"This is my way: I invite unto Allah with sure knowledge, I and whoever follows me."

It was with this these words, quoted from the Qur'an, that King Mohammed VI ended his speech on 17 June, urging Morocco's people to vote for his new constitution project in a referendum to be held on 1 July.

It takes quite a nerve to identify oneself with the prophet Muhammad and compare a political reform to Allah's path. It's also a paradox, coming from a monarch who is supposedly on the point of renouncing his own divine right.

According to Morocco's new draft constitution, the king won't be "sacred" any more. Instead, the people will owe him respect and tawqeer – an Arabic term which means something between reverence and adoration. So how much of a paradigm change is it really?

Although the US says it is "encouraged" by the draft constitution, this is not particularly good news for the monarchy. This mild praise from a rather unknown state department spokesperson during a routine press briefing demonstrates, if anything, the cautious retreat of US diplomacy.

It's a far cry from Hillary Clinton's heartfelt declaration on 30 March, commending Morocco for "achieving democratic change [in a way that is] a model for other countries in the region". At the time it was useful to highlight the difference between a ruthless US-bombed colonel slaughtering his people, and a nice US-backed monarch reacting to street protests by promising "comprehensive constitutional reform". But since then, the situation has changed.

After taking down two dictators, Arab revolutionary fever was tempered by war in Libya and the bloody repression in Syria. Inside Morocco, the 20 February youth-led, pro-democracy movement has petered out. Because it couldn't produce leaders, centralised structures and a focused, unifying claim, it lost momentum and finally proved harmless to the monarchy.

Since the king had already promised a new constitution, he had to deliver it. But with the pressure gone, the final draft is merely a democratic window dressing: each time a clause appears to bring genuine progress, another one seriously tones it down – or revokes it altogether.

To comply with democratic norms, the new constitution was supposed to curtail the king's prerogatives and to empower the elected prime minister, but the only real change is a semantic one. The prime minister will henceforth be called "chief of government" (CoG), though he's still bound hand and foot to the royal palace, not even controlling his own cabinet.

The king will still appoint and dismiss the ministers at will. At best, the CoG can "propose" ministers for nomination or "require" that they be dismissed, but the king is not bound to accept. On the other hand, the king can reshuffle government whenever he wants. He will now have to "consult" the CoG – but again, he's not bound to take his opinion into account.

To cut a long story short, the Moroccan king's absolutism, just like his "sacredness", has not gone. As for separation of powers, the king said it has been "bolstered" – and yet he still presides over the high council of magistrates, thus tightly controlling the courts of justice.

Optimists may see officialisation of the Tamazight (Berber) language as recognition of Morocco's ethnic and cultural diversity, but beyond the statement of intent, legislation is yet to be crafted. Morocco's regime has a history of undelivered promises on that matter. King Mohammed had already committed to implement Tamazight in the schools' curriculum in 2001, though little progress has been made since then.

In Morocco, practice often contradicts theory

In Morocco, practice often contradicts theory. For instance, the palace-promoted new supreme law "forbids" (again, in the absence of specific legislation) conflicts of interest by politicians and the abuse of dominant positions. Yet one can doubt the sincerity of this provision, knowing that the king's private holding company outrageously dominates Morocco's economy, to the extent that its global revenue equals 8% of GDP.

The main reason for viewing this new constitution with suspicion is that it is being validated at a breakneck pace. Political parties were given less than 24 hours to review the draft before the king threw it to referendum.

The 20 February activists immediately organised nationwide protests against what they saw as an "imposed" constitution. Unlike what happened in May, demonstrations were not brutally broken up by police but instead the authorities hired swarms of thugs who thronged the streets, looking for a fight with pro-democracy protesters and bawling that Mohammed VI is their "only king". The mood is turning ugly.

Meanwhile, the referendum campaign is obviously crooked. The state-controlled mosques are mobilised to preach the constitution's virtues – which is evidently unfair. As for public TV, the Election Watch Collective had asked, alongside Mamfakinch website (the online extension of the 20 February movement) for a fair and balanced airtime-sharing between "yes" and "no" arguments. But the government turned a deaf ear. A few days before the king's speech, an administrative decree was issued on the sly, splitting airtime only between officially recognised, mainly palace-subservient political parties and trade unions.

Because of the ongoing mass propaganda, there is no doubt that the outcome of the referendum will be "yes". But the government also needs to persuade large numbers of Moroccans to vote. If the participation rate is below 80%, the monarchy's motto of "unanimous popular support" will become harder to assert.

This is why the local authorities are preparing to transport armies of citizens to polling stations, even though it's illegal. For its part, the 20 February movement is calling for a boycott and preparing to video all suspicious "troop movements" during referendum day. A website has been created specially for that purpose with a new battle cry: Mamsawtinch, ou mamfakinch! – "We won't vote, and we won't give up!"

As a new era of democratic change swept across the Arab world this year, the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy (ARD) at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law hosted two conferences to examine the Arab Spring. On April 29, twelve internationally renowned Egypt scholars convened at Stanford to probe the root causes of the Egyptian revolution and debate the challenges facing the transition period. The second annual ARD conference held May 12-13, brought Arab activists and academics from the region together to provide a comparative perspective on political activism.

Participants in the Democratic Transition in Egypt conference were hesitant to label the popular uprising in Egypt a revolution in light of the fragile transition period. According to Professor Jason Brownlee of the University of Texas at Austin, "repressive agencies of the old order still exist in Egypt: the military intelligence, state security, and the general intelligence service."

Scholars unanimously agreed that nascent opposition parties face the enormous challenge of organizing during a hurried transition period and within a competitive party and campaign structure. Professor Samer Soliman from the American University in Cairo emphasized this point, "the party law is designed to bias the old guard and a legacy of suspicion towards political parties leaves youth hesitant to join or form political parties."

Significant discussion was dedicated to the role of the Muslim Brotherhood who many argued is the only well-organized opposition party in Egypt capable of commanding a majority in the upcoming parliamentary elections. Scholars were left wondering how to translate the success of this popular movement into a constitutionally-based political system representative of all societal interests.

The From Political Activism to Democratic Change in the Arab World conference featured eight activists from Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Morocco, Bahrain, and Yemen--in addition to a live presentation from Ramallah by Mustafa Barghouthi --who were joined by leading scholars to provide a grassroots perspective and original voice to the uprisings.

Panels presented country-based case studies highlighting the key challenges activists face in diverse Arab states and societies to evaluate the potential of democratic transition to take root. While variation exists in each country, it was clear that activists faced the same obstacles in pursuit of their goals and clearly benefitted from this shared forum at Stanford.

A new generation of young political activists connected through social networks learned through the revolutionary experiences of their Facebook friends. Stephane Lacoix, Sciences Po

Participants emphasized the contagion that spread protests across the region, beginning in Tunisia. Stéphane Lacoix of Sciences Po illustrated this point, "a new generation of young political activists connected through social networks learned through the revolutionary experiences of their Facebook friends."

