This is the 3rd of a 4-article mini-series on economic development, the mini-series itself part of a much longer series that began at the end of April and deals with the democratic prospects of the Arab countries.

The argument in the first couple of articles on economic development, you might recall, unfolded in a trio of major divisions --- Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. The current article begins with Part Four. Naturally. And though you can follow the argument here pretty clearly without having read the first three parts, your grasp of its main points will be all the more sure-footed if you've worked your way through them.

More specifically, the current argument is something of a summary statement of what we've learned in the first two articles about economic development. It seeks to distill the necessary changes that any country's policymakers need to undertake --- institutional, cultural, and policy-oriented --- if they hope to launch their country onto a growth-path of out of poverty and sustain it over the long-term, for decades or even generations, narrowing the gap with the rich countries in the process. The summary will uncoil in a set of simple, straightforward theoretical propositions --- exactly four in all, each then clarified and illustrated with concrete examples. Grasp those four theoretical propositions and their implications, and you'll be well situated to make sense of why the world is divided into rich and poor countries, with fortunately several others rapidly growing and converging toward the levels of productivity and per capita income in the rich countries.

Keep in Mind Something

Observe that the convergence doesn't have to be complete. To be blunt, that outcome is unlikely for most countries in the world --- now or in the future.

Come to that, it's even true of the group of rich countries themselves. Despite their wealth and talents, none of the West Europeans or Japan has fully converged with the levels of productivity and per capita income in the US . . . the country with the highest income of this sort for the last 125 years, roughly half the time since the industrial revolution of the late 18th century erupted full-tilt. Japan and Germany aren't exceptions, just the opposite. As recently as 1990, they had closed the gap with the US to around 90% each. By then, lots of observers predicted that they would both match the American level of per capita by 2000, then go on to exceed it.

The reality? Over the decades by 1990, a small mountain of market inefficiencies had cumulatively piled up in each of their economies. Huge vested interests protected the status quo in both Germany and Japan; in each, it has proved stubbornly resistant to change. In the upshot, neither country has adjusted effectively to the dramatic changes in global capitalism, caused by new breakthroughs in information-and-communication technologies and rapid shifts around the world in economic dynamism. Small wonder that right now, half way through 2004, their levels of per capita income have fallen back to less than 70% of the USA's.

That's also true of per capita income in Britain, Italy, and France compared to the USA's. Two or three of the tiny EU countries, plus Singapore, peak around about 75-85% of the American level.

Still, all these countries --- not to forget Israel, Taiwan, and South Korea --- are justly regarded as affluent industrial democracies. By any standard, they're rich. A generation ago, these latter three countries were poor and struggling to develop. South Korea was even described by the World Bank in 1959 as something of a permanent basket-case, unlikely to do without lavish foreign aid for decades on end.

Could anyone have been more wrong?

Something Else Too

Narrowing the gap with the US and other rich countries is still going on. Take China and India, the two together numbering 2.3 billion people --- roughly half the total in the developing world. Starting from a very low level of per capita income only a couple of decades ago, they have been outgrowing the US and West Europe and Japan ever since. In the process, poverty has fallen in China to around 10-20% of the population, and in India it's been halved since 1980 to 25%.

Agreed: the gap with the rich countries is still large. Even so, it might be far less for these two countries in another generation, exactly as Japan had been able to do in the first generation or two after its Meiji Revolution of the 1870s or what South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore did after 1960. It all depends on their ability to overhaul their institutions and cultural habits --- not to forget their economic policies --- in innovative or creative ways that do not stray too far from the logic of long-term development enshrined in the four propositions about to unfold here, even as the reforms are adapted to their own specific national conditions.

PART FOUR:
LONG-TERM SUSTAINED GROWTH REFINED THEORETICALLY: FOUR SUMMARY PROPOSITI0NS

If the various strands of the argument are pulled together now, the following four theoretical propositions --- with some added clarification --- capture, it appears, the essential conditions of successful long-term development.

1. Rich countries are rich, first off, because they have invested high rates of their GDP in both physical and human capital over several decades or even centuries, and they have done so efficiently (productively). In the upshot, they benefit from cumulatively impressive sums of skills and physical capital --- plants, machines, office buildings, laboratories, infra-structure, and schools and universities, not to forget the high levels of systematic spending on R&D.;

Several countries, note quickly, have mobilized high levels of capital investment for decades, but without much to show for it. Their investments weren't made efficiently; the money was largely wasted or diverted to unproductive ends. The Soviet Union is the classic example here; Maoist China down to 1978 is another; the same is true of every other Communist country. Nor is that all. State-directed capitalism in India until the 1980s had roughly the same outcome; so too did the import-substitution developmental strategy of Brazil, Mexico, and the rest of Latin America until then, their economies hobbled by inefficient nationalized industries, runaway regulations, and extravagantly high tariff levels and exchange rates, not to forget excessive money creation and hence galloping inflationary trends.

What happened in the end was fully predictable.

In particular, over several decades, all these countries had relied mainly on quantitative growth, subject to ever greater diminishing returns in their investments. They couldn’t switch to qualitative economic growth, driven by ever greater levels of productivity and technological progress. In the upshot, their rates of GDP growth tapered off over time, then plunged toward zero and a stationary state, overwhelmed by self-inflicted burdens of diminishing returns and Himalaya-high market inefficiencies.

A question immediately prompts itself: what will determine whether investment in physical and human capital any one country are used efficiently or productively --- raising the levels of labor, capital, and total factor productivity (a technical concept, shorthand for technology broadly viewed in interacting with labor and capital)?

2. The answer: essentially a combination of good institutions and good policies. For the time being, think only of good institutions that operate in a clearly beneficial manner. In particular, when countries have successfully grown over the long haul, then you will likely find that to a large degree (with of course variations here across these countries) . . .  

No one country, it should be quickly added --- certainly not the US --- can boast of unqualified success in all these institutional matters. Consider them, if you want, formulated in idealized ways. Still, it's not hard to recognize when a country is afflicted with dysfunctional institutions and maladapted cultural habits.

In particular, poorly designed institutions --- including cultural hinderances such as widely practiced social norms that encourage contempt for the law in any one institututional sector, never mind all sectors --- will produce huge inefficiencies in capital and labor investments, all marked by massive diversions of scare resources or outright wastage through various forms of predatory or incompetent behavior by the dominant elites in a society. If, to be more precise, the following culture-based practices prevail in the social life of any developing country, then it's hard to see how sustained long-term economic growth could occur until these dysfunctional practices and the social norms underlying them are changed:

Posted by Michael Gordon @ 06:08 PM CST [continue] [ 2 comments ]

This is the 2nd in a 4-article mini-series on economic development --- the mini-series itself part of a wider series, weeks old now, on the democratic prospects of the Arab countries.

To follow the argument here, you need to have read the 1st article in the mini-series. The current article even starts with Part Three --- the first two parts, plus some introductory comments, set out in that initial article. A 3rd article will then summarize what we've learned about the conditions essential for sustained long-term economic development --- institutional, cultural, and policy-oriented --- in four sets of simple propositions, each carefully clarified. Since those four summary propositions continue the overall argument, that 3rd article will begin with Part Four.

And the 4th article? It will look at the way in which convergence catch-up growth favors developing countries compared to the growth rates of the rich leader countries . . . at any rate, if developing countries are able to implement the necessary institutional and policy changes that go along with successfully sustained long-term economic growth.

These terms need to be clarified --- obviously. So too does the specific thrust of the argument unfolded here, a continuation of the major points set out and analyzed in the first article. And hence some . . .

INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

The Economic Advantages of Backwardness And Convergence Theory

The original work in this area, pioneered by a former professor of the buggy prof himself back in the 1950s and early 1960s--- Alexander Gerschenkron --- even explicitly used the term “the advantages of backwardness”. See this link for a good review of Gerschenkron’s key book. Gershenkron’s thesis overlapped with a related theoretical approach to development, convergence or catch-up growth --- the main pioneers here two prominent scholars in the 1950s, Robert Solow (a Nobel-prize winner) and Moses Abramovitz of Stanford.

The third article in this series, remember, will deal with convergence theory and catch-up growth at length.

