For Those in Despair over Democracy . . .

Larry Diamond
Hoover Institute

. . . there's a man here to offer encouragement.

In the FPRI's E-Notes (October 2014), Larry Diamond - Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy - writes on "Reviving the Global Democratic Momentum," thereby offering encouragement and hope for those of us who still believe in the diffusion of liberal values:

If we want to promote democracy in the Arab world for the long run, we should invest very heavily in Tunisia in every possible way, because what the Arab world most needs now is one example of a decent, functioning democracy that can serve as a lesson, an inspiration, and a point of diffusion for the region . . . . I know the counter-argument. There is only so much money. How are we going to help people who have nothing - no financial resources, no protection for their human rights, and little or no democracy - if we dilute the available democracy assistance resources by devoting some of them to countries that are, comparatively, much better off? . . . [And more is needed than money, for] we cannot win the struggle for democracy unless we also wage a vigorous struggle for liberty and human rights. Too many governments in the world - not just blatant autocracies but electoral authoritarian regimes, illiberal democracies, and even some democracies we think of as liberal - are moving backwards to constrain and punish freedom of speech, freedom online, freedom to organize and assemble, and freedom to receive funding from and form partnerships with international democratic actors. We need to use our tools of conventional diplomacy, public diplomacy, aid and trade relations, and other forms of leverage to call out and condemn these regressions, and to try to defend the individuals and organizations that are bravely working to make their societies freer and more accountable . . . . It is a completely false and self-defeating notion to think that, in the era of China's rise and Russia's belligerence, we have no more leverage in the world . . . . Finally, let us always remember one thing, above all else. We have the better set of ideas. Democracy may be receding in practice, but it is still ascendant in peoples' values and aspirations . . . . Democracy remains the only broadly legitimate form of government in the world, and there is a growing hunger - including in authoritarian regimes like China, Iran, Cuba, and Vietnam - to understand what democracy is, and how it can be structured to operate effectively. We need to respond to and stimulate this appetite for democratic understanding. We need a comprehensive effort to translate into a number of critical languages a wide range of philosophical, historical and analytical works on the meaning and forms of democracy, democratic culture, democratic transitions, democratic constitutional designs, electoral systems, political parties, civil society, systems of horizontal accountability, civil-military relations, and so on. We should be arranging to distribute these translated works for free on the Internet, to develop different levels of instruction in democracy for citizens at different levels of knowledge and need, and to offer a wide range of massive, open online courses on various topics and issues related to democracy . . . . We should bet heavily on this battle of information and ideas. It is a battle we can win. The one ultimate trump card we have is the diffuse global recognition that democracy is the ideal form of government, the only permanent basis of ruling legitimacy.

Professor Diamond has much more to say on how to spread democratic ideas, so maybe there's hope. I agree with his basic assumption, that the real battle for democracy is a battle of ideas. Interesting that he doesn't mention Islam or even Islamism - though he refers to the Arab world several times. His emphasis on conducting the battle for ideas through the internet, however, shows that he has Islamists in mind, for that's precisely what they are doing, along with their physical battles for territory, of course.

We might not persuade the jihadis, but we can perhaps counter their efforts to radicalize others. That's the real battle.

Islam and Democracy: Negative Association?

Robert D. Woodberry

Google Images

Through searching the internet for more on Robert D. Woodberry and his work, I came across his doctoral thesis, "The Shadow of Empire: Christian Missions, Colonial Policy, and Democracy in Postcolonial Societies," submitted in 2004 to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for the degree of doctor of philosophy in the Department of Sociology. In that dissertation, I found evidence offered for something I'd been wondering about: the consequences of Islam for democracy:

Past research suggests a strong and consistent negative association between the percent Muslim in a society and the level of political democracy. Muslims societies also have more unstable democratic transitions. (155)

Woodberry cites several scholars on this negative association of Islam and democracy:

Clague, Christopher, Suzanne Gleason, and Stephen Knack. 2001. "Determinants of Lasting Democracy in Poor Countries: Culture, Development, and Institutions."Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 573: 16-41.

Gasiorowski, Mark J. and Timothy J. Power. 1998. "The Structural Determinants of Democratic Consolidation: Evidence from the Third World." Comparative Political Studies. 31(6): 740-771.

Huntington, Samuel P. 1991. The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.

Huntington, Samuel P. 1993. "The Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs. 72(3): 22-49.

Karatnycky, Adrian. 1999. "The 1998 Freedom House Survey: The Decline of Illiberal Democracy." Journal of Democracy. 10: 112-25.

Karatnycky, Adrian. 2003. "Liberty's Advances in a Troubled World." Journal of Democracy. 14(1): 100-13.

Lipset. Seymour Martin. 1994. "The Social Requisites of Democracy Revisited: 1993 Presidential Address." American Sociological Review. 59(1): 1-22.

Midlarsky, Manus I. 1998. "Democracy and Islam: Implications for Civilizational Conflict and the Democratic Peace." International Studies Journal. 42: 485-511.

Woodberry, Robert D. and Timothy S. Shah. 2004. "Christianity and Democracy: The Pioneering Protestants." Journal of Democracy. 15(2): 47-61.

Woodberry does not analyze the reasons for this negative association between Islam and democracy -- though he rather generously allows that it might be due to the lack of Protestant missionizing in Muslim areas, which might otherwise have motivated Muslims to promote education, literacy, civil societies, and more in order to compete with Protestants, as sometimes happened when Protestants opened mission fields in some places, e.g., Catholic areas.

Perhaps some of the scholars Woodberry cites have made suggestions?

Robert D. Woodberry: "The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy"

Robert D. Woodberry
Google Images

In yesterday's blog entry, I noted Robert D. Woodberry's article, "The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy," American Political Science Review Vol. 106, No. 2 May 2012). He seems to have proven his thesis, that stable modern democracies are significantly dependent upon the presence of independent Protestants who missionized various places around the world. I won't deal with his statistical data since I have no competence in that area; I will instead quote extensively from his paper in passages where he offers substantive reasons for why Protestant missions led to democracy. Here's his summary of the argument, which describes the role of nonstate, conversionary Protestants (CPs):

I discuss the following arguments in more detail in the history section, but in brief, CPs such as Protestant missionaries wanted people to be able to read the Bible in their own language and wanted to facilitate lay religious involvement. Thus, as CPs tried to spread their faith, they catalyzed mass education, mass printing, and civil society -- hampering elite attempts to monopolize these resources. Protestants themselves did not always provide the most educational, printing, and civil society resources, but Protestant initiatives spurred others to invest heavily in these areas and to pressure governments to create schools that restricted Protestant content. These resource transfers to non-elites helped alter the class structure, fostered the rise of political parties and nonviolent political movements, and facilitated broader political participation.

In addition, Nonconformists (i.e., non-state-supported Protestant denominations) historically suffered from discrimination and persecution by governments and state churches. Thus they fought for religious liberty and against state interference in civil society. In addition, both Evangelicals in state churches and Nonconformists wanted a "converted clergy." Thus in the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries, CPs generally sided with Enlightenment elites against state churches and their conservative allies. When they lacked this religious support, Enlightenment elites had a small power base and typically set up either autocratic or unstable and illiberal democratic regimes.

