This book examines the following question: What explains the different treatments of ethnic minorities in democratizing Muslim-majority countries?1 The answer to this question is of crucial importance because democratic transitions, in all countries, are sustainable only if they are inclusive, and not if they transform themselves, as we saw in several failed cases, into a âtyranny of the majority.â2 Specifically, the democratic transition of the two case studies featured in this research, Turkey and Indonesia , took different paths also because of the differences in their approaches to the inclusion of ethnic minorities. Furthermore, the future security and the risk of radicalization in these, as well as other, democracies around the world are also affected by the inclusion or exclusion of ethnic minorities. Therefore, this book tries to show, even if indirectly, the consequences for democracy and security of the incorporation of ethnic minorities in modern democracies.
Today the threat to democracy that has fallen under the gaze of everyone is that both fledgling and mature democracies risk becoming securitized states, in a permanent state of exception, if they fail in their openness, tolerance, integration, and inclusion of old and new minorities . This is why the present study is important not only for Muslim-majority countries, which happen to have a low number of democracies, for reasons that will not be considered in this study, but for all countries wishing to increase their level of freedom and justice for all members of society.
There are 47 countries in the world where Islam is the religion of the majority of the population, but the literature on democratization generally considers just two of those countries to be democracies: Turkey and Indonesia.3 In the past, this has caused scholars to consider the relationship between Islam and democracy a difficult and sometimes even impossible one.4 Furthermore, the few studies that have examined this relationship have mostly adopted a religious perspective, at least until the so-called Arab Spring. Today, we have clear evidence that Islam is not a significant factor in explanations of democratization ,5 even if studies find a statistically significant negative relationship between Islam and democracy.6 This is because Islam in and of itself, just like all other religions, cannot be considered a factor hindering democratization and, furthermore, cannot be painted with such a big brush as a monolithic set of religious and cultural values impacting the political institutions of a country from an essentialist perspective. Nevertheless, the majority of Muslim countries (mostly in the Arab World) are not democracies, and international factors (including the history of colonization followed by authoritarian regimes supported by external powers) or internal factors, like economic issues, institutional problems, and weak civil society, are not enough to explain this fact.
In the literature of comparative analysis, including in the one comparing Muslim-majority democracies,7 there is a real gap on how Muslim-majority countries democratize and how they include ethnic minorities in this process, and that is the reason for this book. Studies of social conflict or democratization in Muslim countries typically emphasize sectarian religious divisions but tend to overlook ethnic differences. To redress this deficiency, this study examines the incorporation of ethnic minorities in democratizing Muslim countries, analyzing in particular two competing modes of treatment, one of repression and one of accommodation: the âsecuritization â8 of Kurds in Turkey and the âautonomization â9 or granting of autonomy to Acehnese in Indonesia. By examining states with ethnic heterogeneity but very little religious diversity, this study controls for the effect of religious conflict on minority inclusion. This makes it possible to examine citizenship regimes independently of established religions and permits future generalization and comparison to minority inclusion in democratizing states that are not Muslim. Therefore, to further clarify, a comparison of only Muslim-majority countries with respect to democratization âan approach that scholars usually do not adopt to study democratization in majority Christian or Buddhist countriesâis not based on a negative evaluation of the relationship between Islam and democracy, with an Orientalist approach looking at the limits of the religion of Islam for democratization (or even the role of Islam in democratization periods). On the contrary, the book emphasizes a comparative need for generalization and, at the same time, a need for causal analysis of an overlooked but important element of democratization in pluralistic societies, the treatment of ethnic minorities.
The research presented here is important because it lies at the intersection of several current theoretical debates in international relations theory and comparative politics field: democratization, national security, and radicalization. This work has three indirect objectives: to prove the extent to which Muslim countries with ethnic minorities can make their democratization more efficient and sustainable, to suggest how this improvement may be carried out in a way that guarantees stability and national security for the country, and to show how this can avoid social radicalization , which is often connected to the disenfranchisement or repression of minorities.
These three goals may seem to be in conflict at first glance. Democratization requires the inclusion of previously excluded parts of society. At the same time, concerns about national security may grow for some sectors of society and lead to a type of differentiationâincluding juridical discrimination or repressionâfor the sake of social stability and harmony. For example, democratization may encourage self-determination movements but also clashes caused by new ethnic groups migrating to a country. The prevention of radicalization may require an investment in security and, again, control of some specific minority groups. Such control could have opposite effects of increasing polarization and extremism in a democratizing society. This study therefore is of fundamental importance for the future balance among democratization , security, and deradicalization because it analyzes how modern democracies may resolve the possible tensions among these three different goals while integrating minorities in an inclusive process. In this sense, the book seeks to explain why some states may succeed at this while others fail.
Regarding specifically democratization processes, it is impossible to identify the moment at which a democratizing state becomes an established democracy. Democracy is a never-ending process, with ups and downs and with different criteria for different times, and democratization can always be reversed, as we have seen throughout human history and around the world.10 Often, transitions to democracy create procedural or âformalâ democracies but not liberal, âsubstantiveâ democracies, like the case of âone partyâ or âdominant partyâ systems.
Previously, the failure or success of transition to democracy specifically in Muslim-majority countriesâapart from the problem of possible foreign influences that may have an important impact on democratic transitions, particularly in the Arab worldâoften depended on the exclusion or inclusion of ethnic, religious, or political minorities by the new regimes. This can be considered one of the most important domestic factors of âArab exceptionalismâ11 and one of the causes of the failure of the âArab Springâ (with the sole exception of Tunisia) considered as the possible âfourth waveâ or reactivation of the âthird waveâ of democratization in the world.12 These failures have kept the countries of the Middle East as outliers on the global path to democracy. From the problems in Egypt (among which is the lack of inclusion of secular forces in the government made by the Muslim Brotherhood) and Iraq (where Sunni Muslims were suddenly excluded from the al-Maliki regime) to the successful experience of inclusive processes in Tunisia, where power is shared between secular parties and the Islamist Ennahda party, or even Morocco, a monarchy that, following the Arab Spring protests, went through several democratic reforms, including for minoritiesâ rights, we see the extent to which strong and inclusive institutions, economies, and societies are crucial for the stability of the democratizing regimes in the region, as everywhere else in the world, as Acemoglu and Robinson among others famously argued.13 The institutions, economies, and societies in this area have suffered from their past, in particular from the fact that the old processes of nation-state building often sidelined the self -determination right of minorities (from Armenians to Kurds, from Berbers of Maghreb to Arabs of Palestine), creating states that oppressed ethnic minorities. Therefore, dealing with past institutional, economic, and identity issues is a crucial point for the sustainability of democratization processes in the region, as well as in the other Muslim-majority countries in Africa or Asia that have moved beyond postcolonization nation-building. As we will comment later, in non-Muslim-majority countries and in so-called mature democracies, the problem of the inclusion of old or new ethnic minorities is crucial for the sustainability of the ânever endingâ democratization processes.
Regarding the national security issue, the exclusion or inclusion of minoritiesâin cases of separatist movementsâhas an evident impact on security questions, both in Muslim and non-Muslim countries. Since the end of the Cold War, intrastate conflicts have become more frequent while interstate conflicts have almost disappeared. Samuel Huntington was right in arguing that conflicts, after the end of bipolar ideologies, would follow the ethnic, cultural, and religious cleavages within states rather than...