Islam And Democracy: The Failure of Dialogue in Algeria

by Frederic Volpi

Overview

During the late twentieth century, many authoritarian Islamic states underwent a dramatic transition to democracy. This book examines the process of democratic reform in Islamic countries, the problems it throws up and the cultural ideas and practices that prevail. Concentrating in particular on Algeria, and based on extensive on-the-ground research, Volpi offers a unique insight into the political history of the Algerian conflict and raises serious questions about the relationship between Islam and democracy on an international level.Addressing the problem of the radicalization of political Islam in the region, he suggests possible solutions to the security and foreign policy dilemmas linked to international terrorism. A bitter battle has been fought between the civil state and the Islamic fundamentalists in Algeria since the 1980s. It's a paradigmatic "clash of civilizations" for some, whilst for others it's a distorted and local crisis in which "democratization" was introduced in a deeply authoritarian context. Looking in particular at the role of oil resources, which give Algeria great international geo-strategic and economic importance, Volpi explores Algeria's political transition — a story which continues to have immense potential significance for other non-democractic Muslim countries.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745319773
Publisher:	Pluto Press
Publication date:	12/20/2002

About the Author

Frederic Volpi is based at the University of St Andrews.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Understanding Political Democratisation at the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century

ALGERIA AND THE 'THIRD WAVE' OF DEMOCRATIC TRANSITIONS

From the perspective of the political analyst, as much as from that of concerned citizens, the periods of political upheavals that completely redefine the social practices and institutional framework of a polity provide invaluable opportunities to question common assumptions about the logic of social change and the foundations of political order. The events that began to unfold in Algeria in 1988 and that, at the time of writing in 2002, are far from over, are one such instance of a contemporary upheaval that raises many questions. What might the significance be of this attempt at democratisation in a polity of the Muslim world, in a context where identity politics and cultural divides appear to be increasingly shaping world politics? Do the Algerian events tell us something specific about the future of democratisation, revolution or Islamicisation in the Muslim world? If so, what are the mechanisms that produced such a dramatic sequence of events? How far can one analyse and understand these mechanisms with sufficient accuracy to help in resolving the actual Algerian conundrum, or to warn the polities that might unknowingly be following the Algerian path? Before addressing those issues it is important to understand the connections between the macro and the micro level of analysis, and to indicate how far one can extend locally cogent explanations to the international sphere (or the opposite). Political theorist John Dunn warns that one of the most pressing conceptual and practical problems that confronts both contemporary analysts and actors is precisely to identify stable categories for political causality and political agency.

In the present situation, the category 'Islam', in so far as it is a distinct political category, obviously means very different things to very different people. It is inherently difficult to define accurately and appropriately the contours and features of this category in such a way that the description satisfies both the conditions of a specific social context and the conceptual requirements of a grand historical and international narrative. From a theoretical perspective it is perfectly possible that the question, 'what are effective means of democratisation of a polity at the beginning of the twenty-first century?' requires a significantly different answer from the question 'what are effective means of democratisation in Algeria today?' When trying to answer the first question, one primarily endeavours to produce a coherent general analytical framework based on the statistically significant features of political causality at the global level. By contrast, when one seeks to explain what precisely happened in a country like Algeria during this last troubled decade, one must necessarily include many statistically marginal factors, which nonetheless had a local significance. If we err on the side of statistical approximations, we obtain the kind of sweeping generalisations that Samuel Huntington utilises to introduce his notion of a clash of civilisations. Conversely, if we err on the side of the anthropology of religion, the investigation may become so particularistic that it cannot be used in political analysis.

In the contemporary context, I fear that it is not the failings of an overelaborate account of political change that hinder our understanding of the situation in Algeria and in the rest of the Muslim world but, on the contrary, an oversimplification of the notion of political development. In the Western tradition, a dubious legacy of the Enlightenment is an idea of political progress-cum-a deterministic natural process of change passing from an old, obsolete political order to a new, better one. Up to the decolonisation period, the idea that swift revolutionary transformations could radically change people's lives (for the better) thrived, mostly thanks to the efforts and successes of communist movements. Unmistakably the success of the communist revolutionaries at mobilising people and at overthrowing regimes in Asia and Africa in the 1960s and 1970s helped to support the claims of Marxism regarding political change – though it cannot be said to have played a prominent role in retaining the adherence of the newly 'liberated' citizenry to the ideas and practice of socialism. In the late twentieth century, however, after the failure of the archetypal communist regime, the Soviet Union, and the comparative success of 'bourgeois' states, neither the association of revolutions with progressive changes nor that of revolutionaries with well-informed political understanding is easily sustainable. Today, as liberalism has (temporarily?) gained the moral high ground, the revolutionary terminology has been downplayed to the benefit of a new liberal vocabulary based on democratisation. (The publication in the mid-1980s of Guillermo O'Donnell, Phillipe Schmitter and Lawrence Whitehead's Transitions from Authoritarian Rule was the watershed for this vocabulary shift.) In this context, as John Esposito and John Voll indicated, even the proponents of political Islam have increasingly adopted this democratic vocabulary to voice their demands and present the process of Islamicisation.

