The Routledge Handbook to the Middle East and North African State and States System 0367358875, 9780367358877

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of tables
List of figures
List of contributors
PART I: Historical context, state-building and politics in MENA
Chapter 1: State, revolution and war: conflict and resilience in MENA’s states
and states system
The theme of the book
Overview of the studies
Part I: Historical context, state-building and politics in MENA
Part II: State actors, societal context and popular activism
Part III: Trans-state politics: The political economy and identity contexts
Part IV: The international politics of MENA
References
Chapter 2: Historical context of state formation in the Middle East: structure
and agency
Structure: the historical inheritance of state-builders
Agency: regime building after independence
Structure and agency: the MENA states system and its evolution
Notes
References
Chapter 3: States and state-building in the Middle East
Introduction
What is a state?
State formation in the Middle East
Theorizing state-building: contexts and processes
The internal–external nexus: vulnerability and the democracy deficit
Regime–society relations: political change and continuity
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 4: Political regimes of the Middle East and North Africa
Post-independence political unrest, state-building and regime formation
Middle Eastern versions of authoritarianism
Causes of authoritarian resilience in the Arab world
The Middle Eastern political landscape after the 2011 uprisings
Conclusions
Notes
References
Chapter 5: Authoritarian adaptability and the Arab Spring
Post-colonial Arab authoritarianism
Upgrading authoritarianism in the Arab world
The Arab Uprisings: authoritarian collapse in the republics
The resilience of monarchies during the Arab Spring
After authoritarian breakdown: democratization or civil wars, and authoritarian restoration?
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 6: The Arab Spring and the Gulf monarchies
Evolving opposition
Modernizing forces and authoritarian resilience
Countering the Arab Spring: the wrong side of history?
Conclusion
References
Chapter 7: Leadership and legitimacy in MENA
Conceptualizing legitimacy
Leadership, state and nation
Forms of legitimacy
Plausible legitimacy claims in the Middle East and North Africa
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Notes
References
PART II: State actors, societal context and popular activism
Chapter 8: The military in the Arab state
“Path dependence?”: the changing face of the military dimension in Arab politics
The 2011 Uprisings and the return of the military to politics?
The renewed wave of militarism after 2011
Notes
References
Chapter 9: Tribes in MENA politics: the Levant case
Who are the Bedouin and what is the nature of their tribal society?
The (Bedouin) tribes in the Levant (modern states of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan)
Accommodation at the turn of the twenty-first century
The Bedouin and the Syrian Uprising
Conclusion
References
Chapter 10: Political parties in the Middle East
Introduction
A note on political parties, proto-parties and relevance
Categorizing political parties: the importance of the local environment
The Arab Uprisings and political parties
Slim winnings and the issues of trust and representation
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 11: Islam and Islamic movements and MENA politics
Political Islam and state power
Islamist oppositions
Violent Islamism
Islam and state politics beyond Islamism
Islam and international politics
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 12: Civil society in the Middle East and North Africa
Introduction
Civil society and democracy
The application of civil society to the Middle East
Conclusion
References
Chapter 13: The Arab Spring is not lost: moral protest as the embodiment of
a new politics
Introduction
Al-hirak: “peoplehood” in the Arab Spring
Top-down vs. bottom-up change: the limits of state-centred analysis of the Arab Uprisings
One hirak, divergent patterns
Conclusions
Note
References
Chapter 14: Tunisia’s “civic parallelism”: lessons for Arab democratization
Introduction
Foregrounding knowledge: democratization vs. “democratic learning”
Background: Tunisia’s political-historical lineage
Tunisia’s democratization: germination
Civic/democratic parallelism
Democratic learning: perceptions of Islamist parliamentarians
Conclusion: toward a knowledge-centred approach
Notes
References
PART III: Trans-state politics: the political economy and identity
contexts
Chapter 15: The Middle East and North Africa in the lens of Marxist
International Relations theory
Marxism, dependency and the Middle East
The Iraq War of 2003 and the Middle East and North Africa in international relations
UCD and the international relations of the Middle East
Marxism, international relations and the Arab Uprisings of 2011
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 16: Oil and the rentier state in the Middle East
Introduction
Oil in the Middle East and North Africa
The idea of the rentier state and its evolution as an analytical concept
Other types of windfall gains
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 17: Divergent development in Egypt and the Gulf
Weak economic co-operation and integration
Regional transportation infrastructure
Informal economic activity
The economy of the ISIS phenomenon
Ease of doing business
Economic diversification into services
Perceptions of well-being
Poles of economic growth
Egypt’s economic performance
Conclusions
Notes
References
Chapter 18: Studying identity politics in Middle East international relations: before and after the Arab uprisings
Introduction
Debating identity politics in Middle East international relations before the Arab Uprisings
A new Middle East—a new kind of identity politics?
Still dripping with identity politics . . .
Notes
References
Chapter 19: Arab nationalism in Anglophone discourse: a conceptual and
historical reassessment
Introduction
European Nationalism between culture and politics
Whither the cultural and republican project of Arab nationalism?
The search for political autonomy: roots in anti-colonialism
After decolonization and Israel
Syria, Islamist allies and relevance today
Conclusion
References
PART IV: The international politics of MENA
Chapter 20: Conflict in the Middle East
Roots of conflict
The Arab–Israeli conflict
Conclusion
References
Chapter 21: Regionalism in the Middle East and North Africa
What is regionalism and how to evaluate it?
The Middle East as an outlier?
History and development of regionalism in MENA
Explaining regionalism in the Middle East
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 22: An exceptional context for a debate on international relations?
Toward a synthetic approach to the study of the MENA’s
international politics
Introduction
The MENA and international relations: a penetrated system
IR theory and the region: realism and its rivals
Evolution of the regional system
Conclusion
Note
References
Chapter 23: US hegemony and MENA
Historic US interests and strategies in MENA
Militarization of US policy in MENA: the invasion of Iraq
US retrenchment and the Arab Uprisings: policy under Obama
Nuclear non-proliferation
Israel
Notes
References
Chapter 24: Alliances and the balance of power in the Middle East
Explaining alliances
Shifting alliances and the Middle East balance of power
Conclusions
References
Chapter 25: War in the Middle East
A war-prone region
A Waltzian paradigm: levels of analysis
Explaining War: quantitative distributions of war-proneness factors
Toward understanding the interaction of man, the state and system: testing the lines of war causality
Conclusions
Appendix: Middle East wars (since 1945): an empirical survey
Notes
References
Chapter 26: International relations of the Gulf: from stable rivalry to
spreading instability
Rise of the smaller GCC states
Saudi Arabia in the maelstrom
Crisis over Qatar
Expansion of the Gulf security complex
Conclusion
References
Index

Citation preview

The Routledge Handbook to the Middle East and North African State and States System

Conflict and instability are built into the very fabric of the Middle East and North African (MENA) state and states system; yet both states and states system have displayed remarkable resilience. How can we explain this? This handbook explores the main debates, theoretical approaches and accumulated empirical research by prominent scholars in the field, providing an essential context for scholars pursuing research on the MENA state and states system. Contributions are grouped into four key themes: • • • •

Historical contexts, state-building and politics in MENA State actors, societal context and popular activism Trans-state politics: the political economy and identity contexts The international politics of MENA

The 26 chapters examine the evolution of the state and states system, before and after independence, and take the 2011 Arab uprisings as a pivotal moment that intensified trends already embedded in the system, exposing the deep features of state and system—specifically their builtin vulnerability and their ability to survive. This handbook provides comprehensive coverage of the history and role of the state in the MENA region. It offers a key resource for all researchers and students interested in international relations and the Middle East and North Africa. Raymond Hinnebusch is Professor of International Relations and Middle East Politics at the University of St. Andrews. Jasmine K. Gani is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of St. Andrews.

The Routledge Handbook to the Middle East and North African State and States System

Edited by Raymond Hinnebusch and Jasmine K. Gani

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business  2020 selection and editorial matter, Raymond Hinnebusch and Jasmine K. Gani; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Raymond Hinnebusch and Jasmine K. Gani to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hinnebusch, Raymond A., editor. | Gani, J. K., editor. Title: The Routledge Handbook to the Middle East and North African State and States System / edited by Raymond Hinnebusch and Jasmine K. Gani. Other titles: Handbook to the Middle East and North African State and States System Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019029800 (print) | LCCN 2019029801 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367358877 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429342486 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Middle East—Politics and government. | Africa, North—Politics and government. | Middle East—Foreign relations. | Africa, North—Foreign relations. Classification: LCC JQ1758.A58 R68 2019 (print) | LCC JQ1758. A58 (ebook) | DDC 320.456--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029800 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029801 ISBN: 978-0-367-35887-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-34248-6 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK

Contents

List of tables List of figures List of contributors

viii ix x

PART I

Historical context, state-building and politics in MENA

1

  1 State, revolution and war: conflict and resilience in MENA’s states and states system Raymond Hinnebusch, University of St. Andrews

3

  2 Historical context of state formation in the Middle East: structure and agency Raymond Hinnebusch, University of St. Andrews

21

  3 States and state-building in the Middle East Adham Saouli, Doha Institute and University of St. Andrews

40

  4 Political regimes of the Middle East and North Africa Oliver Schlumberger, Tubingen University

51

  5 Authoritarian adaptability and the Arab Spring Stephen J. King, Georgetown University

67

  6 The Arab Spring and the Gulf monarchies Christopher M. Davidson, Royal United Services Institute

87

  7 Leadership and legitimacy in MENA Mark Sedgwick, Aarhus University

98

v

Contents

PART II

State actors, societal context and popular activism

113

  8 The military in the Arab state Philippe Droz-Vincent, Sciences-Po Grenoble (France)

115

  9 Tribes in MENA politics: the Levant case Dawn Chatty, University of Oxford

126

10 Political parties in the Middle East Lise Storm, University of Exeter

136

11 Islam and Islamic movements and MENA politics Ewan Stein, The University of Edinburgh, and Neil Russell, The University of Edinburgh and Newcastle University

153

12 Civil society in the Middle East and North Africa Vincent Durac, University College Dublin

165

13 The Arab Spring is not lost: moral protest as the embodiment of a new politics Larbi Sadiki and Layla Saleh, Qatar University 14 Tunisia’s “civic parallelism”: lessons for Arab democratization Larbi Sadiki, Qatar University

177 191

PART III

Trans-state politics: the political economy and identity contexts 209 15 The Middle East and North Africa in the lens of Marxist International Relations theory Jamie Allinson, The University of Edinburgh

211

16 Oil and the rentier state in the Middle East Thomas Richter, German Institute of Global and Area Studies

225

17 Divergent development in Egypt and the Gulf Rodney Wilson, Durham University

238

18 Studying identity politics in Middle East international relations: before and after the Arab uprisings Morten Valbjørn, Aarhus University vi

251

Contents

19 Arab nationalism in Anglophone discourse: a conceptual and historical reassessment Jasmine K. Gani, University of St. Andrews

270

PART IV

The international politics of MENA

285

20 Conflict in the Middle East Francesco Belcastro, University of Derby

287

21 Regionalism in the Middle East and North Africa Louise Fawcett, University of Oxford

297

22 An exceptional context for a debate on international relations? Toward a synthetic approach to the study of the MENA’s international politics Pietro Marzo and Francesco Cavatorta, Université Laval

312

23 US hegemony and MENA Stephen Zunes, University of San Francesco

324

24 Alliances and the balance of power in the Middle East Curtis R. Ryan, Appalachian State University

340

25 War in the Middle East Raymond Hinnebusch, University of St. Andrews

354

26 International relations of the Gulf: from stable rivalry to spreading instability Matteo Legrenzi, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and Fred H. Lawson

375

Index 389

vii

Tables

  7.1   7.2   7.3   7.4 16.1 17.1 17.2 17.3 17.4 21.1 25.1 25.2

viii

Parts of the nation-state Varieties of legitimacy MENA country groups Patterns of MENA internal legitimacy Contextualizing the rentier state approach Ease of doing business rankings Corruption perception scores Sector shares of GDP Happy planet indices Regionalism in MENA: a chronology Occasions of war involvement by regime types Features of regional systems, issues at stake or motives driving wars

101 103 105 105 230 243 244 245 246 300 356 360

Figures

  3.1 14.1 14.2 16.1

Structure of state formation Civic parallelism in Tunisia’s transition Seats in Tunisia’s new parliament elected in October 2014 Crude oil price in US dollars, 2016 (deflated using the Consumer Price Index for the US), 1946–2016 16.2 Hydrocarbon income as a per cent share of total revenue for the GCC Member States, 1973–2006

43 197 204 226 227

ix

Contributors

The editors Raymond Hinnebusch is Professor of International Relations and Middle East Politics at the

University of St. Andrews. His major works include Egyptian Politics Under Sadat (1985); The International Politics of the Middle East (second edition, 2015) and Syria: Revolution from Above (Routledge, 2001). He co-edited The Foreign Policies of Middle East States (Lynne Rienner Publishers, second edition, 2014); Turkey-Syria Relations: Between Enmity and Amity (Ashgate, 2013); Sovereignty after Empire: Comparing the Middle East and Central Asia (Edinburgh University Press, 2011); The Iraq War: Causes and Consequences (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2006); and Syria: From Reform to Revolt (2014). He edited After the Arab Uprisings: Between Democratization, Counter-Revolution and State Failure (Routledge, 2016) and co-edited (with Omar Imady), The Syrian Uprising: Domestic Origins and Early Trajectory (Routledge, 2018). Jasmine K. Gani is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of St. Andrews.

She is author of The Role of Ideology in Syrian-US relations: Conflict and Cooperation (2014). Her current research focuses on US policy towards Syria from 9/11 to the Trump administration; ideologies and social movements in the Middle East; and postcolonial approaches to nationalism and hospitality. She is Associate Director of the Centre for Syrian Studies.

The contributors Jamie Allinson is Lecturer in the Politics and International Relations of the Middle East at The University of Edinburgh. He is the author of The Struggle for the State in Jordan, co-winner of the 2016 Jadaliyya Political Economy Book Prize. He is currently working on a book about counter-revolution in the Arab world since 2011. Francesco Belcastro is Lecturer and Subject Leader in International Relations at the University

of Derby. His main areas of research are conflict and security, foreign policy and Middle Eastern politics, and civil wars and their effect on regional security. His forthcoming monograph analyzes the foreign policy of Syria during the years 1963–89. Francesco Cavatorta is Professor of Political Science and Research Fellow to the Inter­

disciplinary Research Centre on Africa and Middle East (CIRAM) at Laval University. His current research project focuses on the relationship between traditional media and elected representatives across the Arab world.

x

Contributors

Dawn Chatty is Emeritus Professor in Anthropology and Forced Migration and former Director

of the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford. Her research interests include coping strategies and resilience of refugee youth; tribes and tribalism; nomadic pastoralism and conservation; gender and development; health, illness and culture. She has edited numerous books including Nomadic Societies in the Middle East and North Africa: Facing the 21st Century (Brill, 2006), Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Syria: The Making and Unmaking of a Refuge State (Hurst Publishers, 2018). Christopher M. Davidson is Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute and a

fellow of the European Centre for International Affairs. He previously taught for 12 years at Durham University and, prior to that for 3 years at Zayed University in the United Arab Emirates. He is the author of numerous books on the politics and international relations of the Middle East, including Dubai: The Vulnerability of Success and Shadow Wars. Philippe Droz-Vincent is Professor of International Relations at Sciences-Po Grenoble, author

of numerous articles, among them, “Authoritarianism, revolutions, armies and Arab regime transitions,” The International Spectator, vol. 46, no. 2, June 2011; “Prospects for democratic control of the armed forces? Comparative insights and lessons for the Arab World in transition,” Armed Forces and Society, March 2013; “The Military Amidst Uprisings and Transitions in the Arab World” in Fawaz Gerges, ed., The New Middle East, Protest and Revolution in the Arab World (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Vincent Durac is Associate Professor in Middle East Politics at University College Dublin. He is

co-author (with Francesco Cavatorta) of Civil Society and Democratization in the Arab World: The Dynamics of Activism (Routledge, 2011). His recent work has been published in Democratization, Mediterranean Politics, the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, the Journal of North African Studies and the Journal of Contemporary African Studies. Louise Fawcett is Professor of International Relations and Wilfrid Knapp Fellow and Tutor

in Politics at St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford. She is currently Head of the Department of Politics and International Relations. Major publications include Iran and the Cold War (paperback edition, Cambridge, 2009) and International Relations of the Middle East (fifth edition, Oxford, 2019) Stephen J. King is Associate Professor of government at Georgetown University. He is a com-

parativist with a particular focus on the Middle East and North Africa. Professor King is the author of Liberalization Against Democracy: The Local Politics of Economic Reform in Tunisia (Indiana University Press, 2003), “Sustaining Authoritarianism in the Middle East and North Africa,” Political Science Quarterly, Fall 2007, and The New Authoritarianism in the Middle East and North Africa (Indiana University Press, 2010). Fred H. Lawson is a specialist in the IR and comparative politics of the Middle East. He is the

author of Constructing International Relations in the Arab World (Stanford University Press, 2006); Why Syria Goes to War: Thirty Years of Confrontation (Cornell, University Press, 1996); The Social Origins of Egyptian Expansionism during the Muhammad ‘Ali Period (Columbia University Press, 1992), (American University in Cairo Press, 1999) and ([Arabic translation] Higher Council for Culture, 2005) and Bahrain: The Modernization of Autocracy (Westview Press, 1989)

xi

Contributors

Matteo Legrenzi teaches international relations at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. He holds

a DPhil. in International Relations and a MPhil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from St. Antony’s College, Oxford. Before returning to Venice, his hometown, he taught in Oxford, Ottawa and Seoul winning the Capital Educators’ Award in 2009 in Canada. Pietro Marzo is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Université Laval. He is Research

Associate to the Canada Research Chair in Public Diplomacy and a Research Associate to the Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Africa and Middle East (CIRAM). His PhD project focuses on the international dimension of the Tunisian transition to democracy. His publications have appeared in the Journal of North African Studies and Middle Eastern Studies. Thomas Richter is Senior Research Fellow at GIGA German Institute of Global and Areas

Studies in Hamburg, where he works at the Institute of Middle East Studies. He holds an MA from Eberhard-Karls University Tübingen, Germany, and a PhD from the University of Bremen, Germany. The author of three books, Dr Richter has widely published in academic journals. His most recent research relates to adjustments and economic reforms in the Middle East after the oil price decline in 2014, and second the global diffusion of authoritarian practices. Neil Russell is Teaching Fellow in Politics at Newcastle University and an ESRC-funded PhD

student at The University of Edinburgh. His research examines the relationship between Islamic charities and politics, the impact of welfare provision in generating electoral support for Islamist parties, and how this in turn affects their relations with the state. For his next project, Neil is seeking to extend the findings of his PhD case study of Egypt to conduct a comparative analysis incorporating Tunisia’s Ennahda Party and the Justice and Development Party in Morocco. Curtis R. Ryan is Professor of Political Science at Appalachian State University in North

Carolina. He has written extensively on international relations in the Middle East, on inter-Arab relations, alliance politics and on Jordanian domestic politics and foreign policy. He is the author of three books: Jordan in Transition: From Hussein to Abdullah (Lynne Rienner, 2002), Inter-Arab Alliances: Regime Security and Jordanian Foreign Policy (University Press of Florida, 2009) and most recently, Jordan and the Arab Uprisings: Regime Survival and Politics Beyond the State (Columbia University Press, 2018). Larbi Sadiki is Professor of Arab Democratization at Qatar University and the Lead Principal

Investigator for the QNRF-funded project “Transitions of Islam and Democracy: Engendering ‘Democratic Learning’ and Civic Identities.” His books include Elections without Democracy: Rethinking Arab Democratization (Oxford University Press, 2009/11) and Routledge Handbook of the Arab Spring (2015/17). Layla Saleh is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Qatar University’s Department of

International Affairs and the author of US Hard Power in the Arab World: Resistance, the Syrian Uprising, and the War on Terror (Routledge, 2017). She earned her doctorate in political science from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Adham Saouli is Senior Lecturer at the University of St. Andrews and is visiting Associate

Professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. Saouli is the author of Hezbollah: Socialisation and its Tragic Ironies (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) and The Arab State: Dilemmas of State Formation (Routledge, 2012). xii

Contributors

Oliver Schlumberger is Professor of Middle East Politics at Tübingen University, where he heads the research unit on Comparative and Middle East Politics at the Institute of Political Science. His research interests cover authoritarianism, political regimes and regime theory, as well as comparative politics and the political economy of the Middle East. He also has extensive policy experience engaging with various governments and agencies. Mark Sedgwick is Professor of Arab and Islamic Studies at Aarhus University in Denmark. He

taught previously for many years at the American University in Cairo. He studied history at Oxford University in England and then did his PhD at the University of Bergen in Norway. He works on modern Egypt, Sufism and issues related to terrorism. His most recent publication is an edited volume, Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the New Threat to Liberal Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2019). Ewan Stein is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at The University of Edinburgh. His work focusses on the intersection between political Islam and international politics, and his books include Intellectual dynamics in the Middle East and North Africa (Routledge, 2015) and Representing Israel in Modern Egypt: Ideas, Intellectuals and Foreign Policy from Nasser to Mubarak (IB Tauris, 2012). Lise Storm is Senior Lecturer in Middle East Politics and Director of Education at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. She is the author of Political Parties in the Arab World (with Francesco Cavatorta, 2018), Political Parties and the Prospects for Democracy in North Africa (2013), Democratization in Morocco (2007), and several journal articles, chapters and papers on democratization, political parties and the state of democracy in the Middle East and North Africa. She is currently putting the final touches to a book on international debates on aid, democracy support and party assistance. Morten Valbjørn is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, and Director of the interdisciplinary research project SWAR: Sectarianism in the Wake of the Arab Revolts (www.ps.au.dk/swar). In addition to Shia/Sunni Sectarianism, his research focuses on the analytical implications of the Arab uprisings and the sociology of knowledge concerning the study of Middle East politics, various expressions of identity politics in (the study of) the Middle East, the international relations theory/Middle East studies nexus, the post-democratization debate and transformations of Islamism. Rodney Wilson is an Emeritus Professor at Durham University. He has written 12 books and over 40 articles, including Economic Development in the Middle East (Routledge, second edition, 2013) and Islam and Economic Policy (Edinburgh University Press, 2015). His extensive consultancy experience includes serving as Economic Adviser to the Central Bank of Qatar, the African Development Bank, the Islamic Development Bank and the World Bank. Stephen Zunes is a Professor of Politics and Coordinator of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco, specializing in US Middle East policy, human rights, and prodemocracy civil resistance struggles. His most recent books and articles address conflicts in Israel/Palestine, Western Sahara, Syria, Iran and elsewhere.

xiii

Part I

Historical context, state-building and politics in MENA

1 State, revolution and war Conflict and resilience in MENA’s states and states system Raymond Hinnebusch

The theme of the book The theme of this book is the paradox that conflict and instability are built into the very fabric of the Middle East state and states system; yet both state and states system have displayed remarkable resilience. How can we explain this? Are there exceptional features of MENA that embody and explain it? The Middle East is indeed exceptional but not in any culturalist sense; rather, it is the way universal factors have come together in a configuration particular to the region that must engage our attention. This book aims to expose readers to the main debates, theoretical approaches and accumulated empirical research by prominent scholars in the field that, building on previous work on the state (Andersen 1987; Owen 1992; Ayubi 1995; Bromley 1994), explores the dimensions of this puzzle. It provides a compendium of essential readings as well as bibliographies that, together, provide context for scholars pursuing further research on the MENA states and states system.

The research puzzle Violence was an integral and ongoing part of the shaping of the regional states system (as indeed it was elsewhere). The making of the pre-modern Middle East state—the Islamic empires that periodically rose and fell—was historically the project of warlords and rebels in cycles depicted by Ibn Khaldun, in which successive tribal movements with religious visions issuing from the desert or steppe created empires that expanded, contracted and disintegrated after several generations. The modern “Westphalian” states system was then imposed on this environment as an outcome of a lost war (from the point of view of the dominant regional power, the Ottoman Empire) and a victor’s peace—or diktat—imposed by the Western imperial states by military force (Khalidi 2004). Fromkin (1989) referred to the post-World War I order as the “peace to end all peace” since it shaped a system so arbitrary and flawed that conflict, irredentism and inability were embedded in its very fabric. While other regions subjected to colonialism, such as China and India, recovered their status as global powers after decolonization, the Islamic Middle East, as Buzan observed, is the only great civilization that had not so restored its historic status as a great power in world politics, in good part because the West’s fragmentation of the 3

Raymond Hinnebusch

region into weak mini-states made this impossible, thus spurring recurrent revisionist efforts by regional movements or powers to overthrow the system. The MENA states system was, moreover, “born fighting,” in the words of Buzan and Weaver (2003), launched on its independent existence via the first Arab–Israeli War, itself a product of how the victors’ peace had cleared the way for a colonial settler state to take root in Palestine, with accompanying ethnic cleansing, a major enduring source of subsequent conflict. In good part as a consequence of the irredentism built into the regional states system, it was vulnerable to chronic waves of instability, revolutions and chains of wars; indeed, the Middle East emerged as an epicentre of global crisis, with a wave of crisis, involving revolution and war, spilling out of the region roughly every decade, often drawing in global powers. MENA is the world’s most war-prone region and the only one that has currently experienced inter-state wars, but it has also experienced frequent wars of states against state-like armed non-state movements and proxy wars of intervention in civil wars. The region is also highly prone to revolution and rebellion: anti-imperialist nationalist movements occurred across the region in the pre-World War II period, anti-oligarchic pan-Arab revolutions swept the region in the 1950–60s, Islamist insurgencies and revolution broke out in the 1980–90s, and after 2011 pro-democracy Uprisings toppled presidents in five states. Moreover, revolution and war are intimately inter-related in MENA: the pan-Arab revolutions and the Arab–Israeli wars of the 1940s through 1970s fed on each other; Islamist revolts, including international terrorist movements, and a series of wars in the Gulf fed each other; and the post-2011 civil wars unleashed by the Arab Uprisings provoked proxy wars across the region. Paradoxically, however, in spite of exceptional turmoil, the region has also been marked by the exceptional durability and resilience of authoritarian rule which has proved resistant to both the global “Third Wave” of democracy and its local spinoff, the decade of Arab Uprisings, so much so as to inspire debates about “Middle East exceptionalism.” The region’s states are largely divided into either authoritarian republics or ruling monarchies, with only a handful of “flawed” or semi-democracies. MENA is the only global region where traditional monarchic rule remains viable, and even republics soon revealed a tendency to change into “presidential monarchies” seeking to establish dynastic rule—jumrukiyya in Saad Ibrahim’s words. The dominant power practice, cutting across regime types, is neo-patrimonialism, a hybrid that combines practices from the region’s pre-modern state-building inheritance with bureaucratic structures partly imported from the West (Bacik 2008). The neo-patrimonial state is usually considered “weak” in the sense of the ability to implement policies (Bill and Springborg 1994), and especially foster economic development, but, at the same time, it is quite robust in its combination of different kinds (personal and bureaucratic) of authority, and is also “fierce,” as Ayubi (1995) put it, in its intolerance of opposition and its repressive capabilities. Yet there are considerable variations over time in the robustness of MENA regimes and states. State formation seemed to describe a bell shape curve, as the fragile states that became nominally “independent” by the 1940s, slowly consolidated themselves and reached a peak of durability in the 1980s. This was in part an outcome of revolutions that brought broader based movements to power incorporated into more robust state institutions and also of the wars which propelled the emergence of national security states: “war makes the state and the state makes war,” in Tilly’s aphorism. State making was also a function of the region’s exceptional endowment of hydrocarbon rents which were first unlocked for state builders as a result of war and revolution in the 1970s; oil in turn became a prize, inviting war among regional states and intervention by external great powers. State formation advances were not, however, sustained, in part because of the insufficient political institutionalization and economic development possible under neo-patrimonial governance and partly because of the burdens of war on economies or of external pressures. Hence, after peaking in the 1980s, the region’s 4

State, revolution and war

state formation curve gradually descended, finally entering after 2010 an era marked by several partial or full state failures. Yet, remarkably, even amidst this unprecedented collapse, authoritarian rule persisted or was reconstituted, either within national states or in fragmented sovereignties within states. Also remarkable is the parallel resilience of the states system, which, in spite of its incongruence with dominant identities, pan-Arabism and pan-Islam, has nevertheless endured, with almost no alterations in its widely contested, often “artificial,” inter-state borders. The latest test of system resilience followed the collapse of regimes in the Arab Uprisings which appeared to open the door to a remaking of the states system, notably in Syria and Iraq where the IS caliphate briefly seized semi-sovereignty and where Kurdish separatism threatened to carve out a new Kurdistan from three regional states. Nevertheless, these projects were seemingly contained without any major redrawing of the map—without the undoing of the widely reviled SykesPicot (the past-World War I diktat)—anticipated by some. Continuity—the durability of state boundaries and the resilience of authoritarian governance appeared to be the lesson exposed by this latest episode. However the durability of the states system, no less than the durability of authoritarian rule, does not necessarily mean legitimacy and stability; rather, the legitimacy deficits built into both states and state system seem to guarantee that MENA will remain an epicentre of world crisis for the foreseeable future.

The focus This book takes this puzzle as its focus, with each chapter addressing some aspect of the issue. The chapters variously examine the state in MENA, its politics, political economy and international relations. The book combines the macro and micro. On the one hand, it adumbrates the long durée macro view of the evolution of states and the states system, the context in which both were born and matured into their durable form; on the other hand, more micro analyses of pivotal actors and aspects of the system are subsequently treated. Each of the chapters takes the Arab Uprisings as a pivotal moment that exposed the deep features of state and system— specifically their built-in vulnerability and instability and their remarkable resilience. But the Uprising is not taken to mark a unique or profound watershed, but a path-dependent outcome of the historical macro evolution—less change than continuity—even if it intensified trends that were embedded in the system at its very founding and even before.

The approach States and states system are seen to co-constitute each other, and hence cannot be examined in isolation; but looking closer, we see that there are not only these two levels interacting but rather multiple levels. 1) At the level of the global system, the agency of powerful hegemonic states initially constituted the regional states system, literally building instability into it, with the result that they have had to periodically intervene to sustain the regional order; the role of the US hegemon has been pivotal in this latter respect, although as much to intensify as to manage instability. 2) Varying types of regime with their institutions and norms constituted structure at the state level but also agency insofar as their policies reshaped society internally and affected the regional system as the region’s key regimes, populist republics and monarchies, promoted the spread of their rival legitimacy principles. 3) At the level of the MENA states’ domestic politics, agency has been constituted by state leadership and also organized collective actors that matter most for politics: historically it has been tribes and more recently the army, with political parties, civil society, Islamist movements and protest movements also playing roles in shaping political 5

Raymond Hinnebusch

trajectories. The Arab Uprisings were a pivotal episode in which citizen activists briefly acquired unprecedented agency with major consequences for both states and states system, exposing both their vulnerability and resilience. 4) Between state and state system is a trans-state level in which ideational and material networks constitute structures within which state actors have to negotiate: an identity context made up of contesting supra-state (pan-Arabism, Islamism) identities and a political economy context involving material resource flows, notably hydrocarbons and money. 5) At the level of the regional inter-state system, the norms, practices and enmities of inter-state conflict and rivalry shape the states; in turn states, through their collective behaviour, constitute the regional system—its alliances, regionalism, and regional conflicts, including war—to which each state must individually adapt.

Overview of the studies The studies unfold, building on each other, starting with the historic state-building context and the regimes that came out of it; the next chapters look at actors inside the states, followed by sections on transnational and inter-state politics.

Part I: Historical context, state-building and politics in MENA Two chapters set the long durée macro context—both the structure and the agency of state builders. Chapter 2: Raymond Hinnebusch’s “Historical context of state formation in the Middle East: structure and agency” departs from the historical sociology concept of path dependency, to trace how MENA’s historical inheritance constituted the structure of constraints and opportunities in which state builders had to operate. The pre-modern heritage of small group (tribal, sectarian) politics, patrimonial rule, clientalism and universalistic Islamic identity, and the imposition of a Westphalian state system with bureaucratic apparatuses and territorial boundaries, often incongruent with pre-existing identities, foreclosed on many state-building options and fostered neo-patrimonialism, which exploited both sub- and supra-state identities, as the natural power building practice. The agency of state builders made a difference for the subsequent trajectory of state-building, which, starting from a low point, reached a certain level of consolidation in the 1970–80s before again declining to the post-2010 period of failing states. In parallel to the changes in the consolidation levels of states, the character of the regional states system also altered over time, from a period of trans-state ideological wars of subversion to a period of realist balancing and inter-state war, to the current period of proxy wars. Chapter 3: Adham Saouli’s “States and state-building in the Middle East” examines the causes and consequences of state-building in the region. He offers a theoretical and conceptual framework to analyze state-building and its challenges and dilemmas. He then adumbrates the recurring dilemmas of state builders: they need to concentrate power at the centre, monopolizing it at the expense of rivals; but they also need to expand power, incorporating social forces which otherwise may be mobilized by opponents. This delicate balancing act seldom wholly succeeds; to the extent regimes’ authority remains contested, states are vulnerable to intervention from without by rival powers. Hence internal instability and regional power struggles interact. Regime features: the institutional outcomes of state-building, as they vary over time and space, are examined in four chapters, with the focus on the internal features of regimes.

6

State, revolution and war

Chapter 4: Oliver Schlumberger’s “Political regimes of the Middle East and North Africa” charts the evolution of MENA regimes. They initially took opposing forms, the traditional monarchies and revolutionary (populist authoritarian) republics, with different forms of legitimacy, divergent socio-economic policies and foreign policy alignments on opposite sides of the Cold War. In time, however, they converged as ideological and legitimacy differences declined, as similar patrimonial practices spread, as economic liberalization in the republics was paralleled by expanding oil-financed public sectors in the monarchies, and as both began to rely on rent and foster privileged crony-capitalist classes. The causes of authoritarian resilience included the special durability of neo-patrimonial political practices congruent with both patriarchal societies and rentierist economies, all diluting class loyalties in favour of clientele ones. The Uprising led to some divergence, e.g. between democratization in Tunisia and harder authoritarianism in Egypt and state failure elsewhere. But authoritarian persistence continues. Chapter 5: Stephen J. King’s “Authoritarian adaptability and the Arab Spring” surveys the further development of trajectories in MENA. The Populist Authoritarian regimes emerging after independence were statist, redistributional, socialist in ideology and incorporated popular constituencies in state parties and corporatist arrangements. However, with statist exhaustion, regimes turned to post-populism, excluding their earlier constituencies. To make up for this, techniques labelled “authoritarian upgrading” prolonged authoritarianism. Privatization created new crony-capitalist constituencies. Corporatism changed from including to demobilizing the masses. Controlled pluralism assisted divide and rule, but coercion remained central. However, the costs and negative side effects of upgrading also, ironically, set the stage for the Arab Uprisings. The shift to crony capitalism under economic liberalization was associated with massive inequality and corruption that drove grievances. Electoral authoritarianism exhausted itself after people realized it gave them no real choice, while corporatist structures lost their inclusiveness. A popular martyr in Tunisia, the social media out of control of regimes, and the regional contagion factor spurred region-wide anti-regime mobilization. But outcomes were divergent. The monarchies survived, relying on traditional legitimacy and huge hydrocarbon resources to buy off the public, while the republics that mostly lacked these had to rely on coercion. Hence outcomes in the latter depended in part on the security forces’ loyalty and willingness to coerce; this was determined by a combination of how much mobilization had to be repressed and their autonomy of or penetration by the regime elite. International intervention against (Libya) or for (Syria, Bahrain) regimes further differentiated trajectories. Chapter 6: Christopher M. Davidson’s “The Arab Spring and the Gulf monarchies” traces how the monarchies in the Gulf dealt with rapid increases of modernization—notably the spread of education and mass communications, including the internet, which potentially increases politicization and demands for reform. Efforts of monarchies to constrain, co-opt or repress the formation of opposition began in the 1970s with the use of generous material benefits and took the form in the 1990s of conceding to Islamists influence over educational and cultural institutions; the latter concessions were reversed in the 2000s when some Islamists were treated as terrorists and repressed under the banner of the war on terror. While the new media had the potential to forge horizontal links between citizens, the monarchies used it to link rulers and citizens vertically and to enhance surveillance. Chapter 7: Mark Sedgwick’s “Leadership and legitimacy” argues that the stability of authoritarian regimes depends on a variable mix: coercion, co-optation and legitimacy, with

7

Raymond Hinnebusch

the more legitimacy they have the less costly coercion is needed and the more effective leadership will be. Sedgwick systematically outlines the various sources, kinds and referents of legitimacy by which scholars could compile a composite legitimacy score for regimes. He finds that there have been major variations in legitimacy over time and between regime types. While the republics seemed to enjoy more legitimacy in the period of their founding, on the basis of charismatic leadership and the Arab nationalist struggle (while the monarchies were seen as suffering legitimacy deficits), by the time of the Uprisings the balance had been reversed: the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) monarchies enjoyed the highest legitimacy from a combination of accepted hereditary monarchy, congruence with the dominant (Sunni Islamic) identity of society (except Bahrain) and exceptional service delivery while presidential republics, especially those in identity-fragmented oil-poor societies, could no longer claim either legitimacy from identity congruence with society nor delivery of material benefits.

Part II: State actors, societal context and popular activism Agency: state actors and collective movements that carry the greatest weight in the competition to shape internal politics in MENA states, are examined in four chapters. Chapter 8: Philippe Droz-Vincent’s “The military in the Arab state” shows how the role of the military has varied over time. The widespread establishment of military regimes in the early independence years was variously explained by the military’s modernizing orientation, its role as a vehicle of the “new middle class” and the weakness of civilian political institutions in the monarchies and liberal oligarchies. The MENA monarchies that survived only did so by keeping the military small or excluding the middle class from the officer corps. In the Arab republics, officers established permanent authoritarian regimes; but in time the military was subordinated to ruling establishments; while it remained a key pillar of such regimes, the security forces were the most active agent of coercion and the military a fall-back coercive reserve. Presidencies, backed by family and kin, balanced above the bureaucratic pillars of the regime, lightening their dependence on the military and coup proofing their regimes by professionalizing and depoliticizing the officer corps. At the same time, the military became a privileged institution, with priority claims on budget resources and significant involvement in the economy. Armies that had once been vehicles of upward mobility became more closed and privileged over time. The agency of the military revived at the time of the Arab Uprisings when it played a pivotal role in outcomes. The military’s decision to defend regimes or ease them out was decisive for whether democratic transition started; exceptional mass mobilization and the prospect of using mass violence against fellow citizens made it hard to use conscript armies to defend regimes and if armies were institutionally autonomous, their leadership could force presidents out, as they did in Tunisia and initially Egypt. Yet if the interests of such militaries were thereafter threatened by the transition, they were in a position to reverse it, as in Egypt. Where the army was patrimonially or politically penetrated, as in Syria, it could not turn against presidents. If armies opted to defend regimes and block transition, authoritarian preservation depended on the military’s staying intact, while if it splintered, the outcome was civil war. The military again appeared to become the single most important factor in determining the trajectory of Arab regimes. Chapter 9: Dawn Chatty’s “Tribes in MENA politics: the Levant case” examines the role of the region’s most distinctive social force, nomadic pastoralists tribes that, owing to their

8

State, revolution and war

mobility, arms and cohesion under their shaikhs, historically enjoyed more agency than other social forces; indeed, the Bedouin and other tribal groups had historically been state makers. When the existing state was strong, they were co-opted and controlled; when it weakened, they expanded at the expense of settled agriculture. With the imposition of the Westphalian states system, tribes were often marginalized; state borders cut across their grazing grounds, they were often deprived of citizenship, dispossessed of their pasturage lands, viewed as backward and encouraged to settle. Yet their role vis-à-vis the new states varied. In Syria, many Bedouin fought with Emir Faysal against the Turks and then against the French takeover, but the French later co-opted them. In Jordan, the Bedouin staffed the army of the new state and were loyalists against opposition from settled society and Palestinians. In Syria, Hafiz Al-Asad co-opted them via the party and security services. Yet, in the Syrian Uprising, with the weakening of the Syrian state, the Bedouin again acquired agency, especially the “noble” blooded, transnational Saudi-linked ones that rose against the regime and acquired leadership positions in the Syrian National Council sponsored by Riyadh; lesser status tribes historically linked to the security services remained loyal. When the state weakens, the options of the tribes increase and their solidarity and transnational reach gives them a special advantage even in contemporary times. Chapter 10: Lisa Storm’s “Political parties in the Middle East” suggests that, in an overwhelmingly authoritarian context, parties are less powerful than in democracies, but they have still played a role both in political change and in stabilizing regimes. In the period prior to independence, the mobilization of the population by nationalist parties, some of which became mass movements, was a decisive factor in making colonial rule too costly. The postindependence explosion in parties gave way to single-party states, with mass nationalist parties often transforming into ruling ones. After the global Third Wave of democratization, MENA had controlled multi-party systems under electoral authoritarianism, with opposition parties co-opted in return for limited access to power and playing by the rules; in republics this issued in dominant party systems (with a large pro-regime party flanked by smaller opposition parties) while in some monarchies it allowed kings to divide and rule over multiple parties. In this period the main cleavage, which rulers exploited, became that between Islamist and secular or minority-dominated parties. Where the Uprising initiated democratic transition, new space was opened up for parties. Islamist parties proved the best vote-getters, reflective of the popular perception of them as a break with the old regime and also owing to their superior organization compared to secular rivals. This provoked the rise of anti-Islamist conservative parties, often regime connected, and claiming to represent order in a period of disorder. The potential role of parties as agents of change was not realized: where elections were held party affiliation did not drive voter choices and party politicians were distrusted and seen as corrupt, even in Tunisia. This development was congruent with the decline of parties globally, perhaps a function of the limited policy choices that parties can offer under the hegemony of global neo-liberalism. Chapter 11: Ewan Stein and Neil Russell’s “Islam and Islamic movements in MENA politics” examines the varying roles of Islam. When established, as in Saudi Arabia or Iran, Islam legitimizes the state. The clergy play major roles in politics. But Iran’s revolutionary Islam contrasts with the Saudis’ conservative fundamentalist version. Such varying forms of Islam constitute communities on whose behalf these states claim to act and which may shape their perceptions of their interests. Yet, at the state and international level, Islamism is instrumentalized, e.g. the Saudis used it against secular nationalist Nasserism and then against Iran’s effort to export its anti-imperialist version of Islam via Shia networks.

9

Raymond Hinnebusch

Islamist movements have been the most significant opposition to the authoritarian republics in MENA. They seek to create an Islamic state and revitalize the Islamization of society, but their strategies vary. Modernist moderates seek to operate within the state so as to Islamize it: the Muslim Brotherhood experienced both repression and, with political openings, participation in Egypt and across the region; the Brothers also created a counter society of Islamic charities, banks, schools, etc. as states withdrew from welfare provision under neo-liberalism. They benefited politically from a perception that they were clean and engaged in welfare provision. Inclusion in politics served to moderate their ideology, though some believe this was reversed in Egypt when the Brothers briefly achieved power. Salafists are more fundamentalist and divide between quietists who shun political involvement and activists who seek to Islamize society from below rather than via the state from above, while also seeking to create an Islamic counter society. Several decades of Islamic movements have deeply Islamized society from the rural Salafis to the Islamist urban bourgeoisie. Jihadists, after their ideologue, Sayyid Qutb, see rulers as apostates and violently challenge the state framework. They failed until state collapse opened opportunities for them in Syria and Libya while, in parallel, states’ instrumentalization of sectarianism against each other also spread sectarian divisions to society. For a view of societal context and popular activism, three chapters examine the role of ordinary citizens in affecting politics. Chapter 12: Vincent Durac’s “Civil society in the Middle East and North Africa” looks at civil society associations. The dominant Western view sees civil society as a domain distinct from both kin and from the market and a bulwark against government repression, organizing and socializing people into participation, and thus needed for democratization. But associations can mobilize around divisive identities and need not oppose the state if they are focused on filling a needs gap in society. Autonomous groups can balance the state, without being liberal, e.g. ulama and guilds. In MENA, they may be Islamic charities, professional organizations and unions; and only a tiny minority promote human rights or democracy. Thus, in MENA, we might need to broaden the concept of civil society to include all informal sector activities challenging the state even if these are not liberal; and also networks that do not push democratization. In the era of controlled political liberalization (1990–2010), Western-like civil society organizations proliferated, driven by international funders; yet they made little political impact. NGOs were often forbidden to engage in political activism or were dependent on the state for funding and, to articulate their interests, had to remain a-political; some were even government created (GONGOs). Most were non-democratic within, factionalized, split between Islamist and secular, allowing divide and rule, and enjoying low popular legitimacy. In the Arab Uprising, they were not in leading roles compared to informal networks, except for the local level unions in Tunisia. With authoritarian restoration, e.g. in Egypt, they face stricter limits or repression. Chapter 13: Larbi Sadiki and Layla Saleh’s “The Arab Spring is not lost: moral protest as the embodiment of a new politics” examines the persistence of autonomous citizen activism, pointing to a new form of “bottom-up politics” that has taken root across the region since 2011. The dominant narrative of the seeming failure of the Arab Uprisings can obscure the reality that rebellion against authoritarianism is continuous and endemic in MENA states. The centralizing state has continually provoked resistance by the subalterns or “the periphery.” The rural officers’ revolutions of the 1950s were an early wave. Other manifestations included the bread riots protesting neo-liberal austerity in the 1980s, and the potent Islamists

10

State, revolution and war

movements that mobilized in the 1990s. This chapter argues that the popular protests since late 2010, were a form of bottom-up, sustained, moral protest with emancipatory content, al-hirak, including but not limited to distributional claims. The “Arab Spring” thus ushered in novel, adaptive and sustained modes of resistance against dawlat al-ikrah, the authoritarian state. This hirak has been so potent in part because the technologies linking global ideas and deprived periphery locales empowered critical consciousness and dissent in places outside the channels of formal politics. These technologies created a sense of unity bridging cleavages and overcoming atomization to enable mobilization against regimes as captured in the slogan “the people want the fall of the regime.” As the fear barrier was broken, people demanded dignity, inspired by a willingness to self-sacrifice, first by Bouazizi in Tunisia, later in Syria in the face of violent state repression. Martyrs become icons of resistance, able to topple presidents. To be sure, authoritarian learning made for resilience in regimes: relying on external intervention, sectarian divide and rule, material payoffs, pseudo-democratic reforms, and stressing the costs of the disorder. But claims that the Uprisings merely failed, resulting in civil wars or harder authoritarian restoration, misses the transformation at the bottom. The ethos of people’s bottom-up moral protest persists in informal spaces. Indeed, the closing of institutional access leads to activists’ informal networking. The state cannot restore its full control and remains unstable as increased deprivation and repression deepens the delegitimation of regimes. Al-hirak is here to stay, its impact on MENA states and societies still unfolding. Chapter 14: Larbi Sadiki, Tunisia’s “‘Civic Parallelism’ lessons for Arab democratization” explores the vital issue of Tunisia’s noteworthy and lone democratic transition set in motion by the 2010–11 Uprising in this birthplace of the Arab Spring. For him, specificity (and not exceptionalism) underlies the country’s ongoing, unique political transformation. Some have pointed to the pivotal role of the small, unpoliticized military, which refused to repress protests and eased Ben Ali out of power. Sadiki examines other actors and processes, and especially the skillsets, practices, and values of dialogue and compromise that evolved in what he calls democratic learning. Teasing out its specifics in the Tunisian case, he traces the ways in which top-down (state) and bottom-up (society) forces appear to have cultivated and engaged in multi-partisan, dialogic, electoral, anomic (protest), and legal-parliamentary skills and practices (“civic” or “democratic parallelism”). Compromise in the constituent assembly, especially between Islamists and secularists, led to a democratic consensus legitimized by massive public endorsement. A coalition (troika) of Islamist and secular parties supervised democratic transition. No social and political forces were excluded, including the former ruling party and formerly antagonistic actors settled their differences by dialogue. A quartet joining business, lawyers, trade unions and human rights groups backed a national dialogue that helped heal the crisis of 2013–15 when assassinations of leftist leaders put democracy at risk. Two large parties, the Islamist al-Nahda and the reinvented former ruling party, Nidaa Tounes, incorporated their substantial constituencies into the new order, brought smaller parties into coalition governments and played by the rules, alternating power. Parliament acted as a consensus-building venue, with MPs crossing ideological divides in order to safeguard the country’s democratic gains. The consensus-building practices of political forces and civil society socialized the wider public into democratic norms and practices, including parliamentarization. Sadiki points to Tunisia to contest Orientalist notions that Arab political culture is antagonistic to democracy, but also teleological transitology that ignores the importance of the slow, hard, open-ended process of democratic learning.

11

Raymond Hinnebusch

Part III: Trans-state politics: The political economy and identity contexts Political economy context: MENA state formation and politics takes place within a trans-state political economy context, treated in three chapters. Chapter 15: Jamie Allinson’s “The Middle East and North Africa in the lens of Marxist international relations theory” shows how political economy underlies politics. The subordinate situation of the MENA region in the global core-periphery—a hierarchy not an anarchy— represents a powerful structural constraint on its development and foreign policy options. Marxist scholars, such as Samir Amin and Nazih Ayubi, identified how, as an exploited periphery in the global division of labour, its development was retarded. In MENA, social formations were hybrids of capitalist and pre-capitalist, with, for example, landed magnates turning into capitalist exporters of raw materials. The first wave of regional revolution after independence was a revolt against the MENA’s place in the periphery of the global hierarchy. According to the concept of “uneven and combined development,” given the lack of an industrial capitalist class, military-led nationalist governments sought to secure independence through etatist modernization from above. The result, new hybrid social formations, part pre-capitalist, part modern, was reflected in the evolution of post-revolutionary states into neo-patrimonial regimes that fostered crony capitalism, fuelled by the flow of Gulf capital across the region. These regimes, according to Gilbert Aschar, blocked equitable development, leading to the frustration of subaltern classes that mobilized in the 2010 revolutionary wave. This was in good part defeated by the interventions of counter-revolutionary regional powers—both Saudi Arabia and Iran. Marxist analysis also explained the international politics of the region. The Iraq war was, as Harvey saw it, an attempt by the US to tighten control over regional hydrocarbons, hence leverage competitors to US capital like China. Thus, political economy constitutes the deep structure underlying everyday politics. Chapter 16: Thomas Richter’s “Oil and the rentier state in the Middle East” examines the impact of hydrocarbons on the region. Oil income was used for state-building as a result of nationalizations and the oil price boom of the 1970s. Oil goes through booms (1973–86, 2007–14) and busts (1986–2004) correlating with state-building surges and periods when states were weakening. Hydrocarbons also shaped the kind of state-building. In the GCC, oil income accounts for well over 50% of government revenue, and it tends to drive a “fortuitous etatism.” Regimes tend to be more autonomous of and less accountable to society since they do not depend on taxes; but they are also weak organizationally, flabby since they do not need to develop resource extraction mechanisms to fund the state. Economic policies are often inefficient in the use of resources. Rent also deters democratization and sustains authoritarian rule: the distribution of oil-funded benefits to citizens retards political mobilization and creates a rentier mentality of dependence on the state. Class cleavages are replaced by clientele dependence on the state and the bourgeoisie becomes state-dependent. Large repressive apparatuses are readily funded. Rentier states combined with large dynastic ruling families are especially resistant to change. Transfers of income in aid or remittances to the oil-poor regional states reproduced some of the rentier effects region-wide. The concentration of hydrocarbons in the region therefore goes some way to explaining the coexistence of weak states with durable authoritarian regimes. Chapter 17: Rodney Wilson’s “Divergent development in Egypt and the Gulf” sketches the features of the regional economy. Economic development is retarded by a lack of economic

12

State, revolution and war

integration and cooperation, which has actually declined from the period right after the 1970s oil boom, as the GCC states failed to invest their massive excess capital regionally and ceased to hire regional labour, preferring cheaper politically passive South Asian workers. Economies are underdeveloped in manufacturing and over-dependent on services. Despite policies of economic liberalization in place since the 1980s, MENA ranks low on ease of doing business and high on corruption, a function of crony capitalism. Regional inequality in economic development sharply increased, owing to the maldistribution of hydrocarbons and also of economy-ruining wars, between the GCC and the oil-poor states: on indices of wellbeing, the GCC ranks high globally while the rest of MENA ranks toward the bottom. Dubai has developed into a world-class city based on services, transit trade and property booms. Within states, urban-rural and class disparities have increased. The Uprising further damaged economies and hence the prospects for reducing the grievances that helped spark it to be assuaged. Transnational identity: another trans-state dimension that affected politics and the state is the domain of identity, treated here in two chapters. Chapter 18: Morten Valbjorn’s “Studying identity politics in Middle East international relations: before and after the Arab Uprisings” begins with the observation that realist based IR, which relatively neglected culture for a long time, was not sensitive to MENA’s regional distinctiveness. Realists like Walt argued that states still balanced against threats even from states sharing their Arab identity. Scholars of the region, however, largely agreed that the exceptional power of identity politics made MENA different. In the Middle East, there was considerable incongruence between the boundaries of states and the dominant identities of populations, such that sub- and supra-state identities retained the loyalties of many, making for a legitimacy deficit in many states. States’ politics and foreign policies were profoundly shaped by whether identities were frustrated by borders, making them irredentist, or satisfied. The norms of pan-Arabism and pan-Islam clashed with the dominant global norm of sovereignty. Indeed, the idea of an Arab nation legitimized intervention across borders, yet constrained the use of hard power among Arab states such that their rivalry took the form of Arab “cold wars.” Identities affected foreign policy by shaping notions of states’ interests and appropriate allies and enemies. There were also debates over the origins of identities between those that stressed the historical roots and great power of older sub- and supra-state identities and instrumentalists who saw political entrepreneurs as promoting one over the other as it suited their power interests. As institutionalists might expect, the level of state formation also mattered with consolidated states more immune to penetration by trans-state identities and more able to pursue realist foreign policies. Middle East politics specialists have also disagreed about the relative power of sub-state, state, Arab and Islamic supra-state identities as they changed over time, with most seeing Arabism, hegemonic in the 1950–60s, dethroned by sub-state and Islamic identities from the 1980s, but with Arabism making a recovery owing to satellite TV from the 1990s. In the early phases of the Arab Uprising, Arabism seemed to decline as protestors cared more about internal reform than core Arab nationalist issues such as Palestine; thereafter, the rise of Islamist movements to power across the region suggested an Islamization of trans-state identity, followed by the bifurcation of the region into sectarian Sunni–Shia. This led to new regional cold/proxy wars, with sectarian (and other identities) instrumentalized, seeming to make for a more violence-prone Hobbesian regional system.

13

Raymond Hinnebusch

Chapter 19: Jasmine K. Gani’s “Arab nationalism in Anglophone discourse: a conceptual and historical reassessment” focuses on a key supra-state identity. Arab nationalism is widely argued to have failed or to be dead; and even when it was alive, approaches such as realism and Marxism saw it—as identity and ideology generally—as merely reflecting material interests or as an instrument of conflict over such interests. In comparing Arab nationalism to nationalism in the West, from where it was said to be imported, it was seen to have failed to institutionalize the rights of citizenship, which were subordinated to the struggle for national independence from imperialism, and external threats to the Arab states were used to suspend internal liberties. Arab nationalism’s secularism resonated mostly with intellec­tuals, not at the mass level. Its projects for the political unity of the Arab states on the basis of the shared linguistic community consistently failed. State nationalism and Islam were both powerful competitors to Arabism. The power of Arab nationalism varied with that of these other identities: thus, in Egypt, which had its own state identity, Arabism was weaker than in Syria which did not, largely owing to the dismemberment of historic Syria. One cannot, however, measure the success of Arab nationalism solely by the failure of unity or of republicanism, since antiimperialism was its most powerful strand. Moreover, anti-imperialism gave Arab nationalism a strong populist content: for Arab nationalists, mobilizing the masses for resistance to imperialism required overcoming the sharp inequalities in society and giving citizens socio-economic rights. The movement did successfully oust the European colonizers and while it failed the test of Israel in several wars, it remained relevant afterwards just because of Israel and the West’s continuing periodic interventionism in MENA. The two US wars on Iraq and the conflicts between Hamas and Hizbollah with Israel in the 2000s palpably revived Arab nationalism on the Arab street. Arab nationalist Syria’s alliance with Iran, Hizbollah and Hamas in the “resistance axis” (while fighting Islamists at home), was seen by some as contradicting Arab nationalism, but insofar as the latter’s core was anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism, the alliance made sense in Arab nationalist terms. Political Islamism, while a rival of Arab nationalism in domestic politics and as regards models of governance, incorporated much of its core antiimperialist principles.

Part IV: The international politics of MENA Regional structure: conflict over cooperation: two chapters adumbrate the conflict structure of the regional system to which states have to adapt. Chapter 20: Francesco Belcastro’s “Conflict in the Middle East” looks at the sources and dimensions of conflict. The MENA region is frequently said to be an area of conflict, with war, civil war, terrorism and identity conflicts pervasive. Much of this originated in flawed state formation with imposed borders incongruent with identity, generating border conflicts and irredentism, including pan-Arab or pan-Islamic ambitions that have contested state legitimacy and inflamed state insecurity. Kurds and Palestinians were left stateless by the post-World War I settlement. The heterogeneity of identity in many states riven by ethnic and sectarian divisions was reflected in several civil wars: Lebanon’s civil wars originated in sectarian cleavages and often invited intervention by rival powers instrumentalizing clashing identities in their geopolitical struggles, such as Iran vs. Saudi Arabia. Authoritarian rule that relied too much on repression and not enough on inclusion and the scarcity of democracy meant states were vulnerable to internal civil war. The Arab Uprisings were a symptom of these problems but also exacerbated them. The regional structure fosters inter-state conflict, too: MENA is a heterogeneous region in terms of norms and rival principles of legitimacy.

14

State, revolution and war

These factors deterred effective regional organization that might have diluted insecurity and promoted cooperation. There are also several major fault lines, notably Arab-non-Arab and Sunni vs. Shia. The region is multipolar, with competing aspiring hegemons rather than an established one that might keep the peace. External pene­tration has been destabilizing, not stabilizing. Polarization between rival Cold War blocks hindered regional cooperation; arms transfers increased insecurity and external intervention was highly destabilizing, as was clearest in the Western wars of regime change in Libya and Iraq. And the most intractable source of conflict was the creation of Israel at the expense of the Palestinians; if there is anything that makes MENA unique, it is the presence of a colonial settler state sharply at odds with its environment. Chapter 21: Louise Fawcett’s “Regionalism in the Middle East and North Africa” explores the limits of regional cooperation. Standing against the global trend toward regionalism, MENA is argued to be exceptional as a “region without regionalism.” How far this is so may depend on how you measure regionalism and what you expect from it; for liberal institutionalists it builds on and fosters shared interests and institutions that can dilute the inter-state power struggle and promote cooperation; constructivism points to its basis in shared identities. By contrast, realism predicts short-term alliances and self-help to prevail over cooperation. The paradox of MENA is that while regular recurrent proposals for unity and regional cooperation suggest a perceived need for cooperation, delivery has fallen well short. Unique to MENA was the record of unionist federations inspired by pan-Arabism although all of these floundered on the priority given to sovereignty by individual states and the lack of trust and conflicting interests among state leaders. The region has been drawn into externally led regional organizations such as CENTO and EUROMED, but these are emblematic of its own incapacity at self-organization and are vehicles of subordination to stronger outside powers. The region does have several enduring regional organizations: the Arab League, the Gulf Cooperation Council, the Islamic Conference Organization (ICO) and OPEC, but none includes all of the MENA states and some include states outside of it. The Arab League arose from a shared Arab identity and was a compromise between states’ sovereignty and their need for cooperation over common interests. It has been a forum for consideration of collective interests, especially for reaching consensus over isolating or seeking peace with Israel. Effective leadership has at times been exercised in the League by Egypt and Saudi Arabia but leadership rivalries more often paralyzed collective agreement and much more so common action. Indeed, the shared Arab identity has been manipulated by stronger states seeking hegemony. As for the GCC, given its greater homogeneity of regime type and the shared threats it faces, it has underperformed owing to push back by the smaller states against Saudi leadership; although the GCC intervention in Bahrain could be seen as emblematic of cooperation over internal security, even this was disrupted by the Qatar-Saudi/UAE conflict of 2017. MENA regionalism is, thus, weak in institutional development and core functions like conflict resolution and facilitating regional trade are of low effectiveness, much less able to deliver the benefits of more developed forms of regionalism. Among the chief explanations for the weakness of regionalism are the diversity of regime types/legitimacy; the insecurity of regimes, making them jealous of their precarious sovereignty; and the obstacles to regional trade and investment that were locked in by the core-periphery system and hardened by state-centric economies and the export of capital by oil states. The place of MENA in the global structure: intervention and resistance: the role of the region in the global international structure has played a major role in exacerbating conflict and instability, as the following two chapters demonstrate.