New Growth Theory

Abramovitz went on to help fashion an alternative to the Solow standard Neo-Classical growth-model, developed originally in the mid-1950s. The Solow model focused on the growth of capital and labor inputs ---later augmented to take into account improved human capital --- as the determinants of long-term economic growth, plus technological progress. (Economic growth, note, really means not just the growth of a country's GDP, but even more of its per capita income.) Over the long-haul in the model, technological progress --- whether radically new innovations like cars or computers or airplanes or improvements in the production process of existing products (along with their diffusion in the innovating country and transfers to other countries) --- is the big driving force of dynamic growth.

Solow stressed this from the outset. He justifiably won a Nobel prize for his pathbreaking work.

In his model, however, there's a major explanatory drawback: technology is treated as an exogenous variable, operating on economic growth from outside the Solow mathematical model itself. Technological innovation, to explain this briefly, keeps the growth rate of a national economy from invariably slowing down and heading ultimately for a stationary state --- the slow-down caused, Solow stressed, by the growing impact of diminishing returns as capital accumulation within a national economy piles up and up with a given set of technologies. What this means, in plainer English, is that when an economy, say the Soviet Union in the Stalinist era, doubles the number of steel plants from one to two, then steel output itself might double; by the time you create the 11th plant in the steel industry using the same technology, the 11th plant might cost as much as the 2nd did, but steel output itself might barely grow. Such is the inevitable force of diminishing returns.

If, then, an economy’s per capita income growth rate doesn’t fall off and head towards zero, the stationary state, it’s because of technological innovation. Enter the model’s drawback: technology’s salvaging impact here isn’t itself explained. Treated as an exogenous variable outside the formal multi-variable regression model, rather than appearing as an explicit independent explanatory variable that interacts with capital and labor inputs to explain fully economic growth, technological innovation in the Solow model remains mysterious. Its benign impact, if it occurs and saves an economy from landing in a stationary state of growth as capital accumulation goes on, is like Manna from Heaven . . . a blissful gift that remains as mysterious as Heaven’s blessings.

The model that Abramovitz worked out in the 1950s --- to which he returned three decades later ---- foreshadowed what has become known as “New Growth Theory.”

In contrast to the still very influential Solow growth model --- particularly when it is augmented with human capital improvements --- New Growth Theory endogenizes technological change as an explicit independent variable in its formal mathematical model. In this way, technological innovation itself is then something New Growth theorists seek to explain; and that effort invariably leads them to examine the institutions of a country --- not just those in its economy, mind you, but within its much wider socio-political systems. Paul Romer of Stanford was the first to formalize the theory in mathematical terms, back in the mid-1980s. (See the easily followed interview with Romer that appeared in 1999: it’s very good on New Growth Theory vs. the Solow Neo-Classical Model.)

Beyond New Growth Theory: Institutions and Culture as Wider Influences
on Long-Term Economic Growth

Even then, despite these new theoretical developments in growth theory, the impact of institutions and culture on technological progress and economic growth remains fairly shadowy even in New Growth Theory.

Enter explicit theoretical work that focuses on institutions.

Their pivotal influence in either fostering or hindering long-term economic growth --- not just economic and financial ones, but legal and political and administrative --- has been explained most effectively by Douglass North of Washington University in St. Louis, himself a Nobel Prize winner. Increasingly influential the last decade, North’s work is reflected in the articles or books by Dani Rodrik and William Easterly that appear on the political science 121 syllabus and were discussed at length in the previous article. For that matter, they are discussed again in this second article in the series.

A wider ranging variant --- a country’s “social capability” ---- was also worked out by Moses Abramovitz to explain successful or failed long-term economic development: institutions and culture, including attitudes toward change and risk-taking across each country of the world. Although it’s used a fair amount in developmental work, the Abramovitz concept was never as rigorously defined as the more narrow, but carefully applied institutional work of Douglass North and his followers over large historical epochs and across different civilizations --- above all, in order to explain why parts of West Europe pioneered the big breakthroughs in long-term economic development and industrialization --- and so it has generally lacked North’s growing impact.

So Where Are We?

Well, in the buggy argument that follows, the role of institutions --- clarified in detail --- comes close to the North view as a jump-off point . . . only to range more ambitiously by stressing the cultural influences on long-term economic development. In that sense, the argument here draws on the wider views of social capability and culture of the Abramovitz sort. Note that this isn’t an idiosyncratic view. Even the World Bank and the influential work of William Easterly --- see the previous buggy article where Easterly figures prominently in the argument there --- now recognize that institutions and culture are important here. The same is true of Rodrik, even if he introduces culture and social capability as explanatory concepts indirectly, referring to the need to adapt institutional changes to “specific national conditions” within each country.

Note quickly: the words in quote here are the buggy prof’s, not Rodrik’s --- not that they distort his views. On the contrary, he refers several times to the need to adapt institutional and policy changes to “local opportunities and constraints” within each country. As Rodrik also notes --- a further concession to cultural and social influences --- institutional innovations and new policy-packages that a country’s policymakers have to introduce to sustain short-term economic dynamism over the long-run do not travel well. They have to be carefully tailored to each country’s wider context --- which is obviously a reference to the social, political, and cultural condition in that country.

The Current Article's Aim

In summary, then, the argument here in this 3rd article seeks to clarify the changes and innovations in a country’s culture as well as its institutions and its economic policies that are needed to sustain short-term spurts in economic growth over the long haul, transforming any such spurts into successful long-term development that converges on the levels of productivity and per capita income of rich leader countries. Don't worry: all these terms --- institutions, culture as part of them, and policies --- will be clarified as the argument unfolds. Remember too: the institutions in question aren't confined to the economy of a country; they encompass the legal, political, administrative, and educational systems no less.

Remember something else: the reason the analysis begins with Part Three now is that the overall argument was left hanging fire exactly at the end of Part Two, it and part one both set out at length in the initial article.

PART THREE:
INSTITUTIONS AND RULES-OF-THE-GAME FOR DOMESTIC LIFE WITHIN A COUNTRY CLARIFIED --- SOCIAL, ECONOMIC, AND POLITICAL --- ITS CULTURE INCLUDED

So Far, So Good: But Something's Missing In Our Analysis of Development So Far

Namely? In all these analyses of successful long-term development --- whether those of the rich Japanese, Europeans, and English-speaking peoples, or the newly rich in East Asia or Israel, and those elsewhere likely to join them in three or four more decades--- something crucial to such developmental outcomes has been absent up to now: the role of national cultures. And for the influence of culture on long-term economic development to be spelled out, it’s necessary to clarify both its meaning and the related concept of institutions

1. Introduction: Culture and Institutions.

Note: none of the writers on the political science 121 syllabus go into the need for cultural adjustments of the sort emphasized in our lectures, yet national cultures are impossible to separate from the ways in which institutions --- political, economic, or social --- actually operate in practice. We’ll explain this in a moment. For now, simply note in passing that cultural influences in economic development is a difficult challenge for economists, and for a pair of reasons: first, most economists tend to think in terms of incentive systems that overwhelm cultural influences --- crudely put, incentive systems mean the costs and benefits of doing something (eg, working hard will occur if it pays off in rising income) --- and second, culture is a concept that’s hard to codify, quantitatively, for use in statistical equations, the latter essential to rigorous economic work these days.

Still, in the ps. 121 lectures, we’ve dealt directly with cultural influences on development over the long-haul. In particular, we’ve emphasized the need as countries develop to adapt their inherited belief-and-value systems (transmitted culture through socialization) in these ways:

Posted by Michael Gordon @ 05:45 PM CST [continue] [ Comments? ]

So far, this lengthy series on the democratic prospects of the Arab countries --- viewed comparatively, especially with Turkey’s laudable democratic development and better economic performance --- has concentrated mainly on political change and cultural matters, plus some references, now and then, to economic development. The last article in the series also widened the comparative focus. In a dozen different ways, it tried to show that the tumult, challenges, and violence that have accompanied radical political and economic changes in the Middle East and other developing regions --- prodded by the shockwaves of modernization and globalizing forces --- had also convulsed most of Europe from 1500 on as well . . . often with greater violence and high-coiled religious and ideological extremism.

