In this talk with the leading civil society journal on humanities and social sciences “Mehrnameh”, published in Teheran as one of the few organs of the liberal, democracy-oriented and progressive intellectuals of Iran, Roland Benedikter and Abuzar Baghi cover a wide range of historical and contemporary issues concerning Turkey as an example of Islamic democratization. The interview has been carried out in English and translated autonomously by Abuzar Baghi into Persian (see Persian version).

 

1- Baghi: What is the state of contemporary Turkey, as seen from the interdisciplinary, multi-dimensional viewpoint of the seven-fold approach to the “global systemic shift” in which you specialize[1]? In particular, what is the state of affairs regarding the intricate relationship between Politics and Religion at the Bosporus today?

Benedikter: First of all, there are undoubtedly deep-reaching economic changes that are related to globalisation. There is indeed, as the current “moderate Islamic” government rightly underscores, a noticeable economic and financial growth with constant increases of the GDP of around 5% per year, though its direct benefits seem to be widely confined to the upper and parts of the middle classes. In addition, due to its conservative, domestic-centred and protection-oriented financial system, Turkey has mastered the global financial crisis of 2007-10 relatively well. As scholars like Adem Yekeler of Bilkent University have shown, the Turkish financial system came across a banking crisis in 2001 and was restructured and strongly regulated between 2001-2008, a.o. by strengthening the Turkish Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency (BRSA). This extended reform and regulation period contributed to the recent success of the Turkish banking system in the crisis period between 2007 and 2010. A steady economic and financial progress is undeniable, although the distribution of its outcome remains disputed. Simultaneously, there are ongoing political and ideological changes in today’s Turkey that in my view could result as systemically at least as important as the economic and financial ones. In short, the secular system based on notions inspired by Western enlightenment, modernization and rationalization established by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in the 1920s, which as we know has lain at the very basis of the modern republic of Turkey until the present day, is being increasingly challenged by a variety of religion-oriented or at least religio-phil parties, movements and groups.

2- Baghi: Could you explain this a little bit more in depth?

Benedikter: The global “return of religion” [2] has unfolded a powerful grip upon the political landscape at the Bosporus since the early 1990s. In the past decade, it took on concrete electoral forms not least with the three successive, much impressive victories of the “Justice and Development Party” of Abdullah Gül and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in November 2002, in July 2007 and in June 2011. This has tightened the political spectrum, giving the moderate Islamic party an almost monolithic leadership over the country, and making Erdogan the longest-serving Turkish leader after Atatürk. Particularly the last, probably most influential victory in June 2011 paves the way for the change of constitution envisioned by Gül and Erdogan who want to shift the country from the current parliamentary system to a presidential one. That could lead in the middle and the long run not only to a noticeable further concentration of power, but also to a general de-secularization of state and society. It is no chance that due to its widely unparalleled success in the past decade, Erdogan’s “moderate Islamism” is becoming a role model for Islamist parties throughout the Middle East, including for example Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. That has of course its pros and cons.

3- Baghi: Which ones?

Benedikter: On the one hand, the “Erdogan-Gül model” of Islamo-phil modernization processes is mitigating Islamic parties throughout the Middle East, particularly in the present situation of fundamental openness and deep-reaching transitions. What is interesting on the other hand is that in the framework of this development the general societal atmosphere in Turkey itself is changing. Foremost the educated, Westernized urban populations are perceiving the largely unchallenged supremacy of the governing party and the respective change as regress. This is because the secular state and its laical system are increasingly - and increasingly publicly - challenged in the name of “true democracy” by the religious right. This fact is of course a contradiction in itself.

4- Baghi: Why?

Benedikter: Among those who are currently crying out for a “better democracy” against the keepers of the secular state, i.e. the parliamentary parties, the parliament, the institutions and the military, are - certainly in a leading role - the various Islam-inspired movements. It is important to note that what their representatives usually mean with “better democracy” is not the improvement of the standards regarding pluralism, electoral representation, tutelage of ethnic minorities, tolerance and human rights. It is rather the request for the implementation of a presidential system inclined towards a kind of modern religious popularism: what the majority wants should be carried out. Not by chance international voices like the Economist and the Financial Times have in the past months repeatedly criticized the Turkish government for its authocratic and populistic tendencies.