15

Raymond Hinnebusch

Chapter 22: Francesco Cavatorta and Pietro Marzo’s “An exceptional context for a debate on international relations? Toward a synthetic approach to the study of the MENA’s international politics” depicts the MENA as a penetrated regional system where realist rules dominate. Even after formal independence, the global powers retained vital interests in the region, notably hydrocarbons, and as such MENA remained a penetrated system. This is congruent with realism, which ascribes most agency in world politics to great powers and sees realist rules—power struggle, balancing against insecurity—as operative in the region. Great power dominance of MENA is also congruent with Marxist structuralism, which also sees the region as dominated by the core powers, albeit chiefly through economic dependency and clientele mechanisms, with military means secondary. The region does have some agency, however. The first generation of independence leaders such as Nasser reacted against the legacy of imperialism and the flawed system it left behind, mobilizing Arab nationalism while exploiting Cold War rivalries to roll back remaining British and French influence; but the superpowers introduced their own rivalries into the region, polarizing it into counteralliances and making arms transfers that regional powers used in conflicts among themselves. The 1967 war ended the brief period of regional autonomy and began one of bandwagoning toward the West. Yet, even as Arab nationalism declined, Islamist movements arose to take their place, and while they and Saudi Arabia’s version of conservative Islam had hitherto been supported by the West against Arab nationalism, they now adopted the latter’s anti-Western stance, especially after the Iranian revolution. The US responded by strengthening its links to the conservative monarchies and Egypt after Nasser while benefiting from Saddam Hussein’s attack on Iran, which blunted the Islamist threat. The end of bi-polarity and the emergent US hegemony and Pax Americana seemed to open the door to the incorporation of the region into a liberal world order, with all states bandwagoning with the US. Some saw this as advancing the prospect of ending regional conflicts and fostering cooperation, thus reducing the scope of realpolitik in line with liberal institutionalism. However, US double standards on Israel, the subordination of regional democratization to the anti-Islamist war on terror after 9/11, plus the inequalities stimulated by neo-liberal globalization, led to a regional backlash, with resistance largely taking the form of Islamist identity. The incorporation of the region into the globalizing economy did incrementally advance but relative to other parts of the world it was delayed. Given the weakness of economic integration and of regional institutions to dilute the power struggle, liberal institutionalism acquired little applicability and realist rules remained dominant. Finally, the Arab Uprising raised the prospects of democratic peace in the region, but authoritarianism proved robust or gave way to civil wars. US hegemony became contested by Russia and China, adding some multipolarity to the region and some regional powers became more assertive in contesting outcomes in the failing states via proxy wars. Power balancing returned, but not effectively enough to maintain the peace. Exceptional levels of global interventionism continued, as has the dominance of realpolitik in the region. Chapter 23: Stephen Zunes’s “US hegemony and MENA” examines the de-stabilizing role played by the United States in the region. While the US saw itself as a benign hegemon, different from old empires, bringing peace and democracy, in MENA it was seen in more malign terms for its support for Israel, military bases and alliances with autocratic regimes, and for its intervention and hostility to many regional states, above all its wars on Iraq. The record shows consistent US involvement in the region, driven by the strategic importance of oil and arms sales and domestic driven commitment to Israel and to other allies against

16

State, revolution and war

recurrent perceived threats, either from some external power such as Soviet Russia or regional Arab nationalism or Islamist radicalism. The precise means varied from Cold War alliance formations to various presidential doctrines (Nixon, Carter), varying in their stress on using local surrogates or establishing a direct military presence. Another change over time was Washington’s gradual move into an ever closer and less conditional support for Israel and its expansionist policies. Then with the end of the Cold War, the US thought it could dispense with multilateralism and impose Pax Americana through its unmatched military and economic power after the collapse of the main counterbalancing Soviet power. This took the form of intervention against what Washington called “rogue states” (which were concentrated in MENA) for their unwillingness to accept American hegemony. This reached its apex under Bush Jr, exemplified by invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, justified after 9/11 in terms of a war on terror, but which only intensified resistance and caused failed states that became further terrorist breeding grounds. In Iraq, US behaviour exposed its agenda and exemplified its fundamentally destabilizing role in MENA: it planned to impose a permanent large-scale military occupation and to transform the economy in such a way as to ensure US dominance over it, against the wishes of Iraqis, thereby fuelling insurgency against the occupation. As the US also sponsored sectarian-based co-optation into the new Iraqi regime, insurgency morphed into sectarian civil war, which would spill across the region, and gave birth among Sunni oppositionists to the most radical terrorist entity, Islamic State, which was then used to justify continuing American intervention. Symptomatic of America’s deeply biased role in the region, retarding its bids for hegemony, was its policies on nuclear proliferation and on Israel/Palestine: the US blocked efforts to make MENA a nuclear-free zone to protect Israel’s nuclear monopoly but used proliferation accusations as an excuse to besiege Iraq and Iran. But US interventionism and Israel’s bomb are what incentivized Iran to master the nuclear cycle enabling it to possibly seek a deterrent capability. Regarding Israel/Palestine, had the US delivered on the 1990s peace process this would have inflated its legitimacy in the region, but it put protection of Israel’s expansionist ambitions ahead of peace brokerage. Keeping Israel militarily superior gave the latter no incentive to make peace but was needed to allow Israel to act as a US strategic asset in MENA; but the need to rely on such military coercion was a sign of the deflation of US hegemony. Under Obama, intervention was more restrained, although in Libya the US still promoted regime change that resulted in chaos and US support for the Saudi intervention in Yemen created a humanitarian disaster. The US had little influence over the course of the Uprising in Egypt, a major ally. Altogether, this outcome showed the limits of what the US could do to control the region, signifying a deflation of hegemony. Washington’s more hands-off stance in Syria gave Russia an opportunity to assert itself, another sign of decline in US hegemony. Agency: regional dynamics in MENA: what regional states do matters for the IR of the region, whether it is alliance formation or war-making. Two chapters examine this while a third explores them in the Gulf sub-region of MENA. Chapter 24: Curtis Ryan’s “Alliances and the balance of power in the Middle East” examines this key to understanding regional dynamics. IR theory, especially realism, has long focused on alliance politics. Realism sees alliance formation as crucial to states’ power balancing in an anarchic insecure system by joining together against powerful potentially expansionist states, although Walt showed alliances responded not just to imbalances of power but also to perceived threats from other states, especially neighbours. Balancing via alliance formation

17

Raymond Hinnebusch

is needed to keep the peace but war may still happen if alliance formation upsets the power balance, as when weaker states bandwagon with a stronger power rather than joining the weaker side or if they “buckpass” and fail to join an alliance against a stronger threatening power. As a result, partners in alliances need to worry about abandonment when they face aggressive powers or entrapment by their own allies in an unwanted war. Steven David showed how internal threats to regime security were just as salient in calculating alliance choices, with weaker states often striking alliances with a protective external patron. Ryan sees regional alliances driven by regime security, creating transnational coalitions of regional elites propping each other up. Haas argued that states may fail to balance against a threat if their potential alliance partner’s ideology was threatening to internal security. Gause used this to explain what he claimed was under-balancing against Iran after 2011. MENA scholars have also looked to political economy to explain alliances such as Laurie Brand’s budget security explanation regarding Jordan; Ryan sees accessing resources for regime security as driving alliance choices and Reem Abou El-Fadl (2018) sees alliances serving nation-building development strategies. Domestic political struggles between social forces, Allinson showed, determined different alliance choices. Constructivists such as Barnett and Lynch used MENA cases to show that identity affects choices of alliance partners, and that struggles over a state’s identity at the domestic level can affect this. Gause, as well as Harknett and Van Den Berg, saw balancing against ideational threats in the transnational sphere as more important than military threats, and Rubin saw states using ideational threats against which opponents balanced by promoting counter-identities, in identity “Cold Wars.” All this demonstrated the need for theoretical eclecticism to supplement foundational realist assumptions about alliance making in MENA. In MENA, alliance patterns and the power balance shifted over time. In the Cold War period, after MENA declined to join the Western alliance system, the Baghdad Pact, against the Soviet Union, a struggle inside MENA states between rival social forces coincided with a battle of the superpowers to construct competing alliance systems. The main resulting alignment pattern pitted US backing for Israel and the conservative monarchies against Soviet backing for the revolutionary nationalist republics. This period of the “Arab Cold War” also saw balancing against ideational subversion among republics competing for pan-Arab leadership and over regime security threats that cut across the Soviet-led republican alliance. After the 1967 war, the common threat from Israel drove alliances among the frontline Arab states, but thereafter Egypt’s realignment toward the US fragmented the Arab camp. Wars in the Gulf also drove realignments, with the Arab states aligning with either Iraq or Iran, depending on whether they saw the threat primarily from Israel or Iran. The Iranian threat led to the rise of the GCC among the Arab Gulf monarchies. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait also forced states to take sides; thereafter, the Gulf states struck protective alliances with the West. The 2003 US invasion of Iraq, in removing the main balance against Iran, empowered Iran and led Saudi Arabia to lead a “moderate” “Sunni” alliance including Egypt and Jordan against Iran in the 2000s; in parallel, a “resistance axis” led by Iran and including Syria, Hizbollah and Hamas, solidified against the US threat, Israel, and the Sunni axis. After the Arab Uprisings, Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia waged proxy wars in Syria and Yemen. The GCC seemed to act as a Holy alliance against the spread of the Arab Uprisings, especially to other monarchies, marked by the intervention in Bahrain to support a Sunni monarch against Shia protestors seen as likely to ally with Iran. But Qatar was out of step in actually promoting rebellion in republics such as Libya, Egypt and Syria. Eventually, this led to a split in the GCC, with Qatar isolated by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, but getting backing from Turkey and even Iran. Thus, the potential of a broad-based Sunni led Saudi alliance against the Iranian-led resistance (or Shia bloc)

18

State, revolution and war

was cross-cut by internal conflicts in the former. The lack of consistent alliances reflected the multiple threats that states faced, both external and internal, military and ideational, with each state making temporary alignments according to shifting calculations of where the greatest threat was located, with the result being no stable balance of power and a more dangerous region than ever. Chapter 25: Raymond Hinnebusch’s “War in the Middle East” asks why the Middle East is the most war-prone region. Using Kenneth Waltz’s three-level framework from Man the State and War, this chapter compiles evidence and arguments on the sources of war. Is war proneness built into the region’s non-democratic states, as liberals might argue? Is it down to power-hungry authoritarian rulers as classical realists suggest? Or is it a function of anarchy of the regional states system, as structural neo-realism holds? The study finds that in the most immediate sense, wars were driven from the state level by the abundance of revisionist states. But revisionism needs explaining. It is not a function of regime type—democratic or authoritarian—since this does not distinguish more from less revisionist, hence war-prone MENA states. Rather, it is a function of the regional systems’ construction as a Hobbesian anarchy, manifest in pervasive irredentism from the poor fit of state and identity; disputed boundaries; and the heterogeneity of regime legitimacy principles: these factors constitute grievances or enmities that drive conflict while there are few trans-state economic interests or shared norms to mute them. Exacerbating regional instability is the struggle over oil resources between regional and global powers. These factors generate pervasive security dilemmas and offensive realist struggles over hegemony. But why a particular war erupts at a particular time depends on factors at the systemic and leadership level: the power balance may deter or enable war and having a risk-taking or ideological leader in power may trigger war. Chapter 26: Fred H. Lawson and Lorenzo Legrenzi’s “International relations of the Gulf: from stable rivalry to spreading instability” looks at a key sub-region of MENA. In the 1990s, bi-polarity in the Gulf, with Saudi Arabia leading the GCC and balancing Iran and Iraq (isolated under sanctions), combined with a US security protectorate, made for relative stability. This began to change with the US removal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, giving Iran influence over Iraq, shifting the regional balance toward Tehran while, at the same time, loosening Saudi control of the smaller GCC states, in part as their own bi-lateral links to the US protected them from Saudi dictates (as well as Iran). This led to a shift toward multipolarity and greater instability in the Gulf. Some of the smaller Gulf states began to act independently of and against the wishes of the Saudis, notably by keeping amicable ties with Iran and resisting Saudi moves to tighten GCC security coordination. Qatar was on a quite different tangent, backing the Muslim Brothers, while the UAE became independently active in the Horn of Africa. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia was facing multiple perceived threats: from Iran’s missile capability; in Iraq from Islamic State militants but also Shia militias; and from the Houthis in Yemen where its intervention bogged down. In Yemen, in addition to the Saudi-led coalition against the pro-Iran Houthis, rival Islamic State and al-Qaida-in-the-Arabian Peninsula were on their own tangents, and the UAE was fostering different clients such as southern separatists so that the nominally anti-Houthi forces were often at odds with each other. The Qatar crisis of 2017 generated further cleavages and alignments as the Saudi–Emirati attempt to isolate Qatar over its ties to Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood backfired and actually brought Turkey and Iran to protect Qatar. Meanwhile, Iraqi Shia politicians began a reapproachment with Saudi Arabia to increase autonomy of Iran’s pene­tration. These ever more complex conflicts and alignments kept the Gulf highly insecure.

19

Raymond Hinnebusch

References Abou El-Fadl, R. (2018), Foreign Policy as Nation Making: Turkey and Egypt in the Cold War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Andersen, L. (1987), “The state in the Middle East and North Africa,” Comparative Politics, 20:1. Ayubi, N. (1995), Overstating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East, London: IB Tauris. Bacik, G. (2008), Hybrid Sovereignty in the Arab Middle East: The Cases of Kuwait, Jordan and Iraq, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan Bill, J. and R. Springborg (1994), Politics in the Middle East, New York, NY: Harper-Collins. Bromley, S. (1994), Rethinking Middle East Politics: State Formation and Development, Oxford: Polity Press. Buzan, B. and O. Weaver (2003), Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fromkin, D. (1989), A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, New York, NY: Avon Books. Khalidi, R. (2004), Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East, IB Tauris. Owen, R. (1992), State, Power and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East, London: Routledge.

20

2 Historical context of state formation in the Middle East Structure and agency Raymond Hinnebusch

The formation of the MENA states was the outcome of two major factors: first, the historical inheritance faced by state-builders after independence, which framed the situation in which they had to operate, and their subsequent agency—their strategies and the capacities of the states they built. The historical heritage is constituted by the political culture transmitted from the pre-modern area that continues to inform the norms and practices deployed in power building; and second, by the very flawed version of the Westphalian states system imposed on the region by the Western imperial powers after Ottoman collapse and sustained by their periodic interventions thereafter. The conceptual frame by which this is interpreted is that of international historical sociology, from which three main principles are derived: 1) outcomes result from the interaction of structure and agency; 2) path dependency: the past—constituting structure—shapes what is possible for agency, foreclosing on some possibilities, making others more likely; nevertheless agency can alter structure. The combination of the pre-modern past and the imposition of the Westphalian states system created the structural context—the constraints, the opportunities, resources and liabilities—in which agency—post-independence statebuilders—had to operate. They constituted the cards dealt; generally, state-builders were dealt bad hands but how they played their hands made a difference and further set up the hands dealt to their successors; 3) finally, the states system and states co-constituted each other: thus even as the global states system constituted the regional states, so these states in their interactions reshaped the regional system over time (Hobden and Hobson 2002; Mahoney 2000). The chapter looks 1) at the historical structural inheritance, the context for state-building; 2) it then examines the agency of state-builders: how they have constructed varying and evolving kinds of regimes issuing in varying levels of state formation; 3) finally, it assesses how statebuilders, their strategies and the kinds of states they are able to create, then shapes the evolution of the regional system. This evolution is adumbrated, with the states system’s subsequent impact on the states also assessed.

21

Raymond Hinnebusch

Structure: the historical inheritance of state-builders Pre-modern state-building The pre-modern Middle East state left behind heritages and practices—an enduring politicalcultural residue that was bound to affect contemporary state-building. State-builders in the premodern Middle East faced a challenging ecology that shaped their practices. The area was an arid cross-roads region, vulnerable to invasion by waves of nomadic peoples. Historically, great religious-ethnic diversity and a culture of nomadic tribalism shaped society. In this context, the historic state-building formula, as identified by Ibn Khaldun, the Medieval Arab sociologist, was that a nomadic group with tribal-like solidarity (assabiya) and fired by a religious mission (jihad) seizes key cities by military conquest, establishes an empire as far as its capacity allows, and rules over a diverse divided, mass. The imperial centre lives off the extraction of taxes from trade routes and the peasantry. In Ibn Khaldun’s depiction, empires go through cycles of rise and decline: once the solidarity of the ruling group declines the state centre weakens and loses control of the peripheries. This may be accelerated by shifts in trade routes or nomadic incursions devastating agriculture that shrink the imperial command of resources. The Ottoman Empire, the most developed and enduring of the Middle East empires, which ruled the region in the centuries prior to the creation of the modern states system, left its imprint on the region. The Ottoman power structure exemplified Weber’s notion of a “Sultanistic” state. At its height, the Sultan in principle exercised absolute rule, religiously legitimized as the “Shadow of God on earth.” This personalization of power meant that effective governance required a strong ruler, but the harem system often produced weak Sultans and succession struggles. However, the empire also had a strong component of bureaucratic rule: the senior officials of the Sultan, headed by a grand vizier, regularly filled the vacuum when Sultans lacked vigour. The bureaucrats and soldiers of the Sultan, often his slaves lacking local roots, were charged with extracting taxes, protecting the peasant tax base and the frontiers of the empire. The standing central army (the janissaries) was backed up in the provinces by “knights” (Sipahi) who received temporary fiefs as remuneration for their services; however, the land was owned by the state such that there was no independent landed aristocracy with whom the Sultan had to share power in representative institutions. Once the state weakened, the practice of tax-farming grew up, an exploitative practice which gave rise to local notables (ayan) resistant to central control. In the cities, the ulama—religious preachers and scholar judges—played the role of linking the rulers and the people. The ruling elite stood over a divided “segmental” society—multitudes of little self-contained communities, enjoying autonomy, ethnically and religiously differentiated and imbued by tribalism; hence, at the local level constituting a “kinship society.” The elite was, however, itself multi-ethnic, hence reflected in some respects the composition of society. In identity terms, Islam was the main unifying force, but it was split between conservative state religion and popular religious movements resistant to the state. Moreover, significant non-Muslim minorities existed who had second-class status but also enjoyed considerable autonomy under their own religious leaders. The masses of peasants and herdsmen were considered “raaya” (sheep)—to be protected and fleeced to support the ruling elite, not as citizens. This system was well adapted to maintaining order in a disorderly region and agrarian society in a pre-national age. Establishment of order over a wide region propelled economic booms and allowed the empire to control East–West trade routes. Artisanal industries thrived. However, aridity limited the agrarian surplus, leaving the economy over-dependent on extracting surplus from vulnerable trade routes; when these declined, increasingly short-circuited by Western 22

Historical context

maritime powers, the empire fell back on excess extraction from agriculture, which, also vulnerable to nomadic depredations when the state weakened and in the absence of an “improving landlord class,” also declined, undermining the economic base of the state. This was not effectively addressed for a long time, perhaps because military rulers (of tribal origin) had a disinterest in economic development. Moreover, some of their practices, such as confiscations of the wealth of rich merchants, deterred the growth of a bourgeoisie, smothering rather than fostering the seeds of capitalism inherent in merchant capital enriched on the trade routes. Thus, the economic base of the empire went into decline, even as the capitalist West was becoming dynamic and expansive. At the political level, Ottoman decline was, in ways expected in the Khaldunian model, a result of the loss of dynamism by the ruling elite and, owing to the state’s dominance, the gap was not filled by other forces, since a civil society of independent upper/middle classes was absent. Accumulating crises of the empire were increasingly obvious throughout the eighteenth and into the nineteenth centuries. The empire suffered military defeat and territorial encroachment from imperial rivals, notably Russia from the north (in Central Asia and the Caucasus) and France in Northern Africa. Moreover, at the mass level, the lack of sufficient ingredients of common political identity that could unite all the religious and ethnic communities making up the empire made it vulnerable, once the doctrine of nationalism began to spread, to break-up along national lines: the Balkan Christian provinces gradually sought to throw off Ottoman control with Russian or Western help. Also, local Muslim warlords carved out semiindependent principalities, e.g. Muhammad Ali in Egypt. Economic decline was exacerbated by the loss of trade routes to Western encirclement and the decline of traditional industries as Western manufactures began flooding in; this led to a certain de-industrialization that signalled the beginning of the reduction of the empire to a dependent economic periphery of the world capitalist system.1 Nevertheless, the resourcefulness of the empire was not negligible and the increase in the threat from the West and from disintegration within produced a century of reform—of “defensive modernization”—beginning in the early 1800s. Reforming Sultans and Viziers naturally prioritized military modernization to counter external threats, but this required much wider modernization. Bureaucratic modernization was pursued to re-establish internal order, central control and tax collection capacity. Modernizing the state apparatus was seen to require educational modernization—Western-style schools to produce staff for the new state structures. Economic revival was seen to require private ownership of land. Paradoxically the century of reforms both strengthened yet undermined the state and particularly the traditional order. The reforms promoted the growth of new classes that would challenge the old order. A modern Westernized middle class of officers, bureaucrats and teachers grew up, cut off from the traditional masses. New upper classes also emerged with the beginnings of a large landed class as tax farmers abused the introduction of private ownership of land, which had been intended to create a yeoman farmer class, to acquire large private estates, indeed, whole villages, alienating peasants. A Western-protected tax-exempt merchant class, usually Christians, grew up, also alienating the Muslim masses. Moreover, the formation of the modern state apparatus exceeded economic development such that insufficient economic surplus forced the empire to borrow from Western bankers to finance infrastructure and military modernization. This resulted in mounting Western debt, forcing a vulnerable Ottoman government to cede control of its finances to Western bondholders, with a resultant haemorrhage of resources and increased Western leverage over the empire. The irony was that the modernization meant to ward off military threat from the West opened the door to an economic threat. 23

Raymond Hinnebusch

The reforms and their costs and failures also eroded the political legitimacy of the empire. This was manifest in peasant/tribal rebellions against Westernization, taxation, and conscription and accelerating separatism in the Balkans. The growth of a modernizing middle class less deferent to authority, combined with the on-going crisis, led to the Young Turks movement within the military and bureaucracy which staged a 1908 constitutional coup forcing the Sultan to grant a parliament and other political reforms. In parallel, survival of the empire was dependent, in an age of nationalism, on fostering a common identity that could hold the multi-national empire together. The first generation of reformers fostered “Ottomanism” in which equal political rights were granted to citizens, no longer mere subjects, in return for loyalty to the empire: Ottomanism was attractive to the new modernizing elites and middle class but the masses did not feel Ottoman. Islam was the most viable mass identity and it was promoted by the last Sultan, Abdul Hamid II, but it alienated the Christians and many Islamic leaders were hostile to reforms granting equal citizenship to all Ottomans. The Young Turks turned to promoting Turkism but this excluded and alienated the non-Turks—the Arabs and Kurds. The failure to find a nation-building formula was exposed by Britain’s ability to exploit Turkish-Arab tensions to foster the so-called Arab revolt in World War I. The empire might nevertheless have survived had it not entered World War I on the losing side.2

The political-cultural inheritance of pre-modern Islamic empires Long after the Ottoman Empire collapsed, residues of the traditional political culture of Islamic empires transmitted from the past via socialization (by, e.g. the patriarchal family and local Islamic and tribal institutions) persisted in the region. This culture was both used for postOttoman state-building and was an obstacle to it. Several dimensions of this political culture can be identified. The tribal/kinship culture, combined with the many ethnic/sectarian minorities led to a central role for “small group politics,” that is, the typical unit of political action and loyalty was the small group or “shilla” (based on kin, sect), constituting a certain obstacle to the impersonal associations or economic classes needed to bring large groups of people together to push for development or reform. Second, was the persistence of supra-state identities—taking the form in the post-Ottoman period of pan-Arabism and pan-Islam. As such, identities persisted with either bigger (supra-state) or smaller (sub-state) units of community, competing with the post-Ottoman territorial states for loyalty. The practices of patrimonial rule—the personal rule of the leader via clientele networks—persisted as a “natural” way of building power. This tended, however, to keep formal bureaucratic and political institutions weak. The political ambivalence of Islam also mattered: Islam is taken to give a blueprint for a perfect political community, which tends to have two diverging consequences. It legitimizes rulers’ claims to rule in the name of God and the idea of the sovereignty of God contradicts that of popular sovereignty and discourages the need for democratic participation. Alternatively, however, since the actual state always falls short of Islamic ideals, activism (jihad)—the drive to create Islamic order on earth—was stimulated, often taking an anti-regime form. This tended to foster a periodic alteration between periods of mass passivity and deference to the state and violent rebellion against it. These forces together tended to reinforce authoritarianism (see, e.g. Bill and Springborg 1994, for a politicalcultural view; also, Lindholm 2002; Bacik 2008; Gerber 1987, for a social structural view). The inherited political culture is not, however, unchanging and indeed has been incrementally transformed by the impact of modernization. Thus, social mobilization (e.g. education) tends to broaden loyalties beyond small groups to the nation or state and increases the propensity for activism and participation; modern political technology (communications, organization)—increases mass abilities to associate in broad groups for political action—although it also increases elite 24

Historical context

capabilities to build repressive control structures. Thus, modernization may engender, for significant “transitional periods,” hybrid (combining “traditional” and “modern”) structures and practices, as particularly embodied in the dominant form of rule in the region, neo-patrimonialism—a combination of personal patrimonial and modern bureaucratic practices.

Imperialism and nationalism in the Middle East The second major force affecting state-building in the region was the impact of Western imperialism, which reshaped the region in ways that would create big obstacles for indigenous statebuilders and engendered an enduring nationalist reaction. The universal Islamic (Ottoman) empire was replaced by new political units, the system of (“Westphalian”) territorial states but in a very flawed and deformed way. The boundaries of the states, being externally imposed, were often arbitrary, cutting across pre-existing family, economic and cultural ties and incongruent with the dominant smaller group or larger suprastate identities inherited from Ottoman times, keeping citizen identification with many of the new states initially quite weak. This also fragmented the region into many weak “statelets,” vulnerable to external domination. It was this very flawed framework within which modern state-building had to proceed. The process was initiated under Western colonialism in the region. To govern the conquered areas the imperial powers had to co-opt local elites, in the process fostering a new ruling stratum from the pre-existing class of Ottoman notables and tribal leaders. To give them a stake in the new order, they were allowed to establish large private property in land as power bases and were co-opted into new state offices (or confirmed in old ones). This landed-commercialtribal oligarchy was led by Kings and Presidents, emplaced or reinforced by the imperial powers. Thus, Hashemite rulers were emplaced in Jordan and Iraq, while in Egypt the British buttressed the Muhammad Ali dynasty against the popular nationalist movement led by Orabi that had resisted Western control. These rulers therefore became dependent client elites. The imperial powers also imported or reinforced existing state structures: bureaucracies and armies, but also parliaments that were based on a very limited history of democratic practices and were dominated by the new post-Ottoman oligarchy. However, the fostering of Western education and employment of indigenous personnel in the state (accelerating after independence) expanded the “modern new middle class,” a stratum between the traditional upper-class notability and the uneducated peasant/labouring masses, with high aspirations for modern jobs and lifestyle. However, its social mobilization often exceeded economic development, leaving the new class frustrated, hence susceptible to new ideologies of nationalism and social reform. Imperialism also completed the incorporation of the regional states into the periphery of the world capitalist system in which their role was to supply the West with raw materials (cotton, oil) and markets for Western manufactures which, ruining traditional industries, retarded the formation of a local industrial capitalist class. In addition, the large landed class was primarily interested in primary product export ventures. The region thus remained underdeveloped. In reaction to imperialism, nationalist movements arose, demanding independence. In the inter-war period and especially after World War II, local elites gradually acquired greater autonomy to rule their states. The first generation of nationalist leaders (1920–50) sought, in their proposed state-building projects, to imitate the West’s nation-states, which were seen to be the key to power in the modern world. These leaders were largely from the urban notable class, landlords and merchants, heading large prestigious families in the urban quarters. Their liberalnationalist programme focused on winning political independence from imperialism (pursued in their separate states despite ideologies of pan-Arabism) and envisioned a post-independence 25

Raymond Hinnebusch

order that continued the parliamentary democracy, market capitalism and secular rule introduced by imperialism. They were also willing to continue special relations with the imperial powers after independence. Their weakness was their traditional power base: they constituted a thin upper-class stratum linked to society mostly through urban patronage networks and control of the landed estates (and the peasantry on them); they proved reluctant or unable to mobilize mass resistance to imperialism for fear such mobilization would turn into demands for social reform challenging their great interests, hence they had to reach compromises with the imperial powers (e.g. permitting military bases and treaties) which cost them much of their legitimacy (for example in the case of the Wafd in Egypt). Additionally, the liberal democratic forms through which they sought to rule proved very fragile: parties and parliaments were weak and fragmented, elections manipulated, and the mass of voters lacking in political consciousness.3

Obstacles to nation-building The most important consequence of the imposition of the Westphalian state system from without was the significant incongruence between state/territory and identity, leaving a major challenge to state-builders. The dominant global ideology, which was being embraced by the MENA region, nationalism, promoted the belief that people who feel they make up a nation are entitled to (one) state. States whose territory corresponds to a distinct national political community therefore enjoy a legitimacy bonus and states that do not suffer a legitimacy deficit. State-builders therefore seek to bring the state (government on a territory) into congruence with a sense of nationhood (Smith 1981). But in the Middle East the arbitrary imposition of the states system, giving little attention to territory-identity congruence, kept loyalties to sub- and supra-states identities robust at the expense of the state and built irredentism (movements to redraw boundaries) into the system. Thus, on the one hand, many states were fragmented into a mosaic of sub- or trans-state identities: tribes, identification with cities, ethnicity (non-Arabic speaking minorities: Kurds in Iraq, Berbers in North Africa) and, particularly marked, religious pluralism. Sunni Muslims were the majority community in the Arab world but not in some individual states such as Lebanon or Iraq where Shia Muslims—“12ers”—were large pluralities or majorities. Shia offshoots were politically important in many states: Ismailis (Syria), Alawis (Syria), Druze (Syria, Lebanon) and Zaydis (Yemen). Ibadhis dominated Oman. Christians constituted major communities in MENA but were also divided between Eastern Orthodox (Greek Orthodox of Syria, Copts of Egypt) and smaller groups of Catholics in union with Rome (e.g. the Maronites of Lebanon). This set up a high risk that state-builders would either repress or exclude minorities or minorities would rule over majorities, in either case building into the fabric of the state a vulnerability to civil war and separatism. On the other hand, supra(trans)-state identities also competed with the new states and indeed many of the most powerful social movements and ideologies have been supra-state ones. After the collapse of Ottomanism, Turkish nationalism became hegemonic in independent Turkey while after the Western takeover of the Arab world, independence movements sprang up, varying in their ideologies between state nationalism (watani) (e.g. the Wafd in Egypt), Islam, and pan-Arab nationalism (qawmi), with many combining them (e.g. seeking independence in their own state as a first step toward a larger Arab confederation). Pan-Arab nationalism gradually became hegemonic in the Arab world starting in the 1930s, stimulated by the struggle over Palestine. Arab nationalists believed the Arabs constituted a nation, having the ingredients of nationhood: common language, shared culture and historical memory of greatness when unified by Arab-Islamic empires. However, the Arab nation had been fragmented by imperialism into 26

Historical context

many states, stimulating pan-Arab trans-state political movements in most Arab states aiming at unification or confederation into a single Arab state. From the 1950s, pan-Arabism was exported from Egypt through Nasser’s mass Arabist appeal (after Suez) that spawned Nasserist or Arab nationalist movements in the other Arab states. Separately, Ba’thism arose and became the main political movement in Syria, Iraq and Jordan and had branches in virtually every Arab country. Pan-Arabism was behind numerous unity schemes to merge Arab states during the hegemony of pan-Arabism (hence, the 1958 Egypt–Syria union, the United Arab Republic). State identities persisted in parallel with pan-Arabism, with the balance between them varying over time and among states. State identity was more likely to retain credibility where the post-independence state had some history as an independent entity, perhaps with a distinctive sub-state makeup. In Morocco, an independent dynasty with long historical roots was never absorbed by the Ottomans. In Yemen, Oman and Lebanon, minority sects had historically established autonomous regimes. Egyptian statehood focused on the Nile valley went back to Pharaonic times. However, even where such a state identity existed, it had supra-state content; thus, in Egypt, the substance of Egyptian identity was Arab-Islamic, and attempts to construct alternative definitions of Egyptianness—e.g. Pharaonic or Mediterranean—failed; thus identification with the state did not preclude loyalty to Arabism and Islam. By contrast, where the state was a recent “artificial” creation of imperialism, such as in Syria and Iraq, state nationalism remained weak. Geographical or historical Syria was fragmented into four parts, i.e. current Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Israel, such that the truncated Syrian state struggled to become a focus of identity among Syrians. It is no accident that the main pan-Arab nationalist movement was born in Syria, and was most successful in Syria, Iraq and Jordan. Even with the decline of Arab nationalism after repeated failures of unity movements and the 1967 defeat by Israel, the individual states did not become the uncontested focus of identities since the vacuum was filled by another supra-state identity, political Islam (typically having a pan-Islamic dimension). The consequence of the poor fit of nation and territorial state was the prevalence of multiple competing, sub-state, supra-state (Arab or Islamic) and state identities. The individual states’ legitimacy was often conditional on their being seen to act on behalf of larger Arab or Islamic interests. The weakness of loyalty to the individual state also reinforced proclivities of statebuilders to rely on authoritarian rule as a substitute for the weakness of state-centred national identity—which, in turn, only retarded the citizen’s embrace of the state as “theirs.”4

Agency: regime building after independence5 From liberal oligarchy to instability (1930–50) State—or regime—building took place amidst a widespread breakdown of traditional authority in the years after independence that unleashed a vacuum in which contending social forces battled for power. The emerging middle class challenged the authority of the liberal oligarchs and monarchs who were inheriting power as Western imperialism gradually withdrew from the region. The middle class was mobilized by ideological parties that promoted radical new ideologies that displaced oligarchic liberalism. The dominant Arab nationalist movements raised demands for an end to Western bases and treaties, pan-Arab unity and the liberation of Palestine, combined with a redistribution of wealth, particularly land, and the breaking of economic dependency on the West through state-sponsored industrialization. This political mobilization exceeded the absorptive capacity of liberal oligarchic institutions. The middle class sought to mobilize workers and peasants but although they often had some success in this, they were at a disadvantage in elections that turned on command of patronage. 27

Raymond Hinnebusch

As a result, the middle class turned to the military, where the officer corps was often dominated by politicized middle-class officers, to challenge upper-class elites. A key watershed in de-legitimizing the liberal oligarchs was the failure of the newly independent Arab states to prevent the establishment of Israel at the expense of the Palestinians; this particularly alienated young army officers and beginning in 1949, not long after the Palestine War, a wave of military interventions destroyed the notables’ parliamentary rule across much of the region; far from ushering in a stable new order, however, this unleashed an era of instability—of coups and revolutions—that lasted till the 1970s (Seale 1965).

Age of revolution (1950–70): authoritarian republics and traditional monarchs By the 1960s, the main focus of MENA politics was the efforts of regime builders to establish or restore authority. As liberal oligarchies collapsed across the region (surviving alone in Lebanon), two dominant rival models of rule emerged, the “traditional” monarchies and the authoritarian republics (Halpern 1963). The authoritarian republics took some time to consolidate their authority. They had emerged where the ruling oligarchy had lost legitimacy but the new rulers, typically military officers, also suffered an initial legitimate deficit: they had neither traditional nor democratic legitimacy. The new republican political elites sought to establish authoritarian modernizing regimes legitimized via the personal charisma of the leader, the promotion of nationalist and socialist ideology, and the creation of structures of control—armies, bureaucracies, mukhabarat (secret police)—that could establish a monopoly of legitimate violence over the territory of the state, the Weberian test of state formation. The problem for the military elites was keeping the coercive apparatus reliable. In parallel, ruling single party systems were widely adopted to satisfy participatory pressures and mobilize supporters. The republican regimes embarked on “state capitalist” paths of development, i.e. the use of public sectors to propel national capitalist development, combined with populist redistribution policies to mobilize lower strata—workers and peasants through land reform and state jobs (populism). Egypt under Nasser was the prototype republican regime, the first successfully built on a new basis of authority. The new elite core of “Free Officers” repressed all rivals for power, both liberals and the Muslim Brotherhood and concentrated power in their hands. Nasser emerged as a charismatic leader on the basis of his anti-imperialist campaigns, notably nationalization of the Suez Canal and foreign-owned properties, and re-distributive social reforms. He concentrated power in a powerful presidency, vastly expanded the bureaucracy, organized his supporters in a single ruling party and co-opted other groups into a subordinate parliament. The Nasserist formula was widely imitated in the other republics, albeit with variations. For example, in Syria and Iraq, no charismatic leader comparable to Nasser emerged and Ba’thist state-builders substituted a more robust ruling party built along Leninist lines. In Tunisia, a mass-based independence movement that became the ruling party substituted for military leadership6 The monarchies were, until the mid-1970s, seen as more fragile than the republics, suffering from what was called the “King’s Dilemma.” These regimes were traditionally based on landed and tribal elites. To survive, they had to modernize but doing so strengthened the forces that could undermine them, notably a new middle class that would reject traditional authority and, with the rise of nationalism, contest the monarchies’ Western alignments. This vulnerability was manifest in the military coups that toppled several monarchies across the region in the 1950s and 1960s—albeit mostly in the settled societies while they survived on the tribal peripheries of the region. One monarchy that seemed robust was that of Saudi Arabia, which survived owing to 28

Historical context

the tribal nature of its society, its religious legitimacy as the guardian of the Islamic holy cities and the selective strategies of modernization which preserved traditional values, hence authority. The regime kept the military small while the large ruling family functioned as a kind of surrogate “single party” stretched throughout society. Crucial, however, was the growing oil wealth that, particularly after the 1970s oil boom, allowed the new middle class to be co-opted and the masses appeased by a welfare state. Western alignment turned out a plus for monarchies that were perceived to enjoy protection against revolutionary forces.7

Regime consolidation and post-populist evolution (1975–86) After decades of instability, MENA’s authoritarian regimes had, by the 1970s and 1980s, consolidated themselves. The creation of large coercive apparatuses was part of the formula but was not enough to explain stabilization, since a main source of instability had hitherto been precisely the unreliability of the instruments of coercion, notably the military. Creating institutions able to balance and contain the military, subjecting it to intelligence surveillance and stacking the officer corps with loyalists, helped coup proof regimes. The oil wealth available in the region from the mid-1970s price boom provided patronage for clientelist strategies that made regimes more autonomous of society. Bureaucratic institutions penetrated society and became instruments of social mobility, yet institutions were also subverted by “traditional” practices—e.g. clientalism, nepotism—with the result that developmental bureaucracies lost their political energy while corruption and military spending debilitated statist capital accumulation.8 Nazih Ayubi (1995) cautioned against “overstating the Arab State,” which, lacking the hegemony that goes with a secure class base, was “fierce” rather than strong—over-reliant on coercion and unable to tolerate any opposition or to relax its surveillance over society. By the 1980s, it was, moreover, widely understood that the statist populist version of authoritarianism on which the republics had initially established themselves had given way to a postpopulist stage exemplified by a widespread turn to economic liberalization. While the economic failures of statism partly explain this, equally important was the transformation of the formerly petit bourgeoisie political elites into “state bourgeoisies” serving their own interests and which, as statism faltered, stood to benefit from the re-emergence of the private sector and inflows of foreign capital. The outcome, apparent in the 1980s, was a contraction of the state’s formerly social base and its reliance on a new coalition of state-private-foreign bourgeoisies. Authoritarian power persisted but was now used for different purposes: to impose structural adjustment (austerity for the masses), privatization of public sectors against the resistance of the losers, and to defend the new inequalities by demobilizing and excluding the masses from ruling coalitions.9

State weakening, Islamist and democratic challenges, authoritarian resilience (1985–2010) What had become apparent in the 1980s was that while seemingly durable states had emerged from the decades of post-independence state-building, there had been a loss of legitimacy from a combination of factors: failed wars and realignment with the West, economic crisis and rollback of populist welfare for the masses; and the failure to absorb demands for political participation through political institutions, hence low accountability that enabled widespread power abuse manifest in corruption and human rights violations. In parallel, various social forces were positioning themselves to challenge state power and demand fundamental reforms. The new capitalist class enriched on economic liberalization started demanding a share of power with the state as a condition of investment. The secular middle class (professionals, white-collar 29

Raymond Hinnebusch

workers), disillusioned by state failures, started demanding democratization; and the victims of economic liberalization (lower, lower-middle classes) seeing a return to Islam as the answer, began demanding Islamization of the state. It was the rising political Islamic movements that became the main opposition to ruling regimes, spreading with the decline of secular ideologies, including Arab nationalism, and the successful 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. Many Islamist movements sought peaceful Islamization from below, e.g. as republics retreated from their welfare functions, they filled the vacuum with an Islamic civil society of charities, educational institutions, banks etc. Other Islamists pursued attempted violent revolutions that failed in Algeria, Egypt and Syria. Regime strategies to deal with Islamism entailed varying combinations of repression (most clear in the republics); concession (e.g. limited Islamization of the state, assimilation of sharia into secular law); and co-optation, most evident in the monarchies. Somewhat later, the 1990 end of the Cold War and the “Third Wave” of democratization it unleashed, encouraged demands for democratic reform in the region. Modernization was creating the minimal conditions for democratic transition: increased education and political consciousness. There was a minority of semi-democracies in the region. Turkey had made a transition to electoral democracy as early as 1950 although it was frequently destabilized by military intervention or the authoritarian proclivities of its political elites. Lebanon’s powersharing consociational democracy had survived several civil wars. In response to the global level democratic wave, limited political liberalization was instituted in a number of MENA states in the 1990s. However, it became a substitute for, not a step in the direction of, democratization as executives retained dominant power in spite of multi-party elections to parliaments with limited powers to hold them accountable. By the 2000s, expectations for democratization in the region had largely been disappointed and authoritarianism was proving exceptionally resilient. Arguably, something was shortcircuiting the link between socioeconomic and political change in MENA (Hinnebusch 2006). Broadly, two approaches proposed to explain this. A cultural exceptionalist argument blamed political culture: the lack of an underlying consensus on political community owing to identity fragmentation, the authoritarian heritage of empire-building and the anti-democratic current in important interpretations of Islam (as well as the conflict in Muslim societies between political Islam and secularists.) The rival political economy approach attributed the lack of democratization to the rentierism produced by hydrocarbon rent in the region: it made regimes more autonomous of society (less dependent on it for taxes) and reduced demand for democratization as regimes could trade economic benefits in return for political passivity (Beblawi and Luciani 1987). Another argument was that as those post-populist regimes lacking large rents imposed austerity on the public while enriching crony capitalists, they could not afford to empower mass voters (Farsoun and Zaharia 1995). But the agency of authoritarian rulers also mattered and their strategies of “authoritarian upgrading” allowed them to dilute pressures for democratization (Heydemann 2007). Electoral authoritarianism proved adept at dividing the opposition; privatization of public sectors generated new crony capitalists with a stake in authoritarian rule. And many authoritarian states possessing substantial oil reserves, such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia, seemed immune to pressures for democratization.

The Arab Uprisings: state failures, authoritarian restoration (2010–current) Yet, the hidden vulnerabilities of authoritarian regimes were exposed by the Arab Uprisings beginning in 2010, which were widely seen as a reaction to the inequalities and political 30

Historical context

repression of the preceding two post-populist decades. During the Uprisings early stages, expectations of democracy were revived, as the middle class demanded political rights and, together with mass support, succeeded in overthrowing several authoritarian presidents; seemingly democratic Islamist movements were also empowered where authoritarian regimes collapsed. But expectations of major political reform soon disappeared as the monarchies proved largely immune to the Uprising, only one republic, Tunisia, actually made a democratic transition, and the other republics either experienced authoritarian restoration (Egypt) or civil war and varying degrees of state failure (Syria, Yemen, Libya, Iraq).

Structure and agency: the MENA states system and its evolution The following section summarizes the evolution of the states system that paralleled the evolution of state formation just recounted. It tries to deploy the IHS paradigm in showing how one phase prepared the context for the next and how during each stage changes in the kinds of states shaped the features of the states system and vice versa.

Origins and features of the regional system The global states system—or specifically the core imperial powers—literally constituted the regional states system, creating a particularly fraught kind of anarchy, potentially Hobbesian, in which the struggle for power was endemic, although its intensity did vary over time. Imperialism left behind contested borders, identities frustrated by arbitrary boundary drawing, and two stateless peoples—Palestinians and Kurds—thereby building irredentism into the system. This made neighbouring states threats to each other, and propelled their pursuit of military capabilities and alliances to defend their precarious sovereignty. Further, the regional system was embedded in a trans-state “public sphere” which, combined with porous, often artificial, borders vulnerable to ideological penetration, encouraged inter-state discourse wars and subversion (Barnett 1998; Harknett and VanDenBerg 1997). Agreement on norms and rules of the game that might have diluted the power struggle was deterred by the contrary legitimacy principles of regimes— hereditary monarchy vs. revolutionary republic, secular vs. Islamic states. Trans-state economic links that might have provided the foundation for regional cooperation had been snapped by imperialism and reoriented to the core. The instruments of the regional power struggle varied over time, chiefly as a function of state consolidation: in times of state weakness, hence high permeability, propaganda or “Cold” wars deploying identity discourses aimed to de-legitimize rival regimes, with resulting waves of instability reshuffling the power balance. These struggles were punctuated, in periods when arms races and rents empowered stronger states and upset power balances, by hot wars in which bids for regional hegemony were regularly made and defeated. The global order also mattered for regional trajectories: as bi-polarity replaced imperial rule in the region, opportunities for nationalist regimes to carve out regional autonomy arose; when bi-polarity gave way to globalization and US hegemony, this was reversed. At the same time, regional states had agency and the outcomes, in particular of their statebuilding, helped shape the kind of regional system. As regards state formation, the trajectory of the region has arguably described a bell-shaped curve, with early low levels of state formation associated with permeability, identity wars and empowerment of trans-state actors; in the middle period of state consolidation, the region approached the features of classic Westphalian realist anarchy—with power-balancing and increasing numbers of wars; while thereafter declining state formation and increased dependency on and destabilizing intervention by the Western core 31

Raymond Hinnebusch

(i.e. the Iraq Wars), finally eventuated in state collapses after the Arab Uprising and a resulting intensification of the regional power struggle via proxy wars in failing states. Yet, even though instability was built into the fabric of the states system, making it highly vulnerable to challenge by revisionist agency, the structure also proved highly resilient in turning back such challenges, with the fragmenting boundaries still intact and the conflicts they generated still seemingly intractable nearly a century later.

Evolution of the MENA regional states system MENA’s states system has gone through several identifiable stages. At each stage, the formation of the individual states was a product of the interaction between internal political forces and the simultaneously developing systemic (international, regional and trans-state) structures in which the states were embedded.10

The age of imperialism and liberal oligarchy (1920–50) The states system created under Western imperialism suffering from built-in instability. Even after independence, the region remained under British hegemony and economically dependent. The Arab states, too unstable to conduct rational foreign policies, resorted either to anti-imperialist rhetoric to appease domestic opposition or efforts to secure outside security guarantees against this opposition. The exceptions were Turkey, Israel and Iran, which, more the products of indigenous state-builders than foreign imperiums, enjoyed the greater legitimacy that gave leaders the autonomy in foreign policymaking to pursue policies resembling classic reason of state and more directed at perceived external threats. This unevenness of state formation, issuing from the earlier independence of Turkey and the transplant of a mobilized Zionism into the region, meant the Arab states confronted much stronger non-Arab opponents. Before long, the limited military capabilities of the Arab regimes and their shared dynastic/oligarchic ideology brought them to accept the rules of a multi-polar system—that no state should endanger the vital interests of its neighbours (Maddy-Weitzman 1993). This order was, however, soon aborted by a confluence of several forces. Narrow based oligarchic regimes, suffering de-legitimation from their association with the old imperial powers, lacked the institutional and material capacity to absorb the rising nationalist mobilization of the middle class, which embraced versions of Arab or Islamic identity as the most effective weapons against the oligarchic order, and especially as they infiltrated the army and captured the coercive apparatus from the oligarchs.

The age of pan-Arab revolution (1950–75) The age of pan-Arab revolution was a reaction to oligarchy and imperialism and enabled by the global level decolonization encouraged by bi-polarity. The Palestine War, the struggle to throw off imperialist influence (treaties, bases), and the Arab–Israeli conflict rapidly accelerated political mobilization in the Arab region that destabilized most of the regions’ regimes, ushering in a decade of military coups and military-led revolutions. As a result, states were launched on quite divergent status quo and revisionist trajectories. Status quo traditional monarchies tended to survive in small-population un-mobilized (or communally divided) societies, mostly in the Arabian Peninsula. The main threat from the mid-1950s was from Egyptian sponsored pan-Arabism, which found resonance among the small but dissatisfied middle and working classes. These geopolitically weak states required Western protection from regional threats. In the authoritarian-nationalist republics, where regimes originated in the 32

Historical context

middle-class overthrow of Western client elites by nationalist officers, state formation meant the reconstruction of states against the opposition of the displaced upper classes and amidst Western hostility, requiring, therefore, a measure of mobilized popular support through wealth redistribution. Economic dependency on the West was eased as aid and markets were accessed in the Eastern bloc. Possessing neither traditional nor democratic legitimacy, these regimes sought legitimization in radical nationalism: hence foreign policy took the form of anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist rhetoric. The main root of this differentiation was the impact of imperialism: where the length and intensity of the independence struggle radicalized social forces (as in Egypt or Aden) or where the imposition of the regional state system thwarted indigenous interests and identity (Syria, Iraq), it generated revisionism that ushered in radical republics. Egypt under Nasser emerged as a prototype of the nationalist republic exploiting Soviet protection and pan-Arabism to roll back British hegemony. Conversely, the more the new states relatively satisfied indigenous interests and identity, as in Turkey or Saudi Arabia, or where independence was achieved without political mobilization (the Arab Gulf), more status quo elites survived and newly independent states followed policies accommodating themselves to the West. With the onset of the Cold War, the Arab world split over how to respond to Western attempts to institutionalize a post-imperial security regime (the Baghdad Pact) in the region—at a time when the recent creation of Israel was widely seen as the work of the West. While the pro-Western regimes embraced this project, Nasser of Egypt saw it as a form of neo-imperialism and advocated an alternative Arab Collective security pact. His emergence from the 1956 Suez War as a popular Arab hero and the 1958 overthrow of the pro-Western Iraqi regime, established a powerful pan-Arab norm against foreign treaties and bases. Nasser’s potent appeal to the populations of other states made overt alignment with the West a legitimacy liability; he inspired Arab nationalist movements which overthrew oligarchies in a number of states and established similar Arab nationalist regimes (Seale 1965; Kerr 1971). The rise of Nasser precipitated an on-going inter-Arab contest for regional leadership. This contest was pursued not via military power but media wars over legitimacy (Barnett 1998: 2, 6, 16; Noble 1991: 61). For a period, Nasser was able to establish a sort of informal pan-Arab regime, under which Arab state foreign policies were expected to be governed by a common Arab interest as defined by Cairo, including independence from imperialism and its alliance systems, rejection of the legitimacy of Israel and support of the Palestine cause. Pan-Arabism had been established as a hegemonic institution in the Arab world. Egypt’s pre-eminence derived not just from Nasser’s pan-Arab appeal but also because it was the most stable, coherent and largest of the Arab powers facing weak oligarchies and unstable military regimes in the other Arab states (Walt 1987: 53; Noble 1991: 61–5, 74–5). The pan-Arab regional order was enabled by the emergent bi-polar global order: the Cold War and the weakening of the old imperial powers opened a brief window of opportunity in which counter-vailing Soviet power to some extent sheltered the Arab world from direct Western intervention or its full consequences. The pan-Arab regime was, however, bedevilled by conflicting interpretations of pan-Arab norms, (e.g. the extent of permissible relations with the West, the degree of militancy on Israel/Palestine) and Arab states threatened by Nasser took to anti-hegemonic ideological balancing against Egypt. Pan-Arabism was strong enough that Egypt could use it to threaten other state elites, thereby exacerbating inter-Arab conflict, but not quite strong enough to force a long-term uniformity of goals. Moreover, the practice by which each regime tried to “outbid” the other on behalf of the Palestine cause led Syria and Egypt to blunder into the 1967 war defeat by Israel that ruined Egyptian material and symbolic hegemony (Sela 1998; Barnett 1998; Gerges 1994) 33

Raymond Hinnebusch

Nevertheless, for a period it looked as if a new version of pan-Arabism would replace Nasser’s Cairo-centric version as preparation for the 1973 Arab–Israeli War to recover the lands lost in 1967 forged a new tripartite axis of states made up of the largest (Egypt), richest (Saudi Arabia), and most pan-Arab (Syria) states; Egypt and Syria co-ordinated their strategy in the war while Saudi Arabia financed the military preparations and used the oil weapon. The new order rested on acceptance of the sovereignty of the individual states while Arab Summits engineered an agreed deflation of the standards of Arabism by legitimizing peace negotiations with Israel. In parallel to this, a proliferation of trans-state economic ties—inter-Arab aid, investment and labour migration—driven by the post-war explosion in Arab oil wealth had the potential to provide an economic foundation for political concert. However, just as the conflict with Israel gave birth to the new Arab tripartite axis, so disagreements over the conflict’s resolution destroyed it as, after the 1973 war, Egypt’s Sadat opted for a separate peace with Israel, shifting the power balance toward Israel and putting a comprehensive peace off the agenda. Sadat’s promotion of (Egyptian) sovereignty over Arabism released pan-Arab constraints on the pursuit of individual state interests that jeopardized common Arab interests. In parallel, Saudi Arabia opted to address its insecurity through a massive upgrading of its security alliance with the US in return for recycling the bulk of its petrodollars to the West. Thus, the new Arab economic order also faltered. In this way, the individual states “deconstructed” Nasser’s Pan-Arab regime (Dessouki 1982).

The age of realism: war and anarchy (1975–90) A third stage in the evolution of the regional system was apparent by the 1970s, namely the increased, albeit incomplete, consolidation of both monarchies and republics, a reaction against the instability of revolution but also increasing external military threat, particularly for the front line Arab states in the conflict with Israel and later with Iran. It was enabled by an expansion in the availability of rent following the oil price explosion of the 1970s, which funded the creation of large state bureaucracies and militaries and the co-optation of the middle class. States adopted varying strategies in this new environment. Where wars and threat levels were the highest, as in Syria and Iraq, national security states were created that achieved exceptional levels of military mobilization and armament. As for the monarchies, oil-funded welfare states stabilized them, too, but, still unable to trust the middle class, they kept their armies small which required them, in consequence, to rely for their security on an increasing US naval presence in the Gulf. While the states system appeared to edge toward Westphalianization, it had yet to issue in a nation-states system since the regimes of the Arab world were unable to construct separate state identities convincing enough to marginalize competing sub- and supra-state identities and legitimize their material consolidation. To be sure, the 1967 war had discredited supra-state Arab nationalism, but identities did not necessarily therefore attach to the individual states. Rather the ideological vacuum was filled by a rival supra-state ideology, political Islam, that came to constitute the main opposition in all the Arab regimes, inspired by the Islamic revolution in Iran that Tehran set out to export. Yet Islamic movements faced stronger states than hitherto and the Iranian Islamic revolution was contained by the combined material power of the West and Iraq (Murden 2002). Advances in state consolidation had foreign policy consequences. Top elites, their power relatively consolidated, attained hitherto lacking autonomy of society in the making of foreign policy. In the republics, the hitherto radical elites, either displaced or chastened by defeat in war, moderated their ideological radicalism, thus largely ending the initial ideological cleavage with the conservative monarchies in the regional system. This, plus declining vulnerability to trans-state ideology, with the decline of Arabism and the hardening of states’ control over their 34

Historical context

territories, combined with rising threats from neighbouring states, issued in increased weight being given to geopolitical reason of state over identity issues in foreign policymaking. The collapse of the tripartite Arab axis had rendered the Arab system “centre-less,” unleashing a multi-polar struggle for power among several contending states. The consequent fragmentation of the Arab world made it more vulnerable to external threats on its peripheries: the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the Iran–Iraq War. These threats massively intensified insecurity, which states sought to address through self-help, particularly rent-funded arms races that made each state more of a threat to its neighbours, constructing a classic security dilemma. In this period, inter-state wars became frequent such that the realist expectation that war is always possible and has to be prepared for, seemed to hold. In making war, states “constructed” a regional system fraught with insecurity, which, in turn, precipitated a construction of national security states geared to ensure survival in this dangerous environment. Regional order came to rest on the institution of power-balancing. It was, however, undermined by material imbalances that provided occasions for war. These partly derived from great variations in state size and strength but were exaggerated by the rapid power advantages achieved by states—Israel, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia—that enjoyed exceptional oil revenues or foreign aid and hence access to massive arms deliveries from external powers. The Iran–Iraq War was made possible by the apparent collapse of Iranian military power in the Islamic revolution and the rising oil-fuelled military power of Iraq; the Israeli invasion of Lebanon by the defection of Egypt from the Arab-Israeli military balance. Revisionist states—Israel, Iran and Iraq—each made bids to dominate the regional order but stimulated anti-hegemonic alliances that contained their ambitions. Thus, the GCC and a pro-Iraq coalition formed to blunt Iran’s drive to export its revolution; the Syrian-Iran alliance was born out of defence against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the Iraqi invasion of Iran. Revisionist states were checked, albeit at high cost, sustaining the existing multi-polar balance of power.11

The age of global penetration (1990–2010) In a fourth stage that emerged in the 1990s, a coincidence of domestic vulnerability with major changes in the international system—the end of bi-polarity, the globalization of capitalism— weakened regional states and opened the door to external penetration in ways that had not been seen since before Nasser. Domestically, oil rent had financed a burst of state-building that ended in overdeveloped states exceeding the capacity of their own economic bases to sustain. The oil price bust of the 1990s left many states saddled with debt that greatly increased their vulnerability to Western pressures for structural adjustment and economic opening to the market and, with the decline of the Eastern bloc, there was now no alternative source of capital, markets or technology. This was accompanied by internal economic liberalization that led to alliances of state elites and crony capitalists and a post-populist form of authoritarianism that excluded the masses: regimes that built their legitimacy on a distributive social contract were being pushed toward a policy of trickle-down capitalism that eroded their social bases of support. The decline and later collapse of the Soviet Union was paralleled by unprecedented penetration of the region by US military power, notably in two wars against Iraq. The first war of 1990–91, which had been invited by many Arab states and was accompanied by US promises to deliver public goods—security, a resolution of the Arab–Israeli conflict—led to unprecedented bandwagoning of nearly all regional states with Washington (Hansen 2000). Crucially, the collapse of the Soviet Union had left the radical republics exposed, without the political protection they needed to blunt Western penetration of the region. The oil monarchies’ 35

Raymond Hinnebusch

location contiguous to much larger, poorer and militarily stronger states—Iran and Iraq—was their vulnerability; the invasion of Kuwait showed they could not survive in a world of powerful predatory neighbours without much enhanced Western protection. Their resultant foreign policy changes, hosting US bases, new security treaties—enabled a much more overt Western presence in MENA. Economic troubles led states to “trade” Western-friendly foreign policy for economic aid and investment. Regional states were becoming transmission belts for the enforcement of West-centric globalization manifest in structural adjustment, unpopular and inequitable peace treaties with Israel, and cooperation with US campaigns against terrorism and so-called “rogue states.” This, however, further eroded their precarious legitimacy. The most salient determinant of policy became the effort of regimes to balance between the increased international (Western) demands on them and domestic resistance to these demands. The1990s bandwagoning with the US gave way to re-balancing in the 2000s. The second US war on Iraq (2003) was not welcomed by regional states which, combined with the previous failure of the US to deliver on regional peace, de-legitimized its regional hegemony and precipitated a counter-balancing coalition—the “Resistance Axis” led by Iran and including Syria, Hizbollah and Hamas—that acquired increased public backing at the expense of US-aligned states such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. This was owing to the latters’ ineffectual stands on Israel’s Lebanon and Gaza Wars; to the US pull back from its intervention in Iraq, leaving it under Iranian influence; and owing to the partial realignment of Turkey and Qatar toward the “Resistance Axis.” However, the Arab Uprising completely reshuffled the cards among regional players.12

The age of Arab Uprisings (2010–) The Arab Uprising was a reaction to the authoritarian, West-centric, and in-egalitarian rule of the previous post-populist era, a revolt manifest in the overthrow of “Presidential Monarchies” and the initial empowerment of Islamic movements (Achcar 2013). However, the main result of the Uprising was further state weakening. Where, in more fragmented societies, the regime collapsed, fully or partially, as in Libya, Yemen and Syria, civil war generated insecurity and warlords profiteering via protection rackets and armed trans-state movements filled the vacuum. As regimes collapsed in some states, while others were left standing, the regional power balance shifted: power flowed away from the core Arab republics such as Egypt and Syria that experienced Uprisings, to the GCC, and Turkey, which sought to intervene in and affect outcomes in the Arab republics. The Syrian Uprising threatened to break the Resistance Axis to which the Asad regime was pivotal, causing Iran to intervene on behalf of the Damascus regime. The consequent regional power struggle took on the increasingly sectarian form of a Sunni vs. Shia cleavage between a coalition led by Saudi Arabia and Turkey against Iran. However, the monarchies and Turkey overreached themselves, and precipitated Russian intervention in Syria, which restored the power balance. While for a period state weakening seemed to open the door to revision of the long-standing borders of the states system, by the Islamic State and Kurdish separatist movements, global and regional states pushed back against this revisionism. In Egypt, authoritarian restoration empowered a harder version of authoritarianism and in Syria came close to doing so. The resilience of the state system and of authoritarian rule seemed exemplified yet again.

Notes 1 On the Ottoman Empire, see classic works, Barkey 2008; Hodgson 1961; Lieven 2003: 128–57: 46–85. 2 On Ottoman reform, see e.g. Ahmad 1993: 23–45, 31–51; Brown 1984: 21–81; Keyder 1987: 25–69; Bromley 1994: 53–5. 36

Historical context

3 On imperialism in the Middle East and its impact on the region see Salt 2008; Fieldhouse 2006; Fromkin 1989; Lawson 2006. 4 For the impact of identity on state formation, see Hudson 1977; Harik 1987; Korany 1987; Kienle 1990; Mufti 1996; Noble 1991; Sallouk and Brynen 2004; Bacik 2008. 5 See Bromley 1994; Bill and Springborg 1994; and Owen 1992, for classic overviews of state formation in the region. 6 On the revolutionary republics, see Dekmejian 1975; Waterbury 1983; Halpern 1963; Hudson 1977; Picard 1988; Owen 1992; Batatu 1978; Nahas 1985. 7 For key examples of the literature on monarchic survival see, Anderson 1991; Kostiner 2000; Herb 1999; Chaudhry 1997; Gause 1994. 8 On the consolidation of regimes, see Zartman 1982; Dawisha and Zartman 1988; Mufti 1996. 9 See Farsoun and Zacharia 1995; King 2009; Heydemann 2004; Guazzone and Pioppi 2009. 10 Classic works on the evolution of the states system include Walt 1987; Barnett 1998; Buzan and Gonzales-Palaez 2009; Brown 1984; Hinnebusch 2010. 11 Key works of this period include Taylor 1982; Alnasrawi 1991; Evron 1987; Gause 1991; Battah 1988. 12 On this period see Ehteshami 1997; Dodge 2006; Hansen 2000.

References Achcar, G. (2013), The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising, London: Saqi Books. Ahmad, F. (1993), The Making of Modern Turkey, London: Routledge. Alnasrawi, A. (1991), Arab Nationalism, Oil and the Political Economy of Dependency, New York, NY, and London: Greenwood Press. Anderson, L. (1991), “Absolutism and the resilience of monarchy in the Middle East,” Political Science Quarterly, 106:1, 1–15. Ayubi, N. (1995), Overstating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East, London: IB Taurus. Bacik, G. (2008), Hybrid Sovereignty in the Arab Middle East: The Cases of Kuwait, Jordan and Iraq, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Barkey, K. (2008), Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barnett, M. (1998), Dialogues in Arab Politics: Negotiations in Regional Order, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Batatu, H. (1978), The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Battah, A. and L. Yehuda (eds, 1988), The Arab-Israeli Conflict: Two Decades of Change, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Beblawi, H. and G. Luciani (1987), The Rentier State, London: Croom-Helm. Bill, J. and R. Springborg (1994), Politics in the Middle East, New York, NY: Harper-Collins. Bromley, S. (1994), Rethinking Middle East Politics, Oxford: Polity Press. Brown, L.C. (1984), International Politics and the Middle East: Old Rules, Dangerous Game, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Buzan, B. and A. Gonzales-Palaez ed. (2009), International Society and the Middle East: English School Theory at the Regional Level, New York, NY and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Chaudhry, K.A. (1997), The Price of Wealth, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Dawisha, A. and I.W. Zartman (1988), Beyond Coercion: The Durability of the Arab State, London: Croom-Helm. Dekmejian, R. (1975), Egypt under Nasir, New York, NY: State University of New York Press. Dessouki, A.a.-D.H. (1982), “The new Arab political order: Implications for the eighties,” in eds, M. Kerr and E.S. Yassin, Rich and Poor States in the Middle East, pp. 319–47, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Dodge, T. (2006), “War and resistance in Iraq: From regime change to collapsed state,” in eds, R. Fawn and R. Hinnebusch, The Iraq War, pp. 211–24. Ehteshami, A. (1997), The Middle East in the New World Order, London: Macmillan. Evron, Y. (1987), War and Intervention in Lebanon: The Syrian-Israeli Deterrence Dialogue, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Farsoun, S. and C. Zacharia (1995), “Class, economic change, and political liberalization in the Arab world,” in eds, R. Brynen, B. Korany and P. Noble, Political Liberalization and Democratization in the Arab world, vol. 1, pp. 261–80, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Press. 37

Raymond Hinnebusch

Fieldhouse, D.K. (2006), Western Imperialism in the Middle East, 1914–1958, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fromkin, D. (1989), A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, New York, NY: Avon Books. Gause, F.G. III (1991), “Revolutionary fevers and regional contagion: Domestic structures and the export of revolution in the Middle East,” Journal of South Asian & Middle East Studies, 14:3, 1–23. Gause, F.G. III (1994), Oil Monarchies: Domestic and Security Challenges in the Arab Gulf States, New York, NY: Council on Foreign Relations Press. Gerber, H. (1987), The Social Origins of the Modern Middle East, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Gerges, F. (1994), The Superpowers and the Middle East: Regional and International Politics, 1955–1967, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Guazzone, L. and D. Pioppi (2009), The Arab State and Neo-Liberal Globalization: The Restructuring of the State in the Middle East, Reading: Ithaca Press. Halpern, M. (1963), The Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hansen, B. (2000), Unipolarity and the Middle East, London: Routledge. Harik, I. (1987), “The origins of the Arab state system,” in ed, G. Salame, The Foundations of the Arab State, London: Croom-Helm. Harknett, R.J. and J.A. VanDenBerg (1997), “Alignment theory and interrelated threats: Jordan and the Persian Gulf crisis,” Security Studies, 6:3, 112–53. Herb, M. (1999), All in the Family: Absolutism, Revolution, and Democracy in the Middle Eastern Monarchies, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Heydemann, S. (2004), Networks of Privilege in the Middle East: The Politics of Economic Reform Revisited, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Heydemann, S. (2007), Upgrading Authoritarianism in the Arab World, Analysis Paper No. 13, Washington, DC: The Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. Hinnebusch, R. (2006), “Authoritarian persistence, democratization theory and the Middle East: An overview and critique,” Democratization, 13:3, 373–95. Hinnebusch, R. (2010), “Toward a historical sociology of state formation in the Middle East,” Middle East Critique, 19:3, 201–16, Fall. Hobden, S. and J. Hobson (2002), Historical Sociology of International Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hodgson, M.G.S. (1961), The Venture of Islam, Conscience and History in a World Civilization: The Gunpowder Empires and Modern Times, vol. 3, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hudson, M. (1977), Arab Politics: The Search for Legitimacy, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kerr, M. (1971), The Arab Cold War: Jamal Abd al-Nasir and his Rivals, 1958–1970, London: Oxford University Press. Kienle, E. (1990), Ba’th vs. Ba’th: The Conflict Between Syria and Iraq, London: IB Taurus. King, S. (2009), The New Authoritarianism in the Middle East and North Africa, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Korany, B. (1987), “Alien and besieged yet here to stay: The contradictions of the Arab territorial state,” in ed, G. Salame, The Foundations of the Arab State, pp. 47–74, London: Croom Helm. Lawson, F.H. (2006), Constructing International Relations in the Arab World, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lindholm, C. (2002), The Islamic Middle East: Tradition and Change, Oxford: Blackwell. Keyder, C. (1987), State and Class in Turkey, London: Verso. Kostiner, J. (2000), Middle East Monarchies: The Challenge of Modernity, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Lieven, D. (2003), Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals, London: Random House. Maddy-Weitzman, B. (1993), The Crystallization of the Arab State System, 1945–1954, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Mahoney, J. (2000), “Path dependence in historical sociology,” Theory and Society, 29:4, 507–48. Mufti, M. (1996), Sovereign Creations: Pan-Arabism and Political Order in Syria and Iraq, Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press. Murden, S. (2002), Islam, the Middle East, and the New Global Hegemony, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Nahas, M. (1985), “State systems and revolutionary challenge: Nasser, Khomeini and the Middle East,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 17:4, 507–27. 38

Historical context

Noble, P. (1991), “The Arab system: Pressures, constraints, and opportunities,” in eds, B. Korany and A.E.H. Dessouki, The Foreign Policies of Arab States: The Challenge of Change, pp. 41–78, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, Owen, R. (1992), State, Power and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East, London: Routledge. Picard, E. (1988), “Arab military in politics: From revolutionary plot to authoritarian state,” in eds, A. Dawisha and I.W. Zartman, Beyond Coercion: The Durability of the Arab State, pp. 116–46, London: Croom-Helm. Salloukh, B. and R. Brynen (2004), Persistent Permeability, Regionalism, Localism and Globalization in the Middle East, Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Salt, J. (2008), The Unmaking of the Middle East: A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Seale, P. (1965), The Struggle for Syria, London: Oxford University Press. Sela, A. (1998), The End of the Arab-Israeli Conflict: Middle East Politics and the Quest for Regional Order, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Smith, A. (1981), “States and homelands: The social and geopolitical implications of national territory,” Millennium, 10, 187–202. Smith, C.D. (1996), Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. Taylor, A. (1982), The Arab Balance of Power, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Walt, S. (1987), The Origins of Alliances, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Waterbury, J. (1983), The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat: The Political Economy of Two Regimes, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zartman, I.W., Tessler, M., Entelis, J., Stone, R., Hinnebusch, R. and S. Akhavi (1982), Political Elites in Arab North Africa, New York, NY, and London: Longman.