Finally, nonstate missionaries moderated colonial abuses, particularly when abuses undermined conversions and in British colonies (where CPs had greater influence). To reach their religious goals, nonstate missionaries punished abusive colonial officials and counterbalanced white settlers, which fostered the rule of law, encouraged less violent repression of anticolonial political organization, and facilitated peaceful decolonization. Of course, Protestant economic and political elites were as selfish as anyone else. Protestant slaveowners fought slave literacy, and Protestant settlers exploited indigenous people; however, when missionaries were financially independent of the state, of slaveowners, and of white settlers, missionaries undermined these elite co-religionists in ways that fostered democracy. (246a)

Woodberry's thesis is not entirely straightforward. The particular circumstances, as much as religious beliefs, shaped nonstate, conversionary Protestantism's activities. But the CPs did play a significant role:

Those who doubt the religious roots of democracy typically overemphasize its Athenian, Enlightenment, and Deist roots. However, religious factors are also important. Modern democracy differs greatly from Athenian democracy, and Enlightenment theorists incorporated many legal and institutional innovations from earlier religious movements. In fact, arguments for political pluralism, electoral reform, and limitations of state power were originally framed in religious terms.

For example, Calvinists tried to reconstruct states along "godly" lines and limit sinful human institutions. Perhaps as a result, most Enlightenment democratic theorists came from Calvinist families or had a Calvinist education, even if they were either not theologically orthodox or personally religious (e.g., John Locke, Rousseau, Hugo Grotius, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Patrick Henry, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton), and they secularized ideas previously articulated by Calvinist theologians and jurists. For example, Hobbes' and Locke's social contracts are secular versions of Puritan and Nonconformist covenants, and Locke's ideas about the equality of all people are explicitly religious.

Although stated in secular form, the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights derive most directly from earlier colonial covenants, compacts, and bills of rights that were generally justified explicitly in biblical and theological terms; many were written before Hobbes and Locke expounded their ideas. Only 7 of the 27 rights enumerated in the U.S. Bill of Rights can be traced to major English common law documents. Even between 1760 and 1805, political writings quoted the Bible more often than either Enlightenment or classical thinkers (34% versus 22% and 9%, respectively).

Furthermore, the strength of Calvinism and Non-conformism better predicts where democracy emerged than does the strength of Greek and Enlightenment influence. (248a)

I wonder if these numbers cover the substantive story that needs to be fleshed out. Perhaps the Bible was cited more because it held more authority for most people, not because it contained democratic ideas. In other words, secular and Enlightenment views may have 'borrowed' the cloak of religious authority to make their position more persuasive. This assumes, of course, that the Bible is vague enough -- on the political system it supports -- for democratic ideas to be read into the text. Nevertheless, the impact of CPs was real:

One mechanism through which CPs dispersed power was massively expanding access to printed material and news. Scholars often claim that printing and capitalism birthed the public sphere and that the public sphere in turn enabled democracy. CPs greatly accelerated the development of mass printing, newspapers, and the public sphere for several reasons. First, CPs changed people's ideas about who books were for. According to CPs, everyone needed access to "God's word" -- not just elites. Therefore, everyone needed to read, including women and the poor. Moreover, books had to be inexpensive and in language that was accessible to ordinary people, not in foreign languages or classical versions of local languages. Second, CPs expected lay people to make their own religious choices. They believed people are saved not through sacraments or group membership but by "true faith in God"; thus, each individual had to decide which faith to follow. CPs used printed material to try to convert people, which forced other groups to use such materials to compete for ordinary people’s allegiance. This competition helped give rise to mass printing. (249a)

The principle of free individual choice clearly played a huge role, sometimes by example:

CPs advocated mass literacy so that everyone could read the Bible and interpret it competently. Their attempt to convert people through education threatened other elites and spurred these elites to also invest in mass education. (251a)

These are all plausible explanations, but Christianity in general -- if we include Catholics and Orthodox -- would not seem, in itself, to be obviously conducive to the development of stable democracies. In fact, state-supported Protestantism seems to have been as nonconducive to the development of stable democracies as were Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Two things, I think, remain to be done: 1) detailing the ideological links between stable democracies and the religious beliefs of independent Protestants to show how these religious views supported the secular ones, and 2) explaining in detail how the democratic character of these religious beliefs arose within the context of a Western Christendom that had never been especially democratic. These are important for a bigger question that interests me, namely, whether or not Christianity, in general, was in some way more conducive to the emergence of modernity.

In other words, is there something about Christianity -- in contradistinction to, say, Islam or Buddhism or Hinduism -- that makes its democratic reinterpretation more easily accomplished?

Protestant Missions and Democracy?

Missionary Men
Alice Seeley Harris / Panos Archives
Christianity Today

Andrea Palpant Dilley, writing "The Surprising Discovery About Those Colonialist, Proselytizing Missionaries" (Christianity Today, January 8, 2014), has something of genuine significance to report on the unexpected findings of one contemporary scholar, a sociologist named Robert Woodberry:

One afternoon . . . [in graduate school, Woodberry] attended a required lecture . . . . by Kenneth A. Bollen, a UNC–Chapel Hill professor and one of the leading experts on measuring and tracking the spread of global democracy. Bollen remarked that he kept finding a significant statistical link between democracy and Protestantism. Someone needed to study the reason for the link, he said.

Woodberry knew that he'd found his vocation:

Soon he found himself descending into the UNC–Chapel Hill archives in search of old data on religion. "I found an atlas [from 1925] of every missionary station in the world, with tons of data," says Woodberry with glee. He found data on the "number of schools, teachers, printing presses, hospitals, and doctors, and it referred in turn to earlier atlases. I thought, Wow, this is so huge. This is amazing" . . . . Woodberry set out to track down the evidence for Bollen's conjecture that Protestant religion and democracy were somehow related. He studied yellowed maps, spending months charting the longitude and latitude of former missionary stations. He traveled to Thailand and India to consult with local scholars, dug through archives in London, Edinburgh, and Serampore, India, and talked with church historians all over Europe, North America, Asia, and Africa.

Not just a vocation, but a vacation, too -- albeit a working one -- and an important trip:

In essence, Woodberry was digging into one of the great enigmas of modern history: why some nations develop stable representative democracies -- in which citizens enjoy the rights to vote, speak, and assemble freely -- while neighboring countries suffer authoritarian rulers and internal conflict. Public health and economic growth can also differ dramatically from one country to another, even among countries that share similar geography, cultural background, and natural resources.

In 2001, he noticed something significant in pursuing these differences:

In search of answers, Woodberry traveled to West Africa in 2001. Setting out one morning on a dusty road in Lomé, the capital of Togo, Woodberry headed for the University of Togo's campus library. He found it sequestered in a 1960s-era building. The shelves held about half as many books as his personal collection. The most recent encyclopedia dated from 1977. Down the road, the campus bookstore sold primarily pens and paper, not books.

"Where do you buy your books?" Woodberry stopped to ask a student.

"Oh, we don't buy books," he replied. "The professors read the texts out loud to us, and we transcribe."

Across the border, at the University of Ghana's bookstore, Woodberry had seen floor-to-ceiling shelves lined with hundreds of books, including locally printed texts by local scholars. Why the stark contrast?

The reason was clear: During the colonial era, British missionaries in Ghana had established a whole system of schools and printing presses. But France, the colonial power in Togo, severely restricted missionaries. The French authorities took interest in educating only a small intellectual elite. More than 100 years later, education was still limited in Togo. In Ghana, it was flourishing.

