‘A spectre is haunting the rich world. It is the spectre of ungovernability’, began an editorial in The Economist earlier this year, paraphrasing the opening line of The Communist Manifesto. But it is not only the West that is grappling with ungovernability. Across the Arab world, protesters have been making it clear that they will be ungovernable until their leaders deliver good governance.

The immediate triggers of the protests vary by country. In Algeria, it was President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s announcement of his candidacy for a fifth term that sent people pouring into the streets. In Egypt, it was the government’s tightening of its food-subsidy program, which provides basic goods like rice to millions of people. In Iran, a 50% increase in previously highly subsidised fuel prices was to blame; in Sudan, high prices and bread shortages; and in Lebanon, a proposed tax on voice calls on apps like WhatsApp.

But these sparks caused conflagrations only because there was already plenty of kindling. Even after Bouteflika resigned, Egypt re-enrolled 1.8 million people in its food-subsidy program and Lebanon cancelled the WhatsApp tax, protests raged on.

It’s tempting to assume that, as with the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, the public’s longing for democracy is fuelling today’s fires. But the Arab Spring devolved into winner-take-all Islamist rule in some cases and virtual state collapse in others. Now too jaded to expect fully democratic governments (the army, in most people’s view, will always rule in the end), today’s protesters are demanding functioning, reasonably accountable ones.

Any functioning state, democratic or not, depends on a social contract, in which governments derive their legitimacy from their ability to provide conditions for steady economic progress, secure jobs and a reliable social safety net. Arab dictatorships, beholden to obscure economic interests and shielded by corrupt and unaccountable security apparatuses, have consistently violated this contract.

Recent developments—such as declining oil revenues and, in Egypt, structural adjustment demanded by the International Monetary Fund—have exacerbated Arab populations’ economic travails, pushing many people to the breaking point. In Iraq, frustration with corruption and unemployment is so acute that a clear immediate trigger wasn’t even needed to drive people into the streets.

These protesters are, by and large, motivated by concrete material demands, such as more jobs, better public services and lower living costs, as well as anti-corruption measures. This approach, they hope, will enable their movement to avoid the fate of the Arab Spring, not least because support for it cuts across sectarian lines.

The 2011 Arab Spring uprisings failed partly because of the deep societal cleavages—between Shia and Sunni, Druze and Kurd, radical Jihadist and political Islamist, Berber and Arab, and Christian and Muslim—that they exposed. Embattled autocrats quickly seized upon these tensions to weaken the opposition and reassert their authority.

Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon and Sudan have no shortage of ethnic and religious cleavages, including histories of sectarian conflict. Yet protesters there have been willing and able to transcend their differences. ‘No Berbers, no Arabs, no ethnicity, no religion! We are all Algerians’, protesters in Algiers shouted. It is as if they still subscribe to the fragile promise of a pluralistic Arab nation-state.

To be sure, there have been calls for sweeping political reforms. In Lebanon, even after Prime Minister Saad Hariri unveiled a raft of economic reforms, protests continued, with many hoping to topple the entire political class. In Algeria, protesters boycotted the presidential election that followed Bouteflika’s ouster, on the grounds that all of the candidates were closely linked to his rule.

But interethnic harmony will always be easier to achieve when protesters focus on shared economic grievances, rather than grandiloquent dreams of democracy and nation-building. In Lebanon, the political system protesters are attempting to upend is fundamentally sectarian—one that is now hostage to Hezbollah’s and Iran’s regional designs.

Yet in the long run, the people’s best hope of challenging incumbent powers would be a broad interethnic coalition. Hezbollah’s violent opposition to the protests in Lebanon shows how a cross-ethnic civic agenda threatens an all-consuming culture of resistance that empowers some.

For now, even as the protesters avoid some of the pitfalls of the 2011 uprisings, they remain highly vulnerable. They are confronting powerful repressive apparatuses with neither compelling leaders nor clear strategies. In Iraq, protesters have been shot dead by police. In Iran, the death toll exceeds 300, while arrests number in the thousands. Egypt, too, has carried out thousands of arrests, with journalists among the security forces’ leading targets.

Given that no foreign power is willing to intervene to stop the crackdowns, the odds are against the protesters. At least in 2011, the West, led by the principled US President Barack Obama, supported the Arab world’s push for democracy. Today, Donald Trump—who has little interest in any of America’s international responsibilities, and once called Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi his ‘favorite dictator’—is setting the tone. Europe, for its part, is struggling to rein in its own rising authoritarian and proto-fascist movements.

Today’s Arab protesters have adjusted their tactics and objectives to reflect the lessons of the Arab Spring. They may win some concessions aimed at making them governable again; indeed, they already have. But whether they can overcome the resistance of their governments’ repressive apparatuses to secure genuine governance improvements remains far from certain.

