by Zack Beauchamp
Foreign policy observers who like to entertain the fantasy that Islamists are democratic forces in the Middle East have the oddest of bedfellows – Binyamin Netanyahu. The Israeli Prime Minister claimed that the bill "reflects democracy in Israel," as Haaretz puts it. But the idea that a bill restricting speech could be democratic relies on precisely the same sort democratic theory that is used to claim Islamists* are genuine democrats.
Defenders of Islamist commitment to democracy rely on the idea that these groups have, in some cases, been willing to participate in electoral politics and accept the outcome of elections as legitimate. This is supposed to signify acceptance of democratic ideals. But, as we all claim to have learned after the Bush Administration, elections do not democracy make.
Real democracy requires that each citizen be meaningfully, not just nominally, capable of participating in democratic politics. Though a state like Russia has elections, restrictions on free speech and anti-government political activities make it quite difficult in practice for there to be real competition over political office. Russia is obviously an extreme case, but it gets the point across – some liberal individual rights are necessary for the elections to be more than just political theater.
Rights other than speech and political association are also intergrally important. If people are to be understood as actually represented by their institutions, they must be able to participate in civil society as their actual selves, as opposed to some circumscribed version acceptable to the state. Without basic rights that protect their ability to participate in society openly and on equal footing with other citizens, they will not be able to advocate for their own interests or support candidates representative of their real ideals. To take another extreme but demonstrative case, laws that make homosexuality punishable by death (a la Saudi Arabia and Iran) are undemocratic because they prevent gays from participating in public life as gays. Fat chance of having a gay rights movement when any gay person who joins it is at risk to be executed.
The point, then, is that individual rights are required for democracy. Islamists who want to restrict the rights of individuals to criticize Islam or the rights of women and gays can never be meaningful democrats because they attempt to curtail the very rights that make democratic participation possible. This would be the case even if the Islamists were legitimately voted into office. Infringements on core individual rights would not magically cease to damage the foundations of democracy because a majority or democratically elected legislature approved of them.
Defending the boycott ban as democratic because the Knesset passed it suffers from precisely this same problem. When a Yisrael Beiteinu MK is using the law to sue an Arab MK for calling for a boycott of products from a certain city – not participating in it, but calling for it – it's clear that the right to political expression integral to democracy is under assault.
This is not to draw a false equivalence between the boycott ban and what Islamist groups want to do to women, gays, and religious minorities. It should be obvious that the latter is much more threatening to democracy, though it's not clear that banning Islamists from elections is the best response to said threat (I would favor legal rights protections of the sort that may end up invalidating the boycott ban). Rather, the point is to illustrate that defenders of either the boycott ban or Islamist parties as genuinely democratic are relying on a theory of democracy that fails to take into the importance of rights for real democracy – a position corrosive of the idea's fundamental moral core.
*I'm aware that there are serious divisions between Islamist groups and organizations, some of which are much closer to being meaningfully democratic than others. But with the questionable exception of Turkey's AKP, I'm unaware of a major Islamist group that's down with robust liberal rights, especially for gays and women. That's why I feel comfortable using the word "Islamist" in general.
The Dish 