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Can Middle East Political Reform Survive the American Embrace?
Michael C. Hudson
Published in 2004
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Abridgement of a working paper presented to the Middle East Conference Group workshop on “The Rejuvenated Project of Reform and Democratization in the Middle East” at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, September 4, 2004. The full text, with references, may be found on the Center’s website at http://ccas.georgetown.edu. Opinions expressed are those of the author alone and not the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies.
President George W. Bush’s recent utterance at the Republican Party Convention on America’s policy to promote “the transformational power of liberty” in the Middle East may appear to most people in the Middle East as simplistic, cynical, or impossible to achieve. But when the world’s “only remaining superpower” decides to do something in a particular part of the world, people should pay attention—especially those who live there. So it deserves serious appraisal. To that end I would like to pose five questions about the US administration’s Middle East reform policy.
1. By what logic will the establishment of liberal democracies eliminate or reduce “terrorist” activity?
Putting the matter another way, is authoritarianism the principal incubator of what the president calls “terror” and what the bi-partisan 9/11 Commission Report designates as “Islamist terrorism”?
One must take this proposition with a grain of salt. It is true that Usama bin Laden and his associates singled out the authoritarian regime in Saudi Arabia as one of their complaints. But they also insisted that some 75 years of Western domination of the Islamic heartland was an essential grievance. If Saudi Arabia had been a liberal democracy, but America and the “West” still dominated that country (even maintaining military bases) and the region in general, would the “terrorist movement” not have emerged, or at least failed to gain a foothold? Was bin Laden’s problem with Saudi Arabia that it was authoritarian, or that its rulers behaved “un-Islamically,” especially by consorting with the evil United States? Ironically, both President Bush and bin Laden appear to put great store in freedom: but Bush’s freedom is freedom from terrorists and tyrants, while bin Laden’s is freedom from Western (American) hegemony.
Another difficulty is that authoritarian regimes in the region—many of them friendly to the US—engaged in brutal struggles to eliminate what they saw as Islamist terrorist threats to their own regimes. The United States offered at least tacit encouragement to the regimes in Algeria, Egypt, and Tunisia, to crack down on these opposition movements. The US, as Fawaz Gerges has demonstrated,
was quite ambivalent about encouraging indigenous Islamist political organizations to participate in the limited liberalization programs that certain countries were undertaking.
We will not dwell on the point that the US has at various times supported Islamist organizations committed to armed struggle against regimes or rival great powers.
It might be objected that we have construed the American “liberal transformation” hypothesis too narrowly. It is not entirely clear from official pronouncements what the actual dimensions of reform are. There is no doubt that “freedom” is the core concept. Mention is also made of “democracy,” but not as frequently as “freedom.” This leaves open the possibility that the US might accept in Iraq, for example, a regime that is “free” of Saddam Hussein, but whose “democracy” might be relatively muted—including a liberal, pro-American “center” but excluding nationalist or Islamist “extremists.” There is a broader interpretation of reform that emphasizes economic as well as political freedom. Here the proposition is thatliberal free market reform will energize stagnant economies and raise the quality of life to such an extent that terrorist behavior will be muted. This crude economic determinism seems out of place in a conservative American administration, yet it seems to have broad resonance. But one might ask: if the unemployment rate in a country like Morocco is, let us say, 20 per cent, would we eliminate the some 400 “terrorists” the government says are currently at large by reducing it to 10 per cent? Five per cent?
2. Does the US have the capabilities, and the will, to dismantle the authoritarian political systems of the region and replace them with stable liberal democracies?
The economies of underdeveloped countries are not easily upgraded to “middle class” status. The long history of American foreign aid and investment programs, not to mention those of the World Bank, the IMF, and other wealthy countries, suggests that economic uplift is an extremely slow process. Even the relatively wealthy oil economies of the Middle East display many aspects of underdevelopment which might contribute to alienation and political radicalism. America’s vast foreign aid program in Egypt has neither raised Egypt substantially out of poverty nor created conditions that would erode political authoritarianism.
In his speech to the Republican Party Convention, President Bush mentioned his goal of making Iraq “a vibrant, successful democracy at the heart of the Middle East,” that would stimulate a benign domino effect of democratization throughout the region. If the US war in Iraq proves anything, it is that it is easier to depose a tyrant than to create in his place a “vibrant, successful democracy.” Perhaps we need more time; but will a major American military presence in Iraq over the next ten years or longer (which many experts in Washington are predicting) lead to such an outcome as long as most Iraqis maintain their negative attitudes toward the American occupation?
Furthermore, the American will to reform Arab autocracies (friendly ones anyway), especially after September 11, 2001, and Washington’s war on terrorism, is tempered by security concerns. Arab governments have seized on the current circumstances to tighten, rather than loosen, their domestic political controls. In view of the Bush administration’s own contraction of political freedoms through the USA Patriot Act, its credibility in urging liberal reforms on others understandably is open to doubt.
3. What might be the implications of successful transformation: will new liberal-democratic regimes serve American interests?
