Four years after the uprisings that broke the mold of the old Middle East, 2015 promises to be another year of tumultuous change. The eruptions of 2011 unleashed decades of pent-up tensions and dysfunction in the political, socioeconomic, and cultural spheres; these dynamics will take many years, if not decades, to play themselves out and settle into new paradigms and equilibriums.
In 2014, four Arab countries—Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen—sank decisively into the ranks of failed states with no longer any effective central authority over the expanse of national territory. ISIS arose as the largest radical threat in the region’s modern history, challenging political borders and order and proposing political identities and governance paradigms. Sunni-Shi'i conflict intensified throughout the Levant and reached Yemen; an intra-Sunni conflict also pitted supporters and opponents of the Muslim Brotherhood. Egypt rebuked its previously ruling Islamists and elected a military officer as president who has prioritized security and economics and cracked down heavily on dissent. Tunisia’s secular nationalists and Islamists found a way forward with a new constitution and inclusive national elections. Jordan and Lebanon have managed to maintain stability despite massive refugee inflows. A cautious Algeria maintained its status quo, reelecting an aging president to a fourth term. And Morocco continued its experiment in accommodation between a powerful monarchy and a government led by the moderate Islamist PJD party.
Palestinians tried both negotiations and militancy against Israeli domination but got nowhere with both strategies, while their own deep internal divisions continued. Israeli leaders clung to an untenable status quo with no long-term vision, whether for a two-state or a one-state or any viable-state solution. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates upped their role in regional politics while Qatar’s role waned. In Turkey, Erdogan won the presidency and moved to consolidate his power, but he has struggled with the Kurdish issue and has sharp disagreements with the United States and Europe over the rise of ISIS and with Russia and Iran over the fate of Assad. Tehran’s pragmatists and hard-liners struggled over the future direction of Iran, with much hanging on the fate of the P5+1 nuclear negotiations. The hard-liners kept up their support for Assad, Hezbollah, and Shi'i militias in Iraq, extending their reach to support for the Houthi forces in Yemen.
2015 promises to be no less turbulent than 2014, as domestic and regional dynamics continue to play out. Underlying this turbulent kaleidoscope of change are a bewildering number of trends and systemic drivers that originally broke the mold in 2011 and continue to put intense pressure on political and socioeconomic structures. Of course, trends and drivers are potentially distinct, but drivers often trigger trends, and trends over time are liable to become drivers in their own right. Below are few key trends and drivers to keep an eye on, and that are likely to shape events in 2015 and for many years to come.
Trends and Drivers
The Battles of the Youth Bulge
Prime among these is a demographic youth bulge of historic proportions that burst the precarious piping of the old political and socioeconomic structures and will continue to overwhelm the social and institutional orders of the region for some time. Two thirds of the population is under the age of 30 and their search for jobs, identity, and empowerment will fuel the tumult of the region for many years. Economies are not creating jobs fast enough to accommodate them; governance structures are not opening up sufficiently to include them; and their search for identity has spurred movements as disparate as pro-democracy civic action, radical nationalism, and messianic dreams of a revival of the caliphate. This bulge will take at least a couple of decades to work—or break—its way through the system.
Power Shift toward the Populace
Advances in technology and communication have led to a power shift from once all-dominant states to an increasingly informed, powerful, and demanding populace, both as communities and individuals. They have access to the global web of information and communication; they can build virtual societies and communities of identity and interest; and they can mobilize and coordinate. With this knowledge and power come demands for recognition, participation, voice, and influence. This power and these demands have erupted in many political and militant forms and have led to political change in some countries and civil war in others. They fueled the uprisings of 2011 and populate the armies of ISIS. Although some societies and states will learn how to manage these new realities better than others, the power shift is deep and ongoing.
