Solid kernels in a not so good idea

My SAIS colleague Ed Joseph and Aaron David Miller earlier this week put forward a proposal for a  Union of Arab Democracies that merits examination despite its deep and fatal flaws.  There are nuggets therein worth preserving.

The idea in their words is this:

Egypt and its fractious neighbors desperately need a unifying vision that can inculcate respect for democratic norms across glaring differences. Although Arab nations have no interest in joining the European Union or NATO, the Arab world can draw on the model of Eastern European transition, with fledgling Arab democracies devising their own supra-national organization dedicated to advancing democracy. Like the E.U. in its infancy, this Union of Arab Democracies (UAD) could start with limited objectives and evolve toward ambitious goals, including, ultimately, pan-Arab political union.

Waving their magic wand, Ed and Aaron then tell us all the good things that would happen if such an organization were to come into existence, despite the shambolic history of pan-Arab political union proposals.

If Egypt and the other Arab uprising countries were capable of creating such an organization, they wouldn’t need it.  The weakness of the proposal is all too apparent when Ed and Aaron get to proposing that Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority (known to me as Palestine) would be the leading democracies, with transitioning countries (Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen) and supposedly “liberalizing” countries (Morocco, Jordan and possibly Oman) tagging along.  What a democratic club!  Several are more likely to find themselves joining an Islamic union than a democratic one.

Nevertheless, there is a core idea here that is important:  transitions need a destination.  When the Berlin wall fell, the former Soviet satellites of eastern Europe and the Baltic “captive nations” quickly set their aim on meeting European Union and NATO standards.  This gave direction and impetus to countries that would otherwise have wandered as aimlessly as the North African revolutions are doing today.

The way to answer the question “transition to what?” is not to have nascent Arab democracies try to figure it out for themselves.  They cannot reasonably aim for membership in NATO or the EU, but they should be able to aim at two easier targets:  the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe or, as my Turkish colleague Aylin Unver Noi suggests, the Council of Europe.

OSCE comprises 57 states and plays an important role in the Balkans and the more Asian parts of Eurasia.  Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia are already among its “cooperating partners.”  Several OSCE members are no farther along in democratizing than their Middle Eastern partners.  With 47 member states, the Council of Europe regards itself as the continent’s leading human rights organization.  It has a human rights court with some real enforcement capacity that could provide minorities in the Middle East with real recourse if their mother countries were to join.

The idea of extending OSCE and the Council of Europe to the southern littoral of the Mediterranean may seem far fetched, but efforts to construct more ad hoc arrangements have not worked well.  Neither the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership nor the Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative gained much traction before 2011, Aylin says, and their relevance will be further reduced by the Arab uprisings.

Another of the world’s more restrictive clubs, the rich people’s Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) , has opened its doors to newly developed states like Korea and Mexico, much to their benefit and the benefit of the organization.  Opening the OSCE and Council of Europe to new Middle Eastern members, who would need to meet clearly defined criteria in order to get in, would be a worthwhile experiment.  It would give the Arab uprisings, if they want it, a destination as well as a tough-minded qualification process, which is really what Ed and Aaron were calling for.

So “no” to the Arab Democratic Union.  “Yes” to Arab democracy that aims to meet the not too exacting standards of the OSCE and respects human rights as defined by the Council of Europe.