39

3 States and state-building in the Middle East Adham Saouli

Introduction One of the biggest challenges that has faced Arab societies in the last century is the building of a modern state—political entities including internationally recognized borders, legitimate governments and stable economies. Meeting the challenge has generated different ideologies, movements, ruling regimes, revolutions, military coups and wars. This chapter sheds theoretical and empirical light on why and how ruling regimes and societies in the Middle East have tried to meet the challenge. It addresses five key questions. It first asks the indispensable but difficult question: what is a state? Second, how and why have states and the states-systems formed in the Middle East region? Third, how can we theoretically and conceptually understand the state in the Middle East? Fourth, what have been the main challenges, dilemmas, and consequences of state-building? Finally, what impact did statebuilding have on regime–society relations in the Arab world?1

What is a state? Attempts to define and understand the state have captured the imaginations of many philosophers and social scientists. Some have focused on the functions states deliver such as law and order and social services. Others have treated the state as an instrument of power used by specific political forces to dominate over others in a given territory. But the definition that has endured several condemnations, interpretations and reinterpretations (Lottholz and Lemay-Hebert 2016), remains the one offered by the great German sociologist Max Weber. In a lecture delivered in 1919, Weber argued that a state is “compulsory political organization” whose “administrative staff successfully upholds the claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical forces in the enforcement of its order. . .within a given territory” (Weber 1978: 54, emphasis original). In Weber’s imagination, this definition does not reflect real states. Rather, it is an “ideal-type,” which we can use as a standard conceptual device to compare actual states with. Notice that the definition does not tell us why the state becomes the “compulsory” organization. Or why does it become the sole wielder of physical force? Or, crucially, how does it become the legitimate organization in the enforcement of order within a given territory? 40

State-building in the Middle East

Answering these questions required a historical and sociological investigation of specific cases. For example, another German sociologist, Norbert Elias (2000), examined what he labelled as the “monopolization process”—the centralization of violence and tax-collection in the state—to explain how the state emerged within Europe (see also Tilly 1990). Likewise, understanding states and state formation in the Middle East requires a political, cultural, and historical investigation of its formation and development. As a starting point, it is important to unpack Weber’s definition of the state; precisely, to examine how and why political boundaries have emerged in the Middle East; how did various forces seek to monopolize the use of violence in building their states; how did they legitimize their rule within their societies; and, finally, what impact this had on regime–society relations in the Middle East region.

State formation in the Middle East The modern state and regional state-system in the Middle East have two interrelated origins: the collapse of the Ottoman Empire (circa 1299–1920) and the gradual, but steady expansion of European influence in the region, which started in the eighteenth century. The Ottoman state was a multi-ethnic and religious empire that governed most of what we now call the Middle East (almost all the Arab states, Turkey and Israel) and Eastern Europe (including Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, the Balkans and Greece). The empire was ruled by the Osman (Ottoman) dynasty and Islam was the dominant ideology that offered the cultural, religious, and legal values that contributed to keeping the predominantly Muslim empire intact. The Ottoman leader was, thus, both a sultan (a king in the traditional sense of the word) but also a Caliph (successor of Prophet Muhammed and a perceived guardian of Islam), which bestowed legitimacy. The Ottoman Empire was a tributary state, primarily relying on the taxation of peasants and, thanks to the control of trade routes, tariffs. Thus, military expansion was crucial for Ottoman power and survival. But military expansion began to reach its limits in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, after which Ottoman power began to erode, leading to the loss of territories first at the peripheries (Eastern Europe and Greece) and then in Arab-Muslim territories in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Saouli 2012: 39–41). Ottoman decline and European expansion to the empire’s territories reflected the clash of two different socio-economic and political systems: a traditional, largely agrarian and tributary, Ottoman Empire confronting a technologically advanced capitalist nation-state—such as Britain and France (Bromley 1994: 61; Hinnebusch 2003: 15). European competition over the “sick man of Europe” began to cultivate the seeds of the interaction of international powers with indigenous forces in the region. Let us call this feature the external–internal nexus, which continues until now to explain international penetration of the Middle East region. The expansion of European powers to the rest of the world, including the Middle East, was driven by the need for primary products for their growing industrial economies, markets for their products, and by a geopolitical struggle to control strategic areas, especially trade routes. In many ways, this expansion was a continuation of wars that started in Europe, and which, among other things, gave rise to modern European states as we know them today (Tilly 1990). This European rivalry had two major implications for the birth of states in the Middle East. First, European expansion began to neutralize Ottoman power providing local leaders with a margin of opportunity to expand their own power. By playing off European powers against the Ottoman rulers, local leaders extracted recognition, a nascent territory (though the idea of national boundaries was not clear then), and relative autonomy. For example, Muhammad Ali Pasha, an Ottoman commander who was initially sent on an expedition to re-occupy Egypt after the French invasion of 1798, would then capitalize on his growing power in Egypt and 41

Adham Saouli

European-Ottoman rivalries to lay the ground for the modern Egyptian state. Muhammad Ali started a dynasty, which would be toppled in 1952, built the Egyptian army, and developed Egypt’s socio-economic foundations. But economic weakness in Egypt and British fear of an Ottoman–German alliance led to the British occupation of the Suez Canal as a strategic route tying Europe and India. Other examples are the sheikhdoms of the Arab peninsula and the Persian Gulf. In 1839, Britain occupied Aden as a “coaling station” en route to India. It then established protectorates in Bahrain (1881), Oman (1891), Kuwait (1899) and Qatar (1916). Known collectively as the “General Treaty of Peace,” these protectorates guaranteed British recognition of local leaders’ autonomy over their internal affairs and protection against external threats (Ottomans and European rivals); in return, the local leaders pledged not to align with other external powers. By occupying Egypt, Cyprus (1878), and establishing its power in the Persian Gulf, Britain secured its influence against French, German or Russian infiltration of the region (Saouli 2012: 41–4). The second implication for the birth of the state in the region is European rivalry in the Middle East. When the Ottoman Empire aligned with Germany in World War I, Britain altered its policy, which traditionally had hoped to keep the Ottoman Empire intact to block further European infiltration of the region. Through a subvention policy, Britain mobilized Arab support, particularly of Sheriff Hussein in the Hejaz area, against the Ottoman Turks. The defeat of Germany in Europe, however, expedited the collapse of the empire. It offered France and Britain (and Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution) the opportunity to divide the Ottoman territories into spheres of influence under the Sykes–Picot Agreement (1916) and developed in the San Remo Conference (1920). The agreements gave Britain control over Egypt, Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq; France over Lebanon, Syria and Mosul. The discovery of oil in Iran and attempts to block Russian southward expansion led Britain to occupy southern Iran (Saouli 2012: 39–41). The division of the region into spheres of influence came to be called by the newly formed League of Nations the “mandate system.” This new concept, which was developed after World War I, gave victors of the war the “right” and authority to govern the former Ottoman territories and to help them transition into fully-fledged independent states. The mandate system cultivated the legal foundations for the future recognition of the new entities as proto-states. But despite these legal frameworks and the growing acceptance of the norms of national independence, actual power remained in the hands of the European colonizers. The institutions that European powers established in the mandate states—such as the national armies, police, parliaments, and constitutions—and the alliances they forged at a local level aimed to institutionalize stability as a necessary condition for the realization of other economic and geo-strategic interests. This was particularly true in Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and Iraq. In the princedoms of the Gulf—such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, and later the UAE and Qatar—the process of state-building was more organic. This had important implications on indigenous statebuilding trajectories in the region.

Theorizing state-building: contexts and processes Before we examine actual state-building processes, it is crucial to conceptualize and theorize the process and the context in which it takes place. The demarcation of political/legal boundaries in the region by European powers and the establishment of institutions did not automatically give rise to consolidated national states. What emerged in the Middle East in this nascent period can be conceived as social fields. These are the contexts where states can form, develop, or even deform. The state, according to this approach, is not a fixed entity; it is, rather, a process of state formation or deformation. The state in its early formation is open to many possibilities. 42

State-building in the Middle East

A social field has several properties. First, a geographical and social space that is demarcated by a boundary (even if in reality the legitimacy of the boundary is contentious) that separates it from other social fields. Second, a social field includes a material structure, that is, the climatic and socio-economic conditions that shape the political processes in a field. For example, the history of Egypt cannot be separated from the presence of the Nile River, the concentration of the Egyptian population there, and the historical need for a “state” to organize irrigation, agriculture, or to police and adjudicate over social conflicts. Third, a cultural make-up, which involves the ethnic, religious, sectarian, tribal and linguistic make-up of a field. Lebanon’s contemporary state-building has, for example, been shaped by its sectarian make-up and the various attempts of sectarian leaders to control the state or find consociational arrangements to govern the divided society (Saouli 2012: 8–28). The above three elements form the context or environment that enables or constrains political interactions (see Figure 3.1). But political interactions, as the model below reveals, generates another two properties. First is the political structure. This is the sphere where rival political leaders, parties, ideologies compete for power within a social field. These rivalries are, once again, shaped and constrained by the cultural and material spheres of the social field. In state-building processes, competition—violent or otherwise—among various political actors finds its resolution in another property of a social field: institutions. Building institutions “takes place in the context of powerful actors attempting to produce rules of interaction to stabilize their situation vis-à-vis other powerful and less powerful actors” (Fligstein 2001:108). For example, when we talk about a Saudi state, we are usually referring, among other things, to the institutions the Saudi monarchy built in the context of state-building to consolidate and reproduce Saudi power over other forces in the Saudi social field. These institutions include, but are

Institutions (State)

Political Structure Interests/ Ideologies/Identities

Cultural Structure Ethnic/Linguistic/religious/sectarian Tribal composition

Material Structure Socio-economic System Geographic/Climatic Conditions

Figure 3.1  Structure of state formation (adapted from Saouli 2012)

43

Adham Saouli

not limited to, security forces (army, police, intelligence), tax-collecting agencies, courts, and ideological organizations (ministry of education). A social field demarcates the context in which state-building processes take place, but what about the process itself? Building new states involves the monopolization of three spheres of social and political life. First, the monopolization of the use of violence. This is not only a main element in Weber’s classic definition of the state; it is a pre-requisite in establishing an authority—legitimate or otherwise—in a social field. But to understand state-building, instead of taking the monopoly over the use of violence as a fixed element, we think of it as a sociopolitical process: monopolization (Elias 2000) or de-monopolization. By monopolizing the use of force, by controlling the security organs of a state, a political actor not only stabilizes its own domination, but also attempts to prevent its rivals from threatening its own power. But monopolizing coercion is not sufficient to establish domination in state-building processes. Political actors (kings, parties, regimes) also have to monopolize, or at least have control over, the economic sphere. By collecting taxes from the population, imposing tariffs on trade, borrowing money from lenders, or by directly controlling the economy, dominating political actors secure the economic means to dominate. Thus, in European state formation, tax-collection was not only a key in war-making but also in state development towards democratic governance. Finally, is the monopolization of the ideological sphere, which complements the other two areas. Through a religious idea (say Islamism), an ideology (such as Arab nationalism or socialism), or a tribal or sectarian identity, dominating forces legitimize their power, namely the use of violence. No ruler can constantly and comprehensively police each and every individual in its territory. Thus, dominating regimes rely on ideological frameworks that set certain norms of what is socially accepted or abhorred and laws that discipline and punish those who break them. These ideological frameworks are important as identity markers in nation-building processes, distinguishing the in-group from the out-group. They are also important as devices to mobilize the group against perceived or real enemies. In state-building processes, especially for states in their early formation, the three spheres— coercion, economy, and ideology—are arenas of contestation. In reality, the spheres are interconnected; we separate them here only for a theoretical purpose. When a political actor manages to monopolize the three spheres, what emerges is a regime. A regime usually refers to a political system (presidential, parliamentary, monarchical). Or, as intended here, a regime is a coalition of forces that shares a common ideological and political goal and thus a need to dominate over other rival forces to realize its goal. The coalition emerges from a social field’s cultural make-up and from its socio-economic forces. When specific social forces make political claims—claims that relate to the distribution and reproduction of power—they enter into the political sphere of a social field. When they win the political battle and consolidate this victory, they then attempt to institutionalize their power. Institutional building or rebuilding then serves to reproduce the regime’s domination in a field. Thus, for example, when we talk about the former Syrian regime of Hafez al-Asad, we are actually referring to a coalition of forces composed of Asad, his family, his predominantly-Alawi allies in the security organs of the state, the Ba’th Party, and allied members in the Syrian business class etc. Asad’s regime used the institutions it inherited or built in Syria to reproduce the regime’s dominance; among other things, it dominated over the ideological sphere (by imposing one interpretation of the Ba’th ideology) and by controlling the security organs of the state and thus preventing its enemies from toppling it (Saouli 2018; Hinnebusch 2001). But political domination inevitably generates resistance. Thus, all regimes that aimed to build states in the region faced resistance from oppositional forces. The political activity of this 44

State-building in the Middle East

opposition—be it social movements, political parties, or political leaders—has aimed to challenge the regime’s monopoly of the spheres discussed above. For example, Islamist movements in the twentieth century aimed to de-monopolize the regimes’ control of the ideological sphere in countries such as Syria, Egypt, Jordan or Iraq by offering alternative ideologies, ones, which they hoped, would challenge a regime’s legitimacy. Sometimes the ideological and political challenges took a violent dimension (as Syria in 1978–82; Iraq, 1975–9; Egypt and Algeria in the 1990s), which aimed to break the regime’s monopoly over coercion. But the fight over the control of coercive forces in some cases took place within the army, leading to successive military coups, especially in the republics of Syria, Yemen, Iraq or Libya (Saouli 2012: 22–3). Resisting dominant regimes is more than mere opposition to a ruling government. In early state-building processes, these oppositional forces can be understood as potentially alternative regimes: political forces that carry an ideological and political vision of the state, nation and society. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of social fields in the Middle East raised crucial questions about the identity of the peoples of the region (Islamic, Arab or otherwise), the political boundaries that should map the region or the appropriate ideology (socialism, nationalism) that should govern the society. Starting in the nineteenth century, Arab and Islamic thinkers offered various visions and answers to these questions (see Nassar 1986, 2017). But it was in the twentieth century that these visions began to materialize in and through political contestations within and among states in the region. For example, in the 1950s and 1960s, countries like Syria or Lebanon were politically grappling with several ideological currents: Arab nationalism, Syrian Nationalism, Lebanese Nationalism and, gradually, Islamism. At a regional level, Egypt’s Jamal Abdel Nasser’s Arab Nationalist ideology was competing with Saudi Arabia’s Islamism for regional influence. It was an Arab “cold war” (Kerr 1971). Resisting dominating regimes and the scramble for power within regimes has also involved the activation and mobilization of tribal, ethnic, sectarian or religious identities in state-building processes. Despite their ostensibly secular, Arab Nationalist regimes, in both Syria and Iraq, we observe from the 1960s a gradual attempt to activate sectarian, tribal and familial ties to consolidate the regimes of Hafez Asad and Saddam Hussein, respectively. These domestic ideological and identity divides added more pressure on the consolidation and development of the state in the Middle East (Saouli 2015, 2018).

The internal–external nexus: vulnerability and the democracy deficit The above historical and theoretical analyses so far suggest that the Arab state remains in the process of early formation, a process that can take the state either in the direction of consolidation and legitimization or in the direction of deformation. Faced by oppositional movements, regimes can lose control over the process of state-building; states can collapse. State collapse and civil wars in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Algeria or Lebanon in the last few decades offer numerous insights on the process of state deformation. But there is another feature that has presented major challenges to the consolidation of the Arab state: vulnerability to external subvention. In addition to being a state in the early process of formation, the Arab state is a late-comer to the international system. Whilst the making of European states was concomitant with the emergence of a European states-system, states in the Middle East came late to an already existing international states-system. Indeed, as we saw above, this international states-system, dominated by European powers, played a key role in the making of the Arab state. Thanks to the region’s geopolitical location and natural resources, external intervention continues to impact the formation and development of the states in the region. State formation or deformation is, thus, not a purely internal affair. How? 45

Adham Saouli

To start with, it is important to recognize that regimes and societies in the Middle East had to simultaneously cope with three monumental goals (which in European history required four centuries to realize): state-consolidation, nation-building; national independence; and democratization. This created major challenges and dilemmas for the late-forming states. The main dilemma faced by many regimes in the region was the concurrent need to, on the one hand, legitimize their rule through political incorporation (democratization) and, on the other hand, to survive in power as a ruling regime. As mentioned above, these regimes came to power with national and political visions which, if they were to succeed, they would have had to suppress rival movements. The dilemma: if you incorporate other political forces to increase state legitimacy, you risk eroding your own regime’s power and ideological project. Not surprisingly, regimes choose the survival of their power and ideological project (Saouli 2012: 50–61). In the literature, this has come to be called authoritarian maintenance, which has varied from one case to the other. But choosing regime survival generated further dilemmas for ruling elites. To consolidate their power and to prevent external intervention in their states, ruling regimes repressed the opposition; however, in doing so, they gradually weakened the legitimacy of their regimes and increased the vulnerability of their states to external intervention (Saouli 2012, 52–67). First, domestic insecurity due to intra-regime rivalries, fear of the opposition, and intervention by external rivals, required controlling state institutions by installing key allies in strategic positions. It also required controlling everything that is political in the state: ideology, media, education etc. Put simply; this involved the deepening of the authoritarian system and the contracting of political power to a ruling family and a dictator (e.g. Asad’s Syria, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Mu’amar Qadafi’s Libya). But, ironically, as various regimes were deepening their dominance, their political power was eroding. By relying on kinship, tribal or sectarian ties to consolidate their power, ruling elites weakened the influence of ideology (say Arab nationalism) as a device in nationbuilding or as a unifying ideology for the regime. Worse, they contributed to the mobilization and reproduction of identity divides existing at the cultural sphere of their societies. With time, oppositional forces would draw on these identities to rally against the regimes (examples including the Muslim Brothers in Syria or Dawa Party in Iraq in the 1970s) (Saouli 2018, 2019). Second, regime erosion internally deepened its vulnerability to external forces. Domestic political opposition and accumulated grievances offered rival external forces of the regime the opportunity to weaken it, easing—once again, not without irony—external intervention in the state. For example, Saddam Hussein’s attempts to consolidate his power internally and to limit external intervention in his country generated an unintended consequence: gradually, and since the 1970s, we observe an increase in internal opposition and external intervention (through the support of his opposition), leading to the swift crumbling of the regime after the US-led invasion of 2003. These dilemmas have generated a weak Arab state. Weak, not in its ability to exercise political control in society—on this level, many Arab states are quite strong, or indeed fierce. But weak in terms of legitimacy. But this theory needs a qualification. The effect of the dilemma on various Arab states has varied. Some cases have fared better than others. In the largely homogeneous and oil-rich monarchies—such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE and Kuwait—the trajectory of state formation differed from the heterogeneous societies of Syria, Iraq, Yemen or Libya. In the monarchies, the ruling families came from the tribal, religious and social make-up of society. They did not seek to override tribal ties through secular and/or nationalist ideologies. They have designed and controlled institutions to reproduce their power, incorporating allied tribes and social forces and punishing rebellious ones. Rent from oil and its allocation through social provisions (schools, national health services, employment 46

State-building in the Middle East

in the state) helped to consolidate and reproduce monarchical rule and, to varying degrees, guarantee the loyalty and acquiescence of citizens. Finally, external factors have also contributed to limiting the effect of the dilemma. Allied to the West (first Britain and then the US), Arab monarchies have carefully formulated status-quo foreign policies to prevent the emergence of regional hegemons or powers that would threaten their states. For example, in the 1960s, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, and Morocco played key roles as counter-balance forces against the Arab Nationalist movement and regimes, especially Nasserite Egypt and Ba’thist Syria and Iraq. Since 1979, Saudi Arabia has also been the countervailing force against Iranian Islamist revolutionism. These internal and external policies have helped maintain both regimes as powers and the territorial states of monarchical regimes. But they have not, yet, overcome the democracy deficit (Saouli 2012: 74–98). As we shall see below, the effect of the dilemma on heterogeneous societies has been more damaging. Divided into religious, sectarian or ethnic communities, heterogeneous societies offer the cultural elements (see the social field model above) that can be easily activated or politicized by political actors in processes of state-building and during episodes of political contention. This has had an important effect on political change and continuity in Arab politics.

Regime–society relations: political change and continuity State-building, as you have gathered so far, is a dynamic process. At best, it is an attempt by a regime to establish social and political order within a given territory. These attempts have faced major hurdles and resistance by affected forces. State-building in the region has seen periods of stability, but also episodes of contentious politics that offered new horizons for political change.2 The rise of nationalist regimes in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Tunisia and Algeria in the 1960s and 1970s represented a break with the past: a revolt against the colonial and domestic allied rulers; an attempt to advance indigenous ideologies; develop independent economies; and, finally, to realize national liberation. In many ways, it was a “revolution from above.” But in the process, these populist regimes faced opposition, not least from the Islamist movement that offered a different ideological vision to the largely secular and Arab Nationalist regimes. Authoritarianism (see above), failure to sustain state-driven economic development, and defeat in war (as in the 1967 war with Israel) had by the late 1970s weakened the legitimacy of post-independence regimes. Capitalizing on these developments, Islamist movements mobilized against regimes during several episodes of collective violence. Ba’athist Syria was in a civil war in 1978–82, when the regime was fighting the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), of which membership was punishable by death. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein’s regime repressed the Da’wa (Islamist-Shi’a) Party, and also made membership of the movement punishable by death. After the Islamists won the first round of the elections in Algeria, the military intervened to overturn the results leading to a bloody war in the 1990s. For most of the 1980s and 1990s, Arab regimes were fighting for survival whilst adapting, through economic liberalization, controlled political openings, and pragmatic foreign policies, to rising challenges. But in 2011, Arab societies revolted against their regimes, once again opening new horizons for political change and state-rebuilding. These Uprisings—leaderless revolts from below— shook the foundations of the regimes that rose to power in the 1960s and threatened the legitimacy of monarchies. As opposed to the norms of Arab nationalism, national independence, and Palestine liberation, which predominated in the twentieth century, the latest revolts emphasized freedom from the ruling regimes, human dignity against the police state, and democracy. The fast pace of the revolts exposed regimes’ weaknesses; in the course of a few weeks, the presidents of Tunisia and Egypt were toppled. The Uprisings also highlighted the vulnerability of the state; 47

Adham Saouli

in a few months, the states of Syria, then Libya, and then Yemen collapsed and transformed into battlefields of regional and international forces. The Uprisings generated revolutions and democratic transition (as in Tunisia), counterrevolutions (Egypt, Bahrain), civil wars (Syria, Iraq, Yemen) and regime resilience (Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait) (Hinnebusch 2018). The varying outcomes of the Arab Uprisings reflected how different factors had shaped regime–society relations in these countries and included: state-building trajectories, cultural make-up of the state, geopolitical location, economic resources and the position of the army in the political system (Saouli 2012: 63–7). But the outcomes also reflected the effect of the immediate regional and international political conditions. Egypt and Tunisia, for example, swiftly toppled their autocrats (Husni Mubarak and Ben Ali, respectively). As largely homogeneous societies, with relatively robust national identities, both countries initially managed to transition to democracy. During the transition, contentious issues were centred on political and ideological differences (Islamists versus non-Islamists; nature of the constitution, etc.). But whilst in Tunisia, the army had traditionally been less political, in Egypt the army, since the 1952 revolution, formed the backbone of the state. On the other hand, whilst in both countries the Islamists, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, had a strong presence, in Tunisia secular political parties and labour syndicates formed a strong and organized countervailing power to the Islamist. This political pluralism, and the army’s neutrality, paved the way to constitutional changes and the transition to democracy. The case of Egypt reflected a political divided society. The MB, one of the oldest and most ambitious oppositional movements in the Arab world, hoped to capitalize on the fall of Mubarak to advance its own political agenda; but this stood against the political wishes of many Egyptians who feared the Islamization of state and society. Political polarization, absence of a united political opposition and the military which was eager to regain its position in the system, led to a popular military coup in 2013 that toppled the first freely elected (MB) president of Egypt. The return of the army, which later brought Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi to the presidency, stalled the transition to democracy and reproduced the previous authoritarian system. This outcome in Egypt was not only due to internal affairs. The political polarization in Egypt mirrored a regional struggle between the MB alliance led by Turkey and Qatar and its rivals, namely Saudi Arabia and the UAE, who supported and recognized al-Sisi. The internal–external nexus, once again, continued to shape regime–society struggles and state-building in the Middle East. But it was in Syria where this nexus had its greatest impact. To start with, even before the Arab revolts of 2011, Syria was vulnerable. Its state-building trajectory had deepened its authoritarian regime, as we saw, at a theoretical level above. Elements of its heterogeneous society (a majority of Sunni-Arabs, with significant and influential minorities: Alawites, Christians, Druzes, Ismailis and Kurds) were politicized during the state-building process. Its geopolitical location, bordering Israel/Palestine, Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan and Iraq combined with its 30-year-old alliance with Iran and Hizbollah also made Syria vulnerable to external factors. When the Uprising took place in March 2011, the regime was suddenly exposed to domestic and external threats. Internally, like their peers in the Arab world, many Syrians hoped to topple the authoritarian regime and to enact democratic changes. But having carefully detected the changes in Tunisia and Egypt, the Syrian regime responded swiftly and violently, preventing the rise and mobilization of a united opposition. The regime used techniques of regime survival which it had accumulated during its long reign: violent repression; delegitimizing the opposition as collaborators allied to foreign enemies or as terrorists intending to cause chaos in Syria; accusing the Islamist opposition of intending to Islamize the state and society and, thus, activating sectarian identities, particularly the fears and emotions of minorities (Hinnebusch and Saouli 2019). 48

State-building in the Middle East

Externally, the Syrian regime’s rivals capitalized on the domestic revolt and the regime’s violent response to it to promote their agenda of removing Asad and, thus, weakening and isolating his regional allies—Iran and Hizbollah—who in turn hoped to keep Asad in power. By the end of 2011, Syria was fast collapsing into a bloody civil war. What initially appeared as a “strong” and stable Syrian “state” turned out to be nothing but one force, a regime—or a coalition of forces—in a politically-divided and externally penetrated country. By 2017, Syria was penetrated by among other states, Iranian, Turkish, American, Russian and numerous other pro and anti-regime armed political movements (such as Hizbollah). The developments in Syria (but also Iraq, Libya or Yemen) reflect the failure of state-building in these heterogeneous societies. The Arab revolts, on the other hand, tested the resilience of Arab monarchies. A few weeks after the fall of Ben Ali and Mubarak, Arab monarchies activated the techniques of regime survival. Oil-rich countries increased the salaries of state employees, extended social welfare programmes and pumped money into the economy. Kuwait, for one example, offered money and food staples for each citizen. Except for Qatar, which supported the Arab Uprisings, state religious organs demonized the Arab revolts accusing protesters of fomenting fitna (sedition) and causing disorder in Arab societies. Poor monarchies of Morocco and Jordan used tried and tested tools of political manipulation: offering some constitutional and political concessions to the opposition whilst manipulating their ideological and political divides to maintain a dominant role for the monarchy. They hoped, and largely succeeded, in riding out the political storm. Regime resilience in the monarchy was not a mere domestic affair. Political disorder, civil wars, sectarian mobilization, and international intervention in various cases (Syria, Iraq, Libya Egypt) did not offer a positive demonstration effect for societies in the monarchies. The monarchies continued to offer two crucial provisions: order and social welfare. These domestic and regional developments limited the spread of the norm of democracy. Aware of the dangers of democratic transition, Arab monarchies, especially Saudi Arabia and the UAE, played a key role in influencing developments in other cases. In the wake of the Arab Uprisings, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) invited Jordan and Morocco to join the club of rich monarchies. Although this invitation did not materialize, it did reflect the anxiety of the GCC. Saudi Arabia intervened militarily in Bahrain and quelled the (predominantly-Shi’a) Uprising that threatened to topple the monarchy. And along with the UAE, it offered financial backing to Jordan, Bahrain and Morocco—and after the military coup in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE financially backed al-Sisi (Kamrava 2012).

Conclusion The latest episodes of contentious politics have, thus, tested the Arab states, regimes and regime– society relations. The outcomes reflect varying state-building trajectories, a country’s geopolitical location, its social composition and its economic resources. But despite all of this, there is one constant: the resilience of the state as a territorial entity. Despite the hope and attempts of various Islamist (including the latest attempt by the so-called Islamic State which captured large swathes of territories from Iraq and Syria) and Arab Nationalist movements, the national territorial state continues to map the political world of the Arabs. For many Arab societies and individuals, the state (what we conceptualized here as the social field) has become the natural landscape that shapes their political imaginations, visions and identities. But, whilst Arab societies have, intentionally or not, demarcated the boundaries of the state, these states continue to face major challenges. First is the establishment of legitimate governments—namely, governments elected by the people. Except for Tunisia (and maybe Lebanon and Iraq), most Arab regimes and societies continue to struggle over the question of 49

Adham Saouli

legitimate authority. Economic hurdles (unemployment, corruption etc.), higher literacy rates and diffusion of democratic norms (elections, accountability, participation) will very likely intensify the quest for legitimate authority. The second is the contestation over identities, especially in heterogeneous societies, which will continue to shape the politics of these countries and their foreign policies. This also includes the struggle over the position of Islam in the politics and societies of the Arab world. The last is economic development. Apart from the oil-rich countries that have managed to modernize their economies and with varying degrees diversify them, other Arab countries (especially Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon) continue to face serious difficulties (such as high unemployment rates among university graduates) in developing stable economies. Democratic deficit, identity divides and economic constraints may well make this century one of political protest that may reconfigure regime–society relations in the region and bring the Arab state closer to Weber’s imagination.

Notes 1 This chapter draws on my previous studies on the topic (Saouli 2006, 2012, 2015, 2018, 2019). 2 Contentious politics refers to the “episodic, public, collective interaction among makers of claims and their objects when (a) at least one government is a claimant, an object of claims, or a party to the claims and (b) the claims would, if realized, affect the interests of a least one of the claimants” (McAdam et al. 2001: 5).

References Bromley, S. (1994), Rethinking Middle East Politics, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Elias, N. (2000), The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell. Fligstein, N. (2001), “Social skills and theory of fields,” Sociological Theory, 19:2, 105–25. Hinnebusch, R. (2001), Syria: Revolution from Above, London and New York, NY: Routledge. Hinnebusch, R. (2003), The International Politics of the Middle East, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hinnebusch, R. (ed) (2018), After the Arab Uprisings: Between Democratization, Counter-revolution, and State Failure, London and New York: Routledge. Hinnebusch, R. and A. Saouli eds, (2019), The War for Syria: Regional and International Dimensions, London: Routledge. Kamrava, M. (2012), “The Arab Spring and the Saudi-led counterrevolution,” Foreign Policy Research Institute, Winter. Kerr, M. H. (1971), The Arab Cold War: Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasir and his Rivals, 1958–1970, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lottholz, P. and N. Lemay-Hebert (2016), “Re-reading Weber, re-conceptualizing state-building: From neo-Weberian to post-Weberian approaches to the state, legitimacy, and state-building,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 29:4, 1467–85. McAdam, D., Tarrow, S. and C. Tilly (2001), Dynamics of Contentioun, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nassar, N. (1986, 2017), The Visions of the Umma [Tasawurat al-Umma], Beirut: Arab Centre for Research and Policy Studies. Saouli, A. (2006), “Stability under late state formation: The case of Lebanon,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 19:4, 701–17. Saouli, A. (2012), The Arab State: Dilemmas of Late Formation, London: Routledge. Saouli, A. (2015), “Back to the future: the Arab Uprisings and state (re) formation in the Arab world,” Democratization, 22:2, 315–34. Saouli, A. (2018), “The tragedy of Ba’athist state-building,” in eds, R. Hinnebusch and O. Imady, The Syrian Uprising: Domestic Origins and Early Trajectory, London: Routledge. Saouli, A. (2019), “Sectarianism and political order in Iraq and Lebanon,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, 19:1, 67–87. Tilly, C. (1990), Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Weber, M. (1978), Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 50

4 Political regimes of the Middle East and North Africa Oliver Schlumberger

With respect to the nature of its political regimes,1 the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA) has for decades been labelled the “world’s most unfree region.” This chiefly refers to the longstanding and infamous absence of democracy in the Arab world, a feature that also triggered the notion of “Middle Eastern exceptionalism.” The present chapter first briefly looks at the formation of postcolonial political regimes2 before it goes on to inquire more specifically into the sub-types of authoritarianism as they prevail in the MENA region. Third, I will discuss the suggested causes of this conspicuous absence of democracy, before a fourth sub-section reflects on patterns of change in—and change of—political regimes as we have seen them emerge out of the mass popular protests dubbed the “Arab Spring,” and which affected most Arab countries from late 2010 onwards. The chapter concludes by sketching out, on the basis of this cumulative analysis, three open questions and/or research desiderates with respect to political regimes in the MENA and beyond. While a broad scholarly consensus exists that the MENA has been characterized, and still is, by an overwhelming dominance of authoritarian political regimes, there are three important qualifications to this broad-brush picture that need mentioning in order not to oversimplify the subject matter: first, the non-Arab countries of Israel (in its internationally recognized 1948 borders only!) and Turkey have to some extent represented exceptions to this rule which had been confirmed for most (or at least some) of the post-independence period in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A second (partial) exception to this rule might be Iran before the CIA-orchestrated coup against the government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in August 1953—even though the constitutional monarchy that Iran had been since 1906 must not be mistaken for a democracy. Third, and most recently, Tunisia arguably represents a case of political regime transition much in the sense of what “transitologists” (those who study the systemic transition of political regimes from one type to another, e.g. O’Donnell, Schmitter and Whitehead 1986) conceive of as “successful” democratization—a case that runs counter to the overall trend of authoritarian resilience that still dominates the region as a whole.

51

Oliver Schlumberger

Post-independence political unrest, state-building and regime formation Unlike some other developing regions such as, e.g. Latin America, the countries of the MENA region have been relative late-comers into the world of sovereign nation-states.3 While Turkey and Iran, the two former empires, represent the exception (cf. on these two cases Owen 2004: 19–22), Israel and the Arab states reached independence only around the middle of the twentieth century. Other than Saudi Arabia (independent since 1932), the Arab Gulf countries gained their sovereignty even later, well into the second half of the last century and some even as late as the early 1970s. They can thus be considered rather young states when seen in international comparison. While the mode of gaining independence differed quite substantially across countries and sub-regions, the pattern of political regimes that emerged out of independence was essentially bifurcate: on the one hand, some colonial powers used their leverage to support the establishment of traditional hereditary monarchies (as did the UK with Jordan and Iraq, and later a range of smaller states on the former “Pirates’ Coast” along the Arab peninsula), while the Frenchcolonized territories, as a rule of thumb, ended up in republics rather than monarchies (examples are Syria, Lebanon, Algeria and Tunisia).4 The Italian legacy in what later became Libya lead to a short-lived and weak monarchical regime whose head, King Idriss, abdicated and gave way, in 1969, to an unbloody coup d’état led by Mu‘ammar al-Qhaddafi who was to rule Libya up to his lynching by militant opponents in summer 2011.5 Libya, however, was among the last in a series of coups d’état, overthrows and revolutions that saw their first instance in 1920–23 with the demise of the Ottoman Empire and subsequent abolition of the Sultanate (and Caliphate) in Turkey. It was but 30 years on, in 1952 with the Egyptian “Young Officers” around Gamal ‘Abdel Nasser ousting the former Egyptian King Farouq and thus ending the monarchy, that a whole series of revolutions shook the region. Second after Egypt was Iraq with a nationalist coup against King Faisal II in 1958 that resulted in the abolition of the monarchy and brought Abdel Karim Qasim to the presidency of a newly formed republic,6 followed by the coup against the Mutawakkili Kingdom of Imam Yahya in Yemen, and finally the March Revolution of 1963 in Syria.7 As in Iraq, the Syrian revolution was soon followed by a second coup which, again like in Iraq, saw the Arab socialist Ba‘th party emerge victorious out of the chaos. The Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 when the monarchical dynasty of the Persian shahs was overthrown can be seen as a “latecomer” and marked the preliminary endpoint in this series of roughly two decades of revolutionary transformations of countries in the region. By the late 1970s, the overall landscape of political regimes was essentially consolidated in a manner that would last for several decades—up until the Arab upheavals of 2010–11. While the monarchies in Jordan, Morocco and those in the Gulf (except Yemen) had managed to survive the turbulent post-war times of nationalist revolutions, the “other half” of the Arab countries had undergone revolutionary processes that were usually initiated by a faction of young military officers (rather than, as in “great social revolutions,” initiated by the masses from below), that, after their successful coups, sought to engender legitimacy for the new regimes through some sort of collectivist-progressivist ideology. Such coups also served to do away with a first round of parliamentary experiments (usually in the 1920s to 1950s) which then had been filled with traditional notables, absentee landlords and remnants of a trading and financial bourgeoisie that had risen as clients of the colonial powers’ administration. These patterns of state-formation and state-building led to a now classical distinction, in the literature, between these two types of states, the traditional and conservative monarchical state on the one hand, and the progressivist presidential republics on the other. 52

Political regimes of the MENA

Middle Eastern versions of authoritarianism The traditional divergence of political “regimes”: monarchies vs. republics For generations of Middle East scholars, the dichotomous distinction between republics and monarchies has served as a parsimonious and thus compelling way of mapping the region’s political systems. Well into current times, the literature on Middle East politics has (with a few exceptions such as Henry and Springborg 2001) traditionally and predominantly distinguished in their examination of forms of political rule in the Middle East between hereditary monarchies and presidential republics. While this distinction does come with a bundle of connotations, the features associated with these two general types of authoritarianism in the region typically allude to, first, historical pathways that are intimately linked to the region’s history of modern nation-state formation. Second, the monarchy–republic divide has led scholars to inquire into how and why monarchies, often assumed to be an outdated form of political order, could survive in an otherwise modernizing world of nation-states. Such research was often inspired by Huntington’s (1968: 177ff.) earlier findings about what he had called the “King’s dilemma” (cf., e.g. Anderson 1991). And third, the classical monarchy-vs.-republic divide also led to research puzzles in which the distinction between monarchies and republics was used as an independent variable that was sought to explain differences between individual countries such as, for instance, divergent foreign policy-orientations, differences in their economic policies, in the sources from which they seek to garner legitimacy, and other such dependent variables. As a tendency, republics were seen as embracing some form of collectivist and/or progressivist ideology (Arab socialism; Arab nationalism) that stood in contrast to the much more conservative positions held by monarchs in the Arab Gulf countries (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, United Arab Emirates—but not Yemen). Among the so-called “Arab socialist regimes,” the Ba‘th party in Syria and Iraq stood out because it maintained the core elements of its legitimizing ideology, at least de nomine, into the twenty-first century, that is: well after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Up until the military defeat of Saddam Hussein by the US-led coalition that invaded Iraq in 2003, and well into the reign of Bashar al-Asad who came to office as Syrian president in 2000, no large-scale changes had officially been implemented with regard to the legitimizing ideological foundations of the regimes in both Syria and Iraq. The Ba‘thi leitmotif of “wahda, hurriya, ishtirakiya” (unity, freedom, socialism) should be read as a decidedly postcolonial statement rather than be taken at face value. It sought to establish and legitimize the “unity” of the nation, with “nation” being understood as the “Arab nation” (al-umma al-‘arabiya or al-watan al-‘arabi); the striving for “freedom” was meant not in a liberalist democratic sense, but as the freedom from foreign occupation and oppression that the countries concerned had experienced from their Western colonizers in various phases and shades ever since Napoleon’s intervention in Egypt in 1798; and “socialism” referred to redistributive policies that usually included land reform and redistribution as well as the nationalization of key (mostly heavy) industries and/or financial systems in order to break the power monopoly of an older elite of traditional notables and absentee landlords who had been the beneficiaries of (or at least been viewed as cronies of) the French and British colonial powers. Thus, the Ba‘th party’s motto can be read more as an anti-colonialist statement rather than as a mere imitation of the communist ideology that prevailed in the former Soviet Union or in China under Mao Tsedong. By contrast, the monarchies were extremely wary of the social-revolutionary visions promoted by the republics and feared spill-over effects into their own countries. The reign of 53

Oliver Schlumberger

Middle Eastern monarchs depended on them being viewed as legitimate by either (a) their noble descent, so that tradition—if necessary an invented one as well as invented historical narratives—played a major role in the discourses of legitimation, or (b) their role as not only worldly but also religiously legitimized rulers, either, again, through tracing their ancestors back to the prophet, or by fulfilling religiously important functions, such as, for instance, the Saudi king in his role as “guardian of the two holy cities” who is responsible for the wellbeing of over a billion pilgrims to Mecca each year. More business friendly in their economic policies, it came naturally that the monarchies also tended to be more Western-oriented in their foreign policies during the Cold War. They were the natural allies of the United States just as the “radical” republics enjoyed the support of their Soviet patrons.

Processes of convergence: deciphering “regime” beyond the form of state The Arab type of “socialism,” however, did not have too much in common with the communist regimes of the former Warsaw pact (the Soviet Union plus its allies); from the beginning, it had assumed a decidedly local twist, and even been turned into a truly indigenous pattern of legitimation in its combination with Arab nationalism. Apart from legitimizing them domestically, the collectivist ideology was used by the Arab republics as a means for international alliance-building during the Cold War. That way, most Middle Eastern regimes (conservative monarchies as well as progressivist republics) managed to extract substantial amounts of international political, but also financial, support (or: rent equivalents) from their respective superpower allies without sacrificing their independence in policy-making. Rather than being reduced to the role of mere “satellites,” Arab states thus enjoyed a significant degree of agency due to their geostrategically vital position in the international system. Furthermore, the fact that Arab socialism only remotely resembled that of Eastern Europe has probably also helped the Middle Eastern republics survive the end of the communist ideology after the disintegration of the Soviet Union: by the 1980s, the ideological narratives of “Arab socialism” had become more and more moderated, modified, and ultimately emptied of their former more radically redistributive contents. As a result, the former distinction between “radical” and “conservative” Arab countries became less and less viable. While the most visible differences between republics and monarchies certainly lay in the sphere of economic policy, it should not be forgotten that the economically liberal monarchies had also built up vast public sectors—mainly for social reasons and in order to provide a rapidly growing labour force with employment opportunities. In both republics and monarchies, the state developed into an “employer of last resort.” At the same time, countries such as Tunisia, Yemen, and, of course, Egypt with Sadat’s infitahpolicies of the 1970s, had turned their back on progressivist ideologies and their earlier strictly redistributive (or, in Hinnebusch’s words: populist) policies. This process has, for the presidential republics, been described as their turn into “post-populist Arab regimes” (Hinnebusch 1985, 2014). While the usage of “post” adjectives to characterize political regimes is, from a conceptual point, always questionable, the ensuing changes to the nature of the regimes were important as they effectively meant a convergence in terms of actual policy-orientations. By the mid-1990s, even Algeria and Syria had followed suit. Thus, a process of convergence between the formerly socialist and the conservative regimes had largely been accomplished. While this is not to say that a uniform Arab authoritarianism ever existed, there are striking political and economic parallels despite marked differences in political rhetoric. 54

Political regimes of the MENA

It becomes clear, thus, that as the post-independence regimes consolidated, either with or without having undergone revolutions, the differences that remained were largely rhetorical and more along questions of policy contents rather than in the nature of regimes, in their core traits, or in the instruments that were used for regime maintenance. Yet, as this process of regime convergence between monarchies and republics became empirically more and more obvious, so did the need to conceptually move beyond the classical monarchy-vs.-republic dichotomy which ultimately characterizes the form of state rather than the political regime as defined above. It is possible to identify some common denominators around which all authoritarian Arab regimes converged. First and most importantly in this context, all Arab regimes relied, in their modes of organizing the political regime, on strongly personalized neo-patrimonial patterns of political rule, often with an ideal-type personalist leader at the helm of the regime’s power structure. The stylish oxymoron of a “presidential monarchy” (Hinnebusch 1985: 78) was meant to capture exactly these developments of the republics into regimes that resembled the traditional monarchies in that they had become strongly personalized systems in which several leaders even sought to introduce the hereditary principle.8 In the economic sphere, most had developed either rentier- or semi-rentier politico-economic structures. Intra-regional resource transfers, conceptualized as “political petrolism” (Korany 1986), consisted in labour exports from the oil-poor to the oil-rich countries that were, in turn, matched by capital transfers from the oil-rich to the resource-poor countries (along with growing remittances by foreign workers to their families in the non-oil countries). That way, even the resource-poor Arab economies had developed structures of rentierism (or: “second-order nonoil rentiers,” Beblawi 1987: 62) to a considerable extent by the mid-1980s, so that the political convergence of regimes was matched, despite large differences in individual wellbeing and economic strength, by a similar convergence of the political economies (see Chapter 16 in this volume). Another common feature of both republics and monarchies consists of their economies being largely liberalized, yet still largely state-controlled through a myriad of direct and indirect means of control. Independent of the economic policy-orientations they otherwise displayed, the strong state-owned or state-controlled share in the national economies became a prominent feature in both. Third, the social composition of regimes and their supporters changed over time. By the beginning of the 1990s, as the republics had started to economically liberalize, a partially reconfigured political elite increasingly incorporated a small but increasingly influential private entrepreneurial social stratum that also assumed positions of political influence. For the republics, however, this came at the expense of a neglect of former core constituencies of the regimes, such as the salaried middle-class, peasants and workers. Thus, as new segments gradually made their way into politically relevant elite circles and became strategically important, other segments or pillars on which these regimes had formerly rested upon and on whose support they had relied were gradually but increasingly marginalized (Schlumberger 2008a). Fourth, a new element of technocrat experts entered the second ranks of the political elite which was necessitated by new economic exigencies due to the opening up and alignment of such national economies with mainstream economic policies of (neo-)liberalism in an ever more globalized international economy.

Causes of authoritarian resilience in the Arab world9 While generations of scholars have put forth myriads of different potential explanations for this phenomenon, they can be summed up into four broad types of argument which jointly 55

Oliver Schlumberger

encompass the majority of (serious) arguments that have been suggested as independent variables to explain the continued prevalence of authoritarian modes of governance in the Middle East, and in the Arab countries in particular. These include: 1 2 3 4

The neo-patrimonial nature of political regimes themselves; Perpetuated patterns of patriarchal societal structures; Economic structures including rentier states of first and second order; An international environment hostile to democratization.

One other strand that is more prominent in popular and semi-academic literature tries to trace back the authoritarian nature of political rule in the MENA to the influence of the religion of Islam which is seen, in this line of argument, as hostile to or incompatible with democracy.10 However, two decades of more analytical literature have exposed the weaknesses and flaws of such essentialist and/or culturalist arguments convincingly enough to allow me to dismiss them for the sake of this contribution as fundamentally flawed. I will therefore restrict myself to discussing the four above mentioned interlinked causes of authoritarianism and its resilience in the Arab world. First, and probably the core features of Arab regimes since at least the 1970s onwards, and up to the so-called “Arab Spring,” consisted in a variety of decidedly neo-patrimonial modes of governance. While some colleagues have remained sceptical because of an alleged culturalism they see contained in this concept, this could be countered convincingly in more recent literature.11 Neo-patrimonialism as first conceptualized by Weber includes formal political institutions such as a bureaucracy, parliaments or interest groups, but they co-exist alongside informal institutions such as vast clientelist relations and patronage-networks that influence outcomes at least as heavily as their formal counterparts (Schlumberger 2008a). Key categories of neo-patrimonial rule are “informality, influencing, bargaining, competition, equilibrium” (Pawelka 1985: 27). Such regimes are characterized by a dual and extreme concentration of power: (a) between ruler and elites and (b) between regime elites and the larger society. Loyal elites typically compete for the benevolence and favours of a personalist ruler who rewards them with direct favours, donations, positions, opportunities for self-enrichment or by politically securing monopolistic positions in the private economy for crony capitalists close to the regime (cf. also Erdmann and Engel 2007). By contrast, the public sphere is closely controlled and policed and contacts between citizens and elites are regulated through a multi-layered bureaucracy with the aim of “preventing the emergence of autonomous societal organizations” (Pawelka 1985: 25). For the individual, however, personal ties to elite members are attractive as such connections help in getting legitimate (and illegitimate) demands fulfilled by circumventing the bureaucracy. Such regimes, however, depend on the continuous flow of financial resources; in this regard, the Arab Middle East (and Iran, for that matter) are in a privileged position due to the prevalence of rentierist structures (more on this below). From within the system, little chance for transformation exists. Bratton and Vandewalle (1997) demonstrate with the help of sub-Saharan African cases that financial collapse has been the single most important cause for breakdowns of neo-patrimonial rule. Second, patriarchal societal structures mirror political regime structures in that the principles of organization and interaction that govern Arab societies are organized equally hierarchically. In the larger family which represents the “genes of politics” (Bill and Springborg 2000: ch. 3), it is the father (figure) who “rules” as a patriarch and acts as ultimate decider in all familial matters. Granted, the more the implications of social and cultural globalization are felt in the Middle East, the more porous these patterns become. Yet, patriarchal social structures continue to shape 56

Political regimes of the MENA

Arab societies and to constitute a strong social norm—especially (but not exclusively!) among the little educated and poorer population. Beyond the immediate family, social structures also run along personalist patronage relations and clientelist networks which leads to a social fabric that, rather than being structured horizontally along social class lines, is organized vertically along individual clientelist relations and wasta.12 In combination with the high capacity for surveillance of the regimes themselves, the birth of autonomous civil society forces that are often seen as carriers of democratic reform is particularly hard. On the contrary: patterns of political authority are replicated on the societal level. This, in turn, can lead to a perpetuation of political rule, as Eckstein (1992: 188) formulated in his “theorem of congruence”: “A government is stable when its patterns of authority are congruent with other patterns of authority within the society of which it is part.” Third, there is a longstanding consensus in the literature about the rentierism that characterizes Arab political economies (Luciani 1987). This refers not only to the differential rents which the very oil-rich states earn through their hydrocarbons exports, and which need not be reinvested into the production cycle, but can be allocated according to the political priorities of regime maintenance. It also refers to the intra-regional financial flows (political rents) that are transferred to the non-oil countries primarily in order to stabilize them politically and to prevent all sorts of revolutionary upheavals, thereby creating “semi-rentier states” (Pawelka 1993). Financial and military aid from abroad, Suez-Canal and pipeline transit fees, as well as development aid, constitute other such rent-like resources and complement the overall picture of a region that thoroughly depends on the availability of continuous external capital inflows other than direct investments. These external resources are used in a two-fold manner: first, broad-based public services (such as the health and educational systems, but also food and gas subsidies) have been financed in order to aliment society at large. Second, social segments that are considered strategically important for power maintenance (military and security services, upper echelons of the bureaucracy, crony “entrepreneurs,” etc.) have received massive and targeted privileges in order to buy their loyalty or at least acquiescence. Fourth, it is not only autocracies such as Russia that today pursue foreign policies of active “autocracy promotion”; even established democracies such as the United States and the European Union have, as major players in the international environment, for a long time prioritized the presumed certainty of what they understood as “political stability” over the uncertainty of potential democratization processes that would by definition involve changes of rather than changes in regime. Even the so-called “Arab Spring” did not significantly alter these Western policy priorities; access to economically vital resources and the effort to uphold geopolitical influence continue to dominate American and European foreign policy agendas, despite all the talk of promoting democracy (cf. Schlumberger 2006). As Brownlee (2012) suggests, such policies have helped in “democracy prevention” rather than in aiding democracy in the Middle East. As long as the conflicting foreign policy goals of Western nations in the Middle East are not openly discussed, including their flawed understanding of “stability,” it is highly likely that the short-sighted search for what really is a fata morgana of political stability will continue to dominate Western policy agendas in the Middle East. Furthermore, Middle Eastern autocrats have increasingly succeeded in diversifying their own foreign relations to the benefit of new, non-democratic, great powers such as Russia and China so that the degree of Western leverage over political decisions in their Middle Eastern and North African partner countries has decreased since the early 2000s. Finally, there is a huge credibility gap in Western foreign policies towards the region that results from a pro-democracy rhetoric that is combined with policies that prevent the emergence of exactly this. This credibility gap has not only continued after the Arab Uprisings of 2011, but has attached a very bitter taste to the very term “democracy” for 57

Oliver Schlumberger

the majority of ordinary citizens in the Middle East who feel that they have never played a role in the foreign policy equations of outside powers, including those who pretended to stand for basic civil and political rights and whose claims about their own “norm-based” foreign policies sounded increasingly hollow and cynical. Of course, other reasons and facilitators exist for the resilience of authoritarian rule in much of the MENA region despite obvious declines in their legitimacy long before the 2011 Uprisings. “Authoritarian regime learning” (Bank and Edel 2015) and “authoritarian upgrading” (Heydemann 2007) can certainly be regarded as auxiliary factors. Overall, however, it is these four key causes, I claim, that capture the bulk of the explanation for the amazing persistence of Middle Eastern authoritarianism. Although greatly simplified here due to constraints in space, I contend that in their combination, they work to mutually reinforce each other and are, in this combination, hardly present to a similar extent in any other world region. It is precisely because of this combination of factors that grievances, frustration, poverty and a sense of powerand hopelessness could build up for so many years among Middle Eastern populations until they finally erupted in the 2011 protests.

The Middle Eastern political landscape after the 2011 uprisings Three key features have become evident which were a direct result of the mass protests that hit the region, starting in late 2010 in Tunisia, and which led to the fall of (at least) four former personalist neo-patrimonial leaders in the Arab world. I argue that these three overarching outcomes will shape the face of the Middle East for the foreseeable future, and two of them represent major shifts in the landscape of Middle Eastern political regimes. First, and not what most observers had wished for (and which more than just a few had predicted during the heyday of the mass protests), the core consequence of the Uprisings has not been another regional wave of democratization but rather the foremost novel feature is that the state as such, or state identity, is more contested than it had been throughout the preceding decades. Second, while broad-based democratization processes remain wishful thinking at least for the time being, the spectrum of political regimes has nevertheless become decidedly more diverse than it had ever been before, with the forms of regimes covering a broader range from a fragile, imperfect but nevertheless clear democracy (Tunisia) to hardened military dictatorship (Egypt). A third outcome is often neglected because it does not represent a sea change: the majority of the remaining countries’ regimes have not tremendously altered as a consequence of the 2011 Uprisings, but rather managed, by and large, to persist despite the regional turbulences. This holds for most of the Arab Gulf states plus Morocco, Jordan and Algeria. This also goes for Iran and for Lebanon despite the huge socio-economic challenges it has to cope with because of the massive influx of Syrian refugees. Finally, as it fits less into these overall patterns, a separate note on Turkey seems necessary: moving in an opposite direction than Tunisia, Turkey’s recent developments since roughly 2008–09 send signals of a consolidation of an increasingly personalized authoritarian rule. Not only did the Turkish president replicate the “Russian model” of having himself substituted for a clearly circumscribed time period as the head of state and switched roles with his prime minister only to re-establish himself as president after one tenure, but the sharp decline in basic human rights and freedoms, along with massive allegations of corruption and cronyism, resemble the neo-patrimonial Russian model. In this light, it might also be worth bearing in mind that Russian president Putin, after a state visit to Egypt under Mubarak almost a decade ago, held a press conference in which he publicly stated that he saw Egypt as the “role model of a democracy” to follow. Although Turkey’s process of autocratization led by the president 58

Political regimes of the MENA

and his entourage is encompassing and touches upon all basic freedoms, freedom of the media is particularly threatened.13

Persistent authoritarianism Starting in reverse order, the third observation of recent developments in political regimes is this: not all Middle Eastern countries witnessed notable mass demonstrations, and some did manage to swiftly recalibrate their systems under the old authoritarian bargain that left power relations and regimes, by and large, intact. Regimes that succeeded at such recalibration usually did so by following the “guidelines for autocrats” that Albrecht and Schlumberger (2004; also Schlumberger 2007) had outlined almost a decade earlier, and through tactics described in Heydemann’s (2007) “authoritarian upgrading.” This involves, on the one hand, ad-hoc populist measures geared to vent off dissent such as increases in public salaries, one-off payments to households, public employment programmes that were set up hastily, and cosmetic legal or constitutional reform. On the other, it also comprises various types of repression (cf. on this point in particular: Josua and Edel 2015). Similar patterns apply on a regional level: while Gulf countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates in particular engaged in what can be seen as a revival of regional financial assistance in order to stabilize autocratic rule across the region, they also engaged in crossborder military intervention in at least the case of Bahrain to assist the regime in quelling protests. Strikingly, all Middle Eastern monarchies, whether rich or poor in oil, have not seen drastic changes to their political regimes in the sense outlined above. Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Jordan and even Bahrain, where the regime of al-Khalifa needed foreign military intervention by its neighbours to be saved from the challenge of massive popular protests, all confirm this rule. This might signal that the above-stated convergence around a certain, usually neo-patrimonial regime type with strong rentierist elements might have to be reconsidered in the light of this remarkable monarchical resilience. Most literature has lumped personalist regimes of all sorts together, along the typology suggested by Geddes (1999). Arguably, however, the difference between presidents and ruling (as opposed to representative) monarchs with regards to their respective position in the field of political contestation once public discontent starts to mobilize might play a role, as some argue (cf. Williamson 2012). Ultimately, however, this may hint at the respective strength (or weakness) of different sources of legitimacy that different political regimes rely on (cf. Schlumberger 2010b)—a topic that for Middle Eastern political regimes still remains empirically understudied. Then again, there is no law-like pattern that would hold true without exceptions: the situation in Morocco, and more so in Bahrain, did turn precarious during the Uprisings and demonstrated that at least some monarchical regimes were sensitive to the region-wide demands for greater social justice and basic civil and political rights. Bahrain’s regime in particular underwent serious difficulties in maintaining power; had it not been for the convincing demonstration of outside military strength (by GCC allies led by Saudi Arabia), the outcome of the protests in Bahrain might have been quite different. On the republics’ side, too, there is the Algerian exception of a clear survivor of the Arab Uprisings, without greater challenges to the regime. Even though the state of emergency, which had been in place for almost 20 years, was lifted early on (in February 2011), this did not mean de facto changes in the lives of most ordinary Algerians.

A more diverse landscape of political regimes My second observation is that the breadth of the spectrum of political regimes in the MENA has broadened as a result of the mass Uprisings of the so-called “Arab Spring” of 2011. At least five 59

Oliver Schlumberger

countries of the region—all republics—bear witness to the fact that in some contexts, the mass demonstrations of public anger did lead to substantial and manifest changes in the nature and/or composition of political regimes, including the fall or near fall of longstanding personalist rulers. The examples are well-known: Syria, Yemen, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. Yet, such changes are varied and outcomes could hardly be more divergent. Tunisia underwent a relatively lengthy and heavily contested process of a still-fragile transition to democracy. While the outcomes are uncertain, Tunisia’s trajectory as such already provides evidence that authoritarianism in the Arab world is not a natural law and therefore, at least for the time being, represents another piece of counter-evidence—if such were ever needed— against those who on essentialist and/or culturalist grounds had argued that the Arab world was not “ripe” for democracy. Moreover, Tunisia has achieved its (however fragile) democratic process less with the help of than despite an international environment that proved largely hostile to the idea of democratic transition in North Africa and the Middle East.14 Rather, the fact that oppositional forces had been able to reach an at least minimal democratic consensus against the old regime, along with a highly professional and comparatively small politicized military that rejected to engage in large-scale repression or massacres, seems to have made all the difference when compared to cases such as Egypt, Algeria, Morocco or Syria. As a consequence, Tunisia today represents one of the two poles of a spectrum along which Arab regimes can be grouped. By contrast, and contrary to the local discourse, Egypt did not undergo a revolution (nor a “refolution” or other such ill-defined terms that have been invented by non-political scientists) in any meaning of the concept that is compatible with key political science understandings of this term (good discussions are, e.g. those provided by Tilly 1993: ch. 1 or Van Inwegen 2011: ch. 1). Rather, a partial reshuffling of core political elites resulted in the ousting of parts of the Mubarak family, and in particular in the stripping of the influence of Gamal Mubarak and many of his cronies in the business sphere. Instead, under the leadership of Abdelfatah as-Sisi, the military reasserted its firm grip on power. It was in mid-2013 that the military staged a successful coup against Egypt’s first freely elected president Mursi and his government dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood (in coalition with a range of Salafist parties led by an-Nour). Ever since (and even before), the regime, and its military core in particular, made it utterly clear that anything related to political decision-making will, for the foreseeable future, not be made against its will nor vital interests. Even before becoming new president, Sisi as unofficial strongman had arranged for the vast majority of provincial governors to be replaced by army and police generals who had served under Mubarak.15 Cynics even argue that de facto, no regime change had occurred in Egypt since 1952, with the young officers’ putsch against King Farouq. Egypt towards the late 2010s witnessed probably the least room of manoeuvre for autonomous civil societal forces in decades, and in most major Arab countries. Some observers claim that Egypt today is undergoing a process of authoritarian consolidation. It remains an open question, however, to what extent the extreme levels of suppression and coercion that prevail today can be interpreted as a sign of regime strength. Likely, the peaks of repression which amounted to state terror in Egypt in 2015–16 will ease slightly but tangibly in the medium-term future since they are, in the long run, hardly tenable, let alone sustainable. With even foreigners abducted and tortured to death, such as in the infamous case of young Italian scholar Guilio Regeni, the Egyptian system of repression seems largely arbitrary (even though it’s systematic in its arbitrariness) and would seem to come closer to the sort of state terror which Friedrich and Brzezinski (1956) saw as a criterion of totalitarianism rather than to repression in authoritarianism, which was characterized by Linz (1964, 1975) with his famous description about political power being exercised within limits that are “formally ill-defined,” but “actually quite predictable” (Linz 1964: 297). This goes all the more in the absence of any viable economic or social 60

Political regimes of the MENA

development strategy that would reach beyond seeking a diversification of external political rents in combination with some select populist measures to buy the acquiescence of individual segments of the population at home. The security-obsessed and fully closed regime of Egypt in the latter half of the 2010s, at any rate, represents the second and opposite pole of the broad spectrum of Arab regimes, and of which Tunisia, as explained above, sits at the other end. Looking at the MENA region today, thus, we find a spectrum of political regimes that ranges from liberal democracy at one end (Israel inside the borders of 1948, i.e., excluding its governance of the occupied Palestinian territories, and Tunisia in the mid-2010s) to ideal-type “police states” such as the newly personalized regime under president Sisi in Egypt. In between lies the majority of countries which experience periods of relative liberalization and deliberalization within authoritarian contexts while ruling regimes remain firmly located in the non-democratic sphere of systems of political rule.

The new relevance of statehood Given the new political diversity in the Middle East and North Africa, the yet more striking feature of the region in the post-2011 era without a doubt is the fact that statehood as such has risen to centre stage. While Tunisia on the one hand and Egypt on the other occupy extreme poles on a continuum of political regimes, the group of states that either dramatically fail to fulfil the core functions associated with statehood16 has been growing since 2011. This becomes particularly visible when looking at the three republics, apart from Egypt and Tunisia, that underwent massive political change as a direct consequence of the 2011 upheavals, which are Syria, Yemen and Libya. Two of them saw an at least formal removal of the respective dictators (Yemen and Libya), whereas the third, Syria, continues to be headed by Bashar al-Asad even though his regime lost control over large parts of the territory of the Syrian state after the conflict between the regime and its opposition turned violent in 2011. Arguably, it was mainly due to Russian ground forces and massive airforce support that the regime managed to survive. The former Yemeni president Ali Saleh, for his part, continued to be very actively involved in Yemeni politics, in an unlikely alliance with Shiite Houthi rebels, against his successor government led by Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi (al-Jazeera 2015). In the meantime, a UN-brokered “National Dialogue Conference” (NDC) chaired by interim president Hadi had seemed promising until early 2014, when it ended after two Houthi representatives had been assassinated within a few weeks and the group withdrew from the NDC. While many of its 11 standing working groups had made considerable progress towards national reconciliation between most relevant social forces (except for al-Qaeda), it was the Southern issue that remained unsolved with no roadmap on how to achieve further progress. This was likely also due to the fact that while the Hirak movement was part of the NDC, other Southern groups remained excluded (Al-Shamahi 2014). But after the failure of the NDC, coherent statehood and centralized political order on a national level seems as far off as it remains in Libya—all the more so as Yemen remains caught in a cruel war fought mainly by outside powers (SaudiArabia) against local actors. Both in Syria and in Yemen this struggle over the state itself was accompanied by the renewed rise of militant Jihadist actors who not only act as opponents to the formerly established regimes, but who propose alternative visions of a state that is much more fluid and effectively established state-like authority on significant parts of the territory of both countries. Notably, in the Syrian-Iraqi case of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), this came with a transnationalized understanding of statehood that is debased from its notion of territoriality which almost all 61

Oliver Schlumberger

definitions of statehood include as a key marker. In that sense, ISIS’ vision of its Islamic State can be seen as a either a “plurinational” state, to borrow Bolivian president Evo Morales’ term, or even a non-nation-state. Syria, Libya and Yemen all fell into prolonged and at least regionalized (in the Syrian case: globalized) violent strife for power over the state to an extent that statehood as such is less a given than it was before 2011. Thus, some see good reasons to place the Libyan case, too, into the same box of violent conflict after the breakdown of a prior authoritarian regime: it resembles both other cases insofar as non-state armed groups (ISIS as well as others) made considerable inroads in expanding their presence both in terms of followers and territorial gains. It resembles the Yemeni case insofar as the country has fallen in a prolonged political crisis with two opposing governments in Tobruk and Tripoli, each of which had claimed to act as the legitimate representative of the Libyan people. An agreement in December 2015 set out the path towards a “Government of National Accord,” with uncertain prospects of pacification in the light of greatly factionalized militias and splits in both the Tobruk and the new unity government. Again, both domestic and international forces, from Libyan General Haftar to Egypt and Russia, play an active role in supporting the opponents of that UN-backed government, with no solution in sight at the time of writing. As we discuss these three cases, it must not be forgotten that other countries of the MENA remain fragile. Lebanon has long experienced a volatile situation, which is more true of Iraq. Less thought of in that context, Egypt and Iran also figure among the 50 most fragile countries on the Fragile States Index (out of 178; Fund for Peace 2016). Taken together, the group of fragile, failed or collapsed states makes for no less than seven countries of the core of the MENA region, and Palestine is not even listed in the index. Furthermore, if the geographical margins of the region were to be taken into account, Arab League members such as Mauritania, Djibouti, Somalia and Sudan would have to be added. In fact, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are the only Arab states which the Fragile States Index rates as “stable.” In conclusion, this means that roughly half of the Arab political entities today are directly threatened by or have already fallen victim to state failure. While the task of studying authoritarian resilience has certainly not vanished for scholars, an agenda of research on Middle East politics beyond the Arab Uprisings will have to give much greater consideration to questions of statehood than it has done so far.

