The Spirit of Democracy, page 35
Despite a lackluster economic performance, Wade was able to mobilize support. According to one leading activist, his primary instrument has been corruption—co-opting religious figures, civil society leaders, local administrators, military officers, and opposition members of parliament with money, loans, diplomatic passports, and other favors. Now, it is alleged, the octogenarian president is preparing to hand power to his chosen successor—his son.59 “He has destroyed all the institutions, including political parties. He has taken opposition with him and manipulated the parliament,” the activist told me. “People are so poor and Wade controls everything. If you need something, you have to go with him.” The reaction from Europe and the United States (without whose aid Wade’s government could hardly function) has been muted. The activist lamented, “We expected more from the donors,” referring to the defense of principles, not the gift of money.60
In Central and Eastern Europe, particularly among the new members of the European Union, there is a strong sense of inevitability to democracy: the costs of defecting from democracy would be too great to permit a return to authoritarian rule. African states, however, are far from this pragmatic level of democratic consolidation. The fact that military rule has virtually disappeared from the continent does not mean that new coups are unthinkable, or that once they seize power, new strongmen will not—as the young junior officer Yahya Jammeh did in the Gambia— “regularize” their status by exchanging the uniform for traditional dress and forming a domineering party. Thirteen years after the then-twenty-nine-year-old lieutenant seized power in a military putsch in 1994, Jammeh was reelected in 2006 amid massive fraud, with foreign aid still providing half the government budget. If international donors cannot get tough with a young punk autocrat in a tiny country of under 2 million people, can they do so anywhere?
Yet, if the continental picture looks fragile and discouraging, there are significant grounds for hope. Democracy endures—and with some of the highest levels of freedom on the continent—in landlocked and desperately poor Mali. To be sure, the challenges are legendary and may prove fatal: feckless political parties, a feeble judiciary, immense poverty, deepening inequality, spiraling corruption, and a “near-pathological dependence on foreign aid.” But the country is fashioning a viable democratic culture based on pride in its heritage of tolerance; media pluralism is flourishing (with over 140 FM radio stations blanketing the country); Malian NGOs are compensating (albeit perhaps too much) for the state’s limited ability to deliver services; and political decentralization is bringing government closer to the people while broadening the stakes in the democratic game.61 One finds a similarly mixed but upbeat balance sheet for democracy in Ghana. Despite the relentless creep of corruption—with its swelling of the presidential cabinet, conflicts of interest, and generous patronage—Ghana has emerged as one of Africa’s freest and most vibrant democracies and (aside from South Africa) its best hope for a takeoff to development. The judiciary has more independence and capability than in most of the continent, while better levels of education, infrastructure, and governance are beginning to attract foreign investment. Meanwhile, Ghana’s energetic and independent press raises questions and seeks accountability, and civil society organizations like the Center for Democratic Development monitor the government and build coalitions for reform.
If Ghana and other African countries are to achieve sustainable development, democracy cannot stand still, and freedom alone will not be enough. Democratic institutions will have to work better to control corruption and constrain the exercise of power, so that the chief business of government becomes the delivery of public goods, not private ones.
* For the remainder of the chapter, I will simply refer to sub-Saharan Africa as “Africa.”
CAN THE MIDDLE EAST DEMOCRATIZE?
In the aftermath of the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003, democracy seemed finally to be on the march in the Middle East. The worst tyrant in the most oppressive region of the world had been toppled by the world’s most powerful democracy. Iraq’s authoritarian neighbors were nervous, and the region appeared to enter political ferment. With the end of thirty-five years of Baath Party dictatorship in Iraq, Syria’s Baathist regime wondered if it might be next, and Iran’s clerical rulers sent a letter to the White House proposing broad negotiations.
President George W. Bush and members of his administration issued notice of a bold change in U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East. Addressing the National Endowment for Democracy on November 6, 2003, President Bush declared a “forward strategy for freedom in the Middle East”: “Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe—because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export.”1 In his speech, Bush cited favorable political trends under way in Morocco, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Yemen, and Jordan but also made clear that it was time for Egypt to “show the way toward democracy in the Middle East.”
