DEMOCRACY FROM THE TOP DOWN:

There Is Hope (THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, October 27, 2002, NY Times)

It's true that Bahrain's young king has been planning this transition to a constitutional monarchy for several years, as part of a move to spur economic growth and overcome Bahrain's legacy of Sunni-Shiite tension. He prepared the way by releasing all political prisoners, inviting exiles home, loosening reins on the press and repealing laws permitting arbitrary arrests. Nevertheless, this election is about something larger than Bahrain. It is about how the Arab world confronts the forces that produced 9/11 - and all of Bahrain's neighbors, like Saudi Arabia, are watching. [...]

The Bush team needs to pay attention to the Bahrain experiment, because it is a mini-version of what nation-building in Iraq would require. Like Iraq, Bahrain is a country with a Shiite majority, which has been economically deprived, and a Sunni Muslim minority, which has always controlled the levers of power. Historically in this part of the world, democracy never worked because of the feeling that if your tribe or religious community was not in power, it would lose everything - so no rotation in power could be tolerated.

By electing one house of parliament and appointing another, the Bahraini king is taking the first tentative steps to both share decision-making and nurture a political culture in which the country will not be able to move forward without the new lawmakers' building coalitions across ethnic lines. The same would be needed in Iraq, only on a much larger scale.

The West has a fairly spotty record as far as maintaining consistent support for such experiments--where autocrats devolve power downwards. Jimmy Carter, our recent Nobel Laureate, after all undercut just such an experiment in Iran. And while Franco's Spain, Pinochet's Chile, and Attaturk's Turkey all offer textbook examples of how authoritarian regimes can lay the necessary groundwork for democratic transition, we've had a tendency to be tougher on such leaders and their countries than we have on our true enemies. It's a hopeful sign that Mr. Friedman, who is kind of the unofficial Secretary of State for the establishment, seems supportive of at least this one model of gradual transition. Posted by Orrin Judd at October 27, 2002 6:56 AM