Towards Democracy (Implication)

Until this year, the Arab world boasted a long list of dicators. Muammar al-Qaddafi took charge of Libya in 1969; the Assad family has ruled Syria since 1970; Ali Abdullah Saleh became president of North Yemen (later united with South Yemen) in 1978; Hosni Mubarak took charge of Egypt in 1981; and Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali ascended to Tunisia's presidency in 1987, and the Alaouite dynasty in Morocco first coming to power in the seventeenth century. These regimes have even survived over a period of decades in which democratic waves rolled through East Asia, eastern Europe, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa. Even the Arab countries' neighbors in the Muslim Middle East (Iran and Turkey) experienced enormous political change in that period, with a revolution and three subsequent decades of political struggle in Iran and a quasi-Islamist party building a more open and democratic system in secular Turkey. But today, the trend seems to be changing. Is the world again experiencing a surge for democracy? Why is it so? Is democracy more favourable than authoritarian regimes such as totalitarianism and dictatorships?

Other information and sources for potential questions.

Moreover, the Democracy Index is an index compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit that measures the state of democracy in 167 countries. Tunisia, Mauritania, Egypt, and Niger were all upgraded from authoritarian regimes to hybrid regimes. The Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index is based on 60 indicators grouped in five different categories: electoral process and pluralism, civil liberties, functioning of government, political participation and political culture.

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

"Whether national elections are free and fair"; "The security of voters"; "The influence of foreign powers on government"; "The capability of the civil servants to implement policies". Full democraciesscores of 8 to 10. Flawed democraciesscores of 6 to 7.9. Hybrid regimesscores of 4 to 5.9. Authoritarian regimesscores of 0 to 3.9.

Authoritarianism and democracy are not fundamentally opposed to one another, it is thus perfectly possible for democracies to possess strong authoritarian elements, for both feature a form of submission to authority. An illiberal democracy (or procedural democracy) is distinguished from liberal democracy (or substantive democracy) in that illiberal democracies lack the more democratic features of liberal democracies, such as the rule of law, an independent judiciary, along with a further distinction that liberal democracies have rarely made war with one another. More recent research has extended the theory and finds that more democratic countries tend to have few Militarized Interstate Disputes causing less battle deaths with one another, and that democracies have few civil wars.[6][7]

Facts about democracies

Poor democracies tend to have better education, longer life expectancy, lower infant mortality, access to drinking water, and better health care than poor dictatorships. This is not due to higher levels of foreign assistance or spending a larger percentage of GDP on health and education. Instead, the available resources are more likely to be managed better.[8] Studies suggest that several health indicators (life expectancy and infant and maternal mortality) have a stronger and more significant association with democracy than they have with GDP per capita, size of the public sector, or income inequality.[9] A prominent economist, Amartya Sen, has theorized that no functioning country labeled as having a liberal democracy has ever suffered a large-scale famine.[10] This includes democracies that have not been very prosperous historically, like India, which had its last great famine in 1943 and many other large-scale famines before that in the late nineteenth century, all under British rule. (However, some others ascribe the Bengal famine of 1943 to the effects of World War II[citation needed]. The government of India had been becoming progressively more democratic for years. Provincial government had been entirely so since the Government of India Act of 1935.) Refugee crises almost always occur in the least democratic countries. Looking at the volume of refugee flows for the last twenty years, the first eighty-seven cases occurred in most authoritarian countries.[8] Research shows that the democratic nations have much less democide or murder by government. However it should be noted that those were also moderately developed nations before applying liberal democratic policies.[11] Similarly, they have less genocide and politicide.[12] Research by the World Bank suggests that political institutions are extremely important in determining the prevalence of corruption: parliamentary systems, political stability, and freedom of the press are all associated with lower corruption.[13] Freedom of information legislation is important for accountability and transparency. The Indian Right to Information Act

"has already engendered mass movements in the country that is bringing the lethargic, often corrupt bureaucracy to its knees and changing power equations completely."[14]

Of the eighty worst financial catastrophes during the last four decades, only five were in countries labeled as democracies. Similarly, those labeled as "poor democracies" are half as likely as countries labeled as non-democracies to experience a 10 percent decline in GDP per capita over the course of a single year.[8]

US implication
This skepticism, however, may no longer be warranted. On the morning of September 11, 2001, U.S. priorities in the Middle East changed. Suddenly, the Bush administration came to see democratization, which it had previously ranked below security and stability in its list of concerns for the Arab world, as the critical means by which to achieve these other goals. Indeed, the toppling of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon fundamentally shifted the underlying assumption of U.S. Middle East policy. Arab authoritarianism could no longer be viewed as a source of stability; instead, it was the primary threat to it. To "drain the swamp" that had incubated Islamist radicals such as Osama bin Laden, it became critical to promote political liberalization, even democratization, in the Middle East, and this goal became a central feature of U.S. national security policy. Even before this shift, Washington had already begun to try to promote reform in the Middle East--albeit quietly, and never with anything like Bush's rhetorical zeal or fixation on democracy. The United States had, in recent years, pursued three different approaches toward the Arab world: punishing its enemies with diplomatic isolation, sanctions, and invasion; bolstering civil society; and promoting economic development in friendly states. Assuming that these last two tactics would gently drive political liberalization, the United States funded good-governance programs in Egypt, promoted industrial zones in Jordan, and provided various forms of economic assistance to the Palestinian Authority and, more recently, Yemen...

