written by Cevat Dargin printable version send your friend

Thursday, 22 September 2011

Kenan Engin (Hurriyet Daily News - August 19, 2011) recently suggested that the Arab Spring be called the “fifth wave of democracy.” This struck us as a potentially strong thesis - to link the uprisings in the Arab majority countries to the preceding democratic political transformations in Latin America and Eastern Europe.

The countries involved in the proposed ‘fifth wave’ are all Arab-Islam majority countries. They are authoritarian. A sole, unelected leader, a hegemonic party, and a strong army generally constitute the pillars of the regime. A semi-secular top-down ideology imposed in the name of modernization is also a common feature. According to Daniel Brumberg from Georgetown University (2002), these regimes often are based on a “strategy of survival.” The ‘strategy’ is centered on the inexorable suppression of alternative political formulations. This is made possible through various nationally available and relevant means - the wealth extracted from oil (Libya), or from foreign aid (Egypt), or a tactical manipulation of political, religious and ethnic cleavages (Syria).

The common characteristic of the strategy, however, is (or was, by now) not necessarily the regime structure and means of repression, but the source of legitimacy. Legitimacy of these regimes is not asserted through central government ordering and taxing, and at the same time responding to democratic representation of the will of the people. The state is not a mediating apparatus between the individual and the collective. Rather, the state acts from above and outside any social compact, and imposes its will and claims of legitimacy through autocratic, ruler-obtained leverage against the society.

Whether it is money, collective good or political power; the very origin, and thus the final owner, of these sources of power is the state, not all individual citizens. In practice, there is no difference in outcome for citizens, from the state supported by Gaddafi’s oil, Mubarak’s foreign aid, or Assad’s mastery of power. Besides, not all the Arab majority countries, nor all the Muslim majority countries, have been experiencing the same process of political transformation.

Thus, considering particular qualities of the inhabitants of these countries as the shared reason for the uprisings is self-contradicting. People of those countries rebel, at this time in history, neither because they are Arab nor because they are Muslim. They rebel because politico-economic conditions have brought them to the edge of an abyss, from where there is no escape but to turn to the centuries-old ideals, of ‘freedom’ and ‘dignity’.

The Arab Spring is not a matter of national salvation, a process accelerated by a military victory, the result of an ideological dissolution, or a forced change by an outsider. It is born of those peoples’ calls for freedom and dignity. If there is a commonality among all the ‘waves of democracy’ and the Arab Spring, it can be heard in the universal chanting for freedom and dignity. This chanting asks for restructuring the legitimacy of authority from the one imposed on people toward the one entrusted by them.

The Arab Spring is a revolution, which in the best scenario is expected to create new democracies. Have we turned an historical corner, so that revolutions, seeking to bring about democracy, can no longer be subverted into repressive societies?

Hopefully, we soon will see Engin's “fifth wave of democracy” emerge definitively from the Arab Spring.


* Cevat Dargin (The City University of New York) /Dr. Janet Mindes (Columbia University/New York)

* The author thanks Dr. Janet Mindes of New York City, USA for her helpful comments and editorial assistance.