SO fixated are we with Brexit and the troubles of Europe, that it’s all too easy to forget that there is a world beyond. A small item of news caught my eye the other day off the back of the gilets jaunes protests in France.

It was the announcement by the authorities in Egypt that they have restricted the sale of yellow reflective vests amid fears government opponents there might attempt to copy their French counterparts during the coming anniversary of the 2011 Arab Spring uprising that toppled President Hosni Mubarak.

It’s hard to believe that it’s now seven years since those dramatic days across the Middle East when, from Tunis to Tripoli and beyond, it seemed that an unstoppable force for good had been unleashed with democracy replacing dictatorship.

Next to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Arab Spring uprisings will stay in my memory as among the most remarkable events I have ever witnessed as a foreign correspondent.

I still recall while en route to Cairo and unable to sleep at Amsterdam Airport watching the television news as President Mubarak, after 30 years of iron rule, finally told the world he would step down and not contest the next election.

Maybe now it’s all over, I thought to myself. Perhaps by the time I get there that massive army of pro-democracy supporters who had made Cairo’s Tahrir Square a household name would now be roaming the streets in a grand victory pageant.

How wrong I was. Mubarak was only buying time, and over the course of the next few days I watched as central Cairo became a virtual war zone as anti-government and pro-Mubarak protesters clashed repeatedly in a hail of rocks, bottles and petrol bombs.

READ MORE: Paris in chaos as more than 500 'yellow vest' protesters are arrested

In rush after rush, men wielding scaffolding poles, crowbars, knives, razors, and Tasers, and some carrying guns, charged forward.

Mostly they attacked on foot, but near Cairo’s 6th October Bridge off Tahrir Square, they galloped in on horseback and camels like something from a bygone age. In the end Mubarak finally gave way.

A short time after Mubarak’s overthrow it was the turn of Muammar Gaddafi as Libyans rose up against his 42-year dictatorship.

“All my life I’ve worked on the oil rigs in the desert for little pay while Gaddafi makes a fortune,” Ahmed Rafa, a middle-aged lorry driver turned revolutionary, told me when I met him on the frontline west of Benghazi.

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“I haven’t got a wife, haven’t got a house, I haven’t got a car and nothing in the bank because I’m paid so little, all of this I got from Gaddafi,” he told me.

Like Republican-held Madrid or Barcelona during Spain’s civil war of the 1930s, in Benghazi every section of society had been mobilised to defend the rebel cause. Workers, students, youth and women’s groups as well as expatriate Libyans who had returned to the country made up the revolutionary ranks. It was the same in the capital Tripoli, when a short time later Gaddafi was finally ousted.

These days, given the turmoil in Libya and in Syria where the Arab Spring also took root, some argue that what was meant to be a harbinger of democracy has brought nothing but disorder. Some even go as far as to say that Arabs, or Muslims, are so trapped in sectarianism and intolerance that they are incapable of democracy.

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I tend to agree with the great Middle East analyst Roger Hardy that neither claim stands up to scrutiny. Hardy is right that the first lesson of the Arab Spring is that it is a process not an event, one still playing itself out.

But there are other lessons, too, for those of us quick to criticise its apparent failure, lessons that time and again have played out in the Middle East and of which we here in the West have been a part and sometimes the culprit.

One is that the West has always presented Arabs who insist on running their own affairs as fanatics. Allied to this has been our consistent role in cosying up to client regimes in order to keep the oil flowing. Then there is the thorny and age-old issue whereby foreign intervention in the Middle East almost always brings death, destruction and divide and rule. Just think of Iraq.

When the longer-term challenge is to translate popular protest and popular anger into real and lasting change for the good, such policies, as invariably pursued by the West, are at best obstructive and at worst catastrophic.

It would be wrong then to simply characterise the Arab Spring as an outright failure. The hopes raised in 2011 have not died out but in many instances have simply been driven out of plain sight or underground.

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Across the Middle East there are pockets of political inspiration that have flowed from the Arab Spring. To take just a few examples, last year for the first time anywhere in Syria since 1954, the residents of the town of Saraqib in Idlib Province decided to seize control of their future and hold a genuinely free election.

In doing so they effectively offered an alternative history for the entire Syrian conflict, with Saraqib’s citizens embodying the true soul of the revolution that was part of the Arab Spring.

Elsewhere in Syria, too, you have the Kurdish Rojava revolution, an extraordinary egalitarian and pluralist engagement of self-government underpinned by equality for all races, religions, women and men, making it one of the most progressive forces to emerge to this day in any of the six countries that were scenes of the 2011 uprisings.

Also, it’s not just in the Middle East that the Arab Spring influence still reverberates. From the social and economic inequality activists of Occupy and Black Lives Matter in the United States to the anti-austerity Los Indignados in Spain and the environmentalist Gezi Park protesters in Turkey, the influence of the Arab Spring has had a bearing on them all.

Those heady days when Arabs and others took to the streets in Tunis, Cairo and Tripoli and overthrew three dictators might now seem like a distant memory, but the presence of the Arab Spring is still being felt and it would be wrong to underestimate its lingering influence.

Perhaps it’s no surprise right now that the Egyptian authorities are clamping down on the sale of yellow vests.