Conclusions The first conclusion, as elaborated in the above section, is that the overall landscape of the political regimes in the MENA region today has more semblance with the one that preceded the “Arab socialist” revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s rather than with the one of the 1980s and 1990s in the sense that the poles of the political regimes have moved apart, mainly but not exclusively because of the recent trajectory of Tunisia—however fragile its democratic transition may be. At the other end of the spectrum, Egypt, with levels of repression that today strongly resemble those Hafiz al-Asad’s Syria witnessed in the 1970s, provides a powerful example that old-school (military) dictatorships are not extinct. In a sense, this could be read as a return of the past under less promising conditions: democracytalk, it seems, might be considered by some Arab rulers as no longer necessary in the light of a favourable international environment: the post-2011 international scene finds established democracies of the “West” with decidedly lesser political leverage over their partner regimes’ political development. First, democracy’s reputation lies in ruins after decades of unfortunate foreign policies that have supported Middle Eastern autocrats against their populations in an 62

Political regimes of the MENA

often paternalizing manner. Second, both the search for alternative partners and the rise of such alternatives on the global map have contributed to a stronger stance which the remaining Arab autocrats feel they can take in ignoring any pressures for basic rights or liberties. Russia’s active policies of promoting autocracy are just the most glaring example of this trend, and while this has been studied in detail as regards the former Soviet Union (cf. Ambrosio 2009), the MENA region provides ample evidence that such endeavours to export repression reach well beyond the latter areas.17 The second conclusion is more complex because it entails a range of potentially far-reaching consequences. The phenomenon of failing, failed and/or collapsed states has been present in a few countries for some time, and now characterizes a large part of the MENA region. Obviously, this is not a feature unique to the MENA region, as the longstanding examples of Afghanistan, Somalia and others demonstrate. However, North Africa and the Middle East probably provide a regional environment that boasts a more numerous cluster of such cases than any other world region at this moment—even if sub-Saharan Africa was included. This phenomenon seems to give rise to many open questions in a field of research where, first, notions of “regime” and notions of “state” meet or, in other words: we need a more nuanced understanding of the state–regime nexus. This question of disentangling the multi­ faceted interrelationships between state on the one hand and regime on the other may seem like an unnecessarily fundamental point to make in a contribution to Middle East politics; however, unless we tackle such questions that form part of more basic yet fundamental research, our capacities of understanding concrete socio-political processes not just in the Middle East and North Africa but elsewhere in the world will be limited. My third conclusion is, alas, also somewhat abstract: wherever statehood is not in question, authoritarianism still dominates. This has at least two important consequences: it might require us to take a fresh look into existing (sub-)typologies of authoritarianism that have, for a long time, been ad-hoc inventions established through case studies or small-n investigations. Even though Barbara Geddes’ 1999 proposition of a three-partite (sub-)typology of authoritarianism (single-party; military; personalist) seems catchy at first glance because of its parsimoniousness, it is also seriously flawed because it is made up of categories that are not mutually exclusive: it is very conceivable that an individual political regime might simultaneously be personalist and single-party, or personalist and military, or military and personalist. This goes beyond the fact that she, as many others, does not distinguish between monarchical and non-monarchical personalist regimes. Note that this question of building categories is not just a play of words or a game of who-cites-whom. Logically speaking, this creates very real problems for any further research that wishes to take regime type as an independent variable. If we cannot adequately specify the independent variable, this automatically and inevitably means that we cannot reliably conclude on what regime (sub-)type means for a wide range of potentially interesting dependent variables that we may wish to examine (Sartori 1991). Prominent examples include economic development; social performance; foreign policies and international relations; and so forth. Therefore, the need to investigate more seriously into how we can differentiate within regime types (in a methodologically sounder manner than Geddes’ suggestion) is probably more pressing than ever before. In conclusion, the renewed look at Middle Eastern political regimes beyond 2011 I have undertaken here demonstrates, if nothing else, that important elements of a future agenda for research appear on the horizon. Such an agenda, and even each of its possible components that have been sketched out above, are clearly too vast for any single person or individual project to tackle. If this chapter helps in identifying one or two such directions and maybe inspires some of that research to come, the aim of the present chapter is fulfilled. 63

Oliver Schlumberger

Notes 1 A political regime, according to Robert Fishman (1990: 428), can be defined as “the formal and informal organization of the center of political power, and of its relations with the broader society. A regime determines who has access to political power, and how those who are in power deal with those who are not.” For further discussions on the concept of “political regime,” cf., i.e. Munck (1996) who lists no less than 16 different definitions of the term which had been suggested by different authors already back then. 2 As opposed to state formation—for this topic see Chapter 3 in this handbook by Saouli. 3 For excellent general accounts of “The making of the modern Middle East,” see Roger Owen’s book of that title, as well as Cleveland and Bunton (2009). 4 With the notable exception of Morocco, that is. 5 A disintegration similar to the one seen in Libya was witnessed by Italy’s other former colony in the region, Somalia. Interestingly, both countries already have disintegrated or are about to disintegrate to the point where no entity that covers the former state territory exists any longer. 6 On the evolution of the Iraqi republic, see the unrivalled account by Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett (1987). 7 For an introductory account of this series of events, see, i.a. Cleveland and Bunton (2009: chs. 15–7); Owen (c h. 4); on Syria in particular, cf. Seale (1965) and Hinnebusch (2001: esp. chs. 2–3). 8 Albeit with little success except for the Asads of Syria. 9 This section essentially rests on an argument presented in greater depth earlier (Schlumberger 2008b: 89–138). 10 Prominent advocates of such views were the late Samuel Huntington or Nikki Keddie whose work I do not feel inclined to reference here. The interested reader will easily spot their writings. 11 See, i.e. Erdmann and Engel (2007). 12 On the informal ties created by “wasta” (Arabic for intercession, intermediation), see Cunningham and Sarayrah (1993) 13 Turkey’s press freedom rating (on a scale between 0 [best] and 100 [worst] declined over the past decade from a score of 48 in 2006 to 71 in 2016, which is on a par with countries such as Angola, Oman, or the Central African Republic. Notably, several Arab countries are rated higher on Freedomhouse’s press freedom index, such as Algeria,Tunisia, Morocco, Mauretania, and even Qatar. Cf. Freedomhouse (2016). 14 This is evidenced by numerous statements by Western policy-makers. For instance, and as an example in lieu of many more, the French Minister of Culture Mitterand, as late as January 2011, found that Tunisia was “strictly speaking not a dictatorship,” while only two days before former president Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia, then French Foreign Minister Alliot-Marie had offered his regime help from France through “the globally acknowledged know-how of our security services” to “regulate this type of security situations” (Le Monde 2011). 15 In August 2013, 22 governors were newly installed, whereas all 11 that former president Mursi had nominated were removed from office. Seventeen out of those 22 were former police and army generals, three were judges known to have been particularly loyal to Mubarak, and one a lady of the formerly ruling National Democracy Party. In late December 2015, the Egyptian president installed another round of 11 new provincial governors, nine out of which came from a police, military or secret service background (Ahram Online 2015). 16 These are security, welfare and representation; cf., i.a. Milliken and Krause (2002). 17 Of course, the relative importance of such autocracy promotion is disputed. Lucan Way (2016), for one, finds that the impact of autocrats support to autocrats is generally weaker than assumed. This author is convinced of the opposite.

References Ahram Online (no author) (2015), “Egypt’s new provincial governors: Who’s who?” Ahram Online, accessible at: http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/177478/Egypt/Politics-/Egypts-newprovincial-governors-Whos-who.aspx Albrecht, H. and O. Schlumberger (2004), “Waiting for Godot: Regime change without democratization in the Middle East,” International Political Science Review, 25:4, 371–92. Al-Jazeera (no author) (2015), “Yemen’s Saleh declares alliance with Houthis,” Al-Jazeera Online, accessible at: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/05/cloneofcloneofcloneofstrikes-yemen-saada-breach-150510143647004.html 64

Political regimes of the MENA

Al-Shamahi, A. (2014), “Two of one, six of the other,” Al-Majallah, 5 February 2014, accessible at: http:// eng.majalla.com/2014/02/article55248379 Ambrosio, T. (2009), Authoritarian Backlash: Russian Resistance to Democratization in the Former Soviet Union, Aldershot: Ashgate. Andersen, D., Møller, J., and S.-E. Skaaning (2014), “The state-democracy nexus: Conceptual distinctions, theoretical perspectives, and comparative approaches,” Democratization, 21:7, 1203–20. Anderson, L. (1991), “Absolutism and the resilience of monarchy in the Middle East,” Political Science Quarterly, 106:1, 1–15. Bank, A. and M. Edel (2015), “Authoritarian regime learning: comparative insights from the Arab Uprisings,” GIGA Working Papers, 274, Hamburg: GIGA. Beblawi, H. (1987), “The rentier state in the Arab world,” in eds, H. Beblawi and G. Luciani, The Rentier State, pp. 49–62, London: Croom Helm. Bill, J. and R. Springborg (2000), Politics in the Middle East, New York, NY: Longman, fifth edition. Bratton, M. and D. Vandewalle (1997), Democratic Experiments in Africa. Regime Transitions in Comparative Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brownlee, J. (2012), Democracy Prevention: The Politics of the US-Egyptian Alliance, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Cleveland, W. and M. Bunton (2009), A History of the Modern Middle East, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, fourth edition. Cunningham, R. and Y. Sarayrah (1993), Wasta: The Hidden Force in Middle Eastern Society, Westport, CT: Praeger. Eckstein, H. (1992), Regarding Politics: Essays on Political Theory, Stability and Change, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Erdmann, G. and U. Engel (2007), “Neopatrimonialism revisited: Critical review and elaboration of an elusive concept,” Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, 45:1, 95–119. Farouk-Sluglett-Farouk, M. and P. Sluglett (1987), Iraq Since 1958: From Revolution to Dictatorship, London: Kegan Paul. Fishman, R. (1990), “Rethinking state and regime: Southern Europe’s transition to democracy,” World Politics, 42:3, 422–40. Friedrich, C. and Z. Brzezinski (1956), Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fund for Peace (2016), Fragile States Index 2015, accessible at: http://fsi.fundforpeace.org/rankings-2015 Gasiorowski, M.J. (1987), “The 1953 coup d’etat in Iran,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 19:3, 261–86. Geddes, B. (1999) “What do we know about democratization after 20 years?” Annual Review of Political Science, 2, 115–44. Henry, C. and R. Springborg (2001), The Politics of Development in the Middle East, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herb, Michael (1999), All in the Family: Absolutism, Revolution, and Democracy in Middle Eastern Monarchies, New York: SUNY Press. Heydemann, S. (2007), “Upgrading authoritarianism in the Arab world,” Analysis Paper, 13, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution (Saban Center), accessible at: http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/ 2007/10/arabworld Hinnebusch, R. (1985), Egyptian Politics Under Sadat: The Post-Populist Development of the AuthoritarianModernizing State, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hinnebusch, R. (2001), Syria: Revolution from Above, London and New York, NY: Routledge. Hinnebusch, R. (2014), “A historical sociology approach to authoritarian resilience in post-Arab Uprising MENA, memo prepared for the POMEPS-Workshop,” The Arab Thermidor: The Resurgence of the Security State, October 2014, London: LSE. Huntington, S. (1968), Political Order in Changing Societies, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Josua, M. and M. Edel (2015) “To repress or not to repress? Regime survival strategies in the Arab Spring,” Terrorism & Political Violence, 27:2, 289–309. Korany, B. (1986), “Political petrolism and contemporary Arab politics, 1967–1983,” Journal of Asian and African Studies, 21, 66–80. Le Monde (no author) (2011), “Michèle Alliot-Marie et la Tunisie, retour sur une polémique,” accessible at: http://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2011/02/07/michele-alliot-marie-et-la-tunisie-retoursur-une-polemique_1476436_823448.html 65

Oliver Schlumberger

Linz, J. (1964), “An authoritarian regime: Spain,” in eds, E. Allardt and Y. Littunen, Cleavages, Ideologies and Party Systems—Contributions to Comparative Political Sociology, pp. 291–341, Helsinki: The Academic Bookstore [Transactions of the Westermarck Society X]. Linz, J. (1975), “Totalitarianism and authoritarian regimes,” in: eds, Nick Polsby and Fred Greenstein, Handbook of Political Science: Macropolitical Theory, vol. 3, Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 175–411. Luciani, G. (1987), “Allocation vs. production states. A theoretical framework,” in eds, H. Beblawi and G. Luciani, The Rentier State, pp. 63–82, London: Croom Helm. Milliken, J. and K. Krause (2002), “State failure, state collapse and state reconstruction: concepts, lessons, and strategies,” Development and Change, 33:5, 753–74. Munck, G. (1996) “Disaggregating political regime: Conceptual issues in the study of democratization,” Working Paper, 228, Notre Dame, IN: Kellogg Institute for International Studies, accessible at: https:// kellogg.nd.edu/publications/workingpapers/WPS/228.pdf Owen, R. (2004), State, Power and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East, London: Routledge, third edition. Pawelka, P. (1993), Der Vordere Orient und die Internationale Politik, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Pawelka, P. (1985), Ägypten. Herrschaft und Entwicklung im Nahen Osten, Heidelberg: Meyer. Sartori, G. (1991), “Concept misformation in comparative politics,” American Political Science Review, 64:4, 1033–53. Schlumberger, O. (ed, 2007), Debating Arab Authoritarianism, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Schlumberger, O. (2006), “Dancing with wolves: Dilemmas of democracy promotion in authoritarian contexts,” in ed, D. Jung, Democratization and Development: New Political Strategies for the Middle East, pp. 33–60, New York, NY: Palgrave. Schlumberger, O. (2008a) “Structural reform, economic order, and development: Patrimonial capitalism,” Review of International Political Economy, 15:4, 622–49. Schlumberger, O. (2008b), Autoritarismus in der arabischen Welt: Ursachen, Trends und internationale Demokratieförderung, Baden-Baden: Nomos. Schlumberger, O. (2010a), “Opening old bottles in search of new wine: on non-democratic legitimacy in the Middle East,” Middle East Critique, 19:3, 233–50. Schlumberger, O. (2010b), “Assessing political regimes: What typologies and measurements tell us—and what they don’t,” in ed, E. Kienle, Democracy Building and Democracy Erosion: Political Change North and South of the Mediterranean, pp. 19–42, London: Saqi Press. Seale, P. (1965), The Struggle for Syria: A Study of Post-War Arab Politics 1945–1958, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tilly, C. (1993), European Revolutions: 1492–1992, Oxford: Blackwell. Van Inwegen, P. (2011), Understanding Revolution, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Way, L. (2016), “Weaknesses of autocracy promotion,” Journal of Democracy, 27:1, 64–75. Williamson, S. (2012), Divided We Stand—The Resilience of Monarchies in the Arab Spring, Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana (Honours Thesis), accessible at: http://polisci.indiana.edu/undergraduate/theses/ Williamson.pdf

66

5 Authoritarian adaptability and the Arab Spring Stephen J. King

While scholars focused on explaining the absence of democracy in the Arab world, new modes of authoritarian governance ushered in during the 1990s and accelerated during the 2000s were destabilizing authoritarian regimes in the region (Abboud 2016: 1555). Some of them broke down early on during the Arab Spring: Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen. Syria’s Uprising led to a searing and protracted civil war. The earlier US-led invasion of Iraq led to a civil war and bled into the Arab Spring. As the Arab Spring progressed, authoritarian adaptability has been on display in Egypt, Algeria and in the Arab monarchies of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan, Morocco, Oman and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This chapter explores “authoritarian upgrading” before the Arab Spring and authoritarian adaptability after it. It concludes that while techniques of authoritarian upgrading prolonged authoritarianism in the Arab republics, they also contributed to the mass Uprisings that erupted in those regimes, beginning in Tunisia in late 2010. Democratic outcomes from the transitions away from consolidated authoritarianism in the Arab republics depended on the success of negotiated efforts at national consensus or pacts designed to address five major conflicts that can derail a democratic transition: military extrication from politics pact, political pact or a democratic bargain among political parties, nation–state pact, socioeconomic pact, and a transitional justice pact (O’Donnell, Schmiter and Whitehead 1986). To date, only Tunisia has made enough progress in each area to approach a consolidated democracy. Egypt has witnessed the reconsolidation of authoritarianism. The ability to transition to democracy after civil war, a process that will include pact-making, will determine regime outcomes in Libya, Syria, Yemen and Iraq. Given the current instability in the Arab world, it’s striking to recall that while democratic waves rolled through Southern Europe, Latin America, East Asia, Eastern Europe, and subSaharan Africa, autocratic Arab-majority regimes seemed unlikely candidates for democratic transitions. The absence of Arab participation in the “third wave of democracy” led scholars to seek explanations for what appeared to be exceptional resistance to political liberalization, respect for human rights, and formal democratic practice in the Arab Middle East (Waterbury 1994: 23). What were the characteristics of this resilient authoritarianism in the region and why did it falter during the Arab Spring? 67

Stephen J. King

Post-colonial Arab authoritarianism The first task is a descriptive one. What was the baseline from which, across decades, Arab authoritarian regimes have demonstrated adaptability against challenges? The populist authoritarian regimes (PA) of the early post-colonial era in the Arab republics were characterized by statist, interventionist and redistributive economic strategies with an over-arching goal of rapid industrialization through state-led import-substituting industrialization; primary coalitional support among peasants and workers; vague to explicit socialist ideologies; and nationalist, charismatic and developmental legitimacy. Political power was institutionalized through state parties, their affiliated corporatist organizations, and powerful executives. State intervention in the economy was extensive even in the laissez-faire monarchies of the region. They also implemented populist socioeconomic policies—subsidies on food, fuel, etc.— while creating large, dependent, and protected private sectors. The rentier monarchies were more purely distributive. Without oil wealth, Jordan and Morocco relied more on traditional legitimacy and political pluralism. At some point, populist authoritarian regimes in the Middle East began to change. In a number of studies, Raymond Hinnebusch (Hinnebusch 1985; Hinnebusch 2000) noted that due to the pressure for economic liberalization a post-populist sociopolitical formation, Post-Populist Authoritarianism (PPA), began emerging in the region in the 1970s. Populist authoritarian regimes had economic liabilities that prompted change (Hinnebusch 2006: 383). As a strategy of development, state-led import-substituting industrialization was a transitional model in which developing states temporarily withdrew from the capitalist world market until their state-owned manufacturing enterprises could compete against advanced industrial powers. However, for a number of reasons, industrial competitiveness never emerged. PA leaders subordinated the public sector to the political needs of the regimes, which diminished economic rationality (Hinnebusch 2006). State-led import-substituting industrialization led to trade and foreign exchange deficits (Hinnebusch 2006). The economic growth that it managed to promote could not keep up with the population explosions that populist welfare programmes encouraged (Hinnebusch 2006: 384). Rulers resisted raising the taxes needed to continue ISI experimentation. These vulnerabilities issued in economic crises that forced PA regimes into a phase of post-populist authoritarianism anchored by economic liberalization (Hinnebusch 2006). Seeking a new engine of growth to supplement the stagnating public sector, economic liberalization was also viewed as key to generating a new bourgeois class with a stake in the regime (Hinnebusch 2006). The change from populist to post-populist authoritarian regimes was delayed as long as possible. Oil rent and international aid delayed or diluted the transformation (Hinnebusch 2006). Economic liberalization was undertaken in piecemeal fashion. Privatization, the final piece of neoliberal reform, implemented seriously in the Arab world in the 1990s–2000s, fully ushered in the new modes of authoritarian governance that have been categorized in the literature as authoritarian upgrading.

Upgrading authoritarianism in the Arab world Supporters of neoliberal economic reforms, a set of policies often called the Washington Consensus, expected that economic liberalization in the Arab world would lead to democratic changes as well. In the short and medium term, this did not occur. Instead, prior to the Arab Spring, authoritarianism in the Arab world seemed to be stronger, more flexible and more resilient than ever (Heydemann 2007: VII). Authoritarian upgrading, defined by Steven Heydemann as the reorganization of strategies of authoritarian governance in order to adjust to new political, 68

Authoritarian adaptability

economic and social conditions, took many forms (Heydemann 2007). Heydemann highlighted five features: appropriating and containing civil societies; managing political contestation; capturing the benefits of selective economic reforms; controlling new communication techno­ logies; and diversifying international linkages (Heydemann 2007: 5). My own work argued that the Arab republics secured continuing authoritarian rule by privatizing public assets—state-owned enterprises and land—to generate the patronage resources to create new social bases of crony capitalists and large landowners to provide support for the regimes. In addition, the rulers of the PPA regimes retained the single or dominant party systems and corporatist mass syndicates created in the populist period to demobilize mass opposition to the changes (King 2009). The crony capitalists benefiting from the shifting form of authoritarian rule included the political elite, who were often members of the rulers’ extended families. In a similar vein, Marsha Pripstein-Posusney (Pripstein-Posusney 1997) emphasized the changed purposes of corporatism after populism. Anoushiravan Ehteshami and Emma Murphy (Ehteshami and Murphy 1996) did so as well. Jason Brownlee (Brownlee 2004) researched the correlation between ruling parties and authoritarian regime longevity. Utilizing economic reforms to reshape a ruling coalition was also a theme in the Steven Heydemann edited volume, Networks of Privilege in the Middle East: The Politics of Economic Reform Revisited. To explain how autocrats successfully managed opposition, a number of other studies stressed elite manipulation of the electoral system. Daniel Brumberg (Brumberg 2002) highlighted tactical political openings whose goal was to sustain rather than transform autocracies. Guided pluralism and controlled elections provided more political space for Islamists, leftists, secular liberals, NGO activists, women’s organizations and others without giving way to competitive democracy (Brumberg 2002). Marsha Pripstein-Posusney demonstrated that Arab rulers consciously resorted to manipulating electoral designs in order to produce loyal legislatures and sustain authoritarian rule. Pluralizing single-party regimes found Winner-Take-All (WTA) voting systems to be useful in this regard (Pripstein-Posusney 2005: 91–118). Divide and rule tactics figure prominently in Ellen Lust-Okar’s research on authoritarian persistence (Lust-Okar 2005: 143–68). Monarchical authoritarianism in Morocco and Jordan was sustained by the rulers creating political cleavages in which some parties were granted an opportunity to participate in elections while others were not (Lust-Okar 2005). This environment produced moderation among the included parties, who feared that an alliance with excluded groups could induce the regimes to punish them (Lust-Okar 2005). Vickie Langohr’s research asserted that Arab autocrats allowed NGOs freer rein to operate than opposition political parties (Langohr 2005: 193–220). While NGOs fulfilled some aspects of contestation against autocracy, they also pre-empted opposition political parties, which are necessary for the emergence of competitive democracy. Ballot box stuffing and voter coercion also took place in most of these studies of electoral politics in the Arab world. The enormous wealth that flows into state coffers from oil and gas exports have had an obvious impact on the stability of the autocratic rentier states in the region. During oil boom phases, the regimes can buy popular support through the generous provision of social services and government jobs. Autocrats have also utilized regional or international support to sustain their rule (Heydemann 2007). Nearly all of these approaches to authoritarian upgrading included a continuing role for coercion. For Eva Bellin and Jason Brownlee, state coercion was the most important factor in authoritarian endurance in the Arab Middle East. For Brownlee, authoritarian regimes in the Arab world survived popular Uprisings in the 1980s and 1990s because they could rely on their coercive apparatuses (Brownlee 2005: 43–62). For Eva Bellin (2004), the entire region was 69

Stephen J. King

characterized by states with exceptionally muscular coercive apparatuses endowed with both the capacity and will to repress democratic initiatives originating in society. Eberhard Kienle (2001) argued that in Egypt economic reforms, especially privatization, were accompanied by greater state repression and coercion.

The Arab Uprisings: authoritarian collapse in the republics The Arab Uprising provided telling lessons for the literature on authoritarian persistence in the region. Among the most instructive was its differential impact on the authoritarian republics and the monarchies. Authoritarian persistence in the monarchies will be discussed in detail below, but here it is sufficient to say that they survived through a combination of traditional legitimacy, greater flexibility in making minor concessions to protestors and the ability to buy off citizens with economic blandishments owing in many cases to their enormous hydrocarbon rents relative to small populations. Trajectories were quite different in the post-populist republics. Normally, possessing neither traditional legitimacy nor vast hydrocarbon resources and seemingly less willing to make concessions, they would rely much more on coercion; hence, the ability to coerce would be decisive for the outcomes. In several countries, the region’s notorious coercive apparatus— the military, police and intelligence agencies that formed what is sometimes called the fierce state or the mukhabarat (secret police) state—abandoned the regime or fractured in the face of peaceful popular Uprisings. For Eva Bellin (2004: 127–49), who has argued that the Middle East, as a region, is exceptional in its resistance to democracy because of the presence of an exceptionally muscular coercive apparatus endowed with both the capacity and will to repress, Arab Spring dynamics suggest a refinement of assertions about the role of repression in the region. Key is the varying will of the regimes to repress and the degree of popular mobilization. In turn, the will to repress depends on the degree to which the military is organized along patrimonial lines keeping it loyal to the person of the ruler as opposed to being institutionalized (in the Weberian sense); and the degree of popular mobilization (the number of civilians the military would have to kill to protect the regime). Thus, Tunisia and Egypt’s professional militaries facing large crowds of protestors refused orders by Ben Ali and Mubarak to shoot on the crowds.1 In Bahrain, a patrimonially linked military, tied to the monarch by family and sect (Sunni in a Shia-majority country), did not hesitate to shoot at large crowds. Libya, Yemen, and Syria’s patrimonial militaries fractured in the face of mass mobilization. The result has been civil wars. In addition to coercive powers, the techniques and institutions of authoritarian rule (and upgrading), from dominant ruling parties to multi-party competitive authoritarianism, might have been expected to matter for trajectories in the republics. Tactical political openings bought more time for regional autocrats prior to the Uprisings. While Islamists, secular liberals, leftists and nationalists participated in the façade of multi-party politics, and political liberalization improved political life to a degree, this upgrade of authoritarianism was always self-limiting. Participants and observers understood that elite manipulation of electoral rules prevented any real chance for the emergence of competitive democracy. After a while, the cynicism generated by this game probably de-legitimized regimes, notably Mubarak’s Egypt. Studies indicate that single-party authoritarian regimes, which are more able to co-opt their challengers than other types of authoritarian regimes, tend to survive longer than personalist or military authoritarian regimes (Geddes 1999; Brownlee 2004). However, when uncontrollable popular opposition signals that the end is near, they, like military authoritarian regimes, negotiate a transition (Geddes 1999). On average, military regimes last 8.5 years. 70

Authoritarian adaptability

Personalist regimes survive 15 years on average, and single-party regimes for nearly 24 years (Geddes 1999). The 24 years conceivably marks the limit of the effectiveness of “electoral authoritarianism.” Single or dominant parties’ associated corporatist organizations also help to control challenges to authoritarian rule by dividing the population into occupation groups and mobilizing them under the auspices of the state party. However, the literature picked up on the changed purposes of corporatism after populism (Hinnebusch 2012: 524; Ehteshami and Murphy 1996). Under populism, social control was easier as labour and peasants were the primary beneficiaries of socioeconomic policy, while post-populist regimes operated to the primary benefit of crony capitalists and large landowners. The result of the transformation was co-opted leaderships and a disgruntled base. During the Arab Spring, in the Tunisian case, the leadership of the national trade union federation, the UGTT, was reluctant to abandon the regime, while rank and file members assumed a militant line and used UGTT offices as organizing sites for activists during the revolution (Hartshorn 2014). When populist policies no longer targeted workers and peasants, transformed corporatist organizations became weaker at social control. Economic policies expose the costs of authoritarian upgrading most vividly. Whether under the banner of economic liberalization, economic reforms, structural adjustment or the Washington Consensus, the shift in policies amounted to the abandonment of former populist constituencies by authoritarian regimes. To function, all regimes require a coalition of support. In the switch from populist to post-populist authoritarian regimes in the Arab world state-owned enterprises and land were transferred to capitalist cronies, large landowners and political regime elites (King 2009: 88–192). Thus, economic and political elites replaced popular constituencies. The change in ruling coalition did not go unnoticed and corruption may have been the primary fuel for the Arab Uprisings. During the attempted transitions to democracy in the region that occurred as part of the Arab Spring, it became clear that the private sector was generally seen as synonymous with corruption (Amin et  al. 2012: loc. 207). Liberal, market-oriented economic policies are associated with the cronyism and corruption of the old regimes and have revived calls for a larger role for the state in the economy and greater regulations of private sector activity (Amin et al. 2012: loc. 241). Informal interviews I conducted as part of an international observation team during Tunisia’s Constituent Assembly Elections in October 2011 revealed that the popularity of the moderate Islamist Ennahda party, which dominated the elections, was partly due to the belief that Islamists would not cheat and steal from the state. An earlier interview with Nader Fergany, lead author of the UNDP Arab Human Development Reports (2002–5), described the volatility associated with implementing privatization policies in Egypt characterized by patronage and rent-seeking: Egypt’s privatization and structural adjustment programmes . . . have led to a [brand] of crony capitalism. The operative factor is a very sinister cohabitation of power and capital. The structural adjustment programme is helping to reconstruct a kind of society where a small number of people own the lion’s share of assets . . . Privatization in effect has meant replacing the government monopoly with private monopoly. The middle class has been shrinking while there has been an enlargement of the super-rich. State-owned enterprises have been sold to a minority of rich people. The record of private sector enterprises creating jobs is very poor. We are not reaping the benefits of an energetic bourgeoisie; what we have is a parasitical, comprador class. . .The consequences will be no less than catastrophic. This society is a candidate for a difficult period of intense, violent, social conflict, and the kind of government we have will not do.2 71

Stephen J. King

In sum, as Samer Abboud notes: the lack of any sort of political freedoms, and the massive socioeconomic changes wrought in the 2000s by a shift away from socialist-era policies toward the market, fuelled societal grievances that eventually propelled the protests that began in [late December 2010]. (Abboud 2016) What other factors figured into the dynamics of authoritarian breakdown during the early Arab Spring? The literature on democracy and democratization as a whole may have missed the political importance of the symbolic violence of a martyr. Popular mobilization against Ben Ali’s brutal police state was inspired by Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor of fruits and vegetables, who set himself on fire in rural Tunisia as a response to the confiscation of his wares, and the harassment and humiliation that was inflicted on him by a municipal official. Mr Bouazizi’s conclusion that a dignified life in repressive, corrupt Tunisia was not possible, and that life without dignity was not worth living resonated in Tunisia and across the region. Many lives have been risked and lost when, inspired by Bouazizi, people rose up against fierce states. Authoritarian breakdown in the face of a mass Uprising in Tunisia is instructive in another way. In his overview of authoritarian upgrading, Steven Heydemann rightly noted that autocrats in the region attempted to control new communication technologies. However, in Tunisia and elsewhere the young people who dominated Arab Spring protests proved to have far greater mastery of Facebook, Twitter, and cell phone technology than the regimes they opposed as they built a “cyber civil society” over time, and utilized it to organize themselves during their Arab Spring Uprising. The Ben Ali regime launched a last-ditch effort to stop cyberactivism, but they were largely unsuccessful with protestors mocking their efforts with slogans such as “Free from 404” (internet language for file not found). The power of the new media led to another driver of the Uprisings, that the authoritarian persistence literature as a whole missed: the importance of regional contagion (Gause III 2011). While the global “third wave of democracy,” which began in the early 1970s, bypassed the Middle East, the Arab Spring taught us that citizens in Arab-majority countries are engaged in political life and political developments across the region. When authoritarian rule failed in one country, they were emboldened to think it could happen in their own state. Finally, international and regional interventions have been important variables in the persistence or collapse of authoritarianism during the Arab Uprisings. Thus, the George Bush administration’s “War of Choice” in Iraq, forcibly collapsed Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003. In Libya, international military support for the opposition—a NATO-led coalition that created a no-fly zone—prevented Qaddafi from reasserting authoritarian control, in what would have been a bloodbath against civilians. The Syrian opposition hoped for similar international military support that it did not receive. Instead, the Asad regime, with help from Russia and earlier support from Iran, Hizbollah, and Iraqi Shiite militias, was able to remain in power, at the horrific cost of nearly 500,000, mostly civilian, Syrian lives. One of the earliest Uprisings, which began on 14 February 2011, took place in Bahrain when a majority Shiite population rose up against a Sunni monarchy. At the invitation of the monarchy, troops from the Gulf Cooperation Council, especially Saudi Arabia and the UAE, rolled into Bahrain to crush the revolt. International and regional powers have been and will continue to be factors in determining the outcome of transition away from or restoration of authoritarian rule.

72

Authoritarian adaptability

The resilience of monarchies during the Arab Spring While the post-populist republics proved highly vulnerable to the Arab Uprisings, the Arab monarchies withstood the Arab Spring largely without serious challenge. Bahrain is the lone exception. To survive Bahrain’s more tumultuous popular Uprising, its monarchy, a Sunni dynasty ruling a majority Shi’a population, needed the military intervention of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Cooperation Council countries. To contain domestic discontent, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and the UAE spent heavily from their oil and natural gas cash reserves to successfully dampen popular desire for political change. In addition, they proffered cosmetic political reforms and a willingness to repress. Without hydrocarbon wealth, Morocco and Jordan’s Kings took advantage of the heritage legitimacy of their Alaouite and Hashemite Dynasties to withstand popular challenges to their political power. A light touch with repression in both cases and political reforms that appeared serious but did not result in promised constitutional monarchies, turned out to be effective demobilization tools. The rentier model is commonly used to describe the six monarchies that make up the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and it may not be a coincidence that the states with the most rent, proved the most resistant to the Uprising. The core proposition of the rentier model is that the hundreds of billions of dollars that accrue to Gulf states for exports of oil and natural gas have to have a profound impact on the countries’ political and economic systems. Politically, the dynamic is largely the exchange of state benefits for political acquiescence and support for monarchical rule. In general, in terms of the degree of opposition to authoritarian rule during the Arab Spring, it is important to keep in mind the wealth of citizens in GCC countries. Most of these countries have great resource wealth and small populations, only a minority of which are citizens (Barany 2013: 15; GLMM 2015). GCC citizens pay no income tax, and many receive state jobs and free housing, health care and education (Barany 2013: 15). Qatar is the richest country in the world, with a GDP per capita of $179,000 for its 250,000 citizens (Amadeo 2018). There are roughly 1 million citizens in the United Arab Emirates, with a GDP per capita of $49,600 (Amadeo 2018). Kuwait’s GDP per capita is $48,900, with a Kuwaiti population of 1.4 million (Amadeo 2018). Bahrain, a country of 635,000 citizens, has a GDP per capita of $40,500 (Amadeo 2018). Oman has 2.5 million citizens and a GDP per capita of $22,000 (Amadeo 2018). Saudi Arabia, the largest of the GCC countries with 21 million citizens, has a GDP per capita of $24,200 (Amadeo 2018). Because Oman and Bahrain possessed smaller quantities of readily available revenues than other Gulf Cooperation Council countries, fellow GCC members rushed $10 billion in aid to both countries (Hasan 2014): Another important feature of the GCC monarchies is the fact that non-citizens make up large parts of their populations, and although they did much of the work, with no rights and readily expelled if they made trouble, they could not risk involvement in any democratization protests in the countries in which they worked. Foreign residents are 88% of the total population in the UAE, 90% in Qatar, 70% in Kuwait, 52% in Bahrain, 46% in Oman and 33% in Saudi Arabia. Citizenship is sharply politicized due to the level of state benefits provided for citizens who therefore had a stake in the persistence of the monarchic status quo. Despite these commonalities, each monarchy’s strategy for containing the Uprisings differed.

Saudi Arabia The Arab Spring Uprisings inspired some Saudis to protest, though public protests are illegal in the country (Boghardt 2013: 1). Protests began in January 2011, when a man set himself on fire

73

Stephen J. King

(BBC 2011a) in an imitation of the act in Tunisia that started the Arab Spring in late December 2010. Saudi Shiites, a minority estimated to be 10–15% of the approximately 20 million Saudi nationals, dominated the protests. Shiites are concentrated in the Eastern Province where most of the country’s oil fields are located. Relatives of political prisoners detained for long periods without charge joined the protests along with teachers and unemployed university graduates desiring improved labour conditions (BBC 2011a). Women and their supporters demanding driving rights participated as well (BBC 2011a). Saudi security forces killed at least ten protestors during the public demonstrations (Hill 2011). The protests by Shia Muslims in Saudi Arabia turned out to be the largest and longest protest movement in the modern history of Saudi Arabia (Erlich 2013). Their goals evolved from a demand for reforms (including making parliament an elected not appointed body) to calling for the elimination of the monarchy and the end of US support for the King (Erlich 2013). Shiites claim that they face discrimination in jobs, housing and religious practices (Erlich 2013). They also protested against monarchical corruption. There were minor episodes of political violence by Shiite protestors, which were condemned by the politically active clerics from the Eastern Province (Erlich 2013). In response to the Saudi Spring, the monarchy decreed a new penal system for crimes of terrorism and financing that included participation in the protest movement (Boghardt 2013). Under the new legislation, women’s driving rights campaigners were charged with disturbing public order, a terrorism crime according to the new legislation (Boghardt 2013). The legislation legitimized detaining political prisoners without charge (Boghardt 2013). Muslim Brotherhood supporters were also targeted after the ousting of MB leader Mohammed Morsi from the Egyptian presidency. Fearing nearby democratic change, the Saudi monarchy backed General al-Sisi’s “secular” coup against Egypt’s Sunni Muslim Brothers (Boghardt 2013). Human rights and other civil-society activists were criminally charged with “breaking with allegiance to the ruler” and attempting to distort the reputation of the kingdom, among other charges (Boghardt 2013). Shiite protestors in the Eastern Province were charged with terrorism and instigating unrest (Boghardt 2013). The monarchy also cast the protests as a Shia conspiracy backed by Iran (Matthiesen 2013). The Saudi monarchy’s most potent reaction against popular mobilization, however, was the distribution of petrodollars. In February 2011, the ageing Saudi King, Abdullah, announced massive spending programmes valued at between $120 and $130 billion for social security, house loans, health care, religious institutions and new recruits into the repressive Ministry of Interior (Matthiesen 2013: loc. 503). In short, a combination of repression of minority dissident and enhanced material benefits for the core Sunni citizenry, contained the spread of the Uprising to Saudi Arabia.

Oman Oman, with a population of approximately 3.5 million people, was the first Gulf country to experience Arab Spring popular protests. They began in January 2011 (Matthiesen 2013: loc. 1712). Compared to political mobilization in the post-populous Arab republics, the rebellion was relatively small. Still, on 17 January 2011, just a few days after Tunisian President Zine Ben Ali had fled to Saudi Arabia, some 200 protestors initiated a small-scale demonstration in Muscat, the country’s capital (Worrall 2012). Protests spread across the country’s urban centres, with particular intensity in Sohar, the country’s industrial capital and fifth largest city (Worrall 2012). Protestors made a number of demands, most socioeconomic or against corruption (Worrall 2012). Protestors were concerned about unemployment, wages, prices and the limits of government subsidies (Worrall 2012). Many sought better educational opportunities 74

Authoritarian adaptability

(Worrall 2012). In some areas, there was resentment towards the role of Indians and Pakistanis in the Omani economy (Worrall 2012). Ministers, most who had served for decades, were particularly criticized for corruption (Worrall 2012). Politically, protestors largely maintained a reform-oriented agenda, with little call for the removal of the popular monarch, Qaboos bin Said al-Said. They sought a new anti-corruption authority and the removal of corrupt Ministers (Worrall 2012). Among the demands were an increase in power of the Consultative Council (Majlis al-Shura) and the independence of the judiciary (Worrall 2012). In terms of human rights, protestors called for the end of discrimination against women, the affirmation of the right to form unions, freedom of expression guarantees and the end of exceptional powers held by many state institutions (Worrall 2012). In response to the protests, which never attained the level of a sustained Uprising, the Sultan of Oman extended the powers of the advisory Majlis al-Shura and dismissed large parts of the cabinet (Matthiesen 2013: loc. 1728), measures that did not fundamentally alter the political system. The Sultan also raised the minimum salary and created 50,000 public sector jobs, steps that satisfied the key constituents who had participated in the protests—the unemployed and those dissatisfied with low salaries (Matthiesen 2013).

United Arab Emirates Arab Spring protests failed to get off the ground in the United Arab Emirates. Activists utilized social media sites to call for a public demonstration on 25 March 2011, but this largely did not materialize (Malas 2011). Public support was weak in a country in which the government provides for most material needs even though many are resentful of high-level corruption (Katzman 2011). Supporters of the government had their own rallies in which one leader stated, “What more do we need? Here everything is taken care of, our education, healthcare. We have free housing” (Katzman 2011). While there was little popular mobilization, the Arab Spring was the occasion of petitions for peaceful political reforms. A March 2011 petition signed by pro-reform activists called for increased political space, and constitutional and parliamentary reforms. At the start of the Arab Spring, the UAE’s parliament, the Federal National Council (FNC) essentially functioned as an advisory Council (Malas 2011). It had no inherent legislative powers. Half of its members were appointed by the government. The other half was elected by a group of citizens selected by government officials. The petition called for the transformation of the FNC into a fully elected body with the legislating power of western-style parliaments. A Facebook group with 2700 members called “The UAE Revolution” called for a revolution against the era of the Sheikhs, a revolution against oppression and suppression of freedoms in the UAE, and a revolution against those who have looted the people of the UAE (Malas 2011). Nasser bin Ghaith, an economist and lecturer at the Abu Dhabi branch of the Sorbonne University was arrested for a blog post stating that the UAE government distributed benefits and handouts which assume that their citizens are not like other Arabs or other human beings, who see freedom as a need no less significant than other physical needs.3 Despite the relative weakness of the UAE Arab Spring “Uprising,” the government responded forcefully against any challenges. It arrested a number of the activists calling for political reforms, some under an article of the penal code that makes it a crime to publicly insult the country’s top officials (Human Rights Watch 2011; Amnesty International 2011; BBC 2011b). Others were charged with establishing organizations with the aim of committing crimes that harm state security and oppose the constitution and the basic principles of the UAE ruling system (ICJ 2013: 3). As part of the government crackdown, ties with organizations with foreign agendas 75

Stephen J. King

were criminalized. This measure targeted those with links to the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups, at the time of Muslim Brotherhood rule in Egypt that unnerved UAE rulers. Political prisoners faced torture and trials without due process (Human Rights Watch 2013). The elected leaders of civil-society groups that were linked to petitions for political reforms were removed and replaced by government appointees (Katzman 2013: 6). To quell dissent, in addition to repression, UAE rulers implemented cosmetic political reforms and increased public spending and development programmes. It expanded the members of the Electoral College responsible for choosing half of the FNC members (Katzman 2013: 4). The government also engaged in a minor cabinet reshuffle reportedly to bring in dynamic, youthful members with fresh ideas (Katzman 2013: 5). UAE rulers also made major investments in utilities infrastructure in the more troubled northern Emirates, increased military pensions, and introduced new food subsidies (Fayed 2011; Reuters—Defense Web 2011; Shah 2011).

Kuwait Prior to the Arab Spring, Kuwait’s parliament was the most powerful in the GCC countries (Matthiesen 2013: loc. 1590). Kuwait also has a tradition of free debate and a relatively free press (Matthiesen 2013). Shiites are between 20 and 30% of the Kuwaiti population; however, they have long been allies of the Sunni monarchy (Matthiesen 2013: loc. 187). In 1962, the Emir of the al-Sabah ruling family granted Kuwait a parliament and constitution (Matthiesen 2013). While political power lay in the hands of the ruler and his family prior to the Arab Spring, the constitution and the parliament exercised real constraints on the ruling Emir through parliament’s power to veto government actions and grill government. Still, the royal family appointed the cabinet and Prime Minister (Kinninmont 2019). There were 50 elected members of the National Assembly. Political parties were illegal, though voting blocs served the same function. To resolve legislative-executive disputes, the ruler routinely dissolved parliament (Kinninmont 2012). Arab Spring protests began in Kuwait on 19 February 2011, when dozens of bidun, stateless Arabs, protested their second-class status (Barany 2013: 8). Demonstrations demanding political reforms were also organized by several nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) (Barany 2013: 8). Protestors sought constitutional reforms and the firing of an unpopular Prime Minister (Barany 2013: 8). They also denounced growing income inequalities and corruption (Barany 2013: 8). In early 2011, a group of youth, the Civil Democratic Movement, even called for a constitutional monarchy (Matthiesen 2013: loc. 1571). A group that came to be known as Dignity of a Nation (Karamat Watan), named after an anonymous Twitter account that called for protests and directed them around town, organized the first large demonstration on 15 October 2011 (Matthiesen 2013: loc. 1447). On 17 November 2011, thousands of protestors, including numerous opposition members of parliament, stormed and occupied the National Assembly, until riot police managed to disperse them (Barany 2013: 9). This led a few days later to the resignation of the reviled Prime Minister, Nasser al-Muhammad al-Sabah (Matthiesen 2013: loc. 1571). In addition to the youth movement, established opposition groups, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood and a number of independent politicians, called for an elected Prime Minister and cabinet, the legalization of political parties and a full constitutional monarchy (Matthiesen 2013: loc. 1447). Mass protests continued through 2012 and 2013, with the Emir periodically dissolving parliament and calling for new elections to quell tensions (Matthiesen 2013: loc. 1588–667). Rallies frequently took place at Irada Square, a Kuwaiti version of Egypt’s Tahrir Square (Matthiesen 2013: loc. 1588–667). At one rally, Musallam al-Barrak, a popular 76

Authoritarian adaptability

opposition member of parliament, challenged the political authority of the Emir (Matthiesen 2013: loc. 1588–667). The increasing protests led the Emir to denounce the demonstrations as “chaotic sedition that could jeopardize our country [and] undermine our national unity” (Matthiesen 2013: loc. 1588–667). On 21 October 2012, the biggest protest in Kuwaiti history, with between 50,000 and 150,000 participants, was met with rubber bullets and tear gas by security forces (Matthiesen 2013: loc. 1588–667). In Spring 2013 an alliance of youth groups and former members of parliament established a common opposition front, the Popular Action Movement, that demanded an elected government and the legalization of political parties (Matthiesen 2013: loc. 1588–667). None of these acts proved fatal to the Kuwaiti monarchy. In addition to repression and cosmetic political reforms, the Kuwaiti ruling family bought social peace with the distribution of $3500 to every Kuwaiti citizen, among other benefits: The government approved a record budget of $70 billion, most of which was set aside for fuel subsidies and salary increases for public employees, including military personnel. (Barany 2013: 25)

Qatar No Arab Spring Uprising ever developed in Qatar, although there were online protests on social media, especially on Facebook, in which Qatari activists called for a revolution against Qatari Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani’s regime. They protested against rampant corruption, the lack of an “authentic” political life in Qatar, the censorship against coverage of Qatari domestic affairs on Qatar-based al-Jazeera TV, and Qatar’s friendly relations with Israel and the United States.4 They demanded a minimum wage of 10,000 riyals (around $27,500), full employment, price subsidies on basic commodities and the implementation of an open political and partisan life.5 The Revolution of Qatari Youth announced 16 March as the day of Qatar’s Freedom Revolution (Barkan 2011). They demanded the termination of ties with Israel and the US (both enemies of Islam) and that Qatari resources be exported to Arab and Muslim states (Barkan 2011). Qatari journalists called for a new media law to protect freedom of speech and a free press (Khatri 2011) as the current law prohibits criticism of the royal family, a broad description that includes thousands of relatives of the Emir (Khatri 2011). Other articles of the media law ban publishing materials that cause any damage to the vaguely defined supreme interests of the country (The Peninsula 2011). Qatar is interesting in that through al-Jazeera and regional policies its rulers supported popular Uprisings and revolutionary activities abroad while they denied them at home. The Qatari monarchy embraced changes in transitioning Arab states and to the consternation of neighbours like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, supported the emerging power of Islamist movements, while developing close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood (Ulrichsen 2014a). In the name of seeking Arab solutions to Arab problems, the Qatari government also supported the oppositional insurgency in Libya and Syria (Ulrichsen 2014a). In the summer of 2012, a popular academic and writer al-Khalifa al-Kuwari published a volume of essays by Qatari writers and intellectuals entitled, The People Want Reform . . . in Qatar Too (Ulrichsen 2014b: 160). The manifesto called for increased government transparency, citizen involvement and democracy in Qatar. Topics covered the constitution, the judiciary and the rule of law, the use of earnings from gas exports, identity issues, education, the declining role of Arabic, demographic imbalances, and Qatar’s national development strategy (Ulrichsen 2014b: 160). In later interviews, Kuwari criticized the intertwining of public and private (royal family) finances (Ulrichsen 2014b: 161). 77

Stephen J. King

During the Arab Spring, political activism in the country, online or in the real world has been met with repression, cosmetic political reforms and increased distribution of state benefits. Online activists have been jailed (Amnesty International 2011). The Qatari poet, Muhammad ibn al-Deheeb al-Ajami, was sentenced to life in prison on charges of incitement to overthrow the ruling system, after he publicly recited a poem, “Tunisian Jasmine,” praising the Arab Spring Uprisings (Lynch 2013). Under arrest, he stated “We [Arabs] are all Tunisians in the face of a repressive elite” (The Guardian 2012). In terms of political reforms, national elections were introduced for the National Consultative Council (Shura Council). In addition to repression, Qatar’s monarchy took advantage of its natural gas and oil wealth to appease potential dissidents. In September 2011, Qatar unveiled a $8.24 billion pay-out in salaries, pensions and increased benefits for state and military employees (Reuters 2011). Salaries were increased by 60% for state employees. Officer rank military staff received a 120% increase in salary. Military retirees of officer rank received a 120% increase in pensions and civilian retirees a 60% increase in pensions.

Bahrain Bahrain stands out in a number of ways from the other Gulf rentier monarchies. Its economy is based as much on its role as financial centre for the other Gulf countries as it is on the export of its own oil and natural gas. The country has significant sectarian issues. Bahrain’s Sunni ruling family, the al-Khalifa family, has ruled a population that is 60–70% Shia since 1820 (Fayed 2011). Most importantly, in contrast to the other Gulf monarchies, Bahrain almost experienced a revolution in early 2011; Bahrain’s popular Uprising during the Arab Spring had to be quelled by the military intervention of Saudi Arabia and other GCC countries (Matthiesen 2013: loc. 58). Bahrain had a history of widespread protests and political reforms prior to the Arab Spring. After years of dissent, in 2001, Bahraini ruler Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa limited the power of the monarchically appointed government and increased the power of parliament (Kinninmont 2011). A year later, however, the Emir backtracked by introducing a new constitution in which the 40 appointed parliamentarians in the upper house, the Consultative Council of Bahrain, held greater power than the 40 elected ones in the lower house (Kinninmont 2011). In 2002, the Emir decreed Bahrain a kingdom and granted himself even more executive authority than allowed in the 2001 constitution (Kinninmont 2011). Opposition was led by al-Wefaq, a Shiabased party led by the cleric, Ali Salman. Al-Wefaq used its organizational resources to challenge the monarchy during the Arab Spring. Building on the protests of the previous decade and inspired by the Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, Arab Spring protests in Bahrain began with a demand for real democracy in the form of a constitutional monarchy. A rally on 14 February 2011 sought the rewriting of the constitution and the establishment of a full popular mandate (Zunes 2011). The demand for democracy was met with state brutality. Initially, security forces used tear gas, rubber bullets, and birdshot to break up the demonstration (Alwasat 2011). The next day, mimicking Tahrir Square in Egypt, protestors set up camp on the Pearl Roundabout in Manama (Slackman 2011). On 17 February, security forces forcibly took over the roundabout, injuring more than 300 people in the process, although protestors returned shortly afterwards (Slackman 2011). In response, al-Wefaq MPs submitted their resignation from parliament (Bassiouni et al. 2011). Over the course of the next month, the confrontation and violence between protestors and the regime grew. Tens of thousands participated in the “Gathering of National Unity,” on 21 February (Bassiouni et al. 2011). To quell tensions, King Hamad released political prisoners and dismissed the government (Richter 2011). The tactic did not work. On 8 March 2011, three 78

Authoritarian adaptability

Shia groups called for the abolishment of the monarchy and the establishment of a democratic republic. On 14 March, the GCC deployed about 1500 troops to Bahrain to counter the protests. On 16 March security forces once again forcibly vacated the Pearl Roundabout and later demolished it; eight protestors were killed (Bassiouni et al. 2011). While asserting coercive control, the regime began half-hearted negotiations with the opposition. The Bahrain Debate, organized by a youth group, met with the government. However, in 2012, a top Shia cleric, Sheikh Isa Qassim, organized the largest protest in Bahraini history (Al-Jazeera 2012). The protest was followed by multiple bombings targeting policemen, government officials and large crowds (Phillips 2012). In response, the government banned all protests. While both Shia and Sunnis participated in the Uprisings and declared support for democracy, to strengthen its own ruling coalition dominated by Sunnis, the regime cast the protests as Shia sectarianism with support from Iran (Matthiesen 2013: loc. 754). To maintain the “peace,” Saudi troops remained in Bahrain, causing many Shia to feel that they are living under occupation, and Shia villages and neighbourhoods are heavily policed (Matthiesen 2013: loc. 924). The rulers also distributed the equivalent of $2652 to each Bahraini family (Selvik and Utvik 2015).

Jordan Jordan and Morocco lack the hydrocarbon wealth of the other Arab monarchies. Instead of buying consent—though they did that as well—to counter Arab Spring protests, they relied more on the heritage-based legitimacy of their ruling dynasties and a façade of multi-party politics, with an underlying promise of a true constitutional monarchy in the future. Although Jordan is technically a constitutional monarchy, in reality the executive powers of the Hashemite monarchy are unconstrained. Before the Arab Spring, Jordan’s King Abdullah II appointed the Prime Minister and cabinet, and often ruled by decree (Helfont and Helfont 2012: 85). In addition, the appointed upper house was more powerful than the elected lower house (Helfont and Helfont 2012: 85). Finally, Jordanians of Palestinian descent, who represent the majority of the Jordanian population, were disadvantaged through gerrymandering electoral laws and electoral fraud (Helfont and Helfont 2012: 85). Political mobilization during the Arab Spring in Jordan never reached a level that threatened the monarchy, though a notable protest movement did emerge. The first protests, which attracted more than 3500 people in Amman alone, occurred in late January and early February 2011 (Tobin 2012). Participants included liberal youth groups, trade unions and leftist parties, and the Muslim Brotherhood, whose political party, the Islamic Action Front (IAF), historically has had the most seats in parliament (Tobin 2012; Helfont and Helfont 2012: 82–95). For several months smaller protests occurred weekly after Friday prayers. A demonstration of several hundred people confronted security forces on 25 March 2011 when protestors gathered at Amman’s Interior Circle.6 Blood was spilt as well on 15 July 2011, when around 2000 Jordanians gathered in the capital to begin an open-ended peaceful sit-in along the lines of Egypt’s Tahrir Square (Helfont and Helfont 2012: 88). Violent demonstrations and confrontations between protestors and government forces took place as well in tribal strongholds outside Amman (Helfont and Helfont 2012: 88). Protests in Jordan were spurred by economic grievances: widespread poverty, unemployment and corruption (International Crisis Group 2012). Politically, unlike in many countries during the Arab Spring, public rallies in Jordan did not centre around calls for regime change (Köprülü 2014: 318). Still, while acknowledging the legitimacy of the Hashemites, protestors issued a myriad of challenging demands for political reforms: the dissolution of the government, 79

Stephen J. King

the dissolution of parliament, the holding of new elections under a revised electoral law and the amending of the constitution to allow for the direct election of the Prime Minister and government (Helfont and Helfont 2012: 89). King Abdullah responded to Arab Spring protests in Jordan by setting aside $500 million for salary increases for government employees and subsidies for food staples and fuel (Tobin 2012: 104). Politically, the King ostensibly agreed to relinquish the right to appoint Prime Ministers and cabinets and promised new election and political party laws (Tobin 2012). To appease the public, he also held elections quickly, sacked the Prime Minister, and reappointed the government multiple times during the Uprising (Tobin 2012). Over time, demands for political reforms weakened, attributed to the division between a largely pro-monarchy “East Bank” Jordanian population that is fearful that real democracy would increase, at their expense, the power of the country’s majority, Jordanians of Palestinian descent. In addition, the bloody events in neighbouring Syria, Yemen and Iraq stimulated a desire for security and stability over the risks of political change (Tobin 2012; Helfont and Helfont 2012).

Morocco Morocco, like Jordan, does not possess the hydrocarbon wealth to buy consent to autocratic rule. Instead, a façade of multi-party politics plays a significant role. Like Jordan’s King Abdullah II, Morocco’s King Muhammad VI, holds significant executive and legislative powers despite the presence of democratic institutions. The rhetoric of the two Kings, before and after the Arab Spring, emphasized strengthening these institutions, empowering civil society, and implementing durable economic improvements, though in practice the reserved powers of the two monarchs preclude true democracy. Like King Abdullah II, Morocco’s King can take advantage of the heritage of traditional legitimacy to counteract emerging protest movements: Mohammed VI is the 32nd King of the Alaouite Dynasty, which was established in 1666. Morocco’s Spring began with the 20 February 2011 movement. As elsewhere, it was organized by the youth and largely online. In the first few weeks, it seemed to harness the revolutionary potential that was sweeping the region. There were street protests in every corner of the country feeding a feeling that economic grievances would be addressed (unemployment, poverty, corruption, urban bias), and real political change was imminent (Belghazi and Moudden 2016: 39). After three weeks of nationwide popular protests in Morocco, on 9 March 2011, Muhammad VI announced constitutional reforms. The power of the King would be reduced. Instead of being appointed by the King, the Prime Minister would be chosen by the head of the party that wins the most votes in upcoming elections. That Prime Minister would form the government. In his 11-minute televised speech, he also announced that he would appoint a commission to revise the constitution and instruct its members to amend it in a manner that increases the power of parliament, the independence of the judiciary and the separation of powers. His reform agenda also included boosting the authority of local officials. He asserted that the commission would work with political parties, trade unions and civil-society groups to draw up the details of the constitutional amendments. These were political reforms that had been clamoured for by the democratic opposition in Morocco for decades. They seemed capable of creating a true democracy. The King’s speech split the reform movement. At the expense of political momentum, the united front of nonpartisan youth, the traditional opposition, the radical left and moderate and radical Islamists were divided over the King’s initiative (Belghazi and Moudden 2016). Some urged participating in the consultation process and taking part in it in good faith (Belghazi and 80

Authoritarian adaptability

Moudden 2016). Others considered it yet another ploy of the makhzen, the traditional (deep) state, or patronage-based royal power structure that rules Morocco (Belghazi and Moudden 2016: 39). Sceptics had a number of questions. They were most concerned about the vagueness of the governing responsibilities that the King would maintain. Although the proposals would strengthen the role of a Prime Minister that would be chosen by the election result, and that Prime Minister would head the executive branch, it was unclear if the King intended to maintain some executive powers. If he did so, would his sacredness prevent accountability for decisions? Would the King maintain the power to abolish parliament and legislate by decree? Would he maintain a shadow cabinet of his closest advisers? Would the Prime Minister appoint all cabinet Ministers? The sceptics turned out to be right. Despite the fact that the moderate Islamist party, the Party of Justice and Development (PJD) dominated the first election under the new constitution, which led to Abdelilah Benkirane becoming Prime Minister and appointing his own cabinet, Mohammad VI maintained important executive and legislative powers. The King also retained influence over cabinet Ministers, in addition to maintaining his own shadow cabinet of advisers (Maghraoui 2015). Policy-wise, the King directly took over the most important projects that were destined for success, while leaving the government to make unpopular decisions on difficult issues (Hissouf 2016: 49). Frustrated with the emerging façade of constitutional monarchy, remnants of the 20 February movement called for a parliamentary monarchy, which would completely eliminate the King’s reserved powers. In terms of democratization, in some ways, Morocco has regressed since the Arab Spring. To combat real change, the King turned to the creation of a King’s party, the Authenticity and Modernity Party (PAM), led by his close friend and adviser, Fouad Ali El Himma. This hoary strategy had come into disrepute even under the prior constitution. However, commentators expected PAM, a party with no social base prior to its hasty creation, to be very competitive in elections. Personal freedoms were also being curtailed in Morocco (Guerraoui 2016).

After authoritarian breakdown: democratization or civil wars, and authoritarian restoration? What happens after authoritarian breakdown? The literature on democracy and democratization has long argued that transitions from authoritarian regimes can lead to more than one outcome as adumbrated by O’Donnell, Schmitter and Whitehead (1986: 3) in their collection on the subject: transition from authoritarian regimes could be toward a political democracy; the restoration of a new, and possibly more severe form of authoritarian rule; enduring instability; widespread, violent confrontations, or violent revolution. In the case of the Arab Uprisings, democratic transition succeeded in the sole case of Tunisia. Understanding what made Tunisia different provides key insights into the nature of the Arab state and its variations. For democratic outcomes, pacts are key. Pacts are negotiated efforts at national consensus designed to address conflicts that could derail a democratic transition. In their seminal work, O’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter emphasized three pacts: military pacts, political pacts and socioeconomic pacts. The Arab Spring experience to date suggests the importance of two others: nation–state pacts, and transitional justice and human rights pacts. Tunisia, the only democratic success to date, is extraordinary for its relative success at reaching national consensus in the various areas that support democratic consolidation. Tunisia’s distinctiveness in the Arab world of having a small, professional and apolitical military facilitated a pact on the military’s extrication from politics. The military did not shoot at demonstrators 81

Stephen J. King

when Ben Ali gave the orders. It stayed on the side-lines while civilian leaders of political parties guided the democratic transition after Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia. It did not intervene when secular liberals, disturbed by the electoral power of Tunisian Islamists and influenced by a military coup against Islamists in Egypt, urged it to do so. In the rare instances in which it was called to restore order during the transition, it returned to the barracks as soon as the task was completed. Civil-society groups led by the national labour federation, not the military, stepped in to break an impasse among political parties that threatened the transition. For a transition to succeed political parties that represent all the major factions in a country must strike a democratic bargain or political pact agreeing to compete according to the rules of political democracy and to forego appeals to mass mobilization, violence and military intervention to alter electoral outcomes (Anderson 1999). In Tunisia, as elsewhere in the region, the key challenge was a division between secularists and Islamists. Secular-oriented citizens had to accept the right of Islamists to participate in competitive elections as long as they respected the constitution and democratic norms, and Islamists had to accept the right of secularists to legislate and govern within the bounds of the constitution and human rights, without having to confront denials of their authority based on religious claims—such as the claim that “Only God, not man, can make laws” (Stepan 2012: 89). Thus, overcoming conflicts over religion and values that threaten democratic transitions require “twin tolerations” (Stepan 2012). Tunisia’s dominant Islamist party, Ennahda, and several secular parties worked together, even prior to the Arab Spring, to reach a political pact in support of democracy and the twin tolerations (Stepan 2012). During the founding elections of Tunisia’s democratic transition, Ennahda dominated at the polls but decided to rule as part of a “troika” composed of Ennahda and two smaller secular party partners. The troika emphasized the point that transitional elections, which influence the writing of new constitutions, should not be strictly partisan affairs because the constitution represents the nation as a whole. Despite complications that arose when the Constituent Assembly was unable to produce a constitution within its 1-year mandate, with civil-society support, Tunisian political parties worked through divisive issues and completed a peaceful second turnover in power, which for some is the benchmark of democratic consolidation (Huntington 1991: 267). Ennahda dominated the founding elections and a secular coalition, Call for Tunisia, Nidaa Tounes, the second. Both nation and state are important for nation–state pacts. The consolidation of national identity is a requisite in democratic transitions because, without this, electoral competition is bound to exacerbate communal conflicts (Rustow 1970). In addition to political community, historically democracy has most often occurred in countries that have modern states, which are defined by Weber as possessing a military that monopolizes the use of force in order to maintain public order, a national administration based on rational-legal norms and a tax collection apparatus capable of paying for the military and the bureaucracy. Comparatively, Tunisia has been blessed with national unity—it has a largely homogenous population—and a relatively modern bureaucracy. Tunisia’s transition occurred with much less bloodshed than in other Arab Spring transitions. The UN reported at least 300 deaths and 700 injured during the 2011 Uprising (CNN 2011). This comparatively smaller toll on human life lessens the transitional justice challenges facing the country. Forging a socioeconomic pact may be Tunisia’s biggest remaining challenge. Socioeconomic pacts are needed during democratic transitions because economic ills are primary reasons for Uprisings against autocratic rule, and the instability and rising demands of the post-breakdown context exacerbates those ills. Tunisians and Arab Spring participants in other countries did not rise-up against autocratic rule only to improve their political lives; they rose up also with 82

Authoritarian adaptability

an expectation of improving their material lives and opportunities. This poses a two-fold challenge, leaders have to answer enough of the demands of the politically mobilized to retain their support for the democratic transition, while still being able to limit claims that threaten economic growth and the overall viability of the economy. National dialogues and the institutionalization of bargaining rights among business, labour, and government that result in socioeconomic pacts, create the possibility of a sustainable balance between demands on the economy and its possibilities. Without broad national agreement on socioeconomic policies, governments risk falling into a cycle of demands (strikes and protests for state benefits) and capitulation that make it impossible to implement sustainable national economic policies. Tunisia has fallen into this cycle of demands and capitulation.7 The economy is being sustained through foreign aid that will not continue forever.8 To overcome this challenge, Tunisian economic leaders are calling for a national economic dialogue similar to the national political dialogue orchestrated by the National Dialogue Quartet of civil-society associations, which won the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize.9 Ironically, the Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT), the leader of the quartet, is currently seen as too powerful and unwilling to accept the compromises necessary to achieve a socioeconomic pact.10

Conclusion With apparently only one democracy emerging from the Arab Spring (Tunisia), it is possible to continue to argue for the resilience of authoritarianism in the Arab world. Yet this overestimates regimes’ resilience. A more nuanced conclusion is that the consolidation of democracy after authoritarian breakdown is very difficult. Regional exceptionalism that explains this difficulty may lie in the lack of political community (national unity) and modern states when the Arab Spring transitions began. The other regional exceptionalism is the high number (6 of 22 states in the Arab League) of wealthy rentier monarchies in the region that can buy off challenges to authoritarian rule. Indeed, the region’s exceptional resistance to democracy may be linked to the comparative longevity of monarchical authoritarian regimes as a whole, since very few ruling monarchies exist outside the region and they compose such a large share of Arab League countries (Hadenius and Teorell 2006).

