A special report on the Arab world阿拉伯特别报道
All change, no change万变不离其宗
Jul 23rd 2009
Mountain above, volcano below山峦之下，火山暗涌

IMAGINE an Arab Rip Abu Winkle who had fallen into a deep slumber some time in the early 1980s. If he woke up now, he would rub his eyes in disbelief at how little had changed.
设想19世纪80年代早期, 某个阿拉伯的瑞普-凡-温克尔(Rip Abu Winkle)[译者注:源于同名小说,此人黄粱一梦,世间千年已逝]某日陷入了长眠，如果他现在醒来，会不敢相信这个世界几乎没发生什么变化。

Hosni Mubarak is still the president of Egypt, after a cool 28 years in the top job. In Syria the grim reaper did for Hafez Assad after a run of three decades as the country’s ruler, but his son, Bashar, has become president in his place. In Tunisia Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali remains president after 22 years. Ali Abdullah Saleh has been president of parts or all of Yemen for more than 30 years. Jordan is still run by the Hashemite family, Morocco by the Alouite family, Saudi Arabia by the al-Sauds and Kuwait by the al-Sabahs. Muammar Qaddafi has been imposing his idiosyncratic brand of “Islamic socialism” on Libyans since 1969. And like Syria, Libya may become a family business on the old man’s death: as in Egypt, there is much talk of a favoured son inheriting the fief.
胡斯尼.穆巴拉克(Hosni Mubarak)在位28年，至今仍是埃及总统。叙利亚前总统哈菲兹・阿萨德（Hafez al-Assad）被迫结束其三十年的统治后，其子巴沙尔(Bashar)却继承其位。在突尼斯，扎因•阿比丁•本•阿里(Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali)担任总统一职已有22年。阿里•阿卜杜拉•萨利赫(Ali Abdullah Saleh)三十多年来一直统率着也门的大部分地区,乃至全国。约旦仍然处于哈希姆家族（Hashemite family）的统治下，在摩洛哥是阿拉维家族（Alouite family），沙特阿拉伯是阿尔沙特家族（al-Sauds），科威特则是阿尔萨巴家族（al-Sabahs）。穆阿玛尔-卡扎菲(Muammar Qaddafi)自1969年起就在利比亚推行其独特的“伊斯兰社会主义”，而这位老人死后，利比亚很可能会像叙利亚一样成为家族领导下的国家。就像在埃及，关于哪个儿子会继承封地总是有说不完的话题。

And yet an awakening sleeper would be amazed not only by how little had changed in Arab politics but also by how much had changed in Arab society. One shock would be the sheer press of humanity. By next year the region’s population will have doubled over 30 years—from fewer than 180m people to some 360m. He might also be astonished by the youth of so many of these people: the majority of Arabs are under 25 years old.
让这位从沉睡中醒来的人感到惊讶的，不仅是阿拉伯几乎不变的政治格局，还包括剧烈变化的阿拉伯的社会状况。人口变化是其中之一的剧变，到明年为止，该地区的人口将在三十年里翻一番——从不到1.8亿涨到3.6亿人。他可能还会惊奇的发现，年轻人竟如此之多：大部分的阿拉伯人都未满25岁。

Our Rip Abu Winkle would not have to consult a book of statistics to find out about the ballooning of this youthful population. It is highly visible. That is because rapid population growth has coincided with a massive influx into the cities from the countryside, transforming the sights, sounds and sociology of every corner of the Arab world. Cairo burgeoned from 9m souls in 1976 to a cacophonous 18m in 2006. Saudi Arabia’s capital, Riyadh, hardly a city at all 50 years ago, by 1990 had a population of more than 2m and today has 5m. By 2006 some 87% of Lebanese and 83% of Jordanians were living in cities.
瑞普-凡-温克尔甚至都不用在统计年鉴中求证青年人口的激增现象，这简直是再明晰不过了。随着人口的迅速增长，大量人口从农村涌入城市，阿拉伯世界的种种社会现象都随之变化。开罗在1976年只有9百万居民，到了2006年却容纳了行行色色的1亿8百万人。利雅得，沙特阿拉伯的首都，在50年前几乎不能称之为城市，其人口到1990年超过了2百万，现今则超过5百万。到2006年为止，87%的黎巴嫩人和83%的约旦人都住在城市里。

