Demo what? Demoralization? Oh no, sorry, Democratization

Scientists, students, experts are becoming demoralized, and struggling, and looking for an answer at the question: What went wrong?                                                                                   Well, there is a relevant number of factors we can rely on that could help us to figure it out, but I warn everyone, there is still no response on this matter and maybe we would never be able to find out one, whereas we can attempt to understand the dynamics on the backdrop.

Reading Anderson’s work “Searching where the light shines: studying democratization in the Middle East”, we find a collection of hypothesis about why it went wrong, why Middle East countries didn’t managed to establish democracy.

Some argue that the fault falls back into the interest of Western society in reliable oil supplies and the missing concern about the growing of Islamist threat, misrepresentation of its role. They fueled it providing patronage to many authoritarian states, forbidding the process of democratization.

Some try to blame Islam religion, portraying it like an inhospitable ground to build democracy. But, as many experts claim, there is no correlation between Islam and autocracy: many non-Arab Muslim countries were already democratic. So we have to distinguish Arab Middle East from Muslim world for his own particular history and fragility.

Others debate that it was “bad policy” of American policy makers which supported freedom, spread modernization in order to provide an alternative to the Soviet model.“Modernization was expected to produce political democracy and economic prosperity on the model of United States of 1950s”…

Let’s change perspective: did Arab people know what was going on? 

Could they possibly know what democratization is? The misinformation of masses among Arab countries is, in my humble opinion, one of the main issues: democracy was only a popular word, due to the fact that modern political vocabulary was from England and France. Using the terms “democracy”, “democratic”, seems to show the speaker’s efficacy as a modern leader, they hide themself behind the “words of peace”.

But then,  you stroll around rural streets, among poverty, among people asking THE question and the response you get is: “Demo what? What is that? A spirit? An animal?”

So, how can we suppose that there is space for change if the key players don’t know the rules of the game? We can’t hope to institute a democracy, so a system in which people rule with rights and duties, when they aren’t even aware of them.

 

Arab uprisings… was there a reversal of the situation? Which is the feedback?

Negative. Revolts that aspired to be revolutions that stimulated a huge mass movement, but sadly no important changes obtained on the democratization scale… but something relevant happened: people gave voice to their necessities, to their thoughts, to their feelings. People became aware of their rights, their influence and relevance to let the system work.