The Iranian Islamism, a Model towards Stability in the Muslim World
Islamism expresses the relation between pre-existing reality, religious tradition and it is translation to political ideology. Regardless the western theories of democratic peace, perpetual peace and democratic export, Islamism remains today the main political ideology in the Muslim world and certainly the solely viable one, reshaping and ordering society and government in Islam. Islamic fundamentalism cannot be described as uniform, and the majority of its shapes and forms, change, improve, evolve and diversify. Islamism has become the primary vehicle, dominating the political vocabulary in the entire Muslim world.
Muslims turn their faces towards the Islamic sources to discover the general principles of a good government and to redefine concepts of social and economic justice. In this part of the world nationalism was not part of the solution as Islam does not recognize other but the Muslim citizenship, the left is marginalized since it’s principles contradict the Islamic concepts on private property, society and economy, and liberal democracy does not have support, as it is a doctrine never inspired by Islam principals and law. Due to this reasons, mentioned briefly above, Islamism has every chance in becoming, if it has not yet become, the dominant intellectual theory in the region. The process is just at its beginning. It is for this reason that the only way peace and stability could be achieved in this part of the world is to support Islamism, as it will prove itself as more successful as imported western democratic models.
Being so complex and so dynamic of a phenomenon, Islamism includes many manifestation forms, being creative, free and independent. Not every form of Islamism should be accepted as bringing stability to the world, but the Iranian model has been a success and has represented a real evolution inside Islamist lines of state behavior. Iran represents the proof that a doctrine with an explicit religious vision can promote a truly stable, progressive, tolerant and pluralist politics. It is what the Islamic Republic of Iran is trying to accomplish. The Iranian model being more natural for the Islamic world, as opposed to the occidental one, imposed by the west will certainly be more acceptable by the Muslim society everywhere and should be supported to perfect by every responsible politician.
In this paper, I demonstrated why Islamism is the only suitable option for the Muslim world, showing the total failure that democratic peace theory has proven to be in Islamic countries, presenting the cases of Iraq, Turkey and Afghanistan and proving why we should consider the Iranian model as the only suitable model of Islamism. In this purpose, I have also tried to set out a comparison between the western Democratic Peace Theory and the Islamic Theory of Mahdism messianism. I discussed the reasoning that led me to this conclusion, considering the Iranian Islamist view of the state, form of government and its continuous improvement in the light of Mahdism teaching, its vision towards private property, society and economy. Here I have also approached the issue of the Iranian constitution. Comparing the Iranian model to the other two known models of Islamist Sunni states, Afghanistan and Sudan, I demonstrated their failure in representing guidance to the Muslim world.
The democratic peace theory, is it a total failure in the Muslim World?
War, the most aggressive and nightmare like form of interaction between social groups, societies and nations represents a terror that standing above our heads and threatens our existence ever since the beginning of humanity. The nature of war as well as the means available to avoid war has always represented one of the main concerns of international relations theories.
Every international relation theory and every school of thought, and every political doctrine has developed its own understanding of the causes and nature of war. At the beginning of 1980, the liberal internationalist school of Democratic Peace Theory started to gain way being largely accepted by western elites.
Its importance does not derive from the fact that a large number of western theoreticians, academics and intellectuals came to consensus regarding its validity but in the fact that the Democratic Peace Theory begun to influence widely states foreign policy.
According to Christopher Layne “Michael Doyle’s concept of “democratic peace zone” begun to be used today officially as well as unofficially by US representatives”, becoming at least the theoretical base of US foreign policy doctrine. From Woodrow Wilson who justified war against Germany as setting-on the world for democracy extension, to Clinton’s ”third column” of American’s foreign policy, to Anthony Lake who said that at the end of the Cold War Americans should concentrate their external efforts in promoting and extending democracy abroad, since it alone could bring stability and security to America. The Democratic Peace Theory began its ascension becoming the base of American foreign policy as well as a key in understanding some western foreign actions.
The essence of the theory lays in the idea that democracies do not engage in war against one another, though being as warlike as any other regime when relating to non-democratic regimes. The theoretical origins of Democratic Peace Theory lay in the philosophical works of Immanuel Kant, considered the most appropriate philosopher in explaining the reason why liberal states manage to maintain peace between them, but not in relation to other states. The development of perpetual peace between world nations, he said, is possible in if world states become republics, meaning democracies, as democracy is a regime in which the central authority deciding to go to war has to ask the population in this matter population who is unlikely to desire war as population pays the price of war in democracies and not the military aristocratic class. More, Kant argues that the spirit of commerce could prevent war since free commerce is always affected by war, and due to this reason population is unlikely to sustain war.
