Troubling Forecasts For the Arab World

Inside a pyramid, a sphinx nearby, surrounded by hieroglyphics, but this is not Egypt. It’s Las Vegas, which feels just as foreign, if not more so. Still, it happened to be where  I read/am reading the Economist’s package on the Arab world. Time, my former employer, put out a very good magazine this week, I’m happy to say, the kind of issue that shows they still have a lot to offer as a magazine that publishes journalism from many different places, from people who work in actual bureaus and do the legwork themselves–the highlights, for me, were a dispatch from Zimbabwe and a strong story on Bush and Cheney’s dispute over a pardon for Scooter Libby (strong but a bit too insistent on Bush’s motivation to find the truth, which he didn’t exactly show at other times)–but I think I’m enjoying this Economist even more.

I’d encourage a full reading of the stories, but a few things leap off the pages:

By next year, the region’s population will have doubled over 30 years–from fewer than 180m people to some 360m.

And:

The majority of Arabs are under 25 years old.

And:

The population of the Arab countries is expected to grow some 40% over the next two decades. That amounts to almost 150m additional people, the equivalent of two new Egypts. But Arab countries already have the lowest employment rate in the world and one of the highest rates of youth unemployment.

And:

Barring some miracle, a large proportion of Arabs now entering adulthood face hard times and long periods of joblessness ahead, in societies that have systematically blocked peaceful, institutional avenues to political change.

The report takes note of the dramatic improvements in many countries, such as the threefold increase in literacy rates in the Gulf. But overall, the forecast looks troubled. All those young people, so few jobs, and such poor records of creating jobs outside of patronage systems. And the “moderates” like Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s president since 1981, who has never named a vice president (i.e. a potential successor) have proven so corrupt and have alienated so many of their own people that they are, in the end, not moderates at all. That is to say that they’ve served those they were supposed to protect everyone from. They’ve helped increase the rolls of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood by failing so dramatcally that the funamdenatlists seemed to many a much better options–just as Yasir Arafat’s and his Fatah party’s corruption drove people to turn to and later vote for Hamas, and understandably so.

There has been, and with the continued growth there will most certainly be, a tremendous combination of growth and change (in large part due to technology), which will ratchet up the pressure on these countries and their rulers. In the past, the region’s regimes have responded by cracking down and repressing their people further–Egypt has gotten billions upon billions in US aid money, but Mubarak’s approach to so-called elections are really no different than what just happened in Iran–and there’s every reason to think they will again. Where will all those young people put their frustration and anger? Religious fundamentalism has taken a hit of late, it seems, because its proponents have a habit of overreaching. But I’d be optimistic about my future prospects were I in the fundamentalist camps. At the very least, given the likelihood that few states will be able to fulfill their people’s desire for social and economic mobility–I’d be looking forward to the chaos that  could well be on the horizon.

Boy, Gaza City, 2006