Looking forward, participants agreed that these revolutions are far from complete and challenging work lies ahead. According to CDDRL director Larry Diamond, "democratic change is not produced by grassroots protest and activism alone but requires organization, strategy, and hierarchical structure.”

In each Arab country, tribal, sectarian, political, and religious division threaten the stability of the fragile transition period. In the near term, participants stressed the importance of delaying elections to give time for political parties, institutions, and leadership to develop so the status quo does not reassert itself.

The role of external actors-- from the US to the GCC--was cited as exerting influence on the internal politics in each country. Activists collectively commented on the inconsistency of US foreign policy in the region, which has placed strategic interests above ideological ones, not actively pressing for change in Bahrain, Jordan, and Syria in the same way as in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya.

A tone of cautious optimism imbued both conferences as scholars and activists alike were hesitant to declare the Arab Spring a success, stressing that time will determine the ultimate outcome. Both conferences allowed the ARD Program to make a substantial contribution to the body of scholarly research on this topic as conference papers will be published in an edited volume.

 

In a new piece published on the Foreign Affairs website, CDDRL Director Larry Diamond argues that the Arab Spring is witnessing a thawing and freezing across the region as anti-democratic forces threaten nascent democratic transformations.

The decades-long political winter in the Arab world seemed to be thawing early this year as mass protests toppled Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in January and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in February. It appeared as though one rotten Arab dictatorship after another might fall during the so-called Arab Spring. Analogies were quickly conjured to 1989, when another frozen political space, Eastern Europe, saw one dictatorship after another collapse. A similar wave of democratic transitions in the Arab world was finally possible to imagine, particularly given the extent to which previous transformations had been regional in scope: Portugal, Spain, and Greece all democratized in the mid-1970s; much of Latin America did shortly thereafter; Korea and Taiwan quickly followed the Philippines’ political opening in 1986; and then a wave of change in sub-Saharan Africa began in 1990. All of those were part of the transformative “third wave” of global democratization. In March, many scholars and activists reasonably imagined that a “fourth wave” had begun. 

Two months later, however, a late spring freeze has seemingly hit some areas of the region. And it could be a protracted one. Certainly, each previous regional wave of democratic change had to contend with authoritarian hard-liners, opposition divisions, and divergent national trends. But most of the Arab political openings are closing faster and more harshly than happened in other regions -- save for the former Soviet Union, where most new democratic regimes quickly drifted back toward autocracy.

If Tunisia still provides grounds for cautious optimism, the Egyptian situation is already deeply worrying. Its senior officer corps, which currently controls the government, does not want to facilitate a genuine democratic transition. It will try to prevent it by generating conditions on the ground that discredit democracy and make Egyptians (and U.S. policymakers) beg for a strong hand again. The ruling officers have turned a blind eye to mounting religious and sectarian strife (and an alarming explosion in crime). The military has spent enormous effort arresting thousands of peaceful protesters in Tahrir Square and trying them in military tribunals over the last two months. (In April, one such detainee, a blogger named Maikel Nabil, was sentenced to three years in prison for “insulting the military establishment.”) Yet it claims that it cannot rein in rising insecurity. Many Egyptians see this as part of the military’s grand design to undermine democracy before it takes hold.

The parliamentary elections slated for September are unlikely to help: New political forces have no chance of being able to build competitive party and campaign structures in time. The Muslim Brotherhood, which initially said it would only contest a third of the parliamentary seats, has now announced its intention to contest half of all seats, forming a new political party (Freedom and Justice) for the purpose. If the electoral system retains its highly majoritarian nature, it might well win a thumping majority of the seats it contests (perhaps 40 percent in all), with most of the rest going to local power brokers and former stalwarts of the Mubarak-era ruling party, the National Democratic Party.

Both theory and political experience teach that regimes with spent legitimacy do not last, and the legitimacy of the Libyan, Syrian, and Yemeni dictators is utterly depleted.

Elsewhere in the region, Bahrain’s minority Sunni monarchy opted to crush peaceful protests and arrest and torture many of those with whom it might have negotiated some future power-sharing deal. With active Iranian support and a bizarre degree of American and Israeli acceptance, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad unleashed a slow-motion massacre that could go on for weeks or even months. In Yemen, the government is paralyzed, food prices are rising, and the country is drifting. Having seen the fate of Mubarak, Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh is playing for time, but his legitimacy is irretrievably drained, and he lacks the ability to mobilize repressive force on the scale of Assad’s.

Of course, not every country in the region has been affected by the apparent freeze and some could still avoid it. Jordan and Morocco are not yet in crisis but could be soon. Both countries face the same conditions that brought down seemingly secure autocracies in Tunisia and Egypt -- mounting frustration with corruption, joblessness, social injustice, and closed political systems. Not yet facing mass protests, Jordan’s King Abdullah is in a position to lead a measured process of democratic reform from above to revise electoral laws, rein in corruption, and grant considerably more freedom. Yet there is little sign that he has the vision or political self-confidence to modernize his country in this way.

Morocco’s King Mohammed VI is still domestically revered and internationally cited as a reformer, but he is even weaker and more feckless than Abdullah. He has been unwilling to rein in the deeply venal interests that surround the monarchy, or ease the country’s extraordinary concentration of wealth and business ownership. Instead, his security forces, narrow circle of royal friends, and oligopolistic business cronies fend off demands for accountability and reform, further isolate the king, and aggravate the political storm that is gathering beneath a comparatively calm surface.

For now, both monarchies are treading familiar water: launching committees to study political reform but never moving toward real political change. This game cannot last forever. As a former Jordanian official recently commented to me privately: “Everyone is expecting serious changes to the way the king rules the country, and if these changes don’t happen, the system will be in trouble. The king can’t keep talking about reform without implementing it.”

Scholars of the Arab world had been arguing for years that the region’s various repressive regimes (not least Saudi Arabia’s Al Saud dynasty, which keeps several thousand princes on the take) would either pursue democratic reform, or rot internally until they were overthrown. Ultimately, the options remain the same for the regimes that have avoided revolution this year. Those who have reasserted authoritarianism will find only temporary reprieve. Both theory and political experience teach that regimes with spent legitimacy do not last, and the legitimacy of the Libyan, Syrian, and Yemeni dictators is utterly depleted. They will surely be overthrown if not now, then in coming years. The Jordanian and Moroccan monarchies, however, could still survive if they spend what remains of their political legitimacy on democratic reform. In other words, even if the Arab spring comes in fits and starts, it will eventually bring fundamental political change. But whether democracy is the end result depends in part on how events unfold and how regimes and international actors engage the opposition forces.

