Elections and Legitimacy in the Middle East

Abstract

Israel is an immigrant democracy, not unlike the United States; and its traditions and adverse circumstances have hastened assimilation and have softened the ideological differences so vocally expressed by its party system. In Turkey, democracy had to wait until a generation after it became a nation-state. Whereas the vast majority of voters supported moderate, centrist parties, the election system first encouraged majority tyranny and next gave exaggerated leverage to the extremist parties repudiated at the polls. These weaknesses of the political system—and periodic economic crises—gave rise to periodic military interventions but appear at last to have been overcome by the liberal and popular program of Turgut Özal. Elsewhere in the Middle East, the interlude of Western colonialism and the futile search for pan-Arab unity have delayed the advent of democracy; and in Lebanon, armed denominational rivalries have destroyed the political system. More recently, boundaries and regimes have stabilized throughout most of the region. Elections and parliamentary meetings have reflected the consolidation of Iran's charismatic revolutionary regime and the continuing quest of military or monarchic regimes in Egypt, Jordan, and Kuwait for greater legitimacy at home and abroad.

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References

1. See Max Weber , Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (1922) [The theory of social and economic organization], ed. T. Parsons (New York: Free Press, 1957), pp. 363-373.

2. Thomas Hobbes , Leviathan (1651), pt. 1, chap. 13.

3. For a comparative study of voting systems in Turkey, Lebanon, and Israel, see Jacob M. Landau et al. , Electoral Politics in the Middle East (London: Croom Helm, 1980).

4. Ivor Jennings , The Approach to Self-Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), p. 56.

5. See Dankwart A. Rustow , “Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model,” Comparative Politics, 2:337-363 (Apr. 1970); for a more recent discussion, see Samuel P. Huntington , “Will More Countries Become Democratic?” Political Science Quarterly, 99(2):193-218 (Summer 1984).

6. See J.C. Hurewitz , The Struggle for Palestine (New York: Norton, 1950).

7. Indeed, as Peter Grose's recent study has shown in vivid detail, the early North American settlers arrived in quest of their own Christian vision of the promised Zion. See Peter B. Grose , Israel in the Mind of America (New York: Knopf, 1983), pp. 3-22.

8. Of the 2.1 million immigrants arriving in Palestine or Israel between 1919 and 1977, 78.1 percent arrived after the formation of the state of Israel in May 1948—35.9 percent by 1954, 58.6 percent by 1964, and 75.1 percent by 1974. My calculations are from the table in Bernard Reich , “The State of Israel,” in The Government and Politics of the Middle East and North Africa, ed. David E. Long and Bernard Reich (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1980), p. 280. Of the total number of immigrants, 60 percent came from Europe and America, and 40 percent from Asia and Africa, most of the latter from Morocco, Iraq, and Yemen.

9. On the pattern of defensive modernization in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, see Robert E. Ward and Dankwart A. Rustow , eds., Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964).

10.

10. On Atatürk, cf. Lord Kinross [Patrick Boufour], Atatürk: A Biography of Mustafa Kemal, Father of Modern Turkey (New York: William Morrow, 1965); Vamik D. Volkan and Norman Itzkowitz , The Immortal Atatürk: A Psychobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); D.A. Rustow , “Atatürk as an Institution-Builder,” in Atatürk: Founder of a Modern State, ed. Ali Kazancigil and Ergun Özbudun (London: C. Hurst, 1981); and D.A. Rustow , “Kemalism,” in Südost-Europa-Handbuch: Turkei, ed. K.-D. Grothusen (Gottingen: Vandehoeck & Rupprecht, forthcoming).

11.

the statement is eloquent if somewhat partisan. Cf. “Letters,” ibid., no. 52, pp. 187-190. (Fall 1983).

12.

12. But note that in Turkey the Republican People's Party—dissolved in 1980—represented the left of center, and the Democrat, or Democratic, Party of Menderes, which existed from 1946 to 1960, represented the center right.

13.

idem , “Turkey's Second Try at Democracy,” Yale Review, 52(4):518-558 (Summer 1963); idem , “Turkey's Travails,” Foreign Affairs, 58(1):82-102 (Fall 1979); and idem , “Turkey's Liberal Revolution,” Middle East Review, 17(3):33-43 (Spring 1985).

14.

14. As early as 1954, Premier Menderes had banned the Nation Party from running in the election, because of its alleged violation of the constitutional ban on separation of religion and politics, only to find himself confronting the Republican Nation Party, with a sanitized program, minimally altered leadership, and increased voter appeal.

15.

15. See Kenneth Mackenzie's perceptive analysis , Turkey in Transition: The West's Neglected Ally (London: Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies, 1984).

16.

16. Bernard Lewis , “Democracy in the Middle East: Its State and Prospects,” Middle Eastern Affairs, 6(4):105 (Apr. 1955).

17.

17. Malcolm H. Kerr , The Arab Cold War, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1967).

18.

18. For a more detailed review, see D. A. Rustow , Oil and Turmoil: America Faces OPEC and the Middle East (New York: Norton, 1982), pp. 42-49.

19.

19. The exceptions are the cession of the sanjak of Alexandrette (Iskenderun) from the French-ruled Syria to Turkey in 1938, and Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights in 1981. Israel's other defacto boundaries are those of the Palestine mandate after its separation in 1920 from Transjordan. On the Arabian peninsula, the last major change was the union in 1926 of Nejd and Hijaz under the Saudi monarchy.

20.

America and the World 1984, pp. 581-601 (Feb. 1985).