The Modern Middle East (53 page)

The state’s attempts to give popular currency to a ruling bargain among the urban middle classes and its resort to coercion when necessary have had two larger consequences for overall state-society relations in the Middle East. First, although in some respects the state’s attempts to forge subjective, extrainstitutional links with society have been futile or have elicited sharp adverse reactions, its efforts to corporatize functional groups, its use of patrimonial linkages, and its championing of (official) nationalism have, in some ways, helped it retain a certain relevance to the life and identity of society. In other words, although the institutional links between the state and society may be designed to help maintain the state’s primacy and dominance over society, some extrainstitutional links, however weak, continue to bind the two together subjectively.

This is quite unlike the cases of South America and eastern Europe in the 1980s. There the state unintentionally severed crucial subjective links with society, uncaring or unaware of many sociocultural dynamics about which people cared deeply. This in turn led to the development of a “parallel” or “alternative” society in contrast to the “official” society that the state sought to define and control.
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But virtually all the states in the Middle East, to one extent or another, have sought to carve out a cultural niche for themselves, with some having been far more successful at it than others. A few states have pointed to a favorite cultural disposition, monopolized its interpretation, and made it their primary source of cultural legitimacy. For Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran this has been religion; at the opposite extreme, for Turkey it has been secular Kemalism. For most others, attempts at cultural legitimation have been more nuanced and mixed. The states of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, to name a few, have tried to strike a careful balance in their attention to the prevailing cultural norms of society. Invariably, however, they have alienated one of the strata in society, the Islamists, for whom the state’s attention to religion has been both insufficient and disingenuous. As a result, each state has faced its own Islamist challenge, which itself has been multilayered and highly differentiated.
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A second consequence of the prevailing patterns of state-society relations in the Middle East has been the overall “exit” of society from the political process. The perceived costs of political activity are often too high and the risks involved too perilous for the average urban middle-class person to willingly and voluntarily engage in it. Fear, paranoia, and a perception of the omnipresence of the dreaded secret police, the
mukhaberat,
in addition to a series of lofty broken promises, helped deepen a pervasive political skepticism among the urban middle classes. With diminished
belief in one’s overall political efficacy, routine political involvement became pro forma and an act of prudent obligation. Before the 2011 uprisings, the most common instance of this type of political participation was voting in elections whose outcome everyone knew to be predetermined. If springing from genuine conviction, political activism was likely to take the form of participation in extralegal organizations and means to overthrow the state. Prime examples included organizations such as the Gamaʿa Islamiyya in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, and the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) in Algeria. Other politically active social organizations—for example, Adl wal-Ihsan in Morocco—were not as radical as the Gamaʿa or the FIS, but by and large they were just as committed to basically reconstituting the state.
⁷⁵
Especially in
mukhaberat
states like Iraq before Saddam’s overthrow, Mubarak’s Egypt, and Algeria, therefore, most people participated in presidential elections knowing full well that the outcome was predetermined. But they did so anyway to get the appropriate stamp on their identity cards or birth certificates that might come in handy at some later date. The basic attitudes of urban society toward the state were those of avoidance wherever possible, passive compliance whenever appropriate, and begrudging acceptance in the absence of viable alternatives.

These are some of the more pronounced,
general
features of state-society relations in Middle Eastern countries, and the foregoing analysis does not take into account some of the more subtle sociopolitical dynamics percolating beneath the surface in many parts of the region. The gradual but steady weakening of the ruling bargain over the past couple of decades set in motion a subtle, at times painfully slow process whereby state elites were forced to negotiate over some of the premises of the bargain with selected social actors. In two countries—Iran and Morocco—this slow process of negotiation at some point appeared to be heading in a generally democratic direction. To ensure that the liberalization process did not get out of hand and erode too many of its privileges, however, in both countries the state stepped in before too long and stalled or reversed many of the democratic gains society had or was about to win. In Lebanon, meanwhile, a top-down democratic polity is once again being reconstituted for somewhat different reasons. The forces at work here are not so much bargaining state and social elites as intraelite strategic decisions based on the perceived benefits of reconstituting a collapsed, ostensibly democratic state. As these three examples indicate, political liberalization—of a protracted, painfully slow variety—went some way in prolonging authoritarian rule in the Middle East. But as the fateful events of 2011 demonstrated, repressive
authoritarianism did not go uncontested, nor did it prove invincible in every country of the Middle East.

STALLED DEMOCRATIZATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

There are three general, ideal-type patterns of transition from authoritarianism to democracy: those in which civil society plays a prominent role; those initiated by the state “from above”; and those resulting from a protracted process of give-and-take between competing political groups and actors that previously used the state’s own procedures to gain access to its institutions and resources. From a comparative perspective, the first type of transition occurred primarily in eastern Europe in the late 1980s, most notably in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. “Democracy from above,” in which state elites give up power in a preemptive move to protect themselves from a revolutionary tidal wave, was responsible for most of the transitions in Latin America in the 1980s and early 1990s, especially in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Chile.
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In the Middle East, Turkey also witnessed such a transition, in 1983. The third type of transition, resulting from internal competition within state-affiliated elites, gave rise to the democracies of the Philippines and Nicaragua, among others.

