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Wednesday, 8 April 2020

Coronavirus And The Bioweapon Dilemma



Was the coronavirus manufactured in a biomedical laboratory in China or America? Is the coronavirus a biological weapon?. Do we have biomedical laboratories that create or grow viruses and why do they do so?. Which countries produce them and what happens when they leak?. Do we have examples of cases where highly contagious pathogenic viruses and bacteria have leaked from biological labs?.
I believe these are very important questions that continue to dominate headlines as the world battle COVID-19 which until February 2020 was thought to be a Chinese problem. In this write up I attempt to explore the intricate conspiracy theories that have emerged in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying catastrophic health puzzle that confronts humanity. I will also attempt to share light on the biological weaponry industry across the globe from a pure international management and public policy perspective. The political and moral undertones in these industries are the subject of other write-ups in the near future.
To begin with, the issue of conspiracy theories in the wake of an epidemic is not new. When the Ebola crisis was at its peak in Africa, there were rumours that it was a eugenic weapon, manufactured by some countries to suppress black people in general.
Similar suggestions have been made by sentimentalist about the invisibility surrounding the HIV-AIDS pandemic, the 2019 malaria outbreak in Burundi, the 2019 dengue fever outbreak in Africa and the Middle East, the 2018 Nipah virus outbreak in Kerala, the 2009 H1N1 flu virus, the 2015 Zika virus etc were all posited to have been deliberately engineered to cause human-induced harm to one group of people or the other.
These discussions fall within the purview of the development of biological weapons that dates back centuries ago. History has it that one of the first recorded cases of the use of biological weapons against enemies occurred in 1347 when Mongol forces hurled plague-infested bodies into a port in present-day Ukraine.
The diseases were then picked by Italian ships to Europe and that started the Black Death pandemic that killed 25 million people in Europe over four years. In 1717, Russian forces catapulted plague-infested corpses in Tallin (Estonia) in a fight against Swedish forces while in 1763, smallpox virus-infested blankets were passed on to Indian troops by British soldiers causing a devastating epidemic among their ranks. There are several records of deliberate use of biological weapons and their devastating effect during the two world wars.
To avert the future reoccurrence of this unprecedented humanitarian crisis caused by biological weapons, the international community negotiated successfully to halt the production of chemical and biological weapons after World War I and reinforced the ban in 1972 and 1993 by prohibiting the development, production, stockpiling and transfer of these weapons.
As of 2013, a total of 180 states and Taiwan had signed the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) formerly known as Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction.
Under the terms of the BWC, member states are prohibited from using biological weapons in warfare and from developing, testing, producing, stockpiling, or deploying them. Instead, countries were encouraged to channel their biological weapon resources to productive industrial uses such as pest control, disease control, poison detection, food production etc.
For example, China started cultivating the special Chinese ducks as powerful biological weapons to fight against locust invasion of farms during the dry weather seasons. One Chinese duck can “control” a 4-square-meter of land and can eat at least 200 large size locusts in a single day. Using ducks to prevent locust plague is economically and environmentally friendly compared with spraying pesticides.
In February 2020, a reported number of 100,000 to 200,000 Chinese ducks were sent to Pakistan to help the country fight the locust invasion of their farms. Despite the ban on biological weapons, a number of states have continued to secretly pursue biological warfare capabilities, seeking a cheaper but still deadly strategic weapon rather than following the more difficult and expensive path to nuclear weapons.
US Senator Thomas Bryant Cotton is probably the most visible US personality to suggest that the deadly coronavirus may have originated in a high-security biochemical lab in Wuhan. According to him, his main source of information is a study published by Chinese scientists in the Lancet, which he called a “respected international science journal”.
In February 2020, when the epidemic was at its peak in China the Acting US Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia; Philip Reeker accused Russia in an interview with Agence France Presse-AFP of using fake Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram accounts to spread false theories that suggest that COVID-19 is a US bioweapon engineered by the CIA to “wage economic war on China.
Zhao Lijian (a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry in China) also openly associated the US with the possible exportation of the virus from the US to Wuhan. This was after Robert Redfield, who is the director of US’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had disclosed to US Congress that some US soldiers who took part in a military championship game in Wuhan in October 2019 when the virus was unknown in Wuhan had tested positive with the virus. Robert Redfield had also disclosed to the US Congress that some people in the US who were previously thought to have died of influenza actually tested positive for COVID-19 long before the disease surfaced in Wuhan.
It is gainsaying that, the mention of US, China and Russia does not in any way suggest that they are the only countries interested in the bioweapon industry, but in doubt at front liners in global weapon manufacturing and distribution.
Indeed over the last two weeks a video of the late ex-president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein has gone viral in which he is heard accusing the US of attempting to attack Iraq with coronavirus in the 1990s. On March 22, 2020, Kate Feldman reported for the New York Daily News that Iran’s Supreme Leader; Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Iran had rejected US medical aid to fight COVID-19 in the country because they believed the US will use it as an opportunity to spread the virus to Iran to make the government unpopular.
A critical examinations of the main countries involved in the cycle of accusations and counteraccusations about bioweapons shows that these countries have been unfriendly nations for a long time and their feud usually spills over into an otherwise positive medical safety initiative to cultivate viruses for public health protection.
