Democracy and political culture in Iraq

In the absence of supportive traditions, what are the odds of democracy taking hold in Iraq? Very low, argues the Cato Institute's Patrick Basham, formerly of Canada's Fraser Institute. Basham has published two popular-level articles, A Democratic Iraq? Don't Hold Your Breath, and No Quick Democracy in Iraq. A lengthier and more scholarly essay by Basham is titled, Can Iraq Be Democratic? Writes Basham:

The building blocks of a modern democratic political culture are not institutional in nature. The building blocks are not elections, parties, and legislatures. Rather, the building blocks of democracy are found amidst supportive cultural values. In short, the long-term survival of democratic institutions requires a particular political culture.

A democratic political culture demands the non-violent transfer of power, extends legal protection and equality of opportunity to women, tolerates religious, ethnic, racial, and social minorities, and recognizes the importance of fundamental political liberties such as freedom of speech and popular participation in decision-making.

Larry Diamond, an expert on democratization, bluntly states that "Iraq lacks virtually every possible precondition for democracy." Absent tangible support for liberal political norms and values, and without the foundation of a pluralistic civil society, it is next to impossible for democracy to take root. That reality was borne out over the past generation in numerous countries where authoritarian regimes were displaced by newly democratic regimes but democratization failed due to shallow foundations.

What implication does this have for US policy in that country? President Bush has repeatedly stated that the goal of his administration is to establish in Iraq a democratic constitution. If Basham is correct in his analysis, this aim will have to be severely scaled back. Writing for the Independent Institute, Ivan Eland paints a gloomy picture of American prospects in Iraq: The Way Out of Iraq: Decentralizing the Iraqi Government. According to Eland,

The Bush administration had the naive belief that the United States could pop the autocratic top off a fractious country the size of California, be greeted as a liberator, subdue the country easily, and convert a nation with no prior experience with democracy into a U.S.–style liberal federated republic. The administration is now mired in an open-ended counterinsurgency in an unfriendly country and has little chance of achieving its grandiose goal. Given this bungling, no perfect solution exists. Almost any policy option has drawbacks. But those alternatives with the best chance of success would involve withdrawing U.S. forces rapidly, accepting Iraq’s fractious nature, and allowing Iraqis to have genuine self-determination that would probably result in some sort of decentralized government.

Among the likely alternatives are confederation, partition, or a combination of the two. Internally, the various regions of Iraq will likely be governed in different ways, much as the component states of the European Union have different forms of government. Yet what if Iraq breaks up completely and its remnants prove unable to fend off the designs of their neighbours? Or what if a new Saddam-like tyrant seizes power?

Not everyone is so pessimistic about a democratic Iraq. Writing for the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, Eric Davis, a Middle East specialist and consultant to peace-building projects in Iraq, argues that Iraqis do have democratic precedents on which to draw, including a nascent civil society centred around the labour unions and other grassroots cultural and social organizations. In Historical Memory and the Building of Democracy in Iraq, Davis appeals for an effort to restore the collective memory of such precedents, which was very nearly effaced by decades of Ba'athist propaganda. This is somewhat reminiscent of Solzhenitsyn's quest to anchor a nascent Russian democracy in the precedent provided by the 19th-century zemstvos. All the same, as I have observed in a previous post, good intentions do not necessarily translate into constitutional governance, especially if precedents for it are so few and far between as to require deliberate excavation or even reinvention.

Political culture is not a straight jacket. Nevertheless, any policy — domestic or foreign — that fails to account for its central role in a country's constitution runs the risk of overestimating the possibility of wholesale institutional reform. More to the point, there is good reason to question a military policy whose success is so heavily dependent on a people overcoming the constraints of its own past to become something it has never been before.