It's
been over 2 years since the Arab Spring first kicked off and you would be
forgiven for asking: 'What
for?' Over 100,000 Syrians have been killed in the attempt to unseat
Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Egypt’s democracy has
been rudely interrupted by a coup d'état and American diplomats in Libya, who
had supported the deposing of Muammar Qaddafi, were murdered in September 2012.
To many, the revolutionary Arab Spring now seems like a damp squib. Has it been
worth it? Would the region have been better off without it? Through two cakes
I'm going to untangle which is better; the devil's-food-cake-you-know? Or the
devil's-food-cake-you-don't.
Both of
these cakes start with the same base and it’s only to the second recipe that
I'll add some catalysing ingredients, to give it a bit of a revolutionary
kick.
Ingredients
- Base
- High Unemployment
- De-legitimisation
- Inflation
- Social Media
You need
to begin with an autocratic regime, the fundamental ingredient. Without this,
the recipe with simply will not work. It
could be in the form of a royal family, or perhaps a dictator who came to power
in a coup. Basically they need to be the sole source of power and to have
little legitimacy with their own people. For an example you need only think of
Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, who had been in power since 1981 or Ben Ali who had run
Tunisia since 1987. However it is Colonel Muammar Qaddafi who takes (or should
I say took?) the cake,with 42 years in control of Libya. Each of these exerted
their own version of autocracy. Mubarak deployed pretend legitimacy, winning
office four times but in three of elections no other candidate was allowed to
stand. Qaddafi on the other hand, came to
power in a revolutionary coup, overthrowing the ruling monarchy. While he
allowed a form of symbolic direct-democracy to take place, the General People's
Committees, these were largely a sham and he came to rule by decree.
To
autocracy you now must pour in a healthy dose of oppression. This ingredient is
another key element of the recipe and is indeed often found in recipes where an
autocracy is the base ingredient; they are natural bedfellows. Oppression is
how an autocrat keeps his regime stable, suppressing any tendency in the batter
to rise or revolt. On one end of the scale there is repression like Ben Ali's,
of Tunisia. His government tightly restricted free expression and attempted to
stifle online dissent through hacking and hijacking Facebook and email
accounts. On the other end, we had Qaddafi who, in the name of a
'permanent revolution', banned all private ownership and retail trade,
eradicated the free press and subverted the civil service and military service.
Quite apart from the crippling lack of expression the populace suffered, this oppression could have
some quite nasty side-effects. In Syria, anyone who expressed dissent or an
opinion differing from that of Assad, would often find themselves in the hands
of the Mukharabat, the regime's secret police. This most often meant torture
for the dissident and sometimes death.
Into
this mix we add a hearty glug of kleptocracy and a sprinkling of corruption,
other complementary ingredients. In
an autocracy, with no civil society to contain the actions of the ruling class,
those in power are free to plunder a country's wealth and resources. Back to
Colonel Qaddafi, while his people starved he quite literally sat on a golden
sofa in the shape of a mermaid. (I'm not even kidding. The wealth of
nation does not buy taste apparently.) He and his family used Libya's
huge oil resources to fund a life of luxury and as a result of Libya's
corruption (and the ban on private enterprise) the economy stagnated. Similar,
less extreme, situations existed in Egypt and Tunisia. Both created a type of
crony capitalism which benefited only the ruling class and their friends, and
not the majority of the population. In Egypt, this created a privileged elite,
while the majority of the rest of the population lived on less than $2 a day.
To compound this financial hardship, supposedly cheap public services, such as
education or even obtaining a driving licence, became increasingly expensive
due to corrupt off-the book-payments. The situation was similar in Tunisia
where no investment deal could happen without a kick-back to the ruling family.
Ben Ali's network of relations garnered the rather Mafioso title of 'the
Family' while he was in power and with good reason - over half of Tunisia's
business elite were personally related to Ben Ali.