Among other things, the earlier 11 articles in the series sought to clarify, theoretically, what constitutes democracy, distinguishing two main variants: the solid liberal sort, which is confined to about 30-35 countries, and the wider electoral kind that now encompasses dozens more. Some of these new electoral democracies may evolve over time into the liberal sort: that means instituting an effective rule of law, cutting down rampant corruption and nepotism, and spawning a vigorous civil society of voluntary associations . . . which includes cause groups galore and independent self-governing professions. An energetic and free media is also vital here. Several others of these electoral democracies might remain confined to electoral democracy, decades on end. Yet others might lapse again into authoritarianism, even of a brutal sort. It all depends.

What we have shown is that despite the big surge in the number of new electoral democracies --- dozens of them over the last two decades --- one area of the world remains stubbornly absent on the democratic roll-call: the 22 Arab countries. All are despotic; all are generally marked by a winner-take-all-politics, despite some greater freedom of expression and limited political participation in a half dozen of them; all lack an effective rule of law; and each and every one --- again with some variation in the degree of outright coercion or brutality they use --- rely ultimately on the secret police for their survival. Their failures and political obstacles to becoming electoral democracies --- a small handful more promising than others: the tiny Gulf states, Jordan, Morocco, and now Algeria --- have been carefully set out and analyzed.

So much for the Arab political record. Time now to nudge your attention away from politics and focus it the economic record, above all --- as a first-cut --- in the following ways:

PART ONE:
INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS: EXPLAINING ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Our Task Here In This Article?

It's easy to set out, this current task: to shift our focus from political to economic concerns and concentrate on explaining the causes of economic development --- in general theoretical terms, mind you; and in ways that hold lessons for all poor countries seeking to grow their way out of poverty, not just the 22 Arab countries.

The latter, recall, add up to 300 million people: half of them under the age of 15. They will number 500 million or so in a couple of decades. Subtract oil --- abundant only in the tiny Gulf states, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia --- the 22 Arab countries manage together to export less than tiny Finland, with its 4 million people. Hard to believe, no? True all the same. Come to that, unemployment averages 20-25% among Arab men alone. Illiteracy remains the highest in the world --- higher even than in much poorer Tropical Africa.

It’s a record of massive development failure. The following theoretical analysis of development --- what underlies successful long-term economic growth over generations or even centuries --- should help illuminate, even spotlight, the causes of these Arab failures . . . or come to that, developmental failures elsewhere too.

A Detailed Developmental Record Now To Generalize About About.

Fortunately, since WWII, we can now theorize more effectively than in the past about development --- above all, because several formerly poor countries, even in southern Europe and parts of Latin America, never mind Pacific Asia, have compiled a clear record of economic development that can then be compared with the earlier developmental achievements of Japan, Western Europe, and the English-speaking countries. Other countries have been less successful: their problems and setbacks are further sources of evidence for theoretical analysis. Some have bungled almost completely, especially in Tropical Africa.

Our main theoretical premise? Increasingly, since 1990, developmental economists have begun to recognize that sustained, long-term economic development requires, roughly, the same sort of institutional and cultural changes that lead, ultimately, toward solid, liberal democracies. Many economists balk at extending their theoretical models in that wide-ranging direction. Some even deny that it’s needed. Even the World Bank, though, now grants that without major institutional reforms, developing countries won’t develop.

And as we’ll see, by definition the workings of institutions --- whether economic, financial, political, or otherwise --- always have a strong cultural component.

Agreed: These Are Fairly Abstract Points,

. . . all needing an explanation --- at a minimum, a good article's worth. This one for instance; or more precise, this one and the next three . . . the resulting quartet forming a dense, tightly knitted mini-series. So remember our task in these 4 articles once more:

• To set out and clarify the general institutional and policy changes --- economic, political, and legal: even, come to that despite their slippery nature, cultural ones --- that need to be undertaken over time if the leaders and citizenry of poor countries hope to transform them into affluent, technologically advanced economies.

Wait though. Two sidebar comments suddenly intrude here, by way of clarification.

(i.) You'll note that the argument here refers to a few readings. Which ones? Those, as it happens, assigned to a buggy prof class at UC Santa Barbara in international relations theory, political science 121 --- in particular, the 3 week section of the class that deals with globalization and economic development. The students already have several hand-out exam questions dealing with these in the next mid-term, scheduled for June 1st. These questions, six in all, have to be prepared carefully. Each refers in detail to the assigned readings, and to a lesser extent to the buggy prof's lectures. Those readings will be set out here in a moment. Every one, by the way, can be accessed through the Internet, even if, come to think of it, three or four might require a subscription to the journals where they originally appeared.

(ii.) As you'll see when you reach Part V of the argument --- found in the second article in this mini-sries --- there's a theoretical model used to summarize the conditions of successful development . . . which means, to put it bluntly, the conditions that explain why the rich countries are rich and others aren't.

That model unfurls four major propositions, easy to follow. Three of the four are borrowed from a book by Charles I. Jones, Introduction to Economic Growth (Norton, 2nd ed., 2002), especially chapter 10. His model is sketched out in a suggestive way, nothing more --- a barebones model if you want. And though the borrowing from Jones' work needs to be underscored, the elaboration of the model and the extensive comments that follow are strictly the responsibility of the buggy prof's cogitations, for good or bad.

As for Jones’ book, it’s well worth buying and working your way through his clearly written analysis of various growth models, with one proviso in mind: the book’s ordinarily used in upper division courses in economics --- possibly even in first year grad seminars --- and so to make sense of Jone’s analysis, you need to have a good basis in statistics and multiple regression modeling --- the heart of econometrics. Some basic calculus would also help.

If you prefer, stick to the ps 121 reading listed right now, along with a couple of less demanding but unusually stimulating and intelligent books on development. Two stand out:

• David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Are Some Rich and Others So Poor? (Norton, 1999) --- a masterful historical survey, written with the clarity and graphic vigor of a talented novelist, of how the world became divided into rich and poor nations since the Middle Ages. The book climaxes a long 50 year career of one of the most gifted economic historians of the last century. Its argument is mainly cultural and institutional, even if the analytical framework could at times be strengthened.

• William Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth (MIT, 2001), probably the single best book ever written on development, and all the more admirable because its analysis is generally non-technical and easy for the general public to read. A talented academic economist, Easterly served decades with the World Bank and spent several years in the field in a number of developing countries. Impossible to over-praise this admirable book, which is discussed in the second section below, taken from the political science 121 syllabus.

The Readings Referred To Here:

All are taken from the syllabus for political science 121, spring 2004, for weeks 7-9:

IV. GLOBAL ECONOMICS AND INTERNATIONAL ORDER AND POWER POLITICS (WEEKS 7-9)

1. Globalization

2. Economic Development:

PART TWO: WHAT ACCOUNTS FOR SUCCESSFUL ECONOMIC GROWTH?

The Need To Distinguish Between Short-Term Growth Spurts and Long-Term
Sustained Development

What causes successful development then? Well, the starting point for any theoretical analysis are the distinctions made by Dani Rodrik in "Growth Strategies", especially the one just mentioned in the sub-heading here. More basically, his distinctions on this score show up in three key ways:

Posted by Michael Gordon @ 08:22 PM CST [continue] [ Comments? ]

Three articles have appeared so far in this interlude-series on Turkish and Arab developmental records, and several more earlier on in the wider series that deals with democratic prospects of the various Arab countries, Iraq's included. What now?

Well, an effort to round off your perspective on Turkish and Arab developmental struggles and problems --- plus, of course, some notable successes in modern Turkey. To that end, a broader comparative approach is needed than used so far . . . above all, with the long pioneering trajectory of European modernization from the late Middle Ages on, our main reference point. When these comparative signposts are strung out and fully spotlighted here, you'll likely have a better appreciation of how the struggles and problems that continue to buffet the Turkish and Arab peoples these days --- for that matter, peoples in other developing regions --- also hounded the Europeans for centuries on end, and often in more violent and destructive ways.

No exaggeration, just the opposite.

