The Transatlantic Democracy Network Conference:
Egypt and the Arab World

By Saad Eddin Ibrahim

In a previous article written by me, I had tackled the new law presently being discussed by the U.S Congress that seeks to support democracy in the world with a particular focus on Egypt as a key target for that law. The article attempted to re-warn the despotic Arab regimes that unless they take the issue of political reform seriously it will be externally imposed upon them.

In fact, both the arrogance of Arab intellectuals and the regime's persistent procrastination resulted in several alternative external reform initiatives mainly introduced by the Americans and the Europeans. The recent western attempts to prod reform resulted in the creation of the so called "Transatlantic Democracy Network" (TDN) which composed mainly of a constellation of intellectuals, experts, and government officials which recently convened its first conference in Brussels.

One of the sessions of the conference was dedicated to the discussion of the persistent barriers to democratic transition in the Arab world that remain largely in place despite the introduction of a number of internal reform initiatives formulated by Arab democracy advocates during the last three decades in addition to the recent external initiatives among which the " Greater Middle East" and " Barcelona" initiatives were the most notable. Arab regimes, however responded with the marked sluggishness to this urgings exhibiting a high level of commitment to both the security and economic dimensions of the international reform initiatives whilst overlooking the democratic reform dimension. This could be most clearly seen in the Arab attitude toward the Barcelona initiative which explicitly spells out the three former three dimensions of reform.

The Brussels conference assigned a separate session to discuss the case of Egypt. Participants in the session fiercely attacked incongruous and contradictory statements pronounced by American officials in regard to democracy in the Arab world. Most of the criticism was primarily directed to Laura Bush's statement during her latest tour in the region. In this regard, most of the discussants demanded that Washington proclaims in clear and strong terms its commitment to reform initiatives in Egypt and give credence to this commitment by backing, in no uncertain words, the Egyptian judges in their endeavors to acquire full authority to supervise all phases of the electoral process, starting with fixing the present deeply flawed election lists. Their other important demand, called for by the Judges' Club was a genuine full independence of the judiciary.

The Brussels' conference resulted in the formation of a Euro-American- Arab task force that would be in charge of monitoring the Egyptian political scene during the next six months. The task force would be also responsible for documenting and where possible rectifying the conduct of the concerned actors in a way that make them compatible with the Egyptian people's expectations on one hand, and with the TDN recent recommendations on the other.

By the end of the conference, I had a feeling that the conference was chiefly organized for Egypt and when I told the organizers about that feeling, one of them commented you are right, "isn't Egypt the mother of the whole world"?

Finally, we hope and expect that "the mother of the world" will become subject to intense scrutiny imposed by her sons, especially the powerful and the rich ones. However, I do not believe that the Egyptian school of Fahlawa "slickness" generally adopted by the Egyptian regime to finesse genuine reform -- will work this time.