الديمقراطية والقومية العربية - كلية الدراسات الآسيوية والأفريقية

I. Democracy and arab nationalism

There has been a long tradition by which the AW, conceived as an indifferentiated mass, is generaly reduced, to one of its dominant phenomena: Arab Nationalism, Communism and now Islamism. This approach, is not only highly subjectivist, reducing very complex societies to the dominant ideological current or movement of the day, but is paradoxical in itself. It imposes a mythical uniformity on this part of the world while at the same time negating any of its aspirations to political, economic or even cultural unity.

To begin with: Nationalism is not necessarily antinomic to democracy. In historical terms the English and French experiences prove that the whole democratic concept, in one of its aspects, is based on the allegiance to the Nation: democracy as the Englisman‘s rights and the Jacobinist tradition of the Nation-State are the most notable illustrations.

The question of the relationship between Democracy and Arab Nationalism is one not of ideology but of practice. It seems to me of paramount necessity to distinguish between Arab Nationalism as an ideology and the prevailing consciousness of common identity and destiny among the Arab peoples, which has once more asserted itself during the Gulf crisis.

While certain forms of nationalist ideology legitimise militarism and dictatorship (the dialectic of the dictator and the masses as revealed during the Gulf war) The Bismarkian solution in annexation of Kuwait by SH>>resulting fractricide, disarray, hatred. On the other hand, it is a fact about this region that the system of states established in the wake of the WWI is perverse and has constantly contributed to internal tensions and regional conflicts. People in our part of the world live a dual situation: they are citizens in states which have all the attributes of sovereignty and independance enjoyed by states anywhere else in the world; but on the other hand, their interests, objectives, aspirations and identity are intertwinned and overlapping. Without an overriding regional framework, within which these interests can be reconciled, aspirations expressed and problems and conflicts discussed and resolved peacefully, the region is doomed to continuing conflict and frustration.

Two flagrant contradictions are related to the rejection of democracy in the name of Arab (or Islamic) authenticity on the assumption that ‘imported‘ democratic institutions go against this asâlah. i) these same defenders of authenticity are willing to import all the artifacts of Western civilisation except all that is progressive and benefitial in it;

ii) the assumption is that the West is trying to impose its democratic institutions on us, which seems far from true in historical reality. The opposite seems more likely. The access of Arabs to world history and to universalism corresponds not only to an internal Arab need inscribed in our lives, culture, history and religion; but is also an task to be undertaken against the western upholders of…the modern world and of democracy.

The question is not whether AW should be part of the world or not. There is no area in the world as integrated in the world-system as AW. The question is whether we shall continue to adopt the integration of oil-economies, consumers’ society or the integration of an independant, equal nation which has its right to exist and contribute its share of civilisation (the Islamists as the archaic form in modernity!! or a modern form of archaïsm!!)

II. Internal factors : the roots of authoritarianism

– The invasion by the State of the institutions of civil society

– The institutionalisation of tribalism and confessionalism as base of power.

– The economic instance becomes an appendice of the State in petro- monarchies and state-bourgeoisies alike. The role of oil-based economies in blocking democracy. The paradox of a consumers‘ capitalism that reproduces archaic social and cultural institutions. The question of taxation and representation.

– the constant recourse to mass violence to install power and maintain it. The practice of incurring demographic surgical operations into society (not excluding mass massacres and mass displacement of populations)

– The regimes issued from the Arab Movement for National Liberation are bloody caricatures of the Stalinist model; the role of the army and security organisms as base of power.

+ a vanguardist ideology establishes a didactic/punitive relationship between ruler/teacher and people/pupil (the latter caracterised by the famous tryptic ‘ignorance, poverty and illness‘)

>>>legitimacy: either self-assumed or sustained by foreign backing.

The personalition of the ruler as absolute who incarnates the State as much as the State is the magnified image of the monarch (Laroui)

The inversed relationship between rulers and ruled: Curiously, it is the ruler who becomes source of legitimacy for ‘his‘ people rather than the opposite: this might explain why the AW has this unique characteristic of having whole countries named after a family or an individual!

