DEMOCRATIZATION VERSUS 

LIBERALIZATION IN THE ARAB WORLD:

DILEMMAS AND CHALLENGES 

FOR U.S FOREIGN POLICY

Daniel Brumberg

July 2005

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iii

FOREWORD

 The question of democracy in the Middle East has become an issue 

of high politics and high policymaking for the U.S. Government. Yet 

in the process of rising to such a salient position in the foreign policy 

agenda, many of the nuances and complexities that promoting 

democracy in the Middle East encounters have received inadequate 

analysis.

 The central distinction between political liberalization and 

democratization is particularly important. Political liberalization 

is not a phase in an inevitable transition to democracy in the Arab 

world, but rather a hybrid system that blends liberalization and 

autocracy. For the United States, a key question it must tackle is 

whether it should push Arab regimes to move beyond the boundaries 

of liberalized autocracy. The answer is far from obvious, since any 

push for substantive democratization could empower Islamists, and/

or re-ignite sectarian, religious, or ideological conflict in countries 

such as Egypt, Morocco, Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, or Yemen.

 This monograph, by Dr. Daniel Brumberg, is an important 

contribution to the public debate on these vital issues.

DOUGLAS C. LOVELACE, JR.

Director

Strategic Studies Institute 
iv

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR

DANIEL BRUMBERG serves as a special adviser for the United 

States Institute of Peace in the Muslim World Initiative, where 

he focuses on issues of democratization and political reform in 

the Middle East and wider Islamic world. He is also an associate 

professor at Georgetown University and is a former senior associate 

in the Carnegie Endowment’s Democracy and Rule of Law Project 

(2003-04). Dr. Brumberg previously was a Jennings Randolph senior 

fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, where he pursued a study of 

power sharing in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. In 1997, he 

was a Mellon junior fellow at Georgetown University and a visiting 

fellow at the International Forum on Democratic Studies. He was a 

visiting professor in the Department of Political Science at Emory 

University, a visiting fellow in the Middle East Program in the 

Jimmy Carter Center, and has taught at the University of Chicago. 

Dr. Brumberg is the author of many articles on political and social 

change in the Middle East and wider Islamic world. With a grant 

from the MacArthur Foundation, he is currently working on a 

comparative study of power sharing experiments in Algeria, Kuwait, 

and Indonesia. A member of the editorial board of the Journal of 

Democracy and the advisory board of the International Forum on 

Democratic Studies, Dr. Brumberg is also chairman of the nonprofit 

Foundation on Democratization and Political Change in the Middle 

East. He has worked closely with a number of nongovernment 

organizations in the Arab world, including the Palestinian Academic 

Society for the Study of International Affairs (PASSIA). He is also 

a member of the editorial board of the American Political Science 

Association’s Political Science and Politics. Dr. Brumberg received his 

B.A. from Indiana University and his Ph.D. from the University of 

Chicago.
v

SUMMARY

 This monograph looks at the political origins and dynamics of 

“liberalized autocracy” in the Arab world. Liberalized autocracy is 

a system of rule that allows for a measure of political openess and 

competition in the electoral, party, and press arenas, while ultimately 

ensuring that power rests in the hands of ruling regimes. This mix 

of control and openness has not only benefitted ruling elites, but 

oppositons as well. It gives them room to “let off steam,” to criticize 

regimes, and occasionally to affect public policy. Moreover, given 

the absence of consensus in many Arab states over national identity, 

liberalized autocracy has provided an umbrella by which competing 

groups―Islamists, secularists, Kurds, and Berbers―can achieve a 

measure of peaceful coexistence precisely because no group actually 

wields power. The United States largely has supported such hybrid 

systems, a fact of political life that has not changed dramatically 

under the Bush administration despite its rhetorical commitment to 

democracy. Whether the gap between words and deeds should or 

can be closed or narrowed is a complex question, since a sudden 

move from state managed liberalization to democracy could open 

the door to Islamist power.

1

DEMOCRATIZATION VERSUS 

LIBERALIZATION IN THE ARAB WORLD:

DILEMMAS AND CHALLENGES FOR U.S FOREIGN POLICY

Introduction: Between Philosophy and Policy.

 In his November 6, 2003, speech before the National Endowment 

for Democracy, President Bush laid out an ambitious vision for a 

“forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East.” While some 

observers attributed the speech to the White House’s desire to 

redefine the very purpose of the Iraq war, the fact of the matter is 

the administration’s neo-conservatives long have argued that the 

toppling of Saddam Hussein was the first shot in a long campaign 

to democratize the Middle East. Bush’s speech clearly showed that 

the President has fully embraced the neo-conservatives’ conviction 

that it is the “calling” of the United States (as he put it), to extend the 

global democratic revolution to the Middle East. 

 Will such idealism withstand the test of time and circumstance? 

Thus far, the administration has adopted a philosophy rather than a 

strategy, an aspiration rather than a coherent plan. As a result, it has 

been operating on a kind of default policy mechanism, whose main 

outlines defer to the “liberalization strategy” that has guided the 

Middle East democracy aid programs of the United States for nearly 

a decade. That strategy calls for reinforcing civil society organizations 

in the hope that they eventually will push ruling elites to move 

beyond state-managed political liberalization strategies―strategies 

that Arab elites have used to avoid the challenges of democratization. 

