Sometimes when you get away from your part of the world and view it from afar, the wider perspective can make the dark spots appear less troublesome. Unfortunately, seen from the west coast of the United States, where I have started an extended academic visit, the Arab world appears ever more troubled and troubling than it does from within
The trend in the Middle East seems to be heading toward more incoherence and violence, not less. The situations in Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq are the most troubling right now, as local communal tensions and incompetent governments are aggravated by foreign interventions and alliances, leading to still weaker central governments and greater risks of chronic political violence.
Yet these three troubled lands are not aberrations within a region of otherwise stable and coherent countries. They are only the most glaring examples of low-quality statehood in an Arab world where the concept of sovereign, stable and independent states remains thinly grafted on a deeper foundation of ethnic, tribal and religious identities. The ugly choice that seems to face most Arab citizens is to embrace security and stability in degrading modern police states where human dignity and freedom are banished; or risk chaos and civil war where normalcy is a forlorn hope.
Three particular trends seem to define the broad deterioration in the previous half-century of relative stability and development. One is the continuing intervention of foreign armies and governments, often justifying themselves by claiming to seek more stable societies, but usually only creating more instability and incoherence. Iraq and Afghanistan are the most glaring examples of this phenomenon, which has plagued the region for over two centuries now, with no end in sight.
With the smaller oil-rich states remaining exceptions to the rule, a second trend is the waning of central government power in most Arab countries, alongside the weakening of a few strong regional powers that used to throw their weight around and intervene to resolve disputes in the neighborhood. Saudi Arabia and Egypt are the two best examples of such countries that now seem to have little power to intervene constructively around the Middle East, as witnessed by their inability to improve conditions in Lebanon or Palestine, despite attempts to do so.
The third trend is the diffusion of centralized state power to a more complex array of actors in society, including armed militias, political groups, criminal gangs, tribal and religious leaders, corporate powers and charismatic individuals. The latest actors to join this line-up are international military forces, such as those in Lebanon and Afghanistan.
The cumulative impact of these three main trends is the slow degradation of the concept of centralized nation-states in the Arab region. This is probably an inevitable reflection of the fact that the modern Arab nation-state as we have known it since around World War I has not responded to the interests of two of its three primary constituencies: the Western powers that midwived these states, and their own citizens, whose lives generally improved from the 1920s to the 1970s, but since the mid-1980s have seen political and economic conditions deteriorate on the whole.
The Arab state’s third constituency – its self-appointed rulers – seems to be doing okay in most cases, as evidenced by ruling families, parties and political elites in some “republics that have remained in power for decades. The problem is that countries that primarily serve their own rulers are not very credible or sustainable entities; so we now witness the slow unraveling of some of these Arab countries that have proven to be politically brittle. They have slowly transformed themselves into odd lands, defined by armed gangs, militias, or chronic stalemate.
The main problem in the Arab world is not terrorism or innate political violence; it is the incoherence of modern statehood in the manner and form that it has been grafted onto this region during the past century or so. In principle, Arabs are perfectly able to manage statehood and its attributes, such as the rule of law, political representation, pluralism, and the peaceful contestation of power. But in practice most Arabs have not had an opportunity to practice these things in governance systems that they have defined and chosen, and within logical sovereign frontiers that they have drawn themselves.
The deadly and chronic combination of local tyrants, Arab-Israeli warfare, and Western military intervention over many decades has brought us to this sad situation today. We will flee our current terrible fate by reversing these trends of Western militarism, Israeli dictates and assaults, and Arab strongmen, rather than perpetuating them in the name of a false and elusive security that how threatens entire nation-states after having killed many human beings.
Rami G. Khouri writes a regular commentary for THE DAILY STAR.
