Iraq

Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 4:06 pm on 16 March 2005.

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Photo of Lord Giddens Lord Giddens Labour 4:06, 16 March 2005

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Garden, for initiating this debate. I shall talk about the future of democracy in Iraq.

No one could fail to be moved, indeed inspired, by the sight of over 8 million people turning out to vote in adverse, and often dangerous, conditions. The Iraqi people have plainly given a mandate for the expansion of democracy in their country. Those of us sitting here should be humbled by the experience, living in a country where some of our citizens seem indifferent to their own democratic rights, and sometimes even openly cynical about them.

At first blush, the problems of establishing democracy in Iraq seem almost insuperable. The noble Lord, Lord Garden, alluded to some of the problems. There are the massive security difficulties, and the possible segmentation of the country. Well over 40 per cent of Iraq's labour force is unemployed, and its median age is 19 years. A lot of young people with no jobs is not exactly a recipe for social stability, as ordinarily understood.

In addition, I should mention the deteriorating position of women in Iraq. Over the past decade or so of Saddam's rule, the position of women deteriorated significantly. Some people have estimated that female literacy in Iraq fell by 50 per cent over that period. I want to suggest, however, that there is more cause for optimism than one might imagine.

We cannot understand the prospects for democracy in Iraq without also looking at the massive expansion of democracy and democratic states across the world. If we look back at the past 30 or so years, there are three times as many democratic states in the world now as there were 30 years ago, even using a narrow and demanding definition of democracy. The so-called "third wave" of democratisation—not "Third Way"—began in April 1974 with the overthrowing in a military coup of the dictatorial government in Portugal.

Portugal had never been a democracy. It had had several decades of quasi-fascist rule. Believe it or not, I was working as a social scientist in those days. Many political scientists believed that Portugal's kind of Mediterranean Catholic culture was not propitious ground either for economic development or democracy. After the coup there were several counter-coups, and a period of unstable provisional government. Yet Portugal is now a stable democratic country, as are Spain and Greece.

We can see in recent studies of the expansion of democracy that there is something new in the world. It was often thought that democracy was a rather unstable set of institutions, and that there could easily be a reversal when a democratic system was set in operation, such as in Latin America, with its history of constant movement from periods of democracy back to autocracy and populist rule. However, this is no longer the case. Something has shifted in the structural conditions of world society that makes democracy a much more feasible enterprise for all countries than it ever was before.

Professor Larry Diamond, professor of political science at Stanford University in California, has done an interesting study on the 125 countries that have experienced democracy over the past 30 years. Of those countries, only 14 have experienced a relapse—that is, a reversal of democracy—over that period. Of those 14, nine have subsequently experienced a re-reversal back into democracy. So of the 125 countries, only five—including, in Professor Diamond's list, Russia—have not returned to democratic rule. That suggests a massive transformation in the purchase of democracy on the contemporary world.

It used to be thought that democracy and economic development went hand in hand. That was the thesis of the celebrated political scientist, Seymour Martin Lipset. A certain level of economic development had to be reached before democracy was possible. This is no longer true. Some 20 per cent of the poorest countries in the world are now democracies and 25 per cent of non-Arab Muslim countries are democracies. There is no region in the world, save one, where at least one-third of states are not democracies. Where is that region? It is, of course, the Middle East.

In surveys of attitudes towards democracy, there is no sign of Huntington's famous "clash of civilisations". The Afrobarometer survey carried out in sub-Saharan African countries in 2002 showed interesting results: 69 per cent of Africans believe that democracy is always preferable to any kind of authoritarian system. The proportion of Muslim Africans believing this is almost the same as the proportion of non-Muslim Africans. We do not know, because we do not have effective surveys, what the situation is in middle-eastern countries, but there is no reason to doubt that people in those countries want democracy, individual freedom, equal rights and democratic liberties. It is patronising to think anything else.

If one asks why democracy has spread across the world in such a way, I would simply draw a symbol to explain why. It would look like this—not a male fertility symbol, but a satellite dish. We live in a global information society. Fewer and fewer people are outside that society, and increasingly the middle-eastern countries, like other states in the world, will not be outside it either. A global information society is one where people become much more active and informed citizens than they ever were before, no matter how poor or rich they may be, and I see it as an irresistible force.

Professor Diamond, whom I quoted earlier, has some intriguing things to say about this, which I agree with. He says we could be entering the era of universal democracy; that democracy as a form of legitimacy could become as universal across the world as the nation state form has become over the past several decades. I believe this to be an assessment of fact, and also a statement of purpose that we should embrace.

What are the implications of this for democracy in Iraq? I want to make several points. First, democracy in Iraq is possible. While I do not want to demean it in any way, if democracy in the sense of regular, fair and free elections held over a 10-year period can grow in a country such as Mali, where half of the population is illiterate, which suffers from high levels of primary poverty and which has a history of conflict, then we can certainly have democracy in Iraq.

We all know that Iraq is poised on a knife-edge, but it should be recognised that democracy in Iraq will be made by the Iraqis. By and large, I feel that the British media have not recognised the massive contribution already made by the Iraqi people themselves to the evolution of democracy in their country. By that I do not mean just the introduction of the vote, but the actions and the influence, for example, of the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. He insisted that early elections should be held when it looked as though the Americans were about to put them off and he has rebutted Shia extremism. Iraqis will create democracy in their country.

Secondly, the lessons of democratisation across the world teach us that democracy does not flourish in only one country, just as economic development does not take place in one country. The development of democracy is regional. In Europe, Portugal was followed by Spain and Greece. The success of democracy in Iraq is therefore bound to be affected by how far the flowering of democracy in other Arab and middle eastern countries can take hold. We should be encouraging democratic movements in those countries. Indeed, a dialogue between Iraq and emergent democracies in other middle eastern countries is key to the success of the process of democratisation in Iraq.

Thirdly, people tend to ask whether democracy can flourish at the point of a gun. As the writer Michael Ignatieff has pointed out, we should now be asking whether democracy can be stopped at the point of a gun. The international community should respond by saying no, it will not allow the mandate of the Iraqi people to be stopped at the point of a gun. No matter how difficult the security situation, we must insist that this is an indigenous democratic process which the international community—no matter what its views on the war—should now get behind and support.

Fourthly, we must support the role of women. Women are everywhere crucial to the democratic process. It was heartening to see so many women candidates standing for the assembly in Iraq. There is a flowering of women's groups in civil society, as there is a flowering of civil society generally in Iraq despite the horribly oppressive circumstances of the security situation. We should support these trends.