Alazar Kebede

Today’s economic realities reflects that China, after all, is one of the major actors of contemporary globalization, while the Middle East has been described as its orphan. But just as loudly, this form of characterization speaks to these regions’ aspirations and futures. Here are some of the numbers. Over the past 20 years, average annual GDP growth in East Asia has been over 6%, while that of the Middle East and North Africa has been 2.3%.
China attracts the lion’s share of global foreign direct investment (FDI) flowing to developing countries. The Middle East and North Africa account for less than 1%. China’s exports of manufactured goods are composed of about 15% high-technology products. For the Middle East, the corresponding figure is 0.6%. Lest we forget, for at least 500 years the Arab world was the locomotive of globalization. Philosophy, mathematics, science, resplendent art and architecture and truly global trade were among the benefits this Arab civilization bequeathed the world.
Why then does the Arab world wallow today in stagnant irrelevance? We might note a few related paradoxes that could help to answer this question. Fareed Zakaria in his book entitled “The Future of Freedom”. stated that during the last 50 years, predominantly Hindu India was a poor economic performer as well. Yet, Hindus are now among the most successful global entrepreneurs, not least in one of its most competitive environments, Silicon Valley.
According to Fareed Zakaria, North Korea and South Korea are both products of exactly the same Confucianist culture as is China. And 40 years ago, both North and South Korea were among the world’s poorest countries. Today, the South is rich and one of the world’s most dynamic societies. The North is an unmitigated disaster. Similarly, Thailand and Myanmar (Burma) are neighbors, both Buddhist cultures with a quite similar heritage.
But 40 years ago, Myanmar was significantly richer than Thailand. At some point, Myanmar decided to shut itself off from the world. Thailand, on the other hand, has been one of the world’s most open societies. True, Thailand does face some substantial economic challenges, but the difference between the two countries at the beginning of the 21st century is enormous. The important difference in all these cases, it seems, is not defined by the culture which is Islamic, Confucianist, Christian or whatever it might be. Rather, it is between those societies that are open, tolerant, pluralistic and driven by intellectual curiosity and those that are the opposite.
History teaches this lesson quite forcefully. Spain, for example, was a great nation for several centuries. During that time, many of its cities, notably Cordoba, were true crossroads of Christian, Islamic and Jewish cultures. In the 15th century, however, the Catholic regime became intolerant and dogmatic. It expelled the Jews and the Muslims. And Spain entered a period of five centuries of decline. It only began to recover from this detour after the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975 when, symbolically, it started on a journey of rejoining Europe.
Similarly, when Taiwan was a repressive militarist dictatorship, about eight out of every ten Taiwanese who went to study in the United States failed to return. Following the democratization and general opening that occurred, members of the “Taiwanese Diaspora” returned in droves. They were instrumental in making the island one of the world’s most advanced entrepreneurial hubs of information technology.
The situation in the Middle East is totally different. Fareed Zakaria noted that more than anything else, one statistic illustrates not only that the cultural environment is stagnant but indeed that it has seriously deteriorated. In the 1950s and 1960s, Egypt was a regional, indeed global, hub of cultural dynamism and academic thought. Egypt’s decline into atrophy has been one of the saddest spectacles of the global intellectual scene of the last four decades. An official data of the Cultural Ministry of Egypt revealed the following statistic. Whereas in the 1960s Egypt published an average of 3000 books per year, in the 1990s the number fell to about 300.
The key, then, to the difference between China and the Arab world is not in their cultures. It is in their willingness to embrace certain parts of other cultures. In short their willingness to accept the need to question and to learn from others. Adoption of a liberal point of view is the main thing that would place Egypt, Syria and Iraq back at the center of the global economy that they once dominated.
According to Fareed Zakaria globalization has caught the Arab world at a bad demographic moment. Its societies are going through a massive youth bulge. More than half of the Arab world is under the age of 25. 75% of the Saudi Arabian population is fully under the age of 30. A bulge of restless young men in any country is bad news. Almost all crime in every society is committed by men between the ages of 15 and 25.
Lock up all young men, one social scientist pointed out, and violent crime will drop by more than 95%. That is why the socialization of young men in schools, colleges and camps has been one of the chief challenges for civilized societies. When accompanied by even smaller economic and social change, a youth bulge produces a new politics of protest. In the past, societies in these circumstances have fallen prey to a search for revolutionary solutions.
France went through a youth bulge just before the French Revolution in 1789 and so did Iran before its revolution in 1979. Even the United States had a youth bulge that peaked in 1968 when the country’s strongest social protests since the Great Depression. In the case of the Arab world, this upheaval has taken the form of a religious resurgence.
The most crucial question here is this. What can be done to resolve all these tensions? There is a dominant business class in the Middle East, but it owes its position to oil or to connections to the ruling families. Its wealth is that of feudalism, not capitalism, and its political effects remain feudal as well. A genuinely entrepreneurial business class would be the single most important force for change in the Middle East which is pulling along all others in its wake.
If culture matters, this is one place it would help. Arab culture for thousands of years has been full of traders, merchants and businessmen. The bazaar is probably the oldest institution in the Middle East. And Islam was historically highly receptive to business. Prophet Mohammed (p.b.a.h) himself was a businessman. Ultimately, the battle for reform is one Middle Easterners will have to fight which is why there needs to be some group within these societies that advocates and benefits from economic and political reform.