If, to take this fable a bit further, Rip Abu Winkle were a political scientist, he could hardly fail to be disturbed by the contrast between the decades of political stagnation on the one hand and the decades of rapid social change on the other. At some point, will the demands of all these young people for jobs and prospects, together with the impact of mass education, global ideas and modern media, not mutate into demands for a voice—and then for the broader freedoms common in the rest of the world? How much longer can systems of government based on personal authoritarian rule, or on the rule of a single party, dam up this rising tide of expectations?
如果再把这个故事夸大点，假设瑞普-凡-温克尔是一位政治学家，面对阿拉伯世界里几十年的政治停滞和迅速发展的社会变化，这两者的巨大差异一定会让他困惑不已。这些年轻人对工作和前途的需求量，以及大规模教育、全球观念和现代媒体的影响，是否会在某种程度上逐渐唤起阿拉伯世界对话语权的渴望——继而引发其他国家对更宽泛的自由的渴求？原本建立在个人独裁统治或是一党统治基础上的政治体制，还能在多大程度上阻挡日渐上升的对民主的期望？

Predicting disaster in the Arab world has become something of a cottage industry. Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA analyst now at the Brookings Institution, argued in a book last year that the Arab world is floundering in socio-economic problems so deep that almost every Arab country can be considered to be in a “pre-revolutionary” condition. A recent book on Egypt is subtitled “The Land of the Pharaohs on the Brink of Revolution”. David Gardner, a writer for the Financial Times, called his recent book on the region “Last Chance”.
阿拉伯世界即将到来的变故预计会像家庭手工业的变动一样。肯尼斯•波拉克（Kenneth Pollack），CIA的前分析员，现布鲁金斯学会(the Brookings Institution)的研究员，去年在一本书中指出，阿拉伯世界深陷于社会-经济问题之中，每个阿拉伯国家都可被视为“革命前”的状态。最近一本关于埃及的书则直接命名为“濒于革命的法老之地”。大卫•加德纳（David Gardner），金融时报的一位报道员，将他关于这一区域的新书称之为“最后的机会”。

The dark side变化的阴暗面

If you trawl through comparative global economic and social statistics, it is not difficult to paint a bleak picture of Arab failure, based on a broad pattern of underperformance in investment, productivity, trade, education, social development and even culture. The total manufacturing exports of the entire Arab world have recently been below those of the Philippines (with less than one-third the population) or Israel (with a population not much bigger than Riyadh’s). From 1980 to 2000 Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Syria and Jordan between them registered 367 patents in the United States. Over the same period South Korea alone registered 16,328 and Israel 7,652. The number of books translated into Arabic every year in the entire Arab world is one-fifth the number translated by Greece into Greek.
如果对全球经济和社会统计数据有一定的了解，不难根据投资、生产、贸易、教育、社会发展甚至是文化上普遍的表现不佳，推测出阿拉伯的黯淡前景。阿拉伯世界的制造业出口总额最近降到菲律宾（不到其总人口的1/3）或是以色列（全国人口不超过利雅得）的水平以下。从1980年到2000年，沙特阿拉伯、埃及、科威特、阿联酋、叙利亚和约旦总共在美国注册了367件专利权。而同一时期，仅南韩一个国家就注册了16，328件，以色列注册了7，652件。每年在整个阿拉伯地区翻译成阿拉伯语的书只是在希腊翻译成希腊语书籍数量的1/5。

