Arab Seasons
July 2013
The London Times recently proclaimed the Arab Spring had failed. It’s a bold and sorry claim. The Arab Spring offered so much hope. For generations, Arab economies have been performing woefully compared with their neighbours in Europe. Even oil rich Saudi Arabia, with around 20 percent of the world’s oil reserves, has a GDP of barely more than half Australia’s. The Arab model of autocratic leadership and centralised control of the economy had failed.
Indeed, the history of the Arab world since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 has been a sorry tale. We often forget that the Middle East as we know it today was designed by the British and French during the First World War and that design was incorporated into international law in 1920 in the Treaty of Sevres and three years later the Treaty of Lausanne.
These treaties dismantled the Ottoman structure of the Middle East and replaced it with a number of individual countries under British and French influence. So the British and the French drew the maps and the revolution in Egypt led by Gamel Abdel Nasser established a political and economic paradigm which dominated much of the Arab world until the Iraq war in 2003.
Two years ago it seemed the old Nasser model of centralised economic control under a dictatorship was dying in the face of a public revolt. The Arab street was as much driven by economics as politics. They objected to high unemployment, particularly youth unemployment. Even graduates struggled to find jobs. And for populations battling to make ends meet, the crony capitalism of rich mates of leaders wallowing in wealth born out of government mandated monopolies and oligopolies, was obscene.
So the Arab Spring was about economic fairness and frustration as much as it was about political freedom. That’s so often the case with revolutions. The French Revolution was a bourgeois tax revolt. So was the American revolution.
But now it all seems to have gone horribly wrong. The Western media and some Western politicians had compared the Arab Spring with the revolutions which overthrew Soviet power in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989. What we have ended up with is the collapse or near collapse of the nation states created in the 1920s.
For a start, there’s Egypt, by far the most populous Arab state. The elected president turned out to be two things: divisive and incompetent. Under his brief rule, the economy deteriorated, the murder rate tripled and secularism was attacked by a conservative Islamist. The place became a shambles, so much so that a massive 22 million people signed a petition demanding the elected president’s immediate resignation. That’s a quarter of the total population. Many of these people were secular, democracy-loving liberals.
The army did the job in the end and now the dream of Egypt becoming a successful democracy has gone.
Libya isn’t much better. Qaddafi was only overthrown with Western intervention and now the country has descended into bitter rivalries between warlords and tribes. In Syria there is a bloody sectarian civil war where both sides are being backed by outsiders – Assad by the Iranians and the Russians and the rebels by the Gulf states and the West. It’s estimated that around 95,000 people have been killed and triple that number injured.
In Bahrain, a sectarian revolt by the majority Sia population was put down forcefully by the Sunni government with the help of the Saudis.
So there we have it. A revolution throughout the Arab world which has left minorities such as Christians more vulnerable than they were, has left women more threatened by Islamists who want to downgrade their status and the economies of the region are stuck in the reverse gear. On the face of it it’s a pretty poor scene.
Add to that the inability of the West to sort it out.
Well, it might not be as bad as it first appears. Remember, during the era of dictatorship the only organised opposition was the Islamists – groups like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Once the tools of dictatorial oppression were taken away, the public was inevitably going to turn to the opposition. That’s a natural human reaction. If you hate the government you will inevitably turn to the opposition.
On the way to full blown democracy, the Arab world will pass through the Islamist phase. But my guess is that the average voter will realise that Islamists aren’t going to deliver to them the things they really want. Things we all enjoy like iPads and DVDs, supermarkets and cheap transport, clean homes with sewage and, above all, steady, well paid jobs. They will gradually realise those things can only be delivered over time by the liberal secularists.
I don’t want to sound too deterministic or too optimistic but my guess is that left to their own devices, Arabs will work out that a democratic, liberal society which embraces tolerance and diversity is the only solution to their post-Ottoman torpor. The Arab Spring might be looking decidedly wintery at the moment but all winters pass and spring returns.
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