Our
final ingredient will be a demographic boom. The population of Arab nations
doubled between 1975 and 2005, creating a large number of young people in the
Middle East. Indeed, two-thirds of the population in Egypt is under 30. In
other, more liberal nations this might prove to provide a boost to growth, but
in a corrupt economy it results in rising rates of unemployment
The
resulting mixture creates a weak and stagnant economy, no matter how much of a
demographic boom you add. Where autocracy allows corruption and kleptocracy,
the private sector cannot flourish and subsidies handed out by autocratic
regimes weaken industry still further. National "champions" owned by
friends of the ruling family are mismanaged and not subject to the competition
which could have strengthened them and allowed them to expand globally. The Devil’s-food-cake-you
know results in a predictable tragedy; squandered natural resources, high
unemployment, the wasted potential of a population, instead oppressed and
silenced by an elite unwilling to sacrifice their luxurious lifestyle. For many
this recipe bore much worse; poverty, starvation and torture. Could it really
be that's this Devil’s-food-cake-you-know is better than a
Devil's-food-cake-you-don't?
To see
if this is true I'm now going to describe how to you turn this uninspiring but
predictable recipe into something very different...
Ingredients - Catalysts for the Devil's-food-cake-you-don't
·
High unemployment
·
De-legitimisation
·
Inflation
·
Social
media
We are
now going to focus on the last ingredient we added to the mix; demography. Over
time, this creates unemployment, particularly youth unemployment, and it
becomes a highly reactive ingredient. Prior to the Arab Spring, the youth
unemployment rate was 25% across the Middle East, the highest in
regional unemployment rate in the world. Thousands of young people, angry
about the uncertainty of their economic future and with the large amounts of
time on their hands, became the basis for the first protests. It was also the
spark. Mohammed Bouazizi, a 26 year old Tunisian, had failed to find paid
employment despite applying for military draft as well as for many other
private and public sector roles. There were just too many other job-seekers.
When government officials confiscated the vegetable kiosk he was using to feed
his family and pay his sisters university fees, it was the final straw. He set
himself on fire in the middle of the street. The angry, young and educated in
Tunisia seized on this tragedy, starting demonstrations against the Tunisian
government which would spread across the Middle East.
Now to
add another highly reactive ingredient; De-legitimisation. This ingredient is,
in part, the result of a reaction between the oppression and corruption
experienced by people living under autocratic governments. However, the real
driver of de-legitimisation is a lack of economic growth and development. For
example, people living in China similarly live without democracy and under an
oppressive and to some extents corrupt regime. However, the Chinese government
works hard to drive growth and development and has therefore gained
legitimacy among the majority if its citizens. The same cannot be said of
governments in the Middle East. Ageing leaders, corruption, ineffectual
government and failure to provide not just growth but even basic services had
de-legitimised them in the eyes of their citizens.
These
ingredients alone give the batter enough of an impetus but to speed up the
reaction further we'll add a dose of food price inflation. This was prevalent
in the period leading up to the Arab Spring and by its peak food price inflation
had become a problem all across the Middle East, rising to 18.9% in Egypt just
before Mubarak fell. In a place where poverty is so prevalent it is no surprise
that the rising price of bread drove people on to the street.
Our
final catalyst, the one that is guaranteed to push the batter over the edge, is
a couple of spoonfuls of social media. This is the ingredient which allowed the
anger, caused by youth unemployment and de-legitimisation, to find a voice and
to organise. The first mass protest in Egypt was organised on Facebook and
it helped thousands of protesters outwit the police. It also spread revolution
across national borders creating copycat protest movements across the region.
And
there you have it; the Devil's-food-cake-you-don't. The risk with this recipe
is you're never quite sure how it will turn out, no matter how many times you
bake it. On the one, oven-gloved hand, you could get a fairly stable
result. I'm thinking about Tunisia where Ben Ali left relatively quietly
and the Tunisians are working to create a democratic system, albeit still with
unimpressive economic data and the odd protest. Far from perfect but a
functioning state on (hopefully) the eventual road to development. On the other,
you could get, for example, something as traumatic what has happened in Syria.