This “demand side” approach has been welcomed by the rulers of 

what I call “liberalized autocracies” for obvious reasons: Insofar as 

the rulers of Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Jordan, Kuwait, and Yemen 

depend on a certain measure of state managed pluralism to maintain 

their rule, American aid programs that encourage a gradual 

opening up and pluralizing of civil society are, by design or default, 

consonant with the regime survival strategies of Arab rulers. Thus 

the obvious questions that are central to this monograph: Can or 

should the United States encourage Arab leaders to move beyond 
2

the confines of state enforced pluralism? Can political liberalization 

be transformed into a handmaiden of democratization rather than 

an adjunct of liberalized autocracy?

 As we shall see, the answers are far from clear or obvious. To 

move beyond the piecemeal liberalization approach that has long 

guided our Middle East democracy aid programs, the United 

States must reinforce its traditional “demand side” civil society 

policies with a “supply side” focus that tackles the key problem: the 

institutions and ruling ideologies of Arab states. Such a shift will be 

very difficult, since it will require pressuring some of the very Arab 

leaders whose support on the war on terrorism the administration 

needs. Moreover, inasmuch as a state-focused, supply side approach 

could open the door to Islamist political power, the United States 

will have to carefully assess where and when a democratization 

strategy is least likely to create a zero-sum conflict between Islamist 

oppositions and the state. Since such a conflict benefits only two 

players―Islamists and regime hard-liners―the most likely candidates 

for a successful democratization strategy will be those whose party 

systems already boast a level of ideological pluralism sufficient to 

contain the challenge of Islamist parties. For reasons I will explain 

below, I believe that Morocco is one of the few countries in the Arab 

world where the risks of a full blown democratization strategy might 

be worth taking.

 Finally, I should state for the record that as far as I am concerned, 

no serious democratization strategy has the slightest chance of 

success so long as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict continues to simmer 

and periodically blow up. Unless the administration shows in words 

and, most important, in deeds that it believes that the Palestinians 

are as deserving of independence and democracy as are the Iraqis, 

all the talk of democratization in the Arab world will ring hollow in 

the minds of a vast majority of Arab youth.

The “Democracy Gap.”

 Since September 11, 2001 (9/11), the democracy gap in the Middle 

East has become a focus of public debate in the United States and of 

high policy in the Bush administration itself. But for those who have 

long studied the region or the wider problem of democratization, 
3

the subject is not new. For a decade Freedom House’s annual 

reports have chartered the nondemocratic nature of Middle East 

regimes along two axes: political rights and civil liberties. Year 

after year, the region has come up short, not only by comparison 

to the industrialized West but, more importantly, by comparison to 

other Third World states that have significant Muslims pluralities 

(such as India) or majorities, such as Indonesia. Thus the Middle 

East, and the Arab world in particular, has proven one of the most 

democracy resistant regions of the world. Yet these same figures 

also suggest, albeit in inadequate ways, some interesting nuances.1

Six Middle East states―Algeria, Jordan, Lebanon, Oman, the United 

Arab Emirates (UAE), and Yemen―score worse along the political 

rights axis than they do along the civil liberties axis. In other words, 

while there is a general shortage of formal democracy, a few of the 

region’s autocracies tolerate varying degrees of political pluralism 

and openness. Freedom House’s “partly free” category―which is 

assigned to Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, and Turkey―gets 

at this interesting nuance. But it fails to fully capture the number 

of Arab regimes whose endurance can be explained in part by a 

heritage of political eclecticism. For this reason, Table 1 includes a 

“regime type” category that puts the region in a different light. As 

the table indicates, only a minority of Middle East regimes (seven, 

including Iran and the former Iraq) can be called “full autocracies,” 

by which I mean regimes that tolerate no dissent and permit not 

a shred of independent democratic practice. The vast majority are 

partial autocracies, or what I call “liberalized autocracies.” Unlike 

full autocracies, whose survival depends on quashing all political 

competition, the very endurance of liberalized autocracies depends 

on acquiescing to, or even promoting, a measure of state managed 

political openness.

The Logic of Liberalized Autocracy.

 Liberalized autocracies are not unique to the Middle East. Semiautocracies of one kind or another dot the globe, a tribute to the fact that 

the so-called “global democratic revolution” was less a consequence 

of some kind of Hegelian dialectic by which the democratic idea 

magically conquered the world, as it was a consequence of the 

political and economic failure of full autocracies. 
4

Country FH 1993 Rankings (PR, CL*) Regime Type 

Algeria 6,5 Not Free Partial Autocracy 

Bahrain 5,5 Partly Free (6,5 2002) Partial Autocracy

Egypt 6,6 Not Free Partial Autocracy

Iran 6,6 Not Free Towards Full Autocracy?

