While addressing this week’s Iraqi prison break, Jon Lee Anderson zooms out:
Five hundred Al Qaeda terrorists back on the streets can do a lot of damage wherever they choose to go—to Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, or the fragile Jordan, where hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees now live in camps along the border. Martin Kobler, the U.N. envoy to Iraq, warned this week that the likelihood of a regional conflagration was growing: “The problems in Iraq cannot be separated from the problems of the region. The battlefields are merging.”
Kobler is right. The Middle East is more of a powder keg, with more fuses, than it has been in years. Political violence is surging, with regional actors like Saudi Arabia and Iran lining up on opposing sides, and the United States and Russia arrayed behind them.
Sheri Berman considers all the recent tumult in the Middle East “not a bug in political development, but a feature”:
[T]he false starts and problems, the turmoil and the chaos and yes, sometimes even the violence, were an inherent and often necessary part of the process that ultimately abolished authoritarianism and paved the way for liberal democracy. …
What has happened time and again [throughout history] is that a country begins with a nondemocratic regime, proceeds through a phase (or several phases) of minimal or illiberal democratic experience, and eventually emerges with a consolidated liberal democracy. Almost all early democratic experiments around the world were illiberal or deeply problematic, and many ended badly. Only after many generations and attempts were most countries able to consolidate truly liberal democracies–that is, to eradicate deeply ingrained nondemocratic behaviors and attitudes and develop new ways of thinking and acting that would enable liberal democracy to survive and flourish.
Jay Ulfelder pushes back on that argument:
As a grossly simplified description of the democratization trajectories followed by the United States and much of Western Europe, I think this works. As a road map that the rest of the world will eventually follow, however, I’m not so sure. In historical terms, the period during which the US and Europe could confidently be described as “consolidated liberal” democracies has been relatively brief, and some thoughtful observers argue that that era has already passed. What’s more, the geopolitical, economic, demographic, and environmental context in which political development is now occurring differs sharply from the context in which those earlier arcs unfurled, and the pace of change in that context seems to be accelerating still.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m still optimistic that global politics in the twenty-first century will continue to evolve in a more democratic direction. The tumult occurring in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, Kuwait, and other corners of the Arab world is just the latest evidence that it’s getting harder and harder to sustain the kind of full-blown, paternalistic authoritarian rule that was the prevailing form of national politics around the globe throughout the twentieth century. I’m just not as certain as Berman seems to be about exactly what institutional forms that tumult will eventually produce.
The Dish 