An article from Foreign Policy sheds some interesting light on the potential for democracy in the Middle East.

“The peoples of the Islamic nations want and deserve the same freedoms and opportunities as people in every nation,” President Bush declared in a commencement speech at West Point last summer. He’s right. Any claim of a “clash of civilizations” based on fundamentally different political goals held by Western and Muslim societies represents an oversimplification of the evidence. Support for the goal of democracy is surprisingly widespread among Muslim publics, even among those living in authoritarian societies. Yet . . . [a]lthough nearly the entire world pays lip service to democracy, there is still no global consensus on the self-expression values—such as social tolerance, gender equality, freedom of speech, and interpersonal trust—that are crucial to democracy. Today, these divergent values constitute the real clash between Muslim societies and the West.

There are parts of this article that I don't agree with completely. In particular, "self-expression values" clearly support democracy, but those same values may, in turn, be nutured by the processes of democratic government. I'm certainly no political scientist, but it makes sense to me that allowing people to vote, for example, could generate more demand for accurate information, and thus more demand for free expression and a free press. The authors don't really address that point. Nevertheless, the author's major thesis, outlined in the quote above, seems well supported and gave me much better insight into the problems we face as we turn from winning the war to winning the peace.
- posted by Tom Sawyer @ 1:23 PM