In the Shadow of Democracy: Review Article

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Review: In the Shadow of Democracy: Review Article Author(s): Steven Heydemann Review by: Steven Heydemann Source: Middle East Journal, Vol. 60, No. 1 (Winter, 2006), pp. 146-157Published by: Middle East InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4330220Accessed: 07-05-2015 17:19 UTC

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146 * MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL

Book Reviews

In the Shadow of Democracy Review Article by Steven Heydemann

Uncharted Journey: Promoting Democracy in the Middle East, ed. by Thomas Carothers and Marina Ottaway. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005. viii + 267 pages. Bibl. to p. 282. Index to p. 300. Contribs. $50 cloth; $24.95 paper.

State Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century, by Francis Fukuyama. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. xiii + 121 pages. Bibl. to p. 132. Index to p. 137. $21.

7or Arab democrats and their allies, disappointment is too familiar, as political openings have frequently been followed by reversals, setbacks, and renewed repression. Moments of reform are fleeting, their impact elusive. Yet even for grizzled veterans of democracy promotion in the Middle East, 2005 was a year of frustration.

Events early in the year - elections in Iraq, Syria's withdrawal of troops from Leba- non, electoral reform in Egypt, local elections in Saudi Arabia, elections in Palestine - were eagerly seized on by the Bush Administration as indicators of incipient democratic revolution, an "Arab spring," giving credence to its claims about the demonstration effects that were sure to follow regime change in Iraq. Pressure for reform seemed, finally, to be driving the Arab world toward a point where, finally, it might lose its dubious distinction as the only world region untouched by the wave of democratization that marked the end of the Cold War.

Yet, the excitement and promise quickly faded. Egypt's constitutional amendment permitting contested presidential elections was carefully engineered to protect the incum- bent from competition. It was, in any case, gutted in practice. Husni Mubarak defeated his main rival Ayman Nur by a mere 80 percentage points. Less than a quarter of registered voters bothered to go to the polls. Electoral outcomes in Lebanon and Palestine did not have catalytic effects, far less so municipal elections in Saudi Arabia that gave male voters the chance to select half the seats on local town councils. Despite the withdrawal of its troops, Syria remains a presence in Lebanon, and its government shows little inclination to reform in the face of sustained external pressure.' Mahmud 'Abbas' election as President of the Palestinian Authority in January 2005 temporarily improved the tenor of US-Israeli relations, but has not, to date, altered the determination of the government of Prime Min- ister Ariel Sharon to define Israel's borders unilaterally. Nor did it give 'Abbas the political standing to move quickly to implement an assertive program of political reform, or to confront the diffusion of military power in Palestinian society - a crucial prerequisite to the consolidation of a democratic Palestinian state. 'Abbas' "Altalena Moment" has come

1. Bassam Haddad, "Syria's Curious Dilemma," Middle East Report, No. 236 (Fall 2005).



MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL * 147

and gone. As a result, the possibilities for centralizing authority within electoral institutions and consolidating Palestinian democracy are remote.2

And then there's Iraq. Neither doomsayers nor cheerleaders have yet written the final word on Iraq's future. Its trajectory remains too unsettled to dismiss entirely the possibility that something approaching democracy will result from recent constitutional negotia- tions and parliamentary elections. Nor is it yet possible to conclude that Iraq is locked into a course leading ineluctably to sectarian violence, fragmentation, and a possible return to authoritarian rule - though too many steps down this path have already been taken.3

What is much clearer, however, one year after the "purple revolution" of January 2005, is the collapse of American expectations about what regime change in Iraq would mean for the region as a whole. Combined with daily reminders of the grinding violence that grips much of the country, the chaotic process of constitution building has underscored the fecklessness of Bush Administration claims about a democratic "domino effect" resulting from the invasion. Without question, neighboring states are learning from what they see in Iraq; the lessons they take away, however, are far removed from those imagined by the White House and the Pentagon during the run-up to war. These include a keen sense of the limits of American power. They also include, for Iran, a renewed appreciation for the value of deterrence in any confrontation between a weak state and a superpower.

Despite its auspicious beginnings, therefore, the past year did not produce a turning point in the struggle for political change in the Arab world. Instead, the evident limits of the "Arab spring" have reinforced the depressing pattern of half-step forward, half-step back that has defined the pace of democratization in the Middle East for at least two decades.

