Douglas Alexander Arab Spring speech in full
Read Douglas Alexander's speech on the Arab Spring in full on politics.co.uk.
It’s a pleasure to be speaking to you here at RUSI today.
RUSI’s up to the minute analysis of the latest developments in the Arab Spring has demonstrated both the great expertise housed here and an ability to apply that expertise to a time of unprecedented change.
The institute’s work around the ongoing campaign in Libya, including the recent interim campaign report, show an appetite for dealing with the very latest issues and tackling the most difficult questions, that is a credit to everyone who works here.
I have been invited to give an Autumn perspective on the Arab Spring, to ask, 260 days since the fall of Ben-Ali in Tunisia, how it is unfolding and what Britain is getting right or getting wrong?
I wouldn’t be the first to quote Mao’s foreign minister, Zhou Enlai, who said, two centuries after the event, that it was “too early to say” what the consequences of the French Revolution would be.
Today, Harvard professor Joseph Nye talks of a world shaped by the shifting distribution of power from West to East and the growing dispersal of power from state to citizens.
And it is in that latter context that I want to talk today about the Arab Spring.
My argument this afternoon is that the long term repercussions of the Arab Spring are only beginning to be felt and my concern is that despite getting the short term decisions generally right, we haven’t yet begun to really address the long term opportunities and threats.
THE ARAB SPRING
Fareed Zakaria argued in a lecture earlier this year that there were three drivers of the change we have witnessed.
Firstly, a youthful demographic spike – something associated with revolutions for hundreds of years.
Secondly, a growing realisation throughout the Arab world that the West was ambivalent about the old rulers and wouldn’t necessarily prop them up in the face of popular discontent, derived from sources as diverse as the Wikileaks cables to President Obama’s Cairo speech.
Thirdly, new technology removed the autocrats’ monopoly of information.
Satellite television gave people a sense of what was happening in their world that for years the state controlled broadcasters had failed to show. Online reporting allowed official histories to be challenged. And social networking allowed protesters to see they were not isolated individuals, but powerful majorities.
But if this was a revolution partly driven by technology we must remember what President Obama’s Head of the National Institute of Health, Francis Collins, has called “the first law of technology”: that “a technological advance of a major sort almost always is overestimated in the short run for its consequences — and underestimated in the long run.”
If you look at the whole region of North Africa and the Middle East, I believe that that maxim applies to the political change we have seen since the start of this year.
WHAT HASN’T CHANGED
So while there has been change, the short term can be exaggerated.
In Tunisia, earlier this year, I was impressed by the progress that had been made since the fall of Ben-Ali and I think many hope that small innovative Arab country has the most straightforward path to a better future.
But elsewhere, the list of issues to worry about is a long one.
In Egypt, Mubarak is gone but his replacements in the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces do not appear to have given up on all the tools, like Emergency Decrees, that he used.
Having just returned from Pakistan, I fear for a situation where a powerful military seeks to protect its economic and political role even after the transition to democracy.
And the killing of 24 Coptic Christians in Cairo must be a cause for extreme concern amongst all the new Egypt’s friends, both because of what it says about religious tensions in Egypt and about the interim regime.
And beyond this immediate outbreak of violence, the Egyptian economy shrank by 4.2 per cent in the first quarter of this year compared to a year before. Unemployment runs at around 12 per cent and consumer prices are expected to increase by 13 per cent this year.
In Libya, Labour supported the action to enforce UN Resolutions 1970 and 1973.
There is no doubt that the Libyan campaign took place under the long shadow cast by the decision to authorise military action in Iraq in 2003.
The resulting loss of life and trust from that conflict means that across the country there is real and enduring scepticism about military intervention.
But the decision to protect civilians from certain slaughter was, I believe, the right one and Operation Ellamy has been conducted with characteristic professionalism by our forces. They have our abiding admiration and gratitude.
Fighting is ongoing around Sirte as we speak, and we hope that the pro-Gaddafi forces can be forced to surrender with the minimum of bloodshed.
