RUTHFULLY YOURS

We can recite the mantras of development theory and democracy promotion: Economic reform and political opening are what the region needs. Such platitudes are as useless as they are true. An inexorable buildup of economic and social pressure, like an upwelling of molten rock from beneath the Earth’s crust, threatens to engulf the dysfunctional postcolonial social orders in states from Pakistan to North Africa, and nobody, in the region or in the West, has the slightest idea what to do about it.

he region’s political elites lack the technical competence, political coherence, public legitimacy and disinterested ethos required both to impose the necessary reforms and to make them a success. The protesters in the street lack the organization, political experience, ideological clarity and technical knowledge that a new ruling class would need. Growing populations, stagnant or falling hydrocarbon revenues, and the cumulative effects of corruption and poor investment decisions have combined to produce economic and social dysfunction on a late-Soviet scale. Governments are losing their ability to stave off the day of reckoning by passing out a few more subsidies or a few more make-work jobs to dull the sharp edge of public discontent.

To understand the limited and unhappy choices the West has today in the Middle East, we must give up the expensive delusion that we know how to cure the region’s ills. The Western mix of technocratic administration, market innovation, centrist democratic politics and social liberalism will do well to survive where it is already established; at the moment there is not much it can do for underdeveloped regions.

The Middle East will have to find its own way, and while some societies are considerably better prepared than others to do so, the process is likely to be painful and prolonged. For the foreseeable future there won’t be enough jobs for young people. Governments will fail to provide the political fulfillment that educated populations seek. The attractions of life in the West will glitter tantalizingly, but neither Europe nor anywhere else will voluntarily accept anything like the numbers of people who seek to immigrate.

A minority will make it to the West; the majority will experience the West on their smartphones, its affluence and opportunity remaining out of reach. People will turn in frustration to everything from religious fanaticism and revolutionary politics to drugs as they seek to change their lives or at least dull the pain. From time to time, the burning dissatisfaction will burst through the layers of repressive state institutions.

Europe’s experience with Syria and Libya offers hard lessons about the new Middle East, dominated by problems that can neither be solved nor ignored. A collapse of civil order in Algeria, for instance, would pose a massive threat to France—to the security of its energy supply, the integrity of its borders, the peace of its streets. Yet Paris cannot stabilize Algeria; France struggles to stabilize itself.

It is against this background that we must understand the political experiments in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman seem to have decided they cannot govern their countries by adopting the values and institutions of contemporary Western democracy.

Instead they are following a strategy like that of the absolute monarchs and so-called enlightened despots—rulers like France’s Louis XIV, Russia’s Peter and Catherine the Great, and Prussia’s Frederick the Great. These rulers overthrew old elites and created new and modernizing elites in their place, broke the political power of religious establishments without challenging the hold of religion itself on the masses, and dedicated themselves to the development of their countries’ economic resources without embracing free markets. They craved modernity but feared freedom.

Will the Middle East’s would-be enlightened despots succeed? Maybe not. Sometimes the enlightenment fails, and all that remains is the despotism. Even despotism could fail, leaving more countries to follow the Syrian and Libyan paths to barbarism and anarchy.

Western observers can and often must deplore the repression that the new authoritarians impose. But we have no solutions to offer. We may not like what these rulers are doing, but we do not really know what they should be doing instead.