With little media notice and marginal scholarly interest, a powerful and potentially transformative movement is taking shape across the Middle East. The movement cuts across religious, ethnic and gender lines. It threatens ruling elites. It poses new challenges to the social order. It makes new and urgent demands of civil society. It feeds and animates other movements. And it will reshape the region as we know it, far more than the US invasion of Iraq.
It’s the most important movement in the Middle East, and it doesn’t even have a name, a political infrastructure, or militant supporters. Let’s call it “the economic dignity movement” — EDM (it certainly deserves an acronym given its tens of millions of adherents). I saw this movement grew over the past year, as I traveled to twelve Middle East countries. Mingling with ordinary Arabs and Iranians, the talk turned inevitably to economics, to jobs, to prices, to economic dignity lost. From Algiers to Aden, I heard the familiar EDM mantra: A desire for more and better jobs, wages that correspond to rising prices, a fair economic playing field, an end to government corruption, and an unsettling sense of economic uncertainty amid a desire for basic middle class prosperity. These conversations open both a window into the concerns of the average citizen and a reality check for Western leaders wringing their hands about policy options for the Middle East. While television images flash suicide bombers and angry, fist-pumping mobs, the vast, silent majority of Middle Easterners do not spend their days and nights hating America or lambasting the West. Rather, they spend far more of their time seeking the same things often associated with “the American dream”: Satisfying employment, good education, affordable housing and health care, and a bright future for their children.
Meanwhile, the region’s badly mismanaged economies have dramatically failed their people, turning their dreams into a nightmare. The 280 million people of the twenty-two Arab countries combined have a GDP less than that of Spain; some 25 percent of Arabs live below the poverty line; foreign direct investment rose across the developing world last year, except the Middle East; the region needs to create 100 million jobs by the year 2020 just to keep up with the youthful population, half of them under 21.
Any comprehensive policy initiative — from Brussels, Washington, or region-wide — must reach out to the vast majority of Middle Easterners yearning for basic middle class prosperity. They represent a silent majority, an overwhelming “swing vote”, and the most powerful hope for democracy. The transition to democracy is more feasible and sustainable when a country has a vibrant middle class, a healthy employment market, a dynamic and independent entrepreneurial community, and vigorous economic development. Witness South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Mexico, and Chile, which all moved toward greater democracy after developing their economies and building middle classes.
With youth unemployment currently standing at a startling 53 percent, the movement will only grow. How Arab governments and the West respond to this generation and this broader movement will determine the course of this troubled region.
Islamists across the region — both moderate and extremist — have stepped in. Many weave narratives of economic redemption in their calls for opposition. In Egypt, the relatively moderate Muslim Brotherhood — the grandfather of modern Islamist movements — have taken to leading protests against rising prices. Hamas wins praise in Palestinian territories for its network of social services. In Turkey and Morocco, Tunisia, and Kuwait, Islamists position themselves as untainted promoters of socioeconomic justice.
This is a familiar — and deceptive — pattern. In pre-revolution Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini promised Iranians their own personal share of the nation’s oil bounty and pledged to raise up the “dispossessed.” His speeches were laced with economic populism.
Today, Iranians are poorer, earning 1/4 of what they did before the revolution, while the ranks of the “dispossessed” have swollen. The Iran displays the limits of Islamist promises: Bashing a corrupt autocrat is easy; running a modern economy isn’t.
Amid this backdrop of economic failure and yearnings for economic dignity, Brussels, Washington and regional governments must reach out to the millions of Arabs seeking a better economic life. The promotion of Middle East development is an enterprise well worth the world’s time and resources. Massive numbers of unemployed youth with little hope for their future pose short-term dangers of instability and extremism. Region-wide population declines in the 1990s, however, mean that a heavy investment in new ideas, political capital, and funding will be, at most, a one generation affair. Thus far, the economic dignity movement has proven to be patient, albeit increasingly vocal. In response, talk of economic reform has become vogue in Arab capitals. The region, however, needs more than promises and platitudes. It has waited a long time for the fruits it justifiably deserves. This massive, silent majority with an overwhelming “swing vote” will not wait forever.
— Afshin Molavi is a fellow at the New America Foundation, a non-partisan think tank devoted to pragmatic solutions to global problems.
