Conclusion

The original contribution of this book to the body of knowledge is that it has identified the main impediments to democracy in Iraq and provided insight, through its recommendations, into finding ways to overcome those impediments and consolidate democracy. The book has explored the democratization process in Iraq thoroughly, examined it from within, taken the opinions of different participants, experts and observers, compared it, in certain relevant aspects, to the experiences of other countries in southern Europe, eastern Europe and Latin America, which have democratized in the last few decades, and finally weighed up the progress made so far and the challenges ahead, in an academic and impartial way. Although the book pertains to Iraq, many of its findings can be generalized to other Arab and Muslim countries because Iraq shares, in varying degrees, many cultural and religious characteristics with Arab and Muslim countries. Since democracy is a new phenomenon in the Arab world, this study sheds some light on impediments facing democracy in Arab and Muslim societies, and therefore, it has enhanced the theory of Arab democracy and raised awareness about impediments which are likely to be encountered in other countries if they decide to democratize. One of the basic pillars of democracy is liberalism, and this has been explored in detail, taking the thoughts of one of the leading scholars of liberalism, John Stuart Mill, into account. It has also examined the role of religion in politics and examined in detail the ideas of one of the most important political thinkers in this field, John Rawls, who has studied this phenomenon in depth and provided some important insights that can be useful to the Iraqi experience. Rawls’ ideal of a political conception of justice that is ‘free-standing’ in order to appeal to all citizens is what is needed in Iraq. Our modern society, as described by Rawls, is characterized by pluralism, objection to oppression, quest for justice, debate and dissensus. Therefore, no single religion or philosophical doctrine can be affirmed by all free people. Thus, in order to enable all citizens to feel equal, it’s important that the democratic state doesn’t adopt any religious or philosophical doctrine. The book also explored democracy as a concept and how it developed over the years and what are its main institutions and benefits through the ideas of

Robert Dahl, Joseph Schumpeter, John Dunn, Samuel Huntington, Juan Linz, Alfred Stepan, Adam Przeworski, John Keane, Barrington Moore and Larry Diamond. Their ideas were not accepted entirely but compared and discussed in connection with realities in Iraq. Since democracy cannot just happen without a preliminary process of liberalization and democratization, there was a need to examine the experiences of other countries such as Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Latin Amer ican and Eastern European countries. Each country has a different process depending on the type of the non-democratic regime it was governed by. In Eastern Europe, the Polish experience was totally different to the Romanian one because the non-democratic regimes in both countries were different. Similarly, the Spanish experience, which was considered most successful, was different to the Greek’s or even to neighbouring Portugal’s. Democratization becomes a lot easier if the non-democratic regime was authoritarian as was the case in Spain and Poland. But it becomes a lot more complicated if the previous regime was totalitarian, post-totalitarian, or worse, a sultanistic or personal dictatorship such as Romania and Iraq.1