Notes 1 Bellin notes more ambiguity in the Egyptian case, where the military had been a beneficiary of the regime’s economic cronyism. 2 Interview, October 2006. 3 “Statement from Emirati detainee Dr Nasser Bin Ghaith.” Testimonials Boycott UAE. Boycott UAE, 2 October 2011, [Online], accessible at: http://www.boycottuae.com/testimonials/statement-fromemirati-detainee-dr-nasser-bin-ghaith (Boycott UAE 2011). 4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DV1zagIvO8I 5 Ibid. 6 Reportedly one fatality and multiple injuries. 7 Author Interview, March 2016 with Hedi Larbi, Minister of Economic Infrastructure and Sustainable Development in Tunisia, January 2014–February 2015. 8 Author Interview, March 2016 with Hedi Larbi, Minister of Economic Infrastructure and Sustainable Development in Tunisia, January 2014–February 2015. 9 Author Interview, March 2016 with Hedi Larbi, Minister of Economic Infrastructure and Sustainable Development in Tunisia, January 2014–February 2015. 10 Author Interview, March 2016 with Hedi Larbi, Minister of Economic Infrastructure and Sustainable Development in Tunisia, January 2014–February 2015. 83

Stephen J. King

References Abboud, S. (2016), Syria, Cambridge: Polity Press. Al-Jazeera (2012), “Bahrain’s Shias demand reform at mass rally,” Aljazeera, accessible at: https://www. aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2012/03/201239144334860869.html Alwasat al-Bayrainiya (2011), “‫ مصابا ً في مسيرات احتجاجية أمس‬30 ‫قتيل وأكثر من‬,” Alwasat Al Bayrainiya, accessible at: http://www.alwasatnews.com/3084/news/read/527311/1.html Amadeo, K. (2018), “Gulf cooperation council countries: 6 rich countries that own most of the world’s oil,” The Balance, accessible at: https://www.thebalance.com/gulf-cooperation-council-3306357 Amin, M. et al. (2012), After the Spring, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Amnesty International (2011), “Qatar: Blogger detained incommunicado in Qatar,” Amnesty International, accessible at: https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde22/001/2011/en/ Anderson, L. (1999), Transitions to Democracy, New York, NY: Columbia University Press Barany, Z. (2013), “Unrest and state response in Arab monarchies,” Mediterranean Quarterly, 24:2, 5–38. Barkan, L. (2011), “Clashes on Facebook over calls for revolution in Qatar,” The Middle East Media Research Institute. Bassiouni, M., Rodley, N., al-Awadhi, B., Kirsch P. and M. Arsanjani (2011), “Report of the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry,” Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry, Manama. BBC News (2011a), “Man dies after setting himself on fire in Saudi Arabia,” BBC News, accessible at: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-12260465 BBC News (2011b), “UAE arrests democracy activists,” BBC News, accessible at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ news/world-middle-east-13043270 Belghazi, T. and A. Moudden (2016), “Ihbat: disillusionment and the Arab Spring in Morocco,” The Journal of North African Studies, 21:1, 37–49. Bellin, E. (2004), “The robustness of authoritarianism in the Middle East: exceptionalism in comparative perspective,” Comparative Politics, 36:2, 139. Boghardt, L. (2013), “Saudi Arabia: Outlawing terrorism and the Arab Spring,” The Washington Institute. Boycott UAE (2011), “Statement from Emirati detainee Dr. Nasser Bin Ghaith,” Boycott UAE, accessible at: http://www.boycottuae.com/testimonials/statement-from-emirati-detainee-dr-nasser-bin-ghaith Brownlee, J. (2005), “Political crises and restabilization: Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Tunisia,” in eds, M. Angrist and M. Pripstein-Posusney, Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Regime and Resistance, Boulder, CO: Lynne Reiner Press, 2005. Brownlee, J. (2004), “Ruling parties and durable authoritarianism,” Freeman Spogli Institute. Brumberg, D. (2002), “The trap of liberalized autocracy,” Journal of Democracy, 13:4, 56–68. CNN (2011), “About 300 people killed in original Tunisian Uprising, U.N. Reports,” CNN, accessible at: http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/africa/05/21/tunisia.un/index.html Ehteshami, A. and E. Murphy (1996), “Transformation of the corporatist state in the Middle East,” Third World Quarterly, 17:4, 753–72. Erlich, R. (2013), “In Saudi Arabia, Shiite Muslims challenge ban on protests,” NPR, accessible at: https:// www.npr.org/2013/03/23/175051345/in-saudi-arabia-shiite-muslims-challenge-ban-on-protests Fayed, S. (2011), “Arab unrest puts focus on UAE’s Northern Emirates,” Reuters, accessible at: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-emirates-northern/arab-unrest-puts-focus-on-uaes-northernemirates-idUSTRE7652Y020110706 Gause III, G. (July/August 2011), “Why Middle East studies missed the Arab Spring,” Foreign Affairs, accessible at: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/middle-east/2011-07-01/why-middle-east-studiesmissed-arab-spring Geddes, B. (1999), “Authoritarian breakdown: Empirical test of a game theoretic argument,” The American Political Science Association, Atlanta, GA. GLMM (2015), “GCC: Total population and percentage of nationals and non-nationals in GCC Countries (Latest National Statistics, 2010–2015),” GLMM, accessible at: https://gulfmigration.org/ total-population-and-percentage-of-nationals-and-non-nationals-in-gcc-countries-latest-nationalstatistics-2010-2015/ The Guardian (2012), “Qatari poet jailed for life after writing verse inspired by Arab Spring,” The Guardian, accessible at: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/nov/29/qatari-poet-jailed-arab-spring Guerraoui, S. (2016), “Morocco banned Skype, Viber, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. It didn’t go down well,” Middle East Eye, accessible at: http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/boycotts-appealspetitions-restore-blocked-voip-calls-morocco-1520817507 84

Authoritarian adaptability

Hadenius, A. and J. Teorell (2006), Authoritarian regimes: Stability, change, and pathways to democracy, 1972–2003, Working Paper #331, The Hellen Kellog Institute for International Studies. Hartshorn, I. (2014), “Labor in the Arab Uprisings: Three years on,” Muftah, accessible at: http://muftah. org/labor-arab-uprisings-three-years/#.V8xYpz4rJ-U Hasan, O. (2014), “Gulf urged to fund ‘Arab Marshall Plan’ to contain unrest,” AFP, accessible at: https:// news.yahoo.com/gulf-urged-fund-arab-marshall-plan-contain-unrest-203521039.html Helfont, S. and T. Helfont (2012), “Jordan: between the Arab Spring and the Gulf Cooperation Council,” Orbis, 56:1, 82–95. Heydemann, S. (2007), “Upgrading authoritarianism in the Arab world,” The Brookings Institution, accessible at: https://www.brookings.edu/research/upgrading-authoritarianism-in-the-arab-world/ Hill, J. (2011), “The growing rebellion in Saudi Arabia,” The Global Mail, accessible at: http://www. theglobalmail.org/feature/the-growing-rebellion-in-saudi-arabia/84/ Hinnebusch, R. (1985), Egyptian politics under Sadat: The Post-Populist Development of an AuthoritarianModernizing State, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hinnebusch, R. (2000), “Liberalization without democratization in ‘post-populist’ authoritarian states,” in eds, N. Betenschon and M. Hassanian, Citizenship and the State in the Middle East: Evidence from Syrian and Egypt, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Hinnebusch, R. (2006), “Authoritarian persistence, democratization theory and the Middle East: an overview and critique,” Democratization, 13:3, 373–95. Hinnebusch, R. (2012), “Review: the new authoritarianism in the Middle East and North Africa,” Perspectives on Politics, 10:2, 523–5. Hissouf, A. (2016), “The Moroccan monarchy and the Islam-oriented PJD: Pragmatic cohabitation and the need for Islamic political secularism,” All Azimuth: A Journal of Foreign Policy and Peace, 5:1, 43. Human Rights Watch (2011), “UAE: End trial of activists charged with insulting officials,” Human Rights Watch, accessible at: https://www.hrw.org/news/2011/07/17/uae-end-trial-activists-chargedinsulting-officials. Human Rights Watch (2013), “UAE: Reports of systematic torture in jails,” Human Rights Watch, accessible at: http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/06/27/uae-reports-systematic-torture-jails Huntington, S. (1991), The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. The International Commission of Jurists (ICJ, 2013), “Mass convictions following an unfair trial: The UAE 94 Case,” The International Commission of Jurists, Geneva. International Crisis Group (2012), “Popular protest in North Africa and the Middle East (IX): Dallying with reform in a divided Jordan,” International Crisis Group. Katzman, K. (2013), “The United Arab Emirates (UAE): Issues for U.S. Policy,” Congressional Research Service, Washington, DC. Khatri, S. (2011), “Qatar: Why protests won’t happen here,” The Huffington Post, accessible at: http:// www.huffingtonpost.com/shabina-s-khatri/qatar-why-protests-wont-h_b_830129.html Kienle, E. (2001), A Grand Delusion: Democracy and Economic Reform in Egypt, London: I.B. Tauris. King, S. (2009), The New Authoritarianism in the Middle East and North Africa, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Kinninmont, J. (2011), “Bahrain’s re-reform movement,” Foreign Affairs, accessible at: https://www. foreignaffairs.com/articles/bahrain/2011-02-28/bahrain-s-re-reform-movement?page=show Kinninmont, J. (2019), Kuwait’s Parliament: An Experiment in Semi-Democracy, London: Chatham House. Köprülü, N. (2014), “Consolidated monarchies in the post-‘Arab Spring’ era: the case of Jordan,” Israel Affairs, 20:3, 318–27. Langohr, V. (2005), “Too much civil society, too little politics,” in eds, M. Angrist and M. PripsteinPosusney, Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Regime and Resistance, Boulder, CO: Lynne Reiner Press. Lust-Okar, E. (2005), Structuring Conflict in the Arab World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lynch, J. (2013), “Qatar changes leaders, now can it start reforms?—CNN,” CNN, accessible at: https:// edition.cnn.com/2013/06/25/opinion/qatar-amnesty/index.html Maghraoui, A. (2015), “Morocco: The King’s Islamists,” Wilson Center, accessible at: https://www. wilsoncenter.org/article/morocco-the-kings-islamists Malas, N. (2011), “UAE citizens petition rulers for elected parliament,” The Wall Street Journal, accessible at: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748704132204576190012553500944 Matthiesen, T. (2013), Sectarian Gulf, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 85

Stephen J. King

O’Donnell, G., Schmitter, P. and L. Whitehead (1986), Transitions from Authoritarian Rule, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. The Peninsula Qatar (2011), “No punishment for journalists in media law for criticising royals,” The Peninsula Qatar, accessible at: http://thepeninsulaqatar.com/news/qatar/214177/no-punishment-forjournalists-in-media-law-for-criticising-royals Phillips, T. (2012), “White House continues to support brutally repressive regime in Bahrain,” Activist Defense, accessible at: https://activistdefense.wordpress.com/2012/11/20/white-house-continues-to-supportbrutally-repressive-regime-in-bahrain/ Pripstein-Posusney, M. (1997), Labor and the State in Egypt: Workers, Unions and Economic Restructuring, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Pripstein-Posusney, M. (2005), “Multi-party election in the Arab World,” in eds. M. Angrist and M. Pripstein-Posusney, Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Regime and Resistance, Boulder, CO: Lynne Reiner Press. Reuters (2011), “UAE to fix food prices as global commodities rise,” Reuters, https://www.reuters. com/article/emirates-retail/uae-to-fix-food-prices-as-global-commodities-rise-idUSLDE74P0RC 20110526 Reuters—Defense Web (2011), “UAE boosts military pensions, seen pre-empting unrest,” Reuters— Defense Web, accessible at: https://www.defenceweb.co.za/security/civil-security/uae-boosts-militarypensions-seen-pre-empting-unrest/ Richter, F. (2011), “Shi’ite dissident returns to Bahrain from exile,” Reuters, accessible at: https:// www.reuters.com/article/us-bahrain-government/shiite-dissident-returns-to-bahrain-from-exileidUSTRE71P1A720110226 Rustow, D. (1970), “Transitions to democracy: toward a dynamic model,” Comparative Politics, 2:3, 337. Selvik, K. and B. Utvik (2015), Oil States in the New Middle East: Uprisings and Stability, first edition, New York, NY: Routledge. Shah, A. (2011), “Why the Arab Spring never came to the UAE?,” Time Magazine, accessible at: http:// www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2083768,00.html Slackman, M. (2011), “King of Bahrain allows rally by protesters,” The New York Times, accessible at: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/world/middleeast/16bahrain.html Stepan, A. (2012), “Tunisia’s transition and the twin tolerations,” Journal of Democracy, 23:2, 89–103. Tessler, M., Nachtwey, J. and A. Banda (1999), Area Studies and Social Science, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Tobin, S. (2012), “Jordan’s Arab Spring: The middle class and anti-revolution,” Middle East Policy, 19:1, 96–109. Ulrichsen, K.C. (2014a), Qatar and the Arab Spring, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ulrichsen, K.C. (2014b), “Qatar and the Arab Spring: Policy drivers and regional implications,” accessible at: https://carnegieendowment.org/2014/09/24/qatar-and-arab-spring-policy-drivers-and-regionalimplications-pub-56723 Waterbury, J. (1994), “Democracy without democrats? The potential for political liberalization in the Middle East,” in ed, G. Salame, Democracy Without Democrats: The Renewal of Politics in the Muslim World, p. 23, London: I.B. Tauris. Worrall, J. (2012), “Oman: the ‘forgotten’ corner of the Arab Spring,” Middle East Policy, 19:3, 98–115, accessible at: 10.1111/j.1475-4967.2012.00550.x. Zunes, S. (2011), “America blows it on Bahrain,” Foreign Policy In Focus, accessible at: https://fpif.org/ america_blows_it_on_bahrain/

86

6 The Arab Spring and the Gulf monarchies Christopher M. Davidson

The six “Gulf monarchies” have managed to contain and thwart a number of different opposition movements over the years, but these have rarely been broad-based and have tended to represent only narrow sections of the citizenry. Moreover, the Gulf monarchies have generally been strong and confident enough to placate or side-line any opposition before it has gained too much traction, and have also been very effective at demonizing opponents; either branding them as foreign-backed fifth columnists, as religious fundamentalists or even as terrorists. In turn, this has allowed rulers and their governments to portray themselves to the majority of citizens and most international observers as being safe, reliable upholders of the status quo, and thus far preferable to any dangerous and unpredictable alternatives. When reformist forces have affected their populations—often owing to improving communications between citizens or their access to education—the Gulf monarchies have usually been effective at co-option, often bringing such forces under the umbrella of the state or under the patronage of members of ruling families, and thus continuing to apply a mosaic model of traditional loyalties alongside modernization, even in the first few years of the twenty-first century. Quite recently, however, powerful opposition movements have emerged that have proved less easy to contain, not least because they are making the most of potent new modernizing forces that have been less easy for governments to co-opt. Partly as a result of this, an increasing number of regular citizens in the Gulf states have become emboldened enough to protest against and, often for the first time, openly question their rulers. In 2011, spurred on by developments elsewhere in the region, these opponents and critics began to present one of the most serious challenges yet to the ruling families. In something of a perfect storm for the incumbent regimes, the so-called “Arab Spring” Uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria not only gave hope for those Gulf citizens and Gulf-based movements committed to serious political reform and to the unseating of autocracies, but they also made it harder for the Gulf monarchies to depict their challengers as anything other than pro-democracy activists or disillusioned citizens who had begun to question the political and economic structures underpinning their states. Furthermore, the 2011 revolutions and attempted revolutions—and in many ways even more so the region-wide counter-revolutions in 2013, sponsored by Saudi Arabia and the UAE—also helped expose the Gulf monarchies’ strong preference for supporting other authoritarian states in the region, and their clear fear of having democratic, representative governments take shape 87

Christopher M. Davidson

in neighbouring states. The initial responses of most of the Gulf monarchies were markedly anti-Arab Spring, even if they later tried to change tack. This had a massive delegitimizing effect on the ruling families and governments involved, as in the eyes of many of their citizens they positioned themselves as part of a distinct and reactionary bloc. Unsurprisingly, the post-2011 opposition in the Gulf monarchies has manifested itself in different ways depending on the circumstances and pressures in each state. This has ranged from full-blown street riots complete with killings and martyrs in the poorer Gulf monarchies such as Bahrain to subtler intellectual and even internet-led “cyber opposition” in the wealthier Gulf monarchies such as Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. But in all cases the regimes have responded with more repression than ever before, thus further exposing their ruling families. In some instances, brutal police crackdowns have taken place and foreign mercenaries deployed, while in others political prisoners have been held, judicial systems manipulated, and civil society further stymied. Thus far only Qatar has avoided such heavy-handedness, mostly due to its more favourable circumstances and a rather different stance on the Arab Spring, which has seen it support the Muslim Brotherhood and a range of other political Islamic organizations. Nevertheless, even its ruling family is not without critics.

Evolving opposition Much of the earlier opposition in the Gulf monarchies focused on the economic grievances and frustration of merchant or worker communities in the post-pearling industry era, and— especially in the 1960s and early 1970s—the ruling families’ perceived connections to nonArab, non-Muslim powers, and the need to bring the Gulf states closer into line with the region’s Arab nationalist republics. Particular hotbeds were in Dubai, Bahrain and Kuwait, although there were also some protests in Qatar from indigenous oil workers concerned with the excesses of their ruling family (Fromherz 2012: 7). Several opposition “national fronts” were established, but only one of these—the Dhofar Liberation Front, later the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf—ever led to an armed insurrection. In many ways, the Gulf monarchies were well placed to counter these threats, as Israel’s victories over the principal Arab military powers in 1967 had taken much of the gloss off Arab nationalism. Moreover, with increasing oil exports and expanding state treasuries, this was also the period when many of the region’s wealth distribution practices were inaugurated. Not only were most Gulf citizens enjoying better lifestyles than before, but many were kept busy with the new activities and opportunities resulting from the first major oil booms. In Dubai’s case, many of the same families that had been involved in national front activity and opposition to the ruling family in the 1960s became massively enriched in the 1970s, mostly due to being granted exclusive import licences for the various products demanded by the emirate’s fast-growing economy. And today their descendants, now regarded as key allies of the ruling family, are at the helm of some of the region’s biggest trade and retail empires (Davidson 2007). Subsequent opposition movements were a little more difficult to contain, as most focused on the illegitimacy of the pro-Western Gulf monarchies and their apparent manipulation of Islam. Given that these movements were often based on religious platforms, or led by disillusioned or discriminated against sections of the populations, they were not entirely placated by material benefits. In Saudi Arabia, for example, the most serious opposition to the ruling family in the 1990s came from a diffuse movement of young religious dissidents and conservative university students. Critical of the official religious establishment’s seemingly hypocritical support for American bases on Saudi territory following the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, this Sahwa or “Awakening” movement was only dealt with by granting more control over social institutions 88

The Arab Spring and the Gulf monarchies

and the education sector to religious conservatives. Confirming a long-held view in the ruling family that their main opposition would eventually come from religious circles rather than liberal reformers this was deemed a necessary if unpleasant manoeuvre in order to head off further criticism (Nolan 2011). Similarly, in the UAE and Kuwait, where Muslim Brotherhood organizations or “reform associations” have existed for many years, there was a tacit understanding in place that these groups would be tolerated and given some influence over the religious and educational establishments. In the UAE this led to the Brotherhood’s de facto control over the Ministries for Education and Social Affairs, with its members presiding over curriculum committees and—for many years— dominating the UAE’s principal university. Up until 2003, senior members of the Abu Dhabi ruling family were even holding meetings with Brotherhood representatives, trying to establish a set of compromises (Dar al-Hayat 2010). Following 9/11, the subsequent US-led War on Terror, the CIA’s capture of a major alQaeda figure in the UAE in 2002, and a violent campaign launched against the Saudi oil industry and Western expatriates in 2003 by “al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula,” most of the Gulf monarchies made a volte-face regarding such Islamist or “reform” movements. Partly this was out of fear, with unpublished polls in Saudi Arabia after 2001 indicating that most young Saudi men sympathized with Osama bin Laden and opposed any form of Saudi co-operation with the US over the Iraq War (Nolan 2011). But it was also due to the increasing ease they experienced in simply branding opponents as “terrorists” or alleging their connections to ill-defined al-Qaeda plots. Indeed, in recent years, the Gulf monarchies’ security services have usually been able to arrest activists and repress any Islamist organizations in their territories without fearing any international scrutiny. In many cases, these crackdowns won praise from the Western powers, being described as part of the Gulf monarchies’ “commitment to battling terrorism” (Davidson 2013: 194). In the UAE, for example, the previous concessions granted to the Muslim Brotherhood were reversed, with hundreds of teachers, academics and ministry employees being fired from their jobs in 2006 on the grounds of Islamist affiliations. Some were accused of “dual loyalties” or threatening “violent acts in the occupied Arab emirates,” and in 2008 a large number of activists were imprisoned and accused of being part of an “underground movement in the UAE trying to promote their own strict view of Islam” (Davidson 2013: 194–95). Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia, new anti-terror legislation has been repeatedly used to imprison men who have been described by international human rights organizations as being political activists. In late 2010, Canada’s Global Post reported on 16 Saudi citizens—including businessmen, university professors and a judge—who were charged in a secret court with “supporting terrorism and plotting to overthrow the government.” Having been held in custody for more than 4 years, they were believed to be “widely known for peacefully demanding political reforms.” Their case was not reported in the Saudi press, although some Saudi nationals commented on the matter, claiming that the accused were only “seeking reform and to open people’s minds” and that they were “extremely anti-al-Qaeda.” Moreover, fellow activists complained that such terrorism charges were now widespread in the kingdom as they are “one of the most convenient charges [because] no one will defend you and you will become hopeless” (Davidson 2013: 195). There were countless other such examples in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the region, with a Saudi surgeon having been held in custody and accused of “backing and funding terrorism” since appearing on television and criticizing the government. Similarly, in Bahrain, a trial was held in late 2010 for a group of 25 dissidents who were accused of “financing terrorism” and “inciting hatred of the ruling family.” Reportedly beaten, tortured, and with the Bahraini media barred from covering their case, the men included prominent bloggers, journalists and even a member of a human rights group (Davidson 2013: 195). 89

Christopher M. Davidson

Overall, the branding of such opposition movements and the positioning of the Gulf monarchies as a better, safer alternative to Islamist-dominated governments or other such scenarios was highly effective. Indeed, as described in Jean-Pierre Filiu’s book on the Arab Spring, these “rulers became well versed in their routine of no alternative argumentation: towards the West, they posed as the only ones able to deter an Islamist takeover” (Filiu 2011: 76). Moreover, it was argued that there is now a sad irony that the powers in place have ended up believing their own fantasies about the Islamist threat; they not only displayed that card for external consumption, but they also fed their own masses with gory stories about the inevitability of . . . ruin. (Filiu 2011: 74) And that the Gulf monarchies—and their now fallen Arab autocratic allies in Tunisia and Egypt—have been responsible for “rushing to enrol in the global War on Terror, provided that their domestic opposition would fall under the extensive category of al-Qaeda supporters.” The anti-terrorism legislation and emergency laws used to neutralize opponents were heavily criticized for being an “oxymoron to describe the suspension of the rule of law and the absolute vulnerability of the citizen” (Filiu 2011: 75). In much the same way as the Islamist groups, some other opposition movements in the region, especially in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia—where there are substantial Shia populations— were branded both as terrorists and as part of some greater sectarian plot to further Iran’s interests in the Gulf monarchies. Linked to growing hawkishness towards Iran, this was another relatively straightforward and convenient mechanism in these states with which to portray opponents—no matter how peaceful—as being dangerous fifth column movements serving a foreign power or entity. Again, this allowed the monarchies to discredit opponents in the eyes of other citizens, while also allowing them to demonstrate their willingness to support Western policies on Iran. Frequently in Bahrain, for example, the government claimed that the opposition was either being funded by Iran or was receiving weapons or other logistical support. In May 2011 military officials claimed that the opposition was made up of “traitors and saboteurs” who were drawing “guidance lines from Iran that drew the acts of sabotage and barbarism in the kingdom” (Bahrain News Agency 2011). And even following the publication of an independent report into Bahrain’s crackdown in November 2011 which concluded that the “Iranians are [merely] propagandists and that they can’t be expected not to take advantage of the situation” and that “to say they were funding, agitating . . . we found no evidence of this,” Bahraini government officials still claimed that there was a link, stating that they had “evidence you cannot touch or see physically, but we know it is there” (Davidson 2013: 196).

Modernizing forces and authoritarian resilience Since the beginning of the oil era and the rapid socio-economic transformation of the Gulf monarchies, many of the modernizing forces impacting on the region were expected to lead to significant political openings or, at least, more conscious and demanding national populations. In many ways, what happened instead was the careful control or in some cases even harnessing of these forces by the ruling families. Despite massively improved access to education, with many schools and universities being established, educational curricula have usually been tightly monitored or even shaped to directly support the state or the ruling family in question. This has usually led to skewed or inaccurate history being taught in the region, the absence of some fields of political science and law from university faculties, and a reliance on self-censoring 90

The Arab Spring and the Gulf monarchies

by often expatriate staff in these institutions. Similarly, with regards to communications, the Gulf monarchies have invested considerable resources and efforts in finding ways to censor interactions between their citizens. As such, each new communications technology that has become available in the region has either been sponsored by the state (for example the statebacked newspapers, radio stations and television stations), or—if that proved difficult—has been blocked (such as unpalatable foreign newspapers, unwanted foreign radio and television signals, satellite broadcasts, and foreign books). A case can even be made that the internet itself—predicted by many to lead to sweeping changes in such tightly controlled societies—was also successfully co-opted by the Gulf monarchies, at least in the early days. The blocking of offensive websites, including blogs critical of the regimes occurred, while many other basic internet communication methods such as email or messenger software were either blocked or— more usefully—monitored by the state so as to provide information and details on opponents and opposition movements (Filiu 2011: 46). Moreover, some Gulf monarchies actively exploited internet communications, and arguably much better than most governments in developed states, with an array of “E-Government” website services having been launched—most of which allow citizens to feel more closely connected to government departments and thus help echo the earlier era of direct, personal relations between the rulers and ruled (Davidson 2009). Meanwhile, the rulers themselves often established presences on the internet, and their self-glorifying websites usually also featured discussion fora to facilitate interaction between themselves (or rather their employees) and the general public. Many other lesser ruling family members, ministers, police chiefs and other establishment figures in the region also set up interactive Twitter feeds and Facebook fan sites for the same purposes, and some of these are now “followed” by thousands or even millions of citizens and other well-wishers. The ruler of Dubai’s Twitter feed, for example, first exceeded one million subscribers in July 2012. Tweeting on this success, he emphasized the participatory nature of the software: Together we came up with many social, humanitarian and cultural initiatives and I have personally benefited from your constructive thoughts. Thank you all, and I hope that we take our communication and interaction to the next level soon, for the good of our communities. (Davidson 2013: 197–8) More recently a wave of new internet technologies—often loosely bundled under the banner of “Web 2.0” applications—seemed to finally have the kind of impact on the region’s access to education and communications that would have been predicted or desired by the earlier moderni­zation theorists. Popularly defined as “facilitating participatory information sharing, interoperability, and user-centred design” these applications allow users to connect to each other using “social media” based on content created by themselves in co-operation with other users, rather than simply retrieving information from the internet in the format that is presented to them. Among the best examples of such applications are the more recent incarnations of Facebook, which is now no longer just focused on personal pages and fan sites but has become home to thousands of active discussion groups; the more recent versions of Twitter, which is now host to thousands of third-party applications that aid users in finding and following the most appropriate content and personalities based on their interests; and YouTube, which allows regular users to upload, share and comment on videos from their mobile phones, or even create their own television channels. While these and other Web 2.0 applications can still be blocked in their entirety by cautious regimes, this is now unlikely to happen in the Gulf monarchies as the inevitable outcry from the large numbers of users would be difficult or perhaps impossible to ignore. 91

Christopher M. Davidson

Inevitably these applications are being increasingly used to host discussions, videos, pictures, cartoons and newsfeeds that criticize ruling families, highlight corruption in governments, and emphasize the need for significant political reform or even revolution in the Gulf monarchies. Leading opposition figures and critics are now attracting as many followers on these applications as members of ruling families. While there have been some attempts by regimes to counter-attack against this cyber opposition, often by deploying fake social media profiles so as to threaten genuine users, or by establishing “honey pot” websites to lure in activists and help reveal their identity, for the most part the applications are effectively bypassing censorship controls and the mechanisms used to control earlier modernizing forces. As such, they are facilitating an unprecedented set of horizontal connections forming between Gulf citizens, and between Gulf citizens and outside parties—connections which are crucially now beyond the jurisdiction or interference of the ruling families and their security services. The exact role played by Web 2.0 applications, social media and other such modernizing forces in the 2011 Arab Spring revolutions is still not clear, as at present it is unknown what proportion of the populations of North Africa, Yemen and Syria actually had access to the internet or were using it for revolutionary purposes. Indeed, some have argued that Web 2.0 applications did not lead to “Revolutions 2.0” as not everybody was internet-savvy in these countries and that the abtal al-keyboard or “keyboard heroes” of the Arab world may have posted many angry messages online but did not necessarily take part in street protests (Foreign Policy 2010). Nevertheless, many observers do hold the view that the very recent internet-led expansion of the Arab youth’s public sphere has been of enormous consequence and was certainly an “important instrument added to the protest toolbox” (Filiu 2011: 46). In January 2011, for example, the Tunisian Minister for Youth and Sports, newly installed after the toppling of President Ben Ali, claimed that “in reality we have been ready, we people of the internet, for a revolution to start anywhere in the Arab world.” Stressing the interconnectedness made possible by the Web 2.0 applications, he stated that “we’ve been supporting each other and trying hard since a long time, and you know how important the internet was for the revolution” (Filiu 2011: xiii). Indeed, in both Tunisia and Egypt human rights defenders and activists used social media and proxy websites, often hosted in other countries, to keep track of the repression taking place and to keep countering inaccuracies reported by the state-backed media. In many ways claims of a direct link between opposition activity and Web 2.0 applications in the Gulf monarchies appear much stronger than in North Africa, as the considerably higher internet and smartphone penetration and usage rates in these relatively more developed states indicate that most Gulf citizens—and the overwhelming majority of the younger generation—not only have the necessary access to such technologies, but are also well acquainted with their capabilities. With regard to internet-enabled phones, for example, four of the Gulf monarchies had, at the time of the Arab Uprisings, the highest per capita penetration rates in the world, with 1030 for every 1000 persons in Bahrain, 1000 per 1000 in the UAE, 939 per 1000 in Kuwait and 882 per 1000 in Qatar. This compares with an OECD average of only 785 per 1000 (Filiu 2011: 44). In 2011 it was also reported that highspeed broadband internet subscriptions had jumped massively in the region, with 50,000 new subscribers over the first half of the year in the UAE alone, taking the country’s total number of internet-enabled households to about 1.3 million. Over the next few years, the penetration rate and quality of access continued to increase as many of the Gulf monarchies invested heavily in fibre optic networks. Interviewed in summer 2011, the chairman of the UAE’s largest state-backed telecommunications provider even claimed that the UAE was going to be “one of the top five connected countries in the world” following government investments of more than $15 billion in such networks (Davidson 2013: 200. 92

The Arab Spring and the Gulf monarchies

Web 2.0 and social media usage in the region is a little harder to measure, but most indications are that it increased rapidly. An April 2011 report published by the Governance and Innovation Program at the Dubai School of Government claimed that the total number of Arab Facebook users had increased by 30% in the first quarter of that year, bringing the total to over 27 million (Davidson 2013: 200). Only a year later, in May 2012, Facebook’s operating company announced that it had reached 45 million users in the region, with a penetration rate of about 67%, and had decided to open a regional office in Dubai (Gulf News 2012). Significantly, the 2011 report claimed that over 70% of Arab users were in the age bracket of 15 to 29 years of age. It also estimated that there were over 1 million active Twitter users in the Arab world, who had collectively posted over 22 million tweets during the first quarter of 2011. Significantly, the report claimed that the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait, together with Lebanon, were the five leading countries in the region in terms of the proportion of their population using social media. Over 400,000 Twitter users were in Saudi Arabia and 200,000 in the UAE. It was also estimated that there were about 4 million Facebook users in Saudi Arabia and that over 50% of the UAE’s population was using Facebook, while 36% and 30% of Qatar’s and Bahrain’s populations, respectively, were using Facebook. Claims were also made in the 2011 report that there had been a “substantial shift in the use of social media from social purposes towards civic and political action” in the region, with social media usage being perceived by many of the report’s interviewees as being “mainly for organising people, disseminating information and raising awareness about . . . social movements.” Interestingly, the majority of Tunisian and Egyptian interviewees also argued that their ousted regimes’ attempts to block social media access “actually provided a boost to the [opposition] movements, spurring protesters to more decisive and creative action” (Davidson 2013: 200).

Countering the Arab Spring: the wrong side of history? Perhaps assuming that the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions would quickly fail, or that the US and other Western interests in the area would ultimately deny the opposition movements suffi­ cient international support, a number of the Gulf monarchies’ governments and advisers seemingly misunderstood or underestimated the scale of these Uprisings. Consequently, they chose to portray their states as being bastions of authoritarianism and—collectively—as something of a counter-revolutionary bloc. As a result, many of those wanting change in the post-2011 Arab world were likely to come to view the Gulf monarchies unfavourably, even if Egypt and Tunisia remained open to Gulf investments and development assistance. Moreover, and arguably more significantly, many of the younger and more idealistic Gulf citizens likely also came to view their governments and ruling families with distrust or as being “on the wrong side of history.” In early February 2011, for example, at the height of the Egyptian revolution, a new regionwide group of Gulf citizens including academics, journalists, and human rights activists gathered to “urge the conservative monarchies which have ruled the region for centuries to embrace democracy and freedom of expression.” Referring to itself as the Gulf Civil Society Forum, the group issued a statement calling for “the ruling families in the Gulf to realise the importance of democratic transformation to which our people aspire,” and warned the Gulf monarchies not to crack down on activists planning to stage peaceful protests. Significantly the statement also called for the ruling families to “understand that it is time to free all political detainees and prisoners of conscience and issue constitutions that meet modern-day demands” and claimed that “the Gulf peoples look forward for their countries to be among nations supporting freedom, the rule of law, and civil and democratic rule which have become a part of peoples’ basic rights” (Agence France Press 2011). 93

Christopher M. Davidson

At the same time as these statements were being issued, however, Saudi Arabia’s leading religious authority and Grand Mufti, Abdul-Aziz bin Abdullah al-Sheikh—a septuagenarian cleric who had earlier claimed that “reconciliation between religions was impossible”—was publicly criticizing the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions. After claiming that “these chaotic acts have come from the enemies of Islam and those who serve them,” he then went on to say that “inciting unrest between people and their leaders in these protests is aimed at hitting the nation [the Muslim world] at its core and tearing it apart.” Having already provided the ousted Tunisian President with asylum in a Jeddah palace, and with the King having earlier telephoned the embattled Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, to offer his support and to “slam those tampering with Egypt’s security and stability,” it was abundantly clear that the Saudi ruling family both feared and opposed the Arab Spring. Moreover, soon after Mubarak’s ousting, members of Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces went on record to claim that they had “received information that certain Gulf countries had offered to provide assistance to Egypt in exchange for not bringing Mubarak to justice” (Davidson 2013: 202). Thought to refer to Saudi Arabia, this again seemed to indicate the kingdom’s position on the revolution and perhaps how its government hoped to use development aid to limit or influence the actions of any new Egyptian government. On a foreign policy level, Saudi Arabia also made it quite clear that the new Egyptian and other post-revolutionary Arab governments posed a risk to the region’s security, not least undermining the Gulf monarchies’ stance on Iran. After the post-Mubarak administration granted permission for Iran to sail two warships through the Suez Canal in February 2011 and then announced it would restore diplomatic relations with Tehran, Gulf-based analysts quickly remarked that “Gulf policymakers are concerned about Iran making inroads into Egypt,” that “there’s no doubt the Saudis are very concerned about Egypt’s new foreign policy orientation,” and that “Saudi Arabia is seeking to regain its heavyweight position in the region and doing so in a very assertive manner. It does not want to see Egypt erase any Saudi gains” (Davidson 2013: 202). The UAE’s official position on the Arab Spring, at least in the early days, also appeared in line with Saudi Arabia’s. An attempted rally to “silently and peacefully protest against Mubarak” by Egyptian activists outside their country’s consulate in Dubai was swiftly broken up by police (Davidson 2013: 202–203). And a UAE citizen who had apparently tried to express support for Tunisian and Egyptian demonstrators in a mosque was later seized from his home in Sharjah on the grounds that he was “disturbing public security.” For several days his location was unknown, with Amnesty International filing a request that the UAE authorities confirm his legal status and whereabouts (Amnesty International 2011). Two weeks after protests began in Egypt, the UAE’s Minister for Foreign Affairs became the first—and only Arab—international diplomat to meet with Mubarak during the revolution. Described by another Arab diplomat as “showing extraordinary political support for Egypt,” the UAE visit was treated with great suspicion by many Egyptian protesters, not least because the crown prince of Abu Dhabi had stated earlier in the week that “the UAE rejects all foreign attempts to interfere in the internal affairs of Egypt” (The National 2011). Moreover, soon after Mubarak’s fall one of the crown prince’s aides was reported by Reuters to have “vented his frustration over the downfall of a major ally who Gulf Arab rulers once thought was as entrenched in power as they are,” and to have questioned “how could someone do this to him [Mubarak]?” before explaining that “he was the spiritual father of the Middle East. He was a wise man who always led the region . . . We didn’t want to see him out this way” (Davidson 2013: 203). Meanwhile, in Dubai’s most-read state-backed newspaper, Gulf News, a leading member of the emirate’s merchant community argued that “there is a very real danger that mob rule is destroying Egypt’s reputation, stability and economy while Mubarak was the symbol of stability, economic prosperity and peace” (Gulf News 2011). 94

The Arab Spring and the Gulf monarchies

As with Saudi Arabia and some of the other Gulf monarchies, the UAE was also reportedly alarmed that Mubarak would have to face the indignity of a trial. As claimed by Egypt’s Al-Masry al-Youm newspaper: “certain princes offered to pay the hospital bill of deposed President Hosni Mubarak when they heard that the Egyptian government would not meet the costs of his [private] medical treatment” (Al-Masry al-Youm 2011). Later, after the success of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Muhammad Morsi in Egypt’s May 2012 elections, senior UAE officials went on record with inflammatory statements. Dubai’s veteran chief of police, for example, claimed in July 2012 that members of the Brotherhood had “been meeting people from the Gulf and discussing toppling Gulf regimes” and warned the Egypt-based group that “they would lose a lot if they challenged the Gulf states” (Davidson 2012: 203). Beyond Egypt, the UAE’s diplomatic stance has been much the same on other Arab Spring Uprisings, or at least when they began. In April 2011, nearly two months after the beginning of the ill-fated Bahrain revolution and a month after the deployment of UAE and Saudi troops in the kingdom, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi received a delegation from the Bahraini government which had come to “express its gratitude . . . for the supportive stance that had contributed to establishing security and stability in the kingdom.” Despite the crown prince having no formal foreign policy role in the UAE’s federal government, he reportedly welcomed the delegates by “stressing the deep fraternal bond between the UAE and Bahrain as well as all other Gulf countries” and stated that “these relations are based on strong historical ties, shared interests, and mutual destiny.” Despite the brutal crackdown that was taking place in Bahrain that very week, the crown prince also expressed his “support for Bahrain and its people as well as the measures adopted by Bahrain’s wise leadership for establishing peace and security.” He also “hailed the efforts of the King and the crown prince [of Bahrain] for reforms and development as well as for protecting the values of national unity, tolerance, and peaceful coexistence among sects” (WAM 2011a). Later, Saudi Arabia and the UAE extended financial and moral support to the overthrow of President Morsi by the Egyptian army in 2013, reinforcing their image as a counter-revolutionary force; in parallel, at home, the Muslim Brotherhood was repressed and branded a terrorist movement. In contrast, although Qatar appeared to take the opposite approach by actually funding the short-lived Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt, and by using its al-Jazeera international news network to burnish the image of political Islam in general, its stance was not necessarily revolutionary either. Regarding the Muslim Brotherhood and its fellow travellers elsewhere in the region as the most likely to win power in the wake of the 2011 Uprisings, Qatar likely saw such organizations as a possible counterweight to what it perceived as an increasingly powerful Saudi–UAE axis of control over the region. On a broader level, the Gulf monarchies sought to portray themselves collectively as being inherently different from the Arab authoritarian republics. A concerted effort was made to convince both their own populations and the international community that there were enough structural differences between their style of authoritarianism and that of their neighbours such as to exempt them from Arab Spring-type revolutions. Most notably, there were attempts to broaden the Gulf Co-operation Council to include the fellow Arab monarchies of Jordan and Morocco. Despite these states being geographically separated from the Gulf monarchies and having few economic or social commonalities with the latter, it has nonetheless been reasoned that their survival now matters to the Gulf monarchies. Jordan and Morocco faced serious protests since early 2011, but the regimes remained in place, providing some evidence for the “monarchy is different” theory. In May 2011 a GCC consultative summit was held during which it was decided to offer both Jordan and Morocco GCC membership. The summit’s main topic of discussion was likely to have been the Arab Spring and how the Gulf monarchies could best find ways of delivering financial aid to the region’s two other monarchies. Moreover, given that the usefulness 95

Christopher M. Davidson

of foreign mercenaries has become increasingly apparent since the beginning of the Arab Spring, it is likely that Jordan and Morocco— both of which are manpower rich—were viewed as possible suppliers in the event that the Gulf monarchies have to rapidly expand their security services. Shortly after the summit, the Moroccan Minister for Foreign Affairs visited Abu Dhabi to convey the “gratitude of King Muhammad to the UAE under the leadership of Sheikh Khalifa for the sincere and fraternal call stated in the final statement of the recent GCC consultative summit for the accession of Morocco to the GCC.” Adding that “such a move would further strengthen bilateral ties,” the minister also referred to the “fraternal coordination and co-operation that bind us with these countries since a long time at all levels,” despite Morocco having never had any previous formal engagements with the GCC (WAM 2011b). Unsurprisingly, within a few months of this, and similar meetings between Jordanian officials and GCC representatives, an announcement was made in September 2011 that the GCC would be funding a 5-year development programme in Jordan and Morocco. Finalized in December 2011 with $2.5 billion being allocated to each state, the deal was viewed by some analysts as being a “consolidation of monarchies that are solidly Sunni” and with the “attraction [for the Gulf monarchies] being assistance . . . from [Jordan’s] well-trained military” (Davidson 2013: 205). Similarly, Reuters reported that the deal reflected the Gulf monarchies’ need for “closer ties with Arab kingdoms outside the Gulf as part of efforts to contain the pro-democracy unrest that is buffeting autocratic ruling elites throughout the Arab world” (Reuters 2012).

Conclusion Notwithstanding significant and potentially destabilizing protests in Bahrain, and—at one point—widespread protests in Kuwait and Oman, the Gulf monarchies managed to contain the short- and medium-term impact of the Arab Spring Uprisings within their own territories. Although a military intervention was necessary in Bahrain, in all of the other monarchies a significant increase in government expenditure in the form of increased subsidies and public sector employment, combined with selective repression of the most vocal oppositionists, proved to be enough to quell further protests. More broadly, beyond the Gulf itself, the Gulf monarchies have enjoyed only mixed success in promoting counter-revolutions. Thus far, the Saudi and UAE efforts to maintain influence over Egypt and repress the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood has largely worked, but they have been unable to effectively counter other political Islam organizations in Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, and elsewhere. Moreover, they have been unsuccessful at curtailing Qatar’s support for such movements, with an attempted economic blockade on Qatar—launched in 2017—appearing to have petered out. Beyond the short- and medium-term, the Gulf monarchies will likely still face significant difficulties, as their expenditure-increasing strategy to counter the Arab Spring has in many cases created even greater fiscal pressures and has postponed even further their longstanding economic diversification and privatization strategies. Should a point be reached—perhaps in the near future—when the majority of subsidies need to be cut, or when a critical mass of public sector jobs is removed, then it seems reasonable to assume that most of the 2011-era opposition sentiments will return in force.

References Al-Masry al-Youm (23 May 2011), “Arab princes offer to pay Mubarak’s hospital bill,” Egypt Independent, accessible at: https://egyptindependent.com/arab-princes-offer-pay-mubaraks-hospital-bill/ Amnesty International (9 February 2011), “UAE urged to disclose whereabouts of detained man,” accessible at: https://www.amnesty.org/en/press-releases/2011/02/uae-urged-disclose-whereabouts-detainedman/ 96

The Arab Spring and the Gulf monarchies

Dar al-Hayat (12 September 2010), Dar al-Hayat. Davidson, C. (2007), “Arab nationalism and British opposition in Dubai, 1920–1966,” Middle Eastern Studies 43:6. Davidson, C. (2009), Abu Dhabi: Oil and Beyond, London: Hurst. Davidson, C. (2013), After the Sheikhs, New York: Oxford University Press. Filiu, J.-P. (2011), The Arab Revolution: Ten Lesson from the Democratic Uprising, London: Hurst. Foreign Policy (21 September 2010), “The internet in Bahrain: Breaking the monopoly of information,” Foreign Policy, accessible at: https://foreignpolicy.com/2010/09/21/the-internet-in-bahrainbreaking-the-monopoly-of-information/ Fromherz, A. (2012), Qatar: A Modern History, London: I.B. Tauris. Gulf News (17 April 2011), “Revenge tarnishes post-revolution Egypt,” Gulf News, accessible at: https:// www.khalafalhabtoor.net/en/article/107/?s=italy Gulf News (5 October 2012), “Facebook crosses billion threshold but growth slows,” Gulf News, accessible at: https://gulfnews.com/technology/facebook-crosses-billion-threshold-but-growth-slows-1.1085510 The National (9 February 2011), “Sheikh Abdullah meets Mubarak in Cairo,” The National, accessible at: https://www.thenational.ae/uae/sheikh-abdullah-meets-mubarak-in-cairo-1.417157 Nolan, L. (2011), “Managing reform? Saudi Arabia and the King’s Dilemma,” Brookings Doha Center Policy Briefing. Reuters (20 November 2012), “Gulf considers economic aid for protest-hit Jordan – UAE,” Reuters, accessible at: https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-uae-jordan-aid/gulf-considers-economic-aid-for-protesthit-jordan-uae-idUKBRE8AJ0K220121120 WAM (11 April 2011a), “Abu Dhabi Crown Prince receives Bahraini parliamentary speaker,” WAM, accessible at: https://www.kuna.net.kw/ArticleDetails.aspx?id=2159177&language=en# WAM (16 May 2011b), “Moroccan King thanks Khalifa,” WAM, accessible at: https://www.khaleejtimes. com/article/20110516/ARTICLE/305169839/1002

97

7 Leadership and legitimacy in MENA Mark Sedgwick

The study of the authoritarian politics that are common in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), like the study of non-democratic systems elsewhere, has tended to emphasize factors such as repression and co-option (sometimes called “co-optation”). No regime, however, can survive long on these two bases alone. The insufficiency of repression on its own as the basis for any regime has been noted often, from David Hume (1758: 21) and Alexis de Tocqueville (1834: 139) to Gabriel Almond (1956: 403). A further essential ingredient is legitimacy, giving rise to the classic trio of repression, co-option and legitimacy as the three main legs on which an authoritarian regime stands (Albrecht and Schlumberger 2004: 372–3). As Xavier Marquez (2016: 21) puts it, “human beings are motivated not merely by extrinsic rewards and punishments, but also by normative considerations.” The relationship between the three legs in the classic trio varies. Sometimes legitimacy may be the most important, followed by co-option, and repression. In general, the greater the legitimacy, the less repression is needed.

Conceptualizing legitimacy There are two main understandings of legitimacy, one normative and one explanatory. The normative understanding asks what forms of government should be instituted, draws on political philosophy, and generally concludes that democratic forms of government are legitimate, and undemocratic forms are not. The explanatory understanding, in contrast, asks what forms of government are obeyed in practice, and so asks whether or not a regime is thought to be legitimate. It goes back to the perception of Max Weber (1978 [1922]: 213), who wrote not of the importance of legitimacy but of the importance of “the belief in legitimacy” (Legitimitätsglaube). What matters for explanatory purposes is not whether a regime is “really” legitimate, but whether it is perceived to be legitimate. The perception that matters most is that of a regime’s own citizens, but sometimes the perceptions of external actors in the international system matter too. It is important to distinguish perceived legitimacy from claims to legitimacy, sometimes called legitimation (Grauvogel and Soest 2013: 8). Claims to legitimacy may be bolstered in various ways, including those used by the classic totalitarian regimes of twentieth-century Europe, which “twisted and distorted the production of information” (Goode and Ahram 2017: 823) in ways explored by, among others, George Orwell in 1984. Such efforts at 98

Leadership and legitimacy in MENA

legitimation sometimes achieve their objectives, at least as far as the majority of a population is concerned, and sometimes do not. What matters in the end, though, is not the efforts but the result—perceptions. Attempted legitimation does not always result in actual legitimacy. Because of the influence of the normative understanding, legitimacy has often been assumed to be a characteristic of democratic politics, to the extent that the introduction to a recent special edition of Contemporary Politics on “Legitimation in autocracies,” Alexander Dukalskis and Johannes Gerschewski (2017: 251–2) open by asking whether there can be such a thing as legitimacy in an authoritarian regime. From an explanatory perspective, there can be legitimacy, whether deserved or not deserved. Perceived legitimacy is central to explaining so-called authoritarian resilience and is also central to understanding state collapse. While much literature seems to assume that the natural alternative to authoritarianism is democracy, recent experience in the MENA has shown that the alternative to authoritarianism may also be the partial or total collapse of the state. Legitimacy is also the crucial goal of parties to an insurgency, as the US Army’s updated field manual on Counterinsurgency (US Army 2006: 1.1) stresses. Finally, perceived legitimacy is central to the effectiveness of governance. People will normally co-operate with institutions they perceive as legitimate, and will not co-operate with, or may even deliberately obstruct, institutions that they do not perceive as legitimate (Levi and Sacks 2009: 354–5). As R. A. W. Rhodes and Paul ‘t-Hart (2014: 10) note, “leadership becomes possible because the populace select individuals with whom they identify, or whom they trust, or whose claims to authority they respect.” These three conditions are all forms of legitimacy. Legitimacy is thus fundamental to authoritarian resilience, state survival, insurgency, effective leadership and good governance.1 One of the greatest problems with the study of legitimacy in non-democratic systems is measurement. Claims to legitimacy are easily visible, for example, in speeches reported in newspapers, but perceptions of legitimacy—which are what matter—are usually not easily visible. In democratic systems, survey data may be used. Such data is normally not available in nondemocratic systems, and if available, is probably unreliable (Schlumberger 2010; Grauvogel and Soest 2013: 8). It has sometimes been suggested that the concept of legitimacy should be abandoned, as “the results of empirical studies of its relevance over the long run have often been ambiguous or disappointing” (Marquez 2016: 21). Other ways of measuring perceptions of legitimacy or their absence are available, however. One is breaking legitimacy down into various types, which makes it easier to see what varieties of legitimacy a regime can plausibly claim. A variety of legitimacy that cannot be plausibly claimed is highly unlikely to be perceived, so no actual measurement is then needed. Another method is the use of major events such as the Arab Spring (2011–12). These provide unambiguous data about the views of the more active members of a population. Xavier Marquez (2016) has also made a more fundamental objection to the whole concept of legitimacy, which is that the mechanism or mechanisms through which it ensures compliance have not been demonstrated. This, he suggests, is the fundamental reason why legitimacy does not seem to be that important in practice, and why declining support for the political community in advanced industrial democracies has not yet resulted in the collapse of any of them (2016: 23). Perhaps the crucial question is not so much how perceptions of legitimacy translate into active support for a political order, but how the absence of perceptions of legitimacy, or even perceptions of positive illegitimacy, translate into lack of support for an order, and even into active opposition to it. And while none of the advanced industrial democracies do indeed seem at present to be collapsing, there has still been a dramatic growth in support for those alternatives sometimes described as “populism.” 99

Mark Sedgwick

As this chapter will show, there are several different forms of legitimacy, of which the two most important are “input” and “output” legitimacy, sometimes called “process” and “performance” legitimacy, both of which can and will be subdivided. There is growing consensus on this, and most other terminologies used for the analysis of legitimacy can fairly easily be translated into these terms. There is less consensus on what the legitimacy attaches to, and the general tendency is to refer to “the regime” or “the state.” This chapter will argue that this needs to be broken down into leadership, system and state institutions. System is defined by Erica Frantz and Elizabeth A. Stein (2012: 294) as a “set of formal and informal rules and procedures for selecting national leaders and policies.”2 The rules that matter most may not correspond to the formal rules in a constitution, but they are still rules, and form a system. Some institutions—notably the army—may need to be considered separately.3 It also argues that in a MENA context it is necessary to look at the legitimacy of something even more fundamental: the nation itself.

Leadership, state and nation Discussions of authoritarian politics generally refer to an all-encompassing “regime” or “state,” while discussions of democratic politics instead make a distinction between government or leadership on the one hand and state institutions on the other hand, and between both of these and the political system or constitution. Generally, the view in a democratic context is that a government will be seen as legitimate if it gains and exercises power according to a system that is itself seen as legitimate. A government and its policies may also be popular or unpopular, but that is a different question: an unpopular government may still be seen as a legitimate government (Franck 1988: 711) so long as it acts according to the system, and in fact the system is generally more popular than any individual government (Kane and Patapan 2012: 47). To some extent, the focus on an all-encompassing “regime” is justified under conditions of authoritarianism, as under these conditions leadership and state tend to merge, and constitutions are often primarily decorative, an attempt to gather input legitimacy rather than the key rules of the system. Even under authoritarian conditions, however, legitimacy does not attach equally to leadership and to state institutions, and different state institutions may enjoy different degrees of legitimacy. Any leadership is ultimately mortal, but the state itself is immortal, at least in the medium term. Nasser died in 1970, but the state he built in Egypt survives him. Equally, even under authoritarian conditions, there is always some sort of system (rules of the game). Discussions of legitimacy do not generally investigate the separate legitimacy of state institutions. Although there has been much discussion of the “praetorian state,” a state in which the army “tends to intervene and potentially could dominate the political system” (Perlmutter 1969: 383), there has been little discussion of the attachment of legitimacy to armies. Amos Perlmutter (1969: 383, 393) observed that the lack of legitimacy elsewhere in a political system is one of the main causes of praetorianism, and that a military government often uses ideology in an attempt to legitimize itself, but he did not discuss the extent to which an army, as an army, may be seen as a legitimate actor in a political context. Another question that has received little attention in discussions of legitimacy is the legitimacy of the nation itself. A nation, as Benedict Anderson (1983) has famously shown, is an imagined community. A state, in contrast, is “a legal and political organization” (Seton-Watson 1977: 1) that may be confused with a nation but is in fact distinct from it. While it was once hoped that “the people of every state would form a nation; and. . . every nation would have its state” (Seton-Watson 1977: 1), in practice the two often do not coincide. As it is an “intrinsic premise behind the modern nation state” that “only a society homogenized in (one) identity can lead to political consensus” (Fleiner 2008: 250), problems arise when the nation and state do 100

Leadership and legitimacy in MENA Table 7.1  Parts of the nation-state A Nation B State a System b Leadership c Institutions

not coincide. If there is no political consensus, there can be no consensus regarding legitimacy. So long as the overwhelming majority of the population of a state shares one national identity, these problems mainly affect only one or more minorities. However, past a certain point of incongruity between state and perceived nation, the state itself ceases to be seen as legitimate. As Bruce Gilley (2009: 4) says, “Unless citizens have some core notion of a shared identity and shared standards of evaluation, the state can never be anything but a predatory imposition upon many or most citizens.” Given that the nation is an imagined community, it makes no sense to ask whether or not nation and state “really” coincide. It makes more sense to ask to what extent a particular nation as imagined by a particular state enjoys legitimacy in the view of different individuals and groups within that state. The four main parts of a “regime”—taken here to mean the overall ensemble to which legitimacy may or may not attach—are thus in fact the main parts of the nation-state, and shown in Table 7.1.

Forms of legitimacy A basic distinction may be made between two broad varieties of legitimacy, termed “input” and “output” (Scharpf 1970, 1997). The classic form of input legitimacy in democratic contexts is the election. A president or government that takes power as a result of a free and fair election is by definition legitimate, because of the direct popular input into selecting him or her through the electoral process. This form of input legitimacy will be termed “direct.” In the MENA, leaderships that hold office purely as a result of a free and fair election are very much the exception. Constitutions often have little or no real impact, elections may be micro-managed, and parliaments may lack significant independent power. Other forms of input legitimacy are also available. Most importantly, a leadership may be seen as legitimate in itself, irrespective of the system that has delivered it, because it seems to represent its people or the interests of its people. This form of input legitimacy will be termed “representative.” Whether or not a leadership seems to represent a people is primarily a question of perceptions of identity and values, of “congruence between representative and represented on some list of salient political traits and views” (Weatherford 1991: 260). Perceived congruence gives rise to what is sometimes called “descriptive” legitimacy (Weatherford 1991: 260), but which this chapter will simply call “congruence.” Congruence can also be increased by a regime’s “foundation myth,” which normally aligns the regime and people against some external enemy. A claim to congruence may also be based on sectarian identity: you are Sunni (or Shi’i or Christian) and we are Sunni (or Shi’i or Christian), and so we stand together against the Shi’a (or Sunnis or Christians). Whether or not a leadership seems to represent the interests of a people—which is not the same as whether or not a leadership actually promotes those interests on a daily basis—is primarily a question of ideology, as ideology is what determines how those interests are understood. As input legitimacy can be increased by ideology, so it can be reduced by corruption, as visible corruption suggests that a 101

Mark Sedgwick

leadership or institutions are more concerned with their own interests than with the interests of the people. Probity, then, can also be a source of input legitimacy (Rose 2014). “Output” legitimacy, in contrast, does not derive from any system or from congruence or ideology, but from performance. It derives from what leadership and institutions are perceived to do for us in terms of the provision of crucial social goods such as security and services, including health and education services. Output legitimacy, it has been argued, is what the European Union has, despite its lack of input legitimacy (Scharpf 1999).4 Output legitimacy is reduced by corruption, directly as corruption decreases the value of services to the individual by increasing the cost of receiving them, and indirectly because of the negative impact of corruption on economic and administrative performance (Seligson 2002). Output legitimacy is a difficult concept, as it overlaps with general government performance and with co-option, the use of state resources to secure loyalty in exchange for benefits. The difference between output legitimacy and general government performance is that while general government performance is judged in the short term—how is this government doing now?—output legitimacy is assessed over the medium to long term—how is the whole system working? When the communist states of Europe consistently failed to deliver on their promises during the second part of the twentieth century, this de-legitimized the communist system, not just one particular government (Tarifa 1997: 461). The difference between output legitimacy and co-option is that the services that confer output legitimacy are available to the general population, while co-option is generally understood to describe the process by which a regime buys the loyalty of particular groups within a population, normally members of the elite (Cassani 2017: 350). Co-option may take the form of corruption, which is why the political-science literature at one point saw corruption as having a positive impact in authoritarian systems (Seligson 2002). In fact, even when co-option is not seen as corrupt, it will be seen as unfair, so co-option probably tends to reduce total output legitimacy. As has been noted, most other terminologies that are used for the analysis of legitimacy can fairly easily be translated into terms of input and output legitimacy. Cassani (2017: 352) is among those who refer to “performance” legitimacy, for example, but this concept does not differ significantly from output legitimacy. Weatherford’s “descriptive” legitimacy (1991: 260) is much the same as Gilley’s “justification” (2009: 7), and both differ little from congruence. The scope of this chapter, however, does not allow for a full survey of alternative terminologies. Some other forms of legitimacy are less easy to fit within the pattern of input and output legitimacy. One is charisma, which is clearly important, but hard to define or measure. It is distinct from both input and output legitimacy. Another is the traditional legitimacy attaching to hereditary succession. A third is religious legitimacy. This takes three forms. One is sectarian congruence, as has already been noted. Another is the claim to rule according to God’s plan, which is the claim made by Islamic republics. The legitimacy claimed here is primarily ideological, even though the ideology is a religious one. It is not, then, a distinct form of legitimacy. Finally, someone may claim to rule “by Grace of God,” as did medieval European monarchs. This is a claim to a form of direct input legitimacy, though the input allegedly comes from God, from divine appointment, not the people. Something similar is claimed in the case of hereditary succession in a monarchical system, though here it is less clear where the input is thought to come from: perhaps from history? Monarchy might also be expected to protect a leader against the de-legitimizing impact of such corruption as is visible. As Raymond Hinnebusch (2014: 23) notes, “Kings. . . are perhaps expected to aggrandize themselves while the legitimacy of republican presidents, responsible to the ‘people,’ is debilitated by the same process.” No one is worried by a prince in a palace, but a presidential relative in a palace is a problem. 102

Leadership and legitimacy in MENA

One further form of legitimacy should also be mentioned: external legitimacy, defined by Albrecht and Schlumberger (2004: 376) as “the extent to which political regimes are considered legitimate by the leading external powers, that is, Western governments and international organization.” External legitimacy is the key to various benefits, including aid. These benefits may assist a leadership’s output legitimacy, as they help it to provide security and welfare. External legitimacy, however, may come at a cost in input legitimacy, since if a leadership is perceived as being too close to a foreign government which is unpopular domestically, this reduces congruence, as happened when President Mubarak was perceived as siding with the United States against fellow Arabs (Iraqis) in 2002–3. External legitimacy, then, is useful, but risky. As external legitimacy may bring aid and similar benefits, external illegitimacy may result in the application of sanctions. In principle, these should have a noticeable impact on the regimes targeted, but in practice, they rarely have much impact (Grauvogel and Soest 2013: 6). Severe external illegitimacy, however, may sometimes prove fatal. The leaderships of Iraq under Saddam Hussein, of Libya under President Gadhafi, and of Syria under President Bashar al-Asad all suffered from severe external illegitimacy, and this played an important role in Western decisions to take active measures against them. External legitimacy may derive from a constitutional system, i.e. from internal input legitimacy. This is one reason why, as has often been noted, genuine democracies do not often go to war against each other (Ray 1993). In the absence of constitutional legitimacy, external legitimacy may also derive from a variety of congruence, the role that a leadership is perceived to play in international affairs. The phrase “moderate Arab state,” a phrase more often used than defined, generally indicates perceived congruence. There is external legitimacy, then, and three main varieties of internal legitimacy, two of which further sub-divide, shown in Table 7.2.5 Perceptions of all varieties of internal legitimacy, it should be stressed, are relative to a population’s expectations. This is especially true for output legitimacy, as levels of welfare provision that would be considered unacceptable in one country may be considered adequate or even

Table 7.2  Varieties of legitimacy A External B Internal a Input i Direct (applies to system) 1 Constitutional 2 Divine appointment 3 Hereditary succession ii Representative (applies to leadership) 1 Congruence 2 Ideological 3 Probity b Output (applies to leadership and/or state institutions)  i Security ii Services iii Charisma

103

Mark Sedgwick

good in another. People judge the services available to them not by an international absolute but in terms of their own experience. Ideology may also have an impact on expectations, as people come to expect what they have been promised.

