The Modern Middle East (47 page)

Since Israel does not yet have a written constitution, the constitutional limits of the military’s influence and the nature of its oversight by civilian institutions remain unclear.
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Consequently, many high-ranking IDF officials have become very influential in policy-making circles. In fact, Israeli military officials were highly active in the 1993 Oslo Accords negotiations and others that followed with the Palestinians and later the Syrians. Since the mid-1970s, especially after the Likud Party came to power in 1977, many high-ranking IDF officials have engaged in what has come to be known as “parachuting”: they wait out the obligatory hundred days of retirement and then assume influential positions in one of the political parties, usually the one in power.
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None of this, of course, brings the IDF anywhere close to the levels of power enjoyed by the Turkish military, where the Turkish NSC and the military high command could until recently effectively dictate the policies that the prime minister had to follow. Nevertheless, the IDF’s influence throughout the Israeli polity remains enormous by almost all democratic standards. “The Middle East’s only democracy,” as Israel is often called, still has some way to go to become fully democratic.

Of the quasi democracies, Turkey and Israel are at the opposite extremes of most and least restrictive, respectively, and Lebanon falls somewhere in the middle. Lebanon’s 1926 constitution was meant to accommodate the country’s fragmented sectarian mosaic, divided into no less than seventeen official religious communities. According to the 1932 census, the largest religious community was Christian, with 51.2 percent of the population (nearly 30 percent of them Maronites and the rest Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic, and Armenians), while the Muslims were about 48.8 percent of the population, most of them Sunnis (22.4 percent) and Shiʿites (19.6 percent) and the rest Druze (6.8 percent).
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Within such a highly fragmented society, local notables (
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) assumed crucial importance as the articulators and defenders of communal interests and power. In times of instability and crisis, the
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and other primordial sources of loyalty, such as family and kinship, became particularly instrumental for those feeling threatened by others or by circumstances. The developments in postindependence Lebanon only served to strengthen primordial and sectarian loyalties, at the expense, as it turned out, of a cohesive sense of national identity.

Shortly after independence in 1943, a notable Sunni delivered a talk in which he outlined a Muslim-Christian understanding regarding the overall nature and the character of the Lebanese state. The National Pact (Al-Mithaq al-Watani), as the talk came to be known, reaffirmed Lebanon’s independence from France, its separateness from Syria, and its Arab identity. It also outlined an institutional arrangement for power sharing among the various sects. According to this “informal” provision, the presidency was reserved for the Maronites, the office of the prime minister for the Sunnis, and the speakership of the parliament for the Shiʿites. These same distribution patterns came to be replicated among other echelons of power as well, from the command of the army (going to a Maronite), to the various ministries (Justice Ministry for the Greek Orthodox and Defense Ministry for the Druze), and on to the state bureaucracy.
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Although unwritten, the National Pact essentially became the constitutional foundation of the Lebanese state. For the few happy years that followed, Lebanon became something of a “consociational” or “consensus” democracy—that is, a “government by elite cartel designed to turn a democracy with a fragmented political culture into a stable democracy.”
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By 1975, the precarious arrangements on which the Lebanese state had come to rely could no longer withstand the multiple stresses that confronted them. The political system had turned out to be largely unworkable, with the parliament too weak and the president too powerful. The country’s demography had changed significantly since the 1932 census, with high Muslim birthrates and an influx of Palestinians after 1970. Pressures also arose from Lebanon’s frontline status in relation to Israel, since Palestinian guerrillas attacked northern Israel and Israel retaliated against Lebanese targets. Many of the country’s Shiʿites, especially in the south and in the Biqa valley, experienced abject poverty and discrimination and felt alienated from the politically and economically dominant Christians. Elite infighting and the increasing balkanization of state institutions only exacerbated the state’s inability to effectively contain its own disintegration. Civil war erupted, and, as it dragged on, members of each of the various confessions sought deeper and deeper shelters in their primordial identities. “Lebanese” identity was thus subsumed by Maronite versus Sunni versus Shiʿite versus Druze identity.

