TRY GLUE:

Waking from its sleep: The Arab world has experienced two decades of political stagnation, says Peter David). But there is a fever under the surface (The Economist, 7/23/09)

The political instability of the Arab world is in turn connected to another problem: the missing glue of nationhood. Many years ago an Egyptian diplomat, Tahsin Bashir, called the new Arab states of the Middle East “tribes with flags” (though he exempted Egypt). His point still holds. In countries as different as Lebanon and Iraq, ethnic, confessional or sectarian differences have thwarted programmes of nation-building. That is why Iraq fell apart into Sunni, Shia and Kurdish fragments after the removal of Saddam despite decades of patriotic indoctrination. Syria could follow suit if the minority Alawi sect of the ruling Assad family were somehow to lose control of this largely Sunni country. Sudan has seen not one but two civil wars between its Arab-dominated centre and the non-Arab minorities in its south and west.

In reviewing this litany of troubles, it is necessary to remember that what people call “the Arab world” is a big and amorphous thing, and arguably (see article) not one thing at all. It would be a distortion to portray the whole region as a zone of permanent conflict. However bloody they have been, the wars in Iraq, Algeria, Sudan or on the borders of Israel have not disrupted ordinary life in the whole Arab world. Most Arabs have been touched by the violence only through their television screens (though, as we shall see, the powerful emotions such images stir up have real-world consequences too). Many Arab countries can look back over the past two decades and see elements of progress to be proud of, including, in some places, rising prosperity and a slow but steady expansion of personal freedom.

And yet the years of conflict cannot just be written off, as if the various outbreaks of internal or inter-state violence were just local aberrations or the product of bad luck, or as if they had no bearing on the region’s future prospects. It is not just that, if you add all the bloodletting together, up to a million citizens of the Arab world may have perished violently since 1990, and that killing on this scale cannot but leave deep scars (see table 2). The disturbing point for the future is that none of the underlying causes of conflict enumerated above has disappeared. On the contrary, each appears to be taking on the characteristics of a chronic condition.

Except that, as just noted a few paragraphs earlier, the problem is really just that the region isn't organized into natural nations. Once it is the tensions will largely evaporate.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 6, 2009 8:28 AM