16 - 22 August 2001
Issue No.547
|
Al-Ahram Weekly Online 16 - 22 August 2001 Issue No.547 |
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
One people, many nations
The decline of "Oslo" as a workable formula for settling the decades long Arab-Israeli conflict has revealed the shortcomings of an Arab order that fails to meet regional or international challenges. This is the key message of the 2000 Arab Strategic report, produced earlier this month by Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.
The political will to build a collective Arab strategy on key regional issues is lacking -- deficiency the editors of the report emphatically highlight as they review the year's political and economic performance in Arab countries.
According to the report, the year 2000 produced little to encourage Arab optimism. The report claims that the Middle East moved from the threshold of peace to the verge of war. Promises of economic prosperity were broken and relations with the world continued to be strained.
The year of the second Intifada, 2000, the report avers, was a year when "the mobilisation of Arab masses" over Palestine and Iraq was unmatched by official Arab action. The year 2000 was not only a year of public frustration with incompetent political orders (despite the convocation of the first Arab summit since 1996) but also of wide frustration at governments who preferred to renege on promises of development in favour of chasing the free market economy.
This frustration has been compounded by Arab satellite TV channels that constantly remind Arab viewers of the political and economic aggression which they suffer. Increased access to the Internet, and other modern forms of communication, further accentuates public awareness of the embarrassing failure of the Arab order to spare Arab peoples from political and economic travail.
Therefore, the editors of the 2000 Arab Strategic report do not hesitate to advise, "the central issue now is the modernisation of the Arab regional order to make it better able to deal with on-going developments". But this, the report goes on to say, will not be easy to achieve.
The report rightly notes that collective Arab action is highly dependent on the willingness of individual Arab countries to look beyond their individual interests. And while Arab officials continue to exchange visits, they are not necessarily seeking anything beyond bilateral political and economic support.
"Therefore, the failure to modify the current decision-making process of the Arab League, or to strengthen its secretariat with the clear mandate it needs to pursue Arab summit resolutions efficiently, does not dispel concern over the real will of Arab states to reform the Arab regional order, either politically or economically," the report argues.
And in an unsurprising remark to its readers, the report notes that the absence of a successful political-economic Arab order is coupled by the lack of any substantial, or for that matter even potential, Arab security cooperation except when it comes to intelligence coordination among Arab countries with regimes threatened by Islamist militants. Otherwise it is clearly suggested that, while Arab countries continue to allocate massive budgets for armament purposes, hopes of a unified security agenda remain hijacked by the "current direct and heated animosities". These animosities, the report notes, are often exclusively based on concerns over "national sovereignty," by which it means either territorial or power interests.
The report notes that with this degree of Arab-Arab skepticism and the absence of a common agenda on Arab economic interests, an efficient Arab order will continue to elude.
Meanwhile, suspicion continues to mark relations between Arabs and their immediate geographic neighbours: Iran and Turkey. And, political apprehension still looms over the internal affairs of these countries: Islamist-Secularist confrontation embattles Turkey and Reformist-Conservative discord harries Iran. The result is that Arab countries not only fail to communicate properly amongst themselves, they are also not succeeding in building stout bridges with their non-Arab neighbours.
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
 |
|
|||||||||||||||||
| ARCHIVES Letter from the Editor Editorial Board Subscription Advertise! |
WEEKLY ONLINE: www.ahram.org.eg/weekly Updated every Saturday at 11.00 GMT, 2pm local time weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg |
 Al-Ahram Organisation |
Recommend this page