Myths and Misconceptions of Arab Democracy

Abstract

In the winter of 2001, I was attending an event at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Writer Thomas Friedman had come to speak about the recent peace proposal that Saudi crown prince Abdullah had just launched through him. While I found his story fascinating and was buoyed by its potential, one thing caught my attention. Mr. Friedman said there was “absolutely no other democracy in the Middle East, other than Israel.” At the end of the event, I walked up to Mr. Friedman and suggested to him that Israel was an imperfect democracy and so was Lebanon, but both were democracies nonetheless. Paraphrasing his answer, “Surely, you don’t think a nation under ‘occupation’ (he meant Syrian military presence in Lebanon at the time) can be democratic.”

Needless to say, democracy is an overloaded concept. Historically, it has meant different things to different people. It has been applied to many different formations and, in interaction with different sociocultural traditions and practices, it has produced diverse forms of government some more representative, participatory, and stable than others. Even in Western democracies, there is no consensus on what precisely the concept means and how best to express it as an ideal. There is not even widespread agreement among theorists and practitioners about whether it is a form of government or a method of choosing a government.¹

Amin Saikal