His advisor, Christian Smith, cautioned him:

What began to emerge was a consistent and controversial pattern -- one that might damage Woodberry's career, warned Smith. "I thought it was a great, daring project, but I advised [him] that lots of people wouldn't like it if the story panned out," Smith says. "For [him] to suggest that the missionary movement had this strong, positive influence on liberal democratization -- you couldn't think of a more unbelievable and offensive story to tell a lot of secular academics."

His faith was strong, but he needed proof:

Woodberry was equipped to do something no one else had done: to look at the long-term effect of missionaries using the wide-angle lens of statistical analysis . . . . [He] created a statistical model that could test the connection between missionary work and the health of nations. He and a few research assistants spent two years coding data and refining their methods. They hoped to compute the lasting effect of missionaries, on average, worldwide . . . . One morning, in a windowless, dusty computer lab lit by florescent bulbs, Woodberry ran the first big test. After he finished prepping the statistical program on his computer, he clicked "Enter" and then leaned forward to read the results.

"I was shocked," says Woodberry . . . . "The impact of missions on global democracy was huge. I kept adding variables to the model -- factors that people had been studying and writing about for the past 40 years -- and they all got wiped out. It was amazing. I knew, then, I was on to something really important."

But he wanted to be sure:

Determined to be his own greatest skeptic, Woodberry started measuring alternative theories using a technique called two-stage least-squares instrumental variable analysis . . . . "[The theory] kept on holding up" . . . . Woodberry's results essentially suggested that 50 years' worth of research on the rise of democracy had overlooked the most important factor.

And what do other scholars think of Woodberry's work:

In spite of Smith's concerns, Woodberry's historical and statistical work has finally captured glowing attention. A summation of his 14 years of research -- published in 2012 in the American Political Science Review, the discipline's top journal -- has won four major awards, including the prestigious Luebbert Article Award for best article in comparative politics. Its startling title: "The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy."

Similar to Max Weber's thesis on Protestantism and capitalism, but much better grounded! My question is: "Why did Protestantism have this effect?"

Anyway, fascinating . . . to learn that Annie Lennox was wrong!

Quote of the Election Day - Sheik Khatib al-Idrissi

Sheik Khatib al-Idrissi

Google Images

Neil MacFarquhar reports in the International Herald Tribune that "2 brands of Islam vie for pulpits of Tunisia" (November 6, 20012), and he quotes Sheik Khatib al-Idrissi on democracy in Tunisia:

"If the majority is ignorant of religious instruction, then they are against God . . . . If the majority is corrupt, how can we accept them. Truth is in the governance of God." (page 4a)

The good sheik is a Salafi Muslim -- the strictest kind -- and he means that "Truth is the governance of God" as he, Sheik Khatib al-Idrissi, interprets the rules of sharia.

Meanwhile, in the land that's the source of all corruption -- America -- a democratic election is taking place, and one-half or the other is going to have some sympathy for the sheik's point of view, namely, that the majority is corrupt, maybe even against God!

I can scarcely wait to see which side I'm on . . .

Europe's Integration Problems

Dani Rodrik

Homepage

A year ago last fall, as some may remember, I taught a course on European integration, focusing on cultural issues, mainly, but touching upon some economic and political points, e.g., the Euro as common currency without the equivalent of America's Federal Reserve system to oversee a common monetary policy and without a political center to make fiscal policy. Not that I foresaw any of the current difficulties -- I am too ignorant of economics for that. Others predicted such risks, of course, and the contemporary economic problems in Europe have a way of focusing one's mind, so I've learned to appreciate reading what economists write, even taking a certain grim pleasure -- though not shadenfreude -- in their vocabulary of misery:

So, let's say you have mastered the euro zone concept of "financial contagion." Maybe you even know a thing or two about the euro "doom loop," in which sickly banks and indebted governments threaten to drag each other down a death spiral.

Time now to learn a new buzzword, one that captures the anxieties of those seeking long-term stability for the euro currency union: "trilemma."

The term, coined a dozen years ago by a Harvard University economist writing about the global economy, has come to encapsulate the awkward political options confronting the 17 euro zone countries.

To make the currency union work for the long haul, euro countries' heads of state have generally concluded that they must more fully integrate their economies. But within their own countries, the political leaders have only shallow support for that idea, if not outright resistance, from voters.

According to the trilemma theory, drawn in part from studies of the economic crises of 1930s and 1940s, it is possible to have two of three things: deep economic integration, democratic politics and autonomous nation-states.

But under the theory, it is not possible to have all three.

Lovely terminology: financial contagion, doom loop, trilemma. And ever notice how the word "terminology" sounds so . . . terminal? As though the end is near? But to get back to the trilemma noted by Stephen Castle in this article, "Euro Zone Nations Wrestle With a 'Trilemma'" (New York Times, July 6, 2012). This trilemma has been articulated by the above-depicted Dani Rodrik, Harvard Economist, who also proposes a resolution:

So how does Mr. Rodrik, the Harvard economist, propose that Europe resolve its trilemma?

A solution, in his view, might involve giving Greek, Spanish and Italian voters a greater say over euro zone decisions through a transnational system of democracy.

"This would be something like the U.S. federal system . . . in which the federal government doesn't bail out state governments but looks after residents of Florida, California, etc. directly because they are represented through their congressmen and senators."

He might have added that the bicameral American federal system offers a democratic compromise in return for the loss of individual, autonomous nation-state sovereignty. Each state would have both 'congressmen' and 'senators' who represent the people of their respective nations. Moreover, the 'senators,' who constitute the upper chamber of the bicameral legislature, would retain for each state a degree of state authority (not quite autonomy, of course) and a measure of state power even for states with small populations, so as to not let them be swallowed up in the political system by the democratic power of states with large populations.

But this doesn't so much resolve the trilemma (if a resolution means retaining all three horns) as offer a compromise in return for the loss of nation-state autonomy, and individual European nations might be unwilling to accept that.

Greek Election Bears a Gift for Europe?

Euro Sign of the Times
NYT Image

Everyone's asking about the meaning of the recent Greek vote. Markets swung up high and down low in confused reaction. Let me clarify this for the markets. The Greek vote tells us that misery loves company. Why fail alone when you can fail with about half a billion other folks?

But will the EU really fail?

Success requires more centralization in monetary, fiscal, and political terms, but that would demand each state to give up individual sovereignty, which they might all be loath to do. The future of the EU may have just come down to a democratic vote in Greece, but the voices urging more centralization might insist that the technocrats take charge for now, with a promise of greater democracy for the EU further down the road toward stability.

That would be a risky promise to bank upon.

Murad Wahba on Democracy and the Islamists . . .

Murad Wahba

Memri Special Dispatch Nr. 4744

The Egyptian philosopher Murad Wahba -- a Copt, if I've found the right source -- was recently interviewed on Sada Al-Balad TV on April 20, 2012, translated courtesy of Memri Special Dispatch No. 4744 (May 21, 2012), and I've summarized his remarks on the Islamists in Egypt and what they have in store if they attain power. He first offers his views on democracy:

Democracy has four components . . . : Secularism and relative thinking . . . [and] a social covenant . . . [and e]nlightenment . . . . Enlightenment is thwarted all the time . . . . [Islamists] eradicate any sign of rational thinking. As for liberalism -- there is no room for individualism.

