This is the fifth article in the ongoing series, started about three weeks ago --- interrupted now and then by some other buggy commentaries --- about the prospects of democracy in Iraq and the Arab world . . . particularly in the light of the new Bush administration's initiative to push for liberalizing changes in the Arab world. Announced with fanfare last autumn and just about to emerge through the bureaucratic pipeline into a clear doctrine to be presented at the G-8 Summit meeting in June, that new initiative sparked off this series . . . along with buggy comments then and in subsequent articles why democratic changes in the 22 Arab countries and elsewhere in Islam are in the US national interest. Remember here, the war on terrorism is only partly military. It is partly also a matter of intelligence, police work, and improved homeland security.
At bottom, though, it remains an ideological struggle to combat and isolate radical Islamist fundamentalists and their terrorist followers, by above all promoting change in the failed autocratic states: democratic, cultural, and economic. As it happens, the current article is now finished. As it also happens, a sixth and final article will be needed to deepen the analysis of Iraq's democratic prospects and those of other Arab countries.
PART ONE: CAN ARAB COUNTRIES BECOME DEMOCRATIC?
The Crux Issue
The question just posed is pivotal to all our inquiries in this series on the new Bush initiative to promote liberalizing democratic changes in the Arab world --- some 22 countries, with a total of 300 million people.
As late as April 2003, all were autocratic and relied ultimately for their survival on the secret police. In strict political terms, they differed mainly in the extent to which the use of coercion was at the forefront of political and social life or, alternatively, was more latent and kept in the background. Not, as you'll see, a trivial distinction. Those countries where dictatorial regimes relied less on force and had some underlying sources of popular support and legitimacy --- all of them monarchical, like the small Gulf States or Jordan or Morocco: all of them, come to that, carefully limiting Islamist intrusions into political life --- have also created a variety of better democratic prospects: a somewhat freer media, more broad-based political parties, better treatment of women. And though all the parliaments in these and the other Arab states remain fairly weak, little more than rubber-stamp institutions, they do differ in the extent to which criticisms of the government can be voiced.
To use the terminology that was set out in the table on different kinds of political systems --- democratic and non-democratic --- the more promising Arab depotisms are soft authoritarian in nature as opposed to hard-line ones like Saudi Arabia or Syria or the Sudan or totalitarian like Baathist Iraq under Saddam. That table, you'll eventually see, is found later in this article, used to illustrate some points once more. More to the point, in the next and final article in the series, a variety of quantitative indices will rank the Arab countries in their democratic prospects: developments like the level of literary, GDP, magnitude of corruption, freedom of the media etc.
Diverse Prospects
Interestingly, as you'll also see, these more promising Arab states --- only a handful --- have been recently joined by Algeria . . . especially as the brutal civil war with fanatical Islamist terrorists, a decade long, has wound down and relatively free elections were just held for the presidency. Since last April, post-Saddamite Iraq --- for all the recent spate of violence, essentially centered in the Fallujah area (plus the wider Sunni triangle) and Moqtada Sadr's radical Shia group in Najaf (at most, a few hundred gunmen as supporters) --- seems to have joined this promising group as well. If the current violent challenges there are suppressed, then --- what with all the other encouraging changes under way in Iraq --- there's a good chance that a consensual Iraqi political system with liberalizing promise will be elected in popular elections next January.
A big if? Sure.
We'll return to all their democratic prospects, Iraq's included --- setting out some rankings on a variety of indices that amount to democratic pre-requisites --- in a minute or two. For the time being, fix your attention on the Arab exception, globally speaking, and the implications for the war on terrorism.
PART TWO: THE ARAB EXCEPTION IN THE LATEST DEMOCRATIC WAVE, AT ANY RATE TO DATE
The First Three Waves
Over the last two centuries, democratic developments across countries have unfolded in clustered waves. Samuel Huntington, known to buggy visitors for his pioneering views on the clash of civilizations, has also been a pioneer on these waves. He identified three over these last two centuries or so. More accurately, we can identify four.