The regime of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak—which had held power for more than half a century, since Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser had overthrown the monarchy in 1952—felt compelled to show some progress. Under mounting pressure from Western powers as well as its own society, and facing a gathering struggle over succession between the military establishment and supporters of his son, President Mubarak’s government launched “a high profile effort to cast itself as a champion of reform.”2
The years 2004 and 2005 carried real promise for liberalization in Egypt. During 2004, diverse strands of the opposition—Islamist, leftist, and liberal—converged in advocating systemic political reforms that would permit a freer and more open society and fairer and more neutrally administered elections. Their demands included a competitive presidential election, which had heretofore been a simple yes-or-no plebiscite to “reelect” the autocrat. By December 2004, some of the forces came together under the brash name Kifaya (Enough)—which summed up the country’s mood—and called for an end to the indefinite reelections of President Mubarak and a renunciation of his effort to smooth the path for his son to succeed him.3
Despite harassment and security crackdowns, the Kifaya demonstrations persisted, and in 2005, after nearly a quarter century of domineering rule by Mubarak, “it suddenly became fashionable to publicly campaign for his ouster.”4 Needing American support and some measure of domestic legitimacy, the president steered a complicated course. In January, the most prominent opponent from the secular, liberal camp—Ghad Party chairman Ayman Nour—was arrested on highly questionable charges, but then released, as Mubarak attempted to hold court with the American administration, which continued to provide almost $1 billion a year in economic aid and $1.3 billion in military aid.5 In September, Mubarak for the first time allowed (albeit with restrictions) a multicandidate presidential election. The regime permitted significant judicial monitoring of the vote and of the more open and competitive parliamentary elections that followed in November. Although formally banned, members of the Muslim Brotherhood were able to contest as independents, and for the first time in twenty years, the organization entered the parliamentary campaign with none of its members in government custody.6
At the same time that reform was bubbling in Egypt, Syrian domination of Lebanon—codified and entrenched by the Taif agreement that ended the Lebanese civil war in 1989—began to unravel. With Syria quietly trying to subvert the new political order in Iraq, the Bush administration “began openly criticizing the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, a policy reversal that inspired the opposition movement in Lebanon to reassert itself.”7 France and other European countries followed suit. Showing it would not be pushed around, Syria’s forty-year-old regime reverted to strong-arm tactics, pressuring the Lebanese parliament to extend the presidential term of its faithful ally, Emile Lahoud, in September 2004. The next month, one of the key ministers to oppose that term extension was nearly assassinated, and three weeks later the popular prime minister Rafiq Hariri resigned in defiance of Syrian pressure. In February 2005, Hariri and some twenty others were killed by a car bomb in Beirut. With this attack, the Syrians seem to have overreached. A week later, tens of thousands of Lebanese demanded the withdrawal of Syrian troops and intelligence agents and accused Syria and Lahoud of Hariri’s murder. The protests, which came to be known as “the Cedar Revolution,” continued daily until Lebanon’s pro-Syrian government resigned on February 28.8 In mid-March, hundreds of thousands of Lebanese (by some accounts over a million) rallied in central Beirut for “Freedom, Sovereignty, Independence.” With the political tides shifting dramatically, Syria was forced to withdraw from Lebanon in April 2005, and in elections at midyear, Hariri allies won control of the government. Shortly after Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution, some fifty thousand Bahrainis—“one eighth of the country’s population—rallied for constitutional reform.”9
In Jordan, a limited but hopeful political opening was also forming. Following the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada in September 2000, King Abdullah had dissolved parliament, suspended scheduled parliamentary elections, banned demonstrations, and cracked down on civil society in response to rising public sentiment against the peace treaty with Israel. But after Saddam’s regime was toppled in 2003, the king, flush with increased economic aid from the United States and the Gulf oil states, liberalized. He relaxed restrictions on freedom of expression, held “reasonably free and transparent, though not fair, parliamentary and municipal elections,” and struck a bargain with left and Islamist opposition groups, in which the latter reportedly agreed to restrain their mobilization against Jordan’s pro-U.S. foreign policy in exchange for economic progress and more political space.10
In Palestine, the death of Yasser Arafat in November 2004—after several decades of his corrupt, inept political supremacy—pointed the way to a new era of pluralism, accountability, and possibly even democracy. With the election to the presidency in January 2005 of the more competent and open-minded Mahmoud Abbas, and then the complete withdrawal of Israel from Gaza in August after thirty-eight years of occupation, hopes rose for both internal and regional accommodation.
In Iraq itself, 2005 was a year of democratic possibilities, despite deepening violence and political polarization. Defying fears of chaos and massive bloodshed, nearly 12 million Iraqis turned out courageously to vote in the January elections for a transitional parliament to draft a new constitution. In October, they did so again in even larger numbers, adopting the new constitution in a national referendum. Then on December 15, they voted a third time for a new parliament under the permanent constitution.
It seemed the Arab Middle East—which alone lacked a single democracy—was catching up with the world. By the end of 2005, Freedom House recorded measurable improvements in political rights or civil liberties over the preceding three years in the Palestinian Authority and half of the region’s sixteen Arab states: Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Qatar, Yemen, and even Saudi Arabia. In some of these countries, the change was very modest, leaving a highly authoritarian regime, particularly in Saudi Arabia. Nevertheless, the five-year trend was, in the opinion of Freedom House, “a positive regional trajectory,” bestowing the Middle East as a whole with its best Freedom scores in the history of the survey.11
MONARCHY, POPULISM, AND ISLAM
Yet, just a year later, democratic prospects in the Arab Middle East looked much gloomier. The regimes and their external allies, the United States and Europe, struggled to come to grips with two alarming implications of the political openings: severe political polarization and dramatic gains by Islamist forces.
