Gdansk, Beijing or Tehran? The hunt for parallels to the Cairo uprising.

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World support for anti Mubarak demos

The world is behind you. That's the message to anti-government protesters in Cairo from people around the globe. (Feb. 5)

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"I would say Algeria doesn't have the social and political cohesion for a mass protest movement," Maddy-Weitzman said.

Saudi Arabia, a strong U.S. ally, was deeply concerned by what it perceived as the United States' abrupt abandonment of Mubarak in the midst of the demonstrations, officials in the region said. But unlike Egypt's narrow one-man rule, the Saudi kingdom is governed by a web of complex tribal alliances, with the ruling Saud family numbering in the thousands and deeply entrenched in the country's military, intelligence and other institutions. Periodic revolts by Saudi Arabia's Shiite minority in the oil-rich eastern provinces have been easily contained.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who is Alawite, a minority Shiite sect, keeps a tight grip on the majority Sunni Muslim population. Activists were arrested after a Facebook appeal went out calling for a day of rage similar to the one that drew tens of thousands to Cairo's Tahrir Square. No one demonstrated on Friday.

It is not only the Syrian government's heavy hand that prevents demonstrations, experts say, but also savvy Syrian policymaking, which has sought to temper public discontent.

Unlike Mubarak, who bucked public opinion and maintained a strong alliance with the United States and Israel, "the Syrian regime knows that the people do not like them, so they will not adopt a foreign policy that is not popular with the masses," said Mouafac Harb, a Beirut-based Lebanese-American analyst of Middle Eastern politics.

Stanford University's Diamond predicts that what is most likely to transpire in the Middle East will be similar to what happened in sub-Saharan Africa after the fall of the Berlin Wall. South Africa's subsequent release in 1990 of imprisoned opposition leader Nelson Mandela and other events "catalyzed a wave of mass protests and collapse of authoritarian rule in a great number of sub-Saharan African states."

Yet the ultimate outcome was mixed, he says: Half emerged as electoral democracies, at least for a period, while others maintained authoritarian rule.

"You see the spark in Tunisia," Diamond said. "In the Middle East, some of these guys will fall, some of these regimes will hang on, but what's clear is the region will never be the same again."