No sane person calls for the development of Islam by deleting one of the five pillars or adding two or three pillars, but it is acceptable in democracy and required more than ever.
Why can't what is allowed in religion be demanded in democracy? For the simple reason that democracy is not a religion, but a contract or merely a game rules to regulate power within society. This contract is subject to termination, as in the case of the military dictatorship in Egypt or the populist dictatorial coup in Tunisia. It is also subject to review to improve its conditions in order to ensure the maximum interest of contractors, especially when experience shows gaps in it, as is the case all the time in democratic countries, where legal amendments never stop.
It goes without saying that alternatives to democracy as they are today are not easy, and that there is no magic formula that is valid everywhere and anytime to save the goals of democracy from the means of democracy.
All we have to do, in the face of the magnitude of the risks and challenges, is to think from outside the box, and enough of the mistakes we have made and the illusions that we ran after and led us from one mirage to another.
Today, there are armies behind computers, powerful algorithms, specialized companies, and the intelligence services of great powers whose mission is to interfere in the elections of any country and to direct public opinion in the direction they want and are able to do so.
First: Surface revisions. Means and objectives
With the first-hand experience of 30 years of opposition and 3 years of rule in the highest decision-making and monitoring positions of the work of the state apparatus, I have become convinced that the greatest threat to democracy is its long-shifted means.
In order for the reader to understand a situation that I will recount and may seem strange to him, it must be recalled that the goals of democracy are not freedom of expression, freedom of association, independence of the judiciary and the organization of fair elections.
Here we are talking about the means of democracy, and its objectives that must be recalled are:
- Peaceful transfer of power.
- And the rule of law and institutions so that society does not fall victim to a madman or a fool surrounded by gangs of wholesale criminals.
- And the crystallization of the people of citizens from the womb of the people of the subjects created by tyranny, poverty and ignorance.
- Achieving peace among peoples and facilitating the integration of their countries.
The question, then, is the mechanisms of democracy really serving the goals? Or have they become goals in themselves that serve only the interests of their beneficiaries?
When historians examine the reasons for aborting the democratic experiment in Egypt and Tunisia, they will be amazed by the ability of corrupt money to hide behind the freedom of organization to create political contracting companies under the name of this or that democratic party, and how some of them were able to rise to the highest positions of decisiveness and decision-making and prepare for the return of tyranny.
As for the judiciary, which was exploited throughout tyranny, there were suddenly heroes and heroines who are only interested in expanding the powers of the judiciary, and even placing it above all authorities, everyone is held accountable and no one holds it accountable. These historians will be surprised that the people who initiated the waves of the Arab Spring voted in a majority for the return of the old regime, and then elected a nobody populist who led the country to the brink.
They will be surprised to learn of the enormous role played by a corrupt media that was subservient throughout the dictatorship and bullied the revolution and protected the freedoms it brought for the first time in the country's history, using the worst methods to turn people against this revolution and its men.
During a period of teaching about the Arab democratic revolutions that Harvard invited me to last year, one of my classes was a French media engineer and researcher at MIT. She told me that, after scrutinizing nearly 200 elections around the world, she had proven with the most advanced mathematical equations that it was not race, gender, education or poverty that determined a good election choice, but the quantity and quality of information that voters obtained. At least, the good news in this conclusion is the end of the myth of stupid peoples who do not know their interests, and the distinction between mature peoples who deserve democracy and immature peoples who do not deserve and do not know how to manage them.
This outcome is not optimistic, quite the contrary, it is a worrying and frustrating result about the effectiveness of democracy. It is a mistake to think that it is enough for future Democrats not to tolerate private television channels or monitor social media pages to tip the cuff. It is as if the hernia has widened on the horizon, as no human being, not even any poor country, can control all the old and new means of disinformation that the virtual space has come to provide.
Today, there are armies behind computers, powerful algorithms, specialized companies, and the intelligence services of great powers whose mission is to interfere in the elections of any country and to direct public opinion in the direction it wants and is able to.
Add to this a new danger called artificial intelligence, which will enable fakes tomorrow to flood voters with videos that say the annoying politician of local or international centers of influence is a statement that he never uttered or creates sexual or financial scandals for him, and the voice is the voice of the victim and the images are not being investigated by anyone.
After this, how can we trust statements that have long been associated with democracy and free and fair elections such as the "will of the people"? Or that "the people are the master of their decision"! What to do if some consider the media battle already lost!
It is indeed a battle, and therefore the balance of power can be upset in favor of a media focused on exposing media disinformation, and this is possible and required. But there is a second trend, which is to pull the rug out from under the feet of the disinformation media, or rather to make it useless and completely off-topic.
Today, in major American universities, there is research on alternatives to elections, which are no longer the best solution to achieve the goals of democracy, and sometimes only achieve the opposite, and there is currently research on the effectiveness of the idea of the "lottery".