Iraq 7,7 Not Free Collapsed Full Autocracy

Jordan 6,5 Partly Free (5,5 2002) Partial Autocracy

Kuwait 4,5 Partly Free Partial Autocracy

Lebanon 6,5 Not Free Partial Autocracy

Libya 7,7 Not Free Full Autocracy

Morocco 5,5 Partly Free Partial Autocracy

Oman 6,5 Not Free Partial Autocracy

Qatar 6,6 Not Free Partial Autocracy

Saudi Arabia 7,7 Not Free Full Autocracy

Syria 7,7 Not Free Full Autocracy

Tunisia 7,7 Not Free Full Autocracy

Turkey 3,4 Partly Free Illiberal Democracy

United Arab Emirates 6,5 Not Free Full Autocracy 

Yemen 6,5 Not Free (6,6 2002) Partial Autocracy

Note: Best rating is 1, worst rating is 7. (*PR- political rights, 

CL- civil liberties)

Table 1. Muslim Majority Middle East States.

But if what scholars of modern Russia call “managed pluralism” has 

its analogues in the Arab world, the region’s liberalized autocracies 

have ideological, social, political, and institutional traits specific to 

the region.2

 The distinctive quality of liberalized autocracies creates 

a complex challenge for any serious Middle East democratization 

strategy.

 Like all semi-authoritarian political systems, those in the Middle 

East rely on a complex system of opening and closing, loosening and 

tightening, whose vague contours are designed to keep opposition 

forces off balance. State-managed control of elections, political 

parties, the “opposition press,” and civil society institutions creates 

a safety valve that gives opposition forces a means to release steam 

while enhancing the capacities of regimes to divide the opposition, 

and to gather useful information on the nature and scope of their 

opponents. As the late Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat once 

put it, “democracy is a safety valve so I know what my enemies are 

doing.” 
5

 But it would be a mistake to see liberalized autocracy as merely 

a regime survival tactic. Instead, it is an integrated system whose 

internal rules and logic not only serve the interests of rulers, but also 

those of many (but not all) mainstream opposition elites. Although 

these elites often complain about the limits placed by the state on 

democratic expression, the din of their criticism often masks a rough 

consensus regarding the preferability of liberalized autocracy over 

the black hole of full or rapid democratization. 

 The roots of this rough consensus can be traced to a legacy of 

political development in the Arab world that is some 4 decades old. 

First, the region suffers from an enduring heritage of depoliticization. 

Political life has been dominated by elites who operate through 

patron-client networks or formal corporatist channels. Most of the 

public has been left out of the equation, thus creating a sense of the 

remoteness of national politics itself. Formal institutions such as 

parties have provided a shell through which elites vied for power 

but rarely mobilized the wider population. In “populist” regimes, 

ruling parties such as Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Arab Socialist Union 

never secured a grass roots following comparable to Indonesia’s 

Golkar Party or Mexico’s Institutionalized Revolutionary Parties. As 

for the political parties of Arab monarchies, in a few cases, such as 

Morocco, political parties managed to sink some roots in society. But 

in the vast majority of cases, they are either illegal (as in Bahrain 

and Kuwait) and/or consist of informal groupings or factions led by 

notables that have informal ties to one or another faction of the ruling 

family.3 Second, this process of depoliticization was buttressed by a 

“ruling bargain” by which the state promised jobs, social welfare, 

and security in return for the political quiescence of the wider 

population. Whether funded by oil rents, import substitution, and 

quasi-socialist public sectors, or by strategic grants and loans from 

the Superpowers (sometimes it was a combination of all three, as 

in Egypt), this bargain gave rulers a means to skirt the taxation/

representation nexus that helped foster democracy in the West4. 

Third, precisely because most Arab rulers preferred patronage over 

brute force and co-optation over prisons or executions, they could 

develop an efficient military-security apparatus whose deadly claws 

were usually reserved for those who challenged the very foundations 

of the political system. Eschewing pure despotism, most Arab leaders 
6

accommodated a range of ethnic, social, and religious groups, thus 

creating a level of incipient, if unruly, pluralism. Paradoxically, it 

is precisely this level of pluralism that abets the regime “survival 

strategies” of liberalized autocracies. By playing one group against 

the other, they divide their opponents, thus enhancing the regime’s 

room for maneuver and autonomy from any one group.5 Finally, 

Arab rulers attempted to legitimate this live-and-let-live system 

by disseminating a communal or patrimonialist vision of authority 

that, even in its most “secular” version, relied implicitly on Islamic 

symbols to buttress the ultimate authority of the king or president. 

 During the 1980s, this merging of elite politics, patronage, 

selective repression, and patrimonialism came under pressure as the 

rents that had funded the “ruling bargain” declined. But this decline 

was never decisive enough to create a systemic crisis of sufficient 

severity to either topple regimes or to compel reformists and 

opponents to negotiate a new democratic bargain. Instead, the old 

bargain and its institutions were reworked and revised to create the 

foundations for today’s liberalized autocracies. In countries ruled by 

single parties, such as Egypt and Tunisia, this dynamic began when 

“reformers” such as Sadat or Tunisia’s Ben Ali literally invented 

opposition “platforms” (munabir) or formal parties. Because the 

leaders of these parties usually came from one faction or another of 

the ruling establishment, the liberalization of party life did not create 

parties with grass roots constituencies. Instead, it largely maintained 

the personal or familial networks that had long sustained traditional 

elite structures and that assured support within both regimes and 

oppositions for state-managed liberalization. As for the monarchies 

of Morocco, Jordan, and to some extent Kuwait, while they did not 

boast the ruling parties of their populist cousins, the close links 

between “opposition” party leaders and the king nevertheless 

ensured what was often a remarkable level of consensus. Moreover, 

given the lack of organic links between opposition parties and the 

wider populace in both populist regimes and monarchies, there was 

little basis upon which to mobilize a popular movement in favor of 

reforms that would challenge the basic rules of the game.

