The Economist
Jul 13th 2013
Jul 13th 2013
ROUGHLY
two-and-a-half years after the revolutions in the Arab world, not a single
country is yet plainly on course to become a stable, peaceful democracy. The
countries that were more hopeful—Tunisia, Libya and Yemen—have been struggling.
A chaotic experiment with democracy in Egypt, the most populous of them, has
landed an elected president behind bars. Syria is awash with the blood of civil
war.
No
wonder some have come to think the Arab spring is doomed. The Middle East, they
argue, is not ready to change. One reason is that it does not have democratic
institutions, so people power will decay into anarchy or provoke the
reimposition of dictatorship. The other is that the region’s one cohesive force
is Islam, which — it is argued — cannot accommodate democracy. The Middle East,
they conclude, would be better off if the Arab spring had never happened at
all.
That
view is at best premature, at worst wrong. Democratic transitions are often
violent and lengthy. The worst consequences of the Arab spring — in Libya
initially, in Syria now — are dreadful. Yet as our special report argues, most
Arabs do not want to turn the clock back.
Putting
the cart before the camel
Those
who say that the Arab spring has failed ignore the long winter before, and its
impact on people’s lives. In 1960 Egypt and South Korea shared similar
life-expectancy and GDP per head. Today they inhabit different worlds. Although
many more Egyptians now live in cities and three-quarters of the population is
literate, GDP per head is only a fifth of South Korea’s. Poverty and stunting
from malnutrition are far too common. The Muslim Brotherhood’s brief and
incompetent government did nothing to reverse this, but Egypt’s deeper problems
were aggravated by the strongmen who preceded them. And many other Arab
countries fared no better.
This
matters, because, given the Arab spring’s uneven progress, many say the answer
is authoritarian modernisation: an Augusto Pinochet, Lee Kuan Yew or Deng
Xiaoping to keep order and make the economy grow. Unlike South-East Asians, the
Arabs can boast no philosopher-king who has willingly nurtured democracy as his
economy has flourished. Instead, the dictator’s brothers and the first lady’s
cousins get all the best businesses. And the despots — always wary of stirring
up the masses — have tended to duck the big challenges of reform, such as
gradually removing the energy subsidies that in Egypt alone swallow 8% of GDP.
Even now the oil-rich monarchies are trying to buy peace; but as an educated
and disenfranchised youth sniffs freedom, the old way of doing things looks
ever more impossible, unless, as in Syria, the ruler is prepared to shed vast
amounts of blood to stay in charge. Some of the more go-ahead Arab monarchies,
for example in Morocco, Jordan and Kuwait, are groping towards constitutional
systems that give their subjects a bigger say.
Fine,
some will reply, but Arab democracy merely leads to rule by the Islamists, who
are no more capable of reform than the strongmen, and thanks to the intolerance
of political Islam, deeply undemocratic. Muhammad Morsi, the Muslim Brother
evicted earlier this month by the generals at the apparent behest of many
millions of Egyptians in the street, was democratically elected, yet did his
best to flout the norms of democracy during his short stint as president. Many
secular Arabs and their friends in the West now argue that because Islamists
tend to regard their rule as God-given, they will never accept that a proper
democracy must include checks, including independent courts, a free press,
devolved powers and a pluralistic constitution to protect minorities.
This
too, though, is wrong. Outside the Arab world, Islamists — in Malaysia and
Indonesia, say — have shown that they can learn the habit of democracy. In Turkey
too, the protests against the autocratic but elected prime minister, Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, have more in common with Brazil than the Arab spring.
Turkey,
for all its faults, is more democratic today than it was when the army lurked
in the background.
The
problem, then, is with Arab Islamists. That is hardly surprising. They have
been schooled by decades of repression, which their movements survived only by
being conspiratorial and organised. Their core supporters are a sizeable
minority in most Arab countries. They cannot be ignored, and must instead be
absorbed into the mainstream.
That
is why Egypt’s coup is so tragic. Had the Muslim Brotherhood remained in power,
they might have learned the tolerance and pragmatism needed for running a
country. Instead, their suspicions about democratic politics have been
confirmed. Now it is up to Tunisia, the first of the Arab countries to throw
off the yoke of autocracy, to show that Arab Islamists can run countries
decently. It might just do that: it is on its way to getting a constitution
that could serve as the basis of a decent, inclusive democracy. If the rest of
the Arab world moves in that direction, it will take many years to do so.
That
would not be surprising, for political change is a long game. Hindsight tends
to smooth over the messy bits of history. The transition from communism, for
instance, looks easy in retrospect. Yet three years after the fall of the
Berlin Wall, Europe was overrun by criminal mafias; extremist politicians were
prominent in Poland, Slovakia and the Baltics; the Balkans were about to
degenerate into war and there was fighting in Georgia. Even now, most people in
the old Soviet bloc live under repressive regimes — yet few want to go back.
Don’t
hold back the tide
The
Arab spring was always better described as an awakening: the real revolution is
not so much in the street as in the mind. The internet, social media, satellite
television and the thirst for education — among Arab women as much as men —
cannot co-exist with the deadening dictatorships of old. Egyptians, among
others, are learning that democracy is neither just a question of elections nor
the ability to bring millions of protesters onto the street. Getting there was
always bound to be messy, even bloody. The journey may take decades. But it is
still welcome.
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