Plausible legitimacy claims in the Middle East and North Africa The remainder of this chapter will relate these varieties of legitimacy, derived from the general literature, to the specific experience of the MENA.6 At the time of writing, the Turkish political system is in flux, so for the sake of simplicity, reference will be made to the “classic” Turkish system before the 2016 coup attempt. As has been noted, legitimacy is difficult to measure in an authoritarian system, where expressions of dissent are penalized or prevented, and where standard techniques such as opinion polls cannot be used. There are alternative indicators, however. One recent indicator is the behaviour of populations during the Arab Spring. Lack of protest does not necessarily indicate that a leadership is perceived as legitimate, as there can be many reasons for not protesting, including fear. Widespread protest against a leadership, however, is a clear indicator of lack of legitimacy. That is why protests can sometimes bring down a regime: they make a leadership’s lack of legitimacy clear for all to see. Widespread protest during the Arab Spring, then, indicates a lack of legitimacy, but it does not indicate what variety of legitimacy is perceived to be lacking. This may be in part deduced, however, by looking at legitimation, at the major varieties of legitimacy that particular MENA leaderships claim or, rather, plausibly claim. Certain types of legitimacy claim are simply not plausible in particular MENA countries, and so can be ignored, since a variety of legitimacy that cannot be plausibly claimed can hardly be perceived to exist. Saudi Arabia, which has no constitution, cannot claim constitutional legitimacy, and Iran neither can nor does claim the legitimacy of hereditary monarchy. All leaderships claim output legitimacy, but not all claims are equally plausible. Objective measures may tell us nothing about the perceptions of a population, but they do tell us something about the plausibility of a claim. The claim to output legitimacy of the leadership of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where 2016 per capita GDP was $38,000 and where there are many services and welfare programmes, is clearly more plausible than that of the leadership of Yemen, where per capita GDP was only $990 (World Bank 2017) and where services are rudimentary or absent. Similarly, Freedom House scores tell us something about the plausibility of claims to constitutional legitimacy, and Transparency International scores tell us something about the plausibility of claims to probity. This chapter will therefore now first identify the major varieties of legitimacy that particular MENA leaderships plausibly claim, and will compare these to recent events, notably during the Arab Spring. Leaderships, systems, and institutions may also have other, less obvious varieties of legitimacy, but these are harder to see clearly, and so will not be investigated. MENA countries will be considered in four categories, as shown in Table 7.3. Leaderships in three of these four groups plausibly claim certain major varieties of legitimacy. In general, GCC states claim input legitimacy through their monarchical systems and output legitimacy through their generous services. Non-GCC monarchies claim input legitimacy through a combination of their constitutional arrangements and their monarchical systems. Atypical states claim input legitimacy through their constitutional arrangements. Presidential states, in contrast, plausibly claim none of these varieties of legitimacy, and also often suffer from the lack of congruence that inevitably results from the imagination of multiple communities within one state. The general pattern, together with major exceptions, is shown in Table 7.4, which combines tables 7.2 and 7.3. External legitimacy is not shown, as it had no direct impact on the behaviour of populations during the Arab Spring. 104

Leadership and legitimacy in MENA Table 7.3  MENA country groups A Gulf Co-Operation Council (GCC) a Bahrain b Kuwait c Oman d Qatar e Saudi Arabia f United Arab Emirates B Non-GCC monarchies a Jordan b Morocco C Presidential a Algeria b Egypt c Iraq d Libya e Syria f Tunisia g Yemen D Atypical a Lebanon (consociational) b Iran (Islamic Republic) c Turkey (post-Kemalist)

Table 7.4  Patterns of MENA internal legitimacy Input

Output

Direct

GCC Non-GCC monarchies Presidential

Atypical

Representative

Constitutional

Hereditary

Congruence

Ideological

Probity

Security

Services

No (except Kuwait) Yes

Yes

Yes (except Bahrain) Yes

No (except KSA) No

5.6 CPI

??

Yes

4.1 CPI

??

??

No

No

No

2.9 CPI

?? (Yes: Algeria)

??

Yes

No

Only Algeria, Egypt and Tunisia Yes

Yes (except Lebanon)

3.0 CPI

?? (Yes: Lebanon)

??

Yes

CPI = Corruption Perceptions Index in 2010

This table does not show divine appointment, which no MENA leader really claims, or charisma, which no MENA leader claims with any plausibility (in comparison, at least, to such charismatic leaders of an earlier period as Atatürk, Nasser and Khomeini). 105

Mark Sedgwick

GCC states The most striking feature of GCC states when it comes to legitimacy is output legitimacy. GCC states are distinguished from other MENA states by high petrocarbon revenues in relation to population, which makes possible the provision of extremely generous benefits, including employment, health, and education services. Very plausible claims for output legitimacy may thus be made by GCC state institutions. Beyond this, although no GCC system save Kuwait plausibly claims the constitutional form of input legitimacy, all GCC leaderships claim the direct input legitimacy of hereditary monarchies. Kuwait has an elected National Assembly and a liberal treatment of civil society that leads to it being classed as “partly free” by Freedom House (2017). GCC leaders also claim sectarian-based congruence, except for Bahrain, where the leadership is Sunni and the majority of the population is Shi’i. Other GCC states also have potential issues with the legitimacy of the nation, given the significance of tribal divisions, but in practice these divisions have not resulted in the imagination of multiple distinct communities. No GCC leadership made a plausible claim to ideological legitimacy save Saudi Arabia, where the King claims ideological legitimacy as the “servant of the two holy places” and protector of what is understood locally as “true” Islam. GCC state institutions also make plausible claims to probity. In 2010,7 GCC states had an average Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) of 5.5, ranging from 7.7 for Qatar to 4.7 for Saudi Arabia, which puts them collectively in the same region as South Korea and Puerto Rico, with Qatar doing better than Belgium (Transparency International 2010). Protests during the Arab Spring were rare or non-existent in GCC states, with the single exception of Bahrain. While the causes of Bahraini protest were many and complex, one thing that clearly distinguishes Bahrain from its GCC fellows is its leadership’s inability to claim sectarian congruence. Since only Bahrain experienced serious protests, all that can be said with certainty is that the Bahraini leadership was perceived by much of its population to lack legitimacy. That the other GCC states saw no significant protests, however, may well indicate that their very plausible claims to output legitimacy and to the input legitimacy conferred by monarchy and probity were accepted.

Non-GCC monarchies The two non-GCC MENA monarchies, Jordan and Morocco, differ from the GCC states in not having major petrocarbon revenues. They therefore do not provide services on the same scale as the GCC states. Like all other states, they make a claim to output legitimacy, but it is not possible to say with much certainty to what extent this claim is plausible. Similarly, it is hard to say anything very definitive about the plausibility of their claims to representative input legitimacy, save that they can plausibly claim sectarian congruence, as both leaderships and populations are Sunni. Both non-GCC monarchies have potential issues with the legitimacy of the nation, given the division of Jordanian society between Palestinian and Jordanian groups and the division of Moroccan society between Berber and Arab, but in neither case have two distinct communities been imagined in the way that they are in Bahrain. Neither leadership makes any real claim to ideological legitimacy. The Moroccan King claims to be Commander of the Faithful (Amir al-mu’minin) (El-Katiri 2013) and the Jordanian royal family emphasizes its descent from the Prophet, but neither of these claims is given the same emphasis as the Saudi claim to religious legitimacy. CPI scores point towards a plausible claim of probity for state institutions, but are not decisive. Jordan’s 2010 CPI was 106

Leadership and legitimacy in MENA

4.7 (like Hungary’s) and Morocco’s was 3.4 (Transparency International 2010), somewhat worse than the GCC states. What the two non-GCC MENA monarchies have in common with the GCC states is the claim to traditional legitimacy that may be made by established monarchies. Their systems may also claim constitutional legitimacy as a result of elected assemblies and independent civil society institutions. As with Kuwait, this is significant by regional standards, if not by Western European standards. Both Jordan and Morocco are classed “partly free” by Freedom House (2017). There were protests in the non-GCC monarchies during the Arab Spring, but these were minor in comparison to those experienced in some other MENA states. This may indicate that claims to the input legitimacy conferred by functioning constitutional systems, a hereditary monarchy and (perhaps) probity were accepted.

Presidential states In contrast to GCC states and non-GCC monarchies, no Arab presidential state at the time of the Arab Spring had any plausible claim to any variety of legitimacy save that the Algerian, Egyptian and Tunisian leaderships could claim sectarian congruence,8 and the Algerian leadership could also plausibly claim output legitimacy as a result of having ended the Algerian Civil War (1991–2002). No Arab presidential leadership could plausibly claim any variety of direct input legitimacy. None of them had a system that could claim constitutional legitimacy, as while all had formal constitutions and some sort of elections, in no case did these have the significance for politics that they did in Kuwait, Jordan or Morocco, let alone in Western Europe. Sham elections are designed to increase input legitimacy, but may actually reduce it (Cassani 2017: 351). No presidential leadership could claim the traditional legitimacy conferred by an established monarchy. Three presidential leaderships (Egypt, Libya and Syria) attempted or implemented a de facto succession from father to son, but there is no evidence that heredity rule outside a recognized monarchical system confers any legitimacy, and some evidence that it reduces legitimacy because it so clearly contradicts a nominally republican system. Other than the claims to sectarian congruence already mentioned, no presidential leadership could claim any variety of representative input legitimacy either. Other states had problems with the legitimacy of the nation itself, which inevitably reduced the plausibility of any claim to congruence legitimacy. Iraqis had already come to imagine three communities (Shi’i, Sunni and Kurdish), Syrians quickly came to imagine at least two communities (Sunni and other), as did Yemenis (Zaydi and Sunni) and, possibly, Libyans (Tripolitanian and Cyrenaican). Further, no presidential leadership could plausibly claim significant ideological legitimacy. Many presidential leaderships were heirs to heroic foundation myths steeped in anti-colonial struggle, and many presidential states had at one point charismatic leaders with developed ideologies, but by 2011 the anti-colonial struggle and the nationalist ideologies it gave rise to had no relevance for populations mostly born in a later era. The charismatic leaders were all dead, and their memory sometimes served mostly to emphasize the lack of charisma of their successors. Several leaderships had abandoned any residual claim to nationalist ideological legitimacy by allying themselves with the US, which increased external legitimacy and brought certain benefits to the leadership, but at a cost in internal legitimacy. As has happened before, the legitimacy attaching to praetorian leadership decreased over time (Haldenwang 2017: 274). No presidential state save Tunisia could make a plausible claim to probity. With a 2010 CPI of 4.3, better than Morocco, Tunisia might have claimed the legitimacy conferred by probity, but the average of the other presidential states (excluding Iraq)9 was much worse (at 2.6). 107

Mark Sedgwick

Libya and Yemen had CPIs of 2.2, putting them in the same category as countries like Zimbabwe and Haiti (Transparency International 2010). Arab presidential states, then, generally lacked input legitimacy. They also lacked output legitimacy. No presidential state was in a position to claim the services-based output legitimacy of the GCC states, with the possible exception of pre-Spring Libya, but Libya never really compared with the GCC states in this respect. Protests during the Arab Spring were major in all Arab presidential states save Iraq, which was already engaged in civil war that rendered protest superfluous, and Algeria, the one country where the leadership had a possible claim to a form of output legitimacy.10 This does not prove that the Algerian claim to output legitimacy was decisive, but it may have been. The lack of legitimacy in other states was so general that it is impossible to say which particular lack of legitimacy was decisive. It may well have been the case that what was decisive was not any one individual lack of legitimacy, but the combination of all of them. That Egypt and Tunisia emerged from the Arab Spring with more stability than the other presidential states (Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen), the one with its old system restored and the other with a new system, may reflect the fact that in both countries the imagined community of the nation enjoys legitimacy. It is also possible that the Tunisian constitutional system has since attracted direct input legitimacy, and that the Tunisian leadership and Egyptian army have attracted the same output legitimacy as the Algerian leadership, as perceived deliverers of the security that both countries enjoy, which is striking in comparison to the conflict found in neighbouring countries.

Atypical states Three MENA countries remain: the atypical cases of Lebanon, which has a consociational system that shares power between its confessional communities (Nagle 2015), Iran, which is an Islamic republic, and Turkey, which (prior to 2016) was a secular parliamentary democracy. All three systems claim significant constitutional legitimacy. Lebanon’s unusual consociational constitution was restored almost unchanged by the Taif Agreement of 1989 that ended the civil war of 1975–89, and this constitution may also attract output legitimacy as the basis of the security that Lebanon has subsequently enjoyed, apparently against all odds. Lebanon and Turkey were classed as “partly free” by Freedom House (2017), and the classification of Iran as “not free” might be disputed. None of the atypical states has a monarchical system. In addition to this direct input legitimacy, all three states claim sectarian congruence. The Sunni character of the Turkish leadership matches that of the majority of its people. The imagination of a distinct Kurdish community in Turkey has been a cause of conflict since the earliest years of modern Turkey in 1925, and especially since 1984, but the Kurds are a minority, and the Kurdish conflict is mostly limited to particular localities. The Shi’i character of the Iranian leadership likewise matches the Shi’ism of the majority of its people. No Lebanese sect constitutes a majority, but the consociational system is designed precisely to achieve sectarian congruence. All atypical states save Lebanon also plausibly claimed ideological legitimacy. Iran claims significant ideological legitimacy as the classic Islamic republic. Turkey claims less ideological legitimacy today than it did during the Kemalist period (1923–46), but something of the Kemalist claim remained even after the democratic reforms of 1946–50, as indicated by the continuing iconic status of images of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and by the continuing emphasis on the “secular” (laiklik) nature of the Turkish republic. The only area in which the atypical states could not plausibly claim much representative legitimacy was probity, as both Iran and Lebanon have CPIs comparable to the Arab presidential republics. Only the Turkish system could plausibly claim probity, with a CPI of 4.4. (Transparency International 2010). 108

Leadership and legitimacy in MENA

None of these atypical countries experienced protest during the Arab Spring. As has been said, the lack of protest does not prove legitimacy. All three countries, however, experienced earlier protests that have some bearing on aspects of legitimacy. In Lebanon, 2005 saw the so-called “Cedar Revolution” sparked by the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri (Blanford 2016). This so-called revolution was aimed primarily at Syrian influence and troops, and so suggests that both the imagined Lebanese community and the Lebanese system enjoyed significant legitimacy. In Iran, 2009 saw major protests sparked by what were thought to be faked election results (Ansari 2010). The central point was that the victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was considered by protestors not to be legitimate. The lack of legitimacy, then, attached to the running of the election, not to the constitutional system, and the protests actually suggest that the constitutional system did enjoy legitimacy, even if its operation in 2009 did not. Turkey saw significant protests in 2007 and 2013 against the ideology and authoritarian style of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the Justice and Development Party (AKP). These suggest the legitimacy, for at least one part of the Turkish population, of the constitutional system and of the ideology of secularism.

Comparative legitimacy claims Most MENA leaderships, systems, and state institutions enjoy some form of legitimacy, then, as do most MENA nations. Legitimacy is not the exclusive property of democratic regimes. Several MENA leaderships may enjoy constitutional legitimacy that is comparable to classic conceptions of democratic legitimacy. Three MENA states with significant constitutional legitimacy (Lebanon, Iran and Turkey pre-2016) should perhaps not be described as authoritarian states in the first place, even though they also cannot be described as classic democracies. Some authoritarian MENA states also seem to enjoy legitimacy, in different ways. GCC states, especially, may enjoy output legitimacy because of their hydrocarbon-funded welfare programmes, and non-GCC monarchies may enjoy input legitimacy because of their combination of constitutionalism and the traditional authority of the monarchical system. Arab presidential states probably once enjoyed the legitimacy conferred by heroic foundation myths and by ideology, but both of these have worn thin with time, leaving the leaderships, systems and institutions of Arab presidential states almost without any plausible claims to legitimacy of any variety. Given this, the protests of the Arab Spring are hardly surprising.

Conclusion Legitimacy matters, as one of the three legs on which an authoritarian regime stands, along with repression and co-option. It thus helps explain authoritarian resilience and state survival or collapse. It is also central during an insurgency, and crucial for effective leadership and good governance. Finally, the more legitimacy, the less repression is needed. Legitimacy is hard to measure, but breaking it down into its constituent parts makes it possible to ask what varieties of legitimacy may and may not be plausibly claimed by a leadership, a system, state institutions, and by the nation itself. External and internal legitimacy may be distinguished. Internal legitimacy may be divided between input and output legitimacy, with the additional category of charismatic legitimacy, once important in the MENA but no longer plausibly claimed by any leader. Input and output legitimacy may themselves then be further broken down. On this basis, it becomes possible to ask what varieties of legitimacy a particular state, or type of state, may claim. A plausible claim to a variety of legitimacy does not automatically mean that a part or the whole of a population perceives that legitimacy to exist, but the absence 109

Mark Sedgwick

of a plausible claim does mean that a population is highly unlikely to perceive that variety of legitimacy. What was striking about this chapter’s survey of plausible legitimacy claims in the MENA was the way in which the Arab presidential states lacked almost any plausible legitimacy claims whatsoever. Legitimacy may also be measured by protests such as the Arab Spring. While the absence of protest does not prove the perception of legitimacy, the presence of protest does indicate the perception of illegitimacy, as one does not protest against something one regards as legitimate. That the most major protests of the Arab Spring were found in the states with the fewest plausible claims to legitimacy thus comes as no surprise. Some of the states which saw major protests during the Arab Spring subsequently collapsed into civil wars that indicated the lack of legitimacy of the imagined nation itself. Others returned to stability, sometimes with the help of repression, sometimes with changes in perceptions of legitimacy. Whatever shape future events will take, legitimacy, in all its forms, will remain important.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Morten Valbjørn for his comments on a draft of this chapter.

Notes 1 Leadership may also be understood in other ways, for example as the psychological characteristics of the leader or of other members of the leadership (Helms 2014: 263; Masciulli and Knight 2009: 108–12). Discussion of leadership may lead to discussion of the question of which matters more, the character and psychology of the leadership or the circumstances constraining it. This, as Rhodes and ‘t-Hart (2014: 11) argue, is really just another form of the classic question of agency-structure duality. It is not a question that this chapter will address. The aspect of leadership on which this chapter will focus is legitimacy, not the psychology of individual leaders. 2 Frantz and Stein in fact propose this as a definition of “regime,” but to avoid possible confusion this chapter will use the term “system.” 3 It is possible also to look at the legitimacy of particular actions taken by a leadership, as Mirjam Edel and Maria Josua have shown (2017). 4 Whether or not this remains true, it still makes the point. 5 These differ in both number and nomenclature from those proposed in Sedgwick (2010), but the main difference is not to substance but to clarity. 6 The MENA is here understood as the Arab world, Turkey and Iran, but not including Israel, which has a very different political system, and Palestine, which does not enjoy full statehood. 7 2010 has been used because some MENA states saw their CPI ratings collapse after the Arab Spring along with the collapse of the state. 8 Egypt’s Coptic and Nubian minorities are relatively small. 9 Iraq had a CPI of 1.5, putting it at the very bottom of the scale, along with two other states involved in civil war (Afghanistan and Somalia) and Myanmar. The CPIs of Libya, Yemen and Syria declined after 2011. 10 There were still protests in Algeria, but these were easily controlled by the security forces (Josua 2017: 311). Josua (2017) describes the multiple strategies, including a variety of legitimization strategies, used by the Algeria leadership.The main point, however, is the difference between the way events played out in Algeria and in other presidential states.

References Albrecht, H. and O. Schlumberger (2004), “‘Waiting for Godot’: Regime change without democratization in the Middle East,” International Political Science Review, 25: 4, 371–92. Almond, G.A. (1956), “Comparative political systems,” Journal of Politics, 18, 391–409. 110

Leadership and legitimacy in MENA

Anderson, B. (1983), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. Ansari, A. (2010), Crisis of Authority: Iran’s 2009 Presidential Election, London: Chatham House. Blanford, N. (2016), Killing Mr Lebanon: The Assassination of Rafik Hariri and Its Impact on the Middle East, London: IB Tauris. Cassani, A. (2017), “Social services to claim legitimacy: comparing autocracies’ performance,” Contemporary Politics, 23:3, 348–68, doi: 10.1080/13569775.2017.1304321. Dukalskis, A. and J. Gerschewski (2017), “What autocracies say (and what citizens hear): Proposing four mechanisms of autocratic legitimation,” Contemporary Politics, 23:3, 251–68, doi: 10.1080/ 13569775.2017.1304320. Edel, M. and M. Josua (2017), “How authoritarian rulers seek to legitimise repression: Framing mass killings in Egypt and Uzbekistan,” GIGA Working Paper, 299. El-Katiri, M. (2013), “The institutionalisation of religious affairs: religious reform in Morocco,” Journal of North African Studies, 18:1: 53–69, doi: 10.1080/13629387.2012.712886. Fleiner, L.R.B. (2008), “Trust and tolerance as state-making values in multicultural societies: Paradoxes and chances of federalism as a conflict-management tool,” in ed, J.-D. Nordmann, Federalism: A tool for conflict management in multicultural societies with regard to the Near East, pp. 243–58, Zurich: LIT Verlag. Franck, T.M. (1988), “Legitimacy in the international system,” American Journal of International Law, 82, 705–59. Frantz, E. and E.A. Stein (2012), “Comparative leadership in non-democracies,” in ed, L. Helms, Comparative political leadership, pp. 292–313. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Freedom House (2017), “Freedom in the world 2017,” accessible at: https://freedomhouse.org/report/ freedom-world/freedom-world-2017 Gilley, B. (2009), The Right to Rule: How States Win and Lose Legitimacy, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Goode, J.P. and A.I. Ahram (2017), “Observing autocracies from the ground floor,” Social Science Quarterly, 97, 823–33, doi: 10.1111/ssqu.12339. Grauvogel, J. and C. von Soest (2013), “Claims to legitimacy matter: Why sanctions fail to instigate democratization in authoritarian regimes,” GIGA Working Paper, 235. Haldenwang, C. von (2017), “The relevance of legitimation: a new framework for analysis,” Contemporary Politics, 23:3, 269–86, doi: 10.1080/13569775.2017.1304322. Helms, L. (2014), “Global political leadership in the twenty-first century: Problems and prospects,” Contemporary Politics, 20:3, 261–77, doi: 10.1080/13569775.2014.911499. Hinnebusch, R. (2014), “Change and continuity after the Arab Uprising: The consequences of state formation in Arab North African states,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 42:1, 12–30, doi: 10.1080/13530194.2015.973182. Hume, D. (1758), “Of the first principles of government,” in Essays and treatises on several subjects, vol. 1, p. 22, London: A Millar. Josua, M. (2017), “Legitimation towards whom? Managing the legitimacy crisis in Algeria during the Arab Uprisings,” Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft, 11:2, 301–24, doi: 10.1007/s12286-017-0331-3. Kane, J. and H. Patapan (2012), The democratic leader: How democracy defines, empowers and limits its leaders, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levi, M. and A. Sacks (2009), “Conceptualizing legitimacy, measuring legitimating beliefs,” American Behavioral Scientist, 53:3, 354–75, doi: 10.1177/0002764209338797. Marquez, X. (2016), “The irrelevance of legitimacy,” Political Studies, 64, 19–34, doi: 10.1111/14679248.12202. Masciulli, J. and W.A. Knight (2009), “Conceptions of global leadership for contextually intelligent, innovatively adaptive political leaders,” in eds, J. Masciulli, M.A. Molchanov and W.A. Knight., The Ashgate research companion to political leadership, pp. 89–122, Aldershot: Ashgate. Nagle, J. (2015), “Between entrenchment, reform and transformation: Ethnicity and Lebanon’s consociational democracy,” Democratization, 23:7, 1144–61, doi: 10.1080/13510347.2015.1058361. Perlmutter, A. (1969), “The praetorian state and the praetorian army: Toward a taxonomy of civil-military relations in developing polities,” Comparative Politics, 1, 382–404. Ray, J.L. (1993), “Wars between democracies: Rare, or nonexistent?” International Interactions, 18, 251–76, doi: 10.1080/03050629308434807. Rhodes, R.A.W. and P. ‘t-Hart (2014), “Puzzles of political leadership,” in eds, R.A.W. Rhodes and P. ‘t-Hart, The Oxford handbook of political leadership, pp. 1–21, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 111

Mark Sedgwick

Rose, J. (2014), The Public Understanding of Political Integrity: The Case for Probity Perceptions, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Scharpf, F.W. (1970), Demokratietheorie Zwischen Utopie und Anpassung, Konstanz: Universitätsverlag. Scharpf, F.W. (1997), Games Real Actors Play: Actor-Centered Institutionalism in Policy Research, Boulder, CO: Westview. Scharpf, F.W. (1999), Governing in Europe: Effective and Democratic? New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Schlumberger, O. (2010), “Opening old bottles in search of new wine: On nondemocratic legitimacy in the Middle East,” Middle East Critique, 19, 233–50. doi: 10.1080/19436149.2010.514473. Sedgwick, M. (2010), “Measuring Egyptian regime legitimacy,” Middle East Critique, 19:3, 251–67, doi: 10.1080/19436149.2010.514474. Seligson, M.A. (2002), “The impact of corruption on regime legitimacy: A comparative study of four Latin-American countries,” Journal of Politics, 64:2, 408–33. Seton-Watson, H. (1977), Nations and States: An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Tarifa, F. (1997), “The quest for legitimacy and the withering away of utopia,” Social Forces, 76, 437–473. Tocqueville, A. de (1834), Democracy in America (trans, G. Lawrence, 1969), New York, NY: Doubleday. Transparency International (2010), Corruption Perceptions Index 2010, Berlin: Transparency International. US Army (2006), Counterinsurgency, Washington, DC: Department of the Army. Weatherford, M.S. (1991), “Mapping the ties that bind: Legitimacy, representation, and alienation,” The Western Political Quarterly, 44, 251–76. Weber, M. (1978 [1922]), Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. World Bank (2017), “GDP per capita (Current US$),” accessible at: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ NY.GDP.PCAP.CD.

112

Part II

State actors, societal context and popular activism

8 The military in the Arab state Philippe Droz-Vincent

Whatever their efforts to expand co-optation or manipulation, authoritarian regimes basically rely on coercion or at least the prospect of repression, hence their organic relation to the military. And the Arab world, characterized by the enduring persistence of authoritarianism, is no exception. In contrast to the 1950s–60s, few were studying Arab militaries in the 1990s and 2000s, while nevertheless acknowledging that they were an essential last resort pillar of regimes; rather most studies were focused on whether regimes were liberalizing politically and economically, or which form of opposition could emerge in them, and in particular if Islamists were democrats (or not). After 2011, the Arab Uprisings ushered in a sudden surge of interest in the military among students of Arab regimes and those analyzing possible transitions (from authoritarianism to democracy). Indeed, decisions by Arab officers played a crucial role in determining the outcomes of their respective countries’ protest movements. Yet the military’s involvement in the breakdown of certain regimes was not a simple coup and the army was also responding to a groundswell of civic street activism. The military played a crucial role in defining paths of transition; for instance, divergent ones between Tunisia and Egypt. A hotly debated point was whether the army was an actor unwittingly thrown into politics by (the errors of) former rulers or an active spoiler of democratic transition. These questions reveal how little is known about Arab militaries. In this chapter, I argue that path dependence from the 1950s–60s plays a crucial role in understanding the military dimension in Arab politics. The latter’s scope and depth is however complex and should be understood according to its changing faces. In particular, the army’s role changed after the 1970s with the rise of enduring authoritarian regimes that continued in power for decades. The 2011 Uprisings introduced nascent changes where the military once again played some pivotal roles but was also thrown into hectic times of upheaval that severely pressed upon it. The end result is an unstable and complex militarism in the Arab world.

“Path dependence?”: the changing face of the military dimension in Arab politics Any understanding of the role of the military in the Arab world should go back to a few inaugural historical moments. Arab armies were at the core of post-independence state- and 115

Philippe Droz-Vincent

nation-building processes with a proliferation of military takeovers of governments in the 1950s–60s. The military gave birth to new republican regimes in Egypt (1952), Libya (1969), (North) Yemen (1962), Iraq (1958) and Syria (1963) In these foundational years, “men on horseback” acquired political roles. Decolonization left Arab states with unpopular civilian leaders and difficult socio-economic conditions, along with insecure external security environments (in the first place the Arab-Israeli conflict), thus paving the way for the rise of officers in politics through coups d’état (Hurewitz 1969; Be’eri 1970; Halpern 1963; in general Finer 1962). Officers, self-labelled “Free Officers” (al-Dubbat al-Ahrar) in Egypt, Syria, Libya, Iraq or Yemen, came to power with a radical agenda of political and economic transformation, influenced by socialist developmental ideas in the context of panArabism (Nasserism, Ba‘thism) and anti-imperialism (Abd al-Malek 1968; Seale 1965; Batatu 1978). The general literature on the army in politics that focuses on the study of military organizations, coups and military-led regimes offers key explanations. Its main arguments relate military behaviour, notably intervention in politics, to both the institutional features of armed forces (their superior or “modern” organizational features, a new type of authority said to be based on a rational-legal orientation making them a modernizing force in traditional societies) and to social forces, especially classes (new middle classes [Halpern 1963] or at least rising “rural and lower classes”) and communal groups (Alawites and rural Sunnis in Syria, rural Sunnis in Iraq) (Perlmutter 1977; Nordlinger 1977), of which they are seen as vehicles. The military was seen as an essential engine of change which it saw as needed if it was to perform its functional role as the defender of external borders. Regimes relying on the army became the norm after the examples of Nasser in Egypt, the Ba‘th party in Syria and Iraq, Algeria a few years after 1962 or Qadhafi after 1969. Even certain monarchies, such as Morocco and Jordan, namely regimes with a different genetic make-up from “revolutionary” republics, relied heavily on the military—and certain Kings—Jordan’s Hussein, then Abdallah II—had a strong military background. Conversely, Gulf monarchies downsized their armies or kept them tiny, despite acute security threats (Iran, Iraq), in order to alleviate the risks of politicization in the officer corps. And the immediate flipside of such a rational choice was their reliance on American military protection with bases or at least pre-positioned equipment, and the recruitment of mercenaries (Louer 2013) or the outsourcing of security to rotating units from other Arab (Jordan) or Asian (Pakistan) countries. In all monarchies, the rise of prince-officers, namely members of royal families with a military background, was a way to tie the small yet pivotal military constituency to royal dynasticism. Yet the old literature on the military in politics is insufficient to fully understand the military dimension in Arab politics. The Arab world is very different from Latin America, the true heartland of the military in politics, but in the classic form of the seizure of power then extrication from politics back to barracks: Latin American coups have alternated with elected governments, enabling a legacy of civilian rule or at least political resistance to persist or to re-emerge; and Latin American military governments have not degenerated into complex authoritarian regimes—perhaps with the exceptions of Chile and Venezuela. Regimes in the Arab world were very different. Rulers hailing from the military did not build military regimes per se but were more likely to build security/police (mukhabarat) regimes (Hudson 1991, 1977; Ayubi 1995) and, “beyond coercion” (Dawisha and Zartman 1988), regimes based on the exclusive control of the state apparatus by the executive. On the one hand, the police apparatus was the key pillar of day-to-day rule: with the deployment of policemen in public spaces, the oversight of security agencies over a wide range of areas under the purview of the administration in democratic regimes and the political police chasing opponents. The threatening military pillar remained in the background, supposedly to save the regime in case of need. 116

The military in the Arab State

And the army played such a role: in Egypt in 1986 when paramilitary forces (al-Amn al-Markazi) rioted or in 1996–97 in support of paramilitary forces against an increasingly able Islamist insurgency (Springborg 1989; Kandil 2012); in Syria in 1974–82 during the civil war between the Hafez al-Asad regime and the Muslim Brotherhood (Seale 1990); in Jordan after riots in 1996 in Karak or in 1998 in Maan; or in Saudi Arabia on numerous occasions to support the paramilitary National Guard against riots in the oil-rich (and Shi’a) Eastern province. The military from an engine of change became the guarantor of the status quo in which it occupied a privileged position. On the other hand, regimes took on a life of their own away from the military. They were built upon networks of family members (neo-asabiyya, to modernize Ibn Khaldun for a time of nation-states), complemented by high bureaucrats, police cadres, party apparatchiks, political elites, crony capitalists, media figures, social elites (such as preachers) and high military officers, all owing their position to the ruler and his clique. These networks displayed an ability to steer state policies and manipulate their society, with truncated political openings (elections without choice) and selective economic openings (infitah). And a similar trend occurred in oil monarchies endowed with massive flows of money controlled by the ruling family and distributed through the over-expanded state apparatus. Arab regimes endured for decades in power despite their lack of legitimacy and reliable sources of support—but longevity should not be conflated with stability. As a consequence, the military faded into the background and the paradox was that the army disappeared from radar screens as if authoritarianism had “tamed” it in a kind of authoritarian control of the armed forces. Most analyses studied “coup-proofing” strategies by regimes and related them to enduring authoritarian rule (Brooks 1999). Regimes closely watched after recruitments and promotions, either favouring loyalists or recruiting en masse from what they considered to be their “natural” social base (rural ‘Alawis and Sunnis in Syria, rural Sunnis in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Bedouins and rural Transjordanians in Jordan, Najdis in Saudi Arabia, Northerners in Yemen, those coming from Sirte and Bani Walid in Libya). They built powerful paramilitary forces counterbalancing the regular army (National Guard in Saudi Arabia, Republican Guards in Iraq, Yemen or Syria and to a lesser extent Egypt, “security brigades” in Libya). And military intelligence took prominent roles of internal monitoring in the officer corps. The military changed a lot after the 1970s and with the rise of enduring authoritarian regimes. It became a closed sector and a black box no longer shining in open politics, a new feature signalled by the waning of the number of coups d’état. The problem should not be understood just as one of control, because the army also adapted itself to and benefited from the authoritarian status quo. The army was in reality much more embedded in the polity than the image of the defence sector tamed by authoritarian power would put it. The military was a vital part of the state bureaucracy but also positioned at the crossing of numerous dimensions: with interrelations to or even encroachments into the state, the regime, the civilian society, the economy and the cultural fabric. The importance of these dimensions varied across cases—some directly depended on the regime’s will, others signalled autonomous developments. In most cases, the military was “re-professionalized” as a state bureaucracy in sharp contrast to the 1960s when the officer corps was pervaded by politicization. The Egyptian, Syrian and Yemeni militaries became huge corps built around a sense of professionalism and bloated bureaucracy with indulged officers (and some corruption) and a privileged access to resources. One exception was the Tunisian military which, though modernized, remained however small and poorly funded; Libya was even more of an exception, with the Libyan army systematically disorganized professionally by Qadhafi—a rational strategy to ensure his exclusive preeminence, for the Colonel who came to power through the military and had suffered from numerous coup attempts originating in the officer corps. 117

Philippe Droz-Vincent

Though re-professionalized, the army maintained an intimate relation to the state, not just as a state institution endowed with the monopoly on heavy force, but also ideally/conceptually as embodying some essential myths about the state. In the 1950s–60s, officers boasted about being modernizers, men with a nationalist vision and a sense of discipline and organization— congruent with the views of some modernization theorists like Huntington (1968). This proved a myth, but some ideas remained prevalent among societies and officers alike, about the military as the founder of new political orders or at least with a specific “mission” for the state, to integrate it or to develop it. Armies as different as Tunisia and Egypt exemplified such a view.1 This posture should not be equated with the military as the guardian of an official ideology, as Kemalism for the Turkish military until the rise of the AK Party in 2002, but at least with a pervasive sense of the state. The military, especially in its high ranks, was also intimately related to regimes. That relation was different across cases, from the Egyptian model where a few high officers (the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and the enduring Defence Minister Tantawi under Mubarak) served as go-betweens and “representatives” for the military officer corps to the regime, to Syria where the Asad regime penetrated deeply into the armed forces through a systematic infusion of ‘Alawi (and also minority) officers in key posts (Seurat 1989; Van Dam 1996). Usual dichotomies distinguished between an institutionalized officer corps where recruitment was based on performance rather than politics and cronyism was limited (Egypt), and a patrimonial officer corps where officers were linked to the regime by bonds of blood, sect and ethnicity (Syria, Iraq, Yemen). Yet such characterizations should not be pushed too far: in Egypt, above a certain rank (medium officers), promotions were based on strict allegiance, a strict political quietism, with competing officers positioned in a kind of “waiting game” to climb up ranks and acquire access to high and lucrative positions (Sayigh 2012). Iraq under Saddam Hussein displayed another model whereby the Ba‘th party (contrary to Syria) “tamed” the military with political commissars posted everywhere—Saddam Hussein was a civilian activist, although he took power with General Hassan al-Bakr. The only exception was the small Tunisian army, which avoided politics, with a strong sense of its professionalism, even under Ben Ali, an officer quickly turned a “securocrat”. Ben Ali was an artillery officer but quickly shifted to security positions as the chief of the military intelligence, thereafter, heading the repressive apparatus in the Interior Ministry. The military was specifically related to society. There was an intrinsic link in armies that were based on conscription. Furthermore, NCOs in most Arab armies were closer to the rank and file than to the privileged world of high officers. But officers distanced themselves from lay society. Access to officers’ ranks changed a lot with the officer corps becoming a closed world—and in Egypt in the 2010s, it would be more difficult for Nasser, ‘Amer, Sadat, Mubarak or Tantawi to enter the military academy than when they did. The military amassed a wealth of resources despite the end of the Arab-Israeli wars (whether peace was signed or not) and built networks of wealth, privilege and influence. In the Egyptian case, this encroachment amounted to an economic empire with military enterprises venturing into civilian markets and former officers (with low ages of retirement in times of peace) were massively employed in the economy and the bureaucracy (Marshall and Stacher 2012; Droz-Vincent 2007). In Syria, it took the form of a mixture of parasitic alliances of wealth between top officers and crony capitalists. Yet, the military in Syria remained a relative channel of social mobility, especially for rurals (Sunnis and minority). The military was also embedded in the general socio-cultural fabric of the country. It was in some cases able to keep some legitimacy of its own, while not antagonizing the regime. The army cultivated a symbolic status as the defender of national strength, above political factionalism and devoid of communal strivings or as “a factory producing men” (masn’a rijala), as the Egyptian expression put it. This entailed a belief among officers that they were the custodians 118

The military in the Arab State

of the country’s sovereignty against external enemies and also internal threats. This was not automatically synonymous with a political role, for instance, for the Tunisian military with no historical role in state-building. This multi-positioned posture allowed the military to remain invisible and allegedly politically “quietist” for decades under enduring authoritarian regimes, while at the same time an essential pillar and a crucial insider/stakeholder in the regime. Those focusing on coups in the classic sense missed a whole range of techniques or channels whereby the army could (signalling its “embeddedness” in Arab polities) influence the executive leadership. Their extent included numerous enclaves of military autonomy, reserve domains controlled by the military, and institutional or informal army veto points in decision-making. Such a view will also explain how the military quickly shifted from invisibility to a pivotal actor in 2011.

The 2011 Uprisings and the return of the military to politics? The remarkable and crucial engine of change in 2011 was the sudden and massive civic mobilizations in public spaces. The latter occurred in very symbolic and crucial locations for enduring authoritarian regimes eager to make societies act “as if” their rule was normal and “externally” (in appearances) accepted by their citizens. Although regime breakdowns were due to the pressure (“stress test”) of massive civic mobilizations, the role of the military and its institutional intervention was also of importance with sometimes the return of coups d’état. The complex mixture of street politics and military politics was at the core of the 2011 Uprisings.

The puzzle of 2011 and the role of armies Most analyses of these pivotal events adopt a “decisionist” view of the military faced with a decision “to shoot or not to shoot” at mass protests (Bellin 2012). The army was a strongly hierarchic actor headed by the officer corps; hence, the latter’s will to repress or not was instrumental in determining the course of events. In some cases, army leaders decided to refrain from using their heavy might/violence to crush protests and then eased the end of regimes (Tunisia and Egypt). In other cases, the military entered into repression for a short time (Bahrain) or more intensively, thereafter imploded (Libya), fractured in two halves (Yemen), or was pulled into repression (Syria) (Droz-Vincent 2011). Such decisionist views are complemented with comparisons across time or across regions to find other instances of armies either entering repression or shirking away from it. Such comparative views to some extent deny the importance and the specificity of the 2011 protests movements in the Arab world: they subsume them into a broader category (repression against civilians) and fail to appreciate how far mass mobilizations in 2011 were very different from earlier episodes such as the food riots of the 1970s–80s (and even in 1977, the Egyptian military waited before intervening and not until price increases were cancelled by Sadat); Islamist insurrections; or even the stirrings of a first civil war in Syria (1976–82). In 2011, massive civic social mobilizations that were trans-class, trans-sectorial, lacking cohesive leadership, largely non-violent (at least insurrectionist but not using the degree of violence waged by regimes) made a crucial difference. They directly targeted regimes and their resilient character, and faced extremely violent (and asymmetric) reactions by security forces with sniper shots and live ammunition shots with war weapons. They exerted extreme pressure (“stress test”) on the whole set of social relations constitutive of a regime—its hierarchical relations, the sense of duty and obedience within it, its weak links to society—all were becoming strained beyond the limits of normal operation. Once the police and paramilitary or anti-riot forces proved unable to contain the protests and 119

Philippe Droz-Vincent

disappeared from streets after fierce attempts at repression, the stress test then reverberated on the military. Military behaviour during the 2011 Arab Uprisings presented a puzzling variation for regimes that had all implemented coup-proofing strategies. The decision, if decision there was, would be more accurately described as a complex process whereby the armed forces were pulled into mass politics (there are still controversies about whether Mubarak or Ben Ali gave explicit orders to the military to fire on crowds, beyond the deployment of military units that was an indication in itself of a desire to repress or at least to intimidate2). The massive character of the Uprisings created a kind of affinity between those calling for regime change and the military, especially in cases of conscription armies. Repressing would have meant turning guns on fellow countrymen and tarnishing the military’s reputation, furthermore in a visible manner since cell phones with cameras were widespread, on behalf of de-legitimized rulers. The military dimensions of Arab politics summarized above played a crucial role in explaining the varying reactions, much more than alleged clear-cut decisions or refusals. The stress test exerted on these dimensions determined the various reactions of Arab militaries, depending on their ability to keep coherence, their distance from the regime, their corporatist interests in the whole system and their preserved sense of the state.

Military agency amidst messy transitional settings The key objective for the military was to stay afloat amidst other falling authoritarian institutions in the face of massive civilian protests. An essential element was the military’s ability to keep its coherence before the stress test of massive civic demonstrations. Descriptions introducing differences between NCOs, low officers and high officers added analytical refinements but, when Arab armies lost their cohesiveness (Libya, Yemen, to some extent Syria), they did not fracture according to “class”/hierarchical differences (the classical example by Luckham 1971). The high officers of the SCAF in Egypt made a strong endeavour to maintain the unity of the military against all odds and stresses, with internal coercion, the distribution of incentives (bonuses) and constant contacts with medium officers—there were few open defections. At the same time, they remained ambivalent and seemingly let Mubarak have some time to fix his regime before taking power. Whatever the alleged coup-proofing strategies under Hafez al-Asad (with Alawi officers), things could not be taken for granted for Bashar al-Asad. In 2011, the regime in large part lost control and was unable to use its military in repression with the exception of praetorian units (4th division, special forces regiments). And the regime brutalized its military as much as it brutalized pacific civic demonstrators to retake full control and sow fear inside it. The extensive use of the Syrian army in repression, then war, followed this “securitization” of the military. And the numerous defectors, mostly Sunni rurals and especially between 2011 and 2012, formed the backbone and first nuclei of the armed rebellion (Free Syrian Army). The Yemeni army fractured in two halves with General Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar and some Northern commanders (along with the al-Ahmar family also involved in the military and security)—all were pillars of the Saleh regime—siding with protesters and units controlled by direct family members of President Saleh remaining loyal. This weakening diminished the coercive potential of the regime and opened up a stalemate until the CCG plan offered a way-out and Saleh could no longer procrastinate. The counter-example is Libya where the military imploded, with some units remaining loyal to Qadhafi especially in the Western part and the South, and the Eastern units in Benghazi defecting en masse behind the Interior Minister Abd al-Fattah Yunes in a context of mounting civil war fuelled by external intervention. 120

The military in the Arab State

Another intervening factor was the distance maintained between the military and the regime. It made a difference whether the military enjoyed some autonomy (from the regime) in 2011, whether the regular military was neglected (Tunisia, Libya) or whether it preserved institutional semi-autonomy (Egypt). The counter-example was Syria where the military was penetrated by the security apparatus, with a pervasive and complex security–military nexus whereby security services (mukhabarat) drew resources from the military (much more than other Arab cases) and where the regime used military resources to staff and equip numerous security, praetorian and special forces. Equally significant was the level of interests the military amassed under decades of authoritarian rule. Egypt stood out for its so-called military economy (Abul-Magd 2017; Droz-Vincent 2007 and 2014), along with Yemen in a more disorganized yet pervasive way. Immediately after it eased the fall of Mubarak, the huge Egyptian military signalled its strong desire to protect its prerogatives understood in a very large sense and with a threatening tone – “the military is a red line” (al-jaish khatt ahmar) as Egyptian generals put it. The Egyptian army forcefully fought to safeguard its interests, privileges and autonomy with a strong endeavour to entrench them in constitutional texts, from the so-called “supra-constitutional principles” to guide the constitution-writing process to the oversight of the constituent assembly in 2011–12, up to the strong voice of military representatives in constitutional debates in 2012–14 (for full details, Droz-Vincent 2016). The insiders’ rift in the Yemeni army led only to limited fighting as military leaders from whatever side had an implicit agreement to preserve the military. And Yemeni high commanders forcefully safeguarded the whole batch of interests associated with the army (patronage, land deals, quota imports). Tunisia and Libya acted as counter-examples with small militaries endowed with poor resources and few corporate interests. And finally, of crucial importance was the military’s ability to maintain some sense of the state, a kind of legitimacy of its own that was latent during authoritarian decades and would make a difference with authoritarian regimes’ breakdowns in 2011. The narrative of the army as the mainstay of the state or the new republic or a conviction of itself as the embodiment of national will was expressed with very different overtones in Tunisia with a very legalist military—size also played an essential role with a lack of capabilities—or Egypt with a kind of sense of “ownership” of the country among military elites. Playing on such elements, officers were able to re-legitimize armies under the popular slogan “the army and the people are one hand” (al-jaish wa al-sha’b ayad wahida) (Ketchley, 2014). That sense of military self-legitimacy was lacking in Libya and to some extent in Yemen. Conversely, the Bahraini military was the army of the dynasty and fully aligned with the Khalifa regime and its propaganda about civic demonstrations equating with Shi’a foreign plots against the country.

The army as the decisive actor in most cases? The various dimensions of military embeddedness and the stress test they encountered when faced with mass protest explained the various trajectories of breakdown and transition. But the picture was not as static as many descriptions in terms of military decisions would put it. In Yemen, Libya, Egypt and Tunisia in 2011–13, the army was thrown into a very unstable and uncertain new setting with regime breakdown or unravelling under the pressure of enduring and resilient popular demonstrations. Transitional processes were messier than in other historical cases in Latin America and Eastern Europe. Transitions in the latter cases depended on factions in the regime viewing the cost of supporting the incumbent as too high; they embraced parts of the opposition and viewed democracy as a second-best solution, hence engaging in “pacts” of transition. In 2011, in the Arab world, regimes were not willing to quit power. 121

Philippe Droz-Vincent

Arab militaries (when they kept their coherence) were different from Latin American armies weakened by defeats in foreign adventures or by inept direct rule, and were different too from Eastern European militaries with a tradition of party/civilian control under Communist regimes — hence they were potentially more autonomous to pursue their own interests. The Egyptian army emerged from the 2011 Uprising as a triumphant actor buttressed by the slogan “the army and the people are one hand.” High generals in the SCAF, a body of the 24 most senior officers, were petrified by the prospect of rapid and unruly change in Egypt. They claimed to support democracy but at the same time they never left any margin of manoeuvre for civilians to build a transitional process; they tried to shape outcomes and repressed civil society activists. They exhausted themselves in seeking to wield direct power (2011–12) to the point of endangering the whole interests of the military. A new generation in the SCAF (al-Sisi, the chief of military intelligence, and other key commanders) entered into an implicit deal in the summer of 2012 with the Muslim Brotherhood that left them with the presidency and the crucial task of restabilizing Egypt, until the military re-intervened one year later (Droz-Vincent 2016). Similarly, Yemeni high commanders in the military and the security sector turned into what is called in post-conflict peace processes warlords or spoilers: they built upon their control over units to put pressure on the transitional process. Only in one case, Tunisia, and through subtly defending military interests (especially vis-a-vis the huge Interior Ministry), did the small military quickly hand over power to the civil society-led Instance pour la réalisation des objectifs de la révolution, to carry out elections and institution-building. In some cases, regime breakdown led to state collapses, especially in cases of external intervention such as Libya. The military’s role was important with the defection of whole units in Benghazi and the help of active or former officers who made allegiance to the rebel National Transitional Council. But it was overwhelmed by the dynamics of war and the rise of so-called “revolutionary brigades,” namely militias made up of civilians (locals in cities or neighbourhoods, also Islamist and Salafist activists) after the generalized pillage of the huge Libyan arsenals amassed for years by Qadhafi. Libya had no potent army but immense stocks of weapons that were “socialized” (by revolutionary brigades) during the civil war. Yemen also verged on state collapse in 2014-15 with the coup de force of the Houthi movement and then regional war unleashed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The renewed wave of militarism after 2011 The Arab Uprisings ushered in a period of changes but also witnessed the reinforcement of militaries or other militia-ized actors as stakeholders or spoilers in the post-2011 systems, with the one exception of Tunisia. In this latter case, the recurring problem has been the nearly impossible reform of the huge Interior Ministry, the equivalent of over-expanded militaries in Syria, Yemen and Egypt. In the Arab world in general and quite differently from other areas, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia and even Africa, discussions about Security Sector Reform (SSR) or “democratic control of the armed forces” have remained futile (Droz-Vincent 2014). The crux of the explanation does not just lie in the military’s usually important role during transitions but also in the entrenched militarism that came openly to surface after the 2011 Uprisings. Armies in the Arab world before 2011 were not prominent politically but they were entrenched in their different polities. And, crucially, this specific military dimension has not been side-lined or subsumed under the workings of reborn (civilian) political institutions after 2011. One of the fundamental premises of renewed civil-military relations is the imperative of a functioning political system whose workings will subordinate military issues under civilian political deliberations and decisions. It did not materialize in Egypt in 2012–13 122

The military in the Arab State

where polarization (the Muslim Brotherhood vs. the others) trumped everything leaving room for counter-revolutionary crystallizations that the military provoked and took advantage of (Brownlee, Masoud and Reynolds 2015). In other cases, reborn political institutions were precluded by the agency of self-generated militias or military-security commanders turned warlords (Libya, Yemen), not to speak about civil war in Syria.

The rise of militarism and the weaknesses of armies in politics The Egyptian trajectory after 2013 illustrates the renewed militarism and its inherent weaknesses. Talk about a deep state (what is called in Turkey derin devlet or parallel devlet), namely a shadowy organized machine manipulating state institutions, should be taken with caution. What was crucial in 2013 was a change of mood toward the Muslim Brotherhood in the new generation of officers at the helm of the army since 2012, first among them Defence Minister al-Sisi appointed by President Morsi. The officer corps shifted its posture from being an active bystander and a powerful stakeholder (and a relatively satisfied one with the “Morsi Constitution”) to being the convener of a new ruling coalition. Furthermore, this was a coup d’’état but the coup could not have succeeded without the use and manipulation of mass mobilizations (Tamarrod, meaning rebellion) against Morsi. Thereafter, the military was able to coalesce a few key groups around itself and to position itself as the holder of the balance (“the shadow state”) with an ability to give direction to an heterogeneous coalition: with a political face (at least for a few months), some Salafi parties, some secular parties, some young activists (shabab al-thawra), and religious institutions (al-Azhar, the Coptic church), made very strange bed-fellows indeed; they also came together with state institutions, the police, the judges, the media (public and private) and some businessmen coalescing under military guidance. On the one hand, for the first time since 1967, the military or part of it (military intelligence) was at the forefront of a new militarization of power. The military under Mubarak was an essential pillar but the Mubarak system stood above it. Since 2013, the army is in the direct limelight as highlighted by numerous economic projects, the One Million Housing project, electric power stations in Asyut and Damietta and the golden goose, the new Suez Canal. This is a new situation for the military that is not at all geared to do politics—tensions have surfaced within it, even with rumours of coup attempts. On the other hand, the army has had no real programme except “follow me” as often stated by President al-Sisi: he ran for the presidency without any programme or partisan identification and he manifested a disinterest in establishing a new party or in building government institutions, subordinating everything to the military. Finally, the al-Sisi regime has played on a strong repressive hand: from the inaugural Rab’a massacre of a Muslim Brotherhood’s sit-in in August 2013 to an unprecedented swell in political detentions, the unleashing of security services (often without “limits” as was the case under Mubarak) against opponents, harsh sentences en masse against the Muslim Brotherhood and all activists. Furthermore, this takes place in a context of propaganda with (governmental and private) media fuelling an atmosphere of polarization and instilling fear with conspiracy narratives and the criminalization of all form of opposition. These seemingly weak foundations and legitimacy for the al-Sisi regime, in a race against time and with no sense of a mission (as in the 1950s), are powerfully offset by new factors that decisively balance them, in creating a sense of emergency that requires a strong hand. These factors include: the spread of Da’esh from Syria–Iraq to Libya and the Sinai (a key stake for the army); the rise of one of the most powerful branches of al-Qaeda in Yemen; Islamist violence and in particular increased terrorism in Egypt and insurgency in the Sinai; civil war in Syria; failed states in Libya and Yemen; and a new regional sectarian/confessional discourse (Cold War) of Shi’as 123

Philippe Droz-Vincent

vs. Sunnis between Saudi Arabia and Iran. These factors have been creating an extraordinary and unprecedented level of regional turmoil that has left some room for “law and order” strategies like the al-Sisi regime’s. The recombination of regional and international relations, with Russia to balance the essential American partner, or Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as a source of money, have been offering partnerships to support renewed authoritarianism.

Renewed civil wars amidst regional chaos Similarly, in failed transitions like Yemen and Libya, remnants of the military have positioned themselves as defenders of some form of law and order. In Yemen, commanders have tried to reconstitute their units in the context of rising (tribal or regionally-sponsored) militias, al-Qaeda carving out fiefdoms and regional (Saudi and Emirati) military interventions supporting a fledgling President Hadi (a former Southern general); and in a further step, in April 2016, the old Northern insider Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar was named deputy commander of Yemen’s armed forces loyal to President Hadi. Yet, the Yemeni army was in large part overwhelmed by fragmentation, mirroring that of the state. In messy post-2011 Libya, civilian-led militias/ revolutionary brigades (kata’ib al-thuwwar) have been mimicking the organization of a regular military (or police), registered and paid by the state (for most of them) under the Defence (or Interior) ministry, while keeping their complete operational autonomy. In Benghazi in May 2014, a former commander of operations in Chad under Qadhafi (thereafter exiled in the US), General Haftar, has tried to rise to the fore with his “Operation Dignity” against Islamist militias that led to the stirrings of a civil war amidst regional interventionism. In April 2019, after a blitz in the (oil-rich) South, he sent his forces West to try to take over Tripoli from the General National Accord’s government. In both cases, military (active or retired) actors have been overwhelmed by other competing forces (militia-ization, al-Qaeda or Da’esh) and have not decisively influenced the political game. The Syrian military remains an enigma at the time of writing: in a context of militarization of the Uprising, followed by civil war, it has lost some of its manpower strength (roughly two-thirds) with individual defections (though not whole units). It has been brutalized by the regime, securitized (with the rise of new ‘Alawi officers, the side-lining of non-defecting Sunni officers, and the recombination of units), and counterbalanced while at the same complemented (in manpower) by the rise of pro-Asad Syrian (National Defence Forces) and Iranian-recruited (Shia, Iraqi or Afghan) militias. But in a war context, it has kept a role as a channel providing weapons and training for militias and as the recipient of Russian aid that proved decisive after Russia’s intervention in September 2015. If the core trend of the post-2011 era is either that regimes (in most cases) managed to dodge the effects of civic rebellions or that the massive Uprisings (in some cases) opened up various trajectories including counter-revolutions and a reassertion of authoritarianism, the military is not well geared politically to be a crucial actor in settings that are much more complex than the skeletal Arab polities of the 1950s. Yet it keeps a role, due to the specific military dimension in Arab politics highlighted in this chapter. These features are again apparent in the transitions (to unknown directions at the time of writing) in Algeria and Sudan beginning in April 2019.

Notes 1 And conversely, the weakening of the state by foreign decisions (Coalition Provisional Authority’s orders, 2003–4) and in particular the dissolution of the military (CPA order n 2) created acute problems when in search of “exit strategies” after 2006 and with the “(temporary) surge” in motion, the US tried to 124

The military in the Arab State

recreate an Iraqi military. In fact, except for a few special units, the Iraqi military proved only a collection of militias in the hands of the various and rival insiders (mostly Shi’a and Kurd parties) that played into that system.When there is no state, no concept of the state, there is no army related to it: this was revealed most directly (among many other less well seen instances) when the so-called Iraqi army fled in Mosul in June 2014 when facing a few rag-tag Jihadists of Da’ech and fought only in the outskirts of Baghdad or near Irbil. 2 The main works on this period are rather repetitive, using the same sources. Insider accounts of the trendsetting case, Egypt, will reveal the maze of factors involved in military “decisions” and the fact that the military most often reacted and then back-pedaled (also violently), rather than making clearcut choices.

References Abd al-Malek, A. (1968), Egypt, Military Society, New York, NY: Random House. Abul-Magd, Z. (2017), Militarizing the Nation, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Ayubi, N. (1995), Over-Stating the Arab State, London: I.B. Tauris. Bellin, E. (2012), “The robustness of authoritarianism reconsidered: Lessons of the Arab Spring,” Comparative Politics, 44:2. Batatu, H. (1978), The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements in Iraq, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Be’eri, E. (1970), Army Officers in Arab Politics and Society, New York: Praeger. Brooks R. (1999), Political-Military Relations and the Stability of Arab Regimes, London: Routledge. Brownlee, J., Masoud, T. and Reynolds A. (2015), The Arab Spring, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dawisha, A. and W. Zartman (ed, 1988), Beyond Coercion, London: Croom Helm. Droz-Vincent, P. (2007), “From political to economic actors: The changing role of Middle Eastern armies,” in ed, O. Schlumberger, Debating Arab Authoritarianism, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Droz-Vincent, P. (June 2011), “Authoritarianism, revolutions, armies, and Arab regime transitions,” International Spectator, 46:2. Droz-Vincent, P. (October 2014), “Prospects for the democratic control of the armed forces?” Armed Forces and Society, 40:4. Droz-Vincent, P. (2016), “Changes in civil-military relationships after the Arab Spring,” in eds, R. Grote and T. Roeder, Constitutionalism in Islamic Countries, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Finer, S. (1962), The Man on Horseback, New York: Praeger. Halpern, M. (1963), The Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hudson, M. (1977), Arab Politics, New Haven, CO: Yale University Press. Hudson, M. (Summer 1991), “After the Gulf War, prospects for democratization in the Arab world,” Middle East Journal. Huntington, S. (1968), Political Order in Changing Societies, New Haven, CO: Yale University Press. Hurewitz, J. (1969), Middle East Politics, New York: Praeger. Kandil, H. (2012), Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen, London: Verso. Ketchley, N. (January 2014), “The army and the people are one hand,” Comparative Studies in Society and History. Louer, L. (April 2013), “Sectarianism and coup-proofing strategies in Bahrain,” Journal of Strategic Studies. Luckham, R. (1971), The Nigerian Military, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marshall, S. and Stacher, J. (Spring 2012),“Egypt’s generals and transnational capital,” Middle East Report, no. 262. Nordlinger, E. (1977), Soldiers in Politics, Englewoods Cliff, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Perlmutter, A. (1977), The Military and Politics in Modern Times, New Haven, CO: Yale University Press. Sayigh, Y. (2012), Above the State, The Officers’ Republic in Egypt, Beirut: Carnegie. Seale, P. (1965), The Struggle for Syria, London: Tauris. Seale, P. (1990), Asad, The Struggle for Syria, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Seurat, M. (1989), L’Etat de barbarie, Paris: Seuil. Springborg, R. (1989), Mubarak’s Egypt, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Stepan, A. (1988), Rethinking Military Politics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Van Dam, N. (1996), The Struggle for Power in Syria, London: I.B. Tauris. 125

9 Tribes in MENA politics The Levant case Dawn Chatty

Although the term tribes, especially Bedouin tribes, have been largely missing from contemporary Arab political discourses, there is convincing evidence that the tribes of the Levant, or “Greater Syria” (modern Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Israel/Palestine) have never disappeared. They were simply not officially acknowledged by the modern nation-state. In Syria, they were delegitimized in 1958; in Lebanon, the vast majority did not exist in state records; while in Jordan, they were a remote minority closely attached to and privileged by the monarchy. But times have changed, and in recent years, Bedouin tribal self-identification has grown exponentially in Syria and Lebanon while in Jordan their status and association with the Hashemite monarchy appears to be weakening.

Who are the Bedouin and what is the nature of their tribal society? The term Bedouin is derived from the Arabic word Badia, the semi-arid and arid steppe land that covers so much of Northern Arabia, and refers to those who live in the Badia as Bedu. Unlike other traditional peoples in other parts of the world, the Bedu cannot claim to be indigenous in the sense of being the first peoples in a colonial context, but they can claim to be autochthonous, that is coming from the Badia of Northern Arabia. The opposition of Bedu (desert dweller) to hadar (urban dweller) is specifically an Arab cultural tradition elaborated and developed by the fourteenth-century philosopher cum sociologist Ibn Khaldûn (1958). The other terms commonly used to refer to the Bedouin tribes of the Levant are, ‘Arab, Asha’iri. The social organization of Bedouin tribes has been studied by anthropologists and described as made up of segmentary lineages. These opposing and parallel lineage segments operate at various levels of reality and fiction. The popular Arab saying “me against my brother; me and my brother against my cousin; me, my brother and my cousin against the world” perfectly describes this layered outlook on power alliances and the potential for enmity among families, lineages and tribes. All Bedouin tribes ascribe to an origin myth based on real and fictive blood ties going back to an apical ancestor—Adnan or Qahtan. The segmentation refers to the way in which the tribe is divided into smaller parallel sections—ashiiras, fakhdhs and bayts—sub-tribes, lineages, and extended families or qom/aqwam. The smallest unit is made up of related kin who generally 126

Tribes in MENA politics

can trace a common ancestor back four or five generations to a great-grandparent. This group often moves or more commonly today, lives together in adjacent urban or peri-urban neighbourhoods, town, or hamlets; it manages the herding of family livestock together, and shares both pastures and watering points. Access to distant or non-kin owned pasture or water is often negotiated with other similar tribal units. At the very top, the tribal leadership, made up of the strongest and most charismatic males of the “shaykhly” lineage, negotiates and jockeys with other tribal leaders for access to natural resources as well representing the tribe in its relations with the central authority of the state. This leadership is also vested in a moral authority by the Bedouin tribesman, which can be augmented or lost by behaviour which respects or disregards tribal custom (Chatty 1977: 385–97). The origins of the Bedouin tribes are certainly pre-Islamic and probably date back several millennia. What is important to keep in mind is that the Bedouin pastoral livelihood was an offshoot of agriculture, not a precursor to it (Fagan 1986). This suggests that, in evolutionary terms, it is a sophisticated adaptation to both environmental and political pressure of the centralized state. Ernest Gellner (1958) and more recently James Scott (2008) have regarded such societies as “marginal” in that evidence increasingly suggests a complex but adaptive organization developed in opposition to the centralizing and often oppressive authority of the state. The semi-arid steppe lands bordering the Mediterranean coastline can ecologically support either dry farming or pastoralism of sheep, goat and camel. Thus, throughout history, it has been a zone of conflict and contest between agricultural activity and pastoral grazing. This area between agricultural settlement (Ma’moura) and the Badia is an amorphous transitional zone where some of the best pastures are found and where extensive cultivation can also take place in the right conditions. After the Mongol invasion of the fourteenth century, which practically destroyed central government authority, a pronounced movement and expansion of Bedouin tribes took place into the Badia of Northern Arabia and into the lower Euphrates and Mediterranean coastline.

