Trnasformation and Development Handbook

DRAFT, NOT FOR QUOTATION


Shlomo Avineri (The Hebrew University, Jerusalem)
CULTURAL DIMENSIONS OF POLITICAL TRANSFOMRATION AND

DEVELOPMENT

Theoretical and practical lessons from Eastern Europe

and prospects for the Middle East

The question to what degree do cultural and historical contexts facilitate or hinder developments, especially towards democracy and market economy, has moved into the center of both academic and policy discourses in the last decade and a half mainly due to two sets of occurrences: the demise of the Soviet Union and the collapse of Soviet-style communist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe in the years 1989-1991, and the terrorist attacks of September 11^th , 2001 and the subsequent U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In both sets of cases, blanket linear deterministic projections have slowly – and sometimes reluctantly – been replaced by more nuanced (and knowledgeable) analyses.

The euphoria which accompanied the disintegration of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe was twofold, relating both to the collapse of a totalitarian ideology as well as to the hope for a seamless future development towards political democracy and the introduction of a market economy. Conventional wisdom linked the two with an almost umbilical cord.

One should not overlook the fact that the rapid – and mainly peaceful collapse – of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe took practically everyone – politicians as well as academics, journalists as well as intelligence analysts – by surprise. When Mikhail Gorbachev began introducing the changes into the Soviet system which eventually became known as Glasnost and Perestroika, a lot of skepticism accompanied these developments among Western observes. Even those who saw in it the final vindication of the possibility of loosening up of the system by appearing to introduce something like “Socialism with a human face” à la Dubcek’s 1968 brutally suppressed reforms, had great doubts whether these attempts will not ultimately fizzle out, as did so many of Khrushchev’s steps, due to the entrenched power of Soviet bureaucracy and the recaltricance or inability of totalitarian systems to reform: Jeanne Kirkpatrick was perhaps the most eloquent and influential of these doubters(1).

Others expressed their skepticism in an even more radical fashion, arguing that Gorbachev’s reforms were nothing else than a trick to lull the West’s vigilance: communist tigers will never change their stripes.

Similar reactions could be discerned when General Jaruzelski’s militarized government (by itself a testimony to the weakness and loss of legitimacy of communism at least in Poland), signed in 1989 the Round Table agreement which introduced partially free and multi-party elections in a complex system of power sharing with the Solidarność opposition. This too was seen by many observers in the West as a merely tactical

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defensive mechanism, aimed to endow a totally discredited regime with a semblance of legitimacy – without really giving up the commanding heights of political and economic power.

When the final crash occurred in a reverse of the classical domino theory, epitomized by such high visibility dramatic events as the fall of the Berlin Wall, Prague’s Velvet Revolution, the flight and execution of Ceausescu and the final denouement of the failed Moscow coup followed by the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself into 15 independent republics – one could well understand the almost messianic (“End of History”) tones which accompanied this Goetzerdaemmerung. The communist idol, so much worshipped on the one hand as a universal ultimate redemption of all humanity, and so much feared and demonized as an ‘evil empire’ on the other, has eventually turned out to be not only a God That Failed morally and intellectually – but also having feet of clay. Never had such an apparently powerful system collapsed so quickly and decisively - and with so little violence.

One should bear this atmosphere in mind in order to understand the somewhat uncritical euphoric triumphalism of the early 1990’s: it appeared that the sky was the limit. The fall of communism was understood not only as a failure of a deeply flawed system, which never managed to live up even to a minimal fulfillment of its own promises and ideological claims – but was also seen as a vindication of its ideological alternative: absent the totalitarian repression inherent in the Soviet system, democracy and the market would now automatically, as if guided by the hidden hand of the March of History, flourish and triumph. Ironically, this deterministic approach of seeing democracy and capitalism as the inevitable telos of all mankind, was in a strange way a mirror-image of the old Marxist-Leninist determinism which claimed that all societies are doomed to follow the path of socio-economic development of the West, leading from feudalism to capitalism to socialism.

That Milton Friedman and Karl Marx had, methodologically, much in common has been pointed out before. Overtime, however, the poverty shared by these two opposing examples of this economically-driven model became even more apparent.

