had an easier democratic transition.    A democratic aftermath to dictatorship goes beyond the power of no.

Next on DC: Commentary on the situation in Egypt from an expert.