POLITICAL analysts around the world this year are bemoaning the violence and lack of democratic transformations across the Arab world, five years after the uprisings erupted in January 2011, wondering why the popular revolts did not lead to pluralistic democracies beyond Tunisia. A more useful and politically relevant frame through which to view the turbulent Arab world must go well beyond the past five years, and encompass instead the past century, from 1915 until today, for two critical reasons.

First, though the modern Arab world in the past half-century or so experienced many telltale signs of mass discontent and attempts to blunt the nasty edges of autocratic regimes, they invariably failed due to the persistent power of the autocrats (and serious support from Moscow, Washington, London, Paris, Riyadh, and Tehran). Second, the structural and persistent strain in modern Arab history has not been the battle for democracy, but rather a quest for stable and legitimate statehood.

The core problem that has plagued all Arab societies, without exception, continues to be the elusive quest for negotiated relationships between citizens and governing power elites that can define the following important dynamics which are critical for any stable society or state: identity, community, citizenship, statehood, sovereignty, nationalism, socio-economic dignity, governance and, ultimately, legitimacy. This is a huge menu, but it is also a normal menu of human-political-social relationships that every society in the world navigates on its road to stable statehood and a decent life for its citizens.

The Arab world has experienced erratic conditions and frequent violence in recent years because it has never seriously attempted to address these issues under sovereign conditions; so we remain without any consensus on how they all relate to one another. Not surprisingly, we continue to fragment into tribes, clans, neighbourhoods, militias, ethno-nationalists, sectarian thugs and mobs, resistance movements, terrorists, ideological fringes, free market zealots, neo-colonial satraps and subjects, NGOized sub-cultures, corrupted and bloated state bureaucracies, massive militarized one-party governments, and other smaller units that we cling to for the rights, protection, services, voice, and opportunities that we expect but do not get from our sovereign states. This is a distinctly Arab, rather than a wider Middle Eastern or Islamic, problem because some other non-Arab Middle Eastern or Muslim-majority countries have successfully navigated this path.

 

Historians will in time clarify why modern Arab states remain chronically and collectively erratic and broadly dysfunctional in their governance, defined by worsening disparities in their socio-economic conditions and now increasingly rattled by national fragmentation, sectarian terror and widespread violence in their political configurations. For now, we would do well to simply acknowledge that fixing the troubles and dangers in our region requires that we honestly analyze how we got here since our encounters with modern statehood a century ago.

The Hussein-McMahon correspondence of 1915-16 started a recon-figuration of the Ottoman empire Arab majority lands towards some kind of Arab statehood. Ever since then we have been on a roller coaster ride of state development and de-development that includes impressive eras of growth and embarrassing moments of civil strife and foreign military assaults. Some states split into two and sometimes reunited, others were occupied and colonized, some disappeared and came back into history, many tried to unite with neighbours, and almost all Arab states have actively engaged in warfare against their neighbours or their own people.

The bumpy ride during the 1915-2015 century has seen Arab societies and states achieve many impressive developments in realms like education, industrialization, cultural expression, and others, alongside chronic criminal behaviour both by some state powers and many non-state actors. Always though, at the heart of this past complex century has been the elusive quest for citizen-state relations that are at once stable, satisfying, and legitimate. Oil, ideology, materialism, religion, ethnicity, tribal pride, historical memories and grievances and, most recently, active warfare, have all be used to stoke national solidarity – with partial success in most cases and lasting success in none. The eruption of the Arab uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt five years ago was an important milestone on this long and unfinished journey. It was the most dramatic and widespread simultaneous expression ever of Arab citizens’ mass discontent and their shared aspirations.

 

This year’s five-year anniversary of the Arab uprisings will witness many commemorations and assessments of the outcomes of those historic events. Tumultuous years since then in the Middle East have included fragmenting states, civil wars, numerous direct foreign military interventions, the rise of jihadi Islamist movements, the establishment of an ‘Islamic State’ (ISIS), and waves of desperate refugees and migrants to Europe and elsewhere. It is too early to pronounce any definitive judgment on whether the Arab uprisings succeeded or failed, or rest somewhere in between. A process of retrospective introspection is important in the short run if it can clarify whether new upheavals will occur soon, or why the revolt of 2011 has been beaten back for now. It is evident and troubling that the two symbiotic driving forces of the 2011 uprisings – state autocracy and popular discontent – remain as strong as ever across most of the Arab world, and in some cases have worsened (such as loss of political freedoms in Egypt or freedom of expression across most Arab countries).

