BEIRUT — In rapid-fire succession, one Arab country after another in recent weeks has come face-to-face with that very delicate zone of national leadership where personality intersects with politics. These instances include the succession in Saudi Arabia after King Fahd’s death; Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s announcement that he would not run for another term after serving 15 years in office; Egyptian President Husni Mubarak’s announcement that he would run for a fifth consecutive term, after serving for 24 years in office; the formation of a patchwork new Lebanese government headed by Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, after uncertainty about whether President Emile Lahoud would serve out his full Syrian-engineered three-year term extension; and, the violence and uncertainty in Sudan after the death in a helicopter crash of newly installed Vice President and former leader of the southern rebels John Garang.
These are only the current cases — in just the past two weeks! — of a phenomenon that has long and widely plagued the Arab world. Long-serving Arab leaders who administer autocratic, intolerant, and often violent, state structures are not just an issue of power-hungry individuals. They reflect a much deeper problem of underlying states and statehood structures that are either historical anomalies, or simply have not been managed very efficiently, humanely, or satisfactorily.
The result, painfully visible throughout the Arab Middle East, is countries whose fate is intimately identified with individual leaders. In some particularly egregious cases where the graph line of unending personalized leadership converges with that of increasingly stressed statehood — Mubarak, Saleh, Omar Hassan Al-Bashir in Sudan, Zeinelabedine bin Ali in Tunisia, and Muammar Gadhafi in Libya come to mind — we see most clearly the damage done by leaders who are neither meaningfully contestable nor accountable before their own people.
Ordinary citizens in all Arab countries do not have a credible opportunity to choose their leaders and define their government’s policies; nor have they ever had a chance to ratify the basic geographical and political configuration of their countries. The enormous challenge that Iraq faces in writing a new constitution for all its citizens is common throughout this region: Who rules these countries? Who chooses and changes rulers? How can we have rulers and governance systems that fairly represent the wishes of the diverse citizenry?
Arab governance systems are brittle and vulnerable because they are being challenged by two powerful forces simultaneously: the historical legitimacy of the state itself is under pressure (due to both local and global trends), and current leaders and their policies are under pressure from their ever more angry and concerned citizens and subjects.
The first force — frayed historical legitimacy — strikes me as the most powerful and dangerous one, because, in fact, three different and overlapping legacies of statehood are being challenged simultaneously in the Arab world. This occurs in the violent dictatorships, the more humane and citizen-sensitive monarchies, and the happy-face, police-run republics that increasingly base their legitimacy on their ability to welcome foreign tourists and export inexpensive underwear.
The three shaky statehood legacies are the following:
1. The modern “nation-state” entered world history in Europe during the 16th -17th centuries, and was exported to the world through the colonial enterprise. This Euro-manufactured state system is evolving and weakening all around the world due to globalization and other forces; the evolving nature of sovereignty in Europe itself is the most dramatic example.
2. The second legacy, challenged in this region, is the modern Arab state, also mostly crafted by European hands, starting around 1920. The modern Arab state has been in existence for less than a century is deeply pressured by its own erratic ability to meet the basic needs of its citizens in security, identity, education, health, jobs and international competitiveness. (Iraq is fascinating today because it is the only case of a modern Arab state whose citizens are formally exploring the option of designing their own statehood structures and power configurations; but this is offset by this operation’s disputed legitimacy and lineage, given that it has been the consequence of Anglo-American armed assault that sought, intriguingly, both to preserve and change the Euro-made 1920s vintage Arab state.)
3. The third fraying legacy is the modern Arab security state, in which armed forces, police, intelligence services, and others with a formal mandate to use guns to protect the interests of citizens have tended rather to focus on protecting the interests of the incumbent regimes, often extended families and tribes. The frightening modern Arab security state was first hinted at by army-run Iraq starting in the 1930s, developed institutionally in Nasserite Egypt after 1952, and came into its own after the oil-fuelled regional boom in the mid-1970s. Most Arab citizens are fed up with the degrading humiliations they have endured at the hands of their contemporary Arab security states, and they seek more dignified, equitable governance systems that reflect the voices of ordinary people and respond to their rights and their reasonable needs.
All three of these historical state legacies are now challenged simultaneously throughout the Arab world. This is happening through peaceful and evolutionary forces of education, commerce and globalization, and through violent or political contestation of long-ruling elites and their privileges and powers.
We should keep in mind the important distinctions between state structures that are losing some of their historical relevance, and individual Arab leaders who are losing their current credibility or legitimacy. Sometimes these two forces converge, and sometimes they do not, but in any case they must be monitored in parallel.
Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.
Copyright ©2005 Rami G. Khouri
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Released: 03 August 2005
Word Count: 918
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