The lesson of the recent post-election protests in Iran has little to do with the strength or weakness of Islamism; it is that people care about their democratic rights – about their right to have a say in how they are governed. This feeling is not something cooked up by neo-cons and democracy mongers in Washington think tanks; it is a universal right reaffirmed time and time again by people in all parts of the world who find the denial of such rights a cause of legitimate grievance.

The contention that democracy would be bad for U.S. interests is simply wrong: take, for example, the issue of Arab-Israeli peace. Authoritarian Arab governments exist very comfortably with the Arab-Israeli conflict. Constant tension that occasionally flares up into armed conflict provides the perfect background to the official narrative of permanent emergency, threats from hostile external forces – especially the “Zionist entity” and its evil foreign backers – and the need to prioritize the national /religious struggle over progress in the area of basic human development indicators. ~Neil Hicks

Hicks is right that authoritarian Arab states are basically satisfied with the status quo, as this allows them to divert dissatisfaction with their rule towards Israel, but it might be worth noting that the two states most prone to the rhetoric of permanent emergency that justifies extraordinary security measures are the Israeli and American democracies. Democratization does not prevent the empowerment of fundamentalism, nationalism or other ideological obsessions. Especially in its formative stages, ideological obsessions are very strong in democracies, and the continued promotion of democracy by new democratic states beyond their borders can become an obsession all its own. The early experience of democratization can often mean an outpouring of revolutionary fervor, and democracy provides the overarching justification that everything is being done in the name of freedom and the will of the people. Combine this with a sense of long-standing political or religious grievance, of which there is plenty in the countries in question, and you have a recipe for internal political violence and war.

This is exactly why everything else in Hicks’ argument makes no sense. At least two allied Arab governments have been content to make peace with Israel, pay lip service to the plight of Palestinians and do nothing more. Were the governments of Jordan and Egypt to become mass democracies tomorrow, it is likely that peace between those states and Israel would not last long. Egypt and Jordan can remain at peace with Israel despite the profound unpopularity of this arrangement because the governments are unaccountable and authoritarian. Surely the elections in Gaza should tell us that democratization allows people with deep grievances to vent them by empowering the most extreme and radical elements. This has proved to be ruinous for people in Gaza and far from what Israel wants. Democratization and regional stability are incompatible. If you desire one, you cannot have the other.

Filed under: democracy, foreign policy, politics