The study of Middle Eastern politics shares the problems of area studies in general in political science. Area specialists emphasizing the language and culture of other peoples have been pressured by behavioralists to “objectify” their studies and place all peoples in the context of universals of human political behavior. The result is that the specialized knowledge of non-European peoples and regions especially have had an uneasy relationship with the political science discipline. Post-behavioral political science for a time in the 1970s recognized that the purported scientific universals of the discipline were really the ethnocentric ones of the value assumptions of European and American political science. In the 1980s and continuing to the present, these earlier “scientific” or explanatory universals of political science now arguably have been replaced by the no less ethnocentric ones of democratization and “marketization.” These concepts are examined in the following essays.

Middle Eastern political science has shared the preceding problems but has added to them two additional factors. The first is that the languages and culture of the Middle East are difficult and complex. As a result, the development of a social science consciousness in political research has occurred most importantly only since the 1970s. The second is that the study of Middle Eastern politics is embedded in the historical attitude of American and European culture toward Islam and Arabism. Historically, Islam expanded at the expense of Christian Europe in the eighth century. This adversarial relation continued when European Christians mounted forays into the Moslem Near East in the Crusades of the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries; with the fall of Christian Constantinople to Moslem siege in the fifteenth century; and to the near defeat of Christian Vienna by Moslem attack in the seventeenth century.

Over the past decade the paradigm of “democratization” has dominated analysis of political change, reflecting the dramatic transitions from authoritarian rule in Southern and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and East Asia. While the new literature on democratization has pointedly excluded the Arab world, a growing number of area specialists have sought to identify local developments that signal the early phases of, or at least potential for, a democratic transformation of state and society in the Middle East (Hudson 1991; Ibrahim 1993; Al-Sayyid Marsot 1990; Norton 1994). It is difficult to generalize about political change in the Arab world, as several distinct patterns have emerged, reflecting differences in institutional settings as well as in the strategies of regime and opposition elites.

Does the Middle East's presumed “exceptionalism” imply the disutility of “civil society” as a tool for political analysis? Although the term has gained wide usage in other areas of the world, the Middle East specialists have shown some reluctance to employ it in their own region. This reluctance stems in part from the perception that the term is ambiguous and politically loaded. Historically, “civil society” has signified everything from the peaceable society human beings enjoy under the protection of a Leviathan state (Hobbes), to the stratum of private associations that schools citizens in civic virtue (Tocqueville, Montesquieu), to the constellation of cultural institutions that guarantee the ideological hegemony of the ruling class (Gramsci). In contemporary political debate, the term has become a normative football, representing a bulwark of freedom and anti-totalitarianism to the survivors of communism's fall in Eastern Europe while signifying the spearhead of Western imperialism to those suspicious of efforts to “export democracy” to the developing world.

But reluctance to use the term in the analysis of Middle Eastern politics goes beyond the problematic nature of the term itself and derives from a vision of the Middle East as somehow inhospitable to “civil society.” The Middle East is seen as riven by primordial cleavage, dominated by rent-swollen, power-mon-gering states, unpracticed in reverence for individual freedom and civil liberties. Sociology, economics, politics, and culture conspire to sabotage the development of civil society in the region and so, the reasoning goes, the term is best renounced to check premature expectations of its realization.

If only two important features may be singled out to characterize the “New World Order,” they are the collapse of communism and the globalization of the demand for democracy. We have thus reached “the end of history.” Western democracy can travel across the globe without any entry visa and is welcome wherever it lands.

Contrary to this “endism,” the view adopted in this short paper assumes that the democratization process in the Arab countries will be both long and costly. The contagion effect might transform governments' piecemeal concessions into substantive democracy, but this is less probable than a situation of democratic breakdowns and incumbent governments presenting formal pluralism and controlled multipar-tism as the real thing. The literature's overoptimism reflects the nascent state of research on Arab democratization. In fact, multiple published volumes bringing together worldwide and sophisticated research on democratization (Diamund, et al. 1988, 1989; O'Donnel & Schmitter 1986) do not analyze a single Arab case, or explain such absence.

