Remarks on External Factors in Democratic Transition

المؤلفون

  • المؤلف

  • Azmi Bishara

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.31430/almuntaqa.2.2.0040

الكلمات المفتاحية:

Democratic Transition، Democratic Wave، Consolidating Democracy، US Foreign Policy

الملخص

Although this article generally acknowledges the priority of internal factors, it discusses the conditions for bringing back the external factor in certain cases, especially after the collapse of a despotic regime in a dependent state. The article discusses American foreign policy, refuting the thesis that the US became a supporter of democratic transformation after the Cold War, and makes the point that the “democratic realism” that guided American policy in the Middle East is a continuation of Cold War policies with new enemies. International and regional external factors impeding democratic transformation in an Arab country are less prevalent if the country is less important in geostrategic terms, especially concerning the Arab Israeli conflict and oil production. This is one of the most important differences between the Egyptian and Tunisian experiences.

المراجع

  1. In spite of the rarity of democratic transitions after military coups – only 14 coups of some 217 between 1945 and 2008 led to democratic transformation, i.e. only 6.4%. See: Monty G. Marshall & Donna Ramsey Marshall, “Coup d’Etat Events, 1946–2013,” Center for Systemic Peace (2014); Patrick McGowan, “African Military Coups d’Etat, 1956–2001: Frequency, Trends and Distribution,” The Journal of Modern African Studies , vol. 41, no. 3 (2003), p. 340; Quoted in: Omar Ashour, “Collusion to Crackdown: Islamist-Military Relations in Egypt,” Brookings Papers (March 2015), accessed on 30/4/2019, at: https://brook. We might add armed resistance to despotism (despite the similarly rare incidence of successful democratic transformation following it), as Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan argue in a study of 323 cases of both violent and non-violent resistance to despotism and colonialism. See: Maria J. Stephan & Erica Chenoweth, “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict,” International Security , vol. 33, no. 1 (Summer 2008), pp. 7–44, accessed on gs/2RF7pn4. 30/4/2019, at: https://bit.ly/2CXKiSq
  2. Azmi Bishara, Thawrat Misr: Min ath-Thawra ila’l-Inqilab [The Egyptian Revolution , Vol. II: From Revolution to Coup d'Etat] (Doha, Beirut: ACRPS, 2016), pp. 215 - 250.
  3. Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter & Laurence Whitehead (eds.), Transitions from Authoritarian Rule , four volumes (Baltimore, MD: Johns
  4. It is in this context that US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made his famous declaration, following the Chilean elections that brought Salvador Allende to power, that he ‘[didn’t] see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.’ From the New York
  5. Kurt Weyland discusses the most extreme case of assumed American influence in global regime change, Latin America, demonstrating that US influence is of a more limited degree than is usually claimed. In doing so he draws on State Department and intelligence documents pertaining to coups and regime changes. The importance of the US’s role decreased gradually over the course of the 20th century, becoming more limited thanks to internal confusion and disagreement and a lack of coordination between different institutions and numerous actors within the US administration. The intersection of interests between the US and those who carried out military coups is usually explained as if they were US agents or acting on Washington’s orders. Weyland asserts that in most of the cases the actors conducting the coupes in Latin America had enough motivations to do so without even the US requesting it. The author says that the US found it very difficult to expel the Sandinistas from government in Nicaragua and failed in the case of Cuba. Direct military influence was possible in small countries like Grenada and Panama. Although the end of the Cold War and the emergence of a unipolar system seemed to enormously increase US influence, the limits of this influence were shown by the emergence of left-leaning regimes in the 1990s, including Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador. In spite of US support and the strong economic relationship with Nicaragua and these three countries, the US did not prevent these countries from slipping into competitive authoritarianism. An even greater failure was in Haiti, where US support and diplomatic pressure failed to consolidate democracy; elections were delayed by several years and the US was unable to put in place the infrastructure for democracy in even a weak ally in spite of its economic and political influence. The only government that was expelled by US invasion was Noriega’s government in Panama in 1989. The US also intervened in civil wars in the Dominican Republic (1965) and Grenada (1983), ousting presidents who had come to power through bloody coups. These are all the cases of direct US military intervention in Latin America in the second half of the twentieth century. See: Kurt Weyland, “Limits of US Influence: The promotion of Regime Change in Latin America , ” Journal of Politics in Latin America, vol. Hopkins University Press, 1986). Times archive. See: Anthony Lewis, “The Kissinger Doctrine,” The New York Times , February 27, 1975, accessed on 30/4/2019, at: https://nyti.ms/2VyekEW 10, no. 3 (2018), pp. 137-140, accessed on 29/4/2019, at: http://bit.ly/2Pe5R7C.
