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In Failure, a Year of Arab Achievement

(Daily Star-Lebanon/International Herald Tribune) Michael Young - For the past half-century, the Arab nationalist state has failed to reinvent itself as something open, desirable, legitimate. But in its suffocating, mediocre incarnations, the nationalist state has also displayed uncommon durability, outlasting the dead ideology underpinning it. The Iraqi Constitution sent shockwaves through Arab capitals. In the document, religious and ethnic identities were affirmed over sacrosanct Arabism. Not surprisingly, the avatars of that rejection were Shiites and Kurds, two communities that Arab nationalism, always primarily a Sunni phenomenon, has historically disregarded. Among the paramount victims of secular Arab nationalism's poverty this year has been the Palestinian national movement. Events have confirmed that the movement Arafat built up is today no more than a phantom - a wilted edifice of corruption, waste, factionalism, and violence. Its cheerleaders will not grasp that much of the Palestinian malady is self-inflicted; that the secular leadership has offered no credible model of governance to resist the onslaught of the Islamists. Gone is the democratic momentum that we had anticipated in 2003. The Arab world - its regimes, Islamists, liberals - conspired against change from the outside, mendaciously labeling that fight one of self-determination; but what they really undermined was change from the inside. There is little light at the end of the Arab tunnel today.
2005-12-30 00:00:00
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