The Globalization of Democracy and the Location of the Middle East in the Contemporary Global Order (original) (raw)

CHAPTER 5

The Globalization of Democracy and the Location of the Middle East in the Contemporary Global Order

Andrea Teti

INTRODUCTION 1{ }^{1}

Globalization is notoriously difficult to define, subsuming a staggeringly complex interrelation of social, economic, and political phenomena, which monodisciplinary approaches alone cannot begin to capture (see also Stetter in this volume). Common to most, if not all, these approaches to “globalization” are three ideas: first, that contemporary globalization bears the imprint of a particular historical trajectory inextricable from the “West’s” recent past and present; second, that contemporary globalization involves an accelerated spatiotemporal compression (Scholte; Virilio) driven by the expansion of capitalism (Wallerstein; Frank), often resulting in a complex interrelation of denationalization (Sassen), renationalization, expansion, and resistance; and third, that the diverse phenomena subsumed under this label are crucial if we are to understand the configuration of relations of power in the contemporary global order.

As for the Middle East’s roles in this globalized system, there are many, ranging from the economic (e.g., hydrocarbons, migration, water) to the strategic (e.g., stability, terrorism), the historical (e.g., [neo]imperialism), the cultural (e.g., Arab, Islamic, etc.), and the political (e.g., Palestine). Rather than contributing to this literature, however, this chapter emphasizes the importance of a different approach to a key concept: democratization.

The analysis presented here will not assess how democratic transitions in the region might affect regional and global politics, speculate on the mid- and long-term impact of the uprisings across the region, nor argue that existing scholarship has neglected particular factors. Rather, the focus will be on the politics of the categories of “democracy” and “democratization” themselves.

These categories and the array of both general principles (liberal democracy, good governance, etc.) and technical knowledge (activist training, election monitoring, etc.) that go with them will be analyzed as “categories of action.” All these categories inform the design of democracy-assistance projects and the legitimization of both policy and activism. But particular understandings of what “democracy” is and how to “democratize” emerge in response to particular historical political contexts and problems, and their practical deployment-whether in “everyday” politics or academic analysisalso has political implications: “democratization” is an analytical concept in the analysis of politics, but it is also a category of action in politics, invoked by a wide range of political actors; a category of action on politics, crucial to the production of what is taken as “knowledge” in public debate or policy design; and inextricable from the disciplinary politics of academia itself. In all three contexts, there is a crucial relation between how democratization is thought and the practical, political uses to which the category is put in thinking about and acting on various points in the relationship between the (globalizing) Middle East and the (globalized) West. This makes it crucial to understand what the characteristics and political implications are of the particular knowledge being produced about the Middle East under the rubric of “democratization.” The question this chapter poses is, what role does the particular contemporary understanding of those categories have in shaping not just democratization policies but relations between the democratized (West) and the democratizing (Middle East)? In other words, this chapter aims to contribute to a better understanding of how discourses and practices of democratization fracture world society (see Stetter in this volume), in general, and the relations between the Middle East and the rest of the world, more specifically.

This approach draws on the work of Michel Foucault and Edward Said. Said famously provided a definition of Orientalism as “the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient . . . by making statements about it, authorizing views on it . . . teaching it, settling it, ruling over it” (1978, 2)—“a veridic discourse about the Orient” (1978,6)(1978,6). Foucault gave a more general definition of truth and its relation to power-of which Orientalism is a striking case-by arguing that “truth” is to be understood as “the ensemble of rules according to which the true and the false are separated and specific effects of power are attached to the true” (Foucault 1980, 133; Teti 2012). From Dewey to J. J. Austin, Wittgenstein to Searle, one need not subscribe to poststructuralism to

focus attention on the relationship between discourse and practice-between speech and act-or the view that knowledge is in important senses always “for someone or something.” Certainly, from any of these standpoints, failing to problematize the link between knowledge and politics carries both analytical and political implications.

From any of these standpoints, relations of power are not independent of the production of knowledge, nor is there reason knowledge about democracy should constitute an exception: policy and public debates on-but also academic analyses of-democratization are all immanent to the politics of “democratization”-that is, the political practices that take place under the rubric of “democratization.” Thus it is important to investigate how such “knowledge” is involved in power relations, examine how the particular construction of hegemonic narratives of democratization is related to nondiscursive practices such as democracy-assistance programs or calls for (neo) liberal economic reforms, and understand the connection between democratization discourse and global hierarchies among states.

Approaching the democratization question from this standpoint can shed new light on the apparent puzzle of the imperviousness to change in both Middle Eastern states’ domestic politics and their place in global politics in recent decades-and specifically to the democratization paradigm’s contribution to articulating Western-Middle Eastern relations above and beyond the objective, merely descriptive role such theories assign themselves. At a time when several Middle Eastern societies are in turmoil and Western governments are revising the democracy-assistance strategies, this becomes a particularly important task.

Thus, after analyzing key elements of the scholarly frameworks behind democratization, this chapter offers a critique of these debates. First, it focuses on the limitations of the democratization paradigm itself, with particular attention to the way in which the model of democratic transitions is built and categorizes both consolidated (largely Western liberal democratic) and nondemocratic regimes. Second, through an analysis of key UK documents and programs, this chapter considers the kinds of discursive practices that are actually conducted, “hosted” under the rubrics of democratization and democracy promotion in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), noting the way they reflect the discursive framework of the democratization paradigm within which they are formulated. Finally, this chapter considers the implications of such rhetoric and practices by considering what effects the gaps between them might be: If democratization discourse toward the Middle East is not aiding democratic transitions there, how is it connected to the contemporary global order?

