By: Rakhmat
Abril Kholis
Two
years after the outbreak of what has come to be known as the Arab Spring, the
bloom is off the rose. Fledgling democracies in North Africa are struggling to
move forward or even maintain control, government crackdowns in the Persian
Gulf and elsewhere have kept liberalization at bay, and Syria is slipping ever
deeper into a vicious civil war that threatens to ignite the Middle East.
Instead of widespread elation about democracy finally coming to the region, one
now hears pessimism about the many obstacles in the way, fear about what will
happen next, and even open nostalgia for the old authoritarian order. Last
June, when the Egyptian military dismissed parliament and tried to turn back
the clock by gutting the civilian presidency, The Wall Street Journal’s chief
foreign policy columnist cracked, “Let’s hope it works.” (It didn’t.) And
Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi’s attempted power grab in November made such
nostalgia commonplace.
In
a recent Foreign Affairs article, Sheri Berman contends, “It’s easy to be pessimistic about the Arab
Spring, given the post-revolutionary turmoil the Middle East is now
experiencing. But critics forget that it takes time for new democracies to
transcend their authoritarian pasts.” Berman points to historical examples that
mimic the Middle East’s wave of uprisings: “Every surge of democratization over
the last century — after World War I, after World War II, during the so called
third wave in recent decades — has been followed by an undertow, accompanied by
widespread questioning of the viability and even desirability of democratic
governance in the areas in question.”
She
suggests that the ”first error critics make is treating new democracies as
blank slates, ignoring how much of their dynamics and fate are inherited rather
than chosen. Turmoil, violence, and corruption are taken as evidence of the
inherent dysfunctionality of democracy itself, or of the immaturity or irrationality
of a particular population, rather than as a sign of the previous
dictatorship’s pathologies.” Berman adds that critics ”set absurdly
high benchmarks for success, ones that lack any historical perspective” and
that “They interpret post-transition violence, corruption, confusion, and
incompetence as signs that particular countries (or even entire regions or
religions) are not ready for democracy, as if normal democratic transitions
lead smoothly and directly to stable liberal outcomes and countries that
stumble along the way must have something wrong with them.”
What
do such cases have to say about the Arab Spring? That the problems so evident
in Egypt and other transitioning countries today are entirely normal and
predictable, that they are primarily the fault of the old authoritarian regimes
rather than new democratic actors, and that the demise of authoritarianism and
the experimentation with democratic rule will almost certainly be seen in
retrospect as major steps forward in these countries’ political development,
even if things get worse before they eventually get better. Most countries that
are stable liberal democracies today had a very difficult time getting there.
Even the cases most often held up as exemplars of early or easy democratization,
such as England and the United States, encountered far more problems than are
remembered, with full-scale civil wars along the way. Just as those troubles
did not mean democracy was wrong or impossible for North America or western
Europe, so the troubles of today’s fledgling Arab democracies do not mean it is wrong or
impossible for the Middle East.
Then
and now, most of the problems new democracies faced were inherited. Democracy
does not necessarily cause or exacerbate com-munal and social strife and
frustration, but it does allow the distrust and bitterness built up under
authoritarian regimes to surface, of-ten with lamentable results. But nostalgia
for authoritarian stability is precisely the wrong response to such troubles,
since it is the patholo-gies inherent in authoritarianism that help cause the
underlying problems in the first place.
History
tells us that societies cannot overcome their problems unless and until they
face them squarely. The toppling of a long-standing authoritarian regime is not
the end of a process of democra-tization but the beginning of it. Even failed
democratic experiments are usually critical positive stages in the political
development of countries, eras in which they get started on rooting out the
anti-democratic social, cultural, and economic legacies of the past. Too many
observers today interpret problems and setbacks as signs that an even-tual
stable democratic outcome is not in the cards. But such violent and tragic
events as the French Revolution, the collapse of interwar Italian and German
democracy, and the American Civil War were not evidence that the countries in
question could not create or sustain liberal democracies; they were crucial
parts of the process by which those countries achieved just such an outcome.
The
widespread pessimism about the fate of the Arab Spring is almost certainly
misplaced. Of course, the Middle East has a unique mix of cultural, historical,
and economic attributes. But so does every region, and there is little reason
to expect the Arab world to be a permanent exception to the rules of political
development. The year 2011 was the dawn of a promising new era for the region,
and it will be looked on down the road as a historical watershed, even though
the rapids downstream will be turbulent. Conservative critics of democracy will
be wrong this time, just as they were about France, Italy, Germany, and every
other country that supposedly was better off under tyranny.
Berman
offers a number of comparisons to European experiences with democracy,
including France, Italy, and Germany. Finally, the author suggests that
“problems so evident in Egypt and other transitioning countries today are
entirely normal and predictable, [and] they are primarily the fault of the old
authoritarian regimes rather than new democratic actors, and that the demise of
authoritarianism and the experimentation with democratic rule will almost
certainly be seen in retrospect as major steps forward in these countries’
political development, even if things get worse before they eventually get
better.”
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