COMMENTARY
This approach risks aggravating the Middle East’s daunting complexity
Summer 2009
Although Marc Otte quotes General de Gaulle as saying that he is going to the "complicated East" with "simple ideas", Otte’s own article confronts the already complex Middle East with even more complex ideas. In the present situation of the region, these ideas are likely to further complicate matters, creating yet more disappointments, and providing greater opportunities for sabotage to those who oppose peaceful solutions, economic development and improved institution-building in the region.
Most of these ideas have been tried before in both bilateral and multilateral frameworks, or in God knows what kinds of first and second track negotiations over the last three decades or so. All have been inclusive and comprehensive, or partial and parallel, and sequential and consequential and sometimes all of these at the same time. They all aimed to restore peace to the Middle East, to work for regional integration and all aspired to the democratisation and modernisation of all the countries in the region. And all were much too complex in that they advanced ideas that overburdened a region that already suffers from too much history, ideology and under-development. The end result of all these initiatives has been more "failed" states, more wars and a more rather than less fragmented region.
I would argue that what is instead needed is to go back to the drawing board and concentrate on two elements that are of fundamental importance: the first being the state and the second political power. The only two successful examples of peace in the Middle East have been the Egyptian-Israeli peace deal and that between Jordan and Israel. Both have stood the test of time even though wars and crises have been in abundance because they were in the hands of states, and reflected their leaders’ needs and interests. A Syrian- Israeli peace pact came close to fruition, but then was paralleled by the Oslo talks and other forms of peace process in which no state actors were involved but where ‘sub-state” institutions had become engaged. Bringing a European model of peace building and regional development to the Middle East has done little more than to take geo-political problems that should be in the hands of strategic decisionmakers and place them in the hands of bureaucrats who know more about how to complicate matters than to resolve them.
The realities of the Middle East are basically that the region is divided between those who want peace, itself a prerequisite for economic development, and those who oppose peace on the grounds of history or religion, and sometimes both. The priority of peace negotiations in the Middle East should be to encourage states to conclude peace agreements on their own, and also to deprive radical forces, whether they be state or non-state actors, of ways of spoiling the process. These constitute acts of power when we defined power in more comprehensive terms than just the use of force.
A concert of regional powers like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, the new Iraq and Turkey, working in coalition with the United States and the EU, should work towards peace agreements in the region. The Obama Administration’s approach of "more peace than processes" is to be recommended because it is much simpler than the multi-layered and multi-purpose processes of the past. This concert of powers should work to encourage, persuade and put pressure on states – basically Syria and Israel – to finish what they once started and create the formula for a Palestinian-Israeli two state solution that will be "imposed" – yes imposed ! – on the two parties. The beauty of the Arab peace initiative in fact is that it came from states and it looks at region-building and the normalisation of relations in the Middle-East in simple terms that states can comprehend and implement. What is needed is for this concert of powers not to let itself be side-tracked by lofty and complicated ideas, and to understand the reality that a failed and even more disintegrated Middle East will present problems that are even more complex than those that face us today.