Abstract
In 2019, protests in the streets of Algeria and Sudan, Lebanon and Iraq brought back the fragrance of the Jasmine revolution. Can the pendulum swing back towards democracy and human rights in the Middle East and North Africa region – and in Europe? What will it take to endure? I argue three points. First, I maintain that the human rights aspirations of the Arab Spring rippled across the West in 2011 as disenfranchised groups reacted to increasing social and economic grievances. Second, I contend that the failure to counter these problems has fed a vicious cycle of religious radicalism and right-wing nationalism. Third, I argue that despite widespread Western exhaustion and an inclination to disengage from turmoil in the Middle East, current circumstances make possible new international human rights initiatives, drawn from history, to advance civil liberties, economic progress, security and gender equality in the Middle East, the West and beyond.
“Oh East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet”, until “two strong men stand face to face”, recalled the poet Rudyard Kipling in his The Ballad of East and West. These days the Middle East and the West seem far apart, distrustful of one another, but their destinies once again stand face to face. It is ironic that while the West has often been seen as imposing human rights, or, for the critics, exercising the ‘White man’s burden’ on the developing world, in 2011 the Middle East inspired human rights protesters in hundreds of cities worldwide. Movements such as Occupy and the Indignados marched against economic inequality and austerity, following the pattern of the Arab Spring.
But an opposite trend against human rights has also taken root, both in the Middle East and the West. Libya, Syria and Yemen sunk into civil war; Egypt and Bahrain became more repressively authoritarian than they were before the 2011 protests. 1 Many Middle Eastern cities have fallen into ruin, and the lingering crisis in the region has exacerbated the virulent nationalism which is again sweeping Western democracies. This nationalism is partly induced by a massive influx of refugees viewed as a peril to European economies and ways of life.
I regard this resurgent nationalism as part of the pendulum that has moved since 2013 from Enlightenment to counter-Enlightenment. In 2019, protests in the streets of Algeria and Sudan, Lebanon and Iraq brought back the fragrance of the Jasmine revolution. Can the pendulum swing back towards democracy and human rights in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region – and in Europe? What will it take to endure?
To address this question, I argue three points. First, I maintain that the human rights aspirations of the Arab Spring rippled across the West in 2011 as disenfranchised groups reacted to increasing social and economic grievances. Second, I contend that the failure to counter these problems has fed a vicious cycle of religious radicalism and right-wing nationalism. Third, I argue that despite widespread Western exhaustion and an inclination to disengage from turmoil in the Middle East, current circumstances make possible new international human rights initiatives, drawn from history, to advance civil liberties, economic progress, security and gender equality in the Middle East, the West and beyond.
1. Human rights: From the Middle East to the West
The Arab uprisings of 2011 inspired human rights aspirations far beyond the MENA region, as protests were held in 950 cities in 82 countries. 2 Similar waves of revolutions took place in 1848, 1947, 1968, 1970 and 1989. An inquiry into those revolutionary contagions, many of which took place in Europe, reveals recurring patterns that illuminate the prospects for advancing human rights in today’s Middle East. These circumstances include a synergy of destabilizing forces that spill across borders. 3
Specifically, revolutionary contagions are propitious when five factors are concurrently present, when (1) a hegemonic international order weakens, (2) local elites fail to undertake reforms in the face of a disenchanted citizenry, (3) a regional economic crisis deepens, (4) civil society shows capacity to mobilize and (5) human rights are voiced and disseminated. In 2011, US power in the MENA region had waned as it withdrew from Iraq. US retrenchment weakened its authoritarian Arab allies, and with America’s patronage of local dictatorships in question, the people of the Levant sensed an opportunity. If Western retreat removed one major beam sustaining regional stability, what followed can only be understood in terms of localized economic and social pressures and the response of regional elites to the changing dynamics of power. The elites’ broken promises of political reform made the pre-revolutionary picture markedly worse. Modest reforms or concessions in developing and transitional societies often follow social pressures for change, but when reforms prove inconclusive, disappointment leads to more radical protest. This was the case in Ben Ali’s Tunisia, Mubarak’s Egypt, Qaddafi’s Libya and Assad’s Syria. Despite rapid economic growth in much of the developing world, the MENA economy had been sclerotic for decades. Economic changes took the form of neoliberalism or infitah (opening) which benefited only a thin upper crust of the population. Many regional experts failed to anticipate the powerful impact of surging numbers of young people, a factor that had also fuelled the European revolutions of 1848 and 1968. By 2011, close to 30% of Arab youth were unemployed, one of the highest rates in the world.