(1) Starting with the US revolution of 1776, followed about a decade later by the French revolution --- far more radical in its ideology --- the first wave lasted for about a half century, leading to warfare throughout Europe and Latin America and ending with the monarchical defeat in Europe of Napoleonic France and later the Latin American struggles for independence in the 1820s. Out of all this turmoil, only the US emerged as a solidly institutionalized democracy, but the legacies of those decades continued, ideologically and otherwise --- often with violence --- to shape Europe and Latin America for decades. [The British themselves, drawing a lesson, opted by the mid-19th century for gradual national independence with democratic legacies in the English-speaking colonies like Canada and Australia, a policy later extended to the rest of the empire, often with limited violent struggle for freedom, after 1945.]
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Tuesday, April 27, 2004
Final Version: DEMOCRATIC PROSPECTS AND THE MIDDLE EAST: #5 of an 9 Article Series
(2) The second democratic wave emerged at the end of WWI, under the impetus of Woodrow Wilson's espousal of democracy in the former imperial states, broken apart, in Germany, East Europe, and the Balkans. Almost all these new states --- the Weimar Republic, Poland, Yugoslavia, and so on, never mind Russia --- collapsed into dictatorships of various sorts in the two decades that followed, along with the breakdown of democratic systems in Italy, Spain, and Portugal. So did Turkey, being transformed economically into a secular, modernizing Muslim country by Ataturk, the great nationalist leader.
(3) The third wave --- played down by Huntington given the growth and spread of Communism in East Europe after WWII and in China and Indochina, plus the breakdown into military or civilian dictatorships in Latin America or post-colonial Africa and the Middle East --- occurred after 1945, starting with the democratic transformation of West Germany and Italy and Japan, plus the societal and economic changes under US auspices elsewhere in South Korea and Taiwan.
The long-term successes here were not wisely expected anywhere in the US or Britain or France, but successes they have been. Thumpingly; with enduring stability. Then, too, there's the biggest and most encouraging democratic development has been in post-colonial India, ever since the British withdrew in 1947 and the Indian sub-continent divided among blood-splattered violence into Pakistan and India. With a billion people, India alone represents about a sixth of the world's population. Japan, Germany, and Italy add up to 260 million people and are among the seven richest industrial countries world-wide.
The Impact of the International Distribution of Power. Wave Four Too
In all three of the earlier waves, it took major triumphant powers in warfare --- the new US and France in the late 18th century, the US and Britain after WWI, and the US and Britain after WWII --- to have a major impact on the spread of democratic ideas and policies. Their impact followed the defeat or collapse of old-guard autocratic empires or the defeat in major hegemonic wars of explicitly anti-democratic powers like Imperial and later Nazi Germany, militarist Japan, and fascist Italy.
(4) The same is true of the fourth wave starting in the 1980s, which coincided more or less with the abortive efforts of a rapidly declining Soviet Union to transform itself under Gorbachev in the middle of that decade . . . the struggle uncoiling political and nationalist forces he, a moderate Communist reformer, couldn't control.
(i) The result has been the sudden breakdown and disappearance of the Soviet Union, the disappearance of Communist systems in most of the 15 former member Republics, and the democratic thrusts all over East Europe and in Russia itself. The later violent breakdown of Yugoslavia led to five new states, all of them electoral democracies --- even Serbia and Bosnia, where peacekeeping forces from abroad remain.
(ii) In Pacific Asia, Taiwan and South Korea were transformed in the 1990s into increasingly solid liberal democracies --- still hounded by corruption, but with a rule of law clearly under way --- along with other democratic transitions in the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, and even recently Indonesia. Even a dozen or so African states emerged as electoral democracies during that decade.
(iii) Then there's Latin America. As the cold war wound to a close in the 1980s, the militarist and authoritarian regimes that had prevailed almost everywhere in the 1960s and 1970s either broke down or were transformed by agreement among competing political elites. In Central America, the agreements here followed years of violent civil war, swept up in the larger ideological struggles of the waning cold war.
Freedom House Rankings
The following table, taken from Freedom House --- which uses a variety of cross-checking indices to gauge democratic development --- shows that the number of free or partly free countries has increased dramatically in the 4th wave that is still unfolding in the wake of the cold war and now in the war on terrorism. [Keep in mind that Freedom House further sub-divides these categories into how well they actually do on the concrete measures. For instance, fully free countries are distributed across 4 groups --- 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, 2.5 --- where the lower the score, the better the democratic performance. Partly free countries --- say, either electoral democracies or soft authoritarian ones, with some development of a free media and some due process in legal protection of individual and civil rights --- are divided into five groups, from 3.0 - 5.5, with not free countries divided into three more groups, ending up with 7.0.]
