• Syria: from authoritarianism to benevolence  - Murhaf Jouejati
Bashar Assad and his cohorts are of the view that economic reforms must precede political reform.

• Turkey: the Kemalist roots  - Duygu Bazoglu Sezer
Without the Kemalist reforms, Turkish democracy could not have attained the level it reached with EU-driven reforms.

• Palestine: political will is absent  - an interview withAbdel Rahman Tamimi
Economic reform cannot be undertaken unless there is political stability and a strategic vision.

• An overview: politics first  - Alvaro Vasconcelos
The sequence of economic reform leading to democratization has not worked in the Mediterranean region.

Syria: from authoritarianism to benevolence
 Murhaf Jouejati

Conventional wisdom holds that economic and political reforms are directly linked. With regard to sequencing, the debate within the development community has been dominated by two schools of thought: The first argues that economic reforms ought to precede political liberalization on the grounds that authoritarian regimes are better equipped to carry out economic reform. The second insists that only by altering the political logic that sustains authoritarian regimes--moving from a base built on the discretionary distribution of patronage to one grounded in the legitimacy that comes with procedural legality and political accountability--will political elites ever be persuaded to undertake economic reform.

In the Syrian context, that debate is heavily skewed in favor of those pushing for economic reform first--the political will to redistribute power, or at least to share it, being absent. The recommendations that the tenth Baath Party Congress advanced this summer reaffirmed the Syrian political elite's determination to maintain the political status quo. Some examples: The idea of a constitutional amendment to level the political playing field was ruled out; the Baath Party is to remain the vanguard party, in accordance with Article 8 of the constitution. Among the political parties that will soon be licensed, only those that appear to be the least threatening to Baathi dominance will be allowed to organize. Emergency laws, in effect since 1963, will not be lifted; they will be relaxed. What the term relaxation means, according to the "can do" list put out by the authorities, is that Syrian citizens will now be allowed to, among other things, erect falafel stands and open hair salons without the prior approval of the dreaded secret police, the mukhabarat. In these circumstances, it is safe to assume that those in Syria who stress the need to prioritize political liberalization must be very lonely people.

Bashar Assad and his reformist cohorts, on the other hand, are of the view that economic reforms must precede political reform. Assad's reasoning is that Syrian citizens are more in need of jobs and higher incomes than they are of new political arrangements. In this, the young Syrian leader may be right: when over a fifth of Syria's labor force is unemployed and per capita income is as low as $1,000, only a handful of citizens would give Lockean liberalism the priority. The problem is that Syria's political elite has not yet engaged in the kinds of painful economic reforms that are requisite to restoring the Syrian economy to even its pre-Baath levels. Privatization of the bloated and highly inefficient public sector remains a taboo subject, and talk of a shift to a market economy was deliberately diluted during the Baath Congress to "social market economy"--a catch phrase intended to appease the powerful labor unions and the bureaucracy, the regime's power base.

This is not to say that Syria has not experienced change during the past five years. Assad introduced private banking, drafted more business-friendly investment laws to create jobs, reinvigorated the private sector, and overhauled an important segment of the public sector, giving its managers greater say in day-to-day operations. Moreover, in order to reduce market distortions, Assad eliminated some subsidies and reduced others.

Nor were his reforms limited to the economy. Assad allowed the establishment of private universities. He promoted the demilitarization of society by reducing the length of military conscription and by lifting mandatory high school military uniforms. In administration, Assad replaced hundreds of Baath apparatchiki with younger, more educated and reform-minded elements. Moreover, senior appointments were made according to merit, not to Baath affiliation. Syria's ambassadors to Washington and to London and its deputy premier for economic affairs are cases in point. Finally, Assad freed hundreds of political prisoners and, in an effort to promote national reconciliation, allowed the return of a number of exiled pre-1963 politicians, including a former Syrian president. In short, five years into his rule, Bashar Assad made positive changes.

These measures, welcome as they are, do not amount to much, however. As the noted expert on democratization Marina Ottaway warns, it is important not to confuse positive change with democratization. The transition from an authoritarian to a democratic system, Ottaway notes, requires a political paradigm shift--an abandoning by those controlling the government of old assumptions about the fundamental organization of the polity, the relation between the government and the citizens, and thus the source, distribution, and exercise of political power. As long as changes are benevolent acts of the ruler rather than the recognition of inalienable rights of the citizens, no paradigm change has taken place. In this context, the reforms that Assad made in the past five years appear to be more benevolence than paradigmatic shifts.

In the final analysis, some measure of economic reform seems necessary, even though it does not point a clear-cut path to rapid success. After all, democratization is not an event but a process, and democratization may start with seemingly insignificant changes.- Published 1/9/2005 (c) bitterlemons-international.org


Murhaf Jouejati is professor of Middle East studies at the National Defense University's NESA Center for Strategic Studies. He also teaches at The George Washington University and is a scholar at the Middle East Institute.