For a majority of people in the Arab world, using most basic indicators of quality of life in the material and political realms, people’s conditions and their future prospects remain difficult. We still see the pressures on millions of families that could not fully meet their children’s basic needs or promise them a better life in 2011 – in our education systems, corrupted and often incompetent power structures, security sector control of society, massive informal labour sectors, water and health deficiencies, and stagnant or declining well-being at the family level. The street uprisings in early 2011 elicited cheers or sympathetic solidarity across most of the Arab world because the pain that drove the demonstrators’ quest for liberty and dignity resonated widely with several hundred million people throughout the region who recognized those pains in their own lives.

 

It is likely that people across much of the Arab region will create new opportunities to achieve the real breakthroughs they seek in the realms of dignity, social justice, and democratic transformation. That this quest broadly failed to achieve its goals during the past five years does not mean that it will not resurface again. It almost certainly will, but how and when, and in what form, cannot be anticipated today. Thousands of activists and concerned citizens across the region are analyzing the lessons of the past five years’ shortcomings, and preparing for more effective transitions to participatory, accountable, and equitable governance systems when the next opportunity for such a citizen-led transformation manifests itself. For now we can only honestly analyze our current condition, and identify precisely what has changed in recent years, where mistakes were made or gaps need to be filled, and what imminent trends may shape the near future.

 

The challenges remain the same. The two central dilemmas of Arab men and women today continue to be the same as they have been for decades: citizens’ relationship to their states, and their understanding of what needs to change – and how they can induce that change – to transition from their legacy of political autocracy and socio-economic stress to democratic pluralism and material well-being.

The hard road to achieving lasting democratic change has seen several central forces battling one another across our region since the middle of the last century: the individual citizen’s quest for good governance and sustained and equitable development, erratic citizen interactions with the all-powerful state, the promises and failures of ‘political Islam’, the enormous will of militaries and the regimes they support, alongside Arab and foreign interventions to maintain the status quo, and the needed changes in public governance but also at the level of society, the family, and the individual for a stable democratic system to take root.

Most of those forces – Arab security states and regimes, Arab and foreign interventions, Islamists in the public sphere – have not changed appreciably in the past five years. What has changed, however, and what defines this historic era, is a new awareness and realism in the minds of several hundred million Arabs whose life conditions remain difficult. These people will continue to seek a better life in their own countries because their socio-economic deficiencies and absolute political powerlessness are intolerable to them.

An overwhelming majority of Arabs reject the available current options of illegal migration or joining ISIS. But beneath their acquiescent exterior they are neither static nor docile. Their minds have been awakened and their eyes opened, though their hopes from 2011 have been dashed for now. Today as then, we have no idea how disgruntled citizens will transform their fears into political acts. But we do know that they will do it; so for stub-born Arab regimes this is a much more dangerous citizenry than the one of 2011.

 

This quest for a better life in more stable societies has been ongoing throughout the past century, since the modern Arab world and the wider Middle East were born, often at the hands of retreating European colonialists. As we enter the second century of the modern Middle East, an uncomfortable glance back at the last 100 years makes it clear that in almost every country in the region, including big regional powers and wealthy energy producing smaller states, the single most critical common desire remains: the quest for a stable, satisfying and legitimate statehood. Such statehood should be anchored in and defined by a few critical factors, namely sustained and equitable human development, the assurance of citizens’ political, social and economic rights through social contracts and constitutional systems that are anchored by the principle of the consent of the governed.

This did not happen in the period 1915-2015, and the region enters its second modern century plagued by a growing series of tensions, conflicts and threats that are all the more troubling because they tend to link with and feed off one another, i.e. local civil wars in Syria and Libya offer terror groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda an opportunity to establish themselves and their local franchises, which in turn destabilize states like Lebanon and Tunisia; foreign and regional powers try to counter this through military action that only opens up new opportunities for terror groups to take root in newly destabilized lands. So one major new development at the start of the troubled Middle East’s second century is that an expanding web of individual stresses and threats within many countries is also generating linkages across countries, which means that conflicts within any single country cannot be resolved unless over-arching linkages between countries are addressed. An example of this would be the need for Iranian-Saudi Arabian tensions to be overcome in order to resolve specific and local problems inside Syria or Lebanon.