Even though biological weapons are banned across the globe, the practice of allowing nations to cultivate or keep highly contagious and pathogenic viruses like Coronavirus is permitted, not new, not secretive and not uncommon in so far as its objectives are approved within the framework of international conventions.
It is similar to laboratories created to develop nuclear or atomic energy for positive purposes across the globe but subsequently abused for other destructive purposes. In the case of biomedical science, these high-level labs are called Bio-Safety Level 4 Labs (BSL-4).
BSL-4 labs provide top level security for scientists to handle pathogens of the highest risk (Group 4), such as Ebola, Lassa and Nipah viruses. BSL-4 labs diagnose and investigate these types of pathogens without endangering the staff or the population at large, yet accidents can occur just as accidents occur in hospital theatres leading to loss of lives. Currently, there are 52 Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) laboratories across the world.  15 of them are in the US, 6 in the UK, 1 in China (Wuhan), 1 in Russia, 4 in Australia, 4 in Germany, 3 in India 2 each in Taiwan, Switzerland, Italy, Japan, and Korea. The others are located in other countries.
In developing countries, in particular, industries that are perceived as dangerous like weapon manufacturing, nuclear and atomic physics, nano-technology, bioweapon, etc is not very popular but are vibrant industries in a lot of developed countries such as US, Canada, Japan, China, Russia, Italy, France, etc.
Most of the labs in Africa are levels 1 and 2 with a few level 3 biological labs that handle basic parasites, bacteria and less pathogenic viruses. While studying at the University of Granada in Spain  in the between 2010 and 2013, a Russian colleague confronted me on why I was wasting time studying what i was studying instead of chemistry.  Again while studying in South Africa, a Chinese friend asked me why most African students in the school were studying management, international politics (like myself), political science and finance instead of studying science, technology and engineering as the Chinese were doing.
In both instances, I understood the messages they were communicating about the priorities of an African educational system very clearly. It is therefore not surprising that only two BSL-4 labs (out of the 52) are in Africa. These are the Centre International de Recherches Médicales de Franceville in Gabon and the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in South Africa.
The lack of interest in these perceived dangerous industries and the pressure from developed countries to stop investing in them may explain why all the stock of Uranium in my home country (Ghana) has been sold to China and its Atomic Energy Commission is not very beneficial to the ordinary citizen. A brief history of the BSL-4 Laboratory in Wuhan is important to set the mistrusts in the creation of level 4 biosafety laboratories into context.
The BSL-4 laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was opened in January 2015. The facility is jointly owned by China and France. On February 23, 2017, the then French Prime Minister; Bernard Cazeneuve visited officially inaugurated the joint initiative. The first contagious virus to be transferred to the lab was the Ebola virus from Africa. Wuhan’s laboratory is under the management of the National Health and Family Planning Commission and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Its vision is “to operate top-notch scientific research to respond to diseases based on Chinese and French expertise”.
Mr. Yaping Zhang, Vice President of China Academic of Sciences addressed the inaugural ceremony with these words “the laboratory will help China to strengthen the capability of preventing and controlling outbreaks of emerging infectious diseases and aid scientific research and development of antiviral drugs and vaccines”.
Since only BSL-4 laboratories keep such dangerous viruses and considering their potency for warfare,  there is the growing suspicion that countries hosting BSL-4 Labs uses them to secretly produce bioweapons hence the linkage between Wuhan’s BSL-4 lab and COVID-19. Recently, terrorist groups such as Al-Qaida, ISIS, etc have also started manufacturing their own bioweapons.
This underlines the growing interest in bioterrorism as a field of study and a university in Ghana has started the process to deliver a bachelor program in bioterrorism to study this field more accurately. The global mistrust in the possible use of viruses for bioweapons is well known to China and other nations hence they seize every opportunity to assuage the fears of the global public when these issues come up.
For example during the visit of the French Prime Minister to Wuhan’s BSL-4 Laboratory in 2017, the Director of the Institute, Mr. Zhiming Yuan emphasized that transparency is the cornerstone of the laboratory, and an open culture is of vital importance to guarantee the security of the Laboratory.
Beyond the BSL-4 labs, countries also suspect that other secret installations exist for the development of vibrant bioweapon industry across the globe. In 2018 the Nuclear Threat Initiative of the US doubted China’s public declaration of being in compliance with the Biological Weapon Convention. Past and present U.S. government agencies have alleged that China has a small-scale offensive biological weapons program.
Only “credible evidence” stands between the US and the claim that Chinese entities have transferred control of biological weapons-related items to nations of proliferation concern such as Iran. In 2008, the US Congressional Research Service reported from unclassified sources that China, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Russia, and Syria have some bioweapon capability without much certainty and detail.
Conversely, China, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Russia, and Syria suspects that the US and its allies are also producing bioweapons without credible evidence. These countries believe that military medical institutions and toxin research and development centres in the US are dual-use structures for education and biological weapon manufacturing.
But in reality, a lot of developed countries (even those without BSL-4 Laboratories) appear to be secretly developing bioweapons as part of its biotechnology infrastructure including viruses. This is a certainty without proof and the possibility of viruses leaking from BSL-4 to cause an epidemic is a proof without certainty.
The International Committee of the Red Cross supports this assertion when they state that “today’s advances in life sciences and biotechnology, as well as changes in the security environment, have increased concern that long-standing restraints on the use of chemical and biological weapons may be eroding”. The hypocrisy in the biological weapon industry is similar to that in the chemical or nuclear weapon industry. If you think your neighbour is having more than you and you feel threatened, you make noise to make them look bad.