If anything, historically viewed over the last 5 centuries, those developmental and modernizing struggles caused more havoc and far more bloodshed in European modernizing endeavors than they have so far in the Middle East, never mind Latin America or Asia minus China in the mad destructive Maoist era. To show this, in general comparative terms --- internal and external developments weaved together --- is our general thrust here.

To bring it off, three sets of remarks will uncoil with brisk and busy analysis, each set hogging a division of its own . . . part one, part two, and so on. In the third part, some general comparisons will be made between the developmental records of Europe and other regions of the world, a rapid moving survey that will likely surprise most buggy visitors.

INTRODUCTION TO THE ARGUMENT

Three Arguments Really

The initial set of remarks and uncoiled analysis seek to highlight the recurring turmoil, extremism, and violence in European struggles to modernize from the late Middle Ages on --- whether internal or international and, more to the point, whether rooted in nationalist, religious, or ideological fervor and strife. When you're through reading them, you’ll see how the achievements and failures or at least ongoing problems in the Muslim Middle East aren’t without parallels in European developmental struggles. You’ll grasp more effectively, so the buggy prof hopes, why there was so much marked ideological diversity in European politics and life in 1939, the watershed year that led to WWII: a handful of countries democratic and moderate, a larger number fascist and extremist, Nazi Germany the most powerful and brutally radical of all, and one --- the Soviet Union under Stalin --- another madhouse of ideologically grounded totalitarianism, endlessly violent, murderous, and expansionist.

By the end of this initial argument, something else should illuminate your understanding: tersely put, the historical roots of the popular-based gaps in the world-outlooks that divide most Americans and West Europeans these days about international relations, capitalism, globalizing forces, and the role of governments in people's lives. These gaps aren't speculative. They have been repeatedly captured in recurring public opinion surveys . . . even if, on the level of governments, most European and American policymakers continue for the most part to insulate foreign policy-making in NATO and elsewhere from these powerful currents in popular opinion.

The Second Argument

The next set of remarks deals directly with British imperial expansion, which paralleled other European empire-building --- and for that matter Arab and Ottoman imperialism as well --- but which also, more to the point, differed from other empires in the modern era in some crucial respects. After reading those remarks, you should be able to appreciate two added points relevant to this wider series on the democratic prospects of Turkey and the 22 Arab countries.

• The heavy negative legacies that still reverberate and influence the Muslim Middle East that derive from the earlier successes and then much longer, far more important decline of the Arab empire from the 7th century on and later that of the Ottomans after the mid-1450s.

• And, even more to the point, what explains those unique British imperial legacies --- legal, political, and cultural --- that helped shape a far different developmental trajectory in North American than Spanish and Portuguese empire-building did in Latin America, along with the recurring significance of these differences even today . . . centuries later after the initial European conquests in the New World. .

The Third Argument: Comparisons with the Developing Countries Since 1945

To the surprise of most visitors here, you’ll find --- when the various threads of the two previous arguments are drawn tightly together and analyzed with a third set of remarks --- that the buggy professor is relatively optimistic about the developmental record of the developing countries.

If anything, their successes --- political and even economic, at any rate in Latin America and Asia --- compare favorably with Europe’s strife-torn, war-ridden history from 1500 on . . . marked by clashes of recurrent religious and ideological fanaticism, bursting nationalist upheavals, and shockwaves again and again of brutal civil and revolutionary warfare, never mind mass-murdering wars among the European great powers in the Napoleonic era and again from 1914 until 1945. Even the lucky few countries by the start of WWII --- mainly constitutional monarchies led by England and the Netherlands, with tiny Switzerland the other exception --- had experienced repeated bursts of turbulent violence, religious and ideological in nature, in the 16th and 17th centuries before they were able to institutionalize stable, constitutional politics and achieve big breakthroughs in the 19th and early 20th centuries in industrialization and impressive economic growth. France, as we'll see, was something of an exception by 1939. Since then, it experienced four different political upheaval over the next two decades, all caused by war and internal strife.

For anti-globalizers, the developmental successes of Latin America, most of Asia, and even Turkey in the Middle East, especially political --- a powerful democratic thrust everywhere there --- create a swarm of intellectual challenges, such is their shallow, lop-sided understanding of modernization and globalizing forces, the two going hand-in-hand for centuries now. Don't misunderstand. Globalizing forces have their downside --- even a dark menacing side: witness Al Qaeda and other forms of transnational Islamist terrorism. Without the Internet, the ease of moving money and messages instantly around the globe, and continued migration of radical Islamists from the Middle East to the industrial countries, mass-murdering terrorism of this sort --- inspired by religious fanaticism --- would never have gotten off the ground.

The Third Argument Further Foreshadowed

Back to recent developmental successes, part and parcel of globalization. Take Asia, treated again in the last part of this article.

Amid the turmoil, economic and social, caused by the currency and financial meltdown in Pacific Asia in 1997 and into 1998, we would expect --- if the anti-globalizers were right --- that the nascent democratic forces in Asia would be overturned and dictatorial rule either reinstituted or strengthened (as in Indonesia). Wrong; very wrong. Everywhere in the capitalist parts of Asia, democratic developments pounded ahead with renewed vigor and depth --- even in Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world with 230 million people, now ranked as a promising electoral democracy on a variety of categories. Then there's India. Always democratic save briefly in the mid-1970s, it has become increasingly so since integrating into the global capitalist system the last decade.

The same general conclusions, as you'll see, apply to the whole of Latin America as well, and even parts of Tropical Africa. Everywhere south of the Rio Grande except in Communist Cuba --- admired by so many anti-globalizers, a huge island-prison where the 10 million inmates are told what they can or can't say, have no political choices in their lives, and are monitored by a pervasive secret-police apparatus even as the Cuban economy tumbles into a black hole (all the fault of the US's economic sanctions, you see) --- electoral democracies flourish, including in the recently civil war-blasted region of Central America, where members of the former reactionary governments there sit side-by-side with former Marxist rebel leaders in the legislatures of Nicaragua and elsewhere.

The big black mark on the developmental record, politically speaking? It's really only the 22 Arab countries and clerical-fascist Iran that continue to beat off democratic tendencies with a variety of dictatorial rule and an omnipresent secret-police, the major differerences here being the degree of brutality involved and support for or against fundamentalism Islam. That said, as previous buggy articles in this series have noted, even the Arab countries contain a more fortunately situated group as far as their future democratic prospects go --- mainly Algeria, Morroco, Jordan, and the tiny Gulf states.

PART ONE
EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENT AND MODERNIZATION: ITS PARALLELS AND DIFFERENCES
WITH THE OTTOMANS, ARABS, AND OTHER NON-EUROPEAN PEOPLES

Rippling Strife and Brutal Civil and Revolution Warfare in West Europe

The turmoil and violence that engulfed Europe in its modernizing struggles over the last several centuries --- roughly, from the start of the 16th century on --- didn't spare any country or region there. The Reformation and the violent wars between Catholics and Protestants for 130 years after the 1520's flared everywhere in Mediterranean, Western, and Central Europe, though not in Scandinavia. England in the 17th century was probably one of the two or three most violent, war-torn countries in all of Europe --- the wars internal and external; Ireland was caught up in that internal violence and religious fanaticism when Cornwall and other Protestants invaded that country; the Netherlands was so torn by warfare in the late 16th and 17th centuries with Spain, which ruled its southern areas, that it looked more like Germany in the Thirty-Years War of the same 17th century period than the peaceful, stodgy, democratic country that emerged in the 19th century. For that matter, the Dutch --- a big expansionist imperial country in the 17th century --- fought several wars with the English and the French.

Only in the 19th and 20th century would these national developmental struggles moderate. Only then would industrialization be completed in even West Europe, making for a certain level of prosperity and growing state regulation and intervention to cushion the social shocks and tumult caused by big shifts in economic livelihood from agriculture to manufacturing and services and by rapid urbanization and population growth, not to forget the struggles to transform monachical authoritarian regimes into constitutional ones with democratic elections.

So much for West Europe. Now shift your attention and consider . . .

Southern and Eastern Europe.

Southern and Eastern Europe --- including most of Spain, Portugal, Italy, and the Austro-Hungarian empire --- remained economically backward way into the 20th century. Some parts of Italy in the north and Spain in the Basque areas and around Barcelona were exceptions. Otherwise, they and most of East and Central Europe remained poor and half-industrialized. Germany, the small Austrian Republic of the 1920s, and tiny Czechoslovakia were the exceptions on the eve of WWII.