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Although overall education levels had risen substantially in the region for several decades, academic training did not translate into new jobs. For instance, educational attainments were spread unevenly, with Egypt, Iraq and Yemen accounting for about 75% of the almost 10 million illiterate people in the region.
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Civil society can best be mobilized through an independent media, new forms of communication and a widening cultural space for resistance. The arrival of the Internet and the privatization of television initially offered a new path forward beyond the reach of censorship. Social media provided new channels for popular and artistic rebellion such as rap music, which infused the rhythm of resistance throughout the region. For instance, Tunisian rapper Hamada Ben Amor (aka El General) posted a song called ‘Rais-LeBled’ (‘Head of State’), which became an anthem for the uprisings.
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Ultimately, key actors in civil society sit in the driver’s seat of revolutions. As events unfolded in the Levant, diverse members of the population, some from the ‘silent majority’ and others from NGOs, unions, women’s groups, the Muslim Brotherhood and other social entities, joined the revolutionary leadership. During the Arab uprisings, however, the condition of the public square varied from one country to the other, meaning that, for most, democratization would remain out of reach. Almost everywhere but Tunisia, the revolutions turned sour. The furious return of religious radicalism and belligerent nationalism shifted human rights progress into reverse.
2. The vicious cycle of nationalism
With the end of the French Revolution, the Age of Reason came to a halt. With the end of the Arab revolutions, a new nascent Enlightenment faded in the Middle East, giving way to the rise of belligerent Islamism. Failure to counter these trends has intensified nationalist movements feeding each other worldwide.
The same conditions that lead to revolutionary contagions can create fertile ground for counter-Enlightenment ideologies. In 2012, when everyone was sure that the liberal wave of human rights would carry the day in the MENA, illiberalism instead gained traction. But this trend did not appear ex nihilo. Since the late 1960s, the Middle East’s Islamic fundamentalists had thrived in a world that in many ways resembled Europe during the interwar period from 1919 to 1939. These were times of deep grievances over externally imposed arrangements, including humiliation at the hands of outside powers and a destabilizing encounter with globalizing capitalism. Desperate socio-economic and structural dynamics helped propel five powerful Islamist waves, growing stronger over time: the first was the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood after the 1967 Six-Day War; the second came after the 1973 oil crisis and the Iranian revolution; the third resulted from Iranian and Saudi regional imperialism since the 1980s to the present; the fourth consisted of the electoral victory of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood in 2012; and the fifth, the spread of Jihadism and ISIS. With this last wave came unprecedented flight of refugees in the region. 7
Similarly, in the present-day Western world, populism and fascist forces did not appear from nowhere. The European interwar period taught us that economic distress, power vacuums, fragmentation of civil society and the lack of anchored progressive ideologies create the space for Bonapartism – Führers and Duces – who in these fractured contexts champion ultranationalism. Today, echoing the past, nationalist or religious ideological fervour fills the political void, sinking roots into the fissures of European civil societies. In these circumstances, marginalized people are too-often seduced by the appeal of cultural pride, the myth of the state or religious identity that transcends selfish instrumental and material interests for the sake of nationalist unity.
Despite their deep historical involvement in the Middle East, the United States and the European Union have become insular, turning their attention towards domestic divisions. Further, Western reluctance to address hellish conditions in the Levant perpetuates circumstances that have fed populist and fascist trends within the West, creating a vicious cycle of nationalism with dire and long-term consequences. ISIS continues to transform itself and rebuild its strength. It may not have retained its hold on territories, but without new efforts to bring political and economic stability, radicalism will thrive again in societies devastated by war, and resume its spread to Western shores. ISIS is far from dead. Jihadists from this movement have honed their skills in Iraq and Syria, and are positioned to export their frightening form of terrorism from India to West Africa, shifting their strategy from governance of a caliphate to mounting insurgencies and intensifying terrorism. Recently, ISIS claimed responsibility for the massacre of Sri Lankan Christians – a daunting harbinger of what might come. 8 And even more recently, thousands of Jihadists escaped from Kurdish prisons after the incursion of Turkey in Northeast Europe.
