A COSSA Congressional Briefing

TRANSFORMING THE MIDDLE EAST:

The Future for Democracy and Economic Growth

 

 

Within the past two years, the current Administration and others in U.S. leadership positions have talked about transforming the entire Middle East into a bastion of democracy, with the war in Iraq serving as a jump-start for such a transformation.  Even with seemingly growing global support for more democratic institutions, many important questions remain about the nature of this transition in the Middle East.  In light of this ongoing discussion, COSSA invited three distinguished social scientists to Capitol Hill for a congressional briefing on July 18 entitled, “Transforming the Middle East: The Future for Democracy and Economic Growth.”

 

COSSA Executive Director Howard Silver opened the seminar by setting forth some of the pressing questions that persist in debates about building democratic institutions in that region of the world: “Are the people of the region truly ready for the transition?  Can the governments accept the challenges of democratic rule and will the changeover be peaceful?  How will economic change affect democracy and vice-versa?” 

 

Middle East Public Opinion Widely Favors Democracy

 

Mark Tessler, a professor of political science and vice provost for international affairs at the University of Michigan, began the session by outlining some of his recent findings on public opinion in the Arab world.  When conducting studies of public opinion, he said, one of the most important considerations is determining whose opinion will yield the most illuminating results:  “There’s been a lot of research in political science and other fields…about what it takes to initiate a democratic transition, to sustain a transition to democracy, to consolidate that transition and have democracy survive.  Certainly what elites do, institution building, and all of those things that concern the government and the leadership are very important.  But all the literature shows that what ordinary men and women think is important as well.  It’s important that people support democracy; that people value democracy.”  Tessler went on to say that his “findings are extremely clear.”  In spite of the drawbacks to democracy and regardless of the questions that were asked, “[a]cross all the countries, there is broad support for democracy.”  In fact, 85 to 90 percent of people in all of the nations Tessler surveyed expressed their belief that democracy was the best system of governance for their country.  He also asked: Does religion play a part in views of democracy?  “The answer to that in every single case is no…The minority who don’t favor democracy do not have different views and are not different” with respect to religion, he pointed out.  The only explanatory variable was education:  “People who are better educated are more likely to want democracy and they’re more likely to want secular democracy than democracy with Islam — although the difference really isn’t all that big.”

 

 Tessler’s research also attempted to investigate the linkages between Middle Eastern public opinion on the subjects of both democracy and terrorism.  He found that terrorism flourishes “…to the extent that it finds support among the population.”  He went on to summarize several studies conducted among Palestinians, which indicated that when terrorism declined, it was not necessarily due to greater Israeli security, but rather because support for terrorism among ordinary Palestinians went down.  The data indicate that in the Arab world, “overwhelmingly, people do not support terrorism.  They do not express approval for these things,” he argued.  “But there is a meaningful, a reasonably significant minority that does express support…And we know from the literature that terrorism is likely to be more prevalent when there is a constituency,” Tessler added. 

 

 In investigating the indicators that might predict favorable attitudes toward terrorism, Tessler declared that many of the most obvious variables such as religion, gender, age, and culture had little or no explanatory power.  There were only two factors that mattered, according to his findings.  The first is views of American policies.  He explained that in these countries, “to the extent that you have a negative judgment about American policy, you’re more likely to have a favorable attitude toward terrorism.”  The second explanatory variable was dissatisfaction with current political circumstances.  When “people are discontent with their political circumstances,” which was especially the case in his studies of Algeria, “then there is support for terrorism,” he contended. 

 

 But according to Tessler, another looming question that needs to be addressed is: given the wide-ranging support for democracy in the Middle East, do the people there see democracy through the same lens as we do? Do they support secular government and possess democratic values, for example?  Furthermore, “just because there is broad support for democracy doesn’t automatically mean that these societies…have all the values that come along with being a supportive democracy,” he added.  Tessler found that “close to half of the people who expressed very strong support for democracy, said they want democracy in their country, and said they think democracy is the best political system when they’re given a range of alternatives, nonetheless convey that they want Islam to play a major role in political life,” which was not surprising.  But significant disparities remained about the logistics of involving religion in political life among Sunni and Shi’a Muslims —  ranging from an almost completely secular system to a more strict Islamic model.  He also argued that the most salient point to emerge from these observations is that “strong support for democracy, clear as it is and important as it is, doesn’t automatically mean support for secular democracy.” 

 

 Political Reforms Can Make Way for Economic Change

 

 Tarik Yousef, assistant professor of economics in the School of Foreign Service and the Shaykh Al-Sabah Chair in Arab Studies in the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University, began his presentation by giving an overview of transitions that the Middle East has undergone since World War II.  As with the other panelists, he posed several questions that proved to be important in how we look at these changes, as well as characterizing the general direction in which the Arab world is headed:  “…what role does democracy play in this?  What role do attitudes play in this?  What are the set of obstacles that are there and how are we likely to overcome them or perhaps fail to do so?”

