Let’s start with Tunisia, where the country’s National Constituent Assembly has forged a new Constitution that, as The Times reported, “is a carefully worded blend of ideas that has won the support of both Ennahda, the Islamist party … and the secular opposition.” It is surely one of the most liberal and inclusive constitutions in the Arab world. It took three years of political struggles for the Tunisians to get there, and the whole thing could still blow up at any time, but it is an achievement that Tunisians basically did on their own. What’s the secret?
Answer: The main religious and secular forces in Tunisia, after coming close to civil war, finally agreed to the sine qua non for the success of any Arab democracy movement — “No victor, no vanquished.” Whether you’re talking Shiites, Sunnis, Alawites, Kurds, tribes, Islamists or secular generals, in these pluralistic Arab states, unless all the key parties accept the principle that power will be shared and rotated, there is no chance any of these awakenings will make a stable transition from autocracy to more consensual politics.
But Tunisians had another advantage, says Craig Charney, a veteran pollster in South Africa and the Middle East. Tunisia “already had strong civil society institutions” — like the General Labor Union, the National Business Federation, the Tunisian Bar Association and the Tunisian Human Rights League. These institutions, explained Charney, “were able to play a nonpartisan moderating role between the different political factions.” And, unlike Egypt, Tunisia also did not have a politicized military with deep roots in the economy that had incentives to meddle in the political arena. Syria, Libya and Iraq had no real civil society institutions at all.
And that leads to those numbers. When people in a country are ready to live together, you just need one Nelson Mandela — a unifying leader — to galvanize the political system to work productively. When people are not ready to live together but are ready to live apart — as in Bosnia or Lebanon after years of civil war — you just need 5,000 peacekeepers to police the de facto or de jure lines of partition. But when people are not ready to live together or apart — because of a lack of trust, lack of exhaustion or one or all parties still think they can have it all — then you probably need 500,000 peacekeepers to come in, remove the dictator, eliminate the most extreme elements on all sides, and protect the center for a long time while it forges a new citizenship and party system able to share power. Even then, failure is a real option.
In short, what ails the Arab world is something we alone can’t fix: an inability to manage pluralism in a democratic way. We can stop the worst of it as long as we are there (see: Iraq). But only they can make the best of it — and make it self-sustaining. President Bashar al-Assad of Syria is a monster. But he can only be removed in a way that won’t bring more chaos if the Syrian opposition can demonstrate on the ground that it not only believes in pluralism, but has the will and ability to enforce it. Otherwise, the Syrian minorities gathered around Assad will not abandon him. Everyone urging President Obama to intervene in Syria needs to keep all this in mind.
_________________________
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/opinion/sunday/friedman-1-5000-500000.html?partner=rss&;emc=rss&_r=0