 Still, this opposition-regime elite consensus came with a price: 

the opening of the legislative systems to a degree of competition 

sufficient to give opposition elites some voice but insufficient to give 
7

them the institutional means (or authority) to overcome the ultimate 

power of the executive. The latter’s dominance almost always is 

enshrined in the constitutions of the Arab world, which either 

explicitly give the monarch or president ultimate authority (as is the 

case in Morocco, Egypt, and Yemen), or implicitly do the same by 

not providing a decisive separation of powers that makes it possible 

for elected assemblies to represent the will of elected majorities. 

 During the early and mid-1990s, this arrangement invited periodic 

conflicts between legislatures and executives on a range of issues 

such as party and press laws. But no mainstream opposition parties 

questioned the basic rules of the game that animated liberalized 

autocracies. At worst, legislative-executive conflicts sometimes 

compelled leaders to dissolve parliaments, as was the case in Jordan 

in 2001, or to force the resignation of an existing cabinet, as was 

the case in Kuwait in 2002.6 At best, clever executives initiated new 

“reforms” whose paradoxical consequence was to partly strengthen 

the executive. This was often accomplished by creating an upper 

house whose appointed or indirectly elected members have the 

authority to block the legislation of the lower house and thus can 

effectively defend the supremacy of the executive. Such was the case 

with Morocco’s constitutional reforms in 1996, with those of Algeria 

in 1996, and those of Bahrain in 2002. 

 Why do opposition forces tolerate or even embrace such regimefriendly constitutional reforms? One reason is that while such changes 

do not radically alter the balance of power between executives and 

legislatures, they still give opposition parties a chance to get in the 

game, or to build support among a wary and often distant public. In 

Algeria, Jordan, and Yemen, reforms at different times have made it 

possible for opposition parties to participate in multi-party cabinets, 

and in Morocco, to form a government that during the mid-1990s 

was led by the opposition. But since such cabinets do not wield 

ultimate authority, this only begs the question: Why participate in 

governments that at the end of the day, do not actually rule? 

 One answer lies in the fact that state managed power 

sharing arrangements can create space for social and ideological 

accommodations that would be difficult to sustain in more traditional 

win/lose democratic systems. Many Middle East states remain 

divided by sharp ethnic, religious, cultural, or ideological cleavages. 
8

Because the most transparent and democratic of elections can make 

it possible for victors to use their mandate to disenfranchise their 

opponents, win/lose democracy often invites rather than diminishes 

conflicts over national identity (a point that the Bush administration 

is now learning in Iraq). Algeria’s aborted election in 1992 was a case 

in point. There a host of groups―labor, women’s organizations, many 

Berbers, and elements within the secular intelligentsia―supported 

or acquiesced to the military’s halting of a second round of elections 

that would have brought the Islamic Salvation Front to power.7

 While 

the 8-year civil war that ensued showed that the total exclusion of 

Islamists from politics was a recipe for further bloodshed, Algeria’s 

experience also illustrated the dangers of jumping head-long into 

a win/lose democratic system absent some minimal consensus 

over national identity. Thus, beginning in 1997, the regime and 

opposition parties adopted a system by which Islamists, liberal 

secularists, ethnic Berbers, and state apparatchiks shared seats in a 

parliament. While the latter had no real power, under its roof an 

aura of peaceful coexistence between different parties and identities 

emerged precisely because none of the parties could impose its vision 

of political community through the largely powerless legislature.8

 Algeria may be the most dysfunctional example of liberalized 

autocracy, but it is hardly unique. In far away Kuwait, secularists 

and Islamists since 1992 have sat in a parliament that is probably 

the most vocal and obstructionist institution of its kind in the Arab 

world. While secular and Islamist parliamentarians occasionally 

have joined forces on issues such as foreign investment, none have 

challenged the complex set of formal and informal mechanisms 

that allow the royal family to prevent any one faction from actually 

controlling the parliament―or using an election victory to impose 

its cultural or social agenda on the rest of society. Since Kuwait’s 

relatively open society gives Islamists and secularists opportunities 

to express themselves in parliament and in a variety of newspapers 

and civil society institutions, but also boasts a political system that 

makes it difficult for any faction to impose its agenda on other 

groups “democratically,” there remains a high degree of consensus 

regarding the desirability of maintaining the status quo rather than 

moving to full democracy. 
9

 During the 1990s, the proliferation of civil society organizations 

in Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, and Kuwait greased the wheels 

of liberalized autocracy. Unable to cope with the manifold social, 

economic, and humanitarian challenges facing the state, governments 

let nongovernmental or quasi-nongovernmental groups initiate 

programs in health, the environment, and education. Longstanding professional associations representing lawyers, journalists, 

businessmen, academics, doctors, and engineers also became more 

active and politicized as they attempted to become substitutes for 

ossified political parties. This dynamic served the interest of regimes 

whose very divide and rule strategies benefited from the fragmented 

nature of civil society. Yet given the absence of alternative avenues 

of mobilization, civil society activists embraced the opportunities 

that came their way, even as they occasionally challenged or defied 

the legal and constitutional restraints used by the state to limit their 

activities. As in the arenas of political party and parliamentary 

life, civil society activism helped to sustain liberalized autocracies 

because it offered advantages to both opposition and ruling elites.9

Islamists and the Limits of Liberalized Autocracy.

