Introduction
The word democracy has had many interpretations through history. It is known as a western political system which allows people to elect their rulers in a periodic basis, and it seems to be a term under which most modern governments would like to be associated with but not many are willing to fully comply with its conditions. Democracy is said to be able to bring prosperity and peace, but the fact that most countries in the world now provide some form of popular elections does not seem to have stopped violence between many of them, principally some Middle East countries like Israel or Iran. This work will attempt to define what a liberal democracy is, and then find out if its adoption among Middle Eastern countries would help bring peace to that area.
The Concept of Liberal Democracy
The most common definition of the term Democracy is the one inferred from its roots in the Greek language, where Demos means people, and Kratos means power. However, establishing that the term Democracy means the power of the people has no practical use if there is no convention on how to give that power to the people, or how people can exert that power, or even the scope of such power and who is considered to be called people. Historically, there have been two conceptions of democracy, each with its own definitions.
There is a marked difference between how the ancients used to conceive democracy, and what is known now as democracy . Both conceptions admit that the power must be exerted by the people, but they disagree on what part of the population should be considered as demos or how this part should exert that power. The ancients, being the Greeks the most famous example, valued political participation over any other activity and, for them, being free meant to be able to participate as part of the political process . The modern sense of democracy implies much more than that, as it contemplates control and limitation of the powers of the State, and representative transmission of power .
Modern democracy is now defined as the effective participation of most adults of a society in the control of the political agenda through egalitarian vote based on an informed decision , and it is mostly exerted by representative electoral systems, given the practical problems in the application of direct democracy in large societies , but that representation is the best way to guarantee that the people have a chance to influence in the political decisions of their societies, always respecting the opinions of minorities .
Modern democracy is product of western liberal ideas, and contains a strong secularist vein that can be traced to the Westphalia treaty when European countries saw the need to separate religion from State in order to prevent more religious wars among themselves (Huntington 1997). Liberalism, on the other hand, is the theory and praxis of individual liberty, legal protection against the State and other individuals, and constitutional State . Liberal democracies seek to merge two distinct ideas: the defense of individual liberties and the limitation of the powers of the State by a constitution through the effective separation of powers, with the democratic principle of equality of participation in the government decisions .
Liberal Democracies and International Conflicts
The vision imposed by realism in international relations, that all political agents only seek power and self-aggrandizement , is being challenged by the world view offered by liberalism. Liberalism is an ideological system that rests on the assumption that people´s best interests are self-preservation , and the main goal of liberal democracies is to foster economic freedom, which can only be achieved by ensuring peaceful arrangements among societies . Liberal democracies also seem to have the property of producing wealthier societies as they give their citizens more economic and civil freedom. This can be easily noticed when comparing information given by organizations such as Freedom House, an independent watchdog organization that measures democratic indicators around the world, about how democratic governments are, and the information provided by International Monetary Fund (IMF) about the world economy country by country. As an example, in terms of freedom and democratic institutions Israel ranks the highest and is considered a full democracy while the rest of the Middle East countries struggle with more authoritarian and fundamentalist governments . At the same time, Israel is among the developed countries in the world and fares way better than its neighbors in terms of domestic economy .
One other characteristic of liberal democracies is that they seem to avoid violent conflict with one another. It might be due to the fact that societies that share common cultural values tend to see each other as allies , but this culture based approach does not explain why there have been so many wars between countries that share the same religious beliefs . In contrast, the political approach reveals that democracies tend to regard other liberal countries as “reasonable, predictable and trustworthy” , and so they look for peaceful resolution of conflicts while public opinion might deter their own government to attack another liberal democracy .
One might argue that there are countries that comply with democratic requirements but threaten other democracies with the use of lethal power. However, upon closer examination many countries that undergo popular elections cannot be considered democratic because they lack other institutions that protect citizens from the power of the State, ensure fair political competition, or guarantee the rule of law. One example was the democratically elected German Nazi regime, which through many popular referendums made human rights violations legal and started one of the most deadly international conflicts in history. Now, not many people would refer to it as a liberal democracy.
In general, if a country is provided with a political system that allows fair political competition, respects individual freedoms, and gives equal and fair participation of adults in the control of its political agenda, it can be said that it is a liberal democracy , and liberal democracies tend to avoid going to war with each other because they have other means to resolve conflicts , and the electorate might constrain leaders from attacking other liberal countries .
Adoption of Liberal Democracy in the Middle East
There are serious differences between the western civilization and the Islamic world in regards to political institutions. The roots of the western legal system are roman, which has always been separated from the canonic law, while most Middle East countries still merge civil law with fundamental Islamic rules and institutions . Democracies tend to secularize the State, giving everyone the same legal status and rights regardless of religious or ethnic background. This secularization of the State and law is viewed by Islamic fundamentalists as an alien western ideal, and a form of imposition from the West. So, religion still plays an important part in international relations in the Islamic world, as they have not yet seen the need to separate religion and State because they have not yet had interreligious conflicts with catastrophic effects such as the ones that preceded the Westphalian peace .
Moreover, religions are not democratic. They are a dividing force that offers a total solution to everything, should not be discussed, and that supposes that every aspect of public and private life should be permanently supervised by a superior non-democratically elected instance . Fundamentalist States are then more than reluctant to fully adopt a system where religion were to be relegated to a lesser position. Only one country in the whole Middle Eastern region has embraced the idea of a secular government but it now finds itself surrounded by hostile illiberal countries that want it to literally disappear, forcing it to resort to violence in many cases.
Most people in Israel favor democratic principles over Halakha, the Jewish religious law, in the case they conflict . In contrast, many Islamic countries have increasingly adopted religious practices and institutions since the Islamic Revival in the seventies .
Conclusion
When countries adopt liberal democracy as political system, they certainly seem to try to use nonviolent means of conflict resolution when dealing with other democracies. That would mean that one way of ending the conflict in the Middle East would be convincing their leaders to gradually adopt some democratic principles and to secularize their governments. However, this would be a naïve suggestion, given that democracy is viewed as a synonym of westernization by most Islamic nations and they reject many of its principles for being alien to their culture.
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