October 1998
DEMOCRACY IN THE MIDDLE EAST ?
Middle East soil and climate are
not well suited to most kiind of democratic crops. One such modern crop,
free access to Internet, for instance, grows less well there than cannabis. An older one – government of,
by and for the people, today a staple crop in the West since the
American Revolution, is for most people in the
Middle East still an exotic plant they have never tasted. Were they
asked to define the essence of democracy,
only few could give good answers.. They are used, like their ancestors
in the recorded past (and probably earlier),
to despotic regimes. Absolutism -
unrestricted rule by a khalif, sultan, king, president, a general - is accepted
as a phenomenon as natural as a sunrise, no matter how the state is officially defined - as a
kingdom, republic,
a sultanate, etc. In political practice the chief and his men are
above the law. They a r e the law. That
elsewhere on the globe heads of
democratic states are subject to the law of the land, can be and are
charged
and tried in court for transgressions like any other citizen strikes the
Oriental as very exotic.
In states which
define themselves as “Islamic”, civil law should be that laid down in the Koran
as interpreted by Islamic jurisprudence and tradition. It does so, more or
less, in Aghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan, Libya, for instance. Despotic
Islamic rulers, that is to say most of them, respect that code when it suits them. When not, they
ignore it with little fear of impeachment or even public protest. Their
subjects know better and submit, knowing that if they publicly disapprove too
much, they risk their freedom and possibly even their life. Even those who flee or emigrate are not
safe from retribution. Police in Western countries have loads of files on their
shelves or computer disks on murders of political refugees by terrorists sent
by their home countries’ secret services.
One Muslim state
in the Middle East is an exception: Turkey. The founder of the Republic of
Turkey,
General Mustafa Kemal, a.k.a. Ata
Turk, appointed 75 years ago with rare foresight his
country’s military as the guardian of the infant republic he had proclaimed. It
is still a rather exotic and delicate plant even there. Turkey’s democracy has
been threatened time and again by
hard-core Islamic groups. Whenever their pressure for a theocratic regime
becomes a manifest danger to the survival of the republican constitution, the
leaders of the armed forces, as trustees of the Kemalist heritage, act as
lifeguards to save it from going under, and withdraw again some time after the
danger passes. Since 1923 three such recurrent interludes show how difficult it
is for a parliamentary regime to develop strong roots in Islamic soil. Of Turkey’s 64 million population over 99
per cent are Muslim. No Arab country in the Middle East has yet produced a
revolutionary personality like Ata Turk, or a republican bourgoisie strong
enough to effect and maintain a drastic political change. Ata Turk understood that the Siamese twinship of
state and religion in Ottoman Turkey had blocked intellectual innovation and the social, economic and
technological evolution which have
given the West representative government of the people, freedom of speech, the
press and association, equality before the law for all, including women and
minorities, free access to information and knowledge, from school to Internet.
Ata Turk himself took drastic measures to
safeguard his
reforms against the retarding influences of Islam and its tradition. He
achieved a one-man-revolution comparable, though not equal, in its effect to that of the American
and French nations over 200 years ago. So far the dam he built has held up
against recurrent waves of Islamic
fundamentalism at home or from outside.
But in Turkey
democracy was imposed from above by a strong leader, unlike that of the West
where it was created from the bottom up. Even in the West, as the history of
this century shows, the durability of democracy is by no means assured. Italy, Germany, Spain, Romania,
Yougoslavia, Portugal, Greece,
Argentina and others relapsed into dictatorship, in Germany with catastrophic results
for the rest of the globe and for itself. Unless democratic regimes agree to
take in time preventive action, ambitious and unscrupulous men, military or
religious juntas driven by a strong will for power and aggressive ambition and
fanaticism, may repeat the disasters which Europe has experienced in the century soon ending. In the
Middle East this risk is the greater for the immense wealth which petroleum has
given some of the countries and which power-hungry regimes are able to spend on
weapons of mass destruction. Many Western politicians still believe that
rational self-interest will restrain Oriental fanatics, if not from abuses at
home, at least from mischief abroad,
like terrorism or military aggression.
This dangerous
illusion has already caused serious casualties and damage. And may cause more
in the future. Concepts like
“self-interest”, “quality of life”, “the pursuit of happiness”, have
very different meanings in
different continents and countries.
Even in the West. When
after his victory over France in 1940 Hitler expected the British to feel
beaten, he had his spokesman call over the radio on the British people and
their government to negotiate with him on surrender which he saw as their
self-interest. Prime minister Churchill, speaking in the House of Commons, declined the offer with
contempt and asked with some astonishment: “What kind of people do they think we are?” Chancelleries around the globe exploring the collective mind-sets
of foreign nations will find
examples of gross errors on this decisive aspect of political reality throughout recorded history. Even
geographic neighbours like the British and the Germans, did not
necessarily know one another well and as a result misjudged the other side’s
reactions. The gap of incomprehension
is even wider between East and West. The widely held hopeful belief in Europe
and in the U.S. that some degree
of genuine power sharing between the present (and future) rulers and their
subjects in the Arab Middle East as an overture to democracy in our time
looks fallacious and premature by
generations.
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