Paradoxically, those who believed that societies emancipated from the Soviet yoke would automatically move towards democracy and market economy shared one of the major flaws of Marxist ideology: the almost total overlooking of cultural and historical societal ingredients which cannot be reduced deterministically to what the Marxists used to call “economic infrastructure”. Such a blindness to the relative autonomy of culture and historical heritage was even more ironical when one takes into account the fact that much of Soviet failure had at its base the misguided attempt to transpose to pre-industrial and pre-capitalist 1917 Russia the analysis – and vision – embedded in Marxist theory which were based, after all, on the experience of the industrialized capitalist West (2).

Looking at the Eastern and Central European scene a dozen years later, one has to account for the differentiated picture which has emerged in the post-Soviet orbit: far from moving forward as a more or less unified phalanx towards democracy and market economy, post-communist societies present a most variegated picture. This should be even more surprising to those thinking in deterministic terms, as after all around 1990 all

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these societies were proceeding from more or less the same starting point: Soviet-style communism – with, one should admit, some variations (e.g. Poland and Hungary), but basically all were in the same one-party state, command economy mould. Why the enormous differences?

Today one can discern four types of post-communist regimes:

(1) Countries which basically succeeded in transforming their politics into working democracies and more or less achieved functioning market economies: Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Estonia – and to a lesser degree Slovakia, Lithuania and Latvia;

(2) Countries that encounter difficulties on the road to successful transformation and consolidation, but appear at least on track: Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia; Serbia should probably also be classified under this category;

(3) Countries with some achievements yet with what appears a fundamental difficulty in achieving a meaningful transformation: to this category both Russia and Ukraine should belong, despite significant differences – Russia evolving under Putin into an “authoritarianism with a human face”, while Ukraine still unable to create a viable and functioning state structure based on a open society.

(4) The failures: they range from such reconstituted autocracies like Belarus, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, to much more complex cases like Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Albania and the rest of the Central Asian Republic. This category includes a great variety of different regimes, but they have one characteristic in common: none of them can be classified as a functioning, consolidated democracy. (3)

The question then arises how to account for these vast differences in development and achievement. While development towards democracy and the building of a viable market economy are obviously two distinct subjects and have to be discussed by different methodologies, it should be granted that they are, ultimately, somewhat related – even if one does not subscribe to a simplistic model of the link between the two. In what follows we shall focus mainly on political development, though – mutatis mutandis – some of the same analysis could also be applied to the economic sphere.

There can be no purely economic explanation for the great differences and disparities in development enumerated above: degrees of industrialization and urbanization, regional differences in education or GNP per capita, population density or other quantifiable data do not explain the differences among the countries – and any attempt to relate them to such criteria can be very easily faulted. Because of this, there has been great reluctance to ask these questions and many observers preferred to focus on individual policies adopted – or not adopted – by various post-communist governments, or to focus on the merits or defects of individual leaders – be it Yeltsin or Putin, Lukashenka or Kerimov. The fallacies of such an approach are obvious, though they are driven by the personality-centered public reporting intrinsic to the TV-age as well as the inability of many analysts to relate to issues and problems beyond daily developments.

If one looks carefully at those countries which have experienced successful transition to democracy and also managed to consolidate the transition institutionally, and compare

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them to the less successful cases, one would find one criterion which would ultimately be the best predictor for a successful development toward democracy: the history and political culture of each of these societies before the communist takeover – be it the initial Soviet revolution of 1917 or the post-1945 imposition of Soviet-style communism on Central Eastern European countries liberated by the Red Army from German Nazi occupation or local variants of fascist or semi-fascist regimes. To use a variation of a metaphor sometimes mentioned in this context: once the Soviet Siberian permafrost was lifted after 1989, in those countries where there flowers had been blossoming before – they came up again, and where there was dirt, it too came back to the surface.