After a presidential election with was, obviously, won by the one and unique candidate, rather than the elected president thanking the people for having renewed their trust in him, it is the regime’s press which, in the name of the people, thanks the president for accepting to be reelected. An example of the extent of contempt that a ruler has for his people, a series of articles, probably written by SH himself in the official al-Thawrah, where he castigates the population of southern Iraq, more especially the inhabitants of the marshes, for having been corrupted by the Iranians, and for not being authentic Arabs, for their poverty, nakedness and underdevelopment!!

III. The outside obstacles:

– the rule has been the intervention of western powers in political affairs of region in favour of authoritarian and oligarchic regimes.

Does the West really want to export its ‘model’ to the rest of the world? The big bluff: searching for something congenital or cultural in Arabs and Muslims which forms obstacle against democracy. Since the crushing of the Majlis movement by the British in 1905 (vividly reconstructed by Amin Maalouf in his historical novel Samarcand) the western powers do not have a glorious record of interest for human rights or democratic institutions in the Middle East and the Arab World. The British-French rivalry in ME was the occasion for encouraging more military coups against democratically elected regimes. It is difficult to forget the theories of US sociologists, political s cientists and strategists in the fifties and the sixties which hammered apologies for authoritarian military regimes as vehicles for modernisation and their colloraly the no less famous theory of the New Middle Class, intimately related to the military, as the necessary buffer-class and element of stability in the area against the ‘dangerous classes‘ such as the peasantry (not to speak of them as ramparts against communism).

When, in the 1970‘s and 80‘s, questions of human rights ranked high in relations between the West and the rest of the world, the Arab World stood as a notable exception. At best, regimes assigned to scrutiny into their treatment of human rights‘ issues were constantly selective and momentary. Who speaks of abuse of human rights in SA? Indeed, sanctions were taken against certain states and regimes accused of encouraging or practicing terrorism against foreign nationals. Yet, no Arab regime, to my knowledge, has ever been sanctioned for any form of terrorism it practiced against its own people, even if that meant large scale massacres.

Let‘s be candid: a question: Multinationals and the governments that back them would they prefer to win a contract of billions of dollars in purchase of arms or oil concessions which depends on the decision of one despot, be he an emir, or a president, with the necessary bakhshish on the sides for influential middlemen or members of the court, or pass through the complicated network of institutions, committees, control organisms of a democratic state?!!

– the Gulf war as testing-ground: The Iraqi people disabled and bombed back to the pre-industrial age, the opposition encouraged to rebel and then let down; blockade still punishes the Iraqi people. SH and his regime are maintained. All this in the name of the cynical logic of non-interference in the internal affairs of the Iraqi people!!!!

Whereas SH could only be replaced by a military from the same ruling establisment or that SH is weak enough and desparate to preserve his rule that he would be the most amenable to the dictats of the victors than a new regime liable to show more concern for national interests than the defeated dictator.

– A ‘liberated‘ Kuwait yes, “Aides Say Bush Won‘t Push Emir on Democracy“ He did not even mention the word in a recent letter to him. Just spoke of “reconstruction“ for Kuwait. While Emir Jaber resumes his opulent way of living and reports say that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers helped furnish his new palace in Kuwait city

but the country is still under the same oligarchy, so is Saudi Arabia the only country in the world without a constitution.

IV. Prospects

1. Erosion of power of the regimes. Less spending power to buy-off peoples‘ loyalties. Not necessarily leads to democratization. Might be resolved by one of many ways: i) concessions to Islamists; ii) military take-over (Sudanese model); iii) some measures of liberalization of the economy where interests of regimes and those of New World Order intersect; iv) more erosion and civil strife…

2. weakness of oppositions and democratic alternatives:

– the individual citizen is one identity among many other identities; the least respected; the least protected..

– the opposition is the non-governing wing of the same movement that took power in the sixties: insensitive to democratization, one-party-rule-oriented; lacking democ relations and traditions inside it, (parts of it locked in a life-and-death struggle with the existing regimes to be incapable of real change), etc.

– the intellectuals’ assimilation into the State apparati; the recuperation of the mass-media (now oil-controlled);

– dissent nearly monopolised by Islamists (but not all, nor always contestors!!)