Nonetheless, we should be cautious about permitting our cynicism to run unchecked. As in the past, Arab regimes have maneuvered their way through a period of exceptional pressure. As in the past, they have prevented a moment of liberalization from blossoming into full-fledged democratic openings. Yet their victories have come at a cost. Like air- planes that suffer metal fatigue with each successful take-off, Arab regimes exhibit frac- tures and strains caused by the cumulative stress of holding an autocracy together under considerable pressure. Nowhere was this more evident in 2005 than in Syria, where the strains of coping with the fallout of the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri are increasingly visible. As the Syrian case suggests, the familiar feel of the past year's events can obscure how much conditions have changed since the early days of democracy promotion.

While keeping democracy at bay, Arab governments have conceded ground they once militantly defended. Whether to placate the United States, fend off the World Bank, or appear responsive to European states, Arab governments, including Syria and Egypt, have been compelled to address, and have thus helped to legitimize, norms of good gover-

2. In June 1948, Israel's Defense Forces attacked a ship, the Altalena, which had been hired by the Irgun to bring arms into Israel in violation of a truce. The use of force to impose the authority of the Israeli state over an armed militia was seen at the time as essential to the long-term consolidation of state power. In authorizing the attack, Israel's Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion wrote: "We must decide whether to hand over power to Begin or to order him to cease his separate activities. If he does not do so, we will open fire! Otherwise, we must decide to disperse our own army." A brief history of the episode can be found at http://wwwjewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/Altalena.html.

3. Peter Galbraith, "Last Chance for Iraq," New York Review of Books, Vol. 52, No. 15 (October 6, 2005). A more negative assessment can be found in the International Crisis Group's report, "Unmaking Iraq: A Constitutional Process Gone Awry," September 26, 2005.




nance, transparency, human rights, and accountability.4 These, in turn, have created frame- works around which domestic oppositions can mobilize, and build transnational ties that amplify their domestic influence. Signs of such mobilization - though small and concen- trated largely among elites - are increasingly visible, not least because the Internet helps to make them so. These changes remain stubbornly below the threshold of authoritarian collapse, much less full-fledged democratic transitions, yet they mark gradual shifts in the political balance that are slowly but persistently eroding the power of Arab autocrats.

THE LIMITS OF POLITICAL REFORM?

Although authoritarianism in the Arab world is still formidable, one year after the "Arab spring," it is the limits of reform and the durability of Arab autocracies that stand out, especially relative to changes in other world regions.5 These limits underscore the reality that democratization in the Middle East is less likely to occur through rapid, Eastern European-style mass uprisings than through the slow, patient chipping away at regimes that are both more adept and more broadly consolidated than is often acknowl- edged.6 They also remind us just how deeply resilient these governments have been, how effectively they have managed in responding to changes and pressures that have produced massive political transformations in virtually every other part of the world.

In the large and growing critical literature on democracy promotion, failure to secure political change is often linked to shortcomings in the way programs are organized and implemented. Yet this view both overestimates what democracy promotion can do, and underestimates the adaptability and resilience of Arab governments. Though often de- rided for their bumbling heavy-handedness, the capacity of Arab autocrats to contain and manage pressures for political change is far from trivial. Against significant odds, they have survived the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the loss of patronage and diplomatic support that it provided. They have largely repressed Islamist militants while effectively excluding their moderate counterparts from the political arena. They have navigated shifts in the international system that reduced global tolerance for authoritarianism, weakened norms of sovereignty on issues like human rights, and left them increasingly exposed to external sanctions. Although UN-sponsored Arab Human Development Reports have focused new attention on sweeping failures of governance, Arab regimes have fended off accountability for poor performance in development, education, employment, housing, medical care, technological innovation, and women's rights. Nor has the extraordinary investment that Western governments have made in democracy

4. See, for example, Katerina Delacoura, Engagement or Coercion? Weighing Western Human Rights Policies Toward Turkey, Iran and Egypt (London, UK: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 2003).

5. As Freedom House has recently reported, 86% of people in the Middle East live in "Not free regimes in which their basic political rights and civil liberties are fundamentally denied. By contrast, 32 percent of the rest of the globe's population lives under similarly repressive and closed societies.... The Middle East is the least free geographical region in the world." Freedom House, Freedom in the Middle East and North Africa (New York, Toronto, and Oxford, UK: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005), pp. 5-6.

