Political Order and Political Decay (69 page)

Some observers had believed that Muslim or Arab countries faced special obstacles to democratization absent in other regions of the world, since it was the one region largely unaffected by the Third Wave of democratization. Either Islam or Arab culture was held somehow responsible for resistance to liberal democracy. Any simple arguments that the Arabs were exceptional and would passively accept dictatorship ended with the events of early 2011.
1

Predictions that Arab societies will not be able to sustain liberal democracy may prove correct in the longer run. Four years into the Arab Spring, it does not appear that this form of government is likely to emerge anytime soon in countries affected by it, with the possible exception of the country in which it began, Tunisia. In Egypt, the formerly banned Muslim Brotherhood was elected and dominated the new parliament and presidency for a year, until the military pushed its president, Mohamed Morsi, out of power in the summer of 2013. The Egyptian state then launched a bloody crackdown against not only Islamist groups but against liberal critics as well. The Tahrir Square uprising was not a revolution that displaced the military-led state; it only pushed it into a tactical retreat. Libya remains chaotic in the wake of the military struggle against Muammar Qaddafi, with the central government unable to disarm the country's many militias. Peaceful protests against Syria's Bashar al-Assad were ruthlessly crushed, and the country descended into a prolonged civil war that has pitted radical Islamist fighters against the Ba'athist dictatorship. In Bahrain and the other Arab Gulf states, protests were violently repressed and the traditional monarchies remain in power. Throughout the region, violence and instability have helped the fortunes of jihadist groups that are overtly antidemocratic.

These unfavorable outcomes have led many observers in the West to decry the phenomenon of the Arab Spring as a whole. Some are speaking from a perspective of simple national self-interest: the United States, Israel, and other countries had developed mutually beneficial relationships with the old dictatorships in the Arab world, and are now facing instability and uncertainty within the region. But others make a broader argument that the Arab Spring does not represent a democratic wave but rather the self-assertion of political Islam, and will result at best in illiberal democracy or at worst in the spread of radical Islam and continuing chaos.
2

It is of course impossible to predict the long-term consequences of the Arab Spring. However, those observers who criticize the chaotic results of this upheaval and argue that they cannot lead to a good democratic outcome in the long run often fail to remember what a long, chaotic, and violent process the democratization of Europe was. A stable, well-functioning liberal democracy involves the interaction of a number of different institutions: not just elections for a president or legislature but also well-organized political parties, an independent court system, an effective state bureaucracy, and a free and vigilant media. In addition, there are a number of cultural conditions necessary: politicians and voters cannot have a winner-take-all attitude toward their opponents, they must respect rules more than individuals, and they must share a collective sense of identity and nationhood.

Bringing down dictators like Ben Ali or Mubarak eliminates only one source of authoritarian power. Putting the other institutions in place is not a process that happens overnight. The American architects of the 2003 Iraq invasion expected that democracy would appear spontaneously in the wake of their removal of Saddam Hussein. They discovered to their dismay that they had to preside over a chaotic and violent society from which institutions were largely absent.

What lessons do earlier democratic transitions hold for the future of the Arab Spring? There are many obvious differences between the Middle East and regions like Eastern Europe and Latin America, beginning with culture and the impact of Islam. Indeed, nineteenth-century Europe may constitute a better precedent for political change in the Arab world than the democratic transitions of the Third Wave that took place from the 1970s on. In the late-twentieth-century transitions in Latin America and Eastern Europe, we are dealing mostly with countries that already had had some experience with democracy. Those early democratic periods, some of which had lasted for decades, were interrupted by military takeovers in Latin America and by foreign occupation in Eastern Europe. Democratization was therefore in some sense the restoration of an older political order that had roots in the national experience of each country. In Latin America especially, there were already well-established democratic political parties that regenerated themselves rather quickly once an opening occurred. In Eastern Europe, the countries of Western Europe and the European Union constituted nearby and powerful examples of successful democracy that could offer substantial assistance and incentives to democratize.

By contrast, the Arab world today and Europe in the nineteenth century had no prior experience of democracy. While there is today a large international community providing both political models and concrete democracy assistance, it is largely based in the United States and other Western countries, and therefore suspect by many in the Arab world. This differs markedly from the open embrace of the European Union, NATO, and other Western institutions by Eastern European countries newly liberated from Soviet domination.

While both the contemporary Middle East and nineteenth-century Europe had no direct experience with democracy, there are also important differences between the regions, beginning with political Islam. Religion played a major role in nineteenth-century Europe as well: the German Centre Party and the Christian Democratic parties in France and Italy were organized to defend religious as opposed to class interests. But still, class and nation tended to be more important sources of identity than religion in Europe, while the reverse is more often the case in the Middle East today. (This was not always so; from the 1950s to the 1970s Arab politics was dominated more by secular nationalists than by Islamists, with a sprinkling of left-wing Socialist and Communist parties.)

Conservative forces have a different character as well. Of today's Muslim countries, only Pakistan has a social structure of large landowners dominating masses of peasants, as most European countries did in the early nineteenth century. Conservatives in most Muslim and Arab countries are recruited from tribal elites, traditional monarchical families and their clients, military officers, crony capitalists surrounding the old authoritarian regimes, and Islamists. Europe's conservatives did not have external sources of support, except for the help they rendered each other. Middle Eastern conservatives, by contrast, have gotten substantial external assistance from the United States and other Western countries over the years, and from the bonanza represented by oil and gas in the Persian Gulf. The working classes throughout the region are much less powerful than they were in nineteenth-century Europe, since much of the region, similar to Greece and southern Italy, has experienced “modernization without development.” Trade unions exist in Egypt and other parts of the Arab world, and although they played important roles in the initial fight against the authoritarian regime, they do not represent massive and growing segments of the population in the way they did in nineteenth-century Britain or Germany.

