There is an extraordinary current of energy flowing through North Africa and the Middle East.

In Morocco, we have watched this flow approach us in fast-moving eddies, from Tunis via Cairo, Benghazi and Tripoli. Morocco may or may not be different. If it is, it will be because it is a differently shaped society – an ancient monarchy, its kings descended from the Prophet and commanding religious as well as secular loyalty from many. Morocco is also closer to Europe, literally, economically and culturally, than other Arab countries.

But Morocco has all the same problems, of corruption and staggeringly unequal wealth distribution, poor education, sky-high unemployment and anomie amongst the young.

In three months it has suddenly released vast energy, the energy of young people, channeled through the social media into street protest and intellectual ferment. We have seen one large and disorderly day of demonstrations on February 20th (from which the movement in Morocco takes its name) and another, well marshalled and entirely peaceful, across the whole country on March 20th.

Between the two, the King made a speech promising a new constitution in June. And while this is far from the end of the wrestling that will shape Morocco’s future, it does give hope that the process will be one (to use the words of Moulay Hisham, the King’s exiled cousin) of ‘evolution not revolution’.

It will require wisdom and restraint on both sides.

But the language of possibility has changed. In the press and on the internet we read things that were unsayable six months ago, about the future and the monarchy, about the religious nature of kingship and the unhealthy royal domination of Morocco’s business world. Not only that – after a spasm of denial and under-reporting of police violence by the official press, the vocabulary of protests has made the mainstream. Demonstrations are described in respectful and matter-of-fact terms in Le Matin, and acknowledged as part of Morocco’s political life.

But what is deeply striking is the reversal of flow between the Arab world and the West.

It’s a reversal of the flow of moral energy.

I have watched my children and their friends, deeply disillusioned with student politics (and national politics) in Britain, wake up to the fact that their contemporaries in the Arab world are fighting and winning real battles. British students are arriving in Cairo and Tunis as British tourists are leaving. Some of the energy that European politics lacks in an age of materialistic self-interest and resigned apathy is up for grabs here. This is in part a case of ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive…’ but it is also a huge transformation.

Arabs – and particularly young Arabs – have suddenly become heroic.

Last month there were demonstrations outside the state capitol in Wisconsin, USA, against the Tea Party governor’s legislation to end the collective bargaining rights of public sector unions. Addressing a huge crowd, one speaker yelled ‘Fight like Egyptians!’ and the cry was taken up.

The West is beginning to catch glimpses of the Arab world as a source not of violence and hatred, passivity and ignorance, but of energy, morality and constructive political action; a positive, not a negative, example to us. This is a precious moment, and must not be allowed to slip away in the rush of returning realpolitik.

This reversal of flow is the biggest background event in cultural relations for decades. It is like the Gulf Stream changing direction – a major and unexpected event that changes everything. We must take care to acknowledge it.

We no longer live in the world geopolitically defined by 9/11, where our own heads linger; we live in a world suddenly being shaped by what a senior Moroccan courtier recently described as ‘the last act of the post-colonial world,’ the final working-out of the legacy of European imperialism. Its heroes are young Arabs like Mohammed Bouaziz and Khaled Said, accidental symbols of escape from despair into hope – into a modern Arab world in which democracy and equality shape lives and futures.

Our work in cultural relations is no longer (inasmuch as it ever was) one-way.

The Arab world has something important to offer us, and we need to work out how to become useful conduits of the energy and the idealism that is being thrown up.

There is the opportunity to take mutuality beyond rhetoric and into reality; to encapsulate fascination, curiosity and respect in programmes and projects that exchange cultural and ethical goods rather than just exporting them.

It is a pressing responsibility.

Martin Rose is the Country Director British Council Morocco.

Find out more about the British Council’s work in Morocco.