The great and garrulous one who has bestrode Via Meadia for the past several years, to much acclaim far and wide, is taking a short break. He is doing so not in order to take anything so trivial and intellectually dissipating as a summer vacation but to sally forth from Mead Manor in beautiful downtown Queens on a quest for new knowledge, still deeper understanding, and an entirely new curried appreciation of cuisine. He is going to India.
The great one’s absence will surely seem much longer than it really is, and that is because I have been asked to mutter about in this space until Walter returns. I can’t help but be reminded of the famous scene toward the end of The Wizard of Oz in which the Wizard instructs his subjects to take orders from the Scarecrow and his assistants “until what time, if any, that I return.” So as Walter the Wizard flies off to the universe within a universe that is India, I hereby declare myself Scarecrow-for-a-day (or three).
I am tempted to begin my stand-in peregrinations by talking about Syria, as I am wont to do on my own blog here at The American Interest Online. But except for one brief marginal note to follow immediately after this sentence, I will resist that temptation for now. The marginal note is this: The manner in which the New York Times puts things frequently has a way of taking my breath away. Kofi Annan resigned yesterday as UN peace envoy for Syria, and the article about it, written by Rick Gladstone, characterizes this resignation as, “A move that throws new doubts on whether a diplomatic solution is possible.”
Anyone who still thinks that a diplomatic solution is possible in Syria just isn’t paying attention. Either that or a form of mental exoticism is at work; as another Walter, Walter Lippmann once put it, “It is a disease of the soul to be in love with impossible things.” Rick Gladstone, and presumably his editors, remind me a little of the extremely earnest eight-year olds who needs to be told at least a dozen times that, no, there is no Santa Claus after all, before they will actually believe it.
Rather than perseverate further over Syria or the strange ways of the New York Times, better, I think, to enlarge the discussion of the Arabs and their discontents, in this case with the aid of a newly published essay by my friend Olivier Roy in the current issue of the Journal of Democracy. The article, entitled “The Transformation of the Arab World”, must be read in its entirety; no truncated discussion of it can do it full justice. But before I proceed to truncate here, let me better introduce the matter and the man.
Professor Roy is French. He is the author of many fine books, most of them translated into English, on modern and postmodern Islam. He is also a long-time world-class expert on Afghanistan. Among experts in these fields he is considered without exception absolutely top shelf. His creativity, deep understanding, and willingness to buck the tide of common knowledge and interpretation have no peer. He is always instructive and stimulating even when, in my view, he is not entirely correct. Most unfortunately, those Americans who are not expert in these subjects are unlikely ever to have heard of him.
This is partly because, as I say, he is French. I don’t mean by that that there is anything wrong with French people, and I don’t even mean to thereby implicate the insularity of the American press (although I could if I felt like it). What I’m getting at is that the French understand political sociology against the background of their own long-developed intellectual traditions, and they express themselves often in loaded conceptual language that doesn’t easily deconstruct into English equivalents. I know both the subject and Olivier well enough to grasp, most of the time, what he is actually trying to say even when the words in English don’t exactly say it. That problem shows up, at least a little, in this new essay, as I note below. It’s not a particularly easy read for those not used to probing this subject, and it may require a second and a third reading even for those who are. Nonetheless, it’s very much worth the effort.
Those who are familiar with Dr. Roy’s writing will recognize many themes from of old in this new essay, but he takes these themes into new territory, applying them to new circumstances, and he does so brilliantly. Let me only add one more introductory caveat before getting down to particulars.
As I say, I don’t always agree with Dr. Roy, and in that I am not alone. In this essay he recalls a contention that helped make him well known some years ago among experts in Islamist politics—namely his assertion that political Islam has failed. Of course, the accuracy of this assertion depends on what exactly is meant by “political Islam” and what exactly is meant by “failed.” What Olivier meant at the time, in 1997–98, is that, if I may put it in somewhat simplified fashion, the fear that radical Islamists would seize control of a host of Muslim–majority nations, and through that control upset the geopolitics of the world, turned out to be vastly exaggerated. The reason, again to simplify, is that the utopian dreams of radical Islamists turned out to be impossible to translate into the terms of the modern world. The ubiquitous slogan “Islam is the answer” presupposed understanding the question, and, according to Roy, the Islamists never really did.
I agreed with this assessment at the time, but with a major reservation. Yes, the proximate danger of Islamist takeovers in Arab and other Muslim states was not so great, but, in my view, the progressive Islamicization of these societies might very well create a new, much higher, and more propitious base for future attempts at seizing political control. In other words, my argument at the time was that the key long-term impact of Islamist ambitions was not to be found in proximate high politics, but rather down deep within society itself and off some ways into the future. Olivier was not wrong, as far as he went; my uneasiness about this argument was that he did not go far enough.