Short of the wars that have periodically broken out in the region, the United States has never faced a more urgent set of opportunities and challenges there: real prospects for democratic development exist alongside the very real risks of Islamist ascension, political chaos, and humanitarian disaster. Countries across the Arab world differ widely in their political structures and social conditions, and the United States cannot pursue a one-size-fits-all strategy. But there are a few basic principles that it should apply everywhere. As it has generally and in a number of specific cases, the Obama administration must explicitly and consistently denounce all violent repression of peaceful protest. And it should enhance the credibility of those words by tying them to consequences. For example, in Libya, the United States identified and froze the overseas assets of top officials who were responsible for brutality. Additionally, it imposed travel bans on them and their family members, and asked Europe to do the same. In the past few days, the Obama administration has also moved to freeze the personal assets of Assad and other top Syrian officials. In extreme cases -- Libya is one, and Syria has now become another -- the United States can press the United Nations Security Council to refer individuals to the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

When Arab governments turn arms against peaceful protesters, the United States and Europe should stop supplying them with weapons. Western countries have been selling (or giving) regimes, such as Saleh’s in Yemen, the tools of repression, including tear gas, ammunition, sniper rifles, close-assault weapons, and rockets and tanks. Although Saleh may have been a valuable asset in the fight against terrorism at one time, he has become a liability. By ending such trade, the United States would firmly send the message to the leaders of Bahrain (another recipient) and Yemen that if they are going to violently assault and arbitrarily arrest peaceful demonstrators for democracy, they are at least not going to continue doing so with U.S. guns.

For now, there is an urgent need for mediation to break the impasse between rulers and their oppositions and to find ways to ease the region’s remaining dictators out of power. Recognizing the need for an active UN role during the Arab uprising, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has begun to dispatch experienced and talented UN staff to engage in dialogue with different groups in Yemen and elsewhere. These diplomats can help develop possible political accommodations with the protesters. The United States should encourage the UN to try to mediate these conflicts, reconcile deeply divided forces within political oppositions, and help governments pave the way for credible elections. Because it is more neutral, the UN is the international actor best suited to mediate as well as convene experts on institutional design and help supply technical support for drafting constitutions.

American diplomats will have their own role to play: They can channel financial and programmatic support and provide another venue for different actors to meet and discuss differences. They should also speak out for human rights, civil society, and the democratic process. Such expressions of moral and practical support have made a significant difference in transitional situations in other countries, such as Chile, the Philippines, Poland, and South Africa. The Arab world has its own distinct sensitivities, but the ongoing uprisings present an unusual opportunity for U.S. ambassadors to join with representatives of other democracies to lean on Arab autocrats and aid Arab democrats.

The United States should help Arab democrats get the training and financial assistance they need to survive while urging them to cooperate with one another. This does not just mean more grants to civil society organizations. There is, of course, a need for such funding, but too much U.S. money thrown at these groups will discredit them as “American pawns” or promote corruption. Aid should be pooled among multiple donors, provide core (rather than project-related) funding for organizations with a proven track record of advancing democratic change, and must be carefully monitored to ensure that it is being used effectively.Western countries have been selling (or giving) regimes, such as Saleh’s in Yemen, the tools of repression, including tear gas, ammunition, sniper rifles, close-assault weapons, and rockets and tanks.

Finally, given its enormous demographic weight and political influence in the Arab world, as Egypt goes, so will go the region. Engaging Egypt will prove vital to any larger strategy of fostering democratic change in the Arab world. Beyond aid and vigilant monitoring of the political process, the United States must deliver a clear message to the Egyptian military that it will not support a deliberate sabotage of the democratic process, and that a reversion to authoritarianism would have serious consequences for the U.S.-Egyptian bilateral relationship, including for future flows of U.S. military aid. The United States cannot allow the Egyptian military to play the cynical double game that the Pakistani military has, or Egypt may become another Pakistan in two senses: an overbearing military may hide behind the façade of democracy to run the country, and the military may consort with our friends one day and our enemies -- radical Islamists within Egypt and Hamas outside it -- the next, to show it cannot be taken for granted.

This period of change in the Arab world will not be short or neatly circumscribed. Not a continuous thaw or freeze, the coming years will see cycles -- ups and downs in a protracted struggle to define the future political shape of the Arab world. The stakes for the United States are enormous. And the need for steady principles, clear understanding, and long-term strategic thinking has never been more pressing.

On April 13, Kenneth Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch discussed Obama's human rights record to an audience of over 125 students and faculty, marking Roth's first speaking engagement at Stanford University. This event was hosted by the Program on Human Rights at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, and was the final installment of the Sanela Diana Jenkins International Human Rights Speaker Series.

David Abernethy, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Stanford University, introduced Roth and provided a detailed overview of his professional background and the stunning growth and impact Human Rights Watch has witnessed since Roth took the helm in 1993. Under Roth's leadership and strategic direction, Human Rights Watch tripled in size, expanding its reach to over 90 countries worldwide. 

"Human rights Watch does a remarkable job in combining carefully documented facts with advocacy for a better world, including naming and shaming egregious violators of universally accepted norms," said Abernethy, in emphasizing the courageous work Human Rights Watch pioneers on a global scale.

Abernethy noted that Human Rights Watch is a "is a north, south, east, west NGO, directed towards all points on the compass and operating from all those points, as a truly globalized institution."

At the outset of his comments, Roth framed President Obama's human rights record as a desire to abandon the principles of the George W. Bush administration and embrace an approach that is in stark contrast to the Bush years of unilateral diplomacy.

Obama has evolved -- it has been a journey from being not George Bush to being himself.
- Kenneth Roth

Since assuming office in 2009, Roth noted, "Obama has evolved -- it has been a journey from being not George Bush to being himself."

Roth highlighted the differences between both presidents, emphasizing the fact that, "most significantly in terms of contrast, Obama was going to lead by example," Roth said. "He was going to have a domestic policy that he and we could be proud of and that would persuade others just by virtue of what the US did itself."

In reflecting on the evolution of Obama's approach to human rights since assuming office, Roth saw Obama moving from rhetoric to practice. Roth cited a number of examples where the Obama administration delivered substantially on their commitment to defend these principles and others where they had fallen short.

In terms of multilateral promotion of human rights, Roth discussed how the Obama administration supported the efforts of the United Nation's Human Rights Council by successfully lobbying for the U.S. to become a member and helping to revive the Council into a more effective body in holding governments accountable. 

According to Roth, "the Council has introduced tough resolutions on Libya, the Ivory Coast, Iran, and revived this tool and the ability of a group of a government's peers to condemn it."

Roth also mentioned how the Obama administration has been a key player in supporting the International Criminal Court (ICC) by voting in favor of referring Libya to the ICC, arresting the leader of the Lord's Resistance Army in the Congo, and exerting pressure on Sudan to surrender President Bashir.

These actions, Roth maintained, "strengthened a key international institution designed to stop the impunity that lies behind so many of the world's worst atrocities."

