Charles Elias Chartouni: The Imponderables of a Reconstructed Political Order in the Middle East/شارل الياس شرتوني: الأمور المستحيلة لإعادة بناء النظام السياسي في الشرق الأوسط
شارل الياس شرتوني: الأمور المستحيلة لإعادة بناء النظام السياسي في الشرق الأوسط The Imponderables of a Reconstructed Political Order in the Middle East Charles Elias Chartouni /January 07/2022
Observers of the Middle Eastern political scenery have to reckon with the inability of this region to rebuild its systemic equilibriums, recast the matrix of Statenness, recover a modicum of self determination away from crashing imperial politics, address effectively the problems of national cohesion, diffuse political unruliness, functional governance, and inherent incapacity to manage the dilemmas of ethno-political pluralism and its political imperatives, let alone the aporias of democratization.
Lebanon, two and a half years after the unleashing of the severest crisis of governance it has ever experienced, is still struggling with deliberate oligarchic foreclosures, malevolence insofar as tackling the interlocking financial, economic, social and environmental muddle, and its instrumentalization by a vocal subversion policy structured on the intersection between Iran’s Shiite imperial policy all across the larger Middle East, the disintegration of the centennial regional order which succeeded the demise of the Ottoman Empire, and the spawning patterns of economic delinquency and underground economies steered by Muslim autocracies, criminal oligarchies and terrorist movements (The cases of Iran, Turkey, ISIS, Hezbollah, autocrats and political oligarchs throughout the region….).
Syria has become a typical case study of State failure, protracted conflicts, irreconcilable differences and a platform for clashing power politics, Iraq, Lybia and Yemen are camping on the thresholds of combustible ethno-religious, strategic and ideological faultlines, and the chances of negotiated conflict resolution, moral atonement and reconciliation politics are not only remote and idle yearnings, but have no incidence whatsoever on the nuts and bolts of clashing power politics, where none of the aforementioned predicates has an incidence.
The ethno-political differences and their dynamics are unlikely to adjust around the norms of democratic conflict resolution and nomothetic rules of politics, and convey a scenario of rowdy power politics and raw brutality with no alternative perspective whatsoever. The overlapping political, financial and economic crises and their overall deleterious impact on the respective societies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Turkey, coupled with the colliding Islamic imperialisms and the disarraying dynamics of the monumental unraveling which undermined the interstate system and its widespread geopolitical reverberations, have left no room for political rationality, discursive arrangements and ethical considerations, and led inevitably to the nihilistic drifts that prevail over the region.
The militarization scenarios are functional equivalents of political failures, rampant strategic voids, expanding anomie, and the destruction of the rudiments of a civilized political order which account for this state of institutional violence and lingering warfare.The resurgent Cold War, its geopolitical mapping and projected evolutions (e.g, Ukraine, Iran, Taiwan, Venezuela, Turkey, Iraq, Yemen, Lybia…), strategic black holes, subversion politics and attempts at creating a countervailing international political order have complicated the configuration, disrupted the order of priorities and prompted various scenarios of chaos, structural instability, open ended violence, demographic shifts through forced migration and displacement, whose compounded effects have yielded the rise of Islamist terrorism, the regeneration of Islamic imperialism and their detrimental impact on the Western hosting countries and their underlying social contracts, normative and institutional consensuses.
The state of void cannot perdure without putting at stake the future peace regionally and across various geopolitical divides (extending between South and Central Asia and the European limes), consolidating the disarraying dynamics, and yielding a context of endemic instability that compromises the ultimate need for a viable geopolitical political order.
