The believers said yes, political reform would lead to economic reform. In the end, freedom would liberate the whole of society, including the economy. Free speech, the scrutiny of an open society, would lead quickly to free markets.

No, said the doubters. Without prior economic reform to unfreeze the system, a political thaw would only make matters worse. It would unleash unrealisable expectations. Rampant corruption would add awful inequality to the chaos of inefficiency. The poverty it illuminated would promote public anger and perhaps lead in the end to a sullen and threatening march back towards authoritarianism.

Twenty years later the doubters can point, with some vindication, to the state of Russia today, and make their case. There is a somewhat similar debate now taking place in the West on the advisability of democratic reform in the Middle East.

The victory of Hamas last week in the Palestinian Authority, coming on top of advances by Islamists in Iraq, Lebanon and Egypt, has posed the same question in a different form: can you lay the basic institutions of political openness, such as the right to vote, on top of societies twisted into their current abysmal state by a history of repression and a culture of intolerance? Or do you have to reform the cultural and social base first in order to get favourable democratic outcomes?

We know by now that elections are a necessary but certainly not sufficient condition for producing free, stable societies. If you were to let a classroom of seven-year-olds vote on how they should be allowed to run their lives, you know the result. They would end school, legislate for compulsory chocolate and ice-cream, liberalise fussy rules on TV-watching and computer-game playing and institute a more relaxed approach to bedtime.

If you give the vote to a few million Palestinians in their current state, they will vote for the equivalent of chocolate, TV and ice-cream. They will endorse the annihilation of Israel, the mass murder of Americans and a holy war against infidels everywhere.

That’s not to say that Palestinians have puerile minds. But in political-historical-cultural terms they are like children. They have been conditioned entirely for decades by an environment of repression and poverty, pushed around by corrupt leaders poisoning their minds with hateful bile for decades and decades.

That’s why the US is surely right to force the pace of democratic change in the region. Fomenting a political revolution in the Middle East is the only real way to the world’s long-term security. As unpalatable as Hamas may be, would we really be better off today if that great benign autocrat, Yassir Arafat, were still leading his people? The security and stability supposedly afforded by Saddam Hussein or the Shah of Iran were illusory. On the surface all was calm, but underground, as we discovered in Iran and Iraq, we were laying the foundations for our own tragedy.

But simple , institutional political reform isn’t going to do it either, because it is not just a history of tyranny that has produced these baleful consequences. Attitudes in much of the Islamic world have been conditioned as well by cultural and religious repression. The intolerance of dissent, the suppression of diversity, the denial of women’s rights is not just something imposed by brutal dictators but, for many in the region, mandated by a particular account of their religious principles.

The flap over the publication by a Danish newspaper of offensive cartoons of Muhammad is a good example of what is wrong. The protesting Muslims in Europe or on the West Bank are not rioting and threatening innocent Danes because they’ve been told to but because they believe it’s their religious duty. That is not compatible with freedom. My sensitivities, as a Catholic, are offended almost every day by something I read in the paper. But it’s never occurred to me to avenge what I see by seeking to behead someone at The Guardian or The New York Times.

We can invade countries, impose elections and constitutions, but what can we do to change this culturally ingrained mentality? Not much, I suspect. This in the end is a battle within Islam for the soul of that religion and its meaning in modern life.

It’s wrong and insulting to believe that there is something inevitable about repressive, intolerant Islam. Turkey has shown the alternative. Given a chance, the people of Iran, who have seen the devastating consequences of fanatical Islamism in action for 25 years, would show the way too.

Our job in the West is to make clear by ostracising the lunatics of Hamas and Tehran that there is no future for them and the people they purport to lead in their hateful and distorted ideology. We should encourage, through practical support, those in the region who favour a better way. But we must also, in our own societies, resist the pressure to tolerate the intolerance of Islamist extremism.

The breath of openness blowing through the Middle East is invigorating, but to be sustained it needs deep cultural change. Giving the vote to people who have been acculturated to an ideology of intolerance and hatred will not, on its own, usher in a new era of peace and stability. The risk is it will do the opposite.

gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk

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