March 15, 2015
Syria has always been a larger idea than its own geography,
whether in the past or in modern times. Half a century ago, Syria was called
“the throbbing heart of Arabism,” and in previous centuries the word “Syria”
always referred to a wider region that covered much of the Levant. Today, the
fourth anniversary of the war in Syria provides a somber opportunity to grasp
again the reasons for the crises, violence and occasional chaos and state
collapse we witness in half a dozen Arab countries.
It will take many years to restore Syria to its
pre-war condition, but in the meantime it would be useful to understand the
underlying drivers of the country’s terrible plunge into inhuman warfare and
suffering, so that we might avoid perpetuating them in other Arab lands. Syria
reflects the consequence of several trends that are peculiar to this region and
that have persisted over several generations. Reversing these factors will be
essential if Syrians or other Arab people are to have any chance of enjoying a
more stable and productive national trajectory than they have experienced in
the past century.
We can clearly see in retrospect the key
dynamics that have shaped much of the modern dysfunction of Arab states, whose
high point of national incoherence and fragility we witness these days in
Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya and other countries. The three most destructive
trends during the past century have always gone hand-in-hand. They are that:
1) entire countries have been ruled by small
elites, often individual families or a group of military officers, which
results in 2) security agencies
dominating governments and defining most aspects of people’s lives, which
finally leads to situations where 3)
ordinary citizens never enjoy the opportunity to shape their national and civic
institutions and to define the social contract that is essential to promoting
decent governance, socio-economic growth, and stability.
These three phenomena all have their origins in
the manner in which so many Arab states, like Syria, were established by
European colonial powers, and did not necessarily reflect the free will or
natural inclinations of their indigenous people. Not surprisingly, state fragility
and collapse in the last half a century often have reflected tensions and then
outright warfare among ethnic, national, tribal or sectarian groups that never
found comfortable identity in the new state structures that suddenly defined
their lives.
Local and regional wars or long-simmering
ideological confrontations among Arabs, Israelis and Iranians, most notably,
and with Western powers in recent years, fatally diverted attention and
resources from democratic nation-building and cemented the military’s hold on
power. Military-run security states resulted in large-scale corruption,
mediocrity or broad incompetence in governance. This included erratic health
and education systems that doomed millions of people from birth into chronic
poverty, which entrenched the cycle of human despair that in recent years has
been one element in fueling the growth of terror movements.
Home-grown mismanagement and oppression have
always had a symbiotic relationship with foreign military invasions, coups and
other political interventions across the region. The region’s heavy reliance on
direct or indirect oil and gas income, rather than productive and creative
economic endeavors, also minimized the role of the private sector in creating
jobs and wealth and in promoting a sense of satisfaction and security among
citizens who otherwise had to rely on mostly meaningless government jobs.
Such weaknesses and vulnerabilities were
camouflaged during the early decades of state development last century, but
ultimately they were exposed by two factors that are very evident in Syria’s
current demise — unsustainably high population growth rates and steadily
worsening environmental deterioration (especially water shortages). When Arab
population growth outstripped economic growth in the mid-1980s, most countries
in this region started to suffer more poverty, social dislocation, and
expanding hopelessness by millions of ravaged citizens. Two reactions from
within heightened the inevitable stresses and some collapses we witness now:
more severe security oppression by the state to maintain order, and the
scramble by citizens to ensure their needs by turning to their own religious
and tribal movements. The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is merely the
latest and most severe of many such manifestations.
With the end of the Cold War and the
Anglo-American-led invasion of Iraq, weaker state authorities started to
retreat from some sectors and areas of society, and the vacuums were quickly
filled by tribal, religious and militant groups. Syria reminds us that we are
likely to endure many years of dislocation and violence until local authorities
re-establish order that is not based on the security dictates of a single
family with its national army, but rather on a more credible social contract
among citizens who feel they belong to a state and consensually agree on the
ground rules of that state.
Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily
Star. He was founding director and now senior policy
fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs
at the American University of Beirut. On Twitter at: @ramikhouri.
Copyright
©2015 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by Agence Global