You may not know who Natan Sharansky is, but if you've listened to George Bush speak in the last five years, you know what he thinks. Sharansky, the Soviet dissident and recently resigned Israeli cabinet member, has met personally with Bush, and the President has read Sharansky's recent book, "The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror."
Sharansky divides the world into exclusive realms of democratic free societies and tyrannical fear societies. Many of Bush's most infamous phrases - "with us or against us," "evildoer," "axis of evil" - show evidence of Sharansky's thinking. But the case of the United Arab Emirates shows Sharansky's views are not the universal foreign policy guide they claim to be.
According to Sharansky, morally sound free societies hold regular free and fair elections, which are contingent on freedoms of association and expression. All other societies are fear societies. The necessary diversity of thought in a society and the suppression of expression by power-hungry leaders of a fear society result in increasing repression culminating in the regime's collapse. Fear societies, as they are sustained by repression, are morally depraved.
Fear societies are violent. In an effort to prolong their existence, societies support radical ideologies or blame others for the economic and social failures that result from repression of independent, innovative thought. Unconstrained by popular will, leaders of fear societies may instigate international conflict, which is often used to bolster their victimization myths.
Sharansky's notion of state propagated ideology may at first seem to be present in the Emirati nation. The UAE is run and owned by illiberal Shiek families along with a sympathetic conservative, mainly Emirati business class who comprise a large portion of the population. Foreigners, mostly South Asian but some European, enjoy no political rights, face stiff barriers to citizenship, and accept legally sanctioned inequities in pay. South Asians - often as menial laborers or domestic servants fearing repatriation - lack the social resources to navigate a complacent bureaucracy to advocate using existing legal protections. All organizations - including media, non-government organizations and professional associations - are required to have majority Emeriti ownership. This condition comprises autonomy given the generally conservative predisposition of eligible majority owners.
Normative constructions of the Emirati nation and legal and social inequities affirm and justify each other. Foreigners, as poor, marginalized "others" are a threat to the Emirati nation. Therefore there are state sanctioned inequities - inequities that perpetuate the threatening conditions.
But the country and Dubai in particular present serious problems for Sharansky. The economy is booming. Foreign workers earn enough to send money home. And the Sheiks, with well equipped but small and poorly trained armed forces, are in no position to threaten world peace. Though not accountable to an electorate - Sharansky's liberal incentive of choice - the political leadership is compelled by that other liberal motivator of peace: the complex web of interdependence of global capitalism. Social contentment, the maintenance of the current political order and, perhaps most dearly, the elite's awesomely conspicuous consumption rely on an economy that can only exist in peace. In this material, capitalist and Western social ethos, the UAE has as much to fear from Islamist terror as the United States.
While the nationals reap considerable material benefits from the current political order, foreign workers also gain economic advantages. Peace prevails. To put it baldly, what is there to complain about? Why get all worked up about rights that you don't need? Sharansky's world view is bitterly contemptuous of these considerations. He labels any consideration of these factors as ill-conceived dithering inspired by a common, but no less excusable, bought of moral confusion. "Moral clarity" would reveal the inherent immorality of Emirati society.
Ignorance of these features in assessing the morality and devising a moral and interest-driven foreign policy - as Sharansky argues a policy of democratization is - has deleterious consequences. An inability to see degrees of progress only impedes progress. Judged as permanently immoral, local leaders are likely to be put off to the notion of reform. Such a Manichean view is unlikely to garner the allied assistance necessary to compel change. This dynamic is evident in Iraq, where hurried, arrogant policies of regime change have resulted in unnecessary suffering and uncertain success. Sharansky's views as an Israeli minister, including support for settlements deemed illegal by Israeli courts and demands that Gaza withdrawal be contingent on Palestinian reforms, have only prolonged the conflict.
All of this does not deny a place for liberal values in UAE politics. A genuinely autonomous civil society, including unfettered news reporting, would promote good governance and expose violations of basic rights. Continued equalization of gender opportunities is imperative to the affirmation inherent in human agency and to encourage the contribution of the whole of UAE society. Sharansky, though, is notably unhelpful in understanding this utility, his concepts and theories fatally simplistic and narrow-minded.