While, Roth thought Obama had certainly struck a much more modest tone on the world stage than Bush, he did stress that Obama had retained the option of humanitarian intervention and is not afraid to use military force when necessary, highlighting the recent examples of Libya and Cote d'Ivoire.

Roth believed that Obama's biggest shift was towards China's human rights record. In 2009, Obama was hesitant to exert pressure on the Chinese concerning their human rights practice, which proved to be an ineffective strategy in advancing US interests. Since the January 2011 China summit in Washington, Obama dramatically reasserted himself, calling on China to expand human rights protections and realized "human rights is not a dangerous topic."

In surveying the Obama administration's policy in the Middle East and North Africa, Roth judged it as "inconsistent" toward the recent pro-democracy movements where strategic concerns have sometimes outweighed more ideological ones.

In Egypt, Roth believed the administration took too long to take an active stand against Mubarak in support of the protesters, but eventually came around to prove they were "better late than never."

Similarly in Yemen, Roth described the administration as hesitant to initially oppose President Saleh because it jeopardized their relationship with an important counter-terrorism ally.

In Bahrain, Roth explained that the administration refuses to take an active stance and continues to discuss the possibility of reconciliation in light of the flagrant human rights abuses committed at the hands of the Bahraini regime. Roth claimed that Obama is acting in the best interest of the US's Saudi partners who are "terrified" at the prospect of a Shiite revolution in Bahrain. 

Roth characterized the administration's position towards Israel as a "predictable disappointment," in that the US vetoed a UN Security Council resolution classifying the settlements as a violation of international law and rejected the Goldstone report, refusing to recognize the positive aspects of this comprehensive investigation of the war in Gaza.

On domestic policies, Roth commended Obama's immediate effort to end the Bush policy of torture and shutter the CIA secret detention facilities, but was disappointed that Obama refused to prosecute the Bush torturers and investigate where the torture took place. 

Roth described the issue of long-term detention without trial as a work in progress, believing that Obama's hesitation to release a core group of 48 prisoners in Guantanamo stemmed from his concerns about potential future acts of terrorism. 

In closing, Roth was optimistic about Obama's evolution over the past two years, noting the great strides he has taken to actively implement his values in US human rights policy. However, he was cautious in highlighting the tensions that exist between US interests and human rights, claiming that Obama still has a ways to go in striking a better balance between the two.

This event was a rare opportunity for the CDDRL community to hear from a leading investigator and critic of human rights abuses, committed to reducing human suffering on a global scale.

In a piece for the blog Jadaliyya, Arab Reform and Democracy Program Manager Lina Khatib at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, makes the argument that Arab leaders have reacted in a similar fashion to the growing demands for reform at home.

The extraordinary events that have been gripping the Arab world since December 2010 have demonstrated the steadfastness of Arab citizens across the region in the face of despotic regimes. But they have also demonstrated that Arab despots indeed engage in authoritarian learning. From Tunisia to Egypt to Bahrain to Libya to Morocco to Yemen to Syria (and the list goes on), Arab rulers have followed a peculiarly familiar pattern in the way they have-and are-responding to the protests calling for regime change.

1. Ignore the protests

One of the first reactions to budding protests is simply to ignore them and their potential. Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia completely dismissed the protests when they first started in December 2010, and so did King Mohammed VI of Morocco. Muammar Qaddafi of Libya went even further in the early days by actually joining the protests himself.

2. Offer cosmetic concessions

As the pace of protests picks up, we have seen Arab rulers offer their people a range of largely cosmetic concessions. The rulers of Bahrain, Oman, and Saudi Arabia have responded by throwing money at their people, while those of Jordan and Yemen have dissolved their governments, and the latter ruler, like Ben Ali and Mubarak before him, promised not to run for reelection.

3. Engage in denial

"Egypt is not Tunisia". "Syria is not Egypt". "Yemen is not Tunisia or Egypt". And the statements by Arab rulers go on in trying to convince themselves and their people that the regime change that happened "over there" will not happen "over here". The denial continues even after the leaders start losing those they had thought were on their side, from ambassadors to ministers to army generals, and that's not to mention those international "friends" who call upon them to step down.

4. Quell the protests by force

All Arab rulers who have witnessed protests calling for democracy have responded to those protests through violence. Some, like in Egypt, Yemen, and Jordan, pretended that the violence was "spontaneous" and not orchestrated by the government as they relied on plain-clothed thugs to do the dirty work. While others, like in Libya and Bahrain, sent their (mercenary) armies to quell the protests by force.

5. Warn of civil war

Both Qaddafi and Ali Abdallah Saleh of Yemen have warned that civil war may break out if their regimes crumble. The tragedy is that their warnings have an element of truth, but that's mainly because the civil wars they have warned of are largely to do with that fact that the wars would be catalyzed by them and their (private) armies and allies as they strive to regain power or as a consequence of their "divide and rule" strategies.

6. Blame the media

It would have been amusing had it not been so tragic that so many Arab rulers have blamed the protests on the media, from the social media to satellite television. Qaddafi called the foreign media "dogs", while the Emir of Bahrain put the blame on television-the Iranian Arabic-language channel Al-Alam and Hizbullah's channel Al-Manar-and in Egypt the blame was directed at Al-Jazeera. Egypt, Syria, and Libya have also engaged in various degrees of internet shut down. It is as if the social, economic, and political problems the people are protesting against would disappear if only the media would stop talking about them.

7. Speak about foreign plots

The Emir of Bahrain proudly spoke of successfully foiling a "foreign plot" in an attempt at justifying the violent suppression of protests. So did Mubarak back in February and Qaddafi has also blamed "outsiders" for the unrest. That's because, of course, no indigenous problems ever existed in those countries. Ever.

8. Or al-Qaeda

Ali Abdallah Saleh and Qaddafi have both invoked al-Qaeda to instill fear in the protesters and the international community. Saleh presented himself as the only alternative to an al-Qaeda takeover of Yemen while Qaddafi went even further by warning that he would collaborate with al-Qaeda if all else fails.

What the above demonstrates vividly is two things:

1. Arab rulers seem to belong to the same authoritarian club.

Similar actions, reactions, and strategies can be seen across the board. The stunning irony is that the Arab leaders engaging in this authoritarian learning seem to be doing this blindly, without seeing that those strategies, after having been repeated time and time again elsewhere, are no longer fooling anybody, and while completely ignoring the fate of Ben Ali and Mubarak and the possibility of it happening to them. That's the power of denial (and ego). Arab rulers are showing that they are, par excellence, detached not only from the societies they rule but also from realities on the ground altogether as they refuse to acknowledge that the rules of the game have changed.