 Given the durability and partial legitimacy of liberalized 

autocracies, it might be argued that what works should not be fixed. 

But semi-authoritarianism comes with a huge price tag, not only for 

Arab societies but also for the United States. The most glaring cost is 

this: The very success of liberalized autocracy can make a transition 

to democracy difficult. Rather than open the door to a transition, 

state managed liberalization in the Arab world tends to close this 

door, or at least block its way. Why is this so? 

 To begin with, because of constitutional restraints placed on 

party and parliamentary life, political parties are often deprived of 

the opportunity to practice the arts of representation, mobilization, 

and compromise, all of which are vital to functioning political 

parties. Indeed, as the experience of Morocco, Egypt, and especially 

Algeria demonstrates, over time parties that play the liberalization 

game can loose legitimacy precisely because they participate in a 

system which the society views as bogus, illegitimate, or irrelevant. 

Civil society organizations may have grown in number, but, in 
10

their present configuration, most do little to resolve this problem. 

Indeed, their political activism carries with it a double cost: On the 

one hand, it often undermines their capacity to defend their specific 

professional interests, while on the other, it does little to bolster 

specifically political organizations such as parties or parliaments. 

Most civil society organizations cannot substitute for either, and 

thus cannot compensate for the essential weakness of political society, 

by which I mean a coherent set of institutions whose specific role 

is to mobilize and represent competing interests of the populace. 

Finally, it should be noted that the economic development strategies 

of liberalized autocracies have not created the social foundations 

for more robust representational politics. On the contrary, because 

their endurance hinges on tolerating a variety of public and private 

sector economic actors (and manipulating them in ways that sustain 

the regime’s maneuverability), most liberalized autocracies have 

skirted the tough political choices involved in promoting genuine 

market reforms. Relying on rents of one kind or another, many have 

depended on a muddling through strategy in both the economic and 

political realms.

 Islamists have often been the most vociferous critics of such 

muddling through strategies. They have assailed vigorously the 

repercussions of trying to integrate Arab states into a globalizing 

system, whose economic and especially cultural underpinnings are 

said to be alien to “Muslim” values. But despite or perhaps because of 

these critiques (which enhances their social standing among the urban 

poor), Islamists have been the primary beneficiaries of liberalized 

autocracy. It is not simply a matter of their control of mosques and 

charitable institutions. The essential issue is that this control gives 

Islamists a capacity to mobilize and thus emerge as the only true 

representative nonstate institutions, by which I mean those that have 

organic and organized links to society itself. Paradoxically, though, 

this privileged position owes much to the Islamists’ long-standing 

and sometimes cozy relationship with certain segments of the ruling 

elite or party, a fact of life in Yemen, Kuwait, Jordan, and even Egypt. 

Thus, for example, while Mubarak’s government periodically has 

repressed radical Islamists, it has not only given a fairly wide berth to 

mainstream fundamentalists by ceding control to them of Al-Azhar 
11

University, it has also tolerated and thus effectively condoned the 

courts’ periodic persecution of reformist Islamist thinkers such as 

Cairo University’s Dr. Nasr Hamed Abu Zeid.10

 This advantageous combination of being outside and inside the 

state helped Islamists make substantial gains in elections during the 

early and mid-1990s, a development that often threatened to overturn 

or destabilize the delicate balancing act that liberalized autocracies 

counted on for their survival. As a result, a pattern of opening and 

closing, liberalization and deliberalization, emerged in many Arab 

states. In Yemen the ruling General Popular Congress (GDP) first 

relied on its alliance with the Islah Party to neutralize the secular 

Yemeni Socialist Party, but then used machine politics and physical 

intimidation during the 1997 elections to reduce dramatically Islah’s 

seats in the parliament.11 In Jordan, King Hussein rewrote the 

election laws to create constituencies that favored tribal over Islamist 

identities, then passed a new press law that increased the state’s 

power to censor journalists arbitrarily. His son, King Abdullah, went 

even further in 2001, when he dissolved parliament and ruled by 

decree for a 2-year period during which elections were postponed 

twice. A similar pattern thus far has not emerged in Morocco, where 

the two mainstream nationalist parties so far have retained enough 

support to limit the gains of the Justice and Development Party (JDP). 

But this situation may only be temporary. Knowing full well that 

any sweeping victory might antagonize the authorities, during the 

2002 parliamentary elections the JDP chose not to run a full slate of 

candidates. In the wake of the elections, the JDP emerged as the third 

largest party in parliament―a politically comfortable position that 

enhanced its credibility among its followers, while reassuring the 

king and his allies in the secular parties and security apparatus that 

they still called the shots. In short, far from encouraging a regimeopposition dialogue on how best to move beyond limits of state 

managed pluralism, liberalized autocracy often promotes a zerosum, state versus society stand-off that, from the vantage point of 

the regime, raises the risk of genuine democratization. The resulting 

retreat by the state saps the regime of legitimacy, thus guaranteeing 

the day when a new leader emerges to declare a reopening of the 

system, a new day of dialogue and trust that eventually gives way to 

apathy and/or disillusionment.
12

 The costs of this destabilizing cycle for Arab leaders has been high. 

