World Policy Journal
Volume XVIII, No 3, Fall 2001

 

Arab Democracy: Dismal Prospects
By Lisa Anderson _*

 

Why is the Arab world so conspicuously inhospitable to liberal democracy? A decade after the end of the Cold War, when much of the world has embraced democratic institutions, most Arab regimes have abandoned even token deference to democratic institutions. Unhappily symptomatic was the sentencing this past spring by an Egyptian state security court of a 62-year-old scholar, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, to seven years in prison. Ibrahim faced charges of treason and embezzlement when his highly regarded Ibn Khaldun Center published studies on voter registration and the persecution of Coptic Christians, and worse, for accepting independent funding from several European foundations. Given the abundance of such incidents, one can reasonably wonder whether Arab democracy is an impossible dream.

Fifteen years ago, well before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the bombing of Iraq in the Gulf War, and the signing of the Oslo peace accords, the Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington expressed the conventional wisdom about the prospects for democratization around the world in his essay, "Will More Countries Become Democratic?" ₁ In specifying what seemed to him the essential preconditions for progress to self-rule, Huntington disputed an earlier thesis put forward by fellow political scientist Dankwart Rustow, that only one condition was essential, a shared national identity. ₂ Other factors were as vital, retorted Huntington, first among them being economic growth. He identified an economic "zone of transition"-corresponding to the upper third of the World Bank's middle-income countries-in which traditional authoritarianism led the way either to communism or to democracy. He further maintained that a market economy and a bourgeoisie appear to be necessary if not sufficient for the emergence of democracy. Huntington's assessment of the cultural context of the Middle East was blunt: "Islam has not been hospitable to democracy." The region's inhabitants were presumably to take heart from the scholar's addendum that the external environment matters: "In large measure, the rise and decline of democracy on a global scale is a function of the rise and decline of the most powerful democratic states." The Free World's victory in the Cold War was therefore a seemingly auspicious augury for the Middle East.

Without further belaboring the definitions and the value of these arguments, it is fair to say that the theoretical parameters of democratization still fall between Rustow's hopeful inclusiveness and Huntington's demanding conditionality. Rustow was optimistic, or at least agnostic, about democracy's prospects in countries with some measure of national identity. But Huntington insisted that no matter how liberally defined, the Muslim world lacks the essential preconditions:

Among Islamic countries, particularly those in the Middle East, the prospects for democratic development seem low. The Islamic revival...would seem to reduce even further the likelihood of democratic development, particularly since democracy is often identified with the very Western influences the revival strongly opposes. In addition many of the Islamic states are very poor. Those that are rich, on the other hand, are so because of oil, which is controlled by the state and hence enhances the power of the state in general and of the bureaucracy in particular. Saudi Arabia and some of the smaller Arab oil-rich Gulf countries have from time to time made some modest gestures toward the introduction of democratic institutions, but these have not gone far and have often been reversed. ₃

Both Rustow and Huntington failed to predict the wave of liberalizations that overtook the world-and the region-in the late 1980s and early 1990s, although the developments were not inconsistent with their perspectives. The early 1990s saw what many sympathetic observers took to be indications of potential for democratization in a number of countries, from Algeria to Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestine Authority. This optimism on the part of democrats within and beyond the region led many to expect qualitative change. As it turned out, the regimes proved far more resilient and inventive in devising ways to refashion their autocratic hold on power than anyone-except perhaps the cold-eyed Professor Huntington-thought they would be.

Through the 1990s, advocates of democracy faced enormous challenges. In Algeria, for example, after canceling democratic elections in 1992, the government steadfastly refused to entertain calls for democratization or liberalization, instead waging a war against its Islamist opponents that cost more than 100,000 lives over the following eight years. A fragile civil concord was shattered during early 2001 because of widespread rioting by supporters of Berber rights-a constituency at odds with both the Islamists and the government. In 1994, the Tunisian government jailed the country's leading human rights advocate when he declared his candidacy in the country's presidential race; the incumbent president, who had come to power in a palace coup seven years earlier, preferred to run unopposed and claimed 99 percent of the popular vote. Just this summer, human rights advocates undertook hunger strikes to spotlight the government's complete disregard for free expression. Neither Syria nor Iraq, nor most of the countries of the Arabian Peninsula, have bothered with even the trappings of democracy, while a number of those that did so in the past-Lebanon, Algeria, Yemen, Egypt-have seen their democratic experiments degenerate into increasingly authoritarian regimes.

