Pakistan’s forthcoming May 11 elections will be “severely compromised” unless the interim government takes measures to ensure the safety of candidates and party activists threatened by the Taliban and other militant groups, a new report warns.

The authorities “should use law enforcement agencies and, if essential, the army, to provide as much protection as possible to candidates and political parties from Taliban attacks,” said Ali Dayan Hasan, Pakistan director at Human Rights Watch. “Unless the government, the country’s independent election commission, and security forces ensure that all parties can campaign freely without fear, the election may be severely compromised.”

The Pakistani Taliban has carried out a wave of explosions, suicide bombings and targeted shootings that left 46 dead and more than 190 injured since campaigning officially started on April 21, says the group.

Another attack, in which eight people died, occurred Monday in Peshawar, Affan Chowdhry writes from Karachi. “The target is always the same: a candidate, an activist or an office belonging to one of Pakistan’s secular political parties.”

The Islamist militants are aiming to deter liberal secular activists and give an advantage to hardline candidates.

“Their objective is to create fear among people so that they don’t vote for us in elections,” said Faisal Subzwari, a leader of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement. “They want the right-wing parties to win.”

“This is a clear attempt by the so-called ‘non-state actors’ to oust and defeat moderate parties,” said Raza Rumi, a political analyst who runs the Jinnah Institute (left), an Islamabad-based think tank. “This can’t be a fair and free election.”

“What is happening is that the Taliban is basically calling the shots as to who is allowed to contest the elections and who must be discredited in the process,” he contends.

A successful grass-roots election campaign in Pakistan “depends on having committed, hardworking volunteers. Iftikhar Ali Mashwani, an aspiring provincial lawmaker, has come to realize that his supporters are neither,” The Washington Post’sRichard Leibyreports:

Mashwani, running on the Movement for Justice ticket headed by cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan (right), is learning tough lessons as he scrabbles for votes against well-established foes in this largely rural area. On May 11, Pakistanis will choose the next prime minister in an election hailed as a landmark of democratic progress for a country ruled by the military for nearly half its 65-year history. Yet decades of tradition dictate why democracy has remained more of a concept than a reality.

Even as Pakistan prepares to witness its first democratic transition of power, elite political families, powerful landholders and pervasive patronage and corruption undermine the prospects of a truly representational democracy, political analysts say. The dominant Pakistan People’s Party and its rival, the Pakistan Muslim League-N, have the money, experience and connections that Mashwani does not as a novice contender from an upstart party.

Over the years, U.S. officials have seen only diminishing returns in their democracy-promoting efforts. The upcoming election, while historic, will not necessarily solve anything. Pakistan remains under siege by insurgents and shot through with corruption — and it is still a beggar nation seemingly always on the brink of collapse.

“I see elections not bringing change,” said Shamshad Ahmad, a former Pakistani foreign secretary. “Without a change in the system there will be the same feudalized, elitist hierarchy that remains in power.”

Some political experts see Khan and his candidates paving the way for a more democratized Pakistan just by picking up a meaningful bloc of seats from which to challenge the status quo,The Post’s Leiby reports.

“Can he prevail? Difficult to say at this point,” said Rasul Baksh Rais, a political science professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. “Has he changed Pakistani politics forever? I think he has. He has a presence in every corner of the country.”

The election also gives analysts and practitioners an opportunity to revise their “ongoing negative narrative about youth, which assumes that young Pakistanis are prone to violence, radicalization, or simply disinterest,” says youth development specialist Maryam Jillani.  

“This is unfortunate given that close to half of Pakistan’s voters are considered youth by Pakistan’s government standards,” she writes for Foreign Policy:

Local youth feel disengaged with the national and provincial policymaking process, as revealed by a recent roundtable on youth participation organized by the Jinnah Institute, an Islamabad-based think tank. The roundtable further noted that when youth–particularly those from rural constituencies–do vote, it is largely along the lines of traditional allegiances and biradari (tribal) affiliations. This is a reality check for pundits who feel that youth as a demographic entity in and of itself will affect change.

“It will take well-defined policy measures and serious resource allocation to transform the country’s youth into a demographic dividend,” Jillani concludes.

The Jinnah Institute is a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group.

A ‘symbol of something rotten in the state of China’?
Credit: GlobalVoicesOnline

Observers who hope the appointment of Xi Jinping as China’s president will enhance prospects for political liberalization are likely to be disappointed.  

“Some people define reform as reforming in the direction of Western universal values and a Western political system, otherwise it’s not reform,” Xi said in comments that circulated among officials. “This is stealthily switching one idea for another, and it distorts what reform is for us.”

Xi may be eager to stamp out the rampant corruption that is undermining the ruling Communist Party’s fragile legitimacy, but any reforms will be designed to maintain the party’s monopoly on power, say analysts.

“I think that he’s attracted to the idea of a kind of enlightened dictatorship, or neo-authoritarianism,” said Li Weidong, a former magazine editor in Beijing. “He rejects fundamental political reform, but he wants a cleaner, more efficient government that is closer to the public.”

“I think in the end it will be difficult for them to avoid issues of political reform because otherwise it will be impossible to eradicate corruption,” Li said. “Relying on personal authority and party indoctrination and traditions won’t solve the problems they face.”

The elitists and secretive nature of Xi’s selection attracted comparisons with another poll held this week.

“Over a period of just 12 hours two of the world’s most powerful institutions, the Roman Catholic Church and the Chinese government, have installed supreme leaders chosen in total secrecy. But while the choice of Pope Francis came as a surprise to most, the appointment of Xi Jinping as China’s president for the next decade was decided more than five years ago and merely consecrated by the country’s ceremonial legislature,” the FT’s Jamil Anderlini writes from Beijing:

“Who will be president? I am so full of anticipation. The race will certainly be a dead heat and my heart is beating out of my chest,” wrote one Weibo user under the name “cup of fresh bean brother”.

Other internet users set up an online election with multiple candidates for president and asked the public to cast their vote. The election was blocked by China’s restrictive internet censorship filters and only about 5,000 people had cast their ballot by Thursday afternoon but by then Taiwanese President Ma Ying-Jeou was the frontrunner with about 20 per cent of the vote. Dissident artist Ai Weiwei was running second, with imprisoned writer, political activist and Nobel peace prize laureate Liu Xiaobo a close third.