 

The kind of historic reckoning now taking place in many Arab lands only happens occasionally, when the citizenry’s mass dissatisfaction with prevailing power structures and governance systems challenges the status quo. We recently witnessed such epic changes in the American civil rights struggle, the entire former Soviet system, South Africa, Northern Ireland, Myanmar, Argentina, Chile, and elsewhere. Our region is in the early stages of a transition that sees us coming to terms with our problems, but also striving to achieve the promise of our society. Hundreds of millions of Arab people are essentially affirming not only that they have the right as human beings to live in decent society and to be treated with respect by their own political power structure as well as by foreign powers, but also the capacity to bring that about through political and civic engagement, economic activity, social interaction, cultural expression, and human solidarity. Such mass sentiment combined with action is unprecedented in the Arab world.

 

Only Tunisia today has created a constitutional, democratic, pluralistic, republican, participatory and accountable form of government; yet, it too suffers from serious vulnerabilities mainly due to economic weaknesses, along with troubling new security threats from ISIS offshoots that are able to operate from their bases in neighbouring Libya. Some Arab countries are still at different stages of trying to move towards democratic pluralism, and others like Syria, Libya, Bahrain, Egypt and Yemen have fallen into terrible situations of outright warfare or serious internal confrontation.

Successful transitions must create a credible social contract between citizens and governments, an arrangement which has never been created in our region. Such a social contract that is freely negotiated and fully validated is needed to clarify a range of important issues that are required for a stable state to emerge. Those include national values, public institutions, systems of government, and definitions of issues like religiosity, secularism, rule of law, the role of the security sector, gender equality, and others. This did not happen during the past century, even though Arab men and women had expressed their desires for it since the earliest stirrings against Ottoman or European control in the late 19th century.

The fact that over much of the past 100 years the state, government, and family based ruling regimes (such as Assad father and son, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Hosni Mubarak, Abdel Nasser) were so often seen as a single unit is a telltale sign of the problem we suffer. If the state’s responsibilities, powers and limits were never clearly defined, and could be monopolized by a single family, then it was also impossible to chart a defined relationship between the state and its citizens. Citizens became wards and subjects of the state and its ruling family that controlled the government and armed forces. The concept of credible and legitimate citizenship was never born in the Arab world, which in turn meant that statehood itself was never fully consolidated or legitimated in most cases. The vicious cycle of undefined citizen-state relations, rights and responsibilities explains much of why some of our states limped into the early years of the 21st century as hollow shells or aging hulks of their former selves, and in some cases collapsed completely.

 

Into 2016, we continue to witness on and off demonstrations in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Morocco, Tunisia and Lebanon, most of which demand that the governments treat their citizens with the dignity and the rights that those citizens deserve and expect. This idea burst onto the Arab scene in 2011, when a kind of historical and psychological breaking point was reached across all our lands, the culmination of a century of failed attempts to achieve full citizen rights. This tale starts in the post-WWI period around 1920, with the creation of the modern Arab world as we know it, becoming today’s 22 states in the Arab League. The phenomenon of contemporary Arab statehood began without a widespread process of citizen rights or consultation, or the consent of the governed. Early years of Arab statehood were defined instead by the rule of small elites and minorities, usually self-imposed or put in place by the colonial powers. This kind of governing system survived for decades, from the 1920s to the 1950s.

 

Another factor that damaged the quality of Arab statehood in the Levant starting in the late 1940s, was the cumulative consequences of the Arab-Israeli conflict. These were reflected particularly in one form that probably has been the greatest continuing obstacle to good governance and stable, legitimate statehood in the modern era, and which explains why we never were able to reach negotiated social contracts: political rule by military officers. Military officers taking control of Arab governments has been a death-knell for any sort of good governance, democratic transition, or equitable and sustainable national development, and this problem is still with us today. In fact, in countries like Egypt under the rule of Field Marshal-turned-President Abdel Fattah Sisi, it is probably worse today than ever before.

