Weather is tough to predict in Spring and Arab Springs are perhaps not much different. But longer term, like climate, may be a different beast.
Some factors to consider -
Arab Oil as a vital resource is winding down, except possibly for Asia. New oil technologies and increasing efficiencies are changing that dynamic. The Arab world begins to matter less to everyone else.
The possibility that oil will bring in less revenue. With decreased oil what will be the basis of any future economies? What will be the result of these changes?
The sizable wealth gap between the very wealthy few and the many poor, some of whom are well enough educated but under- or unemployed,
The battle between secular and religious elements and within religious elements between different factions. (And even within factions.)
Currrent Arab-on-the-street is a bit like the mythic Hebrews having been freed from Egyptian slavery: not quite ready to be freed and all too willing to bow to whatever idol might offer a quicker fix from a period of hard work harder times. 40 years, maybe not, but how long does it take? Pretty much every Arab country has had power vested in a few who controlled with heavy use of state power and selectively doling out oil-fueled largesse to reward the loyal.
My preliminary predicition - a messy decade but the strongmen will lose out over time and real democratic institutions will arise whose nature will be the Islamic equal to some of our Southern States desires in which religion and enforcement of those “values” plays a major role even as secular values increase in strength. The lack of any true economic driver and the possible effect of Climate Change seem to be the bigger risks to me.
I’m afraid you may be premature in dismissing Arab Oil. The North Dakota fields are low grade and won’t last long. There’s going to be a nasty economic collapse up yonder when that bubble bursts.
If oil income is going for a steep decline some of these countries are going to suffer really bad. To the extend that they’ll be unable to feed and provide clean water for their own population. Yemen is already almost there. But in general it’ll be for the better. No country, with the possible exception of Norway, is improved by having a landfall of cheap resources.
The Arab world is one of the fastest aging regions of the world. Demographic changes are going to be a stabilizing effect.
The steep decline in oil income will cause a lot of suffering and yet these countries will be better off? Isn’t that a contradiction ?
In any event
a) I doubt that the steep decline in oil income is going to happen any time in the next 20 years
b) the whole idea of the “resource curse” is grossly exaggerated. Most countries are better off with oil though some make much better use of it than others. For example how would Saudi Arabia be better off without oil? It would probably look a lot like Yemen: much poorer, much worse social indicators , a much less educated population.
I am pretty sure the Arab world isn’t one of the fastest aging regions in the world. On the contrary these countries have high birth rates generally higher than the world average. You may be thinking of Iran which has had one of the most dramatic declines in fertility in world history.
This is typical wishful thinking of the type that Thomas Friedman writes every week in the New York Times.It just seems so…well. …easy, so obvious, so much better that way . After all, everybody wants to live in a western democratic society, right? That’s the mindset of an ivory-tower professor, who is totally divorced from the reality of life among the poor people who he’s trying to help..
It’s a nice dream, but it has no basis in reality.
As an analogy:
That kind of wishful thinking is like the old anti-drug campaign in America in the 1980’s.Nancy Reagan spoke wearing a $5000 dollar evening gown at formal fund-raising dinners, where everybody agreed that the problems of drug dealing in the ghetto were easy to solve with the slogan “just say No.” It just seems so…well…easy, so obvious. Everybody wants to live in a drug-free society, right? That’s the mindset of an ivory-tower politician, who is totally divorced from the reality of life among the poor who he is trying to help.
To expand on the resource curse I think countries with lots of resources can be divided into three sorts:
Countries with good governments which make good use of the resources. E.g. Norway. However these countries would be rich anyway, the resources just make them somewhat richer.
Countries with somewhat effective governments. They may be authoritarian and corrupt but they still use a lot of the oil money to create infrastructure and welfare schemes. Saudi Arabia is a good example and no one who knows anything about the country can argue that the oil money hasn’t created a vast transformation of the country which has benefited the average person with better health, education and infrastructure. Again without oil, Saudi Arabia would look like Yemen.
At the same time these governments don’t have the ability to create self-sustaining modern economies so they are vulnerable to the decline of commodity income. As a practical matter though that day is fairly far off at least for Saudi Arabia.
Countries with completely kleptokratic and ineffective governments. Nigeria would be a good example. Almost none of the vast oil wealth benefits the people. However Nigeria would probably not be worse off without the oil. It’s not as if there is any shortage of dirt-poor and horrendously governed countries in sub-Saharan Africa without oil.
Of the three types I would say oil benefits the second group the most because they would have little going for them without oil. The first group would be rich anyway because they have modern societies and good governments. The third group just the waste the oil and come closest to the resource curse.
