China’s government is hunting down signatories of the Charter 08 reform manifesto and upgrading its internet censorship software to allow the authorities to identify and suppress dissent much earlier and efficiently.
Nearly 7,000 intellectuals, farmers, students, journalists, and activists have endorsed Charter 08, modeled after the Czechoslovakian dissidents Charter 77, which warns of “the possibility of a violent conflict of disastrous proportions” in the absence of democratic reform.
The communist authorities appear hypersensitive to the risk of unrest as widespread lay-offs and declining economic growth, fearing that economic insecurity could lead the charter to become a rallying call for unemployed graduates.
Bao Tong, a former top Communist Party official jailed for seven years after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, signed the charter as “a citizen”. “Would the powers-that-be please tell 1.3 billion people why freedom is a crime?” he wrote recently.
Senior government officials have expressed concern that high unemployment among migrant workers could foment further unrest and instability in 2009, a year in which the ruling Communist party celebrates 60 years in power, while dissidents and democrats will seek to highlight the 90th anniversary of the 4th May protest movement or Chinese Enlightenment and the 4th June 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
China’s internet police are using state-of-the-art internet spying technology to pre-empt criticism and manage public opinion, according to the country’s leading provider of search technology.
Officials are under huge pressure following recent events like the Sichuan earthquake, the Olympics, and the economic crisis, He Zhaohui, marketing manager at TRS, told the Financial Times. “Among those working in the news and propaganda in China the heart attack rate is highest,” he said.
The Communist regime has based its legitimacy on its performance in delivering sustained economic growth and improved living standards rather than on a discredited marxist-leninist ideology. For that reason, analysts suggest, it is acutely sensitive to the political implications of the current economic crisis and is consequently wary of any calls for reform.
“The Party apparently thinks–probably correctly–that further economic reform would threaten the country’s authoritarian system, so the Party will not sponsor much more change,” writes Gordon G. Chang, author of The Coming Collapse of China.”So it should come as no surprise that this slow-or-no-reform period coincides with a time of political retrenchment.”
During the chaos of Portugal’s democratic revolution in April 1974, Mário Soares, the provisional government’s foreign minister, visited Henry Kissinger. The U.S. Secretary of State was concerned that Portugal’s communist party would seize power and urged the democratic socialist Soares to take a tougher stance against the Stalinists.
“You are a Kerensky,” Kissinger said, “I believe your sincerity, but you are naive.”
To which Soares replied: “I certainly don’t want to be a Kerensky.”
And Kissinger shot back: “Neither did Kerensky.”
The anecdote was noted by Samuel Huntington, the hugely influential political scientist who passed away Christmas Eve, in a 1997 Journal of Democracy article. Huntington, a member of the International Forum for Democratic Studies‘ Research Council and the Journal of Democracy’s International Advisory Committee, went on to argue that democracy promoters should prioritize transformation of electoral democracies into liberal democracies over democratizing the world’s unfree countries.
He also stressed the need to “develop the sense of community and enhance the forms of cooperation among liberal democracies,” not least through the creation of more publicly funded foundations akin to the National Endowment for Democracy and the UK’s Westminster Foundation for Democracy. “It is also highly desirable that these institutions join together in an international association to coordinate their efforts and to become an effective lobbying group with national governments and international organizations on behalf of democratic development,” he argued.
Huntington was a foreign policy adviser to Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey’s 1968 presidential campaign. As “an old-fashioned Democrat” wrote Robert Kaplan, Huntington “always held liberal ideals. But he knows that such ideals cannot survive without power, and that power requires careful upkeep.”
“Even back then we were nation-building,” Huntington told Kaplan. “We rejected religious and ethnic loyalties as counterweights to the Vietcong because we wanted a modern, democratic nation-state with a national army. Our problem with Vietnam was our idealism.”
Fareed Zakaria, amongst others, takes pains to stress Huntington’s conviction that political order took precedence over regime type. “American-style progress — more political participation or faster economic growth - actually created more problems than it solved,” Zakaria argues. “If a country had more people who were economically, politically and socially active yet lacked effective political institutions, such as political parties, civic organizations or credible courts, the result was greater instability.”
