Continued

Palestine/Israel

If Arab regimes had been democratic in the matter stipulated above, would they have pursued policies vis-a-vis Israel other than the ones they actually have pursued? Generalizing very broadly, one is inclined to answer probably not. If we first consider the Arab-Israeli saga from the Rhodes armistice agreement of 1949 up through 1967, a period when Israel was bent on demonstrating not just its survival capacity but its toughness, it is difficult to imagine political parties in a competitive environment calling for compromise. Indeed, the accommodations sought discreetly in the mid-1950s by the authoritarian Egyptian and Jordanian regimes would have been even less likely under leaderships more affected by public opinion.

Would more representative regimes have been able to avert the Sinai-Suez war of 1956, the Six-Day war of 1967, or the war of attrition along the Suez Canal in 1969-1970? Again it seems unlikely, because the perceptions of objective threat were so intense and pervasive among government decision-makers, but also -- and crucially -- because popular feelings on all sides were, to say the least, amenable to military action. It seems implausible that a democratic regime in Egypt would have been willing, or able, to curb domestic resistance to Britain’s continuing presence in the Canal Zone, the cycle of low-level violence on the Egyptian-Israeli border, and Egypt’s support for the Algerian rebellion against France -- events that precipitated the tripartite (Israeli, French and British) aggression against Egypt in 1956.

In the 1967 case, it is now generally agreed that Nasser did not intend to precipitate a war with Israel, notwithstanding his provocative action in blockading the Strait of Tiran and demanding the withdrawal of the UN force in Sinai; but the logic of threat (and opportunity) drove Israeli policy-makers to launch their devastating strike. Whether a democratic regime in Egypt at the time might have behaved more prudently is possible, of course, but such a government might well have been driven even more strongly by populist-nationalist pressures than was Nasser’s.

The same consideration makes one suspect that a functioning parliamentary system in Jordan would have been more, not less, prone to involve that country in combat in 1967. We can recall that King Abdallah and Husayn, during the conflicts of 1948 and 1956, sought to restrain rather than fan hawkish public opinion.

Syria in 1967 was a more complex case. Certainly the rhetoric and policies of the very radical “neo-Ba`th” regime contributed to the outbreak of war. It is certainly possible that a hypothetical multi-party parliamentary coalition might have been less provocative. Yet, hostility to Israel, based on real and present grievances, was ubiquitous in Syrian politics. Whether such a coalition would have been sufficiently less provocative is doubtful. Israeli policy was not driven only by Syria’s hostile rhetoric, but by calculations of Syria’s threat to Israeli security; and it is hard to imagine Syria’s form of government figuring significantly in Israeli calculations. As events unfolded, Israel attacked Syria, and the government in Damascus, whatever its form, had no choice but to fight.

After their resounding defeat in the Six-Day war the governments of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan -- concerned about winning future elections -- could hardly have opted for anything other than the three “no’s” of the Khartoum summit. Similarly, an external factor -- the diplomatic impasse over securing an Israeli withdrawal from Sinai -- which drove Egypt to attempt the unsuccessful war of attrition in 1969, would very likely have driven a democratic government to the same policy. Under conditions of national emergency, even established democratic government, among them notably Israel, generally give a free hand to the national security establishment; so it is hard to imagine a less robust democratic system doing any less.

The current phase of the Arab-Israeli dispute, since around 1970, presents greater complexity. It is easy to understand why hypothetical democratically-elected governments in Egypt and Syria might have launched a war in 1973 for the purpose of jump-starting a demonstrably stagnant diplomatic process; one can imagine “national unity” governments enjoying massive parliamentary and public support across the political spectrum for a project that would liberate their occupied land in Sinai and the Golan heights. And while Jordan did not significantly participate in the 1973 war, it is plausible to imagine that it might have done so for the same reasons had it been governed by a more representative regime. But could democratic government in Egypt and Syria have maintained the secrecy necessary for such an enterprise? The 1973 war might have been avoidable for the “technical” reason that democracies could not surreptitiously generate consent or maintain the deception.

Let us now consider the Camp David “peace process.” We have been suggesting that, contrary to conventional wisdom, “democratic” Arab governments might have been as war-prone, or even more so, than actual authoritarian Arab governments. Yet can we go even farther and suggest that “democratic” Arab governments might be less likely to make peace? It is hard to imagine a genuinely representative government in Egypt being able to muster consent for a dramatic unilateral peace gesture like President Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem and the subsequent Camp David agreement and peace treaty with Israel. Egyptians and others differ among themselves as to whether Sadat’s initiative and Egypt’s conclusion of a separate peace with Israel were wise or proper policies. But if one believes that this was “enlightened” foreign policy behavior, one might also be thankful that the leader did not have to answer to the people for it.

Turning finally to Arab government participation in the current “peace process” organized by the Bush Administration, we should note first that the logic of Camp David, with its removal of Egypt as the keystone of Arab confrontation of Israel, has redefined the parameters of realism for other Arab governments. The public too is imbued with a certain new sense of pragmatism, even as other elements mobilize against further perceived sellouts to Israel.

One can also note the modest efforts towards democratization in Mubarak’s Egypt and Husayn’s Jordan. But greater democratization does not, on the whole, make it easier for these Arab governments to participate in a process stringently defined by Washington in order to meet irreducible Israeli requirements regarding Palestinian participation and the ultimate shape of a solution. In Jordan, the most popular new force, the Muslim Brotherhood, was, and remains, opposed to Jordanian participation in talks with Israel. Had almost all of the opposition in Egypt not boycotted what it felt was biased electoral process, might there not have been more resistance to Egypt’s role in facilitating the negotiations? Had President Asad’s dominance of Parliament not been so total, Syria’s surprising and dramatic acceptance of talks with Israel would have required President Asad to expend some political capital to bring other political forces in line. Had there been a democratically elected parliament with some power in Saudi Arabia, it might have been quite difficult for the government to meet face to face with the Israelis in Moscow, to receive a delegation of American Jews, and to implicitly endorse a peace process under which Israel, in all probability, will maintain sovereignty over Jerusalem. In short, more democratic systems might not only have had little positive effect in preventing war, but also might have made it more difficult to negotiate peace.

