After the Arab Spring: Outside Influences

The Arab Spring has thrown many things into relief since early 2011, but none more so than the increasing fragmentation of the Arab world. Where previously the shared characteristics of authoritarian systems allowed for ‘Arab states’ to be analysed almost as a single category, it is the differences between Arab states, societies and subregions that are proving critical, and are rightly now attracting more attention.

This means that external interest and prospective engagement in the developments and transitions taking place from the Mediterranean to the Gulf (Persian or Arab) will have to take these differences on-board, and in more detail than hitherto.

Not only are more actors involved – including more international and regional actors with an interest in energy supplies, trade and investment as well as regional security – but these actors are also inter-linked within and across the Arab world in ways unforeseen as recently as two or three years ago. The speed of events has also strained the ability of the international community, variously defined, to keep abreast with developments, engendering an inevitable time-lag of reaction to events rather than the emergence of wellthought- out policies or longer-term strategies.

Only in reaction to the emergence of a credible resistance movement in the east of Libya by the 19 spring of 2011 did the international community devise a plan of action and support for the uprising, legitimised through the UN Security Council, Arab League and then directed and managed by NATO. Although ultimately successful in securing the removal of the Gaddafi regime, the Libyan crisis underscored the reluctance of the traditional ‘coalitions of the willing’ (the US and individual European states) to intervene directly in the conflict on the ground as in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Citing the lessons learned from the previous decade, intervention this time was to be limited to protecting civilian lives from indiscriminate attack through airstrikes on regime targets, then in more openly providing air-support to the eastern rebels gathered under the Transitional National Council. It was the intensification of both targeted airstrikes and the accretion of western Libyan, as well as eastern, resistance groups that allowed the collective resistance movement to claim victory once they had overrun the bastion of the Gaddafi regime in Tripoli in August 2011.

The success claimed for the Libyan operation has come to haunt international attempts to devise a solution for Syria, where lives lost to violence escalated to an estimated 7,000 by early 2012 and nearly twice that six months on. The lack of consensus at the United Nations over the root causes of the conflict, and over the local and wider risks of a Libyan-style international mission, have also highlighted the difficulties of creating any kind of international template to react to domestic insurgencies of the variety and complexity seen across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region over the past year.

External actors, and many more of them than were active at the time of the Iraq crisis of 2003, have thus found themselves caught between short-term and longer-term priorities, and between tactics and strategies barely capable of capturing the increasing inter-relatedness of developments in the Levant and Gulf region in particular.

Where financial and technical rather than military assistance has been the response – as in the European Union’s enhanced neighbourhood policies towards the ‘revolutionary’ states of Tunisia and Egypt, and the ‘reforming’ states of Morocco and Jordan – the risk of outsiders being seen as trying to influence the course of events still unfolding has also provoked local and international concerns, as witnessed by Egyptian debates over whether to accept a $3.2 billion IMF loan in budgetary support for 2012.

Even the large-scale restructuring funds agreed at the G8 Deauville summit in May 2011 and supplemented at the G20 summit in Cannes in November 2011 have been slow to be disbursed, and have raised local expectations of new lines of assistance, when in reality, the $38 billion dollars pledged largely represented existing funds to be channelled through new or existing mechanisms. Identifying the best targets for this assistance, as well as engaging in lengthy assessments of each economy’s absorptive capacities, will take time in a region that remains both sceptical of US and European intentions and internally divided over how to realise its own needs and priorities.

Changing dynamics of external involvement

For the traditional assistance partners of the Arab world, the competition for influence, both local and international, has raised a new set of challenges. With most G8 and Western funding being subject to new forms of ‘pro-democracy’ conditionality, the evolving situation has now made it easier for external actors who are not driven by normative agendas to stake a claim to the region’s future.

Russia and China’s veto on the failed draft UN resolution condemning the use of violence against civilians in Syria in early February 2012 was based on an alternative set of international principles than those invoked by others under the UN’s ‘Responsibility to Protect’ criteria.

