As David Govrin states in his preface, The Journey to the Arab Spring: The Ideological Roots of the Middle East Upheaval in Arab Liberal Thought is a revised version of a dissertation he submitted in 2011 called “The New Liberal Discourse on Reforms and Democratization in the Arab Mashreq Countries 1990–2005.” This title, as will be argued, better reflects the contents of the published work. We will return later to the actual title of the book. The book is a study of the discourses of the so-called “new Arab liberals” on democracy and political reform in the Arab world over the last three decades. The label was circulated in Arabic media after 2011 and referred to a number of Arab intellectuals who reacted to the 9/11 attacks with a renewed criticism of the state of education, economy, and politics in their Arab countries as well as with calls for urgent reform and change. It quickly became a controversial designation and an object of heated debate, and remains so to our present day.

Some regarded those intellectuals as apologists for Western imperialism whereas others considered them as advocates of much-needed changes. The late Jordanian thinker, Shaker al-Nabulsi (1940–2014), was one of their most vocal spokesmen. In a number of articles and books, including a three-volume history of contemporary Arab thought dealing with the period 1950–2000—on which Govrin draws heavily—al-Nabulsi presented their common demands and values, and defended them strongly. Al-Nabulsi saw this early 21st century Arab liberalism as the third wave of a long lineage that started in the late 19th century with the nahḍa, with calls for religious and educational reform, secularization, and women's rights, and which continued in the second half of the 20th century with an increased defence of civil society against the despotism of ruling military and/or partisan regimes. In the third wave, according to al-Nabulsi, the calls also include the denunciation and rejection of religious fanaticism and terror, the acceptance of foreign intervention in getting rid of dictators and bringing about regime change, the readiness to normalize relations with Israel on the basis of political realism and the welcoming of globalization for the sake of economic modernization and improvement. What is common to all these phases, according to al-Nabulsi, is the prioritization of freedom and reason. Not all “new liberals,” whether designated as such by themselves or by others, agree to all such claims. Moreover, these calls remain highly controversial among Arab thinkers today. In fact, one contentious debate flared up following the publication in March 2015 of Joseph Massad's damning article, “The Destructive Legacy of Arab Liberals” (The Electronic Intifada, 30 March 2015, accessed 29 June 2015, https://electronicintifada.net/content/destructive-legacy-arab-liberals/14385).

Govrin's study comprises two parts. The first is historical, in which he briefly presents the intellectual background of contemporary liberal discourse, first in the nahḍa period from 1876 to 1945, and then in the second half of the 20th century, following the establishment of revolutionary Arab regimes. The second part is analytical, in which Govrin examines the views of a number of those “new liberals.” The two parts are preceded by a preface and an introduction in which the author explains his method and approach. In the introduction, he goes over the various definitions of the term “liberalism,” tracing its genealogy in modern Arab discourses back to Rifaʿa Rafiʿ al-Tahtawi (1801–1873), and examining its uses by contemporary Arab thinkers, especially the “new liberals.” In the preface, Govrin concedes that these do not form a homogeneous political, ideological, or social group, but that they share a number of values and demands, which make up a “new liberal” discourse that can be identified as such. It is a discourse that prioritizes individual and civil rights, pluralism, and democracy. As to the criteria behind his choice of these specific thinkers, they include “the widespread recognition of their public and intellectual impact,” the “quality and quantity of their publications,” as well as their “use of the media” (p. xiv) to disseminate their ideas, admitting nonetheless to the difficulty of measuring such an impact.