This chapter argues that on the one hand democratization is a selfdeclared emancipatory discourse, aiming to provide a recipe for the practical

achievement of a morally superior political system, ferrying its subjects from repression to liberation, and fundamentally reshaping the nature of both states and the global order. On the other hand, analyzing the way democratization’s analytical categories are defined and considering these in relation to democracy promotion’s known shortcomings, this chapter argues that the particular way in which democratization is formulated actually contributes to undermining the possibilities for democratic transitions and reproducing the region’s place in the contemporary global order.

Liberal Hegemonies: Democratization’s Genealogies and Limitations

The Middle East’s contemporary global location is not one-dimensional, but even a casual historical perusal shows that the idea of “democracy” and transitions toward it have long been integral to the narratives through which the “West” has related to non-Western counterparts, both in public rhetoric and in scholarly analysis.

In political discourse, democracy was famously first absorbed into foreign policy rhetoric in Woodrow Wilson’s appeal that “the world must be made safe for democracy,” and at least since that speech urging authorization to join World War I, democracy has been at the heart of Western public discourse, a central banner in the legitimization of its foreign policies (see Owen 1994). From Kant to Mazzini, Wilson to Reagan to Obama, democratization’s proponents have justified their policies by arguing that democracies are less aggressive than nondemocracies, so that democratization is not simply a moral imperative but a strategically sound objective to promote peace and prosperity. Indeed, the independence of self-determined and self-governing states occupies a central place in Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” and is central to the League of Nations Charter. Although little of that support for self-determination survived postwar arrangements outside Europe, the cornerstones of procedural notions of democracy-self-determination, freedom of conscience, public order/rule of law, and so on-were embedded in key documents establishing the interwar order. The league’s charter, for example, presents these elements as crucial tests of whether such “communities” have “reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations” can be recognized (Article 22). Once self-determining peoples were “able to stand alone,” and thus become league members, they too would be in a position to “promote international co-operation and to achieve international peace and security” (Preamble).

The Cold War brought together academic reworkings of Kantian arguments forged into a “liberal peace thesis” and policy-driven analyses that, from at least Truman on, advocated active promotion of democracy lest "domino

effects" in the Mediterranean or Asia open the floodgates to communism. In MENA, the Suez Crisis and the Eisenhower Doctrine represented the discursive template of democracy in US foreign policy, legitimizing support for the “free nations of the Mid East” in the face of “International Communism.” But unlike in Europe or Japan, here “democracy” and “freedom” did not mean the development of social-or even liberal-democracy, but rather economic aid and military support, leaving the terrain of social justice to Nasserists and Ba’thists and the Soviet bloc and Non-Aligned Movement that became their international counterparts. Later, Reagan aimed to “roll back” international communism’s “evil empire” through the promotion-not just “defense”-of democracy. Delivering on Johnson’s intent to “wage the battle of ideas,” he established the National Endowment for Democracy (1983) with precisely this aim, funding activities and groups that had been previously supported covertly. Democracy also became one of the key concepts through which the post-Cold War order was articulated. Democracy was presented as the bearer of enlightened values and the midwife of global peace in George H. W. Bush’s advocacy of a “new world order” (1991), Bill Clinton’s liberal humanitarian interventionism, and George W. Bush’s argument that “the best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom [that is, liberal democracy] in all the world.” 2{ }^{2} Thus, throughout the “short twentieth century,” the idea of (liberal) democracy-both in itself and in relation to security-was a central Leitmotiv in the way the global order was publicly presented and the Middle East’s position in that order was articulated.

In scholarship, criticisms of democratization and democracy promotion, both analytical and political, are well rehearsed. Broadly, they attack the democratization paradigm for being analytically flawed or strategically inappropriate based either on culturalist arguments such as Huntington’s or Lewis’s or on more general objections to democracy promotion as strategically misguided as both a tool and an objective from Henry Kissinger to Walter Lippmann and George Kennan to Charles Krauthammer. With the notable exception of the continued popularity of Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” thesis in certain quarters, these criticisms have been (temporarily) sidelined, however, with a parallel consensus emerging around the desirability of democratic transitions. Indeed, the “democratic peace thesis” has been called “the closest thing international politics has to an empirical law,” and, at least at first glance, the “peace dividends” of the 1990s seemed to materialize in the shape of a “Third Wave” of democratic transitions across the globe (e.g., Huntington 1993 [1991]). With the rapid transitions away from authoritarianism in Latin America, southern Europe, and the former Soviet bloc, liberal democracy appeared to many to have proven its superiority.

