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Pseudo-democracy in the Muslim world
Frédéric Volpi
To cite this Article Volpi, Frédéric(2004) ‘Pseudo-democracy in the Muslim world’, Third World Quarterly, 25: 6, 1061 1078
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Pseudo-democracy in the Muslim world
FRÉDÉRIC VOLPI
Abstract
This paper investigates the mechanisms of democratisation leading to the formation of pseudo-democratic political systems in the contemporary Muslim world. It is argued that pseudo-democracies in the Muslim world are created and strengthened by the structural opposition between three types of democratic doctrines, social practices and institutional mechanisms inspired by liberalism, republicanism and Islamism. Departing from the usual instrumentalist analyses that dominate the democratisation literature, this account emphasises that pseudo-democratic regimes are not simply an expedient fallback position from liberal democratic systems but dynamic political orders based on alternative notions of democracy. It is argued that what is specific to the Muslim world as a socio-historical construct is that pseudo-democracies are produced by the evolving stalemate between the three abovementioned political currents. In these polities liberal democratic discourses and practices are undermined by non-liberal yet demotic forms of social mobilisation and political learning that are more effective than laissez-faire models of liberal political mobilisation.
This paper investigates some of the generic mechanisms of democratisation in the Muslim world that favour the emergence of pseudo-democratic political systems. My contention is that the notion of ‘pseudo-democracy’ can be usefully deployed as an analytical tool for comprehending the processes of partial democratisation in the Muslim world in the post-cold war era and post-9/11 order. In a recent critique of the ‘democratisation paradigm’, Thomas Carothers argued that 'what is often thought of as an uneasy, precarious middle ground between full-fledged democracy and outright dictatorship is actually the most common political condition today of countries in the developing world and the postcommunist world. It is not an exceptional category to be defined only in terms of its not being one thing or the other; it is a state of normality for many societies, for better or worse. 1{ }^{1}
At the core of the following analysis of democratisation in the Muslim world is the argument that ‘pseudo-democracy’ does not simply correspond to a deviation from a ‘democratic’ normative framework and teleological order-a case of liberal democracy minus ’ xx ’ or authoritarianism plus ’ yy ’ -but that it forms a distinct analytical category and political phenomenon. I must emphasise, however, that I am not attempting to construct a systematic account of political
- Frédéric Volpi is in the Department of Politics, University of Bristol, 10 Priory Road, Bristol, BS8 1TU, UK. Email: F.Volpi@bris.ac.uk ↩︎
change in the Muslim world (or its lack thereof) solely in terms of the formation of pseudo-democratic regimes. It is perfectly reasonable to argue that some countries may be experiencing genuine transitions from authoritarianism to liberal democracy (eg Indonesia), while others (eg Saudi Arabia) may remain firmly where they are. Pseudo-democratic systems, however, are a common occurrence throughout the Muslim world and it is crucial to understand how and why such outcomes can constitute, in Carothers’ words, ‘a state of normality’.
The gist of my argument is that a useful heuristic device to understand how contemporary ‘pseudo-democracies’ are strengthened and deepened in the Muslim world is to cast them as a case of structural opposition between three types of democratic doctrines and practices based on liberalism, republicanism and Islamism. This account of political change in the Muslim world emphasises in particular the role of the Islamic fundamentalist movements and of the secularrepublican political elites in promoting a democratic ethos based on the notions of Islamic democracy and of republican democracy, respectively. Taking as my starting point Guillermo O’Donnell’s ‘process-oriented’ approach to democratisation, I argue that this confrontation systematically distorts the efforts at building a liberal democratic order but creates instead pseudo-democratic systems with their own set of substantive justifications and values. 2{ }^{2} By examining what people do when they are actively not endorsing liberal democratic views and practices, it becomes clear why democratisation in the Muslim world is more meaningfully presented as a sui generis phenomenon rather than as an instance of Latin American or Eastern European ‘third wave’ democratisation.
Already the literature on democratisation and democratic consolidation in Latin America and Eastern Europe has displayed some worrisome conceptual slippages in representing the rationales of democratisation and liberalisation as reasons for transitions from authoritarianism. O’Donnell’s analysis of common ‘illusions about consolidation’ was an early warning against the tendency to let one’s own normative preferences and teleological inclinations brush aside some of the most serious inconsistencies of the process of democratic consolidation. 3{ }^{3} In the case of the analyses of Latin American and Eastern Europe transitions, these conceptual inadequacies appear not to have been too consequential because the voluntarist drive of the analysts decried by O’Donnell and Carothers often reflected the views of the civil society organisations and political counter-elites that were on the ascendancy in those polities. Unfortunately, such benign assumptions about the nature of civil society and of the political elite cannot be taken for granted today in most of the Muslim world. There, unlike in Latin America and in Eastern Europe, the Muslim proponents of the ‘democratic paradigm’ usually play at best the role of cheerleaders in a social context where many more players are determined to implement a rather different social contract and political order. There are evidently different types of ‘civil society’ or ‘civil sphere’ in different parts of the Muslim world but, as the work of Augustus Norton and his collaborators has highlighted, the presence of a recognisably liberal civil society project is often a mere twinkle in the eyes of an active minority. 4{ }^{4} Although there is no dominant democratisation paradigm in the Muslim context, this weakness of civil society allied to structural factors
such as the role of security apparatuses and the oil rent usually forms the backbone of any explanation of the slow pace of political change in the region. 5{ }^{5}
What pseudo-democracies are…and are not
In most of the democratisation literature pseudo-democracies are defined negatively, by referring to what they are not. 6{ }^{6} Starting from procedural definitions in the tradition of Schumpeter’s ‘minimalist’ model of democracy or Dahl’s more complex ‘polyarchy’, analysts usually define a procedural minimum for democracy (eg free and fair elections), and then consider which additional attributes make democracies more or less functional in order to categorise pseudo-democracies in terms of their shortcomings. In this respect at least, the literature on democratisation is full of sophisticated classificatory schemes for pseudo-democ-racies-be they called semi-democracy, semi-autocracy, virtual democracy, electoral autocracy or liberalised autocracy-some of which, like Brumberg’s liberal autocracies, or Kamrava’s and Case’s pseudo-democracies, apply directly to the Muslim world. 7{ }^{7} Larry Diamond suggests that one of the main reasons why such analytical schemes are developing today is the fact that ‘the term “pseudodemocracy” resonates distinctively with the contemporary era, in which democracy is the only broadly legitimate regime form, and regimes have felt unprecedented pressure (international and domestic) to adopt-or at least to mimic-the democratic form’. 8{ }^{8}
Useful as they may be, however, these accounts of how pseudo-democratic systems thrive in the contemporary international context focus almost exclusively on the instrumentalist nature of this phenomenon. Diamond is right to insist on the fact that most of these hybrid regimes are deliberately pseudodemocratic; but the reasons that he highlights remain instrumental ones. From this perspective ‘pseudo-democracy’ describes a political order that tries to look like a liberal democracy without trying to becoming one. The functional rationale of this strategy is that by mimicking democracy the powers-that-be are able to secure a domestic advantage that they could not obtain otherwise-ie by being either fully democratic or fully authoritarian. What is missing from these accounts of pseudo-democracy, however, is a substantive and non-instrumentalist explanation of the rationale of this political phenomenon. Although it is important to determine which practical political and economic incentives may encourage regimes in the Muslim world to opt for a democratic disguise as the most appropriate way to conceal their autocratic drive, this focus on instrumental reasons should not obscure other features of these pseudo-democratic systems that also have a causal impact on political order in the region. In order to flesh out this notion of pseudo-democracy it is important to look beyond the well rehearsed argument that the rationale of pseudo-democratic processes is mainly to mask authoritarian rule and to consider instead what else the pseudo-democracies of the Muslim world embody. Do they articulate anything specific besides a set of discourses and practices that mimic those of liberal democracies and maximise their utilitarian value for the ruling elites?