Comparisons like these need to be treated with care. For millions of Arabs, living conditions have improved rather than deteriorated over recent decades. Indeed, the starkest economic challenge Arabs face—a massive population bulge—is itself the product of big strides in immunisation, nutrition and child health. In a survey of Arab economies published in 2007 by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Marcus Noland and Howard Pack reported that on fundamental social indicators such as literacy, poverty and education the Arab countries do as well as or better than most other countries with similar incomes. And within the Arab world there are vast regional discrepancies that limit the value of generalisations. In 2002 The Economist noted in a special report on the Gulf states (see article) that the six desert monarchies since 1970 had trebled literacy levels to 75%, added 20 years to average life expectancy and created a world-class infrastructure by spending a total of $2 trillion. Such efforts should be given their due.
这类似的比较都必须认真对待。对数百万的阿拉伯人民来说，过去的几十年内生活状况确实在好转而没有恶化。但事实上，阿拉伯面临的最大经济危机——大量的人口膨胀——源自于阿拉伯在儿童保健、免疫和营养等方面获得的大幅进步。根据彼得森国际经济研究所在2007年出版的阿拉伯经济调查书中，马库斯•诺兰德（Marcus Noland）和霍华德•派克（Howard Pack）指出，在文化、贫困和教育等基本的社会指数上，阿拉伯国家的表现与其他同水平收入的国家相当或更好。但阿拉伯世界里各地区间的巨大差异使得这一结论不具有普遍的适用性。2002年经济学人在墨西哥湾沿岸各国的一篇特别报道中提到，自1970年至今，6个沙漠国家的文化水平翻了三番，达到75%，预期平均寿命增加了20年，并耗资2万亿打造世界级的基础设施。这些努力都部分导致了今天的结果。

Some of these gains are now threatened by the global economic downturn. The bursting of the property and tourism bubble in the Gulf will have ramifications throughout the region. Most of the migrant workers in the Gulf states hail from Asia, but a lot are also sucked in from the poorer Arab countries. They—and Arabs working in Europe—are now losing their jobs and heading home, so families and home economies are deprived of precious remittances. The World Bank reckons that remittances make up about a fifth of GDP in Lebanon and Jordan. Egypt will be hit too: an unknown number of Egyptians, but at least several million, live and work abroad, many of them in the Gulf.
然而有些成果正受到全球经济低迷的威胁。墨西哥海湾的财富增长和旅游泡沫使整个地区都受到波及。墨西哥湾沿岸各国的大部分移民工人来自亚洲，但许多人却进入了更为贫困的阿拉伯国家。这些人和在欧洲工作的阿拉伯人逐渐失业回家，因此家庭和家庭经济也失去了汇款的收入来源。据世界银行的估算，汇款收入约占黎巴嫩和约旦五分之一的GDP值。埃及也将受到同样的冲击，至少有7百万的埃及人在国外居住和工作，而许多人正是在墨西哥湾。

And yet the present downturn is not the Arabs’ main economic worry. If anything, Arab countries are less vulnerable than other parts of the world. The energy producers still have the cash windfall they collected before oil prices tumbled—and now prices are rising again (see chart 4). Thanks to the advent of well-managed sovereign-wealth funds, many have looked after their financial assets far more prudently over this cycle than during previous bonanzas. As for the wider Arab world, what in good times is a disadvantage—the fact that their economies and financial institutions are weakly integrated into the global economy—is at present providing a measure of shelter from the storm.
但目前的经济低迷还不是阿拉伯最主要的经济担忧。阿拉伯国家并不比世界上其他地方更脆弱。能源供应商在油价下跌前就已累计了大笔财富，而现在油价也正在回升（见图4）。由于经营良好的主权财富基金的问世，许多人更加关心他们在这一环节的资产，而不是之前的富矿带。而对更大范围的阿拉伯世界而言，幸运的是过去的某一劣势——即经济和金融机构与全球经济关联不密切的事实——现在反而保护了这些国家不受波及。

