Checkered History for Democracy

BOSTON — The Arab Middle East has tasted democracy before. Both the French and British tried to create liberal democracies that would protect and promote their interests in the region. And therein lay the problem. The political systems could never overcome their connections to their colonial creators, a factor that undermined the appeal of democracy in Arab societies for decades to come.

The states that emerged from the French and British mandates in the Middle East were local replicas of the political systems of the former colonial powers. Syria's and Lebanon's governments were modeled after the French republic; Iraq and Jordan were constitutional monarchies. In Syria and Iraq, the political institutions were formally democratic, with parties, an elected parliament and a liberal constitution. But the Anglo-Iraqi treaty of 1930, which laid out conditions for the formal independence of Iraq in 1932, gave Britain the right to station troops there, as well as considerable power over Iraq's foreign affairs, economy and education system.

In short, colonial domination was perpetuated under the cover of liberal political institutions. Politics remained firmly in the hands of the countries' traditional merchant, industrial and landowning elites. Poverty and illiteracy kept almost everybody else on the political sidelines. In Iraq, the ruling elite also had a sectarian and ethnic character because political power was mainly held by Arab Sunni families from Baghdad in a country with an Arab Shiite majority and a large Kurdish minority.

The narrow social basis of political power in Iraq and Syria, coupled with the governments' inability to incorporate popular demands into the national project, created constant political instability. As a result, these "liberal" regimes were even more dependent on their former colonial masters for survival.

Economics mirrored politics in the Arab democracies. For example, European and American companies received generous concessions to exploit Iraq's oil resources, while a few families of the local elite owned most of the country's fertile land. Popular protests about poverty and the corruption of the state were usually channeled through nationalist and socialist political organizations such as the Baath or Communist parties. But these players were systematically repressed or barred from politics.