The stagnation of the Arab mind
A quiet revolution has begun in the Arab world; it will be
complete only when the last failed dictatorship is voted out
WHAT ails the Arabs? The United Nations Development
Programmed (UNDP) this week published the fifth in a series of
hard-hitting reports on the state of the Arab world. It makes
depressing reading. The Arabs are a dynamic and inventive people
whose long and proud history includes fabulous contributions to
art, culture, science and, of course, religion. The score of
modern Arab states, on the other hand, have been impressive
mainly for their consistent record of failure.
They have, for a start, failed to make their people free: six
Arab countries have an outright ban on political parties and the
rest restrict them slyly. They have failed to make their people
rich: despite their oil, the UN reports that about two out of
five people in the Arab world live on $2 or less a day. They
have failed to keep their people safe: the report argues that
overpowerful internal security forces often turn the Arab state
into a menace to its own people. And they are about to fail
their young people. The UNDP reckons the Arab world must create
50m new jobs by 2020 to accommodate a growing, youthful
workforce—virtually impossible on present trends.
Arab governments are used to shrugging off criticism. They
had to endure a lot of it when George Bush was president and
America’s neoconservatives blamed the rise of al-Qaeda on the
lack of Arab democracy. Long practice has made Arab rulers
expert at explaining their failings away. They point to their
culture and say it is unsuited to Western forms of democracy. Or
they point to their history, and say that in modern times they
would have done much better had they not had to deal with the
intrusions of imperialists, Zionists and cold warriors.
Some of this is undeniable. A case can indeed be made that
Islam complicates democracy. And, yes, oil, Israel and the
rivalry between America and the Soviet Union meant that the Arab
world was not left to find its own way after the colonial period
ended. More recently the Arabs have been buffeted by the
invasion of Iraq. Now they find themselves caught in the middle
as America and Iran jostle for regional dominance.
Strangely, your highness, they like voting
Still, as the decades roll by the excuses wear thin. Islam
has not prevented democracy from taking root in the Muslim
countries of Asia. Even after its recent flawed election, Iran,
a supposed theocracy, shows greater democratic vitality than
most Arab countries. As for outside intrusion, some of the more
robust Arab elections of recent years have been held by
Palestinians, under Israeli occupation, and by Iraqis after
America’s invasion. When they are given a chance to take part in
genuine elections—as, lately, the Lebanese were—Arabs have no
difficulty understanding what is at stake and they turn out to
vote in large numbers. By and large it is their own leaders who
have chosen to prevent, rig or disregard elections, for fear
that if Arabs had a say most would vote to throw the rascals
out.
For this reason, you can bet that if the regimes have their
way, Arabs will not get the chance. Arab rulers hold on to power
through a cynical combination of coercion, intimidation and
co-option. From time to time they let hollow parties fight bogus
elections, which then return them to power. Where genuine
opposition exists it tends to be fatally split between Islamist
movements on one hand and, on the other, secular parties that
fear the Islamists more than they dislike the regimes
themselves. Most of the small cosmetic reforms Arab leaders
enacted when Mr. Bush was pushing his “freedom agenda” on
unwilling allies have since been rolled back. If anything, sad
to say, the cause of democracy became tainted by association
with a president most Arabs despised for invading Iraq.
The illusion of permanence
Can regimes that are failing their people so clearly really
hold sway over some 350m people indefinitely? Hosni Mubarak has
been Egypt’s president for 28 years; Muammar Qaddafi has run
Libya since 1969. When Hafez Assad died after three decades as
president of Syria, power passed smoothly to his son Bashar.
After the failure of Mr. Bush’s efforts to promote democracy,
and the debacle in Iraq, Barack Obama has put “respect” rather
than “freedom” at the centre of America’s discourse with the
Muslim world. That may be wise: since the advent of Mr. Obama,
America’s standing has risen in Arab eyes, and Mr. Bush’s zeal
for reforming other countries was counterproductive anyway. But
this suggests that if the Arabs want democracy, they will have
to grab it for themselves.
