World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [118]
What Markets and Democracy Would Bring
in the Middle East
After September 11, 2001, many prominent voices immediately called for free markets and democratization as the solution for terrorism and ethnic conflict in the Middle East. In a sense, this is no surprise: Poverty and corrupt, repressive regimes have clearly helped turn the Middle East into the cauldron of hatred that it currently is. Thus for Thomas Friedman, the solution to Middle Eastern terrorism and strife is “multi-ethnic, pluralistic, free-market democracy.”
20
Unfortunately, “multi-ethnic, pluralistic, free-market democracy” is not a policy. It is an ideal, and the problem is getting to that ideal. Even if U.S. foreign policy were unconstrained by dependence on Arab oil or other problems peculiar to the region, the basic policy prescription that America promotes elsewhere in the non-Western world—laissez-faire markets and rapid democratization—would be a very high-risk strategy in the Middle East.
It is critical to distinguish between the short-term realities and the optimistic longer term prospects of market liberalization in the Arab states. In the longer term, if the Arab economies could be genuinely opened and their societies transformed from what Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria calls their present “feudal” conditions, there is good reason to think that markets could produce enormous benefits in the Middle East. Three distinctive features of the Middle Eastern states could make market reforms especially propitious. First, unlike most developing countries, the Arab states have an unusually large number of skilled and educated individuals, often with advanced degrees, who are currently unemployed. Second, the populations of the Arab states include groups famous the world over for their “entrepreneurialism.” As Zakaria notes, “The Palestinians, tragically, have long been the region’s best merchants and would probably respond fastest to new economic opportunities if they could put the intifada behind them.”
21 Finally, again unlike most developing countries, the Arab states generally do not face the “problem” of an internal market-dominant minority, and for this reason markets are less likely to be ethnically destabilizing at the national level. Thus, with certain optimistic assumptions, markets can be a key to long-term Middle Eastern reform, both economically and politically.
In the short run, however, laissez-faire global markets in the Middle East will not transform the entrenched realities of Arab society or have a civilizing effect on ethnic relations. On the contrary, for at least a generation, the effects of marketization in the Middle East would at best produce only marginal benefits for the great mass of Arab poor. However correct in theory, free trade agreements and privatization—in the absence of major structural reforms, which are highly unlikely to occur—cannot in the short term alter the pervasive illiteracy, corruption, and Third World conditions prevailing throughout the Arab states.
Meanwhile, even if the turn to fundamentalism in the Middle East is a product of closed or repressive political regimes, it sadly does not follow that political liberalization in the region today would lead to moderation—or, for that matter, pro-market regimes. On the contrary, rapid democratization in the Arab states would likely be a recipe for extremist politics, dominated by ethnonationalist (if not fundamentalist) parties unified in their hatred of Israel and the West. As Zakaria candidly observes: “America’s allies in the Middle East are autocratic, corrupt and heavy-handed.