World Map, by Hamza Serafi, Jeddah, January 23, 2012. Susan Baaghil/Reuters/Corbis
December 03, 2014
The Arab World is witnessing ideological, sectarian, and ethnic conflicts.
The region has not experienced such polarizations in at least a century. As governments are no longer serving as arbiters among
competing interest groups, the state has lost legitimacy. Violence is on the rise across the region. Politics
have become highly militarized, and state-sponsored killing is a common
phenomenon. Several countries have turned into mere spoils of war that various
factions are fighting over, with utter disregard for citizens’ futures. The
incentive of groups to stick together has been dramatically decreased.
A new Arab order will emerge out of these ruins, but it will take
time. In the medium term, some countries will be consumed by internal
conflicts. Central authority has already been lost in Iraq, Libya, Somalia,
Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Kuwait and Lebanon face acute strains on their social fabrics.
Algeria will soon confront turbulence; the looming death of President Abdelaziz
Bouteflika will give way to a power struggle. Others will be divided into sub-regions
that gradually detach themselves from the Arab World (for example, South Sudan
and Kurdistan). New statelets will forge links to Africa and Asia. As a result,
the Arab World will shrink.
There is a dearth of solutions to these crises. The administrations of
large Arab countries have adopted a paternalistic style of governance. Saudi
Arabia, in particular, has anchored its legitimacy through assuming the role of
provider, effectively buying off the middle class. Their religious allies
assert the concepts of “the general will” and “obedience to the ruler.” These
strategies will backfire. As oil prices drop—likely stabilizing at much lower
levels than the past decade—massive social welfare programs will prove unsustainable.
More importantly, this paternalism antagonizes large segments of youth who are more
educated, economically independent, socially entrepreneurial, and globally
aware than any previous generation of Arabs.
Regimes learned the wrong lessons from the uprisings. Arab states have
perfected their dominance of television stations. In the Middle East, this is
the most powerful medium for mass communication given dismal illiteracy rates
that exceed 40 percent. The political elite has mastered the atmospherics of statements
that influence public opinion. But there is no content. With a few exceptions—such
as the energy-reforms in Egypt and the regionalization drive in Morocco—there
is an alarming lack of ideas about how to tackle the Arab World’s social,
economic, and political problems.
Especially startling is that regimes are sidestepping the biggest
issue: lack of competitiveness in the local and global marketplace. A significant
percentage of the 180 million Arabs under 35 years of age are hardly suited for
today’s job market. Putting aside multinational companies, many Arab youths are
increasingly unemployable in their countries’ private sector. As states face
the impossibility of providing for destitute populations, the majority of young
Arabs will be temporary workers in cyclical industries, such as construction
and tourism. Incomes will freeze as prices rise, and many countries will
increasingly be reliant on market forces for energy and food, and potentially
water. Substantial groups of young Arabs—especially among the
well-educated—feel trapped by their governments’ lack of imagination.
Similarly, the opposition has failed to put forward new ideas or
policies. The parties of the previous half century—whether liberal,
nationalist, socialist, or centrist—perpetuate tired rhetoric. Aged figures
with questionable credibility continue to lead opposition parties across the
region.
Anger will swell. Expect another round of mass demonstrations in
various parts of the Arab World, even in countries that seem stable today. Sections
of the middle class will join forces with the poor and frustrated. This is
already leading many Arab activists to explore new parameters for challenging regimes.
As most of the 2011 uprisings have failed, several Arab youth groups believe
that peaceful mobilizations will not affect the transformative change they seek.
Some have already acquiesced to the idea of using violence against entrenched
powers. This is one of the key factors fuelling the confrontations we are
seeing in parts of North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. Militarized
activism, coupled with the states’ militarized exercise of power, will result
in the spilling of much more blood.
Amid these developments, four things have been lost. First, most Arab
states have wasted the opportunity to undergo peaceful transitions. Evolving
gradually—expanding what has been familiar—is no longer a choice. Now, governments
must explore unchartered and dangerous transformations. Second, the Arab World
has lost much of its societal and institutional expertise, which was
accumulated over the past decades. It is a monumental loss. A brain drain has
resulted from the descent into civil wars, the dramatic rise in violence, and
the disconnect between states and their youth. Third, the most ethnically and
religiously heterogeneous Arab societies, notably in the eastern Mediterranean,
have forgone any chance of peaceful coexistence, at least in the short to
medium term. Finally, in several parts of the Arab World, the state’s moral
authority has simply crumbled.
We have been here before. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the
Ottoman and Mamluke authorities lost their grasp of power as their citizens faced
with European modernity for the first time. The elite and the upper middle-class
were shocked by the gap between them—the deficits of their means and
knowledge—and that of the West. Modernization projects altered the economic and
social structures of Arab societies. The reforms that Sultan Selim I and later
Mahmoud III had introduced in Turkey in the mid-nineteenth century shifted the
Ottomans’ focus from the Arab World to Europe. Political voids appeared in Algeria,
Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, Egypt, Greater Syria, and Tunisia. Social tensions
came to the fore and erupted into bloody confrontations, notably the 1860’s
civil war in Mount Lebanon between the Christian Maronites and Muslim Druze.
