Waning autocrats, willing youth

By Dominic MacIver, UK Defence Forum Researcher

 

The key implication for Western policy-makers of the ongoing youth-driven unrest in the Middle East and North Africa is obvious. Now, authoritarian regimes in the region earn should not receive cast-iron backing. Only three countries (Qatar, Kuwait and the UAE) out of the twenty main nations of the Arab League have more than 60% of their population over the age of 25.

Supposed 'stability' and strategic self-interest bought at the cost of the freedom is no longer viable. Popular protest is now possible anywhere. Therefore support or mere toleration of regimes' excesses should be withdrawn or, at least, come with new strings attached. Sullen leaders with a vested interest in the status quo will resent such new realities. The House of Saud is the most obvious example here.

Protesters' motivations show core similarities across the region. Although we must remember that accurately generalizing about a such a large region is tricky, when we look deeper, we always find a young population peacefully attacking an ageing hereditary elite of military-intelligence barons.

In a more abstract sense, calls from academics and political scientists to look deeper than the religious aspect of the region will now have to be heeded. Since 9/11 and before, media and policy- making interest in the region primarily focused on three aspects of the region's politics: "Islamically-motivated" terrorism, the flow of oil, and the state of Israel. This approach has proven to be empty and wrong.

Military-Security elites

Nominal republics such as Libya, Algeria, Egypt, Syria, Yemen and others (including pre-invasion Iraq and Lebanese sectarian bosses) have been ruled, on average, for forty years, by an axis of military, police and the intelligence agencies. Leaders hold hard, tangible and centralized power: guns, tanks, prisons, and budgets. These patrons bind themselves to clients – often colleagues, friends and family – by appointing them to powerful and well-rewarded positions at strategic ministries.

These countries were republics in name, not in aspiration. Mubarak, Saleh, Gaddafi, Hussein and Assad all aspired to set up family dynasties. At the time of writing, Hafez al-Assad, canny even to the grave, seems to have been the only revolutionary autocrat to achieve success, handing power to his son Bashar in 2000. It remains to be seen whether his son will be able to ride the unrest out.

The regimes that freely admit they are monarchies, including Morocco, Jordan and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, Bahrain and Oman, share a similar approach to hard power. Centralized power, in the hands of a court of powerful and loyal barons, allows leaders to play rivals off against one another and prevent the emergence of successors.

To ensure loyalty and prevent coups both "republics" and monarchies use family connections to ensure loyalty. Qaddafi's son Mu'tassim is the head of the country's National Security Council. Other sons control key brigades of special forces. Bashar al-Assad's brother Maher and his brother-in-law Assef Shawqat are respectively heads of the Presidential Guard and Military Intelligence. The Jordanian and Saudi armies are full of generals related to the royal family.

Elsewhere political loyalty and trust – often earned through shared military experience – is the best guarantor of promotion to these ranks. This helps explain the length of the Egyptian army's resistance to the idea of a coup in face of extraordinary protest and public anger. Mubarak, a former air force hero, had nationalist credentials from Egypt's strong showing in the 1973 war with Israel.

In the past these structures were highly durable. Despite international sanctions and condemnation for a decade, it took two international wars to oust Saddam Hussein. Just one key difference exists between the monarchies and the supposed republics.

The republicans came into power claiming legitimacy through popular revolution, blending pan-Arabism, socialism and populism into a potent rhetorical device to mobilize the legitimacy needed to justify their control. After populist promises were betrayed, rhetoric became a tool to stifle dissent. It set strict boundaries of accepted political debate. Nonconformity was discouraged by violence.

The monarchs, on the other hand, relied more on traditional forms of legitimacy. The Jordanian and Moroccan royal families claim descent from the Prophet Muhammad. The first King Saud used marriage to bind his person with tribal rivals, before oil wealth became the lubricator of political allegiance in the oil-rich, sparsely-populated Arabian peninsula.

Trying to pose as benign, long-standing patriarchs has forced them to avoid using force against protesters because this would immediately withdraw that basis of legitimacy, leaving only the decaying foundation of fear. Bahrain is the key exception here. The unhappy status quo there will not last. Across the region, this barrier of fear has begun to fall.

For both republics and monarchies it will be difficult, if not impossible, indefinitely to resist pressure for free and fair elections to choose representative governments. To understand why this has happened now requires looking at the protesters themselves.

The opposition

The Egyptian protesters were drawn from all ages, classes, sexes and religious persuasions. In Libya they have been divided by tribe and geography. The main Syrian cities have stayed quieter as the provincial cities rally. There are many divisions in the array of protesters, but across the region they are largely united by three characteristics.

Firstly they are angry at their leaders' long-standing ability to stifle political reform. As already mentioned, leaders instead rely upon extensive security services to stifle dissent and censor criticism. Opposition groups had little room for movement, often being outlawed. Divided and weak, opposition calls for reform had seemed insipid and uninspiring to a seemingly apathetic population, disillusioned and fearful of state power.

Secondly, the protesters feel they abandoned by economic reform, which has benefited the ruling elite and the select few businessmen that are well-connected to the regime. This inequality bred resentment and frustration for employed graduates unable to find meaningful work. Powerful political and military figures became very wealthy, controlling key enterprises and dispensing jobs and favours to friends and family.