Western preoccupation with domestic issues does not assuage popular fears of Middle East terrorism and refugees now exacerbated by working-class economic distress. This climate has incited populist rage against alleged invaders from within and outside. While the elixir of nationalism unifies people, xenophobia rises against foreigners, particularly Muslims, who are depicted as spoilers stealing the jobs of Westerners, as carriers of infectious disease, as exploiters of the welfare state or as terrorists. Seeking to protect the homeland and to preserve old ways of life, the agenda of extreme nationalists indiscriminately conflates innocent refugees with terrorists. Their political rhetoric heightens the widespread sense prevalent among working-class Whites that their lot has changed for the worse and that outsiders are cutting ahead of them in line for the benefits of economic recovery. Immigrants and refugees are demonized as unscrupulous invaders, treated at the border as criminals.
Whenever the spirit of internationalism, human rights or the liberal order fails to deliver on its promise, people tend to revert to the certain, the familiar, the clan, the community and the nation. The Middle East and the West (in a different way) have proven no exception. The combination of weakening state structures and divided civil societies created fertile ground for the appearance of new strongmen who claim that only they can transcend the conflicts tearing society apart. Western and Middle Eastern populism and illiberalism mimic each other, creating an ironic alliance among authoritarian leaders like Trump, Putin, Erdogan and al-Sisi, who foment popular fear and accrue power by promising security to ‘the people’. The Middle East is on the cusp of renewed social unrest, and Western fatigue and disengagement pose the risk of growing dangers. Terror and forced migration are symptoms of problems that must be addressed at their source. Rather than turning away from the Middle East, we need to understand the dynamic relationship between the West and the region since 2011 and consider domestic and foreign policy based on human rights and informed by historical lessons. 9
3. Five freedoms for the Levant and the West
I argue for a rehabilitation of universal human rights that opposes both the isolationist fatigue of the Left and the xenophobia of right-wing populism. Such a perspective cannot be sustained without a revitalized international liberal order. Should that order be revisited, it would need to subscribe to principles that have never been expressed more powerfully, and more successfully, than in Franklin D Roosevelt’s (FDR) Four Freedoms from 1941: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear. 10 These are encapsulated in the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I add a fifth principle, freedom from sexual discrimination, which is critical to the progress of comprehensive human rights in the Middle East and beyond. These five ideals are not outdated; they can regain momentum in these dark hours.
The drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights understood those rights as universal, inalienable and indivisible. They are universal because they belong to people from all races, sex, religious and cultural backgrounds; they are inalienable because they cannot be revoked by authoritarian leaders or forfeited by statelessness; they are indivisible because human rights must remain bundled together, not rolled out in sequence or accepted only piecemeal. In that sense, Secretary of State Michael Pompeo’s recent faith-based defence of religious rights all but dismantles the cohesive case for universal human rights. 11 These comprehensive principles provided a crucial underpinning for European stabilization and recovery after World War II. The recognition of human rights functioned alongside mechanisms such as the United Nations (UN), Bretton Woods, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the North Atlantic Alliance (NATO) as integrated components of an international liberal order.
Today, the right to free expression, FDR’s first principle, is under attack even in the West, as unwelcome ideas are shouted down by both the Right and the Left; and deliberation, so vital to democracy, is challenged relentlessly by moral relativism, fake news and the routine labelling of truthful reporting as lies. Informed understanding has been reduced to superficial arguments shaped by personal preferences. Without the respectful and rational exercise of free speech, political discourse will not be distinguishable from propaganda that feeds the populist leaders’ cult of personality. The right to free expression was a game-changer during the Arab Spring, as countless young people confronted repressive power, rapping their rage and flaunting their freedom of expression through social media. The subsequent repression of speech in the Middle East should remind Westerners how quickly fundamental rights can be curtailed, closing the path to political representation. Unfortunately, rather than condemning the tactics used by authoritarianism leaders in the Middle East to marginalize or purge the ‘unsavoury’ elements of their societies, illiberal leaders in the West instead follow their lead, condemning the free press as the ‘enemy of the people’.