It is an open secret that the US like others produces its own nuclear weapons in secret, and indeed the US is the only country in the world to have successfully fired a nuclear bomb in Nagasaki and Hiroshima during World War II. However, due to the threat from North Korea and, Iran etc, the US will constantly ring alarm bells to court global disaffection for these countries without disclosing theirs. These countries (North Korea and, Iran) also are constantly spreading anti-American sentiments among their citizens and the global public to court international sympathy.
Thus Anti-America, Anti-China, Anti-Islam, Anti-Black, Anti-Arab, Anti-Israel, Anti-Japan, Anti-Russia and Anti-Korea sentiments etc have all subtly contributed to nourishing a flourishing undercover bioweapon market across the world. Finally, just as nuclear accidents occur in atomic and nuclear laboratories as was witnessed in Chernobyl (Soviet Union) and Bhopal (India), accidents can occur in BSL-4 laboratories and highly contagious pathogenic viruses can escape to cause widespread epidemics in the catchment area or spread abroad.
This is at the centre of the “Wuhan lab conspiracy theory” but this  “invincible biomedical conundrum” will remain unproven. Many patients have died in hospitals by medical negligence but the truth will never come out. Most importantly, even without virus leakages from BSL-4, highly contagious and pathogenic viruses can emerge and mutate.
Most of the greatest epidemic cases in history occurred when there were no virus labs and bioweapon industries. As human as we are, we cannot ignore the thin truism in these conspiracy theories but we need to set the boundary on how much of it is too far and how far of it is too much. “Stay at Home”

Saturday, 10 August 2019

AUTHORITARIAN RULE IN THE MIDDLE EAST: WHY HAS IT PROVEN RESISTANT TO THE SPREAD OF DEMOCRACY

           Introduction
In broaching the leitmotifs of democracy and authoritarianism particularly in the Middle East Region of the globe, the endemic nature of various forms of unrest and upheavals raging from boarder/territory disputes, the politics of water, violence within the parameters of religion inter alia cannot be overemphasized and this can be partly attributed to the authoritarian regimes which has manned the helms of affairs of the region, thereby making the discourse of democracy look like a mirage; with the various instances of cases of human rights violation, issues of gender inequality and so on, which are the consequences of the region not being democratic.
The argument here is that, since various mechanisms and systems has been tried and tested to see if democracy could work in the region and has failed, ipso facto it can be best described as an unfertile ground which resists the spread of democracy and rather upholds authoritarianism. probing the academic literature for a unanimously accepted meaning of democracy, if any, is far from simple or straightforward. It seems, nevertheless, that there is a consensus that democracy principally is ‘a system of governance in which rulers are held accountable for their actions’ (Schmitter and Karl, 1991: 114) and that a society can choose and reinstate those rulers through ‘open, free, and fair’ elections (Huntington, 1991: 9). Democracy is not the ultimate (Touraine, 1997: 28), yet it remains the most valued and proficient forms of government in the world.
conversely, this system of rule still failed to find a grip in the Middle East, a region that has traditionally been a democracy-free zone. This paper seeks to highlight the hurdles that render the Middle East an unfruitful soil for democracy. Therefore, it will be argued that the Middle East lacks many of the democratization prerequisites, such as the adequate political culture and socio-economic grounds. Yet, this could not serve as the main reason why the Middle East is adamant to the spread of democray, as many other countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia succeeded to initiate democratic change even though these prerequisites were absent. The true wonder of the Middle East, this paper argues, lies in ‘The will and capacity of the Arab state’s coercive apparatus to curb democratic initiative’ (Bellin, 2004: 143).
This paper, thus, is structured into three main sections. Firstly, it presents a theoretical overview of authoritarianism in the region, and explores certain salient concepts which are imbedded in this regime; the second section explores the role of the coercive apparatus as a democratization inhibitor will be analysed. In the last section which precedes the conclusion, some democratization obstacles that thwart the consolidation of democracy will be discussed. The conclusion then summarises the argument of the paper.

Authoritarianism in the Middle East – A Theoretical Overview
The question is often asked, why does the Middle East remain largely authoritarian? Or, as it is sometimes posed, why does it continue to experience a democratic deficit (notwithstanding the ongoing developments in the region)? Various scholars have put forward several competing theories and arguments regarding this topic. These tend to fall under four main categories: culture, institutions, the history of international relations and actors in the Middle East, and oil/rentier state.
Scholars such as Samuel Huntington and Ellie Kedourie (1993: 22-49), contend that the lack of democracy in the region stems from the belief that Middle Eastern culture, which they equate with Islam (the reasons for this are discussed in further detail below), is incompatible with democracy.  Huntington (1984: 61) asserts that “Islam has not been hospitable to democracy.” Huntington and other proponents of this view generally argue that Islam’s incompatibility with democracy stems from its system of law, known as Shari’a. Shari’a law lays out the rules and regulations by which Muslims ought to live and links religion and daily life together. Thus, the argument contends, Islamic traditions and values are antithetical to democratic notions of liberty, human rights, and the separation of church and state. According to Elie Kedourie (2000), whereas democracy in the West is based on Western political traditions of constitutions and representational governments, as well as the notion of a sovereign nation state, no equivalent traditions exist within Islam. As a result, Kedourie (2000: 9) asserts, democracy is “quite alien to the mindset of Islam.” Bernard Lewis (2002) discusses the culture argument further. Although he does not specifically address the issue of the persistence of authoritarianism, Lewis (2002) holds essentially the same conclusion.