This recent change of terminology means that it is today far more difficult for political analysts to discern the normative bias in the new analyses of democratisation and Islamicisation than it was to pinpoint the practical and conceptual flaws in a well-explored concept and practice, such as revolution. The immediacy of the problem, the limited historical insights and the normative preferences of the analysts, ensure that it is particularly arduous to separate the concrete mechanisms of change from the rhetorical tropes and the ideological gloss. Despite the current optimism concerning the spread of democracy, it is by no means certain that the contemporary liberal understanding of the mechanisms of democratic transitions reflects a less hasty judgement than Marx's presentation of revolutions as the 'locomotives of history'. Indeed, considering the explanation proposed only recently by Francis Fukuyama, who interprets political changes using an Enlightenment-like notion of progress and who emphasises the abstract aspects of democracy and liberalism at the expense of their down-to-earth consequences, it is difficult not to remark how easily the advocates of these views may replicate the mistakes of the utopian socialists. Increasingly, today, substantive accounts of democratisation and democratic consolidation – the analysis of how democratisation leads to the formation of liberal democracies – present the democratic process not just as the initiation of a rule by the demos but as the rule of a knowledgeable and polite civil society guided by a general concern for human rights and political fairness. In this context, it is not be surprising that an experienced analyst of democratic transition like Guillermo O'Donnell should criticise the proponents of this new literature on democratic consolidation on the grounds that their analyses only indicate that new democracies are 'institutionalised in ways that one expects and of which one approves'.

In the contemporary 'New World Order' as much as in the Cold War context, the greatest danger for political analysts and actors is to confuse their own normative preferences with what it may be 'rational' to do, or to mistake contingent political arrangements for the outcomes of the 'rational' choices of political players. Avoiding substantive arguments, Adam Przeworski suggested that, using a 'minimalist' conception of politics, one could determine which institutional outcomes could be obtained with quasi-mechanical regularity – i.e. those that even marginally rational political actors had to recognise were the best possible solutions available in the circumstances. Thus, vis-à-vis the recent democratic transitions in Eastern Europe and Latin America, Przeworski concluded that the democratic arrangements obtained were not the preferred outcomes for many actors, considering their ideological inclinations, but simply the end result of a political stalemate. While this analysis is highly pertinent, it must be noted that some of the assumptions about the actors' interests, wants and systems of valuation that could (safely?) remain implicit in Europe or Latin America may turn out to be more problematic in the Middle East, Asia or Africa. More importantly, however, it must be pointed out that, whether one is dealing specifically with the Muslim world or not, only a solid faith in rationalism permits one to conclude that transitions from authoritarianism produce liberal and democratic solutions because these arrangements constitute 'objectively' a better state of affairs. As Michael Taylor indicated, the limitations of rational choice theory are immense when it comes to analysing complex series of collective choices, particularly in contexts where one does not fully understand the agents' 'ultimate ends'.

The difficulty of correctly apprehending democratisation from definitional and logical premises is illustrated by Phillipe Schmitter's carefully worded definition of democratic consolidation as

the process of transforming the accidental arrangements, prudential norms, and contingent solutions that have emerged during the transition into relations of co-operation and competition that are reliably known, regularly practised, and voluntarily accepted by those persons or collectivities (i.e. politicians and citizens) that participate in democratic governance.

In practice, it is evident that such a description of the process of consolidation can only apply to a community that shares many, if not most, of the analyst's (or reader's) liberal and democratic preferences. Severed from these normative underpinnings, the same terminology and logic could be used to describe the entrenchment of a situation of violent and anarchic political order, just like the one that became established in Algeria in the 1990s. From a definitional point of view, the fact that some political practices may be particularly brutal does not make them less democratic, cooperative, or voluntarily accepted. One of the main difficulties in dealing with a polity of the developing world is that it may be particularly inappropriate to infer causally from what we (liberals and democrats) identify as rational political behaviour – principally because the citizenry of these polities does not habitually share the same normative habits and social skills as the demos of well-established Western democracies.

Structuralist-minded analyses in the vein of Theda Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions and (neo-)institutionalist explanations in the vein of Samuel Huntington's Political Order in Changing Societies offer a handy solution to those who are daunted by the prospect of a political causality sensitive to re-interpretations of rationality. By analysing the long-term organisational and socio-economic trends inside and outside a polity, these scholars propose to narrow down the number of relevant actors and practices in a specific sociohistorical context and to explain the collapse and reconstruction of political order (relatively) independently of most historical agents' views on the situation. Although such analyses of institutional and socio-economic regularities have yielded many interesting insights, it is unfortunately not always the case that a retrospective analysis of regimes which were, in Lenin's phrase, 'unable to live on in the old way', provides useful information on the dynamics and rationale of changes to come. The most thorough understanding of the mechanisms of past transformations can never constitute an exhaustive catalogue of political causality.