A first step in this analysis would be to use accounts of democratisation that are sensitive to the fact that democratic legitimatisation does not necessarily
coincide with liberal democratic norms and processes. The crudest of analytical distinctions suffices to show that democracy in its simplest sense of the rule of the people-majoritarian democracy-is a very different affair from the kind of democracy that contemporary liberal thinkers and policy makers present as the most promising embodiment of a liberal democratic order in the 21st century. As James Tully points out, the kind of democratic order that had become the ‘norm’ at the end of the 20th century proposes a type of democracy that is designed to place restraints on majority rule with the view to protect very specific individual rights and civil liberties. 9{ }^{9} (In 2004 one needs only to look at the example of the new Iraqi constitution, with its proviso on minority rights and its gender quota, to find a good illustration of this trend. 10{ }^{10} ) This situation creates inherent tensions in the dominant approach to democracy promotion that is currently proposed by Western democracies in Muslim polities. 11{ }^{11} This is not necessarily caused by what scholars from Samuel Huntington to Fareed Zakaria describe as the illiberal nature of Muslim communities. 12{ }^{12} Instead, it is caused by one of the necessary paradoxes of democratisation; in this case that democratisation may entail curtailing some of the prerogatives of the demos for the benefit of a liberal constitutional ideal. 13{ }^{13}
Evidently, if we accept this argument from a liberal perspective, it is easy to point out that the imposition of constraints on individual rights and civil liberties in the pseudo-democracies of the Muslim world is not necessarily a tactical ploy but that it can be a substantive feature of governance that promotes a distinct political ethos. This distinct ethos need not be liberal though. In practice it appears that the political ethos that is promoted in most of the Muslim world is grounded in alternative notions of democracy that emphasise not the individual but the community. Thus, instead of having an individualistic notion like human rights ‘trump’ the call for direct democracy, as in the ‘West’, we obtain a situation where communal notions of public virtue or religious orthodoxy can ‘trump’ similar demands in the Muslim world. I must emphasise that this is a pragmatic reading of the political situation, not an essentialist one. It is not been implied that, if functioning liberal democratic institutions were created, it would be impossible to produce a new social consensus as people incrementally learn to operate within this institutional framework. Simply, looking at the balance of consensus today, this is not happening principally for the reasons outlined below.
Three types of democracy, one pseudo-democratic dilemma
The secularised and nationalist political elites that dominate politics in most pseudo-democratic polities of the Muslim world are best conceived as a hybrid case of republicanism (in a Western lexicon), which I would call ‘republicanist’. Some states, like Turkey, do indeed proclaim loud and clear their republican credentials, as well as promote their own brand of republicanism-Kemalismas the state ideology. 14{ }^{14} (Yet, even in this case, the inspiration for the policies devised by the republicanist elite came from a very partial version of republicanism heavily tainted by 19th-century European nationalism, and not directly from classical republican theory. 15{ }^{15} ) Most other regimes, from Nasser’s Arab Socialist order to Suharto’s New Order, implicitly drew on this republican register
through their espousal of a nationalist creed that used these ideals to define the modern nation-state. 16{ }^{16} In a minority of cases, like the Gulf monarchies, this relationship is either non-existent or based on a tenuous nationalist rationale. 17{ }^{17}
But republicanism is only one aspect of these elites’ socio-political makeup. The other component of this hybrid political entity is probably best defined, using the terminology of the medieval Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun, as the asabiyya system. 18{ }^{18} In the modern context Ibn Khaldun’s definition of tribal asabiyya is best rendered as a political instance of ‘esprit de corps’ or ‘group spirit’. The term ‘esprit de corps’, derived from French military terminology is particularly relevant in the polities of the Muslim world, as the security apparatus is often a conspicuous re-ordering of the tribal fighting unit that Ibn Khaldun described in the classical period. 19{ }^{19} The concept of asabiyya has been employed repeatedly as a key explanans in Middle East politics. Indeed, according to Olivier Roy, ‘the issue of the state in the Middle East cannot be properly addressed without reference to the loci of personal allegiances created by solidarity groups (asabiyya), networks and communities (particularly religious ones)’. 20{ }^{20} Some commentators, like Akbar Ahmed, have recently suggested that a similar notion, ‘hyper-asabiyya’, could be usefully deployed in order to understand new global security challenges in the post-9/11 context. 21{ }^{21} But while this notion of ‘hyper-asabiyya’ emphasises the psychological (or pathological) dimensions of the phenomenon, the account of asabiyya proposed here highlights the pragmatic articulation of opportunities for effective collective action in specific political structures.
