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of the repressive apparatus, and the depth of the fiscal cushion they
could tap into to buy social peace. Yemen, with a GDP per capita of
$4000 and Qatar, at $94,000, are not the same animal. It also
became apparent that, despite shared frustrations and a common
cause, protesters and insurgents were extremely diverse.
Some embraced free-market capitalism, while others clamored
for state welfare to provide immediate improvements to their stan-
dards of living. Some thought in terms of country, while other ques-
tioned that idea. The day after the Arab spring, everyone looked to
democracy for solutions, but few were prepared to invest in the grind
of democratic politics. It also quickly became obvious that the com-
petition inherent in democratic life would tear at the social fabric.
The few experiments with free elections exposed the formidable
polarization between Islamists and non-Islamists. Those modern
cleavages paralleled ancient but pregnant divisions. Under the
Ottoman Millet system, ethnic and sectarian communities had for
centuries coexisted in relative, self-governed segregation. Those
communities remained a primary feature of social life, and in a
dense, urbanized environment, fractures between Christians and
Muslims, Shi’as and Sunnis, Arabs and Berbers, Turks and Kurds
were combustible. Autocracy had kept the genie of divisiveness in
the bottle. Democracy unleashed it.
This does not mean democracy has to forever elude the region,
but that in countries where the state concentrates both political and
economic power, elections are a polarizing zero-sum game—even
more so when public patronage has to be cut back because of chron-
ic budget deficits. The solution is to bring some distance between the
state and the national economy. If all goes well, a growing private
sector would absorb the youth, and generate taxes to balance state
budgets. For that, the Middle East needs just enough democracy to
mitigate endemic corruption, to protect citizens from abuse and
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NTRODUCTION
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