Others observe that Huntington’s theory about “modernizing authoritarianism” was either discredited or discarded. “Huntington showed that the lack of political order and authority were among the most serious debilities the world over,” said Jorge Dominguez, Harvard’s vice provost for international affairs. “The degree of order, rather than the form of the political regime, mattered most.”
But, Dominguez contends, Huntington’s 1991 book, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, “looked at similar questions from a different perspective, namely, that the form of the political regime - democracy or dictatorship - did matter“.
Huntington is more widely known for his theory of a clash of civilizations (a phrase in fact coined by Bernard Lewis). “The fundamental source of conflict in this new [post-Cold War] world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic,” Huntington wrote. “The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural.”
His writings on democracy exhibited sensitivity to the critical function of religious and cultural factors. The Economist notes his belief that “democratization might have more to do with the Second Vatican Council, which had unleashed a wave of democratization across the Catholic world, than with the spread of free-markets.”
Writing in The Financial Times, Christopher Caldwell, suggests that his thesis led him to be more cautious about promoting democracy in regions that lacked Judaeo-Christian cultural or religious underpinnings:
It was unclear to many of Huntington’s readers whether the centrepiece of western diplomacy, spreading democracy, would avert inter-civilizational violence or incite it. Most assumed Huntington thought the former. In fact, he consistently thought the latter.
“My argument remains,” he said in a 2007 interview with Islamica magazine, “that cultural identities, antagonisms and affiliations will not only play a role, but play a major role in relations between states.”
No observation aroused more controversy than his statement that “Islam has bloody borders.” But, Caldwell notes, to Huntington, “this was an empirical statement, not a judgment on Islam’s merits as a civilization and still less an argument for western meddling.”
Anyway, the west’s increasing entanglement with Islam has not been the result of an increasing enmity. On the contrary. Viewed from Orthodox Christian civilization, in Chechnya, Bosnia and Kosovo the west took the Muslims’ side.
Huntington was well aware of the “paradox of democracy“, writes Fouad Ajami:
Democratic experiments often bring in their wake nationalistic populist movements (Latin America) or fundamentalist movements (Muslim countries). The world tempts power, and denies it. It is the Huntingtonian world; no false hopes and no redemption.
Francis Fukuyama, a board member of the National Endowment for Democracy, takes issue with Huntington’s approach:
While I fully appreciate the power and durability of culture, and the way that modern liberal democracy was rooted in Christian cultural values, it has always seemed to me that culture was more useful in explaining the provenance than the durability of democracy as a political system. [Huntington] underrated the universalism of the appeal of living in modern, free societies with accountable governments. … The gloomy picture he paints of a world riven by cultural conflict is one favored by the Islamists and Russian nationalists, but is less helpful in explaining contemporary China or India, or indeed in explaining the motives of people in the Muslim world or Russia who are not Islamists or nationalists. Nation-states and not civilizations remain the primary actors in world politics, and they are motivated by a host of interests and incentives that often override inherited cultural predispositions.
Now that the Third Wave is well and truly over, and advocates of modernizing authoritarianism gaining confidence and adherents, it seems fitting to return to Huntington’s 1997 JOD article and take heed of his call for a renewed democratic internationalism:
Now, after 20 years of the Third Wave, conditions are much more favorable, and private groups should move to create an international association of organizations and movements dedicated to expanding democracy on a global basis and to enhancing the performance of democracy within countries. The Comintern is dead. The time for a Demintern has arrived. The creation of such an association will be a major step toward ensuring the consolidation and the continuation of the momentous expansion of human freedom that began under the leadership of Mário Soares 23 years ago.
Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev yesterday signed a law extending presidential terms from four years to six, apparently expediting Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency. The move fed speculation that Putin, eager to act before the financial crisis further erodes his popularity, is unlikely to wait until scheduled elections in 2012 to return to the office.
The Kremlin acted unusually quickly, pushing the amendment through both houses of the Duma and all of the nation’s 83 regional assemblies in less than 50 days. The liberal Yabloko party objected, highlighting a clause in the 1998 law which requires that regions be given a year to consider proposed constitutional amendments.
