The young and the restless and the right kind of caliphate
Thursday, January 31, 2008 at 1:26AM GLOBAL ECONOMY: "Mideast Jobless Fight Yields New Problems: Oil Boom Creates Work, but Soaring Younger Population Lacks Skills, Shuns Some Sectors," by Mariam Fam, Wall Street Journal, 11 December 2007, p. A12.
SPECIAL REPORT: "Caliph Wanted: Why An Old Islamic Institution Resonates With Many Muslims Today," by Jay Tolson, U.S. News & World Report, 14 January 2008, p. 38.
COVER STORY: "A World Without Islam," by Graham Fuller, Foreign Policy, January/February 2008, p. 46.
The good news with the current oil boom is that the Mideast states that benefit from it seem far more aware this time of the need to diversify their economies, with the big driver being demographics. That youth bulge I've described many times (a staple of my brief) is now concentrated at roughly 15-29, so new entrants into the job market right now are peaking throughout the region. Since fertility rates have dropped throughout the region, except for the Palestinians and a few other pockets, managing this bulge is the democracy question of note for the coming decades.
Thus it's so crucial that this oil boom translate into jobs. Again, the good news is that the regimes seem aware of this and make their plans and efforts. In states without oil, like Egypt, we also see efforts through policy reform.
The second piece of good news, cited in the top story, is that jobless rates are dropping through most of the region (Mideast and North Africa was 14.3% in 2000, and now 10.8%. That average hides a lot. The GCC countries already have low jobless rates (5% and below). It's the resource-poor and labor-rich Arab countries (Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia and Palestine) that account for the roughly 15-10 percent drop.
Only Algeria and Iran are considered both resource and labor rich—something to remember.
Saudi Arabia is an oddity: super resource rich and somewhat labor rich—just not engaged due to the high foreign labor usage. There, the official jobless rate is 12%, but some suspect it's roughly 25%, especially among the young.
The first problem with this picture is that the trend for job creation is more low paying, concentrated in ag and construction. The second problem is that Saudi Arabia's youth unemployment rate is roughly the average for the region: about one out of four young people entering the market are either poorly educated or overly educated for the opportunities provided.
And frankly, it's the smart ones that you gotta worry about.
Given that supply-demand mismatch, there's little wonder why young people feel that the Arab/Islamic world needs to cut a better deal with globalization. The radical rewrite is called the caliphate, in all its imagined forms.
The defensive variation here is culture control, or civilizational apartheid: keep out Westoxification.
The more offensive version is radicalizing Muslims currently globalized (i.e., living in the Core) toward 5th column-like jihad.
The most positive, logical version is an economic commonwealth concept that presents the Arab world with a full-spectrum collective bargaining voice, not like OPEC, which is only about exports.
What the region needs is reasonable access to appropriate positions in global production chains. Globalization integrates trade and disintegrates production. The Middle East feels more integrated in access to consumption (thus the bad content) but feels largely locked out on the disintegrated production, which so far has pulled Asia into the Core but keeps them trapped in the front-end resource supplying role and nothing more.
What would an Islamic commonwealth, based in MENA (Middle East/North Africa), logically demand in such broadband negotiations? Some sort of trade-off on connectivity, integration to production chains, and ability to censor content.
Connectivity is technically no big deal. It has more to do with allowed access at this point (freedom of movement).
Integration to production chains is tied to trust issues, which emanate from security fears. If you're a globally-integrated enterprise, it's easier to stay away from such uncertainty.
On the ability to censor, we're already watching China pioneer that effort somewhat, limited primarily to political expression but just as importantly to sexual content (a losing battle, as we see with movies right now, but try they will).
What should we demand? Besides the two-state solution for Israel and Palestine and the usual stuff on WMD/terror, the key things we need to push are human rights in general, women's rights in particular, and tolerance for other religions.
Is this a hard bargain? Not as much as you might think, because all basically have to happen for the connectivity that's knocking on the door right now not to have a destabilizing impact.
And yeah, I agree with Fuller: even without Islam, we'd be facing roughly the same set of problems. Islam is a patriarchal religion based in the desert requirement for tough codes. Then again, so is Arabic culture in general. Both reflect the underlying geographic/enviro realities.
We may see them as drivers, but they're more dependent variables. The essential struggles of the region (as Fuller describes them: power, territory, influence and trade) "existed long before Islam arrived."
Adding oil on top doesn't make Islam the problem. No Islam and this region is logically Eastern Orthodox, not Western Christian. Given the imperial history of Europe in the region, a resistant ideology was preordained. Plenty of prophets were tried before THE prophet.
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Rob Johnson