Why has the Arab world been so resistant to democratic change, when much of the rest of the world seems convulsed by liberal revolutions? Many observers attribute the region's reluctance to democratize to its culture and traditions, particularly Islam. As the historian Elie Kedourie put it, "Democracy is alien to the mind-set of Islam." ₄ Yet the repeated demands for human rights, political liberalization, and democratic government in the Arab world in the 1980s and 1990s-demands that actually yielded contested parliamentary elections in Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, and Yemen-belie uniform hostility to democracy. Clearly, substantial numbers of Muslims support adoption of democratic procedures and institutions.

The resistance of most of the governments in the Middle East and North Africa to democratization, however, is striking. "A great deal of the explanation" of the poor performance of the region, the Washington-based political analyst Anthony Cordesman noted several years ago (in a wonderful turn of phrase), "lies in the fact that many Middle Eastern states have no enemy greater than their own governments." ₅ A common Arab and Islamic culture cannot account for the divergent attitudes of governments and their citizens.

Huntington was wrong, in my estimation, about the importance of culture, but he was not wrong about the importance of the other factors he cited: political economy (although the problem is not simply one of oil revenues) and external environment. In fact, as some have noticed, Huntington is conspicuously silent about what he calls "the external environment."

Economic Distortions

Clearly, many factors have contributed to shaping the political regimes in the Arab world. These regimes are partly reflections of local cultural predispositions, partly remnants of imperial impositions, and partly results of deliberate choices by domestic and international policymakers. While not denying the complexity of political causation, I would highlight a particular and quite specific characteristic of the region's political economy, specifically its continuing high dependence upon nonmarket economic transactions, both domestically and internationally. These countries have moved from subsistence and local exchange to participation in the so-called world market in a historically specific pattern of integration that has been marked by the mediation of exceptionally strong political imperatives and enterprises.

At the local level, we know that the cash economy has not eradicated nonmarket exchange, and that even within cash transactions, a substantial proportion-more than half in many places-escape government surveillance. Most of these countries have enormous informal or black markets, without which the vast numbers of officially unemployed workers would be starving. The governments have difficulty monitoring, much less taxing or regulating, their national economies, and that measure of ignorance makes the prospect of democratic elections an especially frightening one to the incumbent rulers.

The nature of the domestic economies is not unrelated to-indeed, may be permitted by-the character of their insertion into the world economy. Whereas most countries interact with the world economy in terms of a market for their goods and services-in other words, in international trade-most of the countries of the Arab world have seen an exceptionally high proportion of their economic interaction with the rest of the world shaped by political criteria. From foreign aid conferred to Cold War allies and cooperative partners in the Arab-Israel confrontation, to oil prices shaped, if not determined, by political negotiations, politically motivated international economic transactions have had a profound impact on state revenues for at least a half a century. Not only has this disproportionate reliance on external, politically driven income enhanced the sensitivity of these regimes to the concerns of international patrons and diminished their accountability to domestic populations about which they know relatively little, it has also led to a political economy based on non-economic bottom lines, or what is known as soft budget constraints.

Soft budget constraints are characteristic of economies in which nonmarket, political criteria are important standards of success. The profit motive-the need to end the year in the black-that is the market's measure of success is superceded by political requirements-the desirability of high employment, for example, or the demands of national security. Thus governments or international patrons guarantee periodic bailouts of state-owned firms or entire countries that are living beyond their means because they are fulfilling political purposes. The magnitude of nonmarket economic transactions in given economies varies, and therefore the significance of soft budget constraints in shaping politics also varies. In the Middle East and North Africa, however, there is little doubt that nonmarket transactions have been very important not only in the domestic economies but also in structuring the relationship between the individual countries and the global market. Because the character of political resources is intimately bound up with the nature of economic extraction, assessment of the prospects for liberal or democratic politics throughout the Middle East-and perhaps elsewhere in the developing world as well-requires that we examine the role of political imperatives in shaping putatively economic outcomes internationally as well as domestically.

