What Future for the Arab Order?

In a lecture on the Arab order seven and a half years ago, the present writer said that this order had begun to fade and dissolve into a Middle Eastern one. It had lost its Arab character because it had lost its capacity to act through the core powers that once served as the order's locomotive, the centre of gravity of its main interactions: the role that set the order's agenda and priorities and the way its politics were managed. This does not mean, of course, that regional and international powers had no direct influence on the politics of the order; but the axis of those politics was always at the heart of the order itself. The power vacuum was filled chiefly by two Islamic regional powers, Iran and Turkey. The spread of the values of political Islam, in its various forms, through the Arab political system undoubtedly helped. It gave the role of these two powers a social legitimacy in the Arab world and helped open the doors of Arab societies to them, at the expense of a retreating Arab identity. Several other factors lay behind the forceful entry of the two Islamic powers into the Arab order over the past decade. One was the fall of the Iraqi barrier before Iran in 2003: the barrier of the balancing role, which turned into Iran's principal bridge into the region. Another concerns Turkey: a Turkey returning with a new Ottomanism under two attractive banners, the first a successful model of political Islam in government, which at the time appealed to Arab public opinion, and the second a role that balanced Iran's in the region.

Five years have passed since what has come to be called the Arab Spring; I prefer the term Arab earthquake, with aftershocks that are still continuing and spreading. This situation threw the door wide open, through the Syrian gate, to Turkish-Iranian rivalry on the Arab playing field, while relations between the two outside that field are more than normal.

The Arab scene today bears the following features.

The spread of "Somalisation": regimes have fallen, and others have been shaken or are on their way to falling, bringing with them the danger that the state itself may disintegrate and collapse. The Egyptian and Tunisian cases are of course exceptions, because of the nature of the state and the depth of its institutions in the first, and the cohesion of society and identity in the second in particular, as against the spreading danger of states being hollowed out and collapsing from Libya to Yemen by way of Syria.

The awakening of sub-national identities: identities carried by non-state actors who fight in their name in the civil wars under way in their own countries and in others. Some of these identities are afraid of the past and others afraid of the future. Some want to make the future in the image of the past as they see it, and others want to escape the past into a future they have long dreamed of achieving.

The entrenchment of a clash of sects within the Islamic world: a clash that feeds on the regional conflict on the one hand and helps to strengthen it on the other. It entrenches identity front lines within a single state, and front lines that cross states as well, in the alignments this clash has produced in the Arab East.

The danger of state collapse is strongly present on the first centenary of the Sykes-Picot agreement. All of this points to the failure to build the national state, the state of independence. Are we today facing a new Balkanisation that redraws the maps of states, or a kind of Lebanonisation of settlements, the drafting of a new contract among the various social components of a single country?

Economic conditions are worsening, with grave social consequences, in the countries that went through the change of the Arab Spring and in others. The fall in oil prices has also, for the first time and in earnest, raised the question of the rentier state in the oil-producing countries, prompting a search for a different role for the state in the face of this structural crisis sweeping their economies, which also has negative effects on the labour-exporting countries. The dangers of the economic and social crisis for Arab societies are growing under a regional cold war and an Arab civil war that feeds on, and in turn feeds, the civil wars now under way: the wars after the Arab Spring. These wars are causing a great human, economic and social haemorrhage in those countries and in the region.

What we are witnessing today are the first signs of an order of regional chaos. Meeting this challenge at the Arab level cannot be done by a statement here or a declaration there expressing a moment of diplomatic solidarity: a moment that reflects support which may be wide but comes in varying degrees that fall short of the goal; a moment that cannot by itself produce a comprehensive strategy with defined dimensions and priorities, one that would allow real, broad and effective engagement in saving the Arab boat from sinking. What this rescue requires is an honest Arab reckoning with ourselves, in order to deal successfully with five challenges.

Sectarian and confessional fragmentation, and the policies that tear societies apart, cannot be confronted with a discourse of the same kind, whatever cover we try to give it. What is needed is an inclusive Arab discourse that is the conceptual opposite of the discourse of factional identities and that reassures those who hold them.

Work to build the civil state founded on citizenship, in which no social component is marginalised or isolated: a state that regards the preservation of diversity within unity as a source of wealth, not a threat to anyone.

Give development, in all its dimensions, at the pan-Arab level and at the level of each country, the priority it deserves, in order to build the legitimate stability that is needed rather than an imposed stability, and to address the structural imbalances in national economies.

Consider forming a committee of Arab elders, figures who command respect and standing across the Arab world for their positions and experience, to undertake what is known as second-track or parallel diplomacy: exploring ways to contain present and coming fires, and offering decision-makers proposals for putting them out.

Within the framework of defining shared Arab priorities, work to launch a dialogue with the two neighbouring powers, Iran and Turkey: a dialogue based on the logic of the state, and on organising and containing differences between states, not on the logic of identity ideologies that cross borders and speak from a position "above the state". Its aim would be normal relations that organise disagreement where it exists and carry mechanisms for settling it where possible.

In sum, on the eve of the Arab summit, what is needed is an Arab meeting of another kind: one that discusses these points and works out answers to them with a realistic, open and critical mind. This is the responsibility of all, and above all of the principal Arab powers, so that the Arabs return in strength to their own Arab geography and do not fail the test of history and find themselves cast out by geography. And history is not merciful.