5- Baghi: What does that mean?

Benedikter: The overall development indicates a slow, but continuous shift from the mindset of secular enlightenment, rationalization and modernization towards the ascent of a moderate religious populism which is being justified by the impressive economic and technological progress. This justification is another one of the many contradictions inbuilt in the current development of Turkey.

6- Baghi: Are there other ideological influences usually poorly or not considered, when we look at this complex, but increasingly important relationship between Politics and Religion in Turkey?

Benedikter: As colleagues like for example M. Şükrü Hanioğlu of Princeton University, Vural Ülkü of Ankara and Mersin Universitesi or Cüneyt Kalpakoglu have convincingly pointed out, the historical interface between politics and religion in Turkey has seldom be analyzed appropriately when it comes to secular religion and to the generally small, but influential non-confessional, but still “essentialist” worldview groups and movements which have tried to combine modern secularism with a kind of progressive and individualistic, experiential “spiritual realism”. These groups adhere to a “third way” that can be located precisely at the interface between the militant creation of secular institutions and of a laical state on the one hand, and the search for a kind of “spiritual realism”, often also branded as “rational spirituality” appropriate to modernity, on the other hand.

7- Baghi: For example?

Benedikter: Among these groups is for example the - highly differentiated - field of Turkish freemasonry. Turkish freemasonry, or to put it in maybe more precise terms: Turkish freemasons have played an important role in shaping the modern history of Turkey in the past two centuries, including the establishment of a secular republic as such. These forces were present probably less as a “movement” in the strict sense, but more as single individuals connected by some basic convictions and aspirations - individuals who were distributed within the different movements of their times: in basically most of them, not only in the emancipative, reformist, liberal and progressive ones. What connected them was their “intermediate” ideology between political progress and religious conservativism: their attempts of reconciling progressive politics with a rational essentialism. Cüneyt Kalpakoglu and I have just recently published a brief historical overview about this still widely under-researched topic. [3] We hope this article can serve as a concise introduction into the issue in order to foster debate on it exactly in a moment when Turkey seems to be shifting in other directions.

8- Baghi: Does that mean that these “third way”[4] groups that in a certain sense were balancing between militant secularism and religious confessionalism have been trying to build bridges between politics and religion on a moderate, progressive and liberal scale, thus shaping important elements of the history of modernity in Turkey?

Benedikter: In principle yes, even though as always the “reality process” - as our grand doyen Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel called it as you know - is never as clear and well confined as that. In socio-political processes, you are never able to just and only be the “good guy”. Every reality process in the modern era mixes some basic positive aspirations with their opposite almost always, almost necessarily as it seems. And the latter come into play when ideals hit practical politics and the social sphere. In addition, if you are in politics for a certain period of time (as I was between 1995 and 2003), some things unavoidably go wrong, encounter unforeseen events or even turn into their opposite. The outcome is always a combination between your aspirations and the happenings that are out there. But in principle, what you describe was at least the attempt. It was the idealistic aspiration of parts of the progressive movements from the 19^th century onwards, including for instance some members of the so-called “Young Turks” and their revolution in 1908. Certain members of the “Young Turks” certainly had in mind the integration of modernity, secularism and a kind of public idealism in the form of a religion of visibly progressive traits. And some of them were undoubtedly closely tied to freemasonry and the respective ideals of freedom, equality and brotherhood, which as we know were at the origins and have remained at the center of the main Western democratization processes.

9- Baghi: Who exactly were the “Young Turks”? Were they reformists? Or were they on the contrary the ones who alienated Turkey from its glorious past, as some conservative scholars assert?