For many students of contemporary Arab politics, the most pressing question is whether Islam will become democratic. One need only point to the case of Algeria to find ready evidence that Islamic movements have already become highly democratic, although frustrated in their electoral objective. Leonard Binder (1989), however, asks a far more pressing question: Will Islam become liberal?

As Tocqueville shows, democracy or the love of equality comes easily to citizens of modernity. The love of liberty, however, is a far more difficult love to cultivate. Yet, without this love of liberty, modern democracy comes to embody arguably the most oppressive tyranny in the history of the human race, the tyranny of the majority. In the aristocratic past, such an extraordinarily powerful and omnipresent tyranny was not possible. Thus, it becomes apparent just how pressing is Binder's question about the prospects for Islamic liberalism.

Although Binder's answer to this question could hardly be characterized as overly optimistic, Binder does harbor some hope for Islamic liberalism. He proposes a synthesis of Fazlur Rahman's Gadamerian version of Islam and the pragmatic liberalism of Richard Rorty. Although it is not difficult to show an affinity between Gadamer and Rorty, it is difficult to show that Islam is tending in the direction of acquiring Rahman's understanding of it. It is even more difficult to show that pragmatism is truly liberal. Although Binder points the way to an “Islamic pragmatism,” I hope to show that he fails to point the way to an “Islamic liberalism.” Binder's pragmatism cannot avoid the tyranny of the majority that Tocqueville warns us can be fought only with the love of liberty.

It is said that the old political science attempted to be explanatory and the new political science is interpretive. A key question then is what is the meaning of political interpretation. Does it mean that political analysis is simply subjective and that intellectual anarchy reigns? The old political science had its apparent orthodoxy of the canons of the scientific method. The new orthodoxy refers to these and resembles the old in its underlying liberal, pluralist value assumptions.

The old orthodoxy in comparative politics focuses on develop-mentalism; the new orthodoxy emphasizes democratization, market-oriented economics, rational choice theory, and political economy. Developmentalism stressed the importance of the welfare of the individual as well as at the same time the need for secularization and political participation. Developmentalism was also teleological. The goal was to achieve secularization and participation, in the process replicating the advanced industrial states from which the ideas originated. The values implicit in developmentalism were obscured by the old orthodoxy's patina of behavioralism and “scientific objectivity.”

The new orthodoxy has abandoned behavioralism and “scientific objectivity,” but in neither a systematic nor a philosophical way. Instead, the validity of the criticisms seems to be tacitly conceded even while the spokespersons of the new orthodoxy operate within a “new” scholarly and foreign policy culture that shows evidence of having characteristics similar to those of the old.

The Middle East field is in a crisis within the broader discipline of political science. A review of major departments of political science reveals surprisingly few that have full professors with the politics of the Middle East as their primary research focus. This lacuna exists at such universities as Harvard, Yale, Michigan, Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Chicago, Ohio State, Emory, Brown, Dartmouth, North Carolina, Rice, Pittsburgh, Brandeis, Wisconsin, and elsewhere. Some of these departments have no Middle East faculty at all, others have denied tenure to deserving junior faculty, while still others have an interest in the region but claim to lack resources to make the necessary appointments.

The situation is clearly better at institutions such as Columbia, NYU, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Johns Hopkins SAIS, Indiana, UCLA, Texas, Princeton, Georgetown, George Washington, Rutgers, and a few others. Nonetheless, there are problems here too. Some faculty are administrators and do not teach a full load. Others may be nearing retirement and are concerned that they will not be replaced by a scholar who also specializes in the Middle East. Although we can disagree about particular institutions or individuals (e.g., Is so-and-so “really” a Middle East scholar?), it is evident that this field is in danger of being marginalized both in professional recognition by the discipline as a whole, and in political science departments that may appreciate having Middle East politics courses on the books, but not the scholarship of the course instructor.

Disregard for the Middle East field can be attributed to an array of political and disciplinary factors with which most of us are familiar. And one could reasonably expand the problem to include all area studies.

