BREAKING NEWS
April 14, 2014
The Arab upheaval has been the cause of profound bewilderment in the developed world and among policy makers, not least in Washington. Great enthusiasm for the Arab Spring was quickly replaced by confusion and concern regarding Islamic democracy or an Islamist Winter, depending on one's perspective. This was as quickly supplanted by disconcert and despair in the face of military takeovers and ferocious civil wars. The European revolutions of 1848, the 'Spring of Nations', with their great hopes and dashed dreams, have often been cited as an analog. But indeed, what can the European experience of modernization and regime change during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries teach us about the contemporary Arab world? History does not quite repeat itself, as differences of conditions, place and time are as significant as similarities. Still, history is the best we have got.
What makes nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe and the current Middle East similar is their relative position on the road to modernization. According to the most authoritative estimates, by Angus Maddison, real GDP per capita in non-oil producing Arab countries is in the same range as mid- to late-nineteenth-century Europe (roughly one-tenth of today's affluent world). Urbanization rates in Egypt and Syria are, respectively, just below and above 50 percent, a level crossed by the United Kingdom around 1850 and by Germany around 1900. Illiteracy in the major Arab countries still hovers between 20 to 30 percent (greater among women than men), again in the same range as in mid-nineteenth century Europe (with the exception of the continent's highly literate northern countries).
While these major indicators are of fundamental significance, differences remain that should also be factored in. Whereas nineteenth-century Europe and the West were the world's pioneers and world leaders in modernization, today's Arab countries are among the world's strugglers, with only Africa trailing behind. Because of this, the Arab world enjoys many of the fruits of modernization as imports from outside—in communications, household appliances, computers, medicine and the like. This also means that the Arab world is susceptible to pressures from the hegemonic developed world—most notably economic, partly military, and, more ambivalently, intellectual—even if the efficacy of such pressures is inherently limited. Finally, there are all the differences of culture and historical traditions, for, as we know, the process of modernization, while most powerful and deeply transformative, is far from being linear.
In pursuing our comparison and analysis, the following key concepts will serve as our prisms: democracy, liberalism, development, nationalism, religion, and stability.
DEMOCRACY
The call for democracy has reigned supreme in the enthusiasm that surrounded the Arab Spring and the fall of the Old Regimes throughout much of the Middle East. It remains the strong expectation of Western opinion and the official demand by Western governments, most notably that of the United States. In today's West, democracy is perceived as the ultimate ideal and political norm, unconditioned by extraneous circumstances. But in reality, rather than democracy being an abstract, timeless idea waiting to be recognized and adopted by right-minded people, its successful implementation has always depended on and closely correlated with a number of developmental factors variably embedded in the process of modernization.
Thus it is anything but a coincidence that democracy on a large countrywide scale has neverexisted anywhere before modern times. And when it began to unfold in Europe and the West, even among countries that were turning democratic (and many countries were not), full democratization only arrived during the last decades of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth centuries. This was a protracted and gradual process. In France, for example, breakthroughs to democracy failed, first in 1793-5, and again in 1848-9. Democracy was only achieved with the Third Republic, from 1871-5 on, while women's suffrage was delayed until 1945. In the United Kingdom, the majority of men were given the vote only with the Third Reform Act of 1884, and the expansion and equalization of suffrage among all men and women had to wait until 1918, 1928 and 1948. Developments in the Low Countries and Scandinavia were roughly similar. Even in the United States, with its unique foundations of liberty and relatively affluent estate of free-holders, practically universal white male suffrage was only enacted in the 1820s. Women were enfranchised in 1920, and black voting, despite the post-Civil War constitutional amendments, was secured only in the 1960s. Nonetheless, there is an implicit assumption that the rest of the world should profit from our experience and wisdom, skip all intermediate phases and leap right to the end.
As Aristotle observed, the middle class is the backbone of democracy. Its growth during the nineteenth century—hand in hand with industrialization, urbanization, improved communications, increasing affluence and rising educational levels—constituted the material underpinning of democratization. True, very poor democratic countries also exist, most notably India after independence in 1947, but also a much larger number of poor developing countries that democratized after the fall of Communism and collapse of the Soviet Union. Still, other developing countries have proved highly resistant to democracy, whether for opportunistic or normative reasons. Moreover, there has always been not only an antiliberal but also a liberal apprehension of democracy. Indeed, nineteenth-century liberals were fearful of democracy, and imposed thresholds of property and education for voting, because they suspected that the masses, if enfranchised, would support neither democracy, nor liberalism, nor economic modernization. The same concerns are with us today, not least in the Arab Middle East.
