Davis 383383The Historical Genesis of the Public Sphere
in Iraq, 1900–1963: Implications for Building
Democracy in the Post-Ba‘thist Era
Eric Davis
Recent interest in applying the concept of the “public sphere” to the
Middle East reflects increased concern with the lack of democratization
in the region. In the West, the concept has had an enormous impact,
especially following the publication of Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere. As is well known, Habermas’s vol-
ume laments the decline of a space that he calls the bourgeois public
sphere, a process that, in his view, has undermined democracy in Europe.
Habermas did not intend his concept to speak to the political traditions
of non-Western societies.^1 Nevertheless, the theoretical underpinnings of
the concept would seem to possess a generality that transcends any spe-
cific geographical region. While the public sphere in its most democratic
form may have emerged in early modern Europe, there seems no logical
reason why a space in which citizens engage in reasoned discourse, and
which is not under the control of the state, should not be able to develop
and function in a wide variety of social contexts. This chapter poses the
following questions: What does it mean to apply the concept of the public
sphere to Iraqi politics and society? What analytic traction do we derive
from such an application? Can the concept help us better understand cur-
rent efforts to bring about a democratic transition in Iraq? Or does the
pervasive violence that has characterized post-Ba‘thist Iraq vitiate the
concept’s significance?