I'm not sure which of these are the four components -- I count as many as seven -- but I find odd that he doesn't mention rule of law, human rights, political equality, or the ballot, plus a number of other things that I would consider essential to democracy. Perhaps that is often the way with interviews -- they broach some point, only to meander away from it. Nevertheless, Wahba offers an apt warning about the Muslim Brotherhood:

If . . . the Muslim Brotherhood takes over the state institutions, it will mean the Islamization of the country and of society. When that happens, the army, which is a state institution, will undergo Islamization willy-nilly . . . . [Therefore, i]f the Muslim Brotherhood takes over the presidency, it will herald the beginning of a comprehensive process of Islamization, from top to bottom."

He's right. The Islamists will not rush, of course. Sharia requires time, enough time for the young to be indoctrinated and willing to support the more brutal of Islam's laws on criminal punishment, namely, the hudud penalties.

But even before introduction of the hudud laws, Sharia would forbid equality of men and women, Muslim and Christian, believer and infidel . . .

By bullet if not ballot . . .

Al-Misri al-Yawm

Wikipedia

The Arab Spring threatens to turn unseasonably hot, as we learn from the Egyptian newspaper Al-Misri al-Yawm (The Egyptian Today), by way of Michael Rubin, "Islamists Threaten Insurgency Should Secularists Win Egypt Election" (Commentary, May 20, 2012). Rubin tells us:

On May 19, Islamic Jihad Organization member Shaykh Usamah Qasim took to the pages of Al-Misri al-Yawm to warn that Islamists would not tolerate a victory by any of the non-Islamist candidates.

Quoting directly from Al-Misri al-Yawm (translation via Open Source Center):

The victory of former prime minister Ahmad Shafiq or former Arab League chief Amr Musa in the coming presidential elections would lead some Islamic and non-Islamic groups to respond with "armed action." "Thus, the fate of any of them who reaches the presidency will be like that of former President Anwar al-Sadat, who was assassinated," Qasim said.

In other words if the non-Islamists win . . . they lose.

Thomas F. Farr: Blasphemy and Democracy in the Islamic World

Thomas F. Farr

Berkley Center

Thomas Farr, director of the Religious Freedom Project at Georgetown University's Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, has written a review for Christianity Today of Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes are Choking Freedom Worldwide (Oxford University Press), a recently published book by Paul Marshall and Nina Shea. The review, titled "Islam's Inquisitors: A Review of 'Silenced'" (December 29, 2011), first introduces us to the authors:

Having collaborated for several years, first at Freedom House and currently at the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom, the pair brings to the subject a remarkable background in research and advocacy. Marshall is in many respects the intellectual godfather of the fight for international religious freedom. His 2007 Religious Freedom in the World was the first attempt to provide a comparative index of religious liberty that measured the performances of key countries. And Shea has pioneered activism on behalf of the victims of persecution, while maintaining a steady stream of trenchant writings on the subject. Of late, she has directed much of her fire at the failures of Saudi Arabia to remove toxic Wahhabist principles from its textbooks.

I was familiar with the author's names, though perhaps readers are not, but I've not read much by either, probably just an article or two over the years since 9/11. Their interest in religious freedom dovetails with that of Farr, so in drawing from the review, we'll likely be getting the views of all three combined. Farr notes that Western countries in the past also had blasphemy laws, some of these still being on the law books but largely unenforced, and that today's Christians generally support the position "that all religious communities have the right to make their truth claims freely and publicly, and to win converts where those claims are persuasive." Such a position does not find common ground with most Muslims:

The lands of Islam, however, are still far from embracing this aspect of religious liberty. Blasphemy continues to be criminalized throughout the Muslim nations of the greater Middle East, Africa, and South and East Asia. Converts from Islam -- apostates -- are often imprisoned, tortured, or murdered. Under the aegis of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Muslim nations have for years attempted to internationalize the treatment of blasphemy as a crime.

Apparently, this obvious fact still comes as a surprise to many Westerners, though not to Farr, Marshall, or Shea. The problem of religious persecution has broader implications, for Farr tells us that "there is mounting evidence that religious liberty is necessary for the stability and longevity of democracy in highly religious societies, and for the defeat of religion-based terrorism." I find the link between religious freedom and democracy intuitively obvious, but I do wish that Farr had provided some detailed evidence for the point. Pakistan would likely offer a lot of evidence for the link, for the mere accusation of blasphemy appears sufficient to get the accused killed. The Islamists shoot first and ask no questions later. God will sort the innocent out from the guilty, I suppose.

In such a society as Pakistan's, clearly, an accusation of blasphemy can be used against any opponent merely by claiming that some of the opponent's views on any topic whatsoever, religious or not, are inherently blasphemous. Now Pakistan is hardly an example of a country with a rule of law, but what of more orderly Islamic countries, say one where legal processes based on sharia are more orderly in judging words and actions? Unfortunately, Islam has a rather broad concept of blasphemy. Whereas in the West, "Blasphemy has been understood classically as manifesting contempt for God or, worse, assuming the attributes of God," in the Islamic world, any criticism of Muhammad is also blasphemy, so if one dare even question the moral propriety of Muhammad having consummated his marriage to Aisha when she was only nine years old, one can be put to death. Since Islam is based on the Qur'an as the direct word of Allah and the on the words and deeds of the Muslim prophet Muhammad as the perfect human being, then any criticism or questioning of some purportedly Islamic position could easily get the speaker charged with blasphemy. By extension, any words that might be construed as advocating views incompatible with Islam could get the speaker accused of blasphemy. The Muslim concept of blasphemy is thus implicitly a very far-reaching one, boundlessly elastic in what it can be stretched to cover.

I therefore suspect that readers can easily see how laws against blasphemy would dampen free speech and counter democratic practices.

Timur Kuran: Shariah and Weak Civil Society

Allah

(Image from Wikipedia)

I've previously blogged on Timur Kuran's critique of Islamic law for its deleterious effect upon economics due to its rules concerning inheritance, as reported by Nicholas Kristof, but Kuran has his own article now, one worth noting on the negative consequences of Shariah for civil society: "The Weak Foundations of Arab Democracy" (New York Times, May 28, 2011). In this article, he begins by noting the role of dictators in keeping civil society weak within Arab lands, but he goes on to observe that:

. . . the handicaps of Arab civil society also have historical causes that transcend the policies of modern rulers. Until the establishment of colonial regimes in the late 19th century, Arab societies were ruled under Shariah law, which essentially precludes autonomous and self-governing private organizations. Thus, while Western Europe was making its tortuous transition from arbitrary rule by monarchs to democratic rule of law, the Middle East retained authoritarian political structures. Such a political environment prevented democratic institutions from taking root and ultimately facilitated the rise of modern Arab dictatorships.

As in the previous article by Kristof, which I blogged about on March 8, 2011, Kuran notes that:

Strikingly, Shariah lacks the concept of the corporation, a perpetual and self-governing organization that can be used either for profit-making purposes or to provide social services. Islam's alternative to the nonprofit corporation was the waqf, a trust established in accordance with Shariah to deliver specified services forever, through trustees bound by essentially fixed instructions. Until modern times, schools, charities and places of worship, all organized as corporations in Western Europe, were set up as waqfs in the Middle East.

A corporation can adjust to changing conditions and participate in politics. A waqf can do neither. Thus, in premodern Europe, politically vocal churches, universities, professional associations and municipalities provided counterweights to monarchs. In the Middle East, apolitical waqfs did not foster social movements or ideologies.