“I would guess maybe 30-40 people were directly involved in the decision to select Xi Jinping as the next leader of China,” said David Zweig, chair professor of social science at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “When the party talks about democracy they don’t mean it in the sense of one person one vote; they mean there was an open discussion amongst the leadership.”

The Economist asks whether the arrival on a Shanghai river of the “putrescent carcasses of thousands of dead pigs (above)…..is a potent (and disgusting) symbol of the view,…that there is something rotten in the state of China, and that change will have to come”:

Many think it will. According to Andrew Nathan, an American scholar, “the consensus is stronger than at any time since the 1989 Tiananmen crisis that the resilience of the authoritarian regime in…China is approaching its limits.” Mr Nathan, who a decade ago coined the term “authoritarian resilience” to describe the Chinese Communist Party’s ability to adapt and survive, was contributing, in the Journal of Democracy, an American academic quarterly, to a collection of essays with the titillating title: “China at the tipping point?”

The ruling elite are determined to maintain the Market-Leninist model of economic liberalization and political authoritarianism, says a former insider.

“They are all the sons of the party,” said Yao Jianfu, a retired party official and a researcher in Beijing.

“For them, there’s no conflict between defending their own power and developing a capitalist economy in China,” he said, adding that Mr. Xi “will have to lean more to the left in politics than he can lean to right in economic policy, otherwise he won’t be able to stabilize his place on the emperor’s throne.”

Nevertheless, “the evolution of Chinese society is eroding some of the bases of party rule,” The Economist notes:

Fear may be diminishing. Nearly 500m Chinese are under 25 and have no direct memory of the bloody suppression of the Tiananmen protests: the government has done its best to keep them in the dark about it. A few public dissidents still write open letters and court harassment and jail sentences. But millions join in subversive chatter online, mocking the party when not ignoring it.

“Mass incidents”—protests and demonstrations—proliferate. Farmers resent land-grabs by greedy local officials. The second generation of workers ..[is] more ambitious and less docile than their parents. And the urban middle class is growing fast.

This latent volatility and underlying fragility of the system explains why some party apparatchiks believe that the status quo is unsustainable.        

“The talk of reform is genuine,” said Jennifer Richmond, who analyzes China for Stratfor. “There is absolutely an understanding by the new leadership that they cannot carry on in the way that they have.

“But so many of those that got rich off the old system are a part of the system, and the changes they make will affect them,” she said. “The ultimate fear is loss of party power, and that’s just unacceptable whether you’re a conservative or a reformer.”

Parliament offered signs of the obstacles that any ambitious change will face. A reorganization of government ministries and agencies approved by delegates turned out to be much less thorough than what political insiders and analysts said was proposed several months ago. The powers of the National Development and Reform Commission, which many pro-market economists see as a hurdle to real reform, remained untouched.

“When they start to diminish the power of the N.D.R.C., that’s when I think that this is genuine,” Ms. Richmond said.

On the other hand, the party’s conception of reform “does not mean tampering with one-party rule,” says The Economist:

Rather, as Fu Ying, spokeswoman for the NPC, put it: political reform is “the self-improvement and development of the socialist system with Chinese characteristics”. Put another way, it is about strengthening party rule, not diluting it. Mr Xi seems to agree. A New York-based website, Beijing Spring, has published extracts of a speech he made on a tour of southern China late last year. He affirmed his belief in “the realization of Communism”.

Andrew J. Nathan is a board member of the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group. Beijing Spring is a NED grantee.

China at the Tipping Point? from National Endowment for Democracy on Vimeo.

The conventional wisdom about China’s possible political futures is that the entrenched Chinese Communist Party (CCP), so determined to defend and perpetuate its political monopoly, has the means to survive for an extended period, says a leading China expert.

“A minority view, however, holds that the CCP’s days are numbered [and that] a transition to democracy in China in the next 10 to 15 years is a high probability event,” writes Minxin Pei.

Two principal causes of authoritarian decline emerge from decades of research and the accumulated experience of democratic transitions in roughly 80 countries over the past 40 years:

First, there is the logic of authoritarian decay. One-party regimes, however sophisticated, suffer from organizational ageing and decay. Leaders get progressively weaker (in terms of capabilities and ideological commitment)….. The result is escalating corruption, deteriorating governance, and growing alienation of the masses. Empirically, the organizational decay of one-party regime can be measured by the limited longevity of such regimes.

Second, the effects of socioeconomic change –rising literacy, income, and urbanization rates, along with the improvement of communications technologies — greatly reduce the costs of collective action, de-legitimize autocratic rule, and foster demands for greater democracy. ….. Few authoritarian regimes, unless they rule in oil-producing countries, can survive once per capita income hits more than $6,000 (PPP)…..China is well into this “zone of democratic transition”

China’s is “a robust regime surrounded by meta instability,” said Columbia University’s Andrew Nathan, outlining three possible scenarios at a recent National Endowment for Democracy meeting (above): collapse, resilience or democratization.

As for the latter, there are five scenarios for democratic transition, says Pei, writing in The Diplomat:

“Happy ending” would be the most preferable mode of democratic transition for China. Typically, a peaceful exit from power managed by the ruling elites of the old regime goes through several stages. It starts with the emergence of a legitimacy crisis, which .. convinces some leaders of the regime that the days of authoritarian rule are numbered and they should start managing a graceful withdrawal from power….. At the moment, the transition in Burma is unfolding according to this script.

The paradox, however, is that regimes that are strong enough are unwilling to reform and regimes that are weak cannot reform. In the Chinese case, the odds of a soft landing are likely to be determined by what China’s new leadership does in the coming five years because the window of opportunity for a political soft landing will not remain open forever.

“Gorby comes to China” is a variation of the “happy ending” scenario with a nasty twist. …Hardliners are discredited and replaced by reformers who, like Gorbachev, start a Chinese version of glasnost and perestroika. But the regime by that time has lost total credibility and political support from key social groups. Liberalization triggers mass political mobilization and radicalism. …. Amid political chaos, the regime suffers another internal split, .,…….with the rise of a radical democratizer replacing a moderate reformer. …..Should such a scenario occur in China, it would be the most ironic. For the last twenty years, the Communist Party has tried everything to avert a Soviet-style collapse.