He argues that the roots of Western dominance (or, more bluntly, Middle Eastern failure to counter it) are found within Islam. Historically speaking, particularly during the last century or so of the Ottoman Empire, Lewis (2002: 21) contends, Islamic beliefs hindered Muslims from fully adopting and assimilating Western cultural norms and values, political practices, and science. Consequently, for a long time the Middle East was slow to “modernize” or “Westernize” and match the progress made by the West; large gaps between the Middle East and the West existed in terms of scientific knowledge, social norms like the status of women, and the separation of religion and the state. When attempts at nationalism and socialism in the 20th century failed to bring about a significant resurgence of Middle Eastern “civilization,” Middle Easterners placed the blame for this elsewhere, particularly towards Western “imperialism.” Instead, Lewis 2002: 23) states that people of the Middle East need to “abandon grievance and victimhood” in order for the region to return its former glory. All of these arguments are rooted in what Edward Said (1979: 6) called “Orientalism.” According to Said (1979: 13), Orientalism is the name for the discourse employed by Europeans and later, Americans, to describe, study, and dominate the Middle East. There is not sufficient space nor is it appropriate for this paper to discuss Orientalism in its entirety. However, one important aspect of it pertains to the culture argument which will be discussed in this paper; it will be based on the notion of the “other.”  The “other” is as an imagined, collective group of people who ought to be feared and considered fundamentally different from another group. In the Orientalist discourse, the West has historically viewed the Orient[1] as the collective “other;” the Orient was a place of exoticism, romance and antiquity, whereas Europe was the place of enlightened, advanced and sophisticated civilization.
In its construction of the notion of the “other,” the discourse regarded the entire Middle East as one unchanging entity, retaining an essential “essence.” Orientalists regarded the religion of Islam as having such an immutable essence and subsequently equated Middle Eastern culture with Islam. When it became clear to scholars that democracy would not spread to the Middle East after the Cold War as it did in other parts of the world, they began to look towards Middle Eastern culture, and hence Islam, as the primary reason for the lack of democracy in the region. Huntington’s (1993: 22) “clash of civilizations” thesis reinforced the notion that culture, rather than nation states, ought to be the main focus of study in the field of international studies.
Other scholars have presented factual data to support the notion of the Islam/democracy divide. Steven Fish (2002) argues through statistical analysis that a strong link exists between Islam and authoritarianism. Specifically, he contends, the subordination of women in Muslim societies is a central factor that accounts for the democratic deficit. According to Fish, variables, such as low female literacy rates, high population sex ratios (a high number of males per 100 females), the lower number of women in government, and weak gender empowerment measures (a variable used by the United Nations Development Program studies to measure the overall status of women in a given society), indicate an overall inferior status of women in Muslim societies. Thus, women’s social standing serves as an important factor that links authoritarianism and Islam.
However, most Middle East political scientists and scholars rejected the idea that culture had anything to do with the persistence of authoritarianism in the region. As Lisa Anderson (2012: 197) states, scholars asserted that Islam was not a monolithic entity; its history demonstrated it to be as tolerant and accommodating like Judaism and Christianity. She points out that followers of Islam and other religions in general have interpreted them in different ways. Furthermore, according to John L. Esposito (2002), all religions, including Islam, have had various relations with different kinds of governments, such as sultanates, democracy, republicanism and monarchy. This evidence indicates that Islam is much like other faiths in that it is capable of existing alongside different kinds of governments at different times. Therefore, it is inaccurate to argue that Islam is incompatible with democracy or any other form of government. The cultural explanation ultimately fails to see the complexity of Middle East, which is as diverse as every other region in the world, and Islam, which is equally varied.
Alternatively, some scholars such as Bellin (2010: 139) have directed their attention to the Middle Eastern institutions instead of culture. Some have argued that the region’s lack of “democratic prerequisites” such as strong civil societies, market driven economies, high literacy rates and representational government institutions accounts for the persistence of authoritarianism in the Middle East. However, the fact that countries in the region possess a number of these so called prerequisites challenges this idea. For example, several countries in the region have democratic institutions such as parliaments, political parties, judiciaries and elections.
According to Marsha P. Posusney (2005: 7), there are two general types of institutions: formal organizations and informal rules and procedures that structure political conduct. These include political parties, government military/security agencies, different branches of government, and elections and the rules that govern them. Stephen Cook (2005) argues that it is not a lack of institutions in the region prevent democratic reform and development, rather, it is the flawed “nature” of the institutions themselves that “tend to restrict political participation, limit individual freedom, and vest overwhelming power in the executive branch of government.”
For example, Cook states that in 2004 citizens of Qatar received greater freedoms in the new constitution, but the royal family consolidated its absolute rule. State manipulation of elections is perhaps the most apparent (and well documented in the literature) means for authoritarian governments in the Middle East to maintain their positions in power. Posusney (2005) illustrates this by describing contested, albeit largely controlled, parliamentary elections throughout Middle East during the early 1960s to 2000. The preferred electoral structure used in the region is a “winner takes all” system, where the party that wins the majority of seats also gains the most power.35 In Egypt, party contested parliamentary elections began under late president Anwar Sadat in 1976. However, according to Posusney, Sadat ensured that the government-backed party would win the majority of the seats, which is what occurred. In 1984, president Hosni Mubarak led a new round of an election but the outcome remained the same: the ruling party, which came to be known as the National Democratic Party, won the majority of the seats, while only garnering 73% of the popular vote.