Let us look first at Central Eastern Europe. There were not many countries with a full-blown democratic tradition in the region prior to 1939 or 1945, but the examples of the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary are illuminating, for all the differences among them. Between 1918-39 Czechoslovakia was the one new Central European country with the best democratic record - a multi-party democracy, free press and religious tolerance. It also was the most industrialized country in the region, Bohemia and Moravia having been the major industrial heartland of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Obviously, Czechoslovakia’s politics were not free from serious problems (e.g. Slovak-Czech relations, the position of the German-speaking minority), yet compared with its neighbors it practiced a system which was certainly the most democratic and liberal one in the region. The Czech lands also had a long-standing tradition of political representation – going back to the medieval Bohemian estates and, later, active participation in the post-1867 Austrian Reichsrat in Vienna; this was coupled with a deeply entrenched culture of secularization and religious tolerance, going back to Jan Hus and the Reformation. Both these traits were lacking in the Slovak case, given its different history as part of the Hungarian Kingdom.

Poland and Hungary had a more complex experience between the two World Wars. The political discourse in both countries was marred by expressions of extreme nationalism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism – drawing on the specific conditions in each country (in Poland the fact that more than 30% of its population was made up of minorities – Germans, Jews, Ukrainians, Lithuanians; in Hungary, the double trauma of Trianon and the Béla Kun communist revolution and the White Terror). Yet both Poland and Hungary maintained between the wars a semblance of parliamentary representation, which while not fully functioning, did allow elections – albeit limited and circumscribed – even under the authoritarian regimes instituted, respectively, by Piłsudski and Horthy. Political parties did exist – despite severe limitations, especially on left-wing parties. Neither Poland nor Hungary, for all the non-democratic traits of their pre-1939 regimes, were straightforward fascist dictatorships.

To this should be added, that both Poland and Hungary had traditions of political representations going back to medieval times: true, they were basically aristocratic in nature (so, originally was also the English parliament); but over centuries they functioned as effective breaks on royal authority and their memory was not totally obliterated. Similarly, while the religious histories of both countries were different, in both of them the Churches – in Poland the Catholic Church, in the Hungarian much more pluralistic

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system mainly the Calvinist Church – have played an historical role which, for all the difference between both cases – did become a possible counterweight to power. Not totally separate from this was the fact that universities as well as cities had traditionally enjoyed relative corporatist autonomy from the central government.

To endow these historical outlines, rough as they are, with some more coherent theoretical dimension, what has been said here amounts to the claim that countries like Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary did have a centuries-old tradition of civil society – and it is not an accident that in the last decades of communist rule the slogan of “civil society” was a powerful weapon in the hands of dissidents in these countries – Solidarność in Poland, the Civic Forum and People Against Violence in Czechoslovakia and the Democratic Forum (MDF) in Hungary. What turned this term from a mere abstract slogan to a political and social reality was the fact that traditions of civil society did exist in these countries and were not a mere desideratum.

Civil society – which since Tocqueville is considered the mainstay of modern democracy – is the whole network of autonomous organizations and ways of behavior – voluntary associations, trade unions and professional associations, churches and religious groups, educational groups and academic institutions – which function independently of state power, have a high degree of legitimacy among the population and draw on significant if not massive participation. Western democracies have been successful precisely in regions where these traditions of civil society have been well developed – the English-speaking world, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries being the prime examples. In parenthesis, part of the weakness of the Weimar Republic was precisely the fact that civil society in Wilhelmine Germany was relatively weak and many of its components – the professoriat and the students, many spheres of professional organizations on the right, and many working-class organizations of the left – did not view Weimar as a legitimate expression of their political will.

It was this salience of civil society in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary which may at least partially explain why the three attempts to reform communism from within occurred, albeit not successfully, though each attempt left its marks, precisely in these countries: in Poland in 1956 and again in 1968 and 1980, in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968.

The existence of a civil society, as well as the memory - whether “real” or “constructed” - of pre-communist structures which could be resurrected or reintroduced, gave dissidents, and later post-communist governments, both an internal legitimacy as well as a program which could appear as restorative in terms of historical experience. “Liberty” could be re-introduced, local traditions re-vived.

If one compares this with the Russian experience one immediately sees the difference. Not only did communist rule last in the Soviet Union longer than in Central Eastern Europe: this is obvious. But pre-1917 Russia had very little of a tradition of civil society and citizens’ participation in government to which the dissidents and reformers could hark back to.

