Contempt for the Governed

BEIRUT -- If you're wondering why the Arab world is not very excited about the prospects of serious breakthroughs and real justice being achieved in the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations that were launched in Washington Thursday, perhaps the place to look is not there, but rather in the underlying political governance and decision-making systems that define the Arab world. In that vein, two particular sagas are playing out before our eyes that help clarify why the Arab world seems unable to make coherent war or peace with Israel, and allows the Palestinians to negotiate on their own without any serious backing from the Arabs other than occasional rhetorical promises.

The two I have in mind are the debate in Egypt about the likely succession to President Husni Mubarak by his son Gamal or his intelligence director Oman Suleiman; and, this week's marking of the 41st anniversary of Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi's assumption of power. In these two tales, and many others in the region like them, we witness one of the essential attributes of the modern Arab world: sovereign but disenfranchised citizens, which explains so many of our weaknesses and mediocrities.

National leaderships that rule by coercive security methods and are in turn camouflaged by a thin cloak of hero-worship demagoguery have no serious capacity to engage with other countries in a meaningful manner beyond short-term deals negotiated from positions of weakness, dependency, and vulnerability, because core goals are to promote perpetual regime incumbency and stability, rather than national wellbeing. When citizens are removed from the equation of national decision-making, participatory consultation, and even the most rudimentary forms of holding power accountable, the result is what we see in Egypt, Libya and many other Arab countries: sovereign states that set world records for under-achievement, suffer chronic domestic vulnerabilities, generate little or no international respect, and essentially write themselves out of the global community of credible nations and states, and instead slither into the demeaning world of marginal lands.

It would be difficult to find two other countries in the world that have squandered their enormous human, political, cultural and economic potential as have Egypt and Libya in the past four decades. Libya's small, talented population, water and land resources, and immense oil wealth should have allowed it to become a model economic dynamo. Egypt -- amazing, vibrant, powerful Egypt! -- was the respected leader of the Arab world in many fields for the first three-quarters of the 20th century, at times making history and pulling its weight in global fora like the UN and the Non-Aligned Movement. But that was long ago. In the last few decades, Egypt has succumbed to the corrosive, numbing consequences of concentrating state power in the hands of a small elite that maintains its monopoly of decision-making because of the ironclad support of the security services (and major foreign governments).

In both the Libyan and Egyptian cases, the opportunities that would have materialized by giving life to the principle of the consent of the governed have been squandered by relying instead on political governance anchored in the narrow ruling elite's contempt for the governed. This is not an isolated episode from the past, but rather a living, continuing, horror show that is replicated in many other Arab countries where ruling elites and individual leaders remain in power for decades on end, transforming national governance into a family business. Yet they ignore the overwhelming evidence that hereditary family businesses usually collapse into in-fighting, fragmentation or incompetence by the third generation, because a lack of accountability and non-family participation in management lead to atrophy and megalomaniacal abuse of power. If we maintain this course in the Arab world, we will soon mark an ignominious achievement: The political life span of our rulers and ruling families will be longer than the average biological life expectancy of our citizens.

So it is not so surprising to watch the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations continue fruitlessly, decade after decade. The Palestinian leadership headed by President Mahmoud Abbas suffers the Libyan-Egyptian malaise of speaking for few people beyond its own political corridors, commercial partners, and numerous guards. Abbas almost spends more time in fancy Washington hotels than he does meeting his Palestinian constituents in Gaza or in refugee camps throughout the Middle East. The modern Arab hereditary security state experience suggests that leaders chronically detached from their citizens are not credible or effective leaders, and have zero chance of achieving meaningful results in interactions with friendly or hostile foreign powers -- other than perpetuating their own incumbency.

Egypt and Libya today should remind us of this widespread Arab structural weakness. If the Arab governed do not exercise their right as citizens to be consulted and to ratify state power, those who govern them in turn will steadily lose credibility and impact, and ultimately their legitimacy also.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.