Seems a long time back, already, but it was just two weeks ago in Doha that my colleague at The National, Chuck Culpepper, and I were talking about revolutions, and we agreed that the “default setting” for most people who grew up in democracies is to side with the revolutionaries against autocrats.

Even if we know it won’t always turn out well. Like Castro in Cuba. Or Khomeini in Iran. It’s like “revolution now, figure out the rest later.” It worked out in Eastern Europe, didn’t it?

The point being that … when Egyptians celebrated on the streets of Cairo tonight because Hosni Mubarak’s government threw in the towel … it made most global “democrats” happy, too.

The Egyptians we work with were, of course, ecstatic. And wrung out. One tweeted that he was in tears and hoped he could now go home to a better Egypt. He also declared it the most glorious revolution in history.

When the announcement was made in Liberation Square that Mubarak was out, Egyptians partied like it was 1999. Without the alcohol. The small crowd in the newsroom at about 7 p.m. local time, including most of the sports guys, stared up at the big TVs suspended from the ceiling and saw people jumping around, with their arms up in the air. More than one person from a “football” culture (inside Egypt and otherwise) remarked, “It’s like they won the World Cup!”

It is instructive to recall that the United States was founded by some revolutionaries who were pretty radical, in the milieu of the 18th century. “Give me liberty or give me death” was an extreme either/or that Patrick Henry publicly embraced. And a future president, Thomas Jefferson, famously wrote: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

To Egypt’s credit, their revolution (so far) has been nearly bloodless. The army never fired on the protesters. The reviled police hardly did. The anti-government guys didn’t really have weapons, unless you count rocks and bricks. (Begin your own debate on the Second Amendment.) If the Czechs had a Velvet Revolution in 1989, what was this one? Something nearly as blood-free.

Some places, that sort of revolution will work. But the key conditions are that 1) the regime must depend on a conscript army because conscripts are far less likely to fire on their own people and 2) the regime should not have had the foresight to hire mercenaries who would, in fact, fire on civilians and 3) the regime must believe it truly is popular because up till the end it keeps waiting for “these extremists” to go home and doesn’t actually believe it needs violence to stay in power. Those conditions existed, in Egypt. I imagine Hosni Mubarak remains convinced he was pushed out by 10 percent of his people.

He deserved, of course, to go. Here is one statistic that tells you almost all you need to know about his 30 years in power: One-third of Egypt’s people cannot read. According to statistics compiled by Unesco. Any regime that doesn’t achieve the most basic schooling for one-third of its people has no legitimacy.

Now comes the hard part. After another day or two of giddiness, the issue of “OK, who actually is in charge here?” will come up, and this is where things can go wrong.

It seems as if the country has a power vacuum that only the military can fill. And the problem with military guys taking over is that sometimes they don’t leave for a long time. As Egypt knows well. As Chile, Pakistan, Greece and Mynamar can tell you from recent (or current) experience.

This is going to be a lengthy process, and not a tidy one. (Consider, for example, France, which began its revolution in 1789 and didn’t really have a stable democracy until, like, 1870.)

It may be a decade or two before we see if this revolution was actually successful … or just a means for replacing one autocrat with another.

Meantime, a lot of autocrats and one-party governments ought to be more than a little nervous. Maybe 2011 will be to Asia and Africa what 1848 was for Europe. The Year of the Revolutionaries.