Is Middle East and North Africa comparable to the fall of the Berlin Wall?
Posted on 09 April 2011 with 4 comments from readers
Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill was one of the first to spot the emerging Bric countries, and coined that term for Brazil, Russia, India and China. Now he is saying the Middle East and North Africa is likely to join the Bric countries in the sense of rising demand from a population that wants more, albeit as a result of unrest, revolution and civil war.
Dr O’Neill goes so far as to compare what is happening in the MENA region to the fall of the Berlin Wall: a rather sudden and unexpected popular and largely peaceful rebellion in favor of liberal democracy. Is that a reasonable analysis?
Berlin Wall
It is always hard to reach a conclusion when a historical process is incomplete. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989 but it took time to impact on Russia, and a decade or more before Russia hit an economic bottom. Then there was the lapse of Yugoslavia into a bloody civil war before eventual partition under UN auspices.
In the MENA region Saudi Arabia is the biggest economic power bloc and perhaps comparable to Russia in the Berlin Wall paradigm. Will the revolutions impact Saudi? That seems far from certain. Bahrain is the focal point for Arabian unrest, and the United Kingdom did not fall apart during the decades of troubles in Northern Ireland.
But to be fair the East European analogy does seem to apply to some countries. Syria looked ripe for reform when ArabianMoney visited just four months ago, and we commented on this at the time, long before there was any sign of protest (click here).
Then again where is the parallel with Egypt? The per capita income of this nation of 80 million is far lower than any nation of communist Eastern Europe. The general level of education is also much lower partly as a consequence. Libya is in a slightly better place, and Tunisia clearly the closest of all to European levels of affluence and education in Northern Africa.
Logical conclusion
But the logic of Dr O’Neill’s argument is that the political process sparked by the self-immolation of one poor man in Tunisia in mid-January has an inescapable end, and that as in Eastern Europe all the old regimes must tumble and be replaced.
Heaven help the oil price if that is true. Getting from A to B will be a far from straight line. Already we have Saudi Arabia pumping at maximum capacity to replace lost Libyan oil and oil prices above $123 a barrel. Perhaps the only way is up.
Besides as British historian Niall Ferguson has argued the implementation of some sort of weak democracy across the MENA region is the least likely of potential outcomes (click here). Military regimes, civil wars and new dictatorships are far more probable.
Perhaps a better analogy for what is happening in the MENA region would be the chaos of Latin America in the 19th century. Professor Ferguson’s new book and TV series ‘Civilisation’ contrasts that to the rise of the democratic United States.
Certainly the MENA region has no history of democracy or its institutions, and is still largely post-empire and tribal in character. The United States grew its democracy from property rights which have not been properly established across MENA. The precedent is more for the autocratic model as ruled in Latin America with the downside of political instability and lower growth rates.
Democratic transition?
Thus if Western civilisation is hoping for a smooth transition towards its own democratic model in MENA this is probably hoping for too much, although some countries may get there eventually.
In the meantime there will be a further polarization between the Oil States and the rest in economic terms, with the higher oil prices of the regional unrest benefiting these nations and supporting their regimes. The ArabianMoney newsletter takes up this argument in more depth this month (click here).
4 Comments posted by readers:
Answer to article title question: Not even close.
European civilization during the last several hundred years is quite different from the civilizations of the Middle East. I’m far from an expert on either one, but I’ll offer a little opinion on some differences that I perceive.
Having just read the Wikipedia (shallow, I know) page on the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII, it became apparent that religious influence in the economy and politics was waining in Europe as early as the 1500s. (That shocked me, but I grew up in mostly Catholic Southern Louisiana, so I thought the Catholic Church still ran the world.) The Church controlled a lot during the Middle Ages. As economies developed after the invention of the printing press and industrial specialization of labor, secular power gradually relegated religion to relative insignificance, especially in Northern Europe.