“They’re completely ignoring the law,” said Sergei Mitrokhin, Yabloko’s chairman. “Unfortunately, this happens quite often, but this is the first time the process has been ignored for such a significant issue as a constitutional amendment.”
The amendment coincides with another proposal to expand the definition of treason, a move that democrats fear “could mean a return to Soviet-style prosecutions of government critics as traitors, making crimes even of conversations with foreign reporters and nongovernmental organizations.”
Activists and lawyers suggest that the law is being pushed through in anticipation of increased political dissent and social unrest prompted by the financial crisis and the Kremlin’s economic mismanagement.
The financial crisis is testing the viability of the Putin-Medvedev “tandemocracy,” notes one observer. “The two centers of power promised a gradual evolution of Russia’s political system toward more pluralism and public accountability,” Vladimir Frolov writes in the Moscow Times. But Medvedev’s modernization agenda has given way to crisis management and Putin’s White House is “the political center of gravity.”
The declining price of oil - from $140-plus to $40 a barrel - is hurting authoritarian “petrocrats” like Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, Hugo Chavez as well as Putin. The Wall Street Journal suggests that the Russian premier is particularly vulnerable, noting that the authorities have banned state media from using the word “crisis,” although the Public Opinion Foundation reports that 42% of Russians believe the country is in one.
The closure of political space and emasculation of democratic institutions may backfire against the regime as discontented citizens take to the streets:
As the state is unable to tolerate or channel public anger into democratic debate, hostility can erupt in unpredictable ways. Earlier this month, some 30 Russian cities held demonstrations against a high new tariff on imported second-hand cars. … Riot police were sent from Moscow 3,750 miles east to Vladivostok, the epicenter of the movement. So far, the anti-tariff demonstrations aren’t overtly political, but the Kremlin seems to believe that can change and isn’t taking chances.
Robert Amsterdam’s blog features a rare document of dissent from within the security services, highlighting a posting on the Interior Ministry’s website from a disaffected police officer:
The power knows that actions of people’s protest are possible, and that the consequences could be unpredictable. A question. On whom is the power relying? Who can save it from the people’s wrath? Who will help hold on to what has been pillaged? That would be you and me, colleagues. The Russian police. We are going to disperse the protesters, like we did on 1 May of 1993 and in October of that same year, like we dispersed the Russian March in 2008. So, in everything that has taken place with our Motherland since the year 1993, there is our guilt…. A question. Are we going to be the dogs-on-a-chain of this regime?
As RFE/RL’s excellent Power Vertical notes, the posting has since been removed and replaced with a message apologizing for the “inconvenience.”
Using international leverage to arrest Nicaragua’s downward spiral toward authoritarian rule could prevent President Daniel Ortega from “morphing” into another Robert Mugabe, argues Kevin Casas-Zamora, senior fellow in foreign policy at Washington’s Brookings Institution.
Ortega’s Sandinista movement has reacted violently to the alleged rigging of last month’s elections, cancelling the registration of two opposition parties, and harassing its critics - including former Sandinista poet Ernesto Cardenal - as well as domestic and international civil society groups.
“Our democracy is in grave danger,” said Carlos Tunnermann, a former Sandinista ambassador. “There are dictatorial tendencies taking away Nicaraguans’ right to choose.”
As the largest bilateral provider of aid, the U.S. should follow the lead of European states, and reconsider cooperation links with the Ortega regime, Casas-Zamora argues, “prudently, but firmly” using as leverage the $175 million five-year Millennium Challenge agreement signed in 2005.
With the lowest approval rating of all six Central American heads of state at just 22 percent, Ortega has been courting unsavory international allies, including Iran and Libya. “Ortega has become a deeply unpopular president after a series of scandals,” the U.S.-based Stratfor consulting firm notes. “Making grand gestures in the international system is one way for Ortega to step into the spotlight and perhaps attract an international sponsor.”
