Unevenness of the Economic Development of the Arabic States as One of the Premises of the Conflicts in the Afro-Asian Region

Abstract

The socio-economic reasons of conflicts are numerous. Their premises are very different factors of the economic history of the arabic states. Among most important is the unevenness of their economic development both in the colonial and in the postcolonial periods. Until gaining independence the arabic states were on the different levels of the socio-economic development. One may explain this by many reasons of the political, geographic and socio-economic character. The most important among them are the level of development of the capitalism, the geographic proximity of the arabic states to Europe and generally to their metropolises, the military-strategic situation, the presence of the colonies of migrants from metropolises and of the national communities from other European states, the discovery of rich resources of raw materials, the influence of of the neighbouring countries’s cultures on the process of their historic and socio-economic development. As a result of long historical influence of these and many others factors different arabic countries achieved independence, but all of them were backward agrarian countries. Therefore the main differences among them manifested themselves in the degree of the backwardness Not a single arabic country had the developed manufacturing industry, which production would go to export. Some mining and oil enterprises, which were present in some of them belonged mainly to the foreign capital and practically were the heterogeneous formation in the extremely backward agrarian economy with undeveloped production forces. Only in some of these countries the light and food industry was functioning. In other branches of economy small and smallest enterprises predominated, based on personal labour of their owners and their families, who used primitive means of production. The poor possibilities of competition, the low efficiency of production mechanisms, the extreme unevenness of available natural potentials, financial and human resources, in particular skilled labour, as well as the impact of the interstate and military conflicts, the processes of globalization and growth rates of the economic development led the arabic countries to in the beginning of the new century to very different and even polar results, the main indicator of which is the gross domestic product per capita. The historic experience demonstrates, that the more is the gross domestic product of any country, the bigger state apparatus, including military forces, it may afford and use it actively for its internal as well as foreign policy. For example, arabic state Qatar in 2011 used its military forces for the overthrow of the Kaddafi regime, what led Libya to the state of collapse, and turned it to a conglomerate of several quasi-states, which are connected together by the necessity to produce and to sell oil. If to take the whole period, more than half of the century, of the existence of the arabic countries as independent states , one would hardly find any years during which the peace persisted in their territories. There have been constant military-political conflicts in different parts of the arabic world, as well as between the arabic countries and their afro-asiatic neighbours.