  6. Steven Levitsky & Lucan A. Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
  7. Weyland, p. 147.
  8. Philippe C. Schmitter, “The Influence of the International Context upon the Choice of National Institutions and Policies in Neo ‐ Democracies,” in: Laurence
  9. Even further back, it was not possible to understand democracy in Japan and Germany without the US imposing it after the Second World War in Japan and the Allied administration in the areas under their control in West Germany. Neither can the sustainability and consolidation of a democratic system,be understood Whitehead (ed.), The International Dimensions of Democratization: Europe and the Americas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 27. without knowledge of the internal factors in Germany and Japan and their modern history, including previous experimenting with democracy.
  10. Attila Ágh, “Processes of Democratization in the East Central European and Balkan States: Sovereignty-Related Conflicts in the Context of Europeanization,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies , vol. 32, no. 3 (September 1999), p. 264, accessed on 29/4/2019, at: http://bit.ly/2NbPAuC
  11. Ibid, pp. 267 - 268.
  12. Ibid, p. 269. brought to nationalist secessions from multi- national states.
  13. Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Chapter 12 “Yugoslavia, I: Into the Danger Zone,” pp. 353-381, and Chapter 13 “Yugoslavia, II: Murderous Cleansing,” pp. 382 - 427. I don’t agree with Michael Mann. Nationalism and civil war caused ethnic cleansing. The emergence of the nation state is a historical prerequisite for modern democracy, but this doesn’t mean that democracy
  14. See: Azmi Bishara, Fi’l-Mas’ala al-‘Arabiyya: Muqaddima li-Bayan Dimuqrati ‘Arabi [On the Arab Question: Introduction to an Arab Democratic
  15. Laurence Whitehead, “Three International Dimensions of Democratization,” in: Whitehead (ed.), The International Dimensions of Democratization , pp. Manifesto] (Doha: ACRPS, 2018), pp. 63-64, 72 - 73.
  16. Ibid, pp. 38 - 39.
  17. Thomas Carothers, “The Resurgence of the United States Political Development Assistance to Latin America in the 1980s,” in: Whitehead (ed.), The International Dimensions of Democratization , pp. 126 - 127.
  18. Thomas Carothers, Revitalizing U.S. Democracy Assistance (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2009), pp. 9 - 10.
  19. Ibid, pp. 10 - 11.
  20. Ibid, pp. 11 - 12. 29/4/2019, at: http://bit.ly/2PQ25Av.
  21. Charles Krauthammer, Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World (Washington, D.C.: The AEI Press, 2004). accessed on
  22. Charles Krauthammer, Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World ,p. 16, accessed on 29/4/2019, at: http://bit.ly/2PQ25Av
  23. Ibid, p. 5. War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), p. 504.
  24. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Hard Choices (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2014), pp. 282-285; Robert M. Gates, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at
  25. Krauthammer, p. 14.
  26. Eva Bellin, “The Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Exceptionalism in Comparative Perspective,” Comparative Politics , vol. 36, no. 2 (January 2004), p. 148.
  27. Lisa Anderson, “Searching Where the Light Shines: Studying Democratization in the Middle East,” Annual Review of Political Science , vol. 9, no. 1 (2006),
  28. Ibid., pp. 193-194; George W. Bush, “President Bush Discusses Freedom in Iraq and Middle East: Remarks by the President at the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy,” The White House Archives of President George W. Bush, November 6, 2003, accessed on 29/4/2019, at: http://bit. p. 193, accessed on 29/4/2019, at: http://bit.ly/2wcZSDi; Morroe Berger, The Arab World Today (New York: Doubleday, 1964), p. 297. ly/2C1CqiA
  29. David D. Kirkpatrick, Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East (New York: Viking, 2018). accessed on 29/4/2019, at: http://bit.ly/2Z36odw
  30. Ben Rhodes, The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House (New York: Random House, 2018); Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine,” The Atlantic (April 2016), accessed on 29/4/2019, at: http://bit.ly/2DbyDgY; “Exclusive: President Barack Obama on 'Fox News Sunday',” Fox News , April 10, 2016,
