The Tricky Triangle: Democracy, Social and Economic Development

Naiem A. Sherbiny

For the last thirty some years, the image of Arabs in the world has been negative. Nobody did this to us; we did it to ourselves through ill-conceived policies. Economically, despite trillions of dollars of capital inflows, economic growth has been lagging and employment expansion anemic. Having missed the development train, Arabs are still caught in a vicious cycle of poverty. Socially, we are still living in the Stone Age: most human development indicators are below average, even when compared with other poor countries. Politically, we exist in a lamentable state, content with authoritarian regimes that have robbed us of our civil liberties and human rights. This is the bad news. The good news is that we have no way to go but up – may be!

It is by now empirically established that economic development goes hand in hand with social development. Interestingly, when political reforms are absent, the mileage a country makes in socio-economic development is usually modest. Egypt is a prime example. In the words of Fareed Zakaria, the Editor in Chief of Newsweek International, “Egypt remains the most tragic case of lost potential in the Arab world”. The reason: reluctance to introduce badly needed democratic reforms. With no democracy, economic and social reforms will proceed at snail pace.

Traditionally, the Arab world has followed Egypt in its ups and downs. Since the mid 19th Century, Egypt’s engines have generally pulled the Arab train: in arts, modernization, democratization, education and health, urban development, etc. Not any more. Egypt’s engines have become rusty and weary, while others especially small states are now humming; e.g. Bahrain, Dubai, Jordan, and Qatar. They have introduced democratic reforms that support socio-political transformations. The striking contrast between the small states and Egypt is the mindset of leaders: dynamic and progressive in the small states vs. stale and regressive in Egypt. It is the progressive mindset that thrust Islam in its early days to new heights and built an enviable civilization.

And it is the regressive mindset that robbed Egypt of its democratization potential 50 years ago. In a little-known Arabic book published in Cairo in 1975, the author (Sami Gawhar) had long interviews with and access to memoirs of three surviving principals of the Free Officers Movement that took over power in 1952: Abdel-Latif Baghdadi, Kamal Hussein, and Hassan Ibrahim. The title of the book says it all, The Silent Speak. And they spoke of horrors by the military-backed government to enslave Egyptians and rob them off their basic freedoms, including but not limited to Law 119 of 1965, which gave the president extra-ordinary powers akin to the God-king of ancient Egypt. If half of the book is true, it provides a rare account of how the military squeezed the life out of Egypt’s body politic.

As Arab leaders see it, the problem with democracy is its uncertain outcomes. They cannot live with that. Most of the world is embracing democracy with its uncertain outcomes, even ex communist states like the Ukraine, but not Arabs. In Gawhar’s book, Baghdadi recalls that Nasser did not sleep after the first plebiscite was taken in 1956, until the results were announced at 99.9%! Can anyone blame the likes of Gaddafi or Saddam if they try to emulate or do better than their Godfather?

The Algerian intellectual Malik Ben Nabi captured the essence of democracy in a 1960 Cairo lecture. Democracy, he declared, was a similar mindset of people and their rulers. For people, democracy is the affirmation of their human will and the freedom to reject enslavement. For the rulers, as custodians of national affairs, democracy is the responsibility to govern with justice and equality for all. How farther away we deviated from this simple but profound ideal! No matter: democratization is being introduced in large doses in the small Arab countries. The large countries keep shooting themselves in the foot, and messing things up. Witness the decision of the National Democratic Party in September 2004 to shelve democratic reforms. Will they ever get it right someday?!