The collapse of the old order brought the rise of regional powers. The
Albanian political adventurer Mohammed Ali, for instance, took control of the
entire Nile valley. The large central Arabian family, the Saudis, revived an old
alliance with the conservative Islamic Wahhabi sect; together they asserted
control over the Arabian Peninsula. The Moroccan Alawite royal family expanded its
rule south toward the Islamic parts of Africa’s west coast. A few decades
later, the Hashemites leveraged their descent from the Prophet Mohammed to
claim new kingdoms that, for a period of time, dominated the entire eastern
Mediterranean. In very different ways, the four dynasties established order
through centralizing political and economic power in much of the region.
A second response to the collapse of the old order came from external
powers. Britain, France, Italy, and Spain occupied parts of the Arab World.
This was another consolidation project, albeit with different objectives and
structures.
Today, no regional or external power has the resources to attempt a
consolidation project over any sizable part of the Arab World. The rich Gulf
dynasties realize their limitations and exert their influence selectively. The
Egyptian regime faces acute social and economic challenges, which is why Cairo
will look inward in the short to medium term. Algeria and Iraq have the
financial resources and demographic gravity to play a regional role; however, the
former is consumed by sectarianism, and the latter by a complicated political succession
as well as the ghosts of a civil war. Morocco aims to deepen its connections to
Europe as well as to evolve as West Africa’s economic, financial, and cultural
hub, with limited connections to its Arab neighbors.
Without forward-looking consolidation projects, the Arab World will likely
disintegrate. Some countries will drift away from the Arab system; others will
be divided along tribal, sectarian, and entrenched loyalties. Many Arab
countries will undergo a process of Lebanonization. They will have nominal
political systems with tenuous power. Wealthy regions or social groups will
isolate themselves economically, while continuing to pay lip service to the
central authority. Non-state actors will gradually build capabilities to
challenge, and thus deter, the central governments.
Will these patterns of disintegration devastate the Arab World? I
would argue that this disintegration will evoke new ideas and ideals.
Arab youths, especially within the middle class, will be most affected
by these changes. They are currently marginalized; they are afraid to get
caught in increasingly militarized politics; they are also leaderless and
poorly organized. Over time, clusters of young Arabs will overcome their fears
and organize themselves into powerful political and economic groups. They will
seek ways to shape the very notions of stability, economic progress, and social
harmony. They will generate new views, socio-political structures, even social
contracts.
Amid this forthcoming awakening, two value systems will underpin young
Arabs’ thinking. The first will be championed by the religious, drawing on the
conservative cultures of large agrarian and desert countries (primarily Egypt,
Iraq, and Saudi Arabia). This will propel a new type of Islamism, likely more
conservative than that since the 2011 uprisings. Having witnessed the havoc
that jihadist groups such as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria have wrought,
this Islamist current will be peaceful yet assertive and uncompromising. It
will invoke strict Islamic identity and sharia as the only solution for
rescuing the Arab World from chaos and disintegration.
Other groups of young Arabs will be inspired by the maritime trading
cultures of the Levant, Maghreb, and small Gulf states. This liberal current will
distance itself from twentieth-century Arab Islamism as well as from the heritage
of Arab nationalism of the past seven decades. Yet, the secularists will also be
forceful. They will aim to repeat the Arab liberal experiment of the early
twentieth century, but without too many considerations for the sensitivities of
their conservative or nationalistic counterparts.
New Islamists and new secularists will make the case for surmounting
decay. Both groups will be disillusioned by the regimes that have failed to stem
the Arab World’s degeneration.
A war of ideas will ensue. The two sides will try to salvage the Arab World
through political activism, working to advance economic reforms and social
entrepreneurialism. Both will fail to ascend to their envisaged ideals. Energy
and resources will be wasted. But it will be a rich period in Arab history. Because
these movements will emerge from a period of disorientation and disintegration,
their confrontation will remain political and intellectual. Arab politics will
gradually be de-militarized. This will lead to maturity. The two movements will
evolve beyond their original forms, mixing and borrowing from each other.
It will be a long, difficult, and costly decade or more. The Arab World
will emerge from it smaller and poorer. Yet this long process will be the Arab World’s
catharsis. Long-chained demons will finally be released. The result will
neither be a Western-style liberal democracy nor a Turkish-style Islamist one. Rather,
we will see different blends of the Islamic, secular, and nationalist ideas.
After this cathartic period, there is a strong chance that the secular
current will overpower the religious. Among the factors in the former’s favor: Arab
demographics; the steady rise of the Arab private sector; social
entrepreneurialism; technological changes in communication and exposure to the
world; and the slow evolution of the thinking, rhetoric, and way of operations
of state institutions in the conservative Arab cultures.
Following this tortuous journey, the Arab World will move slowly
towards liberalism. This could put an end to the current plundering of Arab
heritage, and to the suicidal reduction of modern Arab history into
meaninglessness.
Tarek Osman is the author of the
international bestseller Egypt on the Brink.