3. Attempts at democratisation:

Jordan : a response to challenges of regional conjuncture: an attempt by Hussein to i) Jordanize his Palestinian majority, under the impact of the Palestinian intifada and of the Israeli project to transform his kingdom into a substitute Palestinian state; this supposed more reliance on the urban population in contrast to the previous tribal base of the regime, which proved to be not immune to contestation; ii) to associate sections of the population to the administration of the economic crisis partly resulting from the end of the Iraq-Iran war partly from the stop of Saudi aid. Jordan has not yet become a constitutional monarchy, yet it is living an interesting experience, which remains at the mercy of the regional conjuncture and the will of the monarch.

Yemen: pluralism related to unity: the Saudi challenge; the crisis of the regime in the North with its tribal-islamist opposition; SPY reconverted to democracy after its local perestroïka under the impact of the January massacres and the Soviet collapse. Still too reflective of the confessional and tribal pluralism of society. The referendum on the constitution of May 1991 proved existence of a deep current in Yemeni society in favour of democracy and the rule of Law against tribal privileges and islamic fundamentalism. But country haunted by economic difficulties and the corruption of the administration. The age-long hunger for the independance of the State vis-à-vis the tribal structures awaits the resolution of the nature of the new regime: already troubles are breaking because of the feeling that none of the promises of Unity have been achieved and the growing opposition to government corruption and the insecurity and the growing fears that the personalised, tribal-based regime of San`a, remains as it is. The economic difficulties, due to the sanctions against Yemen during the Gulf war and the expulsion of nearly a million yemenis from Saudi Arabis (which have deprived the country of one of its amain sources of foreign currency), are further aggravated by the struggle to control the newly discovered oil resources, between different factions of the regime, and will add to the complexity of the situation and its explosive nature.

Algeria: the future of democracy between the attempts to salvage the one-party rule of FLN, now more and more represented by the military, and the threats of the Islamist take-over, through an electoral victory. The delicate balance between these two forces is rendered even more precarious because many democratic forces in the country, like the Socialist Forces‘ Front of Hussayn Aït Ahmad, refuse to rally the FLN in the name of the common fight against the Fundamentalists‘ danger…the coming elections will tell to what extent the democratisation process has opened its way…

Morocco: the recent liberalisations- the release of hundreds of detainees, including members of the military incarcerated for their role in the aborted coups of 1971 and 1972 and of Abraham Serfaty, the leftist leader expulsed to France; the destruction of the Tazmamart detention center; etc.- are intimately related to the nearing of the date of the referendum on the Western Sahara and the need felt by the regime to improve its relations with the USA and transform Morocco into “ a highway between Africa and Europe“, according to his own words. During a heated crisis with France last summer, not unrelated to questions of human rights, King Hassan II undertook a royal visit to the US where he benefited from a privileged official treatement and a media which obligingly took on the public relations‘ task of setting the mood for the visit. A statement of the Department of State stressed the importance of the Moroccan role in the the Middle East peace conference, hinting that Morocco, next to Egypt, is the closest Arab country to Israel. There remains that the tolerance of an opposition in Morocco- playing at best the role of His Majesty‘s Loyal Opposition, but definitely not in the British sense!!!- and other pluralistic measures, are an example of liberalization by Royal decree solely governed by the whims of the ruler.

Tunisia:

Let us not underestimate the role of popular pressure in all these liberalisation measures: April 1989 in Jordan; October 1988 in Algeria; in Moroccan cities in 1990; the mass demonstrations in the Yemen in favour of unity; etc.

5. Democratisation in the course of a new societal project for AW

– Democratisation- seen as regularised contestation; relatively pacific alternation of power; rule of law; democratic institutions based on politically and legally equal citizens and the secularism of public life and the proinciple of accountability of the rulers to the populaion-

a long-term process of accumulation of cultural traditions and institutions which cannot be easily overturned. Depends now on being incorporated into a new social project for the future of Arab World.

Economic and social difficulties remain the most propicious factor in favor of military coups, regional or civil conflicts, violence and strengthen anti-democratic forces.

