The following remarks were prepared by Tamara Cofman Wittes, Research Fellow, Saban Center for Middle East Policy, Brookings Institution, based on her presentation at the Woodrow Wilson Center June 4, 2004. The opinions expressed here are those of the author and in no way represent the views or opinions of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

The Broader Middle East and North Africa (B-MENA) Initiative is the Bush Administration’s first attempt to build an international coalition for a long-term struggle to promote freedom and prosperity in the region and thereby to reduce the appeal of extremist ideologies. So it is important to evaluate the Initiative in that multilateral context. I want to make a few comments about where the Initiative is strong, where it is weaker and why, and what must be done if this strategy is really to gain the strength needed to sustain itself through a very political year.

The draft agreement is a significant step forward in the heretofore spotty Western commitment to advancing democracy and human rights in the Middle East.

  • It cements a consensus among Western states that continued political stagnation in the countries of the Middle East threatens the peace and stability of that region, and the security of Western states as well.
  • It clearly articulates the goal of Arab reform as democracy, not just “good governance” and open markets, and not just “reform” for its own sake.
  • The statement of principles clearly articulates that democratic values are universal. Moreover, the G-8 states agree that the uniqueness of local circumstances “must not be exploited to prevent reform,” a clear reference to states, like Saudi Arabia, that claim that their faith and conservative identity make progressive social and political reform unpalatable to their societies.
  • It moves the United States and Europe beyond their long-running and sterile debate as to the relative urgency of attending to Arab democracy or to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While the initiative notes that resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is “an important element of progress in the region,” it argues that “regional conflicts must not be an obstacle for reforms.”
  • And it ensures that a dialogue on democratic reform between the West and the Middle East will include not only governments but also business and civil society groups. The document states that government, business leaders and civil society groups from the Arab world are all “full partners” in the work of democratic reform. Local ownership doesn’t mean that governments get a monopoly on the articulation of reform goals for their citizens.

Despite this important progress on principles for democracy-promotion, however, the new BMENA initiative fails in one central respect. In all such summit declarations, the statement of intent is ultimately less important than the commitment of all states present to concrete methods of implementing their declared goals. And in a Middle Eastern environment where Western (not just American) intentions are suspect, and where Western deeds have fallen far short of Western declarations in Iraq and Israel/Palestine, the failure of the G-8 states to commit to robust implementation of their Sea Island commitments may hamper their attempts to play a positive role in the ongoing process of political change in the Arab world.

In February and again in April, the United States government presented its G-8 partners with proposed institutions for the Greater Middle East Initiative that would engage the G-8 states in everything from literacy promotion to free-trade agreements to human rights monitoring.

The most recent and detailed US proposal laid out five core institutions that G-8 states would use to promote effective political and economic change:

  • A “Forum for the Future” would ensure ongoing dialogue and monitoring of progress toward democracy;
  • a Foundation for Democracy would pool G-8 states’ funding for democracy-building programs;
  • a Democracy Assistance Group would further coordinate between G-8 non-governmental entities;
  • a Literacy Corps would train teachers and expand education for adults and girls;
  • a series of measures would expand financing opportunities for private Arab enterprises; and
  • a Greater Middle East Development Bank would give substance to the G-8 states’ long-term commitment to building a better future for the peoples of the region.

The joint document, a draft of which was finalized last week for presentation to the G-8 foreign ministers, abandons entirely one key institution, the Foundation for Democracy.

In addition, the Democracy Assistance Group has run into major opposition from some G-8 members and may not survive the final round of negotiations.

Thus, while the draft document clearly articulates G-8 unity on the goal of democracy, it does not now provide much in the way of credible mechanisms to realize that commitment in the everyday relations between the G-8 and Arab states.

The advocates of the new initiative see the Forum for the Future as the central institution that will advance the democratic agenda and hold Arab governments accountable to both internal and external demands. But there’s a flaw in its design that makes it very hard for the Forum to play its intended role, and I think the flaw in design gets to a very fundamental unresolved question in Western attempts to address this issue of Arab reform.

The Forum is meant to include a regular meeting of ministers (and, in parallel, business and civil society groups) to discuss reform issues and monitor progress on democracy. The Forum is loosely modeled on the APEC Forum and the Helsinki process, two cases in which a group of sovereign states jointly created a mechanism for regular dialogue on issues including human rights and political freedoms.

But this Forum is very much unlike the Helsinki process or APEC in one key respect. The Helsinki process grew from an agreement in which Western and Eastern Bloc states jointly committed to respect each other’s sovereignty and not to overturn each other’s governments by force, and in exchange agreed to loosen internal controls and permit greater social activism and interchange among their societies.

But the G-8 Forum will be endorsed only by the G-8 states and perhaps by the handful of Arab governments (so far, Algeria, Yemen, Jordan and Bahrain) who will show up at Sea Island. The G-8 states do not link joining the Forum with enjoying the other benefits of the G-8 reform package. What, then, is the incentive for reluctant Arab regimes to participate in a “dialogue” that is designed to place pressure upon them? There is no compelling reason for recalcitrant Arab governments to join the conversation. And with no political or human rights criteria set by the G-8 for eligibility for the new document’s literacy and business promotion programs, Arab states are offered the help of the West to implement the economic reforms they want and are free to ignore the political ones they do not.

This failure to provide sufficient incentive to engage Arab governments in a dialogue, on the one hand, is matched by a failure to provide robust enough joint Western commitment to democracy aid to engage Arab activists, on the other hand.

The inability to get the Foundation for Democracy and the Democracy Assistance Group endorsed means that the G-8 agreement looks, from the perspective of an Arab citizen who is already suspicious of Western motives and exhausted by Western intervention, much like the Arab League’s declaration in Tunis the other week – a lot of nice rhetoric, with no meat inside. It has great words on democracy, and it does have meat, but the meat of it is that Arab states should open their markets and embrace global capitalism. This is not a great package with which to win the faith of beleaguered Arab liberals – even those who believe in the free market.

The flaws remaining in the Initiative point to continuing disagreements between the US and some of her friends, particularly some European states, about how outside parties can best influence a process of internal change.

Some European states have a great deal invested in the relationships they have built with Arab governments, particularly North African governments, in the Euro-Med process, and they remain disinclined to embrace a more forward policy. When Europeans launched the Barcelona Process in 1995, their main concern was economic – labor migration from the southern Mediterranean to the north. So the Barcelona process naturally tended to emphasize economic development in Arab states and trade relations much more than its human rights agenda. In a post-Madrid world, it seems to me that European partners ought to be reevaluating that priority list, but I see no evidence as yet that they are doing so.

So the G-8 reform menu also emphasizes economic development, particularly private sector development, and Washington is comforting itself with the theory that, in the long run, private sector growth tends to create pressures for greater transparency and citizen participation in governance. But while that was true in Korea and Taiwan it’s not a universal truth.

There is also a continued attempt by US and G-8 partners in this document to have it both ways: to cajole Arab governments to liberalize and simultaneously to provoke civil society to challenge governments. Now I don’t want to suggest that the industrialized states should be out there fomenting popular revolutions in the Arab world – even if they could. In principle, you want to place pressure from above and from below at the same time. But in the long run that is a very hard policy for Western governments to sustain. When there’s no clear incentive for Arab governments to participate in a Forum that also grants a hearing to their societal critics, they won’t show up. And then what good does it do for Arab human rights activists to come to a Forum and articulate demands to a group of Western states who are sympathetic but who have already forgone the opportunity to do much about it?

If the US and the West started out with a credibility deficit in talking about Arab democracy, I don’t think this G-8 initiative is going to do too much, in practice, to overcome that credibility deficit.