HELP WANTED: PROVIDE HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE TO THE "ARAB SPRING"

Below I listed the large number of wars in Europe between 600 and 1214 and that was meant to suggest that it may take a long time for the less politically developed countries in the Middle East to become something like stable democratic states.  (In a comment to that post, Ken Hoop correctly noted that the U.S. hasn't done much to promote democracy in the ME; in fact, quite the opposite.)

In today's Boston Globe, Leon Neyfakh tries to compare today's events in the Middle East to the European uprisings of 1848.   He argues that those were unsuccessful in the short term but may have led to progress in subsequent decades:

With that in mind, it may be comforting to know that in recent years, historians have significantly revised the conventional wisdom that the revolutions of 1848 ended in failure. Though their immediate aftermath was a decade of reactionary, oppressive rule, the 1860s saw a resurgence of democratic aspirations that was made possible by the earlier upheaval. According to Sperber, large swaths of society became far more politically conscious as a result of the revolutions, and, generally speaking, the liberal aims and values that were voiced during those early weeks and months eventually became part of the public agenda. “The aspirations didn’t disappear and the people who supported these ideas didn’t disappear,” says Sperber.

In light of this, perhaps 1848 deserves to go down in history as its own kind of success. Taking this longer view, we are able to judge a revolution by more than just its immediate effects, and more meaningfully evaluate its legacy. “Maybe,” Sperber says, “we need to rethink what it means to be successful in revolution.”