■ It's time for the international community to try democracy

Vidar Helgesen, Secretary-General of International IDEA

A comment by former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair epitomizes the somewhat hesitant response of the international community to the democratic uprising in Egypt: "you cannot be sure what type of change will be produced there." True. If democracy is allowed to run its course, you cannot be sure. This is the beauty of democracy, of allowing citizens to freely elect their leaders.

Democracy is not the certain outcome of current events, but the desire for democracy is certainly the driving force for millions and millions in Egypt and beyond. While social tensions – and, in particular, mass youth unemployment – played a role as triggers, causes are deeper and political. They will not go away with a couple of top-down measures to reshuffle cabinets, bring down food prices or increase public sector salaries. President Ben Ali of Tunisia did somehow get that message quickly. In Egypt, the belated and half-hearted response of the regime has been further discredited by violence against peaceful demonstrators and the outcome, at this moment, is uncertain. Different spill-over effects are felt in Yemen, Jordan, Syria, Algeria and other countries of the region.

Both the world and the Arab region are changing and, in tandem with these changes, the demand for democracy appears to be returning with renewed vitality. Twenty two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, seventeen years after the end of the apartheid regime in South Africa, thirteen years after the democratic reform in Indonesia, the 2011 democracy wave is about to engulf the Arab world. And this time, democracy doesn't come at the point of foreign guns or as a by-product of other agendas. The seeds are unequivocally and genuinely home-grown. Men and women are simply determined to take their future in their own hands. They want to be represented and have a say in the way their country is governed.

While their agenda is domestic, they are at the same time teaching the international community some lessons.

• Firstly, the marginal role democracy has played in international relations in the last decade has not made democracy less central to citizens' aspirations around the world. The democratic uprising took the world by surprise: again, democracy defies predictions.
• Secondly, in the new, multi-polar world, democracy too is becoming truly global. It can no longer be dismissed as a European or Western cultural export. There are twice as many people living under democracy in the global South as the populations of Europe and North America together.
• Thirdly, the information, awareness-raising and political mobilization capacity of new media has by far exceeded the capacity of authoritarian governments to insulate their citizens from regional and global trends. The multiple social networks are like water streams in a field; they always find alternative paths and create new ones, often in real time.
• Last but not least, in the turbulent Arab region, the alibi of authoritarian regimes as self-appointed guarantors of regional security and stability is no longer convincing and credible, and hence, should no longer be taken at face value by other influential international actors.

The building of democracy in the Arab region will take time. As already discovered in earlier transitions, democracy is not what you find in the pot when you lift the heavy lid of authoritarian government. While democracy is the best guarantor of stability in the long run, the process of democratization is often destabilizing: after all, it is about changing power relations in society. Those rightly concerned with the danger of instability and conflict in the Middle East should however realize that by now, it is delaying democratic change which holds the greater risk.

Citizens of Tunisia, Egypt and other countries of the region have a long way to go. Mass protest can overthrow a dictatorship, but cannot build democracy. Changes are required in constitutions, electoral systems, laws and regulations related to political parties, the media, the justice system, and not least, in people's minds. One fundamental such shift required is that of the place of women in political life in the region.

From the international community, citizens of Arab countries are entitled to expect empathy, support and a willingness to share knowledge and experience if requested, but not guidance. The often tried, tested and failed international approaches of supporting particular leaders from the outside should be abandoned. Allowing democratic change to run its course, with the offer of support for democracy from external actors if requested, will be more successful than past efforts at engineering societal change from the outside.

A rich body of knowledge does exist about many aspects of democracy-building. A rich fund of lessons learned, both positive and negative, is also broadly available. The new actors to emerge on the political stage in the Arab region should have smooth and easy access to that knowledge. With a range of such global comparative knowledge as a starting point, International IDEA is prepared to be a partner in the long-term process of building sustainable democracy in the region, whether on constitutional change, electoral reform, political dialogue, women's political empowerment, or tools for citizens to assess and improve the state of their democracy.

By Vidar Helgesen,
Secretary-General of International IDEA