Posted by Michael Gordon @ 06:47 PM CST [continue] [ Comments? ]

Contrary to what the previous article initially claimed, this mini-series on the Turkish model of development --- its secular constitution, tolerance, and democratic institutions making the Turks resistant to bin Ladenism and other violent Islamist appeals that are widespread in the Arab world and in Pakistan --- hasn't drawn to an end with just two articles, a brief interlude in the wider series on the democratic prospects of the 22 Arab countries. Still fairly brief, that interlude continues with this, a third article dealing with the Turkish model. The chief reason? Simply this: the more the buggy professor went through some buzzing cogitations about that model --- particularly whether it could be emulated by Turkey’s Arab neighbors in the Middle East or in North Africa --- the more his adrenaline-pumping brain led him to delve more thoroughly into the historical causes of Ottoman backwardness, economic, technological, and military: above all, compared to its European great power rivals from the late 18th century on.

Our Present Aims

What follows in this third article is an effort to systematically capture and throw light on those causes of Ottoman backwardness, particularly where they have parallels with those that also explain Arab economic and technological backwardness . . . at any rate down toward roughly the middle of the 20th century.

Since then, of course, Turkish democratic development --- with lots of ups and downs --- has become institutionally stable and more liberal, with more manufacturing industry implanted in the country than is the case in any of the Arab countries. Of the non-oil rich Arab countries, remember, only Tunisia with its tiny population of 10 million matches Turkey’s living standard, the two countries each having a per capita income in purchasing power parity terms of around $7000. Turkey’s achievement, by contrast, stands out if you also remember that it has 70 million people: this, plus far more democratic development and far greater resistance to bin Laden-like fundamentalist intolerance and conspiratorial paranoia . . . part and parcel of the Arab street almost everywhere, though with a clear diminution the better the democratic prospects of the 22 Arab countries when you rank them on certain measures of such prospects.

INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

Dense and crammed with lurid ambition, the current argument unfolds in four parts.

1) We begin by looking back historically at how the developmental paths of Islam and the West diverged markedly after 1100, something that would have surprised a Martian visitor to earth in, say, the 9th or 10th centuries . . . at which point the Arab world was much more technologically and philosophically advanced than Europe itself. Illuminating this is the task of Part One.

2) Then in Part Two we move on to examine in greater depth the specific causes behind the pace-setting developments --- economic, technological, political, and intellectual --- that allowed certain parts of Europe, specifically Northern Italy’s city states and some of the countries in Northern Europe, to leap ahead of the rest of the world in wealth, power, and scientific knowledge. The results can be summarized as modernizing and globalizing forces, originating in those European areas, then spreading with jarring impact --- usually violent --- to the rest of Europe, North America, and the non-European areas of the globe.

Part Two, as you’ll see, also throws light on why Islam’s lead --- innovative and impressive from the 7th through the 11th centuries --- eroded, ending up with the clash of civilizations between modernizers and regressive fundamentalist Islamisms being played out with violent force almost everywhere in the Islamic world these days . . . save in Turkey and Malaysia.

3) In Part Three, we return to where we left off in the second article in this mini-interlude: the Ottoman Empire’s failures to modernize effectively. The argument that unfolds in this part seeks to pin down and explain the specific causes of those failures and their legacies, including --- for all the impressive changes in Turkish life since the start of the modernizing revolution from above carried out by Ataturk and military and administrative elites in the 1920s --- their continued influence in retarding Turkish economic development and technological advance a good eight centuries afterwards.

4) The argument here about Turkey's success and ongoing developmental problems continues in Part Four with some further theoretical and comparative analysis, especially with the Arab countries. As it happens, their problems with reforming and modernizing their economies, or upgrading their literacy levels and scientific knowledge and technical know-how --- or reforming their political and administrative institutions to deal effectively with corruption, nepotism, despotism, and the absence of a rule of law --- are still actively at work everywhere in the 22 Arab countries, despite some variation across them on these scores. As long as they are at work, the democratic prospects of the Arab countries --- even those that are the most promising like Morocco, Algeria, Jordan, or the small Gulf states --- will likely glow much dimmer than in Turkey itself.

PART ONE:
HOW THE DEVELOPMENTAL PATHS OF ISLAM AND THE WEST
DIVERGED AFTER 1100

Our Initial Task

For all its impressive political and cultural changes --- including a secular constitution and institutionalized democracy that has witnessed a transfer of power in election to a moderate fundamentalist Islamic government in 2003 --- Turkey, some 70 million people in number, continues to suffer from economic and technological backwardness, despite some checkered progress, almost a century after the collapse of the Ottoman empire by the end of WWI and the subsequent westernizing revolution from above. That revolution, which abolished the Ottoman Sultanate and Caliphate and established the Turkish Republic after centuries of uninterrupted decline, was initiated by Ataturk and other nationalist leaders of the military and administrative elites.

What explains that backwardness? Answering that question is this article's first analytical task, followed by a second, closely related one.

The Need To Illuminate Arab Backwardness As Well

In numerous ways, right down to the death-throes of the Ottoman empire by 1929, the same historical obstacles that impeded Ottoman industrialization for centuries --- and its institutional and cultural modernization --- were also at work in the Arab world, only for an even longer time . . . roughly 900 years in the making, from 1100 on. Even now, almost a century after Turkey's modernizing revolution that has blunted or reversed many of those negative historical forces in that country --- above all, its political system but to an extent its economy and cultural life too --- these same force continue to retard the economic development and institutional reforms of the 22 Arab countries with stubborn, high-pulsating intensity. Arab failures here, note quickly, weren't predestined. On the contrary, from roughly the 7th through the 11th centuries, the Arab empire in Persia, the Middle East, North Africa, and Iberia was generally more advanced than Christian Europe 1100.

From then on, what happened?

Tersely put, their developmental paths began to markedly diverge: Islam, first the Arab world, then everywhere else in the Ottoman, Persian, and Mogul empires, began to ossify and fall behind. Irreversibly so; without let-up.

By contrast, from the 12th century on, European societies --- especially in northern Italy and parts of France, Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, and Scandinavia --- began to pound ahead in one weighty area after another, technologically, financially, and militarily. Nor was that all. From the 17th century on, building on these earlier developments, France, Britain, the Netherlands, and some other West European countries pioneered those revolutions in science and other modern knowledge, in industrialization and radical technological progress, and in nationalism and democracy that --- together with the potent, kinetically charged ideological backlashes to them, in both Europe and outside it --- would shape the modern world with jarring force . . . first in West Europe and North America, then later everywhere else.

Modernizing and Other Globalizing Forces: Their Inevitable Dislocating Spread Beyond West Europe and North America

Again and again, their jarring forces of these related revolutions --- political, economic, technological, and knowledge-based --- turned violent as they spread out and shaped the modern world even in the core West European countries . . . a strung-out succession of nationalist or colonial rebellions against Imperial rule, nationalist wars among states, democratic struggles against monarchical despotism or other forms of dictatorship, a swarm of revolutions and counter-revolutions in Europe and elsewhere, and class and ethnic conflicts galore. Most of these, note, would be reflected on the intellectual and emotional levels in a violent clash between competing ideologies, themselves outcomes of the modern world . . . a product of the 17th and 18th century recognition that humans could not only understand the natural world thanks to progress in knowledge, but could use such knowledge to shape and control, so it was said, the course of social, political, and economic life no less. Needless to add, for good or bad.

Even the abolition of slavery --- unique to the liberal industrialized countries of the West in the 19th century, especially the pace-setters here: the British and the Americans --- occurred only with violence, including the bloodiest war in American history. The extremist ideological backlashes included, of course, revolutionary Socialism, Communism in a host of forms, militarized reactionary conservatism, and Fascisms of various kinds, including racist Nazism with its exterminationist ideology. Communism alone proved to be mass-murdering on an unparalleled scale, responsible for the deaths of over 100 million people in the last century . . . not to mention the hundreds of millions of other people under Communist rule whose lives were devastated in other ways.

