Continued

Implications of the Case Studies

What, if anything, do these episodes of imperfect democratic practice tell us about Arab foreign policy-making? Clearly, caution should be exercised in drawing any conclusions: the regimes outlined need to be studied further. They were far from being truly democratic, and the historical conditions in which they found themselves were different form those existing today. Nonetheless, one is struck by the lack of an obvious or simple relationship between political structure and policy outcome. It is not intuitively obvious that different kind of decision-making process, whether more or less “democratic,” would have led to different foreign policy decisions in the cases discussed.

Surveying these historical episodes, one is also struck by the disjunction in every case between the formal structure of “democracy” and the popular political arena. As we have seen, the disjunction is greater in some cases (e.g. Iraq) than in others (e.g. Egypt or Lebanon). We may be right in thinking that foreign policy made by a dictator or a small “ruling circle” can lead to disaster, but it does not follow that wider representation will lead to a wiser foreign policy. The popular political arena in the Arab world in the decade following the creation of Israel in 1948 was turbulent and unruly - not very different, perhaps, from the situation today. Too faithful a replication at the parliamentary level of various militant, radical tendencies found at the popular level might have led not only to foreign policy excess, but to domestic instability as well.

Would political parties have been able to channel strongly held political agendas into an orderly policy process marked by compromise and trade-off? Maybe, maybe not. But we do know that three of these imperfectly representative regimes, in Egypt, Syria and Iraq, collapsed anyway .Democracy in the Middle East, of all places, cannot be risk-free, much as incumbent regimes would like it to be.

Would the benefits of establishing more democratic systems have outweighed the costs? We cannot say. But to the extent that the legitimacy of regimes might have been strengthened by parliaments representative of the main political tendencies in their societies, these regimes might have been able to carry out their external relations with greater prudence, knowledge, and authority than would otherwise have been the case.

Arab Democracy and the Conflict with Israel

According to Russett (123), the proposition that “with only very marginal exceptions, democratic states have not fought one another in the modern era.. is one of the strongest nontrivial or non-tautological generalizations that can be made about international relations.” The Middle East would seem to be a particularly arid testing ground for this proposition given the general absence of democracy; and its relevance to the Arab-Israeli conflict would seem to be nil. Yet as we have observed, there have been brief periods in which Arab states in conflict with Israel have been “democratic”, to some extent. The most sustained such period encompassed the years 1947-49, the years of the first Arab-Israeli war during which Israel was established as an independent state.

At this time, three of Israel’s four contiguous adversaries actually had parliamentary systems and elected governments: Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. As was noted, one can argue as to how genuinely liberal-democratic were the constitutional monarchy in Egypt, Syria’s parliamentary republic, or Lebanon’s peculiar consociational democracy; but in form -- and arguably in reality -- these governments that went to war to prevent the establishment of Israel would seem to meet the criteria of democracy specified by writers such as Dahl (1971) and Russett. Were these Arab governments less democratic than the unelected Zionist regime which would become the government of the new state of Israel? Putting aside the possibility that Israel’s government in 1948 was not democratic, it would appear that this war may constitute a nontrivial exception to Russett’s proposition. His characterization of this war as the “nearest exception” to the rule on the basis simply of Lebanon’s “peripheral involvement,” since he appears to dismiss the idea that Israel was undemocratic, understates the significance of the case. It is easy to understand why the example of the first Arab-Israeli war as an exception to Russett’s proposition is not widely cited: in the first place, Arab/Islamic political culture is widely, if incorrectly, viewed as intrinsically incompatible with liberal democracy (see, e.g., Kedourie, 1992); secondly, anybody familiar with the 1948 conflict would find little evidence for the logic of Russett’s proposition: neither the Arabs nor the Israelis perceived of their adversaries as liberal, democratic, or legitimate. One can argue, however, that there was sufficient democracy, or at least populism, on both sides for genuine mutual antipathies to express themselves by resort to armed force.

There are two other episodes of Arab-Israeli warfare which also appear to deviate from the “democracies don’t fight democracies” proposition. The first involves Israel’s invasions of Lebanon in 1978 and 1982 (Doyle, 1983, Part I, p. 213, note 7, refers somewhat vaguely to Israeli-Lebanon fighting in the post-1967 period as a possible exception to the rule). In form, we have a situation of a twice-invaded democracy occupying part of another democracy, and continuing to do so to this day.

Yet this argument might be countered in three ways: first, it can be argued that what happened in 1978 and 1982 were not true wars but only limited interventions. This argument might conceivably be applied to 1978 but not to Israel’s operations in Lebanon between 1982 and 1985. Second, it is also possible to argue that Israel, although a democracy, was driven to war in 1982 by a non-democratic process, namely the adventurism of Israel’s Minister of defense, Ariel Sharon, acting outside government procedures. Thirdly, perhaps the most persuasive counter-argument is that Lebanon at this time was not a democracy. Certainly, Israeli policymakers and citizens alike felt that Lebanon had disintegrated as a state. The constitutionally elected parliament and legally formed government in Beirut was unable to control Palestinian and Lebanese armed groups that had been carrying out armed attacks against Israel and Israelis. This observation is indisputable. At the same time, the fact that Lebanon remained, in form and with continuity, a democratic government, with a legally elected president and parliament, is also a nontrivial observation. Lebanon throughout this period was a democracy, for better or worse, albeit one which was almost fatally crippled.

