The Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED) hosted a panel discussion on President Bush’s fiscal year 2009 budget request and the funding increase in democracy and governance programs across the Middle East. The speakers discussed the budget request’s potential impact on U.S. efforts to support democracy in the region; the changes in the international affairs budget request as compared to past fiscal years; and how the request might affect President Bush’s “freedom agenda” legacy. Ambassador Edward Gabriel, President and CEO of The Gabriel Company, LLC, Stephen McInerney, Director of Advocacy for POMED, and Jennifer Windsor, Executive Director of Freedom House, spoke to these issues. POMED’s Executive Director, Andrew Albertson, moderated the event.
Panelists:
Amb. Edward Gabriel, President and CEO of The Gabriel Company, LLC, where he advises multinational corporations on international affairs and domestic policy, and former U.S. Ambassador to Morocco.
Stephen McInerney, Director of Advocacy for the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED) and author of the April 2008 article “The Bush Administration’s Budget and Democracy in the Arab World” in the Carnegie Endowment’s Arab Reform Bulletin.
Jennifer Windsor, Executive Director of Freedom House and former Deputy Assistant Administrator and Director of the Center for Democracy and Governance (now the Office of Democracy and Governance) at the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Moderated by Andrew Albertson, Executive Director, Project on Middle East Democracy
At a panel event entitled “The Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian Regime: Toward Confrontation?” on Monday March 19th, POMED founding member and Associate Shadi Hamid and Dr. Amr Hamzawy, Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, discussed recent issues facing the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Topics discussed included its plans to form a political party, the recent state repression of the group, and the upcoming constitutional referendum in the country.
Shadi Hamid began the discussion with a summary of the current situation for the Brotherhood within Egypt. He stated that situation in the country was getting worse for the Brotherhood as the Mubarak regime was putting on one of the worst crackdowns in the group’s history. Hamid mentioned that severe financial sanctions were being applied to Brotherhood financiers and that the regime may even dissolve Parliament in order to prevent the Muslim Brotherhood from acquiring seats. The upcoming constitutional referendum will try to ban religious political parties and would be seen as a huge blow to the Brotherhood and their political aspirations.
Discussing the Brotherhood specifically, he mentioned that the group announced in January of 2007 that it would form a political party. Hamid stated that, as a political party, the group would have to become more transparent, normalized, and allow for more public accountability. He discussed the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood has tried to modernize its organization. It began a process of democratizing its internal structure, but this was put on hold because of the severe repression from the state. The Brotherhood is currently in survival mode because of the recent crackdown and this has hurt its modernization efforts. Hamid concluded by saying that the Muslim Brotherhood wants to moderate by forming a political party, but the Mubarak regime’s oppression will lead them to radicalize as a group. He mentioned that the current Brotherhood members in Parliament may resign in protest and that the international community has dropped the ball on democracy promotion, leading opposition groups to move away from the mainstream.
Dr. Hamzawy began his discussion with the current regime oppression of the Brotherhood, focusing on the economic crackdown on the group, including the jailing of 29 of the major financiers of the Muslim Brotherhood. He states that this will severely hamper the ability of the group to run election campaigns against the Mubarak administration and it will deal a huge blow to the social services network that Brotherhood operates. Dr. Hamzawy also discussed the different trends within the Muslim Brotherhood leadership. He predicted that those who had been pushing hard for reform and inclusion into political life would be pushed aside by elements that are suspicious of political participation in the midst of the current crackdown.
Dr. Hamzawy also stated that the Mubarak regime wanted to divide up the opposition movements in order to isolate the Brotherhood, its only serious challenger. He said that this was being accomplished by giving opposition parties alternative stakes in the process from the group, thus turning secular parties against the Muslim Brotherhood. The goal would be to prevent a serious opposition movement by prevent cohesion among the different parties. He also mentioned that the Mubarak regime has done a masterful job of questioning the Brotherhood’s dedication to peaceful political participation and forcing them to defend their internal machinations as a political party. This campaign has reignited suspicion of the Muslim Brotherhood in the general populous and the media.
The event was co-sponsored by The Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding and was held on the campus of Georgetown University.
Event Details
Date: March 19, 2007
Panelists
Shadi Hamid
Amr Hamzawy
Downloads
Click here to read POMED’s full notes from the event.
Scholars debated the definition of democracy and discussed the implications of the controversy for democracy promotion efforts in the Middle East during a panel at Georgetown University on April 24, 2006.
Although many discussions of democracy focus on the political developments occurring in particular countries, the panel addressed a more fundamental question: What does the term democracy mean? Does it entail a strict definition of what a government must look like to be called democratic? Or does it represent a more fluid concept that can be adapted to different local circumstances?
Gerard Alexander, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and associate professor at the University of Virginia, expressed skepticism about the more flexible view of democracy. He traced the history of this idea back to the 1960s, when there were regimes that called themselves democratic despite their obvious lack of adherence to democracy. In the following decades, political scientists proposed proceduralist definitions of democracy that required countries to meet certain criteria to be understood as democratic. However, Alexander pointed to several recent examples of democracy promotion practitioners and policymakers who are departing from this trend and reviving the imagery of heavy adaptation to local conditions.
