COMMENTARY

The Arab Uprisings and the Question of Democracy

S S Tabraz

The current difculties that the Arab uprisings in west Asia face, most notably in Egypt, only afrm that the window of democracy is small and the implications of their closure cannot be underestimated. Yet the fact that there exists something so important, but so little understood or studied, is a cause for cautious optimism because it nally frees the study of Arab politics from the clutches of the two equally pretentious paradigms of democratisation and post-democratisation.

S S Tabraz (sstabraz@gmail.com) is at the Department of Humanities amd Social Sciences, IIT Madras.
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lthough much has been written about the Arab Uprisings of the recent years, there is hardly any consensus on anything about it. Yet, ever since Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on re on 17 December 2010 in a small Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, it caused reverberations in west Asia that did the unthinkable successfully toppling autocrats like Ben Ali (Tunisia), Hosni Mubarak (Egypt), Ali Abdullah Saleh (Yemen) and Muammar al-Gadda (Libya), from what seemed to be the unquestioned seat of power, it also sparked signicant regional protests in Syria, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Algeria, with an alacrity that took everyone by surprise. While the concrete implications of this on the Arab world will become apparent only in the fullness of time, it has already put the west Asian studies in an acute crisis. For over a decade now the paradigm of authoritarian resilience dominated studies of the Arab world, entirely replacing the democratisation paradigm that was prominent throughout the late 1980s and 1990s. This inter-paradigm debate made up much of the serious scholarship on the proper way of studying Arab politics in which the democratisation paradigm remained excessively
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hopeful to the possibilities of emergence of democracy, while the other explained why authoritarianism was so resilient in west Asia. What makes these uprisings important is that they call for a revision in the way in which Arab politics has been studied by holding both the paradigms to account for their failure to explain, much less predict, what caused these uprisings and how to make sense of them. The Democratisation Paradigm The question as to which political regime prevails in which society and why has been central to political science ever since Aristotle classied states by studying hundreds of constitutions of the then Greek world. In a similar attempt to answer when and how societies adopt democracy, in short, democratic transition, both historically and analytically, has always been presented as a resultant of the interactions between competitive market economy (capitalism), political representation and a vibrant civil society. Historically, this was the crucial mix that brought democracy to the western world; it was much later that this essentially western experience was subjected to analytical explanations, of which modernisation theory (MT) was probably the earliest attempt. Reduced to its simplest assumption, MT simply assumes democratic transition to fall into a teleological sequence in which modernisation of a society leads to its economic/political liberalisation that eventually culminates into democracy. That this transition was at hand was attested by the events of the late 1980s
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and early 1990s in west Asia: states like Jordan (1989), Yemen (1993), Algeria (1990) conducted their rst parliamentary elections in years, while Syria enlarged its parliament to include 60 seats for independents in 1990 and Saudi Arabia in 1992 introduced a written basic code and set up a 60-member consultative body (Majlis-e-shura). Coming on the heels of the end of Cold War and accompanied by what Huntington called third wave of democracy, these events brightened the prospects of democracy in the region and the euphoria it evoked led to the evolution of the democratisation paradigm, which underlined not the possibility but, in its exaggerated optimism, inevitability of democratisation in west Asia. Beneath the complexity of wide range of issues raised and debated, this paradigm was structured on some axiomatic assumptions. First, any country moving away from dictatorial rule was moving towards democracy. Second, this moving will always be within the matrix of what has come to be known as transitology a three-phased phenomena of emergence, consolidation and then, maturing of democracy. Third, the unwavering and almost naive belief that equates elections with democracy wherein the latter is perceived only in its procedural aspect and never as a substantive value. These assumptions went a long way in interpreting the events whereby if the west Asian states were engaged in conducting elections or as a result of sharp fall in oil prices acceding to demands of the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank, it was construed as important steps towards democracy because the process of liberalisation that these states had initiated, in the heady optimism of its proponents, had already resulted in creation of necessary conditions for democratisation an independent capitalist class and strong civil society groups to guide the entire process. It is merely a matter of time before the west Asian states would enter the halls of democracy. The Post-Democratisation Thesis The fact that none of these states witnessed such a transition led to the emergence of a reaction which rejected this
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heady optimism as an almost democrazy branch of Middle Eastern Studies, characterised by what might be labelled as democracy spotters (Valbjrn and Bank 2010). To these naysayers, the important question now was not the failure of democracy, which remains something of a foregone conclusion, but the success of these regimes in enduring turbulent times that allowed the emergence of post-democratisation thesis. This essentially critical assessment takes on democratisation thesis against two of its main arguments that of strengthened civil society and free market economy, both of which were believed to have triggered democratisation in the region. That these were the two factors responsible for democratisation of much of north-western Europe is substantiated by the pioneer work in the eld of historical sociology by Moore (1966), who explained that democracy is a balance between state and the independent classes, in which state should neither be autonomous of these classes nor captured by them. The former should be strong enough to tax, but the latter should not be weak enough to acquiesce without demanding representation. It was only after a long struggle in which the middle classes handed out a decisive defeat to royal absolutism that there emerged the rudimentary system of representative democracy in these European countries, governed by three of its most essential criteria: free and fair competition (whether political or economic); inclusive participation of all classes; and lastly, a modicum of civil and political liberties sufcient to ensure the integrity of political competition and participation. If everything was in place, it was quite reasonable to hope that the processes of liberalisation that these west Asia states had initiated should lead to a democratic coalition of classes to take on the autocratic regimes. Yet, what had emerged instead was far closer alliances between these groups and the present regimes, such that what we have in the name of civil society and independent capitalist class are nothing but a few co-opted groups being dependent for their survival on regimes goodwill (Schlumberger 2000). In short, the problem of the

