Dignity, Most of All

With little media notice and marginal scholarly interest, a powerful and potentially transformative movement is taking shape across the Middle East. The movement cuts across religious, ethnic and gender lines. It threatens ruling elites. It poses new challenges to the social order. It makes new and urgent demands of civil society. It feeds and animates other movements. And it will reshape the region as we know it, far more than the US invasion of Iraq.

It's the most important movement in the Middle East, and it doesn't even have a name, a political infrastructure or militant supporters. Let's call it "the economic dignity movement" -- EDM (it certainly deserves an acronym given its tens of millions of adherents). I saw this movement grow over the past year, as I traveled to 12 Middle East countries.

Mingling with ordinary Arabs and Iranians, the talk turned inevitably to economics, to jobs, to prices, to economic dignity lost. From Rabat to Riyadh, I heard the familiar EDM mantra: a desire for more and better jobs, wages that correspond to rising prices, a fair economic playing field, an end to government corruption, and an unsettling sense of economic uncertainty amid a desire for basic middle-class prosperity.

These conversations provide both insight into the concerns of the average citizen and a reality check for Western leaders wringing their hands about policy options for the Middle East. While television images flash suicide bombers and angry, fist-pumping mobs across Western television screens, the vast, silent majority of Middle Easterners do not spend their days and nights hating America or lambasting the West. Rather, they spend far more of their time seeking the same things often associated with the "American dream": satisfying employment, good education, affordable housing and health care, and a bright future for their children.

Meanwhile, the region's mismanaged economies have dramatically failed their people. The 280 million people of the 22 Arab countries have a combined GDP that is less than that of Spain; some 25 percent of Arabs live below the poverty line; foreign direct investment rose across the developing world last year, except in the Middle East; the region needs to create 100 million jobs by the year 2020 just to keep up with the youthful population, half of whom are under 21.

Any comprehensive policy initiative -- from Brussels, Washington or region-wide -- must reach out to the vast majority of Middle Easterners yearning for a decent standard of living. They represent a silent majority, an overwhelming "swing vote," and the most powerful hope for democracy. As the Bush administration contemplates Middle East democratization, no issue will be more important than economic development.

But the transition to democracy is more feasible and sustainable when a country has a vibrant middle class, a healthy employment market, a dynamic and independent entrepreneurial community, and vigorous economic development. Witness South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Mexico and Chile, which all moved toward greater democracy after developing their economies and building middle classes.

With youth unemployment currently standing at a startling 53 percent, the movement will only grow. How Arab governments and the West respond to this generation and this broader movement will determine the course of the region

Islamists across the region -- both moderate and extremist -- have stepped in. Many weave narratives of economic redemption in their calls for opposition. In Egypt, the relatively moderate Muslim Brotherhood -- the grandfather of modern Islamist movements -- has taken to leading protests against rising prices. Hamas wins praise in Palestinian territories for its network of social services. In Turkey and Morocco, Egypt and Kuwait, Islamists position themselves as untainted promoters of socioeconomic justice. Even Osama bin Laden plays populist politics, complaining of the squandering of oil wealth in his calls for jihad.

This is a familiar -- and deceptive -- pattern. In pre-revolutionary Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini promised Iranians their own personal share of the nation's oil bounty and pledged to raise up the "dispossessed." His speeches were laced with economic populism.

Today, Iranians are poorer, earning 25 percent of what they did before the revolution, the technocratic middle class has been decimated, the professional brain drain approaches 200,000 annually, while the ranks of the "dispossessed" have swollen. The Iran example displays the limits of Islamist promises: bashing a corrupt autocrat is easy, running a modern economy isn't.

Amid this backdrop of economic failure and yearnings for economic dignity, Brussels and Washington must reach out to the millions of Arabs seeking a better economic life.

The promotion of Middle East development is an enterprise well worth the world's time and resources. Massive numbers of unemployed youth with little hope for their future pose short-term dangers of instability and extremism. Region-wide population declines in the 1990s, however, mean that a heavy investment in new ideas, political capital and funding will be, at most, a one-generation affair.