Hundreds of years of Czarist rule created a political and social structure which was highly hierarchical and authoritarian, with very few elements of civil society in existence – by

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itself one of the causes for the failure of constitutional liberalism in Russia between 1905 and 1917. For centuries the country has been run by a hierarchical bureaucracy; there was no municipal or regional self-government; no representative institutions existed (until 1905, and after that their history was one of failure); legal political parties were basically not tolerated; the Orthodox Church was not an autonomous institution vis-a-vis state power, but combining the Cesaropapist Byzantine tradition of Orthodoxy in general with the total subjugation of the Church under Czarist rule at least since Petrine times, became another arm of state control (paradoxically, the only ones relatively free from this yoke were the Jews and the Lutheran Baltic Germans); and – last and not least – the aristocracy, despite its wealth, was not an autonomous social power but was basically a caste in the service of the state, existing at its pleasure and mercy. With very little industrial development, no independent bourgeoisie appeared as an alternative counterweight to state power. The fact that Russian peasants were not freed from serfdom until the 1860’s also meant that the peasantry – which is some Central Eastern European countries could be a focus of anti-state activity – was much more quiescent in Russia (in Ukraine, with its Cossack tradition, the situation was slightly different, as it became tragically and brutally clear in the 1930’s).

In short – institutional structures and societal behavior in pre-1917 Russia were anchored in totally different traditions from those of the three countries in Central Eastern Europe we discussed before. This weakness of civil society, coupled with a parallel strong tradition of authoritarian and hierarchic rule meant that Russian dissidents had a much weaker anchoring in society: Russian dissents were indeed basically limited to the two historical metropolises of Moscow and Leningrad, had a strong Jewish component (which again made them less attuned to the social norms of the country-side population), and had no memories, or institutional and normative structures, on which an alternative society could be built. This also is at the root of the fact that changes in Russia occurred not through a victory of dissenters outside the system, but through internal reforms from above within the system itself. Yet the lack of a civil society tradition meant that even the reformers themselves – be it Gorbachev or Yeltsin – did not have a “usable past” which could have helped them to either legitimate or construct their alternative society. For all his apparent liberal intentions, Gorbachev’s vision of an alternative society was dismally poor if compared to that of Vaclav Havel or Adam Michnik. Reform in Russia remained an abstract slogan, not anchored in any Russian tradition: slogans about “socialism with a human face”, just as a yearning after the (failed) tradition of the Kadets in the early 20^th century are a poor substitute for the wealth of civil society traditions which were at the disposal of Polish or Czech dissidents. The weakness of present-day political parties in Russia – their virtual non-existence, except as short-term electoral vehicles for presidential elections, as they emerged under both Yeltsin and Putin continued existence is another aspect of this deficit. That only the Communist Party exists in present-day Russia as a coherent political organization is another aspect of the same phenomenon: all other political formations are in constant flux.

It is a cruel irony of history – but probably not surprising under the circumstances – that the only historical model now somewhat operative in Russia is that of the Czar whose portrait adorns Putin’s office: that of Peter the Great. True, a modernizer and

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“Westernizer” in Russian terms: but the modernity he imported from the West was that of modern warfare, technological efficiency, streamlined bureaucratic control and administrative hierarchy superceding the old anarchic semi-autonomy of the boyars.

Ukrainian observers occasionally maintain that the much more chaotic Ukrainians post-1991 development, compared to that of Russia, has also to be seen in an historical context – that of a lack of a strong state structure in Ukrainian history. Not only was Ukraine never an independent state in the past, but its political culture bears memories of the pluralistic, if not anarchic, Cossack tradition: while in western Ukraine, many pride themselves on Polish traditions which historically prevented the emergence of a strong, centralized Polish state (and eventually led to the demise of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth). This may be compounded by the complexity of Ukrainian church history, very different from the statist traditions of the Russian Orthodox Church, with the Uniate Greek Catholic Church playing an important role in Ukrainian nationalism – but being basically a regional phenomenon in the west of the country, not common to all Ukrainians.