democratic paradigm was that it ignored categorical differences between changes in kind and changes in degrees, which represents a methodological error (Sartori 1991). The democratic studies paradigm failed because they examined that which did not exist (democracy), instead of what actually was going on (hybridisation of these authoritarian regimes). To bring home the point quite rhetorically, Albrecht and Schlumberger (2004), in an analogy drawn from Samuel Beckets masterpiece, equate democratisation with its central character Godot who never shows up till the end and the other two who are shown talking about his arrival with democracy spotters. The analogy is apt in that the entire drama revolves around the tension bet ween an imminent arrival and a perpetual anticipation of it, and neither comes to an end! Arab Exceptionalism That there is a denite democratic decit in west Asia is beyond reasonable doubt in democratisation studies. Even within this inter-paradigm debate, the fundamental point of difference is not that there is no democracy in the region, which is an indisputable fact, but only that, given the conditions, it is reasonable to consider that states are in transition towards democracy or whether they are, as suggested by the opponents, moving towards autocracy. Unfortunately, debates around this decit are not new to west Asia, a region long captured by a pedigree of orientalist scholarship whose response in this debate is that these states would forever remain out of step with this historical need for democracy. What was and continues to be wrong with west Asia, according to this discourse, is Islam since, and here is the regions exceptionalism, it refuses to give in to rationality

