Usually a good thing, but not always.
It’s easy to forget how much we rely on stability. So much of our daily activity depends on the proper functioning of government and business. When you press the light switch, you expect the room to be illuminated. When you go to the supermarket, you expect there to be food on the shelves. When you post a letter, you expect it to arrive at its destination. When you wait for a bus, you expect it to come. These thousands of predictable outcomes contribute to the “quality of life” which we in the developed world enjoy.
Rarely, if ever, do people pause to reflect on the massive human effort needed to maintain these basic services. Turning on a light seems a simple, mundane action. But think of the huge investment of capital and manpower needed to build and maintain the electricity system. It’s only on the rare occasions when the power is cut that you realise how important all this effort is.
What we in the West see as unremarkable is, in many parts of the world, a rare commodity. In many places roads aren’t maintained, electricity supply is patchy and sewers don’t exist. Central governmental authority has broken down and anarchy prevails in places like Somalia. In these Hobbesian places, lacking economic and political stability, life is nasty, brutish and short. Quality of life simply doesn’t exist.
Stability is important, and those of us who live in stable societies should be thankful for what we have. My problem is not with the idea that stability is good. My problem is with the idea that stability is great. Yes, stability is important, but it shouldn’t be seen as a giant, towering over other abstract nouns like freedom and justice. Maintaining stability is not always the answer, sometimes keeping a country stable means keeping it unjust. A period of upheaval is occasionally necessary in order to create a fairer society.
Take the example of East Timor. Following the Indonesian invasion in 1975, the people had two options; to fight or to give in. If they had chosen to accept the occupation of their country then East Timor would have been stabilised under Indonesian rule. Fewer Timorese would have been killed, imprisoned and tortured. The economy would have improved slightly. In the short-term, if the Timorese had acquiesced, their lives would have been more stable and more pleasant.
They chose instead to fight and their guerrilla campaign dragged on for two decades. East Timor was unstable and unhappy. Yet, from the vantage point of 2004, would any citizen of the now independent East Timor say that they chose wrongly in 1975? The Timorese chose upheaval rather than stability in an attempt to create a fairer and freer society. To their credit, they succeeded.
As with East Timor, so also with dozens of other colonised peoples across the world in the latter part of the twentieth century. By resisting colonialism, they chose war, suffering and instability over a stable world where the trains ran on time and the natives knew their place. Stability is no good thing if it is the stability of oppression.
In spite of this, most people like stability, it is a word with positive connotations. Thus when defending unjust regimes, whether in China, Egypt or Zimbabwe, people will often reach for the S-word. The most glaring example is Saudi Arabia. “Stable” is an appropriate adjective to use when describing the regime of the House of Saud. But then again so are “vicious”, “undemocratic” and “hand-chopping”. The kingdom’s apologists in the West, be they greedy right-wing oilmen or craven left-wing cultural relativists, never speak the inescapable truth, that the regime in Riyadh is an affront to justice.
Why do they never talk in these terms? It’s obvious, somehow our oil mysteriously got under their sand, so we have to play nice or they’ll put up the price. Our stability - the lights coming on when you flick the switch - is directly related to their stability - the continuance of a co-operative regime in Riyadh.
So there is precious little talk of human rights or democratisation from Western governments when it comes to the world’s greatest oil pit. Instead the country is praised for being stable, in other words for keeping the people down. Saudi Arabia is stable and stable is good, so Saudi Arabia is good. So what if the religious police beat any woman not “properly” attired? Hey, that’s their culture and we should respect it.
By supporting “stability” in the Gulf, the West helps to make non-violent resistance more difficult. Violent opposition to the royal family is more likely if there is no political space for peaceful dissent. The country is a powder-keg of frustration just waiting to blow.
Just look at what happened to another oil-rich kingdom across the Gulf. Back in the 1970s the Shah’s Iran was the poster-boy of pro-Western stability, backed up by a murderous police state. We all know how that turned out. Given the West’s support for the Shah, it was no surprise that the Iranian people and the ayatollahs who led them should be anti-Western.
From 1979 onwards Iran’s relationship with the West in general and America in particular has been fractious. The hostage crisis, the Iran-Iraq war, the Buenos Aries bomb, WMD allegations, bellicose American rhetoric – what’s the best word to describe this sort of relationship?
How about “unstable”?