Can the Middle East sustain democracy?
Jan 2nd, 2008 by MESH
Charles Issawi (1916-2000) was a leading economic historian of the Middle East and an astute commentator on history, politics, and human nature. In 1956 he published an article on the foundations of democracy and their absence from the Middle East. Below, we reproduce a key passage from that article (in green, beneath Issawi’s photograph). In response to our invitation, MESH member Adam Garfinkle offers a half-century retrospective on Issawi’s views. In the comments to this post, MESH members Joshua Muravchik, Jon Alterman, Michele Dunne, J. Scott Carpenter, and Tamara Cofman Wittes weigh in.
 “In the Middle East the economic and social soil is still not deep enough to enable political democracy to strike root and flourish. What is needed is not merely constitutional or administrative reforms, not just a change in government machinery and personnel. It is not even the adjustment of an obsolete political structure to bring it in line with a new balance of forces reflecting changing relations between various social classes, as was achieved by the Reform Bills in 19th-century England. What is required is a great economic and social transformation which will strengthen society and make it capable of bearing the weight of the modern State. Such a development is a necessary, if not a sufficient, condition for the establishment of genuine democracy in the region. For, in politics as in religion, a Reformation must be preceded by a Renaissance. |
| “What should be done in the meantime? Clearly, while it is futile to lament the absence of democracy in a region still unprepared for it, it is absolutely necessary to set in motion the forces which will transform Middle Eastern society in the desired manner. Great efforts must be made to improve means of communication, multiply schools, and, so far as possible, bring about a cultural and spiritual unity which will bridge the chasms separating the linguistic groups and religious sects. Great efforts must also be made to develop the economy of the different countries in order to raise the general level and to create opportunities which will allow the individual to emancipate himself from the grip of the family, tribe, and village.” |
| Charles Issawi, “Economic and Social Foundations of Democracy in the Middle East,” International Affairs, 1956. |
From Adam Garfinkle
Charles Issawi’s is a remarkable quote, prescient to a stunning degree. Issawi managed to say a great deal in a short space; were that I was as talented.
It seems to me that Issawi makes four basic points, which I will list deliberately out of order for a reason to be made clear, hopefully, below.
First, the Arab Middle East lacks the prerequisites for democracy.
Second, those prerequisites entail not only political-legal adjustments but deep social and cultural ones, not least of them being the strengthening of the state (a very prescient observation for its time).
Fourth, in the meantime great effort should be placed in readying the prerequisites for democracy, including economic growth, wider social communication and better education.
Third is his enigmatic comment that “in politics as in religion, a Reformation must be preceded by a Renaissance.”
As to what has changed, the first point stands: The region is still not ready, and the reason many Westerners don’t see this is that they don’t understand the origins of their own political culture. So I argued in print (“The Impossible Imperative? Conjuring Arab Democracy,” The National Interest, Fall 2002) before President Bush’s February 2003 American Enterprise Institute speech, before the invasion of Iraq, before his November 2003 National Endowment for Democracy speech and before his second inaugural address, because I could feel in my bones what was coming and I wanted to do whatever I could to stop it.
When it comes to the second point, nothing has changed either—but more on this critical matter below.
When it comes to the fourth point, a lot has changed since 1956. As Fatima Mernissi was among the first to insist, there is a new openness in the region, a new kind of conversation (jadaliyya, she called it). There is more communication, there is better if still very inadequate education, and the economies are more modern in many respects if still foundering in others. Much of this change came over several decades in a push-pull sort of way. The weakness of the post-independence Middle Eastern state amid the attentions brought by the Cold War made them prey to outside blandishments and enticements at the same time that weak local elites sought leverage to get or keep themselves in power. The nearly complete penetration of the region by global business, especially over the past 15 years, has helped accelerate the communications revolution and the “creative destruction” that has gone with it.
This very unsettling process has riven most Middle Eastern societies into three parts: salafis who use religion to fight the threat to corporate identity they see; assimilationists who accept the Western secularist route to one degree or another; and those who seek a flexible, living Islamic tradition in order to find a culturally integral route to modernization. I think the third force will win out, even if it takes three or four generations; at least I hope so.
