Towards a democratisation of the Middle-East?

Résumé du document

The Middle East has traditionally been a region where democracy has never really managed to break through. The times of the caliphs had been replaced by a more or less violent period of colonisation. When the time for decolonisation finally came, most of the states –some more or less artificially created by the Western states and authorities- if not returned back to their old mode of performance, simply embraced authoritarian forms, that still remain nowadays, even if many pressures from the outside but also from the inside tended to make a certain dose of reforms and changes necessary. We could even say that the Middle-East belongs to this group of regions of the world which are the most retarded as far as democratization is concerned. Indeed, we could, when taking a closer look fail to find, a really consolidated democracy in the area, a democracy consolidated for a time long enough to be considered as a real democracy.

Extraits

[...] One of the features of the Middle-East that can bring so many hardships when writing a paper about it is the highly strategic character of the area. The natural reserves in oil made the Middle-East a place of interest for the economically, politically and militarily dominating countries throughout history. This has several consequences concerning the information I could find to write my paper. The first is the scarcity of the information concerning an eventual transition towards more democracy in the region, as far as this transition has in the most fortunate cases only begun to happen, and in the worst cases, it is not democracy is not even an acknowledged concept. [...]

[...] Among other factors, this liberalization of the media entailed a greater politization and consciousness of a part of the Middle-East populations. Nevertheless one should not believe that you have now in the Middle-East countries a freedom of speech comparable to the one you can find in the most advanced Western democracies. (Kéchinian p46-51). Anyway, it didn't prevent some other countries to make significant steps towards democracy. This goes for example from Bahrain which has set up a new Parliament and held legislative elections. [...]

[...] According to Al-Khuthaila (Al-Khuthaila p606) “Arabs [ ] do not reject democracy as an alien word or as an idea incompatible with their own concept of it or with the teaching of their religion.” In other words, Arabs may be looking for democracy, but for their own way of democracy, not necessarily the one the Western world is trying to impose them. And the Saudi elections are by some scholars as completely Saudi in their initiation, implementation and production. In other words, they could be encouraging, because even if they a re not perfect, they are the signs of a (faint?) commitment to democracy. Several explanatory factors are needed to understand the particularities of the region. [...]

[...] We can also point out some other reluctance to democratization, even in a country such as Jordan, which is traditionally considered as one of the most advanced countries in the region as far as democratization is concerned. Indeed, several scholars have laid emphasis on the lacks of the Jordanian democracy. the Arab and Islamic world, some regimes have appropriated the symbols of democratization without the principles” (Milton- Edwards p191). Milton Edwards then describes some of the Jordanian elections as a pure façade, being totally instrumentalized by the Muslim Brotherhood that openly had goals far from democratization. [...]

[...] But the simple act of holding elections doesn't mean that a real democratization process is on it way. In our example of Saudi Arabia, only a little part of the allowed population did actually vote (Al-Khuthaila p606). One could easily account for this situation putting forward the habitus theory of Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu, 1980): voting doesn't come into the habitus of the Saudi citizens, they are not used to voting. In other words, those who don't vote don't do it because they don't feel the practical meaning of the act of vote, voting doesn't really make sense for them. [...]