Talk about democracy

Demographic changes and politics of religion and identity are slowly shifting the global balance of power like seldom before in living memory. The biggest bastion of liberal democracy, the US and Europe, loosely defined as the West, is wobbling in the face of ballooning budget deficits and shrinking workforces. As Pat Buchanan, the rightwing American nationalist, observed two years ago in his book The Death of the West, Europeans and people of European extraction in the US and elsewhere are literally dying out as a result of falling birth rates and rapidly ageing populations. How long the West can afford to play the role of the world’s chief advocate of human rights, rule of law and free markets, is anybody’s guess.

One doesn’t have to be a political economist to foresee an early end to America’s current phase of international engagement. The accumulating budget deficits will sooner or later force the world’s sole superpower to cut back on foreign affairs and military spending. “America is an empire without an imperial culture. Foreign affairs is seen as the most dispensable part of the budget,” wrote Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek, in a recent column in which he identified “chronically unbalanced domestic finances” as the greatest threat to America’s primacy. Reduced funding for political, economic and cultural instruments of American power would mean reduced US capacity at the global level for spreading and supporting democracy. For Arab regimes, whether friend or foe of Washington, the implications could not be more obvious.

To complicate matters, West Europeans have more or less counted themselves out of joint US-led efforts in the future to confront rogue states as well as non-state actors with threats of military force. Calling rising powers like China to account for their track record on human rights and rule of law too may not suit Europe’s interests for long. Awareness of its own structural and military weaknesses has made the European Union trim its sails to the prevailing geopolitical winds, while individually European leaders have responded to their publics’ aversion to risk by distancing themselves from a Republican-led America’s muscular foreign policy.

Some would argue that the weakening of the European-American engine of democratic progress would be easily offset by democracy’s growing strength in numbers. On the face of it, the December 2003 report of Freedom House, the respected US-based organisation, validates this: “In the two years since the beginning of the global war on terrorism, freedom and democracy have made demonstrable gains, with 51 countries showing overall progress versus 27 that have registered setbacks.” At a practical level, however, the winds of political change that have since transformed these regions have not uniformly brought tangible gains or created inspiring models, so as to significantly strengthen the cause of liberal democracy worldwide. Consequently, it is inconceivable that pressure on Arab governments to reform their political systems will, in the medium to long term, come from any quarters other than the West, where democracy and freedom remain deeply rooted. As for electoral democracies like India, Russia, Malaysia and South Africa, all of them recognise the value of political rights and civil liberties but not enough to put human rights concerns ahead of commercial and strategic interests.

Aspiring Middle Eastern autocrats can find further comfort in the fact that the combined population of the industrialised countries — home to durable, long-standing liberal democracies — is estimated to remain constant through 2050 at about 1.2 billion. By contrast virtually all human growth will occur in the developing world, where the population is expected to increase from the current 5.1 billion to 7.7 billion. In many of these countries, political rights and civil liberties are more limited, and corruption, single-party domination and ethnic or religious strife the norm. When Werner Fornos, president of the Population Institute in Washington, warned recently that “considering that developing countries bear the brunt of the earth’s grinding poverty, desperate hunger, disease, illiteracy and unemployment, the recent downward revision of demographic figures does not warrant celebration”, he might as well have been speaking for the Greater Middle East’s civil society, whose principal backing, both political and financial, comes from a still influential European-American West.

In the final analysis, the brouhaha about the Greater Middle East Initiative is premature, if not unwarranted. The idea of Washington issuing a “democratise or else” ultimatum to Middle Eastern regimes is at once tantalising and humiliating for the Arab intelligentsia. But nobody seriously expects the West to walk the reformist talk and thereby antagonise moderates in the Arab and Islamic worlds, that too against a backdrop of continued tensions in Iraq and the Palestinian territories. Weakened by internal political and cultural wars, the transatlantic alliance would be punching above its weight if it insists on promoting political and economic reform in the Greater Middle East, oblivious to the grim writing on liberal democracy’s wall.

The writer was until recently editorial page editor of ‘Khaleej Times’