As there is no free food, there are no revolutions without high costs. The food may remove hunger but in revolutions the paid cost may not be known because some is paid immediately in blood, lives and property while the other cost, which is the most important may be delayed until the revolution is settled, in a destination that may have no relation with its original goal. 
The new relations may be entirely opposite to the rebels aspirations.

The disturbing issue besides the paid invoice is that the revolution for one reason or another acquires special sanctity, which has real or false features that allege the pursuit of principles of justice, freedom, democracy and human dignity.

It doesn't matter if one country collapses due to the revolution, another splits or blood is shed, because there is someone who asks in surprise isn't this the revolution we had revolted for.
In the international political thought, there were always the conservatives who look at the revolution with deep skepticism. The French revolution had created a whole legacy that revolted against the revolution, which base for a previous one which was the American revolution that issued the law of (sedition and strangers.)

Sedition meant transferring the thoughts of the French revolution and after it, that of the Bolshevik while the strangers are those who embrace these ideas. As the country was a country of immigrants, everyone could be considered to be a stranger if he had a revolution in his mind or if he is slightly touched by insanity. The Arabic and Islamic political thought used to be fearing sedition, and there are often negative signs to the great sedition (the strife in Islam, following the assassination of the third Caliph Othman Ibn Afan,) and generally speaking al-Ghazali beat Ibn Rushd, not only in the role of the mind, but also in the legitimacy of the revolution against the ruler.

The problem of the conservative thought is its strong hostility against the paid cost of the revolution, however it didn't care much for the continuation of payment for the status quo and its failure to change it.

Only in the nineteenth century the conservative thought was linked to reform, and other with the revolution and reform from within, where the change is in the hands of the ruling authority.
Our generation has lived in the era of the revolutions of the fifties, which despite being military coups, they enveloped themselves with the cloak of revolution because of the of economic and social changes that they had made.

And as the revolution is considered due to induction and not thought, there was no problem in the conservative countries to have (oil revolutions) that cause the same economic and social effect as long as the state is taking care of the citizen from the cradle to the grave.
Despite the difference in details, this became the status quo all along the last six decades and all were celebrating some sorts of revolutions even after the expansion the state's military, security and civil bureaucracy, and the citizens became subjects to another sort of , monarchal or republican states.

The Arab spring revolutions which crossed all seasons during last year up to the current year is different this time. The matter is not in the hands of elites who have the military power or influence. It was the revolution of the people who poured out looking for another form of state different from that which they had experienced and found it to be incompatible with their aspirations or vision at the beginning of the 21st century. 

The whole matter is no more than turning over the national soil so as to dig out what the dictatorship had succeeded in hiding all along the previous centuries.

Simply the Arab revolutions have had a deep vision in the mirror, to distinguish the realities about the structure of the Arab state, despite its simplicity, complexity, its apparent harmony and exaggerated centralism and in spite of the reality that created the contrast between the regions, religions, faiths and denominations.

Before the Arab spring, Sudan split and we said or some of us said that it was a result of foreign intrigue or due to the existing dictatorship, however after the Arab spring, Libya was on the brink of federalism and division and Yemen as well.

No one knows what the conditions in Syria may lead after putting out fire and the removal of smoke.

The Egyptian case was exiting, for despite the known strength of the state and the harmony of the people, however the parties did not seem to be consistent as it was imagined in Sinai, Western Sahara and the Nubba.

The consensus of the Egyptians in lamenting Pope Shanodah 111, could express the sadness for losing one of the national unity pillars.

It didn’t require to be from al-Nubba, Sinai or Marsa Matrouh in order to be in disagreement with the state as did the people in Damietta, who persistently refused a fertilizer plant provided to them by the state. 

The Arab revolutions' cost was not in the martyrs who fell and the destruction. The real cost is the knowledge of the reality in the Arab countries as it is, and not as what the ruling elites hoped and forced  by its power and security forces, and most importantly through their media. 

 The great dilemma could be the old and new Arab elites who are not ready to deal with the new reality, or to understand new forms of a state that had not been imagined before.
In short we haven't the Czech Havel who accepted the secession of Slovenia and, then returned and united with it through the European Union. We also haven't; Lech Vouansa who jumped from the Warsaw Pact to NATO, not only in the strategic sense of the word, which agrees with the coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but in the economic and social sense.

The German unity has been achieved despite those who refused it from Western Germany for fear of its expensive cost. Those who refused it from East Germany used to say that if there is more than one German state like Austria, why shouldn't there be a third one?

This didn't happen, but the European elites used to have the flexibility, thoughts, the readiness for change and to deal with the realities that were created by the different revolutions in Eastern and Central Europe.
The elites in the Arab world are entirely different, where they were not at all prepared to deal with the new realities even after their great effort in undermining it.
They will never exert efforts for determining what will come next, except calling back the frustrating ideas of the dictatorships. We don't need to give examples of the leadership of the  Syrian Revolution, the disgraceful state of the leaders of the Egyptian revolution, or the surprising situation of the revolution that erupted in Barka, where it formed a commanding leadership to start the process of dismantling the state even before its establishment on new constitutional and legal grounds?
The final cost of the revolution is to hand it over to anyone who has an integrated program to take the Arab countries with their revolutions into past times that have nothing to do with the present or the future.