Some in the West are wary of Arab elections, fearing that
Islamists would exploit the chance to seize power on the
principle of “one man, one vote, one time”. Yet Islamists seem
to struggle to raise their support much above 20% of the
electorate. Non-Arab Muslim countries like Turkey and Indonesia
suggest that democracy is the best way to draw the poison of
extremism. Repression only makes it more dangerous.
Democracy is more than just elections. It is about education,
tolerance and building independent institutions such as a
judiciary and a free press. The hard question is how much
ordinary Arabs want all this. There have been precious few
Tehran-style protests on the streets of Cairo. Most Arabs still
seem unwilling to pay the price of change. Or perhaps, observing
Iraq, they prefer stagnation to the chaos that change might
bring. But regimes would be unwise to count on permanent
passivity. As our
special report in this issue
argues, behind the political stagnation of the Arab world a
great social upheaval is under way, with far-reaching
consequences.
In almost every Arab country, fertility is in decline, more
people, especially women, are becoming educated, and
businessmen want a bigger say in economies dominated by the
state. Above all, a revolution in satellite television has
broken the spell of the state-run media and created a public
that wants the rulers to explain and justify themselves as
never before. On their own, none of these changes seems big
enough to prompt a revolution. But taken together they are
creating a great agitation under the surface. The old
pattern of Arab government—corrupt, opaque and
authoritarian—has failed on every level and does not deserve
to survive. At some point it will almost certainly collapse.
The great unknown is when.
A special report on the Arab world
Waking from its sleep
Jul 23rd 2009
The Arab world has experienced two decades of political
stagnation, says Peter David (interviewed
here). But there is a fever
under the surface
AFP
IN A special report on the Arab world which The
Economist published in 1990, the headline at the top of
this page was “When history passes by” (see
article). That was when the
communist dictatorships of eastern Europe were beginning to
wobble and fall. In the Arab world, however, authoritarian
rule remained the order of the day. And whereas western
Europe was making massive strides towards political and
economic union, the Arabs remained woefully divided. Much
Arab opinion remained fixated on the struggle with Israel,
in which the Arabs seemed unable to hold their own, let
alone prevail.
To revisit the Arab world two decades later is to find
that in many ways history continues to pass the Arabs by.
Freedom? The Arabs are ruled now, as they were then, by a
cartel of authoritarian regimes practiced in the arts of
oppression. Unity? As elusive as ever. Although the fault
lines have changed since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait 19
years ago, inter-Arab divisions are bitter. Egypt, the
biggest Arab country, refused even to attend April’s Arab
League summit meeting in Doha. Israel? Punctuated by bouts
of violence and fitful interludes of diplomacy, the deadly
stalemate continues. Neither George H. Bush at Madrid in
1991 nor Bill Clinton at Camp David in 2000 nor George W.
Bush at Annapolis in 2007 succeeded in making peace or even
bringing it visibly closer.
The stubborn conflict in Palestine is a reminder that in
some doleful ways history has not passed the Arabs by at
all. They have seen plenty of history of the wrong sort
these past two decades. It includes a good deal of violence:
the Arab world has been caught up in wars both major and
minor, not only between Arabs and outsiders, such as those
with Israel, but also between, and within, Arab states.
Indeed 1990, the year Saddam invaded Kuwait, was
something of a turning point. America’s quick eviction of
his army from the tiny oil state after only 100 hours of
ground fighting looked at the time like a triumph. But a
case can be made that this was in fact the starting-point of
a whole sorry sequence of events encompassing the rise of
al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden’s September 11th strikes on the
American mainland and—in Arab eyes—America’s no less
traumatic invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003
in its “war against terror”.
Wars can happen anywhere. What makes the Middle East
especially prone to them? Just count the ways. First is oil.
In the late 1990s Mr. bin Laden wrote a letter to Mullah
Omar, the leader of the Afghan Taliban, in which he pointed
out that 75% of the world’s oil was found in the Persian
Gulf region and that “whoever has dominion over the oil has
dominion over the economies of the world.” So long as that
remains broadly true, the interests of energy-hungry powers
from near and far will continue to grind against each other
there.