The hybrid republican-asabiyya model differs from the traditional asabiyya in its political objectives. Unlike the older tribal model, which was meant to lay the foundations of a monarchic system (where the elite obtained the submission of the urban population through sheer military might and made pacts with other warring tribes), the new asabiyya system relies on a republicanist pact where nationalist and developmentalist agendas help legitimate the system vis- aˋ\grave{a}-vis the masses. This reconstructed asabiyya specifically lacks a constitutive narrative but proposes instead a discourse about the state and the nation. In practice some of these asabiyya have been reconstructed far more extensively than others in response to specific socio-historical developments in the different parts of the Muslim world. In some settings, like the new republics of Central Asia, the direct relationship between the old clans and the ruling military elites is hard to miss. According to Roy, these near-tribal asabiyya dominate the politics of most Central Asian republics and of Afghanistan. 22{ }^{22} In Middle Eastern settings like Hafez el-Asad’s Syria and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the relationship may have been somewhat looser because of the introduction of a strong nationalist ideology; but Roy argues that there too ‘domestic politics cannot be understood without reference to the asabiyya’. 23{ }^{23} At the republicanist end of the spectrum, in countries like Algeria, Turkey, or even Egypt by contrast, earlier kinship ties have been superseded by a new form of esprit de corps and allegiance based on patronage and schooled military loyalty-which may evolve into some form of praetorian regime, as Irm Halem suggests in the case of Pakistan. 24{ }^{24}
While the republicanist elites may be based on any of these types of asabiyya, from the more traditional to the more modern versions of the ‘military tribe’,
there are inherent tensions between the two ends of this continuum. At one extreme the republican agenda becomes a mere fig leaf for the personal ambitions of one clan or family, and the system leans more and more towards a monarchic order. (Bashir al-Asad’s accession to the Syrian presidency after the death of his father is a good illustration of this scenario.) At the other extreme, as in the traditional Khaldunian model, an over-extended ruling asabiyya simply looses its internal coherence and is overthrown by a more cohesive counter-elite. This scenario of internal collapse, where the centre cannot hold and factionalism emerges, was momentarily on display in Algeria in the late 1980s to early 1990s; it occurred in Indonesia in the late 1990s and it may even be developing in Turkey at the time of writing. 25{ }^{25}
The final ingredient in this political confrontation is the role of the religious counter-elite. This corresponds to the phenomenon commonly called ‘Islamism’ or ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ and which I would call Islamist in order to emphasise the Islamic colouring of this phenomenon without directly commenting on the nature of its religious credentials. A full-length exploration of the various declinations of this Islamist project is not possible within the confines of this analysis. The politically relevant issue in the context of this argument is simply to note, as Martin Marty and Scott Appleby emphasise in their introduction to the ‘Fundamentalism Project’, that these religious projects have a Wittgensteinian ‘family resemblance’. 26{ }^{26} In this case this similarity is based on Islam as a creed and the community of believers (ummah) as the locus for a just society. The institutional outlook of this project is a more Islamic political system, potentially in the form of an Islamic state. In practice, since the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the collapse of the Sudanese experiment in the late 1990s, probably the best (if not the sole) remaining example of this political model at state level is the Islamic Republic of Iran. 27{ }^{27}
In the context of this analysis the main conceptual (and political) difference between the above-mentioned approaches to democracy and a liberal notion of democracy is the distinction between positive and negative liberty. Isaiah Berlin illustrated the importance of this distinction in his seminal work, Two Concepts of Liberty. He showed how political systems trying to maximise individual rights and imposing constraints on liberties only to avoid people’s personal freedom being trampled upon by other people’s personal freedom differ from those systems trying to maximise a predefined conception of the ‘good life’. 28{ }^{28} For the latter the positive conception of liberty that is being promoted harks back to a classical notion of citizenship, where political participation was understood in terms of proactive civic/religious commitments, not least vis-à-vis military participation in the defence of the polis or community-in our case, the tribe or the ummah. 29{ }^{29} In practice, therefore, republicanist and Islamist approaches blur the distinction between the public and the private that is central to the functioning of contemporary liberal democratic institutions. In addition, they replace this precept by a positive definition of liberty couched in the terms of positive secular or religious law. 30{ }^{30}
From this perspective, the particularity of the Muslim world as a distinct socio-historical and geopolitical entity is that the main social and political forces promote ‘positive’ notions of freedom and citizenship instead of the ‘negative’
Figure 1.
Patterns of democratic transformation in the Muslim world
liberal understanding of political rights and civil liberties. This means that the pseudo-democratic systems of the region are not merely influenced by evolving international ideas about liberal democracy but they are also being reconstructed internally by the interaction between the elite/counter-elite and the populace. The portrayal of this evolving opposition between republicanist and Islamist schemes is a useful analytical ordering device for understanding and explaining the rise of these pseudo-democratic models. In particular, it helps us to understand why, while democracy and democratisation are far more fashionable political terms than they were 20 years ago, the mere presence of a practical interest in democratisation throughout the Muslim world today does not allow analysts to make accurate political forecasts. 31{ }^{31} (The difficulty of assessing the prospects for the new ‘liberal’ and ‘democratic’ constitution of Iraq before elections are held in the country illustrates this predicament perfectly.) This conundrum is created by the fact that, while all the players involved may welcome democratisation as one step closer to their preferred type of democracy, once they reach a ‘pseudo-democratic’ stage, any further democratisation that does not directly strengthen their own political model is, in their view, a move away from democracy. Hence, the situation reaches a stalemate (see Figure 1).
The internal dynamics of change in pseudo-democratic systems
From the perspective of the authoritarian elites in place in most of the Muslim world, their interests as well as the ‘national interest’ clearly would not be best served by the prompt organisation of free and fair elections. This situation is created in part by the real potential of elections to become a means for non-democratic forces to seize power through the ballot box-the so-called ‘Islamic free election trap’. 32{ }^{32} The other dimension of the problem is that, because of the ideological discourse held by the most powerful opposition forces in
those countries-the Islamists-there appear to be few opportunities for the elite to hand over power ‘gracefully’ on the model of the Latin American pacted transitions from authoritarianism. The situation in Southeast Asia is probably the most propitious for such a process, as illustrated by the collapse of Suharto’s regime in Indonesia, which took place without too serious personal consequences for those individuals in power and without a blatant hijacking of the electoral process. 33{ }^{33} Elsewhere in the Muslim world, only the better run parliamentary monarchies, like Morocco or Jordan, appear to provide the kind of exit strategy for the ruling elite that would avoid a brutal transitional period. 34{ }^{34} In most cases, however, what emboldens the determination of the ruling elite to stay in power is simply the perception that dramatic consequences would follow were they to relinquish power to the Islamist opposition. As the failed Algerian transition to democracy illustrated in the 1990s, such perceptions could push the republicanist elite, as well as part of the liberal democratic opposition, to risk civil war rather than confront an elected Islamist government. 35{ }^{35}
But, again, it would be wrong to assume that the endorsement of a pseudodemocratic system of government reflects only the preferences of the militaristic cliques that have dominated these countries since the end of the colonial era. They also reflect a grave societal indecision about the role of the state. In most Muslim polities, as in other parts of the developing world, this uncertainty is probably most usefully described in the terms of Joel Migdal’s state-in-society approach, where a strong society-composed here of asabiyya and Islamic organisations-opposes inherently weak nation-states. 36{ }^{36} This has led to the formation of what Nazib Ayubi describes as ‘hard’ states, relying heavily on force to remain in power in the Arab world, by contrast with ‘strong’ states ruling through a balanced mix of consent and coercion. 37{ }^{37} In these situations, regardless of the political orientation of the elite, there is a lack of deference from many segments of society to the notion that the state is a legitimate agency by which to shape the social and political preferences of the citizenry. Only in relatively few instances, like Turkey, have state actors been able to engineer relatively solid popular support for the nation-state and to shape the long-term expectations of the citizens (which is probably why Turkey’s claim to be a genuine democracy is relatively well articulated today). 38{ }^{38} In most other cases, like Egypt or Algeria during their Arab Socialist period, or Indonesia during Suharto’s New Order, the state appears to have had only partial and temporary success in shaping society in the image of the citizenry of their modern nation-state. 39{ }^{39} Blatant failures of the state to cope with society are also on display in countries like Afghanistan or Yemen; the situation in the Central Asian republics and the countries of the Middle East ruled by near-tribal asabiyya is precarious and only stable because of the extreme ‘hardness’ of the regimes. 40{ }^{40}
In all these situations the citizenry and the elite remain deeply divided about what an end to ‘hard’ forms of autocratic rule should signify for the reorganisation of the polity. In particular there are strong disagreements about whether it should be reorganised according to Islamic principles or republican concepts; or whether it should mean the advent of a Western-style liberal democratic order. Yet these oppositions ought not to be viewed solely in negative terms, as a set
of constraints on the formation of liberal democracies, but also positively as features supporting a pseudo-democratic order. Contemporary pseudo-democratic stalemates reflect the dynamic opposition between different segments of the elite and of the population forcefully trying to implement alternative and contradictory brands of demos-based political systems. Crucially, however, because republicanist and Islamist interpretations of democratic choice follow a similar political rationale-ie both use a positive definition of freedom despite being grounded in different intellectual traditions-they create a political climate in which liberal ideas and practices have a hard time playing more than a subsidiary role in the construction of the national ethos.