According to Holger Albrecht and Oliver Schlumberger (2004: 371), in addition to parliaments and elections, authoritarian regimes in the region have also established other institutions such as new government ministries and institutions that arbitrate economic disputes. They have also allowed the establishment of NGOs, parliaments to enact antitrust legislation, and a more open and freer press. The effect of all of these, according to the authors, is the creation of the appearance of democracy for both domestic and foreign audiences. For example, the authors argue, allowing NGOs to operate creates the semblance of autonomous societal organization, and allowing political parties to form creates the appearance of true political contestation. In short, the establishment of institutions is a means and a strategy for authoritarian regimes in the Middle East to claim to have enacted democratic reform when in reality it is more likely the projection of an appearance of democracy. The third set of explanations for the persistence of authoritarianism in the Middle East is the history of international relations with which the region is predominantly about the legacy of foreign, primarily Western, interventionism in to the region during the 20th century and it is directly related to the oil/rentier state theory which this paper will explore.
Middle Eastern oil was (and continues to be) of great geopolitical and economic importance for the entire world. British businessman William Knox D’Arcy first discovered oil in modern day Iran in 1908, but it was not until after World War II that oil would have a significant and long-lasting impact in terms of the potential for democratic prospects in the Middle East.
The oil/rentier state theory is another category of explanations for the persistence of authoritarianism in the Middle East. The theory in this category explores the possible linkages between natural resources and regime type. In other words, scholars within this category examine whether natural resources (such as oil or minerals) determine either democratic or authoritarian political outcomes. Many of these scholars argue the latter. According to Terry Lynn Karl (2008: 7), commodity-led growth causes institutional change within the state; natural resource revenue, more so than any other factors, triggers these kinds of structural alterations. States that undergo such changes are called rentier states.
 According to the theory, rent is income that is not generated by the “productive” processes of a country, that is the wealth generated by a country’s everyday economic activities such as consumption (people’s wages spent on consumer goods), industrial output (manufactured goods to be sold and the profits earned), and taxation. Instead, rent is income derived from “unproductive” sources: the monopoly ownership of land (by the state or foreign companies) and the extraction and selling of natural resources, strategic rents (such as land leased for military bases), foreign worker remittances, foreign aid, and others. Thus the majority of rent comes from external sources.
Karl (2002) defines A rentier-state as a state in which its monopoly ownership of a resource determines the nature of its politics. The rent revenue generated from monopoly ownership determines a state’s political structures. According to the theory, rent income concentrates wealth towards the state, which is the primary recipient and distributor of rent revenues. The state becomes dependent on these revenues and this dependence fundamentally shifts its decision-making process towards maintaining the extraction of rent income in the future. More to the point, the infusion of rents, which are typically very large, allows the state to become relatively autonomous from society. Therefore, the state leaders do not need to (or very minimally so) extract income from society through taxation, and thus be held accountable by society. Their economic independence and the reliance upon official largesse by entire segments of society fosters the concentration of political power in the state.
This, then, gets to the core of the theory’s argument. The theory asserts that states can only “democratize” when the ruler and his subjects bargain over taxes. This happens when the state does not have any source of income to fund its operations other than the taxes it imposes on its subjects. As a result, the state becomes reliant on its citizens and therefore must accommodate their demands, which they express in representative, legislative bodies such as parliaments. In other words, citizens accept taxation in exchange for representation in the state and in this way society is able to hold the government accountable. This relationship is summed up in the phrase “no representation without taxation.”
The state-society relationship is the opposite in rentier states. Society is not involved with the production of national wealth and taxed very little or not at all. Therefore, society has little or no say in state decision-making. However, to offset any opposition or dissent towards the state, rentier states create an apolitical and acquiescent society by providing free or affordable social services in areas such as health care and education. Thus a rentier state bases its authority and legitimacy on the redistribution rent wealth rather than taxation. In sum, according to the theory, rent income is therefore deterministic: it shapes the politics of the state by giving the state the financial autonomy to possess and wield political and economic power. The state becomes powerful, authoritarian, and undemocratic as a result of all of these factors.

Agent of Democratization
The coercive apparatus, including but not limited to the military and security forces, of the authoritarian regime is the most tenacious obstacle in the way of democratization in the Middle East. This apparatus is the instrument whereby the state pursues its monopoly of physical violence within its sovereign territory. This essay suggests that this repressive apparatus has to be at least neutralised first before a democratic transition can start. That is because the security apparatus’ terror and compulsion are the primary tools of subjugating its people (Linz, 2000) and crushing democratic initiatives.
Indeed, it acts as the dictator’s shield. Without the loyalty and support of this stronghold it would be ‘virtually impossible’ for an authoritarian regime to survive (Kassem, 2004: 7). Ensuring this apparatus loyalty ‘entails the constant flow of state patronage’ as well as social and economic incentives (Ibid). Thus, it is not surprising that the Middle Eastern states’ expenditure on security is among the highest in the world (Bellin, 2004: 147). For instance, in 2000, the average spending of Middle Eastern countries on security expenditure was 6.7 percent of their GNP, compared to an international average of 3.8 percent in the same year (Ibid).
