Turmoil of Peace Awaits Middle East

Hail peace. But be wary. For a Mideast peace deal between Israel and its Arab neighbors doesn’t necessarily mean peace in the Middle East. In fact, it could herald a more turbulent period, unleashing a more complex set of challenges for countries from Saudi Arabia on the Persian Gulf to Morocco on the Atlantic, with a ripple effect worldwide.

A Middle East free of the Arab-Israeli conflict is likely to be a microcosm of the world after the Cold War ended. Instead of clashes between countries, the Mideast becomes an arena where key states are riven by internal political and social turmoil, possibly including the sorts of religious or ethnic eruptions that have troubled other regions in the past decade. In other words, clashes within states.

The reason is clear: Demands for political participation that have swept the rest of the world are going to catch up with the 22 Arab nations, the last bloc of countries to hold out against the democratic tide.

Since Israel’s creation in 1948, Arabs have been able to hide, stall and blame the conflict for their own internal problems: for example, on grounds of security, Arab nationalism or historic claims to the land. The result is a region out of sync.

On the right, the Mideast has most of the world’s remaining true monarchies in Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Gulf sheikdoms. On the left, it has a notorious assortment of autocratic socialist regimes, including Syria, Libya and Iraq. Both systems have produced some of the world’s worst corruption, economic mismanagement and bloated bureaucracies, not to mention repression and failed ideologies, from pan-Arab nationalism to Baathist socialism.

Yet, Arabs now have expectations of progress. Over the past decade, nothing could contain the flow of information transmitted by satellite dishes, video-cassettes, shortwave radios, cable, international cell phones, computers and the Internet--not a decade of isolation and sanctions in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, not the bizarre rule in Moammar Kadafi’s Libya, not even the controlling wealth or veiling of woman in the House of Saud’s Arabian kingdom. Across deserts, villages, mountains, wadis, oil fields and cities, Arabs now know what’s happening everywhere else.

And peace marks the turning point.

With a formal deal, Middle East governments will no longer be able to demand big defense budgets, at the expense of development, that were justified to stand firm against Israel but were, in truth, used to maintain power internally. They will also no longer be able to defer political openings so easily.

So then what? The Middle East is particularly vulnerable because it has waited so long. While the rest of the world underwent change through evolutionary, revolutionary or people-power movements, most Arab governments whittled away at any politician or party that might turn into a serious or popular alternative. For five decades, real opposition was usually intimidated, discredited, outlawed, imprisoned or executed.

As a result, there is little to build on. The problems ahead are reflected in the limited political choices. The spectrum is largely defined by two forces.

One axis is the liberal movement, which is small and based in the Arab middle class. It includes various factions. Some favor highly selective change--economic reform and some individual rights--but are nervous about political equality and empowering the masses. The ideas behind Western liberalism are alien to them. Syria’s Sunni Muslim merchant class, for example, has sought to loosen state control of the economy but is wary of empowering the peasantry and urban underclass and sharing its privileges.

A far smaller group of liberals favor genuine democratizing efforts, including tolerance of opposition forces. Usually part of the intelligentsia and often Westernized, these are the people struggling to form independent citizens groups that make up a modern civil society, to offer Arabs routes to participate and to begin holding Arab governments accountable. A key example are Palestinian human-rights groups critical of President Yasser Arafat’s autocratic style.

The second axis is made up of Islamist forces that, with a special irony, were born out of the disastrous performance of the Arab armies in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, when Israel captured large chunks of Jordan’s West Bank, Syria’s Golan Heights and Egypt’s Sinai peninsula.

The spectacular defeat led Middle Eastern Muslims to blame Nasserism and other secular ideologies and to begin turning to religion on the premise that Israelis had won because they were truer to their religion. Even Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser called for religion to play a more important role in society. Accordingly, in 1973, the Arab offensive against Israel was code-named “Badr,” after the prophet Muhammad’s first victory in 623, which opened the way for creation of an Islamic empire.

In the 1970s, Islam also became a political force, encouraged in no small part by Israel and the West to counter the then-strong lure of socialist ideologies. Its attraction has increased enormously over the past quarter-century, to the point that Islam is now the most energetic political force in the region.

Islam provides a legal infrastructure--in the network of mosques--through which to operate or find other activists. It offers a set of rules to govern society as well as a set of spiritual values that promote equality and human dignity. And, as a social force dating back 13 centuries, it has greater legitimacy than any modern political ideology.

Despite their stereotype in the West, Islamists vary even more widely than liberals. At one end of the spectrum are the majority, who seek peaceful change, political reform and differing degrees of pluralism in an electoral context. While they want a state in which Islamic values have a prominent voice, many advocate coexistence with other cultures and religions. They seek not just one person, one vote, one time, but an enduring democratic climate. Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood and Yemen’s Islah Party are two examples.

On the other end of the spectrum are the better known but comparatively tiny Islamic extremists, who are blatantly antidemocratic. Sovereignty belongs to God, they argue, and only an Islamist elite is qualified to make political decisions. To them, popular sovereignty is heretical. They are prone to be authoritarian and xenophobic. The most notorious and deadly extremist movements are Egypt’s Islamic Jihad and Algeria’s Armed Islamic Group.

The scenarios of the post-peace period fall into three categories.

* Regimes resist change by outright repression or subtle co-opting of the opposition. Algeria is the best example. In 1992, the military opted to end a popular democratic transition when Islamic reformists appeared poised to win parliament in democratic elections. More than 100,000 have since died in a grisly war between the military-backed government and an increasingly militant Islamic faction.

* Change evolves through economic liberalization. The catch is that so many Middle East economies are so corrupt after prolonged one-party rule that an opening up and cleanup carry heavy costs. Reforms, such as cutting subsidies and privatization, can often mean more pain than relief and push the poor into the opposition’s camp.

Egypt’s democratization ground to a virtual halt, in part, because President Hosni Mubarak was unwilling to tolerate reforms that would slash subsidies and guarantees of government jobs to all graduates of higher education, critical to keeping society dependent on his rule.

* Old systems give way to change through reform and fair elections. It’s often a reluctant process in which regimes attempt to manipulate new parties, polls and outcome, as happened in Morocco’s 1993 parliamentary elections. To really work, however, old systems have to concede their failure, which no Arab government has been ready to do.

The bottom line: Peace would be wonderful. It will open the way for long overdue change. The good news is that an important geostrategic region will gradually move forward so that it’s in sync with the modern democratizing world.

The bad news is that the road of change is likely to be rough.

Indeed, just as the world of the messy 1990s has been nostalgic about the simplicity of the Cold War, the potential dangers ahead may actually make peace brokers, Arab leaders, neighboring Israelis, oil companies and a wider world anxious for peace rather than nostalgic for the clarity of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The post-peace period is also unlikely to mean that the wider world can shift focus to other flash points. The Middle East could well be at least as needy post-peace as it has been over the last 50 years. The challenges for the West, particularly the United States, may be even more difficult, as some of its closest allies face determined demands for change.