Democratization in the Muslim World

Changing Patterns of Authority and Power

Frederic Volpi, Francesco Cavatorta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317997375
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the role that political Islam plays in processes of democratization in the Muslim world, detailing the political processes that facilitate the collective learning of democratic ways of solving the practical problems of those polities.

Democratization in the Muslim World represents an important contribution to the debate on democratization and political Islam that emphasises the synergetic effects and global reach of both Islamist and democratic politics. It comes to terms with the problematic relationship between Islam and democracy in the uncertain post-Cold War, post-9/11 world order by highlighting the malleability of Islamic discourses and of its institutional resources, as well as the diversity of the political strategies of incumbent regimes to remain in power. It combines key theoretical issues and country-specific studies of some of the most relevant Muslim polities of the post-Cold War and post-9/11 era.

This text was previously published as a special issue of Democratization and will be of interest to students of Middle East politics, governance, democracy, and human rights.

INTRODUCTION

Forgetting Democratization? Recasting Power and Authority in a Plural Muslim World

FRÉDÉRIC VOLPI and FRANCESCO CAVATORTA

Over the last few years, the international community has focused much of its attention on political developments in the Muslim world. In particular, the issue of the absence of democracy in much of the area has been at the centre of both academic and policy-orientated debate. After the end of the Cold War, many believed that authoritarian regimes worldwide would quickly disappear to be replaced by Western-style liberal democracies and, indeed, this trend seemed to hold true for some time. The successful processes of democratization in Eastern Europe and Latin America justified this early enthusiasm, and contrary to popular belief the Muslim world itself has not been immune from this greater push for democratization. Regimes across the Muslim world have had to contend with liberalizing and democratizing pressures coming both from within and from without. This is confirmed by the fact that even before Eastern European countries moved decisively towards greater democratization, Tunisia and Algeria were already experimenting with democratic reforms.¹

In spite of these encouraging early trends, results in terms of actually successful democratic transitions have been largely disappointing and very few countries in the Muslim world, and in particular in the Arab Middle East and North Africa (MENA), can be considered today as successful democracies.² Due to these poor results, scholars and policy-makers have concentrated their attention on the reasons for the absence of substantial democratic reforms in those parts of the world. This debate has generated a number of very different answers to the question of the failure of democratization in the Muslim world.³ To further complicate the issue it is also the case that these answers are given at a time when political Islam is presented in some academic and policy-making quarters as a global challenger to the Western political, economic and social hegemony. In this context, one of the most conspicuous (if not altogether new) answers to the supposed absence of democracy in the Muslim world is linked directly to the regressive and authoritarian precepts of Islam as a system of beliefs and social organization.⁴ From this perspective, the Muslim world is presented as a monolithic entity incapable of dealing with the requirements of modernity — and most particularly liberal democracy — and responsible for generating an atmosphere of violence targeting ‘infidels’ both within and outside the Muslim world. Evidently, once one begins to think of democracy and Islam as fixed categories that are necessarily in opposition to each other, this approach vitiates a priori the possibility to think of the two as being capable of speaking to and influencing each other in a positive manner.⁵ But at the same time, such grand cultural explanations do provide a parsimonious explanation of the noted difficulties of democratization in the great majority of Muslim countries. Indeed, one can ask legitimately whether it would still make sense to analyse a region such as the ‘Muslim world’ if one were to abandon those grand cultural schemes. In this collection, we will attempt to do precisely that by pointing out that there is a ‘Muslim world’ that can be either defined substantively or, at the very least, posited analytically for the sake of a better understanding of the contemporary political processes of democratization.

This collection proposes to shift the focus away from grand culture-based explanations of democratization in the Muslim world, while retaining political Islam as its defining characteristic in the current socio-historical context. We suggest that this analytical distinction is practical and meaningful in the context of the study of democratization because a key factor of change in all those polities is the role played by Islamist parties or movements — be it directly through challenging the powers that be or indirectly through the countermeasures that are preventively put in place by incumbents to keep Islamists out of office. To be sure, the agency of Islamist movements is but one of the factors that contribute to creating the democratizing dilemmas of the Muslim world. Yet it is the one strategic factor that is specific to this region of the world and, other things being equal, it constitutes the Muslim world as a set of polities with a common political developmental drive, even when the considerable differences among these movements are taken into account. We are fully aware of the reflexivity of this argument, in particular the fact that such a perspective is relevant to the analysis of democratization in the Muslim world today because of the tendency and willingness of political players worldwide to view these Islamist movements as the main negative determinant of the problem (with all the implications that it may have as a self-fulfilling prophecy).⁶

