Question

How does culture influence politics and security issues in the Middle East. Please provide specific examples.

Answer 1

So how should we think about culture and U.S.-Middle East policy? Recently, Tunisia has experienced protests among students and others who are angry over their limited job prospects in an economy that is struggling. Tunisians are demanding jobs and the renewal of a social safety net that has eroded over time. This takes place at a moment when international financial institutions, the United States, and the European Union are counseling the Tunisians to undertake reforms, but they are facing resistance. There is nothing culturally specific Tunisia—a country that has, among other things, North African, Arab, Berber, and Muslim influences—that has brought people out in front of the Ministry of Employment. There have been similar kinds of protests in the Greek capital, Athens, in response to austerity measures. And yet, I detect a cultural aspect to the problem, though culture of a different sort than what people often associate with the Middle East. Instead, it seems reflective of the cultural artifact of a big, authoritarian state that Arabs regarded as their salvation after long periods of colonial domination and European penetration. The existence of this kind of state has, over many years, embedded ideas about its role in people’s lives.

Is it possible that the effort of authoritarians to establish political control over their societies through incentives like jobs, education, and generous subsidies created a “culture” that created expectations and ideas about the social and economic responsibilities of the state? The big Arab state may be a thing of the past, but it seems that after decades of the socialization and assimilation of its functions, citizens remain predisposed toward the dependencies that Arab leaders such as Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Houari Boumediene of Algeria, Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia, and others created in the mid-twentieth century. It is not just in the region’s republics where there may be a cultural challenge to reform. Saudi Arabia’s much-discussed Vision 2030 program promises to alter the relationship between Saudi citizens (including the elite) and a system that has provided generously for them. I am willing to allow that there are straight-forward explanations based on political economy that can account for the resistance to the type of change technocrats believe to be necessary, but again I wonder if analysts are missing something when they avoid thinking about culture, specifically a political culture cultivated by the state.

My only point insofar as U.S. foreign policy is concerned is that our collective anxiety about dealing with anything associated with culture as well as our ingrained sense that liberal ideals are right and good and applicable anywhere perhaps blinds American officials to the political needs and, yes, cultural concerns of their interlocutors. Maybe Egyptians, for example, have not been able to carry out economic reforms hatched in Washington effectively because those reforms undermine a sense of communal solidarity and a large, patriarchal Arab state, which seem linked to an Egyptian cultural milieu that valorizes these things. One need not look too far for clues of this phenomenon. After all, despite its recent failings, the state remains central to the mythologies that shape politics and culture. From regulating the flow of the Nile by building the Aswan High Dam to the 1973 crossing of the Suez Canal to the recent widening of that body of water, there seems to be an ingrained sense about the proper role of centralized authority. Of course, there are a slew of other potential reasons why the Egyptians have been unable to get their economic act together, but Egypt’s economic policymaking and poor economic performance is—with a few brief exceptions—a persistent problem. The Egyptians know what they need to do, so why don’t they do it? This is why I am starting to believe that we need to think more broadly about state culture in authoritarian regimes.

The challenges that Tunisian, Egyptians, and others face have less to do with the particularities of a Middle Eastern way of life than with the cultural milieu that authoritarianism has bred, which includes ideas about the role of the state, individual rights, honor, community, and identity that has had a lasting effect on politics and society. This may be why the technocratic solutions to the array of problems before Arab societies are simultaneously appropriate and deficient; they assume a cultural vacuum or void. Societies certainly change and cultures evolve, but as Douthat explains, ideas matter to people. It might seems strange to remind readers of this fact. It seems obvious, but it is worth repeating because of the analytic community’s collective aversion to grappling with anything associated with culture. There are no doubt material consequences of failing to undertake reform, but there are also significant cultural costs in pursuing them that societies may not be willing to pay.