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Stalled Democracy. Capital, Labor, and the Paradox of State-Sponsored Development, by Eva Bellin. Cornell University Press, 2002, 239 pp., $35.00.
Much has been written in the last few years about the democratic deficit in the Middle East. Particularly in the aftermath of September 11, we have been inundated with studies, and even more often with unfounded opinions, that purport to explain why the Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa lag behind the rest of the world in the development of democratic political systems. Many of the explanations focus, predictably, on the supposedly unique characteristics of Islam as a religion and the Middle East as a region-pointing to the cultural chasm that divides the democratic West from the Arab world. Other studies point to the deepseated Arab resentment against the West, born from centuries of defeat and humiliation, that leads Arabs to continue to reject Western liberal ideals and to seek refuge in primordial attachments to religion and tradition.
Eva Bellin's masterful book, Stalled Democracy: Capital, Labor, and the Paradox of State-Sponsored Development, offers a refreshing departure from approaches that stress the centrality of culture and psychology to the weakness of democracy in Arab countries. Seeking to explain why the democratic transformation of Tunisia stalled during the 1990s, and why this phenomenon did not cause a strong public reaction, Bellin turns to the variables that generations of social scientists have found useful in explaining successful and unsuccessful democratic transitions: the role of social classes and interest groups. While she finds that the...