by Paul Morland
Educationally, too, the Arab world has made only modest progress, particularly in relation to women. While great gains have been made in literacy, female literacy rates in Arab countries in the early twenty-first century are still well below those of areas such as east Asia and Latin America.37 This is reflected in the ratio between female and male workforce activity, which is lower in the Middle East than anywhere else in the world.38 In higher education, few Arab institutions make the academic grade. According to the Academic Ranking of World Universities, four Israeli institutions make it into the top 200 while only one Arab institution does so.39 Data from 1987 suggested that the production of ‘frequently cited’ academic papers in Egypt was two-thousandths of the level in Israel and even in Kuwait, with its oil wealth, frequently cited papers were at less than one-seventieth of the Israeli level.40
As ever, the cause of the region’s ills are not demographic alone. Oil has turned out to be a curse in many places where democratic institutions are not already fully embedded, cultivating a rent-seeking rather than an entrepreneurial culture. Where the state controls a great source of relatively easily accessed wealth such as oil, the most lucrative way of enriching oneself is to get a position as close to the trough as possible rather than setting up a business or offering a service of real value. A culture of corruption tends, then, to seep downward into society. The Middle East and North Africa has often come to be caught in the crossfire of great power rivalry, not least during the cold war, with outside forces supporting repressive regimes prepared to do their bidding. Looking internally for explanations, it cannot be denied that a strong streak of misogyny in many cultures of the Middle East has stunted their development. Where women are not allowed to thrive, societies will rarely thrive. Where women are not allowed even to leave the home without male approval, let alone to drive, as until recently was the case in Saudi Arabia, it is hard to see how women can thrive. Yet this too is bound up with demography. At the heart of demographic and human progress has been women taking control of their own bodies and fertility. A culture which resists this is likely to be stymied.
Although the populations of the region are particularly young and population growth has been exceptionally rapid, other countries with similar demographic profiles have experienced rapid economic growth and social progress, for example in the case of China, whose population was still growing fast during its period of economic take-off. Indeed, under the right circumstances, a booming population can be an economic advantage. Nevertheless, some of the woes cited above can be clearly attributed, at least in part, to population pressures. It is true that other countries have solved their water problem, but with a smaller population the pressure on existing water sources in the Middle East would be less acute. Similarly, it is undoubtedly the case that agricultural productivity could be much higher, but at its current level relative to the space available, there would be more food per mouth if there were fewer mouths. Educational failings have many sources, but difficulties meeting the needs of a fast-burgeoning population of school and university age are among them.
Likewise, while population growth can create its own demand, where other systems such as markets, trade and education are failing, it is more difficult to cope with employment when the workforce is growing so rapidly. It is also difficult to absorb ever-growing populations into the workforce in a productive manner when educational attainment is low and there is a lack of capital investment. A 2002 UN report estimated that 10 million children in the Arab world between the ages of six and fifteen were not in school; now that all of those affected are adults it is difficult to see how they are likely to fit into an increasingly global economy.41 Given the disruption in much of the Arab world since then, particularly in Syria, where millions of children are unable to go to school, the picture in the future may be worse. Nor has economic performance been assisted by the fact that the countries under consideration have had an exceptionally high dependency ratio: that is, the ratio of those outside the age of the workforce to those within the workforce. Whereas the developed world is used to high dependency ratios due to the rising number of elderly, in the case of these countries it has been due to the high number of the young requiring the investment of care and education.
Sharply falling fertility rates in the Middle East should in principle provide their populations with an opportunity to make economic progress as the dependency ratio falls from over ninety in 1980 to an (estimated) under sixty by 2020.42 This so-called ‘demographic dividend’ is often seen to apply where the number of children relative to the workforce reduces; this may in part be responsible for the economic rise of Turkey, and it has been claimed as a factor in countries such as Japan and Indonesia. Again, it is difficult to unpick causally because it is often precisely those countries where economic and social progress is being made that are those witnessing falling fertility rates, and cause cannot always be separated from effect. Nevertheless, as fertility rates fall, women are freed up for the labour force and more funds become available for capital investment. However, these factors work only if the economy is able to absorb female workers, if society can accept their employment, and if the structures of law and governance and political stability are in place to absorb capital into the economy.
When it comes to the Arab world, this is hardly the case. The ‘youth bulge’ has been accompanied by high unemployment, a recipe for social disruption and violence. In the case of the Middle East, it has been accompanied by a rise in religious fundamentalism.43 Indeed, this fundamentalism itself has direct demographic roots: there is evidence of a link between fertility and religious intensity found in Islam, just as there is in other religions, and provided more devout groups manage to retain their offspring, this suggests that demographic as well as other factors will drive the continued growth of Islamic conservatism and even Jihadism.44 Thus while demography has not been the sole cause of the social and economic woes of the region, it has compounded them.
