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|b This study presents the many internal and external challenges facing the Arab world, which have clearly affected performance of this regional system. These challenges may be summarized as follows: The Arab world faces many internal and external challenges which, among other things, clearly affect the internal stability of the Arab countries and their institutions. Internal challenges include political, security, economic and social dimensions. Issues of political reform, democratization, human rights and dealing with extremism and violence, are among the most salient of the internal challenges, but varying in degrees among Arab states. A clear conflicting relationship is noted between the effects of extremism and violence, on the one hand, and the paths of democratic change and the preservation of human rights on the other. Political reform and democracy are the only way out. Both guarantee peaceful development of society and state in most Arab countries, as communities have there lived for more than half a century under emergency rules, deprivation of rights and freedoms, weak partnerships, and the lack of mechanisms for organization. Food security and water security are among the most important of the Arab economic and social challenges. The water crisis, especially, has become a critical issue in the political and economic sphere in the Arab region, and may constitute a crisis for regional conflicts. Other issues include poverty, and mal-distribution of national income, where more than two-thirds of the population are in countries with low-income, and more than 70 million Arabs live under the poverty line. Unemployment is a serious problem in the Arab world, relating to weak economic performance, bad development orientation and weak educational training programs, and a situation requiring deep economic reform and open market paths. Among external challenges are security and political threats which constitute the gravest of issues in the Arab regional system. No individual Arab country can confront such challenges or have remedies for them, as they require collective Arab effort and potentials. Arab governments have adopted positive attitudes towards the international war on terrorism, but also call for a distinction with legitimate resistance against occupation and state terrorism. By the end of the cold war, and upon US participation as main sponsor in the Middle East peace process, and according to the 1991 Madrid Conference, Washington began raising the democratic motto in the region as the new guarantee against threats of imbalance, and dangers of Islamic fundamentalism. Democracy is seen as a guarantee to peace, and aims at a new Middle East with Israel as a regional party to with normalized relations with the rest of the Arab countries. But among the external challenges is Arab national security which is affected by US and Israel's influence and ownership of weapons of mass destruction. Internal economic and social challenges include foreign debt as Arab economies, beginning from the 1990s, started to suffer from strong foreign pressures and challenges that negatively effected moves towards Arab economic integration. Such pressures and challenges worsened as globalization became the name of the game for the U.S., and its hegemony over both the developed and developing countries. This new international environment posed much challenges to the Arab world to start its own institutional and economic reform to avoid the negative impacts of globalization and harvest the expected benefits from such changes and contribute to their merger in the world economy. But decision-makers have to be careful of such a trend because it leads to short-comings in Arab economy performance and to exhaustion of Arab funds in favor of foreign laborers working in the Arab countries.
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