Where next for Libya?

The European press as a whole welcomes the fall of the Libyan regime and the momentum it will give to the “Arab spring” -- but it strikes a more cautious note on the future of the country. A future in which Europe has a decisive role to play.

It is “Libya’s hour,” writes El País, which considers the NATO intervention to have been “a good choice”, even if it does question the tardiness in making initial decisions and the “surprising improvisation” that came with getting the military machinery in the air. The coming period in Libya will be marked by “uncertainty”, and “no one can afford mistakes”: neither the rebel leaders nor the international community, which, “following decades of bad policies in the region, has the chance now to contribute to the spread of freedom.”

“Toppling dictators requires less time than it does to restore normality to the countries they trampled,” writes the commentator Jacek Pawlicki in Gazeta Wyborcza. “To put the dictator on trial – if that ever happens – will be just one small step,” he writes, “towards the goal of a peaceful and stable Libya with its territory intact, a credible exporter of oil and a significant political centre in the Maghreb.” But Libya will be unable to rebuild “with merely the help of the United States, NATO and the EU,” Pawlicki believes. “China, Russia, Turkey and other Arab and African countries,” he adds, will have to help too.

His more sceptical colleague from Rczeczpospolita, Marek Magierowski, believes that “the EU may advise Libya on how to organise free elections and how to create a system of political parties, or support them financially. Sooner or later, though, the advisers will head back to Brussels, the money will run out and Libya will be left to its own devices. The process will be a very painful one, since, like Afghanistan, Libya is a composite state, a constellation of 150 tribes with their own interests. A democratic and peaceful Libya is an attractive prospect, but seems a distant one.”

In The Independent, the Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk asks whether Libya’s future will be very different from its past. Certainly, Fisk writes, one can imagine Libya as “a Middle Eastern superpower” and a country “less African and more Arab” that “may infect Algeria and Morocco with its freedoms.” But Libya, Fisk continues, has long “suffered from the cancer of the Arab world: financial – and moral – corruption.” That is why its new “unelected” leaders should be monitored carefully.

According to Fisk, Libya will not be the last country to feel the effects of the “Arab Spring”: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Yemen, and especially Syria are next on the list. For, he asks, “how long will it be before the people of Europe demand to know why, if Nato has been so successful in Libya...it cannot be used against Assad's legions in Syria, using Cyprus as a territorial aircraft-carrier”?
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