The first concern is that a democratically elected government will not respect democracy. Going beyond despotism of the majority, this is popularly known as 'one man, one vote, one time'. The modern precedent is the Jacobin government during the French Revolution, which enacted universal male suffrage in 1793 but ruled dictatorially and ushered in a murderous reign of terror. Universal suffrage was abolished in the Constitution of 1795, after the fall of the Jacobins. 'One man, one vote, one time' became pretty much the norm in postcolonial Asia and Africa during the 1950s and 1960s. It is the reality in Hamas-ruled Gaza, not to mention the Fatah-ruled Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, both since 2006. Fears that Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood might take the same path after its wins at the ballot box in 2011 and 2012 did not materialize before the overthrow of President Mohamed Morsi and the legal steps against the party in 2013. Confidence in their popular support and a reluctance to spark an open clash with their opponents and the army were variably the reasons for the Brotherhood's relative restraint during their reign in power. Their opponents, however, proved less restrained in bringing down the Brotherhood's rule by force. More than abolition of electoral procedure by the Muslim Brotherhood's government, they feared its infringement on liberal rights and values.
LIBERALISM
Liberals everywhere in nineteenth-century Europe were deeply concerned that democracy would jeopardize liberal rights, such as respect for human life, free speech, freedom of religion, toleration for a diversity of opinion and identity, and, above all, the right to property. They feared that the masses would place little value on these hard-won sociopolitical norms, or else would be swayed by nonliberal creeds, whether traditionalist-conservative or revolutionary. A new age of barbarism was their nightmare, first predicted by Edmund Burke with respect to the French Revolution, which would indeed go down that road.
The Muslim Brotherhood's reign in Egypt was too brief to offer conclusive evidence, but the omens were not very good. The Brotherhood in power were relatively restrained, for the reasons mentioned. Nonetheless, they were ideologically and politically intolerant towards the large Christian minority, the Copts, and failed to respond to widespread incidences of violence against them. They held restrictive views regarding the role of women, and wished to impose their interpretation of Islamic modesty on the public sphere. They supported the practice euphemistically known as female circumcision, already widespread in Egyptian society. And they were sure to advance the incorporation of Islamic law, the sharia, into the country's legal code as much as they felt they could get away with. It is not surprising that many in Egypt, especially in the middle- and upper-class neighborhoods of the large cities, Cairo and Alexandria, felt threatened. And as in nineteenth century Paris and other European capitals, they were strategically positioned near the centers of power to take to the streets and make their influence felt, far more so than the masses of peasantry and supporters of the Brotherhood in the countryside. In Syria, the coalition of minorities—Alawites, Christians, Druze and, partly, Kurds—that has supported and still supports the Assad regime is largely motivated by fear of the Sunni Muslim majority. This fear has only increased as the previously relatively moderate Sunni rebel movement is falling prey to militant Islamist and jihadist groups.
Western opinion and policy makers wish to see democracy installed and maintained, while also wishing that liberal values and norms be protected. They naturally tend to regard democracy and liberalism as inseparable, as the two have become in liberal democracies during the twentieth century. However, when the two sets of cherished values and norms conflict, which of them is to be given precedent? This question has long been absent from the script of Western and liberal democratic discourse. Moreover, liberal parliamentary regimes that were not democratic but later grew to become fully so were very much the norm in nineteenth-century Europe. But their opposite, the recently posited concept of 'illiberal democracy', has rarely if ever materialized anywhere. The reason for this is that liberal values seem to be essential for a deep respect for a democratic system, as opposed to an opportunistic or instrumental attitude towards it. Illiberal democracies do not only infringe on liberal values and norms, but are also ever in danger of turning undemocratic too.
A major liberal right and concern is respect for private property, which interests us in its relation to economic development.
DEVELOPMENT
The fear that the propertyless masses would first move to confiscate the property of the rich was foremost in the minds of the bourgeoisie and liberals throughout nineteenth century Europe. Marx famously saw this as the reason why the 1848 Paris revolutionaries, fearful of the growing intrusion of the masses, surrendered the revolution to Louis Napoleon, later Emperor Napoleon III. The popular, economically liberal and variably authoritarian type of regime that he established, in the mode of his great uncle, is known as Bonapartism. The concept was applied to quite a number of rulers and regimes during the twentieth century, including, except for economic liberalism, that of Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt. It may partly apply to General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in today's Egypt.