I get the impression that the same process is not as advanced in the Middle East. Certainly in at least one country, religious authority remains in complete control of the government. The Protestant Reformation probably had a lot to do with the progress that happened in Europe. Anyway, education and technology took off in Europe and spread to America. Exactly why democracy became viewed as the best form of government in Europe, I don’t know. Was it because it facilitated the building of the most wealth by people from any social strata, or for some other reason? I never liked history. I still don’t, but I wanted to see why the English trashed all those beautiful buildings. They wanted the lead off the roofs.
There is not much history of democratic government in the Middle East. And like the Catholic Church was to believers in Europe during the Middle Ages, Islam is an all encompassing way of life to Muslims in many places. Fewer Christians go to church on Sunday every year, but many Muslims still pray several times a day! I suspect that the mosque is the center of life to many of them, as the church was to Christians a few hundred years ago, and still is in a few places.
We can’t forget the legal system. There is a big difference between common law and Sharia law. Not being an expert on Islamic law, I can’t say whether it is compatible with the concept of democratic government.
The transition from royalty to democracy was a long, violent process in some European countries. The French Revolution was a mess. Stalin killed millions. Russia still isn’t a true democracy. Nazi Germany had to be leveled, invaded, and occupied for years before democracy could take hold. So democracy is no easy thing to get established. To expect democracy to emerge anytime soon throughout the Middle East is wishful thinking.
Hopefully, I’ve stimulated some thought among you history buffs. I wrote the whole thing with a VHS tape of mostly 80’s rock videos taped from the VH1 Classics channel playing, so send in your corrections. I must thank the Brits for much good rock music. Now I think I will be forced to run the dust mop over the floor. The dust bunnies seem to be massing for an attack. And as any resident of the semi-tropics will tell you, the spiders never take a break with the web weaving in the corners. I would spray them with some toxic poison, but that might upset the balance of indoor fauna in here. The webs do give the place an aura of (insert the appropriate French word here). Maybe I could train my neighbor’s resident raccoons to remove them? What is with their weird markings? They can make a strange bird-like sound if they want to. You learn a lot living in this suburban wilderness. Since I sealed the gap in the brick around the water line entrance with epoxy, the spiders have very few roaches to catch. Actually, they’re not THAT big, the spiders I mean. The roaches around here weigh half a kilo.
A very interesting post. I think that what is most predictive of whether or not democracy gets anywhere in the MENA is Ed.’s comment that there is no history of democracy but of tribalism.
I have coined for my own use the word “predemocracy” since I dislike the idea of a nation being described as a democracy when none of the women could vote or only men over 30 years of age. This seems to me to be oxymoronic, namely to describe a country as being a democracy when half the population, the women, cannot vote.
Describing Greece as the cradle of democracy has always seemed to be verging on nonsense when the largest number of the human beings in the land were slaves or women or disallowed the vote on, say, lack of property grounds.
So, I don’t accept that Britain was a democracy until 1918/9 although there had been a definite trend in that direction since the divine right of kings was abolished in 1688. It was a pre-democracy!
Similarly, France and other European countries were pre-democracies until after the Second World War because women did not have the vote. So, democracy is young, very young even in the established democracies – no longer than a century in many.
As Ed. has said, the MENA countries have no history of democratic institutions; their treatment of women is even pre-predemocratic and more like slaves of ancient Greece; tolerance is minimal to minorities such as homosexuals; and pluralism, so necessary for a democracy, is absent by reason of tribalism and Islam.
Speaking of the eventual outcome: “Military regimes, civil wars and new dictatorships are far more probable.”
If I had to provide an educated “guess” as to the likelihood of any kind of democracy in the MENA region, I’d say less than 10%, and probably more like 5%.
From a Financial Times guest interviewed on the Charlie Rose TV show: The banking system in the UK is 5 TIMES larger, as a percentage of the GDP of the country , than the big USA banks are. (OUCH!) The government must do something to protect itself, in the event of another banking crisis, because it could not bail them out again. He suggested possibly breaking them up, so that pieces could fail, without taking down the entire bank. (And possibly the UK- my comment.)
Also, access to oil will be a big problem in the future, with China locking up all it can. He said there could be a fight for it. He volunteered the oil comment at the very end of the interview, without being asked about oil or energy.