Third, we come head-on to the politics/religion, Renaissance/Reformation nexus. It can be argued that the humanism of the Renaissance stimulated significant reform impulses in the Catholic Church in the fifteenth century, and that initial Protestant rebellion in the early sixteenth century, from the far less advanced regions of Germany rather than northern Italy, was in essence a reactionary rejection of that more liberal, humanist direction. The vast changes attending the last gasps of European feudalism soon overtook the reactionary character of early Protestantism and drove it along as it did everything else in its path, but the sketch is interesting. Applied analogically to the modern Middle East, the salafis are the early Protestants shaking up a febrile religious establishment, stimulating them, one may hope, into re-creating a vibrant living tradition in tune with modern times, as Max Weber famously suggested happened to Protestant Europe and, in time, even to Catholic Europe.
And now we come back to the problem of the state. A Reformed religion, to work as Weber saw, has to be contained by the state. But the state system of the modern Middle East is under siege thanks to the onslaught of globalization. Unless a revived centrist traditionalism contributes to the strengthening of the state, all of the communications, education and hoped-for economic reform will be unavailing. How will this go? Well, different experts have taken different views on this question. I don’t know which ones are right. I wish Issawi, and Elie Kedourie and Ernest Gellner, were still alive. They would know.
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In 1956, when Charles Issawi wrote this, there were only a few dozen countries in the world in which the government had been elected by the citizens. Today, there are 123 such governments, according to the rigorous count by Freedom House. The majority of the additional democracies are in countries that were not in 1956, and probably are not today, ready for democracy, according to Issawi’s criteria.
And yet they do it. To be sure, more than a quarter of the democratically elected governments are only “partly free” according to the Freedom House survey, meaning they lack some important features of mature or consolidated democracy, or what some call liberal democracy. Nonetheless, the performance of the elected governments is superior to that of non-elected ones across the spectrum of government performance issues, i.e., peace, economic development, social welfare, corruption, etc.
I’m not so confident that the “state system of the modern Middle East is under siege.” Certainly, the boom in oil prices in the last five years has given states lots of walking-around money with which they can co-opt potential oppositions. But even before the oil boom, the expansion of the modern Middle Eastern state into economies, associational life, spiritual life and elsewhere made it hard for any force to arise that could truly challenge the state’s dominance.
Authoritarian systems in the region have not only proven remarkably durable, but they have been remarkably adaptive. They have adapted to the death of censorship, and they have adapted to the rise of political Islam. More importantly, they have learned, both from their own experience and that of their neighbors. It is not an accident that monarchies in the Arab world are beginning to look more like republics, and republics are looking more like monarchies. Parliaments are rarely meaningful, and executives have tremendous control over the allocation of economic resources.
What strikes me as notable in the half-century since Issawi wrote his words is that many of the tasks he calls for have been done, they have been done by states, and the states have used these tasks to reinforce their prerogatives. National unity, stronger economies, stronger educational systems—all done. But without pledging fealty to the state and its apparatchiks, any individual’s accomplishments are for naught.
I’d be happy to go back and forth with Josh about the reasons that the seeds of democracy fall fallow in the Middle East, but that’s a discussion for another time.
While Issawi’s analysis of why democracy was not spreading in the Arab countries in 1956 had merit, to apply the same analysis to 2008 misses several critical factors.
First, whatever Arabs’ economic and educational status—which, while still lacking, is much better in many countries now than fifty years ago—do they want democratic governments or not? According to World Values Survey polling done in 2000 in Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, and Jordan—as well as much other evidence—they do, in increasing numbers and across the political spectrum.
Second, isn’t it terribly convenient—and misleading—to factor out of this socioeconomic analysis the role the United States and other outside powers have played in the region? Even in 1956 such an approach strained credulity. Driven by the imperatives of beating back Soviet influence, maintaining an unfettered flow of petroleum, and protecting the security of Israel, the United States took over the role of the European colonial powers in supporting cooperative Arab autocrats. Each of those imperatives was important and valid, but they involved costs, including looking the other way while Arab governments perpetrated human rights abuses and failed to develop their economies and societies. The Bush administration began the difficult process of trying to disentangle various U.S. interests and figure out whether the United States can maintain the flow of petroleum, protect Israel, and promote the gradual growth of democracy in the region all at the same time, but abandoned the work when it became overwhelmed by problems in Iraq and Palestine.
So, what should the next U.S. administration do? Much current thinking points in the same direction Issawi suggested in the 1950s (promoting economic growth and education as prerequisites for the spread of democracy) while Adam Garfinkle suggests strengthening the state, by which he seems to mean institutional reform. While economic, educational, and institutional reform are good in themselves, anyone under the illusion that such efforts alone can lead to eventual democratization should read Thomas Carothers’ article, “The Sequencing Fallacy,” in the January 2007 issue of the Journal of Democracy. In short, with the exception of a visionary few (notably lacking in the Middle East at present), autocratic leaders have no motivation to carry out reforms that will expose their excesses and eventually limit their power. Only the pressure that comes from political opposition can compel them to compromise.