Exactly 75 years ago, Australians dressed in steel helmets and khaki shorts, and often not much else, sat in weapon pits in the Egyptian sun about 120 kilometres west of Alexandria. They were preparing for what history would call the second battle of El Alamein, the great offensive planned by Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery. In the summer heat of July 1942, his predecessor, Archibald Wavell, had held the German–Italian drive towards Egypt, a battle in which the 9th Australian Division had played a notable part. Now, after gathering more troops, tanks and guns, Montgomery was ready to launch his Eighth Army against General Erwin Rommel’s Panzer Armée Afrika, a commander and a force admired and respected even by their adversaries.

If it succeeded, Montgomery’s assault might reverse the fortunes of Allied armies in North Africa and the Mediterranean. So far, after victories early in 1941 against the Italians in Eritrea and in Libya, when tens of thousands of demoralised Italians had been captured, no British general had been able to gain a decisive success in the theatre. In 1941, Greece and Crete had been lost. In north Africa, Tobruk had been saved, but in tank battles in Libya Rommel had demonstrated his skill. A British Commonwealth advance to Gazala had ended in disaster and the loss of Tobruk had pushed Axis forces to within striking distance of Alexandria. Allied morale had plummeted and the troops were convinced that they could not beat Rommel. But after a three-week fight on a line between the railway halt of El Alamein and the lip of the impassable Qattara Depression, the Eighth Army had held. Now, under yet another commander, it faced the task of once again taking on Rommel’s Panzer Armée.

Australians at home knew about this epic desert war, a contest so different to the war that was occupying headlines and newsreels. But for the past 10 months, since the Japanese had entered the world war so spectacularly by attacking Pearl Harbor and the European colonies in Asia, the war in what they called the Far East had dominated Australia’s attention. An entire Australian division, the 8th, had been swept into captivity by the Japanese victories in Malaya, Singapore and the islands to Australia’s north. Winston Churchill had sent two of Australia’s three divisions back from the Middle East, falling out with Prime Minister John Curtin over where they should be deployed. Australia’s north had been bombed and Japanese submarines had penetrated Sydney Harbour. While the 9th Division faced Rommel’s panzers at Tel el Eisa in July, Australian Militia had been driven back over the Owen Stanleys towards Port Moresby. While Montgomery gathered strength and planned his great counter-stroke, Australian troops had held the Japanese on the Kokoda Trail and begun the painful advance northwards. The war against Japan captured Australia’s attention, and (judging by the number of books published since) that preoccupation has never wavered.

But late in October 1942, men of the 9th Division, the only remaining Australian troops in the Mediterranean theatre, prepared for their next test. After a colossal bombardment, Montgomery’s infantry—Australian, Scottish, New Zealand, Indian and British—crossed the start-line on the evening of 23 October. The Australians’ task was to ‘pin’ the German defenders of the vital coastal sector while the infantry further south opened up a route for British armour to break through the belts of mines protecting the Axis line. The battle was a vicious 12-day fight in which (measured by their disproportionate casualties, including 500 dead) Australians played a vital part. By early November, Rommel’s troops at last began a retreat westwards that ended six months later with the capitulation of Axis forces in Africa. As Rommel ordered the withdrawal, Australian troops entered the Papuan village that would give its name to the Kokoda campaign, which in retrospect became the focus of Australia’s understanding of World War II.

The victory at El Alamein represented perhaps the British Commonwealth’s finest moment. An army of divisions from Britain and all major dominions (except Canada) had defeated an Axis army in the field. Admittedly, Montgomery had enjoyed a substantial material superiority to Rommel, but the victory was sufficient. Montgomery had won the first of the great Allied victories, one justifying Churchill’s later pronouncement (rightly qualified with ‘it might almost be said’) that before Alamein the Allies had never had a victory and after it had never had a defeat.

For the men of the 9th Division, Alamein was their last experience of war against the Germans and Italians. They were sent home, in response to urgent appeals from Douglas MacArthur and John Curtin. From early 1943, the only Australians to prosecute the war in Europe were airmen of the RAAF and sailors of the RAN, now all but forgotten. The jungle war against Japan came to dominate Australia’s memory of World War II.

This lopsided remembrance is unfortunate. However much Australians rightly recall the war on their doorstep, in Singapore, the islands and Papua New Guinea, the Australian contribution to the struggle against Nazi Germany and fascist Italy was significant on a world stage. Fifty years ago, Bernard Montgomery (by then Montgomery of Alamein) travelled to Egypt on what proved to be his last overseas trip (though he lived for another 10 years, dying at 88). After he visited the war cemetery at Alamein, with its 7,350 graves and memorial bearing 11,945 names, his companion, a former staff officer, noticed he was subdued. ‘I’ve been thinking of all those dead’, he confessed. His thoughts turned to the many Australian headstones he had seen that day. ‘The more I think of it’, he said, ‘the more I realise that winning was only made possible by the bravery of the 9th Australian Division’.

In a few weeks we will of course see articles marking the 75th anniversary of the end of the Kokoda campaign. It is fitting to recall that Australian troops helped to defeat Nazi Germany, as well as liberating Australian Papua.