From Paul Rivlin

My book brings together two areas of research.

The first is an investigation into the balance between resources and needs in the Arab world. Resources can be thought of as the economy that provides the goods and services that a country requires; needs can be interpreted as the population, its age structure and growth. The reality is more complex because one of the factors of production is labor, which means that population is therefore part of supply as well as the source of demand.

The balance between supply and demand is crucially affected by changes in the age structure of the population. The proportion of those of working-age to the young and old (who do not work) in the Arab world is favorable at present and offers these countries the opportunity to develop with lower costs in terms of investment in education, health and other welfare expenditures. The working-age population is still growing more rapidly than the population as a whole, and this will continue for at least another decade. There is an increasing need for jobs, but if they are available, then more workers will be able to support relatively fewer dependents.

But over time this will change as the share of the elderly population increases, something that already presents serious challenges in Europe and Japan. Indeed, Arab population growth already has slowed in the last decade. That will push up costs and reduce the share of the population that can carry the burden.

So far, Arab countries have not taken advantage of this “demographic transition” or “demographic gift” in the way that East and Southeast Asian countries did in the 1970s and 1980s. Research has emphasized the major contribution that demographic transition made to rapid economic development in those regions. The danger is that in the Arab world, this temporary phase will pass and demographic trends will become more burdensome again.

The second area of research is part of what might be called the new economic history of the Middle East. In recent years, a number of economists and economic historians have attempted to provide new explanations for the poor economic performance of the region. They have examined religion, culture, institutions, geography, law, international relations and internal politics in ways that once were a taboo and, for some, remain so. This literature helps to provide answers to the questions that my first research area posed: why are such deep and prolonged imbalances permitted? These imbalances manifest themselves in high poverty rates, growing inequalities in income and wealth distribution, malnutrition and rates of illiteracy. Given the threats to stability that they pose, why have governments not been more effective? This book offers an explanation.

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Some of the many interactive geography quizzes on the web ask visitors to identify the countries and capitals of the Middle East. We assume MESH readers have no problem there, so we’ve collected links to more challenging quizzes. There’s no end to learning.

• Iraq. The United States has been at war in Iraq for five years, but only one in three young Americans can even find it on the map. You can find it, but can you identify all of Iraq’s governates and their capital cities? There are two good versions of the governates quiz, here and here. And once you’ve aced that, move on to the capitals quiz.

• Iran. This weblog has devoted much attention to Iran, the rising power. An Iranian who purports to know something about the United States can probably identify the great State of Texas on a map. So can you identify the great province of Fars? Try your hand at this quiz.

And there is also much talk about how Iran’s ethnic groups might be turned against the Islamic regime. Take this quiz and see whether you can find them.

• Afghanistan and Yemen. U.S. forces have been in Afghanistan even longer than they have been in Iraq, and the President-elect wants to send more. Take the same rigorous test for provinces of Afghanistan, in two versions, here and here. And for the truly expert (or for Yemenis), see if you can navigate another hot spot in the GWOT, by identifying the governates of Yemen, here.

• More fun/frustration. Forget about those simple interactive quizzes that ask you to identify leaders or flags, and try these instead. Here are ten Middle Eastern countries; order them by population size. And here are another ten; order them by total military expenditure. (The answers are supposedly based on the CIA World Factbook.)

Last June, the Population Reference Bureau published Challenges and Opportunities—The Population of the Middle East and North Africa, a concise summary of demographic trends. This graph and table neatly summarize population growth since 1950, and also project growth to 2050, based on United Nations data.

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Despite all that is going on in the Middle East, what caught my eye recently are three items concerning western Europe. Each is very different, but all indicate that the question of the integration of Muslims into European societies will remain contentious for some time to come.

The first involves Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan’s visit to Germany. Khaled Diab has an account of it here. Erdogan’s success in attracting a large crowd of Turks and his pleas to them not to lose their cultural identity irritated Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, who said, “If you grow up in Germany in the third or fourth generation, if you have German citizenship, then I am your chancellor.” But as Diab notes, due to Germany’s unwillingness to grant citizenship to immigrants, very few Turks in Germany fit Merkel’s definition. Europe, Diab concludes, is increasingly multicultural, and increasingly polarized.

One way to deal with this reality is to accommodate multiculturalism by institutionalizing polarization. By establishing clear boundaries between communities one reduces the likelihood of clashes. This in essence is the recommendation of the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams, who in his lecture of February 7 on the topic of civil and religious law in England suggested the recognition in Britain of the sharia’s jurisdiction in certain spheres, such as marital law and the regulation of financial transactions. As he states, “But if what we want socially is a pattern of relations in which a plurality of divers and overlapping affiliations work for a common good, and in which groups of serious and profound conviction are not systematically faced with the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty, it [recognition of Islam law] seems unavoidable.” (The lecture and related materials can be found here.)

Williams’ lecture has caused quite a stir, not for its intellectual content—the relationships between law, religion, and identity are famously knotty, and rather than engage the difficult issues in those relationships Williams instead skims over them by making a series of glib assumptions—but because of what many see as its message of “appeasement” or “surrender.” I don’t think that this was Williams’ intention, but his lecture does lend support to the argument that with the Islamization of Europe now underway, Muslim immigrants should not accommodate European norms and assimilate European culture, but instead they should strive to reshape Europe in accord with their vision(s) of Islam.

Meanwhile the popular Dutch member of parliament Geert Wilders is sending a radically different message. Wilders declares Islam “an ideology of a retarded culture” and “something we can’t afford any more in the Netherlands.” Not only does he want to ban the “fascist Koran” but he claims to have prepared a short ten-minute film on Islam in which he desecrates the Koran. (Go here for an interview with Wilders.)

Wilders claims he loathes Islam but not Muslims. His overtly hostile rhetoric and inflammatory cinematic projects, however, ensure that even lax Muslims in the Netherlands and Europe will, at least in the public and political spheres, identify more closely with their faith and culture, not less. The result will be to foster the growth of suspicion and hostility between Europe’s Muslim immigrant and native populations.

The presence of immigrant Muslims in western Europe in the coming decades is projected to continue to increase in both absolute and proportional numbers. Muslim immigrants have been a significant part of the European landscape for some four decades. Yet, as these three items all highlight, European societies remain anxious and at a loss at how to deal with their immigrant communities. Discord will remain a feature of relations between native Europeans and Muslims. As the incident with the Danish cartoons illustrated, with today’s transnational communities and global communications, conflict inside Europe can and does ripple throughout the Middle East and beyond, with destabilizing consequences.

This new map, prepared by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), illustrates the disposition of Iraqi IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons) and refugees, as of last September. Click on the map to see it in larger (legible) size.