There is also a practical problem with such approaches. Unless the United States concurrently presses Arab governments to open political space and improve respect for human and civil rights, the recipients of our well-intentioned efforts to improve economic and educational capacities will certainly face repression at the hands of their own governments—producing immediate problems that will be difficult for the next administration to ignore, even if it chooses to duck the larger question of how to balance competing U.S. interests.
Two alternate things struck me as I read Issawi’s article. First was its contemporary feel: the argument he advances to deny Arabs are ready for democracy—they need an economic and social transformation first—have changed little in fifty-plus years. Second was its dated feel: the idea that society has to be made ready for the modern state evokes a definitive post-war fascination with the modern state, epitomized to many at the time by the specifically Soviet state which was only a year away from Sputnik when Issawi wrote. Rather than being represented by the State, society should instead be made “capable to bear the weight” of it. Not a thoroughly democratic concept and not one that finds much resonance in modern ears, I suppose.
But it is Issawi’s first broad generalization that is most relevant to me. Are economic and social transformations required before democracy can take root in the Arab world? And does economic transformation automatically lead to individual emancipation? Not according to the facts as they’ve unfolded over the past five decades.
Looking at individual Arab countries tells a story that sweeping assertions miss. Generally, economic growth over the past fifty years has not corresponded with the expansion of human liberty. The Gulf as a whole is proof of that. Oil has proved a curse to aspiring democrats everywhere—Libya, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, among others. The only country in the Gulf that has evolved broad-based democratic practice is, ironically, Yemen, which had adopted democracy as a way of coping with deep societal divides. It is, of course, a very poor country and corruption remains endemic, but according to Freedom House, Yemen is “partly free” and has a robust civil society, multiple political parties and a fairly free press. Since the 1950s the United Arab Emirates has evolved from a group of sand dunes to one of the most highly industrialized countries in the world with one of the highest per capita GDPs, but human freedoms remain tentative at best.
Or take my favorite example, Tunisia. Tunisia today is a homogenous country in ethnicity and religion, with a largish, secular and educated middle class, a functioning economy in which the vast majority own their own homes. Tunisian women have many rights that are protected both in law and in practice. If any country should have made the transition to democracy in fifty-plus years it should be Tunisia, right? And yet, Tunisia remains one of the most repressive regimes in the region with one of the worst human rights record. And that has an impact on broader society. On my last visit to Tunis I felt it to be the least dynamic city of any in the entire region now alive with dynamism. If it were not for the huge transfers from Europe, I’m not sure the “Tunisian Model” would be sustainable. So what excuse would Issawi offer for Tunisia? Do Tunisians have to wait for some other hurdle to be passed before they are allowed a truly free press, for example? Or have someone other than Ben Ali to vote for?
In Arab Mauritania, a fed-up military finally answered a similar question to the delight of the Mauritanian people. Since a bloodless coup 19 months ago, desperately poor Mauritania has exchanged its strongman government for a democratically elected one under a new constitution. Mauritanians have elected not only the President for the first time in history but have also had free elections for parliament and localities as well. President Abdallahi and Mauritanian democracy seem to be doing fine.
So, why when economic growth and social transformation have taken place to one degree or the other has the Arab world remained a democratic exception? It did not start as a problem of religion (though this has now become a premier problem). Instead it’s been a failure of the regimes to progressively give greater freedom to their people.
As was pointed out in the 2002 Arab Human Development Report and in every subsequent year, the states of the Arab world in every measurable parameter of human development have failed their people. Their economies (apart from those in the Gulf) are sclerotic at best; their education system belies the name; their ability to deliver services is practically non-existent; their political systems are moribund. The only service they have proved capable of delivering is security, which is the only thing that preserves them (that and the seemingly endless patience of their long-suffering people). To countless Egyptians, Moroccans, Jordanians and others from this part of the world, i.e. Arabs, this failure has everything to do with the lack of personal freedom, and yes, democracy.
Issawi’s passage ends by noting that “while it is futile to lament the absence of democracy in a region still unprepared for it, it is absolutely necessary to set in motion the forces which will transform Middle Eastern society in the desired manner.” But that was over fifty years ago and the states have failed to deliver. After so much wasted time, it’s high-time to reverse Issawi’s prescription: governments in the region should give people more freedom and see how they transform their societies from within. More economic freedom, more press freedom, more political freedom. Everything else has been tried and failed disastrously: Pan-Arabism, Socialism, Ba’athism and now the threat of Islamism looms.
