C.M. Henry, Promoting democracy: USAID, at sea or off to cyberspace?, Middle East Policy, Jan 1997
PT Journal (Analytic)
AU Henry, Clement M.
AT Promoting democracy: USAID, at sea or off to cyberspace?(Special Focus: U.S. Development Assistance, part 2)
CT Middle East Policy
CY 1997
DB Academic OneFile
XX Service Name: Gale
XX Date of Access: 31 Jan. 2008
IL http://find.galegroup.com.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/itx/start.do?prodId=AONE
AB Attempts by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) since 1992 to build civil societies in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region are based on flawed assumptions. Elected legislatures developed in several MENA countries without assistance from USAID, and Western views of civil society separate that concept from political society. USAID efforts should be directed to helping MENA countries increase exposure to the Internet. Creating virtual communities through universities and research institutions could encourage democratic discourse.
DE Internet_Political aspects
DP Jan 1997 v5 n1 p178(12)
DP Jan 1, 1997
GC Middle East
GC Northern Africa
GN Middle East_International relations
GN Northern Africa_International relations
PB Middle East Policy Council
RM COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group
SU Promoting democracy: USAID, at sea or off to cyberspace?
SU Internet_Political aspects
SU United States. Agency for International Development_Political activity
TX
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is, of
course, an instrument of U.S. foreign policy and hence labors under
political constraints. Its efforts to promote democracy--one of its
strategic objectives, the others being to encourage economic
development, to stabilize population growth, and to protect the
environment--have to be consonant with other policies, objectives and
goals of U.S. foreign policy that may have higher priorities. U.S.
foreign-policy objectives are not always consistent, and many
observers may agree with Thomas Carothers that "democracy promotion is
not a major element of U.S. policy"(1) in the Middle East and North
Africa (hereafter referred to as MENA)--or in China, for that matter.
The United States has other more pressing concerns in MENA. It is
committed to maintaining access to much of the world's oil, for
instance, yet this objective may conflict with promoting democracy
among the Gulf Cooperation Council's ruling families, who control a
substantial proportion of the region's oil reserves. Ironically the
current policy of the "dual containment" of Iran and Iraq strives to
put one of the region's more participant polities in quarantine. The
United States is also committed to the security of Israel and to a
peace process pretty much on Israel's terms. This may be incompatible
at present with any substantial democratization in Egypt) Jordan or
Palestine, as popular sentiment in all of these places runs
diametrically counter to U.S. policy.
USAID also labors under an additional constraint that may have been at
least partly a consequence of the animosities stirred up by the
American-led coalition against Iraq in 1990-91. Any USAID program for
promoting democracy has to be consonant with the host regime's
strategies of political survival. Yet in 1991 and 1992 Tunisia,
Algeria and Egypt successively cracked down on all forms of Islamist
opposition, thereby reversing policies of selective accommodation with
political Islam and bringing cautious attempts at political
liberalization to a halt. These three countries, together with Jordan,
Morocco and Yemen, were the key candidates of USAID's Asia and the
Near East Bureau for the Agency's "Democratic Pluralism Initiative,"
but their domestic strategies of suppressing Islamist opposition were
obviously incompatible with any serious efforts to open their
respective regimes to democracy or political pluralism.
Consequently, USAID's room for maneuver was further constricted. The
"Democratic Pluralism Initiative" gave way in 1992, in the final
months of the Bush administration, to a more cautious "Governance and
Democracy Program," which places greater emphasis on governance and
"improving policy formulation" for the sake of sustainable economic
growth than on democracy or democratic pluralism. Under the Clinton
administration, however, USAID was encouraged to do more for
democracy. J. Brian Atwood, recruited from the National Democratic
Institute for International Affairs to be the new director of USAID,
made the promotion of democracy one of the Agency's four top
priorities.
Coincidentally, USAID's new focus on civil society offered fresh
guidelines for promoting democracy in MENA. There would now be two
tracks, the traditional one of promoting more effective governance and
a new one of building up civil society. Each track could be related to
a portfolio of the Agency's past projects and experience. The first
track continued the efforts of previous administrations to enhance
institutions so as to address the political, legal and regulatory
constraints to sustainable economic growth. The new track of promoting
civil society could build upon previous Agency experiences that had
supported NGOs in a variety of developmental projects. The respective
political logics of these two tracks, to which I was occasionally
exposed as an outside academic consultant, are the focus of this
paper. How, if at all, given the constraints of USAID in the region,
can either track promote democracy?
