Democracy by the sword

The last two decades have supplied us with ample evidence about the conditions under which transformations to democracy may succeed, or fail - examples like post-communist Eastern Europe.

It was Francis Fukuyama, who announced in his The End of History the neo-conservative gospel - in a deterministic argument which tried to invert a simplistic reading of Marxism, he maintained that after the defeat of both fascism and Soviet-type communism, democracy and a market economy will develop automatically.

Developments in post-communist societies, however, have been more much complex. While some countries such as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic are prime examples and have moved successfully towards democracy and a reasonably functioning market economy, this is far from being the general rule. Romania and Bulgaria are still struggling with transition, as is Ukraine, while Russia has moved into an autocratic ambit with the Central Asian former Soviet republics - as well as Belarus – developing into an almost “sultanistic” authoritarianism.

What is the reason for these deep differences between societies? After all, only 15 years ago all had been one-party states, with a command economy and almost total control of the means of communication.

It is obvious that the answer cannot be found in economic or other quantifiable factors, like industrial development or degrees of urbanisation. Instead one has to look at history and what those countries had been before the communists came to power, either in 1917 or 1945-47. It is clear that those countries with a history of a relatively developed civil society, the transition to democracy was possible, whereas those which had no such antecedents, experienced great difficulties.

Let us compare Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic on one hand with Russia on the other. Czechoslovakia was a consolidated democracy before it was torn apart by the Nazis in 1938. It had a multi-party parliamentary system, a free press, a highly secularised tradition with a deeply ingrained religious tolerance, a thriving industrial private sector and a proud tradition of academic freedom.

Poland and Hungary were not as successful in the interwar years, but each had a representative tradition going back centuries, which while anchored in aristocratic privileges made both representation and a tendency to limit central government part of the political heritage. Both had centuries-old institutional traditions of local self-government and academic freedom, and while the role of the church in each of them was different, they were not identified with state-power. Freedom of the press was far from absolute, but both Warsaw and Budapest were, before 1939, home to a thriving iconoclastic community. Both were highly agricultural, with a limited market economy, anchored in a sometimes fiercely independent peasantry, not always distinguishable from the petty gentry.

When these societies tried to establish democratic institutions after 1989, it was not just an aim of a limited intelligentsia: there were enough memories - some "real", some constructed - in each country's history which were able to become the normative and institutional legitimate anchors of a democratic structure.

On the other hand, none of this had ever existed in Russia. Pre-1917 Russia had almost no ingredients of a civil society (hence the collapse of the 1917 attempt to develop a constitutional structure). There were no representative institutions at central, regional or local level. All power was hierarchically organised and the Orthodox Church was a handmaid of the Czarist autocracy, as were the universities. Religious and ethnic minorities were oppressed and persecuted; there was no tradition of legal political parties, there was no freedom of the press, there was no independent peasantry (serfdom, although abolished in the 1860's, failed to create it), and the commercial and industrial middle classes were extremely small. The only "usable past" open to Russia after 1990 - except the failed western intelligentsia of the 19th century - was autocratic and authoritarian. It is no accident that Peter the Great's portrait adorns Putin's office.

Similar analyses could be undertaken, one by one, of any other post-communist country. While history does not absolutely determine developments - countries like Slovakia and Croatia suggest that in borderline cases there is room for alternative developments - it is certainly an important ingredient. And recent events in the Ukraine are the outcome of internal developments.

This background is necessary to understand the utter hubris of an American policy which thrives to export democracy from the outside to Arab countries (it should be noted that Islam as such is not an insurmountable obstacle to democratic development: look at Turkey, Indonesia, Bangladesh, even the complex picture of Iran). Certainly, imposing democracy by the sword, as the US is trying to do in Iraq, is doomed to failure.

Arab societies in general have been - like Russia, but in a different way - extremely weak in developing a vigorous civil society. And this is the reason - not poverty, or imperialism - why there is no Arab consolidated or functioning democracy, and no serious attempts at democratisation have ever emerged in any Arab country, neither from above, nor from below. There has never emerged an Arab Gorbachev or an Arab Lech Walesa or Vaclav Havel, or an Arab Atatürk.

Thus under occupation democracy in Iraq appears as an alien, Western importation. In post-1945 the Western Allies were able to impose democratic institutions on Germany and Japan, but those countries were totally crushed by war, with their political structures dismantled. Nobody had a problem with the legitimacy of these harsh methods and a prolonged occupation. Such extreme measures could not - and should not - be taken in Iraq. Even those, like myself, who feel that deposing Saddam's regime was justified, would not advocate a Macarthur-like pro-consular regime for Iraq.

Moreover what the Americans have totally overlooked has been the specific nature of the Iraqi body politic. Modern Iraq was stitched together by British imperialists after World War I from three very different provinces of the Ottoman Empire: Mosul (with a Kurdish majority), Baghdad (with a Sunni Arab majority) and Basra (with a Shi'ite Arab majority). For their own reasons, the British rulers put power in the hands of the Sunni Arab minority of about 20 per cent: consequently, Iraqi history has been the history of Arab Sunni coercive hegemonism (of which Saddam's regime was only the most extreme variation). It experienced constant rebellions by the Kurds, the Shi'ites, even the small Christian Assyrian community. Iraq could be held together only by the iron fist.

With the fall of Saddam, this oppressive structure fell apart. The Sunni Arab minority, whose old logistical and command structures have regrouped underground, is waging a brutal war not only against US-led occupation, but also against the Shi'ites and Kurds. It targets Shi'ite holy sites in Kerbala and Najjaf as well as Shi'ite leaders and headquarters of Shi'ite and Kurdish parties. It does not appear that the Sunni Arabs, for decades the lords of the land, are going to give up their traditional hegemony by bowing to the electoral process. On the other hand, neither the Kurds nor the Shi'ites appear to be willing to accept the return of the old Arab Sunni domination. In situation like these, perhaps partition - as in Yugoslavia, but hopefully with less bloodshed - may be the only way out.

Nor will analogies with Afghanistan help. Karzai was able to legitimate his rule through alliances with the regional warlords. This is the old, pre-Taliban country, not a new democratic Afghanistan.

The American attempt to impose democracy on Iraq is based on ignorance and arrogance and will fail. The relatively successful elections on January 30 should not hide the fact that the Sunnis by and large boycotted the elections and view them and their outcome as illegitimate: under such conditions the establishment of a functioning democracy in Iraq is far from assured. Paradoxically it may be Iran, a self-styled Islamic Republic, which may develop many ingredients of democracy. It enjoys a certain tradition of civil society, going back to Persian history, and it is invoking a democratic legitimacy within an Islamic discourse. Iran is obviously not a democracy, but it has (within Islamic limits) contested elections, both presidential and parliamentary, more political rights for women than in any Arab country, and a press and student population struggling to be heard. There is much potential here, based on internal legitimacy.

Perhaps one should quote Karl Marx here, despite the obviously different context. In an 1872 speech to the Socialist International he maintained that the route towards socialism will be different in different countries, saying, "We know that one has to take into consideration the institutions, mores and traditions of different countries". He amplified this in 1877 when asked if capitalism and hence proletarian socialism will necessarily develop in Russia, he admitted that he did not know, it may, or may not, then added:

Events strikingly analogous but taking place in different historical surroundings lead to totally different results. [One has to study] each of these forms of evolution separately … One will never arrive [at an answer] by using as one's master key a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being super-historical.

If only someone at the Pentagon had only read Marx rather than Fukuyama …