  31. “ Address by President of the Russian Federation: Vladimir Putin addressed State Duma Deputies, Federation Council Members, Heads of Russian Regions and Civil Society Representatives in the Kremlin,” The Kremlin, Moscow, March 18, 2014, accessed on 29/4/2019, at: https://bit.ly/1U4FWps
  32. Peter J. Burnell, “Promoting Democracy and Promoting Autocracy: Towards a Comparative Evaluation,” Journal of Politics and Law , vol. 3, no. 2 (2010),
  33. Robert Kagan, The Return of History and the End of Dreams (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2008). 29/4/2019, at: https://bit.ly/2mKUgfn accessed on 29/4/2019, at: http://bit.ly/2Q5Ycrd Thomas Ambrosio, Authoritarian Backlash: Russian Resistance to Democratization in the Former Soviet Union (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009).
  34. Foreign Affairs has published many pessimistic articles on the future of democracy, but articles by Thomas Carothers and Richard Young and Thomas Carothers and Christopher Carothers point to more positive indicators in this respect: Thomas Carothers & Richard Youngs, “Democracy Is Not Dying,” Foreign Affairs, April 11, 2017, accessed on 29/4/2019, at: https://bit.ly/2GLrZyZ; Thomas Carothers & Christopher Carothers, “The One Thing Modern Voters Hate Most Charges of Corruption are Toppling Leaders at a Growing Clip. That's a Good Thing for Global Politics,” Foreign Affairs, July 24, 2018, accessed on Naazneen Barma & Ely Ratner, “China’s Illiberal Challenge: The Real Threat Posed by China isn’t Economic or Military it’s Ideological,” Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, no. 2 (Fall 2006), accessed on 29/4/2019, at: http://bit.ly/2KfhbKM; Carola McGiffert (ed.), Chinese Soft Power and Its Implications for the United States: Competition and Cooperation in the Developing World, CSIS Report (Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2009),
  35. Burnell, p. 5. 6/5/2019, at: http://bit.ly/2GZST6c.
  36. Henry Foy, “Russia-Saudi Arabia rapprochement reshapes more than the oil market,” Financial Times, October 30, 2018, accessed on 6/5/2019, at: https:// on.ft.com/2J1oubb; Richard Hall, “ Jamal Khashoggi: Russia refuses to criticise Saudi Arabia in wake of journalist's murder,” The Independent, October 23, 2018, accessed on 6/5/2019, at: https://ind.pn/2DRI4CG; “Putin says can't justify spoiling Saudi ties over Khashoggi affair,” Reuters, October 18, 2018, accessed on 6/5/2019, at: https://reut.rs/2LnTm7G; “MbS to visit China seeking 'greater development of Sino-Saudi relations,” The New Arab, February 15, 2019, accessed on 6/5/2019, at: http://bit.ly/2WpxM3z; Michael Standaert, “Saudi Arabia strikes $10bn China deal,” Al Jazeera, February 22, 2019, accessed on pp. 3-4, accessed on 29/4/2019, at: http://bit.ly/2QGKnfS
  37. This has reached the point, for example, of Sisi defending the use of the death penalty against political opposition figures in Egypt by claiming that the death penalty is part of the ‘culture of the Arab region’. In his response to a question on the human rights situation in Egypt at the end of the Arab-European Summit held in Sharm El Sheikh, Sisi said that ‘in European countries the priority is to secure prosperity for their citizens, unlike the priorities in the Arab region, which are the preservation of the state from collapse and destruction, as you see in many of our neighbouring countries.’ He added that ‘you talk about the death penalty, and we recognise this. But I would ask you not to impose anything on us, because when a citizen is killed by the act of a terrorist, his family demand that he be punished. If we were to ask European states to reconsider themselves and to reconsider the death penalty, this would mean that we did not understand the situation in Europe,’ continuing that ‘you will not teach us our own humanity. We have our own humanity, and you have your humanity.’ Al-‘Arabi al-Jadid , 25/02/2019, accessed on 29/04/2019 at http://bit.ly/2X7Tr0d. Bashar al-Asad had previously stated in an interview with the Wall Street Journal at the beginning of 2011 that he looked at reform differently from the West, adding that ‘The problem with the West is that they start with political reform going towards democracy. If you want to go towards democracy, the first thing is to involve the people in decision making, not to make it. It is not my democracy as a person; it is our democracy as a society. So how do you start? You start with creating dialogue. How do you create dialogue? We did not have private media in the past; we did not have internet or private universities, we did not have banks. Everything was controlled by the state. You cannot create the democracy that you are asking about in this way. You have different ways of creating democracy.’ See: “Interview with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad,” The Wall Street Journal , January 31, 2011, accessed on 29/4/2019, at: https://on.wsj.com/2KKK2L0
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