getting to pluralism: political actors in the arab world - Carnegie ...

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project it was a time when there was a real sense the Arab world that something was about to
change. There were real discussion on the issues of democracy.
The first paper that I wrote on this topic was an overview of the debate that was taking place
– of the debates, I should say, that were taking place in the Arab world or in the Arab press on the
issues of democracy. And I know that my poor research assistant went crazy because these articles
were coming out one on top of the other on a daily basis, and it was a major undertaking just to
keep track of what people were saying, what the discussion was.
And unfortunately, as we concluded this phase of our project we really have come to a very
different conclusion: that this drive toward the reform that seemed to be so strong a few years back
is drive that really seems to have fizzled out – that there is really not a great push now, there is not a
great deal of political dynamism in the Arab world. I will say more about this later. I think I will
just leave it at this.
The question is, you know, why this situation, why is it that Arab governments have proven
so incredibly resilient to change? Why is it that Arab regimes, far from being undermined by the
efforts towards the reform by the pressure coming from the outside, seem to be in the process of
very much reasserting their control and this is true everywhere. It is true from Morocco, where the
King has just launched a new palace party that did extremely well in the last round of elections and
likely to do even better, to all the Gulf countries where if you look around at sort of the ruling
families, are still as firmly in control as always.
And why is it that the efforts that have been made by – particularly under the Bush
administration, but also by the European countries – those various undertaking by outsiders
essentially have not brought more fruit? And I think part of the reason – one of the reasons here
when you try to understand the resilience and also the failure of efforts at democracy promotion, is
that in many ways we need to think about the process of democratization in a somewhat different
way than we normally think.
The discussions of democratization usually seem to hinge on two points. One is the
importance of values – the change in the value systems that have to take place in a country, the
importance of education the importance of civil education, the importance of the organization of
civil society in bringing about the change and so on. And secondly, we think about institutions – we
have to help these countries build institutions. What have we been trying to do in Iraq and in
Afghanistan? What have we been advising countries to do? We have been spending money in
trying to build the institutions.
Nobody denies that values are important, that institutions in the long run are important. But
I think what we have overlooked and what, in the end, is that democratization is about a power
game because, when you have – in order for a country to become more democratic, you have to
have redistribution of power in the country. You cannot have democratization without power
sharing. You cannot have democratization in an autocratic country without some people losing
power and other people earning a greater share of power.
We are not talking about regime overthrow, but certainly there has to be a redistribution of
power, a more balanced distribution of power in the country. And I think our conclusion in turn,
from the analysis of the various political – from the Middle Eastern countries, is that the explanation