Arab Revolt Holds Lessons For Europe

An illustration by Jon Kudelka. Source: The Australian




THE Arab awakening is an unfolding story that is barely two months old and will most likely continue unfolding for years to come. Yet it is beginning to have consequences, and not just for the dictators and their families and cronies being overthrown.

By Bill Emmott
From: The Times March 04, 2011 12:00AM
Courtesy Of "The Australian"

One potentially important consequence can be seen in last weekend's vote by the UN Security Council to impose sanctions on the Gaddafi regime in Libya, to freeze its assets and to refer Muammar Gaddafi to the International Criminal Court.

Welcome and appropriate though these moves are, they are little more than gestures, given that the murderous Gaddafis holed up in Tripoli are not in much of a position to be affected by them. The true significance of the resolution lies in the unity of the Security Council and, in particular, in China's support, albeit reluctant, for the measure.

In effect, China has just voted to refer Colonel Gaddafi to the ICC for having acted against his opponents in pretty much the same way as it did in 1989 when faced with the Tiananmen Square revolt.

Chinese troops then may have fired into the crowds from footbridges rather than helicopters or fighter aircraft, but there is little doubt Deng Xiaoping would have ordered the use of even greater force had it been necessary.

Today's China, much more than that of 1989, insists on the importance of multilateral institutions and agreements. Its government has laid down an apparent marker in the leading multilateral institution that it considers the use of murderous force in the suppression of an uprising to be a crime for which government leaders can and should be held accountable.

It will be important to remind China of this marker when next Tibetans or the Muslims of Xinjiang take to the streets.

Until then, or a new Tiananmen protest in Beijing, we cannot know how seriously to take it, but it could well represent a kind of coming of age: the point when China's increasing exposure around the world (there are a reported 30,000 Chinese workers in Libya) forces it also to take a more responsible international stance. Perhaps the time when it would respond to domestic dissent through a massacre has passed.

The second consequence, which affects the West and China equally, can be seen in the rise in the price of oil. Whether oil continues towards $US120 ($118) a barrel, or even to pass its 2008 peak of $US150, will depend on whether Libya's unrest turns into civil war, and more on whether unrest spreads to Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf oil producers.

The bet, surely, should now be that sooner or later it will. The same conditions of fast population growth, high youth unemployment, readier access to information, income inequalities and inflexible, often gerontocratic regimes apply there in spades.

So, although this will not inevitably result in interrupted oil supplies or a big price shock, governments should be planning now for such a possibility.

A sharp oil price rise would be like a big tax on all oil consumers, and would bring us clearly into double-dip recession territory.

The third consequence of events in Egypt, Tunisia and now Libya is one that casts us far into the future. It is the consequence for the EU of the likely spread of a democratic revolution across a swath of north Africa and the Middle East. We should be patient in assessing how far that revolution will go, just as we were in the first months after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. But, like then, it will pay to plan ahead.

The evolution of the EU has consisted of a series of ideas that seemed far-fetched when they were first mooted, but that later came to seem inevitable.

The next such idea is likely to be the expansion of the EU to encompass the southern coast of the Mediterranean. Such a body, born, let's say, in 2030 or 2040, could even have a familiar acronym - EMU, this time applied to something Britons should feel rather keener to embrace: European and Mediterranean Union.

Given that France, Germany and several other EU countries cannot even accept the idea of membership for Turkey, which is already a democracy, this will certainly seem far-fetched, but think back to the early 1990s.

It quickly became clear that western Europe had a huge interest in fostering the stability, friendliness and economic development of its neighbouring former Soviet satellites, which it did in a long, slow process that led to full EU membership for 10 of them well over a decade later.

The historic opportunity that today's Arab awakening offers to Europe will become clearer in the next months and years, for good and ill. The US is the Western country with the tricky military issues in the region, and which will be held responsible for what does, or doesn't, happen in Palestine.

Europe, as after 1989, mainly has economic and cultural links to offer, or to contend with, given our colonial pasts. A formula needs to be found to offer membership of "EMU" as an incentive for democratic and economic reform, just as for central Europe after 1989. By allowing the EU to become even more of a multi-system entity than it is today, such a move could help to bury the full federalist agenda once and for all.

Mostly, however, it would simply be the right thing to do. Mediterranean, in its Latin root, means "middle of the Earth", after all, not some kind of southern frontier. It is part of Europe's neighbourhood.

The Times