OUR campus lay on the other side of Tahrir Square — from the now burnt-out headquarters of the Egyptian Democratic Party on the Nile corniche. During the peak of Mubarak’s power, I was a young student at the American University in Cairo in an Egypt that was a bastion of order and stability.

While outside Tahrir Square was being dug up to make way for the Cairo underground metro, a symbol of the regime’s prestige, inside, above the loud thudding of the piling machinery, Prof Tarek Ismael would explain the foreign policy behaviour of Arab states by drawing typologies on the blackboard.

“The swathe of territory across North Africa, Mesopotamia and Arabia has been carved out into a series of states with artificial borders.” He would draw two by two matrices to explain that among these successors to the Ottoman pre-system, there were rich states and poor states, there were capitalist and socialist development models and there were regimes threatening to the West and regimes that were allies of the West. However, despite differing orientations, one common strand ran through all of them: authoritarian regimes ruled by autocrats.

The Cairo metro was inaugurated, I graduated with my degree in Middle East politics and subsequently a $100bn in foreign aid and investment have poured into Egypt. Two decades later, Mubarak’s regime is tottering but Prof Ismael’s hypotheses stand even more robust. And when people ask me whether the scenes witnessed on the streets of Cairo would indicate similar vulnerability elsewhere in the region, I am tempted to return to his frame of reference to construct my answer.

True to form, the present unrest has hit poor states — Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Yemen and Sudan — that had long pursued the capitalist development model. On the other side of the Red Sea, do the rich states such as Saudi Arabia and others in the GCC have cause for anxiety? With the enormous resources and reserves at their disposal, surely they can throw more money at the problem. But generous public spending is seldom a substitute for political expression and inclusion.

Kuwait with a parliament and Qatar with Al Jazeera TV began experimenting with limited political freedoms, some years ago. Suddenly much more is needed and much faster to keep this flood out. Even with these, some level of domestic disturbances can be expected in the months to come.

The 40 per cent of Egyptians living below the two-dollar-a-day poverty line are not the ones converging on Tahrir Square. Instead, it’s the students and young educated unemployed and white-collar middle class galvanised by social media like Facebook. Meanwhile, many Cairo taxi drivers and small shopkeepers have lamented the protests which have deprived them of daily earnings.

Similarly, the peasantry appears aloof from the protests or mildly in favour of the Mubarak regime. So is it really economic hardship or the demand for political freedom that is driving the protesters? For the moment the anger appears directed against the ruling party and the state as is evident by the burning down of the party headquarters, of police stations and by the attack on the information ministry and state television, while the worst wrath is reserved for the person of Hosni Mubarak who for most Egyptians is a symbol of repression and tyranny.

Accordingly the chant of the protesters was ‘Freedom’. These features of the uprising would indicate that Saudi Arabia and the other rich GCC states on the capitalist model may not be that immune after all.

On the other hand, the rich states that adopted socialist development models, Iraq, Libya and Algeria would be relatively less affected and may have the longest time to begin reform. Their prosperity and relatively better social structure may serve as shock-absorbers. Still, their political systems would need to become less clogged — as has Iraq’s after Saddam Hussein.

Predictably, their response would be to strengthen their welfare state models and move towards greater political freedom. Of course, a Middle Eastern perestroika carries inherent risks. Algeria, which started this process over 20 years ago, was soon confronting an Islamist rebellion.

Nonetheless, the risks of not acting are greater.

Whether the regimes embrace change or have change forced upon them will depend on how well they ‘get it’ and how fast they act. When he uttered remarks in support of Mubarak on the fifth day of protests, the Saudi king obviously didn’t get it. Mubarak himself didn’t get it when he offered the proposition of “security for Egypt” while the protesters demanded freedom. Neither does the Jordanian monarch get it when he sacks the government and appoints an army general as prime minister.

Five years of reform undertaken by the Egyptian regime’s technocrats, $45bn in foreign direct investment and 3.5 million jobs later, the grievances still remain. It is difficult to imagine how more such reforms would be any more effective. Nevertheless, now that the genie of people’s power is out of the bottle and on the streets of cities across the Arab world, there are many scenarios going forward. Here powerful forces like Arab nationalism, a common language and culture, the role of Islam and the question of Palestine ensure regional cohesion and threaten potential systemic contagion.

What is certain is that order and stability are bygones and change is the new buzzword. Israel gets that — and we can expect it to remain ahead of the curve. I only got a ‘B’ in Prof Ismael’s course but America, like the slow learner, has stayed behind the curve. Probably a C minus for that.

Copyright © 2011 – Dawn Media Group

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