6. This is not to suggest that shocks and ruptures, like the Hariri assassination and its aftermath, won't play a role in the erosion of authoritarian regimes. Even in these instances, however, the openings created may spur the reorganization of an authoritarian system of rule rather than democratization. See Thomas Carothers, Critical Mission: Essays on Democracy Promotion (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2004).




promotion, including at least $1 billion from the United States alone, produced the returns that might have been expected. Unlike the Ukraine, where funding from abroad supported civil society organizations that went on to lead the Orange Revolution, there is little evidence that similar kinds of capacities have been created in the Middle East. Even as civil societies become stronger across the Arab world, their presence in the political arena remains muted.7

Thus, three long years after the invasion of Iraq, the question of Arab democracy continues to cast a very long shadow over the Middle East. It looms not only over Arab governments, but hangs heavily over Washington as well, where the White House's dogged insistence that democracy must happen only deepens debate about why it hasn't. What accounts for the persistence of authoritarianism in the Arab world? What strategies might carve open space for political change? If, as the Bush Administration itself has argued, the Arab world is not doomed to an authoritarian future then what will it take to shift the region's political trajectory onto a democratic path? Coercive strategies of democratization via forced regime change have lost support among all but a shrinking group of die- hard conservatives. US-supported democracy promotion programs have had some posi- tive effects - though at a considerable cost to American taxpayers.8 Yet their ultimate aim remains frustratingly out of reach. How then can we account for the mixed track record of US efforts to promote democracy in the Middle East?

These questions are not new, but the Iraq War and the emphasis of the Bush Adminis- tration on democracy in the Middle East have given them new salience. In particular, the argument that democracy abroad is needed to ensure security at home has not only raised the stakes associated with nation building, but linked democracy promotion to US security interests more explicitly than at any time since the height of the Cold War. Not surprisingly, the urgency that now frames the question of Arab democracy is mirrored in the proliferation of op ed pieces, policy briefs, expert reports, blue ribbon task forces, and the other paraphernalia that routinely accompany the passage of a global superpower through the international system.

If much of this effort is directed toward Iraq and the implications of the Iraq War for other Arab states, it has also generated thoughtful reflection on processes of democracy promotion and democratization, and on the causes of persistent authoritarianism, by scholars and specialists on the Middle East, the rule of law, and democratic transitions. Notable in this regard are the writings of Thomas Carothers, Marina Ottaway, and other researchers associated with the Middle East Reform Initiative of the Carnegie Endowment for Interna- tional Peace, assembled in a recent collection, Uncharted Journey: Promoting Democracy in the Middle East. The reassertion of tight links between security and democracy has transformed the debate about nation-building and democracy promotion among conser-

7. The important distinction between strengthening civil society and strengthening political society is made effectively by Vickie Langohr, "Too Much Civil Society, Too Little Politics: Egypt and Liberalizing Arab Regimes," Comparative Politics, Vol. 36, No. 2 (January 2004), and Daniel Brumberg, "Liberal- ization Versus Democracy," in Thomas Carothers and Marina Ottaway (Eds.), Uncharted Journey: Promoting Democracy in the Middle East (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005), pp. 15-35.

8. Calculating the total cost of democracy promotion programs in the Middle East is no easy task given the complexity of funding streams that support them. Some figures are available in a recent report from the Council on Foreign Relations, In Support ofArab Democracy: Why and How. Report of an Independent Task Force (NewYork: Council on Foreign Relations, 2005), Appendix F See also Tamara Cofman Wittes, "The Middle East Partnership Initiative: Progress, Problems, and Prospects." Saban Center Middle East Memo, No. 5 (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 2004).




vatives as well. Francis Fukuyama's State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21Jt Century stands out as a useful contribution in an ongoing battle of ideas concerning the relationship between American conservatism and nation building in American foreign policy.

MAKING DEMOCRACY UNIVERSAL

In keeping with the conventions of the genre - analysis of current events designed to influence the direction of US policy - these works present themselves as self-consciously of the moment. They draw on and feed into the rhetoric of urgency, ferment, and turmoil that are often used to mark an issue as significant. Carothers and Ottaway, for example, title the introduction to Uncharted Journey, "The New Democracy Imperative." They begin the chapter by noting that the "issue of democracy in the Middle East has erupted." After years of neglect, it is now a topic that is "heatedly and ceaselessly" debated by policy-makers. Similarly, Fukuyama urges attention to the problem of state weakness as a "national and international issue of the first order," one that has acquired new importance because of the immediate security threats associated with state weakness.

