Friday, Nov 23, 2007

Gulf News

Last Tuesday, Jordanians cast their votes in the third general elections since King Abdullah II succeeded his father in 1999.

For a variety of reasons the elections were described as the least democratic since the resumption of parliamentarian life in 1989. Many have used the occasion to revive the classical orientalist assumption that Islam and democracy are incompatible and that Muslim countries have natural resistance towards the electoral process.

Indeed, the relationship between Islam and democracy remains controversial, and studies have reached opposite conclusions.

Yet, in most cases, scholars and researchers have exerted limited effort to make a clear distinction between the socioeconomic conditions of each country in the Muslim world and Islam as the dominant religion and culture in these countries.

In addition, part of the confusion is created by the deliberate concentration on selected cases to deduce general conclusions.

Research has focused either on particular countries or subcategories such as Arab countries which are not representative of majority Muslim states. Indeed, none of the four most populous Muslim countries - Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Turkey - is Arab.

Even when these factors, or some of them at least, are taken seriously by some scholars, the conclusion would in most cases be dismissive, i.e. Arab countries are not mature yet to embrace democracy.

"The likelihood of the Arab world producing a fully democratic regimes in the next 10 to 15 years is remote; it enjoys none of the recognised prerequisites for sustaining democracy: its elites are not committed to democracy, its population is not homogeneous, its national institutions are extremely weak and its per capita GDP is closer to $1,500 than the $5,500 commonly viewed as the democratic tipping point," one American scholar argued recently.

Worse still, after the US's ill-fated venture in Iraq many Western analysts started to warn that the transition to democracy in the Arab world would almost certainly lead to the disintegration of state institutions and that whole countries in the region would slip into chaos and inter-confessional violence.

Evolution

Clearly, this argument tries not only to demonstrate that the prevailing socioeconomic conditions in the Arab world are not right for democratic evolution but warns against taking the path of democracy also.

In fact, one would in most cases agree that the environment in the Arab world is not perfect for democracy promotion but would on the other hand expect from Western scholars in particular to help create the right conditions instead of dismissing the idea of Arab democracy all together.

One would also accept this argument had it been supported by facts and based on solid grounds. On the contrary, this argument sounds spurious and carries no real substance.

For instance, if Arab elites are not committed to democracy, as it is sometimes argued, we truly don't know how much commitment was there among the Portuguese or the Spanish elites during the transition to democracy in these two countries in the mid 1970s.

In addition, neither homogeneity nor GDP can explain why poor and heterogeneous India has become the world's largest democracy.

The lack of democracy in the Arab world can only be explained in terms of the West's reluctance to support and help Arab democrats as it once did in South and East Europe and many other places around the world.

Having argued that, Jordan's general elections could have been more democratic, had there been enough outside pressure to create the right conditions.

Dr Marwan Kabalan is a lecturer in media and international relations, Faculty of Political Science and Media, Damascus University, Syria.

Gulf News 2007. All rights reserved.