According to Alexander, democracies can vary in the institutional forms and processes used in a particular country. Democracies can also vary enormously in the types of policies that result from these processes, he said, but all of these adaptations are peripheral to the core definition of democracy. He argued that a regime is not democratic unless it effectively makes officeholders accountable to the citizenry. The mechanisms that deliver accountability include competitive elections, freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom of leaders to compete for political support, freedom to access alternative sources of information, and the capability of the government to enforce these freedoms. These mechanisms happen to be the core features of Western democracy, Alexander said, but this is because there is no effective democratic alternative to the Western model.
According to Alexander, democracies can vary in the institutional forms and processes used in a particular country. Democracies can also vary enormously in the types of policies that result from these processes, he said, but all of these adaptations are peripheral to the core definition of democracy. He argued that a regime is not democratic unless it effectively makes officeholders accountable to the citizenry. The mechanisms that deliver accountability include competitive elections, freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom of leaders to compete for political support, freedom to access alternative sources of information, and the capability of the government to enforce these freedoms. These mechanisms happen to be the core features of Western democracy, Alexander said, but this is because there is no effective democratic alternative to the Western model.
While some scholars have argued that these mechanisms can be sustained in virtually all social contexts, Alexander called this idea “deeply naïve” and instead proposed that these mechanisms rely on certain conditions that are not present in every country. He identified three cases in which democracies can fail: polarized societies in which groups would rather fight than lose an election, overpowered states such as rentier states in the Middle East, and underpowered states such as weak or failed states.
For the democracy promotion community, this means that continuing to press for democracy even when conditions are lacking will be ineffective, Alexander said. Their work will be more successful if it aims to promote the underlying conditions required for democratization, he argued.
In contrast, Abdeslam Maghraoui, director of the Muslim World Initiative at the United States Institute of Peace, sharply disagreed with Alexander. Trying to duplicate a precise definition of democracy shows a “lack of imagination,” he said. Instead of attempting to implement a universalist model, it is important to imagine the possibility of diverse patterns of change, different political outcomes, and different forms of accountability, he argued.
The most striking feature of democracy promotion efforts is their lack of sociological imagination, Maghraoui said. For example, the Euro-Mediterranean partnership’s Barcelona Process “produced very limited results” in the area of political reforms because it was based on a flawed assumption that economic growth will lead to political change, and because it was driven by immediate concerns like immigration instead of a long-term commitment to democracy.
U.S. government efforts also suffered from a lack of imagination, he said. U.S. democracy initiatives have been “marred with contradictions” because of their linkage with security concerns. The war on terror requires cooperation with security services that are the backbone of authoritarian regimes, Maghraoui noted, and this assistance undermines political reform. The U.S. should “disassociate democracy from issues of security and stability” because they are contradictory goals, he said.
Several democracy initiatives that have emerged in the Arab world are promising, Maghraoui said, but they do not adequately address important questions such as the role of religion in public life and the process by which these issues will be negotiated. Statements such as the Doha Declaration and the Alexandria Charter discuss the procedural requirement of democracy advocated by Alexander, but they do not go far enough in exploring different processes of democratic change, according to Maghraoui.
Maghraoui suggested that one possible alternative is to “engage Islam, not just Islamists,” to “renew Islamic humanistic values” and encourage reforms in the religious sphere. He cited recent Moroccan reforms in women’s rights, revision of school textbooks, and the formalization of religious authority as successful examples of this approach. While these reforms might not fit the strict definition of democracy, they are substantive measures that can lead to an open, tolerant, and diverse society, he argued. Furthermore, the U.S. government “cannot remain neutral or indifferent” to these types of reforms, Maghraoui said. Moroccans do not want the U.S. to fund these efforts, but U.S. policymakers should support and encourage the reforms, he argued.
The broad, flexible nature of both democracy and Islam present opportunities for alternative interpretations, according to John Voll, the Associate Director of the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University. Democracy and Islam both have a vast repertoire of concepts and symbols which can be adapted to different circumstances depending upon the mode of operation that you use, he said. The terms and symbols of Islam are “sufficiently broad [so as] to articulate a thoroughly authentically Quranic political philosophy of either authoritarian rule or democracy,” depending on the speaker, he said.
Voll said that his experience of participating in New Hampshire town meetings, where political party identification is rejected, shows that there are many different formats and modes of democratic action. Alexander presented a model of adversary democracy, Voll argued, but there are alternative models such as unitary democracy or Athenian-style democracy. The real challenge is to create governing systems that are democratic in the way they tolerate and manage diversity, he said.
The panel was co-sponsored by the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED), Americans for Informed Democracy (AID) and Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS). It was moderated by Jamie Arnett, a M.A. in Arab Studies candidate and Associate in the Project on Middle East Democracy.
“Defining Democracy: Contested Visions of Governance in the Middle East” was the sixth event for POMED, an organization dedicated to examining the impact of U.S. policy on political reform and democratization in the Middle East.