Finally, the protesters are frustrated by economic traumas often caused by necessary neoliberal reform. Population growth has long outstripped economic growth across the region, leaving behind a frustrated, jobless and young population with poor future prospects. The economic crisis has reduced opportunities abroad in the Gulf and in Europe, which has brought this situation to tipping point.

Traditional liberal and leftist opposition parties were given a choice: accept the limits on political debate set by the state or face arrest, imprisonment and persecution. Some chose silence and disengagement. Others chose the former option, participating in sham parliaments. Through co-option, they lacked legitimacy and did not develop mass bases of support.

The youth

The real driving force of the protesters is not ideas or organized parties. It is the youth, al-shabab in Arabic. High birth rates, which have long been described as a demographic time bomb, have finally caused an explosion. They have no obvious leaders, making it nearly impossible for the regime to follow its usual pattern of locking up leaders for long sentences. The anonymity of the internet has been turned into a potent weapon of young rebellion.

At the moment, there have been two symbolic figures put forward who represent this youth. Muhammad Bouazizi was the first. A Tunisian street vendor without the funds available to bribe local officials, he set himself alight in protest and in desperation after the authorities confiscated his vegetable cart and humiliated him in public. Protests began in Sidi Bouzid, and eventually spread to the rest of the country.

The second symbolic figurehead put forward was Wael Ghonim, an Egyptian Google executive. He was arrested for organizing one of the first protests. After being released, when the protests seemed to be losing momentum, he gave an emotional TV interview in which he broke into tears upon seeing shots of killed protesters. He denied being any kind of hero. He was hailed as the symbol of the protesters: young, modern, educated and ambitious. He described the revolution as similar to Wikipedia: "everyone is contributing content, but you don't know the names."

The flat, horizontal nature of the revolutionaries contrasts with the hierarchical, vertical structure of the authoritarian regimes. This has created problems for protesters in eastern Libya, as their bottom-up movement lacked the power to dislodge Qaddafi. As the civil war continues, they will have to organize clear lines of command and control, as well as create a mechanism to resolve the differences between the various groups that make up the rebellion.

Modern media

Advances in modern media have proven crucial in escaping the controls set on the flow of information. Initial protests were organized through mobile phones and the internet. Word of the protests has crucially been spread across the region and the world via Al-Jazeera. The channel itself, in turn, has used Twitter as a news aggregator to find out about events on the ground, particularly in Libya when foreign reporters could not access the country.

The importance of Al Jazeera and internet connectivity – which both require higher levels of education and economic development – show that different forces drive the youth in undeveloped Yemen. Here, massive economic trauma is crucial. High food prices, inflation and unemployment power the angry youth. Divided tribal loyalties, two armed rebellions, and a strong Islamist opposition are now squeezing the president.

But the youth's reliance on crowd-sourced information and lack of formal organization would suggest that they will struggle to mobilize as a coherent party in democratic elections. This incoherence and fluidity suggests that for now, at least, previous opposition parties have a better chance of electoral success. Across the region, the leading opposition group is the Muslim Brotherhood, a mainly social movement, and its political affiliates. In Egypt, it is likely to prosper in initial parliamentary elections.

However, the free, proselytizing role played by Al Jazeera in North Africa will not be repeated to the same level in the Gulf countries. The channel, particularly its Arabic outlet, has been criticised for its weak coverage of protests in Bahrain. Saudi Arabia, the Gulf region's dominant power, has a complex and testy relationship with the Al-Jazeera's host and patron, the Emirate of Qatar.

So what should we do?

European and American policy-makers should be encouraged by the distinct lack of anti-Western sentiment expressed by today's protesters in the Middle East and North Africa. This is explainable not only thanks to the relatively friendly lines taken by foreign governments. It is also explainable by many governments' decisions to avoid involvement wherever possible, giving the protesters authentic national legitimacy.

The protesters are patriotic, but not aggressively so. They are refreshingly free of the conspiracy theories that past generations used to blame America and Israel for their society's problems. The new protesters represent an entirely new generation of individuals who have, en masse, suddenly become irreversibly politically active, often for the first time.

The protests' initial driving force was the youth. Like today's atomized and individualist youth in the West, they are far less interested in structured ideologies such as revolutionary Arab nationalism or rigid literalist Islamism than past generations. For the moment at least, the Arab revolution is 'post-Islamic'.

However, without adequate backing, the unstable and chaotic new structures of youth politics will fail to make the gains we all wish upon it. In such cases, powerful actors from the former status quo will enforce their will on the new situation. In this likely scenario, the military-intelligence axis, Islamists and the political parties of the overthrown autocrats will be the ones to benefit, to the likely detriment of the people in the region.

Rather than allowing the politicians that they know to covertly rebuild the former oppressive systems, European and American policy-makers should be working harder to empower the youth. They are far closer in outlook to us in the West than their military-intelligence foes. If we do not keep them on side, they will head in the direction of our real enemies - the theocrats in Iran and the Salafi current.

Bahrain would be a good place to start.