Between idealism and realpolitik

There are no embedded mechanisms to protect the integrity of the political system: instead, the very institutions themselves, from executive and legislative authority through to judicial and economic authority are subject to, what one Egyptian activist has labelled, a “horse-trading deal” where everything is up for negotiation.

The current stalemate in Lebanon presents a clear case of this phenomenon. As the two opposing coalitions negotiate over reform to the political system, political positions, ministries and entire departments are offered up as bargaining chips to appease the increasingly illegitimate confessional elites who cling to their positions of power.

Therefore, where strengthening of, for instance, electoral systems or parliaments takes place (as is a main focus of an institution such as MEPI, the IRI or NDI) it is in fact reinforcing the formal but hollow facade of the very elites that the Bush administration seeks to reform.

Alternatively, real power is wielded through what Toby Dodge has famously labelled the “Shadow State”. It is the informal, yet supremely powerful clientelist networks through which regimes exercise their authority and distribute their largesse. Where the Algerian government, for instance, presents a liberal media law, allowing considerable press freedom, it exercises its control through paper supplies to the newspapers. The government and its associates can pressure, even close, publications while presenting a formal, progressive veneer.

In the words of one prominent Jordanian civil society activist, these regimes manage to balance between “welfare state and controlled chaos” where those who are inside the system are co-opted and those outside the system are powerless. As such, there are few if any agents of democratic reform that can be strengthened in the first instance.

This is not to argue that political reform is not possible in the Middle East. Indeed, it is vital, and must be on the agenda of the international community as well as the United States.

The US is still and will continue to be the most influential external player in the region for many decades. Far from calling for the US to simply withdraw, it is more pertinent for Washington to ask those questions of themselves that will trouble many decision makers, but that can possibly lead to more realistic and beneficial policy decisions by future administrations. In particular, can the United States abandon the rigid idealism that defines its rhetoric while avoiding a return to the cut-throat realism that still resonates in its relationship with regimes in Riyadh and Cairo?