Too young过于年轻的人口

By far the biggest difficulty facing the Arabs—and the main item in the catalogue of socio-economic woes submitted as evidence of looming upheaval—is demography. The population of the Arab world is expected to grow some 40% over the next two decades. That amounts to almost 150m additional people, the equivalent of two new Egypts. But Arab countries already have the lowest employment rate in the world and one of the highest rates of youth unemployment, with about one in five young people out of work. The median age in the three most populous Arab countries—Egypt, Algeria and Morocco—is 24, 26 and 26 respectively. Even before the downturn in energy prices and the world economy, the prospects of creating enough jobs for all these young workers as they enter the labour market looked remote.
到目前为止阿拉伯面临的最大困难——同时也是为证明日渐逼近的巨变而提交的社会经济问题目录中的最主要项目——就是人口统计学的问题。阿拉伯世界的人口在下个20年里有望增长40%。近1亿5千万的新增人口相当于两个新埃及的人口总和。但阿拉伯国家的雇佣率已经是世界最低水平，而且年轻人的失业率也是世界最高水平之一，几乎每五个年轻人中就有一个失业。最受欢迎的三个阿拉伯国家——埃及、阿尔及利亚和摩洛哥——其平均年龄分别是24，26和26岁。即便是在能源价格下跌和世界经济衰退之前，要在这些年轻人进入劳动力市场时为他们创造足够的工作机会都近乎无稽之谈。

It is not for want of trying. Arab governments are acutely aware that too much of the growth in their economies has been driven by oil, property and tourism. They know, and keep saying, that they need to address these imbalances. In June last year Qatar published an ambitious economic “vision” for 2030. At the beginning of this year Abu Dhabi followed suit with a 2030 vision document of its own. Grand strategies such as these voice all the fashionable aspirations about improving skills, freeing the labour market, shrinking the role of the government and diversifying ahead of the day when the oil and gas will eventually run out. But the governments have been saying this sort of thing for decades, and the results are decidedly mixed.
这并不意味着坐以待毙。阿拉伯政府强烈地意识到他们的经济增长过于依赖石油、财产和旅游。他们清楚，也一直强调他们需要解决这种不平衡。去年6月，卡塔尔发布了雄心勃勃的2030年的经济“愿景”。今年年初，阿布扎比也出台了它自己的2030年经济愿景文件。这类的重大战略表达出这些国家关于提升技能、解放劳动力市场、削弱政府监管以及在石油和天然气衰竭之前实现多元化的普遍愿望。但政府已经重复声明这些愿景几十年了，结果依然好坏参半。

Saudi Arabia has invested heavily in downstream energy activities, creating big industrial cities. Dubai, with relatively little oil and gas, seemed until the recent crash to have become a successful business, shopping and tourism hub somewhat like Singapore or Hong Kong. Kuwait pioneered the idea of safeguarding its own economic future by becoming a long-term investor in the economies of others. Sven Behrendt of the Carnegie Middle East Centre in Beirut notes that the huge and increasingly sophisticated sovereign-wealth funds of the Gulf states have for the first time turned Arab countries into a big force in the world economy as strategic investors and not just as suppliers of oil. Some of the countries that lack oil but are close to European markets and influence, such as Morocco and, especially, Tunisia, have begun to create diversified economies.
沙特阿拉伯大量投资于下游的能源活动，由此产生了大型工业城市。迪拜，尽管相比其他城市它的石油和天然气含量甚微，但在最近的一次危机之前，它似乎一直都是像新加坡或香港一样的成功商业、购物和旅游中心。科威特率先实现了通过长期投资于其他国家的经济来维护本国经济安全的策略。贝鲁特的卡内基中东研究中心的一名研究员瑟温•贝伦特（Sven Behrendt）指出，墨西哥湾沿岸各国巨额的、且日渐完善的主权财富基金使阿拉伯国家首次成为世界经济中战略投资者的一员，而不仅仅只是石油供应商。一些缺少石油但临近欧洲市场并影响着摩洛哥、特别是突尼斯等地的国家，也开始发展其多元化的经济。