What publicly shapes the Chinese and Russian agenda is a belief that foreign interference in the domestic affairs of sovereign states is not admissible, even with the best of intentions. Less publicly, other strategic agendas apply, whether these relate to fears of opening the way to greater international scrutiny of Chinese and Russian spheres of influence elsewhere, or more directly to Russia’s access to the port facilities of Tartus in Syria, and regional energy supplies in the case of China.

Those with commercial or mercantile agendas, pursuing investments and contracts without strong conditionality, such as Turkey and the Gulf states in addition to China, also stand to gain from the rapidity with which they can identify and seize new opportunities across the Arab world. The advent of new international actors articulating an interest in the region, such as Brazil, India and South Africa, also increases the ability of both new and old political systems to explore new avenues for external support.

The risk is that the influx of new investments, energy and trade agreements will bolster otherwise fragile regimes, reluctant to respond positively to popular demands for reform (as in Algeria or the broader Gulf), or strengthen the ability of vested interests to mount a revival of the status quo ante (as in Tunisia or Egypt).

Exploring and exercising options that go beyond traditional security and economic relationships with the EU and US have also allowed interim governments such as Egypt’s to undermine the EU’s newly articulated criteria of ‘less for less and more for more’ as a measure of democratic transitions. When the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) has acted in less than democratic ways over the past year, the EU has not ventured to impose sanctions in the absence of US back-up or a credible alternative to urging the military authorities to move the political process on.

For the proponents of democracy and statebuilding, above all the US and EU, the renewed vigour of rejectionist arguments and the new international activism place them in a difficult position for two main reasons.

The first is that a decade on from the launch of the ‘global war on terror’, the ‘West’ has lost much of its local credibility as a collective champion of democracy promotion. In states such as Egypt, where cases of extraordinary rendition have been much commented on, and where President Mubarak played a critical role in support of the US’s strategic defence of Israel, the change in emphasis in US policy since early 2011 has neither been universally welcomed nor believed.

The second reason is that the West’s strategic priorities still remain, as was witnessed in Egypt, in the ambivalent, but still intact financial and technical support given by the US to the Egyptian military, despite growing local opposition to the SCAF. Across the EU, similar examples can be found, of France’s strategic support to President Ben Ali of Tunisia until very late in the day, or Italy and the UK in respect of the Gaddafi regime in Libya, which have been rapidly reconfigured to engage new local actors and local dynamics.

To the credit of Tunisians, Libyans and indeed Egyptians, many have demonstrated their ability to make distinctions between different types of external actor and agency and have drawn their own conclusions about who they will and will not engage with now and why. The appetite for learning from and communicating with the outside world is also strong among the younger generations who have mobilised and participated in change, but with the added distinction that they now challenge and contest attempts to impose terms for these relations from outside. At a time when Europe above all, but also the US, has less economic capacity to respond generously to demands and requests originating from within the region, this change in local attitudes is significant.

Speed of change

What this means for the outside world is that fortune will favour the flexible and light of foot over the next few years. The implications for the slow-moving machinery of international consensus-building have already been felt in the challenge of responding to the crisis in Syria, and the success of Libya – registered in hindsight, but not always felt or publicly expressed over the summer of 2011 – may be the exception that proves a larger rule. The fact that NATO, for example, has not been invoked by its members in the course of diplomatic efforts to curtail the violence in Syria demonstrates the limits to the use of external military power in situations where the full dynamics of the conflict are both contested and impossible to grasp fully from the outside.

Both international and locally driven attempts to establish legitimacy for concerted external action have met their match in Syria. This, rather than the Libyan example, is more likely to prove to be the test case for future regional conflicts, especially if, as is feared, the Syrian situation degenerates into a sectarian civil war or spills over into the neighbouring region.

For the US and Europe, new approaches to anticipating rather than following regional developments are clearly needed, if only to keep pace with the new range of external actors less hidebound by concerns over international legitimacy than the traditional ‘Western alliance’ continues to be.

The battle for the future of the Middle East is in many ways indicative of a wider set of readjustments to the nature of international order in a world of shifting balances of inter- and intra-regional power.

For the old global powerbrokers, led by the US, the inter-related challenges of the MENA region have also emerged at a time when public support for more robust international action is waning in both Europe, preoccupied by the Euro crisis; and the US, preoccupied with its domestic agenda.