Demonstrations against Egypt's authoritarian government are unlikely to spark regime change, a new study suggests (Credit: globalvoicesonline)
Egypt’s political evolution will “shape the timing, character, and success of democratization throughout the Arab world”, claims a new study. The country provides a particularly insightful case for understanding regional prospects for democracy, writes Bruce Rutherford, because of the relatively open and historically rooted rivalry between the “liberal, Islamic, and statist conceptions of political order that compete for preeminence in the Arab world.”
The current regime exhibits a growing contradiction: on one hand, it is a “classic example of stable authoritarianism“, controlling much of the media and political life, while suppressing opponents with legal and extra-legal instruments and monitoring and manipulating political parties and civil society groups; on the other hand, a vibrant judiciary, an assertive Judges’ Club, and a large and well-organized Islamist opposition are poised to take advantage of “a fundamental change in the character of Egyptian politics since the early 1990s”, namely the declining legitimacy and sustainability of the Nasserite statist order.
Egypt typifies the dilemma facing many of the region’s regimes, namely that a consequence of economic restructuring is that “the massive welfare states that enhanced regime legitimacy in many countries have proven financially unsustainable.” The region’s autocratic institutions are not threatened by color revolution-style transitions even if “the tools of centralized state power are gradually eroding,” Rutherford contends. The result is a hybrid regime that combines autocratic elements - a powerful and largely unchecked executive - and democratic institutions that constrain the state and increase accountability.
He notes the role played by the democracy assistance and human rights community in supporting indigenous demands for democratic reform:
These measures were reinforced by a growing network of transnational civil society groups that promoted democracy and human rights. These organizations included human rights groups, international party foundations, and media advocacy groups. They drew international attention to human rights abuses and lobbied Western governments to monitor and punish autocratic regimes. Some of the groups also sought to protect and strengthen pro-democracy forces through lobbying, funding, and training. In addition, international election observers became an important force for identifying and documenting electoral fraud. Their efforts led to substantial improvements in the fairness and transparency of elections.
Despite the challenges to the regime, Rutherford concludes, Egypt is “likely to remain a hybrid regime that contains some legal and institutional constraints on executive power, but which falls short of Western norms of democracy.”
A wave of strikes and protests by China’s upwardly mobile working class - factory workers, cab drivers, teachers, and even police officers - is causing concern within the ruling elite, prompting a clampdown on political dissent. Leading dissidents were detained last week after signing Charter 08 calling for greater democracy, an initiative which led President Hu Jintao to reiterate that China “will never copy the model of the Western political system.”
While officially committed to building a “harmonious society” and “putting people first”, China’s leaders have reason to be cautious about a citizen backlash to restructuring, notes The Economist. It quotes the China Labour Bulletin’s recent joint-report with Canada’s Rights and Democracy that millions of laid-off workers have been left near-destitute due to corruption and poor policy.
The ruling Communist party has long feared the rise of an independent labor movement, proscribing unofficial unions and arresting labor rights advocates. With the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations approaching, the regime is also wary of workers and other social protest groups linking up with unemployed graduates to create the kind of alliance that was crushed by the subsequent massacre.
Having recently conceded the legal right to collective bargaining, some observers believe the party will now be pushed to legalize strikes. “It’s increasingly untenable to view strikes as unacceptable, there are simply too many of them and they are everywhere now,” Robin Munro, China Labour Bulletin’s research director. “They’re happening whether they’re legal or not.”
Reducing unemployment among university graduates will be the government’s main priority next year, prime minister Wen Jiabao said at the weekend. “The creation of a huge population of educated unemployed is worrying for the ruling Communist party, which is keenly aware of the historic role disgruntled students have played in inciting rebellion,” the Financial Times reports, noting that “Mao Zedong, who led the Communists to victory in 1949, was himself an educated son of a rich peasant who had his scholarly ambitions thwarted.”
The regime has been eager to claim credit for China’s dramatic economic growth, basing its legitimacy on performance - its ability to deliver jobs and rising living standards - rather than ideology. But that means that citizens are also blaming the government for the current economic downturn and resulting job losses.
“Government leaders portray themselves as the answer to every problem, expressing their willingness to use public resources to help those left behind by the new prosperity, rather than counting on new businesses to create jobs,” notes one observer, highlighting an ideological shift back toward statism.
