The chances for democracy in the Arab world
Bakhash, Shaul
George Bush hopes that his "new world order" in the wake of the Iraq war will include a measure of democratization in the Persian Gulf states and the larger Arab world. Calls for democratization...
...Whatever the tradition into which they fit, it is unlikely that either Asad or Saddam Hussein will willingly share power, permit even a modicum of political freedoms, or allow public accounting of the past misuse of power...
...If hope for liberal regimes derives primarily from the emergence of middle classes with new ideas, or at least those elements in the middle classes committed to political liberalism, these groups everywhere face a dilemma...
...9 Nor are the middle classes necessarily a force for political liberalization...
...In the ideology of so-called Islamic "fundamentalists," it is said, there is room for more open political systems...
...Iran's ayatollahs run a repressive regime and allow virtually no freedom to opposition political groups...
...The middle classes, these scholars write, want direct responsibility for governance, not merely co-optation by praetorians and authoritarians...
...The loose alliance of Iraqi opposition groups that met (under unacknowledged Syrian auspices) in Beirut earlier this year called for a democratic Iraq, with free elections and a representative assembly...
...In a recent article he noted that a secular, federated, and democratic Iraq is not only necessary to save the country from further destruction but entirely feasible...
...Two weeks after Saddam himself achieved supreme power in June 1979, he convened a meeting of high government and party officials and denounced a large number of "traitors...
...A persuasive argument of this kind, at least in the case of Iraq, has been advanced by the Iraqi exile writer Samir al-Khalil...
...In the authoritarian tradition, itself the product of societies divided along tribal, ethnic, confessional, and other lines, power is concentrated in one man who can maintain order and whom all are expected to obey...
...In Saudi Arabia such institutions do not exist...
...Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait last August has sparked a broad debate in the Arab world on a range of issues...
...Many may seek empowerment through militant Islam with greater or lesser degrees of sincerity or hypocrisy...
...Although few would agree, he argues that some Middle Eastern countries can already be described as "bourgeois states," or at least "embryonic bourgeois states...
...This, too, is a formula for considerable concentration of power in the hands of a ruling group...
...In his recent book, A History of the Arab Peoples, Albert Hourani describes a Middle East in which, in the nineteenth century and in the early decades of this century, power was exercised through an alliance between the ruler and local notables and merchant, landowning, and clerical elites...
...The electoral law was designed to favor the government parties in Egypt and Tunisia...
...Tribalism is characterized by the belief that resources are scarce...
...2 Edward Said, "Empire of Sand," the Guardian, January 12-13, 1991...
...Unlike their predecessors of a previous generation, they could not mobilize the bazaar, the guilds, the clerics, and, through them, larger constituencies...
...One by one virtually all of Asad's original co-conspirators were eliminated...
...On that occasion, Arab intellectuals tended to blame the defeat at least in part on the autocratic nature of Arab regimes, what they saw as an Arab infatuation with rhetoric, and the inclination of leaders in even radical Arab states to substitute lip service to revolutionary programs for the farreaching transformation of Arab societies they had promised.' Now, under different circumstances, a similar if less intense debate is under way...
...In Egypt they have been able to influence economic policy, or at least limit the government's "socialist" excesses...
...This is carefully recorded in Patrick Seale's on-the-whole sympathetic biography of the Syrian leader.' Asad was one of the small cabal of Baath officers who seized power in 1968...
...Yet the obstacles to democratization are formidable...
...Khalil's argument is in many ways compelling...
...According to Friedman, Saddam and Asad have represented each of these three traditions at different times, and most often all three at once...
...In Jordan the Islamic groups and their supporters won thirty-two of eighty seats in the lower house last year...
...The labor unions had little independence...
...In Tunisia, affiliates of the Islamic al-Nanda party, running as independents, garnered nearly 15 percent of the vote in the national elections in April 1990 and 30 percent in the municipal council elections that followed...