This is to do with a number of factors: First, those leaders have, for the most part, ruled over several decades without seeing their authority challenged. So they are likely to underestimate the degree of dissent against them, and overestimate the likelihood of their survival in power. Second, non-democratic leaders normally rely on two ruling mechanisms, "the sword and the gold" (in the words of Yemeni scholar Abdul Nasser Al Muwaddah in a recent paper). They either try to co-opt dissidents by offering them monetary gains (and that is why having complete authority over public funds is so important), or quell them by brute force.

Third, neoclassical realism says that state policy is often affected by the success or failure of outcomes of decisions made earlier by leaders. When a regime like Syria's succeeds in quelling dissidents by wiping more than 20,000 citizens off the map in a past decade, its decisions in the present tense are likely to be influenced by this perceived success. Fourth, the same school of international relations says that leader decisions tend to become more and more ambitious in scope when there are no internal or external checks on their authority. As most Arab despots have had no viable internal opposition movements and have been directly or indirectly supported by the West, they have largely been able to do what they want.

Fifth, leaders are able to invoke scare factors (like al-Qaeda) when they see themselves as being immune to those factors. Invoking al-Qaeda suggests back dealing done by Saleh and Qaddafi with the group, which is not surprising considering both leaders' legacies in ruling their countries. Sixth, the easiest way to absolve oneself from responsibility is to put the blame on "others". The Lebanese did that for years when they called their civil war "the war of others on our land". This kind of conspiracy theory can work because sometimes, when a named foreign "other" is persistently pointed at, they may well become interested in being involved after all, which ends up giving the theory credibility. Think of Iran's current stance towards what is going on in Bahrain, as demonstrated in the recent attack on the Saudi embassy in Tehran.

Finally, authoritarian learning is nothing new. Arab leaders have been engaging in similar behavior and tactics for a very long time as a mechanism of self preservation (from silencing oppositions to imposing emergency laws to controlling the media). So it would actually be unusual for them to suddenly break with tradition.

2. Arab citizens have by now become so familiar with the above pattern that they have come to expect it and even embrace it.

Here is the good news: This embrace is because the above pattern has become a proof of failure on the part of the rulers. First, Arab despots have become very predictable, which will make it easier for protesters to anticipate their actions and strategize accordingly. This is especially that Arab reformists do not operate in a vacuum. Just like the rulers learn from each other, so do the reformers, only that they are firmly tuned in to the changing realities around them. It is not just that they are communicating on Facebook, they are also learning from one another's experiences on the ground.

Second, there has been a role reversal when it comes to the fear factor. Protesters are viewing the cheap concessions offered to them by despots as proof that the despots themselves are scared, and thus are not settling for compromises and escalating their demands. They also see the despots' use of brutal force as proof of how little their own lives as citizens are valued, and consequently are no longer fearful. The more suppression the rulers apply, the more resilient the protesters become. After all, they have already gone so far, and have already sacrificed so much, and look at what happened in Tunisia and Egypt. The rules of the game have changed, and a new Arab reality is in the making.

Each president of the United States enters office thinking he will be able to define the agenda and set the course of America's relations with the rest of the world. And, almost invariably, each confronts crises that are thrust upon him-wars, revolutions, genocides, and deadly confrontations. Neither Woodrow Wilson nor FDR imagined having to plunge America into world war. Truman had to act quickly, and with little preparation, to confront the menace of Soviet expansion at war's end. JFK, for all his readiness to "bear any burden" in the struggle for freedom, did not expect his struggle to contain Soviet imperial ambitions would come so close to the brink of nuclear annihilation. Nixon was tested by a surprise war in the Middle East. Carter's presidency was consumed by the Shah's unraveling and the Iranian revolution. George H.W. Bush rose to the challenge of communism's collapse and Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. Clinton squandered the opportunity to stop a genocide in Rwanda and waited tragically too long before stopping one in Bosnia. George W. Bush mobilized the country to strike back after September 11, but, in the view of many, he put most of his chips in the wrong war.

In the eye of the historical storm, and in the absence of a challenge as immediate and overpowering as September 11, Pearl Harbor, or the Nazis' march across Europe, it is risky to identify any set of world events as game-changing. Yet that is what many analysts, including myself, believe the Arab revolutions of 2011 are. And a surprising number of specialists-including hard-eyed realists like Fareed Zakaria-have seized upon the crisis in Libya as a defining moment not just for the United States in the region but for the foreign policy presidency of Barack Obama as well.

To date, one could say that Obama has had a surprisingly good run for a foreign policy neophyte. He has revived the momentum for arms control with a new START treaty with Russia, while pressing the issue of human rights within Russia. He has managed the meteoric rise of China decently, while improving relations with India. He has not cut and run from Iraq-as most Republicans were convinced he would. And he has ramped up but at least set limits to our involvement in Afghanistan. As the Arab revolutions have gathered momentum, he has increasingly positioned the United States on the side of democratic change. His statements and actions have not gone as far as democracy promotion advocates (like myself) would have preferred, but they have overridden cautionary warnings of the foreign policy establishment in the State Department, the Pentagon, think tanks, and so on. Without Obama's artful choreography of public statements and private messages and pressures, Hosni Mubarak might still be in power today.

All of this, however, may appear in time only a prelude to the fateful choice that Obama will soon have to make-and, one fears, is already making by default in a tragically wrong way-in Libya. Why is Libya-with its six million people and its significant but still modest share of global oil exports-so important? Why must the fight against Muammar Qaddafi-a crazy and vicious dictator, but by now, in his capacity for global mischief, a largely defanged one-be our fight?

When presidents are tested by crisis, the world draws their measure, and the impressions formed can have big consequences down the road. After watching Jimmy Carter's weak and vacillating posture on Iran, the Soviets figured he'd sit on the sidelines if they invaded and swallowed Afghanistan. They misjudged, but Afghanistan and the world are still paying the price for that misperception. In the face of mixed messages and a long, cynical game of balance-of-power, Saddam too, misjudged that he could get away with swallowing up Kuwait in 1991. When the United States did not prepare for war as naked aggression swept across Asia and Europe, the Japanese thought a quick strike could disable and knock out the slumbering American giant across the Pacific. When Slobodan Milosevic and his Bosnian Serb allies launched their war of "ethnic cleansing," while "the West"-which is always to say, first and foremost, the United States-wrung its hands, many tens of thousands of innocent people were murdered and raped before President Bill Clinton finally found the resolve to mix air power and diplomacy to bring the genocidal violence to a halt.

If Muammar Qaddafi succeeds in crushing the Libyan revolt, as he is well on his way to doing, the U.S. foreign policy establishment will heave a sad sigh of regret and say, in essence, "That's the nasty business of world politics." In other words: nasty, but not our business. And so: not their blood on our hands. But, when we have encouraged them to stand up for their freedom, and when they have asked for our very limited help, it becomes our business. On February 23, President Obama said: "The United States ... strongly supports the universal rights of the Libyan people. That includes the rights of peaceful assembly, free speech, and the ability of the Libyan people to determine their own destiny. These are human rights. They are not negotiable. ... And they cannot be denied through violence or suppression." Yet denying them through murderous violence and merciless suppression-with a massacre of semi-genocidal proportions likely waiting as the end game in Benghazi-is exactly what Qaddafi is in the process of doing.