Benedikter: They were certainly reformists in their minds, and in their aspirations. As I said, the reality process can turn things upside down sometimes, and in a certain sense and to a certain extent it did so also with the goals and hopes of the Young Turks. But in principle, the Young Turks were reformers and innovators in a historical moment of transition. Consider that they were in large parts composed of university students, intellectuals and artists, scientists, bureaucrats and administrators, i.e. the educated elites. These elites sensed already before WWI that the epoch of the great trans-cultural empires in Central and South-eastern Europe and in the Middle East was coming to an end, including the Ottoman Empire, and that the era of the modern nation states had begun. Accordingly, they aimed towards the creation of a nation-state including a constitutional system, a liberal economic order and a secular, nationally unified public culture, including one national language. On the other hand, we would certainly have to debate if they reached their goals, and where yes, to which extent, and in which fields exactly. Let us never forget the role of the Young Turks in the genocide of Armenians and Kurds during WWI. Like other movements of their time, the nationalistic fervour drove important parts of the Young Turks into ethnic cleansing and (until then widely unparalleled) crimes against humanity – an enormous, inexpressible contradiction against their own original ideals and goals.

10- Baghi: What were the dominant groups inside the Young Turks? What was their inner organizational structure?

Benedikter: As with many movements in the history of modernity, their inner organization was complex and contradictory, in many ways ambivalent, being disputed by various currents and sub-tendencies. Formally speaking, there was a continuous competition between at least two structural pillars: the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) and the Ottoman Freedom Society (OFS). Regarding the ideology, there were strong disputes between the secularist and materialistic forces, the economy-centered liberals and the “third way” tendencies mentioned above. We can probably say that these disputes have never ended; the Young Turks themselves never reached the structural and ideological unity they propagated for the modern nation-state which they envisioned for the future of their country.

11- Baghi: Before the emergence of the Young Turks and before 1908, the Turkish reform process began. This process continued in a way that the education system, the military, the institutions, etc. were in part reconstructed. Within this period, Europe and more generally speaking the West apparently were the main role models for the Young Turks to follow in reforming and reconstructing the socio-political system. The two-fold question resulting from this is: A) Did the reform efforts occur under the pressure of Western powers? Or (B) were they carried out mainly due to the necessities perceived by the convictions of the reformists themselves? In other words: Where did the main motivation of the reform movement come from: was it foreign or domestic?

Benedikter: Both, differing noticeably inside the Young Turks umbrella movement according to the origins and ideological inclinations of the various appertaining groups we mentioned. The influence of the West was particularly strong in the “third way” currents and in the economic liberals. Nevertheless, I don’t think it is possible to say that the reforms were undertaken “under Western pressure”. On the other hand, the Western influence was certainly less present in the radically nationalist groups which were much more interested in establishing a strong, modernized replacement of the Ottoman Empire, a.o. by “cleaning up” its multi-cultural and pluri-ethnic heritage. To put it in very abridged terms, they wanted to create a unified state able to ascent to a new epoch of splendour and influence. Both these tendencies battled each other inside the Young Turks. You have to consider this to understand their inbuilt ambivalences. As it was foreseeable, in times of war, during WWI, the nationalist currents gained supremacy, and this resulted in a kind of humane catastrophe for the movement as a whole, at least seen from the historical retrospective. The roots for the genocides were laid much earlier though, when parts of the Young Turks started to base their ideas of a unified modern nation on certain European notions of race which circulated among parts of the international elites at the end of the 19^th century.

12- Baghi: There is a belief among some scholars that in the final phases of the Ottoman Empire, Theodor Herzl met with the Ottoman emperor, Sultan Abdul Hamid II, to get the permission to create a land for the Jewish people. But the Sultan seemingly rejected. Some people reached the conclusion that the Zionist movement tried to take revenge by creating the “Young Turks” movement through its representatives in the Ottoman Empire. They tried to make the empire collapse from within. Is that right?

Benedikter: This is a theory that I am not aware of. I believe that until it is proven by sound historical and socio-political research, it has to be considered as unreliable, and that basically means it has to be considered as wrong. As far as I can see, there is no evidence to backup such claims. As scholars like Hasan Kayali of UCSD have shown by historical in-depth studies, you have so many negative speculations on issues regarding the birth of Israel by misusing the history of Turkey and the Middle East, and by arbitrarily creating connections where there are none. I would completely reject any speculation. I recommend to solely rely upon the facts, and I can see no facts backing these kinds of theories you mentioned.

13- Baghi: Atatürk’s political and ideological heritage has been deeply embedded in the everyday atmosphere of Turkey until today. Until a decade ago, opposition against this heritage faced disadvantage and punishment. I would like to know how the Islamists in Turkey could live in harmony with the heritage of Atatürk?

