Democracy and Islam in the Maghreb and Implications for Europe

Abstract

Democracy’s reputation has taken a severe beating in recent years in many areas around the globe—especially in Arab and Islamic quarters. Although in theor? virtually every country on earth has in the past century proudly trumpeted support for the principle of popular sovereignty, in practic?, there has been no shortage of governmental and non-governmental opposition to democracy. Whether in Eastern Europe, Africa, or elsewhere, venal dictatorships and centralized one-party states have all referred to themselves as the “Democratic Republic of” their respective countries. Even Enver Hoxha—the Albanian communist who was so hard-line that he returned from visiting Kim Il Sung’s North Korea convinced that the country was “dangerously implanted” with bourgeois revisionism—organized regular elections in which the people could, in theory, vote him out of power. To take one election during the last years of his reign as an example, some seven people did vote against him—but they were outweighed by the 2 million who approved of the “Paradise on Earth” that the dictator was establishing. To the north of this Eden lay the German “Democratic” Republic, for whose regime the presence of the sacred word in the state’s name was sufficient proof of its virtue (certainly, compared to the mere German “Federal” Republic to the West). As the saying goes, hypocrisy is simply the homage that vice pays to virtue!