The Communist party is “struggling to contain economic fallout,” suggests another observer. “They are all too aware that without the promise of wealth, or if that promise crumbles, then their claims to legitimacy crumble as well.”
The regime’s ideological statism and suspicion of independent organizations means that China’s civil society remains small and unable to act as a shock-absorber - delivering services and providing a channel for peaceful protest - as it does in free societies.
Because an NGO is “essentially an assembly that is capable of collective action and powerfully challenging the government politically,” notes Beijing scholar Kang Xiaoguang, the government has been wary, tolerating social service NGOs addressing issues like poverty alleviation, but keeping any remotely political NGOs under tight control.
The government’s strategy has shifted from across-the-board banning of independent groups to one of “control by categories,” notes Kang, cited by the must-read China Digital Times. Many NGOs have become GONGOs as a result of “elite-ification” - with Chinese retired officials and elite offspring taking key jobs - while many other NGOs have been limited by size. The regime tolerates local NGOs but is wary of national-scale independent groups. It is as if a “high-voltage power line” was suspended above them, he writes.
The looming succession crisis in Egypt may be exposing latent rifts within the ruling elite of the National Democratic Party. The military, which has produced every president in the post-independence period, is reportedly uncomfortable at the prospect of Hosni Mubarak’s civilian son assuming the office.
The Speaker of the Egyptian Parliament has now weighed in. “Authority is granted by the will of the people and not through bequeathal,” Fathi Srour told the Almasry Alyoum* newspaper today, insisting that “even in monarchies, bequeathal is conducted in accordance with the law…” (translation by Mideastwire).
The regime appears to be at a strategic impasse, clearly in the stop phase of what Carnegie’s Michelle Dunne calls a process of start-and-stop liberalization, with the ruling NDP suffering an acute legitimacy crisis, in part due to the obvious coupling of wealth and authority, and the alienation of technocratic reformists like Hala Mustafa, editor of the Democracy Review.
The NDP’s troubles are the “result of a system that severely hinders its activities and a ruling regime that shows no appetite for political reform,” notes a special supplement on Egypt in today’s Financial Times. “Instead, critics say, the regime resorts to tried-and-tested methods to shackle, infiltrate, divide and silence opponents.”
The FT reporter, perhaps naively, attributes the weakness of the regime’s liberal opponents to internal bickering, neglecting the extent to which the NDP and security services consistently infiltrate and sabotage opposition groups. A recent attack on the HQ of the liberal Ghad party was another example of the regime “stripping away the legality” of the party, says Gameela Ismail, a party official and the wife of imprisoned party leader Ayman Nour. “This is what they always do, the security [forces] and the government, they always target parties to break them into factions and pieces, to let them eat themselves from within,” she says.
The question of political transition will also pose a strategic dilemma to the new U.S administration. “Should Mubarak’s successor eschew reform or not manage crises well, Egypt’s long-term stability will be at stake, a situation which could have a bigger effect on the Arab world’s direction since the Iraq War or any other current issue,” argues Jeffrey Azarva, in a symposium in the Middle East Review of International Affairs.
The United States should push for reinstituting the two-term limit abolished by Anwar Sadat, a move that “would not only allow for the peaceful rotation of power, but it would also help to undo today’s perception of the president as a God-like figure,” Azarva argues. The U.S. should also seek to depoliticize the process for licensing political parties which is currently controlled by an NDP-stacked parliamentary committee that “exercises de facto veto power over the formation of new parties and uses its authority to meddle in the affairs of–and effectively neuter–those it has legalized.”
Arab states fall into three categories when it comes to international human rights instruments, argues Khalil Al-Anani, an Egyptian expert on political Islam and Middle East democratization in the Middle East at the Al-Ahram Foundation. Egypt is in the group of states that simply do not recognize the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, especially the political rights to freedom of expression, assembly, free elections, freedom of belief and religion. Countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Egypt, Kuwait, Jordan, Tunisia and the UAE have refused to ratify international conventions such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
A second group, to which Egypt also belongs, alongside Syria, Tunisia and Yemen, purports to respect human rights, but they are unquestionably “authoritarian reserves”, exercising de facto repression against citizens and opponents. A third category of states in effect offer citizens a deal to give up political rights in exchange for economic security and social status, as in the Gulf States.
