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There has been a great deal of rhetoric lately about the need for democracy in the Middle East, and US President George W. Bush has proclaimed the spread of political freedom in the region as a major goal of US policy. Afghanistan is on the verge of adopting a new Constitution, and the US and the Iraqi Governing Council are revising their recent plan for transition to a sovereign Iraqi government. Nearby Georgia has just experienced a revolutionary ouster of its longtime President. Certainly many in the Middle East want to see more representative institutions (but they also do not wish to see these imposed by an outside power). In this context it may be worthwhile to offer a few reflections: not conclusions, not prescriptions, but some things to keep in mind, a sort of sanity check.

The picture is mixed. Iran, with a seemingly democratic political system, keeps electing reformers who cannot pass reforms because of the constraints on the elected leadership. Oddly enough, the most democratic reforms in recent years have come from monarchies: Qatar and Bahrain have instituted elected Parliaments and Oman has just elected its Shura Council for the first time. Even Saudi Arabia plans local elections. (Elsewhere, King Muhammad VI of Morocco has greatly liberalized women's rights: by decree. In Kuwait a few years ago, the Amir gave women the right to vote, and Parliament took it away.) The older republics - Syria, Egypt, Tunisia - may allow opposition in one form or another, but the ruling party always wins. The prospects for democracy are not as dismal as some paint them, but they are not necessarily bright, either. As the debate proceeds, a few points are often overlooked in the rhetoric of the day:

A democratic electoral system, as such, does not assure the sort of liberal pluralist society many in the West equate with democracy. Adolf Hitler was, of course, elected democratically, but only once. What Fareed Zakaria has called "illiberal democracy" may indeed be emerging as a pattern instead of the liberal democratic traditions of the West. There are a number of countries, especially in East Asia, where a democratic system is in place and opposition parties exist but the ruling party always wins anyway (Malaysia, Japan for many decades).

Historically, Western countries tend to forget how recently they achieved full democracy themselves. Westerners are often outraged that Kuwaiti women still cannot vote (as noted earlier, because Parliament refuses to give them the vote: the Amir tried). Yet American and British women could not vote until after the First World War; French and Italian women could not vote until after the Second World War, and Swiss women - good, democratic, neutral Switzerland - could not vote until the 1970s. That is half the population without the franchise. And most Western Parliamentary systems have their roots in institutions several centuries old, or older, and most Middle Eastern countries were not even independent states until after World War I, if then.

Democratization by decree from above does not ensure success. Successful democracies have generally upon a pre-existing healthy civil society: local institutions, often elected from below long before national governments are; professional unions or syndicates; other non-governmental organizations functioning in a manner which permits individual input and participation in the governance of at least some part of one's life. Simply electing a national parliament does not a democracy make. Algeria in 1988-1992 went through a period of rapid democratization and liberalization, creating a plethora of political parties, but the result of elections was not freedom but a coup and a civil war.

Westerners often underestimate the level of political participation in the Arab world. Most Arab countries are not totalitarian in the way the Soviet Union or China were. Saddam Hussein's Iraq came close, but even authoritarian countries like Syria have some aspects of civil society, and Egypt for example has always had vigorously independent (if sometimes suppressed) professional syndicates and, more recently, a feisty opposition press. The fact that the arrest of a democracy advocate like Sa'd al-Din Ibrahim can become a cause celebre is a reminder that Egypt is not Saddam's Iraq: in Iraq he would simply have disappeared. Muslims have always pointed to the concept of shura or consultation as a sign that Islam has a democratic streak, and there is an element of truth to this (though the concept of shura, and the religious concept of ijma' or consensus, were not open to all and usually had some constraints as well). And many Arab countries had their parliamentary period early in their independent years: Egypt before 1952, Iraq until 1958. These were not model democracies by any means, and all ended in military rule, but there was a tradition of parliamentary life and competitive elections.

Democracy is not as universal outside the Arab world as some seem to be arguing. The Arab/Islamic world is not the only holdout. By some measures it has been said that a bit over 50% of the world's population now lives under democratic rule. There are huge exceptions such as China, and most of the former Soviet Union outside the Baltics is indifferently democratic, while Russia seems to be moving away from liberal democracy. If Eastern Europe and Latin America have made great strides, Africa has been a mixed story, at best.

Democracy has almost never been imposed from outside. The exceptions mentioned so often are post-World War II Germany and Japan. Germany was divided, and West Germany came into being as much through the leadership of key democrats like Konrad Adenauer as through Allied guidance. The "MacArthur regency" in Japan is also cited, but here MacArthur had one great asset: the support of the Emperor, the unifying symbol of the Japanese state and people. There was no such figure in Germany; there is no such figure in Iraq. (Nor did Germany or Iraq have the millennia of cultural unity that Japan possessed and possesses.)