Arab futures — II

Tarek Osman
Tuesday 21 Jan 2025

Amidst the strategic changes underway in the Middle East today, many are asking whether there is one or several Arab worlds, writes Tarek Osman

 

This key question is underscored by two factors.

The first is that North Africa, the Arab parts of the Nile Valley, the Levant, and the Arabian Peninsula now have vastly different economic and social circumstances. While this is not new in itself – for decades these different circumstances have created colossal gaps in wealth and standards of living among Arab societies – over the past two decades such gaps have become so large that perspectives about the present and prospects for the future have also become vastly different.

Perspectives about the present mean how large sections of the populations of Arab societies see the drivers affecting their lives now. Prospects about the future concern the factors that will shape what is coming for these societies. These perspectives of and prospects for the societies in the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, and North Africa have become not only different because of different levels of national and individual incomes, but also because the gaps have widened so much over the past two decades that they have been moving in different directions.

Large sections of Arab societies, largely but not only in the Arabian Peninsula, have bright prospects for the future anchored on expectations of high standards of living by any international measures, good education for the younger generations, sophisticated and reliable healthcare systems, and good financial connections to the most economically and technologically advanced societies in the world, all leading to better human development prospects.

But much larger sections of Arab societies, largely in the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa, and even more so in the farthest regions of Arabic-speaking societies in Sub-Saharan Africa, face futures that could well entail more difficulties for standards of living, acute challenges in providing education that leads to sustainable jobs in the future, pressures on already struggling healthcare systems, and frayed connections to the world’s most advanced centres of technology and wealth-creation.

It is realistic to expect that these societies will likely struggle to sustain their current levels of human development, if not face worsening ones. The wider such socioeconomic and human development gaps become, the less concrete the connections between the Arab societies are likely to be.

The second factor is that the international positioning of the Arab countries also differs. On the surface, they have varying degrees of political alliance with different powers in the world and the region. But these varying degrees are differences not merely of scale but also of nature. This means that not only political preferences and short-term objectives differ among the Arab countries, but also that there are different visions of how the Middle East should look in the future among them.

 Not only are the Arab societies moving in different directions in terms of socioeconomics and human development, but they are also backing different futures for the region.

However, two other factors point to a different conclusion and to the view that politically there is indeed a single Arab world.

The first of these factors is that all the Arab countries are on the receiving end of the determinants shaping the future of North Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Arabian Peninsula. This is not only a function of their economic and technological dependence on (largely) the Western world, but also the result of the widening gaps between the Arabs and most of their neighbours in the most important manifestations of power.

This situation is an incentive for the most important Arab countries to come together because in any serious strategic assessment this will enhance their collective bargaining power and strengthen their posture at a time when the region’s immediate future is being reformed with major consequences for all of them.

The second of these factors is that there remains a single understanding of Arabness as a form of cultural identity. This is interesting, for the successive failures of Arab nationalism since the mid-1960s could have led to the emergence of different and opposing understandings of what Arab identity means and comprises.

The fact that this has not happened during a half century in which the Arab world doubled in population means that there are now over 400 million people, the vast majority of whom consider themselves to be Arabs according to more or less the same political and cultural frameworks. This is a solid bedrock upon which political projects that have learnt from the experiences of past decades could be built.

Whether the Arab societies will prove over the coming decade or so that they indeed form a single political world or whether they will move irrevocably towards different futures, their neighbours will not wait for them. There are now several competing political projects aiming to shape the future of the region, as the next article in this series will discuss.

 

The writer is the author of Islamism: A History of Political Islam (2017) and Egypt on the Brink (2010).

* A version of this article appears in print in the 23 January, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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