One could continue this analysis to include some of the cases enumerated above under category 2. Again, Romania and Bulgaria did not have a vibrant civil society tradition prior to 1939; Romanian political life in the 1930’s was characterized not only by violent and vociferous anti-Semitism but also by murderous changes of government between various right-wing factions, with some of the political assassinations carried out under royal authority – etc. Serbian political tradition in the 19^th and 20^th century was particularly violent, and the violence continued under the different circumstances of the Serb-dominated post-1918 Yugoslavia. In this context it should be mentioned that the fact that in these countries the Orthodox Churches, which developed into autocephalous national churches under the impact of 19^th century nationalism, only added another hierarchical element to the power of the state and became instruments of the state rather than possible countervailing powers.

In cases like Slovakia and Croatia, the fact that a not very enlightened version of Catholicism became identified, for historical reasons, with a radical nationalist narrative, especially during World War II, certainly greatly hampered democratic developments in these countries – though they seem to be able to overcome this legacy in the last few years. This shows that while historical cultural traditions are extremely important they are not immutable and are – like all institutions and social traditions – malleable and subject to change.

Yet the fact of the matter remains that once communism collapsed, Eastern European societies were not thrown back to a tabula rasa of a Lockean state of nature – but found themselves confronted with their own historical traditions. Where the building blocks which could be salvaged from these traditions included elements of civil society, tolerance and pluralism, the potential for developing a democratic discourse were better than in cases where these elements were lacking.

Any such analysis which puts so much stress on historicist ingredients opens itself to the obvious criticism that it replaces one kind of determinism – economic – by another one,

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based on cultural or political traditions. Hence a caveat is necessary, so as to make clear what is being argued here and what is not. What the argument here developed tries to suggest is that in order to succeed in a transformation towards democratic political structures, societies need some preconditions, and well-intentioned declaratory goals, or even reform-minded individual leaders, do not suffice. As the history of democratic developments in the West has shown, such a process is a multi-generational one: no society in the West has ever moved in a linear way from an oppressive regime to an open, democratic society. Moreover: the emergence of the multiplicity of societal norms, institutions and patterns of behavior which we have subsumed under the rubric of “civil society” develops over time, and cannot be brought into life by legislative fiat. Even a superficial comparison between the U.S. and Canada on one hand, and Latin America on the other, suggests that the societal differences between the patterns of British settlement in Northern America and those of the Spanish and Portuguese Conquista in South America have created such different pre-conditions which to a large extend determined the different course of history in those two sub-continents.

Yet one has to underline the fact that these pre-conditions are not static and can change and be consciously changed over time (we mentioned earlier the cases of Slovakia and Croatia). This also has policy consequences: any attempt to develop a democratic culture in societies in which such a culture had been historically weak or under-developed entails the necessity of identifying the ingredients of civil society already existing in that particular environment, even if they are weak, and a concerted effort to strengthen and develop them. Thus elements of voluntary associations, trade unions, women’s organizations, political parties and the like should be the targets for further developments, as should be traditions and memories of representation and pluralism. This may be much more helpful than attempts to craft a better sounding constitution or the promulgation of a set of laws (the adoption, numerous times, of copies of the U.S. Constitution by practically all Latin American countries did much less to change the political environment in these countries than the arduous institution-building of elements of civil society). What is obvious is that this is a lengthy process, where ups and downs have to be expected. After all, French democracy did not spring out of Rousseau’s head like a fully-equipped Athena: it took France more than a century to develop the kind of consolidated and stable democracy it now enjoys – and the vicissitudes of countries like Germany and Italy – eventually success stories, yet far from simple ones – should serve as a cautionary tale.

This should be borne in mind especially when confronting the future of Russia. As the main successor state of the Soviet Union, Russia has to undergo four transformations simultaneously: the building of democratic institutions, economic liberalization, the dismantling of an empire and the creation (for the first time) of a Russian nation-state. To imagine that all four transformations could occur at the same time and that they are, indeed, complementary, is the height of wishful thinking (or ignorance). No society can undertake such a multi-layered transformation in a short period of time (one should recall that French decolonization in Algeria became eventually possible only through a coup d’etat which brought de Gaulle to power – something which is sometimes conveniently

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forgotten). The war in Chechnya suggests the far-reaching ramifications of what by itself could be seen as a minor conflict, but it already had far-reaching consequences for the structure of power, the map of political parties and allegiances, the freedom of the press etc. under both Yeltsin and Putin. Moreover, it is obvious that some aspects of economic liberalization may call for, at least initially, a consolidation of state power (e.g. vis-à-vis the so-called oligarchs) and this can be done, and is in fact done, by methods which greatly impair the rule of law and the processes of democratization. Western observers – be they academic analysts or policy makers – should approach the enormous burden bequeathed to the current political system of Russia by hundreds of years of Czarist autocracy and decades of Soviet totalitarianism with empathy and at least some humility. This should not be used as uncritical approval or justification of Putin’s neo-authoritarian system: but one should responsibly consider the available alternatives. Wishful thinking and condescension are poor substitutes for a studied analysis of options attuned to the realities of historical circumstances.

