There has never been a better time to become a student of democratic transitions than now.

With people in Middle Eastern countries taking to the streets to rid their polities of authoritarian regimes, and with the success of demonstrations in Tunisia and later Egypt, some have begun to talk about the “fourth wave of democratization”, with the third wave being the removal of authoritarian regimes in much of the developing world since the early 1970s.

But, the tendency to look for a pattern and regularity — as implied in the catch-all term “wave of democratization”— in democratic transitions has at times led to a gross oversimplification and misconception about the process.

Some of the biggest misconceptions are that democratic transitions are something that can be triggered by external powers, be they the world’s superpower or non-state actors helping to spread the idea of democracy.

The Egyptian experience not only shows that the United States — the world’s lone superpower — has limited power when it comes to politics in the Middle East, it also shows that the US is not an omnipresent entity that can effect any changes it sees fit for the sake of its own national interests.

As if to thumb his nose at the US, ousted president Hosni Mubarak made a defiant speech saying that he would not leave the presidency only hours after Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director Leon Panetta told Congress that Mubarak would resign.

It took 18 days of back-and-forth at the White House before Mubarak left office. And with this, the Obama administration appeared to perform better than its predecessors in effecting democratic change abroad. Quoting CNN pundit Fareed Zakaria, it took three years for President Ronald Reagan to see the ouster of American ally Ferdinand Marcos and one year for President Bill Clinton to see the end of Soeharto’s rule.

I suspect this misconception led Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) politician Anis Matta into making the statement that hundreds of his Muslim-based party members helped foment insurrection in Egypt that led to the downfall of Mubarak. The statement not only reflected Anis’ poor understanding of international politics, it was an insult to the resolve of the Egyptian people in wanting to bring down their modern-day Pharaoh.

The democratic transition in Egypt also challenges the conventional wisdom that democracy comes after economic progress.

Political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset said in 1959 that the more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chance it could sustain democracy. In his study, Lipset found that democratic countries in the Anglo-Saxon world and Latin America had higher levels of average wealth, degrees of industrialization and urbanization and levels of education.

If that’s the case, then countries like Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates would certainly have begun their transitions earlier than Egypt and Tunisia, which are less well-off. On the contrary, we have seen the biggest demand for political freedom in less developed countries like Yemen, Algeria, Jordan, Egypt and Tunisia.

Given that fact, it is always prudent to see transitions to democracy as complex and homegrown processes that rely very much on the internal dynamics of the society.

Some observers of democratic transitions have been keen to argue for what they call “the unstructured and indeterminate nature of transitions and the crucial roles of choices made by the elites of the state and the opposition.”

Others have argued that transition is always the result of fluctuating divisions between hardliners and those less rigid in the state elite.

In a number of cases, the opening up of an authoritarian regime and the start of a democratic transition is the result of liberals challenging the predatory behavior of autocrats — who are backed by hardliners.

In the late 1990s in Indonesia, it was nationalist elements within the Indonesian Military (TNI) that had grown anxious about the Soeharto family’s excessive rent-seeking activities that made it possible for the Indonesian-style glasnost called keterbukaan (openness).

It was the same nationalist element within the TNI — which was worried about the rise of Islamist generals in the military — who pushed for Soeharto’s departure in May of 1998.

The dust has yet to settle on Cairo’s insurrection, but the fact that Mubarak left only after the military delivered a communiqué lifting emergency law — the mainstay of Mubarak’s 30-year rule — is proof that division within the elite had certainly given way to transition.

And, now that a council of generals is running the show in Egypt, it is evidence that the Egyptian military pushed the autocrat out as his predatory behavior became untenable for the survival of the ruling elites.

Division at the elite level is a necessary but not a sufficient condition to bring about a democratic transition.

Another prerequisite for democratic transitions are what some term the “resurrection of civil society”, which in Egypt materialized in the mass protest facilitated by social media like Twitter and Facebook, which to a considerable extent replaced the role played by political parties.

In the case of the resurrection of civil society, the similarities between Indonesia’s experience in 1998 and that of the Egyptian people could not be more striking.

Protesters on the streets of Cairo, Alexandria and other cities in Egypt were concerned by the decline in their living standards, partly attributed to the incompetence of their leaders. The same occurred in Indonesia, where even the middle class saw their affluence disturbed by the late 1990s financial crisis.

This is, of course, a tentative look at the democratic transition in Egypt and Indonesia and making an apples-to-apples comparison between the two could be just another oversimplification, but, in the very least, the comparison is not a one-way determinism on transition to democracy.

In the final analysis, democratic transition is always a muddled and murky affair.

The start of a democratic transition is the result of liberals challenging the predatory behavior of autocrats.

The author is a staff writer at The Jakarta Post.

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