Barack Obama has bluntly declared that Qaddafi must go. The Libyan resistance, based in Benghazi, has appealed urgently for the imposition of a no-fly zone. Incredibly, the Arab League has endorsed the call, as has the Gulf Cooperation Council. France has recognized the rebel provisional government based in Benghazi as Libya's legitimate government-while Obama studies this all. Can anyone remember a time when France and the Arab League were ahead of the United States on a question of defending freedom fighters?

There is much more that can be done beyond imposing a no-fly zone. No one in their right mind is calling for putting American boots on the ground in Libya. But we can jam Qaddafi's communications. We can, and urgently should, get humanitarian supplies and communications equipment, including satellite modems for connection to the Internet, to the rebels in Benghazi, where they can be supplied by sea. And we should find a way to get them arms as well. Benghazi is not a minor desert town. It is Libya's second largest city, a major industrial and commercial hub, and a significant port. Through it, a revolt can be supplied. If Benghazi falls to Qaddafi, it will fall hard and bloodily, and the thud will be heard throughout the world.

Time may be running out. As the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday, "All that stands between Kadafi and rebel headquarters in Benghazi are disorganized volunteers and army defectors spread thinly along the coastal highway." They have passion and courage, but they lack weaponry, strategy, and training. Like so many rebel movements, they need time to pull these all together. Time is what a no-fly zone and an emergency supply line can buy them.

Libya's rebels are pleading for our help. "Where is America?" asked one of them, quoted in the L.A. Times, who was manning a checkpoint in Port Brega. "All they do is talk, talk, talk. They need to get rid of these planes killing Libyan people." The "they" he was referring to was the Americans, beginning with their leader-one would hope, still the leader of the "free world"-President Obama.

Many prudent reasons have been offered for doing nothing. It is not our fight. They might lose anyway. We don't know who these rebels really are. We have too many other commitments. And so on. The cautions sound reasonable, except that we have heard them all before. Think Mostar and Srebrenica. And we had a lot of commitments in World War II as well, when we could have and should have bombed the industrial infrastructure of the Holocaust. As for the possibility that the rebels might lose-a prospect that is a possibility if we aid them and a near certainty if we do not-which would be the greater ignominy: To have given Libya's rebels the support they asked for while they failed, or to have stood by and done absolutely nothing except talk while they were mowed down in the face of meek American protests that the Qaddafi's violence is "unacceptable"?

Oh yes. There is also the danger that China will veto a U.N. Security Council Resolution calling for a no-fly zone. Part of us should hope they do. Let the rising superpower-more cynical than the reigning one ever was-feel the first hot flash of hatred by Arabs feeling betrayed. Go ahead, make our day.

Presidents do not get elected to make easy decisions, and they certainly never become great doing so. They do not get credit just because they go along with what the diplomatic and military establishments tell them are the "wise and prudent" thing to do. This is not Hungary in 1956. There is no one standing behind Qaddafi-not the Soviet Union then, not the Arab League now, not even the entirety of his own army. That is why he must recruit mercenaries to save him. Qaddafi is the kind of neighborhood bully that Slobodan Milosevic was. And he must be met by the same kind of principled power. For America to do less than that now-less than the minimum that the Libyan rebels and the Arab neighbors are requesting-would be to shrink into global vacillation and ultimately irrelevance. If Barack Obama cannot face down a modest thug who is hated by most of his own people and by every neighboring government, who can he confront anywhere?

For the United States-and for Barack Obama-there is much more at stake in Libya than the fate of one more Arab state, or even the entire region. And the clock is ticking.

Over the course of three short months, popular uprisings have toppled regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, sparked a civil war in Libya and created unrest in other parts of the Middle East. They also have raised a question in many people's minds: Are all authoritarian regimes now threatened by this new democratic wave? In particular, is China, a rising superpower, vulnerable to these forces?  

The Communist government in Beijing is clearly worried. It has limited news coverage of the recent uprisings and has clamped down on democratic activists and foreign reporters, acting pre-emptively against anonymous calls on the Internet for China to have its own "Jasmine Revolution." A recent front-page editorial in the Beijing Daily, an organ of the city's party committee, declared that most people in the Middle East were unhappy with the protests in their countries, which were a "self-delusional ruckus" orchestrated by a small minority. For his part, President Hu Jintao has urged the strengthening of what has been dubbed the "Great Firewall"-the sophisticated apparatus of censorship and surveillance that the regime uses to control access to the Internet.

No social scientist or intelligence analyst predicted the specific timing or spread of the Arab uprising-the fact that it would start in Tunisia, of all places, that it would be triggered by an event like the self-immolation of a vegetable seller, or that protests would force the mighty Egyptian army to abandon Hosni Mubarak. Over the past generation, Arab societies have appeared stolidly stable. Why they suddenly exploded in 2011 is something that can be understood only in retrospect, if at all.

But this doesn't mean that we can't think about social revolutions in a more structured way. Even unpredictable things take place in a certain context, and the present-day situations of China and the Middle East are radically different. Most of the evidence suggests that China is pretty safe from the democratic wave sweeping other parts of the world-at least for now.

Perhaps the most relevant thinker for understanding the Middle East today and China tomorrow is the late Samuel Huntington-not the Huntington of "The Clash of Civilizations," who argued that there were fundamental incompatibilities between Islam and democracy, but the Huntington whose classic book "Political Order in Changing Societies," first published in 1968, laid out his theory of the development "gap."

Observing the high levels of political instability plaguing countries in the developing world during the 1950s and '60s, Mr. Huntington noted that increasing levels of economic and social development often led to coups, revolutions and military takeovers. This could be explained, he argued, by a gap between the newly mobilized, educated and economically empowered people and their existing political system-that is, between their hopes for political participation and institutions that gave them little or no voice. Attacks against the existing political order, he noted, are seldom driven by the poorest of the poor in such a society; they tend to be led, instead, by rising middle classes who are frustrated by the lack of political and economic opportunity.

All of these observations would seem to apply to Tunisia and Egypt. Both countries have made substantial social progress in recent decades. The Human Development Indices compiled by the United Nations (a composite measure of health, education and income) increased by 28% for Egypt and 30% for Tunisia between 1990 and 2010. The number of people going to school has grown substantially; Tunisia especially has produced large numbers of college graduates. And indeed, the protests in Tunisia and Egypt were led in the first instance by educated, tech-savvy middle-class young people, who expressed to anyone who would listen their frustrations with societies in which they were not allowed to express their views, hold leaders accountable for corruption and incompetence, or get a job without political connections.