– the need for Arab Unity, not by short-cuts nor by Bismarkian solutions, but by recognistion of the double need to develop progressive forms of co-ordination and mutual assistance developping toward elaborate forms of confederation and federation;

development and the control of natural resources;

No wild-capitalism can evade these questions; no WB or IMF injunctions can solve them (not even attenuate them; rather the contrary!!);

the equitable distribution of wealth: among the Arab states and inside each and every one of them has been aggravated by recent developments especially the Gulf War. Oil economies has produced great social inequalities. Rather than being used to finance the economic, social and cultural development of the Arab region, much of it is used to promote profligate life-styles for the privileged few, and building extensive security apparatus to maintain the existing regimes in power, in addition to investing a good part of it in the western economies; etc. Disparities of wealth are harbingers of apocalyses to come, compared to which the burning oil wells of Kuwait will look like children’s bonfires.

A nahdah, geared to the future, the role of the Arabs in the world of tomorrow, not any return (or reconstruction) to a Golden Age, be it the Rashidin Caliphs or the once-united and glorious Arab Nation…

– Democracy inconceivable without secularisation of State

– A just solution of Arab-Israeli conflict, especially the recognition of the right of Palestinian people to self-determination and his own independant State- and demilitarisation of the region- a great step to further democracy.

– Economic liberalism is not necessarily conducive to democratisation. It requires other elements (including the intervention of the people in the affairs of the city) Peripheral capitalism, of the consumers’ non-productive even parasitical type not only coexists with and reproduces the most archaïc social and mental structures, it also charges them with an explosive mixture once they are related Lebanon as an example.

– The need to produce a real solution to problems of minorities (recognition of their rights to autonomy, cultural and linguistic differences) within the AW

– The progressive participation of women in public life. Part of the tragedy of Arab politics and the unimaginative archaism of Arab life is the dominance of Arab machism.

6. meanwhile:

>> let the Arab (civil) societies breathe, express themselves, practice opposition and dissent as legitimate rights, even at the risk of many perils and the rise of retrograde elements winning elections;

>> let the diferrent contending visions, currents, opinions, etc. submit their programmes and solutions to the only viable and secure legitimate judge: public opinion!!

>> Arab World is probably the world’s highest danger-zone in terms of human rights. It remains the testing ground for the veracity of Human Rights discourse in the West: why not envisage a treaty similar to the Helsinki Treaty for AW? For long years, western powers have been intervening, directly or by their Israeli proxies, to punish the peoples of this region everytime they set to liberate themselves or independantly articulate their demands and aspirations. Presently, the US intervenes in the smallest details in the lives of the peoples of the region. Every inch of Iraqi territory of Iraq is being searched and scrutinised as a potential hiding place for nuclear facilities by satellites and by UN teams. The media’s outcry: Iraq was capable of making a nuclear bomb earlier than expected. Which means within two years, at a time when Israeli sources now reveal that Israel possesses at least three hundred nuclear heads!! To the outcries that it is the people of Iraq who is being punished, the answer is systematically that to release the embargo will play into the hands of Saddam Hussein. But is that not the same logic that SH himself applied in holding European and American civilians hostages to influence their governments. With the sizeable difference that the hostages, in this case are not in the thousands but a whole population of 17 millions!! Since intervention into the minutest details of Arab life is the rule, why not intervene once, just once, in response to the needs of the Arab peoples, rather than against them. Why couldn‘t the principle of the right of “humanitarian intervention to peoples in distress” adopted and applied in the case of the tragedy of the Kurds of Iraq, be extended to cover the right of “democratic intervention“ to help peoples in distress?? why not organise free elections under UN auspices in all the Arab World, starting with the Iraqi people, for example??

until then,

dissent is the catch-word; al-fitnah. Let nobody be surprised. A new Arab generation has grown up It is not sensitive to all our discourses It suffers from unemployment and a deep crisis of identity and has learned from the kids of the Palestinian intifadah that it both right and possible to rebell against a tyrannical rule even unarmed.

