The Modern Middle East (45 page)

Second, there is the interrelated problem of a ruling family that is too small either to dominate state institutions or to form a pervasive corporate identity of its own. Named after the monarchy, the country’s official designation is, indeed, the
Hashemite
Kingdom of Jordan. Nevertheless, the actual significance of this is nothing like the naming of
Saudi
Arabia after Ibn Saud. More important, the ruling family’s small size has from the beginning forced it to rely on loyalists, professional technocrats, and even Palestinians to staff key state institutions such as the Foreign Ministry, the
Defense Ministry, and the Prime Ministry. Before Crown Prince Hassan was removed as the designated heir and replaced by Prince Abdullah, he was somewhat active in state affairs. However, he did not hold any formal cabinet portfolios or command positions within the armed forces.
⁷⁸
Ironically, Prince (now King) Abdullah, King Hussein’s son, who was not the heir apparent until two weeks before his father’s death in February 1999, commanded his own unit in the army. In fact, the constitution of 1952, which is technically still in effect, stipulates that authority be jointly exercised by the king and a bicameral legislature (Majlis al-ʾUmma). While this provision of the constitution was virtually ignored until the early 1990s and the king’s powers remained paramount, the loyalty of those in sensitive state positions could not always be counted on, as represented by attempted coups by some military officers in the 1950s and 1960s.

The predicament of the Moroccan monarchy is only slightly different. As we saw in chapter 3, Morocco, unlike Jordan, has had a long dynastic tradition, steeped in and justified by the Kharajite branch of Islam. Monarchy was restored after the end of protectorate rule by France and Spain from 1919 to 1956, but with powers far surpassing those of prepro-tectorate days. The monarchy’s supreme political and religious positions were enshrined in the 1962 constitution, and the three subsequent constitutions written since then—in 1970, 1972, and 1992—have altered the political balance only marginally.
⁷⁹
In theory as well as in practice, the king considers himself the supreme religious and temporal authority of the land, “above other institutions and above any juridical order, including that of the Constitution itself.”
⁸⁰
In this respect, the monarchy relies on an invented political tradition, as the pre-1912 sultanate was ruled in tandem with the
ulama.
In fact, power sharing between the ruler and others survived well into the 1940s and 1950s, when, during the independence movement, Mohammed V cooperated with and endorsed the nationalist Istiqlal Party’s manifesto calling for the establishment of a democratic monarchy upon independence. Today, however, few Moroccans are reminded of this aspect of the independence movement.

Nevertheless, given the long religio-political tradition of sultanistic rule in the country, the Moroccan monarchy has had an easier task of crafting legitimacy on traditional grounds than the Hashemites in Jordan. The problem has been the monarchy’s inability to count on the absolute loyalty of some of the key institutions in the state. Like the Jordanian monarchy, the Moroccan royal family is too small to enable it to place princes in control of the armed forces and other important state institutions. Instead, the country’s two most recent monarchs, Kings Hassan and Mohammed VI, have
used favoritism and patronage to ensure the loyalty of senior figures and the armed forces. During the “state of emergency” that lasted from 1965 to 1971, the army emerged as the bulwark of the regime, repressing the Istiqlal and other parties with considerable efficiency. But this did not prevent attempted military coups from taking place in 1971 and 1972. At this time the king felt compelled to initiate a rapprochement with the political parties, thus inaugurating what he called Hassanian democracy.

Hassanian democracy soon proved to be little more than a political ploy, as evident from this description of the role the king envisioned for opposition parties in his new, democratic order: “If we were in opposition, we would say, ‘We are before anything else servants of the king, who is the king of all Moroccans.’”
⁸¹
In 1985, Istiqlal left the government and, with other parties, demanded that real reforms be implemented. By the early 1990s the monarchy could no longer ignore the demands of the “opposition” political parties inside and outside the parliament. The old political formula that had placed the king and his legitimacy above and beyond everything but God no longer worked. Despite his best efforts at keeping the parties from developing a life of their own, King Hassan had failed to create a docile “loyal opposition.” New parliamentary elections were held in July 1993 amid much popular excitement. The results were far from a landslide victory for the opposition but were sobering enough that the monarchy realized the necessity of sharing power with the opposition.
⁸²
The
alternance
of 1997 was part of the same pattern.

In 1999, the Middle East’s two remaining civic myth monarchies (along with Bahrain) weathered a most serious challenge when the long-reigning monarchs who had come to personify the political system passed away and were succeeded by their sons in orderly and smooth transitions. In February 1999, Jordan’s sixty-four-year-old King Hussein died after a long battle with cancer and was succeeded by his son, King Abdullah II (b. 1962). Morocco’s King Hassan II (b. 1929), who had reigned since 1961, died of a heart attack the following July and was succeeded by his oldest son, Mohammed VI (b. 1963). A similar transition occurred in Bahrain, where Sheikh Isa ibn-Sulman al-Khalifa (b. 1934), who had ruled the island nation since 1961—Bahrain gained its independence from Britain in 1971—died in March and was succeeded by his son, Sheikh Hamad (b. 1950). In all three cases, the institutional viability and strength of the monarchy were tested, and then proven, during the transition. Perhaps the biggest potential threat to the monarchy arose in Jordan, where, because of an apparent family feud, King Hussein abruptly replaced his brother with his son as the crown prince only two weeks before he died. Nevertheless, as subsequent events
have shown, the Jordanian monarchy remains on solid institutional grounds, and the deposed Prince Hassan has not challenged Abdullah II’s rule. Of course, the 2011 Arab uprisings changed matters for all regional actors concerned, especially for Bahrain and to a lesser extent for Jordan and even Morocco.