In part, the problematic demography of the region has itself been caused by failures of family planning policy. Although fertility rates have fallen, fertility remains high in much of the Middle East and North Africa, and in some places has started to reverse, rising in the last decade or so. Access to contraception is far from universal: whereas two-thirds of married Moroccan women of childbearing age use contraception, barely half do in Iraq and less than a tenth in Sudan.45
If the Arab Middle East has experienced a failure of material development, it has also suffered a failure of political development. This can be seen both in terms of the oppressive regimes which have ruled in the area, depriving its populations for the most part of democratic and human rights, and the more recent disintegration of some of those regimes and the descent of their societies into chaos and civil war. With 6% of the world’s population, the region was reckoned to contain a fifth of its armed conflicts even before the current wave of instability was fully under way.46 This statement is not about the allocation of blame, enough of which is already in circulation, nor an attempt to provide a comprehensive explanation, but rather to illustrate the extent to which human conflict stems at least in part from demographic causes.
The political failures of the region, compared with most if not all other regions of the world, are fairly self-evident. Within the region as a whole, according to Freedom House’s 2014 Index, all the states except Israel were either categorised as ‘not free’ or only ‘partially free’.47 Much of the region stands between the oppression of autocratic regimes and breakdown into chaos and civil war. As I write, there is no single governmental authority effective throughout the national territory in Yemen, Libya, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, and high levels of recent instability have affected Egypt and Bahrain.
There is an almost total lack of democracy in the region, although Turkey can be seen as partly democratic (or could until recently). Tyrannical rule and anarchical breakdown may seem like opposite ends of a spectrum, but the former can be thought of as a prelude to the latt
er, with progress towards stability and democracy as a third stage.48 According to this model, it is unlikely or difficult for a country long under the iron grip of dictatorial or authoritarian rule to move directly to stability and democracy. To get there, a period of civic strife and violence is likely, but this can be seen as a transition to a desirable end point rather than just a descent into chaos. This would be an optimistic interpretation of the Arab Spring. At this point, however, few Arab countries can be seen as seriously making their way to the third stage, out of chaos and towards a liberal, democratic order. Indeed, the most populous country in the region, Egypt, appears to have stared over the abyss and returned to the status quo ante. (Tunisia may be such a case, although it is too early to say that it is an exception and, if it is an exception, it is a rare one.)
Demography has perhaps inevitably made its contribution to this desultory political picture just as it has to the failings of economic and social development. There is a good deal of evidence to suggest the link between instability and conflict on the one hand and demographic trends on the other, the general consensus being that ‘youth bulges’ are associated with increased risk of political violence.49 Where there is a large share of men in the population aged in their teens and early to mid twenties, the chances of civil strife are higher, and it is no coincidence that some of the oldest societies in the world, such as Japan and Germany, are among the most orderly, while some of the youngest, such as Yemen and the Democratic Republic of Congo, are among the most strife-riven. On this basis, it is hardly surprising that the Arab Middle East has been at the centre of so much violence and strife in recent years, and that prior to that, the outbreak of such strife appeared only to be avoided by the imposition of exceptionally harsh regimes. Emigration to some extent takes the pressure off internal systems, but it can often result in the exporting of the problem. Finally, other regions of the world have managed to undergo demographic change without nihilistic terror along the lines of al-Qaida or ISIS.
