Arab League’s challenges decades after its establishment
LISTENING to some Arab leaders describe their countries’ internal challenges at the recent Arab Summit should help us understand why we have been living with the same difficulties for decades, unable to come up with serious, valid solutions.
Culturally, Arabs tend to present their problems without offering practical solutions, accusing their opponents of being difficult and stubborn — and eventually labeling them enemies.
When delivering their speeches, Arab leaders usually sound as if their aim were to share their pains with their peers, but they show no desire to arrive at permanent solutions to their problems.
A couple of decades ago, we Arabs had to contend with a single complex crisis (the Arab-Israeli conflict); today, on the other hand, we are living with internal conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, along with various concealed conflicts in Lebanon, Sudan and Egypt.
Nevertheless, apart from expressing an earnest desire to resolve Arabs’ problems, the League of Arab States at the recent summit did not debate a single concrete proposal aimed at resolving any of these conflicts.
In a way, the League of Arab States symbolizes our chronic Arab challenges.
The league that was established with the goal of uniting Arab nations to better deal with external challenges is today stuck with internal challenges in its member states.
The league that was supposed to become the mind and engine driving Arab nations forward gradually grew weaker, becoming a financial burden on the Arab nation without contributing any clear results.
The league is continually expanding its bureaucratic mechanisms; it employs many experts who are over-compensated but do not have a clear mandate to address the Arab challenges.
Every time a new secretary-general is elected (and they are generally persons of high caliber), I hope that he will manage to increase the role of the league.
My childish hopes are then dashed — as when it became clear that being a good Egyptian bureaucrat had helped the incumbent secretarygeneral assume his post at the helm of this deadweight entity.
The Arab League, which was supposed to act politically on behalf of its member states, has stopped receiving invitations to many political conferences, as it has come to be regarded as a thing of no value.
Most Arab governments refuse to accept other nations’ ideas that could solve their problems; in our region, such proposals are defined as “external interference.”
Each country is happy to live with its challenges and crises for decades, willing to accept any support that strengthens the regime in power and declining any initiative that might undermine the ruling regime.
With this behavior of most of our nations, do we still need the Arab League? In fact, it contributes nothing but imposes significant financial obligations on its member states.
Our main dilemma and challenge lies in the prevalent culture in this region that prevents us from ruling inclusively.
To be able to solve some of our problems, we need to agree that leaders in power are not always right to consider national opposition parties as the “wrong side“; at the very least, this prevents them from benefitting from any solutions the opposition may propose.
Additionally, our common language is not the only thing that can unite us; we, Arabs, need to accept and tolerate ideas put forth by Arab citizens to solve our problems as the only way to move forward.
To modernize the Arab League, we could come up with solutions to our challenges, instead of continuing to rely on the current bureaucratic mechanism that offers secure high-paying jobs with no accountability.
Furthermore, the Egyptian state that insists that the secretary-general of the League of Arab States be an Egyptian should also require that the secretary-general commit himself to carry out a specific mandate prior to his nomination. Mohammed Nosseir, a liberal politician from Egypt, is a strong advocate of political participation and economic freedom. He can be reached on Twitter @MohammedNosseir.