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of modernisation and thus condemns Muslim societies to remain retarded. Weaved around Weberian ideas of an inherent incompatibility between Islam and democracy or that only Protestant societies, being able to develop capitalism, were bound to modernise, this culturist thesis of Arab exceptionalism, endowed with an uncanny ability to inform popular understandings of the region, must be rejected. Especially at a time when it is just as plausible to argue that societies which were already capitalist adopted Protestantism as the religion granting the most legitimacy to the capitalist system (Landes 1998), as it is to see how non-Protestant societies too could modernise and adopt democracy. Yet, there is no denying the fact that some features of the political economy of west Asia do shape a certain regional exceptionalism the rise of a rentier state on oil tells the whole story of this exceptionalism. Variously understood as paradox of plenty or a condition emanating from resource curse, it has drawn attention towards the familiar thesis that states rich in natural resources will in all likelihood be authoritarian. This happens in two ways in west Asia. First, since what makes a state rentier is the fact that it derives a large fraction of its revenue from selling oil, 11 out of 16 Arab states derive more than 70% of their export earnings from oil and gas, they can afford to tax their population less heavily or, in some cases, not at all, and in return the people are less likely to demand accountability from and representation in their governments. Second, by monopolising a resource nobody controls, or at least, requires nobodys consent, these states end up being authoritarian because the availability of huge spending makes it possible for them to subsidise the economy in which revenues are allocated to create large but informal networks of patronage and clientelism that need the state more than state needs them. Is it any surprise that not one of these 11 states is a democracy or when it comes to making use of traditions in creating such networks, the monarchies have always fared better than the republics? However, in the wake of the Arab uprisings the fact that the effects
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of rentierism cannot be eluded is no longer to argue that it is a permanent or irreversible condition. After all, oil-rich Libya has witnessed successful antiregime movement while resource-poor Morocco has remained stable. Arab Uprisings and the Crisis This brings us to the nal crisis that has emerged as a result of changes brought about by these uprisings. If only the success of these regimes, despite the fact that many of them suffered serious lack of legitimacy, remains the fundamental premise of the paradigm of authoritarian resilience, then the fall of these autocrats cast a serious doubt on the validity of this paradigm. Much the same way, one can argue that the problem of this paradigm was its overemphasis on an assumed resilience at the expense of the real but hidden consequences of the neo-liberal reforms of the last two decades which, when reached a critical point, ultimately drove many, for long considered depoliticised, to overcome their fear of repression and demand, as in Egypt, bread (aish), freedom (hurriyya) and human dignity (Karama Insaniyya). If the paradigm of authoritarian resilience is being questioned, it does not mean vindication of democratisation paradigm simply because none of the actors or prerequisites that it deems indispensable are relevant in these uprisings. The fact that crucial actors like the traditional opposition parties and civil society groups were as much surprised by the uprisings as the ruling elites were is a clear indication that the former suffers from lack of legitimacy as badly as the latter. Further, these uprisings call into question the orthodoxy of the Anglo-American political science an almost un-problematised belief in the potential of neo-liberal economic liberalisation to usher in democratic change. In west Asia, however, economic liberalisation of the last two decades pauperised the masses and went on to erode whatever was left of the residual legitimacy of these regimes (Teti and Gervasio 2011). Where liberalisation takes place without democratisation, as it did across the region, the resultant anomaly that it marginalises those very people it
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avowedly profess to empower should not come as a surprise. The glaring failure of the democratisation paradigm has been its inability to bridge this gap between the reality of marginalisation and its rhetoric of empowerment. In the end, the problem of the two paradigms was their rigidity in explaining Arab politics in ways that are now open to question. Perhaps, the shortcoming shared in common by the two paradigms was their overstating the role of state, ruling elites and traditional political and civil society actors to the detriment of the societal forms of unstructured mobilisation and the leaderless horizontal social and political actors (Aarts and Cavatorta 2012). Their rigidity prevented them to foresee what kind of groups became disconnected from politics and the political in general and what processes led to these transformations. While the current difculties that these revolutions face, most notably in Egypt, only afrm that the window of democracy is small and the implications of their closure cannot be underestimated, the fact that there exists something so important but so little understood or studied is a cause for cautious optimism because it nally frees the study of Arab politics from the clutches of the two equally pretentious paradigms.
References
Aarts, P and F Cavatorta, ed. (2012): Civil Society in Syria and Iran: Activism in Authoritarian Contexts (Boulder: Lynne Rienner). Albrecht, Holger and Oliver Schlumberger (2004): Waiting for Godot: Regime Change Without Democratisation in the Middle East, International Political Science Review, Vol 25, No 4. Landes, David (1998): The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (New York: W W Norton). Moore, Barrington (1966): Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lords and Peasants in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press). Sartori, Giovanni (1991): Comparing and Miscomparing, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Vol 3, No 3. Schlumberger, Oliver (2000): The Arab Middle East and the Question of Democratisation: Some Critical Remarks, Democratisation, Vol 7, No 4. Teti, Andrea and Gennaro Gervasio (2011): The Unbearable Lightness of Authoritarianism: Lessons from the Arab Uprisings, Mediterranean Politics, Vol 16, No 2. Valbjrn, Morten and Andre` Bank (2010): Examining the Post in Post-democratisation: The Future of Middle Eastern Political Rule Through Lenses of the Past, Middle East Critique, Vol 19, No 3.

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