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So says the National Rifle Association (NRA) in an open letter responding to President Barack Obama’s suggestion that it is time for all sides in the gun debate to get together and find a “sensible, intelligent way” to make the United States a safer place. The president mentioned common sense and a White House spokesman talked of the need to find common ground.

Common sense has not been in abundant supply in decades of on-again, off-again debate on guns and violence. As to finding common ground between the leading gun lobby and advocates of better controls, the NRA’s Executive Vice President, Wayne LaPierre, says his group will “absolutely not” take part in the sort of meeting envisaged by Obama. Such a meeting, he said in a series of media interviews, would be with people opposed to the constitutional right to bear arms.

Talking to people of different views is obviously not a concept the politically powerful gun lobby intends to embrace.

In his open letter, LaPierre listed steps the president could take to prevent mass shootings, such as the January 8 rampage in Tucson that killed six people and wounded a member of Congress, Gabrielle Giffords. “One of these (steps) is to call on the national news media to refrain from giving deranged criminals minute-by-minute coverage of their heinous acts, which only serves to encourage copycat behavior.”

It’s an argument that presupposes that there are plenty of deranged Americans who, like the Tucson shooter, are well-armed, passed the background check required to purchase guns, and are primed to spring into action after they see scenes of carnage on television. It’s also an argument fit for a pre-Internet dictatorship where presidents could tell the media how and what to report.

Until he tip-toed into the subject of gun violence on March 13, with an op-ed article in the Arizona Daily Star, Obama had kept silent on the issue, disappointing many of those who had voted him into office after a campaign in which he promised various gun control measures, including a permanent ban on the sale of assault weapons. The disappointment ran so deep that one of the most prominent gun control groups, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, gave him an “F”, a failing grade, after his first year in office.

The president’s belated entry into the discussion, stirred anew after the Tucson shooting, will not earn him a reputation as an audacious reformer of a system even some gun enthusiasts admit is defective. “No guts on gun reform,” noted a headline over an opinion piece critical of Obama in The Washington Post.

Obama mum on key issues
The president made no mention of assault rifles, no mention of the high-capacity magazines control advocates want banned, no mention of private sales of guns that do not require background checks, no mention of the so-called Tiahrt Amendment which restricts the ability of local law enforcement to access important information to trace guns, no mention of a proposal that would have required around 8,500 gun shops along the border with Mexico to report multiple sales of two or more assault weapons to the same person.

Thousands of weapons from those gun shops end up in Mexico, where more than 36,000 people have died since 2006 in parallel wars drug traffickers wage against each other – for access to the rich U.S. market – and against the government. President Felipe Calderon has repeatedly called for a re-instatement of the ban on assault weapons the administration of George W. Bush allowed to lapse in 2004.

The Mexican government expressed disappointment when the limited measure – it called for reporting, not prohibiting, bulk sales – died in the House of Representatives in February after energetic lobbying by the NRA. For it, and other gun rights group, tighter regulations are part of a long-standing conspiracy to undo the Second Amendment of the Constitution.

Passed in 1789, the amendment says that “a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The sinister forces working for infringement, in the eyes of many gun owners, include New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the coalition he set up in 2006, Mayors Against Illegal Guns.

It has grown from 15 mayors then to 550 now, advocates “common sense legislation for background checks”, and in January dispatched on a tour of 25 U.S. states a truck carrying a billboard with a running tally of Americans killed by guns since the Tucson mass shooting. When the truck left New York, on February 16, that count stood at 1,300. By March 17, it had risen to 2,316. Daily average: 34.

Such figures do not impress the self-appointed guardians of the Second Amendment. Neither does a bigger number: since the September 11, 2001, attack on New York and Washington, more than a quarter million Americans have died by firearms (murder, suicide, accidents).

In online discussions about guns, without fail someone comes up with the observation that more people die in car accidents than by bullet. So, goes the inevitable question, should there be restrictions on car sales?

Eyebrows were raised when the Japanese government started to rely primarily on seawater to avoid a (further) humanitarian crisis. Where did they get the idea that such a method would be effective at all? Go to certain parts of Russia, where large battalions of nuclear submarines have been receiving similar treatment for decades. In many northern and coastal towns across the former Soviet bloc soldiers and sailors are on twenty-four hour guard, hosing down hundreds of tonnes of potentially cataclysmic materials, or so the rumours go.