In The Levant Express, I identify actual and prospective steps that could promote these ‘five freedoms’. For ‘freedom of speech’, I draw on recent efforts like the Internet Social Forum, inaugurated in Tunis during the 2015 World Social Forum. Building on that example, one could envision the development of a Middle East-wide human rights institution, with appointed delegates known for their integrity, to educate citizens within the Arab world on the theory and practice of human rights, provide policy recommendations, create free venues that encourage independent artistic and cultural expression, monitor human rights progress and enlist the international community to provide economic rewards for countries that improve their human rights standards. It would create a forum of deliberative democracy within and between civil societies while bringing pressure against violating countries by ‘naming, shaming, and blaming’, among other strategies. Today we can witness a revival of 2011 as freedom of expression and quest for political representation consistent with human rights which is once again on the front burner in Algeria, Lebanon, Iraq and Egypt. 12
(2) Freedom of worship, FDR’s second principle, is also under attack in the bastions of liberal democracy. Nationalism often adopts religious overtones, and in the United States and Europe, it is not uncommon to hear people complaining about the corrupting religious influence of Muslim (and other) refugees, elitist multiculturalism and secular humanists. Again, this preservation of cultural identity (and imagined anti-Christian prejudice) is at least partially rooted in the fear of lost economic privilege, aggravated by the influx of refugees from the Middle East, which has made Western democracies increasingly intolerant of religious minorities. Religious freedom in the United States is increasingly understood as the right to discriminate in the name of religion.
In the Middle East, freedom of (or from) worship was briefly celebrated with a burst of interfaith and secular activities during the Arab uprisings, particularly when Copts, Muslims and non-religious Egyptians joined hands to overthrow the Mubarak government. However, after the Arab Spring, some Arab authoritarians justified their resurgent religious intolerance – persecuting, for example, the Muslim Brothers in Egypt, Shia in Saudi Arabia or Sunnis in Syria – by pointing to Western Islamophobia, most glaringly evidenced by the Trump administration’s ‘Muslim ban’ and restrictions on admitting refugees. Religious intolerance knows no border; it fuels a negative cycle of mutual indignation from West to the Middle East, hindering both social harmony and socio-economic interdependence within and across borders.
Despite those setbacks, we also see today a young generation of Muslims seeking more secular societies. That generation yearns for a new and tolerant Islamic Enlightenment – one predicated on the free interpretation of religious texts, on reason, critical thinking, civic education and the separation of religion and state. There are already many promising forces in play. In Algeria, Lebanon and Iraq, protesters call for the end of power-sharing regimes based on confessional rotation and for secular governments.
If widespread support for religious tolerance is to emerge, it could begin in cosmopolitan cities, hubs of trade routes that welcome visitors and workers from all parts of the world. Why couldn’t the Middle East reclaim its old centres of trade and foster the innovations and religious tolerance that once made it the cradle of civilization and the envy of the world? For all the flaws of the United Arab Emirates, the trading cities of Dubai and Abu Dhabi provide a model for combining economic prosperity and religious tolerance within the Arab world. After all, the European Enlightenment also benefited from new trade routes that exposed people to different ways of life and offered new visions for the reconfiguration of feudal absolutist societies by separating the state from religion and invoking a long list of human rights.
(3) Freedom of speech and religion cannot thrive without freedom from want, FDR’s third principle. Following the pattern of the New Deal and the Marshall Plan in the West, in my book I propose an expanding programme of economic integration in the Middle East that would include transportation networks, new financial structures and a commitment to renewable energy across vast expanses of sun, sand and water. The same programmes, if applied to the West, would greatly ameliorate its economic malaise. Large-scale infrastructure investment, better systems of financial governance and a transition to renewable energy could invigorate economies, increase trade and improve our ecosystem for generations to come. The global economy is significantly more interdependent than it was after World War II, and delinking from it is today very costly and damaging for working people – an argument overlooked by those now infatuated with the same protectionist impulses that once fed the descent towards the Second World War.
