Democracy in Iraq

History, Politics, Discourse

Benjamin Isakhan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409401759
  9781409401759
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317153092
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du Moyen-Orient

This book proposes a significant reassessment of the history of Iraq, documenting democratic experiences from ancient Mesopotamia through to the US occupation. Such an analysis takes to task claims that the 'West' has a uniquely democratic history and a responsibility to spread democracy across the world. It also reveals that Iraq has a democratic history all of its own, from ancient Middle Eastern assemblies and classical Islamic theology and philosophy, through to the myriad political parties, newspapers and protest movements of more recent times. This book argues that the democratic history of Iraq could serve as a powerful political and discursive tool where the Iraqi people may come to feel a sense of ownership over democracy and take pride in endorsing it. This could go a long way towards mitigating the current conflicts across the nation and in stabilizing and legitimating its troubled democracy. Taking an interdisciplinary approach and referring to some of the most influential critical theorists to question ideological assumptions about democracy and its history, this book is useful to those interested in political and legal history, human rights and democracy.

Chapter 1
Discourses of Democracy

In sum, the theory of oriental despotism was crucial not just to ‘explain’ Asian backwardness but, no less importantly, to cement the identity of Europe–both past and present–as the birthplace of advanced, democratic civilization.

Hobson 2004: 228

The Discourse of Western Democracy

The etymology of the English word ‘democracy’ can be traced back to the sixteenth century when it was adapted from the French word democratie. Further back, the Late Latin term demokratia had its origins in a Greek word that is itself a composite of two other words, demos and kratos. The latter translates to mean ‘power’ or ‘rule’ and appears today in English words such as aristocracy (rule by the aristoi, the best or elite), autocracy (rule by the autos, the self), monarchy (rule by the monos, alone or one), and oligarchy (rule by the oligoi, the few or little) to name only some. The word demos, on the other hand, was a protean word that had several different, but related, meanings such as ‘citizen body’, or ‘lower classes’ that can be generally translated to mean ‘the people’. Together, then, demokratia literally means ‘people power / rule’, or perhaps more eloquently, ‘rule by the people’.

The word demokratia is believed to have first appeared in the writing of the ‘Father of History’, Herodotus, around 460 BCE. In his seminal text, The Histories, Herodotus presents the origins, context and events of the Greco-Persian Wars of 490 BCE and 480–479 BCE with a remarkable penchant for detail and a vast knowledge of cultures and lands beyond those of his native Greece. Throughout his work, Herodotus repeatedly praises the freedom and democracy of Greece. For example, when Athens is liberated from the despotic rule of Pisistratidae (who owed his allegiance to Persia instead of Greece), Herodotus seizes the opportunity to praise the strength of Athenian democracy. Having thrown off the shackles of despotism,

Thus did the Athenians increase in strength. And it is plain enough, not from this instance only, but from many everywhere, that freedom [elsewhere translated as democracy (see: Forsdyke, 2001: 333)] is an excellent thing; since even the Athenians who, while they continued under the rule of tyrants, were not a whit more valiant than any of their neighbours, no sooner shook off the yoke than they became decidedly the first of all. These things show that while undergoing oppression, they let themselves be beaten, since then they worked for a master; but so soon as they got their freedom, each man was eager to do the best he could for himself. So fared it now with the Athenians (Herodotus 1996 [460 BCE]: V.78).

Athenian democracy emerged when the aristocracy issued Kleisthenes a mandate in 508/7 BCE to formulate a political system that would eschew the centralization of power. Kleisthenes, an adept and popular politician who had long advocated a system of ‘rule by the people’, devized a sophisticated method of participatory democracy centred on the notion of the polis, meaning the ‘city and its citizens’ (Aristotle 1984 [332 BCE]: 20–2). To govern the polis, the Athenians convened in an assembly, an outdoor meeting which presided over issues as vast as ‘war and peace, treaties, finance, legislation, public works, in short, on the whole gamut of governmental activity’ (Finley 1973: 18–9). All adult male citizens were encouraged to attend these assemblies, which convened about 40 times a year, and were permitted to isegoria–the freedom to voice their concerns in front of their fellow citizens. Furthermore, the assembly elected a few key officials and experts to positions of authority, while every citizen had more than a good chance of being chosen by lot for a short-term position in public office. While the developments in Athens remain among the most significant democratic moments of the ancient world, it must be remembered that the sheer size of the Grecian assembly would have prevented a robust exchange of views and that many citizens (women, foreigners, slaves etc.) were excluded from the proceedings. It should also be remembered that demokratia was very unpopular among many prominent Greeks. Plato believed that democracy was very far from an ideal form of government as it privileged the will of the uneducated lower classes; instead, he argued in favour of a republic presided over by a wise philosopher-king (Plato 1975 [380 BCE]). Despite such criticism, the Athenian experiment lasted around two centuries before it was overthrown by the superior military might of the Macedonians, who replaced it with their own oligarchic system in 322 BCE.

