The More Things Change…

A line-up of Arab leaders in 1991, the year the Cold War ended and a wave of democ ratization started to gather momentum around the globe, would look almost identical to a line-up of Arab leaders today. A few kings and emirs have died and have been duly replaced by their legitimate heirs. The long-ruling Syrian president, Hafez alAssad, has also since died and been replaced, less legitimately, by his son, Bashar. In Algeria and Lebanon, there has been much drama, but while presidents and prime ministers have been replaced, the underlying systems remain unchanged, with the same political dynasties controlling the life of Lebanon and a leader of the 1950s war for independence still running Algeria. The Arab world has been bypassed by the process of political change that has marked much of the post-Cold War period in many other regions of the world. Virtually nothing changed in the 1990s in the Middle East. After a brief period of ferment and hope in the early and middle part of the present decade, democracy (or even less farreaching, political reform) appears an ever more distant prospect, as opposition parties, including Islamists, lose ground in elections and incumbents re-establish a firm grip on the status quo. This is bad news for Arab citizens, because for the majority of them, particularly outside the Persian Gulf, the status quo does not hold much promise. On the political front, the status quo means the perpetuation of regimes that do not believe in accountability or participation and put much greater emphasis on regime security than on human security. On the economic front, the perpetuation of the status quo in all but the richest oil-producing countries means difficult living conditions, high unemployment, poor education, fraying health services, and, in many cases, decaying urban infrastructure overwhelmed by population growth. In a perverse way, though, the stress the status quo imposes on human security also contains the possibility that the seemingly dead process of political reform will revive before long. Protests over economic and social conditions are spreading in Arab countries. It is mostly organized on a strictly local basis, so far without any sign of overall coordination or even clear goals, a seemingly endless stream of small protests and critical blogging. There appears to be no underlying ideology or organizational structure unifying the disparate episodes in each country, let alone across the region. Indeed, attempts by leftist or Islamist political parties to join protests or take control have not been well received. But even such small-scale action is