Re:Why Arabs Lose Wars (1999)
by woodandsteel on Friday August 09, 2019 @06:26PM
(#20658692)
>Well, most countries are not particularly democratic
And that is due to a great extent to culture, which is what the article is about
> A colony usually has no culture of the 'citizen', since the people of the colony are basically a resource exploited by the colonist.
But Arab culture prior to the relatively brief period of Western colonization also did not have a concept of citizen, at least not in the democratic sense.
>But Arab culture prior to the relatively brief period of Western colonization also did not have a concept of citizen, at least not in the democratic sense.
This sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole, and I found: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottomanism, which is kinda interesting. I'm thinking the Ottoman thinking is probably the most relevant, since most of the middle east was part of the Ottoman empire.
I'd say there's also the compounding influence of the colonial legacy. A colony usually has no culture of the 'citizen', since the people of the colony are basically a resource exploited by the colonist. Without a deep culture of citizenship, it's kinda hard to get a robust democracy going.