US will promote Arab democracy – and engage autocrats, MEPI head insists

The United States remains committed to promoting democracy in the Middle East, a senior State Department official insisted today, but the pace and content of reform will be determined by local actors and the specific conditions within Arab states.

“Economic and social development are prerequisites for sustainable democracy,” said Tamara Wittes, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East Partnership Initiative.

The Obama administration has been accused of backtracking on democratic reform and of “ambiguity and disorientation” in its policies toward the region.

But implictly rejecting the notion of Arab exceptionalism, Wittes insisted that democracy is a universal human value and essential need.

“The US is not willing to impose democratic values in the Arab world,” she said. “We need people to adopt the democratic participation in decision-making process the way that suits them.”

The US was willing to engage some of the region’s most authoritarian regimes to foster change, including the regimes in Saudi Arabia and Syria.

“We are willing to see transformation to democracy from within the institutions in these countries,” said Wittes, a staunch advocate and analyst of Arab democracy.

But experience suggests that Arab autocrats have effectively neutered external actors’ democracy assistance strategies. Even when the US has adopted more forceful approaches, Arab leaders “proved master manipulators of democracy,” notes one analyst.

“They held elections, loosened press censorship, and allowed a bit more space for dissident voices on the Internet. And they quickly learned how to diffuse, divide, and checkmate even this feeble opposition,” writes David B. Ottaway, a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

“Arab leaders skillfully used elections to illustrate the dangers democracy might end up posing to U.S. ­interests—­exactly contrary to what President Bush had predicted,” which is why, he suggests, Obama “has carefully avoided making democracy promotion a signature cause of his administration.”

The regimes have perfected the appearance of state-managed liberalization, Frances Fukuyama recently noted, “whereby they open up their political systems just enough to convince outsiders that they are ‘transitioning’ to genuine democracy, only to clamp down again once their control is threatened.”

As a recent Institute of Peace report notes, external actors have largely failed to promote democratic reform in the region at the same time as a political, social and ideological polarization between rulers and citizens makes change more necessary and more dangerous.

The report recommends a two-fold process of “strategic political liberalization” and “gradual democratic transformation”, moving beyond a system of U.S. democracy assistance that has overly depended on “the capacity of civil society groups to demand reforms to one that gives states and their ruling cadres a major role in supplying democratic changes.”  

The economic prospects for most Arab states appear hopeful, says Ottaway, formerly the Post’s chief Middle East correspondent in Cairo. But their political outlook is “deeply troubling and socio-economic development will not necessarily generate democracy:

Monarchs, once thought headed for history’s dustbin, are doing surprisingly well at the moment. Both royal and secular autocrats are holding their Islamist challengers at bay thanks to highly manipulative or repressive security services. However, this prevailing model of Arab autocracy, dependent on the mukhabarat and a fabricated popular vote, does not seem a recipe for lasting political stability. Indeed, the Arab political cauldron contains all the ingredients for explosions in the years ­ahead.

A serious Middle Eastern democracy agenda does not require “the loud trumpeting of promises of support for regional democracy that we cannot keep” nor “playing the authoritarians’ game of affirming fake liberalization as the real article of democracy,” writes Fukuyama, a former board member of the National Endowment for Democracy:

It does mean working quietly behind the scenes to push friendly authoritarians towards a genuine broadening of political space in their countries through the repeal of countless exceptional laws, defamation codes, party registration statutes and the like that hinder the emergence of real democratic contestation.

And, he might have added, it means providing sustained assistance to the region’s embattled democrats, civil society activists, independent labor unions and business groups committed to transparency and accountability.