“Tiananmen redux” is a third possibility. Such a scenario can unfold when the party continues to resist reform even amid signs of political radicalization and polarization in society. The same factors that contribute to the “Gorby scenario” will be at play here, except that the trigger of the collapse is not a belated move toward liberalization by reformers inside the regime, but by an unanticipated mass revolt that mobilizes a wide range of social groups nationwide, as happened during Tiananmen in 1989. The manifestations of such a political revolution will be identical with those seen in the heady days of the pro-democracy Tiananmen protest and the “Jasmine Revolution” in the Middle East. ….

“Financial meltdown” – our fourth scenario – can initiate a democratic transition in China in the same way the East Asian financial crisis in 1997-98 led to the collapse of Suharto in Indonesia. The Chinese bank-based financial system shares many characteristics with the Suharto-era Indonesian banking system: politicization, cronyism, corruption, poor regulation, and weak risk management. It is a well-known fact today that the Chinese financial system has accumulated huge non-performing loans and may be technically insolvent if these loans are recognized. In addition, off-balance sheet activities through the shadow-banking system have mushroomed in recent years, adding more risks to financial stability. ….

 But even if the party should survive the immediate aftermath of a financial meltdown, the economic toll exacted on China will most likely damage its economic performance to such an extent as to generate knock-on effects that eventually delegitimize the party’s authority.

“Environmental collapse” is our last regime change scenario. Given the salience of environmental decay in China these days, the probability of a regime change induced by environmental collapse is not trivial [because]  the economic costs of environmental collapse will be substantial, in terms of healthcare, lost productivity, water shortage, and physical damages. Growth could stall, undermining the CCP’s legitimacy and control. Environmental collapse in China has already started to alienate the urban middle-class from the regime and triggered growing social protest. Environmental activism can become a political force linking different social groups together in a common cause against a one-party regime seen as insensitive, unresponsive, and incompetent on environmental issues.

“To date, few have seriously thought about the probability and the various plausible scenarios of a regime transition in China,” Pei concludes, but “it should become blindingly clear that we need to start thinking about both the unthinkable and the inevitable.”

RTWT

The rising tensions in the Asia-Pacific between China, Japan and the US are ominously reminiscent of the run-up to the First World War, observers suggest.

Will China’s ruling Communist party follow the Kaiser’s example and respond to growing pressure to democratize by stoking aggressive nationalist sentiment?

“The analogy with Germany before the first world war is striking – as the adept leadership of Otto von Bismarck gave way to much clumsier political and military leadership in the years before war broke out,” notes the FT’s Gideon Rachman:

The German ruling elite felt similarly threatened by democratic pressures from below – and encouraged nationalism as an alternative outlet for popular sentiment. China’s leaders have also used nationalism to bolster the legitimacy of the Communist party.

But there are two forms of nationalism in China, according to Daniel A. Bell, Zhiyuan Chair Professor at Shanghai Jiaotong University:

The “hard” form often reported by the foreign media tends to be centered in Beijing’s military circles and the upper echelons of the party. ….Since few believe in Marxism anymore, the Chinese “Communist” Party seeks legitimacy by invoking a form of nationalism that assumes an antagonistic and competitive relationship with the rest of the world. In other words, hard nationalism is often put to use to make people serve the government, not the other way around.

But there is another form of nationalism – let’s call it “soft” nationalism – that makes moral sense in contemporary China…. [and] takes pride in Confucian values – a humanitarian outlook and self-improvement by learning from others – and both values are highlighted in Nanjing.

“Most Chinese intellectuals and political reformers recognize the need for a softer form of nationalism,” Bell suggests. “We will know that soft nationalism has reached Beijing when Confucius returns permanently to Tiananmen Square.

The current party leadership “must break with their predecessors in finally acknowledging the inherent tension that exists between cultivating blind nationalism at home while embracing globalization abroad,” argues Zheng Wang, a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

“They should be aware that patriotism can easily become nationalism, and an overly nationalistic foreign policy will antagonize China’s trading partners and undercut economic development,’ he cautions, writes Zheng, the author of Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations:

The Chinese are pursuing the dream of rejuvenating the nation in the 21st century. In this process, however, China must not only modernize its financial system and infrastructure, but also strengthen its political institutions and education system. Chinese elites should recognize that their dream of restoring China’s long lost glory should actually be geared toward a realistic, less nationalistic goal of nation building.

——————————————————————————————

Many analysts believe that the resilience of the PRC’s authoritarian regime is approaching its limits, as a result of deep changes that have been taking place in China. The state apparatus is still strong, but it must deal with an increasingly contentious, nimble, and resilient civil society.

But does this mean there will be a “tipping point” away from authoritarianism in the near future?

Andrew J. Nathan and Louisa Greve, who are among the contributors to a set of eight articles on China appearing in the January 2013 Journal of Democracy, and Maochun Yu will examine whether the evidence points to a coming period of significant political change in the PRC.

The International Forum for Democratic Studies

at the National Endowment for Democracy

cordially invites you to a luncheon presentation entitled

China at the Tipping Point?

featuring

Andrew J. Nathan, Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science, Columbia University

Louisa Greve, National Endowment for Democracy

Maochun Yu, U.S. Naval Academy

Thursday, February 7, 2013 12 noon–2:00 p.m. (Lunch served 12:00–12:30 p.m.)

1025 F. Street, N.W., Suite 800, Washington, D.C. 20004 Telephone: 202-378-9675

RSVP (acceptances only) with name and affiliation by Tuesday, February 5.

Gulf conservative states’ insistence that domestic reform movements are Iranian proxies striving to destabilize rather than democratize is debunked in a new analysis from a leading Washington think-tank.

“Shia movements in the Gulf …are still  driven more by local concerns than by Iranian meddling,”  according to “The Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula,” a report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

Similarly, the pro-democracy reform movement in Bahrain is “driven largely by local discrimination and issues,” according to Anthony H. Cordesman and Robert M. Shelala II, the report’s authors. Contrary to local Sunni rulers’ claims, they observe that “Tehran was unable to successfully spread the Islamic Revolution or win large-scale Arab Shia support” within Gulf states.

