Robert Springborg: The Arab Dignity Deficit

WILLIAM WANKER: Hello and welcome. I am William Wonker, and you are listening to Dignify Audio, a podcast brought to you by Human Dignity Projects and Dignify Magazine, both of which I co-created and co-curate with Pamela Kelly. Today we are continuing the conversation with our highly regarded friend Robert Springboard. In episode one, our conversations focus more generally on the Middle East, a topic of which Robert is expert. Having written numerous articles and several books about the region. And for those of you who have not listened to it, I would highly recommend you do so. But today our conversation will shift to what Robert has called the Arab Dignity Deficit. So again, let's jump in. Thank you for joining us again, Robert. I'm looking forward to this conversation. Thanks, William, for having me. Today I want to discuss something about which you wrote in Dignify magazine. You called it the Arab dignity deficit. What exactly did you mean by that? Well, I'd like to claim it. In reality, the dignity deficit comes from surveys conducted by the Arab Barometer that are now in their eighth iteration, so going back some twenty years. And among the questions asked are those that pertain to people's attitudes and behavior at the time of the ⁓ the distribution of the questionnaires. And as the two thousand eleven Arab Uprising came and went. It provided an opportunity for those behind the Arab Barometer who were at Princeton University to sort of plumb the motives for people going out into the street and in many cases losing their lives. What was it they were really after? And what the constellation of questions ended up causing the analysts using the data to conclude was that it was personal dignity and the lack thereof that was the strongest motivating force for people to make even the ultimate sacrifice. ⁓ and so this then caused, you know, then some considerable ⁓ efforts to disaggregate what is meant here by by the dignity deficit. And it was really the two aspects that we talked about in the last episode both economic and political. ⁓ so what political dignity means that a person is listened to, that people have voice, that their preferences and desires are taken account of, they can express them and expect their government to respond to them. In the authoritarian systems of the Middle East and North Africa, they are denied that. They have no voice, and so the the the dignity component of your view being accorded at least some importance by those who are ruling you is not there. The other part of the dignity deficit is economic, and that is that the lack of interest on the part of ruling regimes in the welfare of their peoples, as attested to by a host of economic data. Whether GDP per capita growth, whether relative equality ⁓ within and between countries, whether unemployment, ⁓ whether the ability of families to put food on the table, a whole host of measures of economic lack of well being suggests that the dignity of individuals at the level of just basic consumption is being ignored. And indeed, in Arabic, the word dignity is karama. And it's interesting that The Arabic is based typically on the three syllables KRM Karam. The name Karim, which is a ⁓ standard name y in Arabic, means generous. So dignity is generous in the sense not just of spirit, but also material ⁓ generosity. And so dignity is is not just having your voice heard, it's having the resources at hand. To lead a dignified life. And being deprived of both of those, as the respondents to the Arab Barometer surveys indicated, meant that they were out in the streets because they wanted to reclaim their dignity. And so it's a strong motivating force, maybe more in the Arab world than elsewhere, because this idea of generosity and dignity is very much part of Arab culture. And so it's probably more a motivating factor there than elsewhere. But I think it's probably a humanity factor just about everywhere in greater or lesser measure. So the dignity deficit is something that, you know, people who study the Middle East and especially who monitor the data generated by various questionnaires are well aware of, but it doesn't seem to go beyond that. And it should, because it should have a big impact on how we look at the Middle East and how we behave towards it. Isn't there also a dimension of this which seems to suggest that There's a lot of individuals who have been educated at even higher levels of higher education and yet there's just no jobs for them and they return to the region whether they were educated there or outside. And that's also prompting them to feel they don't have a voice or don't have a future. Yes, exactly. In fact, the level of unemployed in most countries in the region is higher the level of education. Exactly the opposite relationship that you find in OECD and developed economies elsewhere. These are economies that are failing. And the more educated you are, the higher your aspirations, the less likely you are to be able to fulfill them. Which means that whatever your degree might be, you really have to look after yourself. And looking after yourself economically means informal employment. It means you don't have an official job, it means you're scrambling on the street. To make ends meet. And so we are now talking about something like two thirds of the nominal jobs being filled in a country like Egypt are in informal employment. People selling things on the streets, people offering their labor on a day basis, this sort of thing. And so the fact that you have an education, that you did your law degree, you did whatever degree it was, and you were fully hoping and indeed earlier expecting that you would be employed, let's say, in the government service or in an expanding business of a private or a state owned enterprise. Those hopes have been widely dashed throughout the region. And so education has been a force for the dignity deficit, as you're implying here. That the hopes that are necessarily part of an education are being dashed. And it's more for women than for men. The unemployment rate among women in the Middle East is significantly higher than it is for men. The labor force participation rate of women in the Arab world is on average about fifteen percent. In the world as a whole, it's about three times that. So there is no other part of the world that has lower mobilization of women into the labor force than the Middle East and North Africa. And so what that means is that women are in informal employment. The majority of people working in agriculture are women. ⁓ the wages in agriculture are pathetically low. And so in the inequality of genders, which begins at the level of what are people actually paid and what are their their employment opportunities are