Not until October 1989, by which time most of the warring factions had fought each other into near exhaustion, was a serious attempt made to end the civil war, in Taʾif, Saudi Arabia. Under Saudi, Syrian, and American sponsorship, thirty-one Christian and thirty-one Muslim deputies from the 1972 parliament—the last one to have been convened before civil war broke out—met
and agreed to reform the system. Two of the provisions of the Taʾif Accord stand out: (1) the powers of the presidency, still informally in Maronite hands, were reduced, while the powers of the prime minister, under Sunni control, were increased; and (2) the number of MPs for a new parliament was set at 108, to be divided equally between Christians and Muslims.
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Syria, which had maintained troops in Lebanon since 1976, promised to withdraw them in the near future when circumstances allowed. A new president was also elected. The Lebanese civil war itself continued into 1990. By that time almost all Lebanese factions had given up fighting except the followers of the Maronite general Michel Aoun, who insisted on the withdrawal of Syrian forces before surrendering. He was not as concerned about Israel’s continued military presence in southern Lebanon, where, following the 1982–85 invasion of the country, Israeli forces had declared a “security zone” in which they had stationed troops. At the invitation of the Lebanese government, Syrian forces crushed Aoun’s well-equipped militia in October 1990, and the long and bloody civil war finally came to an end.

To the surprise of most observers, the Taʾif Accord, which did not differ a great deal from the other unsuccessful agreements that preceded it, has managed to hold up so far, despite the state’s frequent political paralysis and continuing hostilities with Israel. Amid jubilant scenes of celebration by the Lebanese, Syrian forces withdrew from the
country in April 2005. Earlier, in 2000, Israeli troops had pulled out of most of the “security zone” areas in the south. In many ways, the Shiʿite Hezbollah still defies the central authority of the state and represents something of a state-within-a-state in Lebanon. Up until its collapse and surrender in 2000, the South Lebanese Army, made up of Christian fighters and supported by Israel, also operated with little regard for the central authority of the state. In July and August 2006, Israel launched a massive military assault on Lebanon following a Hezbollah attack on an Israeli patrol, leading to the death of more than a thousand Lebanese civilians and the widespread destruction of property and infrastructure.
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Hezbollah, with alleged Iranian support, proved itself to be a worthy opponent to Israel, but only at great human and infrastructural cost. The Lebanese polity eventually recovered from this shock, but only after the state once again moved to the brink of implosion as a result of internal bickering and paralysis by the country’s multiple factions in 2007–8. Only after persistent mediation efforts by the Saudi and especially the Qatari governments in the summer of 2008 did Lebanon’s fractious political parties agree to once again work together in a coalition cabinet.

In essence, the Lebanese polity is being reconstituted, yet again, and state authority is once again becoming the paramount political force in the country. In many ways, the reconstituted system is a somewhat reformed and apparently more workable version of consociational democracy. The reasons the reconstituted polity is once again democratic are explored in chapter 8. For now, it must be noted that the democratic system has yet to shed its highly elitist character, which is a product of the larger phenomenon of the
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system. The final shape of the Lebanese democracy has yet to emerge. For the time being, the larger sociocultural and political circumstances in which it was born lend it the features of a quasi democracy as opposed to a viable democracy.

Given the types of institutional arrangements that Middle Eastern states are likely to assume, it is worth asking what forms of political opposition they allow or provoke. As events in the political history of the modern Middle East have demonstrated, most recently in 2011–12, even the most repressive and dictatorial states of the region have encountered severe political crises at one point or another. Some regimes that once seemed politically invincible have succumbed to popular revolutionary movements—as in Iran, Tunisia, and Egypt—while others have faced violent opposition from actors within society, as in Algeria (in the 1990s) and Syria (beginning in 2011). To deflate the potential for popular uprisings, some states, such as the Jordanian, Kuwaiti, and especially Moroccan monarchies, have allowed limited forms of “loyal opposition” while retaining tight restrictions on the scope of political activity. Whatever their form might be, Middle Eastern states encounter various types of political opposition, and the nature of this opposition directly influences the state’s agendas and capabilities, as well as its broader relationship with society.