Considering the fear installed by governments during and post- Cold War on uranium it seems rich now to assume that our attitude should change so drastically because the popularity of using it as an energy source has increased. Other than burying it in certain outposts in the Australian outback we still don’t know how to dispose of it.

As the Japanese are now discovering, we cannot rely wholly on an energy source that is, as yet, not completely within humanity’s understanding. “It is true that our reduction target will be affected significantly,” said a member of the country’s environment ministry, following speculation that there will be a boosted requirement for fossil fuels, placing a major dent in Japan’s ambitious determination to reduce carbon emissions by 25 percent of 1990 totals.

One nation attempting to resolve it’s somewhat conflicting interest in energy management is Australia. Although the country’s lax approach to uranium has seen it come under criticism from international environmental groups, it’s certainly taking drastic steps in other areas. The government is hoping to ratify the Carbon Farming Initiative (CFI) at the start of July, which would see the world’s first nationally legislated market for carbon credits from farming projects. In other words, those that throw money into forestry projects will benefit from tax incentives and the ability to produce on larger scales. A major drawback is that price will have to be set on carbon emissions in order to underscore demand for major polluters, stifling the freedom of the markets.

Much like the accepted attitude toward nuclear power over fossils, it seems to be a short-term solution with an obvious defect from the outset.

Perhaps the most striking finding in the United Nations’ recent 20th anniversary Human Development Report is the outstanding performance of the Muslim countries of the Middle East and North Africa. Here was Tunisia, ranked sixth among 135 countries in terms of improvement in its Human Development Index (HDI) over the previous four decades, ahead of Malaysia, Hong Kong, Mexico, and India. Not far behind was Egypt, ranked 14th.

The HDI is a measure of development that captures achievements in health and education alongside economic growth. Egypt and (especially) Tunisia did well enough on the growth front, but where they really shone was on these broader indicators. At 74, Tunisia’s life expectancy edges out Hungary’s and Estonia’s, countries that are more than twice as wealthy. Some 69 percent of Egypt’s children are in school, a ratio that matches much richer Malaysia’s. Clearly, these were states that did not fail in providing social services or distributing the benefits of economic growth widely.

Yet in the end it did not matter. The Tunisian and Egyptian people were, to paraphrase Howard Beale, mad as hell at their governments, and they were not going to take it anymore. If Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali or Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak were hoping for political popularity as a reward for economic gains, they must have been sorely disappointed.

One lesson of the Arab annus mirabilis, then, is that good economics need not always mean good politics; the two can part ways for quite some time. It is true that the world’s wealthy countries are almost all democracies. But democratic politics is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for economic development over a period of several decades.

Stark contrasts
Despite the economic advances they registered, Tunisia, Egypt, and many other Middle Eastern countries remained authoritarian countries ruled by a narrow group of cronies, with corruption, clientelism, and nepotism running rife. These countries’ rankings on political freedoms and corruption stand in glaring contrast to their rankings on development indicators.

In Tunisia, Freedom House reported prior to the Jasmine revolution, “the authorities continued to harass, arrest, and imprison journalists and bloggers, human rights activists, and political opponents of the government.” The Egyptian government was ranked 111th out of 180 countries in Transparency International’s 2009 survey of corruption.

And of course, the converse is also true: India has been democratic since independence in 1947, yet the country didn’t begin to escape of its low “Hindu rate of growth” until the early 1980’s.

A second lesson is that rapid economic growth does not buy political stability on its own, unless political institutions are allowed to develop and mature rapidly as well. In fact, economic growth itself generates social and economic mobilisation, a fundamental source of political instability.

As the late political scientist Samuel Huntington put it more than 40 years ago, “social and economic change – urbanisation, increases in literacy and education, industrialisation, mass media expansion – extend political consciousness, multiply political demands, broaden political participation.” Now add social media such as Twitter and Facebook to the equation, and the destabilising forces that rapid economic change sets into motion can become overwhelming.

These forces become most potent when the gap between social mobilisation and the quality of political institutions widens. When a country’s political institutions are mature, they respond to demands from below through a combination of accommodation, response, and representation. When they are under-developed, they shut those demands out in the hope that they will go away – or eventually be bought off by economic improvements.

The events in the Middle East amply demonstrate the fragility of the second model. Protesters in Tunis and Cairo were not demonstrating about lack of economic opportunity or poor social services. They were rallying against a political regime that they felt was insular, arbitrary, and corrupt, and that did not allow them adequate voice.