But even after Sirte is taken, stability will be hard won for a post conflict Libya – the country is awash with weapons and shabab fighters and only 43,000 of 6.5 million Libyans are employed in the oil and gas industry that makes up more than two thirds of the Libyan economy.
In Bahrain last week, in a shocking and reprehensible judgement, a Special Tribunal sentenced a group of medics for treating patients deemed to be part of the protests.
Though there has now been some welcome movement on the sentences of the medics, these actions reinforce the extent to which legitimate grievances are not being met with necessary reform.
In Yemen, the ongoing crisis of leadership risks exacerbating both the humanitarian and security problems that bedevil that country.
In Israel and Palestine, peace alas has seemed to move further away in recent months.
Rocket attacks continued over the summer and Prime Minister Netanyahu’s poll ratings went up when he rejected President Obama’s attempts to restart the peace process.
In Saudi Arabia, a woman being sentenced to ten lashes for driving a car shocked even those who have raised lack of human rights in the Kingdom for some time, and for once prompted a response from King Abdullah.
In Iran, many of those who rose up as part of the 2009 protests are still incarcerated, the E3+3 process has made little progress and only a few weeks ago President Ahmadinejad was pushing conspiracy theories about 9/11.
And in Syria, President Assad’s crackdown has included the killing of approximately 2,000 civilians and the detention and torture of thousands more.
Despite diplomatic and economic sanctions from the United States and the European Union, Assad seems no closer to listening to calls to step down from across the international community.
OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM
So the protests, the economic chaos, the concerns about Al Qaeda taking advantage of instability and the brutal repression of civilians – all of these are still present and may be so for many months yet, even years in some Arab countries.
But my argument is not “plus ça change for the Middle East”.
Rather, it is to identify what changes have happened whose long term consequences we must not underestimate.
The big change, is, I believe, based around the insight that the brittle stability of the last thirty years in the Middle East and North Africa was driven by a politics of pessimism.
Pessimism from each citizen that thought their individual complaints would always be crushed by over mighty autocrats.
Pessimism from their rulers who trusted oil over the ingenuity of their citizens when it came to building more prosperous economies.
Pessimism from the West that chose the devil we knew for fear of something worse.
And pessimism at the heart of the extremists’ offer that said the only possible response was one of self-annihilation and murder.
With the biggest youth bulge in recorded history – 65 per cent of the population under thirty – the next decade of the Middle East is going to be driven by optimism.
Optimism, of course, can have different impacts in different circumstances.
It was optimism that put the West on the right side of history at the time of Tahrir Square and it required optimism to believe that the Libyan operation could be conducted without large scale civilian casualties or a rallying around Gaddafi.
But it was equally optimism amongst the pro-Gaddafi forces – that they could push back the rebels or that NATO would lose interest – that is keeping them fighting for so long.
And we do not know what will happen if the optimism surrounding the Palestinian demand for statehood is not turned into meaningful progress towards a two state solution on the ground.
But we can surely say that a geopolitics of the Middle East driven by optimistic, aspirational populaces rather than pessimistic, sedentary autocrats will have a very different dynamic – yes, with greater potential but also with greater risks.
IN SEARCH OF LEADERS
The second change I would highlight today is a new dynamic in how states relate to each other within the region.
When Turkey is taking quite strong steps in seeking to prevent violence in Syria, when the Arab League is calling for No Fly Zones over an Arab country, when countries like Qatar are taking an ever more activist role…
… the era of “zero problems” diplomacy in the region appears to be over.
Despite not being an Arab country, Turkey clearly now seeks a greater leadership role in this new regional environment.
Egypt has traditionally, as the largest Arab country, sought such a role in the past and is likely to do so again.
But wealthy Gulf States, whose capital investment is sorely needed in a post-Ben Ali Tunisia, a post-Mubarak Egypt and a post-Gaddafi Libya, may want to continue to play the important regional political role that they have played in relation to Libya and Bahrain.
