The Financial Times looked at the Arab ‘youth bulge’ in one of its editorials today. This follows a recent and extensive Special Report. There is no reason for surprise at the interest in the rising tide of Arab young – the European elite sees mass migration and revolution on the horizon.

Up to two thirds of Arabs are under 25. More than a quarter are unemployed. The region would need (so it is said) to create 80m-100m jobs within the next twelve years.

The Financial Times' analysis emphasizes a ‘woeful’ educational system, autocracy and the absence of the rule of law as issues for managers of this presumed crisis. But this ‘liberal bias’ in prescriptions for a solution is part of the problem and not part of the solution.

The rush to economic modernization is presented as a race against time to provide millions of jobs (and so stability) but Arab societies may not be able to cope if radical political modernization is sold as part of the package.

Let us take each of the prescriptions of the Financial Times in turn, taking it at face value as a central interpreter of the policies of the Western liberal establishment.

First, educational reform. An improved educational system cannot be instituted over night. A partial implementation may well create a two-tier system in which middle class youths prosper and working class and peasant lads are left until later. 

The illusion that the young of the middle classes are by nature more intelligent than their less well off peers is a classic indication of the fact that the middle classes are never as bright as they like to think they are.

Unless a modernised educational system is imposed Ataturk-style unilaterally and across each country, divisions between classes would increase. But a Kemalist solution to development would, by definition, be a revolutionary act and so a direct challenge to conservative forces.

As for autocracy, the Kuwait example (and others) shows that political liberalization can work against economic modernization.

Far from introducing liberals and representatives of the young into the political process, classic 'bourgeois' democracy simply gives more power to sclerotic and self-interested tribal leaders and to popular Islamists (the closest that the working class and peasant young will get to advocates).

The rule of law is another matter. It is the point at which political and economic modernization might converge in a classic liberal manner. But judicial power (as we have seen in Pakistan) can also work against the political authoritarianism that underpins investor confidence.

Musharraf’s Pakistan was a political accident waiting to happen yet it sustained a liberal economic development programme under Western patronage. The economy is now in a parlous state precisely because liberal constitutionalists began to challenge the President’s authority.

But the main target of the Financial Times is the ‘clerical establishment’ which is really a targeting of Saudi Arabia, the financial powerhouse of the region, and countries like Egypt where deals are cut to give clerics control over education in return for political quiescence.

Actually, this is not really so different from the British State’s longstanding deals over faith schools which stops the churches (implicitly) from interfering in British liberal politics. As with nuclear weapons, we can have faith-based schools, they cannot.

The main criticism is that Arab education is quite simply poor in quality, but (given the record of good faith schools in the UK) this may simply be a matter of poverty of resource rather than the inevitable malign influence of clerics.

The British introduced a non-denominational primary system in Ireland in 1831 for reasons of political control but it did nothing to stop the rise of Irish nationalism - indeed, if anything, it helped give voice to local anger.

Any system imposed by the West or by local elites answerable to the West is likely to fuel social tension unless introduced as part of the existing predominantly Muslim culture or able to displace Muslim culture with something nationalist or socialist (the Kemalist option).

More worrying, in the current state of the global economy, any Arab leader will know that you might educate your brightest along best practice international lines and they will then only move to where the action is.

Arabs who get MBAs and have perfect English may end up in New York or Mumbai or congregate in the Gulf, while those who speak and write only Arabic will still end up in the Gulf or in whatever ‘centre of excellence’ emerges in their particular specialism.

Unless the whole Arab world develops into some sort of economic union, with a redistributive capacity within it, a lop-side competitive Western-style system will only concentrate talent in the usual global centres – plus ca change. The Gulf will suck the rest of the Arab world dry.

However, what is most remarkable about the Financial Times' editorial is the degree to which it just 'loses it' as it tries to evangelise for liberalism. In a wonderfully hysterical use of words, it suggests that, in the current educational structure, “Islamists prey on children”.

Islamists are down there with the sort of ‘weird uncles’ who lurk around children’s playgrounds. This is nonsense. The mental image of sinister cloaked Islamists infiltrating thousands of Arab schools to spread obscurantist devilish nonsense is worthy only for some latter day Sax Rohmer. 

Some form of Islamism (which may vary from the moderate to the point of obsequiousness through to bomb-throwing extremist) is a logical response to rapid modernization for many poor communities.

Working people and peasants need to see why an education is not just going to produce a much more articulate hungry person and they need to feel some sort of ‘ownership’ over the way that their culture is handled.

The secret of Kemalism was that it was, in effect, national socialist without the bolshevism - liberalism had no more to do with it than dynasticism. Its development strategy offered the removal of blocks on lower class aspirations within a strong national culture.