 

 Yousef pointed out that “some profound changes have taken place in the Middle East since the year 1950, since the year 1980, since the year 1990, and the challenges of today and of the next ten to fifteen years are very different from the challenges of the previous forty to fifty years.”  Since World War II, he argued, expectations and norms have been perpetuated that place the state at the center of public life as the guarantor of well-being, health, and income by allowing it to dominate the labor markets, product markets, and economic policy decisions.  However, Yousef observed, since the mid-1980’s and early 1990’s, countries in the Middle East have faced an array of economic challenges having to do with what the state could (or failed to) deliver in light of labor markets, high education levels, and an already swelling population.  The “condition we may be facing in the region or whatever resistance to economic change is a byproduct of recent circumstances,” he said, adding that “it may have nothing to do with innate beliefs or norms about what an Arab is or who a Muslim is.”  But ultimately, in looking at the nature of the changes that went on during this period, Yousef and other researchers were encouraged because it was clear that change was indeed possible in the region.  “You don’t have to remake societies, reengineer people to bring about the kind of change that we think is good for them and perhaps in the interests of the U.S.,” he argued. 

 

 As of right now, Yousef explained, the “number one headache” in the region is creating jobs, advancing economic growth, and unlocking the rigidity of the current systems.  Despite many attempts at reform, very little has changed and the “cracks in the system” associated with poverty, income, and unemployment have become wider and more complex in the past two decades.  He pointed out that “the list of potential solutions for this region’s problems are actually well known.  We have been repeating them, repackaging them, representing them to the region for a very long time.  It is about moving from state domination to private sector domination; moving from oil-dependent and highly volatile economies to more stable and diversified ones; and moving from closed and protected economies to more open economies.”  While attempts at reform have been made, the pace has been slow, and in order to succeed, he argued, the region must go beyond economic solutions to perpetuate an open dialogue about what people in the region want.  Yousef observed that many of those outside of the region who have tried to expedite these reforms have remained blind to the consequences of the political environment:  “We convinced ourselves, even in Washington, that somehow by sitting across from a minister or from a government official in charge of a particular line of work, and getting him to sign a piece of paper saying, ‘we will do this, we will promise to do this,’ that this will somehow get the job done.  It didn’t.  That is why we saw the reversal and the partial, incomplete, and extremely hesitant base of reforms.”  He went on to add that  “[y]ou need political reforms and government reforms to permit you to do the kind of economic reforms that are required in the future, not the other way around.”

 

In conclusion, Yousef warned that skyrocketing oil prices and the dearth of incentives that those prices often bring about in the region “may undermine this decade again and would force one to write ten years later, an article saying ‘another lost decade for the Middle East.’”  In order to avoid this, political openness and transparency must be encouraged in a real way, and those hoping to transform the Arab world into a more democratic place will have to move the issue to the top of their agenda.

 

 Defining Democracy

 

Lisa Anderson, dean of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia and author of several books and articles on Arab nationalism and democratic reforms in the Middle East, concluded the session by fleshing out some of the finer distinctions western nations must make in their efforts to help democratize the region.  After the Cold War, she pointed out, the preponderance of the Middle East was ignored for the most part, while the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo peace negotiations and rebuilding the former Soviet Union took center stage.  Throughout this period, America worked cooperatively with the autocracies and monarchies in the Arab world to serve our interests, but as Anderson explained, “the failure of the Oslo Process, rising oil prices, and most importantly, September 11^th, suggested that we needed to revisit the assumption that autocratic regimes would serve American purposes.”  Social scientists entered the fray by arguing that democracies are less likely to go to war with one another, further fueling the theory that more democratic regimes would better serve U.S. interests, she pointed out.  And while in the long run, Anderson agreed with the general principle that democracies foster peace, she stipulated that “democracy” and “democratization” are two distinct and separate things in the short run, and that “in fact, the process of democratization is associated with heightened levels of conflict, particularly in societies where you have ethnic heterogeneity.” 

 

While a large segment of the population in this region aligns themselves in favor of democratic regimes, it is difficult to stimulate democratic reforms from the outside without better guidelines by which to do so, she argued.  Most democracies appear out of crises such as war, economic failure, and the leading factor — collapse of previous governments.  All of these, Anderson observed, are domestic impulses that stimulate change from within.  Like Tessler, she  argued that despite all of the most obvious factors that would be likely to affect democratic transitions, very few of them were actually significant predictors.  In fact, the only truly significant factor that Anderson found was the need to have a minimal consensus as to the social definition of the community in question and consequently, who the proposed democratic institutions would encompass.  For example, nations wracked by civil war have been consistently unsuccessful with democratization, she argued, while countries such as Tunisia and Egypt may be more ripe for democratic transitions because of their more cohesive sense of community.

 

Anderson went on to draw another fine distinction between western definitions of democracy and what it means to the Middle Eastern nations.  “I think we need to define what we mean by democracy very, very carefully,” she said, adding that otherwise, “we will find that 90 percent of the people in the region agree with us.  Everybody likes democracy.  You know, it is the apple pie of the world.  But in fact, we’re talking about very different things.”  Using democratic reforms as tools to promote economic development or peace, for example, is not necessarily equivalent to valuing or promoting democracy itself, she contended.  Anderson went on to ask, “do we care more about war and economic development or do care about democracy?”  Furthermore, anti-Americanism and anti-westernization are also two different sentiments, she argued, only the latter of which may determine views of democracy itself.

 

Overall, our expectations in the region should be realistic, Anderson explained.  Not only do we need to promote elections, but we need to promote overall ideals of democratic accountability.  As she pointed out, “you can have undemocratic elections, and we have to therefore think about whether we’re more interested in the appearance of elections or  accountable government…”  According to Anderson, part of this effort involves western politicians ditching the expectation that reforms will be swift enough to tally them on a list of accomplishments in time for Election Day, as well as western nations being slower to take credit for democratic victories.

 

To request a copy of an edited transcript of the proceedings, contact cossa@cossa.org.