"Not a single one of the 23 countries that derive most of their export earnings from oil and gas is a democracy today," wrote CDDRL Director Larry Diamond in an an article for the Journal of Democracy, Why Are There No Arab Democracies? In these countries, the state is "large, centralized, and repressive," he notes. Diamond comments in Newsweek about Iraq's prospects for escaping the oil curse.

On February 17, 2010 the Program on Good Governance and Political Reform in the Arab World at CDDRL held its inaugural seminar with Prof. Philippe C. Schmitter, Professor Emeritus, European University Institute, Florence and Visiting Scholar at CDDRL and Dr. Sean Yom, Hewlett Postdoctoral Fellow at CDDRL.

The seminar was titled Exploring the missing link between liberalization and democratization in the Middle East. The seminar aimed to start a public discussion on one of the routine assumptions of students of democratization, which is that there is a close, causal relationship between liberalization and democratization. The former is said to drive those who concede it toward convoking credible elections and, eventually, tolerating ruler accountability to citizens. The link between those processes of regime transformation is alleged to be the mobilization of civil society. It has been argued that the weakness or absence of this linkage is one (among many) of the conditions which make the polities of the Middle East and North Africa resistant to democratization.

In his response to this argument, Philippe Schmitter began by saying that in the work that he started on Southern Europe and Latin America, there was a distinction between democratization and liberalization. Once an autocratic regime enters a process of liberalization, it faces unexpected consequences. Thus, the most vulnerable time for a regime is when it starts to reform itself. Some of the consequences of this process are the resurrection of civil society, more freedom of expression and movement, the release of political prisoners and the freer operation of political parties. Such consequences are what liberalization means.

Schmitter argued that all autocratic regimes have tried this process, and that this process is normally triggered by divisions within the regimes or succession struggles, where regimes feel the need to open up. The kind of liberalization that takes place depends on the type of autocracy present. But the objective of liberalization, Schmitter said, is to coopt and produce a large social basis for autocracy, for example, through cultivating political parties that agree not to be too oppositional.

Schmitter added that many autocracies are under pressure from external regimes. Most of the countries in the Middle East have some kind of agreement with the EU for example, which carries clauses on issues like the rule of law. Another factor is that liberalization is selective in its inclusion, focusing on the urban middle class. It is thus "voluntary", conceded from above by the regime, and not based on any form of mobilization from below. In other words, Schmitter argued that regimes choose to liberalize and are not forced to do so. Thus, regimes are limited in their scope of liberalization (elections for example are not always genuinely free). He then presented a scale of measures of autocracy liberalization, saying that the most difficult measure in the Middle East is that of releasing political prisoners, while the easiest measure is concessions on the level of human rights.

He presented the hypothesis is that almost all efforts at democratization are preceded by liberalization. This is triggered by the resurrection of civil society, which itself is triggered when the costs of repression increase quite significantly and a regime is faced with the question of is it "better" to repress or tolerate? Often, in this case, regimes choose to tolerate the self organization of groups that are not tolerated otherwise. But mobilization of such groups, like lawyer groups, may lead to mobilization on the street. Schmitter said that although Arab regimes liberalize, this kind of process does not normally happen in the Middle East. Liberalization occurs then declines without the regimes suffering many consequences. He finished by stating that there seems to be something in the Middle East region that encourages liberalization, but that leads this liberalization to decline.

Sean Yom responded by saying that for the last 10 years, scholars of democratization literature have made ethnocentric assumptions about this issue. He argued that it is almost assumed that democracy is easy, but what actually happens at the end stage of liberalization is complex. He said that if we take a historical view of the Middle East, the literature says that regimes are durable. But countries like Iran, Iraq, Libya and Syria have all witnessed regime termination. The dictators today in the Arab world are merely the winners of the state-building process.  So why is liberalization not followed by democratization for these survivors?

Yom argued that distinctive regimes have distinctive ways through which they liberalize but not democratize. He related the lack of democratization following on from liberalization to two key questions: Why are there no elite splits in the public arena during times of crisis? And why has the middle class not staked any sacrifice to demand more of a democratic and revolutionary change?

He presented two reasons: the first is that many current regimes have well institutionalized methods of dealing with elite splits before they hit the public domain. Hegemonic ruling provide one such mechanism. The National Democratic Party in Egypt, the Neo-Destur of Tunisia, and the Baath parties in Syria and Iraq for example were able to coopt/isolate softline elites well before their conflict became rebellion.  Yom argued that in monarchical autocracies, incumbents have just as well-institutionalized mechanisms of co-optation that revolve around the palace; such networks were developed shortly after colonial rule, and were designed to effectively enshrine a certain distribution of power.