Over the past half century, military men who took office by force have been the rule in key Arab ‘republics’, including Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Ali Abdullah Saleh, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Hosni Mubarak, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, Hafez Assad and his son Bashar, Zein el Abedine Ben Ali, and a few others. These military and police officers, with their friends, business partners and families, took power and monopolized it for decades on end, in some cases more than 40 years. The Arab world ended up as family run, military-anchored police states. Iraq, Libya, and Syria in particular were the most egregious cases, so it is no coincidence that some of the most violent examples of state fragmentation, government violence, ethnic tensions, and communal collapse in the Arab world today are in Iraq and Syria, followed by Yemen and Libya.

It is also no surprise that the 2011 uprisings started in Tunisia and Egypt, or that the ‘Islamic State’ was born in Iraq and Syria. The common element among all six of these states is that army officers who took power with their fellow officers, families and business cronies ran these countries for three or four decades in most cases, turned power over to their children in some cases, and in all cases ran their economies and societies into the ground. This legacy persists in some countries today, and is a continuing plague rather than a forgotten historical episode from the past. It totally destroyed any possibility of a social contract where genuine national development could take place, and it has also made it very difficult for a smooth transition to more participatory and accountable governance to occur, as we have witnessed since 2011.

 

The failures of such military run, family based rule were for many years camouflaged by several factors. The oil-fuelled development boom was one. The national development process that took place in many Arab countries from the 1940s to the ’70s saw that schools, hospitals and roads were built, along with telephone systems, housing and other aspects of genuine national development. Across much of the Arab world for maybe 50 years, a majority of citizens genuinely felt their lives were improving at the material level, and thus they expected their children to enjoy even more fruits of national development. Politically they had no rights, and no chance of any political participation, complaint, accountability, or redress of grievance; but their housing and road systems were improving, their kids went to school, new hospitals were built, and water systems improved and expanded.

The Cold War between the Soviets and the Americans for 45 years also kept a lid on domestic Arab developments, because both the Soviets and the Americans and Europeans actively supported the now well anchored Arab security states run by families and military men. The continued consequences of the Arab-Israeli conflict also curtailed the democratic aspirations of many Arab citizens and cemented the rule of the officers like Gaddafi, Assad or Abdel Nasser, who usually took power by arguing that they needed to govern with an iron fist in order to defend their countries and Palestine against Israel’s threats, and that a strong military that guided national life was the only way to do this. Democracy could wait.

But we learned in 1967 and beyond that family run security states were not able to stand up to Israel, failed to build strong economies, and were totally incompetent in promoting equitable and sustained socio-economic development. They just ran these countries into the ground to the point where we have today nearly half the children in primary and secondary schools not learning anything, over 25 million kids out of school, and millions fleeing, often risking death at sea rather than staying in their societies. The Arab world has reached a point where the risk of death in the Mediterranean is lower than continuing to live in ones own societies.

 

In retrospect, the three biggest issues over the last century that have really crippled and brought us to this point are the Arab-Israeli conflict and its consequences, the mismanagement and corruption of incompetent militaristic Arab regimes, and a colonial legacy that includes continuous external militarism by foreign powers. External powers intervening in our region, militarily or otherwise, have generally been problematic. When foreign armies come into our region, they usually create more problems than they resolve. There are occasional cases of legitimate foreign militarism; liberating Kuwait from Iraq’s occupation was a case in point. But the rule is that foreign armies create many more problems than they resolve, as we see today in Libya and Syria, for example.

 

Equally clear over many decades is the negative impact that the Arab-Israeli conflict has had on the entire region. The Arab-Israeli conflict is the oldest and most serious destabilizing force in the region, and has plagued us all since the 1930s. One of the reasons why so many Arabs are critical of the USA and other western societies is that foreign powers seemed to pay more attention to security and rights of Israelis than of Palestinians and Arabs. The chronic imbalance created great anger and frustration because the Arab governments were unable to do anything about it. This tension built up over decades and is an important reason, for instance, why we saw the growth in the 1970s and ’80s of the Muslim Brotherhood Movement, and of Hamas and Hezbollah who particularly fought against Israeli occupation of Arab lands.