Kuran makes other related and fascinating points about Shariah's shortcomings in preventing Islamic Civilization from entering into the modern world, and he's the sort of scholar one ought to read as Shariah becomes a larger, potent force around the globe, for he is of an Islamic background, an ethnic Turk born in New York City to a scholarly family, and cannot easily be dismissed as an 'Islamophobe'.

I really ought to read more of what he's written, his scholarly work, for instance . . .

The West's Success: 'Caesarean Section'?

Julius Caesar

(Image from Wikipedia)

Not so long ago, I blogged about Niall Ferguson's book Civilization: The West and the Rest, which I've not read, of course, but I did read up on Ferguson's views and learned about his 'killer apps' -- as readers will recall.

More recently, my friend Malcolm Pollack blogged on Ferguson's report from China (which may appear in his book), posting a passage on what a scholar from the Chinese Academy of the Social Sciences wrote about the West's success:

We were asked to look into what accounted for . . . the success, in fact, the pre-eminence of the West all over the world. We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective. At first we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past 20 years we have realised that the heart of your culture is your religion. Christianity.

I had posted some words on this quote myself, so I was ready to discuss it some more if anyone should express interest. Others do appear interested, for Malcolm noted that Dennis Mangan is also curious about the passage. Malcolm even posted a comment to Mangan's blog entry on the topic:

I wondered if the Chinese scholar himself had said any more about why this should be so: about what, exactly it was about Christianity that they thought best explained. As it turns out, the next line of the quoted passage reads . . . "The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don't have any doubt about this" . . . . I'd still like to know more. In what way, specifically -- by what mechanism -- did these scholars think that Christian morality accounted for the West's flamboyant (and flamboyantly capitalistic!) success?

There are two parts to this. First, the "emergence of capitalism". What about Christian morality uniquely fosters capitalism?

Then there's the "transition to democratic politics". Implicit in this is the remarkable assertion (for a Chinese scholar to make in public, at least) that democracy is a key factor in our global domination. And of course Christianity explicitly distinguishes between God and Caesar. But again: why do you suppose the Chinese Academy of the Social Science concluded that Christian morality is more conducive to democracy than to collective socialism?

I don't know why this academy drew this conclusion, but I have my own theory about how Christianity contributed to the West's secular success, and I think that this success turns upon the point noted by Malcolm, the crucial distinction between God and Caesar, so I commented:

I think that embedded in Christianity -- it's there in the foundational texts -- is a distinction between the sacred and the secular, and thus religion and state, in which the secular is allowed its legitimate place, a distinction that enabled the development of secular laws not subject to religious control, and therefore amendable according to what would work pragmatically, the long-term result being the rise of a powerful, free society that rested upon religiously based legitimacy and was therefore free from religious challenge . . . in principle.

How do other religions compare?

Islam is surely the prime example of a religion that refuses legitimacy to the secular, and look at the results.

Even Confucianism -- let's take it as a religion -- imposes a morally based system of ritual upon all of society, including the state, from which no detail escapes.

I leave a full comparison to these and other religions as homework.

One might object that this analysis implies that not Christianity, but rather its absence, is responsible for the power of the West. That objection fails to grasp that this outcome was the consequence of a deeply Christian principle, the already noted distinction between God and Caesar.

Or so I think . . .

In other words, the West's success rests upon a religiously sanctioned absence of religion, an absence that depends upon a particular religion, specifically Christianity, for the divinely granted condition that provides the absence its legitimacy, the condition being that so long as God gets what is owed Him, Caesar gets what is owed him.

The operative question is that of what, in both cases, is owed, which is where things get complicated, but in principle . . .

Friedrich Naumann Foundation's 2010 Freedom Prize: Necla Kelek

Freedom Prize for Necla Kelek

Awarded by Friedrich Naumann Foundation

Ms. Kelek flanked by Wolfgang Gerhardt und Jürgen Morlok

(Image from Friedrich Naumann Stiftung)

I've mentioned in a few blog posts that I met my wife partly through the auspices of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, for we accidentally sat next to each other on a train headed for that foundation's orientation seminar after we had been awarded doctoral research grants. We were sponsored by the Naumann for three years and attended numerous seminars on free enterprise, democracy, and human rights, among other topics of concern for the foundation. At the time, multiculturalism was a much debated concept, but what had not yet become clear, to me anyway, was the distinction between a moderate multiculturalism intrinsic to Europe and a radical multiculturalism extrinsic to it.

I'm scheduled to teach a course next semester at Ewha Womans University for the Division of International Studies on European unification and some of its difficulties, so I've been looking into these issues, which include radical multiculturalism and its denial of universal values. I was therefore interested to note that the Naumann Foundation has awarded its 2010 Freedom Prize (Freiheitspreis) to the Turkish-German feminist Necla Kelek.

In her acceptance speech, "Let's Speak about Freedom" ("Lassen Sie uns über Freiheit sprechen"), Ms. Kelek notes a problem posed for human rights by Islamism in Europe, which I translate somewhat loosely below:

Human dignity, equality between men and women, freedom of expression, conscience and religion, of assembly and freedom of association, the separation of church and state were thenceforth [i.e., after the liberal Revolution of 1848] principles of European society. Although delayed [in full acceptance], equality and freedom came to be reflected in [European] constitutions and laws, and they shaped the value orientation of civil society and constituted European identity, and constitute it even now. Political Islam -- and I mean, for example, the 45 states [actually 57] of the Organization of the Islamic Conference -- place human rights under the rule of sharia, Islam's divine law. The Islamic organizations in Germany emphasize their retention of sharia. Islam and Islamism are thus difficult to separate from each other, for a rejection of secularism and the culture of the West has not only a militant variant, but is at the core of the policy of almost all Islamic institutions.

(Die Würde des Menschen, die Gleichberechtigung von Mann und Frau, Meinungsfreiheit, Gewissens- und Religionsfreiheit, Versammlungs- und Koalitionsfreiheit, die Trennung von Staat und Religion waren fortan Prinzipien der europäischen Gesellschaft und Gleichheit und Freiheit schlugen sich mit Verzögerung in den Verfassungen und Gesetzen nieder und prägten die Wertorientierung der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft, machten und machen die Identität Europas bis heute aus. Der politische Islam -- und ich meine damit zum Beispiel die 45 Staaten der islamischen Konferenz -- stellen die Menschenrechte unter den Vorbehalt der Scharia, ihres göttlichen Rechts. Auch die Islamverbände in Deutschland betonen den Scharia-Vorbehalt. Es ist deshalb schwer, Islam und Islamismus voneinander zu trennen, denn die Ablehnung der Säkularität und der Kultur des Westens hat nicht nur eine militante Variante, sondern ist Kern der Politik fast aller islamischen Institutionen.)

In stating that "Islam and Islamism are . . . difficult to separate from each other, for a rejection of secularism and the culture of the West has not only a militant variant, but is at the core of the policy of almost all Islamic institutions," Ms Kelek touches on an issue that I've also broached, namely, my view that Islamism is radicalism at the core of Islam.

Unfortunately, I lack time today to go further into this speech and its issues, but for those who know German and wish to read more, there's a pdf of the original speech at the Naumann site (as noted above, and also videos). An edited German version titled "Aus Muslimen müssen freie Bürger werden" ("Muslims Must Become Free Citizens") appears in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (November 9, 2010), so if one knows no German, then one can easily copy and paste at Google Translate and get a fairly decent translation.

