G-8: Nations, Banks To Give $40B For Arab Spring

(05-27) 11:52 PDT DEAUVILLE, France (AP) --

Rich countries and international lenders are aiming to provide $40 billion in funding for Arab nations trying to establish true democracies, officials said at a Group of Eight summit Friday.

Officials didn't fully detail the sources of the money, or how it would be used, but the thrust was clearly to underpin democracy in Egypt and Tunisia — where huge public uprisings ousted autocratic regimes this year — and put pressure on repressive rulers in Syria and Libya.

The overall message from President Barack Obama and the other G-8 leaders meeting in this Normandy resort appeared to be warning autocratic regimes in the Arab world that they will be shut out of rich-country aid and investment, while new democracies are encouraged to open their economies.

On war-torn Libya, European leaders sought to wield carrot and stick. French President Nicolas Sarkozy insisted NATO was ratcheting up military pressure against Moammar Gadhafi's embattled regime, just as British Prime Minister David Cameron said Libya could get a cut of aid — if Gadhafi goes.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/05/27/international/i043715D22.DTL#ixzz1NaHzehpi

http://www.juancole.com/2011/05/g8-marshall-plan-for-arab-spring-nations-falls-short.html

The 8 wealthiest industrial countries, meeting at the G-8, urged that the world give Egypt, Tunisia and liberated Libya (‘emerging democracies in the Arab world’) some $40 billion in aid. The sum will make headlines but there is less to it than meets the eye.

The G8 is only ponying up $10 billion itself, and that is only in the form of relatively vague promises of a sort that have often not been completely followed through on in the past. It is urging that the Gulf oil states to give $10 billion, though some of them, like Saudi Arabia, were not actually very happy about Hosni Mubarak being overthrown and it is not clear that they will want to help grassroots democratization succeed. That $10 bn. may or may not come through, and if it did it might have strings attached that would actually be undemocratic. Saudi Arabia is very afraid of the outbreak of press freedom in Egypt, which could end its stranglehold over Arabophone journalism and open its authoritarian system to critique. What price would it extract from Cairo for its billions in aid?

Egypt’s transition to democracy is going to be rocky enough without the albatross of Hosni Mubarak’s debts hanging around its neck. The world community needs to be far more generous and pro-active if Egyptians are going to feel rewarded rather than punished for their remarkable achievement in moving toward popular sovereignty and a rule of law. The same holds true for Tunisia. But Egypt is a fourth of the Arab world and an opinion leader, and its success really would resonate widely in the Arab world and Africa.

The G8 gesture was good as a confidence-building measure, but it is piddling in relationship to the real needs and is short-sighted in its picayune dimensions. It also signals that war-fighting is more valued than democracy-making. One good thing about the likely victory of the Free Libya forces is that that country’s oil wealth ($26 bn a year) could be used in part to support the new democracies in its neighborhood, while Qaddafi would have tried to undermine them.