For analytical purposes we seek to separate the practical role played by Islamist movements as institutional actors for political mobilization from the more diffuse cultural and religious underpinnings of social mobilization. In other words, we leave aside the meta-questions over Islam and democracy to be able to explain better the practical dilemmas of political Islam and democratization. As Daniel Brumberg pointed out, ‘the challenge is not to figure out whether Islamism is “essentially” democratic versus autocratic, or liberal versus illiberal. Instead, it is to see whether this or that Islamist group is acting within a hegemonic political arena where the game is to shut out alternative approaches, or else within a competitive — let's call it dissonant — arena where Islamists, like other players, find themselves pushed to accommodate the logic of power-sharing.’⁷ Needless to say, what is true of Islamist movements is also true of the secularized nationalist elites (and the military) that hold the reins of power in so many countries of the region and, to some extent, it is also true of the liberal forces in the Muslim world who are quite unsure themselves of the level of liberalism and democracy that they can afford to promote.⁸

At one level of analysis, only the political players themselves can provide an answer to the above-mentioned dilemma, as they come to grips with the process of political change. The study of democratization may have yielded only relatively few insights for the Muslim world so far, but the one remaining relevant finding is that it is through the very process of democratizing the polity that one can promote the collective learning of democratic ways of solving political problems.⁹ This collection contributes to this debate by examining the global reach of Islamist and democratic politics and by presenting country-specific studies of some of the most relevant Muslim polities of the post-Cold War and post-September 11 era. By analysing the tactical choices that are made in those countries, one can understand better which strategic orientations are not only theoretically possible but practically relevant. Our objective is to avoid creating an artificial comparative framework that would aggregate as many putative causal factors of democratization in the Muslim world as possible in order to assess which ones are the most relevant. To be sure, such frameworks have their merits but as every process of democratization is, in the end, unique, we emphasize here a more nominalist approach to the issue of the political dilemmas of democratization. This approach has the added advantage of not presenting polities as being at odds with theory, but rather theory as being ‘at odds’ with the ‘real world’. Indeed, note the conundrum encountered in the sophisticated comparative analysis of democratic consolidation proposed by Schneider and Schmitter: ‘we should not anticipate that autocratic regimes would be able to sustain political liberalization over extensive time periods. Yet, this is precisely what we found in our sample of MENA countries.’¹⁰ The case studies suggest a more practical way of looking at the complex issue of democratization by examining how seemingly contingent causal mechanisms fostered (or derailed) a democratizing synergy in those countries, and by outlining the rationale for the emergence of such typical situations.

In particular, the collection aims to clarify three key issues in the debate on democratization in the Muslim world.

First, it stresses the malleability of Islamic discourses and political movements in the face of changing opportunities for democratization as well as the reconfiguration of authoritarian regimes in the face of changing dilemmas of political liberalization. It indicates that such changes in the dominant political positions (or positions which claim to be dominant) take place within a complex and usually global debate about what democracy and Islam ought to be. Within the parameters set by this formal debate, democratization and Islamization are the more mundane processes which aim at reconciling everyday social and political practices with the kind of institutions and practices that the demos and the faithful would like to have.

Second, this collection explores how institutional arrangements (including co-optation of the opposition) put in place by authoritarian incumbents utilize the procedures and the discourse of democracy to strengthen their own arbitrary rule.¹¹ In particular it indicates that processes such as democratization and Islamization are not bringing people incrementally nearer to some pre-defined political order; that is, principally liberal democracy or Islamic democracy. Rather, it suggests that there is a narrowing of the gap between everyday experiences and political expectations, with all the well-known problems that this situation can generate (for example, the happy slave or, more commonly, the disenchanted voter).

Third, the studies investigate the relationship between political violence and democratization. While incumbent regimes may (and usually do) invoke their role of custodians of the state to use their ‘monopoly of legitimate violence’ to control the process of political liberalization, the non-institutionalized forms of direct action available to non-state players are more idiosyncratic and opportunistic. These two modes of violence interact not only directly between themselves but also by proxy through the democratization process (or its failure thereof). In this context, a democratization process whose end result ought to be the actual handing over of state power to democratically chosen social actors can be subordinated to the need for the securitization of the state as an institutional asset to be secured against the (actual and potential) hazard of any handover of power.

