On the Borders of Cultural Relativism, Nativism, and International Society: A Promotion of Islamist Democracy in the Middle East after the Arab Uprisings

Abstract

This article focuses on post-Arab-uprising calls for democratization in the

Middle East. Scrutinizing the then-Turkish government’s coupling of a cultural

relativist norm-promotion discourse in the global arena with a nativist discourse

in the Middle East, the paper examines how much our current conceptual tools

can explain successes and failures in this process. The article focuses on two

schools of thought that pay considerable attention to the role of culture in

institution-building: the English School of International Relations (ES) and

the nativist strand of post-colonialism. It touches upon two problems in the

ES literature and offers two solutions: (1) It reinforces attention on Buzan’s

conception of interhuman society compared to the ad hoc blending of different

levels of abstraction in cultural analyses. (2) It aims to initiate a dialogue for a

more precise distinction between various ideational and behavioral components

of the concept of culture, since these components do not necessarily fit well

together. Considering these two caveats, the article operationalizes culture in

the given case to examine some limitations of the nativist ideological perception

of cultural zones and its concurrent claims over true nativity. The paper seeks

these limitations, first, by analyzing the extent of cultural commonalities between

three sub-regional Islamist movements that shared a strong common identity,

and second, by examining the dialogue between ideological mismatches in the

constitution-making processes of Egypt and Tunisia.

Keywords

• Relativism,culture,English School,identity,democracy

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