Quick Note: Why Am I A Social Liberal...

NOTE: You can read this companion piece here, on why Centrism is needed in Egypt and the Arab World.

This is a topic on which I could, and should, write an extended piece. But I want to write mainly a quick note on the topic for now.

In choosing an ideology, and in creating an ideology, there are many factors to consider, each one of them would deserve several professional theses, and it is simply a fact that we still remain in debate over them after millennia. Among these factors are: How do we see the world, how do we understand Human Nature, how do we see history and is it going towards a particular point and a particular final form of society (Historicism, Hegelian and Marxist Dialectics), what are the lessons we have learned from history regarding how societies and economies and individuals and nature work, what are the resources of nature and how abundant are they and how are they best managed, what are our rights as human beings, and what are our responsibilities as human beings towards one another, and so forth.

Anthony Giddens, one of the main theoreticians behind modern Centrism (The Third Way) with one of the people he influenced the most, Bill Clinton.

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Why Egypt & Arab States Need Social Liberalism & Centrism

Note (Feb, 2012) : I wrote this piece as a comment on something, not an actual long and edited proper article. As I review it months after writing it the first time, I realise that I have done a few over-generalisations, quite a few inaccuracies, but it remains in essence viable and correct.

This article explores meaning of Centrism, Third Way, and Social Liberalism, and talks about their future in a new Arab World.
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Egypt is out of a revolution, or rather coming out of one. Some would even argue we are still in the middle of it. The economy certainly looks the part, going from a 5% growth in GDP to -4% at the moment, foreign reserves are dwindling, quite a deficit is building up (for Egypt, that is, somewhere between LE134-170bn as per official numbers), more than 10% unemployed, many more underemployed, many more employed with horrible pay and conditions, and there are the clear signs of a social crisis that has been in the making for decades.

The Previous regime has been alternating between remnant policies from the Nasserist era, imperfectly devised Capitalist policies that were supposed to stimulate the economy, and a bunch of disastrous policies intended to keep it in power such as horribly structured and executed subsidies. While I am not against subsidies in certain cases (very few of them, to be honest), subsidies should be structured in a correct, open, easily explorable and dissectible manner, and should benefit those who need them the most. Mubarak's regime was so afraid of doing any radical overhaul of the subsidies system for the fear of a public backlash. Food subsidies stand today at 2% of GDP, Fuel subsidies at 8% of GDP, and subsidies are almost three times the education budget (Source: The Economist).

There is a massive need to both streamline the economy while also attending to the explosive poverty situation. The socialist camp is gaining ground of course on a more grassroots level, while capitalism (of the centre right variety) is gaining ground in the upper strata of society. And there are people like myself. Sometimes we are defined as Social Liberals, Third Way Centrists, or Radical Centrists. For simplification, I will use these terms interchangeably here.

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