In the first chapter of the analytical section, Govrin classifies his thinkers into three categories, depending on the alignment of their positions with those of their respective governments. They consist of “establishment liberals” such as Abd al-Moneim Said; “semi-establishment liberals” such as Abd al-Hamid al-Ansari, Ahmad al-Baghdadi, Khalid al-Dakhil, Osama al-Ghazali, Muhammad Mahfuz, Hala Mustafa; and, finally, “independent liberals” such as Afif al-Akhdar, Sayyar al-Jamil, Amin al-Mahdi, Moncef al-Marzouki, Shaker al-Nabulsi, Said al-Naggar, Sayyid al-Qimni, Burhan Ghaliyun, Tarek Heggy, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Hazem Saghie, and George Tarabichi. He also distinguishes between those with a secularist view and those with a religious leaning. At the end of the book, Govrin provides a useful biographical profile of each one. In the second chapter, he enumerates the events, which, in his opinion, shaped their ideas. They include the collapse of the Communist bloc, the first Gulf War, the failed US initiatives for introducing democracy in the region, changing communications technology, particularly the emergence of the pan-Arab satellite television channels as well as the Internet, and finally the 9/11 attacks and the invasion and occupation of Iraq. In the last two chapters of the book, Govrin analyzes the discourses of the “new liberals” mentioned above and underlines their main themes. These turn primarily on the preconditions and obstacles of advocating and implementing democratic reforms in the region. They chiefly revolve around the political-structural problems pertaining to the nature of the prevailing states, but also to that of the existing political parties. Moreover, they deal with the dominating cultural and socioeconomic patterns, and with the difficulties these “new liberals” find in reaching out to the larger public. Western imperialism and the Arab-Israeli conflict make their task even more complicated.

In the conclusion, the author sums up the main challenges of the “new liberal” struggle on three main fronts: the state, the Islamists (to whom the state is happy to cede control of social welfare, culture, and the media), and society, which Govrin sees as being captive to its traditionalist, Islamic, and tribal nature. He salutes the vitality of the “new liberals,” whom he sees to be more interested in addressing internal Arab problems than in blaming everything on Israel and the West. He regards them as the “only ideological alternative to that of the Islamic movements” (p. 267). Govrin's conclusion warrants two critical remarks. First, it is helpful to remember that the defense of liberties, democracy, human rights, and social and political justice in the Arab world has been carried out by a much larger array of Arab thinkers since the early sixties, if not the fifties, including leftists and even Marxists, such as Abdallah Laroui, Yassin Hafez, Saadallah Wannous, Sonallah Ibrahim, Hisham Sharaby, Elias Khoury, Faisal Darraj, to name but a few; the same applies to inwardly-oriented critical thinking. Second, the relegation of the Zionist problem, one that Arab regimes have often used as a pretext to repress their own populations, to a secondary level by some of the “new liberals” and Arab protestors since late 2010, is not necessarily an indication that the problem is no more. Rather, it is that addressing it should start by removing the regimes that have failed to do so. But the more problematic claims of the book come in the epilogue, where the author states that the recent Arab uprisings cannot be understood without tracing them back to the ideological roots of liberalism, justifying hence the title of the book. This claim contradicts the large consensus reached by observers of those uprisings, namely that the latter were devoid of ideological content and motivation. Instead, they were to be traced back to the decades-old discontent of people and workers about governmental repression, corruption, and economic mismanagement. Furthermore, the two elected liberals, whom Govrin presents as proof for the significance of the “new liberal” current, namely Burhan Ghaliyun of Syria (who was not really elected by the people) and Moncef Marzouki of Tunisia, were both alienated and discredited by their people albeit for different reasons. In the case of Marzouki, he was strongly rejected by the large revolutionary public for his incompetence and moral corruption. Finally, despite pointing out throughout the book the internal and external policies that led Arab societies to their present cultural, economic, and political predicament, including their fragmentation, polarization, and pauperization, Govrin seems to be giving in to a culturalistic explanation of these phenomena, lamenting the “local political culture” that is responsible for shattering the dream of democratization. Islam, he says, seems to have kept its hold on these societies, despite all the efforts at modernization, in an inexorable return of the repressed “natural.” Both culturalism and naturalism, as we know, have proven to be unhelpful approaches for understanding human societies.