Searching for third way reformers

Western officials and think tank analysts explained their take on the NDP's reform agenda to Omayma Abdel-Latif

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Egypt, according to Pascal Drouhaud, head of international relations at the French ruling party UMP, is going through a very important but tense "political moment", with change as the keyword. "What we witnessed," Drouhaud told Al-Ahram Weekly at the end of the NDP's second annual conference, which he attended as part of a high-ranking parliamentary delegation, "was a change of face, change of policy and change of dialogue."

But change, according to the French official, does not mean disorder. Instead, it is understood to be the state's ability to maintain a balance between tradition and modernity. Drouhaud pointed out that this was precisely what the new generation of NDP reformers was doing. "There is a sincere effort to strike a balance between the political tradition of the country, and economic modernisation, and this has been clear in the NDP's reform agenda," he said.

The French delegation was among several other Western entities that attended the NDP's annual event as observers. That dynamic was in line with the tradition established by the party last year to engage the outside world in the internal reform debate going on within the party and in Egypt as a whole.

The presence of foreign delegations at this year's conference, however, has been especially meaningful in light of all the recent talk of "a reform agenda imposed on the Middle East by the West".

Last June, the G8 summit adopted US President George Bush's so-called Greater Middle East Initiative, which contained proposals for democratic transformations in the region. It was, however, received with scepticism in the Arab world, on both the popular and official levels.

French parliamentarian Louis Giscard d'Estaing dismissed the assumption that the G8's blessing of the Bush initiative meant that Europe and the US shared the same views on how to initiate debate on Arab reform. "There has always been a demand and interest from France and other European countries to see an evolution within the Middle East region going in the direction of democracy," Giscard d'Estaing told the Weekly. French governments, he said, have always sent clear messages about the importance of promoting principles of human rights and democratic reform.

The French parliamentarian, at the same time, remained tight-lipped on sensitive issues such as "succession" and the opposition's discontent with the NDP's reforms. While he described the ruling party's reform agenda as "a positive step", he said the French government understood it to be a first step, and that in due time other steps would follow to meet the opposition's demands. His comment on the on-going debate about succession was that it was entirely "up to the Egyptians to decide".

Giscard d'Estaing said the French perspective was that creating democratic conditions in a country must be in accordance with an ability to face up to economic and social challenges. As one French official put it, "Egypt is an important point of stability in the region, and therefore all eyes are on Egypt when it is conducting reform."

The discussions and concerns, as put forward by many of those attending, revealed that there was an overwhelming Western focus on issues of hard security interests in the region, rather than democracy. "There is a near consensus among Westerners that a more security-oriented take on reform is the best approach," said one Washington-based researcher.

Washington and other Western capitals seem to be more concerned about reforming Arab societies as a way of protecting themselves from the supposed bogeyman of religious militancy, rather than as an honest attempt to reform political systems as a whole. Other observers would argue that reform was being used as an excuse by Western powers to occupy the region and usurp its resources, as in Iraq.

Responding to a question about the US meddling in internal affairs on the issue of democracy, Middle East policy analyst Jeremy Sharp said, "the US government wants to see home-grown initiatives for reform."

Sharp acknowledged that national security interests have mostly shaped post 9/11 reforms in the Middle East. However, he also said, "I think the US would be more comfortable seeing a third way, or a middle ground, emerging in Arab politics, and this means a more liberal political movement taking centre stage. The NDP reformers have the potential to be just that movement," Sharp said.