This includes; death, violence, mass migration, the increasing destabilisation
of the region, and a total breakdown in the rule of law. Over 100,000 people
have been killed in the Syrian conflict and 45.2 million people have
been displaced, according to UN estimates, spreading instability across
national border.
This
brings us back to the question I asked at the beginning of this piece; Has
it been worth it? Would the region have been better off without it? It
is easy to look at the results above and declare a resounding no. The results
seems largely to have been loss of life, economic damage (if not collapse) and
political turmoil. None of the countries has transitioned to a fully formed
democracy. Tunisia is closest but in Libya functioning democracy seems far
away as militants have banning anyone who ever worked with Qadaffi from taking
part in government. Thus the most capable reformers and incidentally passionate
anti-Qadaffi fighters have been dismissed from government. Egypt recently
ousted their democratically elected (but wannabe autocrat) leader, Mohammed
Morsi. And in Syria, not just democracy, but any form of functioning government
seems years away.
Against
this background it almost seems callous to suggest that this suffering and instability
were in anyway worth it - that the Devil's-food-cake-you-don't was the wise
choice. And yet that is precisely what I am going to argue. I'm going to
propose that however hard the transition is, it is, in fact, worth it.
Many are suffering as result of the instability, a fact that is hard to ignore when it makes the nightly news. Yet, even before the Arab Spring people were suffering. Repression's tools are often imprisonment and torture. The number of prisoners suspected to be held by Assad in Syria varies between 10,000 to as many as 120,000. However, the true cost of the Devil's-food-cake-you-know cannot just be measured by present suffering but by the lost potential of generations who had few opportunities to improve their lives under these regimes. The perfect example of this is Libya - a country with minimal education, limited free speech and a stagnating economy left the population in extreme poverty with little opportunity to improve their own lives.
While
some economist still rely on narrow and solely economic data to judge a
countries development economists like Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum have
expanded the approach with less traditional measures such as their capability
theory. In this they define development in terms of the opportunities available
for the population to flourish instead of by GDP-per-head. If we adopt this
view, even in countries with healthy levels of growth, development may still
not be achieved and populations can still suffer what they term
“capability-deprivation” under repressive regimes. If these regimes are not removed,
then it is not only the present generation that suffers but future ones
too.
The path
to democracy is rough but instability now needn't mean instability later. And
just because a process is prolonged and painful it does not mean it isn’t worth
is, as many developed countries have proven. For example, the 1848 Spring of
Nations which involved death and the exile of many Europeans. And yet in the
long run it was in fact the catalyst for all the changes which led to the
European monarchies falling over the next hundred years. Similarly England's
glorious revolution in 1688 put it on a very long road to democracy, one which led
finally to universal suffrage in 1928. The fact is that, quite frankly, it often
can take a long time to make a democracy and it is not without disorder and
chaos.
While
this sounds demoralising it shouldn't be. The prolonged instability in Tunisia,
which some have been predicted as harbinger of doom, is actually a good thing.
It shows that Tunisians are unwilling to allow one party rule - they want real
democracy and for this constant pressure needs to be applied to those in charge
to avoid a hijacking of power. Tunisia’s street protests now will hopefully
result in a stable democracy in the future. Of course, one could holdup
Egypt as an example where street protest just lead to further instability under
a coup d’état. It’s true that the results with the Devil's-food-cake-you-don't
are never guaranteed. Since the end of World War II, there have been
roughly 50 major revolutions that have either toppled autocratic regimes or led
to significant political reform in “flawed” democracies. For those revolutions
that have occurred under dictatorships, only about a third have resulted in
transitions to democracy. Yet when the alternative is years of stagnation,
suffering and missed opportunity the fight is still worth it.
The
devil's-food-cake-you-don't is a risk. Though I've given you the ingredients,
I've also given you the odds. Democracies don't spring up over night and to
have believed that the overthrow of autocratic regimes in the Middle East would
bring about stability and democracy in a couple of years would have been naive.
Yet I hope I've shown, through my two recipes, that when the certain results
are poverty and the loss of so much potential that the Devil’s-food-cake-you-know
is the right, if risky, choice. It's a gamble, but one definitely worth taking.