Learn why the hope and excitement of the Arab Spring is gone, why so many Arab states are falling apart, why the youth are so frustrated, why there are so many refugees, and what can be done about it. The so-called Arab Spring appeared to end decades of exceptionalism and bring the Arab world back into the mainstream of global developments. The rebellions promised the return of politics and the reassertion of popular sovereignty against their corrupt and geriatric leaders. Much hope and flowery language greeted the young men and women who deposed their leaders and tried to build new, better societies. Today, the Arab world is in deep crisis. Of the 22 member states of the Arab League, at least five have essentially collapsed: Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Syria exist only in name today, as their territories have fallen to competing, murderous armed groups. In the remaining countries, the old autocracies have reasserted themselves. The repression at home is now worsened by regional conflict on an unprecedented scale, and the resulting frustration has led to the biggest refugee flows in recent memory. What went wrong? This course offers an overview of the structural shortcomings of Arab states and societies, which help us understand why the democratic awakening did not happen but instead “has given way to civil wars, ethnic, sectarian and regional divisions and the reassertion of absolutism.” This raises the obvious and renewed question whether there is something inherent in the Arab, and by analogy Muslim, condition that makes them special. Does this condition make this part of the world impervious to generally observable trends towards greater accountability, popular participation in political decision-making, greater generation and fairer division of economic wealth? Join this course to find out!
3b. The Miracle of Politics: Accountability and Effectiveness
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來自 University of Copenhagen 的課程
After the Arab Spring – Democratic Aspirations and State Failure
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從本節課中
Institutions
Social action inevitably produces institutions, namely values, stable, repeated patterns of behaviour. In this section, you will learn what institutions are, how they come about, how their relative effectiveness is measures, how and why they decline, and why all that matters.
與講師見面
Dr. Ebrahim AfsahAssociate Professor
Faculty of Law
Until the onset of the so-called Arab Spring
momentous political changes saw democracies and
market oriented economies spreading in
virtually every part of the world except for the Arab Middle East.
The American political scientist Francis Fukuyama observes
this in the opening sentences of his book "The
origins of political order" published just
as the Arab uprisings were gathering steam in 2011.
As we discussed earlier in the context of the Third Wave,
liberal democracy became increasingly to be seen as a default form of government.
As we laid out in the previous section,
these changes in the form of
political system were driven by massive social transformation.
The shift to democracy was a result of millions of formerly passive individuals around
the world organizing themselves and participating in the political life of the societies.
The factors that drive this transformation are manifold
and include in no particular order
much expanded access to education and
dramatically better access to information through electronic channels.
This makes people vastly more aware of
their own relative station in the political world around them.
Cheap and ubiquitous communication technology also created
a formerly non-existing public space for deliberation and social organization.
Egyptians for example post-2011 sold T-shirts on Tahrir Square that
proudly displays the Facebook logo as one of the emblems of their revolution.
When local organization failed,
these more accessible communication avenues allowed people to
vote with their feet and migrate to greener pastures up north.
All this happens against the changing economic landscape in which
the state had less to offer in terms of benefits, employments etc.
while simultaneously greater prosperity meant people had more to
lose and thus began to demand better legal protection of their property rights.
These factors are indeed prevalent in the Arab world
and they largely explain why suddenly in 2010
this previously politically dormant part of the world appeared to
renounce its exceptionalism and join the democratic mainstream.
While these factors certainly are real,
the focus on democracy and market economy obscures a much more basic observation:
the failure of the state as such whether
democratic or non-democratic to deliver basic services.
As outlined earlier, the repressive default of
Arab statehood throughout the 20th century constituted an absence of
politics and any organized articulation of interests let
alone grievances was made impossible by the repressive machinery of the state.
If one accepts that societies composed of
living beings are in a constant state of development and social movement,
such a deliberate discouragement of political discourse portents trouble.
What this amounts to is a deliberate refusal of
the status quo to adjust to changing external conditions.
Refusing to acknowledge and adapt to this new conditions
will eventually tip the dysfunctional institutional balance.
And it is here at the institutional basis of
governance where we can observe very serious shortcomings in the Arab world.
Shortcomings that are much more fundamental than
the higher order question of how decision makers are chosen.
Writing in 1968 Huntington whom we have already encountered in the context of
the Third Wave addressed this more fundamental question
by opening his seminal book "Political order and changing societies" by
rejecting the dominant ideological struggle of his day as relatively peripheral.
He writes, "The most important political distinction among
countries concerns not a form of government but the degree of government.
The differences between democracy and dictatorship are less than
the differences between those countries whose politics embodies consensus,
community, legitimacy, organization, effectiveness,
stability, and those countries whose politics is deficient in these qualities.".
It is these basic qualities that Cicero
alluded to in the opening statement to his course.
Qualities that are largely absent in the Arab world quite
irrespective of the question whether these societies are democratic or not.
To single-minded focus on elections and therefore the question of a formal existence of
democracy which has dominated
international discourse after the fall of communism in 1989,
has tended to obscure this deeper institutional reality.
Perhaps understandable in light of the character of
communist dictatorships which by and large were powerful and able administrators.
The chief challenge was seen as opening the political space for
democratic participation to take place and control the awesome power of the state.
In a sense, the existence and strength of the state was a given.
All that needed to be done was to civilize
the state machinery by imposing legal limits and democratic control.
Hence the focus on human rights and electoral democracy.
The problem is that the Arab world despite or because of its history of authoritarianism
has not developed effective state machineries
beyond those necessary for oppressive domestic social control.
Because in the developed world including
the hitherto so-called second world of communist dictatorships,
the existence of effective government is taken for granted.
Much of the focus has been on the form such government takes.
This has tended to obscure how difficult it has
historically been to create functioning political,
social, legal, and economic institutions.
This exclusive focus on taming the power of the state by insisting of on
individual rights has also tended to
obscure how unattractive a world without basic institutions,
with minimal or no governments look likes.
To understand why the Arab rebellions of the past years
failed to yield stable inclusive governance,
it is therefore necessary to acknowledge the extreme difficulty and
indispensable importance of creating and maintaining
effective institutions able to sustain meaningful communal life.
This means governance that is simultaneously powerful,
rule bound, and accountable.
Combining all three attributes is very difficult.
It amounts to a miracle of politics if that elusive yet attractive combination emerges.
So attractive is this combination that millions of migrants are
voting with their feet often at great risk and expense to move to such a community.
As literature on governance indicates a state that
possesses these attributes will not only be attractive to migrants.
More importantly, it will be politically
stable and in all likelihood economically prosperous.
This latter aspect is not coincidental
because the very institutions on which the edifice is built
come into being in response and as
vehicles for the realization of the perceived self-interest of the people.
How individuals and groups define their self interests and
how they collaborate with others to realize them is of
course culturally and historically contingent and develops in
a mutually reinforcing complex relationship with institutions.
But it is evident that self interest and legitimacy,
that is we recall Weber's definition,
the voluntary submission to a given order as beneficial to one's interests,
are the cornerstones of the stability of a given political order.
What makes such an attractive setup the true miracle of politics
is the sheer difficulty of creating effective and inclusive governance.
These inherent challenges are compounded by the normative contestation about questions
of authenticity and the absence of an easy and ambiguous plan of action.
