Economic and Social Foundations of Democracy in the Middle East

Abstract

JT has become commonplace that the parliamentary-democratic 1 form of government has not functioned satisfactorily in the Middle East. During the last few years, a series of coups d'etat have proclaimed, in no uncertain terms, the dissatisfaction of several countries with their parliamentary governments and in more than one country the army has taken over power. The failure of democracy in the Middle East has been attributed to widely divergent, though not necessarily incompatible, causes. One explanation, which is current in the West, is that democracy is a plant of slow growth, which gradually developed, over several centuries, in the congenial climate of Europe and North America and which could not possibly be expected to thrive when suddenly transplanted to an alien Eastern soil which, since the dawn of recorded history, had bred nothing but the thorns and thistles of despotism. The absence of democratic traditions, and of the historical customs, habits, and attitudes required to make democracy work, was one of the first aspects of the East to strike nineteenth-century Europeans and no one has expressed this better than Lord Cromer, who wrote: 'Do not let us for one moment imagine that the fatally simple idea of despotic rule will readily give way to the far more complex conception ' 2 of ordered liberty.. In the Middle East itself, a more popular explanation is that external political factors have been mainly responsible for the inability of democracy to thrive and prosper. The title of Morgan Shuster's book, The Strangling of Persia,3 is indicative of this attitude. It has been cogently argued that no real democracy could develop in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria as long as British or French armies of occupation were the determining factor in all political matters and as long as the population continued to be preoccupied, not to say obsessed, with the problem of its relations with the foreign Power. Nor was the situation of unoccupied