a new third political order?

A postcolonial “second order” was de facto established in west Asia and the middle east in the aftermath of WWII, which replaced the post-Ottoman “first order” that protected the nascent nation-states and their bourgeois middle classes and professional élite groups in the aftermath of the empire’s dismantlement and sudden demise. As it turned out, such groups were doing well and prosperous as long as the French and British colonial order was there to safeguard the middle east from further fragmentation. The 1952 free officers revolution in Egypt and the 1958 Qasim coup against the Hashimites in Iraq were the first indicators of the end of the post-Ottoman colonial bourgeois rule, with all its liberal underpinnings (free press, multi-parties, banking and finance, and family owned industries). By 1963 and the coming of the Baath in Syria and Iraq, the tone was clearly set that we're into "socialism," one-party state rule, secret services, and a preponderant role to the military and their affiliates, which ended up controlling education and major industries. Qaddafi's coup in 1969 against the Idrissi dynasty, the rejuvenation of the Baath in the 1970s under Saddam and Asad, reinforced the trend, while the Iranian revolution in 1978–79 completed the circle of the monolithic state and its military and intelligence apparatuses. So it took three decades after WWII for the political and social “second order” to take shape in west Asia and the middle east. Are the present revolts destined to dismantle that order or consolidate it? The elements that consolidated the old order, and which are still there, came from the rural peripheries and small cities, and were rooted in the military. In the four decades since they've come to power, they've lost touch with their original peripheries, hence what we're witnessing now is the class struggle emerging from large sections of the populations that have been disfavored and marginalized. However, there isn't much of a political program for all those lower classes, which have been joined by fragments of the middle classes that lost their purchasing powers over the years, and young techies that do not fit well into the current societal stalemate. High unemployment and birth rates, inflation of college degrees, the low status of women, and the failure to industrialize, are certainly the main culprits behind the gross failures of the nascent nation-states to modernize and compete with their Asian counterparts. Hence it's a curious combination of elements that are coming together in those street protests, more class- than ethnically-oriented, whose final resolution would take several decades to settle. To be sure, there will be more openings towards more representative political systems (multi-parties etc.), but that won't be enough, hence the possibility of a rigid consolidation if the social forces fail to mature in the right direction. I'm as usual fairly pessimistic, as I don't feel that the region as a whole is yet ready for a mature "liberal" solution.