Arab Spring good news for authoritarian states bad news for those living with revolutions

Who is gaining most this year from the Arab Spring of uprisings, revolutions and civil wars? The citizens of the authoritarian states who have seen salaries and social spending jump, or those living with the reality of transformation?

Put that way the naive optimism of some supporting the Arab Spring is revealed as dangerous. Any student of history knows that revolutions usually make life much harder before they sometimes work out for the best. They are very hard times indeed for the ordinary citizen.

Civil war reality

Imagine being an honest citizen of Sirte over the past few months with a family to feed and living in the middle of a civil war. Yes life will get better now with the death of the former leader but how long before it is better than before the war, or even close to it?

The idea that business is somehow impressed by this movement towards democracy and will follow up with inward investment is laughable. And yet that is what Elizabeth Littlefield, the president and chief executive of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, a US government development finance institution, suggested yesterday at the World Economic Forum in Jordan.

Can we please stop talking nonsense and call a spade a spade? Business will only invest when it has a stable economic environment offering long term returns. Unstable regimes are for adventurers and worse.

The problem for the US is that its insistence on democracy across the Arab world is not a new paradigm for economic growth and stability but a policy that moves the region to anarchy on the model of Somalia or Afghanistan.

US leaving Iraq

Still the US has announced that all its 39,000 troops will now leave Iraq by the end of the year so perhaps this kind of thinking will have to be replaced by something more practical that might actually have a chance of working. Vietnam managed just fine after the US left but we will see what happens in Iraq.

Perhaps the nations that have escaped the Arab Spring uprisings will now get their act together. It is very helpful indeed that oil revenues are at historic highs this year and that the money is available to respond to this challenge. There can also be some aid for countries going through the agonies of transformation.

That might help them avoid transforming backwards rather than forwards, or into a cycle of endless internal infighting. But there is no doubt where life is currently getting better across the Middle East and North Africa, and it is not in the countries living with the consequences of the Arab Spring.

What that suggests for the immediate future is a polarization with business, capital and entrepreneurs heading for the states where the Arab Spring has caused the least trouble, cities like Doha, Dubai and Abu Dhabi and away from those most affected. Indeed, that is what is already happening.