Marx had an economically developed Communist society in mind, and his twentieth-century successors also experimented with socialist routes to industrialization and modernization. Thus private property was long a disputed value. However, the crushing failure of the nationalized economies left the capitalist route to modernity and affluence the only credible game around. In nineteenth-century Europe, and in Britain even earlier, capitalist development was virtually imposed on the disenfranchised masses of peasantry and urban poor, who saw little benefit for themselves from the process for generations, until much higher levels of affluence were achieved and the middle class swelled to become the majority. The most successful cases of economic development in the twentieth century, throughout East Asia, were similarly overseen by authoritarian regimes that imposed the process on all sectors of the population. The large majority of these countries eventually democratized after having achieved economic modernization. China is the latest giant of examples for this process at work, whereas democratic India is constantly obliged to placate its backward rural population, which is still the large majority of the population and which has been a hindrance to more rapid modernization.
Economic development tends to be a prerequisite for a successful democracy, and the Arab overall record so far is one of abysmal failure. Unlike in other developing parts of the world, modernization in the Arab world has not taken off. The reasons for this are not easy to pinpoint. In the early twentieth century Max Weber singled out the cultures of both Confucianism and Islam as being detrimental to modernization and economic development. Since then, the spectacular development of East and Southeast Asia has often been credited to the virtues of Confucianism. Cultural traditions are more multifaceted and adaptive than one assumed. The vogue of third-world socialism in its local form of Arab Socialism during the 1950s and 1960s was probably a major disruptive force for economic development in the Arab world. Unlike in India, in the main Arab countries it was coupled with and enforced by the ruthlessness of authoritarianism, which destroyed the urban commercial and entrepreneurial classes that had existed in Baghdad and Basra, Damascus and Halab (Aleppo), Cairo and Alexandria. Local Jews, Christian Arabs, Armenians, Greeks, and Italians, particularly active in this milieu, were pushed out. The result was two generations of economic stagnation. Before 1960, Egypt was better off than South Korea.
Who can be the agent of modernization in the Arab world and kick-start it on the long road from its currently nearly hopeless conditions? Might the change develop in the Arab monarchies, in countries such as Morocco and Jordan that have secured some modest achievements, enjoying traditional legitimacy and espousing development, while allowing limited electoral and parliamentary participation? Or can it be generated by an authoritarian or semiauthoritarian Arab Franco or Pinochet, or a Bonapartist of the type of General Sisi? None of these options looks very promising at the moment. Nor does a third one: a development-oriented, moderate and genuinely democratic Islamic movement. Unlike in nineteenth century Europe, socialism is dead in the Arab world. There is a widespread popular resentment towards the rich, justified where corruption and crony capitalism are rampant, but otherwise detrimental to economic development. Much of this resentment is channeled into support for the Islamic parties, which preach virtue and social justice, and practice grassroots social relief for the poor.
RELIGION
In some ways, political and social Islam resembles political and social Catholicism in nineteenth century Europe. Catholicism organized itself politically in reaction against the forces of secularism, modernity, liberalism and democracy, preached nonworldly virtue and social justice, and practiced social work for the poor. The most significant political party that exemplified the movement was the Catholic Center Party (Zentrum), which was consolidated to defend Catholic rights in Protestant-dominated unified Germany after 1871. Initially cast out by Bismarck, the party became increasingly integrated into the German political system, and became a major partner in the pro-democratic Weimar coalition after World War I. Destroyed by Hitler, it was replaced after World War II by the Christian Democrats, who led Germany back from the abyss and onto the road to democracy, liberalism and economic development. Although it is customary to associate modernization with secularization, nineteenth century Europe saw growing religious piety, conformism and prudishness in many countries, for example in Victorian Britain, partly in response to the dislocation of traditional society and pressures of modernization. This was true of the middle class, as well as among the Labour movement.
Can political Islam travel the same road and be transformed into the Arab and Muslim equivalent of the Zentrum and Christian Democrats? Even if unfamiliar with the historical precedent, this more or less was the hope of the US administration with respect to the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt. They wished to see a popular, broad-based, democratically elected movement that would increasingly learn to accept democratic procedures, make peace with liberalism and modernity, and embrace economic development. Potentially, this was the most attractive option. However, in Germany the process took generations to mature, as has also been the case with a closer and perhaps more relevant precedent: Turkey.
