A seamless political thread running through the current U.N. General Assembly debate has been that of the Arab Spring, the movement that has shifted the political sands throughout the Middle East.
Yet, among the often self-congratulatory messages praising the Arab Spring, some former East Bloc states have offered sage socio-political advice on how to manage the transitions from dictatorship to democracy.
While the nature of the former East Bloc was a rigid socialist system enforced by the former Soviet Union, the Arab Spring countries, among them Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria, were not beholden to a single external political patron as much as they were reflections of traditional Arab authoritarianism and personality politics. While the rule may have been politically suffocating, it was not dependent on or supported by an outside force as was the case in the Czech Republic, Hungary or even East Germany.