Title:	Negotiating Change
Other Titles:	The New Politics of the Middle East
Authors:	Jones, Jeremy
Keywords:	The New Politics of the Middle East
Issue Date:	2007
Publisher:	I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd
Description:	The title of a conference held at an Ivy League University in the spring of 2005 was ‘Democracy in the Middle East. Is it possible?’ The tone is almost incredulous: it is as though someone had just caught sight of a phenomenon so unexpected, so unlikely, that they could hardly believe their eyes. It is widely held, and not just in America, that the Middle East – with the exception of Israel – is the one region of the world that remains untouched by democracy. Since the wave of democratic change that transformed central and Eastern Europe starting in 1989, democracy has enjoyed, it seems, a global reach. It would scarcely have been imaginable before 1989, and quite inconceivable only 60 years earlier, when some of Europe’s most advanced nations seemed to have abandoned democracy altogether in favour of modern ideologies of fascism and communism. Democratic government had actually established itself as a global norm. Governments that were not democratic had started to look out of step with the times. Governments in the Middle East – apparently a mixture of royal autocracies, military dictatorships and even one theocracy – seemed especially anomalous. They continued stubbornly to resist the global embrace of democracy, and advocates of reform found their message falling on stony ground.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/51542
ISBN:	978 1 84511 270 7
Appears in Collections:	African Studies

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