Mr. Huntington stressed the destabilizing power of new social groups seeking political participation. People used to be mobilized by newspapers and radio; today they are spurred to action by cell phones, Facebook and Twitter, which allow them to share their grievances about the existing system and to learn about the possibilities of the larger world. This change in the Middle East has been incredibly rapid, and it has trumped, for now, old verities about the supposed passivity of Arab culture and the resistance of Islam to modernization.

But do these remarkable developments tell us anything about the possibility for future instability in China?

It is certainly true that the dry tinder of social discontent is just as present in China as in the Middle East. The incident that triggered the Tunisian uprising was the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, who had his vegetable cart repeatedly confiscated by the authorities and who was slapped and insulted by the police when he went to complain. This issue dogs all regimes that have neither the rule of law nor public accountability: The authorities routinely fail to respect the dignity of ordinary citizens and run roughshod over their rights. There is no culture in which this sort of behavior is not strongly resented.

This is a huge problem throughout China. A recent report from Jiao Tong University found that there were 72 "major" incidents of social unrest in China in 2010, up 20% over the previous year. Most outside observers would argue that this understates the real number of cases by perhaps a couple of orders of magnitude. Such incidents are hard to count because they often occur in rural areas where reporting is strictly controlled by the Chinese authorities.

The most typical case of outraged dignity in contemporary China is a local government that works in collusion with a private developer to take away the land of peasants or poor workers to make way for a glittery new project, or a company that dumps pollutants into a town's water supply and gets away with it because the local party boss stands to profit personally. Though corruption in China does not reach the predatory levels of certain African or Middle Eastern countries, it is nonetheless pervasive. People see and resent the privileged lives of the nation's elite and their children. The movie "Avatar" was a big hit in China in part because so many ordinary Chinese identified with the indigenous people it portrayed whose land was being stolen by a giant, faceless corporation.

There is, moreover, a huge and growing problem of inequality in China. The gains from China's remarkable growth have gone disproportionately to the country's coastal regions, leaving many rural areas far behind. China's Gini index-a standard measure of income inequality across a society-has increased to almost Latin American levels over the past generation. By comparison, Egypt and Tunisia have a much more equal income distribution.

According to Mr. Huntington, however, revolutions are made not by the poor but by upwardly mobile middle-class people who find their aspirations stymied, and there are lots of them in China. Depending on how you define it, China's middle class may outnumber the whole population of the United States. Like the middle-class people of Tunisia and Egypt, those in China have no opportunities for political participation. But unlike their Middle Eastern counterparts, they have benefited from a dramatically improving economy and a government that has focused like a laser beam on creating employment for exactly this group.

To the extent that we can gauge Chinese public opinion through surveys like Asia Barometer, a very large majority of Chinese feel that their lives have gotten better economically in recent years. A majority of Chinese also believe that democracy is the best form of government, but in a curious twist, they think that China is already democratic and profess to be satisfied with this state of affairs. This translates into a relatively low degree of support for any short-term transition to genuine liberal democracy.

Indeed, there is some reason to believe that the middle class in China may fear multiparty democracy in the short run, because it would unleash huge demands for redistribution precisely from those who have been left behind. Prosperous Chinese see the recent populist polarization of politics in Thailand as a warning of what democracy may bring.

The fact is that authoritarianism in China is of a far higher quality than in the Middle East. Though not formally accountable to its people through elections, the Chinese government keeps careful track of popular discontents and often responds through appeasement rather than repression. Beijing is forthright, for example, in acknowledging the country's growing income disparities and for the past few years has sought to mitigate the problem by shifting new investments to the poor interior of the country. When flagrant cases of corruption or abuse appear, like melamine-tainted baby formula or the shoddy school construction revealed by the Sichuan earthquake, the government holds local officials brutally accountable-sometimes by executing them.

Another notable feature of Chinese government is self-enforced leadership turnover. Arab leaders like Tunisia's Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, Egypt's Mr. Mubarak and Libya's Col. Moammar Gadhafi never knew when to quit, hanging on 23, 30 and 41 years, respectively. Since Mao, the Chinese leadership has rigidly adhered to terms of about a decade. Mr. Hu, the current president, is scheduled to step down in 2012, when he is likely to be replaced by Vice President Xi Jinping. Leadership turnover means that there is more policy innovation, in sharp contrast to countries like Tunisia and Egypt, which have been stuck for decades in the rut of crony capitalism.

The Chinese government is also more clever and ruthless in its approach to repression. Sensing a clear threat, the authorities never let Western social media spread in the first place. Facebook and Twitter are banned, and content on websites and on China-based social media is screened by an army of censors. It is possible, of course, for word of government misdeeds to get out in the time between its first posting by a micro-blogger and its removal by a censor, but this cat-and-mouse game makes it hard for a unified social space to emerge.

A final critical way in which China's situation differs from that of the Middle East lies in the nature of its military. The fate of authoritarian regimes facing popular protests ultimately depends on the cohesiveness and loyalty of its military, police and intelligence organizations. The Tunisian army failed to back Mr. Ben Ali early on; after some waffling, the Egyptian army decided it would not fire on protesters and pushed Mr. Mubarak out of power.

In China, the People's Liberation Army is a huge and increasingly autonomous organization with strong economic interests that give it a stake in the status quo. As in the Tiananmen uprising in 1989, it has plenty of loyal units around the country that it could bring into Beijing or Shanghai, and they would not hesitate to fire on demonstrators. The PLA also regards itself as the custodian of Chinese nationalism. It has developed an alternative narrative of 20th-century history that places itself at the center of events like the defeat of Japan in the Pacific war and the rise of a modern China. It is very unlikely that the PLA would switch sides and support a democratic uprising.

The bottom line is that China will not catch the Middle Eastern contagion anytime soon. But it could easily face problems down the road. China has not experienced a major recession or economic setback since it set out on its course of economic reform in 1978. If the country's current property bubble bursts and tens of millions of people are thrown out of work, the government's legitimacy, which rests on its management of the economy, would be seriously undermined.

Moreover, Mr. Huntington's scenario of rising but unfulfilled expectations among the middle class may still play out. Though there is a labor shortage among low-skill workers in China today, there is a glut of the college educated. Every year into the future, China will graduate more than seven million people from its universities, up from fewer than a million in 1998, and many of them are struggling to find work suitable to their self-perceived status. Several million unemployed college graduates are far more dangerous to a modernizing regime than hundreds of millions of poor peasants.

There is also what the Chinese themselves call the "bad emperor" problem. China's historical achievement over the centuries has been the creation of high-quality centralized bureaucratic government. When authoritarian rulers are competent and reasonably responsible, things can go very well. Indeed, such decision-making is often more efficient than in a democracy. But there is no guarantee that the system will always produce good rulers, and in the absence of the rule of law and electoral checks on executive power, there is no way to get rid of a bad emperor. The last bad emperor, commonly (if quietly) acknowledged as such, was Mao. We can't know what future tyrant, or corrupt kleptocrat, may be waiting in the wings in China's future.