The second reason, Yom argued, lays in the nature of social opposition.  No dictator liberalizes because they want to give up power.  That is, they do not liberalize to achieve democracy; they liberalize in order to survive in the face of burgeoning social unrest.  The problem is that in the MENA context, the so-called "middle-sector"-labor, professionals, intellectuals, and other urban forces-have not staked out sacrifice to their demands for greater freedom, when push comes to shove.  One reason is that they were incorporated into ruling coalitions early on in the state-building process, and that such early coalitional bargains that traded loyalty for prosperity have proven durable even during economic crises in the 1980s and 1990s.  For instance, large-scale employment in the public sector to certain groups is a common side-payment.  Countries like Jordan and Bahrain exploit population cleavages (the Palestinians and the Shiites, respectively, being the key factors), where the regimes operate an optimal mix of loyalty and oppression/coercion.  In these cases, leaders strategically choose to incorporate different constituents into different networks of patronage.

The presentations were followed by a question and answer sessions where additional factors were discussed and others elaborated on, such as the role of Islamists; authoritarian pacts with the West especially in the cases of "countries that are too important to be politically conditioned" as Schmitter put it, or in the case of illegal Western dealings with Middle East states which makes it difficult for the West to present them with reform conditions; the absence of independent middle classes; and the issue of political prisoners, who are the hardest to coopt by any given regime, and hence tend to be kept inside prisons.

In this op-ed, CISAC's Richard Rhodes argues that public health, a discipline that organizes science-based systems of surveillance and prevention, has been primarily responsible for controlling the effects of infectious disease. A similar campaign around public safety could help end the existential threat posed by nuclear weapons. Such a push would help create unity in common security and a fundamental transformation in relationships between nations, Rhodes argues.

Today, at the other end of the long trek down the glacier of the Cold War, the nuclear threat has seemingly calved off and fallen into the sea. In 2007, the Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Project found that 12 countries rated the growing gap between rich and poor as the greatest danger to the world. HIV/AIDS led the list (or tied) in 16 countries, religious and ethnic hatred in another 12. Pollution was identified as the greatest menace in 19 countries, while substantial majorities in 25 countries thought global warming was a "very serious" problem. Only nine countries considered the spread of nuclear weapons to be the greatest danger to the world.

The response was very different among nuclear and national security experts when Indiana Republican Sen. Richard Lugar surveyed PDF them in 2005. This group of 85 experts judged that the possibility of a WMD attack against a city or other target somewhere in the world is real and increasing over time. The median estimate of the risk of a nuclear attack somewhere in the world by 2010 was 10 percent. The risk of an attack by 2015 doubled to 20 percent median. There was strong, though not universal, agreement that a nuclear attack is more likely to be carried out by a terrorist organization than by a government. The group was split 45 to 55 percent on whether terrorists were more likely to obtain an intact working nuclear weapon or manufacture one after obtaining weapon-grade nuclear material.

"The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is not just a security problem," Lugar wrote in the report's introduction. "It is the economic dilemma and the moral challenge of the current age. On September 11, 2001, the world witnessed the destructive potential of international terrorism. But the September 11 attacks do not come close to approximating the destruction that would be unleashed by a nuclear weapon. Weapons of mass destruction have made it possible for a small nation, or even a sub-national group, to kill as many innocent people in a day as national armies killed in months of fighting during World War II.

"The bottom line is this," Lugar concluded: "For the foreseeable future, the United States and other nations will face an existential threat from the intersection of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction."

It's paradoxical that a diminished threat of a superpower nuclear exchange should somehow have resulted in a world where the danger of at least a single nuclear explosion in a major city has increased (and that city is as likely, or likelier, to be Moscow as it is to be Washington or New York). We tend to think that a terrorist nuclear attack would lead us to drive for the elimination of nuclear weapons. I think the opposite case is at least equally likely: A terrorist nuclear attack would almost certainly be followed by a retaliatory nuclear strike on whatever country we believed to be sheltering the perpetrators. That response would surely initiate a new round of nuclear armament and rearmament in the name of deterrence, however illogical. Think of how much 9/11 frightened us; think of how desperate our leaders were to prevent any further such attacks; think of the fact that we invaded and occupied a country, Iraq, that had nothing to do with those attacks in the name of sending a message.

Richard Butler, the former chairman of the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons and the last chairman of UNSCOM, often makes the point that the problem with nuclear weapons is nuclear weapons. People don't always understand what he means. He means that it is the weapons themselves that are the problem, not the values of the entities that control them. U.S. nuclear weapons are just as potentially dangerous to the world as, say, North Korean nuclear weapons. More, I would say, since we have greater numbers of them and have not hesitated to brandish them--even to use them--when we thought it in our interest to do so.