It’s true as Jon wrote that Arab governments have had remarkable staying power, but what they may have accomplished in the past fifty years is not nearly enough to sustain them for another fifty. Given the huge youth bulges in countries like Egypt and Algeria and elsewhere, unless dramatic economic growth is somehow achieved these regimes will be consumed by grievance—which will not be in our national interest. Despite the challenges of the past few years, it is now more important than ever to give freedom a chance. Not all at once as some envision but deliberately, with vision and purpose. By creating a path to a proliferation of parties, a truly free press, a thriving civil society and a growing middle class many of these countries will unlock their potential and, given time, defeat the Islamist threat from within as well. Economies and societies will be transformed as a result.
Issawi (and Adam) are a bit too focused on state strength, in my view. Most states of the region have, as Jon noted, done a good job of strengthening themselves over the last fifty years relative to those disparate social forces Adam fears so much. The corporatist model they developed, bolstered by oil and strategic rents, girded in the armor of Arabist ideology, and backed by force when necessary, served them very well. Greg Gause did some great work a bunch of years ago showing how the Arab states of the Gulf used these resources to bind their citizens closely to the state, protecting themselves from the potentially destabilizing impact of the Iranian revolution. The state is still viewed by most Arabs as the primary source and allocator of social goods, and the primary repository of the national patrimony.
The question today is whether these corporatist strategies are still functional in a changed environment, in which economic and cultural globalization, along with indigenous demographic and social changes, have created a different set of expectations and demands on the state while hampering the state’s ability to continue employing its old strategies of cooptation and control. A secondary question is what is to be done about those places in the region where states are not strong, indeed are failing: Iraq, Lebanon, and the (nonstate) Palestinian territories.
I argue in my forthcoming book (Freedom’s Unsteady March, coming out in April) that the Arab states’ ability to employ rents, ideology, and repressive capacity to sustain themselves as the central repository and distributor of social and economic goods is challenged today by a combination of factors. The “youth bulge” presents challenges not only in economic terms (employment, credit, and housing) but also in terms of the social expectations young people have of their government, especially when they are more aware of global trends and the gap between their status and that of their cohort elsewhere in the world. Oil prices may be high right now, but income inequality is skyrocketing as well—suggesting that this new wealth is not being invested in binding citizens closer to the state (as happened in the 1970s) but instead is going into the pockets of political and business elites.
I’ve heard anecdotal evidence of similar phenomena in Egypt, where major economic reforms by the government have resulted in overall economic growth and capital inflows—but the gains have largely been pocketed by the business community, rather than being invested in future growth or in new private sector jobs. The resulting disconnect between the macroeconomic picture and the life experiences of the average Egyptian is producing outrage in the form of a remarkable number of protests over the past year on issues such as wages, rents, and subsidies. Many people cite the UAE as evidence to the contrary, with its astonishing levels of investment in education and other forms of social capital, but I think it’s more of an exception that proves the rule.
The challenges presented to Arabist ideology by Islamist alternatives have been the subject of long discussion so I won’t go into that here. And in an era of cell-phone cameras, bloggers, and international human rights NGOs, repression is just more costly and harder to employ than in previous times as a tool for state control. Arab regimes have worked to respond to these challenges, but their piecemeal reforms fail as often as they succeed, and do not, in my view, add up to a successful new model for sustainable governance.
I agree fully with Michele and Scott’s point that economic development is not a pathway to democratization. Those who advocate a policy of promoting economic liberalization “first” should acknowledge that it is far more likely to be a substitute for, rather than a means to, democracy. They must also confront the now-well-documented fact that even less-than-perfect democracies outperform nondemocracies in basic economic and social development. If a U.S. policy of promoting Arab economic development is not an effective means to other forms of liberalization, if it may not even succeed on its own terms because of the concern Arab autocrats have with preserving the economic perquisites of their ruling coalitions (the subject of Tom Carothers’ excellent essay), and if it may not even help to improve the welfare of Arab citizens because of those autocrats’ twisted incentives, then why is this a worthy policy prescription? What does it get us, exactly? If the answer is more reliable economic trading partners, one could easily make the case that global capital markets and global trading regimes are more effective at doing that, at a lower cost, than a U.S. government push for economic liberalization. Let the global market handle economic liberalization.
Given the above, why should the U.S. still act to promote democracy in the Middle East?