But the report takes a cautious approach to democracy and rights issues on the Gulf, arguing that the US confronts major challenges in confronting Iran, the threat of terrorism, and a “tide of political instability” across the Middle East.

Accordingly, the US “must adopt ‘dual standards’ in dealing with each Arab Gulf state and the Gulf Cooperation Council collectively,” the report argues.

“The US must find the right balance between a narrow, short-term ‘pragmatism’ that focuses on the security threats posed by Iran and extremism and the need to help each state ensure its internal stability, modernize, and meet the needs of its people,” Cordesman and Shelala contend.

Would-be external actors must also take into account the region’s distinctive cultural and religious characteristics, the report suggests.

“The US and its European allies must recognize that US and Western values are not ‘universal’ values, that each state is both Arab and Islamic, and that the rate of modernization has to focus on evolution and not revolution,” the authors write. “The US must accept the fact that it must often give security priority over its own approaches to human rights and democracy.”

Rather than adopt a one-size-fits-all approach, external actors should consider the distinctive features of each Southern Gulf state separately, highlighting the “need to constantly adjust US policy to find the right balance [and] mix of ‘standards,’” write Cordesman and Shelala.

“Successful US efforts are going to take continuing US dialogue with each Southern Gulf state. It is going to take strong country teams that can both build more effective security forces and help each state move towards the necessary level of political, social, and economic modernization and reform. “

————————————————————————————————————————————

Yemen

The US must work with Saudi Arabia and the GCC to try to find some workable approach to sheer scale of Yemen’s economic and demographic problems, its growing population of nearly 25 million, and its lack of effective governance and poverty. Such progress is likely to be negligible in real terms in the near future because of the country’s lack of effective governance, inability to absorb aid, corruption, and poverty. The sheer scale of Yemen’s problems also preclude any credible combination of US, Saudi and other aid efforts from buying Yemen out of these challenges and make real membership in the GCC a serious potential liability to the GCC.

The US does not need to make major changes in its security policies towards Saudi Arabia, but it does need to focus on the following challenges.

Bahrain

The US faces a difficult balancing act in Bahrain. Bahrain is a key security partner, its stability is critical to the GCC, and there is no stable substitute for its present regime. The US needs to take these strategic interests into constant account, as well as the fact that the problems in its regime – serious as they may be – are matched by an opposition that has elements that are unwilling to compromise and would be destabilizing, and some opposition elements with at least some ties to Iran.

Iran

Iran on the other hand will continue its attempts to exert influence in the Gulf, seeking to rival Saudi Arabian hegemony and GCC power. The emergence of Qatar as a second Sunni rival to Iranian influence in the broader Middle East can be expected to continue as the situations in Syria and Gaza grow more volatile. As the principal supporters of the belligerents in the Syria conflict, Saudi Arabia and Qatar on the one hand and Iran on the other will be in a position to influence any resolution to the Syrian Civil War, though developments in that conflict are not likely to drive broader US-Iranian and Gulf-Iranian tensions.

Iran will continue its political and covert support to Shia opposition movements in Bahrain and Yemen, while looking for opportunities to exploit other Sunni/Shia rifts elsewhere in the Gulf. The Islamic Republic’s success in those endeavors could be mitigated by continued efforts on the part of the Arab Gulf states to avoid internal Sunni-Shia tensions, as well as by what some believe to be rights-driven Shia movements, rather than pro-Iran movements.

The Need for Country-by-Country Case Studies

If there is any single message that emerges from these statistics, it is just how different each Southern Gulf state is, and just how different the factors are that drive its internal stability, the ability of the US and Iran to compete, and the issues the US must be prepared to deal with in each partner country. As a corollary, it is also clear that military and internal security are only part of the challenges each state and the GCC must meet.

Economics, demographics, politics, and social change are at least as important to each country’s future, and both they and the US must constantly remember that competition with Iran is only one of many priorities.

It is also important to note that while the US and the Arabian Gulf states share a common interest in deterring and defending against Iran, no Gulf state has identical strategic interests with the US or its neighbors.

As is the case throughout the Middle East and the world, the US only must adopt “dual standards” in dealing with each Arab Gulf state and the GCC collectively. The US must find the right balance between a narrow short term “pragmatism” that focuses on the security threats posed by Iran and extremism and the need to help each state ensure its internal stability, modernize, and meet the needs of its people.

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia differs from most countries in the world in that it’s ruling and economic elites seek modernization and reform but do so in the face of much of its clergy and an extremely conservative population. Reform comes slowly from above, and not from popular pressure.

Saudi Arabia’s ruling elites are divided, however, and often act out of narrow self-interest and in ways that are corrupt and abuse power. King Abdullah has pressed for reform in all these areas, but it will come slow and outside pressure often does as much to mobilize opposition as aid the case for change. That reform will also come in a Saudi way, in a Saudi form, and largely at a Saudi pace. No amount of US pressure will make Saudi Arabia like the US.

Saudi Arabia is a deeply religious Sunni puritan state whose political legitimacy depends as much on its religious legitimacy as popular support, and plays a critical role in offsetting the threat from violent religious extremism. No amount of pressure will suddenly make it liberalize in religious or social terms – particularly outside pressures under the guise of human rights that is a thinly disguised effort to open the country to Christian proselytizing.

Tensions Over Saudi Shia

While the Shia remain a small demographic within the broader Saudi population, much of this population is in its Eastern Province, the key strategic petroleum region in the Kingdom. Saudi Arabia feels Iran has deliberately encouraged recent uprisings witnessed in key Shia parts of the country.

While the Kingdom has made progress, Saudi Arabia’s Shia still suffer from social, economic, and political discrimination that has led to periodic unrest in parts of the Kingdom.  This treatment of Shia in the Kingdom is reflected in the US State Department’s 2010 Human Rights Report, which highlights the illegal detention of key Shia, the incarceration for over 14 years of a Shia for “apostasy” with an additional five years for “criticizing the judicial system and the government’s human rights record,” prohibitions on gatherings in mostly Shia areas, and a small Shia representation in the country’s Consultative Council.

