By Rami G. Khouri 

The fascinating, simultaneous demonstrations and challenges to democratically elected regimes in Egypt, Turkey and Brazil this month suggest that we need to look for an explanation for all this in something structural in newly democratized societies, rather than in cultural explanations. The silliest common cultural line of analysis asks about the compatibility between “Islam and democracy,” without our ever hearing an analogous discussion of, say, “Judaism and democracy” or “Christianity and democracy.”The mass demonstrations in these three countries are particularly intriguing because their leaderships are democratically elected, and therefore unquestionably legitimate. Also, all three countries were passing through moments of great hope and achievement; these included significant mass economic improvements in people’s well-being in Brazil and Turkey, and a democratic transition in Egypt that created a new global icon of the popular will for mass dignity and civil rights: Tahrir Square. Politically mummified Egypt set a new benchmark against which other political agitation around the world would be measured, whether in Madison, Wisconsin, in 2011 or in Turkey this month where analysts debated whether the Turkish people were about to create a new Tahrir Square.

 

The hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets in Turkey and Brazil, and those millions in Egypt who promise to hold a mass national demonstration on June 30 to seek the ouster of President Mohammad Mursi on the first year anniversary of his arrival to power, raise reasonable questions that relate to several aspects of the two most compelling dimensions of governance: the policy and the style of the ruling incumbents. If the legitimacy of the leaderships in these three countries is not directly in question – after all, they were elected in free and fair democratic elections – then why have dissatisfied citizens taken to the streets to show their concerns?

 

I suspect that what we are witnessing is a dramatic expression of the weaknesses inherent in two simultaneous processes that are slowly expanding across the world: One is democratic rule based on majoritarianism, and the other is the continued diffusion of neoliberal capitalism, which turns citizens into consumers and gives corporations much greater power in the public realm than it does to the mass of ordinary citizens. The convergence and the initial globalization of these two forces can be traced to the early 1980s, under the leaderships of President Ronald Reagan in the United States and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom.

 

The critical element at play in Egypt, Turkey and Brazil – and visible to smaller degrees elsewhere in the world – is the expression of discontent among citizens who feel that their ability to vote in or vote out their national leadership is not a sufficient expression of their rights to be treated decently or fairly by their own society. Most of the demonstrators in Brazil and Turkey were members of the rising middle classes that benefited from their countries’ leaders and their policies during the past decade or more. Their living conditions, spending power, and capacity to hold leaders accountable, or change them through the ballot box if need be, were broadly improving.

 

In Egypt, economic conditions remained dire, but people felt a newfound hope, empowerment, pride and dignity in their lives, and were involved in the exhilarating, unprecedented, process of writing their constitution and creating a governance system that reflected their values and aspirations.

 

And yet masses of citizens still took to the streets in these countries because they did not feel that existing democratic mechanisms were sufficiently attentive to their rights, needs and grievances. These spanned a very wide array of issues that included ethnic and sectarian identities, economic realities, political freedoms, corruption, stressed public services and, perhaps most importantly, an arrogant style of wielding power. That arrogance of freely elected leaders has tended to chip away at but not totally negate these leaders’ legitimacy. It has also sparked a historic new response from masses of aggrieved citizens who are demonstrating in a manner that tries to force the sorts of compromises, consultations and policy changes that are not occurring as they should through the normal democratic process.

 

The Reagan-Thatcher approach to governance held that a 51 percent majority with a mandate to govern from the citizens could do whatever was deemed to be in the national interest. But the 49 percent of citizens who increasingly feel that their rights and concerns are not being taken into consideration by the policy-setting majority have taken a detour around the blockages of insensitive majorities, and are trying to force change by using new tactics of street politics.

 

Most of the protests have been spontaneous, locally organized and not coordinated in a sustainable national movement. The best outcome from these protests would be to reinvigorate the formal democratic processes – elections, parliaments, courts, political parties – that tend to lose their glamour and much of their legitimacy when they become callously arrogant.