Democracy and authoritarianism in the Arab world. The evolution of a long debate

• Autore: Rosita Di Peri
• Carica: Assistant Professor in Political Science and International Relations, Department of Culture, Politics and Society, University of Torino and ISA (Institute of Asian Studies)
• Pagine: 109-126

Democracy and authoritarianism in the Arab world.

The evolution of a long debate

Rosita Di Peri

Abstract

The representation of the Arab world as “ exceptional” (because of an absence of

democracy) when compared with other regions of the world has permeated political

science debates. Falling in line with Orientalist and culturalist theses, such interpretations

read the region’s political evolution as the result of chaos, randomness and external

events and vie w Arab societies as back ward and tribal. Over the decades, these readings

have become tightly intertwined with studies emphasizing an inevitable clash of

civilizations. In this binary contraposition, the Arab world represents an underdeveloped

and violent region, largely because of Islam. The interweaving of development and

democracy, which started in modernization theory in the 1950s and 1960s, has become

even tighter in the era of globalization: Development, especially through the actions and

the buzzwords of international organizations such as the World Bank and the

International Monetary F und, increasingly became synonymous with democracy. This

paper will unpack the debate by focusing on its key elements. The intent is to show how,

even as paradigms and the lexicon change, this debate is still anchored in a stereotypical

and primordialist view of the entire region.

Keywords: Democracy – Authoritarianism – Arab World – Exceptionalism –

Sectarianism

SUMMARY: 1. Introduction. 2. Development “is” democracy. 3. Democratization

and the Arab world. 4. “Arab exceptionalism” in retrospect. 5. Upgrading the

debate on democratization. 6. Conclusion. A return to primordialism? The 2011

uprisings and the sectarian option.

 Assistant Professor in Political Science and International Relations, Department of Culture,

Politics and Society, Universit y of Torino and ISA ( Institute of Asian Studies). Suggested citation:

R. Di Peri, Democra cy and authoritari anism in the Arab world. The evolution of a long debate, in

Nuovi Autoritarismi e Democrazie: Diritto, Istituzioni, Società (NAD), n. 1/2019, pp.108-125.

Paper delivered on 2 June 2019.

Nuovi Autoritarismi e Democrazie:

Diritto, Istituzioni, Società

n. 1/ 2019 ISSN 2612-6672 | 109

1. Introduction

A map of the world’s democracies reveals the Middle East to be an outlier.

While many of the countries across the globe that have experienced

authoritarianism (for example, in Latin America and Eastern Europe) have

undertaken democratization processes, albeit frequently with uncertain outcomes,

this has not been the case in the Middle East. Despite the protest movements that

have shaken this part of the world since 2011 (the so-called “Arab Spring”), the

presence of democracy in the region, at least according to Freedom House or the

Bertelsmann Transformation Index

1

, has remained problematic. Except for

Tunisia, where protests led if not to a situation of full democracy then at least to

an effective transition process, and Lebanon, with its controversial consociative

system, the area overall remains dominated by authoritarianism

2

.

Throughout the 1990s and the 2000s, cultural explanations, such the presence

of Islam as an inhibitor of democracy, were adopted to explain the authoritarian

resilience

3

. The impossibility of analysing the Middle East within the frame of

democratization theory, which gained particular momentum after the the

publication of Samuel Huntington’s book on the third wave of democratization

4

,

has caused the region to be labelled as “exceptional” or, more generally,

unsuitable for democracy. The narrative of “Arab exceptionalism” has spread

largely in academia and politics to foster a certain representation of the Arab

world by creating a negative and indelible label that is still in force today.

In the following pages, I argue that this is the result of a combination of two

elements: on the one hand, the spread and pervasiveness of a normative and

procedural approach to democratization that, grounded in modernization theories,

was conceived and described as an irreversible process – a set of mechanism that

sooner or later would bring democracy, development and well-being to any

latitude; on the other hand, a consequence of the previous argument, the need for

democratization processes to be incentivized through appropriate tools. One of the

results of this debate is the idea that democracy could be exported. As Nicolas

Guilhot argues, the social and political movements promoting democracy and

human rights have gradually become weapons in the arsenal of power

5

. He

highlights how, especially after the Washington Consensus, these movements

1

See th e maps and rankings by Fr eedom House www.freedomhouse.org and t he Bertelsmann

Transformation Index www.bti-project.org/en/ho me, among others (last accessed 27.05.2019).

2

We are well aware of the difficulty of giving a single name t o the area and will refer

interchangeably to the MENA re gion (Middle East and North Africa) and the Arab world. Another

crucial issue is how to define democracy, an issue th at it is not possible to deal with in this paper.

3

E. Keddourie, Democracy and Arab political culture, Washington Institute for Near East Policy,

Washington D.C., 1992; B. Lewis, A historical o verview, in Journal of Democracy, Vol. 7, No. 2,

1996, pp. 52-63; B. Lewis, Islam and liberal d emocracy, in The Atlantic Monthly, F ebruary, 1993.

4

S. Huntington, The third wave: Democratization in the late twentieth century, University of

Oklahoma Press, Oklahoma, 1993.

5

N. Guilhot, The democracy mak ers: Human rights and international ord er, New York, Columbia

University Press, 2005.