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Much is being said these days about democracy, about democratization of the Middle East, about the supposed fact that democracy has taken hold in every part of the world except the Arab and Islamic worlds, which suggests some of the rhetoric is excessive. (China?) US President George W. Bush has made a stirring speech calling for the spread of freedom in the Middle East, and indeed, things seem to be happening. Afghanistan is about to vote on a new Constitution (See the Dossier in the issue of November 14), and Iraq has proposed a new transition plan to constitutional government (See this issue’s Dossier.) Georgia has just toppled a President in a “velvet revolution” after fraudulent elections to Parliament (Between the Lines), and even Saudi Arabia is talking about partially electing local councils.
That is the good news. Balance it, however, with the bad: Georgia’s democratic revolution came on the heels of an election in Azerbaijan in which the new President is the son of the old, elected in a highly dubious vote, so the record in the Caucasus is mixed. In the rest of the former USSR, only the three Baltic republics appear to be fully functional democracies by Western standards, and they had a tradition from the pre-World War II years to draw on. Belarus and some of the Central Asian states are as autocratic as under Communism, and Russia is, in some eyes, a bit recidivist.
In the Middle East, Iran, with a seemingly democratic political system, keeps electing reformers who cannot pass reforms because of the constraints on the elected leadership. Oddly enough, the most democratic reforms in recent years have come from monarchies: Qatar and Bahrain have instituted elected Parliaments (joining Kuwait) and Oman has just elected its Shura Council for the first time. (Elsewhere, King Muhammad VI of Morocco has greatly liberalized women’s rights: by decree. In Kuwait a few years ago, the Amir gave women the right to vote, and Parliament took it away.) The older republics — Syria, Egypt, Tunisia — may allow opposition in one form or another, but the ruling party always wins. The prospects for democracy are not as dismal as some paint them, but they are not necessarily bright, either.
In this context, and with so much being said these days about the prospects for democratization — and there are many in the region who share the aspiration, if they cannot see how the US can have a role in implementing it — a few observations would seem to be in order. A sort of sanity check, if you will, and a few useful things to keep in mind however the debate progresses. Among the things worth keeping in mind:
- A democratic electoral system does not assure the sort of liberal pluralist society many in the West equate with democracy. Adolf Hitler was, of course, elected democratically, but only once. Fareed Zakaria wrote an influential 1997 article in Foreign Affairs, and a subsequent book, entitled “Illiberal Democracy”, in which he suggested that many new democracies do not, in fact, fit the traditional Western model. There are a number of countries, especially in East Asia, where a democratic system is in place and opposition parties exist but the ruling party always wins anyway (Malaysia, Japan for many decades).
- Historically, Western countries tend to forget how recently they achieved full democracy themselves. Westerners are often outraged that Kuwaiti women still cannot vote (as noted earlier, because Parliament refuses to give them the vote: the Amir tried). Yet American and British women could not vote until after the First World War; French and Italian women could not vote until after the Second World War, and Swiss women — good, democratic, neutral Switzerland — could not vote until the 1970s. That is half the population right there; not to mention, of course, the fact that the southern states in the US disenfranchised blacks in most cases until the 1960s; the unelected British House of Lords held a veto into the 20th century, and so on. The universal adult franchise is quite recent in the West, though few ever mention this when deploring limitations on the franchise in countries which are just beginning to democratize. But the West began to democratize a long time ago: whether one chooses Magna Charta, the earliest Parliaments, the Icelanding Althing, the American Constitution or the Declaration of the Rights of Man, these were all more than two centuries ago, and most Middle Eastern countries were not even independent states until after World War I, if then. Americans have always been a bit idealistic about the applicability of their system to the rest of the world, but even Europeans sometimes seem to forget how recent a thing democracy has been.
- Democratization by decree from above does not necessarily work. Successful democracies have generally been built in societies where there is already a healthy civil society: local institutions, often elected from below long before national governments are; professional unions or syndicates; other non-governmental organizations functioning in a manner which permits individual input and participation in the governance of at least some part of one’s life. Simply electing a national parliament does not a democracy make. Algeria in 1988-1992 went through a period of rapid democratization and liberalization, creating a plethora of political parties. But when the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) won the first round of elections, the second round was canceled and so was democratization, and a bloody civil war resulted. Elections, alone, do not make democracy. Under the wrong circumstances, they can elect a Hitler. And they did in 1933, though the Weimar Republic was a far more stable democracy than most of the nascent ones in the former Soviet Union or the Middle East.
- Westerners often underestimate the level of political participation in the Arab world. Most Arab countries are not totalitarian in the way the Soviet Union or China were. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq came close, and so did the former People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, which disappeared over a decade ago. But even authoritarian countries like Syria have some aspects of civil society, and Egypt for example has always had vigorously independent (if sometimes suppressed) professional syndicates and, more recently, a feisty opposition press. The fact that the arrest of a democracy advocate like Sa‘d al-Din Ibrahim can become a cause celèbre is a reminder that Egypt is not Saddam’s Iraq: in Iraq he would simply have disappeared. Muslims have always pointed to the concept of shura or consultation as a sign that Islam has a democratic streak, and there is an element of truth to this (though the concept of shura, and the religious concept of ijma‘ or consensus, were not open to all and usually had some constraints as well). And many Arab countries had their parliamentary period early in their independent years: Egypt before 1952, Syria briefly in the 1940s, Iraq until 1958. These were not model Westminster democracies by any means, and all ended in military rule, but there was some tradition of parliamentary life and competitive elections.
- Democracy is not as universal outside the Arab world as some seem to be arguing. The Arab/Islamic world is not the only holdout. By some measures it has been said that a bit over 50% of the world’s population now lives under democratic rule. Admittedly the great exception of China tilts the numbers, but most of the former Soviet Union outside the Baltics is, as noted already, indifferently democratic, and Russia seems to be moving away from liberal democracy. If Eastern Europe and Latin America have made great strides, Africa has been a mixed story, at best. And there are difficult cases. Is Singapore a democracy? Structurally it appears to be, but the results do not seem to be those one would expect. Pakistan is hardly a success story even if it does hold elections.
- Democracy has almost never been imposed from outside. The exceptions mentioned so often are post-World War II Germany and Japan. Germany was divided, and West Germany came into being as much through the leadership of key democrats like Konrad Adenauer as through Allied guidance. The “MacArthur regency” in Japan is also cited, but here MacArthur had one great asset: the support of the Emperor, the symbol of the Japanese state and people. There was no such figure in Germany; there is no such figure in Iraq. (Nor did Germany or Iraq have the millennia of cultural unity that Japan possessed and possesses.)
The Estimate offers no clear conclusion to this little exercise, but urges readers to reflect on these thoughts and, of course, to read history before prescribing a specific means for creating a democratic future for the Middle East.
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