Oh and incidentally I think desert solar has some serious long-term potential for the Arab world and North Africa in particular. It will take a very long time but that’s OK because the oil isn’t going to run out any time soon. It’s going to take a lot of investment but some of the oil money can pay for that. In 30-40 years I could see the Arab world transitioning from oil to desert solar. It won’t be as lucrative as oil but it could save their economies from economic collapse.
It’ll create a lot of suffering (to the extend that they have become dependent on the oil-income) during the transformation phase but they’ll be better off in the long run. I just don’t believe becoming rich off resources flowing out of the ground makes for a well-balanced and healthy nation. I’m sure my protestant background is showing.
Iran has actually already passed through some of the transformation since the sanctions have forced them to diversify their economy. Good for them.
I wouldn’t put my money or it just yet, but I think there is a small but not insignificant chance that the change will be a lot more sudden than most people expect. That some of the electric car initiative that are being experimented with now will result in a very disruptive and sudden change.
I can see that if you use the money for education then it can do some good. It just doesn’t seem to be what the Saudis have done. The whole nation seems to be run by an army of South East Asian slave workers and European specialists. All the expats I’ve talked to have pretty much been unanimous in describing the Saudis as lazy, incompetent and addicted to entitlements.
Birth rates in the Middle East (incl. Iran) have been declining faster than almost anywhere else. Many countries are below replacement level, although it remains to be seen if the region as a whole will be.
A few of the smaller countries like Lebanon are below the replacement rate, but most of the big countries are well above it as is the region as a whole. And demographics have a strong momentum so the actual populations are growing quite fast. After sub-Saharan Africa, the Arab world is probably the fastest growing region in the world. These countries should be much more worried about a surplus of young men without jobs than of older people.
Last I looked Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon (as well as Iran and Turkey) were below or just around the replacement level. But in any case current growth and an aging population are not mutually exclusive. The near future will be characterised by an overabundance of youngesters, a little further out it may well be the opposite. And as you said, demographics have a strong momentum, so the birth rate decline may well continue some way into the future. Although it is unlikely that it’ll repeat the up to 60% declined which it did over the last three decades. Here’s a paper: Fertility Decline in the Muslim World: A Veritable Sea-Change, Still Curiously Unnoticed (PDF)
Of the top ten countries in the Arab world by population, Morocco and Tunisia have fertility at or below replacement levels but the other 8 have fertility above replacement level, in some cases well above. As a whole population is growing at 2.4% p.a. which would be the second-highest in the world after sub-Saharan Africa. With those kind of numbers I doubt the region is aging much if at all in the medium term. It is definitely not one of the fastest-aging regions in the world. In that respect it is behind Europe, East Asia, North America, Latin America and probably South Asia as well.
The Saudis seem to have no long term plan (for when the oil runs out). I once saw a documentary where the Saudi government funded wheat farming…using water obtained by desalinization of seawater! How they could ever think that this made sense is beyond me. In the end, what does the Arabian peninsula have (besides oil and sand)?
Modern nations are not built with such stuff.
The Saudis are already talking about receiving international aid from the West. How’s that for a long term plan? Although wheat farming (or some kind of farming) doesn’t seem such a bad idea to me. They can use solar panels for the energy needed to desalinate the water, and the energy required to desalinate is rapidly declining and at the same time the price of solar panels decreasing steeply. Certainly it seems to me a much better plan than the buying up of large swats of farming land in Africa. And Israel is said to have made a desert green, so why not the Saudis? I doubt they’re going to pull it off though.
Re “the resource curse” - to the degree that ample natural resources result in not developing a country’s intellectual resources it is a curse. A country with ample resources does not need a highly educated clever creative population building industries and competing with ideas; its leaders see those people as threats to their control. Even when leadership eventually invests in educational infrastructure it is behind the game in having jobs for them and now has that under and unemployed educated and thinking populus. Which is destabilizing for any autocratic regieme.
I am not btw predicting a rapid steep decline in oil revenue. A period during which the rest of the world does not get as panicked by the prospect of periods of decreased production? Yes. A gradual decrease in revenue? Yes.
chappachula, so what does your less “wishful thinking” analysis predict?
Chaos.
With bread lines, and rioting mobs, fueled by hunger more than politics.
But hopefully the army will strongarm the country back to where it was under Mubarek: a dictatorship. But a dictatorship which provides for a stable society where most of the people have enough bread to eat (and many of them can afford to buy meat.)
It will take far longer than a decade. Maybe a century, maybe more,before stable democracy can begin to develop in Egypt. It requires totally new ways of thinking.
Turkey has been trying to teach new ways of thinking for a hundred years so far. They completely changed their language in an attempt to remove the old concepts, but they have not yet managed to instill the new concepts which Westerners speak of so easily in their own languages.