The Arab Crisis. By Martin Kramer.
The Arab Crisis. By Martin Kramer. Sandbox, December 17, 2013.
Kramer:
This is
an extraordinary time in the Middle East, but just what we have witnessed has
eluded consensus. That is reflected in the terminology. Some called it the
“Arab Spring,” by analogy to the democratic transformations in Europe. When it
became clear that the path wasn’t going to be as smooth as in Europe, others
backtracked and called it the “Arab Awakening,” which sounds like a longer-term
proposition. Still others, who saw Islamists initially triumph in elections,
took to calling it the “Islamist Winter.” The terminological confusion is a
reflection of analytical disagreement.
Another
source of confusion has been the widespread resort to historical analogies.
When it didn’t look like the transition would be that smooth, or might even be
aborted, commentary began to appear comparing the events to Europe in 1848.
When optimists wanted to make the point that sometimes successful revolutions
take a long time, they pointed to the American revolution of 1776. When
pessimists wanted to emphasize that revolutions conceived in idealism could go
astray, they pointed to the Russian Revolution of 1917. Finally, some circled
back to 1989, but this time not with an emphasis on the “Spring” analogy to
Poland, but on the “Balkan Ghosts” analogy to Bosnia. Analogies are a crutch,
to which we return when our analysis is thin.
As a
historian by training, I have no difficulty predicting that the debate over
terminology and the application of analogies will go on for many years to come.
If historians still debate the causes of the French Revolution, there is no
reason to think the events of the past couple of years won’t be debated far
into the future. That’s how we historians make our living.
But you
don’t make your living that way. You do analysis of the moment, and you have to
make a judgment call based on what evidence there is now, in order to predict
the future trajectory on which to base policy and strategy. So while it would
suit me just fine to say that it’s too early to tell, let me go out on a limb
and make some generalizations.
Let us
agree that what we are witnessing is a very profound crisis. Regimes have
fallen, tens of thousands have died, millions are refugees. There is even a
nominal price tag. The banking giant HSBC has just released a report estimating
that this crisis will have cost Middle Eastern countries $800 billion in lost output
by the end of next year. It also estimates that the combined GDP of the seven
most-impacted countries—Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and
Bahrain—will be 35% lower by the end of 2014 than it would have been if the
2011 uprisings hadn’t happened.
This is
wealth destruction on a massive scale. And it is not as if these economies had
a big buffer to absorb this hit: the already-poor have become desperately poor.
As against these mounting costs, the gains have been debatable. Has there been
progress toward good governance and the rule of law? Or descent into rule by
militias and pervasive insecurity? The situation differs from country to
country, but overall, it is hard to be optimistic about any of the impacted
countries, which are mired in various degrees of turmoil.
But
before we can say what sort of crisis this is, let’s say what sort of crisis it
isn’t. It isn’t just a repudiation of authoritarian rule. It is true that the
kind of rule based on personality cult and pervasive fear has lost its grip.
The United States contributed to that by removing Saddam Hussein from power in
2003. Saddam was the avatar for a certain kind of regime, and his fall exposed
others who ruled in the same way. His removal dissipated the aura of fear that
surrounded such regimes, because the praetorian guards entrusted with their
defense could be put to flight. The enablers of these regimes were prepared to
torture to defend them. What they weren’t prepared to do was to fight and die.
That proved to be the case from Tunisia to Egypt to Libya.
But if
it was a revulsion against authoritarian rule, and a yearning for the dignity
conferred by democracy, how does one explain the support of Egyptians for a
Muslim Brotherhood regime which was itself authoritarian? Or the counter-revolution
in Egypt, which returned a military junta to power by coup? Perhaps this isn’t
a political crisis of authoritarianism versus democracy, between bad
(authoritarian) guys and good (democratic) guys. In the case of Egypt, there
isn’t even an agreement over who the bad guys and good guys are. And there
isn’t a consensus over Syria either, where only a handful of the players are
committed to democracy in a form we would recognize.
If it
wasn’t about freedom and democracy, was it a “return to Islam”? It briefly did
look just like that. For a moment, it seemed like another analogy, Iran 1979,
might be apt. Certainly the status quo has been eroded by the spread of an
Islamist social movement among the masses. But Islamists didn’t lead the
uprisings, and they haven’t been able to consolidate their early victories in
elections and secure positions of dominance. Islamists have struggled without
success to translate their social base into coherent and effective politics.
Perhaps this is because people aren’t persuaded they have the answer to the
crisis, or even understand it.