...At a conservative estimate, five thousand to ten thousand persons were killed...
...5 Seale, Ibid., p. 338...
...These elites served their own interests but also had roots in various constituencies in society...
...Everywhere, educated middle classes are clamoring for liberalization...
...8 Samir al-Khalil, "Iraq and its Future," New York Review of Books, April I1, 1991...
...Many of them were top party officials and long-term Saddam associates...
...The people of Iraq, or at least the Shi'ites among them, have exploded the myth of Iraqi support for Saddara Hussein...
...12 Ibid., p. 358...
...Said still blames this condition primarily on the West: "Much of it goes back to the sense of being unjustly treated," he writes...
...I° A Political Economy of the Middle East, p. 437...
...Although left-wing or centrist opposition groups argue that government policies have deliberately favored the Islamic as against the left-wing parties (this clearly was the case in Jordan), these results nevertheless suggest that the Islamic parties have most to gain from greater political freedom Leonard Binder of the University of California proceeds on this assumption in his recent and interesting book, Islamic Liberalism...
...Ten years ago . . . women accounted for 46 percent of all teachers, 29 percent of all doctors, 46 percent of all dentists, and 70 percent of all pharmacists in the country...
...The commitment to the principle of one man (and one woman)-one vote could well mean empowerment of groups hostile to democratic procedures...
...The ease with which Saddam Hussein swept through Kuwait, it is argued, underlines the weakness of narrow family-based regimes, which also prevail in Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states...
...Leonard Binder, Islamic Liberalism: A Critique of Development Ideologies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990...
...Iraq flaunts in public what other police states prefer to do in secret...
...The example of Iran is replicated, with local variations, in Egypt, Iraq, Algeria, and other Middle Eastern states...
...In the aftermath of the Gulf War, even when bloodied, defeated, and under international scrutiny, Saddam showed once again he would not hesitate to exact a terrible vengeance on those—Shi'ites and Kurds—who would challenge his authority or demand a share of political power...
...There is little guarantee the clamps on political activity will not be tightened again, once governments feel stronger...
...The rebellion was crushed...
...In this country, Edward Said, who in the past has often sought to depict the Arab world as caricatured and unfairly maligned by the Western media, recently noted that military regimes seemed everywhere prevalent in the Arab world and that, as a result, "civil society (universities, the media, and culture broadly speaking) has been swallowed up by political society...
...In Algeria the Islamic Salvation Front won over two-thirds of the regional assemblies and over half of the municipal councils in the June 1990 elections...
...Samir al-Khalil's Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989) was virtually ignored when it was first published...
...But the Majlis, or parliament, remains a vigorous forum for debate, although participation is limited to competing factions within the ruling group...
...This situation obtained in Iran under the shah and in Egypt, following President Sadat's infitah, or open-door economic policy...
...The destruction or weakening of the industrial entrepreneurs, big merchants, and great landowners created space, or interstices, that petty capitalists and the smaller merchants and traders occupied...
...In 1982, faced with a serious uprising by the Islamic Brotherhood in the city of Hama, Asad sent his army into the city...
...The guilds were brought under state control...
...In Iran, as in the Arab world, the autonomy of these elite networks was largely eroded by the shah and his bureaucracy...
...He concludes that "the situation is not hopeless, but neither is the time quite right" 12 for the emergence of truly liberal regimes...
...Yet when the revolution came and the shah was overthrown, royal autocracy was replaced by a quasi theocracy of considerable repressiveness...
...Even the president of the Teheran chamber of commerce, hardly a hotbed of opposition, was "elected" by the members only with the shah's approval...
...The entrepreneurial class was either greatly weakened, as after the revolutions in Algeria, Iraq, and Iran, or kept largely dependent on subsidies, tariff protection, closed markets, preferential loans, and other measures of state policy...
...The existence of this middle class has led some students of the region to argue that many Middle Eastern societies are ripe for liberalization...