It has widened the gulf between rulers and populace, while hindering 

the creation of modern political institutions that can galvanize the 

public. Because renewing this system hinges on securing a new 

leader―a King Abdullah in Jordan, a King Mohammed in Morocco 

(or perhaps, a new King/President Gamal Mubarak in Egypt)―

liberalized autocracy rests on the potentially unstable foundations 

of individual personality. This fact is of utmost importance to the 

United States since the vast majority of our friends in the Arab world 

preside over liberalized autocracies. The United States has hitched 

its wagon to a political system that appears capable of survival, but 

not of much dramatic economic or political change, and which thus 

remains vulnerable to internal and external shocks. Moreover, as we 

found after 9/11, many of these regimes or elements within them 

tolerate or occasionally encourage mainstream Islamists, many of 

whom not only express anti-American, anti-Israeli, and even explicitly 

anti-Semitic views but also oppose some of Washington’s most 

forward looking policies, such as the very idea of a two state solution 

to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The question thus arises: Can or 

should the United States do anything to help Arab governments and 

oppositions exit the trap of liberalized authority? 

What is To be Done?

 If President Bush’s recent speeches on the subject of Middle 

East democracy are to be taken at face value, it certainly appears 

that his administration is fed up with business as usual. But on 

the level of actual policy, there is a wide gap between Bush’s neoWilsonian rhetoric and the realpolitik logic that has guided our 

Middle East democracy aid programs. After all, for nearly a decade 

now, these programs, by design or default, have sustained rather 

than undermined liberalized autocracy. The package of aid projects 

the United States has promoted in Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, 

and Yemen―and which it is continuing to promote through its 

Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI)―focus on the usual 

suspects: strengthening civil society, promoting the participation 

of women, giving technical advice to parliaments and parties, or 

encouraging trade and market economic reform.12 While these are 
13

worthy goals, the assumption that this largely bottom-up, “demand 

side” approach eventually will compel regimes to undertake a 

transition from liberalization to democracy is dubious. Because 

demand side programs skirt the essential problem, which is the nature 

of state ideologies and state power, by themselves they cannot help 

reformers and opposition forces exit the circular path of liberalized 

autocracy. Absent a supply side approach that promotes from above 

constitutional and institutional reforms that empower legislatures 

to represent, and opposition parties to mobilize, alternatives to both 

the official ruling parties and to their Islamist opponents, American 

aid policies might help improve the overall quality of political life, 

but they are unlikely to promote actual democratization. 

 That said, in and of itself, such caution is not unwarranted. A sudden 

or messy departure from a piecemeal, demand side approach could 

carry with it risks that could outweigh the benefits of maintaining 

the status quo. The most obvious of these risks is a democratization 

process that would hand the mantle of rule to Islamists. Faced with 

the revolutionary prospect of Islamists in power, moderate Arab 

reformers might be quickly out maneuvered by hard-line opponents 

of all reform. The latter would push for a retreat to full autocracy 

and, in so doing, polarize the political field. Indeed, it is this very 

prospect that helped sustain the political purgatory of liberalized 

autocracy. The challenge for the administration is to devise some 

way of assessing where and when the risks of a democratization 

strategy are sufficiently low, such that it can be implemented without 

reinforcing the position of Islamists and their hard-line opponents 

in ruling regimes. As Samuel Huntington once put it, there is no 

easy choice, and, it is worth adding, no easy yardstick by which we 

can measure the costs and benefits of political liberalization versus 

democratization.

 The most suitable candidate for a democratization strategy 

would be an Arab state whose electoral system is already sufficiently 

independent and competitive, such that, if and when Islamists do 

enter a genuinely open election, they must face, negotiate, and 

ultimately share power with non-Islamist parties. A multipolar 

political arena that contains the challenge of Islamist parties is an 

absolute necessity. Unfortunately, there are few candidates that 

meet this criterion. As I have already noted, liberalized autocracy 
14

tends to benefit Islamist parties, thus producing a zero-sum regimeopposition conflict that makes democratic compromise difficult. For 

this reason, the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, and Bahrain will 

be very hesitant to embrace any kind of strategy that moves beyond 

the limits of political liberalization. 

 The one Arab state whose leaders eventually might entertain such 

a move is Morocco. While the credibility and legitimacy of Morocco’s 

non-Islamist political parties has diminished over the last decade, the 

two largest secular parties, as well as several other smaller parties, 

command sufficient public support such that no Islamist party could 

hope to rule other than in a multi-party coalition. Moreover, as a 

monarchy, Morocco enjoys a structural advantage that the Arab 

world’s presidential systems lack: a leader who is not tied down by 

one ruling party, and who thus can serve as an arbiter who brokers 

compromises over social, cultural, legal, and economic policy.13 This 

brokering function is formalized in a constitution that, despite its 

democratic provisions, gives the king ultimate and supreme power 

over the legislature and the cabinet―when and if he should choose 

to use it. Such eclecticism gives the king the power to appoint cabinet 

members regardless of whether or not they speak for political parties. 

Any democratization strategy worth its salt would have to change 

the provision through a constitutional reform that would clearly 

require the formation of cabinets that represent elected majorities. 

