Fawaz A. Gerges, director of the Middle East Center at the London School of Economics, said that “unlike eastern Europe in the 1980s and 1990s,” which clearly wanted to emulate the West, “the Arab world does not know where it wants to go.”
Gerges warned against assuming “that this transition will lead to Western-type democracy.”
Perhaps religion will play a formal role in some places. Perhaps monarchs will retain a hand in the executive. Perhaps certain ethnic groups will have positions reserved for them, as is the case in Lebanon, where the president is a Christian and the prime minister a Sunni Muslim.
Francis Fukayama—the political scientist who wrote “The End of History?” in 1989 -- said he still believes democracy is the direction of things. But subsequent events have shown that the road is long, and cultural differences may apply.
“Democracy in Asia ... doesn't look like European democracy—there are going to be variants all around the world,” the Stanford University fellow said in an interview.
“I think people's expectations are too high for how quickly you can make a transition. The experiments we've seen (in the Middle East) have not worked very well, but they're also very real and these institutions just take a long time to evolve. Nationalism derailed democracy in the 20th century in Europe, (and) religion is playing a similar role in the Arab world right now.”
“All of these places are going to look different, but they face a common set of challenges and there is a common evolutionary path.”