The collection opens with a review of the recent trends in the analysis of democratization in the Middle East region. Ray Hinnebusch sheds much-needed light on the past mistakes of various brands of democratization hypotheses, applied to a Middle Eastern context. Most often these theoretical models have been at fault due to an excessive linearity and quest for parsimony in their explanation. They have painted the problems of democratization (and liberalization and development) with such broad brushstrokes that alternative forms of political development were simply not considered adequately. Thus, more than a Middle Eastern or Muslim exceptionalism, the non liberal—democratic regimes in the region illustrated which viable political models could also ensure relative stability. While coercion is certainly part of the explanation, Hinnebusch points out that it is important not to simply analyse the repressive apparatus available to authoritarian elites to account for the robustness of authoritarianism. He suggests that there is a need to study Middle Eastern and North African societies in much greater detail because authoritarianism persists in the Middle East in part due to an accumulation of conditions that are hostile to democratization, but also because such forms of governance as populist authoritarian and rentier monarchies represent modernised forms of authoritarianism which come out of and are congruent with indigenous societies. They are, moreover, adapting to the increased modernization of their societies through experiments with liberalised autocracy or pseudo-democracy.

Our first two case studies of the process of democratization in the Muslim world highlight a somewhat optimistic scenario, as they focus on countries outside the Greater Middle East where we have witnessed some promising democratic developments in recent years. The contributions of Douglas Webber and Ben Thirkell-White on, respectively, Indonesia and Malaysia analyse how fairly successful steps toward democratization have been made with the contribution of Islamist political actors. The success of Indonesia and Malaysia is obviously only partial and by no means irreversible, but it contributes to the questioning of deeply held assumptions about the relationship between political Islam and democratic advances. Far from proving to be the key determinant in the sequencing and the configuration of democratic reforms, the specifically religious dimension of the Islamist movements has not propelled these movements into a situation of opposition to other political actors. The socio-economic and political circumstances that were those of Indonesia and Malaysia in recent years have facilitated the emergence of a working consensus on governance between varied political constituencies — a consensus to which political actors have had to adjust regardless of their political preferences. The type of ‘democracy’ achieved in the two countries seems to indicate that the Muslim world does not suffer from a separate ‘disease’ regarding the inability to put in place consensual political and social structures, but suffers instead from the rather unoriginal shortcomings and difficulties that plague most of the developing world. To be sure, although Malaysia and Indonesia appear to be moving in the right direction — in the sense that they are palpably less authoritarian than they were previously — they are still confined to a situation that is to some extent that of a ‘democracy with adjectives’ (semi-democracy, liberalized autocracy, pseudo-democracy, and so on).¹²

It would be naïve to conceive democratization in the Muslim world as a linear teleological process. Whatever may be true of the emerging democratic institutions of Malaysia and Indonesia today, nothing guarantees that the remaining authoritarian aspects of these polities will slowly disappear to make way for a recognizably liberal democratic system. Nor should we assume that those countries are in some ways necessarily leading the way in the political transformations taking place in the rest of the Muslim world. In fact, despite recent statements regarding an Arab democratic ‘spring’, as soon as one moves to analyse the MENA region the picture that emerges is one of the persistence of authoritarianism, although it may be not the same type of authoritarianism that was witnessed a couple of decades ago.¹³ It is therefore worth while outlining what, beyond coercion, can allow and facilitate the persistence of authoritarianism in the Middle East and North Africa and how contemporary authoritarianism can operate to prevent existing challengers from defeating it. As some regimes have become very skilled at the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Democratization Studies
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 Introduction: Forgetting Democratization? Recasting Power and Authority in a Plural Muslim World
• 2 Authoritarian Persistence, Democratization Theory and the Middle East: An Overview and Critique
• 3 A Consolidated Patrimonial Democracy? Democratization in Post-Suharto Indonesia
• 4 Political Islam and Malaysian Democracy
• 5 Algeria's Pseudo-democratic Politics: Lessons for Democratization in the Middle East
• 6 Elections under Authoritarianism: Preliminary Lessons from Jordan
• 7 Faith in Democracy: Islamization of the Iraqi Polity after Saddam Hussein
• 8 Islam and Democracy in East Africa
• 9 Islamist Terrorism and the Middle East Democratic Deficit: Political Exclusion, Repression and the Causes of Extremism
• Index