...4 Patrick Seale, Asad: The Struggle for the Middle East (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989...
...Much of the city was flattened...
...And although even such groups may learn, over time, the advantages of political pluralism, free elections, and a free press, this requires a consensus regarding a process of gradual liberalization—a consensus that is nowhere evident...
...Authoritarianism may find favor with them as long as they have a meaningful role in it...
...Saddam was reported to have required high government and party officials to join him in personally carrying out some of the executions...
...Notes The best summary of the post-1967 debate is in chapter one of Fouad Ajami's The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and Practice Since 1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981...
...The United States is well placed to pressure the conservative Arab regimes it has defended to liberalize...
...A murderous intraparty war followed...
...But the international community paid little attention to the large-scale and destructive relocation of Iraq's Kurdish population, often involving whole villages, that followed...
...In Iraq the return of the Baath party to power in July 1968 was inaugurated with the kind of judicial murder that reflected at once the paranoia of the 332 • DISSENT Comments and Opinions regime, its readiness to use violence against its own citizens, and its policy of turning state violence into public spectacle as a way of cowing the population...
...Binder does not share the view that the "masses" are potential supporters of the liberal, democratic state...
...42-46...
...Unleashing Special Forces on whole communities, using tank fire against residential quarters, slaughtering prisoners, arming civilian supporters, shooting suspects or, what was scarcely better, hauling them in batches before field courts—this slide into brutality swept aside any semblance of the due process of law...
...5 New York Times reporter Thomas Friedman recalls visiting a neighborhood of Hama, now looking like "a plowed up cornfield," after the uprising, where he encountered an old man: "Where are all the houses that once stood here...
...In Iran, middle-class landowners helped defeat a postrevolution land distribution program...
...The highway from Damascus to Hama was then opened, so Syrians could witness firsthand the retribution that would be visited on those who challenged the regime...
...But Said also wonders whether "military force of one sort or another: huge armies, brassy slogans, bloody promises," was the only answer: I do not know a single Arab . . . who would not readily agree that the monopoly on coercion given the state and its army and police have almost completely obliterated democracy in the Arab world, introduced immense hostility between rulers and ruled, placed much higher value on conformity, opportunism, flattery and getting along than on risking new ideas, criticism or dissent...
...The literacy rate in Iraq today is one of the highest in the third world...
...There is, in any case, no reason to expect them to be committed liberals...
...Calls for democratization have also come from people in the two countries most directly affected—Kuwait and Iraq—and in other regional states...
...In Egypt, in the 1987 elections the Muslim Brethren increased their representation in the People's Assembly...
...In country after country, the middle class has grown as a result of the spread of education, urbanization, the expansion of whitecollar jobs and the professions, and improvement in living standards, particularly in the oil-rich states...
...The Democratic Forum, a loose formation of Kuwaiti opposition groups, has called on the emir of Kuwait to restore the constitution and reconvene parliament, permit basic freedoms of speech, assembly, and association, and extend suffrage to women...
...SUMMER • 1991 • 333 Comments and Opinions Scholars have long contemplated the paradox of Middle Eastern states with strong middle classes yet weak civil societies...
...Egypt may be entering the stage, according to Albert Hourani, where, like Turkey, periods of more open parliamentary politics will alternate with periods of military rule...
...and that to survive you must punish and make an example of those who would trespass on your tribe's, clan's, or family's space...
...This "state bourgeoisie" is clearly little inclined to overthrow the state or to challenge its authority...
...Seale writes: Habits of arbitrary rule acquired in the struggle for survival proved addictive...
...Each "traitor" was dragged away as his name was read...
...But its members are of many minds, and might as easily support an authoritarian as an open political system...
...It remains to be seen whether, having regained his country, the emir will permit a resumption of parliamentary life, as he has promised to do...
...In the past two years Egypt, Jordan, Algeria, and Tunisia have held parliamentary elections, permitted participation of opposition parties, and are tolerating such opposition in parliament—without dire consequences...