As with the destruction of slavery, the destruction of Fascism, Nazism, and Communism occurred only through war, vast and violent without parallel in WWII or prolonged and less violent in 45 years or more of the Cold War.

PART TWO:
THE VASTLY DIFFERENT RESPONSES TO MODERNIZING AND GLOBALIZING FORCES
OF ISLAM AND THE WEST CLARIFIED

Modernization and Globalizing Forces: Islam's Responses

These days, we call these world-historical revolutions the main forces behind globalization . . . their origins in the European past a millenium ago. Most areas of the world are eager to embrace them. Islamic societies, as it happens, are generally far more ambivalent here.

Not surprisingly, then, the clash of civilizations between modernizers and regressive fundamentalist forces is playing out with high-potent impact, often violent, in almost all Islamic societies . . . Turkey and Malaysia (with its large Chinese and Indian minorities) the major exceptions, with industrialization and western-secular political life having taken root in both over the last few decades. Not surprisingly either, they and Tunisia are also the most prosperous of the non-oil rich Muslim countries . . . their per capita income in purchasing power parity roughly $7000 - 8000 each.

Sidebar Clarification: Saudi Arabia, which like Iraq has about 25 million people, has a per capita income of around $11,400 this year . . . a huge boost compared to two years ago thanks to the big surge in oil prices, practically its only source of economic growth. Iraq's per capita income is around $2300. Egypt, by far the largest Arab country with 74 million people --- and no oil reserves --- has a per capita income of around $4000. Most Arab countries save Saudi Arabia and the tiny Persian Gulf states with their huge oil exports have a per capita income of around $2500. Illiteracy in the Arab countries, come to that, is the worst in the world . . . worse even than in much poorer Tropical Africa. Unemployment among men alone averages around 20-25%. As for Turkey, its population is about 70 million; Tunisia's is 10 million; Malaysia, where the 30% Chinese minority controls most of the modern economy and finance, has 24 million people.

But Wait, We're Running Ahead of Ourselves: West Europe’s Different Responses

Yes, wait . . . rewind your attention in fast-mode back to the year 1100, the turning point of the West and Islam in all its different forms, whether Arab, Ottoman, Tatar in Russia, Persian, or Mogul in India (1526 on). More specifically, after centuries of strife and economic decline following the break-up of the Roman empire in the West, medieval Europe in Italy and its western country had successfully managed in the 12th and 13th centuries

• to establish new forms of law and security in the seigniorial-manorial system;

• to guarantee the protection of private property and curbed the ability of centralizing monarchs to tax it arbitrarily;

• to create a swarm of small, largely self-governing cities full of merchants and guilds --- something unique to European civilization, not found either in Islam or China or anywhere else;

• and to experience the start of centralizing monarchies in the north and of energetic, briskly thriving city-states in Northern Italy, one of which, Venice, would become a great trading empire in the Mediterranean world for centuries.

Nor was that all. Simultaneously, by the 12th century, European populations were now growing again, and economic and technological development was vigorously under way. Everywhere in parts of Italy and Northern Europe during those last centuries of medieval Europe, important innovations in agriculture, manufacturing, finance, architecture, and long-distance trade began to flourish. New forms of energy systems such as the extensive use of the water-wheel, continually improved on over the centuries until the steam engine, allowed the trading cities to grow and manufacturing to thrive. The upshot? Not surprisingly, more and more economic historians see the industrial revolution of the late 18th century as only one of several such revolutionary changes vigorously occurring throughout Mediterranean and Northern Europe in one wave after another from 1100 on.

Posted by Michael Gordon @ 06:38 PM CST [continue] [ 3 comments ]

Why the split into two articles on Turkey? Well, simply this. As it turned out, the original article on Turkey and its achievements compared to the Arab countries --- especially its secular democracy, its pro-western orientation, its tolerance and immunity to bin Ladenism and radical Islamist appeals, even in the ranks of the moderate fundamentalist political party now in power --- ran on a long, long time . . . maybe, so the buggy prof would like to think, in a kind of gliding, half-graceful manner; but very long all the same, no? No, or rather yes; clearly it did . . . or so it seemed finally to the buggy mind after a flash or two of freewheeling insight when, with effort, the prof’s bug-eyed vision tried zipping across its vast length a moment or two ago and nearly got woozy in the process.

Much better then to cleave the argument into two, particularly since there was a natural break in the initial exposition near the mid-point. And since, too, come to think of it, the final few sections had just been expanded with a few added points. Some of these points sharpened the comparative analysis; others tossed in a few more nuggets of back-up evidence.

The outcome? The first article now sets out Turkey’s political and cultural differences with the Arab countries, a model that, we hope, might be emulated in time by some of the more promising Arab regimes --- the handful that consists of the small Gulf states, Jordan, Morocco, Algeria, and (we further hope) transitional Iraq.

What ensues in this second article is a natural follow-up.

As its initial task, the argument seeks to explain the long decline of the Ottoman empire, at first slow in the making --- the Ottomans an aggressive militarized people still expanding into the heart of Christian Europe as late as the end of the 17th century, only to begin losing the periphery of their empire in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, first in Europe and then in the Middle East starting with the Greek and Egyptian rebellions of the 1820. The decline --- a matter of growing military weakness, blatant industrial backwardness, and incompetent rule in a tradition-laden society tenaciously resistant to modernizing influences --- then picked up rapid momentum in the last decades of the latter century: by then, all the European countries under Ottoman control had rebelled successfully, and later, in WWI, the Arab peoples in the Middle East followed suit. Nor was that the end of decline. Things got worse for the Ottomans. Two years after WWI ended, the Greeks invaded Turkish homeland territory and sought to annex land west of the Dardanelles. All the initial battles were won by the Greeks. As the Greek forces pounded ahead, everywhere in Turkey a sense of raw teeth-clenching crisis and desperation rippled the population.

The moral is clear. Without that long decline and its breakneck pace at the end --- the Turkish homeland itself menaced with big territorial losses --- no swift, high-potent effort by newly energized nationalist leaders to break clean with the Ottoman past would have materialized.

A second task intrudes at this point: to analyze Turkey's revolution from above.

Essentially, in those urgent circumstances after WWI, a section of the military under Ataturk seized power in a coup; immediately deposed the age-old Sultanate-Caliphate form of rule that had dominated Ottoman life for almost four centuries; and --- more important still --- initiated a modernizing revolution from the right that is still unfolding, with ups and down in vigor and success, a good eight decades later. Something else too. In many ways, as the argument will show, Turkey's revolution from above carried out by farsighted military elites paralleled the similar modernizing struggles initiated in Germany and Japan in the 1870s by likeminded military elites. Illuminating the nature of that revolution in Turkey, not least by comparing it with the German and Japanese cases of analagous force-fed modernization from the right --- including their far different outcomes by WWII --- completes the second task.

A third and final task then rears up. No surprise, it’s to probe the multi-sided legacy of the Ataturk revolution and its subsequent influence in Turkish life --- political, economic, and cultural --- on Turkish achievements and problems.

Overall, regard the new duo of articles on Turkish politics and development --- in comparison with others, the Germans and the Japanese, and more recently the Arabs --- as a mini-interlude within the wider series, weeks in the making now, on the democratic prospects of the 22 Arab countries. The next article in that wider series will seek, among other things, to see whether that Turkish model is applicable to the more promising Arab countries. Note that the second article retains the same division of the original article into distinct parts and sub-sections. In particular, it resumes the overall argument where it left off at the end of Part Three.

Part Four:
THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE’S DECLINE CLARIFIED: THE PRE-REQUISITE OF ITS WESTERNIZING
REVOLUTION FROM ABOVE IN THE ATATURK ERA

The Key Point Underscored

Note the pivotal part of the analysis just unfolded here: the crucial background of non-stop decline of a once major great power and empire. Without 150 to 200 years of such endless decline --- spaced out initially and then picking up precipitous speed from the 1870s on --- the Turkish elites would never have had an incentive to undertake the liberalizing westernization of their country under military leadership. Why would they have risked sweeping changes in the status quo that would otherwise jeopardize their power, prestige, and rentier-like sources of wealth?