This recollection actually provides a perfect bridge to discuss his brilliant new essay. That is because he begins by asserting this very principle. The place to look for the sources and impact of the so-called Arab Spring is not in high politics, whether in Egypt, Tunisia, or elsewhere. The place to look is down deep in society. This is extremely important advice, because the standard common knowledge today, at least as far as one can judge from most commentary here and in Europe, is that the tumult of the past nearly two years hasn’t produced anything of much value, certainly not as concerns democracy and liberal values.
Let’s take a look around, shall we? Egypt remains in thrall to its military, and even if the Muslim Brotherhood manages to wrest control from it, that certainly portends no great success for democracy. Dr. Roy is as clear-eyed as can be on this: He will have none of the ignorant foolishness that tries to characterize the Brotherhood as an organization devoted, or potentially converted, to democracy, let alone to liberal values. The situation in Tunisia is not much better than it is in Egypt, and the situations in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Sudan, the UAE, Oman, Syria, and Lebanon are either the same as before, more or less, or worse by any reasonable measure of political decency. Only in Iran in recent years has there been visible agitation from the street for greater democracy, and that did not get very far at the hands of the regime’s enthusiastic thugs.
On the basis of this track record, a lot of observers have reached the conclusion that the whole thing—this Arab Spring—has been a wash, that it has long since sprung a leak and been drained of its benign potential. The Arabs and other Muslims, many now like to say, are suspended between secular authoritarians with or without their military uniforms and religious authoritarians with or without (as in Turkey) their beards. It’s all about culture, as some people might say. In other words, nothing of any significance has happened.
This is a view one might reasonably take from a focus exclusively devoted to high politics. And it is a view that, as Dr. Roy shows, is completely wrong.
Why has this error become so common? It’s quite simple, really. In order to see the dramatic changes within Arab society that gave rise to the so-called Arab Spring, and to understand their implications going forward, an observer has to actually know something about these societies. That means that an observer will have had to invest hundreds if not thousands of hours in serious study, in at least attempting to learn a Middle Eastern language or two, and in some extended travel. Very few Americans meet those qualifying criteria, certainly compared to the relatively vast number who are deft with journalistic lingo. That is why Olivier Roy’s insights are so valuable; for the reasonably serious of mind, Roy’s work at least can plant the right questions for the sake of his otherwise expertise-deficient readers.
So what’s the essence of his argument? Roy asserts that the Arab uprisings of the past two years give lie to the standard script applied by outsiders to the region. These upheavals have not been about abstractions, whether religious or otherwise; they have been about neither the umma nor pan-Arabism. They have not concerned themselves with relations among states, and they have not had anything to do with Palestine or Israel. They have not gone in search of charismatic leaders either. Here is how he puts it: The Arab Spring “simply would not follow the script which holds that the centrality of the Arab-Israeli conflict is fostering an ever-growing Islamization within Arab societies, a search for charismatic leaders, and an identification with supranational causes.” Rather, they have been about individuals, about individual rights and individual dignity. (Olivier muddies the water a bit by use of the term “citizenship”, which does not have the same meaning in Arabic as it does in Western languages, including French.)
What has changed, in a nutshell, to enable this new focus is that the younger demographic in the Arab world no longer respects the social authority of the old system, which, after all, has long since proven its incapacity to negotiate modernity. Changes in technology and the overhang of globalization have individuated Arab society, not uniformly and not all at once, but in ways that undermine old authoritarian habits. As Roy sees it, these deep social changes open the way not necessarily for democracy, but for democratization. Roy insists on seeing the concept not as a static noun but as a process.
Moreover (and here he is at his very best), Roy insists on disentangling democracy as a process from both secularism and liberalism. Americans in particular tend to bundle these three concepts together, because they have been thus bundled more or less in the American historical experience. But this is simply not the case historically or analytically, as a recent essay in The American Interest by Vladislav Inozemtsev took pains to point out, and as Francis Fukuyama’s most recent book also explains at length. Roy’s argument is that Arabs can become democrats without becoming secularists or liberals, and that, indeed, the new context of Arab society is mandating exactly such a circumstance. Roy notes that even Egypt’s salafists, certainly no friend of democracy by any measure, have no choice but to promote what he calls the “autonomization of politics.” No party, whether secular or religious, has a lock on ideological attractiveness, let alone purity, and no party can get away any longer with slogans bereft of actual programs.