A Brief Digression: Democratic Developments in Latin America
Since the early 1990s, Latin America has been marked everywhere by the emergence of electoral democratic systems of a fair and competitive sort, save for Communist Cuba. Even neighboring Mexico had its first honest democratic elections in 2000. True, persistent corruption and a huge underground economy underscore just how hard it is in almost all of Latin America to generate major legal and cultural changes of a fully liberal constitutional sort. [Chile, an admirable democratic country with clear, effective limits on corruption and tax evasion is the big exception. See the NY Times, April 28, 2004]. No less true, though, a vigorous free media flourishes in every democratic country, energetic human rights groups monitor major affronts to civil and other liberties, and women's rights have improved in almost all the countries too. Come to that, the military seems constitutionally tamed almost everywhere too.
The biggest problems by far remain economic and cultural, the two going hand-in-hand.
In particular, whether Latin American countries can find ways to develop economically in sustained, broad-based manner that will help overcome the huge legacies of economic and social inequality --- class- and ethnic-based alike --- still remains uncertain. Side-by-side with this issue flares the need for reforms in cultural attitudes and social behavior that make tax evasion a national sport and accept corruption and nepotism, along with widespread social mistrust of other groups --- ethnic or class-based --- as inevitable, nothing to be done about them. The outcome of further democratic development largely hinges on successful changes on both counts. These unfortunate cultural and behavioral legacies run deep in Latin American history. Hundreds of years old, they go back to the kind of people who conquered the indigneous peoples starting in the 1490s . . . and to the politics, culture, and economic systems --- Spanish and Portuguese Catholicism and militarism, plus large plantation and raching agriculture --- that the Conquistadors implanted throughout Latin America.
Note the differences especially in land ownership with North America. In both Canada and the US, the huge territories were divided largely into small family farms; the result was widespread property ownership from the outset of their colonial histories. Eventually, the destruction of plantation slavery in the US south reinforced these tendendies. Not so in Latin America. There, thanks to the plantation system in almost all of Latin America, or large ranches in Argentina and Uruguay and southern Brazil, land ownership from the start was heavily concentrated in a few hands; and over the centuries, it hardly has changed.
PART THREE: DEMOCRACY CLARIFIED
Most of these new democracies, it's true, are what we've called electoral democracies: they have fairly free competitive elections, with different parties competing for political office in legislatures and the executive branch, but they're deficient --- often noticeably --- on the key categories that constitute solid, effective liberal democracies. In particular, the rule-of-law is not solidly institutionalized, and the same is true of transparency and accountability for all office-holders --- whether political or bureaucratic or civilian or military. Corruption and nepotism, among other other abuses of power, continue to flourish in almost all of them.
The following table, now making its third appearance in this series, helps bring out the differences between electoral democracies and solidly effective liberal ones:
(3) The third wave --- played down by Huntington given the growth and spread of Communism in East Europe after WWII and in China and Indochina, plus the breakdown into military or civilian dictatorships in Latin America or post-colonial Africa and the Middle East --- occurred after 1945, starting with the democratic transformation of West Germany and Italy and Japan, plus the societal and economic changes under US auspices elsewhere in South Korea and Taiwan.
The long-term successes here were not wisely expected anywhere in the US or Britain or France, but successes they have been. Thumpingly; with enduring stability. Then, too, there's the biggest and most encouraging democratic development has been in post-colonial India, ever since the British withdrew in 1947 and the Indian sub-continent divided among blood-splattered violence into Pakistan and India. With a billion people, India alone represents about a sixth of the world's population. Japan, Germany, and Italy add up to 260 million people and are among the seven richest industrial countries world-wide.
The Impact of the International Distribution of Power. Wave Four Too
In all three of the earlier waves, it took major triumphant powers in warfare --- the new US and France in the late 18th century, the US and Britain after WWI, and the US and Britain after WWII --- to have a major impact on the spread of democratic ideas and policies. Their impact followed the defeat or collapse of old-guard autocratic empires or the defeat in major hegemonic wars of explicitly anti-democratic powers like Imperial and later Nazi Germany, militarist Japan, and fascist Italy.
