Live from the Nuke Free Zone

People have a tendency to view regions of the world in dramatically oversimplified terms. This is probably partly a kind of survival tactic; cognitive dissonance in dealing with very foreign areas is dealt with more easily by painting them in some sort of black and white, rigid context that’s easy to understand. Of course, this is obviously not an ideal state of affairs. Aside from the problems of such misinterpretations becoming conscious rather than not and spiralling into dismissal or hatred, one ends up with a tendency to simply miss otherwise obvious and critical things because they pass beneath the radar of alternate worldviews. Things which have No Business being neglected end up neglected, possibilities are squandered, hope is greeted with silence and withers on the vine.

Now that I’ve got your attention focused on the perils of not focusing your attention enough, a question: how many of you have noticed the gradual but steady trend towards the democratization - and not by force - of the Middle East and larger sphere of the Islamic world?

I see by a few of you going “..Wha?” that I’ve gotten your attention a little more. With that settled, off we go…

Traditionally, of course, the region hasn’t exactly been known for its strong democratic nature. Throughout much of modern history (i.e., since the Crusades, Mongols, and all that joyous stuff), the Islamic world has been alternately monarchical and conquered. This is of course not to say that the residents of the region didn’t spend several centuries as the princes of the earth, which they largely did, but simply that there was about as much use of the ballot box going around as there was in Europe at the time. To make things even better, the region was conquered by the European powers at the height of their imperialistic phase, which was not terribly keen on Spreading The Meme Of Freedom And Democracy To All The People Of The World. The dramatic upsurge of fundamentalism, from its nondescript beginnings in the 1920s to the force it is now, capable of shaking entire continents, is another blow against potential forces of freedom in the region. Amidst all this - the nations with black records in the past and present, Iraq flaring towards fundamentalism in the wake of the disasterous conquest, with Afghanistan teetering on the return to the Taliban - there is a growing movement at the grassroots and national levels towards democratizing the Middle East, absent of Western intervention and largely unnoticed by it due to its at least initial modesty.

What are some of these developments? They are first steps, small additions to the franchise, expansions on more established governments, and so on. They are experiments. They are events such as Morocco announcing major and positive reforms of the rights of women in Morocco and the essentially-conquered Western Sahara. They are Oman phasing in an elected economic advisory council in their latest step in eleven years of reforms. They are Kuwait’s established parliament continuing on its own path, with a prime minister not in the royal succession for the first time in decades. They are Iran’s reformist government public lashing out against the hardline Islamist aspects of the judiciary over political killings. They are Saudi Arabia - Saudi Arabia! - astonishing many by beginning to step into the democratic camp, taking baby steps towards public involvement in government in their first real political reform.

They are small, but they are far more significant than most people will accept.

A common myth among most of us who have lived under democratic systems is that they were either always here, or that we lived in blackest tyranny until one Wednesday morning we woke up and were free, equal and voting by secret ballot. It amazes and disappoints me exactly how little most people know of the concept of democracy. To say that these things did not come overnight is a wee bit of an understatement. The western system of democratic government is neither a new nor an instant invention, nor is it a perpetual one in its present form. The system the Americans may have chosen for their government after the revolution may have been inspired by the Roman Republic of 509 BCE-31 BCE, but the system is irrelevant for such things. Far more important is the democratic tradition already present among the people, who came from a culture which had in one way or another been electing representatives to speak for the nation for almost six hundred years prior, since the Magna Carta in 1215. All the ingenuity of system creation a nation can offer will have precious little effect if it’s suddenly There one day, expecting its political culture, notions of involvement, and so on to be there waiting. Democracy, poorly handled, can lead to terrible disasters.

Traditionally, sudden transitions from monarchy or tyranny to pure democracy have been disasterous. I generally buy into the idea that the mindset of democracy has to be there before the system has any possibility to flourish. The problem is, people are by and large a conservative lot when it comes to ideas. This isn’t to mean conservative in terms of ideology - the way most posts on this blog will refer to the term - as much as it is in terms of reluctance to accept fundamentally different ideas, especially ones that are going to affect their day-to-day lives. The difference between a peasant - hell, even a noble - under a sixteenth-century absolutist state (or a twentieth-century totalitarian one) and a citizen of a country where people actually get to complain about who the head of state banged last week is a tremendous change. Getting there is a process of incrementalism; like all good things, democracy takes time.

The French revolutionary experience between 1789 and the early 1800s was an example of this sort of thing. The people had grievances against the French monarchy in general, and Louis XVI in general, and were almost certainly in the right to rise against him as they did. However, the “democracy” thing the revolutionaries were reaching towards was mainly known to them through writings and theorizing. The kingdom’s parliament had not met since 1614, and the reign of previous rulers during that time, such as Louis XIII and XIV and included such figures as Richelieu, was anything but populist. After Louis XVI lost his head in January 1793 and the new National Convention established a republic, however, they promptly seemed to forget their lessons. The result was an increasingly crazed descent into terror and madness which resorted in a reimposition of tyranny under the Reign of Terror, eventually resulting in the short-lived Directorate which in turn collapsed from its own moderation, paving the way for Napoleon to sweep into power and create a pan-European conflict which was spoken of as “the Great War” with a frisson of horror into the early twentieth century.

