February 17, 2013
As we navigate this period that marks the two-year anniversary
of the uprisings and revolutions that began to change the face of the Arab
world in January 2011, we witness a dizzying array of conditions across the
Arab countries: street demonstrations, clashes between groups of young
activists and police, outright warfare, slow-motion constitutional
transformations, the occasional assassination or bombing, many elections and
referendums, and recurring government crises.
It is easy for the observer who surveys this slightly chaotic
regional picture to give in to pessimism and either declare the Arab uprisings
as a messy failure or, at the extreme, to long for the old days of stability
and quiet under Hosni Mubarak and his fellow Arab autocrats. That would be an
unfortunate and inaccurate conclusion, because beneath the surface reality of
turbulence that occasionally reaches violence or stalemate is a much more
complex, time-consuming and hopeful trend.
The single most important and common denominator across the
entire Arab world these days is the grinding attempt by citizens to do two
things simultaneously that they have always been denied: to write their own
constitutions that define the exercise and limits of power for the state and
the citizen; and, the much more difficult task of agreeing on the nature of the
nation-state that adequately responds to the identities and interests of
different ethnic, religious and regional groupings of citizens who are now
defining their state and their own citizenship for the first time ever.
These two massive challenges and goals -- legitimate citizenship
and coherent statehood -- require complex negotiations among many different
domestic players. This process is finally underway, but it takes place amid
severe economic stress and lingering bitterness and distortions emanating from
the excesses, thefts and crimes of previous regimes in most Arab countries, and
often without stable transitional political institutions or agreed rules of the
game.
So in Libya, Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen the overriding political
dynamic is a cacophonous and messy drive to find a workable balance of power
among very different groups of citizens who define themselves by their
ideological, religious, tribal, geographic or ethnic identities, not to mention
the over-arching class tensions between poor and wealthy citizens. So in Egypt
we see many Christians and secular citizens who are deeply worried about the
apparent attempt by the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government to shape the
state, and its values and institutions. In Yemen, various groups like the
tribal-ethnic Houthis in the north and many independence-minded southerners
battle the central government to affirm their rights and interests. In Bahrain,
many Shiites and other citizens challenge the state’s tight grip on power that
they claim discriminates against them. Many Kuwaitis have spoken out and
challenged the state’s manipulation of the election laws to ensure
regime-friendly rubber-stamp parliaments, demanding instead a more equitable
representation of all trends in the country and greater accountability of
government spending.
Many other examples across the region reflect this common need
to agree on the common definition of the values and policies of the state, the
relative powers of the central government and of groups of citizens in
provincial areas, and the rights of all citizens. One of the most important but
under-reported situations that reflects this valiant attempt at state
configuration is in Libya. Ongoing discussions to shape the permanent political
system focus on the drafting of a new constitution, under the aegis of the
constitutional declaration and the transitional government that includes the
elected General National Congress (GNC), the provisional legislature.
Many citizens in the eastern part of the country around Benghazi
agitated politically to change the formation of the constitutional drafting
committee from an appointed body to a nationally elected one. These
"federalists," who fear centralization of power in the hands of
Tripoli residents, have advocated major devolution of central government powers
to the regions. So the movement towards full parliamentary elections and a
permanent constitution in Libya takes place slowly, because of the
time-consuming requirements of achieving consensus among the main political
actors at every stage of the process. Libya is a worthy case to study more
closely: For like all other Arabs engaged in similar challenges, the citizens
of Libya are defining their own country for the first time, without any
previous experience in genuine political contestation, state-building,
constitutionalism or pluralistic politics.
So let us be clear about what witness these days, as we move
into the third year of this historic era of Arab self-determination. In
Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya, we see the most visible progress and also
severe stresses in this process of indigenous state-building. Bahrain and Syria
remain in the previous stage of battling against their autocratic legacies in
order to enter this phase. Other states like Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco and Oman
remain at the first rung of low-key political agitation by citizens demanding
meaningful reforms, rather than regime change.
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. You can
follow him @ramikhouri.
Copyright © 2013 Rami G. Khouri -- distributed by Agence Global