Many experts have suggested that democracy is an inevitable byproduct of revolution and that in the wake of the Arab Spring, new Middle Eastern democracies will rise from the ashes of dead dictatorships to reflect the egalitarian views of the people. Optimists like journalist Matthew Kaminski point to Tunisia where a successfully elected parliamentary coalition government has moved away from religious extremism and includes political and ethnic minorities in the democratic process as an influential example of post-revolutionary democratic success in the Middle East.
Unfortunately, Tunisia will likely prove the exception to the rule. In Egypt and in many other post-rebellion Arab nations, entrenched institutional, social and economic barriers will deter the development of democracy more specifically, the Western style of liberal democracy defined by individual freedom and equality.
Militaries and security forces, many of which retain de facto leadership in the Middle East, constitute the most immediate institutional roadblock to democracy. In Egypt, an entrenched military has consolidated elite power with little accountability, ratcheted up violence against political protestors and diluted democratic reform.
Even if preliminary democratic elections are completed without fraud, some Arab countries risk lapsing back into autocracy or becoming illiberal democracies in which freedoms and human rights are repressed. Fareed Zakaria has warned that democracy can only foster freedom and growth if preceded by constitutional liberalism. Without free markets, independent legal institutions and strong infrastructure, free elections will likely lead to intolerant, illiberal democracy.
The impoverished and divided Middle Eastern landscape is ripe for illiberal democracy. In some countries like Iraq, Sunnis and Shiites teeter on the brink of civil war, and other countries remain divided by deep-seated tribal enmities. Poverty is rampant from Egypt to Yemen to even the oil-rich Gulf States, where authoritarian leaders have amplified economic inequality by exploiting national resources and delegating benefits unequally. Unsurprisingly, few Middle Eastern societies have a strong, politically viable middle class capable of leading the charge toward free-market democracy.
Egalitarian civic engagement and horizontal community power structures, considered by great political theorists from Alexis de Tocqueville to Robert Putnam to be the most important prerequisites to functional democracy, are borderline non-existent throughout much of the Middle East. Many regional communities are defined by vertical power relations, strict familial hierarchies, political patronage systems and even tribal feudalism.
Perhaps most damning to the prospects for Middle Eastern democracy is the presence of Islamism. Before the Mubarak regime had even fallen, the Muslim Brotherhood had engineered a social revolution in Egypt, filling the civic void left by a crumbling government and providing numerous social goods to local communities. In Lebanon and many other Arab states, the story is the same organized Islamist groups are fulfilling the civic duties that weak states no longer can.
Organized fundamentalist religion often corrodes societal foundations of democracy. As Putnam concludes from his study of the Catholic Church in Italy, organized religion is an alternative to the type of egalitarian civic engagement that begets democracy. By precluding the development of cooperative communal groups and preventing the natural formation of grassroots civic engagement, Islamist movements threaten to stifle the growth of democracy at its most fundamental level. If the people do not cultivate civic communities with pro-democratic values, the government is unlikely to institute an effective democracy.
The last few centuries have made it increasingly clear that religion and political democratization don't mix. In 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini and Muslim clerics led a popular revolution in Iran that established authoritarian theocracy. While Egypt may not follow in Iran's despotic footsteps, anti-Western Islamist political movements have hardly proven to be the guarantors of moderation and individual freedom. I'm not suggesting that democracy will never flourish in Arab states. But based on historical precedent, free elections in Egypt and other post-rebellion states are more likely to produce illiberal democracies or autocracies.
But perhaps the Arab revolutionaries of this age of information are uniquely advantaged by their unprecedented youth, and the Internet may substitute for the community-wide civic engagement that is so essential to effective democracy. The Internet has democratized information. Let's see if it can do the same to the governments of the Middle East.
