Quote:
Originally Posted by VladtheImpaler
You cannot export democracy to tribal societies. Democracy functions only in places where there is loyalty to the nation. That allows for peaceful transfer of power - the Democrats and Republicans hate each other, but in the end they know that each is American first and foremost. In the Middle East and most of Africa the first loyalty is to the clan and/or tribe and/or sect, so politics becomes a zero-sum game. You cannot afford to lose power. You can bring in democracy, but it will be of the "one man, one vote, one time" sort. There are certainly exceptions to be found here and there, but the rule holds.
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The above says more about how little you know about the Middle-East, what the word "tribe" means, and about various projects to establish democracy than it does about Middle-East.
Let's start with the word "tribe".
Pretty much all societies used to be "tribal" as one meaning of the word is literally "pre-state". (Clans still exist in Scotland btw, and nobody thinks they're not democratic.) It's also means "largely independent societies outside of state", and those really didn't exist much in the Middle-East before the US destroyed Iraq and Syria descended into civil war. Most Iraqis were simply Iraqis while that thing still existed.
Most of the groups we in the west call "tribes" are things like local ethnic minorities, religious minorities and local armed militias. One reason the Western governments like to call them "tribes" is so they can conveniently bypass the questions of "what do those groups want". After all tribes in the western minds don't have goals, they're just there.
There are of course also some actual tribes in the area, but these are a minority in the big picture.
It's also completely absurd to claim that tribes and democracy don't mix. Many tribes in the very traditional sense had/have some sort of democracies, with elected representatives regurarly gathering to make decisions through voting and debate.
Large parts of Europe used to be "tribal" too, like the areas where we now have the Nordic countries (which are generally considered to be among the most democratic in the world).
There are numerous very recent examples of succesfully introducing local democracy to societies that previously did not have them. The reason they don't stick usually has little do with the societies themselves, as generally those attempts at democracy are seen as threatening by someone with power and interests in the area and are crushed violently.
In Syria when the civil war started, the pro-democracy rebels originally had quite succesful local democracies in the areas they controlled. These only collapsed once the war got prolonged, the societies in general collapsed, and the rebels mostly became radicalized or taken over by radical islamists.
In short, the biggest thing stopping democracy in the Middle-East is the constant violence. Security would enable democracy.
A large part of the problem in the Middle-East is that democracy is not in the interests of anyone who currently has power there. The local armed groups generally are most interested in ruling with their guns, and the Western nations have historically never had any real interest in supporting democracies outside of Europe, especially in oil-rich countries. In fact quite the contrary, they have traditionally supported dictatorships, because those are convenient to deal with.