It will be argued here that the first track, promoting effective
governance, is in keeping with USAID's traditional mission of
fostering economic growth and development and may also contribute to
encouraging political pluralism in a number of states in the region.
If USAID is expected to be in the business of promoting democracy, its
efforts should be concentrated on developing institutions, such as
legislatures, that may facilitate transitions to more accountable
forms of government when internal political circumstances change. The
second track, building civil society, however, is more problematic
because it rests on a secular Western understanding of civil society
and its relationship to democracy that is antagonistic to the most
powerful democratizing forces in the region. This paper argues that
"civil society" needs to be reinterpreted in light of both Islamic and
Western experiences. By deepening its first-track menu of governance
programs, USAID could still promote civil society, suitably redefined,
in ways that would be more politically neutral than the current
second-track approach, which singles out secular NGOs for support
TRACK ONE: GOVERNANCE PROGRAMS
Promoting more efficient and more effective governance has long been
an objective of USAID. Already in the late 1960s, Title IX programs
were promoting democratic governance. In the 1980s the Agency was
involved throughout the world in many programs strengthening
government institutions for the sake of economic development, so that
it was only a small step to refocus some of the institution building
upon legislatures and judiciaries as part of the Democratic Pluralism
Initiative under the Bush administration. In the five MENA countries
where USAID had an active presence in 1995 --Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon,
Morocco and Yemen--programs were either being planned or were already
underway to strengthen the respective parliaments.
This first track of governance promotion is based on the assumption
that enhancing the technical quality of decision making will improve a
country's economic performance. Relatively small amounts of investment
in institutional development can produce large dividends by generating
better-informed discussions and decisions concerning economic policy.
Pressures for salutary economic reforms may be self-sustaining if
enlightened interests are given expression in the policy-making
process. USAID had been in the business of promoting the technical
quality of economic decision making long before the Bush
administration pushed the Agency into the political task of promoting
free societies to complement Ronald Reagan's free markets. In Egypt,
for instance, since the late 1970s USAID had invested substantial
resources in generating information for informed, decentralized
decision making at the regional and local levels. Catalyzed by the
country's international debt crisis in the early 1980s, the central
government then created a Cabinet Information for Decisions Support
Center, not only to keep track of the various debts but more generally
to respond to the cabinet's need for reliable information in a variety
of policy areas.(2) USAID's earlier efforts contributed to Egypt's new
commitment to "information for development" as the Cabinet's
Information Center drew upon the various local and regional sources of
information originally funded by the Agency.
Once the Bush administration decided that USAID should promote free
societies as well as free markets, the logical response of the Agency
was to apply its experience in improving the quality of economic
decision making to political institutions such as legislatures and
judiciaries. Carefully crafted programs could meet the twin objectives
of promoting economic growth and democracy, whether or not these two
valued outcomes were mutually reinforcing. Perhaps it helped within
the USAID bureaucracy, too, to promise success in meeting two or more
strategic objectives rather than just democracy. And in light of the
local sensitivities that democratic development might arouse, it was
perhaps only prudent to emphasize economic as well as political
objectives to host governments.
Elected legislatures became prime beneficiaries of USAID planning in
Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco and, tentatively, Yemen. Interventions
being planned or already being implemented are designed to be purely
technical, enhancing the level of institutional activity by
introducing new information systems and staff training. To the extent
that parliament is politically relevant, a streamlining of its
deliberative and informational capacities may foster economic growth
as well as political development. Egypt's purely consultative (and
only partly elected) Shura Council, for instance, was the first public
forum in which a controversial privatization program was
sympathetically discussed.
Most of these USAID programs are in early stages of implementation,
any evaluation of them would be premature. Legislatures clearly carry
weight, however, even in authoritarian regimes that in various ways
deprive them of their representative character. No outside donor
agency can significantly influence the political strategy of an
authoritarian regime bent on retaining its power by all available
means, which may include systematic practices of torture and other
human-rights violations as well as electoral fraud. But USAID can
still carry out its administrative mandate of promoting democracy by
working on an existing legislature. Legislatures are institutions that
outlast particular regimes. Carefully designed programs can raise the
quality of legislative deliberations by offering new delivery systems
of relevant policy-related information. Both the donor and the
repressive host regime will point to the better quality of discourse
as a sign of greater democracy, but the real impact of these programs
will come when the regime changes or when the incumbents alter their
political strategy so as to include fair representation of opposition
forces committed to democratic institutions.