By the turn of the century, the Middle East alone appeared to defy expectations of this scholarship. The little political liberalization that had earned

some early optimism soon appeared to be part of regional regimes’ adaptive authoritarian tactics, helping entrench rather than undermine autocracy (e.g., Bellin 2004; Kienle 1998). Some ascribed this defaillance (malfunction) to a regional exceptionalism rooted in culture or religion (e.g., Huntington 1993; Lewis 1990; Pipes 1983; cf. Sadowski 1997). Others argued that rentier states such as the Gulf’s oil monarchies were simply more impermeable to pressures toward democratization, while the similarity of superficially liberalizing tactics across different regimes lead others to argue that transition was not occurring but rather that authoritarian regimes were adapting and mutating into “hybrid regimes” (e.g., Diamond 2002; Hinnebusch 1998; Kassem 1999). Outside the region, failures to consolidate democratic openings by early “transitional” systems, the superficial reforms by later counterparts, and limitations in Western democracy-promotion efforts all lead to increasing skepticism concerning the real depth of “Third Wave” transitions.

Although some responded by advocating greater sobriety in predictions of an inevitable advance of liberal democracy (e.g., Carothers 2002), today, most scholars and policymakers defend the idea that this transition is possible in principle, just flawed in practice: despite transitions being fraught with difficulty, obstacles are simple historically contingencies. These voices point to the flaws of early “transitology,” arguing it was too simplistic, linear, and deterministic and that actual policy efforts were either too limited in scope or too short-lived (e.g., Carothers 2002; O’Donnell 1996). More recent experience certainly suggests that transitions toward democracy are not foregone conclusions, and revisions to the linear and deterministic “transitology” approach therefore included the possibility of pauses and reversals. These challenges from both within and without have made the framework more sophisticated, yielding important insights, such as those on hybrid regimes, and bringing a degree of comparative analysis to Middle Eastern cases specifically (e.g., Nonneman 1996). Most of its proponents, however, held fast to its underlying validity, leaving its foundations essentially unchanged (e.g., Collier and Levitsky 1996; Diamond 2002; Linz and Stepan 1996). It remains to be seen whether recent revolutionary developments in some Middle Eastern countries signal a fundamental change to these dynamics. However, setbacks to change in Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen; lukewarm reforms in Morocco and Jordan; repression in Bahrain; and bloody resistance by ruling elites in Libya, Syria, and elsewhere reflect the “long shadow” authoritarianism casts in the region.

These refinements, for all their sophistication, left the debate largely frozen between two poles: the acceptance or rejection of democracy promotion; improvement “versus” impossibility. Today, scholars and policymakers mostly argue about how much and how long democracy-promotion programs should be pushed and which combination from a fixed “menu” of priorities is most appropriate: values vs. interests, capacity building vs. civil society, human

rights vs. elections, political vs. economic liberalization, and so on. The nature of the framework that defines those options remains outside this analysis, making it harder to consider policy alternatives, much less ask questions about the framework or the debate’s own performativity. In this sense, it is unsurprising that elements such as the liberal conception of democracy, the particular interpretation of Western history on which it is based, the liberal understanding of secularism, the role of “free market” capitalism, and the “demand-side” approach to democratic transitions are rarely challenged from within the field. In this sense, scholarship remains firmly within an ameliorative framework that makes it harder to seek out alternative policies to those that have failed in the past, distracting from an investigation of the concrete effects of policies beyond the dichotomy of advancing/undermining democracy. In this sense, if the democratization paradigm’s current configuration effectively entrenches the hegemonic economically and politically liberal discourse on democracy, it commensurately has the effect of legitimizing Western states’ (and scholarship’s) position as privileged authorities on defining what a democracy is and on how to achieve transition while simultaneously delegitimizing alternatives.

The rest of this section outlines key features of the taxonomy underpinning contemporary analyzes of democratic transitions, noting their implications for analysis and policy.

Complex Linearity

The tension in academic and policy literature on democratization-specifically with respect to the Middle East-between the clear acknowledgement in principle of multiple possible definitions of democracy and the preponderantly economically and politically liberal models found in practice is striking. From the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) to the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP), while preambles acknowledge the right to determine locally the meaning and forms of “democracy,” the bodies of policy documents explicitly state or implicitly assume a politically and economically liberal democratic model. In a way, this is unsurprising, since post-Cold War scholarship on democratization has left unchallenged the taxonomy of political systems on which the notion of democracy and democratic transitions rest, classifying political systems on a scale ranging from totalitarianism through different authoritarianisms and part-democratic systems to liberal democracy. Indeed, as Collier and Levitsky (1996,1)(1996,1) approvingly mention, this primacy has been reinforced, as scholarship has increasingly focused on procedural definitions of democracy. In Larry Diamond’s (2003) words, “Fortunately, most conceptions of democracy today . . . converge in defining democracy as a system of political authority, separate from any social and economic features.” This entails restricting definitions to supposedly more easily measurable

“institutional” dimensions-elections, party systems, legislation, state capacity/strength, rule of law, civil society, and so on. As these authors recognize, these variables are shaped by specifically polyarchic conceptions of democracy, providing some explanation for today’s hegemonic conflation between liberal democracy and democracy. However, foregrounding these variables means marginalizing nonprocedural approaches to democracy and democratization.