Concurrent to the rise and fall of demokratia in Athens, was the development of the Roman Republic. Interestingly, the etymology of republic comes from the Latin words res (meaning ‘thing’ or ‘affair’) and publicus (or ‘people’) which together make ‘the affairs of the people’, not altogether dissimilar to the Greek notion of ‘rule by the people’. While in the earliest years of the Republic, the workings of the Senate (originally composed of the heads of clans) and the Comitia Curiata (the general assembly of all arms-bearing men) were complex and relatively egalitarian, the Republic quickly descended into the kind of oligarchic power structures that the Athenians had been so determined to avoid. Nonetheless, scholars such as Polybius and Cicero went to great lengths to defend the Republic, arguing that it came closer to the ideal vision espoused by many earlier Greek philosophers because it combined elements of democracy with a virtuous ruling elite (Cicero 1998 [54 BCE], Polybius 1889 [150 BCE]). Despite such optimism, there can be no denying that Rome was at best a robust oligarchy in which the interests of a small number of wealthy, land-owning nobles almost always trumped the will of the plebs (or ‘common people’). Although the plebs did eventually gain access to the inner workings of the Republic after having fought vehemently for the privilege, the Republic remained the domain of the elite and, as the empire spread out across the known world, an increasing number of citizens were disenfranchised. Eventually, the authority of Rome was undermined by a series of wars, corruption scandals, and a decline in the civic spirit that had underpinned the birth of the Republic.

Thus, the concept of ‘the affairs of the people’ administered by popular governance is commonly understood to have vanished from Europe for around a thousand years (Bryce 1921, Dahl 1998, Dunn 1992). Although the Vikings and the Venetians held assemblies as far back as the fifth century, it is generally thought that it wasn’t until the northern city-states of Italy began to develop systems of popular rule around 1100 that democracy began to re-emerge on the continent. This period saw a thriving socio-economic and cultural atmosphere that paralleled that of ancient Greece and is now acknowledged as having given rise to the Renaissance. Although the authority over the early political machinations of these city-states was restricted to the aristocracy, who were granted supreme judicial authority, the system eventually evolved to include the popolo (the people of the middle classes). By the middle of the thirteenth century there were written constitutions which guaranteed each individual state their own ‘elective and self-governing arrangements’ (Skinner 1992: 57). Shortly after this however, these city-states descended into economic hardship and forms of oligarchy and autocracy replaced these increasingly unstable and short-lived democracies.

Meanwhile, in Medieval England, King John was forced to raise taxes due to an escalating number of military defeats. This greatly enraged the powerful English barons and Catholic bishops who drew up a list of restrictions they wanted to enforce on the actions of the king and rights they wanted to secure. By 1215 the king was forced to sign the Magna Carta (Latin for ‘Great Paper’) which prescribed that the authority of the king was to be shared with a Great Council constituted mostly by noblemen and ecclesiastics. Eventually, this Great Council evolved into the more familiar Parliament (from the French parler, ‘to speak’) during the reign of Edward I. Under the leadership of his grandson, Edward III, the parliament was split into two chambers in the middle of the fourteenth century: the Upper Chamber, which went on to become the House of Lords and represent the interests of the elite, and the Lower Chamber which became the House of Commons and was constituted by representatives of the nation’s counties and boroughs. Although the introduction of the House of Commons has clearly influenced the development of representative democracy, it must be remembered that it consisted of borough representatives who had been elected by the mere 10 per cent of the adult male population who were eligible to vote. Nonetheless, the rising power of the two chambers came to the fore during the seventeenth century when the Parliament became increasingly critical of the monarchy. This paved the way for the English Civil War (1642–51) which, in turn, brought about the passing of the Bill of Rights in 1689 and the Act of Settlement in 1701, both of which upheld the powers of the Parliament and serve as seminal moments in the story of British democracy.