The Mubarak regime is typical of a new trend towards authoritarianism-by-stealth, as military coups or violently contested transitions give way to what one Egyptian observer calls an apparently “innocuous series of constitutional amendments” ostensibly designed to modernize political standards while consecrating a “camouflaged hereditary succession under a pseudo-democratic republican regime.”
Ayman El-Amir, formerly Al-Ahram correspondent in Washington, DC, is skeptical that the unique circumstances of the much-hyped China model are transferable to Egypt. “The Chinese ‘miracle’ was not achieved under circumstances of corruption, fraudulent elections, monopoly of power, cronyism, misrepresentation of reality by paid government propagandists posing as free journalists, and plunder of the wealth of the nation by a privileged few,” he suggests.
Last week’s 60th anniversary of the passing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, was also the 4th anniversary of the imprisonment of Ayman Nour, and the Washington-based Voices for a Democratic Egypt held a Capitol Hill panel highlighting the state of human rights in Egypt. The opportunities for change under a new U.S. administration and the upcoming succession were discussed by exiled dissident Dr. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Neil Hicks of Human Rights First, and Larry Diamond of the Hoover Institution (VDE’s detailed notes and an audio recording of the event are available here and for the Project on Middle East Democracy’s take on the event click here.
* Almasry Alyoum is the country’s largest independent newspaper and the only relatively liberal publication, albeit one with a disturbing tendency to publish illiberal anti-Semitic polemics. “Over the past eight years, the United States has invested huge resources in attempting to bring democracy to the Middle East,” one observer recently noted. “But it’s not clear whether that project will succeed as long as America’s natural allies in the region remain themselves so profoundly irrational and illiberal.”
Events in Zimbabwe took an ominous turn today as Robert Mugabe’s regime claimed that the air force commander, Air Marshal Perence Shiri, had been the victim of an assassination attempt. With the collapse of mediation talks, the always-fragile power-sharing agreement is effectively dead and indications suggest the regime is preparing an all-out offensive against the democratic opposition.
Tendai Biti, secretary general of the Movement for Democratic Change, fears that the regime will use the incident, in which Shirii was reportedly shot in the hand, as a “Reichstag” excuse to suppress all opposition. “Mugabe can kill two birds with one stone,” Biti said. “He can use it as a way of attacking us, and then attacking whatever faction of ZANU-PF he wants to decimate.”
A leading member of the Joint Operations Command, the security service hard-liners currently guiding Mugabe, Shiri is deeply implicated in recent atrocities. He is also Mugabe’s cousin and headed the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade that perpetrated the Ndebele massacres of between 8,000-20,000 civilians from 1982 and 1987.
Opposition forces have faced incrementally growing repression over recent weeks. A march by several hundred civil society activists of the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) was attacked by police using tear gas and dogs. International labor unions condemned the arrests and beatings of more than 48 union activists, including the arrest of Wellington Chibebe, Secretary General of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions.
Other activists have been quietly spirited away or ‘disappeared’ in a manner eerily reminiscent of Latin America’s worst military dictatorships.
Where is Jestina Mukoko? asks Norman Geras, a British blogger who has written consistently and intelligently on the crisis in Zimbabwe. Mukoko resigned from state television to lead the Zimbabwe Peace Project, a human rights monitoring network. He links to this report detailing abductions of Zimbabwean human rights activists and to this story detailing the circumstances of Mukoko’s abduction:
She has collected evidence of tens of thousands of abuses in the past decade. Her monthly reports have detailed the routine tyranny of violence, the shortage of food and the denial of free speech that characterise Zimbabwean life today, particularly in rural areas.
Mukoko pioneered the use of information technology to map Zanu-PF’s attacks on its opponents. Before elections last March she presented her findings publicly in a Harare hotel. She knew her audience included members of the CIO but nevertheless set out patterns of violence in the 2002 and 2005 elections and predicted where trouble would occur in 2008.
