Oh I don’t know about that. European rulers found a basis for integrating Christianity into government for centuries. It’s all a matter of what you prefer to emphasize in your religious texts.
As a frequent visitor to Turkey, it seems to me that the problems of Turkey are largely due to the use of laws brought in by the previous secular authorities. Turkey has some ferocious laws which are used against those making “anti-Turkish” statements - which is basically code for those that don’t agree with the current regime. If Turkey had a few more freedoms (to speak, write, associate, etc.) the idea of an Islamist party ruling Turkey would not be so worrying.
Would you please tell me why the previous secular authorities felt the need to bring these laws?
I too believe this is true.
I would hardly use Turkey as a good indicator of the region in general. It’s great that Turkey has made the secular strides that it has, but much of the rest of the region hasn’t.
Hey. If you know nothing whatsoever about the UK can you please stop talking about it as if you do. There is no bar on catholics becoming PM.
The only ‘religious test’ is the one the electorate apples. We don’t trust anyone to be PM who takes bronze age mythology more seriously than lukewarm anglican platitudes.
That’s one reason why the leader of a right-wing government is leading the way on gay marriage and why the bigoted bleatings of various religious types aren’t swaying things.
As Blair said: ‘We don’t do God’.
One of the many reasons he lost the trust of the electorate was his increasingly obvious religiosity and the suspicion that he was becoming like Bush, someone who would put the wishes of his Imaginary Friend above that of rationality and truth.
That’s why he hid his religious conversion.
No way an admitted atheist is going to be president. Crypto-atheist may have already occurred.
Hey, you should look up the OP. Istanbul Dopefest!
Are you maybe thinking of the Monarch, who can’t be a Catholic, rather than the PM.
Thus forever crushing Tony Blair’s dream of one day becoming Queen.
You’re correct in that there’s no constitutional bar (it was removed in the 19th century), but there’s still the convention. Tony Blair did not officially convert to Catholicism until after leaving office.
Edit:
This simply isn’t true. Labour consistently lost support during the course of their support for the Iraq war. It was obvious that Tony Blair was religious from the outset, given that his administration coined the term “faith school” and expanded their remit to various religions.
I don’t see why, once you accept that his post is his cite.
What I heard or read many times on the subject is this - they would have a chance if they experienced said humanism and rationalism coming from West.
Oh, the poor victims! :rolleyes:
Well, I’m more than willing to learn new things and one of those new things to learn would be to demonstrate Middle-East Arab country that can make a claim that Western country(ies) did everything in their power in last 50 years to encourage democratic process.
However, we both know that there is no such case. Quite contrary, last 50 year history is replete with examples of serious meddling into the internal affairs of almost every Arab country in ME to a degree that – in old times - would warrant a declaration of war if same thing would be done to the country that did the meddling (most notably, UK, France, Israel and US).
I’m not claiming that’s the only factor but it certainly is a major contributing factor to the situation we see today.
Let me just run down notable cases where a case can be made to demonstrate that current situation can be traced back to said meddling:
[ul]
[li]Saudi Arabia[/li][li]Algeria[/li][li]Egypt[/li][li]Iran[/li][li]Iraq[/li][li]Lebanon[/li][li]Libya[/li][li]Palestine[/li][/ul]No?
I’d include Syria, Morocco, Tunisia, Sudan and probably just about all the rest on that list.
It’s a fair point, but on the other hand, there have been very few cases in which any country has “done everything in their power to encourage democracy” in any other country. Most examples are of countries propping up specific factions in other countries for their own benefit.
The best counterexamples are probably the treatment of Japan and West Germany in the wake of WW2, but in both those cases the victorious Western allies had just flattened the previous regime in war, and was warily building up to a feared future war with Communist Russia; their main goal was to create functioning buffers, and elsewhere they did not exactly let considerations of genuine democracy stay their hands in supporting unrepresentative governments.
True democracy is usually an indigenous development, created despite and not because of outsider meddling. It cannot be otherwise, because the essence of democracy is rule for one’s own good - while outsiders are always going to be more interested in their own good, and only rarely will they be far-sighted enough to see that functioning democracies are likely to tend to the good of everyone in the long run.
Which raises the issue - democracies have developed elsewhere in spite of active meddling and repression by colonial overlords - look at India. Why, Israel aside, can’t they develop in the ME? Maybe they can - we haven’t yet seen the final outcome of the Arab Spring in Egypt, for example. Perhaps we are witnessing the birth of truly indigenous democracy there.
Most European countries don’t have secular governments. The UK, Ireland, the Scandanavian countries and others all have state religions and other aspects that would never fly in the US or France.
“non-secular” is not the same as a brutal theocracy and most of the Arab governments are, if anything, as secular if not more secular as the UK and Ireland.
Saudi Arabia is the exception not the rule.
I suspect the answer, or at least part of the answer, is “oil”. The governments of these countries control access to a resource that the rest of the world wants. Therefore, the rest of the world doesn’t put much pressure on them to play nice, because we don’t want them to take their ball and go home.
Heck, if the Ottoman Empire hadn’t aggressively pissed away its power, there might still be a pan-Arabic hegemony of some kind in place. As it is, the Europeans and Americans jumped in to fill the vacuum left by the Ottoman collapse.
India as an example of democracy?
You are making a laugh, aren’t you?
There are so many ways to annul such a claim just going by news headlines… Kashmir, Sikhs separatism, caste society, corruption, religion as key in winning elections – in short, there is no democracy in India but, perhaps, enforced peaceful coexistence of many contradictions and great abandon for Western virtues with occasional terrorist attack. Heck, the biggest terrorist attack in Canada has origins in conflict affecting India.
Simply put, very, very bad example.
…but enough about America.
Gosh, how good of us! How about the Sykes-Picot Agreement? And the various other machinations that followed WWI…
(Hint: The Turks were/are not Arabs.)