After the fall of the fascist regimes in Mediterranean Europe, in Latin America and in Asia and after the fall of the communist regimes in the big region that for fifty years has been under Soviet control, now the time has come for the Arab people’s awakening. The “third wave” of democratization, as Huntington called it, started in 1974 with the Portuguese revolution, has not exhausted its potential. The EU and US governments have been caught by surprise by the masses’ spontaneous movement that invaded the cities’ squares of North Africa and the Middle East. In the name of the international stability they backed until the end the old and falling oppressive regimes in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya and accepted their collapse with disappointment. The governments of the EU did not find the words nor did they formulate any political proposal in order to intervene on the great liberation movement. After the decline of the US influence and with the absence of Europe, the international system does not seem to have the economic and power resources, nor the political view to positively affect the current events and to help and direct the transition to democracy.
It’s disheartening to observe how the European political leaders see the peoples liberation movement fighting against their government’s oppression only in terms of security, so that they just propose to send policemen to guard the shores. This is the Europe that we do not want: the Europe fortress closed on itself, which exhibits xenophobia, which excludes because it is an Islamic country, which in the name of the Christian religion represents its own God with the features of the Western man. The Union for the Mediterranean project (2008), which should have deepened the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (1995), has failed. The meeting of the governments members of this association, expected for December 2010, did not take place. The free trade area, planned for 2010, was not achieved, nor did the EU governments honor the commitment to interrupt the economic cooperation with the countries on the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea which do not respect human rights.
It should be noticed that the pattern of the enlargement, adopted for Central and Eastern European countries, and their inclusion in the EU, cannot be reproduced in North Africa and the Middle East. An international organization based in this region – the Arab League –, is the potential vehicle of a process of regional integration, which should include Israel, too. Unfortunately, integration is yet to come. If we consider Maghreb, only 1-2% of these countries’ external trade develops within the region. And yet, the UN Commission for Africa reckons that the economic integration of Maghreb would pave the way to a 5% growth of the GDP of the region. The EU, which has continued to have bilateral relations with North Africa, could have encouraged regional integration, as the United States did with Europe when it launched the Marshall Plan, and the aid supply was subject to the condition that the reconstruction plans would be devised in common.
The bogeyman of Islamic extremism, brandished by Western governments and Arab dictators, belongs to the logic of the past that does not consider the change brought about by the economic development, the social modernization and the secularization in progress in the region. The spread of education, especially between the younger generations, and the decrease of the birth rate, which is a consequence of the growth in women’s education, have brought the population closer to the values of freedom and equality that are typical of the most developed societies. These are the objective conditions which promoted the development of civil society and pluralism. The Islamic fundamentalism is a reactionary movement which wants to oppose this trend. In fact, it seems to be the main loser in the on-going revolution. At the forefront of the movement there are the youngsters, who despite a good education are penalized by their exclusion from the labour market. They used the new media for mobilization, replacing the traditional political organizations. What strikes about this movement is the lack of leaders in the traditional sense of the word. Nowadays, the figure of a leader is the Egyptian Wael Ghonim, a Google official. The unusual dimensions of the revolution show that the economic and social change, developed in the wake of globalization, require political and institutional changes. Therein lies the mystery that the “short-sightedness” of the Western political élites was not able to penetrate. It was not a mystery for Emmanuel Todd, who ten years ago (in his book Après l’empire) diagnosed the passage to modernity of the Islamic world and foresaw the institutional change.
It should be noted that the weak chain-links of the Arab world, where the collapse of the old regimes has begun – Tunisia and Egypt –, are countries without oil. The oil producing countries, instead, have the resources to promote consensus through free-services concessions to the population (water, electricity, education etc.). In fact, these countries show a greater resistance to the contagion of the revolutionary movement. The armed forces in Tunisia and Egypt have the merit of having eased the fall of the dictatorships without a bloodbath, which unfortunately is taking place in Libya. The huge Tahrir Square in Cairo, where the people that determined Mubarak’s fall have gathered, has not been a new Tienanmen. It should be noted that the army played a progressive role on other occasions, first of all during the coup d’état by Nasser, which toppled King Faruk in 1952. After the Khomeinist revolution in Iran (1979), when the elections paved the way for the establishment of the Islamic Republic principles in Turkey and then in Algeria, again the army prevented the success of Islamic fundamentalism. All over the Arab world the armed forces are the only structure able to direct the transition to democracy, with all the involved risks. For many years the risk for democracy to become a façade institution and the risk of real power staying in the hands of the generals will overhang the Arab people, as the case of Pakistan shows. On the other hand, it should be underlined that the Turkish army relinquished power even because of the EU pressure during the accession negotiations with Turkey.
The examples mentioned above prove that elections are a necessary but not a sufficient condition for democracy. The transition to democracy will be a long process, full of pitfalls. During many years authoritarian governments destroyed (or did not allow the creation of) the essential social structures which can, through elections, pave the way to a democratic government: political parties, independent unions, civil society associations. The transition will be successful if the proper constitutional norms are elaborated; these norms shall ensure the creation of public spaces where the political debate and the choice of the leaders take place in a free and transparent way. On these bases Pan-Arabism would rise again as a solidarity force between peoples who chose freedom and who want to protect it, by creating common institutions and initiating a federative process within the Arab League. The successful outcome of the march of the Arab peoples toward democracy will depend largely on the international order and particularly on the influence of Europe, to which history and geography assign a specific responsibility. If Europe endows itself with federal powers in foreign and security policy and increases its own resources, it will be able to provide two external conditions of the democratization process: a development plan and peace for the Mediterranean region, which we cannot expect from the US any longer.
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