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.”

While the European Union’s gravity model has been an incredibly successful engine of democratization within its borders, the EU is doing a poor job promoting democracy in its near neighborhood, a new report concludes. “Overall trends have been disappointing in most cases,” according to a report from FRIDE’s Richard Youngs.

“Democracy and human rights assistance remains extremely limited, although increased amounts have been allocated for broader governance reform,” Youngs notes. EU support through the European Neighbourhood Partnership “remains heavily state-centered” and even where it has supported media, civil society and opposition figures - as in Belarus - the aid has been has been small scale.

In Morocco, only 4 per cent of ENP funds go towards democracy and human rights, in Lebanon the focus is “overwhelmingly” on economic governance and capacity-building for state institutions, while EU assistance to Jordan stresses economic and poverty alleviation at the expense of public administration reform.

In the EU’s North African periphery, Moroccan modernization has failed to generate democratization; Jordan “remains essentially a ‘security state’”, having curtailed the countervailing powers of parliament, parties, the judiciary and civil society, and NGOs; while

Lebanese stability and confessional power-sharing have been secured at the cost of postponing essential democratic reforms.

To the EU’s east, Ukraine has failed to embed robust democratic institutions and culture; Azerbaijan continues to manipulate elections and restrict the opposition and civil society, although intra-regime divisions hint at prospects for future reform; and in Belarus, the release of political prisoners has yet to lead to meaningful political liberalization.

“The general trend has been towards increasing the share of aid given for direct budgetary support (that is, flowing directly into governments’ coffers) rather than investing significantly in democracy support,” the report states, concluding pessimistically:

In sum, our case studies do much to confirm a relatively pessimistic view of democracy

policies within the EU’s Neighbourhood. Democracy-related challenges are getting harder and political reform processes continue to disappoint despite partner countries having now been in structured partnership with the Union for many years. Within the EU there is an apparent absence of political will fundamentally to revise approaches to democracy support, even if the shortcomings of these policies have been apparent for some time.

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.”

The United States should abandon both the “myth of externally-orchestrated regime change” and the “illusion of imminent revolution” in Iran, a new analysis suggests. Highly-publicized initiatives to support Iranian reformers have backfired, exposing activists to repressive measures and playing into the hands of a regime eager to portray indigenous democrats as agents of foreign powers, argues Brookings’s Suzanne Maloney, a former State Department advisor.

“Abandoning the regime change fantasy means disbanding or significantly retooling democracy promotion programming for Iran, she contends in a report for the U.S. Institute for Peace.  It is understandable that policy-makers seek to replicate the apparent success of democracy assistance in supporting democratic transitions in the likes of Ukraine and Georgia. But Western intervention is the “third rail” in Iranian domestic affairs and conspicuous democracy promotion is likely to backfire on local activists.

The various agents for change within Iran include students and youth, reformist clerics like Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri and a technologically-empowered women’s movement. But, despite what Ladan Boroumand describes as the remarkable resilience of civil society, the opposition currently lacks leadership, organization and a convincing strategy for political change. It also needs to challenge and transcend the current rules of the game.

“The fundamental shortcoming hampering Iran’s democratic aspirations has been the general unwillingness of Iranians to risk their lives and livelihoods to demand the change they want or to defend the dissidents who have been imprisoned for their own advocacy,” she writes.

Meaningful change is unlikely to occur without significant mobilization, but a mixture of repression-induced timidity and fear of political turmoil. “The disinclination of Iranians to mobilize on a mass basis reflects a widespread aversion to unrest and violent change, she notes, “an understandable, if unfortunate, legacy of the Islamic revolution.”

Another analyst notes “Tehran’s trepidation” at the new U.S. administration’s signals on U.S.-Iranian relations:

Tehran’s reception of the early warning signs from Washington are focused on calls for increases in military spending, NATO expansion, boosting intelligence agencies, strengthening of the “nation-building, democracy-promoting” National Endowment for Democracy, …..

