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SPEAKING FREELY
Yes, we still support Arab
autocracy
By Bradley Glasser
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click here if
you are interested in contributing.
Since September 11, 2001, Western
governments have articulated a breathtaking vision
of democratic reform in the Arab world. Government
officials, with the support of myriad policy wonks
and pundits, have embraced the idea of Western
support for a democratic transformation of the
Middle East. Western officialdom has argued that a
democratic boom in the region would alleviate the
discontent that fuels terrorism and fanaticism in
the Arab and Islamic worlds.
This
post-September 11 interest in democracy-promotion
in the Middle East is supposed to mark a reversal
of decades-old Western support for Middle Eastern
dictatorships. The Bush administration has touted
this apparent transformation in US policy toward
the region in countless policy addresses and
campaign speeches in 2003 and 2004. (Indeed, in a
November 2003 speech, President George W Bush
apologized for American support for Middle Eastern
dictatorships over the last 50 years.) And the
official rhetoric has seemingly been matched by a
concerted policy effort among Western powers.
At the June 2004 Group of Eight Summit at
Sea Island, Georgia, the US and European
governments presented a Broader Middle East and
North Africa Initiative, which outlined a common
US-European framework for democracy-promotion in
the Middle East. The initiative created a global
forum for the discussion of Middle Eastern
political reform, and created a fund for
democracy-promotion activities throughout the Arab
world.
Most Arab rulers have rejected the
imperialist overtones of Western
democracy-promotion in the region, and indeed the
Arab media have by and large denounced Western
efforts to reshape Arab political systems. At the
same time, the Western initiative has sparked some
debate on political reform in Arab societies, and
has pushed Arab governments to acknowledge the
need to open up their polities. A few states like
Jordan and Morocco have even indicated their
willingness to work with Western donors on
democracy-promotion.
Sadly, the grandiose
Western proclamations and the impassioned Arab
debate simply obscure a stifling global consensus
that will militate against genuine Arab
democratization for the foreseeable future.
Overwhelmingly, rhetoric aside, Western
governments - including the Bush administration -
seem to agree with Arab rulers on a critical
point: in general, the authoritarian stability of
the existing Arab order should be maintained; at
best, Arab and Western governments are considering
exceedingly cosmetic political reforms that
alleviate domestic discontent and present a
positive face to the international community.
Here the confusion - whereby the American
media and public assume the US government is
pushing for genuine democracy from Morocco to
Egypt to the Arab Gulf - stems from the critical
distinction between political liberalization and
democratization. For more than a decade, the US
and the European Union have invested comparatively
trivial sums in political liberalization programs
in Arab countries. Such aid programs have sought
to support civil-society groups seeking greater
political participation, or have had a technical
orientation that sought, for example, to upgrade
the infrastructure of the justice and
parliamentary systems in countries like Egypt and
Jordan.
What the democracy aid projects of
the 1990s did not do was pressure the various
rulers to share power in any meaningful way: to
allow free and fair parliamentary elections, or to
ease the overwhelming institutional power of the
ruling parties (in the Arab republics) or of the
ruling families (in the Arab monarchies), or to
roll back the brutal dictatorial powers of the
Arab state. The trivial scope of the democracy aid
has reflected the traditional American and
European interest in preserving geopolitical
stability in the Middle East. For decades, of
course, Western governments have preferred to ally
themselves with friendly Arab dictators who would
guarantee the flow of Middle Eastern oil and keep
anti-Western radicals at bay. In designing the
democracy aid projects in the 1990s, American and
European policy-makers assumed that marginal
reforms - enacted at a glacial pace - might enable
Arab regimes to ease popular discontent and in
turn work to prevent anti-Western revolutions (as
occurred in Iran, for example).
The
post-September 11 Western approach to Arab reform
is essentially the same one employed so
ineffectually in the 1990s, notwithstanding the
deafening and misleading rhetoric. Indeed,
Western-sponsored reforms have perversely worked
to enhance the legitimacy of the Arab rulers:
enabling them to project a "democratic" facade to
their domestic critics and to the international
community. In Egypt and Jordan in the 1990s, for
example, while aid flowed, human-rights conditions
actually deteriorated and the rulers further
marginalized their political opponents.
At
first glance, some current American and European
reform initiatives seem worthwhile. In recent
months, for example, the US State Department has
highlighted a new Middle East Partnership (MEPI),
which will spend hundreds of millions of dollars
on Arab reform, broadly defined. In Bahrain last
September, MEPI sponsored a judicial reform
conference for 200 representatives of Arab justice
ministries. Conference participants discussed
various aspects of Western judicial practice,
including judicial ethics, the recruitment of
judges and court administration. The premise of
the State Department is that such promotion of
Westernized notions of "the rule of law" will
contribute to the eventual democratization and
Westernization of Middle Eastern polities. That
may - or may not - be the case in the long run, as
Arab officials absorb Western political and legal
values in the coming decades.
But in the
short and medium term, the current Western aid
projects do nothing more than burnish and enhance
the repressive status quo. Since Arab rulers
thoroughly dominate their judiciaries and
parliaments, the upgrading of judicial and
parliamentary procedures mean little or nothing -
at least in terms of genuine democratization.
Indeed, the aid projects enable rulers to claim
that they are democratizing and modernizing, while
political conditions in fact continue to
deteriorate in major Arab states.
In the
end, Western governments may well have little or
no power to promote substantial reforms in Arab
countries. But given the failures of the
gradualist aid approach in the past decade or so,
only a more aggressive policy - that of political
conditionality - has any hope of contributing to
real democratization in the region. In other
words, the provision of foreign aid and the
expansion of trade ties should be conditioned on
genuine political liberalization and
democratization. Such progress would include
meeting well-defined benchmarks in terms of
respecting human rights and press freedoms,
allowing free and fair parliamentary elections,
and the implementation of constitutional curbs on
executive power.
Arab rulers may well
refuse to participate in such an intrusive
program. But even that eventuality would be
preferable to the current "democracy" activities,
which simply seem to perpetuate a dangerous and
dysfunctional status quo.
Bradley
Glasser is a Visiting Scholar at the Center
for Middle East Studies at the University of
California at Berkeley, and author of Economic
Development and Political Reform: The Impact of
External Capital on the Middle East (Edward Elgar,
2001).
Speaking Freely is an Asia
Times Online feature that allows guest writers to
have their say. Please click here if
you are interested in contributing.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us for information
on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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