Pro-democracy protestors in Tahrir Square, 4th March. The west must act now to ensure their hopes are not crushed
While Yemen and Syria remain in turmoil, the white heat of violent revolution in north Africa has started to cool. There, the optimism and hope of the Arab Spring has given way to trepidation about what comes next. There is still unrest in Tunisia, and no date set for elections. Egypt is under military rule, its constitution suspended. Libya is locked in civil war.
If and when elections do happen in north Africa, few can predict the results. Some fear, with good reason, that the mass protests will be followed by a political vacuum that hardline Islamist groups could fill. This is why the consequences of the Arab Spring matter not only to the people of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, but to the whole of the international community, and to European nations in particular.
Of course, it is not for the US, Britain or anyone else to choose the governments of north African countries. However, it would be foolish to ignore this unprecedented opportunity to encourage the creation of stable, liberal, democratic states with free elections, less corruption and more respect for civil liberties. How best can we do this?
Britain can no longer protect her global interests with military muscle. The defence review has ended any claim we still had to being a military power. Trainee fighter pilots have been dismissed, the Royal Marines downsized, the Ark Royal decommissioned. Seventy years ago the Royal Navy operated almost 900 ships; now, its surface fighting fleet consists of a solitary aircraft carrier, seven destroyers, and 15 frigates. The decade-long operation in Afghanistan shows that even large-scale ground operations do not guarantee swift or decisive outcomes. At a cost of over £11bn since 2001, it is a strategy we cannot afford. So we must be more creative.
This involves making better use of other incentives, such as overseas aid. The size of Britain’s aid budget has been criticised recently: many have asked why, at a time of domestic cuts, the government has promised to raise aid spending to 0.7 per cent of GDP by 2013. However, this overlooks the important role that aid can play not just in saving lives, encouraging development and boosting prosperity, but also in protecting British interests. Rather than cutting overseas aid, we need to ensure we use it in a more efficient, targeted and self-interested way. Aid, shrewdly deployed, can be both compassionate and in our national interest.
As Tony Blair recently pointed out, the Marshall Plan, in which the US gave unprecedented financial support to European countries after the second world war, offers a valuable example of how to strike this balance. The 18 European recipient countries saw their economies grow by up to a quarter between 1948 and 1952: the fastest period of growth in European history. Industrial production grew by a third, and food production soared, soon reaching pre-war levels.
But America benefited too. European countries rebuilt their shattered infrastructures with the huge sums loaned to them, buying many of the necessary raw materials from the US. In this way, the programme both helped rebuild Europe and provided a growing market for US exporters. As relative prosperity returned, rationing and other austerity measures were scrapped. The poverty and starvation that had allowed communism to get a foothold in western Europe soon disappeared, and communism’s appeal, for the most part, vanished with it.
What we need now is a 21st-century version of the Marshall Plan for north Africa. Of course, the circumstances are different from those in postwar Europe. Yet there are parallels between the desire to prevent the spread of communism in Europe then and the importance of promoting political stability and democracy in north Africa now. While the Arab world may not have just been through six years of war, many Arab nations have suffered the impoverishment delivered by 30 years of oppressive dictatorship.
At the most recent G8 summit in Deauville, Britain committed to a four year, £110m aid programme for north Africa. This forms part of a £12.2bn international package of economic aid for the countries that have embraced the cause of democratic reform in the Arab uprisings. This is a step in the right direction, but fails to match the Marshall effort in scale or ambition. We must go further. The total value of economic aid distributed under the Marshall Plan was $13bn, around $125bn (or £76bn) in today’s prices.
What is more, while Britain is keeping its promises on aid, other G8 countries—most notably Germany and Italy—are already failing to hit their targets from the 2005 summit in Gleneagles. This could prove to be a costly failure. While Arab leaders have been toppled or weakened, the economic problems that helped spark the Arab Spring have not gone away. Take Egypt, for example: its economy is expected to shrink by 3 per cent this year, food prices are rising by 20 per cent a year and one person in eight is unemployed. Among young Arab males the proportion is much higher—around 35 per cent in Yemen, for example. Those who can look for opportunities elsewhere are doing just that; since December an estimated 40,000 immigrants have come to Europe from north Africa. Without assistance and encouragement from the international community, countries like Tunisia and Egypt have the potential to slip into chaos, disorder and poverty: conditions in which extremism thrives. For all these reasons, ensuring the future stability of north Africa should be the highest priority for Britain.
We should be ambitious about what could be achieved in a liberal, democratic Arab world. We have a lazy assumption in the west that Islamic nations are economic basket cases unless they have oil. To the extent this is true, it is largely the result of rigid theocratic or military regimes, not Islam itself. The Arab world is a vast common language area and could be the core of a massive economic resurgence, given the right governance. As the Prophet Muhammad is said to have proclaimed: “the ink of a scholar is holier than the blood of the martyr.”
But to help such a change happen, we must ensure that aid is much more closely tied to progress on cutting corruption, political reforms, strengthening justice systems and creating economic opportunities. This does not mean just focus on political reform: it means accompanying it with roads, railways, canals, power, and basic medicine. Not only is this one of the best ways to consolidate and support the Arab Spring as it stands, it could spark reform in other Arab and Gulf countries too. With the right approach, we can help the citizens of north Africa and protect our own interests as well. Our aid policy can and should explicitly and unashamedly go hand in hand with our realpolitik: it is one of the only ways that Britain can still punch above its weight.
