Democracy in the Maghreb

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Tue Jun 11 18:31:51 PDT 2002



>Economist.com
>
>Democracy in the Maghreb
>
>Where voting is a parlour game
>
>Jun 6th 2002 | ALGIERS AND TUNIS
<snip>
>
>Some parts of the game are similar in all three countries. The nationalist
>card is a sure winner when it comes to blasting human-rights groups as
>foreign meddlers. The old tactic of brandishing the menace of fundamentalism
>to silence the middle classes has been newly popular since September 11th.
>But the rules vary widely.

Sounds like the USA. That, basically, is the fate of formal democracy under capitalism, especially when regimes in power are menaced by internal and/or external threats (be they state actors or terrorists or both). What differs between rich and poor nations is the degree of force used in repression of domestic dissenters by the regimes in power. The poorer a nation is, the more force it must use, to ward off domestic threats when they materialize. (The USA deviates from this rule, though, in that it has the highest incarceration rate in the world, despite its wealth.) -- Yoshie

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