5.How does liberalization different from democratization?
Today there is no such thing as democracy or democratization in the Arab
world.Authoritarian rulers (among them the Arab ones) possess a structural advantage over
their democratic counterparts in maintaining power since they do not have to put power at
stake in regular competitive elections. Instead, the specific type of nondemocratic rule still
dominating in the Arab world is (neo-) patrimonialism, in which political power rests
primarily on co-optation. However, political change has occurred in most Arab countries and
in a variety of ways.
Arab regimes’ experiments with political liberalization have been a major focus of scholarly
attention since the early 1990s: multiparty elections, fewer restrictions on the media, a higher
level of individual freedoms, and the proliferation of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)
have all contributed to the impression of a more liberal Middle East. However, political
liberalization was not a new phenomenon when it occurred in the early 1990s. Bahrain, for
instance, had initiated parliamentary experiments between 1971 and 1975. More prominently,
Anwar Sadat’s infitah policies in Egypt led not only to an economic, but also to a political,
opening. Political liberalization, thus, existed well before the current “wave of transitology,”
with its focus on democratization through liberalization.Political liberalization and
deliberalization are successfully employed by Arab regimes as strategies for political
survival. Their alternating use is ultimately a function of each individual country’s political
situation at a given moment in time, that is, its given constraints and opportunities.Political
liberalization entails a widening public sphere and a greater, but not irreversible, degree of
basic freedoms. It does not imply the introduction of contestation for positions of effective
governing power.
The common denominator of liberalization and its opposite is that systemic political
transition has not occurred in a single case. This is not to say that regimes do not change or
that changes beyond the transition level would not matter. But to examine such subsystemic
regime change solely with respect to the level of political liberties leaves us in a
democratization trap. In addition, while liberalization does not necessarily lead to
democratization, it still remains difficult to convince observers that “examining political
liberalization is not an instrument for finding out whether regime change is systemic or
non-systemic, let alone an instrument for tracing democratization”. However,
