Tony Blair is back. After a decade away from the cut and thrust of politics – apart from an ineffectual spell as Middle East peace envoy – he has found a new target for his rhetoric: populism.
The populism that swept the Brexit side to victory in the UK’s referendum last year and the populism that swept Donald Trump to victory in the US is, he argues, most recently in The New York Times, part of the same reshaping of traditional politics.
“Today, a distinction that often matters more than traditional right and left is open vs. closed. The open-minded see globalisation as an opportunity; the closed-minded see the outside world as a threat,” he writes.
This analysis of Brexit is not new. Indeed, writing the day after the Brexit vote, I too drew this open vs closed analogy, but took it a step further, pointing out that reclaiming an open political order would require alliances – alliances that will need to come from much farther away than merely the transatlantic countries.
The political views that animate those who supported Mr Trump or sought to remove Britain from the European Union exist in the Middle East, too.
These Arab populists are driven by the same anxieties that drove the Trump vote and that drive so much of global politics today. For them, the dangers of globalisation, the importance of family and community, the perceived loss of traditional culture and failure of elites are all live issues, as they are for millions in the West. The difference, and this is the reason politicians such as Mr Blair find it difficult to see commonalities, is that these views are often expressed through the prism of religion.
Across the Arab republics, the systematic hollowing out of politics has elided the distinction between the government of the day and the nation state itself. The idea that an opposition could criticise the government but be loyal to the state is still disputed. For figures such as Hosni Mubarak, Saddam Hussein, Hafez Al Assad and Ali Abdullah Saleh, they were the state.
This left religion as the space for political opposition. So, today, when questions such as what it means to be from a particular country or community in an age of globalisation, how to define family in changing times, where traditional culture ends and foreign influence begins – when these questions arise, they are answered in religious terms.
Yet these are not religious questions, per se. And so a schism exists between the populists and the progressives, who offer different answers.
It is important to recognise, however, that the turning inwards that the populists advocate and the openness to new ideas that the progressives advocate are both authentically Arab responses. There are strands of political thought within the histories of Arab countries and the histories of Islam that have offered similar answers.
These questions do not come from the outside. That is important, because neither side has a monopoly on authenticity.
Simply because populists frame their arguments in the language of faith does not mean it carries the weight of centuries of religious practice. On the contrary, these are political questions and they are questions that the Ottomans, the Mamluks and every other political grouping faced.
Indeed, many of the answers the populists offer – the nativism, the return to an unsullied age – have been offered before. That includes the worst effects of these answers: the rise in sectarianism across the Middle East is part of this creation of “enemies”, usually drawn from ethnic or religious minorities. It parallels the same demonisation of difference that is taking place in the West.
Thus when leaders such as Mr Blair speak of alliances across party lines, they should also search for alliances across national lines.
That does not mean across only European countries. It means seeking out the progressives in Turkey opposing the populist turn of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It means looking at what Egyptian progressives did to counter the populist messages of the Muslim Brotherhood. It means looking at how Iraqis rooted their progressive arguments in Iraqi history itself, not in some innovation from the outside.
In the challenges and responses of Arab political trends are ideas and intellectual strategies that will also be useful against the nativists of America and the Brexiteers of Britain.
Combating the drift away from internationalism that is taking place in the United States and Britain will, as Mr Blair points out, take cool analysis, strategy and alliances. But those alliances need to sought everywhere. There is no point advocating an open mind if you only stock it with limited ideas.
Across the Middle East, there are allies for western progressives. The future that they want – the future that politicians such as Mr Blair believe their own countries have lost – is open, tolerant, and outward looking. Western and Arab progressives should seek it together.
falyafai@thenational.ae
On Twitter: @FaisalAlYafai