Benedikter: You probably have to ask them directly to get a well-founded answer. In my view, there are many moderate Islamists in Turkey who recognize the need to keep the features of the modern laical state in effect, even if some of them long for more freedom to manifest their believes in public. My hope is that these moderate currents will prevail within the ongoing religious renaissance in Turkey. And I believe that coexistence is possible, although it will require compromise, and tolerance on all sides involved. My hope is that common sense will prevail. And that in the end, the secular republican system will be defended by the majority of the population, not only by the educated elites. Not least, because this will be a crucial aspect co-decisive for Turkey’s ambitions to modernize, and to join the European Union.

14- Baghi: In recent statements, you describe Turkey as being in the midst of a deep-reaching process of transition; and you describe as the most important issue for its future to activate and empower its “youth” in order to counter-balance the growing influence of traditional religion on the public discourse.[5] Is that a kind of indirect reminiscence towards the “Young Turks” movement?

Benedikter: No, not at all. The “Young Turks” movement belonged to a different era, and it unfolded in completely different historical and socio-political contexts. I wouldn’t compare today’s situation with that of 1908. That said, I believe that it will be a mix of secular and materialistic, economy-driven liberal and “third way” elements together with “non-affiliated” students, intellectuals, artists and members of the civil society (most of them still concentrated in the urban areas) that will be the advocates of the laical republic on the Bosporus in the coming years.

15- Baghi: But again: Could the “Young Turks” in this situation serve as an example for contemporary, progressive reformist movements throughout the region? And if yes: to which extent, and in which fields exactly?

Benedikter: As always with reformist, progress oriented movements of the past, certain aspects may serve as indication, others not. You can’t, and you shouldn’t ever try to repeat history. Every political movement, be it as idealistic, reformist or progressive as it can be, is necessarily ambivalent. So I would prefer to ask your legitimate question slightly differently: Could the republican order of today’s Turkey serve as an example for the surrounding modernizing societies? In my view, the question of the progressive elements of the Turkish civil society serving as an example of a participatory society for its neighbours is as interesting and inspiring as it is disputable.[6] It is interesting and inspiring, because I believe such an example of a “religion-inspired republic” or even “Islamic democracy” is maybe one of the most needed models in our post-9/11-world. It is particularly needed for the transformation towards more liberal societies that is happening throughout the Middle East. But it is also disputable, since Turkey itself is in the midst of a transition of unclear features. I nevertheless am optimistic that the country will exert a positive influence upon the region, hopefully by demonstrating that a moderate religious political influence and a secular, pluralistic state are not completely incompatible.

16- Your outlook on the probable relationship between Politics, Religion and any kind of “intermediate” Ideologies in Turkey to expect for the years ahead?

Benedikter: In my view, the “intermediate” ideologies we talked of may get a unique chance in the coming years. They will get the opportunity to prove their value as an effective, concrete and down-to-earth interface between religion and politics in the 21^st century. “Islamic democracy”, “rational spirituality” and a pluralistic society are in principle no opposites. Since we witness the global ascent of “contextual politics”, i.e. of religion, culture, mass psychology, convictions and ideas to become always more influential political factors, those able to build rational and tolerant bridges between the elements will gain in influence. We shouldn’t forget that as long as the moderate religious parties in Turkey are democratically elected, they are legitimated by the people. In turn, these parties shouldn’t forget that they were able to ascent to governmental responsibility by becoming the main beneficiaries of a pluralistic, republican and participatory system dependent on the will of the people.

THE AUTHORS

Abuzar M. H. Baghi, PhD, is Journalist and Editor-in-chief of the International section of Mehrnameh. Journal of the Iranian Civil Society, published as an independent review for the Iranian Civil Society since 2002 in Teheran, Iran. He graduated in political science at Azad University in Tehran in 1995, and has since then been arrested various times by the Iranian authorities because of his efforts to create a non-Western, independent democratic discourse in Iran. He translated several books and many long theoretical articles from English into Persian in the area of human rights for the Islamic Human Rights Commission, a.o. by Jimmy Carter, Desmond Tutu, etc. He is the brother of Emadeddin Baghi, a leading journalist and human rights activist in Iran who has been behind bars for several years. Contact: abuzarbaghi@gmail.com.

