It is impossible to evaluate the uprisings that together make up the Arab awakening without taking the time to develop a critical analysis of the state of contemporary democracies. The root causes and salient features of the crisis of democracy in the West must be analyzed and duly noted. Firstly, it must be acknowledged that today’s states and democratically elected governments find themselves, structurally, in a position of virtual subservience to the economic sphere, which possesses its own imperatives, its institutions and its multinationals where egalitarian, democratic and/or transparent administrative practices are not enforced. The doctrine of free markets appears to be assuming the form of a new religion in the very heart of the secularized order. In this sense, separating the powers of state and religion does not mean that the problem of reconciling the democratic state’s relations with the other national and transnational power centers of the day has been solved. Take the economy, finance and the media, which wield such power—and on occasion new authority—over state entities that they threaten to undermine the very foundations of democracy that they need and claim to defend.
The most recent global crises, particularly that of 2008, have demonstrated—assuming proof was still needed—that states are so inextricably linked to the private activities of the financial sector that citizens are forced to pay for the foolishness, avarice and dishonest practices of the major private and semi-private banks, which have consulted no one yet mobilize immense media resources to insist on the imperious need for government intervention. Despite soaring public debt, democratic states have bailed out rich but undemocratically administered banks. Nothing really new here: these events reflect the essence of the neo-liberal capitalists system and its management of the system’s cyclical crises. For all that, the frequency and intensity of the crises are sapping the very underpinnings of democracy. Suffice it to observe the fragility, and the debt load of the American federal government, or the threat of bankruptcy that hangs over European countries like Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy.
As if that were not enough, economic globalization has given birth to a new ideology: the “end of ideologies.” Following the collapse of communism in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in 1989, all traditional political parties of the right and the left have rallied to defend the virtues of the market economy. No serious ideology dared question liberal economic fundamentals; political debates were reduced to discussing the degree of freedom to be granted to the state or the private sector, administration of business priorities and disputes—neither always clear-cut nor germane—over economic and social policies. Ours, it is said, is an age of ideological consensus.
In addition to the statement, like the consensus it refers to, being particularly tendentious and misleading, it hides the fact that the “end of ideology” claim is itself highly ideological, stemming as it does from a construct that pretends to confirm its vision and its relevance by the absence of direct challenge by all emerging economic forces (China, India, Brazil and Turkey in particular) and that seeks to marginalize all voices that might oppose the dominant order, North and South, in South America, Africa, Asia and in many Muslim majority countries.
Democracy is in crisis. Its proponents avoid the real issues, and seize the occasions generated by political and media power centres as pretexts to achieve their electoralist and populist ends. The “shock doctrine” as described by Naomi Klein inflicts psychological and emotional stress on the population (just as do terrorism and the “war on terror”) to justify policies that are a threat to freedom at home (surveillance, the curtailment of citizens’ rights) and war abroad (in the manner of the United States and the United Kingdom). If that is insufficient, it whips up fear of immigration, social insecurity and/or the new “Islamic” (and not just “Islamist”) threat. As political and media diversion strategies, these measures necessarily impact political life and the democratic debate in contemporary society. The ideology of fear and the politics of emotion are by definition antidemocratic. The return of nationalistic, identity-based populism, mass xenophobia, structural racism and policies that limit freedoms undermine the foundations of democracy and of human equality, nationally and internationally. Money now moves faster and more freely than men.
Yet some men (generally white, middle- or upper-class, from the North) travel much more easily than others who are no less human, no less innocent, but who tend to be Black, Arab, poor, or from the countries of the Global South.
