The changing face of democracy

This is an election year in a number of important countries. The American president and German chancellor are seeking a second term, for instance. The former French president failed to stay in office and lost to a left-leaning centrist who won on an anti-austerity plank. Elections in Greece and Italy are a clear vote of no-confidence by the public towards economic policy.

This year was supposed to be the year the global economy would come out of the crisis it had suffered in 2008, but the recovery didn't happen as anticipated. Bailout loans, quantitative easing, loose monetary policy and the other remedies in place do not seem to be working. Politically, centrist politics is running out of steam, marred by populist demagoguery.

And popular participation measured by voters' turnout is dwindling. This year could be a cornerstone in the paradigm shift the whole world is undergoing for some time now; and there will be a marked change in democracy, capitalism and western civilisation.

The last two decades of the previous century witnessed the beginning of a global shift, with the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the demise of the bi-polar world order. Western civilisation, absorbing the change, exposed its weaknesses as it expanded to dominate the whole world. Military manifestation in Europe, Asia and Africa compounded with politico-economic outreach and intervention exhausted the West. The system that preserved close-to-perfect functionality started to creak. Political ailments were made worse by a hyperactive economy, thanks to the ballooning of "financial" capitalism before it exploded in the past few years.

For the past decade, one couldn't take analyses and projections of political economy at face value. Many pundits are just forecasting out of conviction and preconceptions rather than sound inputs and conclusions. Actually, that seems to be the case even in scientific research, which became business-driven and mainly financed by corporations for marketing ends with few moral or humane constraints. Despite the optimistic reports on the global economy, the real picture looks bleak. Most likely, all bright projections would, at the end of the day, mean a longer transition period from the previous system to a new one.

The financial crisis was more than a cyclical bust to be followed by boom; it was the main symptom of a deep structural disorder in the global economy and the capitalist system as a whole. Capitalism, now dominating the globe, is in a metamorphosis phase. As the capitalist system has potential to transform from one phase to another — "renewing itself" from agrarian feudalism to trade and industrial capitalism to financial capitalism — it's bound to be transforming now. Of course, forces associated with ‘finance' will like to keep the transition phase going as long as possible, but in the end, a new system will emerge.

Based on many indications, one can venture into predicting that the next phase of capitalism renewal will be religion-linked, or in a far-fetched assumption, be termed ‘Theo-capitalism'. Every phase in the capitalist system's development incorporated the previous ones and went parallel to the political (democratic) development line. The business-dominated politics (democracy) of the past three or four decades is now coming to an end and the best way to go is for a strong power to take it further.

As humanity becomes less creative and more easygoing in thought and philosophy, what could be better than a "holy" theory to keep things in place?

The rise of political Islamism in the East and cult-like groups in the West in the second half of the previous century coincided with weakening of liberalism. Islamic finance was developed by major capitalist circles to incorporate the emerging trend. In the 1980s, Asian ‘Tiger Economies' (the economic term for emerging economies in the region) centred on a ‘nascent' Islamic democracy in Malaysia. Then, tapping the accumulated cash surpluses in Gulf Arab countries, the system developed more Islamic finance tools. Moral and religious rhetoric crept into western discourse even when it was ‘fighting' religious extremism.

Looking at the ‘Arab Spring' countries like Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and possibly soon Syria, one can easily see that the rise of Islamists is propagated as conforming to ‘western democracy'. In fact, democracy as we have known it is being diluted and a sort of "holy" democracy is in the making. Most likely it will be something in the middle, between liberal Islamism in Tunisia and conservative traditionalism in the Gulf. It might take years for that new form of so-called democracy to develop, and more still to be adopted elsewhere, but the economy can find some breath in those years. Religion has the power to convince and promote unacceptable economic policies. If capitalism ‘renewed' itself in a sort of ‘religious' way, that will be the end of democracy, at least as we know it, and the New Middle East will be the next ‘American Dream' for the world. 

Dr Ayman Mustafa is a London-based Arab writer.