Source: Al-Ahram Weekly

Debate over the future political direction of the Arab world has too often been reduced to a set of absurdly simplistic premises, writes Amr Hamzawy*

Opinion polls recently conducted in Arab countries cast into relief four significant phenomena: an increasingly heightened sense of the intricacy and severity of the world's problems; a growing conviction that these problems extend beyond the political crises and generally poor human development indexes in most Arab countries to touch on the very foundations of Arab society and the relationship between the state and society; a growing antipathy towards the role played by outside powers -- the US and Israel above all -- in tandem with increased awareness of the responsibility of ruling Arab elites for the problems faced by Arab populations and hence the need for democratic reform and a continuing concern for common Arab causes - unity, the Palestinian cause -- and a concomitant opposition to attempts to fragment the Arab world.

Subject these opinion trends to any kind of serious analysis and you find they delineate the contours of the challenges currently facing the Arab world and, hence, provide the parameters for any discussion of possible solutions and future scenarios. It is clear that the Arab world is gripped by a protracted crisis that can only be solved if Arab thinkers pool their energies and channel them into new and bold modes of thought that probe the heart of the problem while combining theoretical analysis with the development of practical political alternatives. The time is long overdue for an honest reassessment of the relationship between the state and society and of collective security at the national, Arab, regional and international levels. On the basis of this reassessment we could then act to resolve our current economic, social, cultural and strategic crises.

Such a process would throw up several core questions. For example, is the collapse of the state and its ability to administer public affairs - blatantly the case in Iraq and Lebanon - and the general erosion of the legitimacy of the state in terms of popular support, which characterises the situation of most other Arab states, with the possible exception of some Gulf countries, proof of the failure of the nation state in our part of the world? Or are these conditions more in the nature of an urgent summons to take a closer look at the authoritarian bent that has been the common denominator in the relationship between the state and society and which, by extension, determines the possibilities of democratic reform as the only route to avert the potential collapse of state structures and their sovereign powers (i.e., to hold the monopoly on the legitimate use of force, and to constitutionally and legally set the bounds of the public sphere and the channels for political action)?

What alternatives are possible and how will they impact on the relationship between Arab societies given their religious, ethnic and tribal diversity, and on the individual whose various levels of identity (religion, class, gender) determine his/her actions and choices? Are the only possibilities the nation state or the theocratic state or are there others? Would a federalised state, for example, have any chance of succeeding in the Arab world?

What does democratic reform of the relationship between the state and society mean, in practical terms, in the context of the nation state? What should the reform process consist of in terms of mechanisms for the distribution and rotation of authority and the division and distribution of wealth? How can we reach a consensus over these mechanisms and formulate the legal and institutional guarantees that can ensure their continuity? Can democratic reform help the state to recover its legitimacy and neutrality with respect to the various sectors of society? What timeframe are we looking at? Are Arab ruling elites willing or capable of steering the process of democratic reform? Is reform even on their agenda? Is it subject of contention between competing groups within ruling elites? Are there political and social forces outside the elites that can take part in the reform process and, if so, what are their political agendas and what is the nature of their relationship with the ruling elite? How will conditions affecting the state, the Arab nation, the region and the world impact on the parties involved and the prospects for reform?

These are all questions we must ask ourselves. Unfortunately, channels to explore effective answers to such questions have been reduced to three heavily loaded ideological and fundamentally futile discussions. One, of course, is the mutually exclusive approach that artificially juxtaposes external and internal pressure towards political reform, as if everything boiled down to a choice between Arab leaders caving into US pressure and independent developments in Arab societies that have no connection with the rest of the world. Whereas one can understand the internal-external dichotomy in Washington, where the Bush administration is retroactively justifying its war against Iraq, and its Middle Eastern adventurism in general, by means of a rhetoric that claims to support democratisation in the region, in the Arab world any discussion that takes this dichotomy as its premise does little beyond reproduce obsolete antitheses - to back down and surrender versus to resist and hold steadfast. The result, inevitably, is to divert attention from the need to grasp the moment with its complex interplay of local, regional and international factors.

A second type of discussion found in Arab literature on the subject might be termed the "intentional approach". Its proponents claim to have tapped into the true motives of the major political players and are thus able to gauge their credibility and predict their future orientations. Two modes of this type of discussion have become common. One raises the question of the sincerity of Arab elites in introducing political reforms. Were they temporarily bending to the wind? The other questions the public pro-democratic stances assumed by moderate Islamist movements, suggesting the ballot box will be used only as a means for them to assume power and then discarded. The arguments can be reduced to two simple premises: for those currently holding power political reform is only window dressing, and holds no real substance, while for the Islamists democracy means one person, one vote, and one time only. Such positions overlook the far from predictable dynamics unleashed by the stirrings of political movement in societies that have for so long been stagnant. Dialogue over the future of the Arab world that ignores the complexities of political life will remain circumscribed by another forced dichotomy - that either the will for change must be pure and good, or there can be no change.

A third type of discussion ropes in the concept of gradual change, at best a misleading term, certainly when employed by the ruling elites and its pundits. The average citizen, they claim, is not aware that reform and change are long-term social processes that cannot be accomplished overnight. They frequently point to the fact that Western societies took more than three centuries to make the transition from absolute rule to the beginnings of liberal democracy, with the implication that the Arabs should not be precipitous but rather emulate the patience of Europe's forebears. The thinly disguised exhortation is based on a selective reading of the experiences of a people under conditions so radically different from those that prevail in the Arab world that any attempt at comparison becomes an exercise in intellectual absurdity.

What approaches are left once we discard the chaff from the false internal versus external dichotomy, overly simplistic motivational assumptions and the potted history lesson? One of the most useful alternative approaches centres on what we might call the rediscovery of the nation state, or the sub-regional state from a pan-Arab perspective. It is clear that the political forces operating in the Arab world today, whether their rhetoric is liberal, leftist or Islamist, have for practical and pragmatic reasons restricted their sights to the public realm within their particular countries. Ideologies that transcended the state in the name of Islam or Arabism and that refused to recognise the legitimacy of the nation state have all but disappeared. The existence of the state, for all practical purposes, is beyond question, and the primacy of this affiliation shapes any future dialogue and consensus over present conditions. Indeed, it is impossible to understand current developments without appreciating the importance of the nation state's rehabilitation as the sole framework for formulating visions of the future of Arab societies. This applies not only to relatively homogeneous societies such as Egypt but also to ethnically and religiously diverse societies in the Eastern Arab world and North Africa.

The nation state, today, has a historic opportunity to re-establish its legitimacy by making the transition from a repressive unitary state that rejects diversity of whatever ilk to one that embraces diversity and manages it peacefully through mechanisms of pluralistic political representation and the just distribution of resources. The need to promote this transition can not be overstated. After decades of oppression the Arab people have caught a glimpse of the possibilities of participating in public affairs and they are clamouring for more. If the state does not respond to these popular aspirations through a process of democratic assimilation, Arab societies will explode into religious, ethnic and class conflicts of a magnitude hard to imagine.

* The writer is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.