Prior to the 2011 uprisings, political opposition in the Middle East was generally divided along two principal axes: officially recognized versus clandestine (or formal versus informal), and secular versus religious. Except for the more conservative kingdoms of the Arabian peninsula—notably Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Oman—states in the Middle East allowed for the existence of one or more political parties and their participation in a parliament. From about the 1950s to the mid-1970s, most countries had one all-encompassing political party. The primary function of the sole official party was to foster controlled popular political participation and to channel the ensuing mass energy into support for various state agendas. Examples of these state parties—in each country acting as the “Ministry of Mobilization”—included the National Liberation Front in Algeria, the Arab
Socialist Union and its future incarnations in Egypt, the Neo-Destour in Tunisia, the Baʿth in both Syria and Iraq, and, though hardly successful, the Rastakhiz in Iran.
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Beginning in the mid-1970s, and especially since the late 1980s, most states have allowed limited, highly controlled activities by a few officially approved political parties. In fact, beginning especially in the late 1980s, in countries such as Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, and Kuwait, nonstate parties were allowed to recruit members, hold meetings, and even field candidates in parliamentary elections. Some of these parties have had relatively long traditions of activism, although the state often banned them and then lifted the ban depending on changing political conditions: the Wafd, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the National Progressive Unionist Party in Egypt; the Istiqlal in Morocco; and the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan. Other parties emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s specifically as a result of the more open political atmosphere of the time. Some had been established earlier but were not transformed from paper parties into actual organizations until the late 1980s. Examples included the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) in Algeria, the Democratic Unionist Party (Al-Waʾad) and the Islamic Action Front (IAF) in Jordan, the Al-Nahda and the Social Democratic Movement Parties in Tunisia, the National Entente in Morocco, and the Islah (Reform) Party in Yemen.

Official recognition by the state, or even parliamentary representation, did not necessarily lead to the increased popularity of these parties among the urban middle classes. Many, in fact, turned into little more than obscure, semiofficial, elite clubs. For example, the Islamic Action Front, established in 1992, initially caused much excitement among the Jordanian electorate and was able to get sixteen of its candidates elected to the Jordanian parliament in the 1993 elections. In municipal elections two years later, however, by which time some of the luster of the new party had worn off, the IAF did relatively poorly and lost much ground to procourt candidates from the tribal, southern parts of the country. By 1997, the party, whose fortunes had significantly declined by now, thought it best to boycott parliamentary elections. Tunisia’s officially recognized “opposition” parties were in even worse shape, to the extent that in the run-up to the 1994 elections the Tunisian state decided to subsidize them to ensure their viability, at least as long as they remained politically docile. When they failed to do so, the government arrested and imprisoned their leaders. Prior to the 2011 uprising, they were marginalized to the point of near oblivion. As one observer noted in 2001, “None of the Tunisian parties present any credible alternative to the [state party]. At best, they are gadflies, consciences, safety valves; at
worst, they are salon clubs, ego trips, window dressing. Most ironic, the government need do nothing repressive to keep them in that ambiguous status.”
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There were several reasons for the chronic obscurity and lack of meaningful popular support for the majority of officially recognized political parties in the Middle East. First, to secure recognition from the state and to operate openly, most parties toned down their ideologies considerably and greatly modified their political agendas. Legal status necessitated tacit cooperation with the state and the explicit recognition of the legitimacy of the existing political system. Worse, it was seen as recognizing the legitimacy of the current ruling establishment—an establishment that to the popular eye often looked highly authoritarian and corrupt. Although most of these parties went to extraordinary lengths to distance themselves from the ruling elite and reject the political hegemony of those they saw as politically incompetent, they were often seen as “guilty by association” by most ordinary citizens, for whom participating in the system even as an “opposition party” was tantamount to complicity with autocrats.