(4) The same is true of the fourth wave starting in the 1980s, which coincided more or less with the abortive efforts of a rapidly declining Soviet Union to transform itself under Gorbachev in the middle of that decade . . . the struggle uncoiling political and nationalist forces he, a moderate Communist reformer, couldn't control.
(i) The result has been the sudden breakdown and disappearance of the Soviet Union, the disappearance of Communist systems in most of the 15 former member Republics, and the democratic thrusts all over East Europe and in Russia itself. The later violent breakdown of Yugoslavia led to five new states, all of them electoral democracies --- even Serbia and Bosnia, where peacekeeping forces from abroad remain.
(ii) In Pacific Asia, Taiwan and South Korea were transformed in the 1990s into increasingly solid liberal democracies --- still hounded by corruption, but with a rule of law clearly under way --- along with other democratic transitions in the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, and even recently Indonesia. Even a dozen or so African states emerged as electoral democracies during that decade.
(iii) Then there's Latin America. As the cold war wound to a close in the 1980s, the militarist and authoritarian regimes that had prevailed almost everywhere in the 1960s and 1970s either broke down or were transformed by agreement among competing political elites. In Central America, the agreements here followed years of violent civil war, swept up in the larger ideological struggles of the waning cold war.
Freedom House Rankings
The following table, taken from Freedom House --- which uses a variety of cross-checking indices to gauge democratic development --- shows that the number of free or partly free countries has increased dramatically in the 4th wave that is still unfolding in the wake of the cold war and now in the war on terrorism. [Keep in mind that Freedom House further sub-divides these categories into how well they actually do on the concrete measures. For instance, fully free countries are distributed across 4 groups --- 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, 2.5 --- where the lower the score, the better the democratic performance. Partly free countries --- say, either electoral democracies or soft authoritarian ones, with some development of a free media and some due process in legal protection of individual and civil rights --- are divided into five groups, from 3.0 - 5.5, with not free countries divided into three more groups, ending up with 7.0.]
A Brief Digression: Democratic Developments in Latin AmericaSince the early 1990s, Latin America has been marked everywhere by the emergence of electoral democratic systems of a fair and competitive sort, save for Communist Cuba. Even neighboring Mexico had its first honest democratic elections in 2000. True, persistent corruption and a huge underground economy underscore just how hard it is in almost all of Latin America to generate major legal and cultural changes of a fully liberal constitutional sort. [Chile, an admirable democratic country with clear, effective limits on corruption and tax evasion is the big exception. See the NY Times, April 28, 2004]. No less true, though, a vigorous free media flourishes in every democratic country, energetic human rights groups monitor major affronts to civil and other liberties, and women's rights have improved in almost all the countries too. Come to that, the military seems constitutionally tamed almost everywhere too.
The biggest problems by far remain economic and cultural, the two going hand-in-hand.
In particular, whether Latin American countries can find ways to develop economically in sustained, broad-based manner that will help overcome the huge legacies of economic and social inequality --- class- and ethnic-based alike --- still remains uncertain. Side-by-side with this issue flares the need for reforms in cultural attitudes and social behavior that make tax evasion a national sport and accept corruption and nepotism, along with widespread social mistrust of other groups --- ethnic or class-based --- as inevitable, nothing to be done about them. The outcome of further democratic development largely hinges on successful changes on both counts. These unfortunate cultural and behavioral legacies run deep in Latin American history. Hundreds of years old, they go back to the kind of people who conquered the indigneous peoples starting in the 1490s . . . and to the politics, culture, and economic systems --- Spanish and Portuguese Catholicism and militarism, plus large plantation and raching agriculture --- that the Conquistadors implanted throughout Latin America.
Note the differences especially in land ownership with North America. In both Canada and the US, the huge territories were divided largely into small family farms; the result was widespread property ownership from the outset of their colonial histories. Eventually, the destruction of plantation slavery in the US south reinforced these tendendies. Not so in Latin America. There, thanks to the plantation system in almost all of Latin America, or large ranches in Argentina and Uruguay and southern Brazil, land ownership from the start was heavily concentrated in a few hands; and over the centuries, it hardly has changed.