In his vision, democratic states would eventually form federations that would respect every country’s right and sovereignty, this federation will unite in time to form a greater, stronger Pacific Federation that should extend in time until it shall gather peacefully all nations of the world, bringing perpetual peace and stability to the world. The Pacific Federation becomes in Kant’s vision a collective security system that guarantees non-aggression between its members.
In a 1983 published article Michael Doyle, preloading Kant’s argumentation, demonstrated that “political regimes and institutions have a cert influence in international relations”. Doyle wrote in this famous article, studying the last two hundred year’s wars, that the realist anarchical international system theory is no more reliable in the case of international liberal regimes, determining that none of these wars was ever fought between democratic regimes.
Doyle states that the international regime instituted by the democratic states gives away nonviolent means in resolving disputes and that the pacification of the liberal zone becomes a derivate of liberal democratic values that dominate the democratic world. Liberal states, he says, admit their citizens their right to liberty and moral autonomy, rights that reflect in relation between democratic states that respect one another their autonomy and independence.
The axiom of mutual respect and autonomy in which all democratic states gather, makes inter-liberal peace an unique phenomenon, as other groups of social structures (socialist, feudalist, fascist) have never generated a separate peace phenomenon among them, argues Doyle. He accepts the Kantian argument that capitalism produces peace as long as war destabilizes commerce and international capital. He sums up freedom of speech and freedom of the press in producing peace as these means give citizens the permission to control central government that lead them.
The second argument that Michael Doyle brings to light is that democracies become aggressive when related to non-democracies, as there is between them a tendency to violent conflict that cannot be stopped because of different set of values. Doyle says that occidental imperialist politics outside the Pacific Union do not contradict Kant’s principles of non-intervention and hospitality, and as long as that state is non-democratic, the intervention is not only justifiable but also necessary.
The democratic peace theory became the main school of thought after the end of the Cold War, as most of the former communist countries became democracies. They were considered the third wave of democratic enlargement. After 1989, western countries and their leaders became more interested in this theory as it was thought that only promoting democracy would ensure security and stability for the western world. In this historical context, The Democratic Peace Theory became the leading doctrine for the United States of America that considered itself a promoter of democracy. This was partially true, since with American help and support the former soviet republics in Europe began the long process of democratization. The American post cold war security strategies were all democracy oriented, promoting free trade, liberalization and democratization. This became the foreign American policy for democrats as well as the republican’s candidates and presidents of The United States.
The “third wave” of democratization that swept through southern Europe, South America, and much of eastern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s was conspicuous for its exclusion of the Middle East. Initially, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dawn of a supposedly “new world order,” some observers of the Middle East viewed the advent of democracy into the region as inevitable, arguing that such basic ingredients of democracy as civil society and parliamentary politics were beginning to foster conditions for democratic transitions in a number of Middle Eastern countries. To this day, however, authoritarian systems of various types are pervasive in the region.
The democratization wave though did not touch the Muslim world, and this became a problem of security for Americans and westerners after 9/11 as America has been hit and attacked by individuals of a Muslim country. For its security, as well as for the economical interests to be stabilized, America had to assure stability in the region. It therefore set out the bases of a plan for democratization in the Extended Middle East area.
This plan consisted in rejecting Arab exceptionalism, which held that democracy – for reasons of culture, politics, and religion -- could not progress in the Arab Middle East, as it had over the course of the “Third Wave” in every other major region of the world, from Latin America and the post-communist countries to sub-Saharan Africa and East and South Asia. Second, linking terrorism with political stagnation and failure and saying that it would be reckless to accept the status quo. In addressing this plan, the U.S president George W. Bush called for a new policy, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East.
He stated that becoming a successful modern society involves the development of institutions and values that promote the rule of law, representative and accountable government, human rights, including the rights of women and minorities, an independent media and civil society, and a market economy – in a word western democracy.
Although democracy has been said to have global features and values, the presence of diverse identities and their different demands and expectations from the democratization process requires applying specific approaches of advancing democracy in the Middle East. As shown western democracy and definitely the westernization, process may sometimes contradict to the values and morals of Islam.