If we acknowledge that foreign aid, debt relief, even oil prices, are not set by market mechanisms so much as they are determined by the political needs and desires of actors outside the region, we must recognize that Huntington's abstract and lifeless "external environment" is actually full of political actors making political calculations. While some of these actors may be serving as models of democracy (though not all-witness the historical role of the Soviet Union and the Arab oil-producing states as foreign aid donors), they are also angling for alliance partners, punishing defectors, jockeying for position in the international system. This is particularly true of the Middle East, where access to oil and the security of Israel have trumped the desire for human rights and democracy on the part of Huntington's "most powerful democratic states" for decades.

The availability of soft budget bailouts for compliant regimes has left the region with economies and social structures that are profoundly distorted by conventional capitalist market standards, and profoundly inauspicious for democracy. Indeed, it may be no coincidence that the prospects for democracy seem to increase in direct proportion to the distance of a country from the Arab-Israeli and Persian Gulf arenas. The Columbia sociologist Charles Tilly once observed that a "protected place in time and space" had facilitated state building in early modern Europe; the same may hold for democratization now.

Where international agendas continue to impose themselves, very few of the choices that are ordinarily dictated by hard budget constraints have been faced, much less made, and the domestic economies are a shambles. Between a third and half of the people of the region are under 15 years of age; by 1995, the Middle East had surpassed all other regions of the world in population growth. This means added strains on already overburdened educational systems and increased demands for job creation. Partly as a result of this population growth, the region has recorded a negative growth rate in GNP per capita since 1985. Nearly everywhere in the Middle East and North Africa the public sector accounts for over half the labor force: government employment is a form of social security. How have governments been able to employ so many people in the face of these negative growth rates? The availability of external revenues-the aforementioned foreign aid, oil income, international borrowing-has permitted governments to support their subjects and citizens while ignoring, or at least neglecting, domestic production.

Even the most reluctant observers recognized that the era of dramatic state-led growth in the world ended with the collapse of the Berlin Wall or, perhaps more to the point, with the collapse of oil prices several years earlier, but few of the regimes that have come to power in the era of populist nationalism-from Algeria's FLN and the Syrian and Iraqi Ba'th parties to Libya's Qaddafi and even Egypt's Mubarak-have been able to make much more than cosmetic accommodations to the new realities.

There is, for example, the continued emphasis on rote learning, which ill-prepares school leavers for jobs in the modern economy. For many of these regimes, to be sure, the failure to promote modern education was not entirely inadvertent: a well-educated, knowledgeable, and independent-minded population is demanding and critical, not qualities these regimes were accustomed to fostering. But as a result, the Arab world has among the lowest per capita Internet usage rates and the highest unemployment rates in the world. Because of the regimes' inability to fulfill their promises, whether in education or employment, their grip on their societies is slipping. The ill-educated and underemployed young people throughout the region constitute the backbone of the informal economies that sustain the millions of officially unemployed. These economies in turn breed and sustain Islamist oppositions that provide the only excuse these governments need to deny their citizens the right to express their opinions and to associate freely, much less to repress the exercise of democracy.

Profound Cleavages and New Leadership

Today, although the increasing tension in the Arab-Israeli arena is a sometimes convenient distraction, in my view the most important cleavage in the Middle East and North Africa is not between what we used to call radical and moderate states, or between Arabs and Israelis, or even between secular and religious worldviews, but between those still served by these decaying states and the increasingly large numbers beyond their reach. In fact, tempted as I am by Rustow's hopefulness, I do not think very many countries in the region exhibit even his single precondition, a sense of national identity. This is partly a legacy of imperial designs and the confused and competing nationalisms of the twentieth century, but it also reflects the profound cleavages between the elites and the masses, and the alacrity with which both the regimes and their opponents look beyond their borders for moral and material support.

The beneficiaries of the old regime, including the crown princes and president-designates, have lived well under the internationally sponsored, or at least tolerated, autocracy of the last 50 years, and it is they who will have to decide how much genuine change they can live with and how much they can afford to forgo. Is there reason for optimism?