Indeed, from a liberal perspective, one of the most noticeable outcomes of the attempt to liberalise and democratise the political system of Muslim countries in recent years appears to be, as Daniel Brumberg remarks, the refinement of the authoritarian skills of the political elite. 41{ }^{41} Even a fairly successful newly democratic polity like Indonesia may be reverting today to a more authoritarian type of pseudo-democracy. Vedi Hadiz suggests that the current violent and unsettled domestic situation in Indonesia is ‘not symptomatic of “growing pains” towards an ultimately liberal democratic system, but fundamental instead to the logic of a “something else”-a non-liberal type of democracy driven by money politics and thuggery-that is already entrenched, and the variations of which can readily be found elsewhere’. 42{ }^{42} Scholars of democratisation have recently argued that, as autocrats learn from past mistakes, the rise of more competitive forms of authoritarianism could become a global trend at the beginning of the 21 st century. 43{ }^{43} What is specific about the pseudo-democracies of the Muslim world is that the process of democratic reinvention and institutionalisation of authoritarian socio-political practices is harnessed to the diffusion of a specific ethos-republicanist or Islamist-that portrays them as virtuous components of a political or religious project. 44{ }^{44}
Traditional (neo)institutionalist accounts of democratisation and democratic consolidation generally argue that distortions of the liberal-democratic discourses and institutional practices reflect the fact that ill-intentioned people tampering with the letter of the law are creating these problems. With properly functioning liberal-democratic institutions in place, however, such wilful manipulations of the political process could not occur systematically. 45{ }^{45} It may be so but, if democratic failure is induced not only by institutional flaws and manipulations but also by the entrenchment of a republicanist or Islamicist social contract, it would be misguided to suggest that such departures from the current liberal democratic model can be fixed through institutional design. Phillipe Schmitter’s characterisation of democratic consolidation as ‘the process of transforming the accidental arrangements, prudential norms, and contingent solutions that have emerged during the transition into relations of co-operation and competition that are reliably known, regularly practised, and voluntarily accepted by those persons or collectivities (ie politicians and citizens) that participate in democratic governance’ is a useful procedural account of this phenomenon. 46{ }^{46} Yet in procedural terms this description could apply to a republicanist or Islamist model of democracy as well as a liberal one. Here what is likely to cause problems is less the letter of the law than the spirit of the law.
Political learning: liberal, republican and Islamic
Conceptualising the above-mentioned struggle for the hearts and minds of the population as democratisation makes slow inroads into Muslim polities is an inherently arduous task. It is somewhat unsurprising that political analysts should have widely diverging views on the prospects for liberal democracy in the Muslim world-or that they should substantially change their mind over time. On a continuum ranging from the philosophically construed debates to the more empirically based analyses of social change, two main contemporary approaches to the issue of political learning can be easily identified
At one end of this spectrum are scholars like Ernest Gellner and Samuel Huntington, who view Islam as the main cause of authoritarian drift in Muslim polities. 47{ }^{47} Although their analyses are more sophisticated than many of their detractors suggest, fundamentally these authors argue that Islam fosters an essentially illiberal political culture, either because of some of its more uncompromising, dogmatic normative premises (Huntington), or because it prevents the emergence of a fully functional liberal civil society (Gellner). Yet, by constructing their political analysis from first principles, they unavoidably propose an explanation of political behaviour that goes beyond what can be established phenomenologically. These scholars can present as firm and lasting those connections between creed/culture and political causality that are only experienced fleetingly in practice. From this perspective a survey of the contemporary encounters between political Islam and liberal democracy can easily lead to the dreary conclusion that all the discrete acts of ‘illiberalism’ performed by individual Muslims are in fact the surface manifestations of a deeper and all-inclusive illiberal worldview. (Tellingly, too, such views have their counterpart in the Islamic camp-and to some extent in postcolonial discourses-where an essentially good Islamic indigenous culture is being perverted by a corrupt Western secular political culture grounded in erroneous conceptions of individual freedom and the ‘good life’. 48{ }^{48} )
At the other end of the spectrum, working from empirical premises, scholars like Augustus Norton or Massoud Kamali argue, contra Gellner, that a ‘civil society’ is slowly being created and that a liberal democratic ethos is consolidating in the Muslim world. 49{ }^{49} At the same time political analysts like Mark Tessler or Richard Rose propose, contra Huntington, that the religious beliefs held by the citizenry in various parts of the Muslim world do not in themselves seem to preclude people from taking an interest in ‘democracy’. 50{ }^{50} Indeed, as Rose suggests from a survey of Central Asian countries with substantial Russian minorities, there appear to be no significant differences between these non-Muslim minorities and the rest of the Muslim population when it comes to judging the relative costs and benefits of democracy and of (Soviet-style) authoritarianism. 51{ }^{51} Unfortunately, because of the very nature of data obtained in these empirical studies, it is equally difficult to jump from empirical observations to generic assessments of the situation. Surveys are but a snapshot of political opinion and cannot describe the deliberative processes that over time produce a substantive account of what words like ‘democracy’ and ‘civil society’ actually mean. Ultimately, this lack of substantive characterisation of such key concepts
can easily undermine any attempt to identify an endogenous rationale for the democratisation process, and its failures.
The first set of problems highlighted above relates to whether or not people can learn about liberal democracy in a Muslim context; and if they can, how. The second set of issues, once we have established that they can and how, is to specify exactly what it is about liberal democracy people ought to learn or know in order to create a functional political order. (Needless to say, the issue of how people can learn is tightly linked to the question of what they should learn.)