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At a different level, and in a context of a different discourse, some of the same issues came to a head in the wake of September 11^th. Because of the role of fundamentalist Islam in these terrorist attacks – as well as in similar acts in other regions involving suicide bombers – the question has been asked whether Islam as such is a hindrance for democratic development. Given the fact that few Islamic societies have developed in a democratic fashion – and that no Arab society is a democracy or can show a convincing attempt at democratization – this assertion appears not totally out of place.

Yet like other types of cultural stereotyping, it is misleading and wrong. Islam is intrinsically not different from any other religion when it comes to issues of democracy or human rights. In 19^th century Europe it was considered conventional wisdom that democracy and Catholicism are incompatible – and both democrats as well as Catholic theologians appeared to agree on this – from Mazzini to Pope Pius IXth . Yet today, Christian Democrat parties are a mainstay of European democracy. There is no reason that the same could not happen, over time and given the right circumstances, with Islamic societies. Finding utterly distasteful quotes in the Quran regarding human rights as well as blood-curdling passages aimed at infidels is beside the point: similar quotes can be found in both the Old and the New Testament as well.

That such an overall stereotyping of Islam is factually wrong can be seen if one looks at the recent histories of Islamic countries: over seven decades, Turkey has developed, through trail and error and many vicissitudes, a working democracy – obviously flawed, yet functioning; recently, within this democratic institutional discourse, and through free elections, a party with Islamic roots came to power – and rather than turn the country into an intolerant theocracy, is doing its utmost to open up towards Europe and join the European Union. In the process of doing this, the Turkish Grand National Assembly has
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enacted, under the party identified with Islam, a set of liberalizing constitutional changes which the Kemalist, supposedly “Westernizing” regimes, were never ready to entertain.

Muslim-majority countries like Bangladesh and Indonesia have witnessed developments towards democracy and liberalization which are truly remarkable, even if the last word has not yet been said. That a multi-party system, based on free elections, can function, albeit far from a perfect manner, in a country like Bangladesh – one the world’s poorest – suggests both that Islam per se is not a hindrance – but also that poverty per se should not be viewed as an insurmountable stumbling block to democracy. Bangladesh is among the poorest, and Saudi Arabia among the richest countries of the world – and both are Muslim countries, and the one has shown remarkable successes in the democratic direction, while the other is one of the most authoritarian and societies currently in existence. Obviously the enormous differences in their respective development cannot be attributed to Islam.

Perhaps the best example that Islam as such is not the cause of the lack of development towards democracy is the case of Iran. The last few years have shown that within the political discourse of a country that views itself as an Islamic Republic, there are still options which may lead to encouraging results. The fact that there are elections in Iran – presidential as well as parliamentary – and that while they are conducted within a restricted Islamic discourse, they are still contested, with multiple candidates, with a variety of opinions presenting themselves to the electorate – suggests that an electoral process is not intrinsically alien to Islam as such. Iranian elections may not pass even the minimal criteria for democratic procedures – yet the fact that they are contested, that women have the vote, and that President Hashem was twice elected as representing a more moderate version of Islamic rule than the other candidate and that until the last, highly manipulated elections, there was a relatively moderate majority in the Iranian Majlis – all show how complex and differentiated the world of Islam is – and that a potential for further developments towards a more open system cannot be ruled out. Nor should one overlook the fact that within the Iranian Islamic system, seats are reserved in parliament to the tolerated minorities (Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians). Given Islamic discourse, the Baha’is are excluded from this, being seen as renegades from Islam; and the Jewish representative is obviously expected to join – if not outdo – the official anti-Israeli stance of the Islamic Republic; yet the fact is, that minorities are not ipso facto excluded from representation.

