|
Description
While delivering the keynote adress at a National Endowment for Democracy event in 2005, President George W. Bush singled out Islamic extremism as the number-one foreign-policy challenge facing the United States. A primary reason for this threat, he asserted, is the lack of democracy in Muslim countries. "If the peoples of that region [the Greater Middle East] are permitted to choose their own destiny," Bush argued, "then the extremists will be marginalized, and the flow of violent radicalism to the rest of the world will slow, and eventually end." (1)
Bush did not mention it, but he was wading into a longstanding controversy about "Muslim exceptionalism" regarding democracy. For example, the UN Development Programme has identified a "freedom deficit" in the Greater Middle East that places it last among the regions of the world in terms of political freedom. (2) The World Bank has also lamented what it calls a "governance gap" in the Middle East and North Africa. (3) Among academic observers, the main dispute is over what produces this pattern of embedded authoritarianism, not whether it exists. Some influential writers, such as Samuel Huntington, consider Muslim culture averse to norms of democracy and rule of law. (4) Other experts, for instance Larry Diamond, attribute Muslim authoritarianism to entrenched leadership and lack of opportunity for participation by ordinary people, not retrograde values or beliefs. (5) Left largely unchallenged is the prior assumption common to all sides of the debate, which holds democracy to be unusually lacking in Muslim countries whatever the root causes might be.
There are 47 countries (including the Palestinian Authority) where over half the population adhere at least nominally to the faith of Islam. This is approximately one-quarter of the world's nation states, a distinctly large share to be impervious to democratic practice, if this is so. For convenience, these 47 nation states will henceforward be identified simply as Muslim or Islamic countries, though there are obviously other countries with substantial Muslim populations. They range in size from Indonesia, with a population of more than 200 million, to the Maldives Islands, with a population under 300,000. We should be wary of brushing such a diverse group with the same broad stroke.
This essay uses independent data to show that Muslim authoritarianism may not be as rife and entrenched as many in the international-relations field seem to take for granted. The existence and dimensions of any modern-day democracy gap are not settled issues but constantly changing empirical questions. Just how exceptional is democracy in the Muslim world today? Is it helpful or valid to think of a generic Islamic democracy gap, or is that too easy an assertion that gives the wrong impression about many specific societies? To be clear, the goal of this paper is modest: to plumb the depths of contemporary Muslim exceptionalism with regard to democracy. The analysis gives context to the excessively polarized debate in international relations about clashing civilizations and suggests it is more fruitful to look at countries in a less monolithic way.
DEFINING DEMOCRACY
Democratization is an irregular process of replacing authoritarian regimes with rule-bound competitive systems. The pace of democratization has picked up dramatically since the end of the Cold War, with many additional countries undergoing political renaissance that opens them up to greater involvement by citizens and civil society. Democratization is not a universal historical sequence ending in the same types of political systems, even though more and more nation states are adopting similar-looking political institutions and practices based on a common set of Western models. Public-opinion surveys in Muslim countries show broad support for democracy as a system that can work in those societies. (6) What local respondents actually have in mind when they respond to questions about democracy, however, may not be quite the same as in the United States or Europe. (7)
Democracy means different things to different people. At the simplest level, it is a form of government in which citizens pick their rulers, and rulers are therefore responsive to the preferences of citizens. What are the common denominators? Valerie Bunce puts forward a concise definition that captures two essential aspects of democracy. She suggests we think of the term as "a two-part proposition, having uncertain results (or competition) but... |
Looking for additional articles?
Click here
to search our database of over 3 million articles.
|
