ABSTRACT
The failure of democracy in the Middle East has been attributed to widely divergent, though not necessarily incompatible, causes. One explanation, which is current in the West, is that democracy is a plant of slow growth, which gradually developed, over several centuries, in the congenial climate of Europe and North America and which could not possibly be expected to thrive when suddenly transplanted to an alien Eastern soil which, since the dawn of recorded history, had bred nothing but the thorns and thistles of despotism. The absence of democratic traditions, and of the historical customs, habits, and attitudes required to make democracy work, was one of
the first aspects of the East to strike nineteenth-century Europeans, and no one has expressed this better than Lord Cromer, who wrote: ‘Do not let us for one moment imagine that the fatally simple idea of despotic rule will readily give way to the far more complex conception of ordered liberty.’2
