The end of submission

It is unlikely that the young people of Egypt and Tunisia, and in a wider view those of other Arab countries where protest is growing against despotic regimes, will fade back into obscurity now that they have become aware of their ability to play a leading role in the events that have shaken an apparently petrified world. Perhaps the most striking thing about the unscripted revolts in Tunisia and Egypt, is the decisive role of this amorphous and basically non-ideological force, which dictators from Algeria to Yemen have never thought of as anything more than local color.

The populations of this wide arc of countries, extending from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, live in a situation of relentless repression, widespread misery (in sharp contrast with the wealth and rapacity of the rulers) and chronic, encysted corruption- all of which are definitive characteristics of a thieving police state.

The other common characteristic is the absolute lack of economic opportunity for a whole generation of young people, who have always been silenced under an apparently immutable order. These young people, of an average age of 22, represent at least 60 percent of the 360 million people in Arab countries. They live mostly in urban areas, and to give them all work, some 50 million jobs would have to be created in the course of the next decade.

It is precisely these aimless young people who have become the front line in the rebellion that has liquidated the only kind of Tunisian government they have ever known. Other like them are well on the way to doing the same with the sinister Egyptian regime of Hosni Mubarak. We are looking at an unstoppable wave of liberty and dignity, which is washing away an obsolete world. In greater or lesser measure, the Arab world as we now know it will be rendered unrecognizable for the children of today's protesters. Indeed, the wave of protest casts serious doubt on the cliché of the Arab culture's supposed propensity to tyranny.

It is in Egypt, with a population of 80 million, where the ire and disaffection of the young (unemployed, students, urban professionals) appears particularly intense, in line with their extreme situation. It is not by chance that, just as in Tunisia, the suppression of cellphones and internet was among the first measures taken by the cornered regime, in a desperate attempt to contain the revolt. Technology has put in the hands of young Arabs the tools they need to watch, in real time, the change and evolution that is going on in the rest of the world.