The liberal project: East and West.
Author | Spengemann, Sven M |
Roger D Congleton, Perfecting Parliament: Reform, Liberalism and the Rise of Western Democracy(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Stephen J King, The New Authoritarianism in the Middle East and North Africa(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009).
The year 2011 was marked by the onset of the Arab Spring and the emergence of a series of protest movements in the established liberal democracies of North America and Europe. The Arab Spring is about the resentment of decades of political and economic oppression and the search for new political representation. The Western protest movements are less about a desire to part ways with democracy than about dissatisfaction with the outputs of a poorly regulated free market. Fundamentally, both are about the struggle for a more equitable distribution of wealth. Against this context, each of the two books reviewed here carries a message about sustainable liberalization that has become highly relevant. Roger Congleton's central thesis focuses on the incremental and essentially linear evolution of Western liberal reforms, with parallel contributions from the political and economic realms. Stephen King, in turn, chronicles recent efforts to democratize and liberalize the economies of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), which have led to a concentration of wealth in the hands of ruling elites, the disempowerment of workers, and, subsequently, the rise and initial suppression of political Islam. Taken together, the two studies advance our understanding of the broader, conceptual context around the political transformations in the Arab world and allow for some tentative predictions.
Congleton's Perfecting Parliamentdevelops a compelling approach to the mechanics of Western liberal constitutionalism. His central claim, framed as an interdisciplinary pivot between history and social science, is that liberal accomplishments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are the result of a series of gradual developments, the evolutionary product of "fine-grained constitutional bargaining," rather than of revolutionary change and institutional rupture (266). The project of liberalism, in other words, cannot lay claim to the creation of political or social surprises.
* Sven M Spengemann, formerly Senior Political Affairs Officer, UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (on UN sabbatical leave at the time of writing, Fall 2011) and currently Visiting Professor at the Glendon School of Public and...
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