The Arab League threw a party last week and no one came. The reference here, of course, is to the summit meeting in the seaside capital of Tunisia that would have brought together leaders of the 22 Arab member states in a serious effort to respond to the Bush administration’s Greater Middle East Initiative, a blueprint for democratic reform in the region, and to relaunch a peace plan with the Zionist entity first broached at a similar conference in Beirut two years ago.

Ordinary Arab folk felt the credibility of their governments had been undermined, and conspiratorially minded Arabs predictably were quick to see the reach of the American imperium there.

What doomed the summit was the combination of two interrelated factors. First was the insult to Arabs in how Washington’s democracy plan had been released before any Arab leader was aware of its contents.

Arabs are not alone in their concerns. Europeans too believe that the United States is hectoring the Arab world and ignoring other initiatives, along the same lines, introduced by the European Union and the United Nations. Indicative of that posture is the statement issued in London in the middle of February by a Foreign Office spokeswoman. “We want to build on the UN proposals,” it said. “Much of any change will have to come from the region ... we do not want to impose things.” The EU approach, in other words, is for European governments to try, through trade agreements with the countries of the Middle East and North Africa to put teeth into democratic reform by linking trade and human rights.

The other factor contributing to the collapse of the summit was the unwillingness of Arab leaders to resurrect the peace overtures they had made to the Zionist entity two years ago, at a vociferous time in “the Arab street,” following the assassination of Sheikh Yassin, and a seeming US complicity in Israel’s sidelining of the quartet’s road map and its commitment to finish that infamous $2-billion, 265-mile concrete and electrified wall around a future, skeletal Palestine of its own creation.

It appears that the Tunisian hosts’ task had been, all along, to insure that any resolutions by the summit were not perceived as an attack on US plans for, or US policies, in the region. Since that was not going to happen, Tunisian authorities canceled the meeting.

If any of this points to anything, it points to how weak the Arab world has become, weak not because its lack of unity — you would hardly expect 22 states, with disparate cultures, political systems and standards of living, to walk in lockstep — but because of its inability or unwillingness to consider democratic reforms. And both Arab Human Development Reports, in 2002 and 2003, read, praised and forgotten all in one day, attest to that.

Over the last 500 years — since 1492, to be exact, when the last Arab civilizational stronghold fell in the Iberian Peninsula, and we took a nap from which we are yet to awaken — Western countries have become great, rich and powerful. America, as an example, was primitive and nearly empty as late as 1607, but today is home to the mightiest polity in history, so mighty that, by merely projecting its existence, it has changed the trajectories of other polities around the world.

How did they do it? By allowing writers to write, thinkers to think and intellectuals to pontificate, to their hearts’ content, without fear of retribution; and because, where their governments governed, these derived their authority to do so from a social contract between ruler and ruled, enjoined by law against interfering in the private lives and public debates of citizens — among them not only the do-gooders, go-getters and dreamers, but also the scofflaws, rebels and drifters, who are left alone to pursue their ambitions and articulate their self-definitions. All the pity that by canceling the Arab summit, the Tunisian authorities prevented these seminal issues from being aired publicly.

The collapse of the summit simply publicized our inability to meet the challenges of modernity in our times, and to address head on the burning issues that bedevil our beleaguered world.

And, yes, there is such a thing as bad publicity.

— 1 April 2004