This year we have witnessed an unprecedented series of uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. While the Egyptians and Tunisians were fighting for freedom, some of us wondered if turmoil would be transplanted onto our soil.

The events in the UK and in the Middle East not only caught widespread media attention, but also raised the question of how whole-hearted support for the ‘Arab Spring’ could turn into such condemnation of the ‘Anglo Summer’. The truth is that we cannot interpret the ‘Anglo Summer’ as an English ‘Arab Spring’ - despite violence and mayhem in both places, there is a sharp contrast between the two. Whereas Arab youth has been fighting for a free country, their English counterparts were fighting for nothing more than brand new plasma TVs.

The comparisons between UK and Middle East unrest comes from the fact that in societies with large marginalized populations, riot outbreaks do happen; protests are often underpinned by the perception of illegitimacy of authorities. In both cases the uproar was sparked by a single, violent event (shooting of Duggan in London and brutal termination of peaceful protests by police in Arab countries), then it spread further in a domino-like fashion.

But here the similarities come to a close. The principal difference between the "smash and grab" in London and demonstrations in Middle East lies in motivation and modality of the people involved. In the Arab Spring, protesters, frustrated by years of authoritative reigns, decided to fight for a democratic country. Their demands for the right to vote, free speech, and freedom to demonstrate are something we often overlook, because we take those liberties for granted. Thus the Middle East uprising resembles events leading to the fall of communism in the Eastern Europe. Can we compare riots in England to the fall of Berlin Wall or to the Solidarity movement? It seems rather ridiculous.

Of course, what happened in London and other English cities did not occur by chance. Various factors, such as long-term austerity caused by governmental cuts on social services, closing down of youth centres (perceived by the cabinet as "non-essential") have weakened community bonds and fostered a general animosity toward the government. Long-standing disparities between rich and poor have created a social context in which the alienated youth, lacking in a sense of accountability, feel justified in engaging in criminal activity. In other words, while rioters may not have been fighting for justice, it is the circumstances of injustice which have enabled them to behave in the way they have. The rioters of middle-class backgrounds (hardly struck by the recent welfare cuts) are less easily defensible, seeming to have simply taken hold of an excellent window of opportunity to cause general disorder.

The modus operandi was also strikingly different in the Middle East and in the UK. In Syria, Libya or Tunisia the Arab Spring started as peaceful demonstrations against the regime. The colateral damage in the form of devastated streets and houses didn’t happen until the police took a violent stance against the protests. The arrests and torturing of civilians followed. In England though, there were no peaceful demonstrations - there were plain riots, where hordes of hooligans wreaked havoc just for the sake of it. How many of them were carrying banners with political messages? As the shops were looted and houses burned down, the yobs simply uttered that they had “seized the opportunity to claim back their taxes”, running with a new pair of trainers in one hand, a DVD player in the other.

That said, the UK riots were, above all, acts of sheer, unbridled violence with no political agenda. There is a thick line between what happened in the Middle East and in Britain. Trying to put the English riots in the context of the Arab Spring, as was done by Labour MP Stuart Bell, is just diverting the responsibility of the long-standing social problems we have yet to resolve.

The Middle East uprisings may not bring about instant changes, but they can open doors for further reforms and ultimately lead to a democratic society, just as in Eastern Europe twenty years ago. The aftermath of the English riots is not as optimistic. The looters need to be taught that they cannot simply cause £200m-worth destruction in the country and get away with it. This is particularly alarming in the light of the 2012 Olympics. The government needs to address the problems of our broken society, or else brace for further unrest or - even worse – a global embarrassment when the London Olympic Games are interrupted by flash riots.

Originally published 13 September 2011.