US greater Middle East plan far from proven

Date: 18/03/04

THE US government is poised to launch a major new 'democracy' initiative for the greater Middle East, defined as stretching from Morocco in the west to Afghanistan, and Pakistan, in the east.

It is desperate to involve other western governments and in particular the European Union.

It needs not only their hard cash, but also the respectability that they would add to a venture which otherwise might be seen as yet another example of US imperialism. The Washington proposals, which have been many months in the making, will be presented to three successive summit meetings in June, those of the G8, the US-EU and NATO.

The draft proposals, which I was able to get a peek at during a recent visit to the US, have one great merit: they have been framed in direct response to the views expressed by leading Arab intellectuals. It was they who drew up the United Nations Arab Human Development Reports (AHDR), in 2002 and 2003.

The Arab authors identified three gaping deficits that applied to nearly all Arab countries - freedom, knowledge and women's empowerment. Their reports also contained a mass of statistics, showing the daunting problems that need to be overcome. For example:

• The combined gross domestic product of 22 Arab League countries is less than that of Spain;
• 40% of adult Arabs - 65 million people - are illiterate, two-thirds of whom are women;
• one third of the people in the region live on less than two dollars per day. To improve standards of living, economic growth must more than double from below 3% to at least 6%;
• 50 million young people will enter the labour market by 2010, 100 million by 2020 - a minimum of 6 million new jobs need to be created each year to absorb these new entrants;
• only 1.6% of the population has access to the internet, a figure lower than that in any other region of the world, including sub-Saharan Africa;
• women occupy only 3.5% of parliamentary seats in Arab countries, compared, for example, with 8.4% in sub-Saharan Africa.

The US is proposing a long-term partnership with those whom it describes as "the greater Middle East's reform leaders", but which in practice must mean those governments that are willing to cooperate, in order to address the deficits identified by the AHDR authors.

This should be endorsed, and largely paid for, by the G8 countries, it suggests. The US plan has three main prongs - promoting democracy and good governance, building a knowledge society and expanding economic opportunities.

It lists a total of more than 20 initiatives, ranging from help in organizing free elections, the provision of grass-roots legal aid, leadership training courses for women, help for independent journalists, anti-corruption programmes, assistance for civil society organizations, literacy programmes and support for the translation into Arabic of textbooks and cultural texts.

More directly economic assistance includes a digital knowledge initiative, involving a public-private partnership to provide or expand computer access in schools throughout the greater Middle East, especially in remote areas. Microfinance would also be provided for would-be entrepreneurs.

"For-profit micro-finance institutions", the draft document explains, "are self-financing and do not depend on external grants or funds for continued operation growth. We estimate that, assuming an average loan of $400, $500 million over five years could help 1.2 million entrepreneurs help themselves out of poverty, 750,000 of whom could be women."

For larger-scale operators, the US proposes the creation, co-financed by the G-8, of a greater Middle East finance corporation and a greater Middle East development bank, while a range of proposals are included for improving trade links and for promoting accession to the World Trade Organization.

EU foreign ministers had a preliminary discussion on the American ideas during their meeting on 23 February, but reserved their collective response until a later date.

There is undoubtedly some feeling that "the Americans are coming in to steal our show", as one observer put it, but in the end most member states may extend a cautious welcome to the new US approach.

It is true that, up till now, the EU has been far more active than the US in lending a helping hand to north African and Middle Eastern states.

Its Barcelona process, launched in 1995, which envisaged a free-trade area between the EU and 12 Mediterranean states (and that included an aid programme of some €1 billion per year), has made disappointing progress, largely because of the failure of the Middle East peace process.

Last month, however, it registered a success, when four countries - Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt and Jordan - agreed, at a meeting in Agadir, to remove all trade barriers between themselves.

Under the Wider Europe programme, floated a year ago, much more extensive EU aid is foreshadowed, with a particular emphasis on human rights and building up civil society organizations.

A critical examination of EU policies has just been published by the London-based think-tank, the Foreign Policy Centre. European policies for Middle East reform: a ten point action plan by Richard Youngs, a former British diplomat, sets useful guidelines for how the EU should now proceed.

The priority for the EU must be to get its own policies right, rather than to risk tainting them by association with an American administration which has zero credibility with the Arab in the street, and not much more with many of the governments concerned.

Until and unless the George W. Bush administration is prepared to put its full weight behind the road-map for an Israeli-Palestinian settlement and apply real pressure on the Sharon government to comply, the EU should be extremely wary of involving itself with the new American projects, however worthy they may appear.

If President Bush, or his successor, wants full cooperation from the EU, he must work a great deal harder to win it.

• Dick Leonard is former assistant editor of The Economist and writes on Belgian affairs for The Bulletin. He is a former UK Labour MEP and author of many books.