This style is no doubt seen as helpful in grabbing the attention of crisis-saturated policy-makers. Yet in this instance, at least, it has unfortunate consequences. In particular, it obscures the extent to which today's debates about prospects for Arab democracy grow out of a much longer conversation concerning possibilities for collective self-governance outside the West. Despite their relentless focus on the present, these arguments have a past. And this history matters not only for putting current debates in perspective, but for understanding the fault lines that cut through them and, thus, for making sense of how the Middle East moved from a marginal position within democratization debates at the time of the first Gulf War, to the central position it occupies today. This past also matters for understanding the assumptions that lead Fukuyama to write a book in which the need for nation building coexists uneasily with classical neo-conservative reservations about whether nations can, in fact, be built.

Both the work of Fukuyama and of the Middle East Reform Initiative are anchored in conceptions about, and disagreements over, the possibilities for collective self-governance in the post-colonial world that extend back to the League of Nations, if not before. At the core of democracy promotion literature - even literature critical of the way it is being carried out at the moment - is the conviction that democracy can and should be promoted. Democratization, moreover, is seen largely - though not exclusively - as a matter of technique, of procedure, of program design and implementation. We can imagine the possibility of creating Democracy Without Democrats, for example, through the disci- plining effects that democratic procedures have on political actors, even those who are not, in principle, committed democrats.9 And while local contexts, such as Islam, might impede the smooth movement of democratic institutions and practices from one setting to another, these obstacles do not reflect an underlying incompatibility between local norms and democratic practices, or suggest limits to the possibilities for nation building and democratic governance.

It is not axiomatic, in this view, that if we get the policies right all else will follow. The authors in Uncharted Journey understand that techniques of democracy promotion reflect

9. Ghassan Salame, ed., Democracy Without Democrats? The Renewal of Politics in the Muslim World (London, UK: I.B. Tauris, 1994). A more recent and very creative extension of this general view can be found in Vali Nasr, "The Rise of Muslim Democracy," Journal of Democracy, Vol. 16, No. 2 (April 2005).




underlying ideas about how democracy works, and many of these, they argue, are deeply misguided when applied outside the United States. Hawthorne, for example, effectively debunks myths about the role of civil society in democratization, including, first, that "civil society activism can alone create a democratic opening," and second, "that civil society consists of latent democratic forces simply awaiting activation by Western do- nors." Similarly, Ottaway "cautions.. .against the assumption that by promoting women's rights the United States contributes to democratization of the Arab world..." (p. 116). These are valuable insights, and they deserve careful consideration. Unlike accounts that either dismiss prospects for Arab democracy, or see it simply as a matter of mechanics, the chapters in the Carothers and Ottaway volume occupy a productive, if critical middle ground. Nonetheless, the volume reflects a conviction about the possibilities for democratic change in the Arab world that has become increasingly widespread in recent years, even if, as Fukuyama's book makes clear, the idea generates considerable unease among American conservatives.

What is less visible in these accounts, as in much of the recent literature on democracy promotion, is a sense of just how recently democracy acquired the status of a universally accessible political form, where this view came from, and how it has altered understand- ings about prospects for democratic change in the Middle East. Nor does it convey just how precarious this notion is and how easily it could be undone, either by events in the Middle East or by changes within the American political arena.

The idea of collective self-governance as a universal model for the organization of politics has been a long time in the making, but became prominent in US foreign policy only with the post-war emergence of the United States as a global superpower and the closely related rise of modernization theory within the discipline of political science.'0 As Leonard Binder pointed out more than 40 years ago, in the middle of the 20th century democracy was widely viewed as an exceptional political form. To master it, states required extended periods of tutelage as mandates of Western powers, during which societies could be trained in its requirements.'1 Even this, moreover, represented a significant shift from an earlier conception in which societies that lacked the essential foundations for collective self-governance would gradually acquire them under the benign shelter of Western protectorates. By the 1950s, however, as stage-theories of economic and political development became prominent, democracy had become simply the final phase of a de- velopmental sequence through which all states, and all peoples, were expected to pass. As Daniel Lerner noted in his classic book on modernization in the Middle East, "[d]emocratic governance comes late, historically, and typically appears as a crowning institution of the participant society," but eventually it makes an appearance, even in the Arab world.'2

This conception of democracy as a universally accessible political form had decisive consequences for the study of the Middle East, and its echoes can be heard today. In the 1950s and 1960s, it led researchers to study the social and economic preconditions of democracy in the Middle East. In 1956, for example, economic historian Charles Issawi published a seminal article, "The Economic and Social Foundations of Democracy in the Middle East," that defined the core themes of what would grow to become a major indus-

10. Timothy Mitchell, "The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics," American Political Science Review, Vol. 85, No. 1 (March 1991), pp. 77-96.

