From the rent-seeking society to the knowledge society

The Arab Human Development Report

The Arab Human Development Report 2003 (AHDR 2003)(1) published at the end of October calls on the Arab world to develop a knowledge society. The report sees itself first of all as the basis of an intra-Arabian self-understanding. But implicitly it is also an appeal to the international community for cooperation. The report draws its political weight from having been written and published by respected academics in the region under the leadership of the Egyptian sociologist Nader Fergany and in close cooperation with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Arab Fund for Social and Economic Development (AFSED).


Focal point of knowledge and education

With its focal point of knowledge and education, the AHDR 2003 takes up one of the three developmental shortcomings in the region, which the comprehensive first AHDR (2002)(2) disclosed. Subsequent reports with the focal points of political freedom and women are to complete the series over the next two years. With their focus on the serious deficits in education and knowledge in the Arab region, the authors concentrate on a central element of human development. It is one which in the wake of the globalisation of the knowledge society is becoming an ever more weighty factor of productive economic development. At the same time, they reveal the roots of the present shortcomings in education. These are socio-economic and political structures created by humans, which in the Arab region hinder access to knowledge and the pursuit of education. The current report addresses the international framework conditions of this problematic in plainer terms than did the AHDR of 2002. Its first part is devoted to the international, regional and local general conditions of human development in the region and their latest trends. With a tenor not quite typical for UN documents and with a manifest endeavour to prove their credentials, the UN-sponsored authors disclose how the American occupation of Iraq and the Israeli operations in the Palestinian territories are thwarting efforts to make progress in the project of human development in the region. Like other critical observers around the world, the AHDR authors diagnose a worsening of the situation of political freedom and human rights as being a result of the “war on terrorism”. Thereby at the same time they lay the basis for the planned follow-up report on the situation of political freedom in the region.

There remains, of course, the question of whether the West is sufficiently prepared for the opening and democratisation of the Arab societies. The “unsparing and brutally open self-criticism” – according to the prevailing western Press trend – appears to confirm from the pens of Arab writers themselves what the West always believed it knew about the Arabs. Admittedly, the “collective mea culpa” represented in the AHDRs of 2002 and 2003 is likely to be conducive to an Orientalism that is gaining in strength in the context of September 11, 2001, if the “medical diagnosis” of the Arab societies is not embedded in their “medical history”.


Development as human self-realisation

Conceptually, the Arab regional reports on human development are rooted in the developmental notion of Nobel laureate Amartya Sen(3), who revolutionised the global debate on development theory in the 1990s. Until then, development had been measured in terms of purely economic categories, such as per capita income. Sen's concept of human development opened up the view of the wealth of opportunities for people's self-realisation and the factors which influenced them. Regardless of all the methodological difficulties in determining the concept of development as an “increase in real human freedoms” and, above all, making it measurable and comparable, that concept became the basis of the UNDP Human Development Report (HDR)(4), published every year since 1990. The HDR concept of measuring human development by the criteria of life expectancy, adult literacy, school enrolment rates and per capita income by means of a Human Development Index (HDI) is extended in the Arab regional reports in the form of an Alternative Human Development Index (AHDI). This index additionally encompasses the categories of political freedom, gender structures, Internet access and CO2 emissions, and deliberately renounces the use of per capita income as an indicator of the level of development because it says little about the quality of development.

So if human development is understood as the development of humankind, for humans and by humans, then it is clear that this benchmark of development is a demanding one, since it reveals the shortcomings of the development of both traditional and liberal-capitalistic structures. Marx long ago dreamt of the “Empire of Freedom” as a state of unlimited satisfaction of human needs and possibilities of self-development – although, of course, he saw this as a vision of a post-capitalistic development.

The AHDR chides the Arab societies for having neglected to harness their material resources on the way to the project of human development. It also points out that compared to other development regions they do badly. The report's statistics, stemming from the second half of the 1990s, show that the Arab regions have big deficits in realising instrumental freedoms, particularly with regard to the criteria of political freedom and participation, gender justice and education. In short, its message boils down to the now well-worn line: the Arab societies are more rich than they are developed. But where lie the roots of these structural deficits, which can be seen less as underdevelopment than as wrong development and which within the very heterogeneous region take different shapes?