In some of the Agency's internal deliberations that I have witnessed,
the question was raised whether the timing was right for a legislative
initiative, that is, whether the incumbent regime was preparing to
expand the parliament's political influence over decision making. In
the aftershock of Desert Storm, however, the timing can almost never
be right in MENA; few regimes, with the possible exceptions of Jordan
and Palestine, show signs of any political liberalization. In fact,
the reverse has been the general trend since the Gulf War. It is still
true, however, that "the intensity of political contestation in the
MENA region is increasing. Moreover, it is becoming more focused on
institutions and the rules of the game, a harbinger of greater
commitment to the institutionalization of democratic procedures."(3)
Legislative initiatives put USAID in the position of waiting for Godot
only if significant political change in a democratic direction is
expected soon. The more pertinent question might be whether these
programs meanwhile reinforce the authoritarian trends already so
evident in the region by helping to legitimate existing institutions.
My answer is, definitely not All of the countries in question except
Yemen have legislatures that long predate current authoritarian
tendencies. Their institutional fates are not tied to a particular
regime, nor for that matter to USAID's assistance. Their very presence
however fraudulent the elections that designate their members, is a
potential check on arbitrary exercises of power as well as an asset to
rulers who must pretend to be promoting democracy for the sake of
their domestic and international images. Even Tunisia's National
Assembly could usefully be assisted, despite be Ben Ali regime's harsh
treatment in 1995 of the tamest of opposition parties. USAID's
programs are carefully designed to be non-partisan, but they enhance
capacities for contestation, hence for opposition parties within a
given legislature, by developing information delivery systems.
Contestation may indeed contribute to a regime's legitimacy, but it
does not reinforce authoritarian tendencies.
What might be counterproductive are USAID initiatives to monitor and
offer technical assistance to electoral processes. The International
Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), for instance, was funded to
do pre-electoral surveys and then to monitor legislative elections in
Morocco, Jordan, Palestine and Yemen. As a participant in the IFES
pre-electoral survey of Tunisia, however, I publicly congratulate
USAID for responding to our report(4) by shelving any plans to monitor
the meaningless presidential and legislative elections of 1994. Any
monitoring, despite routine IFES disclaimers of the ability of its
small numbers of obervers to certify elections to be "fair and free,"
would have offered them a legitimacy they patently did not deserve. By
contrast, the first round of the Moroccan elections, held in November
1993, offered a mixture of surprises, despite the monarchy's dubious
history of managed elections.
However unfair or unfree the legislative elections may be, USAID
governance programs for legislatures seem bound to have positive
effects. In the short run, they can be expected to improve the quality
of legislative deliberations and to contribute indirectly to economic
development by shaping better policies. The programs are politically
neutral in that they involve the organization of information flows
rather than content, but they do favor contestation, hence the more
active elements within ruling and opposition parties. The programs do
not and cannot promote democracy in the short run, given political
conditions in the region and the constraints of U.S. foreign policy.
Nor, however, do they legitimate incumbent authoritarian regimes. The
seeds of information are planted, and in time the legislatures may
well gain or regain their centrality in the political process. Similar
arguments can be made in favor of initiatives currently underway
(interrupted and then resumed recently in Egypt, for instance) to
reform the judiciary. But local government in Tunisia is a different
story. Local institutions do not by definition have the same national
centrality as a legislature, and some of them may be too close to the
people. In Tunisia, for instance, any USAID program associated with
the Tunisian government's comites de quartier would be condoning and
legitimating the intrusive practices of a police state.
TRACK TWO: DEVELOPING CIVIL SOCIETY
The second track of developing civil society leads either nowhere or
to disaster rather than to more democracy in the region. It leads
nowhere if the purpose of programs currently under discussion within
USAID and host governments is merely to strengthen apolitical
non-governmental organizations, such as water-user associations or
private charities. It could lead to disaster if USAID were perceived
as intervening in the politics of the host country by building
politically relevant associations. Associational life in much of MENA,
certainly in Algeria, Egypt and Tunisia, is currently polarized
between narrow networks of official NGOs that support the respective
regimes and shadowy or illegal ones that oppose them. Since USAID
cannot support the oppositions, any initiatives to strengthen NGOs are
more likely to play into the hands of repressive regimes than to
strengthen democracy. The only exceptions are certain human-rights and
advocacy groups, which, like the information systems of legislatures,
enjoy a degree of political neutrality. USAID properly supports a
number of these organizations, but any new civil-society initiatives
risk being either irrelevant or politically counterproductive.
