Tamara Cofman Wittes, a research fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, says that there is considerable discussion about political reform in the Arab world. Pressure is coming from within Arab societies and also from President Bush, who has argued that democratic change can help win the war on terror. At an Arab League meeting last weekend, a generalized formula for reform was approved, the first time the umbrella organization for Arab governments promulgated such a plan.

“There’s certainly overlap, rhetorically, in the goals articulated by the United States and the goals articulated by the Arab League in its summit declaration: deepening the basis of democracy, expanding political participation, advancing the role of women and women’s rights, economic reform to improve standards of living,” she says. But the question is how these reforms will be carried out, she says.

Wittes was interviewed by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org, on May 24, 2004.

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The Arab League issued a rather broad, generalized declaration on the need for political reform, as well as statements on Iraq, the Palestinian issue and Syria. What do you make of the results?

I suppose the greatest success of the meeting was that it took place at all. It was originally scheduled to take place at the end of March and was cancelled at the last minute by the Tunisians because of disagreements among Arab states over what they would say on the question of reform. So the fact that, in the face of that very public argument, the Arab states managed to get together and agree upon a document, however vague it may be, represents a certain success for the continued relevance of the Arab League.

That said, the document, as you know, is quite general. It doesn’t include much in the way of implementation mechanisms. And indeed, the more reformist ministers and officials who attended the meeting said that the key would be not in the document itself but in its implementation.

The presumption in this country has been that there is no democracy in the Arab world and very little concern about what we consider human rights, so what has been the driving force behind this document?

There are two. One is the clear demographic and economic reality on the ground. In most Arab states, there is a tremendous youth bulge in the population. The economies are stagnated or growing very slowly, too slowly to provide jobs for all these young adults, and the education system is not training them with skills that would make them employable.

So you have a tremendous problem of under performance and a growing gap between the expectations that the younger generation has for their lives and what the governments are able to provide. That’s a reality that no Arab government, at this point, can ignore and that all of them acknowledge. At the same time, there is this new imperative put forward by the United States and other Western countries that the political and economic stagnation in the Arab world is one source of the vulnerability of Arab populations to extremist ideologies like that of Al Qaeda.

And so, President Bush and others are arguing that part of the war on terrorism is the advancement of freedom in the Arab world, because if people there have the ability to express their grievances peacefully and to change their governments in ways that allow them to better their lives, then they won’t turn to extremist violence. In the face of those two realities, external pressures and internal pressures, the Arab governments have agreed on the need for what they call “reform.” The big question, of course, is how that reform is to be implemented, and there you find incredible divergences of opinion not just between Arabs and the West but also among Arab states.

What are the some of the differences in the Arab world?

First of all, there’s a question of emphasis. There are really four dimensions of reform that are discussed. There’s political reform: increasing the participation of citizens in governance. There’s economic reform: privatizing state-owned industries, enabling foreign investment, increasing foreign trade, and other things that will generate more economic growth and more jobs. Then there’s the question of educational reform, which is very controversial because it involves, in many countries, the role of religious leaders and the religious establishment in the education of youth. And finally, the question of social reform, which includes issues like the status of women, laws regarding divorce and child custody, and female ownership of property; all of these are enormously controversial as well.

On all four of these dimensions of reform, you will find different states emphasizing different aspects. The Jordanians, for example, who are trying to jump start their economy with foreign investment, are very focused on economic dimensions and on restructuring their regulatory mechanisms, their banking systems, in ways that would encourage people to bring their money to Jordan. Others like Qatar, for example, are very focused on education. The Qataris have built what they call an education city where they’re bringing American and other Western universities to open branch campuses.

President Bush gave a speech on February 4 on the need for democracy in the Middle East, and that was the basis of a draft document that was circulated to the G-8 nations earlier in the year. Where do the United States/G-8 discussions intersect with the Arab League document?

There’s certainly overlap, rhetorically, in the goals articulated by the United States and the goals articulated by the Arab League in its summit declaration: deepening the basis of democracy, expanding political participation, advancing the role of women and women’s rights, economic reform to improve standards of living.

Again, the question is how. The Arab League and most Arab governments are extremely resistant to the idea of a reform agenda being dictated from outside, and they are particularly concerned about their relationships with Western states— trade relationships, aid relationships, or diplomatic relationships— being conditioned on the status of reforms inside their states. So the Arab League, with its document, was trying in a way to pre-empt a G-8 discussion and seize the agenda back from the G-8, which until this point hadn’t had a sense that the Arab governments were ready to take this issue seriously.

Within the Arab world there have been many different pro-reform statements by Arab intellectuals and others. Can you briefly discuss them?

It’s been one of the most interesting phenomena over the last several years to watch. With respect to this issue, Arab liberals and pro-reform activists, some of whom are in government and some of whom are not, have been much more willing to speak out publicly about the specific kind of changes that are needed.

For example, there have been several documents that have explicitly discussed the issue of special security courts or emergency courts, which in many Arab countries are run by the military and are not part of the regular court system and are used to stifle dissent or used to punish journalists or others who are critical of the regime. You have reformers now advancing their own agenda in a very public way and challenging governments to accept or reject these recommendations. This places an additional source of pressure on these regimes, of course, but it also gives Western states like the United States that are interested in advancing reform something to seize on, whereby they can say, “Well, this isn’t just an American notion of change, this is something that your own citizens are advocating, and therefore, you cannot ignore it.”

Does this bode well, or have anything to do with the bigger issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or Iraq?

This is an issue of great controversy within the region. There are some who say, and in fact the Arab League emphasized this in its document, that until these major regional conflicts are resolved and until basic security in the region has been addressed, it is, in a way, ridiculous or beside the point to discuss questions of internal political reform.

Others say the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the crisis in Iraq are being used by governments as an excuse to avoid dealing with pressing internal problems and to deflect internal pressures. In fact, the Qatari foreign minister, Sheik Hamad bin Jassem [al-Thani], said that himself just a couple weeks ago. He was asked by one of the Arabic satellite channels, “Do you think it’s appropriate to deal with this reform issue in a big way at the summit when the Israelis are doing what they’re doing in Gaza?” And he said: “Don’t give us this excuse. Reform is too important; reform has nothing to do with Iraq; reform has nothing to do with Palestine.”

There’s a real division of opinion on this. I would say, though, there’s one important connection from the perspective of American policy. When the United States talks about promoting democracy in the Arab world, there are many Arabs who feel it doesn’t have much credibility because the United States has been one of the strongest supporters of Arab autocrats over the years: people like Saddam Hussein until 1991, [President] Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and, of course, the Saudi [royal] family in Saudi Arabia.

One Arab party that is working very hard to undertake internal reforms and is asking for American assistance is the Palestinian Authority, which put forward a proposal to hold new elections for its parliament and presidency. The United States hasn’t yet embraced this Palestinian proposal for new elections, and it rings a bit oddly in the region that the United States, having pushed the idea of elected governments so hard and having emphasized the need for Palestinian reform as a prerequisite for the peace process, isn’t jumping at the Palestinian proposal for new elections.