Paralleling these developments, the middle of the fourteenth century had seen German national Johannes Gutenberg convert a winepress into the world’s first movable-type printing press thus giving birth to the modern mass media. Following the onset of the Thirty Years War in 1618, Europe was inundated with fledgling newspapers and, by the middle of the seventeenth century, ‘political newspapers had the largest circulation of all contemporary forms of printed material, or were at any rate the most widely distributed form of secular reading matter’ and these papers ‘exemplified a norm of neutrality that has remained unequalled ever since’ (J. Weber 2006: 399, 402). The common newspaper also played a critical role in transforming the once esoteric world of kings, courtiers, politicians and ecclesiastics into legible fodder for the common person; they fed into the emerging bourgeois civil society that was to prove so influential in the series of political events and revolutions that paved the way for the materialization of modern democracy. At the time of the French Revolution many previously clandestine newspapers, journals and pamphlets flooded the streets of the nation, garnering the force of public opinion and ‘undermining the credibility of established authority and spreading new ideas of religious scepticism, social criticism and reform’ (Fontana 1992: 111). This led the rebellious few who constituted the representatives of France’s Third Estate (the middle classes and peasants) to found the National Assembly and vow to revolt against the existing monarchy, advocating a system of ‘popular sovereignty vested in the whole of the French nation’ (Fontana 1992: 114). This call was heeded by the citizenry and a bloody rebellion swept across much of France. Chanting Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, ou la Mort! [‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death!’] the insurgents went on to storm the Bastille prison in Paris on 14 July 1789, effectively setting in motion a series of events that ended with the usurpation of the French monarchy. Later the same year, the French Constituent Assembly adopted ‘The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’, which, in 1791, formed the preamble for the constitution and set in place a representative democracy with near universal male suffrage.

The next chapter in the unfolding story of democracy occurred not in Europe, but in the newfound colony of America. Here, according to Alexis De Tocqueville’s seminal study Democracy in America, the emigrants who arrived on the shores of New England from the beginning of the seventeenth century created a situation in which ‘A democracy more perfect than antiquity had dared to dream of started in full size and panoply from the midst of an ancient feudal society’ (de Tocqueville 1864 [1835]: 35). The Americans were able to overthrow their foreign monarch in the American Revolution, prompting their 1776 Declaration of Independence. The Framers of the United States Constitution then went on to deliberate over and redraft their document until it was completed in Philadelphia in 1787. Although, the constitution had its imperfections, it was cleverly crafted to eschew the authority of a monarch while retaining what Americans saw as the merits of the English system. Finally, in 1789 the new republic began operating under the authority of the document following its ratification. As part of their effort to protect civil liberties, the United States also then issued the Bill of Rights in 1791 which included a series of amendments to the Constitution.

Just over a decade later in England, journalists were granted access to the House of Commons in 1803, allowing the birth of a more critical British journalism. The space where these media professionals sat came to be known as the ‘Fourth Estate’, a term which came to symbolize the media’s responsibility in not just reporting the news but in serving as the people’s ‘watchdog’ over the elite. In other words, the journalist’s democratic responsibility was to ‘highlight problems and weaknesses in government policies and performance, in order that corrective action might be taken’ (Romano 2005: 8). In this watchdog role, the media helped to hold governments accountable to their constituents, highlighting abuses of power such as corruption, detailing incompetence and scrutinizing government policy and administration. Beyond this, the media played a central role in the emergence of modern democracy by creating an informed citizenry with a propensity for varied debate and discourse, which, as has been discussed, Habermas referred to as the ‘public sphere’ (Habermas 1989 [1962], 1996 [1989]).

To state that the developments in England, France and America were heralded as a triumph is something of an understatement. Having witnessed European events first-hand, French philosopher Destutt de Tracy stated that ‘Representation, or representative government, may be considered as a new invention … [it] is democracy rendered practicable for a long time and over a great extent of territory’ (de Tracy 1811: 19). Later, the oft cited British political scientist, John Stuart Mill claimed that

There is no difficulty in showing that the ideally best form of government is that in which the sovereignty … is vested in the entire aggregate of the community; every citizen not only having a voice in the exercise of that ultimate sovereignty, but being … called on to take an actual part in the government, by the personal discharge of some public function (J. S. Mill 1962 [1861]: 57).

Throughout much of the nineteenth century, Europe also witnessed the rise of the Industrial Revolution. This engendered a system of capital whereby the wealthy continued to cultivate their riches and the masses were increasingly forced to work in abhorrent conditions for less and less recompense. These harsh conditions led to a series of further democratic revolutions across Britain and Europe through the mid-nineteenth century. In France, bloody protests led to the formation of the Second Republic with an emphasis on universal suffrage and unemployment relief. News spread quickly of the events in Paris and it was not long before a series of violent protests and subsequent democratic reforms occurred across the Habsburg’s Austrian Empire, Germany, Italy and Poland.