Modern Turkey is an especially instructive case. Shaped by Kemal Atatürk, with modernization as its supreme aim, it was a model of neither democracy nor liberalism. Kemalist Turkey made the army the guardian of a constitution that imposed secularism and banished Islam from the public sphere, probably against the people's majoritarian sentiments. Freedom of expression was curtailed on similar grounds, Islamic parties were suppressed, and the army repeatedly intervened in politics, removed democratically elected governments from power, and suspended democracy. Only in the 2000s was the mold of the Kemalist state broken, with the rise to power of the popularly based and greatly moderated Islamic Justice and Development Party (AKP). The party gave up its Islamic brand in favor of 'conservative democracy', is committed to economic development through the market system, and has come to terms with liberalism. The jury is still out on Turkey. But despite the authoritarian and fiery personality of prime minister and AKP leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, large-scale liberal demonstrations against some of his initiatives and recent accusations of corruption, the new synthesis might be working, with the country making great strides in terms of socioeconomic development. Still, eighty years of Kemalism may have laid the groundwork for this stage. They stirred Turkey away from a path similar to Pakistan's failed course, and avoided the major Islamist setback that followed the imperial modernizing hubris of the shah in Iran. Might Arab countries in time adopt a route similar to Turkey's, as Erdoğan recommended to the Islamists in Egypt?
Such a development might take time and require a preliminary semiauthoritarian phase, as it did in Turkey. The apocalyptic violent streak that Islamism has developed in recent decades is a major obstacle. So also is Islamic universalism and its challenge to the Arab states. Whereas militant violence was practically absent in nineteenth century political Catholicism (though not in other, revolutionary creeds), Catholic universalism was a much stronger reality. It nonetheless receded before the European nation-states, which were far more deeply rooted than their supposed counterparts in the Middle East.
NATIONALISM
The idea that national sentiments of affinity and solidarity, and their various political expressions, are exclusively modern and European is one of the great missteps of modern social theory. It is true, however, that mainly due to the dominance of imperial structures in the Middle East over millennia, nations and nation-states did not take root and evolve through most of this region. In the twentieth century, the new states that emerged were further undermined by the competing universalist ideas of pan-Arabism and the Islamic ummah. At the same time, they were undercut by the survival of tribalism, mainly associated with the existence of the pastoralist tribe in the semiarid environments that do not exist in temperate Europe. Confessional communities, familiar from Europe, complete the cleavages and divisions of identity in the Arab Middle East.
Hence the Egyptian quip that except for Egypt itself, all the other Arab countries are just tribes with a flag. Given their ethnic, confessional and tribal disunity, many of these countries were held together only by the coercive and repressive force of brutal authoritarian regimes. Like the former Yugoslavia and Soviet Union, they have quickly fallen apart once these regimes lost power, sometimes degenerating into a murderous mayhem. Where a distinct national identity as one people exists, political differences, sometimes very acute and even violent, do not threaten the very existence of the state. Apart from Egypt, a people and nation with very old roots, national identity in the Arab world has more or less consolidated in Tunisia and partly also in Morocco and Yemen (in which tribal politics is still very much alive). Among the non-Arab countries of the Middle East, Turkey, Iran and Israel are all deeply rooted national states, despite the presence of large ethnonational minorities in each of them. By contrast, Syria and (only somewhat less ruinously) Iraq are the scenes of vicious violent conflict, torn apart as these countries are by their constitutive ethnic and confessional elements that often have very little in common with one another. In post-Gaddafi Libya, the various tribes and militias pay little heed to the central government and its flag.
Contrary to the academic cliché, nations are far from being easily 'manipulated' into existence from supposedly disparate communities in a process of nation building. Nor, contrary to American parlance, are the people in Iraq, the people of Iraq, and the “Iraqi people” interchangeable concepts. The same applies to Syria. Ethnonational differences arouse very deep human emotions and are politically highly potent and potentially explosive. The nineteenth-and twentieth-century disintegrations of the Habsburg monarchy, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia are an ominous reminder of the very bumpy road ahead in much of the Arab Middle East. Federalism, democracy, liberalism and pluralism—all in short supply in the region—are the customary measures advocated in such cases. Sectarian violence, ethnic cleansing and secessionist pressures are as much to be expected as uneasy coexistence.
Constructive optimism is what people tend to expect, but there is no guarantee of a good way forward or a happy ending. Up until the present, the first rule to learn about the Middle East is that good solutions have been few and far between and the realistic options generally ranged from bad to worse, with the primary question being which is least bad. Might this change in the foreseeable future?