Within the space defined by this taxonomy’s limiting cases-totalitarianism and liberal democracy-each position is differentiated from others by a series of gradual transformations. The taxonomy is in this sense fundamentally linear, or “polar,” defined by two prescribed end points. Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan (1996), for example, see state types defined by different levels of institutionalization of “authority” and “liberty.” Such simple linearity was critiqued after the “reverse flux” experienced by many Third Wave countries, with the ensuing reformulation allowing for multiple pathways between any two points and the reversibility of transformations. Thomas Carothers (2002) argued that conceptions of transitions as moving through phases of opening, breakthrough, and consolidation were too linear and deterministic. However, in his own analysis, states are caught between authoritarianism and (liberal) democracy depending on institutional capacity and elite pluralism. In transitions away from authoritarianism, polities might end up in cul-de-sacs such as “dominant-power politics” or “feckless pluralism,” but these remain deviant/ pathological and/or transitional conditions taxonomically located between totalitarianism and liberal democracy.

In the Middle Eastern context, some scholars similarly implicitly assume liberal democracy as the terminus of democratic transitions (e.g., Diamond 2002, 2003). Others emphasize political liberalizations’ fragility and instrumentality, suggesting that political liberalization is “at best a limited and shy process of organizational political pluralism . . . a regime response to crises [rendering] the whole democratization process . . . defensive, truncated, and tactical” (Korany 1994, 511). Others (e.g., Kienle 1998) show how the regime undermined at will Egypt’s “liberalization” of the early 1990s, and Raymond Hinnebusch (1998) argues that patterns of “compression” and “decompression” constitute a distinct political strategy.

The linearity of transitions between established poles that emerges after the debate on transitology is therefore neither simple nor deterministic. Nonetheless, however complex the space of possible pathways between them might be, however reversible individual trajectories, this taxonomy’s basic polarity remains, articulated around fixed starting and arrival points: on the one hand economically and politically liberal electoral democracy, the model that coincides most closely with the currently hegemonic configuration of Northern/ Western politics (e.g., O’Donnell 1996, 117-18); on the other hand its polar opposite, totalitarianism. There is also a clear moral and analytical hierarchy

between these poles and between their discrete intervening states. In this sense, the taxonomy within which models of (de)democratization are formulated displays what can be termed complex polarity or “complex linearity.” This polarity and its transposition into analytical models, however, are not epistemologically neutral, incorporating a normative commitment to liberal democracy, a commitment through which any transitional process/phase other than liberal democracy is viewed as stalled, incomplete, or defective and possibly unstable. In that sense, discourses and practices of democratization contribute and nourish the manifold fractures characterizing present-day world society (see Stetter in this volume). It is therefore unsurprising to see the debate on the “Third Wave” struggling to recognize typological distinctiveness of “hybrid” regimes from either classical forms of authoritarianism or liberal democracy.

Universality

The second limitation of the democratization paradigm’s founding taxonomy is that it closely reflects a particular interpretation of the historical development of Western democracies. Specifically, it is rooted in the familiar narrative of the evolution of democracies from the Enlightenment, through the rise of bourgeois nationalism, and toward gradual post-world war democratization leading to liberal democracy’s post-Cold War triumph. The democratization framework’s taxonomical end point-liberal democracy-is also this historical narrative’s high point. This conflation is not just historically problematic; it reinforces the normative bias built into the democratization framework’s “polar” taxonomy.

Eliding the difference between contingent historical pathway and abstract taxonomical end point also effects a subtle but crucial shift from the taxonomy itself reflecting one particular reading of Western history, a “contingent model” of democracy, to this particular story about the emergence of Western democracies becoming the “universal archetype” for democracy. The West becomes the embodiment of democracy per se. This logical fallacy of accident-eliding the difference between particular and universal-has considerable implications for both theoretical analysis and policymaking: not only does it establish a target toward which democratization should aim; it also establishes the “West” as the privileged authority on democracy, putting it in a position to legitimately “rule” on democratic transitions elsewhere in the world (see, for a related point, Bilgin in this volume). Insofar as it does this, such an epistemological blind spot in the way the template of democracy is built skews the terms in which policy is debated, designed, and implemented.

Secularism

Embedded in the democratization framework’s fabric via the definition of democracy are a series of concepts that provide the building blocks for the models of “democracy” and “democratization” predominant in contemporary scholarship. A prime example of such concepts is secularism. From Marx to Freud to Weber, many scholars have argued that secularization goes hand in hand with modernization. Indeed, the reconstruction of the West’s historical trajectory toward (and current practice of) democracy asserts the central importance of secularism as an essential prerequisite of democracy, understood not just as the separation between church and state but more generally as the separation between religion and politics.

This conception has been extensively critiqued (e.g., Asad 2003). First, such a division between politics and religion as is held up in both scholarly and public debates is only very roughly approximated in the history and the contemporary life of Western democracies. Second, the historical genesis of the idea of “secularism” shows that while it calls for separation of church and state, there are far fewer calls to separate religion from politics entirely. Indeed, key figures of nineteenth-century European nationalism-for example Guiseppe Garibaldi or Guiseppe Mazzini-actively advocated faith in politics: they were secular only in the sense that they were “anticlerical.” This anticlericalism and the primacy of reason over faith in the public sphere were subsumed under the rubric of “secularism” and had a crucial political role in legitimizing a definition of political participation that would displace the power of religious and aristocratic elites.

In contemporary societies, José Casanova points out that, far from its privatization spreading, religion has been deprivatized in Europe, suggesting that it is the European experience that is exceptional (Casanova 1994), not that of (some) other societies. In theorizing a postsecular shift in recent European political discourse, Jürgen Habermas himself recognizes the hybridization of globalized modernity with both religion and a-religiosity simultaneously present in the public sphere, rejecting mutual exclusivity between religion and democracy.

