Democracy and the Arab Spring: Rousseau, Marx, and the Middle East

Introduction: The Arab Spring and Its Historical Analogies

There has recently been a wave of democratic uprisings sweeping across the Middle East. Starting in Tunisia, the call for democratic reforms spread through Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan, Syria, Iran, and many other nations. Many have likened these uprisings to the social unrest of 1848, which gave rise to the Communist Revolution of 1917, but they do so incorrectly. While the popular uprisings that continue to inflame the Middle East may share some causes with those of 1848 — rising food prices and high unemployment — the current unrest lacks the ideological component that defined the earlier period. The protesters do not want to destroy their governments; they want to reform them.

In this way, the uprisings of 2011 are more akin to the establishment of a Rousseau-inspired representative republic. The people were demanding not a complete social restructuring, but a representative form of government that worked as it was designed to work — for the benefit of the people, not a single leader.

Rousseau's Social Contract and Representative Democracy

Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote The Social Contract in 1762, over a century after Locke and Hobbes first presented the idea that a sovereign and his people formed a contract defining certain rights and responsibilities to each other. While Hobbes and Locke were attempting to define the relationship between a king and the people, Rousseau took the idea of a social contract into a kingless realm. Rousseau's concept of the social contract involved individuals uniting together by mutual consent and agreeing to certain rules and duties each owed to the others, in order to achieve mutual protection.

Rousseau was an early proponent of the social contract, and his ideas are often criticized as too abstract or theoretical and not applicable in the real world. Critics have demonstrated that democracy in practice is often a vague concept used by those in power to enforce their will on the masses (Price 2007). Rousseau's idea of democracy demands a certain amount of selflessness on the part of individuals — they must be willing not only to sacrifice certain freedoms but also to behave in a way considered "moral" by the rest of the community. There is an inherent conflict of interest in Rousseau's arguments, as each "man" struggles against his personal interests to become a "citizen" (Cullen 2007). Rousseau himself admitted some of these contradictions when he stated that there had never been a "real democracy" in the strict sense; only forms of democracy (Rousseau 58).

However, Rousseau promoted a "republican" form of democracy in which representatives would be elected by the people, something he stated was "the method more natural to democracy" (Rousseau 95). For this representative form of democracy to function, those elected to office must always keep the interests of the public at large foremost and avoid allowing personal interests to interfere. Anyone who has observed modern politics knows that this is the central problem currently faced by the citizens of any representative government: representatives either put their own interests first, or they prioritize the interests of special interest groups. Politicians then often use rhetoric and political maneuvering to reframe actions inspired by personal gain as designs for the general good.

Marx, Engels, and Democracy as a Tool of Power

Marx and Engels, authors of The Communist Manifesto, viewed the totality of the world in terms of class struggle, and democracy was, in their view, simply a political tool by which one class imposed its will on another. For Marx and Engels, democracy was simultaneously a means of oppression and a key to freedom. The bourgeois capitalists used the tool of democracy to maintain their control over the people. However, Marx and Hegel's idea of communism was essentially a fully democratic society dominated by the proletariat. The Communist Manifesto stated that "the first step in the workers' revolution is the raising of the proletariat to the ruling class, prevailing in democracy" (Marx 81). In other words, when the workers took control of society, they would impose a democracy that would "wrest all capital gradually from the bourgeoisie, [and] centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state…" (Marx 81).

The 1848 Revolutions vs. the 2011 Uprisings

In 1848, a wave of social unrest spread across Europe as inflation and unemployment rose to levels unacceptable to the average person. Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto at this time, although it remained unpublished until 1915. In 1917, the Russian people rose up against their rulers and created a socialist republic along the lines of Marxist theory. Many analysts have drawn analogies between the 1848 social unrest — which gave rise to the communist revolution of 1917 — and the recent social unrest that has spread across the Middle East.

However, Jack Goldstone, in his article "Understanding the Revolutions of 2011," correctly pointed out that while the 1848 uprisings shared similar surface causes with those of 2011, such as rising food prices and high unemployment, the earlier period contained an ideological component that is absent in the 2011 uprisings. The 2011 uprisings in the Middle East were directed at what Goldstone referred to as "sultanic dictatorships," which are not rooted in ideology the way 19th-century European political culture was (Goldstone 2011). Sultanic dictators are described as possessing no ideology other than "maintaining their personal authority" (Goldstone 2011). While they may maintain the façade of democratic institutions, they circumvent these institutions by placing loyal supporters in key positions.

These types of dictators maintain their power by accumulating great wealth at the expense of their people, and they use this wealth to purchase loyalty through a system of patronage (Goldstone 2011). The sultanic dictator places himself at the center of a vast and highly compartmentalized bureaucracy in which all resources are dispensed from the center and contact between different departments is controlled by the center. In this way, the dictator makes himself indispensable to the nation's future, undermining any attempt at change or succession. All of this is held together by an underlying system of violence and fear generated by the presence of spies, informants, and security police.

Conclusion

It is clear that the Iranian government has not lived up to its obligations according to Rousseau's social contract, but, unlike Egypt, Iran is not a sultanic dictatorship — it is a state based upon a strict religious ideology. And while the Iranian people may have rejected this religious-based ideology, they have made clear that they demand a more democratic and capitalistic state. The contrasting outcomes in Egypt and Iran illustrate that the success or failure of democratic uprisings in the Middle East depends less on shared economic grievances and more on the nature of the regime being challenged — specifically, whether it is held together by personal patronage or by a deeply rooted ideological framework resistant to popular pressure.

Works Cited

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Marx, Karl, Friedrich Engels, and L.M. Findlay. The Communist Manifesto. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2004. Print.

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