While Yemen and Syria remain in turmoil, the white heat of violent revolution in north Africa has started to cool. There, the optimism and hope of the Arab Spring has given way to trepidation about what comes next. There is still unrest in Tunisia, and no date set for elections. Egypt is under military rule, its constitution suspended. Libya is locked in civil war.
If and when elections do happen in north Africa, few can predict the results. Some fear, with good reason, that the mass protests will be followed by a political vacuum that hardline Islamist groups could fill. This is why the consequences of the Arab Spring matter not only to the people of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, but to the whole of the international community, and to European nations in particular.
Of course, it is not for the US, Britain or anyone else to choose the governments of north African countries. However, it would be foolish to ignore this unprecedented opportunity to encourage the creation of stable, liberal, democratic states with free elections, less corruption and more respect for civil liberties. How best can we do this?
Britain can no longer protect her global interests with military muscle. The defence review has ended any claim we still had to being a military power. Trainee fighter pilots have been dismissed, the Royal Marines downsized, the Ark Royal decommissioned. Seventy years ago the Royal Navy operated almost 900 ships; now, its surface fighting fleet consists of a solitary aircraft carrier, seven destroyers, and 15 frigates. The decade-long operation in Afghanistan shows that even large-scale ground operations do not guarantee swift or decisive outcomes. At a cost of over £11bn since 2001, it is a strategy we cannot afford. So we must be more creative.
This involves making better use of other incentives, such as overseas aid. The size of Britain’s aid budget has been criticised recently: many have asked why, at a time of domestic cuts, the government has promised to raise aid spending to 0.7 per cent of GDP by 2013. However, this overlooks the important role that aid can play not just in saving lives, encouraging development and boosting prosperity, but also in protecting British interests. Rather than cutting overseas aid, we need to ensure we use it in a more efficient, targeted and self-interested way. Aid, shrewdly deployed, can be both compassionate and in our national interest.
As Tony Blair recently pointed out, the Marshall Plan, in which the US gave unprecedented financial support to European countries after the second world war, offers a valuable example of how to strike this balance. The 18 European recipient countries saw their economies grow by up to a quarter between 1948 and 1952: the fastest period of growth in European history. Industrial production grew by a third, and food production soared, soon reaching pre-war levels.
But America benefited too. European countries rebuilt their shattered infrastructures with the huge sums loaned to them, buying many of the necessary raw materials from the US. In this way, the programme both helped rebuild Europe and provided a growing market for US exporters. As relative prosperity returned, rationing and other austerity measures were scrapped. The poverty and starvation that had allowed communism to get a foothold in western Europe soon disappeared, and communism’s appeal, for the most part, vanished with it.
What we need now is a 21st-century version of the Marshall Plan for north Africa. Of course, the circumstances are different from those in postwar Europe. Yet there are parallels between the desire to prevent the spread of communism in Europe then and the importance of promoting political stability and democracy in north Africa now. While the Arab world may not have just been through six years of war, many Arab nations have suffered the impoverishment delivered by 30 years of oppressive dictatorship.
At the most recent G8 summit in Deauville, Britain committed to a four year, £110m aid programme for north Africa. This forms part of a £12.2bn international package of economic aid for the countries that have embraced the cause of democratic reform in the Arab uprisings. This is a step in the right direction, but fails to match the Marshall effort in scale or ambition. We must go further. The total value of economic aid distributed under the Marshall Plan was $13bn, around $125bn (or £76bn) in today’s prices.
What is more, while Britain is keeping its promises on aid, other G8 countries—most notably Germany and Italy—are already failing to hit their targets from the 2005 summit in Gleneagles. This could prove to be a costly failure. While Arab leaders have been toppled or weakened, the economic problems that helped spark the Arab Spring have not gone away. Take Egypt, for example: its economy is expected to shrink by 3 per cent this year, food prices are rising by 20 per cent a year and one person in eight is unemployed. Among young Arab males the proportion is much higher—around 35 per cent in Yemen, for example. Those who can look for opportunities elsewhere are doing just that; since December an estimated 40,000 immigrants have come to Europe from north Africa. Without assistance and encouragement from the international community, countries like Tunisia and Egypt have the potential to slip into chaos, disorder and poverty: conditions in which extremism thrives. For all these reasons, ensuring the future stability of north Africa should be the highest priority for Britain.
We should be ambitious about what could be achieved in a liberal, democratic Arab world. We have a lazy assumption in the west that Islamic nations are economic basket cases unless they have oil. To the extent this is true, it is largely the result of rigid theocratic or military regimes, not Islam itself. The Arab world is a vast common language area and could be the core of a massive economic resurgence, given the right governance. As the Prophet Muhammad is said to have proclaimed: “the ink of a scholar is holier than the blood of the martyr.”
But to help such a change happen, we must ensure that aid is much more closely tied to progress on cutting corruption, political reforms, strengthening justice systems and creating economic opportunities. This does not mean just focus on political reform: it means accompanying it with roads, railways, canals, power, and basic medicine. Not only is this one of the best ways to consolidate and support the Arab Spring as it stands, it could spark reform in other Arab and Gulf countries too. With the right approach, we can help the citizens of north Africa and protect our own interests as well. Our aid policy can and should explicitly and unashamedly go hand in hand with our realpolitik: it is one of the only ways that Britain can still punch above its weight.
