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Inesha Premaratne, an intern with the GPS show, speaks with Gregory Gause III, professor of political science at the University of Vermont and non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Doha Center, about recent developments in Egypt.
Whats your take on whats happening in Egypt right now?
Well, Im pessimistic about whats happening right now. It seems to me that you have a precedent of the military coming in and ousting an elected government. No matter how bad the government was, thats a bad precedent for democracy. Secondly, if through this action what you get is a Muslim Brotherhood that is pressured by the state and is either not allowed or not willing to participate itself in the political process, you just cant have an inclusive democracy.
So would you say that it would have been preferable for the Egyptians to wait for the elections rather than have the military stage a coup?
Yes, I would say that. They should have waited for the parliamentary elections; that would have been better for democracy. Youll find many Egyptians that will say Im an idiot, that I dont understand that the Brotherhood was entrenching itself to such an extent that the elections would have been useless. But in my reading of the Egyptian situation I hadnt seen the Brotherhood crossing that line yet where they were so monopolizing power, that the elections would have been a sham.
Lets examine the nature of the transition itself as compared to others weve seen. In your piece The Year the Arab Spring Went Bad, you wrote that democratic transitions are particularly tough in this region. Can you explain why you think this is so?
First off, I think we should banish the assumption that the natural end state of the fall of an authoritarian government is democracy. We were kind of spoiled by the results of transitions in Eastern Europe and in the democratic wave in Latin America and East Asia in the 80s and 90s. Many of those transitions did end up in democratic results, so we came to think that democracy was the default position for a transition from authoritarianism.
So why is it harder in this region? I think there are two kinds of cleavages that exist in Arab countries that make stable democratic transitions particularly difficult. The first kind of cleavage is ethnic and sectarian whether it be the competing identities of Kurds and Arabs or Sunnis and Shiites or Muslims and Christians. In a place like Syria or Iraq where those identities are very salient, its hard to have a democratic transition because first elections tend to end up being a sectarian/ethnic census. Minorities dont trust majorities and majorities come to loathe minorities who have held power over them. Politics becomes an all or nothing game, where compromise is very hard to achieve.
The second kind of cleavage is ideological. People have to ask whether they want an Islamist government, as was the case for the Muslim Brotherhood before its fall in Egypt, or a more secular one. This kind of ideological fight is relevant not just in Egypt but also across the Middle East, from Morocco to Iraq and also in non-Arab countries like Turkey and Iran. When societies are characterized by severe identity and ideological cleavages, the spirit of compromise and toleration that makes democracy work is hard to come by.
Analyst: Egypt should have waited for elections ? Global Public Square - CNN.com Blogs