Content area
Full text
More than twenty-five years have passed since the publication of Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Prospects for Democracy, the four pioneering volumes edited by Guillermo O'Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead that inaugurated third-wave democratization theory. More than fifteen years have passed since the 1996 publication of our own Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe. Looking back, what do we find useable or applicable from works on democratization from this earlier period, and what concepts need to be modified? In particular, what new perspectives are needed in light of the recent upheavals in the Arab world?
Here we focus on three topics that have been illuminated by the events of the Arab Spring: 1) the relationship between democracy and religion, especially in the world's Muslim-majority countries; 2) the character of hybrid regimes that mix authoritarian and democratic elements; and 3) the nature of "sultanism" and its implications for transitions to democracy.
Conflicts concerning religion, or between religions, did not figure prominently in either the success or failure of third-wave attempts at democratic transition. The Roman Catholic Church of course played an important and positive role in the democratic transitions in Poland, Chile, and Brazil. But conflicts over religion, which were so crucial in Europe in earlier historical periods, were not prominent. For this and other reasons, religion was undertheorized in scholarly writing about the third wave. Yet the hegemony, perceived or actual, of religious forces over much of civil society in the Arab world, especially in the country-side, had no parallel in the third wave. Thus the central role that Islam has played in the Arab Spring presents students of democratization with a novel phenomenon, and prompts them accordingly to come up with new concepts and fresh data to shed light upon it.
Samuel P. Huntington argued controversially that religion, especially Islam, would set major limits to further democratization. That suggested to one of us (Alfred Stepan) the idea of exploring what democracy and religion need, and do not need, from each other in order that each may flourish.1 Stepan argued that neither laicité of the French sort (generally recognized not merely as secularist but as positively antireligious), nor a type of secularism that decrees a complete separation...