These tensions between the Saudi government and the Shia community are not a recent phenomenon. Relations between the two were particularly tense at the end of the 1970s.The Islamic Revolution in Iran is believed to have escalated Sunni-Shia tensions but not to have driven them – which was more a result of a repressive governor in the province.

There were also incidents in Bahrain, but again driven largely by local discrimination and issues. Tehran was unable to successfully spread the Islamic Revolution or win large-scale Arab Shia support.

They have, however, taken a new form following the beginning of the current political upheavals in the Arab world, as calls have come for greater Shia rights within Saudi Arabia, and as Sunni-Shia tensions have escalated in Bahrain. One prominent Shia figure – Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr – has gone so far as to speculate about the Shia parts of the east breaking away from the rest of Saudi Arabia, which led to calls for his arrest in 2009. He has been accused of also disrespecting the passing of Saudi Crown Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud. Shortly thereafter in July 2012, the police allegedly shot and then apprehended him. The arrest triggered protests, which saw the shooting deaths of two men. Adding to this incident, it is reported that all of the ten fatalities in the Kingdom linked to the uprisings that spread across the Arab World starting in 2011 were Shia.

Riyadh claims that Iranian meddling in the Kingdom is responsible for such Shia unrest, but it is unclear how much leverage Tehran now has in driving Shia actors in the Kingdom. For one, religious leaders from Iraq have made greater inroads with Shia in Saudi Arabia than have their Iranian counterparts.

According to Iran expert Ray Takeyh with the Council on Foreign Relations, it appears that Shia movements in the Gulf – not including Iraq – are still driven more by local concerns than by Iranian meddling. A number of US official experts share this view.

The above brief extract is taken from “The Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula,” a report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

RTWT

The uprisings across the Arab world have not only empowered illiberal actors, but may also undermine vital security interests, writes a prominent analyst.

“The uprisings of the last two years have represented a significant challenge to authoritarian rule in the Arab world. But structural conditions appear to be preventing broader political liberalization in the region, and war, corruption, and economic stagnation could undermine further progress,” argues Seth G. Jones, Associate Director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND Corporation:

Although the United States can take some steps to support democratization in the long run, it cannot force change. Middle Eastern autocrats may eventually fall, and the spread of liberal democracy would be welcomed by most Americans, even if it would carry certain risks. Yet until such changes occur because of the labor of Arabs themselves, U.S. policy toward the Middle East should focus on what is attainable. 

Outside of Tunisia, political developments since the overthrow of incumbent authoritarian regimes have hardly enhanced prospects for sustainable democratic transitions. In any case, there is only a limited role for external actors, he contends.

“The demise of Middle Eastern authoritarianism may come eventually. But there is little reason to think that day is near, and even less reason to think that the United States can significantly increase its chances of happening,” Jones writes in the new issue of Foreign Affairs:

Any effort by Washington to bring democracy to the region will fail if local social and economic conditions are not ripe and if vested interests in the countries oppose political reforms. Indeed, outside powers such as the United States have historically had only a marginal impact, at best, on whether a country democratizes. Until another wave of local uprisings does succeed in transforming the region, U.S. policy should not be hamstrung by an overly narrow focus on spreading democracy. The United States and its allies need to protect their vital strategic interests in the region — balancing against rogue states such as Iran, ensuring access to energy resources, and countering violent extremists. Achieving these goals will require working with some authoritarian governments and accepting the Arab world for what it is today.

Some observers have argued that the Arab awakening “is best understood as a delayed regional onset of the third wave or even the harbinger of a fourth. “But that misreads events and offers undue optimism,” argues Jones, an Adjunct Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies:

Washington should not base its policy toward the greater Middle East on the assumption that the region is democratizing quickly or sustainably. The United States and other Western countries should encourage liberal reforms, support civil society, and provide technical assistance in improving countries’ constitutions and financial systems. But the perceived promise of the Arab uprisings should not cause the United States to overlook its main strategic priorities in the region. … The normative hope that liberal democracy may flourish in the future must be balanced by the need to work with governments and societies as they exist today.

Autocratic regimes such as those in Jordan and Saudi Arabia are vital allies in the fight against radical Islamist terrorism, Jones contends, and “keeping such cooperation intact is imperative.”

“In fact, the cold reality is that some democratic governments in the Arab world would almost certainly be more hostile to the United States than their authoritarian predecessors, because they would be more responsive to the populations of their countries, which are largely anti-American.”

RTWT

China’s leadership transition has prompted extensive commentary on prospects for political reform, but some analysts believe the new generation is less likely to democratize a sclerotic political system than cede authority to a newly assertive military and succumb to growing ‘hyper-nationalism.’

“We will never copy a Western political system,” Hu Jintao, the departing party head, told the opening session of the ruling Communist Party’s 18^th Congress:

The party’s public agenda, which Mr. Hu described in detail in his 100-minute address, was laid out in a 64-page report that is in part intended to highlight priorities for the new leaders, who will be announced later this month. Much of the document had retrograde language that emphasized ideology stretching back to Mao and had little in the way of bold or creative thinking, said Qian Gang, the director of the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong. 

”If you read Hu’s speech last week, which is the consensus of the current leadership and the incoming one, it’s a reassertion of conservative core values – ‘the party must pull out all stops to preserve the monopoly of the party on power,”’ says Willy Lam of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. ”It’s highly unlikely that Xi [the incoming president Xi Jinping] will be able to achieve any political reform, at least in his first five-year term.”

The leadership succession process devised by former leader Deng Xiaoping has served its purpose: “preventing the disruptive, sometimes bloody power struggles that have been the downfall of other authoritarian regimes,” writes Princeton University’s Aaron L. Friedberg:

This year’s succession, however, has been far from smooth. China’s political elite is clearly divided against itself, although the precise composition of the factions is much hazier. Some observers see a contest between a group of “princelings,” the descendants of China’s revolutionary founders, and those from more modest backgrounds, many of whom got their start in the Communist Party Youth League. (Xi belongs to the first group; Li [Keqiang] is a member of the second.)

While some observers expect Li will assume the mantle of outgoing premier Wen Jiabao as an advocate of democratic reform, others are skeptical.

“Li Keqiang will be more effective than Wen Jiabao,” said Bo Zhiyue, an expert on Chinese politics at the National University of Singapore. “Wen Jiabao tried to promote too many things – political reform, social reform as well as economic reform. Li Keqiang will be more focused.”