The old rulers in the region-and some of them are very old-are not good prospects for democracy. Many of them have been pushed in that direction before, to no avail, and they show no sign of a change of heart as they age. Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, Libya's Muammar Qaddafi, and Iraq's Saddam Hussein are all following in the footsteps of Syria's late ruler, Hafez al-Asad, and grooming sons to succeed them, as are the region's monarchs, of course. Among the sons, then, are there more hopeful signs?

The recent successions in the monarchies of Bahrain, Jordan, and Morocco, after several decades of remarkable stability, initiated a major transformation in the region's leadership, and there is much that is appealing to Western democrats in these young rulers. The ascension of Bashar al-Asad to the helm in Syria illuminates the promise and peril his generation represents for the Middle East. Like these new kings, Bashar is a young man, in his thirties, fluent in English, and knowledgeable about modern technologies his father fervently resisted. The apparent modernity belies a skepticism about democracy little different from that of his father.

The new leaders' rhetoric is at first blush appealing: Jordan's King Abdullah has spoken for example "about the promise of a generation of like-minded and forward-looking young leaders taking the helm in various Arab countries, better equipped to deal with the challenges of the modern world." ₆

When Abdullah's Moroccan counterpart, Mohammed VI, came to power in 1999, he said he wanted to promote "a new concept of authority." He talked openly about his admiration for King Juan Carlos of Spain, and his spokesman proclaimed that "the aim is modernity." Yet during his visit to Washington this past summer, he gave a frank assessment of the limits of the change he envisions: "Morocco has a lot to do in terms of democracy. The daily practice of democracy evolves in time. Trying to apply a Western democratic system to a country of the Maghreb, the Middle East or the Gulf would be a mistake. We are not Germany, Sweden or Spain. I have a lot of respect for countries where the practice of democracy is highly developed. I think, however, that each country has to have its own specific features of democracy." ₇

Although Mohammed did not claim to be speaking for all the governments of the region, it seems unlikely that he would find much dissent among his fellow rulers. Democracy will come very slowly, if at all. Prince Bandar ibn Sultan, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States is very impressed with the Moroccan king, "I knew his father very well," he said at about the same time, "and I'm impressed by this young king. He definitely hit the ground running, and I think he made very gutsy decisions. He surprised friends and foes. He's my kind of king." ₈

In fact, all of the rulers of the Muslim Middle East, old and new, prefer to avoid talk of democracy unless questioned by Western reporters or, less often, by Western governments. Crisis-management served the fathers of this new generation well, drawing attention away from their failure to transform their societies while securing the flow of external resources that sustained them in power, and there is a great temptation to perpetuate this arrangement, to modernize it, give it a new name or rationale, but in one way or another, to sustain it.

Although the generous external revenues of the past may be decreasing, there are a few straws at which the adroit may grasp to sustain the privileging of a political logic that permits autocracy. We can expect to see regional alliances among King Abdullah's "generation of like-minded and forward-looking young leaders"-all of whom have as much or more in common with each other as they do with the vast majority of their own citizens and subjects-that will be designed to fortify them against the demands of their citizens for greater democracy and human rights.

Many mechanisms suggest themselves for such an alliance system-a united front against a supposed threat from radical Islam is already serving this purpose in North Africa, for example. Similarly, the governments of the oil producers will be able to trade continued access to oil and influence in oil-production decisions for support of their regimes. The Arab-Israeli relationship is also useful, in almost all its guises, short of all-out war: conflict permits the regimes to trumpet their loyalties to popular nationalist causes; concord might permit some of the "younger, more forward-looking rulers" to see their interests in retaining power served by cooperation with an Israel willing, indeed insistent upon helping, to guarantee their stability, secured by a West, particularly a United States, more than willing to subsidize an apparent end to the Arab-Israeli dispute.

If this model of governments playing the client of international patrons and the patron of domestic clients seems implausible, consider the juxtaposition of the arrest of Saad Eddin Ibrahim last year and Washington's expressed hopes that Egypt would play a pivotal role in helping resolve the deadlocked Israeli-Palestinian negotiations during the summer of 2000. The Egyptian government calculated-correctly-that the United States would not jeopardize the prospects for peace simply to support domestic human rights in Egypt.

