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Democracy and gasoline
The amazing events happening across the Arab world right now are, of course, reminiscent of what occured behind the Iron Curtain some two decades ago. The Berlin Wall came down and before long, regimes were toppling in every Communist country in Europe (although the ripples didn’t carry as far as Cuba or China). Within a few years, Germany had re-united and the Soviet Union had dissolved.
Our Cup of Coffee on page 3 is a reminder that not everything in the former Communist nations instantly became a bowl of cherries. In many cases, the new governments were just as bad as the old ones, just with different masks, and in several former Soviet republics, the Communists slowly re-emerged, except through more-or-less democratic processes.
And in the euphoria surrounding the revolutions in northern Africa or the Persian Gulf, we shouldn’t be blinded to the same kinds of things happening. As old dictators leave the room, there are any number of new ones waiting in the wings for their moment on the stage. Is the new military government in Egypt, for example, a substantial improvement on the Mubarak administration? If the king yields power in Bahrain, what kind of government will take it up?
And it only takes a little uncertainty about the future of oil-rich Arabia to set our fragile economic ship a-rocking in the western world. A Toronto TV commentator was heard to say a little earlier this week that “although Libyan citizens are paying in blood this week in the streets of Tripoli, Torontonians are likely to soon be paying in a different way: at the gas tank.”
It’s hard to believe that a supposedly intelligent reporter actually put it that way, but of course he’s right. The average Canadian really doesn’t care a fig about whether the government in Libya is a democracy or a tyranny, whether its leader is a despot, a madman or a saint. He or she doesn’t care if the average Libyan lives in a hovel or a palace, whether he can read or watch television - or vote. All he really cares is whether Libya, a valued fellow member of OPEC, will continue to export the black gold in a reliable fashion, so he can continue to afford to drive his Hummer or Escalade.
It would be most inconvenient if the struggle for freedom in Algeria or Abu Dhabi or, heaven help us, Saudi Arabia, resulted in even a temporary spike in gas prices. Someone like Ghadaffi is very likely to take a few pipelines and refineries with him as he goes, and that would fairly wreak havoc on the streets and flyways of the civilized world. And Libya is only the world’s 15th largest exporter of oil. The mind fairly boggles as to what might happen if rebels threatened production in the bigger countries.
Of course, all the people screaming and weeping in the streets of Cairo or Yemen have thought of this, surely? Surely they realize that the sympathy of “westerners” watching their struggles on wide-screen TVs from comfortable living room couches will only go so far. If we’re forced to choose between supporting the human rights of people with difficult-to-pronounce names in countries we’d be hard-pressed to locate on a globe, and paying a quarter more for a litre of gas... well, let’s hope things don’t come to that, OK?