In a 1985 American political science roundtable analyzing the state of the field of comparative politics, the participants concluded that Middle East studies lagged behind most other area studies in the generation of theory (PS 1985). They determined that scholars of Latin America, Asia, and Africa had traversed a greater distance along the road to theory than had analysts of the Middle East. Today, almost a decade later, despite some promising developments, the situation remains basically unchanged.

From the Rigor of Metatheory to Theoretical Rigor Mortis

In the 1960s and 1970s, scholars of comparative politics emphasized issues of philosophy of science and the logic of theory construction. They spent an inordinate amount of time debating metatheory, i.e., they theorized about theory. Although this exercise yielded important intellectual advances, it ultimately degenerated into a sterile exercise in logic for its own sake, and its formulations remained divorced from the empirical world. Partially in reaction to this preoccupation with metatheory, many comparativists in the 1980s abandoned theoretical concerns and focused instead upon empirical investigation and data collection. The result has been the generation of uneven, disconnected, and unrelated stagnant data deposits.

In the fall of 1993 President Boris Yeltsin dissolved the Russian legislature and called for elections to a new assembly in the hope of getting a more pro-reform parliament. That parliament in turn would consolidate his position in the struggle with the republics and regions over the issues of autonomy and the distribution of power between Moscow and the provinces. Instead, the December 1993 elections to the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian legislature, were a clear defeat for both him and the pro-reform forces.

Much attention has been devoted to considering the extent of the defeat and its implications. Particular focus has been placed on ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky's strong showing. Despite the electoral gains registered by Zhirinovsky and his party, the organizational activity of the Duma since the elections strongly argues that it was the communists and not he who won the contest for the lower house. Even so, focusing on the State Duma is as misplaced as focusing on Zhirinovsky if one is to fully appraise the results and likely fallout from the December elections. Having virtually swept the races to seats in the new upper house (the Federation Council), provincial elites are once again in a position to press Yeltsin on the issue of regional autonomy. Hence, Yeltsin is faced with much the same situation as before the decision to assault the Russian parliament building, the White House.

In November 1993, 100 years after becoming the first nation to enfranchise women, New Zealand again made electoral reform history as its citizens voted by a 54–46 margin to replace their venerable, U.S.-style first-past-the-post (FPP) method of electing legislators with a new mixed-member proportional (MMP) system. Political scientists in the United States and elsewhere may find New Zealand's decision instructive in six ways:

• as a harbinger of a wider movement toward electoral reform in established democracies and of a global trend toward mixed-member legislatures;

• as a demonstration of how constitutional reform can overcome entrenched interests;

• as a symptom of political backlash against the imposition of orthodox economic policies of the sort advocated by the IMF and other international agencies;

• as a partial repudiation of the Westminster model that U.S. reformers have often taken as their ideal;

• as the source of a new method of ensuring fair and effective representation for a minority ethnic group; and

• as an example of how political scientists can play influential roles as institutional designers and public educators.

Just as sportsmanship is essential for competitive sports, statesmanship is necessary for competitive democracy. This obvious assertion, which I followed with a distinction between primary and secondary democracy, was greeted with some misunderstanding when it was presented at a 1993 American Political Science Association workshop on democratization headed by Gabriel Almond. Because this distinction appears to be controversial, let me defend it here as a way to overcome some of the quandaries found in the literature on democracy; to link democracy to development; and to suggest more fruitful approaches to encouraging democracy than elections.

Professor Almond's response to my primary/secondary democracy distinction was to point out that those participating in his workshop had used a definition of democracy presented by Dahl (1971) in his book on polyarchy, emphasizing two dimensions: widespread participation and contestation (including competition and conflict). This seems to me a one-sided definition (focusing almost exclusively on what I call “primary democracy”), leaving out the aspects emerging from secondary democracy: a mutual respect among competing groups and between leaders and followers and consensus on governmental goals and procedures.

Without secondary democracy, primary democracy tends to be meaningless, much like an Olympics without the necessary conditions for sporting events and rules for participating, competing, and officiating. Another way of making the distinction here presented would be the “two ideals of democracy” suggested by Mansbridge (1991, 7): “one based on conflict, the other on commonality.”