Thus while population numbers cannot be a sufficient explanation for failure, they are inevitably bound up with it. Without its youth and expanding population, it is almost unimaginable that the Middle East and North Africa would be as violent as it is. Just as the First World War as it came to be fought–as mass industrial slaughter–cannot be envisaged without the huge population expansions that took place across Europe in the preceding half-century, so the New York bombings of 9/11 and those in Madrid and London, as well as the violence from Yemen to Syria, may be seen at least in part as the product of the Islamic Middle East’s explosive demography in the decades which preceded them. Between 1980 and 2010 population growth in this most volatile of regions was nearly a full percentage point per annum higher than for the world as a whole. In 1980 the fifteen- to twenty-four-year-old population of the Arab Middle East, as a share of the total population, was the same as for the world as a whole; thirty years later it was one-fifth higher.50
The Syrian civil war, in particular, is arguably as much a demographic conflict as it is a political or religious one. At the time of its independence from France in 1947, Syria had barely 3 million people. Sixty years later, on the eve of civil war, it had more than 20 million. The causes of this population explosion will be familiar–tumbling mortality rates and stubbornly high fertility. The consequences are less easy to trace. Nevertheless, when Syria was struck by drought in the early years of the current century, hundreds of thousands left the countryside and headed for the towns and cities, especially to Damascus, where they often found basic accommodation on the outskirts, held at bay by a suspicious government. This was particularly so since most of the migrants came from the majority Sunni sect, changing the demography of cities such as Damascus which had previously been disproportionately peopled by minorities (such as Christians, Alawites and Druze) who tended to back the Ba’athist regime. Thus the conditions were put in place for a rebellion at its most intense in a ring of poor, neglected and majority-Sunni suburbs which surrounded the capital. And while many seek to attribute the ensuing conflict to global warming,51 indeed while climatic conditions were undoubtedly part of the picture, none of this would have been possible had the size of the Syrian population not exploded so dramatically in the preceding decades.
As ever, the causality is working both ways. Just as demography has played a role in shaping the Syrian civil war, so the war is shaping the demography. Roughly one-quarter of the population has fled the country and another quarter is internally displaced. There are accusations that the government is consciously trying to change the ethno-demographic balance of certain areas, reducing the Sunni element. Meanwhile, although the losses of life have been shocking, they themselves (unlike the emigration) have not had a significant statistical impact on the demography of Syria. Half a million deaths, an approximate estimate as this book goes to print, represents a single year of Syria’s population growth in recent times. None of this takes away from the suffering of individuals but it does show how, just as was the case in Europe at the time of the First World War or Russia during the height of Stalinism, when the human tide is in full flow, even the most horrific carnage can slow but not stop it.
A rapidly growing youth, often poorly educated, politically marginalised and unable to participate in the global economy, is a recipe for instability. As one woman working on youth programmes in Jordan put it: ‘Young people are facing increasing barriers to education and economic opportunities with minimal chance to engage in social and civic life. They are being pushed further into the shadows, feeling disempowered and frustrated.’52 Where economies are not developing, it can be particularly difficult for university graduates to find work; in 2014, 34% of recent graduates were unemployed compared with only 2% of those with a primary school education.53 Unemployed graduates, usually urban-based and in a position to become activists, are more likely to prove politically disruptive than under-employed farmhands. and while social conservatism is in some part shared by the young generation, many are pushing against it, particularly women, whose sense of frustration is made worse where they are given educational opportunities and then heavily discriminated against in both society and the workplace. In Saudi Arabia there has recently been some opening up of jobs. Educated women still feel highly restricted by the need to seek permission from fathers or husbands: ‘He won’t allow me to work even though I need the money… He doesn’t allow me to travel with my mother.’54 While the middle-aged and old may have accommodated themselves to such circumstances, the young are more likely to push against them, and this matters more when the young are more numerous.
While the region’s growing youth have been turning their frustrations inwards–as the political instability since 2010 testifies–they have also turned outwards, and this has resulted in a huge wave of migration towards Europe. This has not only been from the Arab world but from countries such as Afghanistan, which are facing similar problems of political instability, fast-rising would-be entrants into the jobs market and a lack of opportunities. In 2015 there were more than 350,000 Syrian asylum seekers to the EU and more than 150,000 from Afghanistan. Nearly half a million people sought asylum in Germany in the final quarter of that year alone.55 This trend, which has deep demographic roots, will have profound consequences for the demography of Europe. Our television screens in recent years have been hit by streams of people trying to make their way to Germany through the Balkans, or those trying to make it across the Mediterranean to Italy; these migrants are almost always coming from young, high-fertility countries and almost always heading towards old, low-fertility countries. Migration has many causes and has taken many directions over the past centuries, but it is invariably the case that most migrants are young and often they are leaving young societies where opportunities are not opening up or where there is too much competition among too large a cohort.
What happens in the Muslim Middle East matters increasingly to the world as a whole. In 1970 Muslims constituted 15% of the world’s population
; by 2010 this figure had risen to around 23%, and by the middle of the century it is forecast to grow to not much less than 30%.56 If realised, this would make Islam very close to Christianity as the world’s largest religion.
The Arabs and Israel: The Demography of Conflict
Until the start of the revolts across the region from the end of 2010, the Middle East and its conflicts were often seen through the prism of the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbours, especially the Palestinians. In 2009, for example, Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa suggested that unless there was a solution to Israel–Palestine,