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also adopted many resolutions supporting political prisoners and calling
for their political amnesty. In 1963, the SDDC (Spanish Democrats’ Defence
Committee of the Labour Party) recommended to the British government
that the latter launch a boycott on Spanish goods, discourage British
tourists from visiting Spain and British firms from investing in Spain, and
reject the deepening of ties between Spain and the EC. These
recommendations held sway in particular during periods of Labour rule,
when the UK stopped arms sales to Spain, froze collaboration with the
Spanish government and opposed the resumption of negotiations between
Spain and the EEC in 1976.
In the case of Georgia or Ukraine, external pressure was not as far-
reaching as in Spain but it was nonetheless considerable. In 2003, prior to
the elections in Georgia, former US Secretary of State James Baker met
President Edward Shevardnadze and delivered a letter from President
George W. Bush stressing the need for free and fair elections, and
proposing a formula for the representation of different parties on the
electoral commissions to ensure fair and transparent results. The
International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank stated they would
halt their projects in the country unless the government seriously revised
its policies towards the opposition. Following the rigged elections, the US
State Department declared that the results “do not accurately reflect the
will of [the] Georgian people, but instead reflect massive fraud”.
32
The
OSCE and the Council of Europe also denounced the results.
In Ukraine, the Center for Strategic and International Studies
organised a high-level delegation visit to Kiev – including senior, former
US government officials Zbigniew Brzezinski, Robert Hunter and Thomas
Pickering – warning that the presidential elections should be free and
transparent, and making clear that the future of US–Ukrainian relations
and Ukraine’s integration into Euro-Atlantic structures depended on this.
33
The US’s strategy was to keep the regime interested in the West, while
underlining that the development of democracy and therefore free and fair
elections were a cardinal objective of US–Ukrainian relations. The rigged
elections were then unanimously denounced by all international
32
C.H. Fairbanks, Jr., “Georgia’s Rose Revolution”, Journal of Democracy, Vol. 15,
No. 2, 2004, pp. 115-116.
33
Wallander (2005), op. cit., p. 1
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organisations and observer missions. After the elections and during the
Orange revolution, the West intervened through heavy mediation led by
the presidents of Poland, Lithuania and EU High Representative Javier
Solana. Also in Georgia, following the 2003 elections, Washington applied
substantial pressure, with then Secretary of State Colin Powell strongly
advising Shevardnadze to resign. Once Mikhail Saakashvili came to power,
the US administration welcomed the new regime, declaring its support and
assistance.
34
Following from this, the final lesson is the need to exert significant
pressure on the authoritarian regimes in which Islamists and other
opposition actors operate. Elaborating Western policies of engagement
becomes meaningful only if the West puts pressure, through positive or
negative conditionality as well as dialogue, on incumbent regimes, just as it
did in Spain, Georgia and Ukraine. Unless effective pressure is exerted in
words as well as action, opposition actors – no matter how capable and
well trained they may be – will remain unable to seize the political ground
necessary to set in motion genuine change. Moreover, as long as the
deafening silence of the West against the repression and violations
committed against opposition activists persists, Islamists and Middle
Eastern societies writ large will simply continue to view Western
democracy talk as cheap.
Conclusions
This chapter has deliberately downplayed the role of religion – intended as
a fixed framework of belief and action – in mass Islamist movements,
emphasising instead their nature as political subjects operating as
opposition actors on the fringes of authoritarian state contexts. While
acknowledging the concerns as well as the competing goals of Western
actors in the region, which often downscale their commitment to
democracy promotion, we have nonetheless taken this self-declared goal at
face value. With these premises in mind, we have delved into an analysis of
engagement with Islamist actors in the Middle East, setting out three
possible objectives to be pursued through such a policy. We have then
drawn from precedents of Western forms of engagement with European
34
Grey and Volkov (2003), op. cit.
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opposition actors operating in authoritarian contexts, in the search for
lessons to fulfil these objectives.
In drawing these lessons, we have acknowledged the importance of
ideological and political affinity between European opposition actors and
their backers in Western Europe and the US. And it is here that, to close the
circle, we would like to reintroduce the role of religion. As noted above, a
critical difference between our case studies and Islamist actors is the
existence of peer groups in Europe and the US. Whereas Spanish socialists
were ideologically tied to the Socialist International and trade union
movement, and Ukrainian or Georgian liberals to their Western European
and American NGO, governmental and foundation counterparts, the same
cannot be said about Islamist actors. Their natural friends in Europe or the
US would be either European Islamist groups, with little or no political
power, or Christian democratic groups, with whom an effective alliance is
hard to foresee principally because of the perceived divide generated by
religion. It is thus here that the role of religion in politics is reaffirmed, by
separating groups across Europe, the US and the Middle East.
Notwithstanding the fundamentally different political, social and economic
contexts in which they operate, these groups may actually share more
similarities than we are prepared to acknowledge at first sight. Both
espouse a liberal economic outlook coupled with political and social
conservatism. By contrast, the differences that separate them are perhaps
overestimated by the imagined divide created by religion. If these
reservations are set aside, both the EU and the US, and most pointedly
European and American civil society actors, can extract important lessons
and best practices from other precedents in Europe’s history to be applied
mutatis mutandis to the critical case of political Islam.
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