In Egypt, for example, since the 1970s, with President Sadat’s political changes in the country, the army’s subordinate role in politics was acceptable in exchange of safeguarding the institution and its leaders’ interests (Harb, 2003). The Egyptian military enjoys increasing economic investing in almost everything. From companies of production of pasta, mineral water, butane gas cylinders, military-gear and gas station services to housing, farming and tourism enterprises (Abul-Magd, 2011; Barany, 2011: 32). ‘The revenue from these enterprises goes straight to the military’s coffers and is disbursed without state oversight’ (Ibid).
Furthermore, it is often difficult to identify the distinction between the despotic regime and the coercive apparatus. As in most cases, the ‘civilian’ ruler, like in Egypt, Algeria or Sudan, is a former military officer. This conflation, along with patrimonial, symbiotic or ethnic linkages between them, makes the coercive apparatus’ elites very hostile towards any gesture of regime change, as they believe that they will be ‘ruined by reform’ (Bermeo, 1997). An unequivocal example is Syria, in which the Alawites, the religious sect of Bashar al-Assad, ‘hold key military positions’ (Pipes, 1989: 429). The army atrociously fights the anti-Assad movement because of the belief that ‘Political opening and popular accountability would deprive the Alawi officer in Syria of his special perquisites, if not his life’ (Bellin, 2004: 149)
During the 2011 Arab uprisings[2], the Arab armies have fiercely quelled the democratic movements in Bahrain, Syria, Libya, and Yemen. Barany (2011: 30) contends that in Tunisia and Egypt, the soldiers ‘backed’ the revolution. However, for various reasons it was only in the Tunisian case that the military did not oppose the democratic change. First, in the heydays of the Egyptian uprising, the military’s top brass did everything in their power to save their supreme commander-in-chief, Hosni Mubarak. They endorsed Mubarak’s plan to transfer some powers to Vice President Omar Suleiman and urged ‘the return of normal life’ (The Huffington Post, 2011), whereas their troops on the ground ‘were actually detaining and abusing protesters’ (Barany, 2011: 31-32). Second, permitting the pro-Mubarak and security elements to attack the peaceful protesters in Tahrir Square, in 2 February, put the military institutional integrity and its domestic legitimacy in jeopardy. Therefore, it was crucial for them to behave as if they were neutral. Third, the army’s abandonment of Mubarak was merely a ‘good strategy to secure the long-term interest of the military elite’ (Franzén, 2012). Finally, on 3 July 2013, because the coercive apparatus remained ‘intact and opposed to political reform’, the military was able to extinguish the hope of political change (Bellin, 2004: 143). Not only has the military ousted Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, in essence ‘It has ousted democracy’ as well (Gerges, 2013a).
Apart from the coercive apparatus’ role in inhibition of democracy, some Middle East analysts usually forget the complicated evolution of democracy in Europe. It has passed many reformations in the past, and it is unsurprisingly expected to undergo further changes in the future (Maghsoudi and Khorshidi, 2011: 16). Democratization is a complex process, in which no single variable will prove imperative or enough to it (Diamond et al., 1999). Therefore, the subsequent section will review some aspects of the cultural, economic, societal and international factors, which are believed to hinder the consolidation of democracy in the Middle East.

Creed/Faith Playing a Factor
For some historians and political theorists, Islam is perceived to be incompatible with democracy (Huntington: 1991: 298-307; Vatikiotis, 1987). For instance, Bernard Lewis (1958) contends that Islam is inclined to authoritarianism, also Eli Kedourie (1992: 1) views that ‘the idea of democracy is alien to the mind set of Islam’.
Conversely, it is a fallacy, for different reasons, to attribute the lack of democracy in the Middle East to Islam. First, there are other Islamic nations in the  likes of  Indonesia, Turkey and Bangladesh have functioning democratic systems (Chaney in Zakaria, 2012). Second, given the opportunity to play by democratic rules, people in the region enthusiastically participate in the democratic process (BBC, 2011). Third, ‘Catholicism and Confucianism have been accused of incompatibility with democracy, yet these cultural endowments have not prevented countries in Latin America, southern Europe, and East Asia from democratizing.’ (Bellin, 2004: 141).
On the other hand, some analysts contend that it is an ‘Arab’ rather than ‘Muslim’ democracy gap (Stepan and Robertson, 2003). Albeit, the 2011 Arab uprisings and the fact that ‘for decades’ people in the region have been resisting and protesting against unrepresentative and oppressive regimes’ Franzén (2012), disprove this claim.
Yet, all religions, including Islam, ‘require some level of hermeneutics to give them meaning in specific contexts’ (Bromley, 1997: 333). Thus, the problem is that ‘some interpretations such as those favoured by radical Islamists conflict with democratic ideals’ (Otterman, 2003). Some of them are hostile to democracy because they believe that only God’s laws, al-Shari’a, must be implemented (Ibid). Another problem, given the weight of Islamist opposition movements in the Arab world, is the fear that ‘Islamists would only participate in elections to win power and put an end to democracy immediately’ (Ottaway and Carothers, 2004). Some could argue that, this is what Egypt’s deposed president, Morsi, has done shortly after his first few months in office, when he granted himself sweeping powers and ‘immunity from legal oversight’ (Beaumont, 2012). On the other hand, as considerable portions of the region’s peoples support the Islamist movements, it seems that without their inclusion, democracy is impossible in the Middle East (Ottaway and Carothers, 2004).