No results found
A political regime that can handle these pressures need not be democratic in the Western sense of the term. One can imagine responsive political systems that do not operate through free elections and competition among political parties. Some would point to Oman or Singapore as examples of authoritarian regimes that are durable in the face of rapid economic change. Perhaps so. But the only kind of political system that has proved itself over the long haul is that associated with modern Western democracies.

Which brings us to China. At the height of the Egyptian protests, Chinese web surfers who searched the terms “Egypt” or “Cairo” were returned messages saying that no results could be found. Evidently, the Chinese government did not want its citizens to read up on the Egyptian protests and get the wrong idea. With the memory of the 1989 Tiananmen Square movement ever present, China’s leaders are intent on preventing a repeat.

China is not Tunisia or Egypt, of course. The Chinese government has experimented with local democracy and has tried hard to crack down on corruption. Even so, protest has spread over the last decade. There were 87,000 instances of what the government calls “sudden mass incidents” in 2005, the last year that the government released such statistics, which suggests that the rate has since increased. Dissidents challenge the supremacy of the Communist Party at their peril.

The Chinese leadership’s gamble is that a rapid increase in living standards and employment opportunities will keep the lid on simmering social and political tensions. That is why it is so intent on achieving annual economic growth of eight percent or higher – the magic number that it believes will contain social strife.

But Egypt and Tunisia have just sent a sobering message to China and other authoritarian regimes around the world: don’t count on economic progress to keep you in power forever.

© Project Syndicate 1995–2011

Two centuries ago, Napoleon’s arrival in Egypt heralded the advent of the modern Middle East. Now, almost 90 years after the demise of the Ottoman Empire, 50 years after the end of colonialism, and eight years after the Iraq War began, the revolutionary protests in Cairo suggest that another shift may well be underway.

The first pillar – military presence – dates back to French and British occupation of parts of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, and was reinforced by the Cold War-era military links forged by the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1955, the West was even strong enough to sign up a remarkable cast of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan in a kind of West Asian NATO known as the Baghdad Pact.

The Yom Kippur War in 1973 was a neat illustration of the Western and Soviet military influence. The Egyptian army fired Czechoslovak 130mm rockets while Syrian MIGs fought Israeli Skyhawks over the Golan Heights. But American and Soviet influence was not confined to the battlefield, as both countries made their presence felt high up the military chain of command. More recently, military installations in the Persian Gulf protected the oil supplies of the Cold War alliance and deterred both Ba’athist Iraq and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Iran from grabbing the prized oil wells or choking off export routes.

But this military pillar has been steadily eroded. An early sign was the failure of “Operation Eagle Claw” to rescue US hostages in Iran in 1980. Another crack appeared with the 1983 Hezbollah attack on the US Marine barracks in Beirut, which triggered an abrupt US withdrawal from Lebanon. Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, US forces have withdrawn from Saudi Arabia and discovered that their conventional military potency does not necessarily translate into impact on the ground.

The second pillar of the West’s Middle East role – commercial ties – has also been weakened. America used to be the essential trade partner for the Gulf countries, but this has now changed. In 2009, Saudi Arabia exported 57 percent of its 2009 crude oil to the Far East, and just 14 percent to the US. Responding to this underlying shift, King Abdullah has been pursuing a “look East” policy since 2005, resulting in trade worth more than $60bn.

Eastward shift
This eastward shift has made China a bigger trading partner than the US for both Qatar and the UAE. And almost a quarter of Qatar’s trade is with China, compared to just over five percent with the US. Likewise, 37 percent of the UAE’s trade is with China, India, and South Korea. To many Middle East states, what China wants is now just as important as the interests of the US.

Finally, the US no longer has a string of relatively stable clients in the region. The US believed that the massive amounts of aid that it doled out to Egypt, Israel, and Jordan guaranteed both stability and cooperation on issues of American interest. This worked for three decades, but now the link is weakening.

The pace of the decline of Western influence seems to have accelerated over the past decade. The Saudis made it clear in 2003 that they could no longer host US military installations. In both his first and second terms as Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu refused to follow the US script on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. And, despite hosting a huge US military base, Qatar maintains close links to Syria and Iran.

To this must now be added the revolt in Egypt. Hosni Mubarak was the lynchpin of the West’s policy: he was uncompromising with potential US enemies; he could be relied upon to appear at peace talks with the Israelis; and he could be used to add weight to the American position on Iran. Now the US-Egyptian alliance is under threat, and with it American policy for the entire Middle East.