Kleptocracy, alternatively cleptocracy or kleptarchy, is a form of political and government corruption where the government exists to increase the personal wealth and political power of its officials and the ruling class at the expense of the wider population, often without pretense of honest service. This type of government corruption is often achieved by the embezzlement of state funds. Embezzlement is the act of dishonestly appropriating or secreting[assets by one or more individuals to whom such assets have been entrusted. World revolution is the Marxist concept of overthrowing capitalism in all countries through the conscious revolutionary action of the organized working class. These revolutions would not necessarily occur simultaneously, but where local conditions allowed a revolutionary party to successfully replace bourgeois ownership and rule, and install a workers' state based on social ownership of the means of production.

Oligarchy (from Greek (oligarkha); from (olgos), meaning "a few", and (archo), meaning "to rule or to command")[1][2][3] is a form of power structure in which power effectively rests

with a small number of people. These people could be distinguished by royalty, wealth, family ties, education, corporate, or military control. Such states are often controlled by a few prominent families who pass their influence from one generation to the next.

Authoritarianism is a form of social organization characterized by submission to authority. It is usually opposed to individualism and libertarianism. In politics, an authoritarian government is one in which political authority is concentrated in a small group of politicians. Totalitarianism (or totalitarian rule) is a political system where the state recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible.[2] Totalitarian regimes stay in political power through an all-encompassing propaganda campaign, which is disseminated through the state-controlled mass media, a single party that is often marked by political repression, personality cultism, control over the economy, regulation and restriction of speech, mass surveillance, and widespread use of terror. Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful,[1][2] or alternatively as opposing authority and hierarchical organization in the conduct of human relations.[3][4][5][6][7][8] Proponents of anarchism, known as "anarchists", advocate stateless societies based on non-hierarchical[3][9][10] voluntary associations. Meritocracy, in the first, most administrative sense, is a system of government or other administration (such as business administration) wherein appointments and responsibilities are objectively assigned to individuals based upon their "merits", namely intelligence, credentials, and education,[1] determined through evaluations or examinations.

From Innovation to Revolution

During the heady days of protests in Cairo, one activist succinctly tweeted about why digital media was so important to the organization of political unrest. We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world, she said. The protesters openly acknowledge the role of digital media as a fundamental infrastructure for their work. Moammar Gadhafis former aides have even advised him to submit his resignation through Twitter. However, overemphasizing the role of information technology diminishes the personal risks that individual protesters took in heading out onto the streets to face tear gas and rubber bullets. How far has social media such as the social networks like facebook played a role in the Arab Revolution?

Why is social media so effective? (Sources for potential questions)

The great thing about the internet is it is a meritocracy and it's free. Newsweek called it Egypts Facebook Revolt

First, digital media are social networks. It matters not whether social mobilization occurs face to face over a lunch counter or through a short text message sent by mobile phones. It has become a false dichotomy to describe strong ties as being face to face communications and weak ties as being short text messages. The personal decision to face rubber bullets and tear gas is only ever taken when appeals for solidarity come through social networks. Images of friends and family being beaten by security services draw people into the streets. Increasingly, those appeals come digitally, as wall posts, tweets and pixilated YouTube videos hastily recorded by mobile phones. Second, the significant structural change in how political life is organized is not so much about new connections between the West and the Arab Street, but about connections between Arab Streets. The digital storytelling by average Tunisians is what spread across North Africa and the Middle East. Protesters in Tunisia and Egypt used social media to link up. Telling stories about their shared grievances and sense of desperation became much of the content flowing over these networks. Eventually, such content spilled over the social networks that transcended national boundaries. The cascade effect, however, wasnt simply that shared grievances spread from Tunis to Cairo. Instead, it was the inspiring story of success overthrowing Ben Ali that spilled over networks of family and friends that stretch from Morocco to Jordan. In a sense, there is an important parallel between Obamas success and Mubaraks failure. An important part of Obamas successful 2008 presidential bid was the ability of his campaign to use digital media to connect his supporters to each other.
Third, the content that seems to have the biggest cascading effect over digital media is personal, not ideological. In most previous social upheavals and political revolutions, there is an ideologically driven opposition that topples a dictator from another part of the political spectrum. Radical socialists, leftleaning union leaders or a Marxist army from the countryside would lead a popular revolt. Or religious conservatives or right-wing generals would lead a coup. But most of the reports from the ground suggest that these rebellions are largely leaderless and without traditional ideological labels. Across the Middle East and North Africa, however, there arent very many other countries with similar dynamics. Tunisia and Egypt have the largest number of Internet users. Several years ago, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made bold statements about Internet access as a basic right. U.S. leadership on keeping Internet traffic open, especially in times of political crisis and when dictators try to disconnect their nations from the global flow of political discourse, is vitally important. Addressing human rights broadly means understanding the ingredients for democratization and especially digital media.

Further, due to the nature of online interaction, where identity and anonymity are more readily managed than in direct interaction, the effects of offline social inequity can often be discounted in online communities. Intelligence, effort, education, and personality may be readily conveyed in an online interaction but a person's gender, race, religion, and social standing can be easily obfuscated or left entirely unaddressed.