As authoritarian regimes crumble throughout the Middle East, so too does the tenuous gulf that once separated politics from religion. The recent elections in relatively moderate Tunisia exemplified this shift through the victory of the previously banned Islamic Ennahdha Party and the distant fourth place finish of the main secularist opposition bloc. In Egypt, when and if military control fully transitions into democratic pluralism, the Muslim Brotherhood is projected to emerge as a major, if not the dominant, political player in the race to replace Hosni Mubarak’s reconciliatory, pro-Israel regime. Similarly, as Jordan’s foreign policy becomes increasingly more responsive to public opinion, the pro-Western stance that has come to characterize the nation’s government is in danger of eroding into a heterogeneous stew of Islamism, fervent anti-Zionism, and at least some form of pluralism.
In several other Arab Spring nations, including Yemen, and to a limited extent Libya, expanding the role of Islam in civil society has become increasingly tied to the process of democratization. Yet even where this link is not explicit, it can be inferred; the Arab populace, by and large, rejects a separation between faith and state and thus, in countries where democracy succeeds, popular opinion will likely result in the fusion of these two elements anyway.
The emerging constituents of the Middle East not only differ from their weakening authoritarian governments through their adamant support of the fusion of Islam and the state, but also, with the notable exception of Libya, through a more skeptical view of West. As much as Islamophobia plagues the United States and Europe, recent studies have shown that the reverse phenomenon is even more salient in the Arab world. Thus, as regimes democratize, the relatively cordial relations that the European Union and United States once enjoyed with Hosni Mubarak, King Abdullah II, and Ben Ali, among other Middle Eastern leaders are, at least in the long term, in danger of discontinuation. After all, democratic governments theoretically represent the sentiments of the people, and sentiments of the Arab populace hold little in the way of desired comradeship with the West.
To claim that this brewing strain on international relations is entirely a function of Arab ideology, however, is false. European governments in particular have done much to justify and exacerbate anti-Western sentiment over the past few years, fostering the growth of anti-Muslim ideology on the continent. The last decade has seen the banning of burqas by France and Belgium, of minarets by Switzerland, and the rise of officially anti-Islamic political parties in the Netherlands, Sweden, and, more recently, Finland. When a Muslim state sees liberal democracies explicitly and implicitly denouncing the practice of the religion that is central to its own legitimacy, severe tensions, no matter how much diplomatic maneuvering takes place, are bound to arise.
On the whole, the Middle Eastern governments that have arisen out of the Arab Spring, if they indeed do come to represent the sentiment of their constituents, will likely shift toward policies that involve both institutional Islam and skepticism of the West. Western governments on the other hand, particularly in Europe, continue to grow increasingly intolerant of Islam and the accompanying Muslim culture. In this way, the two regions are set to diverge into an era of diplomatic turbulence rather than converge in the assumed harmony of a shared system of government. When analyzing the situation, one cannot help but harken back to the famous, semi-pessimistic thesis detailed in Samuel Huntington’s book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, which predicted that the most troublesome political fault line would ultimately occur between Western and Muslim civilizations. While the Muslim civilization, according to Huntington, might borrow some of the instruments of Western civilization, such as the institution of democracy, it would come to follow a civic path that was fundamentally different and diametrically opposed to that of the US and Western Europe. As a consequence, irreconcilable divergence would ensue between the two cultures. Representative democracy, rather than acting as the unifying force that it is assumed to be, may be the borrowed instrument through which the Muslim world catalyzes Huntington’s ideological clash.
Despite the growing cultural separation, the West has been able to mitigate the effects in the short-term through aggressive diplomatic gesturing. Pledged EU support to aid Tunisia in the process of democratization, and the somewhat ironic Swiss pledge to protect the burgeoning civil society of Libya, both illustrate the West’s desire to establish friendly relations. While such actions may, in the short term, hide the cultural gulf that is bound to emerge, they do not address the underlying long-term problems with relations between the two regions.
Perhaps the onus for making the necessary concessions and building the required cultural bridges falls on the shoulders of Europe and the West. Whereas Islam is a religion of absolutes, classical Western governance is theoretically built upon the principles of liberalism, concessions, and at least primitive tolerance. The structure of the European Union is built around the idea of multiculturalism, but the EU has been contradicting its own principles for the last decade. Still, the situation is by no means hopeless. The latest 2011 elections in Denmark and Switzerland, both nations historically being objects of focused ire by the Muslim populace, saw a shift away from anti-Islamic extremism after what had been prolonged periods of xenophobic escalation. While minor, these events reverse an anti-Muslim political impetus that had slowly been gathering steam on the continent.
Furthermore, one must note that many newly emergent Islamic political parties in the Arab world, such as the Ennahdha Party in Tunisia, are avowedly moderate and have made claims, though not yet proven, that their foreign policy will not be hostile towards the West. Hopefully this trend continues and Western and Arab governments grow not necessarily more amenable to, but at least less odious of, the ideologies of their somewhat skeptical counterparts. It is only by making these legitimate attempts to close the emerging gulf that the West, as well as the Middle East, can hope to build a future international environment that is largely free of distrust, mutual suspicion, and violence.