This is precisely the sort of national educational culture that Financial Times' liberals do not want  - it tends to corporatism and nationalism - but it is still the only version that is a viable alternative to Islamism until further progress has been made in developmental terms.

What the Financial Times and its sources in the Foreign Office and elsewhere actually want (even if they have not yet worked through consequences) is for rulers to declare cultural war on their people without making such changes palatable through strategies of redistribution.

Redistribution is, of course, deeply anti-liberal in the economic sense – for liberals, subsidies must be stopped, free trade encouraged and corruption criminalised ever more effectively. And liberals want to get from A to B in under twelve years.

But think back to (say) 1996, just before Tony Blair took power, and see how liberal good intentions can decline into chaos over that period of time in just one country of relative wealth.

What do liberals really hope to achieve in twelve years through this Gramscian ‘optimism of the will’ in a region that is poorer, more riddled with inequality and is without, in some cases, even a minimal civil society? This is hubris with bells and whistles on it.

Local dynasts and dictators are right to be cautious. Their subjects are probably right to want them to be cautious. The way forward is certainly bureaucratic, rather than one of liberal modernization, albeit based on the introduction of the rule of law. 

Yes, success is almost certainly a matter of the diversion of funds to technical and skills education instead of building silly cities in the desert and ridiculously tall buildings to make rich men richer.

It is probably also about increasing efforts at a workable economic union between Arab states (without waiting for the never-ending Peace Process to be completed).

We have become so obsessed with the Peace Process that we are in danger of believing that peace between Israel and Palestine will somehow transform the region and provide prosperity for all. It is a step, nothing more.

But what modernisation and education should not be about is the privileging of a free market technocratic minority and its value system at the expense of the values of the majority.

For every Arab who heads up Citibank one day, there will be ten of equal intelligence in dead-end middle rank jobs as servitors and one hundred wondering why they are not even allowed to be bored for money.

Of the hundred or more, you only need a few to see the problem as political and then you have that very cadre of radicals that the modernization process was supposed to eliminate.

Liberals in the West seem not to read history books and certainly not to understand that ideologically-driven revolutionary leadership arises with liberal educational opportunities. The Western liberal view of the universe is far from self-evident even to its apparent beneficiaries.

A little education can permit a man to question his conditions. From there, he may consider alternatives, weigh up the balance and find the existing system wanting. The next step is political action instead of political thought.

Frustration at rigid systems must inevitably, in a minority of a minority, lead to violence. Offering a sclerotic bourgeois democracy before the ground has been adequately prepared is not going to do much to help.

The only means of bringing the Arab world as a whole into the liberal community is by recognizing that the task should not be hurried, that cultural norms must be respected and that elites must restrain themselves (or be restrained).

Redistributive strategies are also required for the transition and education must reflect this need to bring the brightest of the poor along with the process.

The best of the dynasts and dictators understand this and Westerners should ‘butt out’ of attempts to second-guess them on their own security and free trade interest.

The Financial Times’ real target, of course, is the 'Chinese model'. This has its inherent flaws but it is condemned because it offends liberal intellectual sensibilities and not because the real flaws are being analysed in any depth.

The fear in the West is not that the Chinese model won’t work but that it will. The West will then be left holding a far less effective liberal baby.

This is the same crisis of confidence that afflicted the West in the late 1950s and early 1960s during the rapid phase of economic growth of the Soviet Union. Another silly panic at a time of difficulty - the sort of panic that gets you stuck in stupid proxy wars.

China aspires to Western conditions of existence but within its own cultural norms. Arab norms are never going to be able to mimic Chinese discipline. The Chinese model in the Arab world is a non-issue.

Meanwhile, the West bumps and grinds its way to eventual economic success and relative stability through its unique form of creative destruction amidst its equally unique form of laughable intellectual hysteria.

But I leave the best to last. Apparently, in another moment of hysteria for the Financial Times, we are told that Arab states are ‘predatory’. One does not know whether to laugh or cry!

I suppose ‘predatory’ might have been a good term for Arab culture when the Arabs crossed the Pyrenees, but I would have thought that the august Financial Times would have worked out by now that it has been the West and its proxies that have been the predator for many years since.

We can safely put this anonymous editorialist to one side as the expression of a frustration amongst many Western liberals that the carefully laid plans outlined for the world in the wake of the Fall of the Soviet Union have failed to come to fruition on so many fronts.

The rest of us should just move on and let the market, common sense and nature – and Arabs themselves – decide what is best for the Arab World.

www.tppr.co.uk