LAHORE – Pakistan is undergoing three transitions simultaneously. How they unfold matters not only for Pakistan, but also for much of the Muslim world, particularly as the Arab Spring forces change upon governments across the wider Middle East.
Most Muslim countries were governed for decades by autocrats who had either emerged directly from the armed forces, or had strong “khaki” support. That was the case in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and, of course, Pakistan.
The Arab Spring drained away whatever spurious legitimacy that style of governance ever had. But, in Pakistan, delegitimation of military rule had actually occurred three years earlier, and the pressure for change came from much the same source – a restive and mobilized new middle class.
Several decades ago, the American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington argued that economic prosperity in developing countries with weak governing institutions would not necessarily lead to political stability. On the contrary, economic growth in such contexts can be – and often is – politically destabilizing.
That proved to be the case in Turkey and Pakistan in the 1990’s and early 2000’s, and later in much of the Arab world. Indeed, the rising aspirations of Arab youth in Egypt and Tunisia, the wellspring of the Arab Spring, followed impressive economic growth that had failed to trickle down. And such rising expectations have been visible in all large Muslim countries.
As Huntington suggested, when young people see their economies grow, they begin to demand participation in decisions that affect all aspects of their lives, not just their economic well-being. Military-dominated political systems precluded such participation, so, with economic growth, demilitarization of politics became a rallying cry in all large military-led Muslim states, from Indonesia to the Mediterranean coast. Even Iran, where the Revolutionary Guards control roughly one-third of the economy, was affected when the result of the presidential election in 2009 triggered large anti-government protests in Tehran and other major cities.
But demilitarization means more than transferring power and policymaking from the armed forces to elected parliaments. In their recent book Why Nations Fail, the economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson suggest that elections – even those that are free and fair – do not necessarily move societies from what they call “extractive” to “inclusive” systems. Indeed, extraction of a country’s wealth for use by the elite can occur even in democratic societies when those who dominate the political system face no constraints other than periodic elections. More
