Where American dreams turn sour
- Financial Times -
By Richard Joseph
Published: January 21 2003 21:06
news.ft.com
Democratic imperialism, the bold foreign policy vision of American neo-conservatives, contemplates the use of force to impose democratic institutions on a repressed people. Because people subject to authoritarian rule cannot determine their own fate, so this vision goes, foreign powers have a moral obligation to forge their destiny for them. Military intervention and regime change become necessary to create a new ethical order based on individual rights and liberties. Political stability, economic prosperity and world peace presumably ensue.
The problem with this vision, as it relates to the Arab world, is that it is difficult - perhaps impossible - to achieve. Indeed, in the culturally diverse and politically complex Middle East, democratic imperialism provides a formula for disintegration, stagnation and fratricide, not for stability, prosperity and peace.
Underlying the democratic imperialist ideal is the faulty premise that the peoples of the region are culturally homogeneous, that their middle classes are strong and politically assertive, that their citizens are mindful of the duties owed to one another and that a social and institutional basis exists for political democracy. This vision reflects the fundamental naivety that socially and institutionally they are like westerners and that, like westerners, they share a common conception of citizen, society, civic duty and state.
In the Arab world, nothing could be further from the truth. Notwithstanding their democratic aspirations, many Arabs cannot agree on the essential contours of the nation, much less the basic structure of the state. Arab fundamentalists define "nation" in terms of the community of Muslim believers, whose interpersonal relations are governed by Islamic law. Arab nationalists define it as those who share a common Arabic language, culture and heritage, bound together by civil laws and secular institutions. Arab minorities, such as Copts and Maronites, define it in terms of their own peculiar sectarian traits, dominated by institutions that ensure proportional representation. And non-Arab minorities define it in linguistic and cultural terms, linked to the Arab majority through political federation and Islam.
From an institutional perspective, parts of the Arab world are not ripe for democracy - not that the Arab mind is incapable of liberal thought but, rather, because of societal and institutional barriers to its realisation. Modern-day Arabs inherit from their Ottoman, Mameluke and caliphate predecessors a political tradition that is centralised, bureaucratic and authoritarian. Reinforcing this tradition have been monarchs and military dictators bent on consolidating power, suppressing opposition, preserving privilege, commanding economic development, waging war and holding their communities together in the face of the forces that tend to tear them apart.
As a result, the uncompromising spirit of limited government, checks and balances, separation of church and state and individual freedoms that so pervade western democracies has not evolved in Arab societies. While elements of the middle class have taken up the cause of democratic reform, and defended it in the face of government transgressions, these elements remain weak relative to the military, monarchical, clerical and agrarian forces whose priorities are entirely different.
The implications of all this are clear: without long-term commitment, extensive tutelage, revolutionary reform, mass education and the redrawing of regional boundaries - all encompassed under that abhorrent term "nation-building" - democratic imperialism will fail, and fail miserably, in the Arab world. Any half-hearted attempt to impose democratic institutions is likely to produce discord and discontent.
Democratic imperialism promises not only to liberate the Arabs from despotic rule but also to unleash the sectarian, ethnic and ideological animosities that historically have torn them apart. Far from revitalising the Arab world, it is likely in some regions to breed frustration and paralysis in some regions, threatening fundamentalist takeover, sectarian and ethnic conflict, political instability, military intervention and, ultimately, the restoration of autocratic rule. By failing to realise that socially, culturally and institutionally the Arab world is not like the west, democratic imperialism in its crudest form may well contain the seeds of its own demise.
The writer is a senior lecturer at The University of Texas at Austin, a Middle East scholar and an American of Arab descent |