The places she identified - such as Manicaland and Masvingo provinces - were indeed subjected to Zanu-PF campaigns of mass eviction, communal beating and murder. Opposition figures believe much of Zimbabwe’s current tragedy might have been avoided if international observers had followed her advice and gone to such trouble spots.
Mukoko has been an outspoken critic of Zimbabwe’s system of supplying food. Her analysis shows food is supplied to those showing loyalty to the ruling party and is denied to opposition supporters.
Credit: FT
A blend of repression and disillusion is forcing Islamist parties to reconsider their participation in the democratic process in several Arab states, analysts suggest. Unable to point to tangible benefits or the realistic prospect of political power, relatively moderate elements are on the defensive.
“The danger now is that the setbacks for political Islam will undermine moderate elements within these movements and strengthen conservatives,” writes Roula Khalaf in the Financial Times, as Islamists question the merits of embracing electoral politics.
“When you participate and you notice that the regime does not want a real democracy, you do ask yourself whether participation makes sense - it is a legitimate question,” says Mustafa Ramid, an official with Morocco’s Justice and Development party. Observes suggest that disillusion could foster a disengagement from the political process that works to the advantage of radical Salafi forces.
“The Muslim Brotherhood and other moderate groups are losing their appeal before the Arab public perhaps because they are focusing on politics and neglecting religion … so Salafis are sliding up to centre stage,” says Khalil al-Anani, recently a visiting fellow at the Saban Centre for Middle East Policy. “If anything, this is a moment of truth for moderates. Either they connect once again with the public, or they embrace irrelevance.”
Despite some electoral success, Islamist movements have failed to influence policy and are under pressure from their rank-and-file for jettisoning their ideological edge, according to a new paper from the Carnegie Endowment. Echoing the claim of a recent analysis that democracy ‘normalizes’ Islamists, Marina Ottaway and Amr Hamzawy state that “Islamist movements operating without constant threat of repression by the state are more willing to compromise, focus on pragmatic policy issues, and remain committed to democratic processes, while Islamists whose participation is hampered by the state are more focused on ideological issues and marginalize reformers within the movement. ”
Political participation will not necessarily engender democratization and moderation within Islamist movements, they contend. But disengagement, whether due to repression or strategic choice, guarantees that moderation will not occur:
The choice is not between allowing the somewhat risky participation by Islamists in politics and their disappearance from the political scene. It is between allowing their participation despite the existence of gray zones with the possibility that a moderating process will unfold, and excluding them from the legal political process-thus ensuring the growing influence of hard-liners inside those movements and the continued existence of gray zones.
A new administration committed to change should maintain continuity in at least one respect - keeping the door open to democratic dissidents. So argues Jackson Diehl in the latest of a series of recommendations that the Obama administration should not ditch the Freedom Agenda.
He notes that President George W. Bush this week marked Human Rights Day by meeting with dissident bloggers and new media activists, including Cuban-American blog Babalu, Alexander Klaskovskiy of Belarus’s Belapan, Burmese blogger Maung Maung Win, Xiao Qiang of China Digital Times, Iran’s Arash Sigarchi, and (via video link) Venezuela’s Miguel Octavio of The Devil’s Excrement.
Xiao Qiang drew the president’s attention to Charter 08, the manifesto for democratic reform and human rights signed and launched by some 300 Chinese intellectuals and activists this week. Mahmoud Saber reminded Bush of the Egyptian bloggers jailed by Hosni Mubarak’s government and noted that presidential attention hasn’t always helped dissidents like the exiled Saad Eddin Ibrahim or the imprisoned Ayman Nour, “a symbol of one vindictive autocrat’s victory over the ‘freedom agenda.’”
But Diehl concludes that Barack Obama should follow Bush’s lead in meeting with democracy activists since, on balance,…
“….the attention of the American president is precious to dissidents. It gains them enormous attention in their own countries and injects their liberal ideas into arenas from which they are usually excluded. Though some may be thrown in jail on their return from the White House, they also gain a de facto immunity from torture or assassination — otherwise a high risk in countries such as Belarus and Burma.”
