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The "Arab Spring" Has Sprung

   May 20, 2011
   By Ben Zimmer

   Yesterday, President Obama gave his much-anticipated "Arab spring"
   speech, setting out his foreign policy objectives in the Middle East in
   the wake of the revolutionary wave that has shook countries from
   Tunisia to Bahrain. But how did we come to call this moment in history
   the "Arab spring," considering that the Tunisian protests that got the
   ball rolling started way back in December?

   Of course, the "Arab spring" doesn't actually have to correspond to
   dates between the vernal equinox and the summer solstice, because
   spring is understood metaphorically and not literally. The obvious
   model for Arab spring is the Prague spring of 1968, when Czechoslovakia
   enjoyed a brief interval of democratic reform before the Soviet Union
   invaded. But even before 1968, spring and springtime have had a long
   history of usage to refer to optimistic periods of political
   transformation, and the same goes for equivalent terms in other
   European languages.

   As Michael Quinion notes on his World Wide Words site, Arab spring and
   Prague spring have a much earlier precursor: the European revolutions
   of 1848, which historians dubbed springtime of the peoples or spring of
   nations. Those terms are translations of German Völkerfrühling and
   French printemps des peuples. From 1848 to 1968 to 2011, the social
   movements given the spring label have shared a hope for liberalization
   in the face of oppressive regimes.

   It appears the Germans latched onto the political metaphor of
   springtime first. The political philosopher Ludwig Börne used the term
   Völkerfrühling in an article in the paper Die Wage in 1818, and as
   early as 1832 Börne's expression received the English translation "the
   People's Spring-time." When revolution struck Germany and other nearby
   countries in early 1848, Völkerfrühling was readily applied to the
   uprisings. One of the participants in the German rebellion, Carl Shurz,
   would later emigrate to the United States, eventually becoming a Union
   general in the Civil War and a U.S. Senator from Missouri. In his 1906
   memoirs, Schurz recalled the Germans' "enthusiastic enjoyment of what
   they called the 'Völkerfrühling' â the People's Springtime." Other
   writers translated the expression as "The Spring of Nations."

   In the twentieth century, the first political movement to earn the
   spring label was Russia's Liberal reform of 1904, a forerunner to the
   country's revolutions of 1905 and 1917. In his 1917 book The Soul of
   the Russian Revolution, the writer Moissaye Joseph Olgin explained
   that "the second half of 1904, known as 'Spring,' was marked by a
   strong Liberal movement." The Oxford English Dictionary's entry for
   spring notes that along with the Prague spring of 1968, there has been
   a Polish spring of 1956 (and again in 1982), and even a Seoul spring in
   South Korea in 1979.

   In the Arab world, commentators discerned the first glimmers of
   political springtime well before the Tunisian demonstrations of last
   December. In a March 2003 New York Times Magazine piece entitled
   "Dreaming of Democracy," George Packer wrote pessimistically that the
   Iraq war was more likely to "provoke governments to tighten their grip
   than to ventilate the region with an Arab spring." But just two years
   later an "Arab spring" seemed like more than a pipe dream, with
   competitive democratic elections in Lebanon, Iraq, and the Palestinian
   territories. Egyptian political sociologist Saad Eddin Ibrahim wrote in
   February 2005 that these developments, along with promises of
   presidential elections in Egypt, "may well usher in an Arab spring of
   freedom, one long overdue." It would take another six years for the
   Arab spring to become a tangible reality in Egypt and elsewhere.

   These springtime labels all owe their rhetorical power to a master
   metaphor that transfers the qualities of seasonal change to political
   change. The idea of political seasons is an ancient one: think of
   Shakespeare's famous opening line in Richard III, "Now is the winter of
   our discontent, made glorious summer by this sun of York." (The "sun of
   York" refers to the blazing sun adopted by Richard's brother Edward IV
   on his ascension to the throne, and also puns on Edward's status as a
   "son of York," since he was the youngest son of the Duke of York.) But
   I can't help thinking of the wonderful movie Being There, adapted from
   Jerzy Kosinski's satirical novella. Peter Sellers stars as a
   simple-minded gardener named Chance who, through a series of mistaken
   impressions, is thought to be a profound economic thinker. Here he is
   talking seasons with the president (Jack Warden) and his confidant, a
   wealthy businessman (Melvyn Douglas).

   IFRAME: http://www.youtube.com/embed/YgGvd1UPZ88?rel=0

   [10s.jpg] Ben Zimmer is executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and
   editor of the online magazine. He is a language columnist for The
   Boston Globe and the former "On Language
   " columnist for The New York Times Magazine. He has worked as editor
   for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press and as a
   consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary. In addition to his regular
   "Word Routes" column here, he contributes to the group weblog Language
   Log. He is also the chair of the New Words Committee of the American
   Dialect Society. Click here to read other articles by Ben Zimmer

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   ARTICLE TOPICS:
          Word Origins, Politics, Words

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