D5 & the transformation of digital government.

• Author: Massoglia, Anna

No quick fix is on offer for the great geopolitical turmoil in the Middle East. Laying its demons to rest will be a long haul requiring guns and classical diplomacy as well as social change. Out-of-the-box ideas can mitigate the mess.

The great expanse of territory from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Hindu Kush is the contemporary world's worst geopolitical cauldron. It boiled further and more abruptly in 2014. It could boil over in 2015. The turmoil is taking an increasing grip too of Saharan Africa. Falling oil revenues provide less money for regimes to buy allegiance. The United States, as the world's remaining superpower, agonises between the conflicting instincts of duty to intervene and of plunging in to something it cannot control. In a weak and insecure Europe terrorist threats, accentuated by the Charlie Hebdo murders, have injected a new dose of hysteria among Europeans who dither between unthinking panic reaction and blinkered attention to the roots of the problem, both at home and in the Middle East.

The Middle East is a complex reality of many historic divisions, a region in which the contemporary nation-state is not always the principal reality. But traditional nationalism is broader, older and may have returned as a primary driving motivation.

What currents are driving this scene?

European colonialism riding on the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and Caliphate nurtured modern Arab secular nationalism. That too has now collapsed. Unravelling the layers of conflict and we see the age-old competition between Turks and Persians re-asserting itself as both reach for, if not regional hegemony, then at least regional influence. This competition is emerging as the major underlying current or theme of current Middle East politics.

It is fairly classic commentary to describe a nation-state in geographical terms thereby neatly combining its two components. "A state is a political and geopolitical entity, while a nation is a cultural and ethnic one." The term "nation-state" implies that the two coincide, but they don't always. But it has become the dominant form of political organization today. People identifying with them, although often with an additional identifying characteristic. Nazi Germany spoke of Teutonic tribalism, while in the Middle East the identifying characteristic, the badge of membership, so to speak, is religion.

Most 20th century conflicts have indeed been basically ethnic or nationalist in character. This is a reality which conflicts of ideologies often obscure, especially if one is American. "At the outset of the century there were two dominant views.... the liberal expectancy, which held that ethnic attachments were pre-modern modes of thought, not very attractive, and would soon go away with the progress of enlightenment.... the Marxist prediction, which held that ethnic attachments were epiphenomena of pre-modern mode of production, and would soon go away with the progress of socialism. Both were wrong. Ethnicity is in fact post-modern."

This reality is particularly true in the Middle East where a superstructure of state organization was imposed on a base of ancient nationalisms and in the cases of Iran, Turkey, and Eqypt on ancient political structures. (Israel as well but a rather different case.) Throughout the wider Middle East we are dealing with a complex pattern of ethnic, religious, clan and tribal loyalties, sometimes with their own admixture of nationalism. The defining boundaries are largely local or, rather, regional. The major theme of nationalism shares the arena with those other conflicting complexities of allegiances, fealties and identities. Unfortunately, the ancient boundaries do not fit well those of today's countries.

We now have "Bundles of Divisions", each bundle has it own boundaries on the ground, and they do not coincide with the boundaries of existing states. While they are not purely tied to physical boundaries, "It is an illusion to believe that conflicts rooted in geography can be abolished".

An ancient war revives.

The 21st century history of the Arab world may become known as the 100 year struggle to reconcile Islam's relationship with a globalized world. The Arab world, having failed the earlier promises of Arab Nationalism and then the Arab Spring, is now being torn apart by a renewal of the ancient intra-Islamic war between Sunni and Shiite. Two questions spring to mind. Is this theocratic conflict the cause or the symptom of nationalism and ethnic politics? Are we doomed to suffer the Arab world's schisms and Arab decimation for the foreseeable future?

Fundamentally the turmoil and conflict ripping through the Middle East is a competition for power. From one perspective it looks like a religious conflict between Sunni and Shi'a. But other significant differences are at play: Arab-Persian, Arab-Turk, Turk-Persian, Egyptian-Others, Kurds-everyone, Berber-Arab (in North Africa), secular-religious, elements of modern nationalism as in Iraq and Syria in particular, and tribal/family/dynastic loyalties just to name the most obvious. This complex disarray at the heart of the Middle East is being reflected in the renewed struggle for power between Iran and Turkey.

Nor, while trying to grope one's way through the tangle of loyalties afflicting this region, must one forget the pervasive evil which exasperates ordinary people more, perhaps, than anything else - lack of government competence. The governments in the region by and large...