What the region can—and cannot—teach the Arab world about democracy through revolution.
Thailand and the Philippines cannot be the model for the Arab World: Tunisia, Yemen, and Egypt. In Thailand protesters overthrew a military regime in 1992, but they failed to nurture its newfound democracy. In the Philippines a sea of yellow-clad demonstrators peacefully overthrew Marcos, a corrupt, aging, U.S. backed dictator in 1986, but the country is still beset by poverty, cronyism and nepotism that provoked the 1986 revolution.
The countries the Arab countries should learn lessons from are South Korea, which carefully constructed a prosperous democracy, and Indonesia, which has changed not in one cataclysmic jolt but through years of brick-by-brick nation building.