Women Empowerment and Male Backlash
The power shift from states to people also includes a power shift—or long overdue equilibration of power—from men to women. Women have benefitted from the same trends that have empowered populations in general. The old dominance of men—enforced by restriction of access to information, mobility, and mobilization—has been undone by the same changes in technology that have affected society in general. Although only in a few cases, as in the strong women’s movement in Tunisia, has this power been directly harnessed and organized, the backlash against this empowerment has been strong, from the patriarchal repressiveness of the Muslim Brotherhood, seeking to herd women back into traditional roles of mother and homemaker, to the wholesale brutalization, exploitation, and enslavement of women advocated and implemented by ISIS.
Moderate Economic Growth, Severe Unemployment
Overall economic growth in the Arab countries is projected by the IMF to be around 3.8% for 2015. Even before the uprisings, growth in Egypt was respectable, at about 5% annually. But this growth was not accompanied by a commensurate growth in jobs, and new wealth was disproportionally accrued by the upper income group. Unemployment for the MENA region, officially at 11.1%, is the highest of any other region of the world, and youth unemployment is around 30%. Some of the oil-rich economies of the Gulf have made great strides in diversifying their economies—some becoming global hubs for trade—and increasing their national employment numbers, and all of the Arab countries, including the large non-oil economies, have tremendous talent and capacity in their young labor pool. But none of the large non-oil countries like Egypt or Morocco have been able to undertake the domestic reforms that would enable them to surge as manufacturing and innovation hubs and achieve the high levels of economic and job growth achieved by Turkey or China over the past decade.
Not Enough Land, Not Enough Water
Conflict and instability in the Middle East is partly driven by narrow and dwindling land and water resources. These conditions will only worsen in the twenty-first century as demographic growth, urbanization, and climate change take their toll. With 6% of the world’s population, the MENA region only has 1% of global renewable water resources. In the Arab countries, almost all the river water comes from outside the region—Turkey’s use of the Tigris and Euphrates heavily impact agriculture downstream in Syria and Iraq, and Ethiopian plans for a great dam threaten Egypt’s Nile inflow. Underground water tables continue to drop precipitously; Sana will be the first major world capital to run out of water. Changing weather patterns have also taken their toll. The uprising in Syria was partly caused by droughts that sent hundreds of thousands of destitute Syrian farmers into northern towns and cities. Only 4.3% of the region’s vast land expanse is arable, with the remaining 95% made up of desert and narrow arable strips being challenged by rapid urbanization.
Oil: Curse or Cure
In the past, Spain used the windfall discovery of gold in its South American conquests to maintain an imperial status quo and proceed grandly into a long decline, while England built on its conquests to increase trade and innovation and lead an industrial revolution. The region’s black gold has been used by some countries, as in Iran, Algeria, and Saudi Arabia—like further afield in Russia—to maintain a status quo, but the UAE has demonstrated that a temporary resource windfall can be leveraged to create tremendous economic change and build global hubs for trade, investment, and even tourism. The present challenge is in Egypt: will Gulf funding be used to paper over economic dysfunction, or will Gulf support—as well as Gulf know-how—be used as leavening and leverage to undertake dramatic economic reforms and spur the Egyptian economy toward high, sustainable, and export-led growth?
Failing and Resurging States
Twenty percent of Arab states have failed in the past few years, others are teetering, some have adapted, and still others have regrouped to reassert old power. The failed states—Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen—have in common conditions of low national unity, but they have failed for different reasons. Syria and Iraq could have avoided collapse through basic power sharing and accommodation in the political system and institutions of the state. Libyans have ample resources but Qaddafi left them with hardly any state institutions or political system to work with. Yemen was collapsing even before the uprisings, mainly due to plummeting water and economic resources that aggravated regional and tribal divisions and rickety governance structures.
Greater Sudan had failed and broken apart before the uprisings, with the breakup legitimized with the birth of an independent South Sudan, but both south and north today are struggling with challenges of basic stability. Lebanon teeters on the brink, but has managed to maintain a precarious calm through political power sharing and repeated putting out of brushfires, carried out by the national army. Saudi Arabia and Algeria are able to provide enough economic satisfaction to postpone dramatic political demands, although Algeria might face the hardest challenges if oil prices continue to drop. In Egypt, the military surged back into power after a widespread public rejection of Brotherhood rule, but state stability in Egypt is challenged by strong security threats in the Sinai and elsewhere, deep economic needs, and unresolved political tensions.