In this context the self-serving justifications of many autocratic leaders, that the citizens are as yet ‘unfit’ for democracy and that they need to be ‘edu-cated’-and even ruled over with a firm hand-in order to prevent them from creating trouble, is often just a poor excuse for their own refusal to hand over power. Nevertheless, this refusal to let people exercise their own political judgement allows the powers-that-be partially to avoid a dilemma that genuine (liberal) democrats have yet to face. One needs not be a corrupt state official to remark that, if one wants to promote a more liberal democratic political order in the Muslim world today, it may be unwise to let the populace decide right now which political representatives they want. (This is so principally because the social consensus currently prevailing among the citizens may be palpably non-liberal.) For external observers, of course, the main problem is that these two issues are usually inextricably intertwined. On official visit in the USA in 1994 the Algerian Prime Minister, Redah Malek, justified the recent coup d’état in his country by arguing that ‘democracy is not a matter of going to the voting booths…democracy is a culture, a formation, and organisation’. 52{ }^{52} Malek was clearly making a sound general observation, but it was timed in such a way as to serve very down-to-earth political objectives. Similarly, when General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan boldly declared a few days after his successful 1999 coup that this was ‘not martial law, only another path towards democracy’, he could meaningfully proclaim that the armed forces had ‘no intention to stay in charge any longer than is absolutely necessary to pave the way for true democracy to flourish in Pakistan’. 53{ }^{53} What Musharraf meant by ‘true democracy’ and how the military could ensure its success in the polity remains of course at the heart of the problem. But in the post-9/11 context even the proponents of Western liberal democratic ideals could condone these interpretations of ‘democracy’ in order not to face the dilemmas posed by Islamist regimes with popular legitimacy. 54{ }^{54}
This reliance on individuals or institutions that allegedly know better what is politically desirable and achievable is a common trope of republicanist, Islamist and liberal discourses. In effect the practical similarities between the institutional models devised by the republicanist elite and the Islamist counter-elite can be quite striking. In organisational terms there is little that separates a body of religious overseers from a body of secular, republican overseers. Looking at recent political reforms in Turkey and Iran introduced by parties with sizeable popular support, it is noticeable how they have failed in a similar fashion in the face of institutionalised loci of republicanist/Islamist orthodoxy. Both the Islamicising efforts of the Refah Party in Turkey and the liberalising endeavours of Khatami’s supporters in Iran were foiled by the military or religious guarantors of public integrity. 55{ }^{55} In both cases it was argued that these political challengers,
collectively or individually, subverted the ethos of the polity as expressed in the Constitution. Unsurprisingly, these political models have an obvious appeal for other regimes in the region. During the Algerian democratic transition, when leaders of the Islamic Salvation Front proposed that a body of Islamic scholars would supervise, in the style of the Iranian Guardians’ Council, the working of their Islamic democracy, they were not offering anything strikingly different from the Algerian Generals who set up a Turkish-style National Security Council to secure their grip on power. Yet it would be over-simplistic to say that the pseudo-democratic system that was created in Algeria in the 1990s was a mere stop-gap measure designed to contain the rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism. It was also the affirmation of the institutional model that could best promote the political ethos that republicanist political forces wanted to have in the countryor as General Liamin Zeroual described it, promoted ‘the kind of democracy to which Algerians could legitimately aspire’. 56{ }^{56}
In the longer term, however, it may be doubted how far these institutions are successful at making the bulk of the ‘unenlightened’ populace endorse the desired political outlook. For decades the populations of Muslim countries, from Algeria to Indonesia and from Iraq to Kazakhstan, have been force-fed a neopatrimonial, nationalist or socialist state ideology by the institutional (including educational) apparatus. Yet the political outcomes of these efforts have generally been extremely disappointing. Today it is probably over-optimistic to suggest that the authoritarian policies currently in place in the less sophisticated pseudo-democracies of the Muslim world, like the Central Asian republics, are, in Paul Kubicek’s words, more a ‘cure’ than a ‘curse’. 57{ }^{57} They may keep a lid on these peoples’ ethno-religious demands but they are unlikely to ‘cure’ people of their aspirations. Indeed, looking back at 60 years of Soviet rule in Central Asia, it is plainly the case that a socialist state ideology failed to replace durably pre-existing tribal or religious allegiances. As Roy points out, even during the Soviet period, the traditional asabiyya model of these communities remained a main principle of social organisation, albeit hidden behind a veil of socialist rhetoric. 58{ }^{58} Instead of providing a ‘cure’, what these policies seem to ensure is that non-liberal democratic views and practices remain central to the organisation of political power in those societies.
It is doubtful too whether the partial political liberalisation-what Brumberg terms ‘tactical liberalisation’-proposed in the more sophisticated pseudo-democratic regimes can provide an easy way out of this vicious circle of authoritarianism. 59{ }^{59} It is clear that, even in the case of the rather successful process of political liberalisation in Latin America, an authoritarian legacy can also be transmitted by political parties with a history of collaboration with the ruling elite. 60{ }^{60} As Abukhalil remarks in the Arab context, the partial introduction of multipartyism has usually resulted in many new parties duplicating the autocratic and nepotistic methods of the regime instead of proposing more liberal democratic practices. 61{ }^{61} Even in a sophisticated multiparty system like that of Turkey, Kamrava assesses that the (non-Islamic) parties which have traditionally dominated the political scene have increasingly become irrelevant relics of the nationalist movement, squabbling between themselves over the legacy of Atatürk and turning into mere tools of patronage. 62{ }^{62} A functioning liberal democratic
system would require not only that the loci of legitimate authority are transferred from a small militaristic or religious clique to a democratically elected group of political actors, but also that the methods of governance change drastically. Yet, even when this political liberalisation occurs formally in high politics, as in Turkey or Indonesia, there remain important obstacles to the successful trickling down of these new political and socio-cultural behaviours.
As specialists of informal politics point out, these political difficulties are not simply the outcome of ideological oppositions; they are also grounded in pragmatic socioeconomic choices and opportunities. In particular, there is no guarantee that the citizens at the bottom of the social ladder will show any enthusiasm for these new liberal practices if the economic situation and social organisation of supply and demand remain such that it is very costly to play by these new rules (when others don’t). 63{ }^{63} Fundamentally, in order to follow these ‘virtuous’ liberal democratic rules even when it may be more costly than well tried methods of socioeconomic and political patronage, people have to be somewhat convinced of the virtuousness of the rules.
