Democracy in the Arab World

Ibrahim Elbadawi,Samir Makdisi

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136979613
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Categoría: Demokratie

Despite notable socio-economic development in the Arab region, a deficit in democracy and political rights has continued to prevail. This book examines the major reasons underlying the persistence of this democracy deficit over the past decades and touches on the prospects for deepening the process of democratization in the Arab World.

Contributions from major scholars in the region give a cross country analysis of economic development, political institutions and social factors, and the impact of oil wealth and regional wars, and present a model for democracy in the Arab world. Case studies are drawn from Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Sudan and the Gulf region, building on these cross-country analyses and probing beyond the model's main global variables. Looking beyond the effect of oil and conflicts, the chapters illustrate how specific socio-political history of the country concerned, fear of fundamentalist groups, collusion with foreign powers and foreign interventions, and the co-option of the elites by the state contribute to these problems of democratization.

Situating the democratic position of the Arab World in a global context, this book is an important contribution to the field of Middle Eastern politics, development studies, and studies on conflict and democracy.

Part I
Democracy and development

Conceptual and cross-country perspectives

1
Political culture and the crisis of democracy in the Arab world

Abdelwahab El-Affendi

When the scandal over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison broke out in early 2004, Seymour Hersh, one of the key figures behind the revelations, pointed to the irony that Abu Ghraib had been a notorious torture centre under the Saddam Hussein regime that was thoroughly looted and stripped even of windows and doors after the fall of the regime. The United States military took over the deserted building, gave it a thorough face lift, with ‘the floors tiled, cells cleaned and repaired, and toilets, showers, and a new medical center added’ (Hersh, 2004a). Then they proceeded to do exactly what the Saddam regime had done there before, only this time they took pictures to amuse themselves.

In the heated controversy that followed, the US authorities and mainstream media argued that the torture at Abu Ghraib was an aberration, the responsibility of only a ‘handful of rogue elements’ in the US military. However, many analysts argued that the abuses reflected the erosion of democratic and human rights standards in the post-9/11 era, and were linked to the overall US policies in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo, involving the widespread use of torture on terror suspects (Hersh, 2004b). Some even compared the process to the creeping Nazification of Germany in the 1930s (Rajiva, 2005).

Other observers compared this latest Western incursion into the Arab world to the first: that of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1898. That one also used the pretext of bringing ‘liberty’ to the Arabs, and ended equally disastrously. Two prominent US historians (Richard Bulliet of Columbia University and Juan Cole of the Global Americana Institute) made the comparison almost simultaneously in August 2007. Napoleon had ‘proclaimed his intention of liberating the Egyptians from their Mamluk oppressors. And he brought an army of scholars and advisers with him to make the occupation of Egypt a model of European benevolence’ (Bulliet, 2007). Both leaders displayed a ‘tendency to believe their own propaganda (or at least to keep repeating it long after it became completely implausible).

Both leaders invaded and occupied a major Arabic-speaking Muslim country; both harbored dreams of a ‘Greater Middle East’; both were surprised to find themselves enmeshed in long, bitter, debilitating guerrilla wars. Neither genuinely cared about grassroots democracy, but both found its symbols easy to invoke for gullible domestic publics. Substantial numbers of their new subjects quickly saw, however, that they faced occupations, not liberations.

(Cole, 2007)

Napoleon’s promise of liberation soon confronted the locals as ‘an avalanche of bothersome regulations’ and predatory practices aimed at raising revenue for the invaders (Flower, 1972: 48). When the people could take it no more and revolted, the advocates of liberty used the most brutal of tactics, including resorting to indiscriminate shelling of Cairo and even the mosque. Every rule in the book was broken, and all pretence of promoting liberty or respecting Islam was dropped. Al-Azhar was occupied and desecrated.

Horses were tethered to the Kiblah, furniture was hurled around and the Koran kicked about the floor. El Djabarty, aghast, saw soldiers spit on the carpets, urinate on the walls, and litter the mosque with broken wine bottles … Heavy fines were imposed all round, and ten Sheikhs believed to have been implicated were stripped naked and shot in the Citadel.

(Flower, 1972: 50)

Sound familiar? It could be Fallujah 2004, Hebron 1986, Hama 1982, or Halabja 1987.

1. Democracy, liberalism, occupation

This convergence of regime conduct across times and cultures should cast a sharp light on some of the unspoken assumptions that underpin much of the current discussions on democracy and democratization. One could cite numerous other examples, from the way the British conducted themselves in the face of the 1857 rebellion in India, through the French atrocities in Algeria, to Israel’s behaviour today, to highlight aspects of this phenomenon, which I would like to call the ‘Napoleon–Saddam Syndrome’. It is a condition that seems to infect rulers and other political actors in the region, regardless of their cultural background or origin, and suck them into a spiral of abuses, oppression, mounting resistance and more repression, leading to eventual collapse.

An inkling of the nature of this pathology can be found in remarks made by Israeli leaders who, in their attempt to defend Israeli’s aggressive and often brutal behaviour towards the Palestinians by claiming that the Middle East is a brutal area where only the language of violence is understood, betray a sense of siege and isolation (Barak, 1999). The resulting paranoia is self-reinforcing; the actor who feels threatened by everyone around him acts in a manner that further alienates people and confirms his fears. Ironically, this paranoia is also shared by entrenched and increasingly beleaguered Arab regimes, and the excuses are comparable. When challenged about the horrendous abuses they engage in, Israeli officials often use the refrain: ‘This is not Switzerland, you know.’ Arab despots respond to mild suggestions that they moderate their abuses of human rights by quipping: ‘If I were to do what you ask, the fundamentalists would take over … Is that what you want?’ This invariably silences the interlocutor, who quickly changes the subject (Zakaria, 2001).

