Electing Militant Groups is "Problematic"
By Matthew Levitt
In the current issue of Foreign Affairs, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has offered parting statement under the title “Rethinking the National Interest: American Realism for a New World.” The section on the Middle East includes an elusive passage that seems to acquiesce in the political inclusion of violent groups. As I argue at the Middle East Strategy at Harvard (MESH) blog, it misses the point.
“The participation of armed groups in elections is problematic. But the lesson is not that there should not be elections. Rather, there should be standards, like the ones to which the international community has held Hamas after the fact: you can be a terrorist group or you can be a political party, but you cannot be both. As difficult as this problem is, it cannot be the case that people are denied the right to vote just because the outcome might be unpleasant to us. Although we cannot know whether politics will ultimately deradicalize violent groups, we do know that excluding them from the political process grants them power without responsibility. This is yet another challenge that the leaders and the peoples of the broader Middle East must resolve as the region turns to democratic processes and institutions to resolve differences peacefully and without repression.”
Secretary Rice’s analysis correctly points out that groups must choose between being a terrorist group and a political party if they want to be accepted by the international community as legitimate political parties. Indeed, the lesson is not that elections are bad. The lesson is that elections are not the sum total of democratic transformation; they must follow, not precede, the development of civil society; and they are the product of civil society, not the precipitant for it. Elections done right have positive transformative powers. Elections done wrong are just as powerful, but they are as likely to entrench as to transform, and are more likely to have negative rather than positive implications. The slow and not-so-sexy process of building the “democratic institutions” the Secretary refers to in passing must be prioritized over the quick-fix allure of holding elections prematurely.
In the case of Hamas, which the Secretary cites, the international community’s mistake was in only trying to force the “terrorist group or political party” choice upon Hamas after it participated in elections. Because it came after the group’s electoral victory, forcing that choice after the fact was all that much more difficult. As I argued almost a year ago in the wake of the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip, “The West made a critical mistake when it welcomed Hamas to participate in democratic elections without demanding that it adhere to democratic principles. The electoral laws in most Western European countries would have barred Hamas, an extremist party, from running for political office.”
As the cases of Hamas and Hezbollah have both demonstrated, radical and violent groups have been painfully successful in walking that thin line between power and responsibility, for the most part enjoying the perks of political power without being constrained by political responsibility. They do this by explaining their exceptionalism in terms of their ongoing conflict with the enemy. That is, the “resistance” comes first and all other considerations—political or otherwise—come second.