The Approaching Day of Reckoning

As the region's rulers construct alliances designed to ensure their continued hold on power, the disenfranchised and alienated will also find allies across the region and throughout the world. Indeed, insofar as the elites rely on regional or international allies rather than on domestic constituencies at home, they will face opposition that also transcends state boundaries. The reports of international Islamist political networks born of common experience and shared frustration with unresponsive and incompetent governments are unlikely to abate.

We know that the long-term stability of the Middle East and North Africa-and of peace agreements and oil exports-will depend upon the creation and maintenance of genuine ties between governments and their subjects and citizens. It is true that this may not have to be in the form of conventional liberal democracy. England, Japan, and Spain are all monarchies, and we would certainly applaud constitutional development in the region's monarchies. It is certainly no small irony that the monarchies, with their clear procedures for succession, seem best equipped to meet the immediate challenges of political succession and stability. They are not constitutional regimes, however, and they face the more fundamental dilemma of creating a twenty-first-century rationale for monarchy as a legitimate type of regime, a problem Iran resolved only through revolution.

We also know that the United States, which is on record as supporting democratic government as the best mechanism for guaranteeing accountability, has been a complicating factor in the democratization of the region for decades. As patron of the oil producers and ally of Israel, the United States has routinely honored its commitment to liberal values largely in the breach. Too often, scholars and government analysts alike approach the question of the U.S. role in the region the same way Huntington did, by relegating it to "the external environment." The United States and its international allies now find themselves supporting autocratic but compliant friends, willing to do the West regional and international favors at the price of the West's blind eye to domestic tyranny. How can the common long-term interests of both international actors and local citizens in the extension of democratic politics be fostered in the short run?

The answer is not simple, for although democracies may be stable and peace loving, democratizing states rarely are. If this very sketchy analysis is correct, the next generation of leaders in the Arab world will be drawn from one of two groups: those with-in the state and its ruling circles, and those living at its margins. Neither are great proponents of liberal democracy. The elites appear to be modern but not democratic-often a dangerous combination, as the communist experiment showed-and the masses are angry. Were the United States to insist seriously on democratic reform, we would find that the democratizing process would unleash opinions and allow associations-from new nationalisms and new ethnic conflicts to anti-American and anti-Western political ideologies-we would find abhorrent.

Yet squelching unpopular or unpleasant ideas and movements only postpones the day of reckoning. The elites and the masses alike are witnessing the state they hoped to put to their purposes increasingly challenged by both internal decay and the negative effects of the globalization of finance and communication that are the watchwords of the new century.

Democratization would force wide-ranging, raucous, and possibly violent debates about the resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the role of the United States in the region, and the pervasive view of inequity in the world, which the current rulers now suppress with America's perhaps reluctant but very real blessing.

Thus far, the United States has evinced no appetite for the inevitably awkward and painful discussion of its past and present role in the region that genuine democratization would entail. It continues to collude with the regimes in power, permitting fixed elections and human rights fakery to provide a fig leaf that allow it and its client regimes to continue in the game. This will serve the interests of neither peace nor democracy in the region (nor regional development and prosperity for that matter), and it is not too early to confront the significant role that American policy will play in either facilitating or impeding democratization in the Arab world.

Endnotes

Note *: Lisa Anderson is dean of the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University. Back

Note 1: Samuel P. Huntington, "Will Countries Become More Democratic?" Political Science Quarterly, vol. 99 (summer 1984). Back

Note 2: Dankwart A. Rustow, "Transitions to Democracy: Towards a Dynamic Model," Comparative Politics, vol. 2 (April 1970). Back

Note 3: Huntington, "Will Countries Become More Democratic?" p. 20. Back

Note 4: Elie Kedourie, Democracy and Arab Political Culture (Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1992), p. 1. Back

Note 5: Anthony Cordesman, "Transitions in the Middle East," address to the Eighth U.S.-Mideast Policymakers Conference, September 9, 1999 (http://www.csis.org/mideast/reports/transitions.html). Back

Note 6: Middle East International (London), February 26, 1999. Back

Note 7: King Mohammed VI of Morocco, in an interview in Time, reprinted in Friends of Morocco, summer 2000. Back

Note 8: Roxanne, Roberts, "Morocco's King of Hearts," Washington Post, June 21, 2000. Back