DEMOCRACY FOR ARABS, TOO

  Artículo de Joshua Muravchik en “The Washington Post” del 04.09.2003

George F. Will dismisses the idea that it is America's "duty" to repair the world's broken nations [op-ed, Aug. 17]. But this strike against a fringe position seems merely a diversionary tactic, his real targets being Tony Blair, George W. Bush and neoconservatives who hope to bring democracy to the Middle East as an antidote to terrorism.

Such an approach is folly, says Will, because the social experience of Middle Easterners is so different from that of Anglo-Americans whose "attachment to freedom is . . . the product of complex and protracted acculturation by institutions and social mores that have evolved over centuries that prepared the social ground for seeds of democracy." To believe that democracy can be made to grow in the soil of the Middle East is to believe that "either national cultures do not significantly differ, or they do not matter or they are infinitely malleable under the touch of enlightened reformers."

Although Will strikes a pose of historicity, he ignores most relevant experience. To be sure, it was 561 years from the Magna Carta to the birth of the American republic, the first modern democracy. But over the next 200 years, democracy spread to more than one-third of the world's nations. Then, in the past 30 years, the trend accelerated sharply. Today, according to the authoritative count of Freedom House, 121 of 192 recognized states have freely elected governments.

Granted, only 89 of these 121 meet all the criteria for what Freedom House calls a "free" country. The other 32 are rated as only "partly free." These fledgling democracies may lack a reliable judicial system or a fully free press or may be plagued by corruption or civil strife. Nonetheless, the rulers are chosen in competitive elections, and there is reason to anticipate that democracy will deepen just as it did in the United States after highly imperfect beginnings.

Whether one counts electoral democracies or the shorter list of "free" countries, one finds that democracy has spread far from its cultural origins. There are 30 electoral democracies in Latin America and the Caribbean (of which 21 are rated "free"); 24 in Asia and the Pacific (of which 18 are "free"); and 20 in Africa (11 "free").

As the large number of African states on these lists makes clear, poverty has not proven to be an insuperable obstacle to democratization, although wealth and its concomitants -- a large middle class, high literacy -- make it easier. What does this imply for the Middle East? While there are no meaningful current data for Iraq, such oil-poor Arab countries as Egypt, Syria and Jordan have per capita incomes in the range of $3,500 to $4,000. Is this too low to sustain democracy? Hardly. Of the 121 electoral democracies, 27 have per capita incomes below $3,500. (Eleven of these are "free.") Looking beyond gross domestic product, the U.N. Human Development Index, which factors in life expectancy, literacy, education and the like, shows that Arab states score marginally above the average of developing countries and significantly above those of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

Will's focus, however, is on "culture," not economics or social statistics. Much of what he says aims at straw men. Of course "cultures . . . differ," but so do democracies: The American, French and Japanese systems are disparate, not to mention those of the developing countries. And of course culture "matters," but it is not politically determinative: Scores of countries have gone from dictatorship to democracy or the reverse without a sudden change of culture. Gradually, cultures do change, although perhaps not "infinitely."

A grain of truth in Will's argument: The Muslim world has been little affected by the tide of democratization. Of 22 Arab states, none has an elected government. Among the other 25 predominantly Muslim countries, however, nine are electoral democracies (although only two are "free"). This suffices to disprove that Islam is incompatible with democracy. Might Arab culture be?

Perhaps. But the same was said once of others. The State Department warned President Truman during World War II that "experience [has] shown that democracy in Japan would never work." In the 1920s, as Latin America and southern and Eastern Europe lapsed into dictatorship, analysts pointed to the sense of obedience and hierarchy inculcated by the Catholic Church. Today more than 90 percent of predominantly Catholic countries are electoral democracies.

Until now the United States has refrained from lending its weight to democratization in the Arab world the way it did with considerable success in Eastern Europe and Latin America. We won't know what we can achieve until we try. The reason for doing so there, as elsewhere, is not "duty" but to make the world safer -- not least for ourselves.

The writer is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of "Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism." He will answer questions about this article during a Live Online discussion at 1 p.m. today at www.washingtonpost.com.