Nobody – women, minorities, the poor – can flourish when Arab states break down
The
Arab Spring has failed. Angry crowds ransacked the offices of Egypt’s
democratically elected President, Mohamed Morsi, this week just as they
once forced their way into the marble palaces of the region’s dictators.
The mob set the place on fire and if there had been a statue of the
president they would surely have toppled it.
What
is happening in Egypt is not just part of a global revolt against
austerity or a protest against the yawning gulf between rich and poor.
It marks the death of an idea: that greater political choice and free
speech could swiftly transform the Middle East. That turns out to have
been a Western mirage in the desert. None of the European points of
reference, from the uprisings of 1848 to the toppling of communism in
1989, really applied to the modern Arab world, not to the teeming urban
poor of Cairo, nor the frustrated medical students of Bahrain nor the
warlords of Libya.
We
wanted a different outcome. We wanted dictatorship to be replaced by
democracy. Instead it was replaced by the escalating collapse of nation
states. In the squares and streets of Cairo we can watch this
tumbling-down in real time. There are plenty of men with weapons in the
mob; guns have been flooding in from the Libyan surplus stockpiles and
amateur armourers make improvised ones, called fards, that fire
birdshot. These were fired at President Morsi’s HQ this week. Because
the police are all but invisible, because there has been a twelvefold
increase in armed robberies since the 2011 “Spring”, because the murder
rate has increased 300 per cent, the small arms market is booming.
In
all other respects, though, the economy is shrivelling. One quarter of
the population are struggling to live below the very low Egyptian
poverty line. Unemployment has soared. To keep fuel and food subsidies —
and thus head off further unrest — President Morsi has dipped into
foreign reserves, which have plunged from $36 billion before the Spring
to $13 billion last March.
You
could put this down to Mr Morsi’s incompetence, or at least to the
failure of his Muslim Brotherhood to reinvent itself as a governing
class. More charitably, you could blame the huge corruption and
wastefulness of his predecessor, Hosni Mubarak. But it is a more general
malaise. The Egyptians were rightly proud that they (like the Tunisians
before them) were able to unseat their dictator themselves rather than
by a Western invasion in the manner of Saddam Hussein.
That
brief satisfaction has now given way to fury that the State can no
longer meet expectations of security or prosperity — and a gathering
sense that the Islamists are actually afraid to govern, or to accept the
consequences of leadership. Thus Mr Morsi eagerly accepted $4 billion
from Qatar and Saudi Arabia this year because it was easier to be in
hock to Arab oil-producers than to swallow the conditions of an IMF
rescue package.
Across
the region the State is only just functioning. In Libya the
Gaddafi-enforced consensus among tribes has given way to outright
rivalry. In Syria few still believe that Bashar Assad will be able to
rescue even the shell of the state that he inherited from his father.
Rather, the to-and-fro of the fighting, seemingly random to Western
outsiders, seems to reflect Assad’s determination to establish a secure
Alawite enclave connected through a land corridor to
Hezbollah-controlled areas of northern Lebanon.
Much
blood has still to flow but the Syrian outcome may well be two
dysfunctional states, one controlled by Assad or by Alawite generals who
have displaced him, and the other by a Western-backed rebel
administration.
Nobody
in the region is getting what he or she wants. Minorities feel
threatened. Women are more marginalised than before the Spring. Justice
is as corrupt. In Egypt official courts have virtually withdrawn from
the Sinai, replaced by Sharia justice. And according to some estimates
80 per cent of the secret police were previously employed by Mr Mubarak.
Is
that what the West wants? Probably not, but nobody is really asking us:
two years after the Arab Spring, the West is even more helpless than it
was. The Army may soon become a pivotal force in Egypt again.
Yesterday
it gave the Government of President Morsi 48 hours to satisfy the
(unspecified) demands of the people, otherwise it would take over the
reins. The military high command says that the swirling crowds have now
become a matter of national security (code for a putsch that would
probably throw its weight behind a transitional government of
technocrats until parliamentary elections later in the year).
So
the West’s dilemma is more or less the same as it was two years ago: do
we accept a military takeover that brings a semblance of stability to a
strategically important country? Or do we speak out for a democratic
process that is in part the product of our imaginations? My bet is that,
in our funk, we will accept the Army as the least-worst option and
pretend to believe its self-portrayal as the guardian of the people.
But
here’s the rub: you can’t have a coup d’état without an état. And there
just isn’t much of a state structure left, not in Egypt, not in Libya,
not in Syria.
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