To answer this question, we begin by invoking that ubiquitous Chinese proverb: beware of what you ask for; you might get it. In the Arab world, reformers who are working for political liberalization and democracy very often also strongly oppose certain American policies in the region. They ask: if the regimes in countries with close US ties, such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, and Yemen (to name a few) were genuinely free and democratic, would they permit American military bases and many other facilities that buttress the American strategic hegemony in the region, especially while the US military is occupying Iraq and the administration is turning a blind eye to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories? Public opinion polls from across the region offer devastating evidence of the broad popular antipathy toward the US.
4. What would an empirical examination of US reform efforts in the region so far reveal in the way of successes or failures?
These skeptical comments notwithstanding, it should not be assumed that the US is totally incapable of promoting liberal reforms in the region. Certainly there have been no “transformations” of the kind President Bush is hoping for, but there have been modest accomplishments. Some have been the result of diplomatic pressure, or “jaw-boning.” In their book on legislatures and democratic reform in the Arab world, Abdo Baaklini, Guilain Denoeux, and Robert Springborg recount how the US embassy in Kuwait pressured the ruling family to reinstitute democratic procedures after American and other forces had expelled the Iraqis from that country. They also report instances of American government pressure on Egypt in the 1990s to correct electoral irregularities. The US expressed such severe criticism of Egypt’s jailing of the prominent reformer Saad Eddin Ibrahim that he was eventually released; but this was accomplished at the cost of angering the Egyptian political establishment over “highhanded foreign interference.” Governments in Yemen and Jordan, anticipating American criticism, have undertaken modest relaxations of their authoritarian practices. There have also been a number of successful
American-funded initiatives of a technical sort. Programs, for example, to upgrade the infrastructure of the Lebanese parliament, and to promote voter-education programs for women in Yemen, presumably have yielded positive results without eliciting accusations of American interference in local politics.
That said, it is worth quoting the conclusions of Sheila Carapico (Middle East Journal, summer 2002), who has studied US foreign aid and democratization projects: "On the other hand, foreign funding for explicitly political projects raised the same kinds of doubts and suspicions as they would, and have, in the United States. The nonappearance of Islamist and Arab nationalist institutions among scores of recipients of democratization funds seemed to verify allegations of ideological bias. More than a few targets of feminist consciousness-raising felt patronized, and joined their male colleagues in complaining that foreigners with little understanding of political realities controlled project purse-strings."
5. How do local reformers feel about America's reform agenda?
This is what we might call the “kiss of death” question. Americans may not know that there has been a movement for political liberal reform in the Arab world going back to at least the early 1980s. For some examples, see the substantial output of Beirut’s Center for Arab Unity Studies on issues of democratic development, civil society, and political Islam. Long before the neo-conservatives of the Bush administration discovered that promoting “freedom” might diminish the terrorist threat to America, indigenous reformers were grappling with these issues,albeit often in a hostile political environment.
Witness the frustration of these reformers, then, when the United States, whose policies in the region are so despised, moves in to co-opt the domestic reform agenda. While many local NGO and civil society groups have welcomed support (direct or indirect) from the US, they have also been acutely aware that their own standing could suffer from the association. To quote Carapico again:
Meanwhile talented researchers grappled with the ethical implications of Western funding for projects critical of Arab governments and especially the Palestinian Authority. Furthermore, when their own governments used external fi nancing as a pretext for censorship and censure, external patrons offered little recourse. Weighing the pros and cons of foreign funding at the turn of the century, several prominent groups and individuals had already concluded that the fi nancial benefi ts were not worth the political risk.
It is virtually impossible for Arab reformers not to question the bona fi des of the US government at the present juncture. Reluctantly, many of them recognize that America has the ability to influence local political affairs in a (limited) liberal direction, even if for entirely wrong reasons. At the same time, it is hard to find an Arab reformer who does not believe that the US today is part of the problem, not the solution, The prominent Swiss Muslim intellectual Tariq Ramadan, whose US visa was recently revoked, thus denying American students the freedom to listen
to an important Muslim voice, captures the ambiguity of the reformers’ situation (NYT, 1 Sept 04):
I believe Muslims can remain faithful to their religion and be able, from within pluralistic and democratic societies, to oppose all injustices. I also feel it is vital that Muslims stop blaming others and indulging in victimization. We are responsible for reforming our societies. On the other hand, blindly supporting American or European policies should not be the only acceptable political stance for Muslims who seek to be considered progressive and moderate. In the Arab and Islamic world, one hears a great deal of legitimate criticism of American foreign policy. This is not to be confused with a rejection of American values.
A Concluding Thought
We cannot ascertain whether Arab political reform can survive the American embrace simply by examining the American side of the equation. As noted, the political reform movement in the Arab world has indigenous roots. Political scientists working on the Middle East have observed substantial local challenges to the region’s entrenched authoritarianism. In hindsight, perhaps some of their early analyses were overly optimistic; but most would contend that the reform currents are still signifi cant and perhaps irreversible. But can they survive the American “kiss of death?” While Washington’s “helping hand” can facilitate reforms in a small way, its unpopular policies are undermining indigenous reform efforts in a large way and providing unintended support for radical Islamist and nationalist currents.
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