Following the end of the First World War and the dissolution of the great Prussian, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, several nominally democratic states emerged across Europe. However, such developments were countered by the effects of the Great Depression which brought with it significant economic hardships and a widespread dissatisfaction with the existing political order. Under these conditions the 1920s and 1930s witnessed ‘the establishment of varied forms of dictatorship and totalitarianism of the left and the right in Russia, Germany, Italy, Japan and other countries’ (Saward 2003: 37) as well as the emergence of non-democratic regimes in parts of Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia. As David Held has pointed out, these events suggest that democracy is a ‘remarkably difficult form of government to create and sustain’ and that the forces of ‘fascism, Nazism and Stalinism came very close to eradicating it altogether’ (Held 2006 [1987]: 1).

However, with the success of the Allied powers at the conclusion of the Second World War, ‘all of the main alternatives to democracy either disappeared, turned into eccentric survivals, or retreated from the field to hunker down in their last strongholds’ (Dahl 1998: 1). This, coupled with the successful democratization of the occupied nations of Germany and Japan as well as the growing economic strength of the West during the 1950s and 1960s, meant that democracy was once again flourishing across much of Europe and the Western world, even spreading to parts of South America and Asia during the 1970s and 1980s. However, the end of the Second World War also saw the USSR emerge as one the world’s two leading superpowers and the power vacuum created by the defeat of Nazism led to the ‘mutual suspicion and vilification, arms building, proxy confrontation and ideological posturing of the Cold War’ (Saward 2003: 43). But the economic pressures of the 1980s, as well as internal resentment of communist oppression and external demands for democratization, caused the socialist republics of the Eastern Bloc gradually to give way to form more liberal, democratic governments. Then, in 1991, under the weight of these same pressures, the USSR disbanded and the long Cold War was over.

The end of the Cold War prompted many libertarian Western intellectuals to herald the triumph of the Western world and its ideology of free market-based liberal democracy. Foremost amongst this body of work was Francis Fukuyama’s controversial thesis that the world was witnessing ‘not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’ (Fukuyama 1989: 1). Whether or not Fukuyama’s central thesis is correct, democracy certainly continued to spread across much of the globe throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s. Much has been made of this Third Wave (Huntington 1991) or Global Resurgence (Diamond and Plattner 1996 [1990–1995]) of democracy. Along these lines, one influential Freedom House Report claimed that the twentieth century had been ‘Democracy’s Century’, an era which witnessed the transformation of democracy from a handful of ‘restricted democracies’ in 1900 to a situation where more than half of the world’s population lived and thrived in ‘electoral democracies’ by the end of the century (Democracy’s Century 1999). Since the coming of the new millennia, democracy has continued to flourish with developments across much of the globe. Perhaps most telling has been the modest successes of a series of people’s movements in the former states of the USSR, including the ‘Rose Revolution’ (Georgia, 2003), the ‘Orange Revolution’ (Ukraine, 2004) and the ‘Tulip Revolution’ (Kyrgyzstan, 2005). Similarly, recent developments in countries such as Thailand, Iran, Burma, Pakistan and Nepal indicate, at the very least, the popularity of democracy and its continuing support amongst various people’s movements opposed to oligarchic or autocratic forms of power. Even the tiny Himalayan nation of Bhutan recently held its first general election (March 2008), ironically enough under the orders of the king himself. Most recently, the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2010 and 2011 has not only toppled long-standing regimes in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, but also served as a mechanism for people across the region to express their disdain for authoritarian and oppressive forms of government (Isakhan, Mansouri, and Akbarzadeh 2012). It is fair to say that recent history has witnessed democracy spread across much of the globe to stand today as the preferred method of human governance.

As democracy spreads, it is interesting to note the degree to which it is understood according to the lineage of events, practices and movements outlined above. Clearly, these developments–from as far back as the Greek concept of demokratia and the Roman Republic, but more directly since the establishment of the British Parliament, through the American Declaration of Independence, the French storming of the Bastille and the apparent global spread of democracy since the fall of Communism–have had a profound impact on our understanding of the Western world today. This extraordinary sequence of events has frequently been invoked throughout the various political and social movements that litter Western history. For example in Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘On the Concept of History’, he discusses briefly this connection between Europe’s political past and more contemporary events. He states that ‘The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome incarnate. It cited ancient Rome exactly the way fashion cites a bygone mode of dress’ (Benjamin 2003 [1940]: 395). Mor...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• A Note on Translation and Transliteration
• Prelude: In the Beginning
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Discourses of Democracy
• 2 Democracy in Ancient Iraq
• 3 Islam and Democracy in Iraq
• 4 Discourses of Democracy in Colonial Iraq
• 5 Oppression and Resistance in Post-Colonial Iraq
• 6 Occupation and Democracy in Re-Colonial Iraq
• Conclusion
• References
• Index