Second is the continuing and worsening Arab, and lately
also Iranian, conflict with Israel. Since 1990 thousands
more Arab and Israeli lives have been thrown into the maw of
this voracious struggle—in the Palestinian intifada
(uprising) that started after the collapse of Mr. Clinton’s
Camp David peace summit in 2000, and in Israel’s ruthless
mini-wars in Lebanon in 2006 and in Gaza at the beginning of
this year.
The last and perhaps greatest underlying cause of
instability arises from the nature of the Arab states
themselves. Elections are widespread in the Arab world. And
yet if you put aside the Palestinians’ imaginary state,
hardly any of the 21 actual states that belong to the Arab
League can plausibly claim to be a genuine democracy. In the
absence of democracy, Arab states therefore rely to an
extraordinary degree on repression in order to stay in
power. And from time to time this system of control breaks
down.
A spectacular example came in Algeria in 1991, when the
army blocked a promising experiment in free elections that
was starting to unfold under President Chadli Benjedid.
After an opposition Islamist party won in the first round of
parliamentary elections, the generals blocked the second,
and so detonated a gruesome civil war that lasted almost a
decade and may have killed 200,000 people. In the 1990s
internal terrorism stalked Egypt too: radical Islamist
movements such as Islamic Jihad and the Jamaat Islamiya
claimed more than 1,000 lives. And although most of Egypt’s
erstwhile jihadists have long since renounced violence,
others—notably Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mr. bin Laden’s number
two—went on to found and lead al-Qaeda.
Tribes with flags
The political instability of the Arab world is in turn
connected to another problem: the missing glue of
nationhood. Many years ago an Egyptian diplomat, Tahsin
Bashir, called the new Arab states of the Middle East
“tribes with flags” (though he exempted Egypt). His point
still holds. In countries as different as Lebanon and Iraq,
ethnic, confessional or sectarian differences have thwarted
programmers of nation-building. That is why Iraq fell apart
into Sunni, Shia and Kurdish fragments after the removal of
Saddam despite decades of patriotic indoctrination. Syria
could follow suit if the minority Alawi sect of the ruling
Assad family were somehow to lose control of this largely
Sunni country. Sudan has seen not one but two civil wars
between its Arab-dominated centre and the non-Arab
minorities in its south and west.
In reviewing this litany of troubles, it is necessary to
remember that what people call “the Arab world” is a big and
amorphous thing, and arguably (see
article) not one thing at
all. It would be a distortion to portray the whole region as
a zone of permanent conflict. However bloody they have been,
the wars in Iraq, Algeria, Sudan or on the borders of Israel
have not disrupted ordinary life in the whole Arab world.
Most Arabs have been touched by the violence only through
their television screens (though, as we shall see, the
powerful emotions such images stir up have real-world
consequences too). Many Arab countries can look back over
the past two decades and see elements of progress to be
proud of, including, in some places, rising prosperity and a
slow but steady expansion of personal freedom.
And yet the years of conflict cannot just be written off,
as if the various outbreaks of internal or inter-state
violence were just local aberrations or the product of bad
luck, or as if they had no bearing on the region’s future
prospects. It is not just that, if you add all the
bloodletting together, up to a million citizens of the Arab
world may have perished violently since 1990, and that
killing on this scale cannot but leave deep scars (see table
2). The disturbing point for the future is that none of the
underlying causes of conflict enumerated above has
disappeared. On the contrary, each appears to be taking on
the characteristics of a chronic condition.
Take the contest over energy resources. This stands
little chance of abating at a time when the energy appetites
of China and India continue to grow and when a beleaguered
America and a rising Iran are competing for domination of
both the Levant and the Persian Gulf. As for Palestine,
peace looked more achievable during the negotiations
initiated by Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat in the 1990s
than it does now, with Hamas and a Likud-led government in
Israel darkening hopes of a two-state solution. In most Arab
countries the glue of nationhood is still weak: the
sectarian conflict in Iraq may intensify again as America
begins to withdraw its forces (and Shia-Sunni tensions have
spread beyond Iraq). Lastly, in almost any Arab country, at
almost any time, political and social discontent is in
danger of tipping into violence—even, some insiders and
outsiders are beginning to argue, into revolution.
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Banipal Magazine is dedicated to the
memory of Palestinian poet Mahmoud
Darwish.
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