Up until the late 2000s, efforts by civil society organizations to bring about political change were met by often violent state responses across the Middle East. To stem the tide of opposition, states instead adopted a combination of repression and concessions, responding to pressures for change with repression on the one hand and limited liberalization on the other. This careful balancing act became all the more prevalent toward the end of the 1980s and the 1990s as Middle Eastern leaders scrambled to find ways of staying out of the “third wave.” In a move that at the time appeared to be the beginning of meaningful democratic transitions, most took to drafting “national charters” (
al-Mithaq
). Although slightly different in each case, the national charters invariably reaffirmed the commitment of social actors to the basic tenets of the state and committed the state to a process of liberalization.

This was the case in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Jordan, where in the final years of the 1980s national charters were drawn up with great fanfare. Major constitutional changes were also undertaken in Iran, and a less doctrinaire, comparatively more open “Second Republic” began to take shape. In a less formal way, in 1993 the Egyptian state called for the initiation of a “national dialogue” (
al-hiwar al-qawmi
). Buffered by their oil wealth, the oil monarchies of the Arabian peninsula did not go so far as to draw up
national charters, but most did clean up their public image and strengthened their traditional bonds of patronage. Beginning in 1986, for example, the king of Saudi Arabia adopted a new title, “Custodian of Islam’s Two Holy Mosques.” The Iraqi state, desperate after an inconclusive, bloody war with Iran, resorted to a radically different tactic, but one with which President Saddam Hussein was familiar: invasion, in this case of Kuwait.

Despite the considerable initial excitement generated by the drafting of national charters and by other promises of liberalization implicitly or explicitly given by the state, it soon became obvious that the concessions of the late 1980s and early 1990s were, for the most part, tactical retreats by state elites who in the long run were unwilling to institute power-sharing arrangements. The most stunning and dramatic reversal occurred in Algeria, where electoral successes by the FIS in the first round of parliamentary elections in December 1991 triggered a military coup and plunged the country into civil war for much of the 1990s. Hopes for a democratic opening were once again raised in the run-up to presidential elections in 1999, for which some fifty candidates initially signed up. But the number of the candidates was reduced first to twelve, then to seven, and eventually to only one, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the military’s so-called national consensus candidate.
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Elected to a second presidential term in 2009, Bouteflika brought an end to the civil war but did not result in any tangible changes in the state’s overall nature. Next door in Tunisia, alarmed that a similar Islamist victory might take place at the polls, President Zein el-Abidine Ben Ali also constricted the narrow political space he had initially allowed and banned the religiously oriented Al-Nahda Party. There was also a reinvigoration of authoritarianism in Egypt beginning in the early 1990s: the state asserted its control over many professional syndicates, terminated the elected positions of village mayors and deputy mayors, manipulated election laws ahead of the 1995 parliamentary elections, and arrested scores of journalists, parliamentary candidates, and members of the Muslim Brotherhood.
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Elections did proceed as scheduled in Morocco and Jordan, but in both cases the states’ vocal opponents were harassed and some were even arrested.

Compared to the rest of the Arab world, the advent of multipartyism (
ta
ʿ
addudiyya
) brought significant political liberalization to Jordan and Morocco. In Morocco, throughout the 2000s the monarchy launched a series of meaningful reforms by improving human rights conditions, updating personal-status laws, and denouncing corruption, all the while ensuring that the powers of the king remained unlimited.
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The inclusion of the Islamist Party for Justice and Development led to a win-win situation
for both the state and the PJD, enhancing the legitimacy of the former and the electoral appeal of the latter.
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But in most cases it also soon became apparent that the political opening did not extend beyond mostly cosmetic changes. By showing greater tolerance toward the emerging “loyal opposition” and allowing parliamentary elections to go ahead, the Jordanian and Moroccan monarchies helped promote the appearance of a more open political space, hoping to thereby marginalize the more radical elements of the opposition. But neither state was willing to loosen its tight control of the liberalization process, and some of the state’s core policies (e.g., the monarchy’s powers and privileges, the conduct of foreign policy, the state’s treatment of the opposition) remained closed to discussion and debate by the parliament. Before long, it became obvious that the ongoing processes of liberalization were mostly cosmetic and that multipartyism was having little structural impact.
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The two states have remained sultanistic monarchies that continue to rule through royal patronage and the dispensing of favors through the
makhzen.
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In each Middle Eastern country, the unfolding of events was influenced by what was occurring elsewhere. Each state was, of course, trying to prevent the emergence of conditions similar to those that had engulfed east European dictatorships. But, more importantly, the controlled liberalization processes set into motion in Jordan and Morocco, and more briefly in Algeria and Tunisia, were motivated by a series of perceived international economic and diplomatic benefits that each state hoped to accrue. Both the Jordanian and Moroccan states faced crushing debt burdens, and loans and grants from the International Monetary Fund served as important catalysts for the initial impulse to liberalize and, as time went by, to appear less authoritarian. Image appears to have been the primary motivator in Algeria and Tunisia, where state elites sought to look less like “Oriental despots,” especially before the French and others in the international community. Earlier in the 1980s this concern with image had prompted Turkish generals to give up power almost completely, move behind the scenes, and let elected, approved, civilian politicians enhance Turkey’s image as a European country worthy of membership in the European Union. The greater immediacy of an “image problem,” or at least the perceived immediacy of its consequences, appears to have been a factor resulting in a unique process of democratization from above in Turkey, whereas other Middle Eastern states only partially liberalized. Even in Turkey, as discussed in chapter 7, the military establishment continued to exert considerable political influence through the powerful National Security Council, to the extent that in 1997
it launched a “silent coup” against an elected prime minister and banned his political party.
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