Kuwait and the battle for democracy

At the risk of sounding like a Wall Street Journal junkie, the paper ran a somewhat interesting front page piece on Kuwait's democratic struggles last week. The basic gist of the story is this- Kuwait's emir dissolved the National Assembly yet again after the cabinet resigned on parliamentarians' motion to grill the prime minister. As the Journal article notes, the elections to be held this spring for a new assembly represent the sixth government for Kuwait since 2006.

Despite it's being rated as the most free country in the Middle East in terms of political rights by Freedom House, there's very little that's going right in the country. Kuwait has taken a large hit in the recent global economic downturn because of bad bets and investments undertaken by its local banks. It has the dubious honor of being home to the only bank in the region that has so far defaulted on its outstanding obligations. This despite the fact that the government sits on enough reserves to bail out the country several times over. It only passed a stimulus package for the financial sector after the emir dissolved the National Assembly. The measure will need to be returned to a newly elected Assembly which is sure to delay action until after its legislative recess over the summer.

Even before the current crisis, Kuwait was missing out on economic expansion largely because of its dysfunctional democracy. As countries as wildly erratic as Libya, Lebanon, Syria, and Sudan were attracting tens of billions of foreign direct investment from other Gulf, Asia, and European firms, Kuwait had an investment outflow between 2002-2008. Even its ambitious JV deal with Dow Chemicals had to be shelved over National Assembly objections. Sure, Kuwaitis were getting richer by the day on a per capita basis during this period on the back of high oil prices. But in the meantime, their infrastructure was crumbling and their university students were being segregated based on a demand from a few organized and vocal National Assembly members.

So one has to ask, as many Kuwaitis themselves already are and the Journal does in the above linked article, democracy at what cost? What does it benefit the country to go to the polls every few months only to have the government completely unable to effectively carry out most mandates? Kuwait continues to fall behind many of its neighbors when it comes to economic development and diversification. This particularly irritates Kuwait's upper classes who remember when the country was a regional leader. A US academic from George Washington recently speculated at a conference I attended the possibility of Kuwait revisiting its constitution to try and fix the system. But what can the country do? Few would want to see a return to autocracy (it's unlikely the Sabah who have always been seen more as a "ruling family" vice a "royal family" like its neighbors would be able to pull such a move off) but the ethnic and socio-economic status of most voters in Kuwait will likely ensure that regardless of the number of elections the country has, the general composition of the National Assembly will remain unchanged. And that composition ensures government stagnation.

Will Kuwait's sad downturn have ramifications for the rest of the Middle East? The Journal seems to think so but I have mixed feelings on this one. Kuwait's experiments in democracy have long been dismissed by other countries across the Middle East as exactly what not to do. They see the moribundity of the system and its failure to effectively get things done as an excellent example of why they don't want unfettered democracy. So it's not as if this current crisis will make them lose hope they don't have.

More troubling, though, is the implications that Kuwait's failed experiment has for US policy. Even if the Obama administration abandons or lessens the democratization push of the Bushies, US foreign policy is led by US ideology and that ideology more or less ensures that some sort of advocacy for democracy remain part of the plan. In the past, the State Department has always gotten around this by focusing on institution and civil society building. But when you look at the problem in Kuwait,neither institutions nor civil society seem to be the problem. The National Assembly is a pretty good institution- it's enshrined in the constitution, it has free and fair elections, technically anyone can run for office, it has the power of the purse, the right to question ministers, etc. So how do we promote democracy when democracy is so spectacularly failing in the most free country in the Middle East?

I hope someone smarter than me might be willing to take this on...