The (Bedouin) tribes in the Levant (modern states of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan) Historical records show that local sheep-herding “common” tribes (‘Arab) occupied the semiarid lands (Badia) of the Levant from at least the fourteenth century; long distant camel-herding “noble” tribes (Bedu) entered the region from around the beginning of the eighteenth century. In the closing years of World War I, many Bedouin leaders supported the establishment of an independent Arab state as was promised to the Sharif of Mecca in the wartime Husayn MacMahon Correspondence of 1916. The British, desperate to bring the Arabs into the war against the Ottomans after the Allied defeat at Gallipoli promised Sharif of Mecca, Husayn, that he would have an Arab Kingdom in the Hijaz and that it would include Greater Syria and Mesopotamia (Rogan 2009: 178–82). In 1918 both Nuri Sha’laan of the Ruwalla tribe and Trad al-Melhim of the Hassanna tribe entered Damascus with the troops of Emir Faysal, one of the sons of Sharif Husayn, and T.E. Lawrence to establish the Kingdom of Syria (1918–20). However, while Bedouin leaders attention was focussed on local negotiations regarding the political future of the Arab provinces of the dying Ottoman Empire, their own homeland, the Badia, was being carved up following the secret negotiations between Sir Mark Sykes and his counterparts among the French and the Russians (Sykes-Picot Agreement, 1916). Sykes drew a line from Acre to Kirkuk to protect future oil interests, and the open territory of the Badia became a British corridor between Transjordan and Iraq, guaranteeing control over the Suez Canal. This secret agreement, once implemented, divided up the Syrian Badia between 127

Dawn Chatty

French and British mandatory control and separated the territory from its natural southern half in Saudi Arabia. At the stroke of a pen the Aneza and Shammar confederations of the noble camel-herding Bedu tribes in the northern half of the Badia and the Howeitat and Bani Sakhr in the southern half of the Badia—became transnational. Their migratory movements to maintain their livelihoods were no longer contained within one state—the Ottoman Empire. Rather they crossed over into numerous states; their movements though largely based on the economy of herding livestock were also susceptible to political exigencies in these different states.

Lebanon In order to establish their League of Nations Mandate over Greater Syria, the French determined to carve up the territory into a number of statelets; the State of Lebanon was thus created by attaching the Syrian Bekaa Valley to the predominantly Christian Mount Lebanon. One of the first measures in establishing French control over this new state was the establishment and collection of statistical records in 1926 and later on in the 1932 Census (which remains the most recent Lebanese population count). Many Bedouin traditionally migrating into and out of the Bekaa Valley were not registered in this census, either because they happened to be seasonally out of the Bekaa Valley at the time or because they refused to be registered in opposition to the French “colonial” presence. The irony was that while some of the Bedouin evaded the census count for the sake of resistance against the occupier, the new nation-state created by the French legislatively excluded the Bedouin and marginalized them even further in the process of state formation. Without a nationality, the majority of the Bedouin tribes residing in the Bekaa Valley were not able to purchase land in their own name; nor did they have access to education and public health care. As the French sold off pasture land—over which the Bedouin believed they had use rights—in the Bekaa Valley for agriculture, the Bedouin were increasingly pushed to reduce their migrations and to reduce their herd size (Haj 1991; Thomas 2003). The French Mandate period in Lebanon (1920–43) can be characterized as one where the authorities worked consistently at transforming the nomadic Bedouin tribes into settled agropastoralists and farmers (Chatty 2013; Thomas 2003: 540). The authorities set out to enforce the boundaries of the state and to establish custom barriers and tariffs to control this frontier zone. This was locally devastating for the Bedouin, motivating them to find new ways to keep the borders and frontier zones permeable for their way of life to continue. By the mid-twentieth century, many tribes found themselves “encapsulated in marginal areas within well-populated agricultural regions” (Chatty 1977: 400). With independence in the mid-twentieth century, Lebanon continued the earlier policies to marginalize and push Bedouin to settle. Moving herds from north to south along extensive but sparse areas of grazing in the Bekaa Valley and the Anti-Lebanon Mountains became increasingly difficult. By the 1970s many of the Bedouin group had begun to build informal settlements on former grazing land and to negotiate access to agricultural fields after harvest. Bedouin tribal leaders, such as the Emir Faour of the Fadl tribe and Emir Tamir el Milhelm of the Hassanna tribe were regularly in contact with leading Lebanese politicians such as Kamal Jumblatt negotiating citizenship proceedings and, in the Bekaa Valley, acting as arbitrators in disputes with major land-owners and among the various sections of the different Bedouin tribes. The few Bedouin with full citizenship were able to buy land on the outskirts of rural villages along the frontier zones of the Anti-Lebanon Mountains and to invest in large mechanical tools and vehicles to pave the way for their entry into agricultural enterprises. For the most part, Bedouin without citizenship began to “emplace” themselves in small settlements that were 128

Tribes in MENA politics

irregular if not illegal. Social and economic survival often meant maintaining migration and trade networks across the border zones in Syria along the eastern and northern frontiers. In Lebanon today, most Bedouin are unrecognized and denied nationality. It is estimated that there are 150,000 Bedouin in Lebanon of which perhaps one-third—50,000—hold full, uncompromised citizenship. The attempts of the Bedouin leaders and their constituencies to regularize their presence in Lebanon have resulted in a confusing array of identification categories. At the same time, these various nationality “statuses” of the Bedouin are clearly of political significance in Lebanon’s consociational form of governance. In 1958 a Lebanese law was passed giving Bedouin who had not registered in the 1932 French Mandate authority census a special qayd al dars (“under-study”) nationality status. In 1994 the Lebanese government granted those Bedouin with an “under-study” status from 1958 the right to Lebanese nationality. This was extended to approximately 10,000 Bedouin out of a total population estimated at between 100,000 and 150,000.

Syria The French divided up the rest of the territory of Greater Syria into five semi-independent parts accentuating religious and cultural differences (e.g. Jebel Druze, Aleppo, Lataqiyya, Damascus and Alexandretta): an Alawite state to the north of Lebanon, a Druze state, a state for Aleppo, Damascus and Alexandretta. In order to put this “divide and rule” plan into effect, the French needed to put troops on the ground. In 1920, the French landed troops at the port of Beirut and proceeded through the Bekaa Valley where they were engaged in numerous clashes with Bedouin tribesmen of the al-Fadl and al-Hassanna tribe who attempted to halt their advance. Proceeding toward Damascus, they defeated a small armed group at the Maysaloun pass and put the Emir Faysal under house arrest, thus ending the Bedouin-backed Kingdom of Syria (1918–20). Many Bedouin leaders and their tribesmen had supported the Arab Revolt of World War I and then the establishment of an independent Arab state under Emir Faysal over a part of Syria. The leaders of three Bedouin tribes with close proximity to Damascus—the Ruwalla, the Fadl and the Hassanna—were particularly active in supporting first the Hashemite Kingdom in Syria (1918–20) and later in protesting the policy of the French Mandate authorities. However, French control over the territory did not come easily. Led from the Jebel Druze area, and perhaps supported by British agents from Transjordan, many Bedouin fought alongside Syrians in the Great Arab Revolt against the French Mandate in an uprising which lasted 5 years (Provence 2005). However, the Bedouin then, as now, did not speak or act in unison. The Fadl tribe had thrown their full support behind Emir Faysal’s movement for independence from Ottoman rule; Nuri Sha’laan of the Ruwalla had prevaricated and originally co-operated with the Ottoman authorities. However, after a period of house arrest in Istanbul, he returned to Damascus and joined T.E. Lawrence’s efforts to set up a Syrian Kingdom in 1916 (Chatty 2013: 421). These Bedouin leaders’ involvement with the various Ottoman, French and British agents underscored their political sophistication by both asserting their hegemony over a particular “marginal” region and at the same time supporting the emergence of a non-colonial central authority. After the defeat of Emir Faysal by the French in 1920, each of these tribal leaders and their supporters went their own separate ways. Shaykh Trad of the Hassanna continued his campaign for the establishment of an independent nation. The Fadl leadership protested against the establishment of a French Mandate over their territory and went into exile into the newly created British Mandate state of Transjordan. The Ruwalla leadership of the Sha’laan vacillated between both the French and the English until they finally reached an agreement with 129

Dawn Chatty

the French Délégué, Colonel Catroux, to safeguard caravans in the Badia and to secure peace among the tribes in payment of a monthly stipend of 2000 gold pounds. The Bedouin of the Badia—that part of Syria that consisted of nearly 80% of its landmass— were separated out and encouraged to set up their own nation supervised by a special French unit, the Contrôle Bedouin. This semi-autonomous department managed mobile health care, seasonal desert schools, well-digging, post, patrols, armament, special taxation rates and the practice of urf—traditional law. The major tribal leaders were also guaranteed seats in the National Parliament (Longrigg 1958: 283). These measures, although very much in keeping with the spirit of the “marginal” independent tribe remote from central authority, worked to the detriment of the Bedouin in the long term. But during the Mandate years between 1920 and 1943, the French needed the co-operation of the Bedouin. First, they could not leave two-thirds of their newly acquired Mandate territory, the semi-arid Badia, out of their control. And second, they needed to guarantee a continuous and safe passage through the region for commerce and travel to Baghdad. Furthermore, the petroleum line to Mosul had to be secured, as did the oil pipeline to Haifa. By the 1950s, independent nationalist rulers of Syria wanted to tame this “wild,” semiindependent population in the Badia. Thus, they pursued an aggressive tribal policy aimed ultimately at abolishing all tribal privileges and power established during the previous French rule. In 1958, Gamal Abdul Nasser, the President of the United Arab Republic (including Syria) repealed the Law of the Tribes and proclaimed that henceforth tribes would cease to possess any separate legal identity. This legislation marked the final legal act in the long struggle between the central government and the Bedouin tribes, many of whom then fled the country. In 1970 Hafez al-Asad led an internal Ba‘th Party coup and set out to broaden the support base for his own regime. He invited tribal shaykhs and other dissidents to return to Syria— including some who had been in exile in Jordan and under the protection of King Husayn. Hafez al-Asad encouraged reforms that permitted the Bedouin to continue to operate an alternative system of authority based on customary law. At the same time, he built up relations with numerous minor shaykhs as potential challengers, if need be, in the future. In the past two decades, both Hafez and then his son Bashar have appointed Bedouins as Ministers of Agriculture as well as to important posts in the Ministry of Interior and the Ba‘th Party Regional Command. A trend to identify as Bedouin or create “fictive” kinship links with the Bedouin is also gaining prominence. Whereas Hafez el Asad astutely sought out cooperation with Bedouin leaders and gave them leeway to manage their own lands; Bashar seems to have taken this relationship a step further by promoting a significant number of individuals who either self-identify as Bedouin or are encouraged to do so. It suggests a contemporary recognition by the state that some Bedouin leaders have a strong following, which is potentially beneficial to the government but needs to be harnessed.

Jordan The British, with their bounty in the southern provinces of Greater Syria (Greater “Palestine” including Transjordan) assured, hoped to make some amends to the Sharif Husayn of the Hijaz for not respecting the wartime Husayn MacMahon Correspondence to establish an Arab kingdom in the Levant. They proposed a “Sherifian” solution. With one son, Faysal, removed from his seat in Syria by the French, the British proposed making two of his sons Kings in British mandated territory, one in Transjordan and the other in Iraq. By June 1921 Winston Churchill was able to report to the House of Commons that Emir Faysal, previously King of Syria, was 130

Tribes in MENA politics

now on the British Mandate throne of Iraq and his brother, the Emir Abdullah, was on the British Mandate throne of Transjordan (Rogan 2009: 183). Between 1921 and 1946, the British ruled Transjordan with a light-handed, indirect rule. Emir Abdullah kept close to the Bedouin tribes who had supported his advance from the Hijaz into Transjordan. Furthermore, fear of the expansionist policies of Ibn Saud in Saudi Arabia meant the British also assisted the government in creating a strong-armed force made up originally of Chechnyan, Circassian and Bedouin fighters. Over time this force came to be largely made up of Bedouins and was known as the Arab Legion. It was commanded by a series of British generals, the best-known being General John Bagot Glubb (1939–56). Glubb Pasha, as he was known, had cut his teeth with Bedouin tribes in Iraq before coming to Jordan and was widely respected as an expert on the Bedouin. The critically important 9th British Army Handbook of Nomads, Semi-Nomads and Semi-Settled Tribes, which was produced by Her Majesty’s Government, was attributed to him (Glubb 1942). In the early 1950s after the assassination of his grandfather Talal, Husayn came to the throne. By 1956, King Husayn found British influence over government policy oppressive. In March of that year, in a measure to assert Jordanian independence, he dismissed Glubb Pasha as the commander of the Arab League, now named the Jordanian Army. He then replaced all the British officers with Jordanians. This largely Bedouin army was fiercely loyal to King Husayn, and he was to maintain the strong real and fictive tribal connections for the rest of his reign to the end of the twentieth century. Tribal ties and networks of influence remained important in politics, and it was not unknown for significant international financial agreements to be undermined when Bedouin interests were ignored or underplayed. A word of discontent from tribal leaders who had ready access to the Royal Court could reverse long-planned projects and economic schemes. One example is the way in which the World Bank Second Tourism Development project for Jordan was developed in the late 1990s and focussed on re-developing tourism in Wadi Rum. Long before the introduction of tourism and protected areas in these desert regions, a series of factors had modified the Bedouin relationship to their traditional grazing lands (dirahs) in Jordan. Starting with the establishment of the modern state of Transjordan (later renamed Jordan) under the British Mandate in 1923, borders were drawn with the newly established Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that cut across several important dirahs. Those traditional Bedouin grazing lands within the new Jordanian state became, nominally, state-owned (Bocco, Jaubert and Métral 1993). This is not to say that tribal territory disappeared, but as in Syria and more so in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, these lands were not recognized in modern legislation; however, in the restricted area of Wadi Rum, the state intervened very little in the development of the area and members of the Bedouin tribal groups associated with the Wadi continued to manage access to its natural resources according to traditional Bedouin systems of collective and shared access; this included an accommodation to locally developed tourism as well. State authorities recognized this economic de facto reality. In 1996 the World Bank attempted to create a “modern” tourism plan for the Wadi which did make some concession for local Bedouin economic gain but failed to take into account critical political issues regarding territorial matters—traditional claims over land and the manner in which such disregard fuelled conflict between tribal groups. A few well-chosen words by Bedouin tribal leadership in King Husayn’s ear and the World Bank plan was stalled indefinitely. Given the political and social contexts of the Wadi Rum project, it is clear that conflicts of interests over the reserve were inevitable. The Jordanian political system has been described as traditionally an alliance between the ruling monarch and the Bedouin tribes. And though things may be changing with the new millennium and change of monarch, certainly at the end of the 131

Dawn Chatty

twentieth century, Bedouin economic and political concerns were clearly also the concerns of the ruling monarch and outweighed some of the economic premises put forward by international development agencies.

Accommodation at the turn of the twenty-first century Lebanon In 1994 the Lebanese government granted citizenship to those Bedouin with an “under-study” status dating back to the 1958 bill to establish their right to Lebanese nationality. This was extended to approximately 10,000 Bedouin out of a total population estimated at between 100,000 and 150,000. However, this decision was challenged in 2000 by the Lebanese Maronite League (al-Rabita al-Marouniyya) who claimed that the nationalization law disrupted the sectarian balance in the country. However, those 50,000 or so Bedouin with citizenship in Lebanon, do actively engage with political parties and municipal and national elections. Increasingly these Bedouin citizens are sought after for their votes and during municipal and national elections, Bedouin community leaders are frequently sought out for the number of votes they can guarantee. At times competition between political parties—such as the 8 March and 14 March party coalitions—for the Bedouin informal settlements took place, particularly in the Bekaa Valley. In the first few years of the twenty-first century, Bedouins from Syria were also present in the Bekaa Valley as part of the Syrian internal security presence. However, with the withdrawal of Syrian forces from the country in 2005, Lebanese Bedouins who were seen as “collaborators” were ostracized in an action reminiscent of the tradition of expulsions (Jala) practised by many Bedouin communities to deal with political and social conflict within the community. Those Bedouin who had established their residence in the Bekaa Valley over the long-duré became more public in their expression of modernity and distancing from traditional and backward practices of Syrian Bedouin. The insistence of many Bedouin in Lebanon to be called Asha’iri rather than Bedu is one indication of this change in attitude.

Syria The Bedouin tribes of contemporary Syria have managed to maintain their identity and the authority of their leadership into the twenty-first century with little real interference in their affairs and their management of resources in the Badia of Syria. After the siege of Hama in 1982 when some tribal leaders agreed to maintain a “cordon sanitaire” around the city, Syrian authorities were forced to recognize that real control over the Bedouin still remained with the tribal leadership, despite decades of government effort to break their power. This political reality gradually played back onto the Bedouin tribesmen themselves who began to elect their Bedouin tribal leaders as functionaries of government Hema cooperatives. Today, the authority and power of Bedouin tribal leaders is recognized in the Badia by local residents as well as by the security apparatus of the state. No official statistics exist in Syria regarding the size of the Bedouin population in the country. The national bureau of statistics does not have a category for Bedouin—in keeping with Ba‘th Party philosophy—but it is possible to extrapolate from livestock figures a sense of the Bedouin presence and importance to state politics and economy (UNDP 2005). As a percentage of the total population of the country, Bedouin represent between 7–12% of the total. In 1943, 10 seats out of 135 (7%) were set aside for Bedouin representatives to Parliament (a carryover of the French Mandate policy), while in 2012, 30 of the 250 elected members of 132

Tribes in MENA politics

Parliament (12% of the total) were Bedouin. This is not a reflection of government policy, but rather an expression of the strength of Bedouin identity as an ethnic group or minority in Badia.

Jordan In Jordan as elsewhere in the Middle East, the twentieth century ruling elite and the urban middle class have appropriated the vision of the British and French Mandate officials, as well as international experts in the first decades after independence that the Bedouin as nomadic pastoralists are a backward way of life antithetical to social and national development (Bocco 2006; Mundy and Musallam 2000). From the end of the nineteenth century to the present, the aim of most central powers has been to control territory, which was inevitably meant to settle people who move, to modernize them through economic development projects. Even in Jordan with its national mythology of the significance of the Bedouin for the security of the monarch and the nation, Bedouin who still live in the Badia are regarded as an uneducated, backward social group who need to be modernized (Bocco and Chatelard 2001). This is a view widely shared by Jordanian senior civil servants and technocrats. The alliance of these technocrats and the new King Abdullah II who took over from his father in 1999 has only grown stronger into the twenty-first century. Many Bedouin tribal leaders in the country express concern as to impact of their influence and power with regard to the monarch and his palace offices.

The Bedouin and the Syrian Uprising The 2011 Arab Uprising has drawn Bedouin leaders, national and transnational, deeply into the emerging unrest and armed conflict, more so in Syria (and Iraq), but also in Lebanon and Jordan. The peaceful protests in Syria turned into a violent confrontation between protestors and Syrian security personnel in March 2011 in the town of Der’a and shortly thereafter in Homs and Hama. This string of towns has a strong Bedouin tribal presence. It is clearly evident that the Bedouin communities in these flashpoints resorted to armed self-defence. Some tribal leaders issued manifestos against the Asad regime (e.g. al-Hassanna); their followers formed brigades to defend their neighbourhoods in the front-line cities against security forces’ onslaughts. In the later phase of the Syrian Uprising the al-Hassanna, Aneza and Shammar Bedouin confederation leaders, joined the Syrian Tribal Council which met in Jordan and then later in Turkey to find commonalities with the Syrian National Coalition. In July 2013, Shaykh Ahmed al-Garba, a member of the same family as the great Shammar leader, Ajil al-Yawar, was elected president of the Syrian National Coalition. Other Bedouin tribal leaders and their followers from the Ageidat, the Sbaa’ and the Beni Khaled were particularly active in forming armed antiAsad fighting groups at the local level and as part of a national tribal coalition. The Hadidiyin fought with the Opposition near Aleppo and Idlib, the Mawali near Hama, Aleppo and Raqqa. Some Mawali tribesmen fought against the Syrian military in the vicinity of Ma’arat Nu’man. Yet the tribes were not uniformly anti-regime. Tribal leaders with previous close links to the internal security services in Syria and in Lebanon have remained loyal to the regime. Other tribal leaders, particularly those who had been drawn into close working relationships with the internal security forces of the country as well as in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon aligned themselves with the Syrian Ba‘th regime (e.g. some Baggara and al-Hadidiyin). However much it would be convenient to draw an association of all the “noble” formerly camel-herding tribal leaders and their followers with the Opposition forces and their backers in Saudi Arabia, and the “common” local sheep-herding tribes with the Syrian regime, the lines are not clear-cut. The Baggara—a large confederation of sheep-herding tribes in the Jazira east of the Euphrates River—has participated 133

Dawn Chatty

in armed activities both in support and against the Opposition. Some Baggara fighters were reported to have worked with the Syrian military to attack Opposition controlled neighbourhoods in Aleppo. Many of the Hadidiyin are furious that one of their sub-tribal leaders has sided with the regime while most of the tribe are siding with the Opposition. Perhaps this is a legacy of the Hafez al-Asad (1970–2000) era when numerous minor tribal leaders were either being cultivated or punished, the “common” tribes with no ties to Saudi Arabia could not remove themselves from the disempowering influence of the regime. Instead, they had to remain in Syria and suffered the deprivations and calculated favours that were parsimoniously handed out by the regime. The result of this astute political game by both Hafez and his son, Bashar, was that among many of the “common” tribesmen alliances and allegiances to their leadership were not so clearly drawn. For tribal leaders whose traditional territories were cut and fractured in the various treaties dividing up Greater Syria, their transnational turn has meant that they have political and social capital across the region. They are able to translate their transnationalism—and Saudi Arabian support—into greater political acuity for the region’s future. Should Syrian regime forces start to prevail in wider arcs around Syria, some of the Bedouin will be among its armed forces. These are most likely to be members of the local “common” tribes. The transnational “noble” tribal leaders and fighters, however, are most likely to distance themselves from the reach of the Syrian government as they have done during conflicts in the past. While some local “common” tribal leaders and fighters in the Opposition might seek sanctuary in the Bekaa of Lebanon, the transnational tribal leaders in the Opposition would go into “exile” in Saudi Arabia or Jordan until such a time as they were invited back or it was considered safe to return. It is very likely that should the Asad government remain in power in the mid-term, it will invite the Bedouin back into the fold from Saudi Arabia and Jordan just as Hafez al Asad did in 1970 when he consolidated his power in the country.

Conclusion It is often assumed in contemporary literature that the Bedouin are a backward people, irrational and anachronistic. Decades if not nearly a century of effort to settle them and transform them into something else has come to nought. Whether as an outcome of silent resistance (Scott 2009) or simply “marginal” ethos (Gellner 1958), the Bedouin emerged from the shadows as, post-2011, the Levant faced its most critical political crisis in decades. The authority of Bedouin leaders was reinforced and invigorated by the political stand that they took both against and with the current state power. The transnational as well as the local Bedouin tribes of the Levant have moved from the margins and become significant players in the politics of the Arab Uprising.

References Bocco, R. (2006), “The sedentarisation of pastoral nomads: International experts and the Bedouin question in the Arab Middle East,” in ed, D. Chatty, Nomadic Societies in the Middle East and North Africa: Facing the 21st Century, Leiden: Brill Publishers. Bocco, R. and G. Chatelard (eds, 2001), Jordanie: Le Royaume Frontiere, Paris: Editions Autrement. Bocco, R., Jaubert, R. and F. Métral (eds, 1993), Steppes d’Arabies, États, Pasteurs, Agriculteurs Et Commerçants: Le Devenir Des Zones Sèches, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Chatty, D. (1977), “Land, leaders and limousines: Emir and Sheikh,” Ethnography, 16:4, 385–97. Chatty, D. (2013), From Camel to Truck: The Bedouin in the Modern World, Cambridge: White Horse Press. Fagan, B. (1986), Peoples of the Earth: An Introduction to World History, Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co. Gellner, E. (1958), The Role and Organization of a Berber Zawiya, London: University of London. Glubb, J. (1942), Handbook of the Nomads, Semi-Nomads, Semi-Sedentary Tribes of Syria, G.S. I. Headquarters, 9th Army, Palestine. 134

Tribes in MENA politics

Haj, S. (1991),“The problems of tribalism, the case of nineteenth-century Iraqi history,” Social History, 16, 52–3. Khaldûn I. (1958), The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans, F. Rosenthal, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Longrigg, S. (1958), Syria and Lebanon Under the French Mandate, Oxford: University of Oxford Press. Mundy, M. and B. Musallam (eds, 2000), The Transformation of Nomadic Society in the Arab East, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Provence, M. (2005), The Great Syrian Revolt and the Rise of Arab Nationalism, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Rogan, E. (2009), The Arabs: A History, London: Allan Lane. Scott, J. (2008), “Zomia: A zone of resistance. The last great enclosures and stateless peoples in Southeast Asia,” in Annual Elizabeth Colsen Lecture, Refugees Studies Centre, Oxford: University of Oxford. Scott, J. (2009), The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, New Haven: Yale University Press. Thomas, M. (2003), “Bedouin tribes and the imperial intelligence services in Syria, Iraq, and Transjordan in the 1920s,” Journal of Contemporary History, 38, 539–61. UNDP (2005), “Poverty in Syria: 1996–2004,” Diagnosis and Pro-Poor Policy Considerations UNDP. Damascus.

135

10 Political parties in the Middle East Lise Storm

Introduction Political parties in the Middle East are abundant. Parties have operated legally, clandestinely and as so-called “proto-parties” in most Arab countries since the pre-independence period, and in Israel and Turkey since the early 1920s. In fact, the wealth of parties in the region has often been overlooked as scholars have displayed a tendency to link the study of the parties of the Middle East to the debate on prospects for democracy in the Arab (and Muslim) world to the neglect of other roles and functions they may play in regional political systems. This chapter begins with a brief discussion of what constitutes a party and how these are relevant in the Middle East, focusing in particular on the understudied Arab world, but also covering Turkey and Israel. The discussion then moves onto the issue of how to categorize political parties in the region given the oft-cited weak ideological foundations of most of these, touching not only upon the party families debate, but also on the environment—or political context—in which the parties operate. The final part of the chapter is devoted to an analysis of the future of political parties in the Middle East, placed in the context of the global disillusionment with political parties, the growth in anti-establishment sentiments, the related rise of neo-populist political leaders with weak party credentials, and the transformation of social movements into political parties with rapid ascent to power. With an increasingly top-down party structure beginning to dominate in the West over the past few decades as party strategies switched from representing pre-defined sectors of society to wider (catch-all) electoral appeal, the relationship between the party and party members as well as interest groups has weakened and become less regular, in short, instrumentalized. To a great extent, parties have come to act instead of the people rather than as their representatives (Pitkin 2004). This reality is similar to that of the Middle Eastern parties. Hence, there are indications that political parties—at the global level—are facing the same kind of problems, albeit in very different contexts. In a day and age where there is a growing gap between the electorate and the parties, manifested for instance in decreasing turn-out levels at election time and increasing partisan dealignment, which has seen the political parties lose their organizational hold on society and their capacity to engage citizens (Dalton and Wattenberg 2000; Gallagher, Laver and Mair 2005; van Biezen and Poguntke 2014; Kitchelt 2000), how can parties in the Middle East and 136

Political parties in the Middle East

further afield guarantee their own survival? And with reference to the Arab region in particular, how can parties carve out a more powerful role for themselves within their respective political systems? In short, what lessons can these parties learn from their past, most specifically from their ability to remain viable and relevant in an often hostile environment, and what lessons can political parties in general learn from the Middle Eastern parties?

A note on political parties, proto-parties and relevance Political parties, defined here according to Sartori’s (1976: 63) work as “any political group identified by an official label that presents at elections, and is capable of placing through elections (free or non-free), candidates for public office” have existed in the Middle East for nearly a century. Furthermore, in some officially “party-less” Middle Eastern states, such as for instance Kuwait, political parties do effectively exist but are barred from labelling themselves as such. Because these parties are not legally entitled to identify themselves under a party label, some scholars use the term “proto-parties” when referring to these (Kraetzschmar 2018). However, the term “proto-parties” is generally used to describe political parties that “work with the aim of someday qualifying as parties” (Pedersen 1991: 99), that is, autonomous organizations with ambitions of becoming political parties, but which have not yet taken part in national elections. The reason why these proto-parties have not yet been allowed to present candidates for office in national elections relates to the so-called “threshold of authorisation”; proto-parties must first fulfil some formal obligations, such as for instance the gathering of a certain number of signatures before being allowed to contest (Pedersen, Muller-Rommel and Pridham 1991: 100). Several of the Middle Eastern parties with the ambition of becoming legalized political parties do present candidates in national elections and gain representation in parliament. These parties are barred from using the label political party because parties are prohibited as a consequence of the fact that they operate in a competitive authoritarian setting rather than a democracy. Consequently, in this chapter, these organizations are defined as political parties, even though they have not formally acquired such status. The Middle East not only has a plethora of political parties, but of relevant political parties. Relevance criteria such as Sartori’s (1976: 123) “coalition potential” and “blackmail potential” are fulfilled by several of the region’s parties in the sense that their parliamentary presence and, to some extent, their very existence (with regard to clandestine parties) “affects the tactics of party competition and . . . alters the direction of the competition.” While the pool of parties is reduced somewhat if the relevance criteria applied are more stringent, e.g. along the lines of Panebianco’s “solidification” as adapted by Rihoux 2000 (in which the relative stabilization of the party organization helps form the party as an institution (Panebianco 1988: 49, 53)), several Middle Eastern parties still qualify, and this also remains the case if one includes governmental participation as a further threshold of relevance. Even if ideologically weak and often with feeble roots in society, many Middle Eastern parties have remained in existence for decades, participated in several consecutive elections at the national level and held cabinet portfolios. The more well-known of these are the so-called regime parties, such as for instance the now-defunct Rassemblement Constitutionnel Démocratique (RCD; Constitutional Democratic Rally) in Tunisia, the National Democratic Party (NDP) in Egypt, the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN; National Liberation Front) in Algeria, and the Arab Socialist Ba‘th Party in Iraq and Syria (the former now banned). To these one can add more recent Islamist front-runners, most notably the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP; Justice and Development Party) in Turkey, Tunisia’s 137

Lise Storm

Ennahda (Renaissance Party), Morocco’s Parti de la Justice et du Développement (PJD; Party of Justice and Development), and Lebanon’s Hizbollah (Party of God), a Shi’ite party.

Categorizing political parties: the importance of the local environment Almost as long as scholars have studied the political parties of the Middle East, there has been disagreement over how best to classify these. In short, are the parties of the region so different— exceptional—that they cannot be directly compared and similarly categorized to their counterparts elsewhere, whether for instance in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, or Eastern Europe, or do they broadly conform to these Western ideal types? The line taken here is ambiguous as it is neither a straightforward yes nor an unequivocal no. A number of Middle Eastern parties fit the traditional party family categories, others fit less well and some not at all, not even with adaptation.1 Hence, speaking of party families in the Middle East makes sense for the sake of comparison to cases farther afield as long as such studies are contextually grounded.2 The political environment affects how political parties develop and operate; it shapes, propels and constrains (Storm 2014; Lust-Okar 2004; Lust 2016). If one is to understand Middle Eastern political parties, one must comprehend the local context—local as in regional, national and, at times, truly local in the sense of village/city/district level.

Party families and Western theory In the West, the classic way of grouping parties has been via the use of the so-called left–right spectrum inherited from the French Revolution following which members of the National Assembly would gather according to their position vis-à-vis the monarchy, with supporters on the right and opponents on the left. Regardless of the debate on the appropriateness of the use of the left–right spectrum in analyses of contemporary Western European politics, particularly following the birth of the European Union and the parties it spawned, the spectrum is still widely used today (Pettitt 2014; Mair and Mudde 1998). The traditional view of the left–right spectrum is based on socioeconomic issues; in particular on the role of the state in the operation of the free market and the role of the state in offering (financial) support to its citizens. The left-wing, then, is viewed as comprised of parties in favour of generous state support and state intervention in the free market, with the right being occupied by parties preferring a “small” state and individual self-sufficiency (Pettitt 2014). The left–right spectrum is closely tied to the concept of political cleavages, i.e. the underlying conflicts and divides in society (Lipset and Rokkan 1967; Rokkan 1970). Traditionally, the following four political cleavages have dominated the study of political parties: the centre– periphery cleavage (local and regional opposition to nation-building), the church–state cleavage (the role of the state and the church in political, social and moral life), the class cleavage (which forms the basis for the left–right spectrum), and the rural–urban cleavage (often defined as agrarian versus industrial) (Rokkan 1970). The left–right spectrum and the political cleavages are, in other words, what parties are seen as relating to; this is what defines them, despite the rather static definition of the spectrum and political cleavages. In short, how parties position themselves on these factors (largely) determines which party family they belong to (Mair and Mudde 1998; von Beyme 1985; Seiler 1980). How party families are defined varies greatly. Some scholars emphasize origins and/or the sociology of parties, a second group zeroes in on international federations or other transnational groupings to which the individual parties belong, a third focuses on the similarities in party 138

Political parties in the Middle East

policy or party ideology, and then there are those who simply look to the party name or label despite the reality that these are not always a reliable indicator of a party’s ideology (Mair and Mudde 1998; Pettitt 2014). Mair and Mudde (1998: 225) suggest a combined focus on party origins and ideology (not to be equated with policy), reflecting “two different but equivalent orientations to the study of party families,” although they do admit that this approach encourages “case-specific interpretations, thus discouraging comparison and generalization.” Such an approach allows for travel, making it highly suitable to the Middle East, although the authors had Eastern Europe but also Latin America and Asia in mind at the time. Unsurprisingly, when taking into account the discussion above, there is a wealth of party families, some of which are relevant in a Middle Eastern setting. However, it is of crucial importance to acknowledge that while parties that mirror Western ideal types do exist in the region, the main defining features of Middle Eastern political parties usually relate to very different issues compared to those in the West (Willis 2002a, 2002b; Lust-Okar 2004; Storm 2014; Cavatorta and Storm 2018). In other words, ideology matters, but not in the traditional (Western) sense. Up until the eruption of the Arab Uprisings, and in most countries also in their wake, Middle Eastern parties could (with few exceptions) best be differentiated according to their position vis-à-vis the regime (which often relates to their origins), the role of religion in politics, and the position of minorities. In other words, parties habitually position themselves as regime or opposition parties, religious or secular parties, and ethnic/sectarian/tribal parties versus non-ethnic/sectarian/tribal parties, albeit at times in a rather convoluted fashion with a view to avoid breaking laws prohibiting certain types of parties, most frequently ethnic, religious or regional parties, which have often been viewed as a threat to the (territorial integrity of the) state. Consequently, party families tend to overlap in the Middle East. The categories are not clear-cut, neat and distinct, but rather an ever-changing complex set of overlapping circles of different—and changing—sizes. That said, for all parties, given the overwhelmingly authoritarian post-independence political history of the region, the key defining feature is the regime–opposition division, which for many years determined whether a party was allowed to operate legally or forced into exile and/or clandestine activities (Willis 2002a, 2002b; Lust-Okar 2004; Storm 2014; Hinnebusch 2017).3

The Middle Eastern political environment: effects and constraints As in sub-Saharan Africa, party pluralism first emerged in the Middle East during the final stages of colonial rule.4 However, parties had been in existence for decades prior as vehicles of the local elites, which sought to increase their influence on—and reform of—the colonial political system. In other words, political parties in the Middle East, despite occupying a less powerful position in politics if compared to their Western counterparts, have played a central role in fostering change in the region for nearly a century (Catusse and Karam 2010; Hinnebusch 2017). They have been key drivers of politicization from their inception, and although few have had mass party ambitions (in an organizational sense as well as in terms of individuals actually mobilized), the first parties to gain a footing in the region sought to mobilize great swathes of the population. Their goal: to end foreign occupation and forge a national project.

The nationalist parties, independence and the emergence of the regime–opposition binary This group of parties, often referred to as nationalist parties, operated at a time before the regime–opposition binary, which has come to shape the party landscape over the past six 139

Lise Storm

decades, had materialized. Rather, the nationalist parties—often with an armed wing operating concurrently—were the chief vehicles of popular mobilization and citizen representation during the period from the mid-1920s until the mid-1950s, when most countries in the Middle East had gained independence (Hinnebusch 2017; Penner Angrist 2006; Willis 2002a, 2002b). Amongst the nationalist parties, one finds the Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (CHP; Republican People’s Party) in Turkey, the FLN in Algeria, the Destour and the Neo-Destour (i.e. what was to become first the Parti Socialiste Destourien (PSD) and later RCD) in Tunisia, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), the Yemeni Socialist Party (YSP) in South Yemen and the Wafd in Egypt. That said, the parties listed here were by no means the only nationalist parties on the scene at the time, nor were they always the first nationalist parties to emerge in their host countries. However, they were the dominant parties, in most instances due to either their close ties to the new head of state or as a consequence of their aforementioned access to arms and, therefore, coercive power giving them an edge vis-à-vis other nationalist vehicles, either with no such links or with links of a less prominent character.5 Following independence—or national liberation—the nationalist project was revised with emphasis shifted to state- and nation-building. In some countries, this process simply resulted in the nationalist parties rapidly transforming themselves into regime parties, or, indeed, parties with an ambition of becoming regime parties, despite the fact that upon gaining independence, most Middle Eastern states witnessed a veritable explosion in parties within a very short period of time. The sudden mushrooming of new parties—leftist, conservative, liberal and Islamist— which took place in an air of freedom and great national aspirations regarding state formation and democratic rule, came to a halt in the early 1960s, when authoritarianism took hold in earnest (Penner Angrist 2006; Hinnebusch 2017).6 Faced with competing visions and feeble roots in society, the newly powerful local elites sought to consolidate their power by doing away with dissenting voices and competition, i.e. some of the fundamentals of democracy, emphasizing instead the importance of unity and stability. The citizenry was still to participate actively but directed by the ruling party on behalf of the country’s leader.7 Single-party states—sometimes totalitarian8, and often with a military slant—became the order of the day with multi-party politics labelled a Western phenomenon and those championing representative democracy accused of being foreign minions, seeking to destabilize the newly independent states (Tachau 1994; Sassoon 2016; Hamid 2014).9 Again, the Middle Eastern story unfolded in a similar vein to that of sub-Saharan Africa. In most cases, the dominant nationalist parties made the transition with ease, riding on a wave of popularity due to their central role in the successful struggle for liberation and/or as a result of their intertwining with what in many states became the armed forces. While many nationalist parties transformed into regime parties, this was not the case for all such parties. A number of nationalist parties central to the struggle for national liberation, and which furthermore harboured an ambition of becoming partis uniques, were ultimately unsuccessful and had to accept a less prominent role in politics.10 These parties became the founding fathers of the opposition family.11 They did not automatically have widely opposing agendas to the regime parties, nor did they usually have more established roots in society, a greater presence on the ground, etcetera. Rather, the main feature that set them apart from the regime parties, and which continues to do so, was their position vis-à-vis the regime. The opposition parties sought a change in leadership, but not necessarily in leadership style nor in ideology. As a consequence of single-party states being the norm in the Middle East during the period from the 1960s until the beginning of the 1990s, the regime parties were, indeed, partis uniques. The regime party was the only party allowed to formally exist and, therefore, contest elections in a great many countries. While opposition parties were prohibited they did, nonetheless, 140

Political parties in the Middle East

generally still exist on the ground, either operating clandestinely and/or from abroad, with some parties—usually leftist—more heavily repressed than others due to their anticipated ability to mobilize the masses and therefore threaten the incumbent regime.12 However, as the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the so-called Third Wave of democratization swept the globe, the Middle Eastern political systems—and with them the party systems—underwent change.13 Democracy and democratization had become global buzzwords, and Middle Eastern heads of state were not immune to their effect. Driven by a desire to ensure the survival of their regimes, authoritarian leaders across the region embarked upon a strategy change, moving from coercion to cooptation (Hamid 2014; Lust-Okar 2005; Perthes 2004; Schlumberger 2007). As a consequence, the Middle East witnessed a wave of economic liberalization and political reform processes, reforms that in most instances resulted in the transformation of the party systems as opposition parties were legalized, albeit in a strictly controlled fashion. Hence, whereas the Third Wave led to democratic transitions in almost all other regions of the world, the Middle East remained rather immune. Democratic methods, that is, multi-party politics and competitive elections, were introduced with a view to perpetuate authoritarianism, thus earning the Arab states, in particular, the title of “competitive authoritarian regimes,” cases of “electoral authoritarianism” or the title of “liberalized autocracies” (Levitsky and Way 2002; Schedler 2006; Diamond 2002).

Political parties under competitive authoritarianism Whereas the political systems of the heavily authoritarian era were based on a monopoly of coercion, the Third Wave ushered in a new era of controlled competition in the Middle East. Parties were allowed to exist provided they agreed to play by the rules of the game as set out by the incumbent regime. In most cases, the pact made between the aspiring parties and the regime was designed in such a way that although alternatives to the regime party were allowed to exist, these were never to have a chance of becoming ruling parties. Rather, in exchange for becoming co-opted into the system, thereby affording the regime legitimacy, the newly legalized parties would be competing for limited access to power. In the Arab republics, the vision was that of a dominant party system. Hence, access to power would generally be achieved either as a supporting party to the regime vehicle within a coalition government (as in the case of Algeria) or as a recognized opposition party with some access to spoils (as in the case of Egypt) (Lust 2016; Hinnebusch 2017). In the monarchies, the situation was different. In most of the Arab Gulf states, political parties remained prohibited, although proto-parties were allowed to contest elections in, e.g. Kuwait. In the monarchies of Jordan and Morocco, a multitude of political parties were legalized, in Jordan without these being afforded much of a role in politics if compared to not only the monarchy, but also the tribes, while in Morocco the political parties were eventually permitted to play a much more central role in political life, contesting heated elections and deciding on matters in parliament, albeit under strict monarchical oversight and limited to areas not of interest to the monarchy.14 By licensing multiple parties, the monarchs effectively facilitated fragmented and weak parliaments, governments and cabinets in comparison to which they appeared strong and reliable, while also creating a group of actors (parties, politicians) with whom to share the blame or, rather, to pass the blame onto in the event of failed policies (LustOskar 2005; Lust 2016; Storm 2014; Hinnebusch 2017). The main function of the political parties in the region’s competitive authoritarian regimes was, in other words, to legitimize the regime and serve as channels of directive and clientelistic linkage. Hence, in most countries, the rise of competitive authoritarianism resulted in a surge in new parties with the purpose of ensuring that the regime had allies that covered all segments of society,15 and which could accordingly assist in directing the citizenry along the lines set out by 141

Lise Storm

the head of state while also distributing spoils in proportion to their proximity to the regime;16 in this way, dissent was minimized by offering a voice, even if muted, and by providing goods from higher up in the system.17 As a general rule, from the late 1990s onwards, in the dominant party system, the regime party and the legal opposition together mirrored the relevant political currents in society, encompassing religious, secular, ethnic and sectarian parties, as well as leftist, conservative and liberal parties, thereby offering the representation of all and the exclusion of none—at least formally. In reality, not all groups were represented. Those actors and segments of society deemed radical—whether self-identifying as such or designated by the regime—remained outside of formal politics. In general, this group of actors was made up of leftist parties and activists in addition to Islamist actors, regardless of whether they had a moderate or fundamentalist outlook (Resta 2018; Storm 2014; Lust 2016). The exclusion of Islamist parties, in particular, caused enormous resentment and political apathy amongst scores of the citizenry, particularly amongst the unemployed youth in the urban centres as well as amongst the more conservative elements of the population. After all, the Middle East was experiencing a steady rise in Islamist ideology, which to many was closely linked to the region’s Muslim heritage. Some wished to see a closer relationship between religion and politics; others merely looked to Islamism as a hitherto untested hope for the future as the left was seen to have failed; so too had the secular incumbent regimes as food and fuel prices were soaring, unemployment had sky-rocketed, and issues relating to housing, sanitation and public health were becoming increasingly pressing.18

The Arab Uprisings and political parties Competitive authoritarianism, the global economic downturn of the 2000s, the growing availability of the internet, and rise of social media even in the poorest parts of the Middle East, paved the way for the popular unrest that swept the region from late 2010 onwards in what became known as the Arab Uprisings. “Bread, freedom, justice and human dignity” were what the protesters demanded as they took to the streets. They called for the resignation of governments, investigation into political corruption, the end of political cronyism, and better minority representation, with educated youth, politically marginalized ethnic and sectarian groups, and Islamists often taking an organizational lead (Haddad, Bsheer and Abu Rish 2012; Lynch 2014; Achcar 2013, 2016; Brownlee, Masoud and Reynolds 2015; Patel, Bunce and Wolchik 2014).19 The outcome of the Arab Uprisings varied from state to state. In some cases, the results were revolutionary in the sense that long-serving incumbent regimes fell, such as in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Yemen, while in other states the authoritarian leadership survived not only unscathed, but also without making any concessions (or even rolling back reforms) as in the case of Algeria and Bahrain, or very minor ones as in the case of Morocco. Some countries witnessed hardly any protest—Algeria, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, for example— while others—Libya, Yemen and Syria descended into civil war. The Arab Uprisings, in other words, appeared to be a so-called potential “democratic moment” for the region (Przeworski 1991; Plattner 1993). A time when significant political change was made possible due to shifts in the balance of power and therefore political instability, thus potentially opening up new democratic space for political parties to operate.

Slim winnings and the issues of trust and representation In most countries, however, the Arab Uprisings resulted in very slim winnings. Not only in terms of regime change—both in the sense of transition from authoritarianism to democracy 142

Political parties in the Middle East

and if understood as alternation at the government level—but also in terms of party politics (Lynch 2014; Elbadawi and Makdisi 2017; Storm 2017; Cavatorta and Storm 2018).20 Despite unprecedented levels of popular mobilization and civil disobedience in the post-independence era, the Arab Uprisings brought about the birth of very few new (as in externally created) parties. Rather, the vast majority of parties licensed in the wake of the recent popular unrest were internally created parties—as has been the case since parties first entered the scene in earnest in the mid-1950s, and since the 1990s resurgence of parties following the Third Wave of democratization with tentative Arab political openings (Catusse and Karam 2010; Hamid 2014; Storm 2017). That is, their formation was driven by members of parliament or members of already existing parties, hence, earning them the label of “parliamentary parties” (Duverger 1954).21 These parties, in other words, had their roots within the system, rather than in the populace. They were—like most of their predecessors—formed with a view to control the citizenry and channel spoils, not with the objective of socializing and mobilizing the masses, nor as a means for the citizenry to hold their elected representatives accountable (Storm and Cavatorta 2018; Hamid 2014).22 The parties of the Middle East have been tasked with filtering and controlling, rather than channelling social demands. Hence, Middle Eastern party politics have been dominated by small group politics, with parties forming (and fragmenting) around personalities, clans and sects (Willis 2002a, 2002b; Hinnebusch 2017; Storm 2014). Given the limited emphasis on citizen representation and the formulation of party programmes beyond the regime–opposition binary, it is hardly surprising that at the time the Arab Uprisings erupted, as well as in their aftermath, the people of the Middle East not only had very little trust in their political parties but also did not feel much of a connection with them. According to the Arabbarometer23 surveys, only little more than half of the respondents in 2007 found party affiliation important or very important when voting for a candidate, while in the 2011 wave only 19.9% of respondents found party affiliation mattered to a great extent when voting for a candidate. Furthermore, in 2011, at a time when the Arab Uprisings were at their most intense, having already brought political change to a number of countries, 57% of those surveyed stated that “no party represents my aspirations,” referring to political as well as social and economic objectives. By the time of the 2013 survey, that figure had risen to 66%, with respondents feeling the most disillusioned in Kuwait (95.6%) and Jordan (94.4%), and the most satisfied in Palestine, where 32.6% of respondents agreed with the statement that no party represented their aspirations.24 This data is echoed by the findings of recent large-scale projects focusing in particular on the region’s youth, most notably Sahwa, Power2Youth and the Arab Transformations Project.25 Here young people—generally between 15 to 34 years of age, but also others self-identifying as youth—indicated that while they remain interested in political matters and issues of political participation (Sika 2016), they did not trust the political parties and that voting did not matter as politics and politicians are corrupt, a criticism levied not only at the regime parties, but also at the opposition (Laine et al. 2016; Omrane 2016).26 In Tunisia, where the Arab Uprisings were the most successful, and where one would accordingly have expected to see a higher level of trust in and satisfaction with the political parties, survey results have been highly damning. Asked which institutions the youth had the most trust in, political parties (and politicians too) came towards the bottom of the list with only 16% in comparison to trade associations and unions at 27%, religious leaders at 34%, the European Union at 44%, the national media at 49%, and “the people in general” at 64% (SAHWA Youth Survey 2016 as presented in Roberts, Kovacheva and Kabaivanov 2017). In addition to the data produced by Power2Youth and Sahwa, a 2014 survey sponsored by the UN’s Democracy Fund showed that 56% of respondents had very low trust in the country’s political parties, while 20% had low trust. Less than 5% had 143

Lise Storm

high or very high trust in the Tunisian political parties. Furthermore, according to Lust (2016), only 34% of Arab citizens had great or medium trust in their elected parliament, while 50% had trust (great/medium) in civil society.

Post-Uprising political parties in an era of populism in the Middle East and beyond The issue of trust is a key factor in contemporary politics. To a large extent, it defines the popular mood of the twenty-first century. Voters across the globe, whether in the West or the Middle East, Latin America or sub-Saharan Africa, have lost faith in their political representatives following various scandals relating to corruption coupled with the global economic downturn and political secrecy in times of war.27 The electorate no longer feels represented, and there are strong indications that young people, in particular, are beginning to look elsewhere, expressing a preference for horizontal networks and issue-based politics (van Biezen and Poguntke 2014; Dalton 2014; Mair, Müller and Plasser 2004). Consequently, some scholars have come to question whether what we are witnessing—on a global scale—is the end of parties? If the Middle East and recent experiences from Europe and the US are anything to go by, the answer appears to be a no. Parties have not become irrelevant, the types of political systems in place—whether in Western democracies or the (predominantly) authoritarian states of the Middle East—remain the same as a few decades ago, and the role and functions of parties within these also remain the same and cannot be taken over by another actor, whether e.g. tribes, social movements or trade unions (van Biezen and Poguntke 2014; Kausch 2012; Storm and Cavatorta 2018; Catusse and Karam 2010; Randjbar-Daemi, Sadeghi-Boroujerdi and Banko 2017; Katz and Mair 1995, 2009; Allern and Bale 2012).28 Furthermore, there are also indications that political parties are beginning to adapt to the changing political context, specifically, to the political apathy of the citizenry and their lack of trust in the established institutions. Hence, the new parties emerging onto the party scene in recent years and managing not only to survive but to outperform the so-called “dinosaurs,” have unashamedly adopted populist strategies under the auspices of a charismatic leader. And got away with it. In the West, Macron’s En Marche! is the latest example of a successful movement making the transformation into a political party following its leader’s capture of the French presidency on the basis of an electoral campaign whose strongest identifying feature was the reality that Macron belonged to neither of the country’s two most established parties. The success of the centrist En Marche! comes in the wake of strong performances by Italy’s right-wing, anti-establishment Movimiento 5 Stelle, which is even reluctant to use the label “party,” the left-wing (but equally anti-establishment) Podemos in Spain, and the more institutionalized Syriza in Greece, a party born out of an alliance of radical leftist parties launched just prior to the country’s 2004 elections (Kioupkiolis 2016; Orriols and Cordero 2016; Vezzoni and Mancosu 2015; Biorcio 2014; Stavrakakis and Katsambekis 2014; Spourdalakis 2014; Safdar and Amraoui 2017; Sawa 2017; Judis 2016), and finally Hungary’s Fidesz led by Viktor Orbán (Mudde 2016; Batory 2016).29

The Islamist parties In the Middle East, the parties dominating the post-Arab Uprisings elections have all had a strong populist streak, although some more than others. However, whereas in the West the populist high-fliers have generally been anti-establishment, even in the case of Trump with his affiliation to the Republican Party and Macron’s history as a Minister under the socialist Hollande, the Middle Eastern parties can be roughly divided into two categories, again structured along the 144

Political parties in the Middle East

regime–opposition binary: the so-called “neo-secular” parties with ties to the (ancien) régime, and the Islamist (opposition) parties—ranging from those of a moderate nature to radical Salafis. To a certain extent beyond the reach of the state’s repressive arm due to their close links to various religious networks, the Islamist parties were already on the rise in the period leading up to the Arab Uprisings (Kausch 2012; Hamid 2014; Kraetzschmar and Rivetti 2018).30 Hence, scholars had predicted a strong performance by Islamist forces in the national (legislative and presidential) elections held in their wake, something which incumbent leaders and other stakeholders had warned the West about in an effort to garner support for continued restrictive practices at election time (Lust 2016; Clarke and Khatib 2016; Al-Anani 2012; Kausch 2012). Similar to the strong showing by Islamists elsewhere in the region when they were first allowed to contest national elections, such as for instance Lebanon’s Hizbollah, Turkey’s AKP and Morocco’s PJD following the tentative political openings of the 1990s, and the Palestinian Hamas in 2006, Islamists in Tunisia and Egypt swept the board when they were finally legalized in 2011.31 In Tunisia, the moderate Ennahda became the country’s largest political party following the 2011 legislative elections, commanding a 40% seat share, and subsequently formed a coalition govern­ ment with two smaller secular parties, the leftist, union-based Ettakatol (FDTL; Democratic Forum for Labour and Liberties) and the centre-left CPR, which also held the presidency. In Egypt, Islamists won both the legislative of 2011/12 and the presidential elections of 2012. The legislative elections were a joint victory for the Muslim Brotherhood’s FJP, which came first in the polls with 235 out of 498 contested parliamentary seats, and the ultra-conservative Hizb al-Nour, which came second with 123 seats.32 The Islamist parties constituted a break with the ancien régime, and they were better organized than most of their secular competitors, two factors that appealed to the electorate in the early days of the post-Arab Uprisings era (Tessler and Robbins 2014; Kraetzschmar and Rivetti 2018).

The neo-secular/populist parties on the rise Largely in response to the legalization and strong performance of Islamist parties—moderate and radical—at the polls, a new group of parties, referred to here as neo-secular/populist parties, began to emerge from the mid-2000s onwards, often with regime involvement. It is worth noting that the neo-secular/populist parties are not, indeed, secular, but simply anti-Islamist. Their main defining feature is populism. Like most other parties in the region, save for, of course, in the non-Muslim majority countries, the neo-secular parties emphasize the country’s Islamic heritage as of crucial importance. They also increasingly resort to religious rhetoric as this has proved to resonate with the electorate and do accordingly not speak of a strict separation between the state and religion (Wolf 2018; Dunne and Hamzawy 2017; Kraetzschmar and Saleh 2018).33 Hence, these parties are not areligious, but simply argue that the Islamist parties— their main rivals on the scene—are a threat to democracy, security and prosperity, regardless of whether they are moderate or radical in orientation. Two of the most prominent neo-secular/populist parties in recent years are arguably Tunisia’s Nidaa Tounes and the Moroccan Parti Authenticité et Modernité (PAM), both of which are internally created parties. In fact, the two parties—along with counterparts in other Arab countries— appear to signal the emergence of a new species of “regime party” within the boundaries of competitive authoritarianism. They set themselves apart from previous regime vehicles in the sense that while they would undoubtedly like to become the parti unique, the days of the singleparty state are over—and unlikely to return—in most of the Middle East. A further difference from the classic regime parties is the nature of their relationship with the upper echelons of power, which is more blurred. These parties were not formed directly by or on the direct orders 145

Lise Storm

of the head of state, but were founded by a close friend and confidante of the current King in the case of the PAM (thereby earning the party the title of “palace party”34) or, with regards to Nidaa Tounes, by former members of the old regime party, the RCD. Their ability to deliver “wasta,” that is, directive and clientelistic linkage given their proximity to the uppermost echelons of power, namely the head of state and more broadly the old political and financial elite, has served these parties well at election time, giving them a definite edge against their equally ideologically weak competitors. In short, establishment ties have proved highly beneficial in the Middle East even in a day and age where anti-establishment sentiments are on the rise. This state of affairs can to a large extent be explained by the reality that the disenchantment with politicians generally manifests itself as anti-party sentiments35, coupled with a general fear of instability and further political unrest in an already volatile region and, of course, with the comfort of the familiar.36 Everyone in the region knows the power of wasta, and how wasta works. Many might be tired of it and consider it archaic and wrong, yet wasta remains an undeniable part of the fabric (Lust 2016).37 Hence, even in the post-Arab Uprisings Middle East, politics remain highly personalistic and national elections are thus contested along the lines of local elections.38 This is as true today as it was during the early years of independence, when Halpern (1963: 281) wrote that party politics in the Middle East is largely centred around conflict of cliques as opposed to conflict of orientations. Politics in the Middle East is a game of distribution. Of spoils and channels. “Competitive clientelism,” as Lust (2016) so aptly calls it, is the order of the day and the region’s political parties play a central role in maintaining this complex system, serving as gate-keepers and middlemen between the regime and the citizenry, and in some cases also between the regime and the tribes. Who can deliver the goods is key.

Conclusion Where does this leave the Middle East, then? There is no denying that change is far from inevitable. Democracy might never take hold in the region, and the political parties might never transform into representative vehicles with strong and stable roots in society. The resilience of authoritarianism in the region following the Third Wave and now the Arab Uprisings has clearly demonstrated this point. However, this by no means implies that change is not possible. The Middle East is not exceptional. Democracy can take hold in the region as evidenced by the cases of Lebanon and Turkey (at times) as well as Israel if limiting the scope only to the country’s non-Arab and nonMuslim citizens. Whether the region’s parties will transform into parties of substance, i.e. something closer to the Western ideal type remains largely up to the parties themselves. Even within the hostile, restrictive environment in which they operate, there is scope for such change. Whether there is a desire and willingness for such change to happen within the parties is another matter.39

Notes 1 The same is the case for Africa (Burnell 2001; Salih 2003; Carbone 2007). And, some scholars argue, the ideological battlefields identified in European party politics do not assist us much in understanding Indian and American party politics (Pettitt 2014;Verney 2004; Ware 1996; Gerring 1998; Mair and Mudde 1998). 2 It is not, in other words, like “comparing apples to oranges.” And the latter two can, in fact, be compared (Sandford 1995). 3 This is not to say that all Middle Eastern party systems are essentially the same or that they have evolved in a similar fashion, but rather that the dominant defining feature is that of the regime-opposition cleavage. How the party landscapes in the different Middle Eastern states have formed and evolved over 146

Political parties in the Middle East

4 5

6

7 8 9

10

11

12

the years is closely tied to local environmental factors as already mentioned above, i.e. regime type, the ethnic and sectarian composition of society along with tribalism, rural-urban divisions, and the role of the military in politics. Parties and party systems have developed differently in monarchical regimes compared to in the republics, as have parties and party systems in military regimes compared to those operating in civilian authoritarian states, and those in monolithic societies compared to parties and party systems in divided societies. For more on African political parties, please refer to, among others, Kuenzi and Lambright (2001), Lindberg (2006) and Randall and Svåsand (2002). Nationalist parties in the Middle East, it is important to add, are not a thing of the past. Plenty of nationalist parties exist within the region’s party landscape, including some which originate in nationalist movements that are still struggling for independence, such as for instance the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) in Iraq, which has risen to prominence following the fall of Saddam Hussein. For more on the region’s leftist parties, please see a recent contribution by Resta (2018) or classics by Ismael (1976) and Batatu (1978). Mainstream Islamist parties and the Salafis are covered expertly by Kraetzschmar (2018); Pall (2018) and the edited volume by Kraetzschmar and Rivetti (2018). See Cavatorta (2015) and Garrison (2015) for case studies of the Tunisian and Egyptian Salafis. In addition to Algeria’s FLN, the PSD in Tunisia, the PLO in Palestine, and the YSP in South Yemen, other important regime parties (or partis uniques) in the Middle East include the Ba‘th parties of Iraq and Syria, the NDP in Egypt, and the General People’s Congress (GPC) in post-unification Yemen. See, for instance, the Ba‘th Party in Iraq and Syria. There were, of course, exceptions to the rule. Since the formation of the state of Israel in 1948, the country has had in place a multi-party system best characterized as a case of limited pluralism (the effective number of parties being 3–5). That said, for much of the period power has effectively been concentrated in the hands of two parties (or alliances, at times), namely the right-wing, secular Likud (The Consolidation), an amalgamation of liberal and conservative forces, and the secular, leftwing labour movement-affiliated Miflegt HaAvoda HaYisrelit (HaAvoda; Israeli Labour Party). Turkey operated with an effective two-party system dominated by, on the one hand, the moderately right-wing Demokrat Parti (DP; Democratic Party) and its off-shoots the Adalet Partisi (AP; Justice Party) which remained active until the military coup of 1980, and the Doğru Yol Partisi (DYP; True Path Party), that is, the re-incarnation of the original party allowed to operate in 1983 as part of the move towards the return to civilian rule.The party’s main rival and (usually) superior at the polls was the social democratic Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (CHP; Republican People’s Party), the country’s oldest party, which sprung from the nationalist movement and war of independence and, more importantly, was long fronted by the father of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. For most of the period, several other parties were legalized and contested the elections, but parliament was clearly dominated by these two parties. From 1983 onwards, the multi-party system remained in place, but power became less concentrated and the party system could best be characterized as an instance of limited pluralism. The main new entrant on the scene was the centre-right, neo-liberal (but with Islamist undercurrents) Anavatan Partisi (ANAP; Motherland Party) headed by Turgut Özal. One example is the Moroccan Parti Istiqlal (PI; Independence Party), which was side-lined during the early years of independence by King Mohammed V, who had become the symbol of the struggle for independence, partly as a consequence of his years in exile. The PI was subsequently forced to accept the legalization of competing parties (often orchestrated by the monarchy), which contributed to the fragmented state of the country’s party system and, consequently, the monarchy’s continually firm grip on power in the decades to follow. Another, more recent, example is that of the KDP in Iraq, which sought to out-flank its closest rival, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), in a bitter civil war that came to an end in the late 1990s. Having come to accept its old frère ennemi as a useful partner, the two parties effectively rule the Kurdistan Region of Iraq today, although there is fierce opposition from Gorran, a splinter from the PUK with the chief objective of ending KDP/PUK monopoly on power, and a number of Islamist parties (the Kurdistan Islamic Union, the Kurdistan Islamic Group, and the Kurdistan Islamic Movement). As a consequence of these dynamics, and the preponderance of splinter parties in the region, most parties on the scene in the Middle East today can trace their origins back to parties that emerged around the time of independence (many belonging to the category of nationalist parties) or the decades shortly after. Two recent examples of such parties, which have received much attention following the Arab Uprisings, are Tunisia’s Ennahda led by Rachid Ghannouchi from his base in London for many years, and the 147

Lise Storm

13 14 15 16

17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30

31

Congrès pour la République (CPR; Congress for the Republic) headed by Moncef Marzouki from his exile in Paris. Even in the most repressive and least competitive states in the Arab Gulf, signs of (token) political opening were evident. For an analysis of the state of parties in these countries and others, please refer to the individual chapters in Cavatorta and Storm (2018). Even in the most repressive regimes, co-opted “representatives” of those repressed have usually been part of the regime with a view to give an air of democracy. Consequently, even if competitive elections did not have much to do with the actual distribution of power in any meaningful sense, whether in the monarchies or in the republics, they remained of crucial importance. It was at election time that the distributors of goods were identified and their share allocated (Gandhi and Lust-Okar 2009; Lust 2016). Egypt is a textbook example. See Blaydes (2010). See the surveys (pre- and post-Arab Uprisings) by the Arabbarometer online at http://www. arabbarometer.org/content/online-data-analysis. According to the Arabbarometer survey from 2013, respondents stated that the main reasons why the Arab Uprisings erupted were a desire for “civil and political freedoms, and emancipation from oppression,” “the betterment of the economic situation,” “fighting of corruption” and “increased social justice.” See http://www.arabbarometer.org/content/online-data-analysis. Approximately 60% of those surveyed by the Arabbarometer in 2013 stated that the Arab Uprisings did not realize their objectives. Please refer to the website at http://www.arabbarometer.org/content/ online-data-analysis. Although mass parties did exist in the region (the term referring here to a particular form of organizational principle, rather than the size of the membership organization), Middle Eastern parties have generally come about as the result of a top-down process. They resemble “modern” cadre parties expanding their membership), emphasizing clientelistic or directive linkage rather than electoral and/or participatory linkage as traditionally prioritized among Western parties (Lawson 1988; Pedersen 1989; Pettitt 2014). www.arabbarometer.org. Please note that these findings are supported by the data collected in the various World Values Surveys. See www.worldvaluessurvey.org. Please refer to www.sahwa.eu; www.power2youth.eu; and https://www.arabtrans.eu. For useful contextual information, see Hoffman and Jamal (2014) on youth attitudes prior to the Arab Uprisings. See the World Values Surveys at http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs.jsp. With particular reference to the Middle East, a further contributing factor to parties remaining unpopular in the region, and many citizens accordingly viewing parties as not worth investing their time in, is their ineffectual role in politics combined with low parliamentary autonomy and efficacy (Lust 2016; Clarke and Khatib 2016; Randjbar-Daemia, Sadeghi and Banko 2016; Storm and Cavatorta 2018). In fact, in the Arab Middle East, tribes and political parties are often pitted against each other by the incumbent regime in order to facilitate regime survival following a divide and conquer strategy (Cavatorta and Storm 2018). From further afield and, indeed, further back in time, research on Latin America shows how parties in the region have successfully made the transition from social movements into political parties, albeit not without difficulty (van Cott 2005). In North Africa, the Islamists were marginalized and repressed—often with public support—as the incumbent regimes played on the fear of “an Algerian scenario” i.e. recalling the predicted victory of the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS; Islamic Salvation Front) in the 1990/91 elections that were aborted by the military and the subsequent bloody civil war that ravaged Algeria for more than a decade. Allowing Islamist parties, it was effectively argued, could easily result in political instability and civil war or, in the worst-case scenario, the creation of an Islamic state; a Caliphate. Islamist parties have been part of—and, indeed, headed—governing coalitions across the Middle East in recent years, Morocco’s PJD being one example, and the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) in Egypt, Tunisia’s Ennahda, and the Lebanese Hizbollah a further three. In Turkey and Palestine, Islamist parties—in the shape of the conservative, yet comparatively moderate AKP in Turkey and the Palestinian Hamas—ascended to power more swiftly than elsewhere in the Middle East, and that despite a historically strained relationship with political Islam in Turkey, where the so-called

148

Political parties in the Middle East

32

33

34 35 36

37

38

39

“Islamist threat” has been used as a justification for the instigation of a military coup (and coup attempts) on more than one occasion. One of the country’s first parties, the Terakiperver Cumhuriyet Firkasi (PRP; Progressive Republican Party) was closed down after only seven months in existence, accused of being a vehicle of Islamist subversive forces and anti-Kemalist following the Sheikh Said Rebellion in 1925 (Weiner and Özbudun 1987). The AKP is the result of a merger between the moderate/reformist wing of the banned Islamist Fazilet Partisi (FP; Virtue Party) and defectors from the ANAP and the DYP. The FP sprung from the Refah Partisi (RP; Welfare Party), which was banned in 1998, and that party ties back to the short-lived Islamist Millî Nizam Partisi (MNP; National Order Party) and the Millî Selâmet Partisi (MSP; National Salvation Party) which were both closed following the 1980 military coup.Yet, despite a rocky road to legality, the AKP is arguably the region’s most successful Islamist party to date, having won the country’s legislative elections in 2002, 2007, 2011 and twice in 2015, as well as the presidential elections in 2007 and 2014. Spurred on by the political openings initiated with the Arab Uprisings, and riding on a wave of steadily rising conservatism, Salafis, who have traditionally shunned party politics, appear to be gradually changing their stance (Pall 2018; al-Anani 2012). In addition to the Egyptian example, Salafis have entered electoral politics and proved key players on the Kuwaiti party scene in recent years (Kraetzschmar 2018). That said, undoubtedly reflecting the ambivalence within the Salafi community over whether or not to participate in party politics, newly legalized Salafi parties have done less well elsewhere in the region despite an assumed strong (and growing) support base. In Tunisia, for instance, which has been plagued by radical Islamist violence in the wake of the fall of Ben Ali, neither the Justice and Development Party nor el-Islah (Reform Front Party) won any seats in the 2014 legislative elections. The Arabbarometer survey from 2013 found that 48.3% of the respondents in the Middle East strongly agreed or agreed that religious parties are preferable to non-religious parties, while the proportion of respondents strongly agreeing or agreeing to the reverse statement was 25.5%. The figures were particularly high for Tunisia, where 42.7% of the respondents favoured religious parties. See http://www. arabbarometer.org/content/online-data-analysis. Palace parties are commonly referred to as makhzen parties in Morocco. For more on anti-party sentiments, please refer to Torcal, Gunther and Montero (2002). See a poll conducted by the Pew Research Centre in Tunisia in 2014 at www.pewglobal.org/ 2014/10/15/tunisian-confidence-in-democracy-wanes. Data from the Arabbarometer survey of 2013 further indicates that people prioritized the combatting of financial and administrative corruption and achieving stability and internal security much more than enhancing (strengthening) democracy. See http://www.arabbarometer.org/content/online-data-analysis. Further examples include the rise of the populist general el-Sisi in Egypt, who promised stability at volatile times and was deemed credible by many due to his military credentials, and the strong performance of the now defunct al-Aridha (PP; Popular Petition) in Tunisia in the 2011 legislative elections, following a strong, but highly populist election campaign, which was made possible due to party leader Hemchi Hamid’s position as a media tycoon. The PP was externally created, although Hamid had flirted with the Ennahda previously, eventually falling out with Ghannouchi. When asked what is the most important factors when settling on which candidate to vote for, 22.7% of the respondents to the 2011 Arabbarometer survey answered “the candidate’s level of education,” followed by 15.4% mentioning “the candidate’s level of religiosity.” 10.7% of respondents answered “the extent to which you agree with the candidate about issues that are important.” Please refer to the survey data available online at http://www.arabbarometer.org/content/online-data-analysis. For an in-depth discussion of this issue, please see the study of Kuwait by Kraetzschmar (2018).