Thus an oversimplistic concept of “secularism” not only “lumps together in one semantic concept the multiplicity of different historical developments which have characterized European state formation” but has also become “an intrinsic and almost unavoidable part of linear and teleological modernization theories” (Jung 2004, 64). Deployed in debates over the “admissibility” of Islamist movements to democratic politics, far from being a merely analytical, neutral device, it becomes a key operator delegitimizing political movements with a “religious point of reference.”

Taking for granted such “secular” representations of democratic public space has several analytical and political implications. First, it foregrounds the

absence of such “secularism” in the Middle East and by extension the absence of secularism’s requisite “rationality.” Second, it entails conditions for dialogue with “religious” political actors based on the a priori acceptance of the public sphere’s areligiosity, such as those imposed by Western governments on negotiations with Hamas or the continuing caution displayed toward Turkey’s governing Justice and Development Party (AKP). Third, it facilitates a shift in the epistemological balance of explanations for nondemocratization toward cultural and religious factors (see Sadowski 1997) and commensurately away from other factors. Lewis (1990) and Huntington (1993), for example, present “Political Islam” as “inherently” undemocratic based on absolute differences between Islam and democracy. As former US assistant secretary of state and former ambassador to Israel and Syria Edward Djerejian said, “Political Islam” means “one man, one vote, one time” (Djerejian 1992).

So ingrained is this idea of secularism and its ensuing religion/democracy dichotomy that one often finds it embedded even in sophisticated postOrientalist scholarship. In Laura Guazzone’s otherwise excellent The Islamist Dilemma (1995), for example, the danger of Islamist participation stems from the prospect that an unwillingness to recognize the primacy of secularism might lead them to abolish democracy itself (also Salamé 1994). This assumption also frames the terms of the current debate over “civil vs. uncivil society.”

This definition of secularism also has policy implications. Unwillingness or failure to comply with its standards has provided Western governments with grounds for portraying as incompatible with democratic values-or at least as suspect-an range of Islamist groups, thereby rejecting dialogue with them and providing grounds for intervening against them. This understanding of secularism thus contributes to an analytical and policy impasse in which nearly all Middle Eastern opposition groups save small liberal elites are eschewed (e.g., Turkey’s AKP, Egypt’s Ikhwan) if not ostracized outright (e.g., Hamas, Hizballah). This is not to suggest that these groups are necessarily democratic but that this standpoint blinds observers to elements within them open to dialogue and democratic values while making it easier to dismiss political openings and legitimize their securitization. To this extent, the net effect of this conception of secularism is to reinforce the current domestic (and thus regional) political order and leave liberal democracy’s analytical and policy hegemony unchallenged (on political Islam, see Jung in this volume).

Economics

The tension between pluralistic conceptions of democracy and the de facto hegemony of liberal and procedural definitions is mirrored in economic terms. Although hotly debated, both scholarly treatment of democratization and policy discourse mostly associate economic growth with democracy (at least

in the long term). Even a cursory review of documentation on initiatives by both Americans (e.g., MEPI, the Middle East Free Trade Area [MEFTA]) and Europeans (e.g., ENP) shows the strategy to achieve growth favored in policy discourse is predominantly liberalizing economic reforms.

A recurring criticism among independent civil society actors in Middle Eastern countries with association agreements with the EU (e.g., Egypt) is that such initiatives are more concerned with market access than with political liberalization, 3{ }^{3} an impression apparently confirmed when analyzing the proportional attention economic matters receive in EU and joint documentation when compared to issues of political, social, or economic rights.

How economic liberalization relates to democratization is more complex: despite recent rhetorical shifts toward state “capacity building,” policy discourse and practice still bear the hallmarks of “demand-side” democratization. Economic liberalization is considered a keystone of democratization insofar as it supposedly leads to both long-term economic growth and a demand for rule of law and transparency, eroding patrimonial and clientelistic relationships and ultimately expanding democratic culture from the economic realm into politics generally (e.g., Diamond 2003; cf. Przeworski et al. 2000).

On the other hand, political liberalization and democratization-particularly redistributive measures-antecedent to or exceeding the requirements of growth-inducing economic liberalization are argued to produce suboptimal economic as well as political outcomes, “squandering” economic gains (e.g., Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki 1975; DfID [2009]; Diamond 2003). As noted earlier, Diamond (1996,21)(1996,21) argues that “fortunately, most conceptions of democracy today” remain “separate from any social and economic features.” Yet “economic features” are clearly part of the definition of democracy insofar as long-term economic growth is held to be central to democracy (e.g., DfID [2009]). Moreover, economic reform processes are considered necessary for democratic transitions: what Diamond implies is that redistributive claims, issues of social or economic justice, are no longer viewed as legitimate relevant to measurements of democracy (cf. Dahl 1992).

Whether more or less explicitly articulated, this approach survives despite economic liberalization being openly acknowledged as increasing relative inequality, thereby contributing to socioeconomic destabilization and occasionally political radicalization (Carothers 2002; see also Hinnebusch in this volume), not to mention the disenchantment with Western governments’ democracy-promotion policies and with democracy per se. Second, such liberalization often actually weakens local states, and less hegemonic regimes tend to rely more on authoritarian tactics to remain in power, thereby entrenching rather than undermining authoritarianism.