It is a given that not all democracies are equally democratic, some being more true to the essence and spirit of democracy than others. For a variety of reasons, some democratic systems place institutional limitations on the scope and nature of the political rights and liberties they grant to their citizens. The degree to which civil liberties are curtailed and the reasons for their curtailment differ from case to case and depend on specific historical and political circumstances. However, these democracies often feature a plethora of official or unofficial political “red lines” that the electorate cannot cross. These red lines might be drawn around certain broad issues, such as the overall ideological character of the state, or around the participation of specific groups in the political process, such as various ethnic or religious minorities. Seldom are these restrictions outlined in the constitution or in any of the other legal frameworks on which the state relies. They are, nevertheless, widely observed and guarded by state actors and by other self-ascribed guardians of the state, whether the armed forces or specific elite groups. By and large, the electorate is also mindful of the boundaries beyond which it should not step, although at times it is willing to risk pushing the boundaries to see what happens. Despite the existence of the institutions and practices of democracy, therefore, such democracies often place obvious political restrictions around certain issues or specific groups. For this reason, they might be best classified as “quasi democracies.”

There is a subtle but important distinction between quasi democracies and democracies that are “partial” or “incomplete.” As chapter 8 discusses, processes of democratic transition are often fraught with tension and conflict among state leaders, whose loss of institutional or ideological cohesion, or both, paves the way for competing groups to press their demands on the state. While the state is in the process of transition, its nondemocratic elements and features continue to resist giving up power. The ensuing political system is full of contradictions, at least temporarily, until its precarious “negative balance” is tipped one way or another. Some aspects of the state, such as elections to the parliament, are very democratic, while others, such as nonelected figures’ continued hold on power, are highly undemocratic.
This makes the system at best a partial democracy. In chapter 8, we examine the emergence of such a political system in contemporary Iran. In these partial democracies, the contradictions are institutional; some of the institutions of the state are democratic, others are not. This is not the case in quasi democracies, in which existing political institutions tend to be uniformly democratic, except, of course, for the armed forces. Here the system’s contradictions are not institutional. Instead, they revolve around the larger political culture that informs and guides the broader understanding of the permissible forms and limits of political participation. Democracy exists for some but not for others. Some political issues are open for discussion; others are not. As we will see below, these quasi-democratic systems are the sort found in the Middle East, especially in Israel, Lebanon, and Turkey.

Several interrelated and reinforcing dynamics result in a political system developing into a quasi democracy as opposed to a more “viable” democratic polity.
⁸³
Three factors stand out: age, institutional design, and the political role of the middle classes. To begin with, quasi democracies all tend to be rather young political systems in historical terms, with their establishment traceable to no more than one or at most two generations of political leaders. By itself, age is not a determinant of the nature of a political system. However, especially in democracies, where the deliberately crafted institutions of the political system need time to settle into their mutually dependent, countervailing relationships, age and experience can be highly stabilizing, maturing factors. With time, imperfect democracies can—though not all will—work out their internal contradictions. In the American democracy, for example, with time, a serious secessionist movement was suppressed (the Civil War of 1860–63), slavery was outlawed (Thirteenth Amendment, in 1865), voting rights were extended to blacks (Fifteenth Amendment, in 1870) and then to women (Nineteenth Amendment, in 1920), and racial inequities were targeted for change (the civil rights movement of the 1960s).

The Middle East’s three existing democratic systems are all relatively recent in historical terms. Israel has the oldest uninterrupted democracy, dating back to 1948. Lebanon’s fragile democracy, which took shape after the country’s independence in 1943, was shattered in 1975, not to be reconstituted until the civil war ended in 1990. Turkey’s first democratic elections were held in 1950, but there were military coups in 1960, 1971, and 1980. Another “silent coup” occurred in 1997, when, from behind the scenes, the military forced the resignation of the sitting prime minister.

Age is only one factor pushing an emerging democratic system in the direction of limited democracy. Many west European democracies are
equally young but are quite vibrant and are free of the built-in institutional limitations that saddle quasi democracies. The circumstances that give rise to a democratic system, and the larger sociopolitical and diplomatic context within which that system is established, are even more important. Viable democracies tend to have their genesis in society and are often initiated “from below.” A relatively wide coalition of social actors puts pressure on the state and, if successful, forces it to democratize. As we shall see in chapter 8, the depth of civil society is a crucial determinant of the viability and vitality of a democratic political system. Quasi democracies, in contrast, tend to come “from above.” They are often initiated either by state actors themselves for the specific purpose of protecting their privileges, as in Turkey, or by social elites, for whom the protection of privilege also emerges as an important priority, as in Lebanon. The political system thus crafted, democratic as it may be, also reflects an institutional imperative to protect the privileged position of certain elements in society, such as the armed forces (in Turkey and Israel), prominent social elites (in Lebanon), or dominant ethnic groups (the Jews in Israel and the Turks in Turkey).

Crucial to any democracy is the role of the middle classes, without whose sustained participation in the political process a democracy becomes hollow and meaningless. This is especially the case in younger democracies, where initially the electorate comes to play a deliberate, guardian role in ensuring the system’s integrity. In many of the more recent democratic transitions in the developing world, the middle classes have played a most vital role, at least in the initial phases of the struggle to bring about a democratic political system. Before long, however, economic pressures and circumstances force much of their attention away from political activities and toward economics, thus giving state elites a freer hand in pursuing their own agendas. The confidence of the middle classes in the stability of their economic position (not having to work multiple jobs to keep their middle-class standing) and their economic independence from the state (not having to rely on direct state salaries or indirect state largesse) determines the extent and nature of their role as watchdogs over political elites. In other words, what “the people” let their elected officials get away with has a lot to do with how confident they feel about their economic standing. As we shall see, in Lebanon and Turkey, and to a lesser extent in Israel among the country’s Arab citizens, there are large segments of society for whom sustained, routine attention to politics is a luxury they cannot afford.