As the three pillars of Western Middle East policy crumble, a new Middle East is taking shape, buffeted by Pacific trade winds and owing allegiance to more than one power. Its geopolitical architecture is being shaped by the North African revolutions, Turkish assertiveness, Iranian intransigence, and the Iraq debacle. The West will not find the resulting strategic terrain easy to navigate.

© Project Syndicate 1995–2011

A strictly economic interpretation of events in Tunisia and Egypt would be too simplistic – however tempting such an exercise is for an economist. That said, there is no question that the upheavals in both countries – and elsewhere in the Arab world – largely reflect their governments’ failure to share the wealth.

The problem is not an inability to deliver economic growth. In both Tunisia and Egypt, the authorities have strengthened macroeconomic policy and moved to open the economy. Their reforms have produced strong results. Annual growth since 1999 has averaged 5.1 percent in Egypt, and 4.6 percent in Tunisia – not Chinese-style growth rates, to be sure, but comparable nonetheless to emerging-market countries like Brazil and Indonesia, which are now widely viewed as economic successes.

Rather, the problem is that the benefits of growth have failed to trickle down to disaffected youth. The share of workers under the age of 30 is higher in North Africa and the Middle East than in any other part of the world. Their economic prospects are correspondingly more limited. University graduates find few opportunities outside the usual areas of banking and finance. Anyone who has travelled to the region will have had at least one experience with a highly literate, overeducated tour guide.

With modern manufacturing underdeveloped, many young workers with fewer skills and less education are consigned to the informal sector. Corruption is widespread. Getting ahead depends on personal connections of the sort enjoyed by the sons of military officers and political officials, but few others.

Getting ahead
It may stretch credulity to think that a high-growth economy like China might soon be facing similar problems. But the warning signs are there. Given the lack of political freedoms, the Chinese government’s legitimacy rests on its ability to deliver improved living standards and increased economic opportunity to the masses. So far those masses have little to complain about. But that could change, and suddenly.

First, there is the growing problem of   unemployment and underemployment among university graduates. Since 1999, when the Chinese government began a push to ramp up university education, the number of graduates has risen seven-fold, but the number of high-skilled, high-paying jobs has not kept pace.
Indeed, the country is rife with reports of desperate university graduates unable to find any kind of productive employment. Newspapers and blogs speak of the “ant tribe” of recent graduates living in cramped basements in the country’s big cities while futilely searching for work.

In part, these unfortunate outcomes reflect the inflexibility of China’s education system. Students spend their entire four years at university studying a single subject, be it accounting or computer science. As a result, they have few skills that can be applied elsewhere if the job they expect fails to materialise. There has also been a tendency to push students into fields like engineering, even though the Chinese economy is now beginning to shift from manufacturing to services.

Thus, China needs to move quickly on education reform. It needs to provide its university students with more flexible skills, more general training, and more encouragement to think critically and creatively.

Residency permits
Moreover, there is the problem of less-skilled and less-educated migrants from the countryside, who are consigned to second-class jobs in the cities. Not possessing urban residency permits, they lack even the limited job protections and benefits of workers who do. And, because they may be here today but gone tomorrow, they receive little in the way of meaningful on-the-job training.

The migrants’ predicament underscores the need to reform hukou, China’s system of residency permits. A handful of provinces and cities have gone so far as to abolish it, without catastrophic consequences. Others could usefully follow their lead.

Finally, China needs to get serious about its corruption problem. Personal connections, or guanxi, remain critical for getting ahead. Recent migrants from the countryside and graduates with degrees from second-tier universities sorely lack such connections. If they continue to see the children of high government officials doing better, their disaffection will grow.

The ability of disaffected youth – university-educated youth in particular – to use social media to organise themselves has been on powerful display recently in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere. In January, it was still possible for the Egyptian government to halt all internet traffic and for the Chinese authorities to block the Chinese word for “Egypt” from its Twitter-like service Sina. But in social media, as in banking, the regulated tend to stay one step ahead of the regulators. Such shutdowns will be increasingly difficult for those in power to enforce.

If Chinese officials don’t move faster to channel popular grievances and head off potential sources of disaffection, they could eventually be confronted with an uprising of their own – an uprising far broader and more determined than the student protest that they crushed in Tiananmen Square in 1989. 