11. Leonard Binder, The Ideological Revolution in the Middle East (New York: Wiley, 1964). 12. Daniel Lemer, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (Illinois: The

Free Press, 1958), p. 64. See also W.W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1960); and Leonard Binder, et. al., Crises and Sequences in Political Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964).




try, not only among regional specialists but in the social sciences more broadly: establish- ing the links between capitalism, development, and democracy."3 Pre-figuring the more prominent work of sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset1", Issawi argued that democracy had failed in the post-colonial Middle East because "the economic and social basis which it requires is as yet non-existent."' 5 Drawing on the experiences of Western European democracies and their offshoots (Australia, the United States, New Zealand), Issawi iden- tified the relevant preconditions as: "size of territory and population, level of economic development, distribution of wealth, industrialization, homogeneity of language and re- ligion, degree of education, and habit of cooperative association." 16

For the next decade or more, the idea of preconditions (influenced more by Lipset than by Issawi) animated the research of prominent Middle East specialists, including Manfred Halpern's work on the New Middle Class, which suggested that economic modernization in the region was beginning to create the social and economic foundations that might possibly produce a slow transition to democracy.'7 The general notion that increasing social and economic complexity - particularly processes of industrialization and class differentiation - would require more complex political forms was commonplace in the modernization theories that were widely applied to the Middle East during these years, even if the link between political complexity and democracy was sometimes implied rather than explicit.

AGAINST DEMOCRATIZATION

No less important, the idea of democracy as a universally accessible form also reso- nated within policy circles, and with far more significant consequences than the debates that roiled academia. By the 1970s, and during the Carter years (1977-1980) in particular, possibilities for nation building had emerged as a central battleground between Demo- crats and Republicans, including a still nascent neo-conservative movement that cut across party lines. President Jimmy Carter's interest in human rights and democracy had become a lightening rod for security hawks, and the critique of democracy promotion that resulted helped to consolidate the rejection of nation building as a core feature of contem- porary American conservatism.

The iconic statement of the emerging neo-conservative position was Jeane Kirkpatrick's article, "Dictatorships and Double Standards," that appeared in Commentary in 1979.18 In a sharp critique of the "Carter administration's foreign policy failure" and its "disastrous effects on the U.S. strategic position," Kirkpatrick singled out US support for "the replace- ment of moderate autocrats friendly to American interests with less friendly autocrats of extremist persuasion." The "collaboration" of the US in efforts to replace Shah Muhammad Riza Pahlavi of Iran and President Antonio Somoza of Nicaragua represented an alarming

13. Charles Issawi, "The Economic and Social Foundations of Democracy in the Middle East," International Affairs, Vol. 32, No. 1 (January 1956), pp. 27-42.

14. Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1960). See also Lipset, "Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy," TheAmerican Political Science Review, Vol. 53, No. 1. (March 1959), pp. 69-105.

15. Issawi, "The Economic and Social Foundations." 16. Issawi, "The Economic and Social Foundations." 17. Manfred Halpern, The Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and NorthAfrica (Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963). 18. Jeane Kirkpatrick, "Dictatorships and Double Standards," Commentary (November 1979), pp.

34-45.




and dangerous shift in US foreign policy. At the root of these policy blunders, however, were the modernization theories that had misled the administration into the false belief that democracy everywhere was not only possible, but near inevitable.

To reinforce the illegitimacy of these ideas, she tendentiously characterized the emphasis that scholars had earlier placed on the relationship between capitalism and democracy as evidence of their Marxist inclinations. In their view, Kirkpatrick tells us, "Democ- racy could function only in relatively rich societies with an advanced economy, a substan- tial middle class, and a literate population, but it could be expected to emerge more or less automatically wherever these conditions prevailed." From the vantage point of the late 1970s, she countered that, "this picture seems grossly oversimplified." The preconditions of democracy are not economic, but moral and cultural. Democratic values, moreover, are not created automatically, but require time to be learned and assimilated within a society: "Decades, if not centuries, are normally required for people to acquire the necessary disciplines and habits." Of course, sound institutions and economic development are needed as well, but these appear secondary in Kirkpatrick's worldview to the cultural dispositions that she viewed as essential for democratic development. Without them, support for regime change in the developing world will simply reduce America's standing by promoting anti-American extremists.

