Trite (and tritely wrong) comparisons are being drawn between what is happening in different Arab countries and the collpase of European communism.

My thoughts:

Egypt‘s Berlin Wall Moment?

Back in 1990/91 first the Warsaw Pact then the Soviet Union keeled over and died. In the arc of decadent national socialist Arab regimes things now are different. They are not locked into one doomed structure and can decay (or not) at their own pace. 

The other key difference with the end of European communism is the motivation of the masses and local elites. All the Soviet republics (except Russia) plus all the Warsaw Pact countries knew what they wanted – to escape brutish imperialist rule from Moscow. For many of them that meant joining ‘Western’ organisations (above all NATO and the European Union) as fast as possible – patiently building democratic standards mobilised the population for years to come. In some countries respectable traditions of pre-WW2 multi-party democracy gave a further patriotic impulse for systemic change.

In the Middle East the natural pent-up frustration at the cultural and economic failure of the ‘Arab world’ is not complemented by a clear model of what might replace it. And there is no serious institutional democratic tradition based on checks and balances. Insofar as there is a common view it tends towards lumpen Muslims-as-victims ideology, fuelled by vile anti-Semitic propaganda.

The United States for many years has poured into Egypt lavish military assistance. These programmes started for Cold War reasons (paying Egypt to keep clear of Soviet blandishments) but continued long after they made sense. All that support now looks like a poor investment – yes it helped moderate official Egyptian policy towards Israel, but at the price of making anti-Americanism and wider anti-Westernism a rallying cry for angry crowds.

The deep diplomatic problem now for US/EU diplomacy is that we missed the boat when the Cold War ended, by not articulating a generous pro-reform agenda for the repressed Arab world. Western governments got dragged in to the Yugoslav fiasco and failed to offer a strong new reform-based partnership, particularly for North Africa (in part playing to a European quasi-racist idea that ‘Arabs can’t run a democracy’). President Bush bravely tried to change this approach after 9/11, but by lunging at Iraq he failed to mobilise American let alone European opinion on his side.

The speech by President Obama in Cairo in 2009 and then his failure to offer serious encouragement to Iranians massing against the Tehran regime now look like a banal, doomed attempt to encourage ‘dialogue’ with the repressive Islamic/Arab status quo by reining back on US active support for democratic reform. The US/EU now stand becalmed, left with nothing coherent to offer as events gather pace.

The Middle East shows what happens when diplomacy’s much vaunted ‘stability’ isn’t stable any longer. Autocratic regimes are like imposing wooden houses with bullying owners who are clueless at termite control – the structure looks strong right until it wobbles then collapses. No-one knows in advance when the collapse will happen, so at the time it seems ‘unexpected’. The policy problem comes from the fact that the edifice has sat there for so long that all concerned have stopped thinking about its inevitable end – and how best to prepare for it

 

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