The internal flaws of the Turkish or Indonesian elites notwithstanding, it is clear that the populace in these sophisticated pseudo-democracies remains attracted to non liberal-democratic discourses and practices. Looking at the pre-university student body in Indonesia, Mary Fearnley-Sander et al pointed out that, if there was a noticeable shift from the ‘integralist’ state ideology (Pancasila) to a more liberal approach to politics among students in elite schools after the fall of Suharto, the bulk of the student population in poorer schools continued to express support for Pancasila ideology. 64{ }^{64} (It should be noted that, while Pancasila used to rely on significant Islamic discursive tropes, in the aftermath of the 1998 democratic transition the Islamic component of the discourse has been most effectively articulated separately by the new Indonesian pro-Islamic parties. 65{ }^{65} In Turkey too, the issue of winning the hearts and minds of a new generation of citizens (eg in the Refah-sponsored religious schools) was at the heart of the constitutional coup of 1997 aimed at ousting the Islamist Refah party from power. But even with the banning of the Refah, the Islamist approach to social and political life continued to gain new ground among the electorate. As the moderate Islamist Justice and Development party won the 2002 elections, one survey confirmed that among the party’s voters ’ 81%81 \% saw themselves as Muslim first and Turks second, while 60%60 \% said that religious values took precedence over national values, democracy, human rights or secularism’. 66{ }^{66} In the case of Algeria the strengthening a more Islamic conception of the state and society was also one of the prime outcomes of the tentative 1988-92 democratic transition. A 1993 survey conducted among adolescents at the end of their secondary education showed that the ‘value’ that they most recognised and respected was religion-while other ideals connected to the nation, nationalism, human rights and civil liberties trailed far behind. 67{ }^{67}
A main difficulty of democratisation in the Muslim world is commonly seen as this disjunction between a rapid top-down reform of the political mechanisms that allow people to express their choices via free and fair elections, and the protracted bottom-up process of civic education that gives them the opportunity to acquire the aforementioned liberal democratic skills and habits. In the
dominant (neo)institutionalist literature the solution to this problem is usually predicated upon an assumption that, with the proper set of institutions in place, liberal democratic methods can effectively compete with, and win over, non-liberal practices. But can we be confident that better institutional design will necessarily prop up these liberal democratic practices in the face of stiff competition from more proactive republicanist and Islamist notions of social commitment? Drawing from Robert Putnam’s argument about social capital in Making Democracy Work and Bowling Alone, one could suggest that, in view of the social practices and ethos that is on offer, a liberal democratic victory might not be a realistic outcome in this context. 68{ }^{68}
Turning the picture upside down and looking at democracy from the bottom up in the vein of Putnam (or Tocqueville), we should not be surprised to see that the kind of ‘social capital’ that prevails among the masses should influence the practices developed at the apex of the socio-political order. 69{ }^{69} If the kind of associative life promoted by liberal democratic players in the Muslim world is akin to that which prevails in contemporary Western democracies, it will not require nor facilitate strong social networks of communication and reciprocity. The old Tocquevillian ‘associative spirit’ that was crucial to the emergence of a democratic political system in the West is simply not best represented by the membership of what Putnam calls ‘letterhead organisations’-ie an arms-length engagement in civic life. Instead this associative spirit is more readily instantiated by the social commitments promoted and demanded by Islamist and republicanist organisations. (It is not entirely coincidental that, after the 1997 confrontation between the Turkish military and the Refah party, a flurry of ‘Associations for Ataturkist Thought’ were created throughout the country in an attempt to revive the republican message of Turkey’s founding father. 70{ }^{70} ) This straightforward competition between different forms of social commitment contributes significantly to the repeated failures of liberal democratic practices to become entrenched in this region of the world, as well as to the reinvention and reproduction of pseudo-democratic systems.
Conclusion
The argument presented here is an attempt to move away from paradigmatic accounts of democratic transition in the Muslim world based on a mechanistic analysis of the institutional constraints that prevent democratisation from progressing towards a liberal democratic ideal-type. While there are indeed instrumental rationales that contribute to the formation of pseudo-democracies as a fallback position from fully liberal democratic systems, viewing democratisation in the Muslim world solely or primarily from this perspective can quickly become counterproductive. It is important to recognise too that there exists today an international environment that favours essentialist definitions of democracy. It is also crucial to notice how these essentialist models are being developed at the national level in social and political discourses and practices. These features of the political environment ensure that the social and institutional mechanisms designed to promote greater political (or religious) awareness among the masses
can also entrench the notion that some key individuals and organisations possess an indispensable political or religious expertise. Understanding the process of the diffusion and reinvention of republicanist and Islamist social practices that do not correspond to liberal expectations but that are nonetheless demotic can help us to understand better the rise and fall of pseudo-democratic regimes throughout the Muslim world. From this perspective, ‘pseudo-democracy’ is not a downgraded form of liberal democracy but a stepping-stone to building a different kind of (republican/Islamic) democracy. In practical terms this should encourage analysts to pay greater attention to the possibility that the failures of liberal democratic politics are causally linked to the successes of non-liberal forms of social mobilisation and political learning. In other words, it is being suggested that far more effort should be placed on understanding how non-liberal associative models become more effective than ‘laissez-faire’ models of liberal mobilisation in such competitive political settings.
Notes
A first version of this paper was presented at the 2003 Political Studies Association annual conference. I wish to thank Ben Thirkell-White, David Shankland, Rob Gleave, Geoffrey Pridham and Francesco Cavatorta for their helpful comments and suggestions for this paper.
1{ }^{1} Thomas Carothers, ‘The end of the transition paradigm’, Journal of Democracy, 13 (1), 2002, pp 5-21, at p18.
2 See Guillermo O’Donnell, Counterpoints: Selected Essays on Authoritarianism and Democratization, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999.
3 See Guillermo O’Donnell, ‘Illusions about consolidation’, Journal of Democracy, 7 (2), 1996, pp 34-51.
4{ }^{4} Augustus Richard Norton, ‘Introduction’, in Norton (ed), Civil Society in the Middle East, Leiden: EJ Brill, 1995. See also Dale F Eickelman & Armando Salvatore, ‘The public sphere and Muslim identities’, Archives Européennes de Sociologie, XLIII (1), 2002, pp 92-115; and Amy Hawthorne, ‘Middle Eastern democracy: is civil society the answer?’, Carnegie Paper No 44, March 2004.
5 See for example, Michael L Ross, ‘Does oil hinder democracy?’, World Politics, 53 (3), 2001, pp 325-361; Eva Bellin, ‘The robustness of authoritarianism in the Middle East: exceptionalism in comparative perspective’, Comparative Politics, 36 (2), 2004, pp 139-157.
6{ }^{6} The most useful analysis of these trends probably remains David Collier & Steven Levitsky, ‘Democracy with adjectives: conceptual innovation in comparative research’, World Politics, 49 (3), 1997, pp 430-451. More recent trends are identified in Steven Levitsky & Lucan A Way, ‘The rise of competitive authoritarianism’, Journal of Democracy, 13 (2), 2002, pp 51-65; and Larry Diamond, ‘Thinking about hybrid regimes’, Journal of Democracy, 13 (2), 2002, pp 21-35.
7 Daniel Brumberg, ‘The trap of liberalized autocracy’, Journal of Democracy, 13 (4), 2002, pp 46-68; Mehran Kamrava, ‘Pseudo-democratic politics and populist possibilities: the rise and demise of Turkey’s Refah party’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 25 (2), 1998, pp 275-301; William Case, ‘Malaysia’s resilient pseudodemocracy’, Journal of Democracy, 12 (1), 2001, pp 43-57.
8 Diamond, ‘Thinking about hybrid regimes’, p 24.
9 James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
10{ }^{10} Full text of the Transitional Administrative Law approved by the Iraqi Governing Council on 8 March 2004 available at: http://www.cpa-iraq.org/government/TAL.html.