Thus, the appropriate target for US democratization policy is not right-wing dictatorships, which, given time, will develop an internal demand for democracy, but Communist societies. As she observes, in one of the more widely cited observations of the period: "Although there is no instance of a revolutionary 'socialist' or Communist society being democratized, right-wing autocracies do sometimes evolve into democracies - given time, propitious economic, social, and political circumstances, talented leaders, and a strong indigenous demand for representative government."

By the end of the following decade, and the spread of popular uprisings that swept Communist governments from power, the inaccuracy of this prediction would become stunningly clear. Yet by then, opposition to democracy promotion had become deeply embedded within the neo-conservative wing of the Republican Party. It became central to Republican critiques of the Clinton Administration, and advocates of this view rose to posi- tions of considerable power. It was in no small part opposition to Clinton's expansion of America's role in nation building that defined George W. Bush's 2000 election campaign.

The collapse of Communist regimes, with little evidence of emergent demand for democracy in the authoritarian Middle East, might have undermined the theoretical claims of neo-conservatives. Yet, it would take more than two decades, and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, before a Republican administration repudiated the Kirkpatrick position and embraced a far more radical conception of nation building, doing so precisely on the grounds that democracy should be seen, after all, as a universally accessible political form.

However, the intervening years were not easy ones for democracy advocates in the Middle East. Kirkpatrick's legacy, both in its emphasis on the normative underpinnings of democracy and on the primacy of strategic interests lingered in American relations with Arab governments. The failure of democracy to secure a foothold in the region undermined assumptions about its universality, and gave new life to culturalist arguments about Middle East exceptionalism, the incompatibility of Islam and democracy, and the lack of "disciplines and habits" in the Arab world that might support democratic change.

Despite hopeful indicators of political liberalization across the region in the late- 1980s, the Arab world thus remained marginal both to the democracy promotion efforts of the Clinton Administration and, within academia, to the growing literature on authoritarian breakdown and democratic transitions. Indeed, the exclusion of the Middle East from the study of emerging democracies led Michael Hudson, in an article published in this journal during the first Gulf War (1991), to castigate "[t]he editors of a recent four-volume




survey on democracy in developing countries" who "ignored the Arab world entirely." Noting that some 115 million people lived in Middle Eastern states that had been identi- fied by the Economist as showing "elements of pluralism," he asked whether "Orientalist stereotyping of Arabs, so evident in parts of American academia and the news media [had] blinded mainstream analysts to the possibilities of more participatory politics in this region."'9

In effect, Hudson's plea was to restore the sense of democracy as a universal possibility, to reject claims about the absence of cultural prerequisites, and to take seriously the signs of political change in the region - "remarkable rumblings of political liberalism and even democratization in the past several years." While skeptical about the value of US democracy promotion efforts, Hudson, recalling the earlier work of Issawi, Lipset, and Halpern, predicted that rising democratic demands, via the "process of developing a more effective civil society," would be "driven inexorably by the socioeconomic changes, even the painful ones, that are ubiquitous throughout the Arab world."

Yet this plea, which captured a more widely held view among regional specialists at the time, went unheeded both in policy circles and among social scientists. It was soon overtaken not only by the rise of post-Communist states as the focus of nation-building and democracy promotion efforts under President Bill Clinton, but by the rapid retreat of Arab regimes from their brief liberalization experiments - partly as a response to, but also fueling, the rise of militant Islamist movements. In the absence of Arab democrats, the focus of scholars and policy-makers alike shifted in technical and procedural directions. As noted above, they explored possibilities for the emergence of democracy without democrats, doing away altogether with a concern for preconditions.20 They also preferred, as Daniel Brumberg indicates, to promote liberalization rather than full-fledged democratization, in the hope of deepening the social, economic, and institutional foundations for eventual democratic change at some point in the future.2' With the election of President Bush in 2000, and the expectation that democracy promotion and nation building would soon be downgraded as priorities of US foreign policy, even these ambitions began to appear overdrawn.

NATION-BUILDING RED UX: BRINGING THE ARAB WORLD BACK IN

In the event, of course, things changed. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 upended the Bush Administration's approach to nation building and democratization. The ripple effects of this shift are still reverberating, both in the field of democracy promotion, and among conservatives in the United States. It would be hard, in fact, to overesti- mate the extent of the rupture in administration policy - and among neo-conservatives - that accompanied the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and the immersion of US forces in nation building on a massive scale in Afghanistan and Iraq.

