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FROM THE NATIONAL INTEREST
Fall 2002
The Impossible Imperative?: Conjuring
Arab Democracy (an excerpt)
Adam Garfinkle
The first problem concerns the
presumption that Arab democracy will equate to a
"peaceful swath" in the Middle East. The truth
is that semi-institutionalized populist democracies can
make war more likely; that, specifically in the
"transitional phase of democratization, countries
become more aggressive and war-prone, not less."
This is particularly so in contemporary non-Western
societies where democratization intersects with the
recrudescence of identity politics to produce what
Samuel Huntington calls the "democracy
paradox": democracy facilitates the rise to power
of groups that appeal to indigenous ethnic and religious
loyalties that are likely to be anti-Western and—here
is the paradox—anti-democratic in the not-very-long
run. We have already seen this phenomenon at work in
Muslim domains like Indonesia and northern Nigeria, and
one example nipped in the bud in Algeria. We know that
mainstream opinion in most Arab countries is more
anti-Western than that of the regimes now governing
them, so why, then, if that opinion comes to drive
government policy—instead of merely complicating it,
as it does today—should we expect peace to break out?
The second problem is that a
successful campaign to bring democracy to the domains of
rogues and villains really does presuppose either a
major shift in U.S. attitudes toward the undemocratic
ruling classes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and others
that we have long called our friends, or a permanent
condition of blatant diplomatic hypocrisy. If we do
suddenly begin to act as though our long-time
authoritarian allies are really enemies blocking the
democratization of their countries (and with it the best
guarantee of our protection from mass-casualty
terrorism), we will, in effect, be choosing bad
relations with ten mostly well-entrenched regimes,
without any reasonable near-term prospect of replacing
them with democratic governments. Hypocrisy, on the
other hand, might not even be an option: How could we
possibly isolate the impact of a democratic Iraq (and
Palestine) from Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt, or from
our relationships with their leaders?
The third problem is even more
fundamental: Can we do it? Are Muslim, and particularly
Arab, political cultures so malleable that within a
generation or two we can transform most, or even some,
of them into genuine liberal democracies? Perhaps we
can. But perhaps in our desperation to achieve absolute
security in a newly perilous world, we are distorting
the social history of democracy and misreading the
nature of the societies whose political virtue we mean
to raise up. If this is the case, then we are in for
much frustration, not to mention a misdirection of
effort and resources, in the years ahead. Walter
Lippmann once warned that it is a disease of the soul to
be in love with impossible things, so it may repay
effort to look more closely at this third problem.
Adam Garfinkle is the editor of The National
Interest.
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