With regard to economic development, positive steps have already begun, and must be continued. In the Middle East, increasing investment in solar power in the Arab Gulf countries, Egypt and Morocco has begun to capitalize on the region’s abundant solar resources to create jobs and diversify the economy. Extensive proposals for much-needed transportation infrastructure wait only for the political will to further people’s interaction and economic interdependence. These projects, likely involving private and public partnerships, would revitalize regional economies where interstate trade volume is a small fraction of that of other world regions and where youth unemployment remains very high. 13
(4) Only in a climate free from fear, FDR’s fourth principle, can the other human rights materialize. The world must not forget the images of Syrian refugees clutching scared toddlers against life vests while crossing pitiless waters, forced by the relentless catastrophe of war to take unimaginable risks just to survive. The world cannot turn away from the thousands of children dying in Yemen. The refugee crisis has rocked the liberal order in the West and heightened fear across Europe and the United States. To restore safety to Middle Eastern populations and to create a more peaceful order, new security architectures will be needed, modelled on the creation of NATO. The Trump administration’s undermining of the UN and the almost moribund NATO in the name of nationalism has fed domestic and worldwide insecurity. The priority should not be to dismantle such institutions but to reform and strengthen them, drawing greater involvement from the developing world and refocusing their mission to connect economic growth with human security.
Regional security planning may be beyond the reach of the Arab League and of little interest to the current US administration, but other powers could make significant contributions, especially in specific security theatres in which they already have historical interest. France is positioning itself to be moved more forcefully in the Middle East to thwart Russia’s muse with diplomacy and contain the influence of China. Macron understood this to be a priority, proposing to develop A European Intervention Initiative as an informal association of countries “able and willing” to increase operational involvement. The nine original participants (France, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Denmark and Estonia) were soon after joined by Finland, and Greece might be next. 14
Five different subregions might be envisioned in the MENA: one from the Maghreb, a second in the Fertile Crescent, a third comprising the currently embattled states, a fourth encompassing the Gulf States and a fifth the weak Middle East countries hosting Syrian refugees. Each requires different approaches, and each has unique historical associations with particular outside powers. Freedom from fear is not a complete chimera, as there are positive developments that have fallen below the radar of political campaigns. For example, high-level conversations are occurring, particularly in the Arab Gulf, towards expanding regional economic integration. These plans could be extended to address the needs of the millions of Syrian refugees displaced to Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, along with the region’s massive unemployment.
As regional powers grow weary of the brutal, financially draining and unwinnable proxy wars driving the refugee crisis, Westerners need to back promising developments in the region and provide sustainable solutions. For example, recently Yemen’s UN-recognized government signed a Saudi Arabian-brokered power-sharing agreement with separatists in the south of the country after months of fighting in the area. This is a positive first step, but the second step should include Houthis (the Iranian-backed Yemeni group) in the peace process. Overall, this would require greater rapprochement between Iran and the Arab Gulf in Yemen, Iraq and Syria.
More immediately, Western engagement could build on strengthening the existing security cooperation between Israel, Jordan and Egypt by promoting economic development and other human rights for Palestinians, thereby addressing one underlying source of their conflict with Israel. These are some examples, drawing from The Levant Express, where I examine how current efforts to build security regimes can draw on the specific characteristics of those subregional theatres, with international regimes combining security measures with post-war reconstruction initiatives based on equitable economic development. Only under these conditions would great power engagement be justified.
(5) No less than men, women aspire to freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear. For women, however, those freedoms will not be realized without a fifth freedom, the freedom from sexual discrimination. 15 This was not one of FDR’s four freedoms, but it is certainly overdue. A new liberal order will require popular agency from within, and the renewed global women’s movement has the critical capacity to galvanize a broad progressive human rights programme nationally and internationally.