The conflict contributed to the frustrations within Arab societies of tens of millions of citizens who were humiliated by their own governments’ inability to do anything about the Arab-Israeli conflict, either through war or peace. This citizen disdain for their own governments eventually resulted in low legitimacy of many Arab regimes in the eyes of their own people. Today, at the latest stage of this historical process, we see Arabs challenging their governments and fighting to replace them in some instances. So resolving the conflict peacefully, and respecting the rights of Israelis, Palestinians and the existing Arab states to live in security and legitimacy would be a critical and positive step towards allowing Arab societies the space to address their many other domestic challenges,

 

In 2016, the ‘success’ of Tunisia’s democratic transition, alongside continuing political reforms trying to inch their way forward in countries like Morocco, Jordan and a few other pockets, though to limited extents, are in their early stages. On the negative side is the return of the military in Egypt, open warfare in places like Syria and Libya, external warfare in places like Yemen and Syria, and proxy wars all over the region with both foreign powers (whether Americans, Europeans, Russians) and regional powers (Turks, Iranians, Saudis, Israelis) all involved in these different proxy wars. The ongoing involvement of foreign military forces inside Arab countries dates back to the days of Napoleon 220 years ago, and remains one of the most destructive forces that have shaped the Middle East or the Arab world.

Civil and sectarian tensions often slip into religious warfare and scattered violence. We see fragmentation and some collapse of states where the central state has essentially lost control of its territory and been replaced by different local sovereignties and authorities, whether religious, tribal, military or something else. We see massive refugee flows from Iraq and Syria. The Palestinian refugees from 1947/48 continue to be one of the biggest forces for regional tension; the lack of resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict, symbolized by the Palestinian refugees, remains one of the biggest and oldest forces for radicalization and destabilization in the region.

We are likely to see refugees coming out of Yemen and Libya. We’ve seen major refugee flows in the last 30 years from Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq and Kuwait when it was occupied briefly by Iraq. So this is a recurring and chronic modern Arab problem, and will worsen if socioeconomic conditions deteriorate in the years ahead. Our stressed economies already relegate tens of millions of people to lifetimes of poverty and marginalization. We suffer runaway urbanism, massive peri-urban poverty belts in the major cities of the Arab world, chronic poverty, and the most important problem which is severe and growing disparities in living conditions and people’s expectations for a better future.

 

Syria serves as an ugly reminder of how non-violent struggles for reform and democracy can turn into vicious sectarian wars, which is one of the new problems we face. The government of Syria made it clear that it was not open to any discussions about real reform or political change that would alter the prevailing power balance which was firmly in the hands of the Assad clan and their supporters. After hundreds of peaceful demonstrators were killed by the state, some demonstrators started to arm themselves in self-defence, and then Islamist movements quickly moved in, often with the support of Arab or foreign governments. Syria today is the site of the biggest proxy war of the post-WWII world, with scores of regional and inter-national forces battling it out there. It’s the most complex war in the region today, and has no easy solution.

A corollary to this is that Iraq and Syria have both gone beyond the point where they can regain their former configuration, with a strong central government. Probably Iraq and Syria, along with Yemen and Libya, will all be decentralized in the future, with much more power in the hands of regional assemblies and authorities that reflect localized ethnic, tribal, and sectarian identities. These situations reflect at once four parallel problems we face across the region: violent regime responses to citizen reform demands, the sectarianization of political tensions, foreign intervention in domestic conflicts, and the challenge of finding a balance between a strong central government and decentralized sovereign powers that mirror the demographics of our pluralistic countries.

 

A danger emanating from these conflicts, as ISIS already reveals, is the move by some people in the region and abroad to create small, pure ethnic states or statelets. The first example of an attempt at pure ethnic statehood in the region was Israel, which wanted to be a Jewish state, or a state for the Jewish people, which meant it has tried to get rid of as many Palestinian Arabs as it could. That goal failed, as about 25 per cent of the citizens of Israel are not Jewish, but mainly Muslim and Christian Arabs. ISIS is the second example of an attempt to create an ethnic state, a purely Sunni fundamentalist state in the Arab world, and I think both of these attempts are wrong. We do not need ethnic-based states; we need states based on equal citizenship for all, and not based on race or religion.

