Washington is pushing for democratisation in the Middle East on the grounds that authoritarianism fosters the terrorism that threatens its security. Is this claim credible and can the Middle East be democratised from without?
Democratisation from without will only produce instability unless the internal conditions for it have matured. Arguably, the spread of mass literacy, the growth of salaried middle and working classes, and the rise of new capitalist classes wanting rule of law have put the Middle East at the level of social development where democracy is possible. But actualizing democratization requires political action. "Democratization from below" would require these classes to form and alliance to demand it from the state. They have not, however, yet attained enough economic independence of the state to risk this while the capitalist class relies on the authoritarian state to impose the reductions in wages and worker's rights on which it makes investment conditional. Authoritarian rulers could initiate "democratization from above" but they must want or need to do so and believe they have the legitimacy to survive in power. Having suffered declines in the rent (aid, oil revenues) needed to service their regimes' patronage networks, authoritarian elites have considered appeasing their publics by substituting some political rights for dwindling economic entitlements. Also, the new generation of Middle East elites, socialised in a period of democratic advance, have lost confidence in the legitimacy of authoritarian rule. These factors have driven elites to experiment with limited political liberalization which is particularly designed to appease the capitalist class, while retaining intact sufficient authoritarian powers to advance economic liberalization against popular resistance. Full democratization, however, has been obstructed by elites' lack of confidence that they have the legitimacy to survive it.
One source of the legitimacy deficits they suffer is the lack of a secure mass identification with many of the regions "artificial" states and the consequent threat that political mobilisation on the basis of continued powerful loyalties to sub and supra-state identities will result in communal strife, the rise of political Islam and civil war, as the cases of Lebanon, Algeria and Iraq demonstrate. Another root of the legitimacy deficit in some regimes, particularly Egypt and Jordan, is their foreign policies. In the latter cases, the special combination of separate peace treaties with Israel and close alliances with the US (at a time when Washington is seen as the enemy of the Arabs and Islam), deprives them of the national legitimacy that would allow them to deepen democratisation; to the extent they open space for political mobilisation, it inevitably takes an anti-American/anti-Israeli form incompatible with their foreign policies and hence is reversed—for these regimes seem to value the rent the US still provides them over legitimacy at home. Only if an equitable settlement for the Palestinians is reached and the Americans exit Iraq would American alignment cease to be de-legitimising for Arab regimes. Democratisation under American conquest, patronage or pressure appears to be a non-starter.
Finally, it is very debatable whether it is authoritarianism , per se, that fosters anti-American terrorism since, while most Middle East governments are authoritarian, the 9/11 terrorists were disproportionately recruited from regimes aligned with the US (Egypt and Saudi Arabia) while countries opposed to Washington (Iran, Iraq, Libya Syria), were hardly represented. This suggests that it is the pro-US foreign policy of authoritarian regimes that is the decisive factor in generating anti-American terrorism. What democratisation would do is allow the public expression of this anti-Americanism in ways that could overturn their pro-American foreign policies.
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