By modern standards, contemporary Middle Eastern Arab nations are failed societies. On virtually every index of socioeconomic and political development, they compare poorly with other parts of the world.
Under the auspices of the United Nations Development Program and the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, an independent group of 20 Arab scholars analyzed the state of Arab human development in a widely-circulated 2002 report. Their findings were stark.
In particular, the Arab Human Development Report 2002 found that the 19 nations under study suffer from a “freedom deficit”:
“Out of seven world regions, the Arab countries had the lowest freedom score in the late 1990s … The Arab region also has the lowest [score] of all regions for voice and accountability [based on] a number of indicators measuring various aspects of the political process, civil liberties, political rights and the independence of the media.”
The Arab region not only ranked last on the freedom scale, but the gap between Arab countries and the next-to-last ranked region, Africa, was substantial. The authors also found the Arab world lagged in gender equality, education, Internet use, human welfare and technological development.
“The [total] average [scientific] output of the Arab world per million inhabitants is roughly 2% that of an industrialized country,” the authors noted. “In 1981, the Republic of Korea was producing 10% of the output of the Arab world; in 1995, it almost equalled its output.”
In the number of frequently cited scientific papers generated per million inhabitants, Switzerland scored 79.90, the United States 42.99, Israel 38.63. Among Arab nations, Kuwait led the pack with 0.53, followed by Saudi Arabia with 0.07, Egypt at 0.02, and Algeria at 0.01.
The poet Nizar Qabbani, quoted by Fouad Ajami in his famous book The Dream Palace of the Arabs, concluded that Arab societal dysfunction is so pervasive that he could no longer write:
“I don’t write because I can’t say something that equals the sorrow of this Arab nation. I can’t open any of the countless dungeons in this large prison. The poet is made of flesh and blood. You can’t make him speak when he loses his appetite for words. You can’t ask him to entertain and enthrall when there is nothing in the Arab world that entertains or enthralls. When we were secondary schoolchildren, our history teacher used to call the Ottoman Empire [Europe’s] ‘sick man.’ What is the history teacher to call these mini-empires of the Arab world being devoured by disease? What are we to call these mini-empires with broken doors and shattered windows and blown-away roofs? What can the writer say and write in this large Arab hospital?”
How can we explain the discouraging state of Middle Eastern Arab societies? Is it the fault of Western imperialism or the existence of Israel, as often claimed?
It is true that there were brief European imperial and colonial disruptions in the Middle East, and that Arab leaders were guided by Western socialist and fascist political models in developing their dictatorial political systems. Yet these system have been largely over-layers added to — not replacements for — traditionally tribalized Arab societies, with their legacies of violence left intact from Bedouin days.
It is to the latter that we must look to understand the circumstances and difficulties of the Arab Middle East. The lesson is that, in the Arab world and elsewhere, culture matters.
The Arab Middle East has remained largely a pre-modern society, governaned by clan relationships and violent coercion. People in both the countryside and the cities tend to trust only their relatives, and then only relative to their degree of closeness. People define their interests in terms of the interests of their own group, and in opposition to those of other groups. A pervasive cult of honour requires that people support their own groups, violently if necessary, when conflict arises.
What is missing in the Arab Middle East are the cultural tools for building an inclusive and united state. The cultural glue of the West and other successful modern societies –consisting of the rule of law and constitutionalism, which serve to regulate competition among unrelated groups — is absent in the Arab world. The frame of reference in a tribalized society is always “my group vs. the other group.” This system of “balanced opposition” is the structural alternative that stands in stubborn opposition to Western constitutionalism.
Islam, which might have provided an overarching constitution of universalistic rules binding together all members of society, has failed as a political organizing principle, as well — for it too reflects the region’s underlying sociology, having been built up by the Arabs’ Bedouin forebears on a foundation of balanced opposition. This is why it has fueled rather than suppressed the Middle East’s various bloody feuds, such as those between Sunni vs. Shiite and between Muslim vs. infidel.
As a result, Arab political reform has proven elusive, and will remain thus so long as balanced opposition dominates the region’s political culture. Whatever formal unity is imposed by coercive force over a national population — we need only think of the regimes in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, etc. — remains illegitimate in the eyes of the subjects on the receiving end, and thus constantly open to violent challenge and radical replacement.
The primary goal of such regimes is to remain in power and maximize their spoils, rather than to enhance the lives of society members. Their dysfunction explains why so many Arabs have suffered so long, and remain without the liberties we in the West take for granted.
Philip Carl Salzman is a member of the Board of Directors of SPME. He is the author of Culture and Conflict in the Middle East (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2007), from which this article is drawn. This book is available through SPME Mart. Philip Carl Salzman is co-editor of the book “Postcolonial Theory and the Arab-Israel Conflict “
