Liberal and leftist forces in the Arab world are the best placed to forge a new social contract for the Arab people, writes Amr Hamzawy* There is a general presumption that tends to dominate our discussions on the importance and social efficacy of the liberal and left-wing forces compared with those of Islamist forces. It holds that the social fabric and prevailing cultural norms and political structures in Arab countries obstruct the growth of the former while facilitating the growing popularity and influence of the latter. Admittedly, there is considerable and diverse evidence to the fact that this impression is partially true. The sway that the religious dimension has over public debate, the decline in the popularity of left-wing parties and the ideas they espouse, and the powerful rise of Islamist forces are incontestable. However, it is simultaneously true that, in spite of many institutional restrictions, Arab liberals and leftists do not lack the social openings and political space needed to build grassroots support around alternative visions or complementary positions to those of the ruling elite and Islamist forces. In fact, the first step that the left must take in order to recover from its current frailty is to conscientiously take stock of the essence of the issues that open the avenues into society and that shape the potential realistic contours of the spaces for political action. The following are four such issues that I believe are of central importance across the board in the Arab world. SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC RIGHTS: With the exception of a few instances in the Gulf, Arab countries are gripped with severe economic and social problems, most notably widespread poverty, high unemployment and illegal immigration; deteriorating educational, health and other primary social services; and crumbling social security networks. Moreover, the neo-liberal economic policies adopted by most Arab ruling elites since the 1990s have worked to exacerbate these problems during the past few years (even if they led to some improvement in overall rates of economic growth), driving entire sectors of the poor and limited-income classes towards severe hardship. Since the 1980s, Islamist forces have constructed an expanding social service network in the fields of education, health and other support services, thereby partially supplanting the ineffective government agencies that are officially charged with these tasks. For the most part, however, the Islamists do not have clear perceptions on how to deal with the deficiencies in the people's economic and social rights, and in their publicised statements and programmes they continue to swing back and forth between an economic liberal tendency that regards the market and the private sector as the engines of growth and a quasi- leftist tendency that advocates the return to the powerful, centralised, paternalistic state. The Arab left and socially committed liberals (a term I use to distinguish them from the economic neo-liberal cliques in and around the ruling elite who advocate and practise a form of rampant capitalism unhampered by restrictions and social obligations and who are interested solely in profit) have a genuine opportunity to formulate an alternative vision that casts to the fore the essential issues behind the gross disparities in economic and social rights, namely the questions of justice and equality, fighting unemployment, building effective social safety networks, and reducing the ever-widening gap between rich and poor in Arab societies. Undoubtedly, liberal and leftist conceptualisations will be markedly different. However, the work of identifying the flaws and weaknesses in the opinions of the ruling elites and the Islamists and of exposing the injustices in Arab societies will bring them closer together and, simultaneously, bring them closer to broad segments of grassroots opinion. I am convinced that the best conceptual approach to this task is to focus discussion on the missing social contract in our countries. There is an urgent need to formulate a true consensus on the actual substance of such a contract and to pressure both the ruling elites and the Islamists to consider the relevant issues. POLITICAL, CIVIL AND INDIVIDUAL FREEDOMS: All the official talk of democratic reform and political liberalisation over the past few years has not been translated into a qualitative shift in that direction in any Arab country. Little has changed or seriously improved in such vital matters as the rotation of authority, the rule of law, the separation of and checks and balances between powers, and broadening popular participation in public life. Nor has the growing political influence and activity of Islamist forces brought a tangible and lasting expansion in the realm of political party competition. Simultaneously, the Islamists have failed to strengthen their pressure on the ruling elites to implement democratic reform. Indeed, in many cases, they have fallen prey to participating in official contexts that have proved ineffective and for which they are paying a heavy price in terms of declining popularity. The poor and stagnant levels of political, civil and individual liberties and the declining credibility of the government's and Islamists' reform banners offer leftist and liberal trends the opportunity to home in on such issues as the freedom of association and the freedom to form political parties and to syndicate, the freedoms of opinion and expression, the right to worship, and the need to eliminate all forms of discrimination in all these areas. In their advocacy of such essential rights, political liberals and the left must come up with a clear and succinct discourse centring around equal citizenship, secularism and plurality and targeting in particular the more politically and socially disadvantaged sectors of the population, such as religious and ethnic minorities, women, and those whose personal lifestyles or preferences depart from social or religious norms. THE CONSENSUS-MAKING CULTURE: The polarisation between the ruling elites and Islamist forces has caused the zero-sum mentality and simplistic absolutist approaches to dominate all public debate and political life in the Arab world. Unfortunately, many left-wing intellectuals and activists have also fallen prey to such black- versus-white reductionism. Not all components of the ruling elite or all the various shades of Islamism are tainted. True, at present the ramifications of the predominant attitudes and policies of the official and Islamist camps are grim. However, any realistic and serious search for avenues to economic and social reform and to democratic transition can not ignore a systematic exploration of areas in common with the ruling elites and Islamists and, accordingly, the process of identifying the bases for possible coordination and negotiation with them within the local and national framework in every Arab country. I have no doubt that the only way forward in this regard is to resist the temptation to formulate and disseminate an inflexible and stereotypical image of the type of change that is needed, in accordance with which evil ruling elites and Islamist extremists must be replaced by honest and socially committed leftists. FREEING ARAB DEBATE FROM THE CONFINES OF SPECIFICITY: Arab countries are not alone in suffering the banes of cruel economic, social and political hardships and injustices. These are universal human concerns, as diverse as their manifestations and repercussions may be. The causes of justice, freedom, equality and social solidarity are gaining increasing priority in the humanitarian agendas of both industrialised and developing nations. Certainly, the recent financial crisis that shook the fiscal pillars of the global economic order has heralded the end of the era of unbridled rampant capitalism and trained the intellectual spotlight on the major bastions of capitalism on possible corrective strategies and, eventually, on a consensus on the means and principles for striking a new balance between the economic domain (in its narrower sense of activities undertaken for financial gain) and the social domain and the attendant concepts of fairness, freedom and equality. Refreshing the global outlook on the nature of the best means to manage the relations between the state, society and the citizen offers the Arabs a broad and important scope for linking our discussions on a new social contract to extremely vital and dynamic dialogues that are taking place beyond our borders in the West, the East and South. Political liberals and the left are best poised to establish that link. They are the most familiar with the intellectual approaches and conceptual instruments that shape such dialogues around the world. Also, if they can rediscover themselves and revive the memory of their former social efficacy, they can bridge the gap between the attitudes and rhetoric of the Arab ruling elites and the Islamists, on the one hand, and the forward-looking ideas and aspirations of the collective human conscience. * The writer is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