The trouble is that any new initiative is likely to rest on the
historically flawed conception of civil society developed by USAID
officials in 1993, when the Clinton administration was urging the
Agency to do more for democracy. A consensus was developed within
USAID over many months about the meaning of civil society. As
reiterated in a number of drafts of a design paper (hereafter referred
to as the Blair Report) civil society "inhabits the area between
individuals (or families) and the state and is made up of
associational groupings of all sorts."(15) This geographic conception
of civil society separates it from the individual and the state, much
as the Atlantic separates New York from England, and then reduces it
to the objects inhabiting the space, like ships crossing the Atlantic.
Reducing civil society to secondary associations may appear to be a
useful strategy for understanding how democratic pluralist polities
work, but it also reflects a theoretical misunderstanding of possible
relationships between civil society and democracy. In other societies
the procedure will only magnify our misunderstandings of our own civil
society.
The Blair Report admits that there is a problem with the geographic
analogy if boundaries are taken too literally, because some NGOs may
be too closely tied to the state. For operational purposes, USAID's
definition of "civil society organizations" (CSOs) is narrowed to
include only associations that "enjoy a significant degree of autonomy
from the state" and that "have as one important goal among others to
influence the state on behalf of their members."(16) There are other
conceptual problems. Business firms, trade unions and political
parties are excluded from the Agency's version of civil society. When
challenged that only driftwood (like water-users' associations) might
be left in the new version, the author's response conveyed by USAID to
me was that "anecdotal evidence (including some in the literature)
suggests that there's a pattern whereby NGOs, as they get bigger and
more ambitious, find themselves bumping against policy constraints
which they can deal with only by becoming more political (i.e. more
like CSOs)." USAID's support for NGOs run by well-connected elites can
indeed enable them to be more "political" in this sense.
Such a conception leaves USAID open to objections by nationalist
critics in the host countries that, as one Tunisian put it, "Civil
society represents a spearhead for the West's newest imperialist
project-`democratization' --a project of dubious value and
questionable appropriateness to political and economic conditions in
developing countries."(7) NGOs selected and funded by USAID may be
perceived as imperialist lackeys. CIA efforts to promote associational
development in Latin America in the 1960s at least had the dubious
merit of being clandestine, until, inevitably, they were exposed.
Particularly in MENA, efforts to promote a "secular" alternative of
CSOs to counterbalance Islamist oppositions are likely not only to be
ineffective but to backfire.
USAID excludes not only trade unions but middle-class professional
syndicates from working definitions of CSOs in MENA because the most
dynamic of them have been taken over by Islamist political forces
committed to working within the legal order,(8) and they are opposed
and suppressed by incumbent regimes. In Algeria, Egypt, Tunisia and
Yemen, the most viable potential CSOs are associations sympathetic to
or associated with the FIS, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Nahda and
Islah, respectively. USAID is constrained by official U.S. policies
geared to propping up some of these regimes and to ignoring, if not
helping to eliminate, their oppositions.
If promoting civil society means supporting voluntary associations,
then the Agency will obviously be taking sides. A better
conceptualization of civil society, however, could offer USAID an
escape from the dilemma of supporting either associational appendages
of repressive regimes--fake civil societies--or the real civil
societies articulated by their respective political oppositions.
Supporting real civil society would indeed promote democracy in these
countries, but not on terms that current U.S. foreign policy finds
acceptable.
CIVIL SOCIETY AND POLITICAL ISLAM
Conceiving civil society as a set of secular civic associations puts
the cart before the horse and confuses historical effects with
underlying causes. It reflects a misunderstanding of the genesis of
civil society in the West, and notably in America, which comes from a
very selective reading of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America
Indeed, USAID's misunder-standing of civil society is very much in the
mainstream of American political science, for the academics who
developed the Agency's working consensus drew heavily upon this
tradition. It is best articulated in Robert Putnam's outstanding work
on Italy, Making Democracy Work which was published in 1993, just as
the Agency was completing its internal deliberations about civil
society. USAID keeps good intellectual company because whether or not
Putnam was actually consulted, their respective views of civil society
are very similar.