Moreover, this reform would have to provide, at the very least, for 

the direct election of the upper house. 

 Would Morocco’s young king, Mohammed VI, be ready for such 

a move? It is hard to know. Having inherited a constitution that 

already was amended twice, there is ample precedent for him to help 

his countrymen move beyond the limits of liberalized autocracy. 

With bold leadership, and a readiness of all parties to cooperate 

on the negotiation of a new democratic pact, such a move is not 

inconceivable. Still, given the country’s huge income disparities and 

the capacity of Morocco’s urban poor to mobilize, a democratization 

strategy would entail considerable risks. King Mohammed alluded 

to that very point when he stated, more than a little defensively, “that 

each country has to have its own specific features of democracy”―an 

implicit, if obvious, rationale for maintaining Morocco’s own brand 

of liberalized autocracy.14
15

Conclusion.

 The Bush administration has not chosen the path of encouraging 

democratization of liberalized autocracies. Rather than find even one 

Arab country that might be suitable for a genuine democratization 

strategy, it has hitched all its hopes on a policy of military intervention 

and regime change in Iraq. The guiding assumption here, it seems to 

me, is that the eclectic legacy of semi-authoritarianism is so deeply 

embedded in the social, economic, and political soil of the Arab world 

that there can be no hope of genuine political reform unless one Arab 

country is given the chance to demonstrate for the entire region how 

to get it right from the very beginning. To put it in both political science 

and medical terms, the administration believes that the scourge 

of “path dependency” can only be removed by transplanting the 

political heart of the region’s sickest patient: Iraq.

 This assumption is as compelling as it is troubling. It is compelling 

in the sense that, however sick the patient, Iraq has always suffered 

from a malady that afflicts nearly all Arab states: a basic lack of 

consensus over national identity. The divisions between Shi’a, Kurds, 

and Sunnis in Iraq may be sharper than those between Berbers and 

Arabs in Algeria or Morocco, or between secularists and Islamists 

in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen; but the problem of how to pursue 

democratization in societies divided by profound ideological, social, 

or ethno-religious differences is present in every Arab state.15 As 

noted earlier, this problem arises from the capacity of democracy to 

reward one group repeatedly at the expense of others. When elections 

reproduce the same winners and losers over time, the latter have 

no rational reason to support democracy. Faced by the possibility 

of their “democratic” exclusion, they will often prefer autocracy or 

revolt over free elections.16

 The solution to this “democracy dilemma” in Iraq was to 

impose through violence, intimidation, and oil-financed patronage 

a particularly vicious form of full autocracy in the name of “Arab 

nationalism.” In an interesting echo of Bolshevism, although this 

ideology claimed to speak for the (Arab) “masses” or “people,” in 

practice it was designed to defend or rationalize the particularistic 

interests of the Sunni minority in general, and the Saddam Hussein 

Tikrit-based super minority clan in particular. If the United States 
16

can, by force of arms, destroy this cynical system and replace it with a 

successful experiment in democratic power sharing, one can readily 

imagine that such a happy outcome might eventually inspire other 

Arab leaders and their oppositions to negotiate democratic solutions 

to identity conflicts. In this sense, the administration’s reasoning is 

compelling, even if it rests on a political and military “experiment” 

(to use Kanan Makiya’s own words) whose odds of success were at 

best 50/50 when the United States and its partners embarked on the 

Iraq campaign in March 2003.

 Since then, the odds have gone down considerably, so much so 

that the experiment in Iraq eventually may produce the very opposite 

result intended by the United States: more rather than less autocracy 

in the Arab world. This is why the Iraq gambit from the start was―at 

least in the opinion of this author―even more troubling than it was 

compelling. The chances of success always were small because, to 

prevail over the long term, any credible power sharing arrangement 

between Kurds, Shi’a, and Sunnis would have required―among other 

things―a long-term political and especially military commitment 

from the entire international community. As in Kosovo and BosniaHertsogravenia, the international community for the foreseeable 

future would have to take on the state’s most important function: 

maintaining a monopoly over the means of coercion. This was 

especially true in Iraq, since it would be years, if not decades, before 

any new Iraqi military or police force would have the nationalist 

credibility and military discipline to resist the centrifugal forces of 

ethno-religious conflicts that Saddam Hussein’s fall released. When 

the United States chose to go it alone, it effectively gave up the crucial 

symbolic and political umbrella it needed to transform what many 

Iraqis viewed as an American-led invasion into an internationally 

blessed and secured liberation. Thus many Iraqis―and not merely the 

Sunnis―have come to view the current unhappy situation through 

the lens of the “1920 Revolution,” when Shi’ites and Sunnis joined in 

common cause against the British. 

 We can only hope that the current―and certainly belated―effort 

to internationalize the Iraq gambit will reverse what appears to be 

a growing Sunni-Shi’ite insurrection. But even if the United States 

is lucky enough to contain the insurrection and secure a long-term 

political and military commitment from the United Nations and/
17

or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to rebuild Iraq’s political 

and military institutions, much damage has been done already in 

Iraq, and in the wider region as well. The liberalized autocracies of 

the Arab world always had a distinctive solution to the dilemma of 

political reform in divided societies. Rather than opt for either full 

democracy or full autocracy, they have promoted experiments in 

state-managed power sharing that have endured precisely because 

ultimate power rests in the hands of the state. As we have already 

noted, in Kuwait, Algeria, Bahrain, and Jordan, liberalized autocracy 

allows for a kind of peaceful coexistence in parliaments whose lack 

of authority is, paradoxically, the precondition of social peace: So 

long as no one group actually wins or loses―or actually wields real 

power on behalf of elected majorities―the system can totter along. 

