Daily Standard: Illiberal Democracy on the Rise?

By Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

I have a new article posted at the Daily Standard, co-authored with my colleague Nir Boms. We have written previously about how liberal institutions are more important than elections to U.S. efforts to transform the Middle East: "Since the only safe way to criticize most Middle Eastern governments is from a fundamentalist direction, the choice at the ballot box tends to be between the corrupt rulers now in power and their Islamist opposition. . . . By adopting a strong policy of promoting liberal institutions, the U.S. can help the Middle East move beyond this forced choice between thieves and killers."

In our latest article, Boms and I expand this analysis by exploring the options the U.S. has for promoting liberal institutions. An excerpt:

Two important realizations are needed. The first is that a democratic culture cannot be built overnight -- especially not in a region which has such a long history of oppressive and authoritarian government. The second is that democracy must be measured by the level of liberalism it engenders, not the number of ballots cast. As recent history shows, elections can be the continuation of autocracy by other means.

True, elections are easy to measure and can be quite dramatic: See the wave of purple-fingered citizens that marked Iraq's first democratic vote. But elections are not the most important indicator of a state's progression -- and we may want to temper our enthusiasm for pushing them until the Middle East developed a more liberal culture.

To help promote liberalism, our policymakers need to improve their cultural literacy so they can more easily identify and effectively work with regional and local players devoted to the values of tolerance and political freedom. It took a revolution to create democracies in Europe and America--and it may take another revolution in the Middle East. But that revolution can only come from within, spearheaded by existing forces that already work toward democratization.

Read the whole article here.

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