In brief, Putnam argued that democratic institutions have functioned
most effectively in those parts of Italy that were most densely
populated by voluntary associations. Through them citizens acquired
Tocqueville's art of association and accumulated over generations a
kind of "social capital" that makes democracy work independently of
economic development. Almost three-quarters of the associations in
question turned out to be football clubs,(9) and Putnam deliberately
excluded political parties and trade unions from his analysis on the
ground that he was examining people's proclivities for association
independent of politics. He also excluded associations connected with
the Church, on the ground that they would be hierarchical and hence
not conducive to public engagements among equals. For Putnam, as for
USAID officials laying plans for MENA, civil society is supposed to be
secular as well as distinct from political society. And it seems
largely reducible to apolitical associations like football clubs.
While Putnam built a statistically compelling case for civil society
operationalized in this way (making democracy work in Italy), his
reading of Tocqueville, the classic expositor of the art of
association, is highly selective. Tocqueville indeed singled out the
extraordinary ability of Americans to associate for public causes as a
principal bulwark against potential tyranny by the majority in a
democracy. But the civil society he and Beaumont observed in their
fieldwork conducted over nine months in 1831-32 was hardly secular.
Their America was brimming with puritanical religiosity. And while the
art of association protected Americans from political tyranny, it
definitely discouraged independent thinking. In Tocqueville's words,
"I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind
and real freedom of discussion as in America. Freedom of opinion does
not exist in America."(10) He continues,
While the law permits the Americans to do
what they please, religion prevents them from
conceiving, and forbids them to commit, what is
rash and unjust...I do not know whether all
Americans have a sincere faith in their religion
--for who can search the human heart?--but
I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable
to the maintenance of republican institutions.(11)
Today American mainstream political science, while inspired by
Tocqueville, dismisses or forgets these dissonant observations when,
faced with "traditional" Catholic or Islamic societies, it reifies
civil society into secular forms of voluntary association.
A careful reader of Tocqueville should not be surprised that Islam
drives the art of association in Muslim societies just as puritanism
once drove the American. The logic behind this driving force is the
same: the believers are equal before God, Whose divine scriptures are
equally accessible to all readers independent of any earthly religious
authority. Moreover, personal salvation requires a zealous concern for
the public good of the community of believers.(12) Whether in
seventeeth-England, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America,
or contemporary MENA, these puritans have often been a cantankerous,
illiberal lot, meddling in each other's private affairs out of
religious zeal, but they have constituted the backbone of civil
society because of their ability to articulate public meanings in
God-centered communities.
In seventeenth-century England and Holland were built the first
mass-based parties of the modern world, reflecting the rise of the
nation state. The political Islamists of MENA operate within a
different religious tradition, but the structural similarities between
Protestantism and Sunni Islam are sufficiently similar to produce the
same effects. Like the Puritans of seventeenth-century England,
Egypt's Islamists have mobilized the most "sociologically
competent"(13) professionals and middle-class activists into a mass
party with solid local roots. Across much of MENA, in fact, the
Islamists have captured virtually the entire field of popular public
discourse and are making steady inroads into official state media and
educational systems. Like their English ancestors they display a rich
diversity of political tendencies because no single individual or
organization has the exclusive right or authority to interpret God's
word. Consequently the quest of any faction or tendency for
ideological hegemony is doomed to failure, as most Islamists,
including the late Sayyid Qutb, seem to understand.(14) There is no
reason why contemporary Islamists need repeat the sad experience of
Cromwell's England. Despite traditional Christian and Western fears of
Muslim fanaticism, the mainstreams of political Islam seem committed
to working out their internal differences through institutional means
expressed in laws and constitutions. Repressive responses of the
incumbent regimes, however, threaten to radicalize or undermine these
mainstreams in favor of the Islamist fringes advocating violent means
to achieve political change.
USAID can only observe, it cannot become directly involved in these
struggles between incumbent regimes and political Islam. But the
Agency needs to rethink the concept of civil society. The current
consensus of working with NGOs as if they were ships at sea in effect
leaves the Agency at sea, trying to be non-partisan yet favoring some
over others and, in effect, intervening in favor of host regimes
against the major forces behind civil society. At a theoretical level
the working consensus reifies associational effects rather than
getting to the root causes of civil society and its relationship to
democracy. The principal advantage of the official consensus is that
it allows USAID to interpret the new mandate of building civil society
in ways that fit and build upon its organizational experience. USAID
has often integrated NGOs into its traditional development programs
and is presumably still in need of the domestic political support that
the American NGO community can offer in return for a share in overseas
civil-society projects to mentor foreign counterparts.
