20 | R
OBERT
S
PRINGBORG
An appropriate EU strategy has to come to
terms with both the regional
contexts within which Islamism may re-radicalise and that process within
specific countries.
The regional context, despite its importance, is beyond the scope of
this chapter. Suffice it to say here that the intertwined politics of the
MENA, a region in which evaluation of governmental performance rests
heavily on the price of bread and other deliverables of social contracts,
render any strategy that does not take account of these contexts largely
moot. Progress within specific countries will be hard to make against a
backdrop of
heightening regional tensions, especially when they appear to
result at least in part from Western interventions. Growing economic
hardship can easily raise political temperatures to levels at which
compromises cannot be forged. Thus, the EU needs to address these most
salient regional issues, while simultaneously seeking to induce MENA
governments to repair gaping holes in their social safety nets, presumably
by offering sweeteners.
As for specific national settings, laundry lists
of objectives and
activities intended to promote democracy are relevant, but probably not
terribly helpful. The Rand Corporation study cited at the outset of this
chapter includes just such a list and not a bad one at that. It urges the US
government to “pursue realistic democracy promotion rather than a return
to realism” and then recommends that it “apply sustained
pressure…emphasise judicial reform and rule of law, human rights and
transparency…avoid taking sides….safeguard security while respecting the
rule of law…engage Islamist parties while levelling
the playing field for
other types of political opposition”.
18
In other words, it calls for direct
democracy promotion by protecting individuals from the state, thereby
encouraging them to participate in politics and presumably challenge
incumbents. It specifically includes Islamists as those to be thus
encouraged, although it indicates a desire for non-Islamists to be re-
invigorated by the political oxygen provided in newly opening political
space.
These are sound, balanced recommendations, but they do not go far
enough in the sense that they do not include an
assessment of what may
happen if indeed oppositionists are empowered by protections of
democratic rights and how an external actor might contribute to achieving
18
Kaye (2008), op. cit., pp. xiv-xv.
I
S THE
EU
CONTRIBUTING TO RE
-
RADICALISATION
?
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a desired political outcome. The analysis above may suggest at least how
those issues might be framed in that it identifies the key political dramatis
personae. Within regimes, they comprise hardliners and reformers: the
former being based in executive branches, ruling parties and the means of
coercion and surveillance; and the latter
typically being professional,
technically proficient types brought in by regimes to improve economic
performance, governance quality and other state outputs. Among the
opposition’s liberal secularists may be latent actors, as the authors of the
Rand study clearly hope, but that has yet to be proved because the
conditions under which they might flourish have yet to be created.
Similarly, youthful activists on campuses and in Arab cyberspace at this
stage comprise proto-political actors who may assume greater importance
either by dint of their own efforts or because of changed circumstances. But
at present, the opposition political stage is dominated by Islamists, albeit of
various different types.
They range from Salafists, who at least in their
imaginations might identify with jihadists, to politically quiescent Salafists
and Sufis, to card-carrying Muslim Brothers, to more radical Islamists just
on the borders of acceptance by states, to an as-yet-amorphous and
disenchanted amalgam of young Muslim activists alienated from regimes
and despairing of the capacities and outlooks of the MB,
but possibly still
members of it out of the hope that generational change will make it more
relevant and capable. Given this array of actors, it is possible to conceive
many political dramas with quite different outcomes.
The most desirable outcome would elevate the power and status of
moderates at the expense of hardliners in both government and opposition
forces, possibly while including heretofore largely alienated youths within
the political system. Such a scenario is imaginable, if barely so. Regime
moderates are weak. Hardliners are no less committed to staying in power
and have plentiful resources at their disposal.
The leadership of the MB is
entrenched, with the reins of organisational power in its hands and a
commitment to democracy only of a very contingent, tactical nature.
Youths, whether Islamist or otherwise, are energetic and wired, but not
truly organised and comparatively easily dispersed.
Yet the makings of a political counter-culture are there, so long as
that counter-culture has room to breathe politically. In Turkey, the rise to
political power of the AKP (Justice and Development Party)
is the story of
coalition building among these types of actors, who operated within a
broad Islamist framework granted space within a comparatively open
political system. The task of democracy promoters in the Arab world is to
work on converting the emerging political counter-culture, which does