False Dilemma: The Mideast doesn’t have to choose between Dictatorship & Caliphate

http://www.juancole.com/2014/06/between-dictatorship-caliphate.html

False Dilemma: The Mideast doesn’t have to choose between Dictatorship & Caliphate
By contributors | Jun. 30, 2014
By Hazem Saghieh

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A blocked legacy

But while it is easy to criticise the narrative of the war on terror, it is not easy to come up with alternatives that can benefit the peoples of our region and the world. There are many perenially good ideas, from economic development and poverty reduction to parliamentary democracy and representative institutions. But when the societies concerned are deeply divided, in a way that prevents them from reaching even the minimum level of consensus, such ideas remain closer to being empty rhetoric.

Moreover, the countries where al-Qaida and its ilk have spawned are also those where ruling elites have identified with particular groups, religious communities, regions or ethnicities to the exclusion of others. In the absence of traditions of coexistence, or ways to resolve disputes through political institutions, these countries have often been dominated by tyrannical regimes. In such cases the ruling power worked to repress society’s unacknowledged contradictions, only to find the latter metastasizing in the shadows. The resulting deformities were reinforced by the cold war from the late 1940s until the late 1980s, which guaranteed the survival of these regimes and the political units on which they were built.

To escape from this dysfunctional inheritance, the solution can only come from a reconsideration of existing national and societal arrangements. The latter, after all, are the true incubators of the conflicts that have now erupted in full. They too did much to contribute to later disasters, by curbing healthy interaction among religious, sectarian, and ethnic groups; forestalling any potential change; closing down avenues of public expression; and quickly turning even small-scale protest into open-ended civil conflict.

In Syria, for example, the national framework soon pushed the popular uprising of 2011 towards civil war. In Iraq, the chance of an inclusive nationwide movement against a corript government with authoritarian tendencies was thwarted by a centrifugal landscape of Sunni, Shi’a, and Kurdish questions. The same applies, albeit with different labels, to the situation in Libya, Yemen, and elsewhere.