Recipe for revolt

The Arab Spring is not quite shading into our Indian monsoon, but it has claimed some impressive results already. The long-serving Presidents of Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen, in that order, have fled their palaces for refuge elsewhere (or in the case of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, for a jail cell in Cairo).

Libya is in the throes of civil war, and no observer would bet on its leader, Col. Muammar Gaddafi, extending his 42-year tenure in power to a 43rd. The Bahraini monarchy tottered briefly, till being shored up after vigorous Saudi intervention. The Syrian regime has had to resort to fairly brutal repression to survive, and the events in that ancient land still continue to unfold amidst mounting uncertainty. Even if the wave of change that has marked the first half of 2010 in the Arab world goes no further, its impact on these six countries, at least, may well have changed Arab politics irreversibly.
There are obviously local factors in each of these countries that have influenced the nature and shape of the unfolding revolutions. But what are the deeper trends underlying them?
The first of these is undoubtedly demography. Population growth across the Arab world in the last 60 years has been astonishingly rapid, as life-saving medical techniques and better nutrition has dramatically improved child mortality figures.
To take a look at some startling UN numbers: the population of the United Arab Emirates has increased by a whopping 10,698 per cent between 1950 and 2010; Jordan’s by 1,278 per cent, Libya’s by 518 per cent, Syria’s by 498 per cent, Egypt’s (bigger to begin with) by 277 per cent and Tunisia’s by 197 per cent. These figures represent a significantly larger number of mouths to feed; they make the challenge of governance so much greater than ever before. Compounding the problem is galloping urbanisation, concentrating more and more Arabs in crowded cities where services rarely match needs. And who are these cities filling up with? A burgeoning cohort of youth, especially in the 15-29 age group — impatient, hot-headed, under-educated, looking for work and, in most of the Arab world, deeply frustrated by the lack of opportunities in their countries’ sclerotic systems. Cumulatively, this is a recipe for revolt.
But demography alone cannot explain everything. Economics underlies most political problems, and the Arab world is no exception. It is not that the Arab governments have failed — gross domestic product growth throughout the region is far more impressive than in the West, ranging from some 5.1 per cent in Egypt in 2010 to 3.7 per cent in Tunisia and 3.2 per cent in Syria. It’s just that this level of economic growth is simply not enough to keep pace with the demands of the population, and it is growth that hasn’t generated enough jobs. Unemployment has grown, adding to the pressure in the streets. In every society, and not just in the Arab world, there is no more potent vehicle for the expression of discontent than a mob of unemployed young men — believing they have nothing to lose, and everything to gain, from change, whatever form that change might take.
The respected New York-based International Peace Institute (IPI) undertook and reviewed a number of polls across the Arab world this year. Their findings are instructive: the percentages of those who feel they are not “thriving” correlate closely to those countries that have been caught up in the recent upheaval. So does the level of those who pronounce themselves dissatisfied with their nation’s economies — only 18 per cent of Yemenis and 28 per cent of Egyptians and Libyans, for instance, think that things are getting better in their local economies.
This is hardly surprising, but economic dissatisfaction naturally ties in to the demographic reality to pose a mounting challenge to politically inflexible regimes.
All of this has been happening at a time that we are learning to call the “information age” — an era of rapid development in telecommunications. Mobile penetration has gone up by leaps and bounds across the Arab world, enhancing people’s ability to communicate with each other (and therefore to organise and to mobilise protests). Satellite television, notably Al-Jazeera and its imitators, has brought news, views and images from one corner of the Arab region to the rest, inflaming larger numbers of people than would have been possible in the days when most people could only see their nationally controlled TV channels. While the IPI reports that trust in media is not high (only 32 per cent of Egyptians, for instance, say they trust their media), neither is trust in officially conducted elections (28 per cent in Egypt).
This is not all bad news, except for the autocrats who have ruled for decades with scant regard for their subjects. Interestingly, when IPI’s pollsters asked people in Arab countries their views about a democratic form of government for their countries, an overwhelming number of respondents opted for democracy — 81per cent in Yemen and 85 per cent in Egypt. And a separate poll in Egypt, where parliamentary and presidential elections loom in the next few months, secular parties are preferred by large numbers of voters to the Islamist ones in the fray. These are encouraging signs, giving the lie to those cynics who suggest that the spasm of revolt in the Arab world will merely replace one kind of despotic regime with another. By this time next year, the nature of the governments that will have come to power in Tunisia, Egypt and perhaps Yemen and Libya, will undoubtedly be much more democratic than their predecessors.
Obviously all these represent a portrait of a flowing wave, which will cascade onwards in the coming weeks. But even if the details of the portrait may change as the wave flows, they point to an underlying reality it would be unwise to discount. If I were serving the government of a country like Jordan, where (unlike the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia or Bahrain) oil revenues are not available to offset the ineluctable trends of demography and economics, I would certainly begin to worry.

The author is a member of Parliament from Kerala’s Thiruvananthapuram constituency