In the 19th century, "Sick Man of Europe" was a phrase used to describe the 500-year-old Ottoman Empire. Decaying, unable to protect its territories, it was ruled by sultans who steadfastly resisted change. Ottoman subjects on three continents -- Arabs, Turks, Greeks, Kurds, Armenians, and Serbs -- and of three faiths -- Muslim, Christian and Jewish -- clamored for change, to no avail. Instead of reforming itself, the empire simply grew more repressive.
Much of what is happening in the Middle East today is reminiscent of the Sick Man of Europe. Most of the 30-odd countries of what American officials are calling the Greater Middle East have been sociopolitically stagnant for decades. This is not for lack of popular desire for change. Saudi women defied the puritanical Wahhabi traditions and broke a stifling taboo by driving their cars in the streets of Riyadh 14 years ago. Thousands of political prisoners have been rotting in Syrian, Tunisian and Egyptian detention compounds for years without trials.
Such people provide an eloquent answer to the Arab rulers who met recently in Riyadh and Cairo for the purpose not of proposing plans for reform but of circumventing such plans, rumored to be coming from the United States and Europe. Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak seems to be taking the lead in resisting democratization in the region. He was quoted in a New York Times report from Cairo as saying, "If we open the door completely before the people, there will be chaos."
Never mind the condescending tone vis-à-vis his own people. How about just keeping the door ajar, as the opposition parties have pleaded with him to do for 20 years? In a joint statement with King Fahd of Saudi Arabia two weeks earlier, the two Arab leaders rejected any attempt to impose reform from "the outside." This is quite understandable for people who suffered from colonization. But what about the persistent demands from within?
On Nov. 18, 2002, Egypt's five major opposition parties and 10 civil society organizations formed the Committee for Defense of Democracy (CDD) and drafted an elaborate but gradual plan for constitutional and political reform. Since its establishment, the CDD has sought an audience with Mubarak to present the case for the overdue reforms, some of which were promised by President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1968 following massive demonstrations by university students. In February 1974 President Anwar Sadat renewed the promises of democratic reform in a document called "The October Paper." Last year the CDD organized three rallies in Cairo, each of which braved its way out of a police cordon and marched to the presidential palace to present demands for reform. Not even a presidential aide would see them. The farthest the CDD got with the Mubarak regime occurred Feb. 15, when the president disdainfully allowed the fourth march to hand a "petition" to the guards of the outside gate of the palace.
The last major force to join the chorus for change is the Muslim Brotherhood, the mother of all Islamic movements in the world, from Indonesia to Morocco. On March 3 the newly sworn-in Supreme Guide of the Brotherhood declared his full endorsement of the same list of demands contained in the CDD manifesto. How much more authentic and endogenous can popular demands be before Fahd, Mubarak and other Mideast rulers will listen?
Like the antique Ottoman sultans in the last decades before their final fall in 1924, most Middle Eastern leaders have been eager for Western aid, trade and investment. They have accepted conditions imposed on them by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Club of Paris and other outside creditors. They don't invoke "national dignity" or express resentment of the "outside," except when the advice is to share power with their own people.
Three years ago a U.N. Arab Human Development report cited democratic governance as essential to socioeconomic progress in the region. This was not a matter of "outsiders" dictating to Arab leaders; the U.N. had commissioned an all-Arab team of internationally renowned scholars to prepare the report. Secretary General Kofi Annan and several world leaders on both sides of the Atlantic made frequent public references to it. But Arab rulers ignored it completely, as if it were about another region on another planet.
More recently, another eminent Arab public figure, Ismail Serageldin, convened a pan-Arab conference of nongovernmental organizations in the newly reborn Library of Alexandria in Egypt to deliberate the issue of reform. At the end they issued the Alexandria Declaration, a sort of Arab Magna Carta. We hope the Arab Summit in Tunis this week will implement it.
Of course, Palestine and Iraq are invoked time and again in this ongoing argument, as they should be: The Arab and Muslim world has historical and legitimate grievances that must be settled if democratization is to strike roots and be sustainable. But it should be clear to all concerned that it will not be tyrannical regimes that settle these grievances. For half a century, they have held their peoples and democracy hostage, and everything just got worse. So for a change, give democracy a fair chance -- implement the Alexandria Declaration.
Saad Eddin Ibrahim is a professor of political sociology at the American University in Cairo and a visiting professor this semester at New York University.
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