There is an assumption that the similarity between the Thirty Years’ War in Europe and the current chaos in the Middle East requires the Arab world to find something like the 1648 Peace of Westphalia for itself. The idea is that the rambling chaos of the Protestant and Catholic fighting in the German states mirrors the multiplicity of wars in the Arab world with their increasingly sectarian divisions.
The danger with this parallel is that any comparison across almost 400 years and different continents is bound to be a bit stretched. But it also misses the point that the treaties of Westphalia were largely about how independent states behaved with each other, while the issue in many Arab countries today is how a varied population can find an inclusive relationship with a central national government.
Most of the fighting in the Arab world today is between different ethnic groups or sectarian factions within a nation-state that has failed. Apart from Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic Sate of Iraq and the Levant), no militia is seeking to build a new nation-state or merge its territory across national boundaries, although one can see some of the Kurds edging that way sometimes. So the challenge in today’s Middle East is not a crisis between nation-states, but about the need to rebuild national governments that offer inclusive governance to all citizens.
The Thirty Years’ War raged between Catholics and Protestants from 1618 to 1648 and caused the death of half the population of Germany. It ended with the Peace of Westphalia that provided the building blocks of the modern state system, with the recognition of the sovereignty of each state and its right to political self-determination, the equality of all states, regardless of their size, and the principle of nonintervention. As John McHugo points out in A Concise History of the Arabs, this led to constitutional forms of government where writers like John Locke and Montesquieu formulated theories of the separation of the three powers of the state: Executive, legislative and judicial. These led in time to new constitutions that enshrined the principles of democracy and secularism, based on the principle that an individual’s rights are the most important definer of society, rather than religious duties or affiliation.
External guarantors
In Brendan Simms, Michael Axworthy and Patrick Milton’s impressive article in the January issue of the New Statesman, it has been pointed out that Westphalia also included a requirement on the princes to respect their subjects’ basic rights, such as religious freedom (even for Calvinists), enjoyment of property and access to judicial recourse. But the authors add that the treaties gave France and Sweden the right to act as external guarantors of the system, to intervene against either the emperor or the princes to uphold the system. It is hard to imagine which modern state can take on the role of a guarantor of any settlement in the Arab world. Regional powers like Iran or Turkey are hopelessly tainted and global powers like Russia or the United States will not be accepted even if they have the will to take on such a miserable task.
A further difficulty is that much of the political thinking in the Arab world is expressed in the context of the Islamic society. There is no Arab state that is overtly atheist and even to argue in favour of secular (religiously neutral) government requires pages of definition to make clear that secularism is not atheism. And in what is still a socially conservative region, there is no widespread support for the European and American idea that libertarian individualism is more important than religion. While it is obvious that the vast majority of Arabs value their personal liberties they are nonetheless happy to remain within an overtly-Islamic structure.
It is true that Tunisia’s Islamist Al Nahda party chief Rached Gannouchi announced last week in Le Monde that Al Nahda is a political, democratic and civil party. “We will exit political Islam and enter Muslim democracy. We want religious activity to be completely independent from political activity,” he said. But Abdul Rahman Al Rashid of Al Sharq Al Awsat quoted him, as telling a party rally on the same day that “We’re surprised by some parties’ insistence to eliminate religion from national life”. How constitutional Islamic parties work out their future is still a work-in-progress, but the immediate need is to build inclusive stability.
Therefore the key is for the political thinkers to find a new way forward that makes inclusion and tolerance the key to future stability. This is why it is important that all Iraqis refer to themselves as Iraqis and that no Syrian militia calls for the break-up of the Syrian nation. There is still some room for the various sides to recognise that mutual recognition has to be at the core of any end to the fighting because extermination or expulsion is not an option. This is why it is important that the Yemen peace talks recognise that Al Houthis will be part of the solution, even if it is not yet clear how that will happen. Stability in the Arab world will come from a willingness to work across sect or ethnic divide within a national consensus.
