Of cabbages and kings

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): Back in 1948, four years before he was overthrown by a military coup, King Farouk of Egypt remarked: "The whole world is in revolt. Soon there will be only five kings left: the King of England, the King of Spades, the King of Clubs, the King of Hearts, and the King of Diamonds." How wrong he was.

The King of England -- or rather the Queen, in her present incarnation -- is still there, but the British monarchy is in serious trouble. On Nov. 6, Australia votes in a referendum that could make it a republic, and even in Britain there is a relentless long-term decline in popular support for the monarchy. Whereas in the Arab world, the institution of monarchy still seems to be in the rudest of good health.

The stories are straight out of the Thousand and One Nights. King Mohammed VI comes to the throne in Morocco last month after decades as his father Hassan's understudy, immediately pardons 7,988 convicted criminals, and promises to eradicate illiteracy (60 percent) and unemployment (2 million) in his North African kingdom.

King Abdullah comes to the throne in Jordan a few months earlier after decades in the shadow of his father Hussein, and dresses up in shabby clothes and a false beard so he can drive a taxi around Amman and hear his subjects' secret complaints. ("God bless you, Your Majesty! Now we realise that it was only your evil advisers who misled you!").

Moroccan newspapers greeted King Mohammed's arbitrary mass release of prisoners and promises of development ecstatically, as proof that the winds of freedom were now blowing through the kingdom. The Jordanian media lapped up the leak by the palace spin-doctors as though heart-warming stories of the king moving among his subjects disguised as a humble trader/drover/taxi- driver had not been a staple of regime propaganda all over Europe, the Middle East and Asia for the past thousand years.

And this is the sophisticated end of the Arab world. At the other end, out in the Gulf, there is not even the facade of parliaments and elections (with the honourable exception of Kuwait). The kings and sheikhs rule by divine right. Sometimes they do it well, and sometimes they do it very badly, but they do it on their own: no nonsense about democracy.

But why? Why are there no Arab democracies? Why are the closest approaches a few pseudo-democratic republics like Egypt and Yemen and a few pseudo-constitutional monarchies like Morocco and Jordan, while all the others are absolute monarchies like Saudi Arabia and Oman or military dictatorships like Syria and Iraq?

This isn't normal. A number of monarchies in Europe and Asia have survived by retreating to the symbolic role of national figurehead (Britain, Spain, Thailand, Japan), but only in tiny enclaves like Monaco and Bhutan do they still wield supreme power. There haven't been any kings in the Americas for over a century, and the biggest kingdom in Africa (apart from Morocco) has fewer than two million people.

Nor is the wider Muslim world an exception to this rule. Apart from Malaysia's strictly constitutional monarchy (which rotates among the kings of the various states), there are no kings in the whole sweep of countries from Turkey to Indonesia where most of the world's Muslims live. So what's different about the Arabs?

It is very striking that not one of the twenty-odd Arab countries (exactly how many depends on how you categorise marginal cases like Sudan and Eritrea) is a working democracy, and that many are monarchies as absolute as those of Henry VIII of England or Louis XIV of France.

Social hierarchies and social climbing are as old as primates (probably as old as the higher vertebrates, in fact), but in most parts of the world we have managed to smooth the hierarchies out so they aren't quite so offensive. We aren't all equal in any practical sense, but we tacitly agree to act as though we were equal (give or take a million dollars) for political purposes, and even when we meet in the street. It isn't perfect, but it's a lot better than the old barnyard pecking order of king, nobles, and commoners.

Individuals will go on playing the old status games, of course, and the less imaginative will even try to do it within the old feudal hierarchies. An amusing recent example was Canadian press baron Conrad Black, who wheedled a peerage out of the British government on the grounds that he owned a major British newspaper, the Daily Telegraph.

The Canadian government intervened to say that Black couldn't accept a British title and still keep his Canadian citizenship, so now he is suing Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien for blocking his elevation to Britain's House of Lords. It's pathetic, but in the context of the contemporary West it's just silly people playing meaningless status games. In the Middle East, by contrast, proximity to the monarchy is often the essence of political power.

So why are the Arabs different? It probably has something to do with history (the last place in the world to be colonised was the Arab Middle East). It may have something to do with Arab family and clan structure (but it isn't all that unique). It might even have something to do with the sense of helplessness Arabs feel in the face of a triumphal Israel and its overwhelmingly powerful Western backers. But the result is brutally plain: most of the Arab world, politically speaking, lives in a cave.