“The Arab
Spring started in Tunisia, and within a few weeks it had spread to neighboring
Egypt. Today, 2 ½ years later, Tunisia is close to ratifying a democratic
constitution with well over two-thirds’ support in the constituent assembly.
Egypt, as the world knows, is in the throes of a military coup that removed the
democratically elected president.
The obvious —
and crucial — question is: What’s the difference? Why has democratic
constitutionalism worked relatively well in one North African Arab country
while it has crashed and burned in another? And what will the answer tell us
about the future of democracy in the Arabic-speaking world, from Libya to Syria
and beyond?
You might
think the answer has something to do with Islam. But remarkably enough, it
doesn’t. In both Tunisia and Egypt, the first democratic elections produced
significant pluralities favoring Islamic democratic parties.”
Feldman
asks the right question and anticipates the wrong-headed conventional response,
which he then shows to be a self-serving distortion. First, absorb the details of the conflict
here, as concisely summarized by Feldman.
“Ennahda, the
Islamist movement whose political party won in Tunisia, is ideologically similar
to the Muslim Brotherhood, and is a kind of associate of the Brotherhood’s
loosely affiliated internationale. Both parties believe in combining Islamic
values with democratic practice. Both accept a political role for women and
equal citizenship for non-Muslims, even if in practice they are both socially
conservative and seek the gradual, voluntary Islamization of society.
The
contrasting personalities and styles of their leaders, however, have pushed
Ennahda and the Brotherhood to behave differently when negotiating religion
with secularists in their respective countries. Rachid Ghannouchi, the
spiritual leader of the Tunisian Islamists, has emerged as the closest thing to
an Islamic Nelson Mandela. During his decades in exile, Ghannouchi wrote extensively
about the compatibility of Islam and democracy and developed a relatively
liberal vision of how Islam and the state should interact.
Skeptics then
claimed that Ghannouchi’s views were a cover for a more radical agenda; and
some Tunisian secularists still think so. But the evidence thus far is sharply
to the contrary. When Islamists called for inserting a reference to Shariah
into the Tunisian constitution — usually the sine qua non for any Islamic
political party — Ghannouchi took seriously the opposition from secularists. In
a dramatic showdown with members of his own party’s leadership, he reportedly
threatened to resign unless they dropped the measure.”
Feldman
sees the value of leadership willing to take on its own internal extremism…if
we want democracy to work, this is the kind of courageous leadership that is
needed.
“This may have
been the turning point in Tunisia’s constitutional process. Ghannouchi’s
position is straightforward: He wants Tunisians to adopt Islamic values, but
piety means nothing if imposed by coercion. Islam, he believes, will succeed in
persuading people to adopt its truths more effectively if they don’t have its
teachings shoved down their throats.
Ghannouchi’s
diehard critics would say that omitting Shariah from the constitutional draft
was only a tactical retreat, not an ideological one. But if they are right,
that is yet another reason why Tunisia’s constitutional process is working:
Leaders have displayed willingness to compromise in the face of ideological
opposition.
By contrast,
when Mohammed Morsi was president, he proved disastrously unwilling to
negotiate during Egypt’s truncated constitutional drafting process. The
Brotherhood could have shown its good faith by moderating the various Islamic
provisions it sought to incorporate. It wouldn’t even have had to omit Shariah,
a reference to which was already included in Egypt’s pre-revolutionary
constitution. Instead, the Brotherhood went further, giving constitutional
authority to the clerics of al-Azhar.
Compromise
alone wouldn’t have forestalled the protests that led to Morsi’s overthrow. But
it would have signaled a willingness to govern on behalf of the whole populace,
not just those who voted for the Brotherhood.”
Second,
we can now see compromise and moderation as the heart and soul of a thriving
democratic culture…in an Islamic or Christian context, and perhaps particularly
in societies with deeply held religious views.
“The
willingness to share governing responsibility is probably the single most
salient factor separating Tunisia’s relative success from Egypt’s disaster.
Ennahda has governed as part of a coalition with secularist parties, whose members
filled the positions of president and speaker of the Assembly alongside
Ennahda’s prime minister.
This so-called
troika of parties has often been dysfunctional and has failed to take decisive
action on the economy, which is the most important national issue and the
impetus to the Arab Spring in the first place. But the symbolic power of the
coalition has helped ensure that frustration about the slow pace of economic
change hasn’t focused solely on Ennahda, but on the government more generally.
In contrast, Morsi failed to appoint a coalition Cabinet with any meaningful
breadth. Anger at shortages and a failing economy then fell squarely on him and
his party.
This isn’t a
new problem. Autocratic government has been the curse of Arab states since
decolonization. The Arabic-speaking public lacks a political culture
experienced in democratic power sharing.
The tradition
of unchecked presidential power explains both how Morsi could have tried to
govern without compromise, and how the protesters could have come to see him as
a dictator worthy of being deposed, even though he was elected democratically.
Both sides somehow imagined that an elected president would be a bit like an
unelected one: all-powerful, all-responsible, and the sole focus of positive and
negative political energy.”
It
is worth repeating a key insight here: The willingness to share governing responsibility is probably
the single most salient factor, that is, the willingness to
look beyond party and short term presenting conflicts to see the larger ebb and
flow of events and power and policy debates in a democratic society.
And
the expectations average citizens bring to politics and leadership, which are
cultivated by public and private sector elites, has a real impact on the
outcome of these conflicts. Feldman then uses this comparative analysis to make
an observation about how democracies work that the leadership of our own
political parties (following Mann and Ornstein, particularly our Republican
Party today) should think about.
“Democracy requires parties to learn to work
together and take account of one another’s interests. Those out of power must
believe they will eventually be re-elected, and those in power must know they,
too, will cycle out. That alone creates incentives to treat the opposition with
political consideration and moral respect.”
Yes
it does; yes we can.
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