Article

2005-08-27 Iraq-Jordan

Jordanian king puts constitutional monarchy plan on the back-burner

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Posted by Dan Darling 2005-08-27 01:24|| || Front Page|| [4 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 There are three obvious possibilities here. The first is that the king has no intention to ever share power. The second is that he is either rationalizing keeping his power, or is trying to democritize from the top down. The third, if he was most serious about democracy, would be that he would start by democratizing from the bottom up, that is, to make his country used to democracy by familiarity. Councils, boards, committees, etc., being elected and having to vote for everything. Nothing is too petty for democracy, is the idea.

That is, to get his people into a mind-set of automatically questioning authority, unless it is elected. When a group tries to make a decision, somebody automatically chimes in, "Let's vote for it!", and it is accepted without question. And, importantly, then people also learn about the limits to democracy, such as military and police service.

He could also seriously impair the opponents to his regime by requiring them to be democratic. Imams and other anti-democrats hate having to be approved of by their followers. They see their legitimacy as direct from Allah, and it bugs the heck out of them for the group to say "no" to their schemes, instead of blindly obeying.

"Why are you Imam? We didn't elect you!"

Posted by Anonymoose 2005-08-27 10:11|| 2005-08-27 10:11|| Front Page Top

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