Turkey stepped into the new millennium with a grand domestic project and international commitment: to carry out a sweeping reform of its political and economic system in order to qualify for membership in the European Union.

Turkey's formal ties with the EU (then the EEC, European Economic Community) began in 1964 when it became an associate member. It inched closer to membership in 1999 when the EU finally granted it candidate status. In principle, full membership seemed now to be within reach. One formidable challenge remained, however: Brussels' injunction that Turkey, like all other candidates, fulfill the so-called Copenhagen Criteria. Briefly, these amount to a liberal democratic political and economic system.

The Turkish system has been drastically overhauled since 2001 under the close scrutiny of the EU, with the result that Turkey has come closer to becoming a true liberal democracy. In recognition, the EU agreed in fall 2004 to open accession negotiations with Ankara on October 3, 2005.

I argue that these achievements have become not merely feasible, but conceivable, only because Turkish state and society underwent structural transformation much earlier. Through a process broadly described as "Turkish modernization" or "westernization," launched in its most radical form in the 1920s by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and his colleagues, Turkey laid the political, legal and cultural substratum of change. This substratum and the pillars on which it stood provided the necessary foundation upon which further pro-reform structures could be built, deepening and broadening the original project of modernization. In a way, the most recent stage amounts to the renewal of Kemalism.

The paramount objective, the supreme goal, which inspired and guided the founders of modern Turkey in the 1920s and 1930s was the dream to mold a new state and society on the basis of values and premises collectively defined as "contemporary civilization." In real life, "contemporary civilization" was understood exclusively as western civilization. The principles and policies adopted in this period are broadly referred to as "Kemalism".

The Kemalist project seemed over-ambitious and supremely unrealistic--then and even now. For it implied an uncompromising clash of worldviews and value systems between the existing reality in Turkey--traditional and eastern, with Islam enjoying almost unquestioned power over the life of the state and society, especially of women--and the New Order and New Man that the Kemalist dream promised: modernized and westernized, implying among other things recognition of the power of man's free will and reason, the importance of empiricism as the path to truth, and by implication the dethroning of Islam as the organizing force in the life of the state and society. Clearly, the intellectual roots of Kemalism go back to the French Enlightenment and Revolution. Positivism, rationality, and secularism, as well as nationalism and popular sovereignty, became the organizing notions around which the tasks of state and nation-building were structured in the 1920s and 1930s.
Energized by these notions, Turkish reformers prioritized three interrelated areas as the target and the locomotive of societal transformation: religion, the law, and education.

Secularism, or laicite, defined the role of religion in Turkish state and society in the formula expressed as the "separation of state and religion". Moreover, in 1924 the Caliphate was abolished, formally ending Turkey's historical position within the Muslim world as its spiritual leader, and sending a message to the whole world that Islam's place in Turkey would no longer be the same.

The legal system was thoroughly secularized. The Sharia, Islamic law, ceased serving as the basis of justice. Instead, the Italian legal code and the Swiss civil code were adopted. The new civil code revolutionized gender and family relations, granting women full equality with men in family as well as public life. Polygamy was forbidden. Civil marriage replaced religious marriage. A new dress code forbade women to wear the veil in public space.

A unified nationwide system of public education terminated the two-pronged system of the late Ottoman era, where secular and madrasa education operated side by side. Madrasas and centers of religious-sectarian teaching were outlawed. The Arabic alphabet was dropped in favor of the Latin. Over 400 books from among the western classics were translated into Turkish for required reading in public schools.

Reforms were enacted as part of the "revolution from above". In many instances, they were enforced arbitrarily under one-party rule. Clearly, there were mistakes and deficiencies in numerous areas. Yet millions of young Turkish citizens came out of the system having successfully internalized the notions of the French Enlightenment and Revolution. Since transition to a multi-party system in 1946 compromises have occurred, especially in the cardinal principle of secularism, provoking the military to intervene in politics as the guardian of the Kemalist principles.

More than half a century later, the Kemalist reforms still have their domestic and western detractors. I am convinced, however, that without those reforms Turkish democracy could not have attained the level that it has reached with the EU-driven reforms. Besides, the Kemalist reforms were thoroughly home-grown, not a response to external demands.- Published 1/9/2005 (C) bitterlemons-international.org

Duygu Bazoglu Sezer is professor of international relations at Bilkent University, Ankara, and is founder and director of the International Dialogue and Cooperation Studies Center (IDCS). She has written extensively on Turkish foreign policy, Russian foreign policy, and European security and arms control.