USCFL - Fears of Arab Democracy

It is not only Arab lands that Israel occupies, it is Arab minds as well. As the compulsive explanation for nearly all the shortcomings and troubles of the Arab world, the "Israeli threat" often also serves as a justification for the democracy deficit in the Arab states. As long as there is a need to defend Arab land against the enemy - so goes the argument - there is also a need for an unyielding policy and tight leadership which would only be hampered, if not weakened, by democratic rights and rules.

Historical experience should really have taught the Arabs precisely the opposite. Their absolute monarchs, military dictators and single-party bosses have led them from defeat to defeat, while Israel has built a democratic state and at the same time grown ever stronger militarily. Authoritarian rule is not a prerequisite for military might. If anything the opposite is true; indeed, nowadays some Israelis fear that their country's development - that is, its military strength - may endanger its democracy and rule of law.

Transparent, responsible government and democratic participation are being called for not just by the few intellectuals who have just made public their report for the UNDP. Those demands are also voiced by Arab peoples everywhere, though repressed in many places. In numerous countries the call has become so marked, and the regime so rotten, that steps toward democratic forms have actually been taken. In the smaller Gulf states and in Morocco, the slow opening toward freedom of opinion, public participation and more efficient administration is being cautiously continued under the watchful eyes of the ruling families. In Syria, Jordan and Egypt, tentative beginnings of political liberalization have been begun and then halted again in recent years. And ten years ago Algeria plunged into a bloody civil war because the country's first free elections were broken off by a military coup in order to prevent a balloting victory by the Islamists.

Arab rulers often cite Algeria as a further justification of their caution (translation: inertia) with regard to the call for democracy. They paint a picture of the danger posed by an Islamist takeover of power, by a radicalization and destabilization of their respective countries and neighboring lands. Western governments are especially susceptible to this argument. The West makes much of democracy whenever it wants to level criticism against the "wrong sort" of regime, while closing both eyes to the censorship, legal authoritarianism and repression in "friendly" countries. Why is pressure put on Arafat but not on Mubarak? Why is the Islamic Republic of Iran - which at least has an elected president and parliament - considered part of the "axis of evil," while the fundamentalist despots of the House of Saud are "friends of the West"?

Fear of the imponderable risks of democracy is understandable, but counter-productive. Support for a synthetic stability in those countries beneath which rest the world's largest oil reserves, and where millions of unemployed youths dream of a better life, keeps regimes in power which are incapable of efficiently administering their wealth or using it for the well-being of their people. The longer this state of affairs continues, the greater becomes the danger that increasing tensions will ultimately discharge themselves in revolutions, terrorism and civil wars.

Naturally, free elections would yield good results for Islamist parties in most Arab countries, and probably bring them to power in some. But Islamist parties capable of winning a majority of the vote do not consist of extremists or terrorists, as is so commonly assumed in the West; rather, they are part of a broad ideological movement which uses religious and populist arguments to advocate a socially conservative program. In a democracy, the Islamists' words would be measured by their deeds, their platform judged by its success. In all likelihood, that would lead to some disillusionment among those who today see the solution to all their political problems in Islamism. Democracy is a learning process, in which a people and its leaders are forced to learn from successes and failures. Commitment to that learning process by the Arabs would harbor some short-term risks, but in the long run it would unquestionably be a healthy thing, for them and for the world.

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Article:	Fears of Arab Democracy
Author:	Jurg Bischoff
Date:	July 2002