11{ }^{11} In the Mediterranean context, see Richard Gillespie & Lawrence Whitehead, ‘European democratic promotion in North Africa: limits and prospects’, in R Gillespie & R Youngs (eds), The European Union and Democracy Promotion: The Case of North Africa, London: Frank Cass, 2002; and Frédéric Volpi, ‘Regional community building and the transformation of international relations: the case of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership’, Mediterranean Politics, 9 (2), 2004, pp 145-164.
12 Samuel P Huntington, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996; and Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, New York: WW Norton, 2003.
13{ }^{13} See James Tully, ‘The unfreedom of the moderns in comparison to their ideals of constitutional democracy’, The Modern Law Review, 65 (2), 2002, pp 204-228.
14{ }^{14} See Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968; and Hugh Poulton, Top-hat, the Grey Wolf and the Crescent: Turkish Nationalism and the Turkish Republic, London: Hurst, 1997.
15{ }^{15} As Bernard Lewis emphasises, words like citizen and citizenship had until recently no direct equivalent in the Arabic, Persian or Turkic languages. Bernard Lewis, ‘Islam and liberal democracy: a historical overview’, Journal of Democracy, 7 (2) 1996, pp 52-63. On republicanism in the Western political tradition, see Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
16{ }^{16} See Bertrand Badie, The Imported State: The Westernization of Political Order, trans C Royal, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000; and Badie, Les Deux Etats: Pouvoir et Société en Occident et en Terre d’Islam, Paris: Fayard, 1987.
17{ }^{17} See Rosemarie Said Zahlan, The Making of the Modern Gulf States: Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman, London: Ithaca Press, 1998; and Michael Herb, All in the Family: Absolutism, Revolution and Democracy in the Middle Eastern Monarchies, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999.
18{ }^{18} Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans F Rosenthal, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958.
19{ }^{19} For an appraisal of Ibn Khaldun’s argument, see Ernest Gellner, Muslim Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
20{ }^{20} Olivier Roy, ‘Groupes de solidarité au Moyen-Orient et en Asie centrale’, Les Cahiers du CERI, 16, 1996, p 3. See also Roy, ‘Patronage and solidarity groups: survival or reformation’, in Ghassan Salamé (ed), Democracy without Democrats, London: IB Tauris, 1994.
21{ }^{21} Akbar Ahmed, Islam under Siege: Living Dangerously in a Post-Honor World, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003.
22 Roy, ‘Groupes de solidarité au Moyen-Orient et en Asie centrale’. See also Kathleen Collins, ‘The political role of clans in Central Asia’, Comparative Politics, 35 (2), 2003, pp 171-190.
23{ }^{23} Roy, ‘Groupes de solidarité au Moyen-Orient et en Asie centrale’, p 43. For Roy, this characterisation also applies to a country like Lebanon, where the asabiyya has expended and reconstituted itself on the basis of entire ethno-religious communities, but has not laid the bases for the formation of a nation.
24{ }^{24} Irm Haleem, ‘Ethnic and sectarian violence and the propensity towards praetorianism in Pakistan’, Third World Quarterly, 24 (3), 2003, pp 463-477. More generally see Ghassan Salamé, ’ “Strong” and “weak” states: a qualified return to the Muqaddimah’, in Giacomo Luciani (ed), The Arab State, London: Routledge, 1990.
25{ }^{25} On Algeria, see William Zartman, ‘The military in the politics of succession: Algeria’, in J Harbeson (ed), The Military in African Politics, New York: Praeger, 1987; Robert Mortimer, ‘Islamists, soldiers, and democrats: the second Algerian war’, Middle East Journal, 50 (1), 1996, pp 18-39; and Frédéric Volpi, ‘Democratisation and its enemies: the Algerian transition to authoritarianism’, in R Luckham & G Cawthra (eds), Governing Insecurity: Democratic Control of Military and Security Establishments in Transitional Democracies, London: Zed Books, 2003. On Indonesia, see Donald J Porter, ‘Citizen participation through mobilization and the rise of political Islam in Indonesia’, Pacific Review, 15 (2), 2002, pp 201-224; Vedi R Hadiz, ‘Reorganizing political power in Indonesia: a reconsideration of so-called “democratic transitions”’, Pacific Review, 16 (4), 2003, pp 591-611. On Turkey, see Martin Heper, ‘Conclusion-the consolidation of democracy versus democratization in Turkey’, Turkish Studies, 3 (1), 2002, pp 138-152; and Philip W Sutton & Stephen Vertigans, ‘The established and challenging outsiders: resurgent Islam in secular Turkey’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 3 (1), 2002, pp 58-78.
26{ }^{26} Martin E Marty & R Scott Appleby, ‘Introduction’, in Marty & Appleby (eds), Accounting for Fundamentalisms: The Dynamic Character of Movements, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994; and Marty & Appleby, ‘Remaking the state: the limits of the fundamentalist imagination’, in Marty & Appleby (eds), Fundamentalisms and the State: Remaking Polities, Economies and Militance, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
27{ }^{27} See Katarina Dalacoura, ‘A critique of communitarianism with reference to post- revolutionary Iran’, Review of International Studies, 28 (1), 2002, pp 75-92; Heather Deegan, ‘Structures of government in the Islamic Republic of Sudan: the question of legitimacy and the 1998 draft constitution’, Journal of North African studies, 4 (1), 1999, pp 87-101; and Gabriel Warburg, ‘Mahdism and Islamism in Sudan’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 27 (2), 1995, pp 219-236.
28{ }^{28} Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958. See also Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, London: Oxford University Press, 1969. For an alternative exposition of these notions of liberty, see Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998; and Skinner, ‘The idea of negative liberty’, in R Rorty et al (eds), Philosophy in History: Essays on the Historiography of Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
PSEUDO-DEMOCRACY IN THE MUSLIM WORLD
29{ }^{29} In the liberal tradition, this is an argument most forcefully made by Benjamin Constant in his seminal work on the liberty of the ‘ancients’ and the liberty of the ‘moderns’. See Benjamin Constant, Political Writings, trans and ed B Fontana, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
30 Note that even religious law may lean toward positive law when it is being codified. See Rudolph Peters, ‘From jurists’ law to statute law, or what happens when the Shari’a is codified’, Mediterranean Politics, 7 (3), 2003, pp 82-95.
31 Compare Adrian Karatnycky, ‘The 1999 Freedom House survey: a century of progress’, Journal of Democracy, 11 (1), 2000, pp 187-200, with Karatnycky, ‘Muslim countries and the democracy gap’, Journal of Democracy, 13 (1), 2002, pp 99-112.
32 See Alfred Stepan, 'Religion, democracy and the “twin tolerations” ', Journal of Democracy, 11 (4), 2000, pp 37-57.
33 William Case, ‘Revisiting elites, transitions and founding elections: an unexpected caller from Indonesia’, Democratization, 7 (4), 2000, pp 51-80; and Kikue Hamayotsu, ‘Islam and nation building in Southeast Asia: Malaysia and Indonesia in comparative perspective’, Pacific Affairs, 75 (3), 2002, pp 353-375.