Roland Benedikter, Prof. DDDr., is European Foundation Professor of Interdisciplinary Sociology with focus on Contextual Political Analysis and Global Change, in residence at the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies at the University of California in Santa Barbara, and Research Affiliate / Visiting Scholar at the Europe Center, Stanford University. 2000-2002 Visiting Professor at Mersin Universitesi, Turkey. Authorized websites: http://europe.stanford.edu/people/rolandbenedikter/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_Benedikter. Contact: rben@stanford.edu or r.benedikter@orfaleacenter.ucsb.edu.

Published in a translation into Persian in: Mehrnameh. Journal of the Iranian Civil Society. Special Issue: Turkey. Teheran, August 2011.

 

In the May-June edition of The American Interest, Francis Fukuyama traces the contemporary history of U.S. development policy and its failure to incorporate Huntingtonian-style theory, which emphasizes the interconnectedness of economy, politics, and society. Using Egypt as an example, Fukuyama calls for policymakers to break down their silos to more holistically examine and support democratic transitions.

While academic political science has not had much to tell policymakers of late, there is one book that stands out as being singularly relevant to the events currently unfolding in Tunisia, Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries: Samuel Huntington’s Political Order in Changing Societies, first published over forty years ago.¹ Huntington was one of the last social scientists to try to understand the linkages between political, economic and social change in a comprehensive way, and the weakness of subsequent efforts to maintain this kind of large perspective is one reason we have such difficulties, intellectually and in policy terms, in keeping up with our contemporary world.

Huntington, observing the high levels of political instability plaguing countries in the developing world during the 1950s and 1960s, noted that increasing levels of economic and social development often led to coups, revolutions and military takeovers rather than a smooth transition to modern liberal democracy. The reason, he pointed out, was the gap that appeared between the hopes and expectations of newly mobilized, educated and economically empowered people on the one hand, and the existing political system, which did not offer them an institutionalized mechanism for political participation, on the other. He might have added that such poorly institutionalized regimes are also often subject to crony capitalism, which fails to provide jobs and incomes to the newly educated middle class. Attacks against the existing political order, he noted, are seldom driven by the poorest of the poor; they instead tend to be led by rising middle classes who are frustrated by the lack of political and economic opportunity—a phenomenon noted by Alexis de Tocqueville in his masterful analysis of the origins of the French Revolution and raised again in the early 1960s by James Davies’s well known “J-curve” theory of revolution.²

Something like this Huntingtonian process has unfolded in recent months in both Tunisia and Egypt. In both cases, anti-government protests were led not by the urban poor or by an Islamist underground, but by relatively well-educated middle-class young people used to communicating with each other via Facebook and Twitter. It is no accident that Wael Ghonim, Google’s regional head of marketing, emerged as a symbol and leader of the new Egypt. The protesters’ grievances centered around the fact that the authoritarian regimes of Ben Ali and Mubarak offered them no meaningful pathway to political participation, as well as failing to provide jobs befitting their social status. The protests were then joined by other groups in both societies—trade unionists, Islamists, peasants and virtually everyone else unhappy with the old regimes—but the driving force remained the more modern segments of Tunisian and Egyptian society.

Societies lacking institutions that could accommodate new social actors produced a condition Huntington labeled praetorianism, in which political participation took the form of strikes, demonstrations, protests and violence. The military often seized power in such circumstances because it was the only organized actor in society capable of running a government. The Egyptian Republic’s first autocrat, Gamal Abdel Nasser, came to power in precisely this manner back in July 1952, when his Free Officers movement represented the rising Egyptian middle class. The tragedy of modern Egypt is that there has been scarcely any meaningful political development in the more than half-century since then—meaning, in Huntington’s terms, the rise of modern institutions that could peacefully channel citizen participation.

Socioeconomic development, meanwhile, has proceeded apace: Between 1990–2010 Tunisia’s Human Development Index (a composite measure of health, education and income compiled by the UN) rose 30 percent, while Egypt’s rose 28 percent. Both countries produced tens of thousands of college graduates with no discernable future and a lopsided income distribution in which a disproportionate share of the gains from growth went to a small group of politically connected insiders. Huntington’s analysis of Egypt in the 1950s and 1960s thus remains eerily relevant today.