To grasp the magnitude of the changes in Turkish life that the decline generated, recall that the Ottoman Turks had been Muslim for a millennium by the time Ataturk's revolution was under way in the early 1920s . . . itself built upon earlier changes, from 1908, initiated by newly emerged nationalists known as Young Turks. From the late 15th century on, following their conquest of the decrepit Byzantine Empire, Constantinople became the home of the Caliphate for the Muslim world, including Ottoman rule --- direct or indirect --- over the various Arab peoples that soon followed. It was only in the 1920s, to clarify, that Ataturk abolished the Sultan's rule and his Caliphate status --- his role as the religious or spiritual head of Islam and a legitimizing source of political power in the Ottoman empire --- and solidified the break with Turkey's Islamic past.

The Causes of the Ottoman Decline

The Ottoman Empire's prolonged decline and then quick collapse and disappearance after WWI has to be understood both in historical and comparative terms.

Comparisons with what? Tersely put, with other "revolutions carried out from above" by right-wing military and administrative elites, mainly as a way to foster national power and influence in order to close the gap with the far more powerful, more modern western democracies. Several countries have sought to modernize this way, without succeeding. Those that did --- our comparative focus --- were Japan and Germany from 1870 on. As for the western democracies that were far more advanced and seen as threats by the Japanese, Germans, and Turks, we're talking about France, Britain, and the USA. Obviously.

Posted by Michael Gordon @ 06:07 PM CST [continue] [ Comments? ]

This is the 8th article in the series on the democratic prospects of the Arab countries, at a time American foreign policy in the Bush era is actively seeking to promote liberalizing reforms in all 22 of them . . . the ultimate aim to try nudging them in a solid democratic direction.

That aim is a central part of the wider war on terrorism, an ideological struggle unfolding everywhere in the Muslim world between modernizers and fundamentalist forces of various sorts. Not all the modernizers are democratic, though most probably are to one degree or another. One thing for sure, scarcely any of the fundamentalist movements are democratic in any meaningful way, the line between so-called moderate and radical Islamists very fuzzy at best . . . save in Turkey, a point we’ll return to in a few seconds. As for the masses of Arab populations --- what can we say about them? Where do they stand in this ideological tug-of-war?

Well, in the absence of ongoing systematic survey data in their despotic countries --- a big drawback for scholarly work --- the best we can do is speculate. Most likely, the Arab populations are largely concerned with jobs, income, and law-and-order, plus better social services, and will support any government that helps provide them adequately . . . any whatever its political nature.

Back to Islamist fundamentalists.

With a tiny handful of exceptions --- Turkey the stand-out here --- they and their mass followers and sympathizers actively support Islamist terrorism, including bin Ladenism. That claim isn't speculative. As we'll see in a moment or two, a 2004 Pew Global Attitudes survey provides hard evidence here. Simultaneously, though, the fundamentalist leaders and spokesmen in each of the Arab dictatorships have to be wary of actively promoting any challenge, direct or indirect, to the existing despotic governments themselves. Any such challenge will be ruthlessly quashed by the secret police and other security forces: witness Syria in the 1980s or Egypt and Algeria in the 1990s or Yemen now. Even the more moderate Arab dictators have sought to repress any challenge from home-grown fundamentalist movements . . . all of which, with little variation across the 22 Arab countries, are inspired by some notion of purified Islamist revenge for hundreds of years of Arab decline and humiliation, the root causes of which are always imagined, in paranoid conspiratorial fashion, to lie with foreign devils --- Jews, Israel, and the US above all, plus their dictatorial lackeys within the Arab world itself.

Part One:
THE CURRENT ARTICLE'S FOCUS AND HOW IT LINKS TO THE PREVIOUS ARGUMENT IN THE SERIES

In the previous two buggy articles, the democratic prospects of the 22 Arab countries were set out and evaluated at length. A small handful --- Algeria, Morocco, Jordan, and the tiny Gulf states --- were found to be more promising on this score. In turn, remember, democracy tends to reduce radical fundamentalist appeals. That, to repeat, isn't feckless speculation. Here are the results found in the tantalizing Pew Global Attitudes Survey for 2004.

As you can see, 65% of the people in Pakistan, a struggling country whose leaders are seeking to become more democratic after years of military rule and ethnic conflicts, admire bin Laden. In Jordan, one of the better situated Arab countries as far as democratic prospects go, the figure drops to 55%, still alarming enough; in Morocco, more advanced in its prospects still, it declines to 45%. By the time you reach the much more solidly democratic Turkish Republic, public support plunges to around 7% . . . scarcely higher than the equivalent figures in West Europe. Yet Turkey, recall --- though by far the most promising Islamic electoral democracy in the Middle East, and one of only two or three others (Mali, Senegal, and Indonesia) --- isn't even ranked as a totally free country in Freedom House's annual surveys, generally regarded as the best comparative source for ranking countries across 14 categories --- grouped more generally into three broader classes (free, partly free, not free).

Freedom House's ranking of Turkey, note immediately, is actually encouraging. In effect, it seems to suggest that an Islamic country need not even be a fully free, liberal democracy for the appeal of bin Ladenism to be heavily blunted, even shattered.

All of which prompts a key question, the overarching theme of this article: what explains Turkey’s democratic success in fostering democratic development and a clear pro-Western orientation that immunizes its population against radical Islamist fundamentalism?

Part Two:
WHY IS TURKEY SUCH A PROMISING DEMOCRATIC PROSPECT AND
A PRO-WESTERN MEMBER OF NATO?

Turkish Achievements

Turkey --- with 68 million in population (about the size of the largest Arab country, Egypt) and a per capita income of around $7300, roughly two to three times the equivalent for the non-oil rich Arab countries --- has been undergoing a modernizing revolution with ups and downs, including democratic development, under military auspices for almost a century now. Even now, more than 8 decades after the revolution began, the military remains a dominant force in Turkish politics. In this respect, it’s not much different from Arab countries. What is different is that the military officer corps is the embodiment of the modernizing revolution, with a strong emphasis on secularism and a pro-western orientation. It has implanted Turkey inside NATO; seeks to enter the EU; and has a military alliance with Israel in all but name. More to the point, it has also shown a much greater willingness than the Arab militaries --- whoever the despot is (a king or a president-for-life) --- to foster democratic development as well.

Off and on, to be more precise, the country has experienced a growing trend of increasingly free elections in the last two decades, and --- a sign of clear progress --- a moderate fundamentalist party won the last parliamentary election in 2002 and now dominates a government that respects fully the secular Constitution of the country. This is a notable achievement. There are other achievements too.

In particular, its current leaders --- the heads of the military behind the scenes and the elected government headed by a moderate fundamentalist party (ATP) and its leader as Prime Minister, Recep Tayip Erdogan and his ATP party in parliament --- studiously avoid what Arab fundamentalist movements constantly drum up support for. Concretely put, Turkish leaders of all sorts . . .

• Shy away from any demands to apply the Shari, Islamic law, in the country.

• Eschew the conspiratorial paranoid fantasies that flourish in the Arab world about Arab despotism (the fault of others), economic and technological backwardness (ditto), and declining power and influence for generations now . . . likewise the fault of others, especially Jews, Israel, the US, and its western lackeys that follow it.

• Renounce any demonization of Israel, an Arab obsession in the popular media everywhere and on the Arab street. On the contrary, Turkey has close military ties with Israel and draws repeatedly on Israeli expertise for its technological and economic development.

• And, finally, avoid any anti-Semitism . . . now a flourishing part of the Arab street almost everywhere, purveyed in virulent, Nazi-like racist ways. Not only does Turkey maintain a semi-military alliance with Israel, there is scarcely any observable animosity toward Jews in public or private life. When, for instance, a synagogue was bombed last year by Islamist terrorists, the lead politicians of the country --- together with the leading Muslim clerics --- all spoke on the same public platform with the chief rabbi of Turkey’s tiny Jewish population (about one-fifth of 1.0% of the 68 million Turks) and, without exception, denounced the barbarous attack on a co-religious place of worship.

Vivid Differences with the Arabs Here

The contrasts on these scores with the Arab countries, even the more moderate and politically promising, are graphic, a cause for reflection.