extremely discriminatory against women. And the double paradox is that women are much better educated than men now in the Middle East. That the higher proportion of women in universities, for example, with university and postgraduate degrees is much higher than men throughout the Arab world, including in countries like Saudi Arabia, which are notorious for being patriarchal, but which in reality are educating more of their women than they are their men. And yet these women don't get satisfactory employment in the wake of those educational experiences. So there are serious problems here that need to be addressed and which are not being addressed. Well, that would suggest a real tinderbox exists within the region, one that would remain even if the current situation with Iran and others are settled. True? And if true, what does that pretend? Well, as you say, a tinderbox is something that's likely to explode, and the question is since two thousand eleven, why haven't there been more explosions? Because the explosion of twenty eleven throughout the Arab world was driven by the factors that I'm just mentioning, ⁓ the dignity deficit, ⁓ decline in the standard of living, a deterioration of the proportion of those who could be called middle class despite their growing educations. So what's happened since that time and why haven't they been back out in the streets? There are several reasons. The most important is the degree of repression, that the regimes that survived realized that they were not going to be able to address the dignity deficit, that they were there on the basis of their coercive capacities. They were not there because they were delivering the goods to their citizens. And so they doubled down on coercion. And it just so happens that at this particular time was the great expansion of electronic means of coercion, facial recognition technologies, spyware of various sorts, monitoring of even social media, the eavesdropping of virtually every aspect of communications, all of that is really a post two thousand eleven phenomenon, at least in the degree to which it now obtains throughout the region. This eavesdropping state is then coupled with a brutal state in that it not only imprisons a very significant portion of its population by global standards. Three of the four leading countries in state executions are in the Middle East and North Africa. ⁓ These are brutal states. They engage in extraterritorial killings of their own citizens. They Routinely engage in extrajudicial killings, of which in Egypt there are, as Amnesty International has reported, at least 500 during the course of the life. These are just killings by the security services without any trial and so on. Deaths in custody are routine throughout the Arab world. And so the coercive capacities and the willingness to use them are an another league in comparison to any other part of the world, basically. So when you're facing That's sort of a potential penalty for even making statements, much less engaging in political activity, clearly you're going to have a lot of second thoughts about it. So they've intimidated their populations, and that's the sort of number one reason. Number two is that they have coupled this intimidation with the idea that if you don't go along and support the state, that you will pay the price. That the collapse of states around you, such as in Libya, such as in Sudan, formerly in Syria, now in Yemen, that your life will be even worse than it is living under our oppressive hand. And so Egyptians, ⁓ Moroccans, Jordanians, and so on are fearful that if we go back to two thousand eleven, we start demonstrating that the whole thing will fall apart. And then we are going to have an even worse scenario than we have now. There are some other factors in there as well, but I think that fear The fear of what happens if I do protest, if I speak up in any way. And the fear ⁓ of collapse of the state, bad as the state is, are the two main driving factors that keep people from demonstrating and bringing down regimes, and that's what regimes count on, and so they continue to feed those factors. And this is inimical to any sort of economic development, much less political one. So the tinderbox will remain, but the question is Will it explode? And the answer would be either things get so bad that these are insufficient deterrents, or there is perceived weakness on the part of the coercive capacities that the minute they seem to be weaker, you can expect trouble. So we are by no means through the woods yet. What you described is just horrific. And you can imagine how difficult it must be for the individuals living in those states. And, you know, when we think about things here, the first thing that will come as a result of your descriptions is a a response from people that say, Why should any of this matter to those of us who live in the United States? We can't be the police officer for the entire world. We can't, you know, invest in every single crisis around the world. What What you have to say to those people why this matters, why it should matter? Well, there are really two levels at which you can answer that. The first level is geostrategic. Middle East is aptly named the middle. It was deemed to be in the middle of the world, between East and West. And indeed, politically speaking, it has been. Much of World War II, the Cold War, the current struggles between an emerging China and a declining United States are being contested. And indeed being fought over in the Middle East. And you can say, well, all right, let the Chinese establish a a dominant hegemonic position in the region, much as the United States had, and they will inherit the problems that we ⁓ couldn't deal with and indeed maybe caused ourselves. But that's pretty short sighted. ⁓ this geostrategic region is not just geographically in the middle, it is the single most important energy producing part of the world, far and away. And we are using presently about a hundred million barrels of oil a day, of which the cheapest source of which and will always remain such is the Middle East and North Africa. It is the single largest provider of it, and it is the provider of the cheapest amount of petroleum products. In addition, natural gas, ⁓ the cataries are the world's second largest producer of natural gas. So the two main hydrocarbons, being centered in the Middle East and North Africa, will remain of vital importance in our lifetimes and well beyond. So to surrender that region of the world to someone else's direct control were they to seek to assert it, would be disastrous for global energy markets. ⁓ so we do have a direct interest there, whatever the production of the United and the United States is now the world's largest producer of gas and oil. But that