There is a second episode which brings into question Russett’s proposition, and even if it is debatable, it is worth raising: namely the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians in the occupied territories. Whether the Intifada can be called a war is, of course, questionable. In its initial phases, at least, the weapons of choice for the Palestinians were stones, not firearms. Moreover, Palestine at present is a state only on paper and the leadership of the Palestinians is unelected. Nevertheless, the Palestinians indubitably have displayed national consciousness and political capabilities, and they do possess certain important attributes of democratic politics, including a parliament (unelected but still representative of various sectors of the Palestinian people), political parties, associations, and a greater degree of political freedom than is present in most Arab countries. This does not mean that the Palestinian community has an indisputable claim to be democratic, but considering their difficult circumstances one could argue that the Palestinians for many years have been engaging in significant political participation and contestation -- Dahl’s criteria for democratic behavior. One can venture to say that the Palestinian community today is hardly less democratic than was the Jewish community in British Mandatory Palestine. If, for the sake of argument, accepts these characterizations, then we must consider whether today’s conflict between “democratic” Palestine and “democratic” Israel constitutes another exception to the proposition that democracies do not fight each other.

II. Imagining Democratic Arab Regimes: Foreign Policy Consequences

We can turn now to the three speculative counterfactual exercises. What if the main Arab state actors had been democratically organized over the past four decades or so? Would individual and collective Arab policies on the major issues of the time -- Palestine, Arab unity, and relations with the West -- have been much different? A myriad of alternatives can be presented. The methodological issues associated with counterfactuals are formidable; but as Fearon (1991) has pointed out, in small-n comparative research they are a virtual necessity and can yield important findings if used carefully. Not only must the counterfactual antecedent, when joined with appropriate theories and facts, imply the consequent, but the counterfactual antecedent must be”. . ‘co-tenable’ with the facts or ‘initial conditions’ used to draw the inference, meaning that if the antecedent had actually occurred, the initial conditions could also have occurred” (Fearon, p. 193). Whether the counterfactual assumption of “Arab democracies” meets the test of co-tenability is debatable; one can only reiterate that our speculations are intended as an exploratory exercise.

First, we must imagine what “democratic” Arab regimes might look like. Let us take Turkey -- which despite its limitations remains the only long-functioning, indigenous Middle Eastern democracy -- as a heuristic model. Suppose that Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia actually had a domestic political environment similar to that of Turkey. Imagine that each of them had two major parties, one dominated by conservative business interests respectful of religion and tradition, similar perhaps to the Turkish Democrat/True Path Party; the other dominated by left-of-center nationalists, technocrats, secularists, and statists, similar to the Turkish Republican Peoples’ Party/Social Democrat Populists. Imagine further that transitions from one party to the other would occur occasionally and that there was some significant degree of freedom of political expression and association. We would expect, in addition, that there would be radical and transitional movements on the left and on the religious right which, although largely “outside” the formal system, would still exert influence derived from the “masses” and pose certain concerns for the organized mainstream parties. Policy outcomes -- domestic and foreign -- would reflect the outlooks and interests of the leading elements in Arab society: the “civil” elements like the business community, the landed elite, the professions, the intelligentsia, and labor, and also the military, which would play a “guardian” role.

We have proposed the Turkish model because it takes some account of the historical, social, and cultural milieu of contemporary Arab political systems. Alternatively, we could have stipulated a “purer” philosophical model of liberal democracy, but to do so would have perhaps necessitated a greater suspension of analytical disbelief than would be acceptable to most social scientists or Middle East specialists. But there is a price for this greater empirical “fit” in relation to the proposition that democracies don’t (often) fight each other. The logic of that proposition as explained by Doyle (1983), Russett (1991) and others, places considerable weight on the “liberal” character of democratic systems: mutual recognition of system legitimacy depends on genuine popular representation and individual rights and liberties. Does the Turkish model or any intuitively plausible Arab model exhibit enough liberalism to sustain the argument relating democratic structure to non-warlike foreign policy behavior? For that matter, does the Israeli model do so?

To speculate whether this hypothetical alternative to the actual “domestic environment” would have made any difference in foreign policy behavior forces us back to the core theoretical debate: would the imperatives of the international system, mediated through “rational” state actors, tend to produce the same positions and decisions on the parts of the Arab governments we examined, regardless of whether they were more or less “democratic” in structure or more or less authoritarian? Let us look briefly at three key issue-areas, giving particular attention to the Palestinian conflict.