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North Africa and the Near and Middle East

I begin by apologising for the fact that I will not be able to hear the winding-up speeches, but I look forward to reading them. I agreed with the shadow Foreign Secretary's observation that patterns are emerging in the Arab spring, and I wish to draw attention to one pattern that has not given risen to much comment but which is very significant. Although turmoil has affected every country in the Arab world from Morocco to the Gulf, it is significant that the greatest turmoil and the revolutions have taken place and dictators have fallen in the republics, whereas the monarchies, with the exception of Bahrain, despite experiencing significant disturbances, have not seen such substantial violence or attempts to overthrow the system. It is worth asking why that might be. It is over-simplistic and incorrect simply to say, ““It is to do with those countries that have oil and those that do not””, because clearly Morocco and Jordan have minimal amounts of oil while Libya has a great deal. I think that it is about legitimacy. I am not suggesting that there is antipathy towards republicanism as such in the republics of the Arab world or that there is a love for monarchy, but these are dictators who have acted cruelly, who achieved power by force—or, in the case of Assad, whose father took power by force—who have maintained it by the cruellest methods of despotism and who therefore have not earned their people's respect. Admittedly, the monarchies have not been democracies but authoritarian states, some of which have exercised their power in a way that we and many of their own people would consider unacceptable, but nevertheless in the eyes of a significant proportion of their own people they still have that legitimacy without which a modern Government cannot expect to survive.