DAR AL HARB/ISLAM: LITTLE CHANCE OF AN 'ARAB' (MOSLEM) DEMOCRACY

History offers little chance for Arab democracy
Regional, Tribal Influences Still Dominate
Matthew Fisher, National Post

JERUSALEM -In an absorbing discourse last week, one of Israel's greatest thinkers, Shlomo Avineri, sketched out the bleak history of democracy in the Middle East and what he called Palestine.

This history explained why the 74-year old Polish-born intellectual is deeply skeptical that it will take root any time soon except, curiously, perhaps in Iran, which at the moment is threatening Israel with nuclear annihilation.

After noting that Iran is not, of course, Arab, and that the ideas of the current government repel him, Avineri told a small group of foreign journalists that Iran can nevertheless be defined as a "civil society" because it holds elections including presidential runoffs, that women can drive, vote and sit in a parliament that is not controlled by the president.

This is not true of the Arab League. Big or small, monarchy or republic, not one of its 21 states has taken many step towards democracy except Lebanon, which has what might be described as a non-functioning party system.

Why, Avineri asked rhetorically, has there been monumental political change in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and eastern Europe over the past 20 years while the Middle East has been immune to the trend?

"This is not because of Islam. That is a total red herring," the usually soft-spoken emeritus professor of political science at Hebrew University thundered scornfully.

"Turkey has industrialized, is democratic and has an Islamic-based party. Bangladesh and Indonesia are more-or-less free countries. In Iran there is Islamic representation and there are political debates."

What is absent in the Middle East is a history of democracy. There has been no inspirational figure such as Ataturk, who forged modern democratic Turkey out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. As a result there have been no democratic building blocks for Arab nations to copy.

"Those countries in eastern Europe that became democratic such as the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary, had had long democratic traditions before communism," Avineri said. "There was no such democratization in Russian because it had had a long history of authoritarian regimes."

Instead of democracy, what Arab countries have are pre-modern institutions where tribal and regional allegiances are paramount, the British-educated academic said, citing the example of Iraq. "There was a history of Sunni hegemony because the British put them in power," he said. After Saddam was overthrown the Shia-majority used the country's first elections to come to power, but neither Iraq's majority nor its minority knew how to behave in a democracy with chaos and carnage being the grim result.

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1) History offers little chance for Arab democracy