Saturday, May 6, 2017
Re: Social Movements and Democratization
Unfortunately, the Middle East has not had a rich history of Democracy and is only now reaching its wave of Democratization. I think the reason why democracy has not held in the Middle East is because it was mainly a western theory. Today the Social Movements have had little effect on actual steps to making the Middle East Democratic, due to the fact that these authorities have held onto power for such a long time and have so much power in the country that it would be almost impossible to make a new government without the country being destroyed from Civil War and having changed only after the death of thousands of people for reform. In many countries of the MENA region, ruling royal families are in power, such as in Morocco, Jordan, the Sheikhs that rule the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. These royal families have so much power in the country it would be extremely hard to take them out of power. I do not think that Democratization could hold in these MENA countries mainly due to the strict governments, anti- Western views and the fact that they are not European and Democracy does not always work.
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I don't quite agree that being non European is the reason MENA countries cannot democratize. If anything, it is the West that essentially sponsors the coercive apparatuses that maintain authoritarian regimes in most states. The capacity of the coercive apparatus to suppress opposition is based on money and influence that is obtained from Western countries in exchange of maintaining stability in the area. In the cases of Libya and Egypt, the primary reason the West let or even forced the regimes to fall was not so much to encourage democracy but rather because they thought the regimes could not maintain stability in the region anymore either because they were too brutal, or too weak.
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