...Arab intellectuals and sectors of the Arab press are once again using the Kuwait crisis to argue that Arab regimes need to open up their political systems, to create trust between rulers and ruled, and to permit greater public participation in decision making...
...By 1986 the ruling family itself was coming under attack...
...9 A good summary of recent scholarship on the role of the bourgeoisie in Middle East states can be found in Alan Richards and John Waterbury, A Political Economy of the Middle East: State, Class, and Economic Development (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990...
...In at least two states—Iran and Egypt—the parliamentary tradition is older, more continuous, and therefore stronger...
...You are probably driving on some of them too," he mumbled, and then continued to shuffle away.° Friedman argues that regimes in the Middle East are the product of three different but intertwined traditions: tribalism, authoritarianism, and the culture of the modernizing bureaucracies...
...Pressure from elements among the educated middle classes, as well as widespread dissatisfaction among lower classes as a result of declining economic prospects, explains the willingness of governments in Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria to permit freer elections and opposition participation in parliament...
...In Saudi Arabia there is little prospect the king will permit an elected parliament...
...Moreover, in most Middle Eastern societies there already existed a well-entrenched traditional middle class of merchants, traders, shopkeepers, and small business owners...
...Moreover, preoccupied with the Palestinian issue, the Kurdish problem, and a final settlement with Iraq, it seems unlikely that the Bush administration will press either the Saudis or the Sabah family very hard in behalf of political liberalization...
...we stopped and asked...
...The record of Hafez al-Asad in Syria is characterized by a similar culture of violence...
...Parties permitted to participate in the electoral process are still carefully vetted and elections carefully controlled...
...The clerics play a somewhat unique role in Iran, so that Khomeini's prestige and his hold on the masses was immense in the early years of the revolution...
...lo 334 • DISSENT Comments and Opinions As Richards and Waterbury suggest, the middle classes have not been entirely powerless...
...In Kuwait an assembly with limited powers based on a limited franchise was dissolved in 1976, reconvened in 1981, and again dissolved in 1986, on both occasions because the deputies were too vigorous in asserting their prerogatives and in criticizing the government...
...I said...
...Nevertheless, it is striking that the secular parties and middle-class groups that helped overthrow the shah were so ineffective in preventing the imposition of a regime little to their liking...
...This was another instance of violence as spectacle or exemplary punishment...
...The modernizing bureaucracies are determined to use centralized power to create modern nation-states in countries where state traditions are weak or nonexistent...
...So run the arguments...
...In Iran the shah had weakened the middle class and all professional associations...
...Binder looks primarily to the increasing size of the bourgeoisie in Middle Eastern states...
...Political parties were abolished and replaced by an ineffective one-party system...
...336 • DISSENT...
...But his passionate description of the degradation of moral and political standards that have resulted from two decades of Baath rule has recently attracted much attention...
...86-87...
...The event is graphically described in Judith Miller and Laurie Mylroie, Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf (New York: Times Books, 1990), pp...
...The political opening in all four countries is still extremely narrow...
...3 The meeting at which the "traitors" were denounced was filmed and shown to party cadres across the country...
...In conditions of limited political freedom the clerics, with their mosques and religious schools, their experience in instruction, and their closer contacts with the urban working class and rural inhabitants, have proved far more adept at mobilizing votes and public opinion than the middle and professional classes...
...6 Thomas Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem (New York: Farar Straus Giroux, 1989), pp...
...Iraq, he wrote, is today a country of seventeen million people, most of whom live in cities, follow modern ways, and have never known anything other than an urban way of life...
...3 When Saddam Hussein used poison gas against his Kurdish population in the closing weeks of the Iran-Iraq war and killed several thousand people in the village of Halabjeh, this received wide publicity...
...Laroui seeks a dialogue with Western liberalism and a synthesis of Islamic and Middle Eastern traditions and liberalism...
