August 22, 2014
The
dramatic expansion of the territory controlled by the Islamic State (IS) in
Syria and Iraq in the last few months has generated a historic moment of
reckoning in several arenas in those two countries, which mirror similar trends
across the entire region. These relate to statehood and nationhood, governance,
and foreign military inavolvement in Arab lands, and in all three arenas we
still dwell in ambiguous territory for the most part.
I will touch here only on the most important big
picture issue that touches on the fate of many Arab countries, which is the
nature of statehood and nationhood in the Arab region, and whether some Arab
countries will collapse soon, or slowly over time. Some Arab countries that
have existed for nearly a century today appear to face the risk of collapse or
fragmentation into smaller units; many of them already witness ethnic
cleansing, rapid demographic polarization, and the reversal of the tradition of
pluralism among different groups that had lived together for centuries or even
millennia.
Iraq and Syria are prime examples of this, as
both comprise a mosaic of different ethnic, religious and national groups
living alongside a dominant majority (Sunni Arabs in Syria, and Shiite Arabs in
Iraq). They were both ruled for decades by military men who put state power
largely in the hands of their own minority, i.e., Saddam Hussein and Baath
Party Iraqi Sunnis who ruled with an iron fist over the majority of Shiites,
Kurds and others; and, Hafez and Bashar Assad and Syrian Alawite/Shiite
compatriots who have maintained their style of autocratic rule for nearly 45
years now. Once their absolute control of their state and people was shattered
by foreign invasion (2003 in Iraq) or domestic rebellions (2011 in Syria), the
previous unity of the country was weakened and society started to fray and
fragment.
Nobody knows whether Iraq and Syria will hold
together as centrally dominated or loosely federated states, or collapse into
smaller units. The main reason for this uncertainty is that we have no clear
evidence for the actual wishes of their populations — the only exception being
the evident desire of Iraqi Kurds to move towards independence, which might
prod their Syrian Kurdish compatriots to join them. Yet even this is riddled
with some new uncertainties, for during the current battles in northern Iraq to
push back the IS forces there the Iraqi Kurds clearly needed the support of the
Iraqi armed forces, American air power and Kurdish troops from Turkey to simply
hold onto their territory, let alone roll back IS units.
Kurdish officials have also asked the new Iraqi
prime minister to deliver to them the withheld billions of dollars of oil
revenues that the Kurds see as their fair share of Iraqi oil income. This
suggests that the Kurds’ understandable and legitimate quest for independence
is likely now to be tempered by their obvious benefits from remaining within
the Iraqi state.
We simply have no idea if the majority of
Alawites, Druze, Shiites, Assyrians, Christians, Sunnis and other distinct
demographic groups in these two countries genuinely seek independence or feel
more secure within a larger state of Syria or Iraq. The personalized security
state rule of the last half century or so never allowed any citizens in these
countries to express their views on this pivotal element of statehood, e.g.,
how do citizens feel about their relationship to their state and government?
Does religion or ethnicity equate in their minds with statehood?
This is a challenge that many Arab lands face,
including Libya, Yemen, Lebanon, Morocco, Sudan and others to lesser extents,
as evidenced by recent history. Iraq, Yemen and Sudan in the 1990s offered
perhaps the earliest signals of how thin was the glue of unified statehood that
held together diverse population groups. Yemen split up, fought wars, and
reunited several times, Sudan similarly saw its southern district secede
peacefully, while other regional wars continued, and several Iraqi regional
rebellions in the north and south against the central government in Baghdad
were brutally put down.
The advent of the IS and apparent adherence to
it by some Sunni tribes in Syria and Iraq is the latest attestation of the
fickle and thin nature of citizen allegiance to the contemporary centralized
Arab state. It reaffirms the basic recurring principle in all these cases:
Citizens will rebel against their central state if they do not feel that their
needs are being met equitably, or that they are being mistreated by the government
and its military forces. The antidote to this remains decent governance and
equitable development policies, which Arab citizens have long sought but never
fully enjoyed.
Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and
director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International
Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon. On
Twitter: @ramikhouri.
Copyright © 2014 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by
Agence Global