Too Much Civil Society, Too Little Politics: Egypt and Liberalizing Arab Regimes

In a provocative article, Thomas Carothers offered a corrective to common ways of thinking about liberalizing authoritarian regimes. At the height of a worldwide wave of liberalizations in the early 1990s, optimistic assumptions that any liberalizing regime was in transition to democracy led observers to count as many as one hundred countries that were expected to become democratic. By 2002 no more than twenty had moved beyond tentative liberalizations to institute meaningful political competition. The other four-fifths, including countries in Central America, Africa, and the former Soviet Union, not achieved relatively well-functioning democracy or do not seem to be deepening or advancing whatever democratic progress they have made.' Carothers' argument is important not only for democratization studies but also as an invitation to rethink the role of Arab liberalizations within them. Discussions of