As he has argued before, underlying this transformation is a change in the very concept of religiosity, a change ironically promoted by fundamentalist exertions over recent decades. In traditional society, religious behavior is utterly social. As some observers have put it, observances are largely mimetic, which is to say that people learn proper religious behavior by following the examples of their elders. As urbanization and literacy advance, and as individuation attends both, the social support structures of religion tend to dissolve into private faith. “There is a cultural gap”, Roy points out, “between the Islamists and the younger generation that is less about Islam per se than about what it means for a person to be a believer.” Islamic fundamentalism, as Roy has contended for many years, has aided mightily this process because its appeal is to individual believers in the face of, and as opposed to, received static tradition, which fundamentalists have savaged as being adulterated with accumulated superstition, corruption, laxity, and even idolatry. Fundamentalism, in other words, has diversified––indeed, pluralized––Islam. As Roy explains (and here I piece together a quote assembled from different discussions within the essay):
This individualization and diversification have had the unexpected consequence of disconnecting religion from daily politics, of bringing religion back into the private sphere and excluding it from that of government management. Fundamentalism, by disconnecting religion from culture and by defining a faith community through believing and not just belonging, is in fact contributing to the secularization of society. . . . The growing de facto autonomy of the religious arena from political and ideological control does not mean that secularism is necessarily gaining ground in terms of culture and society. Yet certainly a new form of political secularism is emerging. Once it takes hold, religion will not dictate what politics should be, but will itself be reduced to politics. . . . Religious identity and faith are two different (and possibly opposed) concepts in politics. Identity might be a way to bury faith beneath secular politics.As I have already indicated, accept no substitute—not even mine—for reading Dr. Roy’s essay in its entirety. That is the only way for you to understand his words properly in context. I have tried to give only a bit of their flavor, and some key elements of his thesis. Please take time to do the rest of the work yourself; whether you agree with him in the main or not, you’ll end up much wiser for the engagement. You will at the very least learn where the real action is in Arab and other Muslim societies: It’s in places you rarely get to read about in the newspaper.
Roy does not elaborate what the social developments he espies mean for either French or U.S. foreign policy. That is not a criticism, merely an observation. There is only so much one can do in a single essay, and this essay brims with such insight that it would be churlish to criticize it for what it never set out to do. Roy is no starry-eyed idealist. He doesn’t see trends in Arab society in politically utopian terms. He is under no illusion, I am sure, that still very lightly institutionalized populist democracies will bring their people only roses and serenity. But I think it’s worth making explicit what Roy leaves here unsaid. Two points seem to me, if not also necessarily to him, most germane.
First, American policy is no stranger to the difficult problem of choosing between values and interests deemed equally important. The policy of the Obama administration toward Egypt illustrates this very well, as did, in other contexts, the policy of several administrations before it. Of course, we’re Americans, and so we want other countries to be democracies, or to be more stable and vigorous democracies than they are. At the same time, we want them to respect and contribute to the protection and advancement of our interests, and because we want both things so much, many people have persuaded themselves that the more democratic other countries become, the more likely they are to have similar interests to our own. Sometimes this is true, but sometimes it isn’t.
For example, there isn’t much question that most Egyptians (and the reasons are not important for the time being) don’t like Israel and don’t like the peace treaty Egypt has observed with Israel since March 1979. The more the Egyptian government resembles and reflects popular opinion, the more likely that treaty will either collapse or be discounted into frailty if not irrelevance. But that treaty, whatever else it has been good for, obviates war in the region on the scale of 1967 and 1973, and for a whole host of reasons that is important to the United States. A more democratic Egypt is not an Egypt necessarily more aligned with American interests.
That’s not all. It has been American policy for a while now to promote gender equality in the Arab world. There are all sorts of programs in the State Department, USAID, and even the Justice and Defense Departments set up and funded for this purpose. Of course, 21st-century Americans cannot do otherwise, and if anyone still doubts that foreign policy is very often a projection of domestic political culture, let him ponder this new imperative. But a more democratic Muslim country whose society remains traditional in its religious culture, whether Arab or not, is very unlikely to promote gender quality, as we understand it, as a key public policy goal. One of the first things that some new members of the Libyan transitional government wanted to do was to reinstate the legality of polygamy. Not only does the “autonomization” of politics in Arab countries not promise an alignment of interests; it does not promise an alignment of values either.
And second, to put it as simply as I can, the democratization process in the Arab world will put paid to democratic peace theory. By pluralizing democratic politics far beyond its current extent, and particularly by creating democratic political cultures that are neither secular nor liberal (if, indeed, that is what the future portends), it will be much harder to say with any assurance that democratic countries do not make war against one another. We may very well learn from this experience that what has kept democracies from making war on one another has not been democracy but rather the liberal values that have tended to lie side-by-side with democratic politics for most of the past two and a half centuries. (Tended to, but not always: Note that Hitler and the Nazi Party rose to power by democratic means; they were not, however, liberal.) As diverse as democratic cultures are today—European (Northern, Southern, Iberian, and Eastern), North American, South American, Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, Israeli, Indian, and more—each one of these varieties underwent (or did not require) a protracted period of secularization before it underwent significant democratization. Arab societies, to one degree or another, are exceptions to this historical trend, with implications we will learn if Dr. Roy’s assessment of their political trajectories turns out to be correct.
A person could be forgiven, I suppose, for confusing correlation with cause in a case like this. But I suspect that a lot of well-meaning Western and especially American idealists, of both conservative and liberal temperament, will not take this news very well if and when it comes eventually to stare them in the face. Yes, they too will have to concede that, in the end, there really is no Santa Claus.
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