Yet alternatives to this consensus on the relationship between liberalization and democratization are well known. Within democratization studies,

for example, wealth and (in)equality have concerned key authors. Although socioeconomic inequalities do not play a central role in his 1971 Polyarchy, Robert Dahl (1989,1992)(1989,1992) himself-whose work Diamond, Collier, and Levitsky all refer to-includes equality as a condition of possibility for democracy (also Przeworski et al. 2000). Moreover, that there is an at best ambiguous relationship between economic and political liberalization has never been a mystery (e.g., for the Middle East, Niblock and Murphy 1993; Nonneman 1996). Nonetheless, definitions of democracy used in analyzing democratic transitions and in policy discourse either ignore or reject the inclusion of socioeconomic indicators.

In sum, there is a discrepancy between the awareness of the plurality of definitions of democracy as a political system and the economic systems compatible with it, on the one hand, and the emphasis in scholarship and policymaking on one version of that political-economic compact being understood as both objectively and morally superior, on the other hand. This divergence has important analytical and policy implications. Privileging liberal, procedural/institutional conceptions of democracy and assigning epistemic priority to economic “freedom” delegitimizes demands for economic and social rights as integral to democracy, “depoliticizing” debates over democratic reform by relegating substantive social, economic, and political demands-particularly redistributive claims-to such a time when procedures and institutions are sound enough. Moreover, by collapsing definitions of democracy along procedural lines, other democratic goals and methods-whether social-democrat or Islamist-outside that norm appear nondemocratic, thereby also reducing the likelihood that such groups will fit the profile of a “democratic interlocutor” that Western agencies might be willing to work with. This helps explain the impasse one frequently finds Western governments in, viewing only a few, sparse, often isolated-that is, not co-opted-liberal elites as possible counterparts. In turn, this marginalization of “nontraditional” groups from the process of defining democracy may well radicalize rather than moderate their politics. Moreover, to the extent that the West’s own selfportrayal as liberal democratic identifies it with the end point of democratic transitions, the democratization paradigm as currently articulated implicitly reinforces the West as the authority on democratization. Taken together, these implications suggest that in its concrete effects rather than intentions democracy-promotion discourse reinforces the West’s position in the contemporary global order while making it harder for transitional countries to emancipate themselves. As a result, rather than transcending global inequalities and hierarchies, the democratization paradigm tends to reproduce deep fractures in world society (see Stetter in this volume).

Limitations in Practice: Western Democracy-Promotion Policies

An analysis of publicly available documentation on projects related to democracy promotion by most Western state agencies reveals not only a number of discursive themes common to virtually all projects but also a considerable degree of overlap with the mainstream academic debates previously outlined. The picture that emerges confirms this chapter’s theoretical sketch, with the rationale for democracy promotion and the forms of its practical implementation constructed around either explicitly articulated or implied procedural definitions of democracy-the process of democratization being driven in the final analysis by a process of economic liberalization. This section outlines some of the broad characteristics of these programs, focusing on the United States and the European Union, which have the world’s largest democracypromotion programs, and considering UK policy as an exemplar.

US policy discourse has broadly reflected the liberal democratization paradigm, alternately prioritizing economic liberalization (e.g., MEFTA, MEPI, the Greater Middle East Initiative [GMEI]) or programs constructed around procedural understandings of democracy (primarily elections, particularly between 2003 and 2006). The European Union’s democracy-promotion activities have been framed as being both normatively and strategically desirable and-with the exception of Iraq’s “regime change”-often explicitly appealing to the “liberal peace thesis.” Alongside its member states, the European Union-the world’s self-proclaimed largest aid donor-has adopted similar twin-track economic and political initiatives epitomized by its EuroMediterranean Partnership (EMP, now Union for the Mediterranean) and its European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) frameworks, alongside thematic instruments such as the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights. On the surface, these programs are conscious of and explicitly attempt avoiding the pitfalls of both “market democratization” and the wholesale export of the “European (Western) model.” Indeed, in both cases, policy statements systematically emphasize both the importance of avoiding one-size-fits-all solutions and the need for greater responsiveness by sponsors and greater ownership by recipient countries. However, it is equally clear that the substantive provisions of these documents focus on economic liberalization and on procedural understandings of democracy. Liberalization is framed as desirable not only for European economies but also in terms of growth in local economies, while democratization is viewed as a long-term correlate of liberalization-driven economic growth and in the short term as a human rights issue. In these documents, economic growth enhances not only the prospects for democratization but also European-and local-security (e.g., in relation to the effects of migration and radicalization). As for the local

“ownership” of democratization processes, while this is professed in principle, in practice the European Union frames its “Neighborhood” political and economic reform explicitly in terms of an Enlargement-like acquis, albeit one characterized by a “variable geometry” in which individual countries move at a speed depending on their own circumstances.

Thus, under the rubric of activities promoting or facilitating democracy, one finds first and foremost programs that provide election monitoring and support and a range of “good governance” programs that focus primarily on “transparency,” “rule of law,” public accountability, and “good governance”; support for the defense of human rights (mostly in relation to freedom from torture, religious freedom, and women’s rights); and support for civil society organizations believed to be necessary components of democratic opening, transition, and consolidation. Economic liberalization and aid programs toward the Middle East are legitimized in terms of both their direct impact on growth and their indirect facilitation of democratic transition.