In Political Order Huntington was also making a broader point about the process of development itself. The significance of his book needs to be seen against the backdrop of post-World War II modernization theory, which in turn drew on classic 19th-century European social theory articulated by academics like Edward Shils, Talcott Parsons and Walt W. Rostow. American modernization theory argued that development was a single, seamless process. Economic development, changing social relationships like the breakdown of extended kinship groups and the growth of individualism, higher and more inclusive levels of education, normative shifts toward values like “achievement” and rationality, secularization and the growth of democratic political institutions, were all seen as an interdependent whole.

By pointing out that the good things of modernity did not necessarily go together, Huntington played a key role in killing off modernization theory. Political development was a separate process from socioeconomic development, he argued, and needed to be understood in its own terms. The conclusion that flowed from this point of view seemed at the time counterintuitive to the point of stunning: Without political development, the other aspects of modernization could lead to bad results—to tyranny, civil war and mass violence.

There were other reasons why Western modernization theory fell into disrepute by the 1970s: It came to be regarded as too Eurocentric—indeed, as too Americentric insofar as it seemed to posit American society as the pinnacle of modernization. It failed to recognize the possibility that countries like Japan and China might take roads to modernity that would look very different from the ones pioneered by Britain and the United States. But even if one agreed that the end point of development should be some form of industrialized liberal democracy, Huntington made it clear that arriving at the desired destination was far more elusive and complicated than modernization theorists believed.

The central piece of policy advice that emerged out of Huntington’s work was the concept of the “authoritarian transition.” If political systems opened up to democratic contestation too early, before the development of political parties, labor unions, professional associations and other organizations that could structure participation, the result could be chaotic. Authoritarian regimes that could maintain order and promote economic growth, Huntington argued, might oversee a more gradual institutionalization of society, and make a transition to democracy only when broad participation could be peacefully accommodated. This form of sequencing, in which economic development was promoted before a democratic opening, was the path followed by Asian countries like South Korea and Taiwan, which made democratic transitions in the late 1980s only after they had succeeded in turning themselves into industrialized powerhouses. It was also the development strategy recommended by Huntington’s former student Fareed Zakaria, as well as by the leaders of many authoritarian governments, who liked the idea of economic growth better than the idea of democratic participation.³ We will return to the question of how well that strategy worked in the Middle East later.

Development in Silos 

As interesting and important as Huntington’s work was, it lay outside of mainstream thinking about development, which from the start was a highly Balkanized academic field that was dominated by economists. Few scholars have sought to understand development as an inter-connected process with political, economic and social parts. Few scholars have sought to understand development as an inter-connected process with political, economic and social parts.Development economists looked primarily at economic factors like capital, labor and technology as sources of economic growth, and thought neither about the consequences of growth for politics nor the relationship of political institutions to growth. The Harrod-Domar growth model that was dominant in the 1950s suggested that less-developed countries were poor primarily because they lacked capital, which then led development agencies like the World Bank to try to kick start growth with generous infusions of capital for physical infrastructure. It was only when steel plants and shoe factories in sub-Saharan Africa went idle due to corruption or lack of organizational capacity that they were forced to go back to the drawing board.

The political scientists, for their part, scaled back their ambitions from large Huntingtonian-style theory and focused primarily on political phenomena. Beginning in the 1980s, there was increasing interest in the problem of transitions into and out of democracy; with democratic transitions in Spain, Portugal and nearly all of Latin America, this became a particularly pressing issue. There was some revival of interest in the democracy-development linkage, but it never led to a clear consensus on the causal links connecting the two phenomena.

The academic interest in transitions corresponded to the burgeoning of democracy promotion as a distinct field of international practice, both on the part of the United States and of other democracies around the world. The idea was planted during the 1970s, when the institutes linked with the German political parties played a key role in beating back an attempted Communist takeover in Portugal and facilitating that country’s transition to democracy. The 1980s saw the establishment of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a taxpayer-funded but quasi-independent organization devoted to support of pro-democracy groups around the world. One of the NED’s early successes was its funding of the Solidarity trade union in Poland before the collapse of communism. The 1990s saw the growth of a host of international organizations capable of monitoring elections and the funding of the Democracy and Governance branch of the U.S. Agency for International Development to the tune of almost $1.5 billion annually.