Event Details
Date and Time: September 27, 2007 12:00-2:00pm
Panelists
Geneive Abdo, Century Foundation Fellow and author
Anthony Chang, Deputy Director for the Europe Division of the International Republican Insititute (IRI)
Matthew Frumin, Senior Advisor at the National Democratic Institute
Moderator
Shadi Hamid, POMED Director of Research
Downloads
Right-click or control-click here to download a full MP3 audio transcript file. Or use the controller below to listen to a streaming version:
Click here to read POMED’s full notes from the event.
America should continue to support the development of democracy in the Middle East despite the outcomes of recent elections in Palestine and Egypt, said scholars in a panel at Georgetown University on Feb. 21, 2006.
Both the voting process in Palestine and internal divisions in Fateh inflated the number of seats that Hamas received in the Palestinian parliament, said Daniel Brumberg, an associate professor of government at Georgetown University. In a society like Palestine’s, in which there is no consensus on major issues like the role of religion in governance, said Brumberg, the type of voting system used in this election is unlikely to create consensus and in fact may make divisions even more rigid.
Fateh was “unbelievably disorganized” in this election and disdainful of outside assistance, said Leslie Campbell, the Regional Director of Middle East & North Africa Programs at the National Democratic Institute. Members of the movement frequently expressed the feeling that “we’ll pull it off as we always have,” Campbell said, and kept waiting for someone to save them at the last minute.
Part of the reason that Hamas performed so well was the fragmentation of non-Islamic parties, Brumberg said. In several countries, he explained, liberalized autocracy as a system of government has fragmented the political opposition to ruling regimes, with the partial exception of religious-based parties. Political life in liberalized autocratic states has some degree of openness, and citizens have limited choices, Brumberg said, but the minimal amount of freedom provides no real political space for any alternative “third-way” to the regime on the one hand and to Islamists on the other.
In the past, the U.S. often faced a Hobson’s choice in these scenarios, said Campbell. America, seeing no alternatives to either the current regimes or the Islamic opposition, was reinforced in its determination to support existing autocrats. This vicious circle made it even less likely that alternatives could emerge. But President George W. Bush decisively changed this policy, Campbell argued, and dramatically increased funding for work with democrats in the Middle East.
This policy of supporting democracy has come under attack from both the left and the right with the victory of Hamas and the strong showing of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Campbell noted. To abandon democracy now would be fickle, he argued, in light of the fact that America has only boosted funding for democracy promotion programs over the last 18 months.
“We’ve only begun to head down this road,” he said, noting that the elections in Iraq and Palestine have faced the particular challenges that come with occupation. Campbell also argued that if the Palestinian elections had actually taken place on time, these elections would have been the third or fourth iteration of elections – and perhaps Fateh would have received an earlier wakeup call that would have spurred it to conduct a more effective campaign.
Middle Easterners want the chance to choose those who govern them, said Campbell, and reversing course to put free and fair elections out of bounds would put America in an untenable position. Instead, he suggested first that rather than looking at one election, the America should consider the results of successive iterations of elections, which tend to draw parties towards the center. Second, he argued that the U.S. must respect democratic outcomes, and that “below-the-surface talk of engineering new elections” was discouraging because Hamas won “fair and square.”
Trumpeting the virtues of democracy and then seeking to undo the results of the elections in Palestine is an example of American foreign policy that is rhetorically forward-looking but has become disconnected from Middle East realities, said Casimir Yost, the director of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University. Yost, who observed the recent elections in Palestine, argued that current American policy towards Hamas – to encourage it to abandon violence, accept Israel, and commit itself to the Oslo Agreements between Israel and the PLO – was likely to fail. When it does fail, Yost argued, the alternatives are not good – America will hopefully be able to muddle through, but more likely the situation will break down entirely.
To spur alternatives to authoritarian regimes and Islamist oppositions, Campbell argued that American democracy promotion organizations should redouble their efforts devoted to political party development. The National Democratic Institute spends only about 20% of its funds on political party development, he said, describing the endeavor as “a field that has barely been tried.” Brumberg later suggested that 80% of NDI’s money should be spent on political party development, as opposed to civil society programs that have received a great deal of funding but have proven less effective.
During the question-and-answer period, Tyler Golson, a student in the Arab Studies program, noted that during his time in Syria people frequently said they wanted democracy but didn’t want America to give it to them. In response to his question about how America should promote democracy and what democracy encompasses, Campbell stressed democracy’s basic procedural elements of genuine elections and political parties. Brumberg added that there is no consensus anywhere about what democracy means – casting doubt on the claims of dictators making relativistic arguments that a particular form of government is culturally-specific to their country.
The panel was co-sponsored by the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED), Americans for Informed Democracy (AID) and Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS). It was moderated by Lauren Torbett, a joint J.D. / M.A. in Arab Studies student and Associate in The Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED).
“Counting Votes: U.S. Policy Towards Middle East Elections” was the fifth event for POMED, an organization dedicated to examining the impact of U.S. policy on political reform and democratization in the Middle East.
Event Details
Date: February 21, 2007
Panelists
Daniel Brumberg
Les Campbell
Casimir Yost
Downloads
Click here to read POMED’s full notes from the event.
