Democracy and Arab Political Culture

As democracy spreads to such unlikely places as Bulgaria and Angola, the Middle East becomes more and more conspicuous as the region left behind. All twenty-one member states of the Arab League, for example, are ruled by individuals who reached power without the mandate of their citizens.

Against this backdrop, Kedourie ponders democracy's prospects in the Middle East. To begin with, he notes that the region's traditional political culture contained nothing akin to democracy; and that for many years the European political system with the greatest impact on the region was not Anglo-American democracy but Germano-Russian enlightened despotism. Second, he shows that for Arabic-speakers, democracy has meant more than choosing leaders via the ballot: their quest for democracy "has in effect been a quest for constitutional and representative government." The bulk of the book then takes up the four major Arab experiments with democracy: Iraq in the period 1921-38, Syria 1928-49, Lebanon 1926-75, and Egypt 1923-52. (Libya 1951-69 and the Sudan after 1953 get cursory treatment too.)

Concluding that the record of constitutional and representative government in the Arab world was "disappointing, not to say dismal," Kedourie doubts democracy's future prospects: "those who say that democracy is the only remedy for the Arab world disregard a long experience which clearly shows that democracy has been tried in many countries and uniformly failed."

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