Democratization in the Middle East

My starting point will be the conceptualization of democracy as it was crystallized by several scholars. Thus, I will refer to the classical study of Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, who founded their theory of democratic transition and consolidation upon the delineation of the five arenas that necessarily interact in a democratic system. The five arenas that they pointed out are: a free and lively civil society, a relatively autonomous and valued political society, the abiding by the Rule of Law, an impartial state bureaucracy that is usable by the democratic government and an institutionalized economic society .

Each of these arenas will be demarcated and discussed . Yet this endeavor will not remain a merely theoretical one, because it mandatorily needs to extract its substance from the genuine morphology of the Middle Eastern itself.  Therefore, I will first proceed to a rigorous assessment of that which constitutes the very fabric of the society. By evoking the Middle Eastern interpretation of basic concepts such as freedom, equality, justice and consensus, I will pinpoint the frailty of Neo-Orientalist arguments that gave the “clear verdict” of incompatibility between democracy and the Middle Eastern civilization.

Needless to say, the configuration of the Middle Eastern world would be curtailed if I overlooked the heritage of its recent history.  To be more specific, I will underscore the concrete consequences of colonial practices and how they were subsequently adopted and instrumentalized by the indigenous regimes. An illustration of this aspect will be a discussion about the Rule of Law in the Middle Eastern world and the connotations that have been attached to it, turning it into de facto “rule by law”.

Following the assessment of the “raw material” that constitutes the backbone of the Middle Eastern society, I will grant ample space to a crucial facet: the political landscape. Admittedly, the political landscape being extremely varied, the ideal approach would be a case-by-case one. Yet space and time impede me from extending the discussion to such dimensions, so that I will resort to a more basic (yet functional) division: that between full autocracies and liberalized autocracies (semi-authoritarian regimes). The latter being overwhelmingly more frequent in the Middle East, they will constitute the main focus .  In more concrete terms, I will emphasize the features, practices and entrapments of semi-authoritarian regimes, as well as the deriving difficulties of challenging them.

This section will be the centerpiece of the entire problem, since it will provide the instruments for a more accurate understanding of the obstacles that hamper democratization. Indeed, this approach corresponds to the theory that states that the specific type of regime of a country will determine the path that it will take in the direction of democratization. Another crucial premise on which I base my undertaking is the fact that democratization needs to be seen as a process, and not as an event.  Consequently, the immediate question that follows is: what are the criteria by which it can be established that the process is following the right path or not?

This stage of the discussion needs to be treated with utmost caution, given the fact that the temptation of elaborating a recipe is most alluring. And as a matter of fact, certain criteria have been identified in order to label a democratization process “successful” or not. The most important ones include: institutionalized political competition, institutionalized constraints on the executive power and the guarantee of civil liberties to all citizens in their daily life and in acts of political participation.  Yet a most important caveat needs to be signaled at this level, and it is derived precisely from the misleading nature of semi-authoritarian regimes. In other words, this type of checklist may prove deceptive if an essential difference is not made: democratization as such is not to be confused with mere liberalization policies (which has been the most deceptive game played by semi-authoritarian regimes that sought to give the pretense of openness while in reality holding a strong grip on power). Therefore, the above-mentioned criteria will serve as guidelines, while at the same time always keeping in mind that they need to measure substantial change (with the potential to produce an authentic paradigm shift) and not just minor modifications in the façade of the semi-authoritarian edifice.

More “flesh” will be added to the assessment of the democratization process by pointing to the two directions from which change can occur: internal (domestic) and external (foreign). In what regards change generated by internal factors, the discussion spawns an interesting ramification, in that it prompts an evaluation of two opposite democratization formulas: the top-down and the bottom-up approach. Certainly, each of the two has a host of implications considered from the standpoint of efficacy and the outcomes. In direct connection to these two approaches, another significant discussion arises: are incremental solutions preferable to sudden ones, or is it precisely the other way around?

Finally, the other direction (the external one) bears a particular significance, because it represents the exact intersection point with the debate about the US Foreign Policy. More precisely, after having looked at the concrete prescriptions of the Policy in the previous chapter, I will analyze in the third chapter their potential as outside factors of change. Consequently, I will lay emphasis on how the US complex agenda in the Middle East can be conciliated with the values that it promotes, what are the limitations of external interference (since it often implies bypassing the state) and what is the strategy that leaders resort to in response to the US Policy.
Gabriel Horia Nasra