STABILITY
In the matter of stability, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe stands as another ominous precedent. Socioeconomic development, even when it finally took off, did not lead to democracy and liberalism everywhere. In many countries, including a highly developed and powerful Germany, the strongest counterculture emerged in reaction against and resistance to Western liberalism. This mood found expression in a variety of authoritarian and semiauthoritarian movements and regimes, in some ways resurrected, with much of the same cultural baggage, in today's Russia and China. Fascism was the most extreme expression of that mood. In the Arab world, cultural hostility towards and resistance to Western liberal values is very deep and widespread, and has been so since the beginning of Arab nationalism in the late nineteenth century. These sentiments have always coexisted with a grudging admiration for and a humiliating sense of inferiority towards Western achievements, which have only aggravated the problem. The acutely felt gap between the manifest backwardness of the Arab world and the Arab/Muslim self-perception of noble superiority is insufferable. These sentiments, simmering resentment and sense of cultural defensiveness are particularly powerful among the middle classes that have played a central role in the Arab Revolutions. Contrary to their image in the Western media, Arab liberals are a tiny minority.
At variance with the progressive view of modernization as ultimately spurring democracy and liberalism, only American power and crushing military victories in the two World Wars shaped the world we know and take for granted. The twentieth century became the democratic century only because it was also the American century. Forced democratization actually did succeed in post–World War II Germany and Japan, but the prerequisites for this success need to be borne in mind: the two countries had first to be not merely defeated but pulverized in the war (and the Communist and Soviet threat at their doorstep also helped), something which will hopefully never be repeated; both countries possessed the infrastructure of modern industrial societies, while also being cohesive national communities, attributes which are very much missing in the Arab Middle East. The future development of the countries in the region will depend to a large but limited degree on American and Western influence, both direct and indirect. But it may equally be influenced by the future trajectories of Russia and, most importantly, China, and on whether each of them will eventually democratize and liberalize politically. This cardinal question of the twenty-first century might also determine the viability of a potentially alternative model and source of support for Arab societies.
A sense of realism and proportion in assessing the odds and prospects of success is thus needed in shaping American, and Western, policy towards the Arab Upheaval—present and future. While interventions, both military and nonmilitary, should not be ruled out, depending on the political, strategic and humanitarian circumstances, their inherent limitations must be recognized. Given that the potential for hugely adverse developments in the region is at least as great as that for improvements, there is much to be said for preserving stability, as well as for patience and quiet support for a gradual fruition of local processes. Thus what appeared as high-handed American interference, more declarative than practical, against the ousting of the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt cannot really affect the process. It merely aggravates prevailing sentiments and deepens the cultural backlash against the US and the West. It accentuates the notion among the Egyptian urban middle classes and other opponents of the Brotherhood that naïve American moralizing and disregard for the realities of Arab society require them to surrender their freedom and way of life in the name of an abstract ideal of democracy. Saudi Arabia has a reactionary and in many ways objectionable social and political regime. But is a democratic and progressive alternative feasible at present or in the foreseeable future? Would a revolution that establishes a radical regime in a country that controls such a large share of the world's oil reserves be a better alternative? Has the regime of Khomeini and the ayatollahs in Iran been a better option than the shah, with all the flaws of his regime? Were the Bolsheviks and the untold horrors they inflicted a superior alternative to the reactionary and reprehensive Czarist regime, under which Russia was nonetheless beginning to experience accelerated industrialization and burgeoning parliamentarianism?
Needless to say, like nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, the Arab world is not uniform or cut from the same cloth. As we have seen, different countries within the region have their particular characteristics and potentially different trajectories. Some give more cause for hope than others, and a discriminated understanding is called for. Still, like nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, they share a great deal in terms of socioeconomic development, history, cultural traditions (plus language), religion and a sense of common identity. As the Arab Upheaval has demonstrated, they also deeply influence one another. The first obligation of doctors is to do no harm. Stability should not mean stagnation or be preserved at all costs. Democracy, even if imperfect, reasonably liberal values and norms, toleration, economic development and internal peace should be cultivated as much as possible, coupled with awareness that outside influence has an inherently limited role to play. This is well recognized with respect to China and Russia. It applies no less to the Arab Middle East.
Azar Gat is currently the Ezer Weizman Professor of National Security and was twice Chair of the Department of Political Science at Tel Aviv University.
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