August 22, 2013
Thursday
of this week was a bad day in modern Arab history. The four leading Arab cities
of recent eras—Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut and Cairo—simultaneously were all
engulfed in bombings and urban warfare, mostly carried out with brutal savagery
and cruelty against civilians in urban settings. Even more problematic is that
the carnage was predominantly the work of locals, not foreign invaders or
predators.
Our
four greatest modern Arab cities are now routinely depicted around the world in
scenes of bomb craters, flames and rows of dead bodies. Other Arab lands are
only slightly less chaotic, like Libya, Yemen, Palestine, Tunisia, Bahrain,
Algeria and Sudan. This is a dramatic and telling moment, but a moment that tells
us what, exactly? Have we collectively failed the test of statehood? Modernity?
Civility? Democracy? Independence? Sovereignty? Secularism? It is important at
this moment of reckoning to avoid the temptation that engulfs so many analysts
and writers around the world, which is to make definitive and cosmic historical
judgments about the meaning of this moment, like The End of History, the End of
Islamism, the End of Arab Liberalism, or the End of the Arab Spring.
So
my humble suggestion is that when you run into a phrase or headline describing
the current Arab situation that starts with “the end of….”, you should not
bother to finish reading it, because it will probably tell you more about the
psychological ego of the writer than about any significant trends within the
Arab region. We have had few real endings in this region in the past 6,000
years of urban life, but only perpetual transformations and reconfigurations of
how identity, power and governance mesh together and evolve slowly year after
year.
For
those who do like neat historical markers, though, Thursday could easily be
seen as a symbolic moment that marks a serious pause, a slight shift and a
momentary regression in the uprisings and transformations that started in
December 2010 in Tunisia—but really had started a generation earlier. The old
autocratic Arab order that had prevailed since the mid-20th Century
started to fray at the edges and atrophy in its center in the 1970s, as ruling
elites turned into security regimes, and nationalist and developmental states
turned into showcases of consumerism and corruption.
The
overthrow or challenge of former regimes have not led to smooth transitions to
democratic and pluralistic societies governed by the rule of law in any Arab
country—yet. The moment of hope for a series of simultaneous Arab democratic
transformations remains unfulfilled, due to different reasons and conditions in
each country. This transitional phase will give way in due course to renewed
efforts to build stable constitutional democracies that will reflect local
values, but this will only happen after we get through this nation-building
rite of passage.
The
most important lesson we can learn from our messy transitions—this is the
meaning of the suicide bombs and the sniper’s bullets Thursday in Baghdad,
Damascus, Beirut and Cairo—is that the six dominant regional phenomena that
have defined the modern Arab world are totally inappropriate vehicles for
creating modern pluralistic democracies. These six are religion (mainly
Islamism), armed forces, resistance, sectarianism, Arabism and tribalism. These
powerful shapers of personal identity and immensely effective instruments for
mass mobilization and street activism are also utter failures as entry points
into stable democratic states.
Egypt’s
striking lesson today is that its two most powerful, organized and trusted
groups—the Muslim Brotherhood and the armed forces—both proved to be
incompetent clods in the business of governance. This is not because they do
not have capable individuals and smart and rational supporters; they have
plenty of those. It is rather because the ways of soldiers and spirituality are
designed for other worlds than the responsibility of governance and equitably
providing services and opportunities for millions of people from different
religions, ideologies and ethnicities.
Our
societies probably necessarily must pass through these moments of seeing
military, religious, tribal and other groups try their hand at governing, and
then also fight each other politically and militarily. They must do this and
fail, as the military and the Muslim Brothers are doing in Egypt, in order to
confirm over and over again that none of them are:
a) qualified to govern; or, more
importantly,
b) mandated by a majority of their
citizens to rule on their own.
The
lack of other organized and credible indigenous groups of citizens that can
engage in the political process and shape new constitutional systems is largely
a consequence of how military officers, tribalists and religious zealots have
dominated Arab public life for decades.
So
it is no surprise that Egypt and other Arab lands have moved very quickly from
revolutionary moments to what are essentially civil wars. From these events,
new and more rational political actors ultimately will emerge that can shape
more stable governing orders—after entire societies are frightened, embarrassed
and then humbled by the experience of their own home-grown killing sprees and
political immaturity.
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