Mehdi Khalaji, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute, won’t be surprised at the Islamic Republic’s hostile response to the prospects of a new administration in Washington. Despite occasional suggestions of Tehran’s openness to dialog with the United States, the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei’s ideological commitment has led him to sabotage any serious initiatives:

Khamenei considers himself not only the leader of the Islamic Republic but also the highest authority on Islamic ideology in the world. He therefore sees himself as responsible for the survival of Islamic ideology and its values, as well as his image as its leader. Because the Islamic Republic has failed to meet its economic, cultural, and social promises, Khamenei has made anti-Americanism the cornerstone of that Islamic ideology.

The plight of Iranian dissidents was recently highlighted by the Omid, the virtual memorial database of the Islamic Republic’s victims, specifically the peaceful dissidents and intellectuals slain in Iran in the fall of 1998:

Ten years ago, on November 22^nd 1998, Darioush and Parvaneh Forouhar were brutally murdered in their home by agents of the Ministry of Information. While the Iranian society was still chocked by the news of this abject crime, two members of Iran’s writers’ association, Mohammad Mokhtari and Mohammad Ja’far Pouyandeh disappeared and were found dead on December 3^rd and December 10^th, 1998, respectively.

(The Forouhar, Mokhtari, and Pouyandeh families are appealing for an independent investigation into these deaths. To support this appeal please send your name and city of residence to daadkhahi@googlemail.com)

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.

The indispensable Project on Middle East Democracy is running an interesting series of responses to the question, “As President, What Should Obama Say to the Middle East?”

A recent article suggested that Obama should give his first 100 days speech in Cairo. POMED is soliciting ideas from notables about should be in such a speech. The series, which began with responses last Thursday and on Tuesday, will culminate in a publication and event in January.

Michele Dunne, editor of the Arab Reform Bulletin, suggests that Obama stress the interdependence of four key goals in the region: peace, justice, prosperity, and democracy. “There can only be peace with just resolution of longstanding conflicts and there can only be prosperity with accountable and transparent government, she writes.  

Local ownership of home-grown reform is critical, writes Gerald Hyman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Domestic reform is for the people of the Middle East to embrace, not for imposition from abroad,” he states. “Yet without those reforms, international cooperation is insufficient.”

Former MEPI stalwart Scott Carpenter rejects the inevitability of standard trade-offs between realism and idealism, security and reform. Now the Keston Family Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Carpenter believes Obama should state unequivocally:

“Cooperation with your governments on security matters will continue, but I’ll insist security not be a concept reserved exclusively for the state.  Human security from the state is as critical. I am committed to dialogue with adversarial governments like Syria and Iran but will not abandon principle or cut deals that abandon those who yearn for freedom.”

Read the rest.

The evolution of Islamist parties in Egypt, Turkey and Indonesia indicates the conditions under which political participation might normalize them, a comparative survey from Australia’s Lowy Institute suggests.   

Drawing on case studies of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Indonesia’s Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) and Turkey’s ‘post-Islamist’ Justice and Development Party (AKP), the report argues that, as Islamist parties move from authoritarian to democratic contexts, several “fairly consistent shifts in Islamist ideology and activism” emerge:

• From shari’a state to shari’a values: an Islamic state becomes less important than the promotion of Islamic principles; 
• From Islamic governance to good governance: policy agendas become secularized as they are forced to address a wider range of issues for which there is no ready Islamic response;  
• From moral message to moral messengers: leading Islamists become “exemplars of Islamically inspired probity, effectiveness and selflessness” rather than ideologically driven movements;  
• Greater membership diversity: imperatives of electoral competition and the need for political talent demand that Islamist parties broaden their membership and electoral base;
•  Regeneration: while noted for their lack of internal democracy, Islamist groups are nevertheless opening up to “younger, more open-minded, worldly and technically adept activists”;
•  Oscillation rather than moderation: Islamist parties do not necessarily become more moderate in more open political contexts but do “become susceptible to greater internal tensions over ideology and policy” between purist and pragmatic factions.