Many theoreticians tend to follow the autocrats in emphasizing the role of the ‘environment,’ usually delineated in cultural terms. For example, Flower argues that Napoleon’s problem was that his slogans about the ‘rights of man’ had little resonance with ‘the inward-looking Egyptians’ (Flower, 1972: 47), before giving a catalogue of the endless oppressive measures introduced by Napoleon under these slogans. This blaming of the victims suggests that it is not just Napoleon and Bush who tend to believe their own propaganda, but that many analysts do so as well. For the Egyptians did not rebel against the ‘rights of man’, but against unbearable oppression by an alien and insensitive power which ruled by force of arms.

To start, we can draw one logical conclusion from the encounters just mentioned: that the amount of repression needed to sustain a regime is proportional to the depth and breadth of rejection it faces from the people. That the US occupation forces in Iraq are having to use similar techniques of repression to the Ba’athist regime they displaced is a sign that they are facing comparable resistance from Iraqis. By definition, democracy should not face popular resistance, since democracy is rule by the people, which cannot be in revolt against itself. So if a certain order provokes a fierce resistance, that order is, by definition, not a democracy.

While there are many disagreements about defining democracy, David Beetham is right to argue that:

Disputes about the meaning of democracy which purport to be conceptual disagreements are really disputes about how much democracy is either desirable or practicable; that is, about where the trade-off should come between democratic and other values.

(Beetham, 1993: 55)

For Beetham, democracy can be defined as:

A mode of decision-making about collectively binding rules and policies over which the people exercise control, and the most democratic arrangement to be where all members of the collectivity enjoy effective equal rights to take part in such decision-making directly – one, that is to say, which realizes to the greatest conceivable degree the principle of popular control and equality in its exercise. Democracy should properly be conceptualized as lying at one end of a spectrum, the other end of which is a system of rule where the people are totally excluded from the decision-making process and any control over it.

(Beetham, 1993: 55)

There is a broad agreement on this conception of democracy as a political system ‘in which the members regard themselves as political equals, as collectively sovereign, and possess all capacities, resources and institutions they need in order to govern themselves’ (Dahl, 1989: 1). The theoretical disputes, as Beetham points out, revolve around rival and contestable claims as to how much democracy can be realized in a sustainable form. This is an important consideration since democracy has been ‘a remarkably difficult form of government to create and sustain’ (Held, 1993: 13).

Sustainability, or ‘consolidation’, is a key concern for theoreticians of democratic transitions, and is said to occur when democracy becomes ‘the only game in town’, i.e. ‘when no significant political group seriously attempts to overthrow the democratic regime or to promote domestic or international violence in order to secede from the state’ (Linz and Stepan, 1998: 49). One could argue that this requirement is too stringent, since it could imply that today’s Spain or Britain during the IRA insurgency are not consolidated democracies. However, the general idea is that a democracy can be considered consolidated when such activities do not pose a serious threat to its stability. Linz and Stepan stipulate six conditions needed for a democracy to be consolidated: an authoritative state, a lively civil society, an autonomous political society, the prevalence of the rule of law, an effective state bureaucracy and an institutionalized economic society (Linz and Stepan, 1998: 51–8).

However, modern democracy has another dimension to it. As Bernard Crick puts it, what is usually meant by democracy today is ‘a fusion (but quite often a confusion) of the idea of power of the people and the idea of legally guaranteed individual rights’ (Crick, 1998: 257). More often described as ‘liberal representative democracy’ (Held, 1993: 18–20), to distinguish it from ancient direct democracies (like those of Athens) or from other forms that do not respect individual liberties, modern democracies are also referred to as ‘constitutional democracies’. Liberal constitutionalism seeks to limit the powers of the state through guarantees of individual rights and private property. Liberalism (‘a doctrine devoted to protecting the rights of the individual to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness’: Plattner, 1999: 121) could and did exist without democracy, while constitutionalism could be, and has been, used to curb democracy. The designers of the American constitution in particular had used complex constitutional curbs on democratic rights (indirect elections of the president and senate, special role for the Supreme Court, etc.) in order to guard against the ‘tyranny of the majority’ as much as to guard against the tyranny of the few (Blondel, 1998: 74).

Given that liberalism contains principles that ‘have been profoundly hostile to democracy’, the evolution of modern democracy has been the ‘history of successive struggles between liberals and various types of democrat over the extent and form of democratization’ (Beetham, 1993: 58). In spite of this, the convergence was seen as inevitable, since liberalism’s values of liberty and rights cannot long survive the denial of equal rights for all (Plattner, 1999: 122). In fact, attempts made to abolish some of the liberal features of modern democracies ‘in the name of a more perfect democracy have only succeeded in undermining the democracy in whose name [these rights] were attacked’ (Beetham, 1993: 57). To a large extent then, modern democracy can be seen as having been ‘conceptualized and structured within the limits of liberalism’ (Parekh, 1995: 165).

However, and of central relevance to our current investigation, the consciousness of the distinction and tension between liberalism and democracy has led to another startling conclusion. Taking as its premise the same point made above (that democracy and liberalism have become inseparable), some analysts have argued that in cases where democracy could lead to illiberal regimes (as was the case in the former Yugoslavia or some Arab and Muslim countries where Islamists could come to power), it might not be wise to promote democracy. Instead, some form of authoritarian liberalism should be championed (Miller, 1993; Zakaria, 1997; Plattner, 1999). From this perspective, it could be seen that what Napoleon and George W. Bush we...

Índice

• Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Politics
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Democracy and development
• Part II Case studies
• Part III Summing up
• Index