And yet economic reform, difficult anywhere, is especially hard for the rentier economies and authoritarian polities of the Arab world. Sufyan Alissa of the World Bank points out that both the oil- and non-oil states depend disproportionately on collecting rents—if not from oil then in some other form, such as remittances or foreign aid or loans. Such rents, he argues, are used to provide a temporary cushion against economic pressures, preserve the privileges of the elite and buy continued loyalty to the state. At the same time reform is hampered by chronic weaknesses in the government bureaucracy, defective judicial systems, a lack of political transparency or accountability and the vested interests of those who benefit from the existing arrangements.
然而，尽管经济改革的难度是普遍存在的，但对阿拉伯世界的租赁经纪和主权政治而言，要实现改革则更加的困难。世界银行的Sufyan•Alissa指出石油国家和非石油国家都过于依赖于租金收入——不是以石油的形式就是以其他方式，例如汇款、国外援助或贷款。他认为，这些租金被用来短暂地缓冲经济压力，保护精英阶层的特权并延续其对国家的忠诚。与此同时，变革还受到其他因素的阻碍，包括政府长期的统治无力，司法系统的低效，政治透明度或责任感的缺失以及那些从现有格局中获利的特权阶级的利益。

Having it too good 过于安逸的境况
It follows that when rents increase, the incentive to tackle underlying economic problems diminishes. When oil prices are high, grumbles Ahmed Heikal of Citadel Capital, a private-equity group based in Egypt, governments become less enthusiastic about encouraging private investment. In a study for the Carnegie Middle East Centre, Ibrahim Saif, an economist, notes that the long boom in oil prices which began in 2002 undid many of the good intentions of the Gulf states.
租金的提高会导致解决经济问题的动机随之降低。斯托特资本管理集团，总部设在埃及的一家私募股权机构，该公司的员工Ahmed Heikal抱怨说，油价高时，政府就不那么热衷于鼓励私人投资了。在卡内基中东研究中心的一项研究中，经济学家Ibrahim Saif指出，自2002年起就一直增长的油价减弱了墨西哥湾沿岸各国的良好意图。

Until then they had been contemplating raising taxes and opening more of the economy to competition in order to deal with mounting budget deficits. But the rising oil price allowed them once again to avoid grasping the nettle of reform. Oil revenues in 2006 contributed a bigger share (86%) of government revenue in the GCC countries than they did in 2002 (77%), and domestic taxes, on average, amounted to less than 5% of GDP.
直到预算赤字日益增长时这些国家才会开始考虑提高税费并扩大经济对竞争的开放以解决日益增长的预算赤字问题。但油价的增长只能再次避免改革的困境。2006年GCC国家的石油收益占政府收益的86%，高于2002年的77%，而平均来看，本国税收只占不到5%的GDP。

It seems unlikely, then, that another spike in the oil price will enable even those Arab countries that enjoy the mixed blessing of hydrocarbons to create balanced economies capable of providing enough work for their fast-growing populations. Barring some miracle, a large proportion of Arabs now entering adulthood face hard times and long periods of joblessness ahead, in societies that have systematically blocked peaceful, institutional avenues to political change. That is why so many analysts conclude that something has to give. Will the mass of Arabs continue to bite their lips and buckle under? Or is there a danger of an eruption?
哪怕油价再次上涨也不可能将这些既受益于石油也受其牵累的阿拉伯国家改造成能为其迅速增长的人口提供足够就业机会的平衡经济体。在和平和体制的政治变革路径被全面堵塞的阿拉伯国家里，正进入成年期的大部分阿拉伯人将不得不面对艰难的生活和长期的失业，除非奇迹发生。这就是为什么大量的分析员总结认为肯定会发生些事情的原因。大部分的阿拉伯人是厌恶地咬咬嘴唇然后向其屈服呢，还是即将爆发出革命？