Rent-seeking economy
as an obstacle

The AHDR authors identify the rent-economy structure of Arab societies as the core of the Arab development problem. They say this is so because within these societies ideals like freedom, productive work, knowledge and social cooperation are replaced by development-impeding features such as an authoritarian expansion of power, elites that are bent on safeguarding their privileges, a striving for material wealth, and self-interest.(5) With these observations the writers tackle central elements of the manifestations of the present Arab societal structures.(6)

Even now, at the beginning of the 21st century, the Arab societies reproduce themselves – although to a varying degree – on the basis of economic and political rent incomes, especially since oil prices began to rise in the 1970s. These rent incomes finance a development model in which control over the societies' resources is concentrated in the hands of power elites that initially managed to legitimise themselves by a paternalistic form of distributive welfare services. At the same time, the state was freed from the constraint to finance its existence by tax revenue and thus of having to maintain a productive economic basis, and could do without democratic structures. Such structures would virtually throw the functioning of this system of rule out of kilter. Patrimonial rule is considerate – hence the term 'bread democracies' for the Arab societies of the 1950s and 1960s. But it is not democratic in the sense of political equality and participation. Rather, it is based on rank hierarchies. Access to resources depends upon one's status in the social hierarchy, and that in turn depends upon access to positions of power in the state machinery. The relative autonomy of internal power corresponded, of course, to the maintenance and, indeed, deepening, of outward dependence. Matching the extent to which rent incomes became the basis of the existence of the Arab states, their foreign and foreign trade policy had to be subordinated to acquiring rents, and not seldom also to the interests of foreign powers.


The historic roots of wrong development

The decisive question, of course, is not whether the ' rent-seeking society' gave rise to these structures and phenomena. That is, whether control over rent-producing resources inevitably produces societal development dynamism which has to contradict the goal of 'human development'. A rent is first of all nothing but a capital income. Whether such a capital income proves to be a developmental blessing or curse depends on whether it is used for the benefit of society as a whole or for the privilege of the ruling elites. That means it depends on the structures of political power and rule. That these structures do not arise mechanically from the mere existence of rent incomes is shown by the example of Venezuela. At least for a while, the country managed to subject its oil revenues to democratic control and begin to use them for modernising its national economy.

Rather, the decisive question is about the traditional constellations which brought about the rent-state and thus the current Arab ruling structures. This question leads unavoidably to complex historical contexts of which an ahistorical modernity is no longer aware, but which cannot be detailed here. However, it can at any rate be noted that the colonial overlapping which Marx still hoped would give tribal or pre-capitalistic societies a capitalistic push to modernisation, has instead for the Arab countries created the bases of the present extremely parasitical concentration of power. This has resulted in real blocks to development. The only key to resolving them is the radical democratisation of which many people in the Arab region dream, which, of course, can only be supported, not brought about by force from outside.

In an address to mark the publication of AHDR 2002, Dr Rima Khalaf Hunaidi, a Jordanian politician who initiated the regional report series, called on the Arab people to reflect critically on whether they had tackled the development problems of their region in the right way. In doing so she renounced, like the AHDR as a whole, pointing accusing fingers at the international community. A central principle of the way tribal societies worked, has always been the well-balanced nature of their receiving and giving, and it is worth preserving. So is the western smugness over the collective mea culpa of the Arab region really appropriate?

1) UNDP / AFSED: The Arab Human Development Report 2003. Building a Knowledge Society. New York 2003 (www.undp.org/rbas/ahdr/)

2) UNDP / AFSED: The Arab Human Development Report 2002. Creating Opportunities for Future Generations.
New York 2002 (www.undp.org/rbas/ahdr/)

3) Amartya Sen: Development As Freedom. New York 1999.

4) http://hdr.undp.org/reports/default.cfm

5) AHDR 2002, et al, p. 119f.; AHDR 2003, p. 134 ff.

6) Cf. Andreas Boeckh, Peter Pawelka ( eds.): Staat, Markt und Rente in der internationalen Politik. Opladen 1997; Werner Ruf ( ed.): Politische Ökonomie der Gewalt. Staatszerfall und die Privatisierung von Gewalt und Krieg. Opladen 2003; Ingrid El Masry: Die arabische Region im Challenge neoliberaler Globalisierungspolitik, in: Michael Berndt, Ingrid El Masry ( eds): Konflikt, Entwicklung, Frieden. Festschrift for Werner Ruf. Kassel 2003, S. 55-68