German Marshall Fund Hosts Discussion on US and EU Policy toward Islamists
December 10, 2007 | Printer Friendly
Reporting by CCD Program Officer Daniel Hollingsworth

On December 3, 2007, the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) presented a panel discussion entitled “The Challenge of Islamists for EU and US Policies” to correspond with a joint publication of a report of the same name by the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) and the German Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP – Institute for International and Security Affairs).  The discussants at the event were the editors of the joint report, Muriel Asseburg of SWP and Daniel Brumberg of USIP, and the discussion was moderated by Thomas Kleine-Brockoff of the German Marshall Fund.

Asseburg focused the discussion on the gap that exists in US and EU foreign policy in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) with respect to Islamist groups in the region.  She said that these policies have concentrated on countering the threat of Islamists related to terrorism while ignoring the wide array of Islamist groups that do not advocate such violence.  While she recognized that lower-level engagement with other Islamist groups has occurred, she lamented the rhetorical focus of high-level officials on those groups linked to terrorist activity, thus creating the public perception that no appropriate distinction exists within the minds of US and EU policymakers. 

Brumberg expanded on the fact that there has been extensive engagement outside of the public eye.  He identified attempts by USAID to promote and host dialogue between Islamists and non-Islamists in Egypt.  He also noted US efforts, through democracy promotion organizations such as the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs and the International Republican Institute to engage with mainstream Islamist parties in Morocco, Yemen, and Egypt.  To date, attempts to create alliances between Islamists and non-Islamists seeking democratic change have failed, but he emphasized that such engagement is at least being attempted.  The central problem in the MENA region, according to Brumberg, is that Islamist and non-Islamist parties are cast in opposition to one another.  He contrasted this with Indonesia, where a multiplicity of Islamist parties exists, allowing for a different type of debate that moves beyond a competition between religious interests and those perceived as anti-religious secularists who seek to bar religion from the conversation altogether.

Speaking more directly to the European approach to democracy promotion in the MENA region, Asseburg identified a prevailing discomfort that Europeans have with respect to what they see as attempts by external actors at “social engineering” in the region.  She also identified a backlash against the democracy agenda, based both on the Bush administration’s Iraq policy and the rise of radical Islamist parties through electoral processes.  She noted that while the perceived conflict at times between democracy promotion and domestic security is not new, Americans and Europeans generally accept that long-term interests in the region depend on greater legitimacy of regimes.  She also distinguished between high politics and low politics in approaches to democracy promotion, stating that at the level of low-politics, there has been greater continuity in long-term approaches to democracy promotion, which emphasize the development of stable democratic institutions.  Through this, she said that many Islamists have become more pragmatic in pursuing their political aims.  However, this has not yet resulted in genuine democratic reform, as autocratic regimes in the region have been successful in restricting the actions of Islamist parties, and she said there is a risk that these Islamist groups will become less interest in political participation and resort to more violent approaches.

With respect to specific policy prescriptions, Asseburg expressed skepticism in the wisdom of pushing for early elections.  She added, however, that where elections are already part of the political process, US and EU policies should encourage the reform of existing electoral processes, seeking to open them to greater competitive forces and to bring them into conformity with international standards.  She also called for a recasting of policies in the region with respect to conflict resolution and state building.  She argued that policies too often seek to address human suffering without tackling the root causes of conflict, resulting in the persistence of both the conflict and the suffering.  Finally, she proposed a careful coordination of policies between the US and EU in the region, through the sharing of information and coordinated analysis, rather than explicit and visible cooperation.  She argued that the low credibility of American policy in the region threatens to undermine any joint US-EU actions.

One major issue addressed in the following question and answer session regarded the complexities of dealing with religion in general in the MENA region.  Karen Volker of the U.S. Department of State noted the danger of labeling movements as secular; she said that secularism in the American sense of tolerance and pluralism does not have an equivalent term in Arabic, and it is often translated as a form of laïcité, with a more antagonistic stance toward religion in general.  She urged that we resist the temptation to rely on one- or two-word terms and make the effort to more fully describe what we mean by a secular approach to religion and politics.