State-Backed and State-Wannabe Non-State Actors
Hezbollah for the past 30 years pioneered the role of non-state actors in the modern Middle East. With backing from Iran it rose to dominate Lebanon and project power against Israel and recently into the Syrian civil war. One can say that Fatah and Hamas were earlier examples, but they were fighting to regain a state they had lost, not rising to challenge a state they were part of. Today ISIS is the Sunni response. It controls territory the size of Jordan and has the resources and cohesion to be around for a long time. Hezbollah is a non-state actor fully backed by a state, Iran; ISIS is a non-state actor that quickly announced that it was establishing a state, the Islamic State. The Houthi movement in Yemen is the latest non-state actor to develop the ambition and capacity to dominate a state. Kurdish militia are part of a federal state in Iraq, but are fighting for autonomy in Syria. Dozens, even hundreds, of Shi'i and Sunni militias and militant groups are challenging state authority or waging internal war, from Mauritania through Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, through Syria and Iraq and all the way to Yemen. A few, in Syria, are non-Islamist, but rather nationalist groups fighting to unseat the Assad dictatorship and build a new republican Syria in its place.
Paradigms Lost
The Arab uprisings of 2011 heralded that the past paradigms had broken, but this created a scramble for new paradigms, and to date no new paradigm has emerged as paramount. The old paradigm of repressive authoritarianism and quiescent populations, in exchange for socioeconomic development, broke down in the face of slow and unequal economic growth, growing popular empowerment, and worsening government corruption and repression. The initial uprisings inarticulately threw up outlines of a paradigm of democratic, pluralistic, and socially just government. The Muslim Brotherhood proposed a paradigm of Islamist government. The military in Egypt is proposing a neo-nationalist paradigm in which order and economic growth are paramount. The Moroccan king might be on the road to evolving a constitutional monarchy. Lebanon and Tunisia are managing precarious but pluralistic and power sharing political systems. The Gulf countries emphasize the primacy of rapid economic progress. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is going all the way and proposing the reestablishment of the caliphate—albeit in his own twisted and murderous terms. Three years ago, Arab public opinion was resonant with a loose paradigm of popular empowerment and accountable and inclusive government; today it is a bickering Babel of competing paradigms. Until the region settles on a governance paradigm—as Western Europe did, albeit after centuries of conflict—this cacophony of visions and ideologies will continue to bedevil the region. In the long run as this century develops, democratic and inclusive government—whether as constitutional monarchy or republican democracy—will probably be the only sustainable paradigm.
Political Islam and Secular Nationalism
These have been the best of years and the worst of years for political Islam. The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) had the biggest victory in their 80-year history in Egypt, followed by their greatest defeat. Their one-year rule created a popular backlash and a resurgence of secular nationalist sentiment, which defense minister Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi rode to a large electoral victory. The MB also rose in Tunisia to head the first post-uprising government, but also caused a backlash and ended up losing the 2014 elections to the secular nationalist Nidaa Tounes coalition. Two years ago, it appeared that the MB was the future, as it was winning post-uprising elections and receiving backing from Turkey and Qatar and acceptance from the United States and Europe. But the Brothers’ brief stint in power in Egypt and Tunisia lost them much of their appeal and luster and turned wide publics against them; it also triggered a strong backlash from the military in Egypt, while the Turkey-Qatari pro-MB axis was robustly countered by a Saudi-UAE alliance to counter the MB. Although nationalism has lost much of the ideological clarity it had several decades ago, in the face of strong Islamist narratives that seek to rearrange community and society along religious lines, there has been a resurgence in some countries of attachment to the broad outlines of nationalism that base community on attachment to the nation-state and the constitutions, institutions, and laws that it promulgates.
