الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

Islam and the West… for a better world @

gives me the opportunity to develop and share with a highly qualified audience some reflections I recently presented to the Doha Forum on “Free trade and Democracy”. They resulted from an attempt to understand how much my academic and scientific endeavors can make sense and be of practical meaning when they are put before issues like those we are dealing with today. On that occasion my case was primarily against the ethnocentrism displayed by main stream political science – and I mean Western political science. But more particularly – and I believe: less trivially – I argued against the limits of the scientific method on which main stream comparative political science is build upon. This method aims to produce models: models of political systems and of ways through which those systems are produced. These models are not intended – not at least in the scholars’ eyes – to be normative: that is to prescribe how people ought to be ruled. It would be easy however to prove that these models do in the end serve to this purpose, that they are often taken as overall guidelines or legitimation for policies both internal and international. But this is not my point. My point concerns rather the intrinsic scientific value of such ‘models’. What I claim is that almost inevitably a hierarchical appreciation creeps into the mind of the scholar who operates at building models; and that this sort of bias flaws the reliability of his product. I should like to give an example, connected with a most popular – and still very much debated – model of a democratic system: the parliamentary democracy. A crucial factor in this system is the existence of a parliament elected on a relatively large representative basis and capable of deciding the destiny of the executive: cabinet or government, as you like to term it. This system was developed and improved in Europe from the 18 th to the 20 th centuries, but at a very uneven pace. Germany and Italy, for instance, could hardly be defined as countries with a parliamentary government still on the

-86-

Made with FlippingBook Online newsletter