The Russian and Chinese experiences were something similar, with the purges and secondary civil wars in each in the 1920s and 1960s, although they of course had the intent of not being terribly democratic after the dust settled anyway. The American example includes similar events, with the massive reprisals against loyalists leading to an equally massive refugee movement as hundreds of thousands were forced abroad. (As an interesting note, my hometown has a monument praising the very same “United Empire Loyalists” who are demonized in American history textbooks. Elsewhere in the Commonwealth, the loyalists are seen as patriots. There’s another finger in the eye of black-and-white thinking!) Germany after the First World War was not quite so tyrannical a nation as czarist Russia or Bourbon France, but the Weimar Republic, imposed after the war, was not only another snap change from a monarchical system to a democratic republic, it was one done against the peoples’ will anyway. The end result could hardly be anything other than the growth of cynicism and instability that followed, leading to the government falling every six months until, by 1933, people were willing to elect anyone to get the problems dealt with…

See, the problem with democracy is that it has to be born democratically. History has shown that most instances of imposed democracy have been disasters, brought upon people with no sense of the ideology of democracy, no experience at handling the system (particularly the idea of The Other Guy winning the election!), and so on. If people are not used to the idea, used to the system, and confident enough in it to be willing to bring it further forward, it will always fail. This is the fundamental mistake of politicians like Dubya, who not only believe that democracy is some kind of “natural” government which people, freed from tyranny, will quickly gravitate to - but that they won’t mind if it’s imposed on them by force by another nation. People ranting and raving about how Afghanistan and Iraq must be uncivilized based on how they reacted to being “freed” need not look at the citizens of both countries as much as they need to look at the method in which democracy was “brought to them.” Whatever one thinks about ideal or natural system of government, I personally don’t puff up in outrage at the idea of people questioning the legitimacy of the current government in Iraq.[1] A democracy cannot exist without a foundation to build on, and the only way to build one worthy of the word is the incremental process the various states listed at the start of this article are going about it - that is to say, at a pace which the west will not consider acceptable.

However, the west needs to, to put it inelegantly, sit down, shut up and live with it for things such as this. A country which announces it’s granting women rights is not a country that’s going to shift to secret-ballot elections for the head of state just because foreign pressure says “that’s not good enough!” Of course it’s not good enough - short of fundamental changes to human nature, I believe a representative democracy established in a manner which manages to check both the impulses of the government and those of the people to a reasonable extent is the best form of government we can pull off right now. However, those of us who are somewhat learned in The Way Things Work know that the instant-gratification game is inherently unwinnable in these sorts of things.

We descendants of a culture which took seven hundred years[2] to achieve a level of democracy that we can begin to be satisfied with have no right to condemn states which appear as though they might take a generation to make that same shift.

Patience and incrementalism is the name of the game for this sort of thing. Mild pressure and support on nations which aren’t democratic to move that way is the best way to go about things. Demands to dismantle governments at risk of sanctions or war will only lead to sanctions or war - and will just as likely result in more North Koreas and Third Gulf Wars if the current trend continues. No, patience is what is needed for this sort of thing. The changes in governments being taken by Morocco, Oman, and even Saudi Arabia are initial steps which are establishing both the idea and the act of democracy in peoples’ heads. Indeed, this idea of bottom-up - popular - involvement in democracy is far better than a more top-down style where the government decides that we’re all running for office and voting for political parties tomorrow afternoon.[3]

As people get used to the idea of involvement, it accomplishes a few things: first, it ideally leads to foreign pressure going down a bit, which hopefully results in a reduced desire to clamp down out of nervousness. After all, the people are at this point handling relatively trivial concerns, and evil foreign nations aren’t using them to subvert the government, so there can’t be much harm, can there? This of course leads to the second point - that the pressure will eventually begin to come from the growing electorate. See, that’s the thing about rights, unlike a lot of government reforms - things can be created, adjusted, and done away with, but even the most oppressed people begin to get a little protective of their rights when they have the time to get used to them and begin to see their own effect on things. This is what the engine of change in this region will consist of - not massive political conferences, high-handed speeches, and military campaigns launched from halfway around the world. A proper democracy should be self-sustaining and self-perpetuating in this way - democracy in Oman must be democracy of and by Oman as well, or it will be an insult to the concept. And any moves towards these expansions of freedom are going to have to happen at their own pace. They should be supported as positive and hopeful actions, not condemned as ineffectual or insufficient.

We need to look back at our own history and see how we went about this. The Magna Carta was an ancient nobility wresting some tiny privelege from a divine monarch - a miniscule step on the road of democratization, and one almost purely motivated by self-interest, at that.

Look, however, at where that road ended up.

[1] - I do consider Karzai’s government in Afghanistan to be legitimate. Although he was kind of dropped on the country as the American replacement for Mullah Omar, the loya jirga went on with minimal interference from the Americans and seemed to legitimate him. Small blessings…

[2] - Yes, my American readers, I know your Revolution began in the 1770s, five centuries after the Magna Carta was signed. However, the remaining fifty percent of the American population only achieved the vote in August, 1920. Only two years earlier, the Senate defeated a resolution to support a women’s suffrage movement.

[3] - I remember Tang commenting on K5 that if a fully representative democracy was zotted into place in Pakistan, you’d likely see a Kill All The American Infidels Party immediately become at least the official opposition. One can imagine the end result of such a backlash not being terribly easy on either All The American Infidels or Pakistan given the current state of the region. One could consider this a somewhat more self-interested reason not to rush the process. ;)