Any hopes that he may be a reform-minded leader are grounded in his student days. Not only did he support open and free elections, he also immersed himself in English and law, studying under a professor who taught constitutional democracy. Mr Li has not forgotten his language training. He speaks the best English – proficient but not fluent – among China’s top leaders. But he seems to have shed much of his idealism on the way to the summit of Chinese politics.

Wang Juntao, his former classmate who is now an exiled democracy campaigner, wrote about meeting Mr Li nearly a decade after graduation: “I felt he had less of his independent strength of character and was more world-weary.”

Nor is the probable incoming president likely to be a force for reform, writes Harvard University’s Roderick MacFarquhar: 

Xi is a “princeling”, the son of a revolutionary who became a senior official of the Mao and Deng eras. Retired elders such as Mr Jiang apparently prefer princelings since they are assumed to have a stake in preserving the system. But because Mr Xi’s elevation has been a result of factional struggle and compromise, he has no personal mandate. Almost certainly that is one reason Mr Hu and his colleagues moved swiftly this year to unseat Bo Xilai, the charismatic princeling boss of Chongqing. Mr Bo could have constituted a real threat to Mr Xi had he entered the PSC.

Even if Xi is committed to political reform, “there is very little chance that he will be able to implement the kind of change that China needs,” says Princeton’s Friedberg, author of A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia:

At best, he will be first among equals and will have to bargain and compromise with others who give even less evidence of enthusiasm for real reform. Even among those who favor change there are no influential public advocates of a genuine, multi-party system or unrestricted freedom of political expression. On closer inspection, reform proposals usually turn out to involve mechanisms for creating the appearance of greater choice by expanding “democracy within the Party.”

The authorities stopped publishing statistics detailing the number of large-scale protests or “mass incidents” in 2005 when the figure exceeded 80,000, Friedberg notes. And the upsurge in social unrest helps explain why some members of the ruling elite have reportedly taken to reading Alexis de Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the French Revolution.

China’s leaders are ”fascinated by the French thinker’s writings because of what his observations say about conditions in their times,” says Nailene Chou Wiest, a visiting professor at China’s Sun Yat-sen University.

Outgoing premier Wen Jiabo has described China’s economic growth model is as “unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated, and ultimately unsustainable.” Many observers agree that economic restructuring cannot be achieved without challenging existing power structures.

“In order to build a real market economy, we have to have real political reform,” said Yang Jisheng, a veteran journalist and a leading historian of the Mao era. “In the next years, we should have a constitutional democracy plus a market economy.”

But the ruling Communist Party and other vested interests represent serious obstacles to reform:

The 400 or so incoming members of the party’s Central Committee, Politburo and Politburo Standing Committee, as well as their friends and families, have close ties to the most powerful of China’s 145,000 state-owned enterprises. The growing presence of princelings — the children of notable Communist officials — in the party, the government and corporations could mean an even more closely meshed web of nepotism. It is a system that Xi Jinping, anointed to be the next party chief and president and himself a member of the “red nobility,” would find hard to unravel, even if he wanted to.

“There are people who run state-owned enterprises who are Xi Jinping’s friends, relatives and old classmates,” said Zhang Lifan, a historian. “This group is part of his political energy and support base. If Xi Jinping is willing to reform, he must sacrifice the interests of these people for the long-term good.”

“To break one-party rule right now is probably not realistic, but we can have factions within the party made public and legalized, so they can campaign against each other,” said Mr. Yang, who added that there was no other way at the moment to ensure political accountability. “What happens in this kind of economy is that wealth concentrates where power is.”

The ruling elite managed to purge neo-Maoist Bo Xilai in the run-up to the current Congress, but “absent Bo, factionalism in the PSC could threaten Mr Xi’s policies and position,” writes Harvard’s MacFarquhar: 

Solving China’s huge problems will provide ample room for disagreement: corrosive corruption from top to bottom; widespread resistance to the depredations of local officials; environmental degradation; vast income disparities; and capital flight. If Mr Xi is a closet reformer, his room for manoeuvre is small. The 83m party members did not sign up for radical changes that would threaten their power or piggy-banks.

Giving voice to the party orthodoxy of democracy with Chinese characteristics, one Congress delegate claims that reform towards a “socialist consultative democracy” is implicit in Hu’s report.

“The report makes clear that political consultation must be incorporated into decision-making,” Wang Huan tells the official Xinhua news agency. “This requirement will reinforce the effectiveness of democratic consultation and help take in more advice from different sectors of the society. All of this bears testimony to the vitality of socialist democracy.”

But while the party claims that it is promoting a system of grassroots, village-level democracy, “the problem of over-concentration of power is more serious than ever,” says Qian Gang, director of the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong.

“How can meaningful reform of local people’s congresses occur without addressing the core issue of separating the Party and government?

That’s why there has been no real progress on reform of the people’s congress system over the past 20 years. Since 2002, it has been routine for top Party chiefs in every province to chair their local people’s congresses, recentralizing power.

Just like a quarter century ago, real political reform in China requires a change in the Party’s power structure. This entails tough questions, and even tougher answers, about the origin of power, the independent exercise of power, and safeguards to ensure power is effectively checked and monitored. Instead, Mr. Hu’s pronouncement that China “will resolutely not follow Western political models” revives a hardline phrase that has often presaged a stubborn unwillingness to carry out any sort of meaningful reform.

Another theory why democratic reform is likely to be stillborn “is that the Chinese military is becoming a louder voice in Beijing, at the expense of economic technocrats and diplomats,” says the FT’s Gideon Rachman:

Behind the new group of top leaders lies a younger generation of Chinese raised on the “wolf’s milk” of hyper-nationalism. In the post-Tiananmen era, the Chinese government has sought legitimacy in a new national narrative – rammed home in schools – that emphasizes patriotic revival and the avenging of the humiliations inflicted by foreign powers, above all Japan.

Princeton’s Friedberg shares such concerns.

