Source: The Daily Star

The Arab world is changing. Popular protest movements, parliamentary and municipal elections, and successive concessions by the ruling elites are creating a momentum for political transformation in countries as different as Lebanon and Palestine, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Yet it is difficult to foresee what the outcome of the long anticipated "Arab democratization wave" is likely to be. The dream of pluralist polities and open public spheres goes hand in hand with the risk of authoritarian backlashes and radical Islamist insurgencies.

Apparently we can account for the uncertain political path of the region by referring to the inherent ambivalent nature of profound transformations in non-democratic countries. Neither their driving logic nor their consequences are clear from the outset. This was the case in Eastern Europe in 1989-1991, and it is definitely going to be the case in the Arab world in the years to come. However, there are other sources of political uncertainty that are specific to the historical legacy and social reality of Arab countries.

Throughout the last decades we witnessed various seemingly promising beginnings that did not bring about any substantial changes. Different measures of political liberalization did not pave the way for real democratic change, and privatization strategies led to stagnant crony capitalist structures rather than socially responsible market economies. Several Arab countries suffered from a systematic rise of radical ideologies and violent movements that had its root causes in state repression and economic deprivation. Traditional elements, mainly tribalism and primordial loyalties, remained as persistent in the social fabric as authoritarian and chauvinistic nationalist notions in the prevailing political culture.

Above all, in the last two decades the region lacked agents of democratic transformation. Arab ruling elites, including the young, Western-educated generation of monarchs and presidents' sons, were not interested in power sharing in any substantial way. Liberal parties and civil society organizations were never able to alter their legacy of structural weakness and social isolation. The formation of broad alliances for democracy to contest the dominance of autocratic rulers and force democratic concessions clearly exceeded their capacity in the 1980s and 1990s. Back then, non-violent popular Islamist movements such as the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the Moroccan Justice and Development Party were yet to come up with a strategic commitment to democratic forms of governance. Caught in a triple iron cage of state oppression, continuous radicalization on the fringes of the Islamist spectrum, and international fears of their potential role, these movements were forced out of the official political sphere and excluded from Western efforts to promote democracy in the Arab world.

In the last few years, however, this overall picture has gradually fallen apart. Confronted with increasingly disenchanted domestic populations as well as Western, primarily American efforts to promote democracy in the region, a representative number of Arab governments has embarked on the road of political reforms or accelerated the pace of their realization. Changing regional conditions, especially since the collapse of the Baath regime in Iraq, have helped create an unprecedented momentum for debating the perspectives of democratic transformation, from Morocco to Bahrain. Never before 2003 was the public interest in power sharing and good governance as genuine and far-reaching as it has been since then.

Yet the path to Arab democracy continues to be problematic. Reading the contemporary regional political scene, legitimate doubts emerge at three central levels: the degree of commitment to reform by governments, the limits of internal democratization pressures, and the plausibility of effective democracy promotion strategies implemented by the United States. In a nutshell, democratic reforms in authoritarian polities never happen out of impulsive noble motivations of autocratic rulers. The experiences of Eastern Europe and other parts of the non-Western world in the 1990s suggest that a combination of opposition movements pushing for democracy and international pressures on ruling autocrats is crucial in paving the way for significant reforms to take place. 

However, pressuring the autocrats does not mean alienating them. Managing the first reform steps remains the prerogative of existing governments, and without their backing the whole process can not take off.

In the Arab reality of 2005, the predominant missing element when compared to more successful experiences of political transformation is the emergence of democratic opposition movements with considerable constituencies that contest authoritarian power and force concessions. American efforts to promote democracy in societies where the tradeoffs of undemocratic governance continue to be bearable for the ruling elites do not suffice to make political reforms plausible or viable. Without the formation of far-reaching popular alliances for democracy, the Arab autocrats and their rather sophisticated state apparatuses will eventually manage to deal with external pressures, either by inventing a "theater of democratization" based on various creative scenes, such as cosmetic reforms, and official discourses on human rights and good governance, or by discrediting them publicly as acts of foreign aggression against national sovereignty.

History informs us that authoritarian rulers are best equipped to successfully play the game of "us against them," and in so doing to portray themselves as national heroes to whom unquestioned obedience becomes a sacred duty.

Amr Hamzawy is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He previously taught Middle Eastern politics in Cairo and Berlin. This commentary is taken from bitterlemons-international.org, an online newsletter.