AWKWARD, BUT PROGRESS:

Kuwaiti Complexities: Is democracy possible in the Arab Middle East? Peter Berkowitz travels to Kuwait to find out. (Peter Berkowitz, Fall 2004, Hoover Digest)

On July 5, Kuwait held elections for its national parliament, and many Western observers didn’t like what they saw. “Women Protest Being Shut Out of Elections” reported the July 6 headline in the Los Angeles Times. “Islamic Traditionalists Sweep Liberals in Kuwaiti Election,” proclaimed the July 7 headline in the New York Times.

In fact, women are prohibited by law from voting in Kuwait, the liberals lost six of their nine seats, and the Islamists—proponents of establishing the sharia, or Muslim religious law, as the law of the land—enjoyed a small gain, giving them about a third of the seats in the 50-member National Assembly. So viewing the conduct and the results of Kuwait’s election as a major setback for democratization is seductive. But the story is far more complicated.

For starters, the remainder of the seats in parliament, or more than 50 percent of the total, went to candidates loyal to the government. And this is not bad news at all. The government, which is headed by the emir, is composed of ministers appointed by him, many of whom are drawn from the extended royal family and educated in the West. In the context of Kuwait, with its mix of old and new, city and desert, religious and secular, the royal family is a liberalizing institution.

Indeed, there is plenty of good news to report concerning the forces of democracy in Kuwait. And when the elections are placed in perspective, Kuwait’s 40-year-old constitutional monarchy can be seen as slowly, awkwardly making progress in fulfilling the promise of the preamble of its constitution, providing its citizens with “more political freedom, equality, and social justice.”