Middle East: Recent Developments

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Friday 13th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Howell, is already basking in the praise of other noble Lords, but I, too, thank him for his excellent introduction. Even though I sit on the other side of the House from him, I think his contributions are universally outstanding —except when I disagree with them, which is the case today. In my contribution to the debate I shall make comments on the role of social media and communications technologies in the Arab spring.

The changes brought together under the term “Arab spring”, as the Minister said, are some of the most momentous of the past 20 years. In common with other great transformations of world history, they were essentially unpredicted, even by people who had spent their lives studying the Middle East. This was also true of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, of the rise of the internet and of the current global economic crisis. Many of the biggest transformations are not understood before they happen. They happen suddenly and their consequences are for that reason difficult to puzzle through. Who would have thought that some of the most despotic and conservative regimes in the world, those in the Middle East, could be challenged effectively almost overnight? I think that the answer is no one, but it has happened.

The term “Arab spring” seems at first sight not a happy one. After all, the term does not come from 1989, as many people seem to think; it comes from the Prague spring of 1968. Alexander Dubcek, who wanted to make reforms within the framework of communism, was removed from power by force and 150,000 Soviet troops occupied the country. It took 20 years before democracy came to what was then Czechoslovakia. Checking back over that period, I find it quite interesting how the headlines of the time duplicated what is being said today; for example, there was a BBC report headed,

“Russia brings winter to ‘Prague Spring’”.

One of the big differences between the Prague and Arab springs is the visible impact of internet technologies in the latter case. How important were these technologies and can we generalise about their transformational impact on democracy elsewhere? We know that the social media are in widespread use throughout the Middle East today. They were implicated at the point of origin of the Arab spring in Tunisia, through Libya, Egypt, Syria, Bahrain and, more latterly, further south in Sudan.

There was a lot of breathless discussion of all this in the newspapers to begin with, but, more latterly, it has become a fashion among commentators to question the influence of the social media. After all, internet talk, Twitter et cetera might seem very insubstantial when the tanks roll in, just as were the flowers that the Prague activists offered to the Russian soldiers. I want to argue that this is wrong and that the influence of the social media is deeply structural and almost certainly irreversible, not only in the Middle East but in other authoritarian states throughout the world.

There are two main reasons that I would offer for this. The first is the impact of voice. Facebook and Twitter have created what you could call a virtual civil society in countries which possess very few civil society institutions. A significant aspect of this is that groups which were previously excluded, such as young people, women and minorities—certainly in the beginning, have had an enormous impact. This is a very different group from the power system in those countries and it marks something new in terms of being a wedge for continuing change.

The second reason is the influence of cosmopolitan attitudes. In the era of the internet, it is impossible to close off the diversity of the outside world. This is true of all of us throughout the world today. For instance, you can download an interview with a Saudi hip-hop artist describing his work and arguing that it is consistent with his Arab identity. There is no way back from the inherent cosmopolitanism of a globalising, communication-driven society.

I conclude with three consequent observations. First, the Prague spring, in retrospect, was actually one of the conditions of 1989. It helped stimulate the development of Solidarity in Poland, similar movements in Hungary and, as I know intimately since I used to go there at the time, counter-movements in perhaps the most repressive state in eastern Europe, East Germany. There was a causal connection, therefore, between the Prague spring, even though it was repressed, and the democratisation which occurred later. It is not surprising in the light of this that the situation in the Middle East is currently so inchoate, so ambiguous and so fraught. There is no known example in history—at least to me—of a country which has moved from being an authoritarian state to becoming a reasonably fully fledged democratic one in a very short period. This is bound to be, therefore, a fairly lengthy process, full of conflict.

Secondly, internet technologies are generally liberalising but can also promote extremism. Closed groups of believers who concentrate on outlandish views of one kind or another are created and intensified. In other words, what happens on the internet is that extremist groups only talk to one another; they create closed circles; and these closed circles around the edges are closely linked to the possibility of violence. The internet has a double effect in this respect, which has consequences for the problem of schism across the Middle East and the sufferings of minorities, which have been mentioned by previous speakers.

Thirdly and finally, one of the paradoxes of new communication technologies is that while they promote democratisation in authoritarian states, they appear to undermine democracy in their heartland countries in the West or at least contribute to that process. In other words, at the same time as people are suffering so much to create democracy, in democratic countries there is massive and, surely again, structural disillusionment with democracy and political leaders. The origins of these things could be the same. Almost everywhere, political leaders are held in low standing and populist parties have arisen. The interest of this, as was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Empey, is that we should not assume that what unfolds in the Middle East is simply a process of catch-up with the West. We have all to do some pretty fundamental rethinking of how we can stabilise and accentuate democratic mechanisms in a society which has been transformed by global mass communications. I therefore support previous speakers who have said there may be various lines of evolution to democratic participation. We can perhaps learn as much from other parts of world as they can learn from us.