We are starting to see in ISIS, in refugee flows, in the desperate joining of radical movements, the consequences of two generations of young people since the 1970s who have had little hope of ever enjoying a normal life, a decent job, social benefits, home ownership, marriage and a family, and living a middle class life. It was that sentiment in early 2011 which helped to spark the uprisings. The people who went out into the streets were not just poor people, or people who were angry because they were mistreated by the police. It was a combination of political and socio-economic denial together that drove people to rebel, just as these drove Mohamad Bouazizi to self-immolate because he had lost all hope in his life.

Millions of young Arab men and women who had graduated from high school, maybe even going to college, saw absolutely no chance of their ever getting a decent job to become a school teacher, to work in a bank, to work in an administrative clerical office, to own their own business, or to work in an NGO. The core driving force of the Arab uprisings, which partly reflects this problem of millions of young citizens who lack the human talent to function in society, has been the feeling that they have little chance to get out of poverty, marginalization, pauperization and vulnerability that they experience every day and in every aspect of their life, since their birth and probably until their early death.

 

The present economic, social and political structures in the Arab world cannot possibly ever deal with the challenges of today, given the tens of millions of needy people and the limited state resources to care for them. The underlying drivers of many of the tensions that we see today in the Arab world were these unmet basic needs over several decades, which generated mass fear and vulnerability, which then translated into anxiety, exasperation, and finally desperation. Perhaps as many as 100 million of the 370 million Arabs may fit into this category, and are still looking for possible ways to improve their lives.

The ongoing wars in half a dozen Arab countries means that the number of desperate families may be increasing due to refugeehood, displacement, economic losses and injuries. The dynamic that drives uprisings and revolutions remains active, helping reconfigure future conditions, as more Arabs every year become increasingly anxious, and sometimes desperate, about their capacity to ever live a normal middle class life. That promise shaped the first three generations of Arabs from the 1920s, but since the 1970s or so that promise of active citizenship and a decent life has been largely denied to a large number of Arabs.

 

The hard reality is that not a single Arab country other than Tunisia today operates according to the principle of the consent of the governed. Not a single one. And this has been the situation in every Arab country for the past century, with minor and fleeting exceptions. Nowhere else in the modern world has such a large number of people, comprising an entire political-cultural region of the world, been subjected to sustained autocracy over such a long period of time. The worse news is that in many of the Arab countries, including some of the wealthy oil states in the Gulf, and especially countries like Egypt, there has been a regression in political, cultural and social freedoms in the past five years. A continuing clampdown by the prevailing political and security forces has reduced the space for normal expression of political and social views, in a totally peaceful manner, in the media, in schools, in local cafes, and public events. All these issues played a role in the recent uprisings and the consequent turmoil that we have experienced.

If and when a real change for the better occurs, it is unlikely to happen easily, because the cumulative problems, constraints, distortions and inequities that exist in the Arab world today are so strong and deep that they cannot be resolved quickly. The United States or Western Europe had revolutions, some had civil wars, many saw civil rights and other social equality movements, and all underwent some sort of contested or negotiated constitutional process. It took 150 to 200 years in the United States and Europe to give women the vote, to give black people the vote, and equal rights to all minorities. It took a long time to achieve real political reform giving all citizens equal rights. We will have to negotiate one day how to actually apply mechanisms of consultation and political engagement to trigger the birth of pluralistic and participatory political institutions that will move us into the democratic world we seek to join.

 

In the meantime, ISIS is the culmination and the almost perfect reflection of a century of mismanagement, ineptitude, criminal governance, uncaring political orders, foreign manipulation, internal strife, lack of citizenship and the many other problems mentioned earlier. These spawned a generation of violent Islamist militants who sought to overturn the existing order, and replace it with a perfect Islamic society, as they understood that concept. These problems, and tens of thousands of disgruntled and desperate Arabs, ultimately created ISIS.

The many different political, social and economic reasons why people join or support ISIS provide the agenda of mismanagement, inequity and deprivation in the Arab world that we need to address and reform in order to fix the problems of our societies and return to normal statehood – a statehood in which citizens matter, where the governed and governing agree on a rulebook for governance via a social contract. That way, one day, in the coming century, we citizens of our hobbled Arab states can join forces to bring about the kind of sustained economic growth, opportunity, stability, and dignity that all of us want.