That the problem with nuclear weapons is nuclear weapons may seem counterintuitive, but two centuries ago governments began to think that way about disease, with untold benefits to humanity as a result. Epidemic disease had been conceived in normative terms, as an act of God for which states bore no responsibility. The change that came when disease began to be conceived as a phenomenon of nature without a metaphysical superstructure, a public health problem, a problem for government and a measure of government's success, was revolutionary. More lives were saved, and spared, with public health measures in the twentieth century in the United States alone than were lost throughout the world in all of the twentieth century's wars.

As my Scottish friend Gil Elliot wrote in his seminal book Twentieth Century Book of the Dead, "[These lives] are not saved by accident or goodwill. Human life is daily deliberately protected from nature by accepted practices of hygiene and medical care, by the control of living conditions and the guidance of human relationships. Mortality statistics are constantly examined to see if the causes of death reveal any areas needing special attention. Because of the success of these practices, the area of public death has, in advanced societies, been taken over by man-made death--once an insignificant or 'merged' part of the spectrum, now almost the whole.

"When politicians, in tones of grave wonder, characterize our age as one of vast effort in saving human life, and enormous vigor in destroying it, they seem to feel they are indicating some mysterious paradox of the human spirit. There is no paradox and no mystery. The difference is that one area of public death has been tackled and secured by the forces of reason; the other has not. The pioneers of public health did not change nature, or men, but adjusted the active relationship of men to certain aspects of nature so that the relationship became one of watchful and healthy respect. In doing so they had to contend with and struggle against the suspicious opposition of those who believed that to interfere with nature was sinful, and even that disease and plague were the result of something sinful in the nature of man himself."

Elliot goes on to compare what he calls "public death," meaning biological death, death from disease, to man-made death: "[I do not wish] to claim mystical authority for the comparison I have made between two kinds of public death--that which results from disease and that which we call man-made. The irreducible virtue of the analogy is that the problem of man-made death, like that of disease, can be tackled only by reason. It contains the same elements as the problem of disease--the need to locate the sources of the pest, to devise preventive measures, and to maintain systematic vigilance in their execution. But it is a much wider problem, and for obvious reasons cannot be dealt with by scientific methods to the same extent as can disease."

To advance the cause of public health it was necessary to depoliticize disease, to remove it from the realm of value and install it in the realm of fact. Today we have advanced to the point where international cooperation toward the prevention, control, and even elimination of disease is possible among nations that hardly cooperate with each other in any other way. No one any longer considers disease a political issue, except to the extent that its control measures a nation's quality of life, and only modern primitives consider it a judgment of God.

In 1999, for the first time in human history, infectious diseases no longer ranked first among causes of death worldwide. Public health, a discipline which organizes science-based systems of surveillance and prevention, was primarily responsible for that millennial change in human mortality. One-half of all the increases in life expectancy in recorded history occurred within the twentieth century. Most of the worldwide increase was accomplished in the first half of the century, and it was almost entirely the result of public health measures directed to primary prevention. Better nutrition, sewage treatment, water purification, the pasteurization of milk, and the immunization of children extended human life--not surgeons cutting or doctors dispensing pills.

Public health is medicine's greatest success story and a powerful model for a parallel discipline, which I propose to call public safety.

Where nuclear weapons--the largest-scale instruments of man-made death--are concerned, the elements of that discipline of public safety have already begun to assemble themselves: materials control and accounting, cooperative threat reduction, security guarantees, agreements and treaties, surveillance and inspection, sanctions, forceful disarming if all else fails.

Reducing and finally eliminating the world's increasingly vestigial nuclear arsenals may be delayed by extremists of the right or the left, as progress was stalled during the George W. Bush administration by rigid Manichaean ideologues who imagined that there might be good nuclear powers and evil nuclear powers and sought to disarm only those they considered evil. Nuclear weapons operate beyond good and evil. They destroy without discrimination or mercy: Whether one lives or dies in their operation is entirely a question of distance from ground zero. In Elliot's eloquent words, they create nations of the dead, and collectively have the capacity to create a world of the dead. But as Niels Bohr, the great Danish physicist and philosopher, was the first to realize, the complement of that utter destructiveness must then be unity in common security, just as it was with smallpox, a fundamental transformation in relationships between nations, nondiscrimination in unity not on the dark side but by the light of day.

Violence originates in vulnerability brutalized: It is vulnerability's corruption, but also its revenge. "Perhaps everything terrible," the poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote, "is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us." As we extend our commitment to common security, as we work to master man-made death, we will need to recognize that terrible helplessness and relieve it--in others, but also in ourselves.