“While acting with excessive caution at home, a weak collective leadership may actually be prone to pursue more assertive, even aggressive external policies,” he writes in The New Republic:

Faced with rising domestic discontent, this leading group will probably feel compelled to rely even more heavily than their predecessors on a militant strand of nationalism to rally popular support, and they may seek to deflect public anger outwards towards foreign bogeymen like Japan. Lacking the stature and experience to stand up to the military, the civilian leadership may be inclined to give in to its demands for yet more resources and tougher policies. And, in the event of a crisis or confrontation, none of the members of the inner circle will want to risk accusations of being “soft” or lacking patriotic zeal.

“Despite their seeming blandness, China’s new rulers could end up steering their country into very dangerous waters indeed,” he concludes.

After a steady increase in the number of the world’s democracies, authoritarianism is on the rise, Council on Foreign Relations analyst Joshua Kurlantzick writes in a forthcoming book.  Democracy has been in decline over the past decade, he contends, a development that is likely to have a vast impact on human rights, economic freedoms, and the international system.

At the start of the 20th Century, only a tiny fraction of the countries in the world could have been called true democracies.  Even as recently as 1988, before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, a small minority of the world’s people lived under democracy; Central Asia and Eastern Europe had no democracies, and sub-Saharan Africa had virtually no true democracies as well. Compared with those bleak periods, the number of democracies in the early 21st Century seems like a great advance.

No one expects that democracy will backslide to its weak global position in 1900; the prospect of democracy being wiped away completely, as seemed possible in the 1930s, now appears all but impossible. Indeed, the point of this book is not to suggest that democracy is in its death throes, but that it is in decline over the past decade— a decline that should be worrying because of its vast impact on human rights, economic freedoms, and the international system.

Choosing to look at democracy’s decline over the past decade is not arbitrary. Just as 1974, and then 1989, were watershed years for democratization, so too was 2001 such a year, although not in a positive way. Over the subsequent decade certain trends, which were less apparent in the 1980s or 1990s, clearly indicated weakening democracy throughout the developing world.

Those trends began to materialize in 2001, and they would grow stronger throughout the 2000s and into the early 2010s, as surveys such as those done by Freedom House and the Economist Intelligence Unit, as well as my own research, would show this distinct decline in democracy in many nations.

The global landscape that had begun to be transformed in 2001 included the weakening of American power. In the months after the September 11, 2001, attacks, American power seemed to be at its zenith, but as the United States became entangled in two long wars stemming in some ways from that day, its power would ebb, with significant consequences for America’s ability and willingness to attempt democracy promotion in the developing world. In 2001, too, both Russia and China would begin to consolidate their leadership transitions, and in that year the foundations would be set for the authoritarian great powers to reassert their dominance both at home and in their near neighborhoods, where they would lead a backlash against democracy.

Also in 2001, broadband Internet began to become available to a growing number of homes in developed countries, the first step toward what would become its widespread use, and would impact democratic change in many developing nations. The early 2000s also saw the height of the anti-globalization movement and the questioning of the Washington consensus regarding economic liberalization, a change that would reverberate through young democracies, as many citizens who had linked economic and political reform would come to question whether democracy was necessarily the best system to produce growth and development.

Finally, in 2001 the initial signs of conservative, middle- class revolts against electoral democracy would begin to emerge in many key developing nations, including Pakistan, the Philippines, Venezuela, Russia, and others.

Democracies have faced many challenges in the past, and at other times countries that seemed to have democratized suffered serious reversals, occasionally regressing, as in the case of Germany in the 1930s, to outright totalitarianism. But those reversals tended to be relatively isolated, and eventually global democracy progressed once again. That progression can no longer be taken for granted: today a constellation of factors, from the rise of China to the lack of economic growth in new democracies to the West’s financial crisis, has come together to hinder democracy throughout the developing world.

Absent radical and unlikely changes in the international system, that combination of antidemocratic factors will have serious staying power. Yet Western leaders do not seem to recognize how seriously democracy is threatened in many parts of the developing world. Though some observers, like Freedom House, have begun to recognize how democracy has become endangered, few have systematically traced how a form of government once thought to be invincible has been found lacking in so many places and consequently tossed aside, often by the very middle-class reformers who once were democracy’s vanguard. Among senior American officials, few are willing to accept that the current climate is anything more than a blip in democracy’s ultimate conquest of the globe, that the Arab Spring and Summer might not turn out to be like 1989’s year of democratic revolution— or that a prolonged democratic rollback would have severe consequences for global security, trade, and American strategic interests, not to mention the well- being of millions of men and women across the developing world.

This is taken from a longer extract published by Asia Sentinel. Joshua Kurlantzick’s new book, The Decline of Democracy,  is to be published soon by Yale University Press.

“After the shooting stopped in 1945, thousands of children and teenagers in Berlin’s ruins were left to their own devices. One in five schoolchildren had lost a parent. Despair gripped the adults in the capital, all of which was still under Soviet control,” writes Anne Applebaum:

In the western district of Neukölln, a group of young people decided to take matters into their own hands. Announcing on the day before the Allied victory that they would help rebuild the city, they formed a civic group and called it “anti-fascist.” Two weeks later, they had 600 members, had cleared the rubble from two sports stadiums and had organized five orphanages.

Inspired by their example, other young Germans began organizing similar anti-fascist groups in Berlin, but they didn’t last long. On July 31, the Soviet Military Administration banned all unregistered organizations. After that, many groups, clubs and associations were denied permission to exist.

“This decision was not an aberration,” Applebaum notes:

Newly opened archives show that the persecution of civic activists, frequently enforced by violence, often took precedence over Communist parties’ other political and economic goals in the Soviet bloc at that time. Selective violence was carefully aimed at elites — intellectuals, businessmen, priests, police officers, anti-Nazi partisans — and above all at anyone capable of founding and leading any kind of spontaneous organization, no matter how apolitical. Scout groups, Freemasons and Catholic youth leaders all figure among the early victims of these regimes.

“People were jailed or deported or executed in totalitarian states not for being threats to the regime but for being threats to the future, a much broader jurisdiction,” Louis Menand notes in The New Yorker:

Applebaum tells of a Polish man who was executed for possession of an unlicensed radio, of a printer who was sentenced to five years for a typographical error in an obituary of Stalin, of teen-agers who were sent to camps or prison for making faces during a lecture on Stalin. By 1954, six million people in Poland were registered as criminal or suspicious elements. That was almost a quarter of the population.