Not all of these countries always share all of our values.
We disagree regularly over the language used about Israel and about human rights.
But particularly regarding the two non-Arab countries seeking leadership in the Arab world, we should be clear about the difference between disagreement and danger.
Iran has been eclipsed in the last six months by a resurgent Turkey.
And while we should not be uncritical friends of Turkey, we should be clear that there is no equivalence between a democratic NATO ally and a country that supports attacks on our forces and defies the world over its nuclear programme.
In fact, when Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Turkey – and we hope – Egypt are all democracies, albeit of different levels of fragility, the Iranian 1979 revolution looks far more like an aberration within the Muslim world than a pioneer.
BRITAIN’S APPROACH
What then does this autumn perspective mean for Britain’s approach?
The bipartisan House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee has characterised the Government’s foreign policy as being based on “its declared wish to build strengthened bilateral relationships with emerging powers outside the traditional Euro-Atlantic area, and the increased emphasis it was giving to commercial interests in the UK’s foreign relations.”
I was sceptical that such an approach would be sufficient before the Arab Spring – now it looks less and less relevant to the challenges we face.
For my part, I think there are three aspects to the response we need.
Firstly, while other EU members will be understandably focussed on the crisis in the eurozone, it must fall to Britain to be constantly raising the future of North Africa in Brussels.
More radical moves to open European markets to Egypt, Tunisia and a free Libya would benefit European consumers, cement new friendships and help ensure that political optimism isn’t met with economic disappointment over the medium term.
Secondly, we need to address the multilateral system to the challenges facing the region. For Europe, it means finding a way to work more effectively with a pre-accession Turkey on diplomatic issues, like Syria, where we have a common cause.
It also means working to strengthen and build formal links with the multilateral institutions existing within the region, such as the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Arab League.
And it means using multilateral tools that can promote peace, which is why Labour has said the Government should be willing to support the Palestinian call for statehood at the United Nations as part of continuing steps to achieve a comprehensive two state solution.
Third and finally, we must address our diplomacy not just to states, but to the peoples of the Arab World at their moment of optimism.
BBC Arabic online audiences grew by 300% during the height of the protests in Egypt to 1.6 million.
The World Service Trust is working to support Tunisian TV in the transition to being public service broadcasters, rather than just broadcasting the regime views.
Do these services have an effect? If they didn’t, why would BBC Persian television has been subject to increasing and aggressive jamming from within Iran.
The channel has suffered deliberate attempts to interfere with its signal intermittently since its launch in 2009.
The interference intensified on the evening Saturday 17 September just as the channel had begun broadcasting a documentary about Iran’s Supreme Leader.
The continued attempts of the regime to put pressure on the service show how much they worry about outside broadcasts – and should redouble our support for the work the World Service does.
And – going back to my starting point – that public diplomacy needs to develop for a world of technological change.
In my view, that means Britain's foreign policy needs to be clear that promoting unrestricted access to the internet is in our national interest and promotes our national values.
We need to look at the export licensing of technologies that filter the internet, support online civil society in countries that continue to restrict internet access and work with EU partners in providing online journalists the arenas where they can post free from censorship by their national governments.
CONCLUSION
In the short run, the West got the major judgements right – choosing to side with protestors in Cairo and Tunis, choosing to protect civilians in Benghazi and choosing to sanction the regime in Damascus.
But short run change could never be as sweeping as the rhetoric that accompanied the first days of the Arab Spring.
For the long run challenges, we urgently need to up our game.
But it is those long run challenges that will define the foreign policy challenges of the next decade:
* How we ensure that popular optimism is met with prosperity and not dangerous disappointment?
* How can we use the moment of exceptional technological change to promote the values we, as a country, believe in?
* How we can help support the chances of peace between peoples, rather than only brittle truces between states?
* How we can stop Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb from using the instability to its advantage – not withstanding the body blow to its raison d’être that has been dealt by the Arab Spring?
This autumn is not too late to start to address these bigger, long term questions – by next autumn it might be.
