The Syrian crisis, in its fifth year of blood and destruction, has exposed all the frailties of the Western world. The question was debated from the outset on the level of legitimacy and law: the United States and Europe wasted time in understanding whether the Assad government was or was not worthy of those parameters of democracy that the West itself designed on the basis of its legal and social resources, but they have not reflected enough on the historical opportunity that the crisis has offered.
Since the elimination of Saddam Hussein in the 2003 the chain of purge of presidential-dynastic regimes in the Arab countries has not stopped. Governments gradually overturned with direct hetero interventions have always been a secular background, with a self-defined "sacredness" according to the classic rules of single-party regimes. A weak sacredness, sometimes folkloristic, net of the endemic cruelty of every dictatorship, even sympathetic.
But the majesty of the monarchic dynasties has never been harmed, those that from Morocco to the Gulf of Aqaba represent the cradle of conservation and at times of obscurantism. No one in the West has ever allowed himself to judge the kingdoms of the Persian Gulf, nor to put his finger in their delicate and often fragile internal balances.
Set aside the Hashemite Jordan illuminated by King Hussein and his son Abdallah, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait all have a common trait: although at the center of Middle Eastern (and not only) geopolitical lines, they always remain immune to countermeasures and external pressures .
It is curious how the West has always hastened to conspire and to arm itself against systems that are certainly debatable, perhaps repressive and corrupt, but often also imbued with social ambitions that in other Arab countries are excluded a priori. All the more curious if we think that the West we are talking about is no longer the one linked to the Victorian colonialist model but the one who wants to be a champion of human and civil rights. What seems ready to fight for structural reforms even within the sphere of family and gender identity.
Just Syria, like the Iraq of the first Saddam, were the test bed of an almost socialist design, food for thought for Nasserist legacies, good or bad linked to a form of Arab emancipation often advocated by the Western powers themselves. If the Baath regimes in a Cold War logic ended up in the Soviet orbit (mostly due to the presence of Israel), the collapse of the ideological walls should have at least aroused a form of revision of the relations between the Western world and the Arab world.
With regard to Syria, we note instead that the isolation of then was followed by the even greater ostracism of recent times. The aversion of the liberalisms of Reagan, Thatcher, Bush and even the neo-Atlantic Sarkozy to a social-national-republican model is understandable. Much less understandable that all other Europeans have adapted.
We are aware of our outlook from the repressive aspects of Arab presidentialism, but it must be said, however, that the ideological ambitions of realities such as Syria (and in part of the dead Iraq and Libya) have placed them in history far from reality. sic et simpliciter dictatorships scattered throughout the world.
The West, so attentive to individual rights, sometimes does not distinguish between theory and practice and ends up privileging the theoretical workshops of immobility. Checks in white to a Turkey less and less mindful of Ataturk's lay design are half proof.
Politics is not done with theory, you know, and we cling to the geopolitical cynicism that has guided Western chancelleries for centuries. In other words, the mere risk of replacing secular governments with forms of Islamic fanaticism should have at least raised a doubt that few have noted.
No Arab country can define itself as a forerunner of progress, let it be clear, but those projects (including Syria) must be recognized, at least intended to create a modern and secular state, far from the traditional clichés to which we habitually reconnect the Islamic world. In Damascus, as in the Jamahiriyya of Gaddafi, a space for ethnic minorities and for different denominations, at least in theory has always been recognized. In countries like Saudi Arabia, vice versa, the crime of apostasy against Christians still exists ...
The choices of us Westerners are sometimes bizarre. Reducing everything to economic interests seems limited and narrow. We still want to believe romantically that we are able to make mistakes or simply to contradict ourselves ...
(photo: Andrea Cucco)
