A decade ago, in 2015, several “visions” emerged across the Arab region. They set 2030 as an initial target for attaining a set of aspirations inspired by the developmental paths other countries had forged before us. We were weary and enfeebled by the “Arab Spring”, with its attendant turmoil, civil strife, warfare and terrorism; and national revival projects had become imperative.
While Cairo and Riyadh were the first to establish a target date, other Arab countries that boarded the reform train at later dates naturally opted for more distant horizons into the 2030s and 2040s. Hopes and ambitions were high. Egypt, for example, launched an urban development plan that aimed for 2050.
It is hard to predict what the world will look like in 2030, let alone 2050. We can predict certain things, such as the growth of the human population, which currently stands at eight billion. We can make educated guesses about others, such as whether efforts to address global warming will succeed or continue failing to rise to the challenge. We will see the ways the fourth technological revolution – artificial intelligence – interacts with the third (digital) revolution and other technological advances to lead humankind to new stages of existence.
Perhaps much of what we know today will change completely. Science fiction novels and films have long been an endless fount of future fantasies that often defy our imagination, yet today some of the visions that seemed impossible decades ago are unfolding before our very eyes.
On the other hand, it is impossible to tell how human beings will behave in the future. Even if some of mankind’s imagined technologies have stepped out of the realm of fiction and into reality, human conflict and lethal rivalries have persisted. All our attempts to forecast the future have remained confined to material developments – both positive and negative – while the future of the human psyche, with all its capacities for good and evil, has remained an enigma. Pessimists – and they abound – will tell us we only need to look at the current state of the world, especially the Middle East, to grasp the seeming inevitability of misery, war and conflict. But there is a minority of optimists who see things differently.
Among such optimists are Kishore Mahbubani and Lawrence H Summers, who co-authored an article in Foreign Affairs entitled “The Fusion of Civilisations.” In a direct challenge to the “clash of civilisations” outlook that Samuel Huntington had popularised in the 1990s, Mahbubani and Summers argue that the world is so intertwined and intersecting that everyone shares the same goals and aspirations: a good education for their children, lucrative employment, a comfortable standard of living, and a productive life as a member of a stable and robust society.
Here in the Arab world, we have entered a new phase we can call the post-Arab Spring era. Amid the raging blazes that had swept the Arab region in the form of civil strife and terrorism, there emerged a forward-looking trend that saw modernisation and development not just as a way out of our current plight but also as the path to a promising future.
The so-called Arab Spring of 2011 was, in fact, an earthquake that shook the entire Arab region. It totally disrupted the balance of power, feeding the ambitions of regional and international powers, which variously seized and occupied territory, expanded illegal settlements, repeatedly violated the national sovereignty of Arab states, and fostered militias that manoeuvred themselves into states within states.
During the decade beginning in 2011, the Arab world was caught between three main currents: the proponents of total anarchy, the Islamists who rose to power and gave us IS and its “caliphate,” and the reformists. Led by Arab monarchies that had been spared the upheaval and pivotal Arab states such as Egypt, the reformist current was based on three pillars: the revival of the nation state, comprehensive development and modernisation across the entire territory of that state, and renewal of religious thought and discourse in line with modernity and the pursuit of progress.
The Middle East today is defined by two realities. First, the region is divided between reformists who seek peace and stability – both prerequisites for development – and the proponents of instability and conflict, whether driven by historical or religious factors, or by an interest in obstructing development. Secondly, there is an implicit and explicit rivalry between these two camps. The fifth Gaza war and other wars involving militias have made it clear that the central task in the Middle East now is to encourage states that seek to realise peace and stability by relying on themselves and to deny radical forces the chance to sabotage those efforts.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 24 April, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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