Reasons for optimism in the Middle East | 22 April 2011

As the Libya crisis drags out, and Bashar al-Assad orders a crackdown in Syria, many have begun to doubt whether the changes seen in Tunisia and Egypt will actually spread to the rest of the Middle East. One former British ambassador recently suggested that perhaps the peoples of the Middle East preferred a mixture of authoritarianism and democracy — and that Britain should accept this; not impose its values and views.  

But there is plenty of reason for optimism. The first is to look at the countries that have transformed themselves over the course of the last fifty years. Powerhouses like India and Brazil, but also smaller countries such as Vietnam, were mired in poverty, maladministration and the consequences of war. Yet they managed to pick themselves in a remarkable way.

Vietnam’s crisis of the late 1980s included things Egypt never had to deal with, including hyperinflation, famine, the exodus of refugees and the disappearance of the country’s main trading partner, the USSR.