Haroon Moghul: The Islamists vs. The Markets: Egypt’s Election Analyzed

I also think that the value of these democracies is perhaps romanticized. We are currently in a global situation wherein long-established Western democracies are completely powerless before international finance. Who seriously thinks that Greece, Italy, Spain, Ireland, or Iceland, or even the United Kingdom and Germany, have any meaningful democratic domestic consensus? Who seriously thinks that the people in those countries have any meaningful options in how their countries respond to the current economic crisis—which affects a whole range of domestic social policy and priorities?

And how will the Arab world possibly be any different? The source of much of the Arab world’s recent unrest lies in income inequality, injustice, authoritarianism, and economic stagnation. No country in the world, the United States included, can now pursue domestic policy independent of international financial markets. How much more so the Arab world—considering how much poorer and less developed it is? And in that case, what difference does it make what government you have? Left or right, the market seems always to win.

This is actually where I would locate the greater threat to Arab democracy, and the temptation to slide into some form of authoritarianism, older or newer. As the people of the region confront the reality that they have little say over economic policy, and will be forced to accede to the contingencies of global capitalism, they may well become immensely frustrated by the scale of change and demand something different. Considering how volatile European and American politics have become, and how frequently we now see street protests and even supposedly stable and demure countries, how much more so these new democracies?

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/5454/the_islamists_vs._the_markets%3A_egypt%E2%80%99s_election_analyzed/