34 Abdeslam Maghraoui, ‘Monarchy and political reform in Morocco’, Journal of Democracy, 12 (1), 2001, pp 73-86; and Mansoor Moaddel, ‘Religion and the state: the singularity of the Jordanian religious experience’, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 15 (4), 2002, pp 527-568.
35 Volpi, ‘Democratisation and its enemies’; and Y Bouandel, ‘Political parties and the transition from authoritarianism: the case of Algeria’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 41 (1), 2003, pp 1-22.
36 Joel S Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988; and Migdal, State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
37 Nazih N Ayubi, Over-stating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East, London: IB Tauris, 1996.
38 Poulton, Top-hat, the Grey Wolf and the Crescent.
39 John Ruedy, Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992; Kirk J Beattie, Egypt During the Nasser Years: Ideology, Parties and Civil Society, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994; and Michael RJ Vatikiotis, Indonesian Politics Under Suharto: The Rise and Fall of the New Order, London: Routledge, 1998.
40 See Salamé, ’ “Strong” and “weak” states’.
41 Brumberg, ‘The trap of liberalized autocracy’.
42 Hadiz, ‘Reorganizing political power in Indonesia’, p 607. See also Abubakar E Hara, ‘The difficult journey of democratization in Indonesia’, Contemporary Southeast Asia, 23 (2), 2001, pp 307-326.
43 See Levitsky & Way, ‘The rise of competitive authoritarianism’.
44 For a dramatic illustration of this process in Algeria see Frédéric Volpi, Islam and Democracy: The Failure of Dialogue in Algeria, London: Pluto Press, 2003; and Luis Martinez, The Algerian Civil War 1990-1998, trans J Derrick, London: Hurst, 2000.
45 See Juan L Linz & Alfred Stepan’s, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America and Post-Communist Europe, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. In a Middle Eastern context, see Marsha Pripstein Posusney, ‘Enduring authoritarianism: Middle East lessons for comparative theory’, Comparative Politics, 36 (2), 2004, pp 127-138.
46 Phillipe Schmitter, ‘Interest systems and the consolidation of democracies’, in L Diamond & G Marks (eds), Reexamining Democracy: Essays in Honour of Seymour Martin Lipset, London: Sage, 1992, p 158.
47 Huntington, The Clash of Civilisations; and Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and its Rivals, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994.
48 For a radical critique by one of the best-known Islamist ideologues see Sayyid Quth, Milestones, Indianapolis, IN: American Trust Publications, 1993. For a more measured analysis of the perceptions of Western secular influences in Muslim societies, see the contributors to A Tamimi & J Esposito (eds), Islam and Secularism in the Middle East, London: Hurst, 2000.
49 Norton, ‘Introduction’; and Massoud Kamali, ‘Civil society and Islam: a sociological perspective’, Archives Européennes de Sociologie, XLII (3), 2001, pp 457-482.
50 Mark Tessler, ‘Islam and democracy in the Middle East: the impact of religious orientations on attitudes toward democracy in four Arab countries’, Comparative Politics, 34 (3), 2002, pp 337-354; and Richard Rose, ‘How Muslims view democracy: evidence from Central Asia’, Journal of Democracy, 13 (4), 2002, pp 102-111.
51 Rose, ‘How Muslims view democracy’.
52 Quoted in Frédéric Volpi, ‘Language, practices and the formation of a transnational liberal-democratic ethos’, Global Society, 16 (1), 2002, pp 89-101.
53 The transcript of Musharraf’s speech is available on the BBC world service at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/ world/monitoring/477829.stm
54 Indeed, as George W Bush asserted in 2002, Musharraf had articulated 'a vision of Pakistan as a
progressive, modern, and democratic Islamic society’. Remarks by President Bush and President Musharraf of Pakistan in Press Availability, The Cross Hall, 13 February 2002, available at: http://www. whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/02/20020213-3.html
55 On Turkey see Cengiz Çandar, ‘Redefining Turkey’s political center’, Journal of Democracy, 10 (4), 1999, pp 129-141; and Niyazi Günay, ‘Implementing the “February 28” Recommendations’, Research Note 10, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2001. On Iran see A William Samii, ‘Iran’s guardians council as an obstacle to democracy’, Middle East Journal, 55 (4), 2001, pp 643-678; and Mihrangiz Kar, ‘Constitutional constraints’, Journal of Democracy, 14 (1), 2003, pp 132-136
56 Quoted in Volpi, Islam and Democracy, p 87.
57 Paul Kubicek, ‘Authoritarianism in Central Asia: curse or cure?’, Third World Quarterly, 19 (1), 1998, pp 29-43.
58 Roy, ‘Groupes de solidarité au Moyen-Orient et en Asie centrale’.
59 Brumberg, ‘The trap of liberalized autocracy’. See also Aqil Shah, ‘Pakistan’s “armored” democracy’, Journal of Democracy, 14 (4), 2003, pp 26-40.
60{ }^{60} Michelle M Taylor-Robinson, ‘Old parties and new democracies: do they bring out the best in one another?’, Party Politics, 7 (5), 2001, pp 581-604.
61{ }^{61} As’ad Abukhalil, ‘Change and democratisation in the Arab world: the role of political parties’, Third World Quarterly, 18 (1), 1997, pp 149-163.
62 Kamrava, ‘Pseudo-democratic politics and populist possibilities’.
63{ }^{63} See Guilain Denoeux, Urban Unrest in the Middle East: A Comparative Study of Informal Networks in Egypt, Iran and Lebanon, New York: State University of New York Press, 1993; Asef Bayat, 'Un-civil society: the politics of the “informal people” ', Third World Quarterly, 18 (1), 1997, pp 53-72.
64{ }^{64} Mary Fearnley-Sander, Mawardi Effendi Isnarmi Zulfahmi, Wahidul Basri & Nurhizrah Gistituati, ‘Political learning during reformasi’, Australian Journal of Political Science, 36 (2), 2001, pp 325-346.
65{ }^{65} See Douglas Ramage, Politics in Indonesia: Democracy, Islam and the Ideology of Tolerance, London: Routledge, 1995.
66{ }^{66} Gareth Jenkins, ‘Muslim Democrats in Turkey?’, Survival, 45 (1), 2003, pp 45-66, at p 55.
67{ }^{67} Hassan Remaoun, ‘École, histoire, et enjeux institutionels’, Les Temps Modernes, 580, 1995, pp 168-184.
68{ }^{68} Robert D Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000; and Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
69{ }^{69} See also Francis Fukuyama, ‘Social capital, civil society and development’, Third World Quarterly, 22 (1), 2001, pp 7-20.
70 David Shankland, Islam and Society in Turkey, Huntingdon, UK: Eothen Press, 1999.