Abstract
The Arab Spring of 2011 came as a great relief—not only for most Arabs, but also for political scientists working on the Arab world. The revolt challenged the impression of an “Arab exceptionalism” that had started to haunt the discipline after the “Third Wave of Democracy” swept through Eastern Europe but stopped short of the Arab orbit. At first, during the 1990s, political scientists were optimistically searching for elements of a civil society that could serve as a basis for liberalization and democratization.2 However, disillusionment followed in the early 2000s. The ruling regimes turned out to be more stable and durable than many had thought.3
Liberalism, either as a conception of political liberty or as a doctrine about economic policy, may have coincided with the rise of democracy. But it has never been immutably or unambiguously linked to its practice.1
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Notes
Philippe C. Schmitter, “Democracy’s Future: More Liberal, Preliberal, or Postliberal?” Journal of Democracy 6/1 (1995), p. 16.
Augustus Richard Norton (ed.), Civil Society in the Middle East, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1995–1996).
Eberhard Kienle, A Grand Delusion: Democracy and Economic Reform in Egypt (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2001);
Holger Albrecht and Oliver Schlumberger, “‘Waiting for Godot’: Regime Change without Democratization in the Middle East,” International Political Science Review 25/4 (2004), pp. 371–392.
Holger Albrecht and Rolf Frankenberger, “Autoritarismus Reloaded: Konzeptionelle Anmerkungen zur Vergleichenden Analyse Politischer Systeme,” in Autoritarismus Reloaded: Neuere Ansätze und Erkenntnisse der Autokratieforschung, ed. Holger Albrecht and Rolf Frankenberger (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2010), pp. 37–60;
Oliver Schlumberger, “Opening Old Bottles in Search of New Wine: On Nondemocratic Legitimacy in the Middle East,” Middle East Critique 19/3 (2010), pp. 233–250.
Jacob L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker &; Warburg, 1955).
Cf. Steven A. Cook, The Struggle for Egypt: From Nasser to Tahrir Square (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Ernst Nolte, Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche: die Action française, der italienische Faschismus, der Nationalsozialismus (Munich: R. Piper, 1963), trans. Leila Vennewitz as Three Faces of Fascism; Action Française, Italian Fascism, National Socialism (London: Weidenfeld &; Nicolson, 1965).
Daniel Brumberg, “The Trap of Liberalized Autocracy,” Journal of Democracy 13/4 (2002), pp. 57–68.
Jürgen Gebhardt, “Das Demokratische Prinzip und die moderne politische Ordnung,” in Demokratie. Chancen und Herausforderungen im 21. Jahrhundert, ed. André Kaiser and Wolfgang Leidhold (Hamburg: Lit Verlag, 2005), pp. 19–40.
Malcolm H. Kerr, The Arab Cold War, 1958–1964: A Study of Ideology in Politics (London: Oxford University Press, 1965).
Roger Owen, The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
Revolt: Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, and Libya. Civil War: Algeria, Libya, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Sudan. See Christoph Schumann, “Das Revolutionsjahr 2011 und die Krise des arabischen Republikanismus,” in Analysen nationaler und supranationaler Politik: Festschrift für Roland Sturm, ed. Heinrich Pehle and Klaus Brummer (Stuttgart: Verlag Barbara Budrich, 2013), pp. 315–326.
Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968);
Michael C. Hudson, Arab Politics: The Search for Legitimacy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977).
Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2009), pp. 846–848.
For more theoretical details see Christoph Schumann, “Die politische Artikulation der Gesellschaft: Politische Ordnung und Revolte in der Arabischen Welt,” in Was hält Gesellschaften zusammen? Über den gefährdeten Umgang mit Pluralität, ed. Michael Reder, Hanna Pfeifer, and Mara-Daria Cojocaru (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2013), pp. 67–87.
Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans. Franz Rosenthal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958), vol. 1, p. 262.
Cf. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, trans. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).
Hanspeter Mattes, “Formal and Informal Authority in Libya since 1969,” in Libya since 1969: Qadhafi’s Revolution Revisited, ed. Dirk Vandewalle (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), pp. 55–81.
In using the word “break,” I refer conceptually to Ernesto Laclau’s notion of “emancipation.” See Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996).
Albert H. Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939. 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983 [1962]).
Nathan J. Brown, The Rule of Law in the Arab World: Courts in Egypt and the Gulf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 61–92.
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© 2015 Meir Hatina and Christoph Schumann
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Schumann, C. (2015). Liberalization and Democratization in the Arab World: A Conceptual Critique. In: Hatina, M., Schumann, C. (eds) Arab Liberal Thought after 1967. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137551412_3
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