19. Michael C. Hudson, "After the Gulf War: Prospects for Democratization in theArab World," The Middle East Journal, Vol. 45, No. 3 (Summer 1991), pp. 407-408.

20. Skepticism about the importance of economic development as a precondition of democracy has found empirical support. Based on a study of some 80 countries over 30 years, Przeworski and Limongi conclude that, "the emergence of democracy is not a by-product of economic development." Democracy is or is not established by political actors pursuing their goals, and it can be initiated at any level of economic development." Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi, "Modernization: Theories and Facts," World Politics, Vol. 49, No. 2 (January 1997), p. 177.

21. Brumberg, "Liberalization versus Demoracy."




Speaking at the National Endowment for Democracy in November 2003, President Bush explicitly associated the United States with the view that Kirkpatrick had worked to undermine. In its place, he adopted the perspective of a more radical wing of the neo- conservative movement, represented by Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith. "In many nations of the Middle East," he noted, "democracy has not yet taken root. And the questions arise: Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty? Are millions of men and women and children condemned by history or culture to live in despotism? Are they alone never to know freedom, and never even to have a choice in the matter? I, for one, do not believe it. I believe every person has the ability and the right to be free." Dismissing the cultural foundations of Kirkpatrick's view, he flatly rejected the assertion by "some skeptics of democracy.. .that the traditions of Islam are inhospitable to.. .representative government."

He rejected the strategic side of her argument, as well, declaring that, "sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe - because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty."22 It would be dangerous for America, he told his audience, to "main- tain the status quo." Addressing a British audience two weeks later, the President went even further. The West, he complained, had been too "willing to make a bargain, to toler- ate oppression for the sake of stability. Long-standing ties often led us to overlook the faults of local elites. Yet, this bargain did not bring stability or make us safe. It merely bought time, while problems festered and ideologies of violence took hold."23

Virtually overnight, the President turned his back on more than two decades of conservative doctrine. He committed himself and the US government, however reluctantly, to a view of democracy as a universally accessible model of governance, and to ensuring its promotion, above all, in the one region that had thus far proven most resistant to it: the Arab world.

To read the volumes by Carothers and Ottaway and by Fukuyama in this context is to encounter two very distinct reactions to the shifts that produced the United States' latest foray into the political transformation of the Middle East. For the former, the overarching concern is how to seize a moment of opportunity created by the Bush Administration to push the apparatus of democracy promotion toward a more encompassing conception of political change - a task they undertake by hammering home the limits of liberalization, the ineffectiveness of interventions that focus on procedures and mechanics, the impossi- bility of imagining that democratization can be pursued without ruffling the feathers of Arab governments, and the imperative of recognizing the seemingly obvious idea that the transformation of politics requires direct engagement with political change - not simply "capacity building" and other indirect strategies to secure the social or institutional preconditions for democracy. As the editors note in their conclusion, "to have a chance of success, democracy promotion efforts in the Middle East will require new approaches carefully tailored to the regional circumstances, as well as a willingness to go beyond low-risk indirect approaches to take on the harder, more central challenges of expanding the depth and breadth of political contestation and encouraging real distributions of power" (p. 251).

Like their intellectual predecessors, these authors are committed to the idea of democracy as a universally accessible model. Yet unlike them, and in contrast to their conservative counterparts, their impatience with the notion of preconditions clearly reflects the hard lessons of the past 40 years, both theoretical and practical. These include a keen

22. Speech at the Twentieth Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, Washington DC, November 6, 2003.

23. Speech at the Royal Banqueting House, London, November 19, 2003.




awareness of the resilience of autocracy in the Middle East and the capacity of Arab governments to exploit limited strategies of reformism to advance their own political aims. Their diagnoses come with a warning label: unless we can translate newfound enthu- siasm for democracy promotion in the Arab world into meaningful gains on the ground the moment will be lost; the old dynamic of half-step forward, half-step back will reassert itself.

For Fukuyama, the question of nation building poses a different set of problems, partly ideological and partly pragmatic. His response is twofold: first, to provide an intellectual rationale justifying conservative support for nation building in general and, second, to establish what, precisely, nation building can accomplish, seeking both to restore the core principles articulated by Kirkpatrick, and to provide an alternative to the radicalism that defines the Bush Administration's current approach.