For their part, Middle Eastern states have to differing degrees adopted (see, for a related point, Bilgin in this volume) a range of policies to meet Western expectations, from the (partial) removal of price controls and subsidies, the privatization of state-owned companies and assets, to the setting up of special Industrial Zones. These reforms have partly liberalized-or better, privatized-the economic sector, eroding social and economic safety nets at the very same time that they have included poverty-reduction schemes. However, economically, their principal effect has been to transfer into private ownership assets previously controlled from within the public sector without generating competition, much less the demand for rule of law that is a prerequisite of “demand-side” democratization. Politically, as several regional specialists had predicted, what little liberalization took place amounted largely to ta’addudiyya (reversible cosmetic openings) with little substantive democratization (e.g., Korany 1994; Ottaway and Choucair-Vizoso 2008). The remainder of this section draws on empirical and field research to illustrate some of the major characteristics of Western democracy-promotion efforts in the twenty-first century, with a particular focus on the Middle East.

A number of recent British initiatives within the Department for International Development (DfID) and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), and cognate agencies such as the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD) and the Westminster Consortium (TWC), provide a practical illustration of the configuration and limitations of this policy landscape. Initiatives within DfID focus primarily on development, but democracy promotion, like security, is central to the publicly articulated rationales for spending priorities and program initiatives.

The United Kingdom’s National Security Strategy for 2008 assigns democracy promotion a value with respect to both economic growth and the pursuit

of peace and stability in foreign policy. The strategy understands democracy primarily in procedural terms (elections, rule of law, etc.) and economic growth in terms of the benefits of trade liberalization and market access.

DfID’s public documentation portrays democracy as crucial for the longterm sustainability of development and for transitional states’ political stability. It consistently argues that “democratic politics is not a prerequisite for economic growth and poverty reduction in the short term,” although it does “increasingly have a positive effect” helping “protect and sustain economic growth and development more effectively in the long run” (DfID 2007, 19). Congruent with the analysis presented previously, the model of democracy contained in DfID’s public literature appears to prioritize procedural definitions of democracy. Thus, for example, its brochure “Making Democracy Work for the Elimination of Poverty” clearly intended for presentational purposes, states that a “party political system is not an essential pre-requisite for democracy” (DfID [2009], 3). It also states that “regular and well-run elections are an essential part of the democratic process. The freer and more efficient the electoral process becomes, the more likely that the outcome will reflect the wishes of all the people including the most vulnerable groups” (DfID [2009], 3) while omitting minimal social or economic requirements for democracy. Such documents suggest that DfID’s formulation reflects a combination of emphases on procedural dimensions of democracy and a discounting of democracy’s role in short-term development to the point of dismissing even the necessity of parties, alongside more explicitly articulated substantive, distributional aims that democracy supposedly facilitates, although only in the longer term.

For the UK Foreign Office, particularly after the 9/119 / 11 and 7/77 / 7 attacks, democracy promotion has become a policy priority subject to and articulated within the primary aim of “national security.” This is reflected, for example, in the ranking of priorities in public documentation: security is first, as opposed to democracy promotion, which is seventh out of eight (FCO 2009b). Just what is meant by “democracy” becomes clear through statements such as its list of priorities under the heading “Democracy” on its web page for Human Rights and Democracy: “Improving electoral processes; promoting civil society’s ability to influence, monitor and hold accountable [sic!] state institutions; freedom of expression” (FCO 2009b). Albeit a rough measure, the ranking of priorities is reflected in differences in budgetary allocation within the Strategic Programme Fund (SPF), where “Counter terrorism and radicalization” received £40.15£ 40.15 million for fiscal year 2008/9, while “Human rights and democracy” received barely £6.25£ 6.25 million (about 15 percent). Including the grant-in-aid to WFD ( £4.1£ 4.1 million), total spending on democracy-related priorities rises to £10.35£ 10.35 million, still just under 26 percent of SPF spending (FCO 2009a).

The Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD) and the Westminster Consortium (TWC) are publicly funded organizations that, although independent of government, nonetheless remain within the state-based sector and reflect its policy articulations and priorities. WFD is funded through an FCO grant-in-aid of £4.1£ 4.1 million per year. Established under John Major as a counterpart to the US International Republican Institute, half its budget is administered directly by the WFD board for projects of its own designation, while the other half is divided in a 3:3:1:1 ratio among UK parliamentary parties, who second officers to WFD to administer party-run bilateral democracy-promotion programs, mostly involving parliamentary training workshops with “sister parties.” The near totality of WFD’s programs focus on either election monitoring and assistance, parliamentary training, or the sponsorship of local civil society.

The recently formed TWC is led by WFD, receiving funding from DfID’s Governance and Transparency Fund of around £6£ 6 million for five years. TWC also includes the UK branch of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, the Overseas Office House of Commons, the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute, and the Centre for Democracy at the University of Essex. Its remit is to “[build] capacity in the areas of parliamentary process and management, financial oversight and access to information,” and its vision of the implementation of this remit consists exclusively in the organization of training workshops for foreign parliamentarians. 4{ }^{4}

The picture emerging from these documents is that democracy and democracy promotion are part of a tripartite approach that includes development and security. Although it is held to be a value in itself, as a strategic policy priority the justification for democracy promotion comes from its impact on security and economic growth. As then secretary of state for international development Hilary Benn put it, “development without security is not possible; security without development is only temporary” (Benn 2004), and democracy is in the long run a requirement for securing and stabilizing both. Albeit rarely, it must also be pointed out that these documents mention certain groups as security threats and/or threats to democracy, Hizballah and Hamas among them.