Furthermore, it is dubious how far one can really weigh 'objectively' these institutional or socio-economic trends a priori. In the contemporary context, Forrest Colburn points out that it would be a hopeless task to compare the socio-economic and political situation of the countries of the Third World in order to detect where the situation is ripe for change, because most of these polities face extremely tense situations or are already on the brink of disaster. This observation is directly relevant to the analysis of the Algerian situation, as no knowledgeable political commentator of the situation in the Middle East and North Africa had identified Algeria as the most likely focal point for democratising and Islamicising efforts in the region before 1988. At that time, all the political, religious and socio-economic indicators showed that Algeria was a very unremarkable polity indeed.

Obviously, with the benefit of historical insight, one may now be in a position to re-assess these socio-economic and institutional trends and argue that the conditions were in fact ripe for revolt in Algeria in 1988; just as one might explain that the 1979 Iranian revolution or the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 were predictable. In a prospective analysis, however, such structuralist and institutionalist approaches can be more debilitating than helpful, especially for policy-makers, as they confine one's perspectives only to historically tested conditions for change. Furthermore, because they emphasise the preconditions for change, these approaches underestimate the extent to which social and political transformations are affected by what the actors want to achieve, how skilful (or fortunate) they can be, and how imaginatively they can interpret their achievements. Unsurprisingly, the role of ideology and culture is particularly badly handled by these explanations. From this perspective the analyst is not in a position to offer a description of ideology or culture other than that of a deviation from the 'objective' pattern of socio-economic or institutional development.

However, we have learnt from the mistakes of Marxist thinkers, from Gramsci to Althusser, that it is extremely difficult to measure the potential of ideology as a relatively independent causal variable in the 'objective' structure of events without reaching the conclusion that this ideological input always distorts people's choices, and alone shapes the course of events. In this respect, the culturalist twist that Huntington proposed in The Clash of Civilisations as an addendum to the institutionalist approach that he had developed earlier must be credited at least with internal consistency. But how far should this ideological or cultural analysis intervene in the explanations of the Algerian events? And how meaningful a notion can it be for a generic explanation of political change?

In the present situation, it would be over-hasty to affirm that the failure (so far) of democratic transition in Algeria, as elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa, is attributable to the agents' lack of cognitive and normative affinities with the rest of the liberal-democratic world. Furthermore, I believe that a theoretical debate aiming at determining the historical possibility or impossibility of having a liberal democratic political order in an Islamic society should not precede and pre-empt the actual analysis of Algerian political events or the inquiry into the behaviour of the Muslim populations concerned. It is particularly unhelpful to start by saying that these communities have no practical experience or conceptual affinity with liberal democracy and, therefore, cannot reach it on their own – be it because of an absence of civil society (according to Gellner) or because of the authoritarian logic of this religious creed (according to Huntington). Conversely, it would be equally unwise to assume that it is just a matter of time before these polities endorse liberal and democratic ideals as people eventually realise that this is what they need for their individual and collective self-fulfilment. (In this respect, one may regret that so many contributions to debate on the future of civil society in the Muslim World have a tendency to recycle the Third-Worldist arguments that developing societies only have to overcome contingent dilemmas and externally imposed fetters in order to flourish.) Vis-à-vis the democratic transitions in Latin America, O'Donnell and Schmitter showed convincingly that one could not have spelt out ex ante the likely outcomes of these events, because part of the process of transition was precisely the collective learning of an appropriately democratic way of solving the polities' predicaments. The main characteristic of those democratic transitions was the exploration in real time of the very possibility of democratic political change. To my mind, this observation strongly suggests that it is probably best to investigate the role of culture and ideology in the Algerian and Muslim context in the light of this agent-centred, open-ended practical endeavour to resolve one's political predicament.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Islam and Democracy"
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Copyright © 2003 Frédéric Volpi.
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Table of Contents

I. Understanding political democratisation at the beginning of the 21st century
1. Algeria and the ‘third wave’ of democratic transitions
2. Islam and the ‘West’: a clash of ideologies in Algeria
3. New political actors for a new international order

II. Political ideas and practices in historical perspective
1. Genealogies of state power: colonial experiences post colonial dilemmas
2. Historical perspectives on Islamic fundamentalist ideology: a pragmatic account

III. The Algerian political opening: democratic symbols and authoritarian practices (1988-1991)
1. The 1988 October riots: the symbol of a new era
2. The Algerian democratic opening: successes and failures

IV. The 1992 coup d’état and beyond: war as politics through other means (1992-1994)
1. The 1992 coup d’état
2. The military in control: the repressive option
3. The Islamic movement: from political opposition to ‘holy’ war

V. A new authoritarianism: guided democracy versus radical Islam (1995-2000)
1. The re-composition of the political field
2. Electoral marketing: formal representation and informal authoritarianism
3. On the margins of politics: The military and the Islamic guerrillas
VI. A civil society in transition: survivalist strategies and social protest
1. Coping with violence and deprivation: survivalist strategies
2. The articulation of social protest: defying the regime

VII. The international arena: strengths and weaknesses of the New World Order
1. The political economy of the conflict: the role of international actors
2. Algeria as the future of democratisation in the Muslim world
3. Exporting the Jihad: the internationalisation of radical Islamic actors

VIII. Conclusion: learning and unlearning to be democratic

References

Index