...This small political opening, moreover, appears to have favored Islamic groups and parties...
...As many as five hundred persons— including one-third of the members of the Revolutionary Command Council—were shot...
...You are driving on them," he said...
...Numerous Arab commentators have argued that the audacity of Saddam Hussein in even contemplating the invasion of Kuwait and the passivity of Kuwait's ruling family and its ruling classes are symptomatic of a malaise in the Arab world rooted in the unrepresentative, autocratic nature of most Arab regimes...
...Businessmen, intellectuals, professional people, Shi'ites, "spies" for Iran, were jailed, executed, or simply disappeared as the Baath systematically eliminated potential sources of opposition...
...Again, the openings are narrow...
...Five months after seizing power, the government announced it had smashed a major "spy ring...
...that you need power to secure enough for yourself, your kin, and your tribe...
...But there are also large middle classes in Iran, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and most of the oil-rich Gulf states...
...John Waterbury and Alan Richards, two American academics, argue that the middle classes seek empowerment...
...Although Binder is guardedly optimistic, it is significant that his optimism is grounded not in the ideas of those he describes as Islamic "fundamentalists" or those closest to the Islamic leaders involved in politics and forming the local leadership but in thinkers like the Moroccan intellectual Abdallah Laroui...
...In the Persian Gulf states of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, ruling families have generally preferred informal consultation with some elements in the elite to the establishment of formal representative institutions...
...in Tunisia the government party won all 141 seats in the Chamber of Deputies...
...These developments, however, are not necessarily a bellwether of future trends...
...A significant portion of the middle class—the technocrats, economists, administrators—have been absorbed into the civil service...
...If the presence of an educated, urbanized middle class were sufficient for democratization, then prerevolution Iran would have been a prime candidate...
...2 Several reasons are adduced as to why this is a good moment for liberalization...
...But where are all the people who used to live here...
...See especially pp...
...Fourteen persons, eleven of them Jews, were publicly hanged and their bodies left to dangle before crowds, often numbering hundreds of thousands, in Liberation Square...
...But Laroui is French educated, writes for the elite, is little involved in hands-on politics, and has little following in those elements of the urban population among whom the clerical parties garner their largest following...
...If in the early 1960s there were still politicians in cabinet posts in Iran who had some public following exercised through elite networks, by 1970 the Iranian cabinet was composed primarily of technocrats, and these technocrats/managers had few political links with society...
...In Jordan no one yet dares disagree with the king...
...He seeks to discover whether the ideology of the thinkers of the Islamic revival provides grounds for believing such an "Islamic liberalism exists" and whether secular liberals may find allies among the Islamicists for a more liberal politics...
...In Kuwait there is at least a parliamentary tradition, however brief...
...But because of the strength and wide appeal of Islam, Binder argues, political liberalism will not succeed in the Middle East without "a vigorous Islamic liberalism...
...In both countries public scrutiny of royal family finances, which can hardly be avoided if representative bodies enjoy autonomy and freedom of speech, SUMMER • 1991 • 335 Comments and Opinions could prove embarrassing...
...In an almost unprecedented move, forty-five Saudi businessmen and intellectuals published an open letter to King Fand in April urging him to establish national and municipal consultative councils...
...In Iraq and Syria, the violence and brutality that characterized the rise of the Baath to power is by now woven into the very fabric of Baath party rule...
...Similar "plots" were uncovered in the following years, and scores were executed, often after making the requisite and abject public "confessions...
...The large and significant class of the petty bourgeoisie of shopkeepers, traders, and small merchants has generally benefited from the policies of "state socialism...
...This is not yet the agonizing reappraisal that followed the Arab defeat in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war...
...The failure of the middle classes to achieve political power can be explained in other ways...
...In Egypt President Mubarak has already begun to reimpose his control...
...99-100, 216-17, and 409-16...
Vol. 38 • July 1991 • No. 3
