The Problem with Democratization

There are several main problems that Anderson talks about in her article, including:

1. “Insincere rulers” who hold out democracy as their form of government, naming their states “democratic republic of...” “people’s republic of...” when in reality, these states are not in any sense of the word, democracies. In fact, the presence of the word democratic in the name of a state is a fairly reliable bellwether for the presence of an authoritarian regime.

2. Democracy is destabilizing. The United States and others have historically been perfectly willing to allow traditional autocratic rulers remain in power in order to maintain the status quo and stability. The United States’ Cold War policy of supporting Islamist regimes that would help stand against the atheist communist Soviet Union in many ways contributed to the resistance to democratization in the Middle East we see today. Islam is not inherently resistant to democracy, as we can see in Indonesia and Turkey (at the time the Anderson article was written), while Arab Muslim states seem to be the ones with the major democratic deficit. These Arab states are the ones that were most directly influenced by American Cold War policy.

3. Rentier states in which governments can effectively bribe their people into acquiescence. People pay no taxes in these states and are instead paid dividends each year by their governments, that have massive hydrocarbon wealth.

According to Anderson's argument, the United States’ involvement in the region since the end of the second world war has been and continues to be the single most potent problem for democratization in the region. The US helped to cement a system of authoritarian regimes in the region through its involvement both as it relates to the Cold War and opposition to atheist communism, as well as the maintenance of access to abundant oil resources in the region. The United States and other Western powers have been very active in the region over the past sixty years, helping to cement rentier states with authoritarian regimes.

The Arab uprisings of 2010-11 have changed matters very little in the long run. Some of the uprisings ultimately resulted in civil war, as in the cases of Syria and Libya, a failed state in Yemen, and ongoing violence and unrest in other states. Tunisia is one example of a state that successfully transitioned to democracy with a fairly good constitution as a result of the Arab Spring.