Is the liberal order falling apart?

 I came to the "capital of the world" for a panel at Columbia University on a new and highly interesting book: "The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions." Penned by the prominent academic Michael Walzer, it is a book that explains how the secular parties that founded most post-colonial states were soon challenged and even defeated by a religious revival. Examining the three separate yet somewhat similar cases of India, Israel and Algeria, Walzer shows us why and how the "progressive" visions at the founding of these young republics were soon challenged by what he calls "zealots": Hindu nationalists in India, the religious right in Israel and the Islamists in Algeria. 

As you can guess, this pattern has something to do with Turkey as well. In Turkey, too, the secularist vision at the founding has also been replaced by a religious revival. This revival first looked like "democratization," and it indeed was, but it soon proved to be "democratic" only in a very illiberal sense: the religious majority "got their country back" from the formerly authoritarian secular elite, but only with an urge for vengeance and an intoxication with power. And we don't yet know how far they will go in deepening and consolidating their newfound hegemony. 

Moreover, Turkey is still a heaven on earth when compared to the political disasters that have hit its neighborhood in the past five years. The "Arab Spring," which gave many people, including myself, many hopes, only turned out to be a complete disappointment. With the notable and invaluable exception of Tunisia, Arab countries touched by the "spring" devolved either into civil war, as in Syria, Libya and Yemen, or turned into even more repressive tyrannies, as in Egypt.