Has History Passed the Arab World By?

In comparison to two decades prior to now.

“Freedom? The Arabs are ruled now, as they were then, by a cartel of authoritarian regimes practiced in the arts of oppression.
Unity? As elusive as ever. Although the fault lines have changed since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait 19 years ago, inter-Arab divisions are bitter. Egypt, the biggest Arab country, refused even to attend April’s Arab League summit meeting in Doha.

Israel? Punctuated by bouts of violence and fitful interludes of diplomacy, the deadly stalemate continues. Neither George H. Bush at Madrid in 1991 nor Bill Clinton at Camp David in 2000 nor George W. Bush at Annapolis in 2007 succeeded in making peace or even bringing it visibly closer.”

The article identifies the following as the reasons for The Arab World being so ‘prone’ to War; Oil, strongly followed by the Israel- Palestine conflict and finally he writes “The last and perhaps greatest underlying cause of instability arises from the nature of the Arab states themselves.”

“The political instability of the Arab world is in turn connected to another problem: the missing glue of nationhood. Many years ago an Egyptian diplomat, Tahsin Bashir, called the new Arab states of the Middle East “tribes with flags” (though he exempted Egypt). His point still holds. In countries as different as Lebanon and Iraq, ethnic, confessional or sectarian differences have thwarted programmes of nation-building. That is why Iraq fell apart into Sunni, Shia and Kurdish fragments after the removal of Saddam despite decades of patriotic indoctrination. Syria could follow suit if the minority Alawi sect of the ruling Assad family were somehow to lose control of this largely Sunni country. Sudan has seen not one but two civil wars between its Arab-dominated centre and the non-Arab minorities in its south and west.”

He goes onto write about how these ongoing issues have not evolved but rather now grown into chronic illnesses of the region.

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The original report written in 1990 can be found here.
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