In particular, WFD and TWC activities reflect a procedural definition of democracy both in their long-standing emphasis on bilateral party programs and in more recent shifts toward state capacity building. The WFD’s activities and the TWC’s recent arrival suggest that to the extent that there is a shift away from “demand-side” democratization toward “capacity building,” this is a shift within the democratization paradigm, prioritizing one aspect (parliamentary “culture”) rather than another (elections) but remaining

within the procedural/institutional understanding of democracy without critically examining the framework per se.

Most important, despite nods in the direction of democracy made by either DfID in relation to its role in development or FCO in relation to its security implications, the preeminent understanding of democracy these documents reveal is the “thin” liberal democracy that authors like Alois Schumpeter and Robert Dahl favor, not least because it provides stability for existing elites. The principles, policies, and specific groups funded by DfID, FCO, and WFD/ TWC programs engage precisely those counterparts one might expect within the liberal, “polyarchic” framework sketched above while avoiding engagement with exactly those actors one might expect to be marginalized on the basis of that framework. Groups such as Islamist organizations or workers’ rights movements that challenge the notion of secularism, the subordination of substantive aspects of democracy to procedural dimensions, or the prioritization of liberalizing economic reforms over redistribution or social justice agendas are often not viewed as credible partners for dialogue.

Public documentation places rhetorical emphasis on democracy as a key component of a virtuous circle of security, stability, and economic development. However, Western states’ democracy-promotion policies still appear to be built around the perception of a trade-off between political liberalization, which most are committed to in principle, and alignment with Western states’ (perceptions of their own) interests. Although policymakers often believe in the long-term benefits of political liberalization, in practice they appear unwilling to risk the possibility of the short-term political costs it might entail (e.g., International IDEA 2009). In this context, proceduralism provides what policymakers hope will be a balance between the rhetoric of Western commitments to democratization and the reality of narrowly defined “interests.” However, insofar as this procedural emphasis marginalizes substantive claims to political rights, economic rights, and social justice, the tension between Western policy rhetoric and practices increases the friction between a restricted range of mostly isolated and weak democratic interlocutors aligned with existing regimes and opposition groups whose closeness to disenfranchised peoples leads them to emphasize precisely those substantive issues that a procedural approach to democratization subordinates. This increasingly polarized political spectrum in turn establishes conditions under which an opening to previously marginalized groups might in itself appear a risk to democratic consolidation.

CONCLUSION

Democracy has long been an integral part of Western foreign policy discourse and practice and remains central to the articulation of the contemporary

global order. This chapter has argued that democratization discourse in both academic and policy circles shares an emphasis on procedural and capitalist aspects of democracy and democratization. The debate within this discourse remains confined to an “ameliorative,” technical discussion concerning which of the framework’s elements ought to be prioritized and how. This leaves out-indeed, prevents-discussion on the impact of the framework itself. Framing the debate in the far-from-inevitable terms of this “ameliorative” paradigm has performative effects, which only approaching this paradigm as a discourse reveals: the emphasis on particular elements-primarily secularism and the role of religion, social justice, and economic rights-produces policies designed to promote democracy that end up restricting the range of areas and interlocutors, delegitimizing and marginalizing any groups outside the liberal norm. The result is an apparent paradox: a discourse devoted to emancipation achieves its opposite, reinforcing existing fractures in world society and the Middle East in particular (see also Bowker in this volume).

To this extent, at a minimum, the resulting policy and intellectual impasse damages the credibility of Western commitments to democracy promotion and even their democratic credentials. It helps delegitimize local governments, the prospects for democratic transitions, and ultimately the very idea of democracy itself. This impasse cannot be faced with simple appeals to strengthen the resolve or increase the magnitude of existing approaches alone; it is necessary to acknowledge and understand how those policies might themselves help bring democratization’s “failure” about. The added benefit of such an approach would also be to undermine culturalist explanations for nondemocratization, where the current framework actually makes them possible.

Thus the democratization paradigm as currently configured plays a role in structuring relations between the Middle East and the West that is not simply one of passively describing democratic transitions or merely providing instruments to achieve such transitions; rather, it is a framework that actively contributes to articulating the place of Middle East in the contemporary global order. It does so by helping to reproduce a specific Western-centric moral, political, and analytical hierarchy, which paradoxically reinforces the production of antagonistic Islamist subjectivities.

NOTES

1. The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Carnegie Trust (grant RGB3381) and the invaluable feedback of the editors and contributors to this volume.

2. For George W. Bush’s Second Inaugural Address, see http://www .bartleby.com/124/pres67.html.

3. Based on interviews with European donors conducted in 2010 and interviews with Egyptian liberal, Islamist, and leftist organizations and fund recipients conducted in collaboration with Gennaro Gervasio during 2008−102008-10.

4. A full list of seminars is available on http://www.thewestminster consortium.org (last accessed 14/09/2009).