Nevertheless, with respect to Islam, and in order to help democracy settle in the Middle East, there are some efforts need to be done. For instance, the Islamic scholars should resume the endeavours of ‘Islamic modernism and revivalism’ that were nurtured by ideas of prominent religious leaders like that of the Islamic jurist Mohammed ‘Abdu (Dawn, 1991: 8). They should scrutinize the Islamic heritage, history and literature in order to provide the people with clear answers to questions about the relation between Islam and democracy.
In addition, for the Islamist parties, they need to revamp their views, and offer real guarantees to the public and non-Islamists parties to emphasize their adherence to the rules of the democratic game. Conversely, it is still early to gauge the Islamists’ experiment in post-revolutionary Tunisia, it could be useful to contrast their success in supporting the democratic transition and cooperating with other factions in Tunisia, the trajectory of the Muslim Brothers in post-Mubarak Egypt.

Cultural, Societal and Historical Factors
Democracy, to Ayubi (2001: 397), is not merely a system of governance, ‘it is also a cultural and intellectual tradition’. By culture, sociology defines it as the way a group of people live; this may include the food they eat, the clothe they wear, where they profess their creed (religion) and so on. Consequently, it could be argued that, in the Middle East, the high levels of illiteracy and widespread autocratic, patriarchal and masculine traditions in both family and society impose a serious problem to acknowledging the democratic values (Crystal, 2001).
Not only the poor illiterate portions of the community that make the boulevard of democratization bumpy, but also the disc of the business, religious, academic, public servants and military elites who choose to ally with the authoritarian government, in exchange for incentives, benefits and the state’s patronage. In the region, ‘Missing until now are elites committed to serious rather than cosmetic reform’ in the economic and social structures in their states (Norton, 2009: 146).
Norton (2009: 130) opines that ‘the region’s governments are not simply undemocratic but anti-democratic’ which implies that they are resistant to the spread of democracy. This disdain for democracy date back to the founding of the Arab republics, in the 1950s and 1960s, when openly military dictatorships replaced the partial democracies of the colonial period in Egypt, Iraq and Syria (Bromley, 1997: 327). In that era, democracy was portrayed as ‘nationally divisive’ and a Western tool (Ibid). President Nasser viewed the partial parliamentary democracy in Egypt, during the period 1923 to 1952, as nothing more than ‘an easy tool for the reimbursements of the feudal system’ (BBC in Owen, 2004: 133).
In consistency with the anti-democracy legacy of the Arab systems, there was no ‘fairly strong institutional separation of the realm of politics from the overall system in society’ (Rueschemeyer et al., 1992: 41-58). Moreover, absent were the checks and balances within the state system, which is overwhelmingly controlled by the authoritarian leader. Furthermore, the civil society that could have played an intermediary’ role between the individual and the state, as well as ‘a constitutive role by redefining the political game along democratic lines’ (White, 2004: 14-15), has been undermined and fizzled out as a result of the regimes’ containment and repressive policies (Kassem, 2004: 126-7).

Socio-economic and Development Factors
If we follow the international financial institutions’ doctrine that the path to democracy starts from liberalised economy (Norton, 2009: 137), it might be argued that the Middle Eastern countries have a democracy problem, in part, because of the lack of the adequate economic preconditions. Generally, there are some common socio-economic features in the region. For instance, the public sector remains the major employer in the state. In addition, in most cases, the state is rentier, which means that the state depends mainly on the rents rather than taxation. According to Beblawi (1987: 383), the rent is generally ‘a reward for ownership of all natural sources’, like the oil wealth in Gulf countries. To put it another way, it is ‘the income derived from the gift of the nature’ (Marshall, 1920).
While Huntington (1991: 65) argues that ‘broad-based economic development involving significant industrialization may contribute to democratization’, he suggests that oil-based economies do not. In Huntington’s opinion, the oil revenues accrue to the state, and this helps to fortify the state bureaucracy and, lessen the need for taxation. Consequently, the absence of taxation disengages the citizens and separates the state from the society. Just as if the state pays in exchange for silence and obedience of its citizens. Luciani (1994: 132) asserts that ‘The roots of democratic institutions are in the state’s need to tax in order to support its activities’.
In 2011, in the awake of the Arab uprisings, the Saudi King’s plan to save his throne was spending ‘an unprecedented amount of money, more than £60bn ($100bn) and counting’ on raising salaries, helping people to buy houses, and benefits for the unemployed citizens (Buchanan, 2011). Therefore, in a sense, oil could be a curse, when it becomes ‘a factor perpetuating authoritarian government’ (Luciani, 1994: 131). In keeping with this view, Ross (2011) suggests that citizens of the Arab countries with little or no oil generally had more freedom than those of lots of it.
Similarly, foreign aid is one of the sources of the rents. For instance, the United States provides Egypt with $1.55 billion as annual aid package. This aid, in part, does help the government reduce its dependence on the conventional taxation (Norton, 2009: 136). Egypt, the second largest recipient of US aid (Sharp, 2010), and some other Middle East countries are among the most dependent and vulnerable countries in the world (Ayubi, 2001: 401). This vulnerability and dependence is closely linked to the discussion of international obstacles in the following part.

