As with every single posting Baheyya writes, this is a must read…
0 thoughts on “Baheyya on power politics”
Incisive and thought-provoking as always, and I agree with much of what she says…but this sentence made me squirm:
“In a word, Hamas and Hizballah are underwritten by the gold standard of democratic legitimacy in a region replete with fakes and knock-offs.”
Well…yes, they have popular legitimacy, have been voted to power, but their popularity also rests partly on their willingness to use violence, which is not all that different from the tough-guy legitimacy of the Israeli hawks. I think it’s stupid to wish they would go away and to deny that they can win elections fair and square and are much more legitimate than the “official” parties, but their methods (however justified by circumstances) hardly represent a democratic ideal.
Good point, SP. Moreover: While Palestinian elections, by all accounts, were the most competitive, fair, and well-administered the region’s ever seen, last time I checked, Lebanon’s elections, including last year’s, were still quite flawed, far short of intl standards and mostly about patronage and horse trading among confessional-based groups. Lots and lots of vote-buying, too. (Lebanon also uses the handy “elections-in-stages” method that serves the Egyptian regime so well.) This is just to say that Hezbollah’s legitimacy in Lebanon, considerable though it may be, doesn’t seem to come from winning seats in pre-cooked elections. Anyway, writing about elections seems quite trivial in the midst of all the suffering and unfolding war, so I’ll stop here.
Incisive and thought-provoking as always, and I agree with much of what she says…but this sentence made me squirm:
“In a word, Hamas and Hizballah are underwritten by the gold standard of democratic legitimacy in a region replete with fakes and knock-offs.”
Well…yes, they have popular legitimacy, have been voted to power, but their popularity also rests partly on their willingness to use violence, which is not all that different from the tough-guy legitimacy of the Israeli hawks. I think it’s stupid to wish they would go away and to deny that they can win elections fair and square and are much more legitimate than the “official” parties, but their methods (however justified by circumstances) hardly represent a democratic ideal.
Good point, SP. Moreover: While Palestinian elections, by all accounts, were the most competitive, fair, and well-administered the region’s ever seen, last time I checked, Lebanon’s elections, including last year’s, were still quite flawed, far short of intl standards and mostly about patronage and horse trading among confessional-based groups. Lots and lots of vote-buying, too. (Lebanon also uses the handy “elections-in-stages” method that serves the Egyptian regime so well.) This is just to say that Hezbollah’s legitimacy in Lebanon, considerable though it may be, doesn’t seem to come from winning seats in pre-cooked elections. Anyway, writing about elections seems quite trivial in the midst of all the suffering and unfolding war, so I’ll stop here.