This should not be misunderstood or mis-represented as an uncritical attitude towards the Iranian system: it is oppressive and tyrannical, yet it is evolving with an inherent potential for further positive developments: a true struggle is taking place in Iran between a fundamentalist and more modern version of Islam, and while it is not clear who will eventually emerge the winner, this is a far cry from the one-dimensional Islamic fundamentalism which has characterized the Islamic Republic under Ayatollah Khomeini.
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On the other hand, one cannot find even a semblance of such encouraging developments in any of the 22 member-states of the Arab League: not only is none of them a democracy, but none can point to even such hopeful signs as those now visible in Iran. Whether traditional fundamentalist dynastic states like Saudi Arabia, milder royal autocracies like Jordan, Kuwait and the Gulf states, or military one-party states of various degrees of oppression (from the milder Egyptian variety to the harsher Syrian one – not to speak of the abominable Iraqi variety deposed by force from the outside) – no Arab society appears to be able to develop meaningful processes of democratization, neither from above nor from below: there are no Arab Gorbachevs, no Arab Wałęsas, no Arab Havels. Neither rich nor poor Arab societies appear to be able to develop the kind of civil society which is so central to democratic development, and all Arab societies experience different varieties of etatist economic structures – be it under the aegis of a Saudi dynasty or a Ba’athist National-Socialist regime.

As pointed out above, the causes cannot be found in Islam as a religion or culture: yet until Sept 11^th, this basic Arab democratic deficit has not been widely discussed, neither by academics nor by policy analysts for a variety of reasons. Yet the fact that 15 out of the 19 suicide murderers of Sept. 11^th were Saudis, focused attention on the fact that the lack of political space in countries like Saudi Arabia (and under different conditions is Egypt as well) may be responsible for pushing young, well-educated people towards a terroristic option. Until recently, this has been a taboo subject in the Arab political discourse, and even outside the region there has been little serious academic research on this Arab Sonderweg. The courageous OECD Arab Human Development Report, which for the first time raised the issue publicly within an Arab discourse, is short on both analytical and prescriptive levels. Yet for the first time the issue had been raised openly.

That the situation is different in the non-Arab Muslim world may, perhaps, suggest at least a partial explanation. In such disparate cases as Turkey and Iran, Islam is obviously an important ingredient in the political and spiritual cultures of these societies: but there are other layers as well – Ottoman and Turkish ingredients in one case, the richness of Persian culture on the other. It may be that the combination of Islam and Arabism (and especially Sunni Islam and Arabism) is not helpful towards developing an autonomous civil society, given the hegemonistic tradition of Sunni Arabism in the Middle East. But this is a hypothesis which has to be further tested, yet it has already a number of possible policy implications.

The current American call for the need for democratization in the Arab world is by itself a laudable policy orientation: for decades the Arab world has enjoyed an immunity from the universal US-led campaign for human rights which has certainly been influential in weakening the Soviet system (as well as helping processes of democratization in Latin America, the Philippines, Indonesia etc.). Yet at a time when the U.S. has – rightly – condemned in the harshest language Iran’s infringements of human rights, it was virtually silent about the much more repressive Saudi regime and such secularist autocracies like Egypt.
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This has now changed, but as is often the case with US policy orientations, current wisdom in Washington has moved to the other extreme: silence about the Arab democratic deficit has been replaced by an ideologically-driven almost naïve belief that democratization can be easily achieved in the Arab world when the major building blocks are so weak - and when the dangers of even worse developments cannot be ruled out (Algeria is an obvious warning alternative). In its most extreme form, this almost messianic belief in quick democratization is evident in current American policies in Iraq.

Beyond the justifications for the US-led war in Iraq, the American attempt to introduce a democratic system into Iraq in a relatively short time is doomed to failure, and the debacle becomes clearer by the day. As mentioned before, there is no legitimate Arab model. Secondly, there are no indigenous Iraqi civil society ingredients – no democratic or constitutional historical memories or institutions to use as legitimizing factors. Thirdly, introducing democracy under conditions of occupation is by itself problematic, and the post-1945 examples from Germany and Japan are problematic (where are the Iraqi Konrad Adenauers and Willy Brandts?).

