With U.S. distracted, Arab reforms slow

I hope this is just a setback rather than a full regression. It seemed like the only brightside to Bush's ME initiative...


http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060603/ap_on_re_mi_ea/arabs_democracy

By DONNA ABU-NASR, Associated Press Writer Sat Jun 3, 12:32 PM ET

BEIRUT, Lebanon - The daily carnage in Iraq is claiming another casualty — Arab reformers who have increasingly become the target of governments that no longer feel pressured by the United States to change.

Ten intellectuals were recently thrown in jail in Syria. In Egypt, more than 600 people protesting in support of two reformist judges who called for the independence of the judiciary have been detained. And in Yemen, journalists are facing a rash of mysterious beatings, arrests and other forms of intimidation as the government cracks down on the media ahead of the presidential elections.

"There's been a setback in reform in most of the Arab world," said Salama Ahmed Salama, a prominent Egyptian columnist. "Liberals are going through a very difficult period."

Analysts blame the slowdown on several developments that followed the 2003 U.S.-led war which toppled Iraq's dictator
Saddam Hussein.

After the war, the United States promised Iraq would become a model for Arab democracy, and it pushed regimes in the region to yield to some local demands for change. Reform, Washington says, will make Muslim and Arab societies less fertile ground for extremists.

For a while, it looked like the Arab regimes, most of them autocratic, were responding to the U.S. demand.

The Palestinians held a vote that brought moderate President Mahmoud Abbas to power to replace the late Yasser Arafat. Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy, held its first elections ever, a vote for municipal councils. Egypt allowed candidates for the first time ever to run against President Hosni Mubarak last year. They lost. And Syria promised a host of reforms.

But the momentum seems to have been lost, and the governments appear to have closed the door to dramatic reforms.

Experts said one reason is that Arab regimes believe President Bush is too preoccupied by the violence in Iraq to pressure them to change.

"The Arabs put on a show, and when they saw Bush becoming weaker, they revealed their true face and their lack of intention to reform," said Hazem Saghieh, a senior Lebanese columnist with the London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat.

At the same time, the experts say, the U.S. zeal for reform has waned after it became clear that democracy is bringing to power the same groups it had hoped the reform process would sideline, such as the militant Palestinian Hamas which won the Palestinian parliamentary elections in January.

In Egypt, parliament elections in November and December saw a flood of support for the Muslim Brotherhood, who increased their presence in the legislature six-fold.

Some liberals believe part of the problem stems from the intellectuals themselves.

Sulaiman al-Hattlan, a Saudi writer, said reformers have lost credibility in his country because in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks they used the small margin of freedom the government gave them to lash out at extremists but refrained from writing critically about corruption and government performance.

"The government used the liberals in the war against the Islamists," al-Hattlan said. "But when that crisis was over, the liberals didn't turn their attention to the problems facing the country."

"The question now is 'What kind of principles do liberals stand for?'" he added.

Many Arabs say the democracy call was premature in a region where democratic values are not entrenched.

"The people themselves do not believe in the democratic process, and that has a reflection on the governments since governments emanate from the people," said Abdul-Reda Assiri, a professor of political science at Kuwait University.

Saghieh said it is an "oversimplification to assume that the masses are great and only the governments are bad."

He said the Arab culture is not receptive to modernity and has scores to settle with the West — some as old as the Crusader Wars against Muslims and others relatively new such as the 58-year Arab-Israeli crisis in which the West is perceived as biased in
Israel's favor.

"That makes it difficult to apply the Eastern European model of democracy here," he said, referring to the spread of democracies that occurred after the fall of the Soviet Union. "The Eastern Europeans didn't have this cultural issue."

There are also several prerequisites that should be in place before democracy could thrive in the region, such as a large middle class, stability, lack of militancy, religious reform and the empowerment of women, Saghieh said.

"The question is not whether we do democracy or not. The question is whether we can develop secular sources for legitimacy in the Arab world," he said.

Some liberals, like Saghieh, say the reform process has gone back to square one.

But others, like Salama, say some progress has been made and despite the setbacks, it will be impossible to go back to the kind of oppression that was rampant in the Arab world before the Iraq war.

"The liberals face a great challenge to prove their ability to resist the current regressive conditions," he said. "Will they succeed? Only time will tell."

"But we've gone beyond square one — by a small margin," he added.

 

Sure, Bush and the State Dept. deserve credit for democratic reform movements in the ME. I question the over-arching strategy that tries to combine our efforts in Iraq with the ME initiatives achieved with diplomacy. Similarly, I'll question the over-arching strategy that attempts to combine Iraq with the War on Terror....

In the long term, success in Iraq could tip any balance towards democratization, but it's just as possible that a favorable outcome would be similarly achieved by investing as much political and economic resources as Iraq towards the ME reform initiative.

 

Because Iraq will continue to become a drain on resources for the forseeable future. Scandals will be magnified because public sentiment (of nations we're targeting) won't give us leeway or the benefit of the doubt.

 

Timely but still relevant.


Democratization?
What is it and How is it Done?
The Estimate
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.