The truth is that, much as we might theorize about the causes of social revolution, human societies are far too complex, and change too rapidly, for any simple theory to provide a reliable guide. Any number of observers dismissed the power of the "Arab street" to bring about political change, based on their deep knowledge of the Middle East, and they were right every year-up until 2011.

The hardest thing for any political observer to predict is the moral element. All social revolutions are driven by intense anger over injured dignity, an anger that is sometimes crystallized by a single incident or image that mobilizes previously disorganized individuals and binds them into a community. We can quote statistics on education or job growth, or dig into our knowledge of a society's history and culture, and yet completely miss the way that social consciousness is swiftly evolving through a myriad of text messages, shared videos or simple conversations.

The central moral imponderable with regard to China is the middle class, which up to now has seemed content to trade political freedom for rising incomes and stability. But at some point this trade-off is likely to fail; the regime will find itself unable to deliver the goods, or the insult to the dignity of the Chinese people will become too great to tolerate. We shouldn't pretend that we can predict when this tipping point will occur, but its eventual arrival, as Samuel Huntington might have suggested, is bound up with the very logic of modernization itself.

On February 17, 2010 the Program on Good Governance and Political Reform in the Arab World at CDDRL held its inaugural seminar with Prof. Philippe C. Schmitter, Professor Emeritus, European University Institute, Florence and Visiting Scholar at CDDRL and Dr. Sean Yom, Hewlett Postdoctoral Fellow at CDDRL.

The seminar was titled Exploring the missing link between liberalization and democratization in the Middle East. The seminar aimed to start a public discussion on one of the routine assumptions of students of democratization, which is that there is a close, causal relationship between liberalization and democratization. The former is said to drive those who concede it toward convoking credible elections and, eventually, tolerating ruler accountability to citizens. The link between those processes of regime transformation is alleged to be the mobilization of civil society. It has been argued that the weakness or absence of this linkage is one (among many) of the conditions which make the polities of the Middle East and North Africa resistant to democratization.

In his response to this argument, Philippe Schmitter began by saying that in the work that he started on Southern Europe and Latin America, there was a distinction between democratization and liberalization. Once an autocratic regime enters a process of liberalization, it faces unexpected consequences. Thus, the most vulnerable time for a regime is when it starts to reform itself. Some of the consequences of this process are the resurrection of civil society, more freedom of expression and movement, the release of political prisoners and the freer operation of political parties. Such consequences are what liberalization means.

Schmitter argued that all autocratic regimes have tried this process, and that this process is normally triggered by divisions within the regimes or succession struggles, where regimes feel the need to open up. The kind of liberalization that takes place depends on the type of autocracy present. But the objective of liberalization, Schmitter said, is to coopt and produce a large social basis for autocracy, for example, through cultivating political parties that agree not to be too oppositional.

Schmitter added that many autocracies are under pressure from external regimes. Most of the countries in the Middle East have some kind of agreement with the EU for example, which carries clauses on issues like the rule of law. Another factor is that liberalization is selective in its inclusion, focusing on the urban middle class. It is thus "voluntary", conceded from above by the regime, and not based on any form of mobilization from below. In other words, Schmitter argued that regimes choose to liberalize and are not forced to do so. Thus, regimes are limited in their scope of liberalization (elections for example are not always genuinely free). He then presented a scale of measures of autocracy liberalization, saying that the most difficult measure in the Middle East is that of releasing political prisoners, while the easiest measure is concessions on the level of human rights.

He presented the hypothesis is that almost all efforts at democratization are preceded by liberalization. This is triggered by the resurrection of civil society, which itself is triggered when the costs of repression increase quite significantly and a regime is faced with the question of is it "better" to repress or tolerate? Often, in this case, regimes choose to tolerate the self organization of groups that are not tolerated otherwise. But mobilization of such groups, like lawyer groups, may lead to mobilization on the street. Schmitter said that although Arab regimes liberalize, this kind of process does not normally happen in the Middle East. Liberalization occurs then declines without the regimes suffering many consequences. He finished by stating that there seems to be something in the Middle East region that encourages liberalization, but that leads this liberalization to decline.

Sean Yom responded by saying that for the last 10 years, scholars of democratization literature have made ethnocentric assumptions about this issue. He argued that it is almost assumed that democracy is easy, but what actually happens at the end stage of liberalization is complex. He said that if we take a historical view of the Middle East, the literature says that regimes are durable. But countries like Iran, Iraq, Libya and Syria have all witnessed regime termination. The dictators today in the Arab world are merely the winners of the state-building process.  So why is liberalization not followed by democratization for these survivors?

Yom argued that distinctive regimes have distinctive ways through which they liberalize but not democratize. He related the lack of democratization following on from liberalization to two key questions: Why are there no elite splits in the public arena during times of crisis? And why has the middle class not staked any sacrifice to demand more of a democratic and revolutionary change?

He presented two reasons: the first is that many current regimes have well institutionalized methods of dealing with elite splits before they hit the public domain. Hegemonic ruling provide one such mechanism. The National Democratic Party in Egypt, the Neo-Destur of Tunisia, and the Baath parties in Syria and Iraq for example were able to coopt/isolate softline elites well before their conflict became rebellion.  Yom argued that in monarchical autocracies, incumbents have just as well-institutionalized mechanisms of co-optation that revolve around the palace; such networks were developed shortly after colonial rule, and were designed to effectively enshrine a certain distribution of power.

The second reason, Yom argued, lays in the nature of social opposition.  No dictator liberalizes because they want to give up power.  That is, they do not liberalize to achieve democracy; they liberalize in order to survive in the face of burgeoning social unrest.  The problem is that in the MENA context, the so-called "middle-sector"-labor, professionals, intellectuals, and other urban forces-have not staked out sacrifice to their demands for greater freedom, when push comes to shove.  One reason is that they were incorporated into ruling coalitions early on in the state-building process, and that such early coalitional bargains that traded loyalty for prosperity have proven durable even during economic crises in the 1980s and 1990s.  For instance, large-scale employment in the public sector to certain groups is a common side-payment.  Countries like Jordan and Bahrain exploit population cleavages (the Palestinians and the Shiites, respectively, being the key factors), where the regimes operate an optimal mix of loyalty and oppression/coercion.  In these cases, leaders strategically choose to incorporate different constituents into different networks of patronage.

The presentations were followed by a question and answer sessions where additional factors were discussed and others elaborated on, such as the role of Islamists; authoritarian pacts with the West especially in the cases of "countries that are too important to be politically conditioned" as Schmitter put it, or in the case of illegal Western dealings with Middle East states which makes it difficult for the West to present them with reform conditions; the absence of independent middle classes; and the issue of political prisoners, who are the hardest to coopt by any given regime, and hence tend to be kept inside prisons.