Nonetheless, there are a number of similarities between the Arab world and Europe a century ago. In the first place, the democratization process was rooted in social mobilization driven by underlying socioeconomic change. As industrialization progressed in nineteenth-century Europe, it created an expanding middle class and a proletariat. Masses of former peasants left the countryside for cities, where they were available to recruitment by new political parties and susceptible to appeals based on identity politics.

Something similar has been going on in the Middle East since the later decades of the twentieth century. The region is urbanizing rapidly, growing from 30 to over 50 percent of the population between 1970 and 2010.
3
The Human Development indices compiled by the United Nations (a composite of indicators of health, education, and income) increased by 28 percent in Egypt and 30 percent in Tunisia between 1990 and 2010. The numbers of college graduates increased at an even faster rate, and in both countries the latter complained about the lack of jobs commensurate with their levels of education. It was these groups that were the most savvy about using the Internet and social media to spread images of repression and organize demonstrations against the regime.

Samuel Huntington argued in
Political Order in Changing Societies
that the middle classes are critical to political change. Revolutions, he noted, are never organized by the poorest of the poor, because they have neither the resources nor the education to organize effectively. The middle classes, by contrast, are the group most likely to have experienced rapid increases in their social status and therefore face the sharpest disappointment if their subsequent mobility is blocked. It is the gap between their expectations and reality that creates political instability.

In both the Arab world and in the European Revolutions of 1848, the middle classes were the key actors in organizing the revolution and pressing for political change. The Tunisian uprisings against Ben Ali and the Tahrir Square demonstrations against Mubarak were led by urban, middle-class individuals who felt that their chances for social and economic advancement were being thwarted by the authoritarian regime. (The upheavals in Libya and Yemen were more complicated; the middle classes there were less numerous and complex tribal rivalries also were at work. There was a somewhat larger middle class in Syria, but sectarian identity quickly overwhelmed class or economic grievance.)

A new middle class was not the only product of urbanization, however. In many respects, the rise of political Islam in the Middle East can more appropriately be seen as a form of identity politics than as a matter of revived religiosity per se, and as such has displaced class as a rallying cry for the mobilization of political outsiders. That is, the Middle East experienced the same kind of shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, from traditional villages to modern cities, that Europe experienced in the late nineteenth century, with all of the anomie and identity confusion that such a shift entails. For a generation after independence from colonialism, secular nationalism worked as a source of identity, but it was discredited by the late 1970s by its failure to produce consistent and shared economic growth, and by its political failure in dealing with issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The vacuum was filled by religion, which became a clear source of identity to recently urbanized rural folk who now had access to satellite television and the Internet. One of the reasons for the strength of political Islam today is that it can speak to issues of identity, religion, and social class simultaneously.

Social class remains important in the contemporary Middle East under the veneer of religious politics. The supporters of Western-style liberal democracy tend to be largely drawn from the educated, urban middle classes, while the Islamist parties like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Ennahda in Tunisia tend to recruit from rural areas or from poor and marginalized communities within urban areas. As banned parties under the old authoritarian regime, these organizations turned to the direct provision of social services to the poor and therefore were in a good position to mobilize these populations when a democratic political space opened up. The same is true of Islamic conservatives in Iran, who tend to recruit from the poor and less educated layers of society.

The European experience in 1848 indicates, however, that the initial toppling of an authoritarian regime and the organization of democratic elections is only the beginning of a much longer process of political development. Democracy is built around the institutionalization of mass participation in an agreed political process, which requires in the first instance well-organized political parties. The middle-class liberals who lead the revolution have to go on to organize themselves to be able to contest elections, and they have to be able to form coalitions with other groups. The liberal revolutionaries of 1848 failed to do either in the short period they had before they were overwhelmed by the military countermoves of the authoritarian establishment. The middle-class groups that led the Arab revolutions had similar problems in organizing themselves on a long-term basis to contest elections in the first couple of years after the uprising, being internally divided and centered on individual leaders rather than mass political followings. Now they face a revitalized military government that will actively restrict their ability to organize.

In Europe, the middle-class groups that led the push for democracy were seldom able to bring it about on their own. All required cross-class coalitions of various sorts. In Denmark, the middle-class groups aligned with the peasantry (or, more properly, farmers, since the old peasantry had largely disappeared by this point) to demand an end to absolutism in 1848; in 1915, they aligned with the working class to demand universal suffrage. In Germany, the middle classes aligned with working-class parties in support of the Weimar Republic, as they did in Sweden, Belgium, and the Netherlands. And in Switzerland, Britain, and Italy, they aligned with conservative parties to expand the franchise.

As noted in chapter 28, however, middle-class groups do not inevitably end up supporting liberal democracy. They can align with conservative forces not to extend democracy but to restrict it from popular forces that threaten their interests. This was the strategy followed by many middle-class groups in Latin America during the dictatorships of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, and in Turkey up through the end of the 1990s. This pattern repeated itself in Egypt in 2013, where many former liberals became so disgusted with Islamist President Morsi who had been elected the previous year that they supported the military coup removing him from power.