By the late 1990s, there was some degree of convergence in the agendas of economists and political scientists. By that point Douglass North and the school of “New Institutional Economics” he founded made economists aware of the importance of political institutions—particularly property rights—for economic growth. Economists increasingly sought to fold political variables like legal systems and checks on executive power into their models. Political science had itself been colonized at this point by economic methodology, and it was natural for such rational-choice political scientists to start looking at the economic impact of political institutions.

The return to a more interdisciplinary approach to development was marked as well by the tenure of James Wolfenson as President of the World Bank from 1995 to 2005.⁴ Wolfenson early on gave a speech on the “cancer of corruption” and signaled to the institution that, henceforth, political issues like corruption and good governance would be taken seriously. The publication of the 1997 World Development Report, The State in a Changing World, marked an intellectual break with the Washington Consensus focus on economic policy and state downsizing, and the Bank created a new branch devoted to reform of developing country public sectors. These changes constituted an open admission that politics was a critical component of development, and that the state was not simply an obstacle to growth but often a necessary underpinning for it. Increasingly, donor agencies have seen the promotion of democratic accountability as one tool in the fight against corruption.

This modest degree of convergence should not, however, obscure the continuing degree of compartmentalization that exists in the field of development. While paying lip service to the importance of institutions, most economists and field practitioners still see politics as at best an obstacle to the real work of development, which is improvement in incomes, health, education and the like, and not as an independent objective of development strategy. (Amartya Sen is an important exception to this generalization.) The democracy promotion agencies, for their part, spend relatively little time worrying about economic growth, social policy or public health, which in their view are goods often used by authoritarian regimes to buy off populations and prevent democratization.

The intellectual confusion surrounding development has led to severely Balkanized policies both in the United States and in the international community that often work at cross purposes from one another.The intellectual confusion surrounding development has led to severely Balkanized policies both in the United States and in the international community that often work at cross purposes from one another. For example, the authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes of Meles Zenawi in Ethiopia, Paul Kagame in Rwanda and Yoweri Museveni in Uganda have been aid darlings over the past decade because of their track records in promoting economic, health and social goals. At the same time, democracy promotion groups have been highly critical of them and have supported opposition groups and civil society organizations seeking accountability and limits on executive power. To be sure, aid agencies don’t object to greater government accountability on the part of these regimes, while the democracy promotion community wouldn’t stand in the way of progress on HIV/AIDS or malaria. Yet no one takes a larger view and asks, for example, whether existing aid programs are helping to keep the regime in power or, conversely, are destabilizing it.

Egypt itself presents a good case of this particular form of policy incoherence. Despite the fact that Egypt ranks as one of the top American aid recipients, it is hard to say that Washington was pursuing development goals of any sort there. The United States was primarily interested in stability. Despite brave speeches on democracy by both Condeleezza Rice and Barack Obama in Cairo, the United States actually pulled its punches in pushing serious democratic reform on Egypt, particularly after the Hamas electoral victory in Gaza in 2006. Nonetheless, U.S. economic aid programs were still pushing education and economic policy reform programs in the country. Had American aid administrators taken the Huntingtonian view that their assistance was covertly designed to promote an expectations gap and delegitimate Hosni Mubarak, this might have been a clever strategy. But no such cleverness existed. Instead, it was simply an example of compartmentalized aid programs doing their thing in ignorance of the interdependent effects of politics and economics.

What Is to Be Done?

Ideas precede action. Before we can hope to generate a coherent set of policies for Egypt, or anywhere else for that matter, we need a better understanding of development—that is, how changes in economy, politics and society over time constitute a set of discrete yet interlinked processes. Whatever the shortcomings of classic modernization theory, it at least began from the insight that the phenomenon under study required development of a master social science that transcended existing disciplinary boundaries. This objective is as far away as ever in academia, where the traditional disciplines keep a chokehold on how younger academics think and do research. Today, the single most popular form of development dissertation in both economics and political science is a randomized micro-experiment in which the graduate student goes out into the field and studies, at a local level, the impact of some intervention like the introduction of co-payments for malaria mosquito netting or changes in electoral rules on ethnic voting. These studies can be technically well designed, and they certainly have their place in evaluating projects at a micro level. But they do not aggregate upwards into anything that can tell us when a regime crosses the line into illegitimacy, or how economic growth is changing the class structure of a society. We are not, in other words, producing new Samuel Huntingtons, with the latter’s simultaneous breadth and depth of knowledge.

