[MUSIC] Those schools in the language of politically correctness will reject the characterization Melhem has given earlier. Namely that Arab civilization such as we knew it is all but gone, destroyed by inner forces of radicalization, anti-rationalism, and a surprising communally suicidal propensity for violence. There is no recognizable legitimacy left in the Arab world. He comes to this assessment today when the Arab State system is in open dissolution. Large parts of its population are internally displaced, into national refugees driven out by violence and economic despair. Or, staying put in exile amidst the drudgery of political repression and social stagnation. Melhem makes clear that we won't easily find answers, but that the need for analysis and honest reckoning is evident by direct societies left behind. No one paradigm or one theory can explain what went wrong in the Arab world in the last century. There is no obvious set of reasons for the colossal failures of all the ideologies and political movements that swept the Arab region. Arab nationalism in its Baathist and Nasserite forms, various Islamist movements, Arab socialism, the rentier state and rapacious monopolies, leaving in their wake a string of broken societies. Melhem writes this today, when the evidence of failure of all competing ideologies, all of which had justified massive repression and intellectual contortion has become incontrovertible. Kanan Makiya, writing more than 20 years earlier in his Republic of Fear, The Politics of Modern Iraq, discusses the Stalinist use of terror and massive repression during the period of enforced industrialization of the Soviet Union during the 1930s and 40s. In common narratives, the economic and social backwardness of the Soviet Union justified violence and terror in the eyes of half-baked Marxists and progressive nationalists like the Ba'ath who have raised high the banner of parochialism, cultural relativism and Third Worldism. If Stalinist violence were compensated for by the emergence of the Soviet Union as a superpower, then Ba'thism could find its justification by way of precedent. Both Baathist states have now completely collapsed. Iraq under the strain of external threat of attack from the United States while Syria was destroyed by internal rebellion, although it's supported by external actors. It is quite clear, that the reign of terror, unleashed on their populations just as a somewhat less severe but equally suffocating repression. And virtually all other Arab states has not yielded the developmental benefits promised. Both socialist and capitalist theories of state-lead development have failed to deliver results. It has become apparent that the key claim of modernization theory in its various guises has been false. Namely, that economic development could be kickstarted by the state and would quasi-automatically lead to corresponding political development. Social mobilization coming in the way of state driven modernization has tended to outpace relatively immature political institutions. When traditional social structures have been displaced by new modes of living and greater expectations, highly unstable social situations ensued which could often only be control with very high rates of repression. This reliance on repression, fear, conspiracy thinking, and impossibility of rational critique, that too marked degradation of thought that Makiya describes vividly. How do barrages of myths coming from every direction- newspapers, the media, workplace, street, and family affect people after twenty years, especially those once illiterate? What does the administration of lies from the cradle to the grave do to people's judgement, especially when they are afraid? No one knows. From the outside one can reach in and scratch at the surface. From within the world is black, and having the courage to want to understand is about groping around trying to get a sense of what cannot be seen. This is the cold world of analysis in which all stories are forbidden. Those who denounced as Eurocentric such cold analysis with its application of universal standards and common tools of inquiry make a two-pronged argument. One normative and one epistemological. The normative relativist argument is utterly bogus, false, and must be rejected on principle. The second epistemological is correct and must be treated seriously. Differentiating between the two is not difficult but necessary as you will see now. The relativist critique argues that European values, as expressed in the peculiar form of government that developed here, are somehow inapplicable to non Europeans. They argue that therefore democracy, constitutional limitation of governmental power, the protection of rights, and the predictability of economic and social life that comes from the existence of effective, enforceable legal rules are somehow inappropriate for non Europeans, non whites, non Christians. Because these people somehow prefer a more authentic existence, subject to the stipulation of their own culture or religion. This position claims in other words, that the benefits of good governance are somehow culturally contingent. I reject this position on principle because the benefits of decent governance mean longer, healthier, happier lives. Denying that governance matters or claiming that some cultures somehow don't care for decent governance is tantamount to saying that some cultures like to die sooner, live sicker and unhappier lives. However much one dresses up that argument and romanticize notions about exotic peoples, it is untenable. The other Eurocentric critique, by contrast, has substance. The classical theoreticians of modernization, like Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Henry Maine, Ferinand Tonnies, and my hero Max Weber, studied for obvious reasons the experience of those nations in which modernity and industrialization had manifested itself first. Trying to derive abstract theories about that process with a view to identify the driving factors that account for the transformation of traditional societies into modern, socially, normatively and intellectually mobile ones. They have tended to see the particular experience of that process in England, Germany, France, and the United States as paradigmatic for the process as such. While that focus is understandable in light of the earliest manifestation of modernization in the West, the criticism of modernization theories derived from that particular cultural and evidential basis as reductionist, is accurate. Development is a highly complex and contextually contingent phenomenon, strongly influenced by past dependencies, idiosyncrasies, and local particularities. Seeking to abstract a single or very few causal factors is therefore fraught with danger and experience of any one locality will only rarely transfer to a different one. The peculiar trajectory of European political, economic and social development therefore, cannot offer ready made blueprints for other parts of the world. As had for instance, erroneously been claimed by so-called modernization theory and its communist equivalent in the 1950s and 60s. This critique, while accurate in the context of the self righteous certainty of development theory during the period of decolonization, addresses a caricature of arguments presented here. My argument is not about form, the historically and culturally contingent solution to a particular social problem, but about performance. That is, whether the problem got solved effectively, efficiently, and durably. Many such solutions were found in Western Europe, but no one is arguing that its peculiar experience with irrational bureaucratic legally structured administration can be simply transposed into different culture contexts. Still, the manner in which these government machineries produce output in terms of public services is a useful, and in a world marked by migratory information flows, necessary standard of comparison. This insistence on performance output is stressed in a widely cited paper by two world bank economists, that in its original title, Getting to Denmark, ruffled precisely such relativist feathers. The two wrote, Most argue that the (perhaps very) long-run goal is to ensure that the provision of key services such as clean water, education, sanitation, policing, safety/sanitary regulation, roads, and public health is assured by effective, rules-based, meritocratic, and politically accountable public agencies- that is, something resembling the Weberian bureaucracies. We call such a world, Denmark. By Denmark, we do not, of course, mean Denmark [the actual country]. Rather, we mean the common core of the structure of the workings of the public sector in countries usually called developed (including new arrivals like Singapore). To be sure, there are numerous variations to the core Denmark ideal. Indeed, remarkably similar performance outcomes can be and are delivered by different and culturally distinctive, institutional forms, for instance Denmark, New Zealand, Germany, and Japan. The historical evidence is surely that while development is likely to entail a convergence in terms of institutional performance outcomes, the precise form those institutional arrangements actually come to take in each country will continue to be as varied as the countries themselves. Now, Getting to Denmark is a curiously accurate title for the problem at hand. For it is precisely the inability of all Arab states to deliver the kind of institutional performance outcomes necessary for reasonably stable, reasonably prosperous, reasonably free, reasonably predictable, and reasonably fair societies that has motivated increasing numbers of people to vote with their feet and quite literally try to get to Denmark or more accurately, Germany and Sweden. The first relativist argument, namely that non Europeans somehow don't covet the kind of good governance generally associated with Western constitutional democracies is both normatively and quite evidently empirically false. It is contradicted by every single refugee boat crossing the Mediterranean, testimony to the culture transcending attractiveness of that institutional package. [MUSIC]
