The Hindu : Democracy not unsuitable to Arab world, says Chris Patten

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Nov 28, 2003

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Democracy not unsuitable to Arab world, says Chris Patten

By Our Special Correspondent

Chris Patten

CHENNAI NOV. 27. The European Union Commissioner for External Relations, Chris Patten, said today that it was important to "try to develop better governments in the Middle Eastern countries." But this cannot be done by "precision-guided munitions." The process had to be built from the grassroots.

"It is very often said in the West that democracy cannot be tried in the Arab world after the experience of Algeria. It is very often said that democracy will open the way to extremist fundamentalism. It is very often argued that it would be better to keep autocrats in place," he said. But this argument had a fundamental flaw. Authoritarianism led to bad economic reforms. It ended up denying the people the right to decide on their destiny. This, in turn, created a sense of disposition and alienation and encourages people towards violence, he added while participating in a lecture-discussion on `conflict management and peace-building'. It was organised by the Centre for Security Analysis (CSA), Chennai and the Madras University Department of Defence and Strategic Studies.

Mr. Patten said that it would be interesting to watch the manner in which Turkey's application to the E.U. was handled and was of the view that Turkey should be encouraged and helped.

There were invariably social and economic reasons underlying a conflict. But these did not justify the affected taking recourse to terrorism. "We also recognise that the beginning of wisdom is that even if you have the largest hammer, every problem is not a nail," he said. There are "very often other things" that need to be done apart from the use of force. "It is not irrelevant that 25 of the poorest countries of the world are countries which are at present immersed in conflict... One fifth of Africa is at present a war zone," he said.

The E.U. tried to intervene in such situations by providing a mixture of development assistance and armed personnel. He cited the case of Afghanistan, the Balkans and Congo as areas where the E.U. had military presence now and added that in Congo — since the United States did not want to get involved — the force operated entirely under European command. The development assistance that the E.U. provided was used to alleviate poverty and ensure sustainable development. "This in my view is an important element in preventing conflict as well." But he agreed that the E.U. did not do enough in the area of providing development assistance. "We have committed ourselves to a benchmark increase in contributions to development assistance, " he said. According to this, all the member-states of the E.U. will have to fund development programmes and the quantum of this assistance has been fixed at the average of the E.U. contribution.

The concept of conflict had to also be looked at from the point of view of the failure of the state or institutions of the state.

"A number of states are pre-modern. States in which the governments cannot provide citizens with the basic stability which they have a right to expect and which is essential to economic and social progress," he said and added that Afghanistan and Somalia were examples of such states.

"Afghanistan was not so much an example of state-backed terrorism as terrorism backed state," he said. Hence, the problem of institution building had to addressed as this was also very crucial to preventing conflicts.

The Madras University Vice-Chancellor, S.P. Thyagarajan, outlined the various international collaborations of the university and said that the university had five star accreditation. He appealed to Mr. Patten to consider the university for research programmes that the European Union might wish to undertake.Earlier, Mr. Patten called on the Governor, P.S. Ramamohan Rao, at the Raj Bhavan.

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