There are those who wonder why university presidents are chosen according to strict criteria, and heads of state are chosen according to their ability to shout: Palestine, corruption, justice... Etcetera! Shouldn't we think about choosing them as the Nobel Committee chooses the best brains? Imagine if the presidency of universities, companies and Nobel Prizes were awarded by free and fair elections so that the people would exercise their full sovereignty!
Yes, but how do we throw in the trash the most important thing in the elections, namely the periodic discharge of the violence that inhabits us all and that we get rid of through the symbolic killing of the leader and the periodic revenge of those who oppress us by removing them from power? Isn't it dangerous that after abandoning these symbolic battles, we will be drawn to nostalgia for bloody battles!
In this regard, the Arab Council will organize a conference of Arab democrats in which they will discuss the problems raised in these articles. We hope that new intellectual and political visions and proposals will emerge from collective brainstorming that will guarantee our nascent democracy every chance of survival, expansion and rootedness.
Second: Depth reviews. The legitimacy of democratic power
Focusing on mechanisms is useless if we do not go to the foundations of the democratic system itself to ensure their soundness, as perhaps they must be re-engineered themselves, i.e. return to the premises.
In order for society not to be a jungle society dominated by chaos, ruled by violence, eaten by the strong and weak and impossible to live together, there must be organization, organization must have authority, and authority must have legitimacy that makes its orders and prohibitions acceptable without the need for a great deal of coercion and violence.
The huge problem that all societies face is on what legitimacy we build the power that is the cornerstone of any organized and viable society.
Historically, and still so, in religious authoritarian regimes, power has no legitimacy except that which derives from God and His representatives on earth (guardians).
Due to the increasing secularization in the world and the decline of this type of legitimacy with the decline of the role of religions in governing societies, the people were replaced by God. Thus, constitutions are written, laws are enacted, justice is issued in the name of the people, and everyone praises him and claims death for the sake of serving him, and that he does not put anything above his will, and it has become an alternative to God's will, which no one has the ability and right to exceed.
We have seen the emptiness of the people's concept and the lie of their will through the opinion of part of the electoral lists, and then the absurdity of imagining legitimacy based on an illusion, at best, and a deception in the worst scenario.
Perhaps it is said that the director is to attribute legitimacy to the "public interest" and not to the imaginary will of an imaginary people. But with this option, we only take the crisis to another level, and do not get rid of it completely. It is self-evident that people are a wide range of contradictory interests, such as those of employers and workers, or those of competitors for the scarce resources of the state.
Juvenile and do not forget about the interests of parties, lobbies and individuals, all of whom claim that his understanding of the public interest is correct.
Let us leave on the one hand all technical difficulties and all possible methodological errors in determining this public interest. Even then, have we found the final solution to the question of legality? Of course not. Should the Palestinian people accept the legitimacy of Israel's decisions, because they are all in the interest of the overwhelming majority of its people? Did we have to accept the legitimacy of colonialism, because it was in the interest of the Western peoples?
There is therefore something higher than the public interest to build the legitimacy of any authority, and that is the right of peoples to self-government and their natural resources, that is, in fact, respect for justice, equality, freedom and peace, that is, commitment to the supremacy of values over interests, whatever their source and justification.
Do we find what we want in "values" to be the refuge for the solution?
Yes, and it must be so, because it is the best expression of the will of the majority and its legitimate interests, since there is only a minority of human beings who do not accept justice, equality, freedom and dignity for all human beings.
But who will determine the list of these values? And from what source will we draw them to turn them into laws?
There are two sources that can be exploited to build a new legitimacy for democratic power.
- First: Religious or secular values that society places at the top of the list of attitudes and behaviors required of all its members
The Muslim community can return to its Islamic values, the Christian community to its Christian values, and a secular society like the French can focus on its secular values.
- Second: The unanimous text
The only text on which all nations, religions, cultures and races are unanimous is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This text is an inventory of the most important values required for a healthy society, and it is a very precise text in determining the necessary values, even if they are put in a form that we read sometimes as rights and other times as duties, we say that I have the right to life, dignity, liberty and physical inviolability, or that it is my duty to respect your right to life, dignity, liberty and physical integrity.
In addition, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the backbone of many international covenants and treaties that constitute the law of all humanity. This makes us safe from magical thought and empty bidding if we write in future constitutions that the legitimacy of any authority derives from its full respect for the basic values of society, from full commitment to all articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international covenants and covenants, and from ensuring the enactment and implementation of all laws that communicate these rights to their owners.
In this sense, the more an authority moves away from these values, the less legitimate it becomes illegitimate and has the right to end it by all means.
In this new way (which of course will raise the question of the ability to impose them), we will see the evaporation of magical concepts. The reference is not a gelatinous people used by authoritarians and populists, but a specific list of rights and duties that every temporary holder of power is held accountable for, and which alone can serve the interest of those who elect and those who do not elect, i.e. the actual public interest.
The major practical problems remain: how we will impose such an augmented and revised democracy in a situation that is not more difficult.
This is what we will cover in the fourth article: "How to win the most important battles?"