© Project Syndicate 1995–2011

Revolutions happen for a reason. In the case of Egypt, there are several reasons: more than 30 years of one-man rule; Hosni Mubarak’s plans to pass the presidency on to his son; widespread corruption, patronage, and nepotism; and economic reform that did not benefit most Egyptians, but that nonetheless contrasted sharply with the almost complete absence of political change.

The net result was that many Egyptians felt not just alienated, but also humiliated. Humiliation is a powerful motivator. Egypt was ripe for revolution; dramatic change would have come at some point in the next few years, even absent the spark of Tunisia or the existence of social media.

Indeed, social media are a significant factor, but their role has been exaggerated. It is hardly the first disruptive technology to come along: the printing press, telegraph, telephone, radio, television, and cassettes all posed challenges to the existing order of their day. And like these earlier technologies, social media are not decisive: they can be easily repressed by governments as well as employed by governments to try and motivate their supporters. 

Timing counts for a lot in politics. Mubarak’s announcement that he would not seek re-election would likely have averted a crisis had he issued it in December. But, by the time he did say it, the mood of the street had evolved to the point that he could no longer placate it.
The initial success of revolutions is determined less by the strength of the protesters than by the will and cohesion of the regime. Tunisia’s collapse came quickly, because its president lost his nerve and the army was weak and unwilling to stand by him. Egypt’s establishment and its military are demonstrating far greater resolve.

Measured transition
Mubarak’s departure is a significant but not decisive development. To be sure, it closes a prolonged era of Egyptian politics. It also marks the end of the first phase of Egypt’s revolution. But it is only the end of the beginning. What begins now is the new struggle for Egypt’s future. 

The objective must be to slow the political clock. Egyptians need time to build a civil society and open a political spectrum that has been mostly closed for decades. A hybrid, caretaker government, including military and civilian elements, may be the best way forward.  To slow the clock is not to stop it, however. A genuine political transition needs to move ahead, albeit at a measured pace.

Early elections should be avoided, lest those (such as the Muslim Brotherhood) who have been able to organise over the years enjoy an unfair advantage. The Muslim Brotherhood should be allowed to participate in the political process so long as it accepts the legitimacy of that process, the rule of law, and the constitution. The history and political culture of Egypt suggest a natural limit to the Brotherhood’s appeal if Egyptians can bridge their most important differences, maintain order, and restore economic growth.

Constitutional reform is critical. Egypt needs a constitution that enjoys broad support – and that includes checks and balances that make it difficult for minorities (even those who command the support of a plurality of voters) to rule majorities.

Revolutionary movements invariably split into factions. Their sole common objective is the ouster of the existing regime. As soon as this goal comes close to being achieved, elements of the opposition begin to position themselves for the second phase of the struggle and the coming competition for power. We are already beginning to see signs of this in Egypt and will see more in the days and weeks to come.

Some in Egypt will be satisfied only with full democracy; others (probably a majority) will care most about public order, greater official accountability, a degree of political participation, and economic improvement. It is never possible to satisfy the demands of all protesters, and regimes should not try.

Split decision
Egypt will face enormous economic difficulties, exacerbated by recent events, which have frightened off tourists, deterred investment, and kept many from working. The challenges of a fast-growing population, inadequate education, insufficient jobs, corruption, bureaucracy, and rising global competition constitute the greatest threat to the country’s future.

Outsiders have had and will have only limited influence over the course of events. Over the past 30 years, intermittent calls by the United States for limited political reform were largely rebuffed. Once the crisis began, the people in the streets, Mubarak himself, and above all the army have been the principal protagonists. Moving forward, it will again be Egyptians who will largely determine their own path.

In this vein, outsiders should be careful of intervening too much, especially in public. It is up to Egyptians to define for themselves how much and what kind of democracy is established. Outsiders can assist – for example, with ideas for constitutional reform or voting procedures – but this should be done privately and as suggestions, not demands.

Developments in Egypt will have uneven consequences in the region. Not every country will be affected equally. True monarchies, like Jordan, have a legitimacy and stability that the leaders of faux monarchies (Syria, Libya, and Yemen), as well as the Iranian regime, do not. Much will depend on what transpires and how.

Change in Iraq was imposed from the outside by force, whereas change in Egypt has come from within and has largely been accomplished by consent rather than coercion. But it is too soon to know whether change in Egypt will be far-reaching and long lasting, much less positive, and thus too soon to assess its historic impact.

© Project Syndicate 1995–2011