What are the prospects of home-grown democracy?

Regardless of what President Bush and his senior political advisors think of the relationship between Islam and democracy, the truth is that the more conservative Arab governments have been a great deal more open to democracy and change compared to the secular and more radical ones.

For decades, modernisation theories in the US have regarded conservative forces as a major hurdle toward the establishment of modern and functioning democracies in the Middle East. Acting on this belief, the US government received positively the coup of the free officers in Egypt and did not seem to be bothered by the toppling of the Iraqi royal family in 1958. It, furthermore, assisted the first Syrian military coup in 1949 and is believed to have had connections with the third one.

Ataturk-like leader

The overriding argument was that an Ataturk-like leader was better equipped to start a modernisation process from the top, attempting to change, forcibly if necessary, the conservative culture of Middle Eastern societies. These theories proved baseless. The past five decades have shown that the ruling secular élite in the Arab world have been a great deal more reluctant to democratise, or even modernise, than had been initially anticipated.

In Egypt, Libya, Syria and Iraq, where western-oriented élite overthrew traditional or conservative regimes, a police state was established, corruption became institutionalised, poverty increased and the state-central planning lagged far behind the annual rate of population growth. In other secular countries, such as Algeria and Tunisia, the record was not much better, as the governments handled the development process so badly that they ended up becoming prisoners to the socially-destructive agenda of the IMF and the World Bank.

By contrast, the conservative regimes, which survived the revolutionary tide of the 1950s and 1960s, proved to be more rational, adapting quickly to rapidly changing regional and international conditions. In addition, most of the conservative Arab regimes have understood the implications of big international events, such as the collapse of the Soviet Union, the 1991 Gulf War and the latest war on Iraq, and undertook limited but vital steps toward democratisation. The secular and westernised regimes, by comparison, resisted change and tried to thwart any attempt toward democratisation, or at least start some sort of political liberalisation.

One way of explaining this contrast involves referring to the different nature, culture and political structures of monarchies and republics in the Arab world. Unlike republican regimes, the institutions of Arab monarchies provide a fertile ground for the concept of power-sharing. Most Arab monarchies rule in tribal societies and their governments reflect a relatively small polity, highly coloured by the tribal ethics and customs of the Arabs, where the concept of consultation occupies a central stage.

Monarchical political institutions, hence, are more open to compromise than any other sort of authoritarian regime. In addition, Arab monarchs do not claim their power by virtue of a popular mandate. Instead, the mechanism by which they assume power is institutionally independent of the popular will, expressed through elections or other means. Arab monarchs can, therefore, hold free elections and allow their people a voice in the conduct of the government without surrendering their thrones, or all the power that goes with it.

Other sorts of modern authoritarianism, by contrast, claim a popular mandate to rule; usually through elections that express the will of the people they represent. The rulers of a single party or military regime, without holding elections might claim they serve the general will, or they might hold elections, but rig them. Yet, they are rarely so bold as to hold free elections which may rob them of the very legitimacy they claim to possess.

It must not be a surprising, therefore, that for authoritarian leaders of the populist variety, elections must be won; for monarchies, elections must merely return deputies to the parliament. When monarchs come under pressure to liberalise, they consequently find it much easier to negotiate parliamentary openings. This explains why monarchs usually make sure that elections are fair, or largely fair and when they do not wish to hold fair elections, they usually hold none at all. This scenario was recently repeated in Morocco, Kuwait and to a lesser extent in Jordan.

Democratisation

The success of Middle Eastern monarchies to deal more effectively with calls for democratisation could be also attributed to their ability to combine traditional institutions with ones more modern, or more liberal. Hence, political development in these cases was possible through the adaptation and evolution of traditional institutions, rather than through their destruction – something was seen necessary in the case of revolutionary regimes. This brings to the fore the idea that a home-grown democracy is more likely to succeed in the Arab world and that a plurality of democracies could exit throughout the world with the possibility of an Islamic form of democracy. It also throws into question the widely prevalent belief that western political traditions of democracy are necessarily the only way for democratisation world-wide, something Arabs and Americans need to think about.

Dr. Marwan Al-Kabalan is a scholar in international relations based in Manchester, UK. He can be contacted at: makabalan@gulfnews.com