Because the reigning corporatist model of Arab states is no longer functional, and social forces in those states are rising that, in the absence of democratization, could prove destabilizing and detrimental to U.S. interests. There is real pressure for change in the region—but what form that change will take is yet to be determined, and the Arab regimes have less ability to control that outcome than the strong-state-advocates like Jon might wish. The possibilities for change that are not in U.S. interests are real, growing, and very unpleasant: even if states maintain control it may be in a form we can’t easily cooperate with. In the long term, regional stability, Arab prosperity and U.S.-Arab strategic cooperation all require democratic reform in the region. I think wise-minded Arabs and Americans both know that, they just don’t know how to get from here to there and they’re paralyzed by the risks.
Yes, democratization could also produce destabilizing effects, and outcomes that are detrimental to U.S. interests. But I think that the balance of harms is on the side of democratization, for reasons I go into in my book. I also think that the risks of negative outcomes for the United States can, to some degree, be managed through a wiser strategy of democracy promotion than that followed by President Bush (sorry, Scott). Bush pushed hardest for democracy in the weakest states of the region, rather than the strongest. He also focused on political process over political rights, and did not match his democracy assistance programs with robust diplomacy. The result was an exacerbation of conflict in places like Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine, gains for regional radicals, a failure to give Arab leaders sufficient incentive to reform, and a resulting hardening of Arab autocrats on questions of domestic politics overall.
I think the core focus for American democracy promotion should be advocating for the expansion of basic political rights: freedom of speech (especially in the media), assembly, and association. Our attention should be focused on the region’s strong states (who also happen to be our closest allies): Saudi Arabia and Egypt, as well as Jordan and Morocco. In supporting political rights, we would be helping to give voice to the existing tensions within Arab society whose democratic role, Issawi noted, is crucial; we would be supporting the aspirations of Arab youth and citizenry at large for greater choice in their lives; we would be supporting the habits of civil discourse that are developed by all mature democracies; and we would be helping to illuminate and raise the scrutiny of the catch-all claims made by the Islamist opposition movements, deflating their current role as empty vessel for the hopes and fears of frustrated and weary Arab citizens.
And then, of course, we need to help the basket cases of the region—but not with democratization, with state-building.
To my mind, Tammy is right about the inefficiency of today’s Arab regimes, but she’s wrong about the inevitability of reform. For almost a century, outside observers of the region have predicted a Malthusian crisis that hasn’t come and a whole series of other changes that would shake the region to its core. Instead, regimes have not only implanted themselves, but become more firmly embedded. Consider the fact that there has not been a system-changing coup in the Arab world since the Libyan revolution of 1969, after two decades of rather dramatic change.
I join Tammy and Scott and Josh in very much hoping to see more transparency and rule of law in the Middle East, the growth of meritocracy, and economic and political advances that raise the standard of living and overall happiness in the region. But wanting to see it is different from saying it’s inevitable. Such a change would harm an immense number of people who currently hold power in the region, and their principal interest is holding power, not maximizing the economic efficiency of their economies or burnishing their approval ratings. If all they want to do is hold onto power and are willing to pay the other costs, I don’t see why that’s not sustainable.
Equally, what I see among publics is a keen desire for better outcomes, not necessarily a desire for greater voice. Technology is helping promote freer speech, anyway (both by empowering information producers and crippling censors), but I see people fundamentally disaffected by politics rather than clamoring to run for office.
Assuming leaders and publics in the Middle East want the same things we want (and even more narrowly, what academics in Washington think tanks want) doesn’t guide us to good policy.
I look forward to reading Tammy’s book and being persuaded otherwise.
Just a clarification, which looks to be needed after reading the various interesting comments on Issawi. My point about the state is simple: There can’t be a sustainable democracy, especially in a heterogeneous social environment, when state structures are weak. In such circumstances, the exercise of democratic forms will drive matters away from pluralism and back toward tribalism, because the legitimacy of state authority is what matters. When I say a strong state, as Michele Dunne understands, I don’t mean a state that can knock down doors and drag people away at 4 in the morning. A mukhabarat state is not a strong state; the fact that it thinks, probably correctly, that it needs to do such things to survive is testimony to the exact reverse. These states are weak states, and the fact that they have become masters of survival does not change that, does not mean that most of them have absorbed or subdued other foci of authority in their respective societies. What I mean by a strong state is one in which the authority of the state is accepted matter-of-factly by most citizens as the highest authority in the social realm, and which can deliver basic services in a way that justifies at least a rudimentary social contract, implicit or otherwise. So when Issawi spoke of the pull of tribe, village and mosque as retrograde, he was exactly right.