As history acknowledges, western democracy could never been imposed in Muslim countries. Some rely on the example of Turkey. Turkey has let international forces directly shape its domestic priorities. As a result, the desire to be considered European and to be admitted into the European Union has prompted state elites to consistently maintain an imperfect but functioning democratic system since 1983. However, we must analyze it as an atypical model of democracy since it is a democracy imposed by the army. In Turkey the military establishment continues to exert considerable political influence through the powerful National Security Council, to the extent that in 1997 it launched a “silent coup” against an elected prime minister and banned his political party. Turkish society is lacking the democratic control over the military; unfortunately, Turkey has an inversed model of army-controlled democracy over the population.
Following the democratization plan of the extended Middle Eastern region, the west begun two wars that had as declared purpose democracy promotion in the region, the expected regime change doctrine.
As expected, these wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq were at least a total failure from this point of view. After discovering that their plan would not work in the region, at least for some time, and realizing that war had created problems rather than resolving them, the west and the U.S.A begun to understand slightly that probably this was not a solution in the Muslim world. Their democracy promotion discourse begun to teach about the difficulties of the region, the good of pacific means and the evil of the military means in democracy export, the U.S. declaring that in the democratization process in the area regimes should be encouraged to reform from within, even if the process would take a while. They stated that the US will encourage in the beginning the free election process in the region, even if that will bring extremism to power.
Although democracy has proven itself to be of global resurgence in recent years, authoritarianism has shown remarkable resistant in staying in power in the Middle Eastern Zone. There are several factors that underlie this resilience, firstly the weakness of civil society, the continued strength of state institutions, and the societal relevance of state institutions as guaranteed through ruling bargains that rest on nationalism, patrimonial, and corporatism. Of course, equally important has been the absence of international pressures for democratization, which were of paramount significance in influencing the demise of authoritarian polities in Eastern Europe and South America. No state, of course, is immune from the unfolding of international events and their potential consequences for domestic politics. Nevertheless, so far a vast majority of Middle Eastern states have not confronted international developments that have had domestic consequences for democratization. Ironically, the United States’ invasion of Iraq and its subsequent overthrow of the Iraqi state in 2003 appear to have strengthened authoritarian hard-liners throughout the Middle East.
The Democratic Peace Theory was a true disaster in the Middle East as it was a guaranteed success in other parts of the world. The theory based on export of democracy and the bureaucratic state worked in various parts of the world as bureaucrats treated citizens equally regardless of religion. It did not work in the Middle East, as the state here did not view its citizens equally. Even if there was no discrimination for religious minorities, even if the state gave these minorities equal rights, the state view them differently, naming them and even positive discriminating them as different, as this states were and are based on Islamic Law and canonic judicial systems.
The Iranian model, a possible solution
The failure of western democracy was not a surprised in the region, as Islamism becomes the main political ideology in the Muslim world, the solely viable one, reshaping and ordering society and government in Islam. Islamism represents the primary vehicle, dominating the political vocabulary in the entire Muslim world. Islamic sources are viewed to discover the general principles of a good government and to redefine concepts of social and economic justice. In this part of the world nationalism showed that it was not part of the solution as Islam does not recognize other but the Muslim citizenship.
The left is marginalized since its principles contradict to the Islamic concepts on private property, society and economy, and liberal democracy does not have support, as it is a doctrine never inspired by Islam principals and law. Islamism has every chance in becoming, if it has not yet become, the dominant intellectual theory in the region. The process is just at its beginning. It is for this reason that the only way peace and stability could be achieved in this part of the world is to support Islamism, as it will prove itself as more successful as imported western democratic models.
Given that in the Middle East the state is by far the more dominant and powerful partner in state-society relations, any meaningful moves toward a greater opening of the political process are likely to be initiated from within the state itself. The most likely course of a democratic transition in the Middle East is that certain actors within the state begin using the state resources and institutions at their disposal to reform the system from within and make it more democratic. The internal tensions within the state—the competition between “soft-liners” and “hard-liners”— set off a slow, nonlinear process whereby the state becomes increasingly less authoritarian and more democratic. In turn, the more open political atmosphere that ensues allows members of the intelligentsia and other state-affiliated or state-approved figures to engage in dialogues over the essence and propriety of state-society relations. The defining characteristics of the dialogue—its main premises, its intellectual content, the venues of its expression, and its censorship or tolerance—all vary from case to case and country to country. But it appears that such a dialogue is indeed in the offing in Iran, where, relatively meaningful processes of state-originated opening have been taking place.