RETHINKING CIVIL SOCIETY
In contemporary America, as well as in MENA, it is more useful to
imagine civil society, following Jurgen Habermas,(15) as a public
discursive space than as a set of voluntary associations. The space is
the set of arenas in which people debate issues of public concern
including norms of legitimation or governance. The arenas define the
publics, and in any given society there may be many of them,
corresponding to different policy concerns and geographic localities.
Writing in the late 1950s, Habermas was concerned with the growing
concentrations of mass-media power that had displaced earlier publics
defined in the eighteenth century by the commercial newsletters,
political clubs and drawing rooms of emerging bourgeoisies (emulating
the salons of enlightened aristocrats). Viewed in this context,
Putnam's associations constitute only a small part of civil society.
Putnam also includes newspaper readership as one of his measures of
civic community,(16) just as USAID includes the media in its working
definition of civil society, but the art of association is more
central to Putnam's argument In other work he has observed a decline
in America's social capital, evidenced by relative declines of
membership in bowling leagues and other associations.(17) If, however,
civil society is viewed as public discursive space rather than samples
of formal voluntary associations that help to fill it, then there may
be more hope for both Putnam's America and Habermas's Germany. This
space is being filled with virtual communities which exhibit new arts
and alternative forms of association.
New information technologies indeed seem to be reversing the
tendencies toward the concentration, dull conformity and corporate
manipulation of public discourse noted by Habermas and many other
observers. Anyone with an inexpensive computer and modem may publish
on the World Wide Web, and alternative news agencies have greater
opportunities to capture attention and market share from the media
giants. New publics, in the form of newsgroups and listserves, are
proliferating across national boundaries and transforming the world
into a global village. While the MENA countries have lagged behind
much of the world in assimilating the new information technologies,
they, too, are becoming connected to the Internet despite a variety of
cultural, economic and political obstacles.(18) USAID could assist
them in their endeavors and thereby make a distinctive contribution to
civil society in the region.
Traditionalists may immediately object that virtual communities can
never replace "real" associations as the incubators of civic virtues
that make democracy work. Virtual communities lack the concrete
face-to-face presences of real public meetings. But is the virtual
participation offered in most formal public meetings any more real
than the tangible messages exchanged through elecronic media? A more
critical objection is that computers serve only a select educated and
affluent elite in MENA. But most of the region's politically relevant
CSOs display equally narrow social bases, whereas the new technologies
may be expected to become more widely available and transform patterns
of public interraction just as transistor radios altered them in the
1950s and 1960s. USAID could already be helping its hosts adapt to the
new technologies. It needs to rearrange its priorities to fit a more
dynamic conception of civil society driven by the new forces of the
twenty-first century.
TOWARD A NEW ENABLING ENVIRONMENT FOR CIVIL SOCIETY
Despite the vast theoretical gap that separates Habermas from Putnam
or me from the Blair Report, operationalizing the new concept of civil
society into the Agency's portfolio of projects could be relatively
easy. In fact, the Agency's consensus document already speaks of two
possible strategies for "supporting civil society to promote
democratic development," namely "endeavoring to improve the enabling
environment!" and "supporting specific organizations within civil
society."(19) Unfortunately the first of these strategies, added to
the final version of the Blair Report et the behest of some USAID
officials and outside academic consultants, is not yet fully
integrated into programs for developing civil society. Country
documents, however, emphasize as the major subgoal of USAID Governance
and Democracy programs "an improved environment for the growth of
democracy." In Egypt, for instance, this subgoal is the rationale for
USAID's two major track-one projects: strengthening the legislature
and the judiciary. USAID officials are also aware of the need to
improve the enabling environment of civil society -- through policy
dialogues, for instance, to alter existing legislation concerning
NGOs.
Thus, an administrative rationale already exists for focusing programs
on improving the enabling environment at the possible expense of more
programs designed to strengthen specific NGOs. USAID would then be
able to apply its considerable expertise in developing information
systems for legislatures and other administrative bodies to a broader
field of public discursive spaces. Existing legislative programs could
also enhance civil society by placing more resources into one of their
stated objectives, enhancing communications between legislators and
their constituencies. The common thread relating the first track of
institutional development to the second track of building civil
society is the free and efficient flow of information.