One can also read a complete English translation of the FAZ edited version at the blog Gates of Vienna, and there may be other sites, possibly translating the original version, but I've not yet found any.

Dictator Lee Myung-bak Imposes Majority Vote!

Representative Democracy in Korea

Photo by Yonhap News

(Image from JoongAng Daily)

Who needs The Onion for news when you've got the legislative actions of the Korean National Assembly being reported on? Ser Myo-ja, reporting for the JoongAng Daily, already knows how to do irony: "Yearly budget brawl rocks Assembly" (December 9, 2010).

This actually is a yearly event. The South Korean National Assembly literally brawls each December over the upcoming year's budget. Why don't they just vote and get it over with, you ask? What?! And let the majority win? No way:

The fierce battle began on Tuesday night, two days before the end of the regular legislative session. About 200 lawmakers and staffers of the Democratic, Democratic Labor and New Progressive parties entered the main lobby of the National Assembly building Tuesday evening vowing to deter the ruling Grand National Party from passing the budget bill with its parliamentary majority. Opposition members blocked entrances to the main chamber and to the meeting room of the budget committee in order to stop deliberation and voting. (Italics mine.)

Let the majority outvote the minority? Unlike the use of physical force, that would be undemocratic:

Shortly after the ruling party approved the budget bill, Democratic Party spokeswoman Cha Young issued a statement condemning the action. "The passage of the budget bill indicates the birth of dictator Lee Myung-bak," Cha said. "Lee is no different from North Korea. North Korea fired a gunshot at the Korean people's hearts. Lee fired a gunshot at the Korean people's pride."

One sees why Cha Young holds the position of spokeswoman for the Democratic Party, given her way with words. I wonder if her turn of a phrase sounds as remarkable in Korean as in English.

But why -- you may well wonder -- is a majority vote undemocratic? Because the majority Grand National Party voted against the Democratic Party. Hence, by definition, the vote was un-Democratic. There's a sort of logic to that . . . a circular logic, of course, but that's the sort of logic least amenable to disproof. Q.E.D.

Some days, this blog just writes itself.

Scott Burgeson on Korea's Anti-Democratic Left

2008 Anti-FTA Protests

(Image from Wikipedia)

Long-time Korea resident Scott Burgeson has published an online article, "A Stranger in Chongno" (hat tip, Robert Koehler), analyzing the anti-democratic character of the Leftist street protests of 2008, which were aimed at reversing the Free Trade Agreement between South Korea and the United States and at bringing down the pro-American Lee Myung-bak administration. Burgeson's explication of the Korean Left's irrational anti-Americanism is particularly persuasive because he himself is on the Left and in fact started out covering the protests as a sympathizer, a position made clear in a letter to the International Herald Tribune (cf. NYT) on June 19, 2008:

As a long-term American resident of South Korea, I have often been perplexed by extreme manifestations of Korean nationalism on both sides of the demilitarized zone. However, I think Philip Bowring missed the mark in 'A potent, troubling nationalism' (Views, June, 16), by overstating the anti-American and nationalistic aspects of protests over resumption of U.S. beef imports in South Korea.

Fears of beef tainted with Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or BSE -- while legitimate to a certain extent -- were merely the spark that set off a much wider firestorm across the Korean Peninsula.

In effect, U.S. beef was used as a kind of stealth weapon by opponents of the newly installed president of South Korea, Lee Myung Bak, in order to put a check on his neo-liberal policies, which include the privatization of numerous state companies and services.

Speaking as someone who has attended the protests daily, they are largely about internal Korean politics and social divisions, with nary a whiff of anti-U.S. sentiment to them.

As a regular reader of the IHT and also a long-time resident of Korea paying close attention to the anti-beef protests, my reaction at the time was one of incredulity, and I wondered how Mr. Burgeson could be so blind. Well, eventually, so did he. His article serves the double purpose of explicating not only the Korean Left's unreasonable blindness but also how his own eyes were opened.

Burgeson's article is fascinating but a hard read. Most difficult for many readers will be the liberal sprinkling of Korean expressions throughout the text -- in Korea's own Hangul alphabet! Granted, these are mostly translated in footnotes, but few readers will be able to wade through them without losing patience and giving up. Second in difficulty is the heavily theory-laden character of Burgeson's writing, even somewhat distractingly overtheorized. If you're not up to snuff on critical theory, you'll find his analysis nearly impenetrable. This doesn't mean that his writing is abstract or stilted. Indeed, he has a tough, vigorous style that kept my attention. Personally, I enjoyed much of the theoretical aspect (a quirk of mine) and thought that some of the material on myth worked fairly well -- though I wonder if Benedict Anderson might not have been more relevant than Roland Barthes. Nevertheless, I learned something about Barthes on myth, and that appeals to the historian of ideas in me.

Where Burgeson really stumbles, I think, is in the analogy that he makes between the anti-US beef protests in Korea and the pro-war sentiment in America leading up to the invasion of Iraq. Burgeson finds in both a profound complex of deception and irrationality. I agree that the anti-beef protests were deeply deceptive and irrational, but the pro-war sentiment seems to me to have been fundamentally sincere and rational, which isn't to say that I was pro-war. Let me explain. Even though the chant "Bush Lied, People Died" has become a meme of the Left, I don't think that the Bush Administration did lie about its intelligence on Saddam. Rather, the intelligence was faulty and incomplete, as intelligence often is. The mistaken conclusion that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction was understandable, for the man acted like he had something to hide. He did in fact have something to hide, to wit, the fact that he had nothing, as Burgeson acknowledges:

Saddam Hussein could not have simply come straight out and admitted in public to having no active WMDs program, since such a naked admission would have left his country dangerously vulnerable to his enemies in the region, Iran most of all.

Absolutely correct . . . in hindsight. That explains why the weapons inspectors could find no hard evidence but simultaneously felt compelled to keep searching. Saddam had nothing, but acted like he had something. Prior to the invasion, the belief that Saddam had WMDs was reasonable and widely held, not just among conservatives, and remained to be disproven. I thought that he had them, though I was also in favor of continuing the weapons inspections and not in favor of invasion to rid Saddam of WMDs unless there were no other choice.

The anti-beef protests, however, were based upon 'evidence' that was demonstrably false at the very moment that the 'evidence' was cited. Belief that US beef posed a high risk of Mad Cow Disease in human beings who ate it was clearly, empirically unreasonable.

Burgeson's analogy thus appears flawed to me. A comparison to the current "Tea Party" has been suggested instead by other readers, citing the widespread "Birther" views among those attracted to its protests (or the belief that Obama is a "Secret Muslim). I suppose that Burgeson's Iraq analogy, however, could serve to establish his street cred among the Korean Left and leave them more open to considering his critique of their irrationality . . . though that same irrationality might preserve them against any rational critique even from others on the Left.

Burgeson's article, as I've noted, is a hard slog, but it's worth the intellectual hike and serves as a manifestation of his basic honesty and willingness to follow pretty much where the facts lead him. He might be rather overstating his case in arguing that the hard Left leading the protests was aiming an an coup d'état (why not a revolution instead?), but he is surely on the mark in noting this Left's undemocratic attempt to bring down the then recently elected Lee Myung-bak government.