In Iraq, a constitutional stalemate, deepening civil war, and the unfortunate choice of proportional representation in a single nationwide district as the young democracy’s electoral system transformed the January 30 elections into an identity referendum, with voters choosing on the basis of ethnic and sectarian loyalties. Sunni Arab parties boycotted the voting, fearing they would be underrepresented by lower voter turnout due to the greater violent unrest in their region. The Sunnis nursed a host of objections to the political order and the American occupation, but the boycott magnified their political marginalization. Interim prime minister Ayad Allawi’s “Iraqi List,” the principal nonsectarian option, suffered a humiliating political rout as Shiite Islamists captured a commanding plurality of seats and, together with the Kurdish alliance, formed a transitional government.
With the Sunnis largely excluded from the parliament and from negotiations over a permanent constitution, the sectarian gulf widened. Under American pressure, fifteen Sunnis were ultimately added to the fifty-five-member constitutional drafting committee, but too late to produce a compromise before the August 15 deadline for completion of the draft—a deadline that the United States insisted on, despite Iraqi appeals for an extension under the terms of the interim constitution. The October 15 constitutional referendum thus became a second identity plebiscite, with the Kurds and Shia voting almost unanimously for the document and the Sunni Arabs overwhelmingly against it.
The same polarization held sway in the December 15 parliamentary elections under Iraq’s new constitution. Parties and coalitions made “nogo” areas of their ethnic strongholds, and the secular and transethnic lists (particularly Allawi’s) once again paid the heaviest price. In Baghdad and many other cities, the election was disfigured by bombings, assassinations, and other armed attacks. Although turnout increased to 77 percent of registered voters, ethnic and sectarian polarization hardened. “Any hopes that the electorate would vote to separate religion from politics or to transcend ethnic fissures were completely frustrated,” as Allawi’s Iraqi List wound up losing almost half the seats it had won in January and other independents were trounced.12
In the aftermath of the election, the violence in Iraq intensified and the political condition drifted under the hapless new prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki. Despite a prereferendum agreement in October 2005 to consider a broad package of amendments to the constitution within a few months of convening parliament, there was a deadlock over such basic issues as federalism, the structure of executive power, and the control of oil production and distribution of its revenue. Meanwhile, competing Shiite Islamist forces, including those loyal to the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, tightened their grip over various parts of southern Iraq. Baghdad, Baquba, Kirkuk, Mosul, and other multiethnic cities in the center and north saw mounting terrorism, violence, and ethnic cleansing. By early 2007, something on the order of a hundred Iraqis were dying every day. An estimated 2 million or more Iraqis had fled the country, and at least another 1 million were internally displaced. One of every three Iraqis was unemployed, and electricity production was at only 60 percent of the target goal the American occupation had set for its June 2004 termination.13 On every single indicator, a February–March 2007 public opinion poll showed dramatic deterioration in Iraqis’ perceptions and hopes for the future. Sixty percent said their lives were going badly or very badly, compared to 29 percent in 2004 and 2005. Half said conditions in Iraq were worse than before the 2003 American invasion. Only a quarter of Iraqis said they felt safe in their neighborhoods (down from 63 percent in 2005); 88 percent said they had inadequate electricity (up from 54 percent in 2005); only 28 percent expected better electricity and 38 percent more jobs in the near future, compared to three-quarters who were hopeful in 2005.14
Arab autocrats seized upon the swelling turmoil in Iraq to dampen and rebuff public demands for democracy. In Egypt, Jordan, Algeria, and Yemen, regimes that had opened more political space for opposition and dissent firmly took it back. In essence, their message to their restive populations was, “You want democracy? Look at Iraq. You want that kind of chaos? Be grateful for what you have.” In a private meeting with a long-serving “elected” president in the region, an Arab civil society activist warned brashly, “You had better allow democracy or you will face the fate of Saddam Hussein.” But as chaos increasingly rolled over Iraq, the president campaigned in 2006 on the chilling rejoinder, in essence: “You had better vote for me or you will face the same ‘democracy’ as in Iraq.”15 Similarly, as the absolute monarchy in Saudi Arabia retreated from the modest atmosphere of reform that had accompanied the formal ascension of King Abdullah in 2005, political activists from the country’s Shiite minority blamed the wars in Iraq and Lebanon for the new political freeze. “An oft-quoted phrase attributed to the late King Fahd has acquired new resonance, especially in the Eastern Province [where the Saudi Shia are concentrated]: ‘Why start fires on the inside, when there are fires on the outside?’ ”16
Beyond the violence in Iraq, another force inhibited the tentative steps toward democratization of the Arab Middle East: Islamic fundamentalism. During the first round of Egypt’s parliamentary elections in November 2005, the Muslim Brotherhood, contesting as independents, won more seats than the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP): eighty-eight seats, nearly 20 percent of the total. However, “authoritarian management” restored the hegemony of the NDP in subsequent rounds of voting.17 In Palestine, the militant Islamist movement Hamas stunned the ruling Fatah Party by winning 56 percent of the seats in parliament (albeit with only a slim electoral plurality of 45 percent). In Iraq, Shiite and Sunni Islamist lists won a majority of votes and seats in 2005, and in Bahrain, they won a majority of the forty seats in the lower house of parliament in the 2006 elections. In Kuwait, Islamists won a third of parliamentary seats, the largest single bloc, in 2006.