The Sunni-Shi'i Divide
Even hackneyed clichés are often true, and the conflict between Sunni and Shi'i movements, states and non-state actors, has proven so far to be the defining regional conflict of this century. As ideological conflicts of right and left receded in the last decades of the twentieth century, the politics of sectarian and communal identity rose to the fore. And as Egypt’s power waned and the power of Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey rose, so too did proxy contests among them instrumentalizing religious identity as a lever of foreign policy. The conflict has torn Iraq and Syria apart, is in the process of dismantling Yemen, and continues to shake Lebanon and Bahrain. Part of the conflict is a natural domestic process of groups demanding political rights and power sharing against authoritarian regimes; part of it is Iran and its rivals jockeying for power in the Middle East. In the absence of inclusive political institutions and vibrant civil societies, sectarian narratives will continue to drive political mobilization. Until Iran decides whether it is a revolutionary state or accepts the norms of international relations, and until Iran’s differences with the GCC and other regional players are better resolved, this sectarian conflict will continue to fuel instability in the Middle East for years or decades to come.
The Intra-Sunni Divide
The Sunni states, while worried about Iran, have also bitterly divided over support for, or opposition to, the Muslim Brotherhood. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt, as well as Kuwait and Bahrain, are decidedly on the latter side, with Turkey and Qatar very much on the former. The falling out came to the fore in the events of Egypt in the summer of 2013. They have almost led to the expulsion of Qatar from the GCC, and have broken the potential of a broad Turkish-Arab alliance. This has divided efforts to support the Syrian opposition and only emboldened Iran, whose allies and clients remain united.
Broken Regional Order
The Middle East is one of the few regions without any semblance of a regional security, economic, or political order to contain conflict and manage its intra-regional affairs. The Arab order that existed—albeit flimsily—for most of the second half of the twentieth century broke down in stages, largely as a result of Egypt’s decline after 1967. Assad’s Syria bolted first and allied with revolutionary Iran after 1979; Syrian influence allowed for the rise of Hezbollah and the subordination of Lebanon into the Iranian-Syrian axis in the 1990s. The United States destroyed the Ba’thist regime in Iraq and handed over Baghdad to Iranian influence after its intervention there between 2003 and 2011. The Yemeni capital of Sana might be the next to realign. Attempts at building a regional cooperation order, at least between Arabs and Israelis, after the Madrid conference in 1991 came to naught. Today, there are various axes within the region, but no movement toward building any architecture of regional order. Prospects for Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab peace seem a wistful memory of the twentieth century. Arab-Iranian relations are at their worst ever; and prospects at least for deep Arab-Turkish partnership have also been derailed by recent events.
Changing Fortunes within the International Order
The Middle East has been a much-trammeled region in the international order. After half a millennium of Turkish Ottoman rule, it came under Western domination in the interwar period. After World War II it fell into the bipolar domination of the U.S. and Soviet orbits. For a brief couple of decades after the collapse of the USSR, U.S. domination was paramount. But U.S. imperial overreach in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as an economic crisis at home, led to a marked retreat of U.S. power from the region during the Obama administration. A re-assertive Russia and rising China have cooperated to challenge U.S. dominance in the UN Security Council and challenge U.S. policy, particularly in regard to Syria. Over the longer term, changes in global energy markets will render the Middle East, especially the Gulf, of less strategic importance to the United States and of acute interest to Asia—China in particular. The revolution in shale oil extraction is moving the United States away from energy dependence and turning it into an energy exporter. As such, the decades of critical U.S. dependence on Gulf oil are waning, while the dependence of China and much of Asia deepens. States in the region are already grappling with the changing dynamics of global power shifts; the waning of an external hegemon creates its own instabilities. Whether the region will find a new pattern of stable relations as global power shifts East remains to be seen. ...
Continue reading at the Middle East Institute. Republished with permission from the Middle East Institute.