Gabor Steingart: Optimistic Europhile

Gabor Steingart

(Image from Homepage)

Readers will probably recall my post yesterday on the way in which the European Union's crisis over the euro has pushed the heads of state in Europe to press the European Central Bank for action to stabilize the European economy. I argued that this will require greater political centralization for the European Union but also result in a larger democratic deficit, unless the EU undertakes further political reform.

After posting that argument, I happened to read yesterday's hard copy of the International Herald Tribune -- delivered to my apartment here in Seoul -- and discovered that the German journalist and author Gabor Steingart holds an opinion very similar to mine, albeit from a more optimistic perspective. His online article, "It Takes a Crisis to Make a Continent," which appeared over the weekend (May 21, 2010), makes the following points:

[H]istorians will likely look back to May 9 as a turning point. That is when, in a conference room in Brussels, European leaders announced a blanket guarantee of 750 billion euros (about $1 trillion) for the countries on the euro zone's southern flank. Even the European Central Bank, which until then had been regarded as an independent body, silently stepped in to bail out the troubled states. Though they would never admit it, the men and women who sat in Brussels formed the first European economic cabinet, making policy on the fly, just as in a regular state.

Yes, the rules governing the euro are being breached every day, causing panic in the market. But this is part of a movement forward, not dissolution. According to the monetary union treaty signed in 1999, member states were never meant to take on the debts of a fellow member state, and the European Central Bank, modeled on the German Bundesbank, was meant to ensure monetary stability at all cost. But, at this critical moment, Europe decided that monetary unity was not enough, that it was worth breaking the rules to bring its members closer together as a political unit.

Mr. Steingart doesn't explain how this "policy on the fly" adds up to a "regular state," nor does he discuss the need for a more centralized system to offset the danger of instability if powerful European nations should happen to fundamentally disagree over the European Central Bank's policies, but he must have some inkling of the need for a more centralized political structure to make political and economic decisions, for he offers a further point that reveals his own recognition of the inherent 'democratic deficit':

Having forced itself into an era of continental policymaking, Europe must now play catch-up with its democratic system. Millions of Europeans already feel alienated by Brussels; if the achievements of this crisis are to survive, European leaders must figure out how to make sure the people are heard in the political process. Europe as a decision-making body is a fact; now it has to become more democratic.

My point may sound contradictory, namely, that if the European Union is to survive, it will need both more centralization and greater democratization, but I think that's precisely what survival requires. One possible way of attempting to achieve both would be for the President of the European Parliament to assume the role of President of the European Council and act as a prime minister formulating economic, political, and even foreign policy. Mr. Steingart has already referred to the European Council as an acting "economic cabinet," with the European heads of state acting as cabinet members, and a cabinet surely needs a prime minister who represents not just one state but the whole of Europe. Yet, how to integrate the heads of state on that council, if such a president is to have effective power, poses the big headache, for a prime minister typically selects the cabinet, rather than inherit one. Are powerful heads of state likely to subordinate themselves to a party in the European Parliament?

I'm neither Europhile nor Europhobe, but you can put me down as a Euroskeptic for now because I'd like to hear the solution to that issue.

European Central Bank: Its Changing Role, and Some Implications

Jean-Claude Trichet

Image by Ralph Orlowski/Reuters

(International Herald Tibune)

A few days back, I reported on the changing role of the European Central Bank in supporting the euro's stability, so I thought that I ought to follow that up with another report, this one borrowed from an article in the International Herald Tribune, "Trichet Faces Growing Criticism in Europe Crisis" (May 20, 2010), by Jack Ewing and Steven Erlanger.

According to Ewing and Erlanger, the president of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, came under heavy political pressure to act against his previously stated position:

In the early hours of May 10, European leaders cobbled together a nearly $1 trillion deal meant to stun bond investors who, after Greece was driven to the brink of default, were hungrily eyeing attacks on Portugal and even Spain.

A few days before, on May 6, Mr. Trichet had told reporters that the bank was not even considering buying bonds from the weakest governments of the shaken euro zone. On May 7, markets tumbled.

But a few hours after the leaders adjourned -- at 3:15 a.m. on May 10, and by all accounts under severe pressure from President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and other European leaders -- Mr. Trichet and the bank board members reversed themselves.

As Ewing and Erlanger explain:

Mr. Trichet has reversed himself on buying sovereign bonds from weak euro zone countries . . . [and also] agreed to keep accepting Greek bonds, however downgraded, as loan collateral.

The implications are striking:

Mr. Trichet's willingness to bend or break the rules and buy government bonds -- aimed at halting a potentially catastrophic sell-off -- served as final confirmation that the central bank had stepped once and for all beyond its narrow founding mission solely as a bulwark against inflation.

The European Central Bank now seems to have been pushed into the much larger role of guardian of financial stability in the 16 countries that belong to the euro area, with implications for all the 27 nations of the European Union.

Ewing and Erlanger do not spell out all these implications, but they seem to mean that the ECB is gaining a greater degree of power over the economies and finances of the EU at the same time that the ECB itself is coming under greater control by the heads of state in the EU. This is a potentially chaotic development unless some political structure is established to set the new rules, but such would require greater political centralization for the EU, a point that I raised in my earlier post, potentially enlarging the so-called 'democratic deficit'.

Why do I say that without greater political centralization, Europe faces a chaotic situation? Imagine a United States of America in which the Fed could be pressured to alter its policies by the more powerful states, say California, Texas, or New York. The risk would be that differing economic interests of two such states would throw the entire system into disarray as the two press for their divergent policies. That's a bit like the danger that we see in Europe currently if, for example, France and Germany should each attempt to gain control over the ECB.

But one 'solution' to this problem, further centralizing and empowering the EU's political system by giving more power to the President of the European Council, would increase the democratic deficit mentioned above because this President is appointed by the heads of state to the European Council rather than elected by the European population. Reducing this democratic deficit -- for instance, by expanding the role of the European Parliament and granting greater political power to its own President of the European Parliament in directing the EU's central political and economic policies -- would require a rather large transformation in which the heads of state would have to relinquish power, and that would necessitate a messy, and perhaps nasty, political fight.

We live in interesting times . . .

Democracy is Coming: Whom to Believe?

Leonard Cohen

"Democracy is Coming"

(Image from Wikipedia)

We've heard with some frequency that the US wants to provide security in Afghanistan and stabilize the place to allow some sort of 'democracy' to take root there as it perhaps has in Iraq -- that's part of the rather complex, shifting narrative, anyway -- but how exportable is democracy? Can it take root everywhere? Some say yes, some no. Let's hear from three men who've spoken on the issue of democracy's future in the non-Western world.

First, there's the well-known Francis Fukuyama, in "Is the age of democracy over?," writing for The Spectator (February 10, 2010) and taking a broad view, as one might expect of the intellectual who penned the famous "End of History" thesis back in the heady days of the latter 1980s:

[T]he future of democracy is not so bleak. In the first place, democracy remains, in Amartya Sen's words, the 'default' political condition: 'While democracy is not yet universally practised, nor indeed universally accepted, in the general climate of world opinion democratic governance has achieved the status of being taken to be generally right.' Very few people around the world openly profess to admire Putin's petro-nationalism, or Chavez's '21st-century socialism,' or Ahmedinejad's Islamic Republic.

No important international institution endorses anything but democracy as the basis for just governance. China’s rapid growth incites envy and greed, but its exact model of authoritarian capitalism is not one that is easily described, much less emulated, by other developing countries. Such is the prestige of modern liberal democracy that today's would-be authoritarians all have to stage elections and manipulate the media from behind the scenes to legitimate themselves.