International Interference
The international patronage, occasionally, plays a key role in sustaining and stabilizing the authoritarian regime and its coercive apparatus. This notion was proven in Latin America and Europe by the end of the Cold War, as the withdrawal of American patronage of the Latin American dictatorships and the cease of Brezhnev doctrine to support Eastern European communist systems quicken the pace of the fall of these regimes (Janos, 2000). Contrarily, in the Middle East, the patronage continued as the authoritarian regimes secured the Western interests in the region, which revolve around the security of Israel, the access to oil, and containing the Islamist threat (Bellin, 2004).
Despite the American rhetoric of supporting democracy and human rights in the region, the truth is that the USA has long been and remains a key ally of tyrannical Arab regimes. In the time was President Clinton, in the 1990s, talking about promoting democracy all over the world, his prominent aid, Martin Indyk (2002), viewed democracy in the Middle East as a chaos-inducer, and detrimental to Israel. Indyk’s perspective reflects the long-standing tradition of the US foreign policy in the region; upholding the status quo, as working with the dictators is better than dealing with what might democracy produce. The fact that ‘American policy in the Middle East has never been historically pro-democratic’ (Ayubi, 2001: 402) was emphasized in the words of Madeleine Albright (2003), the former Secretary of State; ‘we did not make democracy a priority. Arab public opinion, after all, can be rather scary’.
Even in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when the Bush administration decided to break the conventional American foreign policy and adopt a unilateral, interventionist agenda in the Middle East where the US enjoyed an intimate relationship with despots, promoting democracy was merely rhetorical. In July 2003, with the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair stated before the US Congress, ‘We promised Iraq democratic government. We will deliver it’ (CNN, 2003). In August 2003, Condoleezza Rice declared ‘a generational commitment to helping the people of the Middle East transform their region’ into a democratic zone (Milbank, 2004). Furthermore, in November 2003, President Bush reiterated the commitment of the USA to the goal of promoting liberal democracy and market-driven economy throughout the entire Middle East (Bush, 2003).
On the contrary, there was a mismatch between this pro-democracy discourse and actions in reality. The Bush administration turned a blind eye to human rights violations and authoritarianism in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere in the Muslim world (Abootalebi, 2007: 427). Freedman suggests that ‘emancipation was not the reason why the Bush administration went to Iraq war. For Rumsfeld and Cheney, the war was about solving the Saddam problem rather than the Iraq problem, about bringing security rather than justice’ (2006: 134).
Distancing itself from Bush’s interventionist and tarnished legacy, the Obama administration returned to the traditional realist line of Middle Eastern policy. During the Arab uprisings, Obama stayed reluctant to side with the democratic uprising of Egypt until it became obvious that Mubarak could not continue (Gerges, 2013b). Also, his administration was ‘reticent to support the Bahraini uprising because the Bahraini monarchy best serves U.S. regional interests’ (Hughes, 2011). Likewise, during the Tunisian uprising, France supported Ben Ali ‘right up to the moment he fled’ (Chrisafis, 2011).
Not only was America pro-tyrants, but occasionally it moved against democratically elected regimes. For instance, in Iran, in 1953, the CIA was involved in a clandestine operation, codenamed Operation Ajax, to overthrow the elected prime minister of Iran and return the pro-America shah to his throne (Bill, 1988: 86-94). Also, when the Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas won the Palestinian elections in 2006, the ‘US plotted to overthrow Hamas’ government (Goldenberg, 2008).
A fair assessment of the Western role in Middle East might bring us back to Thomas Jefferson’s observation on the world of his days: ‘We believe no more in Bonaparte’s fighting merely for the liberties of the seas than in Great Britain’s fighting for the liberties of mankind. The object is the same, to draw to themselves the power, the wealth and the resources of other nations’ (Chomsky, 2003).

Concluding Remarks
Explaining the paradigm of democratisation in the Middle East is ‘a complex business’ (Bromley, 1997: 340). Throughout this essay, the main accounts for the region’s democracy deficit have been classified into three main categories. Firstly, the theoretical overview of authoritarianism which has densely influenced the entire system in the region. Secondly, the Arab state’s coercive apparatus which acts as a democratisation agent. The existence of this apparatus intact and opposed to political change means that a democratic transition cannot be initiated at all, and herein lies the singularity, if any, of the Middle East. Thirdly, this paper has refuted some fallacies and erroneous conclusions  regarding the incompatibility of Islamic or Arabic culture with democracy. In addition, it was argued that democratisation obstacles such as an inadequate literacy rate and socio-economic arrangements, the weakness of civil society and the Western support for the region’s dictatorships rendered the region an infertile soil for democracy. Finally, despite the Arab Spring’ disappointing consequence, and the democratisation problems in the region, there is still hope. This hope is incarnated in the revolutionary Tunisian march for a better hope, in which Tunisia is stepping forward ‘on its path to democracy, shattering stereotypes and setting an example for others to follow.’ (Abdessalem, 2014).





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[1] The ‘Orient’ referred to not only the Middle East but also the entire Asian continent and North Africa.
[2] The Arab Spring or Uprising was a series of anti-government protests, uprisings and armed rebellions that spread across the Middle East in early 2011.