Thomas Piketty whose book on income inequality was an international sensation, followed up with an argument that inequality is a major driver of Middle Eastern terrorism, including the Islamic State attacks on Paris earlier this month — and Western nations have themselves largely to blame for that inequality.
Piketty writes that the Middle East’s political and social system has been made fragile by the high concentration of oil wealth into a few countries with relatively little population. If you look at the region between Egypt and Iran — which includes Syria — you find several oil monarchies controlling between 60 and 70 percent of wealth, while housing just a bit more than 10 percent of the 300 million people living in that area.
This concentration of so much wealth in countries with so small a share of the population, he says, makes the region “the most unequal on the planet.”
Within those monarchies, he continues, a small slice of people controls most of the wealth, while a large — including women and refugees — are kept in a state of “semi-slavery.” Those economic conditions, he says, have become justifications for jihadists, along with the casualties of a series of wars in the region perpetuated by Western powers.
Piketty is particularly scathing when he blames the inequality of the region, and the persistence of oil monarchies that perpetuate it, on the West: “These are the regimes that are militarily and politically supported by Western powers, all too happy to get some crumbs to fund their [soccer] clubs or sell some weapons. No wonder our lessons in social justice and democracy find little welcome among Middle Eastern youth.”
Terrorism that is rooted in inequality, Piketty continues, is best combated economically.
The argument has not gained much notice in the United States thus far. This is perhaps the reason that some commentators have failed to understand the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. It may have also impelled Brexit.
Whether inequality is a root cause of the Islamic State should be debated fully in the Presidentail raace in the US.