With the transnational explosion of the #MeToo movement and the reawakening of feminism in reaction to Donald Trump, sisterhood seems to be global once again. Even for many who did not favour Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, the election of Trump – despite his misogynist history – came as a shock. Before that election, women’s rights were in stagnation, if not retreat; Trump’s victory has brought renewed energy to rally against sexual harassment and reduce the gender wage gap across global capitals and extending even into rural Iran. Politically, it makes sense to build on a movement that has brought women’s rights to renewed prominence across class, race and culture. Reinvigorating democracy and human rights requires, as Eleanor Roosevelt reminds us, that we start at home. At the same time, if it begins at home, that struggle has to occur everywhere.
The struggle for women’s rights is particularly acute in the Middle East. Even though the Arab Spring was either crushed or unfinished for everyone, the post-revolutionary setback left women especially frustrated. First, while social media initially empowered women’s digital voices, their freedom of expression was later suppressed in political spaces; second, having sought a more liberal interpretation of the Qur’an, they remained sexually discriminated against by both religious and secular authorities; third, despite being more educated on average than men, they suffered from increasing economic inequality; and fourth, having overcome the duress of revolutions and wars, they remained as vulnerable as before. Order can be more easily restored after uprisings when men remain in control of the household. As long as men can still subjugate or legally discriminate against women, their own frustration, due to unemployment or repression, can be more easily appeased or vented at home than by defying their powerful rulers. Put another way, when a man’s home is his castle, the prince is safer on his throne.
But, as long as a patriarchal social and religious system keeps women silent in the public sphere, sexually dissatisfied, disempowered in the family, impoverished despite their education and living in fear despite their growing resilience, pressure will build towards a new women’s rights contagion – a female time bomb that will almost certainly reorder families and destabilize autocratic regimes. This year, as the Arab Spring was pronounced dead, women took again to the streets of Algiers, Khartoum, Beirut, Baghdad and beyond. In that sense, women have the potential to carry the torch of universal human rights mobilization in the Middle East, which is currently finding an echo in the rest of the world. 16
In short, the lingering Middle East crisis continues to fan the flames of populism and nationalism in the West. The future of human rights in the West and in the Middle East is closely intertwined – now more than ever. The international liberal order is in real threat, and the struggle against nationalist forces within the West cannot afford to neglect the Middle Eastern sources of anti-liberal sentiment. In his 1941 speech, facing the threat posed by Nazism, FDR understood that the future of the United States depended upon building a post-war Europe based on the foundational pillars of freedom. Yet since the Sykes–Picot agreement during World War I, Western powers have been directly responsible for keeping autocrats in power, sustaining their own geopolitical and oil interests at the expense of ordinary people in the MENA. Today’s leading regional powers, Iran and Saudi Arabia, are equal culprits. These nations all bear responsibility for the future of the Middle East, but that future will ultimately have to be shaped by the people themselves.
I have here outlined a number of approaches which I develop much further in The Levant Express. These proposals examine aspects of current situations, including persistent obstacles, but also opportunities and hopeful signs that have generally fallen below the radar of the media. One can observe the spread of public and virtual spaces for open discussion that could strengthen civil society and human rights; the yearning for a renewed Islamic Enlightenment, once fostered by a network of commerce, which once made Islam’s Golden Age possible; the creation of green energy in Gulf countries to reduce their own dependence on oil; subregional security architectures – shaped by current geopolitical and economic realities, that can move the Middle East to a more stable future; and mounting social agitation for women’s rights.
It is important not to succumb to populist and nationalist fervour, but to see how the viability of Western democracy and the international liberal order needs a peaceful Middle East as an essential step towards halting the global refugee crisis. One should consider current possibilities for the Middle East, drawing on the kinds of hopeful visions and practical policies that helped defeat fascism and protectionism during World War II. Many Western countries with special historical ties and in partnership with regional actors could contribute to the work of post-conflict reconstruction in different theatres of the Middle East. It remains important for both ordinary citizens and policymakers to address the lingering and insufferable plight of people in that region, working to overcome the large-scale human rights violations that have also greatly impacted the West. In this sense, the fate of the Middle East is closely connected to our own.
FDR reminded us in an even darker time that ‘the world will either move forward toward unity and widely shared prosperity or it will move apart’. I concur with his view, and I would add that the stakes are too high; the world cannot afford to lose.
