It’s disappointing when a journalist’s general knowledge extends a decade at most. A few weeks ago, a reporter from the Phnom Penh Post suggested that the “Spring Movement” of Cambodia’s exiled political opposition “may refer to the Arab Spring series of anti-government protests and uprisings.” Whether this was ignorance or intentionally disparaging is hard to tell. The article, after all, was an uncritical recap of a roundtable on “Color Revolutions and the Evolving Global Order” organized by the Royal Academy of Cambodia’s International Relations Institute (IRIC) earlier this month.

Roundtable, one says: actually more of a pissing contest between “academics” to see who could better recite the government’s talking points. Kin Phea, the IRIC’s director general, probably sprayed the highest. The “danger of regime change in Cambodia in the name of democracy is real and true,” he stated. “Fortunately, these conspiracy tactics have been crushed and such attempts have been prevented.”

The Royal Academy is proving to be as scholastic as it is independent. Maybe that’s what happens when Beijing (and increasingly Moscow) foots the bill. And in a display of its wisdom, I hear the IRIC thought it sensible to put up visiting guests for a different conference a week earlier in the Phnom Penh Hotel, which was sanctioned by the U.S. government for connections to the vast cyberscamming industry a few months earlier.

Alas, the Phnom Penh Post’s copy-editors probably do need reminding that the sobriquet “spring” dates back longer than 2010 – in fact, all the way back to the European revolutions of 1848, the “springtime of nations,” after which any popular revolt occurring between March and May usually earned the title. (More evocatively, it conjures the blossoming of liberty after a winter of absolutism.)

The Czechoslovak uprising in 1968 was the “Prague Spring.” Croatian protests three years later were the Hrvatsko proljeće, or “Croatian Spring.” Hence, when the people of North Africa started to revolt against their dictators in early 2010, the rather disparate protests were quickly branded the “Arab Spring.” The Burmese chose the “Spring Revolution” for their revolt against the military junta that seized power in February 2021.

Why any rebellious movement would actually want the “spring” affiliation is a riddle in itself. At best it is germinal for future revolutions: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels dashed off the “The Communist Manifesto” in a few weeks in early 1848, and the events of 1968 in Eastern Europe cannot be divorced from those of 1989. But the appellation seems to consign any upheaval to a dismal conclusion; the immediate consequence of most of these “springs” has been simply another season of oppression. The original springtime of 1848 resulted in Prussian absolutism and Hapsburg dominion. Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring. The Arab Spring led to military dictatorships and anarchy. One hopes Myanmar bucks the trend.

Nonetheless, Sam Rainsy and his exiled fellow travelers have branded their latest tactics the “Spring Strategy.” “We need to start practicing spring strategies,” he implored on social media on December 7. “The situation,” presumably the downfall of the Hun dynasty, he argued, “is ripe.” We’ll see, yet one struggles to fathom why Sam Rainsy, days later, would want to draw a line between current events in Syria and his homeland. “The regime of father and son… has collapsed in just 10 days,” Rainsy wrote on social media on December 9. “Don’t be afraid to say spring,” he wrote in another post, presumably again about events in Syria.

Bashar Al-Assad, the dictator who fled Damascus this month, did, indeed, inherit the country from his father, just as Hun Manet, Cambodia’s prime minister, inherited the country from his father last year. But any comparison ends there – and Cambodia’s exiled “spring-ists” ought to want them to end there. The forces that overthrew Al-Assad’s regime are hardly Voltairists bathed in the Enlightenment ideals of the forty-eighters or, indeed, of Cambodia’s Europhile exilees. And Syria is now being carved up by the not-so-enlightened governments of Turkey, Russia, and Iran.

That wasn’t the case for another popular revolt of 2024, the Bangladeshi uprising. (Thankfully, it took place in July so wasn’t dubbed the “Dhaka Spring.”) That month, the country’s dictator, Sheikh Hasina, was overthrown by disgruntled students and a military that refused to protect her regime. The caretaker government is now headed by a Nobel laureate and seems to be doing a good job: the economy hasn’t collapsed, and the public is mostly on board with the new leadership. Indeed, Bangladesh is an example of how a popular revolution can avoid leading to further tyranny or anarchy. Recall that events in Dhaka in July sent Phnom Penh into a tizzy throughout the summer. Hun Manet’s government arrested almost 100 people around that time for plotting yet another one of the made-up “color revolutions.”

Sam Rainsy has had his usual hyperbole to hand over the past few weeks, but he wasn’t wrong when he commented on December 3 that the “Hun clan regime is stuck.” Indeed, the economy is far from healthy. Household debt is crippling. The public is growing mutinous over corruption. The disloyal within the army and police are being purged (one must ponder why). Hun Sen, aware that the international storm clouds are amassing, has now taken full control of foreign policy after sacking the foreign minister last month and re-installing his trusted sidekick.

Come January, Washington may impose 10-20 percent tariffs on all imports, which would be calamitous to Cambodia’s economy since the United States is by far the largest purchaser of its goods. Almost certainly, a Trump administration packed with China hawks will be far rougher on Phnom Penh than the outgoing administration. China is growing more interventionist in the region at the same time as it’s less able to guarantee no-limits investment to Cambodia. Hun Sen traveled to Beijing earlier this month to plead for more money. Is a new round of spats with Vietnam going to occur when work finally begins on the Funan Techo Canal next year?

Nationalism was always the chink in Hun Sen’s armor; it gaped open again this year. The usual anti-Vietnamese voices found a new existential threat in the rather dull and unimportant Cambodia-Laos-Vietnam Development Triangle Agreement. Unable to silence the noise after months of trying, Phnom Penh simply gave in and left the tripartite agreement in September. Since then, the public’s eyes have turned westwards to Koh Kut, an island Cambodia disputes ownership of with Thailand. “Koh Kut, our island,” Mu Sochua, usually one of the less irredentist of her opposition cohort, wrote on Facebook this month, an indication that this will now drive their springish agenda early next year.

However disparate, the two popular revolutions of 2024 have shown how quickly things can fall apart. No event is unforeseeable, but who last month was predicting the immediate collapse of Al-Assad’s dictatorship or in June of Sheikh Hasina’s regime? Then again, most dictatorships are still around. If you were a betting man, all your money would be on Cambodia’s ruling party overcoming its problems, by hook and by quite a lot of crook, over the coming year.