Was it
an economic crisis? Many of you are no doubt familiar with what I might call,
for lack of a better term, deep explanations for the revolutions. One of them,
backed up by many statistics, is the demographic youth bulge which has surged
through the Arab world. This part of the world is in a transition to lower
rates of fertility, but it is now paying the price of extraordinarily high
fertility rates registered twenty to thirty years ago. Millions of young people
have flooded the labor markets, and no economy in the world could keep up. The
turmoil is sometimes interpreted as the outburst of frustrated young men
venting their rage at their own indolence and impotence.
But if
this were primarily an economic crisis, why did it erupt at a time of economic
expansion and growth? And why wasn’t it anticipated that the resulting
instability would actually worsen the economic plight of these countries?
Having
now exhausted various explanations, and found them wanting, I proceed to my
sweeping generalization. This is a crisis of culture. That is to say, it is
more than a political or social or economic crisis. Of course it has elements
of all of these things, but at its most fundamental, it is a crisis of
culture—to be precise, the implosion of the hybrid civilization that dominated
the twentieth century in the Arab world.
That
hybrid was the defensive, selective adaptation of Islamic traditions to the
ways of the West. The idea was that the tradition could be preserved, that its
essence could be defended, while making adjustments to modernity as needed. The
timeless character of the political, religious, and social traditions of the
region could be upheld, even as upgrades were made to accommodate modernity. In
Turkey, Atatürk’s cultural revolution had thrown all of tradition overboard and
embraced the ways of Europe without reservation. The Arabs resisted the notion,
and their leaders promised them a different path, a hybrid of the Arab-Islamic
tradition with Western-style modernity.
This
hybrid civilization pretended to be revolutionary, but it permitted the
survival of those pre-modern traditions that block progress, from
authoritarianism and patriarchy to sectarianism and tribalism. This hybrid
civilization has now failed, and what we have seen is a collapse, not of a
political system, but of a moral universe left behind by time.
That
failure was long concealed by a mixture of regime maneuvering and the prop of
oil. It has been cushioned in those places in the Arab Gulf where rulers have
given up on the better part of Arab-Islamic civilization, inviting the Louvre
and the Guggenheim and American universities to build branches, and allowing
expatriates to outnumber the Arabs. These are the places that have become
refuges from chaos elsewhere, and that have even profited from it. But in the
great centers of Arab-Islamic civilization, from Cairo to Damascus to Baghdad,
the crisis of the political order is primarily a symptom of the collapse of
their own hybrid of tradition and modernity.
The
failure of the hybrid is most dramatically evidenced by the rise of
sectarianism. The Sunni-Shiite divide has lots of layers, including a disparity
of power, often the legacy of colonialism. But the mindset of sectarianism is
thoroughly pre-modern. Modern nationalism was devised at least in part to blunt
sectarianism among Muslims.
But
because the tradition had to be respected, the hybrid civilization of the
region tolerated the exclusion of Jews and the marginalization of Christians.
It was only one step from there to the defamation by Shiite of Sunni, by Sunni
of Alawi, and on and on. The jihad of Muslim against Muslim, whether waged by
Lebanon’s Hezbollah in Syria, or by extreme Islamists in parts of Iraq and
northern Syria, is a huge reversal. It is like a page taken straight out of
eighth- or ninth-century Islamic history. Here we are in a Middle East where
the major divide isn’t over the form of government, or the nature of the
economic system, or the extent of individual liberty. It is over a dispute
dating from the seventh century of Islam—the sort of thing Europe left behind
when it secularized during the Enlightenment.
There
are some who would actually reify this by inscribing it on the map. There is a
certain line of reasoning, that what the Middle East really needs is a new map,
drawn along sectarian lines. This is how the argument goes: The 1916
Sykes-Picot map is worn out, it is coming apart at the seams. The lines on the
political map are losing their meaning, the lines that aren’t yet on the map
are becoming realities. An alternative map is needed, and most of the
alternatives have a standard feature: divvying up the Fertile Crescent along
sectarian and ethnic lines.
There
is no doubt that the present crisis is weakening some states, and that they are
losing their ability to project central power up to their borders. Sectarian
and ethnic separatism does have purchase. But even if new lines could be drawn,
how would this solve the crisis? How would it make the region better suited to
embrace modernity? The fact is that sectarian statelets, predicated on
pre-modern identities, could well go the other way. Think about the Sunni
Islamist quasi-states centered around Raqqa in northern Syria and Gaza on the
Mediterranean. These aren’t going to become the next Dubai or Qatar, and not
just because they don’t have oil. If the map does come undone, and new
statelets or quasi-states or mini-states are born, that is just as likely to
bring about more sectarian and ethnic conflict than ease it.
In
summation, there are millions of people who now must reconfigure the way they
see themselves and the world, not just through a political revolution, but
through a cultural one. There is no way any outside power outside can
deliberately accelerate or channel this transformation. And since we are much closer
to the beginning of that process than the end, the region will remain a
cauldron for years if not decades to come.