But the main target of totalitarian remaking was not the individual dissident or nonconformist. It was civil society itself.

“From the earliest days of the Soviet Union, Soviet representatives in the region were very interested in what we now call civil society,” she recently told RFE/RL. “So they were very interested in self-organized groups. That means both political parties, it means soccer clubs, it means chess clubs. Self-organized groups of all kinds were a target of Soviet interest and in some cases repressed from the very beginning.”

Applebaum’s new book is not about contemporary Russia, notes The Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt. But the chapter headings of Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-56 “point to the essential tools and pressure points: Policemen. Violence. Ethnic Cleansing. Youth. Radio. Internal Enemies. [and] …also bring into jarring relief how faithfully Putin has followed the Stalinist recipe,” he observes:

Like Putin, Stalin’s loyalists tolerated, for as long as necessary, certain trappings of democracy. But they made sure from the start to control the security organs — the KGB, by whatever name it took — and they made sure that the organs ultimately controlled everything else. Like Putin, they also tolerated, for a while, some relatively free media. But the media that mattered — radio, after World War II; the television networks, for Putin — were quickly brought to heel.

Identically to the martinets of Eastern Europe, Putin is quick to blame Western provocations when things go awry, to exploit ethnic prejudices and nationalist bigotry to cement his power, to point darkly toward internal enemies. … Even the squashing of Pussy Riot is unoriginal; the Communists 60 years ago were panicked by oddly dressed jazz musicians they couldn’t control.

And as in Putin’s Russia, those who resisted might be beaten, imprisoned or murdered.

“Soviet puppets did not merely want control of their governments, they wanted total control,” one reviewer notes. “They wanted to create a world full of perfect socialists – a breed of man that dissidents sarcastically named Homo sovieticus – who not only accepted their subservience but embraced it, and who were so steeped in ideology that any alternative was quite literally unthinkable. “

By contrast, today’s authoritarian regimes have largely given up the pretense of ideological aspiration, content to secure the passive consent of citizens through a new social contract – offering prosperity or stability in exchange for political docility. Or perhaps it’s not such a novel pact at all?

“In a certain sense, this was the genius of Soviet totalitarianism,” Applebaum writes. “The system created large groups of people who disliked the regime and knew the propaganda was false, but who felt nevertheless compelled by circumstances to go along with it.”

For decades after Russia’s occupation of central and eastern Europe, “this Soviet pattern of ‘totalitarianization’ — the pursuit of total control over all aspects of public life — was widely imitated,” she notes.

“Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Libya got Soviet and East German advice on secret police methods, as did Chinese, Egyptian, Syrian, Angolan, Cuban and North Korean governments on those and other aspects of societal control.”

(And, she might have added, recently released German archives reveal that Fidel Castro also drew on those other totalitarians, recruiting former member of the Nazi Waffen SS as military trainers.)

When it comes to aiding democratic forces, “[p]rivate and government organizations can give material help, and nongovernmental organizations can advise, particularly on legal and regulatory issues that often are ignored,” she writes. “Officials and activists who have lived through turbulent transitions elsewhere can share experiences, as Poles and Czechs now do with Tunisians and Egyptians.”

The Post’s Hiatt makes a similar point about the historic significance of democratic solidarity.

“For all its tragedy, ‘Iron Curtain’ is in one sense a happy story: The dictators failed to reshape human nature. Europeans rebelled, first in 1956 and again in 1989. Communism crumbled,” he writes:

But the ending, or at least its timing, might have been different had the West not unequivocally defended freedom, including with the Marshall Plan, NATO, Radio Free Europe and the National Endowment for Democracy. The same kind of determination has yet to be mustered in response to Stalin’s imitators in Belarus and Central Asia, not to mention his star pupil in his old Kremlin stomping grounds.

“But above all,” Applebaum concludes, “a repressed society needs a motivated populace if it is to become politically vibrant again. To be more precise, it needs patriotism, historical consciousness, education, ambition, optimism and, especially, patience.”

A veteran Russian human rights activist has a sardonic take on the news that the European Union will receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

“First they give [it] to Obama, then to the European Union. Who is next? Maybe the Shanghai Cooperation Organization,” said former Soviet dissident Lyudmila Alexeyeva, the head of the Helsinki Human Rights Group.

The SCO has been described as “the most dangerous organization that the American people have never heard of,” an authoritarian international for Eurasia’s illiberal regimes, and “one of those international bodies whose proclaimed ideals conceal an often sordid reality.” Other observers have noted that Beijing is using the SCO to ensure that it gets “the thickest piece of cake given to the modern Chinese by the heavens,” granting $10 billion in loans to Central Asian states last year.

Freedom House and the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom cordially invite you to the roundtable Anti-Extremism Laws in Russia, Pakistan, and China and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Thursday, November 8th 3:00 PM – 4:30 PM 1301 Connecticut Ave. NW 4th Floor Washington, DC This event is on the record. Opening Statement: David J. Kramer, President, Freedom House Introduction: Knox Thames, Director of Policy and Research, United States Commission on International Religious Freedom Participants: Tariq Ahmad, Foreign Law Specialist, Law Library of Congress; Virab Khachatryan, Foreign Law Specialist at the Global Legal Research Center; Peter Roudik, Director of Legal Research, Global Legal Research Center; Aleksandr Verhovsky, Director, SOVA Center; Laney Zhang, Senior Foreign Law Specialist, Global Legal Research Center.

To RSVP for this event by November 7th at noon, click here. Freedom House is pleased to host a roundtable on the anti-extremism legal frameworks in China, Pakistan, and Russia. Moderated by Freedom House President David Kramer, the on-the-record roundtable will provide an opportunity for participants to engage experts and authors of The Law Library of Congress’s report Legal Provisions on Fighting Extremism. The participants will compare and contrast the differing approaches to anti-extremism laws in China, Pakistan, and Russia. The round table comes at an important time as repressive regimes are developing anti-extremism laws and implementing them in broad terms to suppress criticism.

RSVP for this event here: Anti-Extremism Laws in Russia, Pakistan, and China and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization

SOVA Center and the Helsinki Human Rights Group receive support from the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group.