doesn't provide ⁓ guarantees not only to American citizens and Canadian ones, but also those in Europe and elsewhere. ⁓ we do not produce enough for the rest of that world. They are heavily dependent on Middle Eastern sources of energy. So there's national interest at stake. But maybe the more important consideration and the idea of dignity and humanity is that if we abandon this region to authoritarianism, not only in terms of the regimes within the region, but in terms of support for them by other authoritarian regimes, of course, China and Russia the two most important, then we're sort of turning the globe over to what you might think of as being analogous to the fascism that arose in the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties in Europe and beyond. We have an interest not only geostrategic and in confronting fascist powers, today's authoritarian powers, but think about the lives of the people being subjected to that. I only need to remind our audience here of the Holocaust and how that arose and how the the the lack of response to impose discrimination ⁓ against minorities of which Jews paid the greatest price gave rise to what occurred. ⁓ from nineteen thirty nine nineteen forty five in Germany. And that may be an overstatement of things, but it's not a world that you and I really want to live in, one in which authoritarianism is running amok unchecked. And I say this not lightly, I say it on the basis again of some empirical evidence. The approval ratings of China are now many times higher in the Arab world, again based on Arab barometer surveys, than is the United States or the West more generally. And it Not necessarily the case they approve of Chinese authoritarianism. They approve of Chinese economic performance. But they see the two things as being linked. They no longer believe that democracy is going to provide a better economic system than is authoritarianism. So all of this is to suggest that a world in which democracy and freedom and economic performance are thought to be something we can't afford. We have to have an authoritarian system and will sacrifice any political power that we as citizens might have to have some sort of decent standard of living. This is not a world that will be a good one, even if we're not living directly in that part of the world. So we have both geostrategic and sort of humanity and our own humanity interests at stake here, and ⁓ it's therefore something we we need to stand up against, much as we ultimately had to do in the wake of the rise of fascism in Europe in the nineteen thirties. Well, we've seen the move towards war, certainly, and you've provided some recommendations as to how change might occur. Do you have any more recommendations specifically with regard to how we might address these problems of inequity or inequality peacefully? Well, again, I think we have taken a lot out of the Middle East, hydrocarbons being the most important part of it. But then the petrodollar phenomenon that the huge amount of money invested in the West has come out of the Middle East. The net capital outflow has been the history since World War Two, up until quite recently. And so I do think that we need to use our foreign assistance monies ⁓ in a strategic way to benefit populations. I think that's absolutely key and not To solidify the authoritarian regimes that are in power. I think that's number one. But number two, collision is more predominant in the Middle East and North Africa than any other part of the world, both domestic and between states of the region. We can't walk away from that fact, ignore it. We have to be prepared to deal with it. And we have unfortunately not handled that well. The war in Iran and the war that Israel is now perpetrating not only on the Palestinians but on other of its Arab neighbors is something that is enormously costly to the Middle East and to ourselves. And we need to do everything we can to prevent coercion of this nature from being as destructive as it is and as widespread as it is. We have pressure over Israel that we can assert and should assert to prevent it from seeking to expand its own powers, capacities and maybe even its borders in the region. As far as Iran is concerned, Iran is ruled and has been since nineteen seventy nine by a regime that is lawless, that is ⁓ executes more of its people as a proportion than any other country in the world. There can be very little temporizing with Iran. But at the same time, the question of how to deal with that arises, and the war as we have seen has not gone well for a variety of reasons. Destabilization of Iran, it strikes me, ⁓ is a much better way of doing it. And that's a combination of economic, social, and personal pressure within that country. And we have backed away when this significant portion of the Iranian population has risen up in peaceful fashion against the Mullah governments. We have done very little, if anything, to support them. And there are plenty of opportunities to do so. So a combination of economic pressure and the sheer pressure of the population, I think, is the way to deal with the Iranians, ⁓ rather than the straight out military path that we chose. But at the same time, we cannot just suddenly walk away from coercive capacities because ⁓ the Iranians do threaten people around them. And those people don't have the capacities to defend themselves, such as in Lebanon, such as in Yemen. And we need to play some role in those cases. Well, I think this has really brought an interesting perspective on things, particularly as we look in the paradigm and perspective of the Arab dignity deficit and the way humanism can really change the lens in which we look at things. So that really brings us to the end of episode two in this podcast series. It was, as I anticipated, a conversation as equally fascinating as the first. And I have no doubt that episode three will be equally fascinating. As we will then turn to Robert's work involving culture and cultural heritage. With that, let me say thanks again to our audience for listening. We look forward to connecting again across the airwaves as we continue to explore human dignity and living a dignified human existence through the ideas and innovations of yet other designers, artists, craftspeoples, heads of companies and nonprofits, and political commentators via Dignify Audio. To find a list of past and future podcasts, please go to Humandignity Projects dot org, all podcasts of which are distributed through Spotify, Apple, and YouTube. And make sure you catch up on the latest edition of Dignify magazine or catch up on past issues by visiting the same human dignityprojects.org. Thank you again, Robert, for your time, and thank you again for listening. I am William Wonker, and this is Dignify Audio.