Arab Unity

If Arab regimes had been “democratic”, would some greater degree of Arab unity or cooperation been achieved? The fact that non-democratic regimes have failed to achieve very much inter-Arab cooperation, let alone unity, does not allow us to conclude that democratic regimes would have succeeded. Indeed, Arab integration projects, initiated through more participatory domesticprocesses, might have been harder to achieve than those sponsored by individual leaders, in that the competing interests of various parties and groups would have been brought into play. Still, once achieved in this manner, however, it is likely that such projects would have endured longer than the ephemeral schemes of populist-authoritarian presidents.

Arab politics in the post World War II period were driven by the ideological imperative of Arabism and by the realpolitik imperative of the ever-shifting balance of power, in what was, for the most part, a multipolar state system. Would-be hegemons, notably Nasser’s Egypt, exploited the ideological resource of unity to promote (at least in the near-term) raison d’état. But the pursuit of hegemony inevitably brought into play balancing behavior and the formation of counter-coalitions. Driven at the system level by “objective” security considerations -- and ambitions -- state actors regularly sacrificed unity for more immediate concerns. It is difficult to imagine that more democratic regimes would have behaved much differently, although one can imagine an important mitigating factor. To the extent that wider participation might have induced more intelligent policy-making -- in particular, an appreciation of the many economic, cultural, and political advantages of integration -- the pursuit of unity might have elicited steadier, less emotional support. An incremental and functional approach to integration or unity would also have reduced the fears and jealousies that the more grandiose and totalistic visions of unity aroused among the less powerful states.

The glacial, detailed, tedious process of European integration, marked by endless negotiations over agricultural and business issues, seems the antithesis of the poorly planned ventures in Arab unity like the United Arab Republic and assorted, short-lived, empty efforts at “confederation.” The pluralistic, democratic character of the European state actors necessitated such an approach, and it appears already to have delivered many impressive results. Arab countries, it should be noted, did not lack the technical expertise to pursue functional integration. The level of planning exhibited at the 1980 Arab “development” summit, for example, was impressive; but regimes proved incapable of the systematic elaboration and implementation of the plans.

Relations with the United States

If Arab regimes had been “democratic”, would they have positioned themselves differently vis-a-vis the United States? We can begin with the observation that the governments most closely and continually aligned with the U.S. since the 1950s -- Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Tunisia, Morocco -- were not democratic. Lebanon is an exception: one can qualify both its democratic features and its alignment with the United States. Of course, the Arab states aligned against the U.S. for much of this period were not democratic either -- Egypt under Nasser, Iraq, Syria, or Libya under Qadhafi . Raison d’état or more precisely raison de régime, was the underpinning of the pro-U.S. alignments: U.S. support was a bulwark against the security threats of Arab nationalism and Soviet-backed communism; and the oil connection made for a very special relationship in the case of Saudi Arabia. These considerations overrode distate for American support of Israel.

Had “civil society” been more represented in the councils of government in these countries, through political parties, interest groups, and a freer press, the moral, national, and perhaps religious issue of Palestine would have played a more prominent role than calculations of realpolitik. To the extent that the anti-U.S. regimes were broadly popular, if undemocratic, is due in significant part to their championing of the Arab position on Palestine and Israel. It would have been more difficult for Washington to enlist Arab governments’ support for containing Soviet expansionism and the spread of communism because parties and independents represented in Arab parliaments would probably have placed higher priority on national issues than on superpower rivalries in the region, and also because anti-U.S. groupings would have had substantial visibility and influence.

Let us not exaggerate or oversimplify anti-American feeling in Arab civil society. To one degree or another, more democratic Arab political systems presumably would have represented a variety of group interests. Borrowing again from the Turkish model, it is conceivable that a conservative, business-oriented party might have come to dominate some Arab parliaments, or at least to be a significant minority party. Such a party might well have counselled a pragmatic approach to the U.S. and the West in general. The attractiveness of, or dependency on, U.S. economic, technological and cultural resources, even at times of deep political animosity, would not have been inconsequential. In Saudi Arabia, for example, it is very likely that such a tendency would have played a leading role. But even in countries that became vociferously anti-American one can imagine a more temperate foreign policy climate than what actually transpired under populist-authoritarian rulers. Moreover, such a climate might have diminished the demonizing of the Arabs that occurred in the American policy arena, contributing possibly to a more evenhanded American stance in the Middle East.

There is some plausibility in the realist view that American interests are better served by undemocratic Arab regimes, on the grounds that authoritarian rulers could pursue regime interests without the distraction of unruly and unfriendly public opinion. This is fine for as long as those authoritarian regimes feel that their interests lay with the U.S. Often, of course, they feel otherwise. On the other hand, democratically elected regimes might have engendered more popular respect for foreign policy positions -- even controversial ones -- than autocratic regimes which were perceived as colluding with hostile foreign powers. The logic of international politics suggests that an involved outside power like the U.S. is bound to be drawn into the balance of power “game” in the Middle East, making (and changing) both “friends” and “enemies”, regardless of their democratic or undemocratic character. But to the extent that the domestic environment is represented in foreign policy decision-making one might envisage a struggle between popular ideological positions hostile to the U.S., and particular interests favorable to ties with the U.S.