Paving the Path To Democracy

AFTER THE WAVE OF PROTESTS that overthrew authoritarian regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, all eyes are on similar movements brewing across the Middle East—in Bahrain, Yemen, Libya and Jordan. Although it is too early to say whether Tunisia and Egypt will make a successful transition to a sustainable democracy (the example of the 1979 Iranian revolution, when a monarchy was replaced by an Islamic theocracy, still rankles), they have at least taken the first step.

Meanwhile, an old debate on the process of democratisation in authoritarian regimes seems to have been revived. What are the causalities of—or the conditions necessary for—democratisation in disparate countries? What are the mechanisms that can support it over periods of great public repression? Is there a set of necessary—perhaps imperative—and sufficient conditions that can catalyse such a change?

At least on the face of it, the different protest movements in Middle East seem to have an uncannily similar form and content. Discontented youth, connected by the engines of social media, organise their dissent against a prevailing authoritarian regime. They are united in their awareness of their rights and a determination to bring about change. They draw their inspiration from the successes of their fellow dissenters (or that newly acceptable word in the West: revolutionaries) who just toppled a dictator in a neighbouring country.

Nonetheless, behind the seeming similarities in these protest movements, there are subtle but long-established differences in the political and social fabrics of these countries.

Tunisia was a secular, economically secure state with a thriving middle class. Thanks to the social development programmes of its first post-independence president, Habib Bourguiba, Tunisia had a high level of education, emancipated women and one of the most pragmatic Islamic movements in the region. With an army that has long been small and largely apolitical, and a vibrant society poised for decades for access to democracy, the ousting of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who became the Tunisian Republic’s second president in 1987, was just a matter of time.

Unlike Tunisia, Egypt has been governed by military emergency laws since 1952, has far greater economic inequality and lives under the shadow of a suppressed but active Islamic fundamentalism.

Neither Yemen nor Libya has institutions as strong as those in Egypt and Tunisia. Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the region, has been battered by a secessionist movement in its south and a growing al-Qaeda influence in its northwest.

In Bahrain, dissent is along religious lines—between the king and the ruling elite, who are Sunnis, versus the rest, roughly 70 percent of whom are Shias angered by discrimination in jobs, housing, education and other social programmes.

In his book Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650-2000, Charles Tilly, one of the most respected sociologists of our times, grappled with the very questions of democracy and authoritarianism in Europe that today haunt Middle East. He came to the conclusion that there is no inescapable set of conditions that will, without fail, trigger a democratic change, nor is the path to democracy always mappable.

But he did find one common, consistent characteristic: “In Europe after 1650, all the main historical paths to democratic polities entailed sustained contention. Democracy results from, mobilizes, and reshapes popular contention.”

This essentially means that while it may not be possible to mark, or predict, or even imagine, the transition to democracy by a set of predetermined paths, nor define a set of conditions which, when met, will trigger the process to democracy, one thing is certain: the common factor in any such upheaval is the collective fight for rights, which can acquire forms ranging from simple petitions to protests to mass uprisings. Tilly also observed that while democracy may come about as a result of political contention, once in place, democracy greatly limits life- and property-threatening forms of contention, substituting them with far less destructive varieties of interaction.

Different dictatorial regimes exercise varying degrees of coercion on their people, and every society is segregated into different political, ethnic and economic groups. Each group has its particular interests and claims, which, more often than, conflict with those of another. But while these differences will continue to exist, democratic change may get ignited when people, cutting across group loyalties, come together in their belief that the best way to govern themselves and manage these conflicts is within the parameters of democratic formulae. The matter of how this change will happen and what shape it will take will be inevitably planned through vigorous political contention.

So while disparate nations in Middle East continue to be rent by tensions between different ethnic, religious and social groups, the people of the region as a whole seem to agree that non-democratic despotism is not the best form of governance. Each country will undoubtedly chart its own, perhaps unique path to its own form of democracy. But once democracy is firmly in place, it will hopefully resolve longstanding internecine conflicts and establish more peaceable norms of transaction.

Anant Nath