In addressing the ideological question, Fukuyama endorses the strategic position of the Bush Administration: nation building is a priority because weak states threaten Ameri- can security. However, for Fukuyama, the task at hand is not nation building, per se, far less the naive pursuit of democratization, but the more limited and entirely instrumental job of strengthening states to ensure their capacity to contain the extremist ideologies that now threaten the United States, chief among them militant Islam. State-strengthening might seem perverse, he writes, in an era marked by a global trend toward reining in and shrinking the state, shifting functions it once performed to the market. Yet, it has become necessary today, for our own protection. Taking a page from the Bush Administration's pre-Iraq script, he writes that "[flor a while, the United States and other countries could pretend these problems [failed and weak states] were just local, but September 11 proved that state weakness constituted a huge strategic challenge as well. Radical Islamist terrorism combined with the availability of weapons of mass destruction added a major security dimen- sion to the burden of problems created by weak governance" (p. xi).

Fukuyama devotes a full chapter (one of three major sections of a volume that grew out of lectures delivered in early 2003) to the elaboration of this view. What his discussion underscores, however, is just how deep resistance to nation building runs among neo- conservatives - with all that this implies about the precariousness of current policies. Absent a commitment in principle to the possibilities for effective collective self-governance in developing states, the security argument becomes critical. Only by securitizing nation building, with the limited aim of improving state capacity, does US engagement with it become palatable. To his credit, Fukuyama is willing to confront aspects of conservative orthodoxy in identifying the sources of state weakness, concluding that neo-liberal programs of economic reform have mistakenly confused the weakening of state institutions with the strengthening of markets.24

To tackle the pragmatic question of what we can expect to accomplish in our pursuit of stronger states, Fukuyama takes a different tack. He presents a summary of current research on a wide range of issues relating to dimensions of stateness, development, and the impact of economic reform on state capacity, governance and legitimacy, and public administration, to determine the scope and limits of possibilities for improving governance in weak states. Here, however, his starting point departs from administration rhetoric to follow Kirkpatrick. Yet in the process, he reverts to the long-discredited language of the mission civilisatrice and the colonial mandate. The task of state building is urgent, but we should not expect to change norms and culturally embedded practices that play a large role in

24. In making this case, Fukuyama sounds less like a neo-con and more like the progressive political economist, Colin Leys, who offers much the same diagnosis in The Rise and Fall of Development Theory (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996).




determining the efficacy of state institutions. Nor should we imagine that there exist universal institutional models that can easily be exported beyond the contexts in which they originated.25 Instead, he argues, "[i]f we want to increase the institutional capacity of a less-developed country, we need to change the metaphor that describes what we hope to do. We are not arriving in the country with girders, bricks, cranes, and construction blue- prints, ready to hire natives to help build the factory we have designed. Instead, we should be arriving with resources to motivate the natives to design their own factory and to help them figure out how to build and operate it themselves" (p. 88). This unfortunate phrasing, with citizens transformed into natives, lends itself all too easily to an image of motiva- tional speakers streaming out of the country to energize rapt audiences abroad - at the expense of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), of course.

What this prescription makes clear, however, is the extent to which two competing conceptions about the possibilities for collective self-governance continue to define struggles over democracy promotion and nation building, with the Arab world at the center of these debates. The legacies of Lerner, on one hand, and Kirkpatrick, on the other, continue to shape how we think about possibilities for democracy in regions such as the Middle East. The call for a more comprehensive, more assertive, approach to democratization in the Arab world expressed in Uncharted Journey, with its more expansive assumptions about the possibilities for collective self-governance, still competes for the attention of policy-makers with the limited, securitized, and almost entirely instrumental conception of state building contained in Fukuyama's work.

Which of these, or what combination of their attributes, will prevail in US foreign policy debates will not be determined entirely in Washington, however. What happens over the course of this year in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere in the region will be no less important in determining how, and whether, the United States continues to accord priority to democracy promotion in the Middle East. Not least, it will be the efforts of Arab democrats themselves that will be decisive in shaping the trajectory of political change in the region. For the moment, however, and despite the Bush Administration's call for a more expansive, comprehensive approach, the Iraq experience is pushing US policy in the direction of a more strategic, more instrumental, and more limited vision of what it expects to accomplish in its pursuit of democracy abroad. And while this is certainly pragmatic, it is not likely to lift the shadow that still hangs over the question of Arab democracy.

Dr. Steven Heydemann, Director Center for Democracy and the Third Sector, Georgetown University

25. A similar view is expressed in Amitai Etzioni, "A Self Restrained Approach to Nation-Building by Foreign Powers," International Affairs, Vol. 80, No. 1 (2004), pp. 1-7.



In the Shadow of Democracy: Review Article

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