Autocracy is the cause, not the cure, of the Middle East's ills

The headlines in and on the Middle East seldom vary. Fragile states burst asunder. Sectarian faultlines widen. Thousands die every month. Refugees are scattered to the winds. Autocracy is back, and sometimes welcomed as a relief from factional turmoil. Improbable coalitions - to fight Sunni jihadism, to oppose Shia Iran - form and evanesce.

Yet underneath this grim super­structure lie three gaping deficits: in education, institutions and what Robert Putnam, the Harvard political scientist, calls social capital, a civic culture that connects people in networks of trust and reciprocity. To highlight these holes is not to suggest that authoritarianism should prevail until they are filled. Autocracy is a main cause of these deficits. It cannot remedy them.

The quality of education can be patchy at best across the region. This is not always because of low state spending. Often, as in Egypt or Saudi Arabia, it is because schooling has been surrendered to clerical or Islamic forces. Arab elites can buy education for their children: something like 2m Saudis have been educated abroad. For those at home, invigilated by the Wahhabi clerical establishment, the story is very different. A Saudi executive says that almost all his recruits need remedial courses in maths, Arabic and English: "They are no use to me if all they can do is recite the Koran."

Institutions, where they exist, are often mirages highlighting a lack of nation-building vision. Those vital to the elites, such as an army, will often overshadow the judiciary, the legislature or even the private sector, as in Egypt. In mercantile Lebanon, the central bank survived civil war and occupation, but as an amenity convenient to all factions - not as the seed of a nation.

The idea of institutions as common platforms, clearing houses to protect the interests of all citizens, is depressingly rare. That is in good part because of the absence of social capital. In the Levant, Iraq and parts of north Africa and the Arabian peninsula, civic interaction has retreated into clan and family, sect and tribe. Yemen is but the latest example, following Lebanon and Iraq, Libya and Syria.

In Egypt, under former army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the military, Islamists and liberals look unable to deal with each other. "The habit of gathering [together] people with different views from diverse walks of life is very limited," says Sameh Fawzy, head of research at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, who wrote his PhD on social capital. "Trust is almost absent across the political spectrum." The discourse of co-operation is largely absent, except in abstract appeals to watan, or homeland, which factions appropriate to themselves.

The salience of tribe and sect has roots. Tribal society, throughout antiquity, was a logical mechanism of resistance to imperial autocracy. In more modern times, the Ottoman Empire devised a system of top-down autonomy based on religion, setting boundaries against a larger identity. The European carve-up of post-Ottoman territories into artificial nation states exacerbated this, and the hollow promises of pan-Arab nationalism failed to resolve it. Even countries that determined their own borders, such as Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia, are a volatile mix of the modern and pre-modern. The retreat, under huge societal stress, into sectarian and tribal boundaries is hardly surprising.

Yet institutions - and decent public education - are the outcome of a culture of co-operation across such boundaries. The overwhelmingly young proto-citizens of the Arab world, protagonists of the so-called Arab spring, seem able to disregard these internal "borders". But they and the region desperately need to find ways of flattening them.

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