Fukuyama has a point about the 'legitimacy' that democracy grants, for the democratic system means that the people, more or less, grant 'legitimacy' to themselves. But how does one get to democracy from whatever political system a nation finds itself under?

Suggesting one route is Iran expert Reuel Marc Gerecht, in "Iran, Beacon of Liberty?," written for The New York Times (February 10, 2010):

To an extent seen in no other country, Iran’s intellectuals have battled and evolved over these questions [of how to ground democracy in local conditions (i.e., Shiite Islam)]. For a century, the country has been trying to develop constitutional government. For 30 years, dissident clerics and lay intellectuals have struggled to reassert the democratic promise in the revolution.

Especially for religious dissidents, democracy is now seen as a keystone of a more moral order, where the faith can no longer be used to countenance dictatorship. An operating assumption of President Obama's speech to the Islamic world in Cairo last year is that Washington can work with authoritarian regimes against extremism -- that Muslims don't need to be politically free to tame religious militancy. But the evolution of Christianity, which never had Islam's deep fusion of church and state, tells us something different: that it has been the West's political evolution -- from autocracy to democracy -- which has, more than anything, depoliticized Christianity.

The same process is happening to Islam in Iran, but at a much faster pace than anything seen in the West. As a result, millions of Iranians -- the sons and daughters of once faithful revolutionaries -- have secularized. Whereas secularizing Westernized autocracies like the shah's prompted upwellings of religious radicalism, Iran's religious dictatorship has produced a softening secularization that is likely to last, since both nonreligious and faithful Iranians increasingly see representative government as indispensable to their values.

Gerecht would thus seem to side with Fukuyama, namely, that democracy is the default position in our modern world because other systems don't work very well, so nations turn to democracy when all else fails. Democracy allows individuals to work through their differences without violence . . . once that it is established, at any rate.

But is that true? Is democracy the default position? Does it allow for resolution of differences without violence? Consider the words of journalist Lee Smith, writing in The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (2010) about Arab distrust of democracy (quoted in Michael J. Totten):

The assumption that democracy was all a plan to set the Arabs at each other's throats also made sense to many Arabs because it fit the way they see their own societies. For the Americans, democracy meant investing the Arab man, woman, and child with the rights due every human being. From the Arab nationalist perspective, empowering the Arab individual would necessarily come at the expense of the Arab nation. And weakening the unity of the nation would animate the sectarian monster that has stalked the region for a millennium.

Nowhere were these fears stronger than in Damascus. For the Syrian regime, democracy would mean an end to the domestic peace cultivated through coercion and repression since the founding of the modern Syrian state, and the unleashing of violence at unprecedentedly lethal levels. Majority rule, meanwhile, would obviously not only spell the demise of the Alawi regime but also threaten the very existence of the Alawi community. As they watched what was happening in Lebanon and Iraq, it was easy for the Arabs to conclude that if representative government meant brother slaughtering brother, then the Americans could keep their precious democracy to themselves. (p. 199)

One might argue that the Arabs misconstrued America's 'gift of democracy,' but that's precisely Smith's point -- democracy requires a culture of democratic assumptions in order to work. If you fear democracy because it means that some larger group will dominate your group within a culture that sees power as a zero-sum relationship, then you might prefer the possibility of victory offered by armed struggle to the certainty of defeat looming through democracy. If Smith is right, the US has likely been spinning its wheels in its wars of the past decade because for democracy to work, "the heart has got to open in a fundamental way," and that hasn't obviously been happening.

"Democracy is Coming"? Maybe . . . maybe not.

Abu Taha 'Abdallah Al-Miqdad: "democracy . . . is an infidel regime"

Sada Al-Jihad

Pro-Jihad Islamist Magazine

(Image from MEMRI)

I recall explaining to a skeptical Korean audience on September 11, 2002 that the 9/11 attacks of the previous year were not merely a consequence of America's foreign policy but also an expression of Al Qaeda's hatred for American democracy. I even quoted one of Al Qaeda's spokesmen, Suleiman Abu Gheith:

America is the head of heresy in our modern world, and it leads an infidel democratic regime that is based upon separation of religion and state and on ruling the people by the people via legislating laws that contradict the way of Allah and permit what Allah has prohibited. (MEMRI: Special Dispatch No. 388)

Anti-American sentiment in Korea was peaking at that time, so my words didn't go over particularly well, but most Islamists still seem to hate democracy, for Abu Taha 'Abdallah Al-Miqdad tells us:

Though our clerics [i.e. salafi jihadi clerics] have spoken of democracy and clarified that it is an infidel regime, I will cite for you Wagdi Ghneim, who is known for his affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood movement, who are the greatest proponents of democracy in our time. He stated in his book Divine Shura and Manmade Democracy (Rabaniyyat Al-Shura wa-Wadh'iat Al-Dimuqratiyya): 'Democracy is erroneous from its foundation. Allah's religion [i.e. Islam] considers it wrong, and anyone who believes in it, promotes it, confirms it, accepts it, or acts according to it . . . is an apostate, even if he has a Muslim name and falsely claims that he is a believing Muslim -- because in Allah's religion, Islam and democracy are absolutely incompatible.'" (MEMRI: Special Dispatch No. 2434)

Abu Taha 'Abdallah Al-Miqdad is a hardcore Salafi Islamist who dislikes even the Muslim Brotherhood's flirtation with democracy and cites one of the Brotherhood's intellectuals to demonstrate the inconsistency. I suspect that the Brotherhood's interest in democracy is purely instrumental, a means to power and not an end in itself, but even that instrumental concession goes too far for Abu Taha 'Abdallah Al-Miqdad.

Why is he so opposed to democracy? He tells us the fundamental reason:

"The dangers of democracy are clear for all to see, since it directly impairs tawhid [the belief in Allah's unity]."

By this criticism, he means that a Muslim should live only for Allah and follow only his laws, an imperative contradicted when Muslims submit to manmade laws, for this means that Muslims are submitting both to humanity and to Allah simultaneously, an insult to Allah and a division of Allah's unity through the sin of shirk (i.e., associating something nondivine with the divine Allah).

This shirk -- this democracy -- leads to moral deterioration:

"Human history has never known villainous massacres such as those of the era in which democrats emerged. World Wars I and II are evidence of the extent of the democrats' moral deterioration and their failure to take into account the simplest of [moral] principles of life customary among people in past eras."

I suppose that Abu Taha 'Abdallah Al-Miqdad would have preferred the nondemocratic regimes to have emerged victorious in those conflicts . . . even though those same nondemocratic regimes were also not Muslim. And if they had won, he might have decided that they, too, were full of democrats, for he sees democrats everywhere:

[On the one hand] are piled up all the democrats -- Christians, Jews, atheists, Hindus, Shi'ites, Zoroastrians, apostates, hypocrites, Murji'ites, and Ash'arites -- and [on the other hand are] the ranks of the Muslims clinging to the path of Allah.

Abu Taha 'Abdallah Al-Miqdad includes an image of Ayatollah Khamenei casting his vote in the recent Iranian election as evidence of that Shi'ite regime's democratic apostasy, but perhaps he will have softened his criticism on that since the election seems to have been less than fully democratic.

Be that as it may, the continuing hatred of most Islamists for democracy is useful to know as a reminder of one primary motive for the jihadist terrorism that the world confronts.