The report’s authors stress that such shifts are not an inevitable result of democratization. Critical variables encouraging ‘normalisation’ of Islamist parties include the existence of strong competition from other parties or movements; the legitimacy of countervailing forces or institutions; and the adoption of genuinely participatory, non-violent strategies.

The authors are critical of the “Faustian pact that secular liberals have made with authoritarian rulers” in many states, noting that such compromises neither prevent repressive measures against Islamists being used against others nor stop regimes from adopting Islamist-tinged restrictions in an effort to co-opt popular religious sentiment.

The U.S. should maintain financial and moral assistance to Arab reformers, despite concerns that such support provokes a backlash, a new analysis concludes. “The value of programs like the Middle East Partnership Initiative should not be discounted just because they are a legacy of the Bush administration,” say Isobel Coleman and Tamara Cofman Wittes.

“In the end, American support - both direct (through the U.S. government) and indirect (through the National Endowment for Democracy and regional foundations) - should be offered to Arab activists, leaving them free to decide whether they can afford to accept it,” they argue.

Despite the shortcomings of the Freedom Agenda, “regional activists credit American attention to democracy and human rights for creating an umbrella under which they can better press their own demands for change.”

There is considerable scope to marry reform imperatives to wider interests through new partnerships that engage regional states while also empowering independent actors. In Egypt, for example, a strategic dialogue on economic development should be broadened to include counter-terrorism and human rights issues, while new economic assistance should be conditional on Cairo meeting benchmarks for reform.

Hosni Mubarak’s regime has tried to impede democracy assistance to local activists or divert funds to GONGOs and the next president “should insist on the principle that the U.S. government must be the one to determine the recipients of its democracy and governance funding.” Democracy assistance funding should also take advantage of renewed activism in Egypt’s labor movement.

Even in Saudi Arabia, there is potential for promoting a human development agenda and supporting the country’s emerging civil society groups. “While there is potential for backlash against U.S. involvement, reformers within the kingdom are best placed to judge, and they still view U.S. support as important to maintain momentum behind reform initiatives,” they write.

While noting “no Arab leader has made either an unqualified commitment to or any significant progress toward full-fledged electoral democracy,” Coleman and Wittes believe it is imperative that the U.S. continue to sustain support for reform in moderate Arab states like Jordan and Morocco, even if local, bottom-up initiatives will be critical to genuine democratization.

“Wherever possible, reform should be encouraged by supporting the demands of indigenous activists and by using international norms, positive incentives, and societal and cultural exchange and learning,” they conclude.

The Bush administration launched several initiatives to “encourage reform, democratization, and political openness” in the Middle East, notes Oussama Safa, general director of the Beirut-based Lebanese Center for Policy Studies in Beirut, a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy. Citing the Middle East Partnership Initiative, the Democracy Assistance Dialogue, the Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative, and the Foundation for the Future, he argues that while “most of these tools were designed with grand democracy goals in mind, their effectiveness has waned and they now should be redefined to take into account new priorities in the region”:

Reform declarations issued by conferences in Alexandria, Sanaa, and Doha, among others, should be revived and governments in the region should be urged to keep their commitments to them. Concomitantly, the new US administration should encourage the dissemination across the region, where appropriate, of successful homegrown experiences of democracy and openness in countries such as Turkey, Morocco, and Kuwait that reconcile religious values and local cultures with demands for reforms.

The New Republic carries an interesting article by David Keyes, coordinator for democracy programs at the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies. The work of Jameel Aldweek, director of the Al-Razi Association, gives an insight onto the challenges and nuances of teaching democracy on the West Bank.

One student says that Israelis clearly love and understand democracy, and that the Palestinians are having a much harder time with it. Another girl counters that Israelis only want democracy for Jews, not Arabs. Aldweek tells me that he is open to the idea of taking the students to the Knesset. I ask what the West can learn from the Arabs and vice versa. “Democracy” is what one girl thought the Arabs should learn from the West, and, in turn, the Arabs should teach the West about Islam.

And what words immediately come to mind when the girls hear the word, “Freedom”? Their answers are as follows: individual freedom, freedom of opinion, democracy, free expression, freedom of movement, and self-defense.