Consider, to take just one example --- a very recent one --- the latest garbled, crazy-house outburst that blames the recent terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia on Jews [click here for MEMRI]. Its demagogic ranter? Believe it or not, none other than Prince Abdullah, the Crown Prince himself . . . widely regarded as the head of the modernizing camp in that Mafioso clan of utterly corrupt, gangster-rulers who control the country and have lavishly used oil-money to spread the hateful racism and other extremism paranoia of Wahhabi Islam around the world.

Posted by Michael Gordon @ 06:51 PM CST [continue] [ Comments? ]

This, the 7th article in our series on the new Bush initiative to promote democratic changes in the Arab world --- all 22 Arab countries at the start of 2003 despotic and ultimately dependent on the secret police for their survival, but with differing prospects for democratic development --- almost completes the series, focusing mainly on the overall democratic prospects of the 22 Arab countries. It’s not new, this focus. At the end of the 6th article --- which ranked the Arab despotisms according to their democratic prospects --- the argument about their political future was left hanging fire. We still want to predict whether those better-situated Arab countries --- five or six, remember, with the most promising prospects --- will evolve into more solid electoral democracies in the near future.

INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

Two-thirds of those promising countries are, it’s true, pretty tiny: the small Gulf states and Jordan, the latter about 5 million in population. Even so, two of them --- Morocco and Algeria --- are the third and fourth largest of the 22 Arab countries: Egypt tops the slate with about 75 million people, followed by Sudan’s 38 million, with Morocco and Algeria next in line. . . each around 32 million in population. The fate of Iraq --- with 25 million people the fifth largest of the 22 Arab countries --- is still shrouded by lots of uncertainty. For its worth, though --- as the 8th and final article in the series will show --- the buggy professor continues to believe that a transitional government, under UN auspices, will emerge on July 1st this year and prepare the country effectively for its first universal elections next January.

That belief, you might note, is in line with the views just vented in an interview by Bernard Lewis, the greatest scholar of Islam and the Middle East since World War II . . . a professor emeritus at Princeton now in his 80s:

Enough, however, about Iraq for the time being. It will be the center-stage focus of our 9th and last article in the series. For the time being, keep your attention riveted on the other Arab countries, 21 in number. (The 8th article, in case you are wondering, will probe Turkey's democratic development at length, explaining why it's not likely to be easily emulated by the Arab countries themselves.)

Part Two:
RIGHT NOW, THERE ARE NO ARAB ELECTORAL DEMOCRACIES

No, Not Unequivocally . . . Something Unique to the Arab Region of the World

Maybe so, but what about Algeria . . . discussed at length in the previous buggy article? Didn't it just experience an election for the presidency, monitored by 150 international observers, that was widely deemed as the freest and fairest ever held in the Arab world? Wasn't that election doubly impressive, considering that it was initiated and overseen by a government that had just completed a nasty, decade-long conflict, full of gore on both sides, to destroy Islamist terrorism on its soil?

The answer is yes, it is impressive. Still, commendable as the democratic opening has been, it doesn't make Algeria an electoral democracy; not fully. Suppose, to explain the point, that one of the opposition candidates had won the recent election. What then?

Well, most likely, the actual nature of power and rule in the country wouldn't have been noticeably altered. Since 1962, the year Algeria gained its independence from France, political and economic power in Algeria has been concentrated in a small coalition of dominant military and administrative elites, including the managers in charge of the oil and gas industries. Had President Abdelaziz Bouteflika lost the campaign for re-election, the winning candidate would still have had to come to terms with this entrenched elite and appointed a Prime Minister and Cabinet more or less identical to the existing one. At most, a handful of ministers might have different names. A little shuffling of the major members of the ruling coalition and clientele networks would also have ensued, including of course the new president himself --- just as, in the past, the dominant elite had violently eliminated or jailed a top-guy or two who looked like aggrandizing too much power at their expense, then closed ranks against all others. In short, whoever was president, power would still be heavily lodged in the hands of a dominant, largely unchanged cabal of elites.

To note this is not to denigrate the milestone nature of the recent political changes in Algeria, themselves genuinely encouraging. It is to show a certain hardheaded realism about the nature of how power is concentrated in Algeria, ruled by an overwhelmingly powerful coalition. Over time, of course, that coalition might broaden. It could open up to opposition politicians, including --- if they can be clearly identified --- moderate Islamist leaders who fully renounce terrorism and their endeavors to institute the Shari, Islamic law.

The Promising Arab Handful Classified

Where to place Algeria then in our buggy table that divides the countries of the world into solid liberal democracies, electoral democracies, hard and soft authoritarianisms, and quasi- and hard-line totalitarianism?

Posted by Michael Gordon @ 07:20 PM CST [continue] [ Comments? ]

This is the 6th article in the series on the new shift in US foreign policy toward the Arab despots --- to pressure them in a variety of ways to liberalize and open up to democratic trends, the best way in the long run to combat radical Islamist fundamentalisms and their support for Islamo-fascist terrorism of the Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas sort. President Bush announced the new policy last fall, part of the wider ideological war on terrorism that was a major motive for toppling Saddamite Iraq; and he has subsequently criticized three traditional Arab allies of the US --- Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Tunisia --- for their authoritarian practices. As the previous article noted, some of the 22 Arab dictatorships have more encouraging democratic prospects than others --- roughly a handful of them. What follows in the commentary is lots of data singling out those more favorably situated countries, based on a variety of measures.

One More Article To Come

A 7th and an 8th article will deal directly with Iraq’s transforming prospects, much of which now hinge perilously on the ability of the US occupying forces to quell the existing terrorism and limited insurrection, either by the direct use of force or --- an encouraging sign in itself --- the use of local Iraqi forces as in Fallujah to take over at least a large share of responsibility for maintaining security. Will those Iraqi forces, led by a former Baathist general, do what the general and the local leaders in Fallujah promised to do: disarm the insurrectionists, isolate and turn over the terrorists, and maintain law and order?

Right now, nobody can say.

What is pretty clear by now --- a point we’ll hammer home in the 7th article --- is that there aren’t many Iraqis to develop a democratic Iraq: rather, religious and ethnic sects, plus tribal divisions within them: Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite. When we get around to clarifying this point, we’ll draw on what we’ve learned about democratic transformation from the successful military interventions of the US and its NATO allies in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s . . . another area of the world, it was said, incorrigibly prone to ethnic hatred and warfare, unable to evolve in democratic ways. The Austro-Hungarians had learned that; the Ottomans just as long --- or so we were told; and then so had Yugoslav’s leader, Milosevik and his demagogic government, after Marshall Tito’s death in the 1980s.

The doomsters, as it turned out, were wrong about the Balkans. They may be wrong too about Iraq and some of the other Arab countries.

Part One:
THE ECONOMIST’S RANKING OF DEMOCRATIC PROSPECTS

An unusually stimulating list of indices for ranking the Arab countries’ democratic prospects appeared last month in the admirable British weekly, The Economist. Its table is reproduced directly from that article, and all references should be strictly to it, not the buggy site.

Illuminating as The Economist’s measures are, note right off that they have a drawback: they don’t have some non-Arab control countries --- say, Bosnia in the former Yugoslavia or Bangladesh in South Asia or Indonesia in SE Asia, never mind Turkey in the Middle East itself --- as comparisons. The three latter countries are overwhelmingly Muslim, with tiny non-Muslim minorities; Bosnia is nearly 50% Muslim, with about 37% of the remaining population Serbs and 13% Croat. All four are electoral democracies; at least one of them, Turkey, is clearly near the fuzzy borderline between electoral democracies and more solid liberal ones. It’s a strange, regrettable drawback.

What to do about it?

Fortunately, we can offset it to an extent . . . even though there's no direct way for the buggy prof to parallel the kinds of rankings that The Economist uses. No surprise. That admirable weekly isn’t a scholarly journal that sets out explicitly its methodologies. Even so, there are other sources that more or less parallel The Economist rankings that we can draw on to compare the prospects of the Arab countries with those of the four Muslim electoral democracies just mentioned.

So, here for what it's worth --- transposing the rankings of the four countries just mentioned in terms that approximate, let us hope, The Economist's measures --- are how they would compare with the table above.