If the Arab League wants to get anything done, it is going to need to form a consensus, and that certainly does not mean making sweeping regional policy statements when almost half of all member states are absent.
At the League's 2008 Damascus summit last weekend, only half of the member states brought delegations.
While it is rare for all members to attend -- not unlike any session of the United States Congress or the United Nations General Assembly -- significant absences from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, all in dissent of perceived Syrian influence in a recent Lebanese election, give little legitimacy to the summit.
The basic division between Shiite and Sunni Muslims that has caused violence in Iraq makes it difficult to facilitate a consensus between the 22 members of the Arab League. While Iran, Iraq and Lebanon are the only Shiite-majority states in the League, their influence and power in the region cannot be discounted, especially regarding Iran’s recent nuclear ambitions.
The three widest-reaching decisions made at the summit regarded Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine, and while each of the three has strong promise in resolving conflict, none can be interpreted as the standpoint of the Middle East as a whole.
The Washington Post reports that the Damascus Declaration, as recent statements have been named, calls upon “Iraqi brothers to stop bloodshed immediately and preserve the lives of innocent citizens" in a further goal of a clear "end of the foreign presence."
But a good idea can easily be tainted if not everyone is allowed a say. Some Iraqi officials feel that the “bloodshed” mentioned is an oversimplification of the terrorism and the Sunni-Shiite-Kurd conflict currently going on in Iraq, violence that cannot be so simply stopped.
Similarly, compromises on Lebanon’s electoral crisis and the status of a 2002 agreement of the League on peace in Israel will possibly be overlooked because of the dissention of select members.
A different kind of compromise needs to be reached. The Middle East is already in a seemingly submissive position to more traditionally powerful Western states: many Arabs who immigrate to European and North American states face discrimination (think France’s car-burning riots of 2005 or 2007) and the policy decisions of Middle Eastern countries are often subject to the review of Western powers (think Iran’s nuclear program and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty).
The mere setup of the international system makes it easy for the voice of the Arab world to get lost. The western-led UN Security Council, where all the control for possible military intervention lies in the hands of the five gigantesque powers, gives little voice to any developing states and often serves as a means of promoting the interests of the US, UK, France, China and Russia.
So while the Middle East may be rife with conflict between the two main sects of Islam, the Arab League will need to speak in a unified voice if it wants to have any significant impact on what is going on in the international system. The most basic way to make possible such a unified voice is to realize the potential power of the Arab League as a supranational organization and to recognize the importance of each member state.
This means that Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran and split-down-the-middle Iraq will all need to see that they are more like each other than the neo-colonialists of the West, who only seems to listen to the voice of the Middle East when it contains echoes of oil and nukes.
Jake Robert Nelson is a columnist for The DSJ. His views do not necessarily represent that of the entire staff.