Within the next year or so, several Arab countries will be holding a number of referendums and general elections in what their leaders describe as a bid to transform them into Western-style democracies.
The process opens with Algerians going to the polls in June. The Jordanians will follow them later in the year. We shall then witness a general election in Morocco followed by a parliamentary poll in Kuwait. In the meantime, Bahrain has declared itself a constitutional monarchy and announced that legislative elections will be held on Oct. 24, and Qatar is expected to hold referendums to establish a system of constitutional monarchy, followed by parliamentary elections.
Some of these elections will take place in the presence of international observers with former US President Jimmy Carter expected to play a prominent role in organizing the supervisory efforts.
The latest developments have elicited some interest in the West, specially the United States, where the New York Times has lauded “the emergence of a new bloc of democracies” in the Arab world. Last month, several Arab leaders, including the king of Jordan, the crown prince of Bahrain and the foreign minister of Qatar were in the US to promote the new bloc as a potentially important factor in Middle Eastern politics.
How much of all this is serious and how much hype remains to be seen. It would be wrong to disparage the efforts of these countries to experiment with new ideas and methods. But it would be equally wrong to foster the illusion that the mere holding of elections constitutes democratization.
Students of politics know that while there is no democracy without elections, there can be elections without democracy. The now defunct USSR held regular elections at all levels for almost 80 years. Even North Korea holds elections in which the “Dear Leader” Kim Junior regularly gets 100 percent of the votes.
Holding elections is nothing new in the Muslim world. Elections have been held in Iran for almost 100 years under two different dynasties and the current Islamic Republic. Egypt also held a number of elections from the 1920s until the 1952 coup d’état, as did Iraq before 1958. But none of those elections led to change of government or of major policies, let alone of the regime in place. Those elections were, for the most part, nothing but plebiscites designed to show support for the status quo. Each time an election appeared to be upsetting the status quo, the armed forces intervened to interrupt the process or cancel the results. (In the broader context of the Muslim world, that has happened three times in Turkey since 1960, five times in Pakistan since 1947, and once in Algeria in 1991.
The principal mechanism for major change in the politics of most Muslim, especially Arab, countries remained either coup d’état or, in the case of Iran, a full-blown revolution.
Playing at democracy to please the West or simply because it is fashionable could become a dangerous game for at least some of the societies concerned. It could also harm the longer-term prospects of political development in the Arab countries as a whole.
For many decades, Arabs have suffered from political “mimetism”, often dictated by fashionable ideas in the West. During World War I, the British promoted the concept of Pan-Arabism, patterned on the idea of nationalism then prevalent in Europe, as a means of inciting the Arabs against the Ottoman Empire. Tribal chiefs who had no notion of European-style nationalism were cast in the role of Pan-Arab leaders and then parachuted to newly carved up artificial countries as rulers — countries that some of them had never seen before. In time, the Pan-Arab idea was turned against its original mentor, Great Britain, and the West in general. (A similar trajectory was traversed by Pan-Turkism and Pan-lranism).
In the subsequent decades, various Arab leaders and political movements played games with a number of Western ideas and methods. Military juntas seized power in the name of Arab socialism and nationalized as much of the economy as they could. The West encouraged Islamist trends as a means of countering these new regimes and, beyond them, the Soviet Union. By the 1980s, the Islamist card was played by many states against the left in general. Some, like Algeria, decided to import preachers from Egypt to promote Islamism against middle class liberal and left tendencies.
Sadly, every borrowed idea quickly turned into a caricature of itself, and was discredited in the eyes of the Arab masses.
None of the borrowed ideas, from Pan-Arabism to socialism to Islamism, was able to generate a coherent political strategy and a genuine grass-roots movement. This was no surprise as the regimes that played with those ideas had no intention to sharing the slightest bit of power with anyone.
As a result, it is virtually impossible for anyone today to try and launch a genuine political movement in the name of any of the major Western ideas of the past 200 years. Socialism, nationalism, liberalism, and, lately, Islamism have all been discredited because they were usurped by dictators, adventurers, profiteers and, in some cases, terrorists at various levels and at various times. It seems that those who imported the Western ideas gave them a kiss of death. The masses do not know, and have no means of knowing, that what was offered to them was fake. A person who has never seen a real diamond has no reason to spot the ersatz. The net result is that the Arab world, and in a sense the Muslim world as a whole, is now closed to most of the big political ideas that took shape from the so-called Age of Enlightenment onward.
Could the same fate befall the latest fashionable idea — that is to say the idea of electoral democracy? The danger certainly exists. There is no guarantee that any of the governments in the “emerging democratic bloc” would be prepared to alter any of its basic policies, let alone surrender power, as a result of any of the general elections planned. In any case, that is ruled out from the start because there are no organized forces to offer the would-be voters a choice of alternatives.
Initially, the people may take part in the new exercise with enthusiasm just as they had done when nationalism, socialism and Islamism were first offered. After a while, however, disillusionment could set in. The French phrase “the more it changes, the more it stays the same” will remind voters that the mere putting a piece of paper in a ballot box has no impact on real life.
Not long ago, this writer observed an election in an Arab country that has to remain unnamed. At one polling station, on the eve of the election, the supervisor showed us the results of the voting instead of the number of those eligible to vote. He had made a mistake by pulling out the wrong paper from the drawer of his desk, 24 hours too early! In a presidential election, in another country that had better remain unnamed, we did not find a single person who had voted for the candidate who won with a landslide. We even offered a handsome reward for anyone who could show us anyone who had voted for the victor. We left the country keeping the reward.
Learning from the historic political experiences of others and even borrowing ideas is nothing to be ashamed of. In many cases, it is a necessity. We did not invent the automobile but now use it widely, though we remain the worst drivers in the world. But what would the public attitude be to automobiles if they were to become instruments not for getting you to your destination but for whisking you to places you do not wish to go to?
Here is a sincere plea. Please, please do not organize elections if you don’t really mean to play the game according to the rules. Please do not discredit yet another Western idea which one day may help Muslims in general and Arabs in particular to use as a means of achieving consensus in support of a genuine modernization program. There is no shame in not holding elections in societies that, for whatever reason, are not ready for such exercises. But there is shame in holding fake elections.
The postmodern Western democracies have long embarked on a new path of popular decision-making that goes beyond the mere exercise of voting. While the number of voters continues to decline in most Western democracies, other methods of assessing the public mood and involving more people in the national debate are being evolved. But that is the subject of another column.