Viewing the chaos in Iraq, many Arab leaders, from both regimes 

and oppositions, probably will conclude that trying to fix this novel, 

if flawed, system is foolish. In societies where traditional values 

and norms remain strong, a preference for the supposed comforts 

of stability may once again prevail, eclipsing the few noble and 

courageous voices who have dared clamor for democracy.

ENDNOTES

 1. Freedom in the World 2003, The Annual Survey of Political Rights and Liberties, 

New York: Freedom House, 2003.

 2. See Daniel Brumberg, “The Trap of Liberalized Autocracy,” in Larry 

Diamond, Marc F. Plattner, and Daniel Brumberg, eds., Islam and Democracy in 

the Middle East, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003, 

pp. 35-47. On Russia, see Harley Balzer, “Managed Pluralism: Vladimir Putin’s 

Emerging Regime,” Post-Soviet Affairs, 2003, Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 189-227. For a 

good comparative analysis of semi-authoritarian regimes, see Marina Ottaway,

Democracy Challenge, The Rise of Semi-Authoritarianism, Washington, DC: Carnegie 

Endowment for International Peace, 2003.

 3. Michael J. Willis, “Political Parties in the Maghrib: Ideology and 

Identification,” The Journal of North African Studies, Vol. 7, No. 3, Autumn 2002, pp. 

1-28.

 4. Lisa Anderson, “Arab Democracy: Dismal Prospects,” World Policy Journal, 

Fall, 2002, pp. 55-60. Quote from p. 58, originally cited in Roxanne Roberts, 

“Morocco’s King of Hearts,” Washington Post, June 21, 2002.

 5. Daniel Brumberg, “Authoritarian Legacies and Reform Strategies in the 

Arab World,” in Rex Brynen, Bahgat Korany, and Paul Noble, eds., Political 
18

Liberalization and Democratization in the Arab World Vol. 1, Theoretical Perspectives, 

Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner, 1995.

 6. On Jordan, see Russell E. Lucas, “Deliberalization in Jordan,” in Diamond, 

Plattner, and Brumberg, eds., pp. 99-106. On Kuwait, see Michael Herb, “Emirs 

and Parliaments in the Gulf,” in Islam and Democracy in the Middle East, pp. 84-

106.

 7. See Michael Willis, The Islamist Challenge in Algeria: A Political History, New 

York: New York University Press, 1996.

 8. See Ahmed Mahiou and Jean-Robert Henry, eds., Où va l’Algérie? Paris: 

Éditions Karthala, 2001.

 9. See Amy Hawthorne, “Middle East Democracy: Is Civil Society the 

Answer?” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Working Papers, Middle East 

Series, Democracy and Rule of Law Project, No. 44, March 2004. Also see Vickie 

Langohr, “Too Much Civil Society, Too Little Politics, Egypt and Liberalizing 

Regimes,” Comparative Politics, January 2004, pp. 181-204.

 10. Geneive Abdo, No God But God: Egypt and the Triumph of Islam, Oxford: 

Oxford University Press, 2000. Note that I do not accept Abdo’s thesis that Islam 

had “triumphed” in Egypt. That said, the nature of the regime does tolerate and 

often encourages Islamist activism and thinking.

 11. Jilian Schwedler, “Yemen’s Aborted Opening,” in Islam and Democracy in 

the Middle East, 2003, pp. 91-98.

 12. On MEPI, see the program’s web page, http://mepi.state.gov/. In my 

discussions with MEPI officials, they have made it clear to me that MEPI’s main 

thrust is political liberalization rather than democracy. The latter, I am told, is 

simply too risky, given the advantages that Islamists enjoy.

 13. The amendment of Morocco’s Islamist-friendly Family Code, approved by 

the country’s Senate in January 2004, offers an excellent example of this function. 

The king’s intervention secured changes in the code that met some of the demands 

of women’s groups, but also reassured Islamists by placing the application of the 

code’s provisions in the hands of judges, whose conservative inclinations make 

it likely that their rulings will not offend Islamists. At the same time, the bill’s 

passage reaffirmed the king’s authority as Amir al-Mu’mamin, or Commander of 

the Believers.

 14. Lisa Anderson, “Arab Democracy: Dismal Prospects,” World Policy Journal, 

Fall 2002, pp. 55-60. Quote from p. 58, originally cited in Roberts.

 15. See Milton J. Esman and Itamar Rabinovich, eds., Ethnicity, Pluralism and 

the State in the Middle East, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988.

 16. For the classic statement of this problem, see Arend Lijphart, Democracy 

in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration, New Haven and London: Yale 

University Press, 1977. More recently, see Donald Horowitz, “Democracy in 

Divided Societies,” in Larry Diamond and Marc Plattner, eds., Nationalism, Ethnic 

Conflict and Democracy, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 

1994.