It’s the Culture, Stupid
Last July, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney invited the ridicule and wrath of the world’s politically correct during a visit to Jerusalem. Culture, he said, seriously impacts the prospects for economic and political development in Palestine and the Arab world. A senior aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas immediately branded Romney’s remarks “racist” and insisted that Palestine’s only problem with development is the Israeli occupation.
But if one looks beyond the equally critical media headlines, Romney and the Harvard emeritus economist and historian David Landes, whom he cited, turn out to have an army of unexpected allies in the Arab world. Between 2002 and 2009, the United Nations Development Program published the five-volume Arab Human Development Report (AHDR) drawn up by more than a hundred Arab scholars and experts.
The 2002 AHDR states that “culture and values are the soul of development…They provide its impetus, facilitate the means needed to further it, and substantially define people’s vision of its purposes and ends.” A foreword adds, “the predominant characteristic of the current Arab reality seems to be the existence of deeply rooted shortcomings [that]…pose serious obstacles to human development.”
Of course many factors contribute to a country’s poverty or prosperity, including the quality of its leadership, its economic orientation, and the absence or presence of effective legal and other governing and regulatory institutions. Some lessons can be harvested from history; others can be learned from neighbors; still others can be discovered by informed trial and error. It is also true that some countries face far greater developmental challenges than others, thanks to the vagaries of history and geography.
Still our self-inflicted blindness on the role of culture in history and current affairs is one reason why so many Western commentators had such unrealistic expectations about the “Arab Spring.” The emergence, prominence, and ideological orientation of the Muslim Brotherhood in a democratic Egypt, for example, were as predictable as tomorrow’s sunrise on the Sahara. And though democratically elected, there is so far little reason to believe that the new government in Egypt—or those that may arise in other Arab countries—will undertake the tough long-term reforms that would move them into the developed world, nor indeed that that is what the bulk of the voting population most wants from them.