On a policy level, we need far more mutual understanding between those who promote socioeconomic development and those who work on democracy promotion and governance.On a policy level, we need far more mutual understanding between those who promote socioeconomic development and those who work on democracy promotion and governance. Traditional development agencies like USAID already think politically to the extent that their aid projects are designed to support U.S. foreign policy. But they, like their counterparts in multilateral organizations like the World Bank, are not trained to do political economy analysis; they do not seek an understanding of the political context within which aid is used and abused, and what is not sought is very rarely found. We call for the liberalization of ports in Haiti, for example, without trying to understand which particular politicians are benefiting from existing arrangements that keep them closed. For their part, democracy promoters focus on democratic transitions, providing help to opposition parties and civil society organizations in authoritarian countries. But once a transition occurs, as it did after the Orange and Rose revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia, they have relatively little to offer new democratic governments in terms of policy agendas, anti-corruption strategies or help in improving the delivery of services that citizens want.

Beyond these relatively minor adjustments, a more robust theory of social change might tell us that, in certain circumstances, the best way to destabilize an authoritarian society would be not the funding of civil society groups seeking short-term regime change, but rather the promotion of rapid economic growth and the expansion of educational access.⁵ Conversely, there are many societies we know will simply waste development assistance dollars because they are ruled by unaccountable authoritarian regimes. In such circumstances, it might be a more efficient use of aid resources to cut development aid entirely and to work only for political change. This is, in effect, what has happened to Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe, but the country had to sink very far before anyone considered pulling the aid plug.

Huntington got a number of things wrong. The authoritarian transition was not a universally applicable formula for development. It worked reasonably well in East Asia, where there were a number of figures like Lee Kwan Yew, Park Chung-hee or the Chinese Communist Party leadership, who used their autocratic powers to promote rapid development and social change. Arab authoritarians were cut from a different cloth, content to preside over economically stagnant societies. The result was not a coherent development strategy but a wasted generation.

The aspiration of social science to replicate the predictability and formality of certain natural sciences is, in the end, a hopeless endeavor. Human societies, as Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper and others understood, are far too complex to model at an aggregate level. Contemporary macroeconomics, despite dealing with social phenomena that are inherently quantified, is today in crisis due to its utter failure to anticipate the recent financial crisis.

The part of social change that is the hardest to understand in a positivistic way is the moral dimension—that is, the ideas that people carry around in their heads regarding legitimacy, justice, dignity and community. The current Arab uprising was triggered by the self-immolation of an overeducated 26-year-old Tunisian vegetable seller whose cart was repeatedly confiscated by the authorities. After Mohamed Bouazizi was slapped by a policewoman when he tried to complain, he reached the end of his tether. Bouazizi’s public suicide turned into a social movement because contemporary communications technologies facilitated the growth of a new social space where middle-class people could recognize and organize around their common interests. We will probably never understand, even in retrospect, why the dry tinder of outraged dignity suddenly ignited in this fashion in December 2010 as opposed to 2009, or ten years before that, and why the conflagration spread to some Arab countries but not to others. But we can certainly do a better job in putting together the few pieces we do understand, in a way that would be useful to policymakers coping with the reality of social change.

¹Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies: With a New Forward by Francis Fukuyama (Yale University Press, 2006).

²Davies, “Towards a Theory of Revolution”, American Sociological Review, Vol. 27 (1962).

³Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (W. W. Norton, 2003); see also Zakaria, “A Conversation with Lee Kuan Yew”, Foreign Affairs (March/April 1994).

⁴For a description of the Wolfenson presidency, see Sebastian Mallaby, The World’s Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations (Penguin Press, 2004).

⁵See Harold James’s retroview, entitled “Growing Pains”, of a classic December 1963 essay by Mancur Olson (“Rapid Growth as a Destabilizing Force”) in The American Interest (September/October 2006).