Installing electronic information systems has been a major component
of USAID efforts to enhance existing institutions. The most promising
and politically neutral way of promoting civil society is to support
similar information systems for universities, research institutions
and NGOs. Islamists will not object; in fact many of them are well
ahead of their "secular" counterparts in their use of the Internets.
USAID's support of technical infrastructure might make a more level
playing field, but, of course, Islamist sympathizers will also acquire
increasing access and experience in electronic networking through the
virtual communities of universities and research organs that the
Agency could usefully assist. Host governments are aware of the
political risks, but the forces of international commerce are driving
them to ever-greater acceptance of electronic networking. Indeed, just
as they require active legislatures to keep up a pretense of
legitimacy in the international political community, they also need
free and efficient flows of electronic information to keep up their
standing in international business communities. Just as historic
Western civil societies originated with the emergence of classic
bourgeoisies, so the new civil societies are driven by global
business.
Interactions among Islamists and between them and other active
participants on the Internet could in trun foster virtual institutions
and rules of the game whereby different parties learn to tolerate each
other's discourse. As any Internet participant in listserves and other
virtual communities will know, rules of "netiquette" evolve, and
participants quickly learn to obey the rules and conventions if they
desire to have an impact. Just as legislatures evolve procedures for
political contestation, a vibrant virtual civil society can evolve its
rules and procedures over the Internet. Such institution building,
like the development of active legislatures, may offer frameworks that
anticipate the exercise of real political pluralism and create a
climate of civility.
By promoting virtual communities expressed in listserves and web
sites, USAID can distance itself from local politics, where the
balance of forces seems unfavorable to democratic development at the
present time. The Agency may project the form of efficient information
flow without becoming involved in content, just as it already serves
legislatures. Whether or not the information superhighway will one day
be submerged in competing Islamist discourses -- which may have
meanwhile learned to tolerate their differences and to include
non-Islamists -- cannot be the concern or responsibility of USAID. The
Agency can only offer space to local competitors and view from a
distance the development of civil society and democracy in the region.
(1) Thomas Carothers, "Democracy Promotion Under Clinton," The
Washington Quarterly, vol. 18, no. 4, Autumn 1995. (2) Elizabeth
Bouri, The Development and Decline of Public Libraries in Egypt: A
Shift in National Development Priorities, PhD dissertation, University
of Texas at Austin, 1993.
(3) Abdo Baaklini, Comparative Assessment of the Legislatures of
Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia and Yemen (Albany, NY: SUNY,
Center for Legislative Development), with the assistance of Robert
Springborg, January 13, 1994.
(4) Jeff Fischer and Clement Henry, Pre-Election Technical Assessment:
Tunisia. Typescript (Washington: International Foundation for
Electoral Systems, 1994).
(5) Harry Blair et al., Civil Society and Democratic Development: A
CDIE Evaluation Design Paper, U.S. Agency for International
Development, Center for Development Information and Evaluation,
February 24, 1994, pp. 4-5.
(6) Ibid, p. 8.
(7) Cited by Eva Bellin, "Civil Society in Formation: Tunisia," in
Augustus Richard Norton, ed., Civil Society in the Middle East, Volume
I (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995), pp. 120-121.
(8) Clement Henry Moore, Images of Development: Egyptian Engineers in
Search of Industry, 2nd edition (Cairo: American University in Cairo
Press, 1994) pp. 21 1-34.
(9) Robert D. Putnam et al., Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions
in Modern Italy (Princeton. NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p.
92.
(10) Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 volumes (New York:
vintage, 1959), pp. 273, 27s.
(11) Ibid, p. 316.
(12) Ernest Gellner, Muslim Society (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1983), pp.15-16, 43, 62-69.
(13) Michael Walzer, Revolution of the Saints (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1965).
(14) Sayyid Qutb, Milestones (Malaysia: Polygraphic Press, 1980), p.
100-110.
(15) Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (1962),
translated by Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994). (16)
Putnam, p. 96.
(17) The Economist, February 18, 1995, pp. 21-22.
(18) Elizabeth Bouri, Electronic Gateways: Sharing Resources Through a
Virtual Library, Annual Symposium of the Center for Contemporary
Studies, Georgetown University, April 20-21, 1995.
(19) Blair, p. 13.
Dr. Henry is professor of political science at the University of Texas
at Austin.
ZZ