PART THREE: DEMOCRACY CLARIFIED
Most of these new democracies, it's true, are what we've called electoral democracies: they have fairly free competitive elections, with different parties competing for political office in legislatures and the executive branch, but they're deficient --- often noticeably --- on the key categories that constitute solid, effective liberal democracies. In particular, the rule-of-law is not solidly institutionalized, and the same is true of transparency and accountability for all office-holders --- whether political or bureaucratic or civilian or military. Corruption and nepotism, among other other abuses of power, continue to flourish in almost all of them.
The following table, now making its third appearance in this series, helps bring out the differences between electoral democracies and solidly effective liberal ones:
| DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT | NON-DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT | ||||
| Solid Tested Democracy | Transitional Democracy | Soft Authoritarianism | Hard Authoritarianism | Quasi- or Post- Totalitarianism | Totalitarianism |
| Old, Established US, West Europe, Japan , Israel Australia have been democracies for decades. Costa Rica too. New Democracies, India Spanning the two groups (old or new), given its authoritarian rule in the mid-1970s Chile , Argentina , Brazil , Uruguay , Philippines , South Korea , Taiwan are newer, fairly solid democracies that have had several elections, changes of opposition, and have weathered big economic or security challenges. | Electoral Democracies: Varying Liberal Constitutional Prospects Russia , East Europe, most of Latin America, Thailand , A tiny group of African states Earlier: Weimar Republic and Japan im the 1920s. Mexico Many in Latin America and some in Asia , eg. Thailand , may become solid democracies. Others like Russia are more a question-mark. | Gulf States , Much of SE Asia , African States Indonesia moves into the transitional column after its forthcoming election this year. | Syria , Some former USSR republics, Some African states, Sudan , Saudi Arabia Syria's Baathist regime , though brutal, lacked the total hold over society and the economy that Saddamite Iraq had. And its brutality compared to Saddam's was limited. Secret police pervasive. Most Arab states probably span the soft-hard authoritarian grouping. | Post-Stalin Russia , Post-Mao China : Probably Shiite Iran (hard to classify: official Shia ideology and administration of the Sharia, but an elected wing that contests the power and secret police rule of the hard-line Mullahs. Probably it could overlap with soft-authoritarianism) China actually looks more like a mix of Post-Totalitarianism and Soft Authoritarianism: its dilemma is how to maintain a CP power monopoly and become fully modern and advanced. | Maoism, Nazism, Stalinism, Pol Pot, Taliban Afghanistan , Saddamite Iraq |
| Traits Systems have been tested; and at least two or more times, opposition has taken power peacefully. A rule of law has emerged or is emerging. Note : There may be higher quality and lower quality democracies here (eg, Italy with its extensive corruption and clientelism vs. Scandinavia). In Latin America, only Chile does well in limiting corruption. | Traits These are systems in transition from authoritarian or quasi-authoritarian regimes. Several dozen countries have emerged into this category the last 25 years or so, not least after the cold war. Some will become solid democracies; others not; yet others will revert to authoritarianism. In many of these countries --- not all, mind you --- there are dominant coalitions, usually a ruling party, that limit the scope of electoral opposition and power-sharing. In many others, power oscillates between competing but fairly corrupt and ineffectual elites, and changes in office-holders don't lead to more effective governmental policies. | Traits Though these sys-stems restrict democratic competition for office and restrict or repress basic civic and political liberties, they may enjoy different degrees of legitimacy. Coercion is then limited for the most part. Still, most rule depends on the secret police and various forms of bribing or crushing potential opponents. A rule of law is absent or barely exists. No legal political opposition is recognized in any real sense either. | Traits
Lacking legitimacy, these systems use a high degree of threat and coercion to maintain power (though efforts may be made, not least in foreign policy, to gain legitimacy: e.g. standing up to America or the West or for true Islam).
Civil society is largely barren. Any claims to a rule of law are a cruel joke. | Traits Single party dictatorship and an official ideology prevail, but widespread use of terror is limited; and ideology is itself gradually diluted and ritualistic. Little or no social mobilization of the masses for big ideological causes. State-controlled capitalism usually prevails, though as in China today limited free markets can emerge. | Traits Single party monopoly, official ideology, constant social mobilization, extensive terror, usually a charismatic leader Totally administered societies, with no free markets or civil society (no autonomous groups, voluntary associations or professional groups or trade unions or free churches permitted) A widespread use of terror and scapegoated internal and external enemies are pervasive. |