Moroccan thinker pleads for reforming Arab regional system
Regional-Morocco, Politics, 5/10/2003

Abdelhadi Boutaleb, a renowned Moroccan thinker, on Thursday called for hastening the reform of the Arab League and enable it better face up challenges thrown at Arab countries.

The Arab regional system should be reformed through reviewing working mechanisms and methods and identifying gaps in a bid to keep pace with the modernization and democratization process, Boutaleb, a member of the Academy of the Kingdom of Morocco, told a conference in Rabat on "the Crisis of Arab Systems, Causes and Means to Tackle it."

Boutaleb, also a former advisor to the Late King Hassan II, called Arabs to adopt the methodology enforced for creation of the European Union, a methodology that privileged the economic dimension based on interests rather than sentiments.

The conference, held on the Moroccan diplomacy Day, analyzed the concepts of world and regional systems and the crisis of Arab systems.

Boutaleb, who had also led the Islamic Scientific, Educational and Cultural Organisation (ISESCO), detailed the history of Arab regional systems since the Great Arab Revolution of 1916, led by Charif Ali Ibn Al-Hussein, going through the call to create a regional system comprising the Fertile Crescent countries in the 1930s that led to the creation of the Arab League on March 22, 1945.

He highlighted the ideal of pan-Arabism, its objectives and principles and the challenge that the admission of Israel in the United Nations in 1948 constituted along with the events that followed like the Arab-Israeli wars and their consequences on the evolution of the Arab regional system.

Boutaleb deemed that this system has gone through two major crises consisting in the militarization of the Arab system through the train of coups d'?tat that overthrew civil regimes, followed by "counter coups d'etat" and the dilapidation of Arab states because of political discords and armed conflicts.

This series of crises was fatal to Arab systems because the Arab states entered in an arms race and purchase of inefficient weapons compared to the sophisticated ones owned by Israel, he lamented.

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