The Study On Bahrain’s Political Democratization Process

The Kingdom of Bahrain is located in the Arabic Gulf, with narrow land area. In history, owing to itsgood geographic position, it was under the colonial rule of foreign powers for a long time. Bahrain hadbegan to emerge as a national entity since the Khalifa family entered into this area in the18th Century,however, it did not start to build its modern political system until the time of British colonial rule. After theend of the Second World War, the Middle East area ushered in the wave of nationalist movement and theestablishment of nation states which lasted for nearly half a century. In this context, Bahrain got rid ofBritish colonial rule in1970s and headed toward exploring its own economic modernization and politicaldemocratization path of development.The Bahrain government with the Khalifa family as its main body has pursued democratizationreforms in the political area from top to bottom since Salman Emirates era. Its purpose is to transform itstraditional absolute monarchy so that it can adapt to the development requirement of modernization. Thegovernment successively promulgated the1973Constitution, the National Action Charter, and the2002Constitution. Moreover, it organized a bicameral Parliamentary, carried out parliamentary and municipalelections and gave some Shia political organizations legal status. The reform measures with the purpose ofimproving domestic political environment has, in a way, promoted the development of Bahrain’sconstitutionalism, representative system and party politics, thereby making it a model of politicalmodernization construction for other authoritarian countries in the gulf.The process of Bahrain’s political democratization is the coma exogenous type of politicaldemocratization. As a traditional Arab Islamic country, its political system was deeply exposed to theinfluence of tribal patriarchal ideas and Islamic religious and political culture, while its political operationalmode has obvious authoritarian and theocratic characteristics. Thus, the development of Bahrain’s politicaldemocratization has always been the products of compromise between the ruling family and the ordinarypeople, Shias and Sunnis, the traditional ideology and the modern one.The collisions and conflicts between tradition and modernity, religion and secularity, autocracy anddemocracy, have always existed in the course of Bahrain’s political democratization. It is hard to implementthe separation of church and state. It is also very difficult to force the family authority to make concessions with the elected government. These are two long-term dilemmas confronting the political development ofBahrain. How to deal with the various conflicts in the period of political transformation? How to weakenthe social turbulence effects caused by social transformation? How to accommodate to the modern societywhile maintaining tradition? How to guarantee the stable transition from authoritarian rule to democracy?These are not only problems for the Khalifa family to resolve in the future, but also important issues forother monarchies to ponder over.