What is left of the Left in the AW? what is left for the Left to do? Marxism is still one of the most inspiring theories of our times. A theory for general human emancipation from all the shackles that barr man’s access to freedom and happiness, be they the traditions of old or the alienation of the commodity. Its rationalist and critical historical edge has been blunted when it became a state-religion. We are now witnessing the end of communism as a historical movement which tried to replace capitalism by building an alternative regime, closed to the rest of the world, and hoping to act as model and as spearhead of change and revolution. Socialism now equates the Goulag, bread queues, the police-state. Its strength was elsewhere: its military might. But its vonlontarsim made it think that military might can compensate for economic weaknesses and failures. As it happenend, it was the capitalist commodity that gnawed at the very foundations of this empire-which reached the climax of this volontarism with the programme of economic competition with capitalism along its own quantitative terms rather than the terms of building a radically different society- till it collapsed, in a similar way that it gnawed at the foundations of the pre-capitalist empires of, as Habermas has masterfully demonstrated.

Socialism? A doctrine of distribution. The first false assumption was to consider that access to socialism is quicker in underdeveloped societies. The reverse is true. The problem: to control the wealth and ressources you have and to create new wealth in order to be able to distribute them in an equitable way. What to do?

Communism is defeated but fascism, racism continue and prosper. But what about that other “nomenclatura” that of the rich world only containing15% of world population and yet it controls 80% of the planet’s ressources: Third World is vanishing from world economy and who are ruining the Third World. Only 0,37 of GNP of rich countries given in aid to Third World.

Let us hope that a new Wall between North and South is erected to replace the Berlin Wall between East and West. It could be that Marx’s prophecy about the end of capitalism has not come true as soon as anticipated let us hope that his main prophecy does not itself come true: Socialism or barbarism!!

What can the AW make of all that? First, we are left alone to invent everything from the beginning. That might liberate the Arab mind of models and spurr it out of its intellectual laziness.

Of all the peoples of the world, the Arabs are closest to the West, with a long history of exchange (in commerce or in wars) with it and a long opening to its ideas. Of all peoples of the world also, the Arabs seem not only to occupy a strategic and geographic intermediary position vis à vis to the West; they also occupy an economic intermediate position: they are rich enough to incite all kinds of controls and poor enough to be at the bottom list of the “least developped” countries of the world. This proximity has long been the source of a mimrtic urge to compare and identify: forgetting the time and historic lag. This illusion has been a source of a terrible impatience which has been extremely detrimental to progress.

Parts of the AW are now integrated into the capitalist system and parts are simply marginalised and pauperised and crushed. The question is not whether AW should be part of the world or not. There is no area in the world as integrated in the world-system as AW. The question is whether we shall continue to adopt the integration of oil-economies, consumers’ society or the integration of an independant, equal nation which has its right to exist and contribute its share of civilisation (the Islamists as the archaic form in modernity!! or a modern form of archaïsm!!)

Let us not underestimate the role of popular pressure in all these liberalisation measures: April 1989 in Jordan; October 1988 in Algeria; in Moroccan cities in 1990; the mass demonstrations in the Yemen in favour of unity; etc.

What do I understand by Arab Unity

The equitable distribution of wealth among the Arab states and inside each and every one of them has been aggravated by recent developments especially the Gulf War. Oil economies has produced great social inequalities. Rather than being used to finance the economic, social and cultural development of the Arab region, much of it is used to promote luxurious life-styles for the privileged few, and building extensive security apparatus to maintain the existing regimes in power, in addition to investing a good part of it in the western economies; etc. The disparities of wealth can only announce apocalyses to come, compared to which the burning oil wells of Kuwait will look like children’s bonfires.

Of all the effects of the Gulf war one is to my mind the most pernicious: the way the Iraqi people is being abolished and treated: in less than a year, a people, already bled white from eight years of an atrocious war with Iran, was punished thrice: once, by a 40 days war by the allied forces when he was bombed back to the “pre-industrial” age and “disabled”, for what? for being the people which is the victim of SH; secondly, because he believed that the war was about democracy and was let down when he rebelled last March and the whole world stood watching ; and thirdly and ever since because of the blockade which was supposed to deciminate up to 170 thousands Iraqi child last summer, according to a Harvard University survey. I can only impress on you, to raise your voices to put an end to this murderous blockade.