Last and not least: the ethno-religious composition of Iraq (an Arab-Shi’ite majority, and strong Kurdish minority concentrated in the north) – all make the construction of a pluralistic, democratic regime in Iraq almost a mission impossible. To imagine that this can be solved or managed by promoting a constitution, which appears as imposed from outside as the current provisional government, is naïve if not pathetic. Perhaps an independent Kurdistan may have better chances for democratic developments – but, besides the geo-political issues raised by such an eventuality – this would still not solve the problem how the rest of Iraq – more or less totally Arab, but deeply split between the historically dominant Sunni minority and the historically oppressed Shi’ite majority – can evolve a workable an coherent form of government based on principles of democracy and pluralism when almost all the building blocs are lacking. It may be a bleak perspective, but to deny it is analytically wrong and politically dangerous.

Developments in the two regions discussed above – post-communist Central Eastern Europe and the Arab Middle East – point to the fact that not ignoring or overlooking issues of culture and history in any equation aiming at enhancing democratic development involves missing a major ingredient. This analysis is far from decreeing a cultural determinism, yet it strongly suggests that avoiding the issues of political culture and historical heritage makes one unable to account for the great differences in developments in societies which otherwise appear analogous – and, moreover, prevents one from charting a realistic course for democratic transformation in societies which are groping their way out of different forms of oppressive regimes.

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Notes:
(1) Jeanne J. Kirkpatrick, Dictatorships and Double Standards”, in: H.J. Wiarda (ed.), Human Rights and U.S. Human Rights Policy (Washington, D.C., 1982), pp. 5-29.
(2) That Marx himself sometimes expressed a less deterministic approach can be seen from his November 1877 letter to Otechesvenniye Zapiski, when he challenged those who tried to “metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historico-philosophical theory of the general path every people is fated to tread, whatever the historical circumstances in which it finds itself.” He goes on to say that in what may otherwise appear as analogous developments one should “study each of these forms of evolution separately…but will never arrive there by using as one’s master key a general historical-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being super-historical”. See Karl Marx, On Colonialism and Modernization, ed. Shlomo Avineri (Garden City, N.Y., 1968), pp. 444-5.
(3) I am well aware of the fact that this categorization may not be universally accepted, but it seems to me to give adequate expression to the differentiated developments in post-communist societies. Even if one or two countries can be moved around from one category to the other – and I am aware that my categorization of Russia under (3) may cause some unease - there is no doubt that there exists a vast difference among the more than two dozen post-communist societies that has to be explained. For simplicity’s sake I left out some of the post-Yugoslav states like Bosnia and Macedonia, so as not to overburden the classification with even more complex cases which are – after all – quite marginal, despite their salience in public opinion due to violent developments and war (the same applies to Kosovo).

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Fouad Ajami, The Dream Palace of the Arabs – A Generation’s Odyssey (New York, 1998).
Shlomo Avineri, “The Return to History”, The Brookings Review (Spring, 1992).
Ivo Banac (ed.), Eastern European Revolution (New York, 1993).
Larry Diamond & Marc E. Plattner, Nationalism, Ethnic Conflict and Democracy (Baltimore/London, 1994).
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, 1992).

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Larry Garber & Eric Bjornlund, The New Democratic Frontiers (Washington, D.C., 1996).
Bronislaw Germek et al., “Peaceful Transitions to Democracy”, Cardozo Law Review, Vol. 19, No. 6 (July, 1998), pp. 1891-1985.
Misha Glenny, The Rebirth of Democracy – Eastern Europe in the Age of Democracy (London, 1993).
George Kohler & Martin Meyer (eds.), Die Folgen von 1989 (Munich, 1994).
Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? (New York, 2002).
Juan Linz & Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transformation and Consolidation

(Baltimore, 1996).

Elżbieta Matynia (ed.), Grappling with Democracy (New York & Prague, 1996).
Wolfgang Merkel, Systemtransformation (Opladen, 1999)
Kazimierz Z. Poznanski (ed.), “Transition and Its Dissents”, Eastern European Politics and Societies, Eastern European Politics and Societies, Vol. 15, No. 2, pp. 207-355.
David Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb (New York, 1993).