References Achcar, G. (2013), The People Want, London: Saqi. Achcar, G. (2016), Morbid Symptoms, London: Saqi. Allern, E. and T. Bale (2012), “Political parties and interest groups,” Party Politics, 18:1, 7–25. Al-Anani, K. (2012), “Islamist parties Post-Arab Spring,” Mediterranean Politics, 17:3, 466–72. Batatu, H. (1978), The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Batory, A. (2016), “Populists in government? Hungary’s ‘system of national cooperation,’” Democratization, 23:2, 283–303. 149

Lise Storm

Biorcio, R. (2014), “The reasons for the success and transformations of the 5 Star Movement,” Contemporary Italian Politics, 6:1, 37–53. Blaydes, L. (2010), Distributive Politics in Mubarak’s Egypt, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brownlee, J., Masoud, T. and A. Reynolds (eds, 2015), The Arab Spring, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burnell, P. (2001), “The Party system and party politics in Zambia,” African Affairs, 100:399, 239–63. Carbone, G. (2007), “Political parties and party systems in Africa,” World Political Science Review, 3:1, accessible at: http://adpm.pbworks.com/f/africa%20party%20systems%20carbone.pdf Cavatorta, F. (2015), “Salafism, liberalism, and democratic learning in Tunisia,” Journal of North African Studies, 20:5, 770–83. Cavatorta, F. and L. Storm (eds, 2018), Political Parties in the Arab World, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Catusse, M. and K. Karam (eds, 2010), Returning to Political Parties? Paris: IFPO. Clark, J. and L. Khatib (2016), “Actors, Public Opinion, and Participation,” in ed, E. Lust, The Middle East, pp. 242–87, London: Sage. Dalton, R. (2014), “Interpreting partisan dealignment in Germany,” German Politics, 23:1/2, 134–44. Dalton, R. and M. Wattenberg (2000), Political Parties Without Partisans, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Diamond, L. (2002), “Elections without democracy,” Journal of Democracy, 13:2, 21–35. Dunne, M. and A. Hamzawy (2017), “Egypt’s secular political parties,” Carnegie Papers, 31 March. Duverger, M. (1954), Political Parties, New York, NY: Wiley. Elbadawi, I. and S. Makdisi (2017), Democratic Transitions in the Arab World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gallagher, M., Laver, M. and P. Mair (2005), Representative Government in Modern Europe, London: McGraw-Hill. Gandhi, J. and E. Lust-Okar (2009), “Elections under authoritarianism,” Annual Review of Political Science, 12:1, 403–22. Garrison, D. (2015), “Sacred confronts profane: The Salafi political experience in Egypt, 2011–2013,” in eds, S.G. Donabed and A. Quezada-Grant, Decentering Discussion on Religion and State, pp. 193–212, London: Lexington Books. Gerring, J. (1998), Party Ideologies in America, 1828–1996, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haddad, B., Bsheer, R. and Z. Abu Rish (eds, 2012), Dawn of the Arab Uprisings, London: Pluto Press. Halpern, M. (1963), Politics of Social Change, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hamid, S. (2014), “Political party development before and after the Arab Spring,” in ed, M. Kamrava, Beyond the Arab Spring, pp. 131–50, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hinnebusch, R. (2017), “Political Parties in the MENA,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 44:2, 159–75. Hoffman, M. and A. Jamal (2014), “Political attitudes of youth cohorts,” in ed, M. Lynch, The Arab Uprisings, pp. 273–95, New York, NY: Columbia. Ismael, T. (1976), The Arab Left, New York, NY: Syracuse. Judis, J. (2016), “Us v Them: the birth of populism,” The Guardian, 13 October. Katz, R. and P. Mair (2009), “The Cartel Party Thesis: a restatement,” Perspectives on Politics, 7:4, 753–66. Katz, R. and P. Mair (1995), “Changing models of party organization and party democracy: the emergence of the cartel party,” Party Politics, 1:1, 5–28. Kausch, K. (2012), “Political parties in young Arab democracies,” FRIDE Policy Brief, 130. Kioupkiolis, A. (2016), “Podemos: the ambiguous promises of left-wing populism in contemporary Spain,” Journal of Political Ideologies, 21:2, 99–120. Kitchelt, H. (2000), “Linkages between citizens and politicians in democratic polities,” Comparative Political Studies, 33:6/7, 845–79. Kraetzschmar, H. (2018), “Proto-parties and participatory politics in the Emirate of Kuwait,” in eds, F. Cavatorta and L. Storm, Political Parties in the Arab World, pp. 230–51, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kraetzschmar, H. and P. Rivetti (eds, 2018), Islamists and the Politics of the Arab Uprisings, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kraetzschmar, H. and A. Saleh (2018), “Political parties and secular-Islamist polarisation in post-Mubarak Egypt,” in eds, H. Kraetzschmar and P. Rivetti, Islamists and the Politics of the Arab Uprisings, pp. 221–39, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kuenzi, M. and G. Lambright (2001), “Party system institutionalization in 30 African countries,” Party Politics, 7:4, 437–68. 150

Political parties in the Middle East

Laine, S., Lefort, B., Onodera, H., Maïche, K. and M. Myllylä (2016), “Towards more inclusive youth engagement in Arab Mediterranean countries,” Barcelona: CIDOB, Sahwa Policy Report 3, November. Lawson, K. (1988), When Parties Fail, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Levitsky, S. and L. Way (2002), “The rise of competitive authoritarianism,” Journal of Democracy, 13:2, 51–65. Lindberg, S. (2006), “Opposition parties and democratisation in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 24:1, 123–38. Lipset, S. and S. Rokkan (1967), Party Systems and Voter Alignments, New York, NY: Free Press. Lust, E. (2016), “Institutions and governance” in ed, E. Lust, The Middle East, pp. 160–204, London: Sage. Lust-Okar, E. (2004), “Divided they rule,” Comparative Politics, 36:2, 159–79. Lust-Okar, E. (2005), Structuring Conflict in the Arab World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lynch, M. (ed, 2014), The Arab Uprisings, New York, NY: Columbia. Mair, P. and C. Mudde (1998), “The party family and its study,” Annual Review of Political Science, 1:1, 211–29. Mair, P., Müller, W. and F. Plasser (eds, 2004), Political Parties and Electoral Change, London: Sage. Mudde, C. (2016), “Europe’s populist surge: a long time in the making,” Foreign Affairs, 95:6, 25–30. Muller-Rommel, F. and G. Pridham (eds, 1991), Small Parties in Western Europe, London: Sage. Omrane, M. (2016), “Youth in Algeria,” Sahwa Policy Report, December, accessible at: http://www.sahwa. eu/OUTPUTS/SAHWA-Policy-Papers/SAHWA-Policy-Paper-on-youth-policies-in-Algeria Orriols, L. and G. Cordero (2016), “The breakdown of the Spanish two-party system,” South European Society and Politics, 21:4, 469–92. Pall, Z. (2018), “Do Salafi parties represent a contradiction in terms?,” in eds, F. Cavatorta and L. Storm, Political Parties in the Arab World, pp. 100–23, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Panebianco, A. (1988), Political Parties, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Patel, D., Bunce, V. and S. Wolchik (2014), “Diffusion and demonstration,” in ed, M. Lynch, The Arab Uprisings, pp. 57–74, New York, NY: Columbia. Pedersen, M. (1989), “En kortfattet oversigt over det danske partisystems udvikling,” Politico, 21, 265–78. Pedersen, M. (1991), “The birth, life and death of small parties in Danish politics,” in eds, F. MüllerRommel and G. Pridham, Small Parties in Western Europe, pp. 95–114, London: Sage. Penner Angrist, M. (2006), Party Building in the Modern Middle East, Washington, DC: University of Washington Press. Perthes, V. (ed, 2004), Arab Elites, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Pettitt, R. (2014), Contemporary Party Politics, London: Palgrave. Pitkin, H. (2004), “Representation and democracy: uneasy alliance,” Scandinavian Political Studies, 27:3, 335–42. Plattner, M. (1993), “The democratic moment,” in eds, L. Diamond and M. Plattner, The Global Resurgence of Democracy, pp. 26–38, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Przeworski, A. (1991), Democracy and the Market, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Randall, V. and L. Svåsand (2002), “Political parties and democratic consolidation in Africa,” Democratization, 9:3, 30–52. Randjbar-Daemi, S., Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, E. and L. Banko (2017), “Introduction to political parties in the Middle East,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 44:2, 155–8. Resta, V. (2018), “Leftist parties in the Arab region before and after the Arab Uprisings,” in eds, F. Cavatorta and L. Storm, Political Parties in the Arab World, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rihoux, B. (2000), “Governmental participation and the organisational ‘transformation’ of green parties,” paper presented at the Political Studies Association-UK 50th Annual Conference, London, 10–3 April. Roberts, K., Kovacheva S. and S. Kabaivanov (2017), “Modernisation theory meets Tunisia’s youth during and since the revolution of 2011,” Sahwa Scientific Report, February. Rokkan, S. (1970), Citizens, Elections, Parties, New York, NY: McKay. Safdar, A. and A. El Amraoui (2017) “Populism: the French election’s big winner,” Al Jazeera, 1 May. Salih, M.A.M. (ed, 2003), African Political Parties, London: Pluto Press. Sandford, S. (1995), “Apples and oranges: a comparison,” Annals of Improbable Research, 1:3. Sartori, G. (1976), Parties and Party Systems, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sassoon, J. (2016), Anatomy of Authoritarianism in the Arab Republics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sawa, T. (2017), “Populism sapping the strength of mainstream parties,” Japan Times, 20 June. Schedler, A. (2006), Electoral Authoritarianism, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. 151

Lise Storm

Schlumberger, O. (2007), Debating Arab Authoritarianism, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Seiler, D.-L. (1980), Partis et Familles Politiques, Paris: Presses Univ. de France. Sika, N. (2016) “Youth civic and political engagement in Egypt,” Power2Youth Working Paper no. 18. ISSN: 2283-5792. Spourdalakis, M. (2014), “The miraculous rise of the ‘Phenomenon SYRIZA,’” International Critical Thought, 4:3, 354–66. Stavrakakis, Y. and G. Katsambekis (2014), “Left-wing populism in the European periphery: the case of SYRIZA,” Journal of Political Ideologies, 19:2, 119–42. Storm, L. and F. Cavatorta (2018), “Do Arabs not do parties?,” in eds, F. Cavatorta and L. Storm, Political Parties in the Arab World, pp. 1–20, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Storm, L. (2014), Party Politics and Prospects for Democracy in North Africa, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Storm, L. (2017), “Parties and party system change,” in ed, I. Szmolka, Political Change in the Middle East and North Africa, pp. 63–88, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Tachau, F. (ed, 1994), Political Parties of the Middle East and North Africa, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Tessler, M. and M. Robbins (2014), “Political system preferences of Arab Publics,” in ed, M. Lynch, The Arab Uprisings, pp. 249–72, New York, NY: Columbia. Torcal, M., Gunther R. and J.R. Montero (2002), “Anti-party sentiments in Southern Europe,” in eds, R. Gunther, J.R. Montero and J. Linz, Political Parties: Old Concepts and New Challenges, pp. 257–90, Oxford: Oxford University Press. van Biezen, I. and T. Poguntke (2014), “The decline of membership-based politics,” Party Politics, 20:2, 205–16. van Cott, D.L. (2005), From Movements to Parties in Latin America, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Verney, D. (2004), “How has the proliferation of parties affected the Indian Federation: a comparative approach,” in eds, S. Hasan, E. Sridharaa and R. Sudarshan, India’s Living Constitution, pp. 134–58, Delhi: Permanent Black. Vezzoni, C. and M. Mancosu (2015), “Diffusion processes and discussion networks: an analysis of the propensity to vote for the 5 Star Movement in the 2013 Italian election,” Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, 26:1, 1–21. von Beyme, K. (1985), Political Parties in Western Democracies. London: Ashgate. Ware, A. (1996), Political Parties and Party Systems, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weiner, M. and E. Özbudun (1987), Competitive Elections in Developing Countries, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Willis, M. (2002a), “Political parties in the Maghrib,” Journal of North African Studies, 7:2, 1–22. Willis, M. (2002b), “Political parties in the Maghrib: ideology and identification,” Journal of North African Studies, 7:3, 1–28. Wolf, A. (2018), “What are secular parties in the Arab world?,” in eds, F. Cavatorta and L. Storm, Political Parties in the Arab World, pp. 49–71, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

152

11 Islam and Islamic movements and MENA politics Ewan Stein and Neil Russell

Assessments of Islam’s role in politics often tend toward one of two extremes. Although, as with most such heuristic devices, pure examples of each extreme may be difficult to find, evidence of “Orientalist” versus “instrumentalist” approaches to Islam remain widespread in academic literature. At one extreme, Orientalism ascribes “unity, autonomy, and primacy” to Islam and Muslim culture (Nafissi 1998) Orientalist axioms about Islam as a unified and all-pervasive system or civilization (Gellner 1983), in which religion and state (din wa-dawla) are inseparable, can, when combined with Eurocentric assumptions about the structural determinants of Western democracy, lead to the conclusion that Islam is incompatible with democracy and that the secular nation-state cannot take root in the Muslim world so long as Islam continues to occupy a prominent place within local cultures.1 Modernization theory, an embattled but still widespread conceptual paradigm in the social sciences, holds that religion’s importance necessarily declines as states progress toward an ideal Western model (Lerner 1958). At the other extreme, opponents of both modernization theory and Orientalism often minimize Islam’s political importance. For many scholars, often part of a backlash against Orientalism led by Marxist scholars and most influentially articulated in the work of Edward Said,2 it is external factors (specifically imperialism) and/or resource characteristics (especially oil), rather than Islam, that explain trajectories of state formation in the Middle East. As Simon Bromley (1994) has argued, following Roger Owen: Religion neither determined the nature of state power, except in relation to how power was on some occasions legitimated, nor did it provide a significant obstacle to the consolidation of the state’s rule: on the contrary, the modernist strand of Sunni Islam was mobilized to legitimate the policies of the state, and political control was extended over the ulema. Islam in such analyses neither drives nor inhibits political development but rather operates as an instrument for legitimizing particular forms of authoritarian rule and policymaking. By approaching Islam in a more sociologically and historically contingent way, this chapter challenges both the orientalist and instrumentalist interpretations of Islam’s role in politics. Islam should not be treated as a unified, primary and autonomous category, but nor does it serve 153

Ewan Stein and Neil Russell

simply as an ideological resource through which holders of power might legitimize themselves or their policies. Although a widely accepted tradition of Islamic thought informs much political discourse in Muslim countries, the canon is continually reinterpreted, augmented and synthesized with other intellectual influences. Islamic political thought, like other major idea systems, developed in time and served simultaneously to rationalize existing power relations and offer a vision of an ideal future. The ideal of an umma united under the stewardship of a divinely guided Caliph and governed according to shari’a was rarely, if ever, achieved in practice (Zubaida 1995). But, as a recent study on the institution of the Caliphate demonstrates, Islamic political thought could adapt to and accommodate a wide range of social and political realities in diverse geographical contexts over time (Hassan 2017). With this in mind, the current chapter explores some (but by no means all) of the ways in which Islam has impacted political life in the contemporary Middle East. We focus on three levels of analysis: the state, society and the international. We begin with a discussion of the role of Islam in the politics of self-styled Islamic states, before examining the role of political Islam as a peaceful, and violent, oppositional force. The chapter then examines the role of Islam in statelevel politics more generally, before delving into the broader phenomenon of Islamic grassroots activism across the Middle East. The final section of the chapter provides some reflections on how Islam should best be conceptualized as a factor in the international politics of the region.

Political Islam and state power From the late 1960s, and particularly since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, scholars have viewed Islam’s political role primarily through the prism of “political Islam” or “Islamism,” umbrella terms covering a range of political and social movements that aspire to the creation of “Islamic states.” The vision of an Islamic state has been seen to constitute “the central focus for Islamist energies,” in turn deriving from a “preoccupation with capturing the state in order to change society” (Ayoob 2008). During the 1950s and 1960s, when socialism and more secular nationalisms dominated Middle Eastern politics, Islamism was typically viewed as a form of “reaction,” antithetical to “progress.”3 But, regardless of whether one considers them to be “progressive,” Islamist movements should be recognized as products, and upholders, of modernity in that they orient themselves toward reforming existing state entities, are largely based within “modern” social classes, and aspire to broadening political inclusion through Islam (Kepel 2009; Eisenstadt 2000).4 Although Islamists typically set the restoration of the Caliphate (or, for Shi’a, the Imamate) as a long-term goal—and thus reject the legitimacy of modern state borders—state contexts, as we discuss below, nevertheless exert an overweening influence on Islamist behaviour and ideological positions (Haroub 2010). The Islamic Revolution in Iran, a quintessentially modern event (Halliday 2009) vindicated Islamism as a political project and belied the notion that modernization meant following in the secular footsteps of the West. But the Islamic Republic of Iran was not the first regime to be founded on the back of an Islamist movement. A prior, often overlooked, example of an Islamist movement ascending to state control is that of Saudi Arabia. The Saudi state crystallized an alliance dating back to the eighteenth century between the ideological power of the Wahhabi religious reform movement and the political and military power of the Saud family (Commins 2012). In both the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia domestic and foreign policy is formulated and legitimated predominantly, though by no means exclusively, with reference to Islam. A central analytical question that arises in relation to self-styled Islamic states such as Iran and Saudi Arabia is, just what is it that makes each of them “Islamic”? In Iran, although the 154

Islamic movements and MENA politics

declaration of an Islamic Republic suggested a sharp break with a secular past, the previous Pahlavi regime was not explicitly hostile to Islam and relied to a significant degree on the support of the clergy to offset the social power of the secular left. The revolutionaries took over, augmented and strengthened the institutions of the Shah’s state (Abrahamian 2008; Ansari 2012). The “Islamicity” of the Islamic Republic emerges from its control by Shi’i clerics, who developed the concept of Vilayat e-Faqih (governorship of the Supreme Jurist) and deployed Islamic motifs alongside populist policies to garner support among devout poor and lower-middle-class social constituencies (Abrahamian 1991). Shi’ism, with its in-built repertoire of resistance, sacrifice and sense of injustice, formed a constituent part of Iran’s revolutionary ideology which, also synthesizing leftist, republican and Third-Worldist ideas, served to distinguish the ruling coalition and its supporters from so-called “enemies of the revolution” at home and abroad. In Saudi Arabia, although the modern state established in 1932 was not “captured” via a revolution but built more or less from scratch, state formation depended preponderantly on external support and security guarantees. The kingdom’s institutional character as a sovereign entity owed as much, if not more, to emulation of other modern states and pressures from the international environment as it did to “Islam” (Halliday 2005). The institution of monarchy in Saudi Arabia as elsewhere in the Middle East is of relatively recent, and non-Islamic, provenance (Anderson 1991). The “Islamicity” of Saudi Arabia centres on the ideological hegemony of Wahhabism, which enjoys widespread approval within a society whose material wellbeing the monarchy undertakes to secure. Whereas the Shi’ism of the Iranian Revolution constituted—or, in Althusserian terms, “interpellated”—a revolutionary and internationalist political community, Wahhabism defined the Saudi community in conservative and communitarian, rather than universalist, terms. This reflected the political community’s shared interests in defending itself against external ideological threats, as well as against domestic potential insurgencies from within economically more marginalized and religiously non-conformist (especially Shi’a) sections of society. Islam in both Iran and Saudi Arabia thus plays an important—but very different—role in “boundary defence” (Haykel 2009), helping to define political communities as an “in group” and binding regimes to core constituencies, rather than simply offering a ready-made source of legitimation or providing a blueprint for political order. The extent to which leaderships are accepted as being authentically “Islamic” within society often reflects the extent to which social groups perceive their material wellbeing and security to be secure.5

Islamist oppositions Although many political movements across the Middle East and beyond share certain key features that justify the application of the term “Islamist,” they vary considerably over time and from place to place. As will be discussed below, Islam plays an important role in politics through the activities of grassroots actors. But most self-identifying Islamist movements share an aspiration toward “institutionalized participation in the politics of the nation state” (Volpi and Stein 2015). Islamism thus encompasses a range of strategies directed at the state level, casting Islam as a repertoire of opposition (characteristic of the Muslim Brotherhood and “activist” Salafis), as well as armed struggle to try and capture the state (jihadism). The archetypal Islamist movement is the Muslim Brotherhood. Until the Egyptian Revolution of 2011—the troubled period of the 1950s and 1960s aside—the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood could more accurately be described as a reformist pressure group rather than a revolutionary movement bent on seizing state power (Brownlee 2010). The Brotherhood exhibited a general willingness to accept the basic premise of the nation-state, pursuing Islamization gradually rather than by force. In the early years under the leadership of its founder, Hassan 155

Ewan Stein and Neil Russell

al-Banna, the Brotherhood focussed on religious education, with the idea of an Islamic state assuming secondary priority (Mitchell 1993: 245). The Nasser period was one of both accommodation and confrontation with the state, in which an internal struggle within the Muslim Brotherhood developed over the uncompromising ideas of its most mercurial ideologue, Sayyid Qutb (Zollner 2007). After a limited political opening under Sadat, the Brotherhood underwent a “metamorphosis,” entering elections for the first time in 1984 under Mubarak, thus completing its transformation from a mass religious movement into a modern political party oriented toward maximizing electoral success (El-Ghobashy 2005). It was not until the fall of Mubarak in 2011 that the Brotherhood was able to complete its transition from pressure group to party of government in waiting. Movements with Brotherhood links or inspiration flourished across the Middle East, with partial political liberalizations in the 1980s and 1990s leading to Islamists contesting elections in states such as Algeria, Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia. Increasing Islamist political participation has led scholars to posit that the effect of “inclusion” has been the “moderation” of their ideological goals, primarily the establishment of Islamic states, and to embrace democratic norms (Schwedler 2011). Islamists engaged in cross-ideological cooperation with liberals and socialists over shared concerns, such as opposition to Israel or Western intervention in the Middle East (Browers 2009). However, the debate has been complicated somewhat in the wake of regime change in Egypt and Tunisia. Shadi Hamid argues that repression whilst in opposition effectively “forced” the moderation of Islamist parties, while the opening of the political sphere and the “temptations of power” led Islamists and their secular opponents in Egypt to see less reason to work together, viewing politics as a zero-sum game to control the state and its resources (Hamid 2014). In contrast to the intransigence of the Brotherhood, however, Ennahda’s decision to step down from office, and accept a position as a junior partner in coalition government following fresh elections in 2014, suggests Islamist adaptability in both contexts. “Activist Salafis” have also pursued a reformist approach to political engagement as opposed to one devoted to seizing power. Salafis valorize the pursuit of a pure Muslim life in emulation of the life of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions (the Salaf). They tend to shun secular politics as a corrupting influence on moral values but differ in the strategies they advocate. “Quietest” Salafis focus on piety and acquiring religious knowledge and tend to accept the authority of the ruler, whereas “activist” Salafis are more likely to directly oppose political authority and seek change at the level of the state (Meijer 2010). The latter form are well represented in Saudi Arabia by the Sahwa movement, whose “insurrection” in the 1990s was sparked by the American military presence in the kingdom during the Gulf War (Lacroix 2011: 35). Despite launching a widespread protest movement, the Sahwa movement was unable to crystallize its mobilization in institutional form. Activist Salafis have, however, participated in parliamentary elections in the neighbouring Gulf states of Bahrain and Kuwait for a number of years. Despite the assumption of Salafi doctrinal rigidity, Salafi parliamentarians’ behaviour is tempered by political incentives more than political ideology (Monroe 2012). In Bahrain, the Salafi bloc al-Asalah does not promote democratic norms because reforming the country’s sectarian political system may limit their current position and power (Monroe 2012: 412). On the other hand, in Kuwait, the Islamic Salafi Alliance sees parliament as a way to leverage influence against the monarchical regime and national policy, and thus have a strong track record of supporting political reform (Monroe 2012: 414). In Egypt, the quietist Salafi scene was transformed following the 2011 Revolution, with a trio of Salafi parties led by al-Nour capturing nearly a third of the vote in the first postMubarak parliamentary elections. After long eschewing politics, Salafi scholars from the informal movement from which al-Nour emerged, the “Salafi da‘wa,” reconsidered their position 156

Islamic movements and MENA politics

and embraced political participation. Many, but not all, Salafis supported the shift as a means of maintaining and expanding the Islamic identity of Egypt (Al-Anani and Malik 2013). In light of this, Stéphane Lacroix has argued that al-Nour is best viewed not as an Islamist party, but “the lobbying arm of a religious organization whose goals fundamentally remains changing society from below, not from above” (Lacroix 2016: 4).

Violent Islamism The aforementioned “statist” Islamist movements share a willingness to engage with existing nation-states and participate in an iterative process with the state over the (re-) constitution of political communities. Islamist opposition movements, such as the Saudi Sahwa movement or reformist factions in Iran, have accepted the “rules of the game,” engaging with, while attempting to reshape, official Islam. But some Islamists have also rejected the more gradualist reform approaches of the movements discussed above, turning to armed struggle as a means of seizing state power. Ideologically, contention over the use of violence has centred on the issue of takfir, or the labelling of a Muslim as an apostate (Wiktorowicz 2011: 273). Applying takfir to leaders who are viewed as implementing non-Islamic law legitimizes the use of jihad against them, leading to a branch of Islamism known as “jihadism.” The most influential proponent of this approach, who also inspired Iranian Islamists, was the Egyptian ideologue, Sayyid Qutb. Executed in 1966 after being convicted of plotting to assassinate Nasser, Qutb saw the Muslim world as being in a state of jahiliyya (pre-Islamic ignorance), necessitating the formation of a revolutionary vanguard, insulated from the surrounding “jahili” society, to usher in the Islamic state.6 Islamist activists interpreted Qutb’s ideas in different ways. Some, like the Gama’a Islamiyya in Egypt, saw in his work a mandate to use both persuasion (da’wa) and violence in society to enforce correct Islamic behaviour and grow the social base of the fighting vanguard, while others prioritized the toppling of apostate regimes (Stein 2011). The Egyptian Islamic Jihad, whose main thinker, an electrician named ‘Abd al-Salam Faraj, dismissed the increasing Islamization of Egyptian society as incidental, and adopted the strategy of military coup (Kepel 1985: 193). Inspired by, and seeking to replicate, the Iranian Revolution, a small cell of the group assassinated President Anwar Sadat during a military ceremony in 1981. Elsewhere, prolonged Islamist insurgencies took place in Syria (1976–82) and in Algeria (1991–2002). Despite the “success” of Sadat’s assassination, and the disruption caused by armed insurrection in Syria and Algeria, the ultimate goal of capturing the state ultimately failed in each case. More recently, amidst the turmoil following the Arab Uprisings of 2011, the path of armed revolutionary jihadism has been revived, particularly in the cases of Libya (Ashour 2015) and Syria (Pierret 2016).

Islam and state politics beyond Islamism Although political Islam has dominated the debate on religion and politics in the Middle East since 1979, Islamist movements do not hold a monopoly on “Islam.” Islam has played a central role in state politics in the Middle East since the formation of the modern regional states system in the wake of World War I. Even during the 1950s and 1960s, the supposed heyday of Arab nationalism, the symbolic contestation within and among states in the region was not so much between Islamic and secular frameworks as it was between differing interpretations of Islam’s political meaning. Nasser harnessed the considerable ideological power of al-Azhar to help legitimize his foreign and domestic policies in Islamic terms (Vatikiotis 1965; Piscatori 2012). The purest statement of Nasserism’s revolutionary intent, the National Charter of 1961, reserved a special place for Islam in “Arab socialism” and was drafted with input from al-Azhar and prominent 157

Ewan Stein and Neil Russell

Islamist intellectuals. Even the Syrian Ba‘th Party, from 1966 one of the most staunchly secular political forces in the region, was unwilling to endorse atheist ideas in the public sphere and actively suppressed those that were actively critical of religion (Zisser 2017; Piscatori 2012). The persistence of Islam in society needs to be understood in relation to the impact of Islamist regimes and movements, but it also reflects ostensibly “apolitical” grassroots dynamics. Islamization from above needs to be considered alongside concurrent social activism that aims to change society from below. Islamist movements can claim partial credit for the Islamization of political life in the Middle East since the 1970s. In some senses the Islamization of political discourse represents the slower structural, more “Gramscian” successes of an Islamist war of position across the region. In Egypt, for Bayat, Islamism has slowly conquered civil society and effected a gradual change in state discourse, contra Iran where in the absence of a strong Islamist societal movement a war of manoeuvre was required to overthrow the Shah (Bayat 1998). But the abiding, if not increasing, salience of Islam in society also reflects the influence of networks of non-Islamist activists and norm entrepreneurs, through which practices and norms from Islamic traditions are inserted into the social sphere (Ismail 2003; Deeb 2006). The importance of Islam as a “language of politics” (Eickelman and Piscatori 2004) has risen steeply in tandem with the cultural Islamization of the urban middle classes in many parts of the Middle East since the 1970s, reflecting in part the failure of the secular mobilizational projects of the previous two decades, but also responding to the growing importance of rural society across the region in the context of post-populist political development (Hinnebusch 1981). The Islamization of political and civil society reflected shifts in demography, particularly the rising weight of so-called “devout bourgeoisies” more connected with rural religious society and conscious of their alienation from secular elites. The AKP in Turkey, for example, channels the aspirations of this constituency, which was excluded politically and disadvantaged economically under the Kemalist system (Gumuscu 2010). The party rejects the epithet “Islamist,” but it nevertheless uses Islam to connect with wider devout Muslim bourgeoisies in Turkey, and indeed in the Middle East as a whole. Yet although the AKP evolved from Turkish Islamism, and it gains legitimacy among its devout base when its rulings accord with Islamic principles, the party has adapted to Turkey’s secular state context. Through the development of the Islamic concept of da‘wa beyond its traditional meaning as proselytization, Islamists have incorporated the idea of “activating” Islam in “all spheres of life,” through the creation of a “seamless web between religion, politics, and charity and all forms of activism” (Clark 2004). Islamist parties often have links to networks of charitable institutions who provide social welfare services, among other activities, such as collecting religious alms, building mosques, and establishing Islamic educational institutions and publishing houses (Eickelman and Piscatori 2004: 35). Since the 1970s the number of these social institutions has expanded greatly for a host of reasons. Financial crises suffered by “populist” republics such as Egypt led to a retraction in the state’s welfare provision in an era of economic privatization, and the encouragement of private actors to ease the burden on the state (Harrigan and el-Said 2009). In countries such as Algeria and Lebanon, the destructive aftermath of conflict hammered these states’ capacity to provide services, leaving a void for Islamic activists to fill (Eickelman and Piscatori 2004: 116; Cammett 2011). The political calculations of authoritarian regimes have also played a role, encouraging varying degrees of Islamization to both legitimate regime policies and counter leftist/Nasserist opposition (Hinnebusch 1985: 200). Owing to this combination of political and economic factors, the ceding of space to non-state actors has enabled Islamists to expand their fields of operation in society, and vicariously benefit from the growing profile of “Islamic,” but not necessarily “Islamist,” organizations. This in turn invites us to reassess the political significance of grassroots activism as a whole. 158

Islamic movements and MENA politics

The increasing prevalence of Islamic social institutions challenges the authority and legitimacy of the state itself. By performing state-like functions effectively, they provide an alternative conception of an Islamic ordering of society, which may in turn increase support for the overall Islamist project. This growth has culminated in what Carrie Wickham calls a “parallel Islamic sector,” “largely independent of—and competitive with—the cultural, religious, and service-oriented arms of the Egyptian state” (Wickham 2002). The development of an Islamic substitute to state institutions, such as alternative banking institutions or reliance on Islamic welfare, may represent a “politics of silence” that implies disillusionment with the state (Eickelman and Piscatori 2004: 109). This Islamic alternative has become particularly acute in the unregulated housing areas of cities in Algeria, Egypt, and Tunisia, where a form of “informal politics” has developed (Ismail 2003: 23). In the near-complete absence of state apparatus, communities have embraced this disengagement by forming informal economies and establishing local hierarchies through which association with Islamist groups constitutes economic and political power (Ismail 2003: 24). Thus, in spaces of relative autonomy from the state, new forms of political participation may emerge that are detached from formal political institutions, but which wield power in localized contexts. Yet it is not only, or even primarily, in poor areas that Islamists operate or enlist new activists. Due to the requirements of running charitable institutions they have tended to foster middle-class networks of doctors and directors, whilst their constituencies also tend to be in middle-class areas which have also suffered from deficiencies in the state’s service apparatus. As a result, Islamic social institutions are largely “run by and for the middle class” (Clark 2004: 4). Another indication of the political significance of Islamic activism lies in the ways in which service provision boosts the political support of Islamist parties. “As is well known,” states one such example, “the Islamist movements, especially in the Middle East and North Africa, have achieved their salience and popular support through blends of religious, political and welfarist activism” (Benthall and Bellion-Jou 2008: 88). In the Occupied Palestinian Territories, political support for Islamists is credited to the activities of charitable institutions in poor communities (Challand 2008: 228), whilst the responsiveness of Algeria’s Front Islamique du Salut in providing emergency relief following an earthquake is similarly linked with its electoral success (Anderson 1997). The assumption of Islamists’ popularity stemming from service provision was, however, rather anecdotal, with little demonstration of concrete links between service provision and voting behaviour. The electoral success of Islamists in Egypt and Tunisia following the 2010/2011 Uprisings allowed for a reappraisal of this assumption. One study asks if there is an “Islamist political advantage” due to welfare provision (Cammett and Luong 2014). It finds that most Islamic welfare providers are in fact independent, community-based organizations, rather than part of Islamist networks. So while welfare may provide a degree of direct support, Islamists also benefit from a “reputational effect” for “good governance” accrued by the provision of Islamic welfare services generally, enabling them to amass support among constituencies with whom they have had no direct contact (Cammett and Luong 2014: 199). Tarek Masoud draws similar conclusions in his case-study on Egypt. Using survey data to measure voter preferences, he shows that Egyptians tended to identify the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party and Salafi al-Nour party with left-leaning policies of redistribution and welfare (Masoud 2014: 147). Rather than voting due to being actual beneficiaries of welfare provided by the Brotherhood’s charitable institutions, many voters indicated they chose them due to the perception that they were heavily involved in welfare and that their economic policy as a government would also be distributive (Masoud 2014: 152). The downside of this may be heightened expectations about performance while in government, which may partly explain the rapid disillusionment with the Brotherhood and Ennahda governments in Egypt and 159

Ewan Stein and Neil Russell

Tunisia respectively. So, whilst reputational advantage may be beneficial to Islamists as opposition movements, it does not necessarily represent a sustainable base of support from the position of power, to which the Muslim Brotherhood’s failure to mobilize sufficient popular pressure to sustain Muhammad Morsi’s presidency in Egypt perhaps attests. The above discussion highlights the complexity, and ambiguity, of the linkage between activism invoking Islamic idioms, and Islamists seeking advancement in formal political processes. Much, if not most, Islamic activism occurs independently of organized Islamist networks. This leads us to ask if Islamic activism is only political as far as it relates to the Islamist project in the electoral process. In a short conceptual article on political Islam, Charles Hirschkind (2011: 14) suggests that this is not the case by providing a more nuanced understanding of what constitutes “the political.” As part of nation building, he notes, states have undergone a process in which they have developed institutions to oversee and regulate the procedures relating to education, health, and social welfare. This overlaps with much of the da‘wa pursued by Islamic activists, which is therefore necessarily political, as it engages with the political domain through activities that are subject to the legal and administrative structures linked to the state. In corroborating this view, Saba Mahmood notes that the spiritual side of Islam has not been “politicized” by Islamic activists, but rather the conditions of secular liberal modernity mean that “for any world-making project (spiritual or otherwise) to succeed and be effective, it must engage with the all-encompassing institutions and structures of modern governance, whether it aspires to state power or not” (Mahmood 2012: 194). The inference here is that even Islamic movements such as quietist Salafis, which eschew conventional political engagement, may nevertheless engage politically in the sense that they abide by, and promote, particular social norms and practices that contradict or compete with those of the state.

Islam and international politics If conceptions of a monolithic overdetermining Islam are of little use in helping explain state and sub-state politics in the Middle East, the same applies to politics at the supra-state or international level. Few scholars would argue that Islam “drives” foreign policy in the region. More than half a century ago the editor of a volume of conference papers on Islam and International Relations could conclude that “Islam is actually of quite limited significance in shaping the attitudes and behaviour of Muslim states in international relations today” (Proctor 1965: vii). Later, writers like James Piscatori stressed that Muslim statesmen were no less pragmatic pursuers of raison d’etat in international affairs than were non-Muslim ones (Piscatori 1986). But, as with the domestic sphere, minimizing the explanatory significance of a monolithic “Islam” does not mean that Islam plays no role in the international relations of the Middle East. Just as Islam can support very different domestic politics, so too can it underpin a diversity of foreign policies and normative frameworks. In the late nineteenth century, notions of pan-Islamism were elaborated to rally support for the Ottoman Sultan against Western imperialism. For Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, one of pan-Islamism’s most influential exponents during this period, the umma was weak because it was divided. Later, pan-Islamism came to be associated with Western security frameworks, particularly as promoted by the staunchly proBritish Hashemite monarchy in (Trans)Jordan (Yapp 1996). Threatened by the radical socialism espoused by Egyptian president Nasser, Saudi Arabia, and other pro-Western regimes like Iran again argued for an Islamic Pact uniting the states of the region in a security regime that would not threaten Western interests. Saudi Arabia’s conservative brand of pan-Islamism gained increasing traction following the discrediting of the Nasserist regional project in the wake of the 1967 Six Day War. 160

Islamic movements and MENA politics

Following the Iranian Revolution, the split between radical and conservative interpretations of Islam returned to the forefront of politics on the regional level. Much as the radical camp had argued during the years of the so-called Arab Cold War (Kerr 1971) Iranians argued that Islam was a revolutionary doctrine that could liberate the Muslim people from internal and external oppression, whereas Saudi Arabia and its allied regimes stressed Islam’s respect for moderation and tolerance in international affairs. Those latter states also began to emphasize Arab ownership of Islamic heritage, as a way of delegitimizing Iran’s claims to regional leadership (Chubin and Tripp 2014). The fall of the Ba‘thist regime of Saddam Hussein in 2003, which markedly increased Iranian influence in Iraq, saw an uptick in sectarianism in regional political discourse. Many Arab regimes, as well as Islamist and Salafi movements, now portrayed the umma as an explicitly Sunni community, under threat from Shi’i expansionism from the other side of the Gulf. The internet and satellite television played a critical role in globalizing the sectarian conflict in Iraq, with Salafi sheikhs in particular highlighting the heresies of Shi’ism as compared with the correct Sunni Islam. Regional negotiations over Islam as a theory of international relations constitute an aspect of the normative “dialogues” that characterize interstate politics in the Middle East (Barnett 1998). These negotiations involve state as well as non-state actors, of which Sunni and Shi’i Islamist movements currently represent the most visible examples. On a superficial level state and nonstate actors may appear to instrumentalize Islam in furtherance of geopolitical or particularistic interests. More fundamentally, though, collective interpretations of Islam help to constitute the transnational political communities in whose interests actors are recognized to act and toward what ends. In AKP-led Turkey, for example, Islamism expresses the government’s solidarity with the devout bourgeoisie as well as its integrative regional aspirations (Hoffman and Cemgil 2016). Similarly, for Iran, Shi’i Islam underscores the revolutionary anti-imperialist raison d’etre of the Islamic Republic, whose internationalism is demonstrated by Iran’s membership in a regional “axis of refusal” uniting the Islamic Republic not only with Shi’i Hizbollah but also Sunni Hamas and the Asad regime in Syria. This universalist narrative has been seriously upset in the context of political realignments during the Syrian civil war that began in 2011 (Stein 2017; El Husseini 2010).

Conclusion As the previous discussion attests, Islam and politics cannot be reduced to dichotomous “Orientalist” or “instrumentalist” positions, which either uphold the primacy of Islam as a monolithic, all-encompassing system, or relegate it to the margins of political importance. Instead, we see the adaptability of Islam on a variety of levels, from the local, grassroots, to the contestation and exercise of state power, up to the formation of foreign policy, and transnational forms of political identity based on Islamic idioms. Within each level we see a multitude of forms being accommodated, that demonstrate the diverse ways in which Islam influences social and political life. At the grassroots level, Islamic activism offers an alternative to the state, which may provide a degree of political support to Islamists, while also helping to develop new political constituencies of “devout bourgeoisies.” In the formal political realm, reform-minded Islamist groups demonstrate a variety of divergent ideological positions, including the Muslim Brotherhood and activist Salafis, whilst sharing pragmatic responses to shifting political contexts. Even jihadists have incorporated varying degrees of da‘wa alongside armed resistance, sometimes abandoning the latter entirely, as in the case of Egypt’s Gama’a Islamiyya. Islam has also informed the exercise of state power, particularly in the cases of Iran and Saudi Arabia, which demonstrate 161

Ewan Stein and Neil Russell

distinct, albeit contrasting, forms of modernity, pitting a revolutionary Shi’i discourse against a conservative Wahhabi Sunni doctrine. Although Islam serves to legitimize both states, its use is more than instrumental, helping not only to formulate domestic and foreign policy, but also connecting regimes with their core constituencies. The use of Islam on the international level, while to some degree instrumentalized by regimes, also reflects the nature of state-society relations and domestic coalitions of power, as well as setting the parameters for transnational Islamist movements to, for example, heed the call to defend the “true” Sunni Islamic heritage.

Notes 1 Hamid (2016); for a critique of this view see Stein (2016). 2 For a discussion of, and intervention in, the debate, see Halliday (2003). 3 A good example of a former leftist who previously discounted Islamism’s importance as a popular movement but subsequently revised their assessment is the Egyptian scholar Tariq al-Bishri. See al-Bishri (2002). 4 Kepel (2009); Eisenstadt (2000): For a contrary position see Mandaville (2002). 5 For perspectives on the contingencies of the social contract in the Middle East see Hazbun (2015: 55–65); Bilgin (2004). 6 The notion of a revolutionary vanguard mirrored global trends of Marxist-Leninist vanguardism, such as Che Guevara.

References Abrahamian, E. (2008), A History of Modern Iran, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Abrahamian, E. (3 April 1991), “Khomeini: fundamentalist or populist,” New Left Review, 186, 102–19. Al-Anani, K. and M. Malik (Spring 2013), “Pious way to politics: the rise of political Salafism in postMubarak Egypt,” Digest of Middle East Studies, 22:1, 57–73. Al-Bishri, T. (2002), Al-Haraka al-Siyasiya Fi Misr 1945–1953 [The Political Movement in Egypt, 1945–1953], second edition, Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq. Anderson, L. (1 April 1991), “Absolutism and the resilience of monarchy in the Middle East,” Political Science Quarterly, 106:1, 1–15. Anderson, L. (1997), “Fulfilling prophecies: state policy and Islamist radicalism,” in ed, J.L. Esposito, Political Islam: Revolution, Radicalism, or Reform?, London: Lynne Rienner. Ansari, A.M. (2012), The Politics of Nationalism in Modern Iran, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ashour, O. (August 2015), “Between ISIS and a failed state: The saga of Libyan Islamists,” Brookings Institution Rethinking Political Islam Series, Working Paper. Ayoob, M. (2008), The Many Faces of Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Muslim World, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan. Barnett, M. (1998), Dialogues in Arab Politics: Negotiations in Regional Order, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Bayat, A. (1998), “Revolution without movement, movement without revolution: Comparing Islamic activism in Iran and Egypt,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 40:1, 136–69. Benthall, J. and J. Bellion-Jourdan (2008), The Charitable Crescent: Politics of Aid in the Muslim World, London: IB Tauris. Bilgin, P. (2004), Regional Security in the Middle East: A Critical Perspective, first edition, Routledge, Abingdon: Oxon. Bromley, S. (1994), Rethinking Middle East Politics, Cambridge: Polity Press. Browers, M. (2009), Political Ideology in the Arab World Accommodation and Transformation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brownlee, J. (1 May 2010), “The Muslim Brothers: Egypt’s most influential pressure group,” History Compass, 8:5, 419–30. Cammett, M.C. (March 2011), “Partisan activism and access to welfare in Lebanon,” Studies in Comparative International Development, 46:1, 70–97. Cammett, M.C. and P. Jones Luong (February 2014), “Is there an Islamist political advantage?,” Annual Review of Political Science, 17, 187–206. 162

Islamic movements and MENA politics

Challand, B. (May 2008), “A Nahḍa of charitable organizations? Health service provision and the politics of aid in Palestine,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 40:2, 227–47. Chubin, S. and C. Tripp (2014), Iran-Saudi Arabia Relations and Regional Order, Routledge. Abingdon: Oxon. Clark, J.A. (2004), Islam, Charity, and Activism: Middle-Class Networks and Social Welfare in Egypt, Jordan, and Yemen, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Commins, D.D. (2012), The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia, London, New York, NY: IB Tauris & Co Ltd. Deeb, L. (2006), An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi’i Lebanon, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Eickelman, D.F. and J. Piscatori (2004), Muslim Politics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Eisenstadt, S.N. (2000), “Multiple modernities,” Daedalus, 129:1, 1–29. El-Ghobashy, M. (August 2005), “The metamorphosis of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 37:3, 373–95. El Husseini, R. (July 2010), “Hezbollah and the axis of refusal: Hamas, Iran and Syria,” Third World Quarterly, 31:5, 803–15, doi: 10.1080/01436597.2010.502695. Gellner, E. (1983), Muslim Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gumuscu, S. (July 2010), “Class, status, and party: The changing face of political Islam in Turkey and Egypt,” Comparative Political Studies, 43:7, 835–61. Halliday, F. (2003), Islam and the Myth of Confrontation: Religion and Politics in the Middle East, New York. NY: IB Tauris. Halliday, F. (2005), The Middle East in International Relations: Power, Politics and Ideology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Halliday, F. (5 March 2009), “Iran’s revolution in global history,” OpenDemocracy, accessed 22 September 2017, accessible at: https://www.opendemocracy.net/article/iran-s-revolution-in-global-history Hamid, S. (2014), Temptations of Power: Islamists and Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hamid, S. (2016), Islamic Exceptionalism, New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. Hassan, M. (2017), Longing for the Lost Caliphate: A Transregional History, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Harrigan, J. and H. el-Said (2009), Economic Liberalisation, Social Capital and Islamic Welfare Provision, London: Palgrave MacMillan. Haykel, B. (2009), “On the nature of Salafi thought and action,” in ed, R. Meijer, Global Salafism: Islam’s New Religious Movement, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Hazbun, W. (1 September 2015) “A history of insecurity: from the Arab Uprisings to ISIS,” Middle East Policy, 22:3, 55–65, doi: 10.1111/mepo.12143. Hinnebusch, R.A. (1981), “Egypt under Sadat: Elites, power structure, and political change in a postpopulist state,” Social Problems, 28:4, 442–464. Hinnebusch, R.A. (1985), Egyptian Politics under Sadat: The Post-populist Development of the AuthoritarianModernizing State, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hirschkind, C. (2011), “What is political Islam?” in ed, F. Volpi, Political Islam: A Critical Reader, Abingdon: Routledge. Hoffmann, C. and C. Cemgil (1 October 2016), “The (un)making of the Pax Turca in the Middle East: Understanding the social-historical roots of foreign policy,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 29:4, 1279–302. Haroub, K. (ed, 2010), Political Islam: Context versus Ideology, SOAS Middle East Issues, London: Saqi in association with London Middle East Institute, SOAS. Ismail, S. (2003), Rethinking Islamist Politics: Culture, the State and Islamism, London: I.B. Tauris. Kepel, G. (2009), Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, revised edition, London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd. Kepel, G. (1985), The Prophet and Pharaoh: Muslim extremism in contemporary Egypt, London: Saqi. Kerr, M.H. (1971), The Arab Cold War: Gamal ’Abd al-Nasir and His Rivals, 1958–1970, third edition, London: Published for the Royal Institute of International Affairs by Oxford University Press. Lacroix, S. (2011), Awakening Islam: The Politics of Religious Dissent in Contemporary Saudi Arabia, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lacroix, S. (November 2016), “Egypt’s pragmatic Salafis: The politics of al-Nour,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace—Papers. Lerner, D. (1958), The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East, Glencoe, IL: Free Press. 163

Ewan Stein and Neil Russell

Mahmood, S. (2012), Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mandaville, P.G. (2002), Transnational Muslim Politics: Reimagining the Umma, Taylor & Francis. Masoud, T. (2014), Counting Islam: Religion, Class, and Elections in Egypt, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meijer, R. (2010), “Salafism: doctrine, diversity and practice,” in ed, K. Hroub, Political Islam: Context versus Ideology, London: Saqi in Association with London Middle East Institute, SOAS. Mitchell, R.P. (1993), The Society of the Muslim Brothers, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Monroe, S.L. (2012), “Salafis in parliament: Democratic attitudes and party politics in the Gulf,” The Middle East Journal, 66:3, 409–24. Nafissi, M.R. (1 February 1998), “Reframing orientalism: Weber and Islam,” Economy and Society, 27:1, 98–118. Pierret, T. (2016), “Salafis at War in Syria: Logics of fragmentation and realignment,” in eds, F. Cavatorta and F. Merone, Salafism After the Arab Awakening: Contending With People’s Power, pp. 137–53, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Piscatori, J.P. (1986), Islam in a World of Nation-States, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Piscatori, J. (January 2012), “Secular aspirations and political Islam in the Arab Middle East: The 1950s reconsidered,” Maghreb Review 37:1, 3. Proctor, J.H. (1965), “Introduction,” in ed, J.H. Proctor, Islam and International Relations, London: Pall Mall Press. Schwedler, J. (April 2011), “Can Islamists become moderates? Rethinking the inclusion-moderation hypothesis,” World Politics, 63:2, 347–76. Stein, E. (June 2011), “An ‘uncivil’ partnership: Egypt’s Jama’a Islamiyya and the state after the Jihad,” Third World Quarterly, 33:5. Stein, E. (July 2017), “Ideological codependency and regional order: Iran, Syria, and the Axis of Refusal,” PS: Political Science Politics, 50:3, 676–80. Stein, E. (December 2016), “Islamists and liberal values in the Middle East,” Current History, 115:785, 363–5. Vatikiotis, P.J. (1965), “Islam and the foreign policy of Egypt,” in ed, J.H. Proctor, Islam and International Relations, London: Pall Mall Press. Volpi, F. and E. Stein (2015), “Islamism and the state after the Arab Uprisings: Between people power and state power,” Democratization, 22:2, 276–93. Wickham, C.R. (2002), Mobilizing Islam: Religion, Activism, and Political Change in Egypt, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Wiktorowicz, Q. (2011), “A genealogy of radical Islam,” in ed, F. Volpi, Political Islam: A critical reader, Abingdon: Routledge. Yapp, M. (1996), The Near East Since the First World War: A History to 1995, second edition, London and New York, NY: Routledge. Zisser, E. (2 October 2017), “Syria—from the Six Day War to the Syrian Civil War,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 44:4, 545–58, doi: 10.1080/13530194.2017.1360011. Zollner, B. (August 2007), “Prison talk: The Muslim Brotherhood’s internal struggle during Gamal Abdel Nasser’s persecution, 1954–1971,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 39:3, 411–33. Zubaida, S. (May 1995), “Is there a Muslim society? Ernest Gellner’s sociology of Islam,” Economy and Society, 24, 151–88, doi: 10.1080/03085149500000007.

164

12 Civil society in the Middle East and North Africa Vincent Durac

Introduction Since the end of the Cold War, the concept of civil society has assumed enormous significance in relation to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Its purported centrality to the process of democratization has played a major role in policymaking on the region and, in turn, attracted a great deal of scholarly attention. This chapter examines the origins of civil society in Western political thought, variously understood as it has been, and, particularly, its asserted relationship with democracy. It then explores the relevance of the concept to the MENA region, which has been disputed by some who argue that the specifically Western origins of civil society render it inapplicable to non-Western contexts. This is followed by a survey of the expansion of the civil society sector in the Middle East following the end of the Cold War with a focus on the emergence of a school of thought that is sceptical of the claim that a proliferation of civil society organizations (CSOs) is positively correlated with democratic political reform. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Middle Eastern civil society in the aftermath of the 2011 Arab Uprisings and calls for a rethinking of the concept and the possible implications of such a reconsideration.

Civil society and democracy Understandings of the concept of civil society in the Western political tradition are far from monolithic. Kumar (1993) observes that, until the end of the eighteenth century, the term “civil society” was synonymous with the state or “political society,” reflecting its classical origins. However, in the second half of the eighteenth century, there was a break with the equivalence of civil society with the state. New ideas about civil society developed in response to what has been characterized as a perceived crisis in the ruling social order caused by the rise of the market economy and “the breakdown of traditional paradigms of authority” (Edwards 2004). Enlightenment thinkers such as Locke, Paine, Ferguson and Smith developed an understanding of civil society as a sphere distinct from the state and with forms and principles of its own. This conceptualization of civil society was elaborated in the context of debates about despotic rule and how to counteract it. Civil society was viewed as a “self-regulating universe of associations” 165

Vincent Durac

committed to the same ideals that needed to be protected from the state in order to preserve its role in resisting despotism. Central to this view of civil society was its function in curbing the power of centralizing institutions, protecting pluralism and nurturing “constructive social norms.” A highly articulated civil society was seen as the foundation of a stable democratic polity (Edwards 2004). While enormously influential, the liberal view of civil society has not gone unchallenged. Hegel focused on the conflict and inequality that existed between different economic and political interests within civil society while Gramsci compared civil society to “the labyrinthine trench systems of modern warfare” (Keane 1998) and emphasized the role it played in the manufacture and maintenance of hegemony (Kumar 1993). However, despite the diversity of understandings of civil society in Western political theory, the liberal conception of civil society, understood as “the zone of voluntary associative life beyond family and clan affiliations, but separate from the state and the market” (Hawthorne 2004) has been enormously influential. This approach sees civil society as a buffer to the power of the state and positively correlated with democracy. Thus, democracy depends on the activities of “particularist, selfdetermining associations” of civil society, which performs three key functions for democracy: it serves as a centre of collective resistance against oppressive government; it organizes people for democratic participation; and it socializes people into the political values necessary for selfgovernment (Rosenblum and Post 2002). The expansion of civil society will therefore lead to the expansion of liberal and democratic values. This understanding of the relationship between civil society and democracy drew strength from a particular interpretation of events in Central and Eastern Europe and in Latin America at the end of the Cold War in which the activism of CSOs was seen as both a support for democracy where it existed and a catalyst for democratic change where it did not (Hawthorne 2004; Yom 2005). The most prominent actors in the struggle against authoritarian rule in Central and Eastern Europe and in Latin America were civil society groups and activists whose engagement in the creation of networks and groups, where the issues of human rights and political reform were promoted, led to a mobilization from below that authoritarian regimes could no longer suppress. Others have noted how this understanding of civil society was viewed as a panacea for the ills of state-led and Keynesianinspired development models by proponents of neo-liberal reforms that included the minimization of the role of the state, privatization of the public sector and the abolition of social welfare supports. In this paradigm, CSOs would fill the gap left by the rolling back of the state (Abdel Rahman 2002). In contrast to this optimism regarding the potential of civil society to play a central role in the process of democratization, a number of writers have pointed to the anti-democratic potential of civil society. Berman (1997) points to research which showed that the rise of radical and anti-democratic movements in the United States and Europe during the interwar and post-war eras was not the work of unattached, isolated individuals but often of those who actively participated in CSOs. She concludes that civil society often serves to fragment rather than unite a society, accentuating and deepening pre-existing cleavages—the most dramatic example of this being interwar Germany where a flourishing civil society exacerbated rather than alleviated the country’s divisions (Berman 1997). More recently, according to Chambers and Kopstein (2001), the post-Cold War societies of Russia and Eastern Europe have witnessed the emergence of organizations that mobilized citizens around proto-fascist ideologies. The ambiguity of the relationship between civil society and democracy has led some to question the extent to which civil society activism can lead to democratic political change. Kamrava (2007) identifies a crucial distinction between “civil society” and CSOs. CSOs are the various organizations and groups whose collective efforts over time make the emergence of 166

Civil society in the MENA

civil society possible. They are frequently issue-specific and issue-driven and often emerge in response to the inability or unwillingness of the state to perform functions which society relies on it to perform. He argues that the emergence over time of CSOs and later of civil society is contingent on the nature and extent of the relationship between the state and larger society. Since democratic transition will not be made possible until an authoritarian regime is confronted with a crisis of power, CSOs, and even civil society, are in themselves inconsequential, so long as they do not directly weaken state power. While they do give social actors a sense of empowerment, that is not the same thing as an institutional weakening of the state. Kamrava (2007) concludes that civil society does not, by itself, lead to democratization. Indeed, its existence is not even a prerequisite for democratic transition.

The application of civil society to the Middle East Is there a MENA civil society? There has been significant debate also on whether or not the concept of civil society has validity in the context of the Middle East. Here the core assumption is that civil society emerged from the Western political experience and from Western political theory and, as such, has no little or no application in non-Western settings. Mardin (1995) characterizes civil society as “a Western dream” which did not translate into Islamic terms. For Mardin, civil society with its core components of an autonomous sphere of social action, defence of the rule of civil law and respect for “individual cognition” stood in essential contrast with “the Muslim dream of society” in which “the Muslim would bow only to the political obligations set by the Qur’an.” Hall (1995) echoes this view, arguing that Islam possessed a civilizational vision of its own, radically opposed to that of the West, which obviated any equivalent to “occidental liberties.” However, Kamali (2006) rejects the “West-centred” theoretical bias of most discussions of civil society. He argues that neither individualism nor democratic institutions are necessary for civil society to exist. The basis of civil society is the existence of influential groups and their institutions, which can, through established mechanisms, counterbalance state power. In Islamic societies, the existence of civil society depends not on the presence of sovereign and free individuals, but on groups and communities that enjoy a significant degree of autonomy from the state. In particular, Kamali focuses on the role played by the ulama in Islamic societies. Their economic independence from the state and their autonomous access to the state provided a legitimate basis from which to challenge the state. The existence of the manbar (pulpit) provided a public setting for the promulgation and legitimization of political ideas while delegitimizing others and mobilizing support while the monopoly enjoyed by the ulama over Islamic law allowed them to defend traditional civil society against the state’s intervention. Finally, the social solidarity of the Islamic community was institutionalized in civil society practices and protected by the two powerful groups of this civil society—the ulama and the merchants (Kamali 2006). Browers (2004) discusses the relevance of civil society in contemporary political thought in the Arab world. She suggests that the concept of civil society has been “ardently” applied by Western scholars to developing and democratizing regions, usually to draw attention to their deficiencies in this regard. However, neither civil society nor democracy have remained confined to any particular context but have entered the discourse of intellectuals and activists throughout the world. By the 1990s, at least, it was possible to detect, among a broad and diverse sector of Arab intellectuals and activists, a shared political language that included the concept of civil society and that, despite variations in understandings of the concept, there was 167

Vincent Durac

broad agreement that enlarging a democratically engaged public sphere was a priority for the development of the Arab world (Browers 2006).

Civil society in the Middle East since the end of the Cold War However conceptualized, CSOs or other similar elements of civil society have historically existed in the MENA, whether in the form of political autonomous ulama or in the form of merchant guilds (Kamrava 2007). But, in particular, since the end of the Cold War, there has been an enormous increase in the scale of the region’s associational life. Yom (2005) estimated that the numbers of CSOs across the region had increased from 20,000 to 70,000 in the mid1990s with 14,000 in Egypt alone. More recent figures appear to show an even greater prolife­ ration of CSOs. According to official figures, Algeria has over 90,000 registered associations; Egypt now has 47,000; Tunisia has 21,000; and Yemen has 10,000. The figures for Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine are 8500, 108 and 3600, respectively. Carapico (2000) identified a set of domestic and international factors that help to explain this extraordinary rise in civic activism. At the domestic level, these included the suppression or co-option by regimes of opposition political parties and other outlets for “civil energies” together with the relatively greater licence given to religious, charitable, social, cultural and business associations, together with the impact of social trends in urbanization and education, increasing levels of anomie, and the encouragement of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) by international development agencies. At the international level, the increased level of civil society activity was encouraged by the tendency of international agencies to support NGOs while political factors—funds flowing from the Palestinian-Israel peace process and the impact of neo-democratization theory as well as the increased prominence of NGOs, international conferences on human rights, environmental and feminist concerns—were also significant. The expansion in the salience of civil society in the Middle East was given particular impetus by the end of the Cold War which brought with it an increased interest in the issues of political reform and democratization in the region. The assumption that civil society and democratization are inextricably linked quickly fed into the policymaking realm. The post-Cold War goal of “democracy promotion” in the MENA was increasingly tied to the belief that support for the development and strengthening of civil society was crucial to the project of encouraging democratic political reform. Based on the experiences of Latin America and Eastern Europe in the 1980s, CSOs were seen as a critical counterbalance to the power of the state, representing an autonomous sphere of social engagement. As a result, donors were willing to fund CSOs in the region in the hope that they would facilitate democracy and promote human rights (Wiktorowicz 2002). For instance, in 2002, the United States government set up the Middle East Partnership Initiative amongst the objectives of which were the strengthening of civil society and the rule of law across the region. In a similar fashion, in 2006, the European Union established the European Instrument for Democratization and Human Rights whose specific mission is “to strengthen the role of civil society in the promotion of human rights, political pluralism and democratic participation and representation.” Even the World Bank put programmes in place to promote the goals of democratization and political pluralism through its links with CSOs. While these initiatives were unsuccessful in their ostensible goal of assisting the democratic transformation of the Middle East, they reflected the widespread assumption that civil society could and should drive change from below (Cavatorta and Durac 2010; Carapico 2014). But, while the numbers of CSOs rose in absolute terms across the region, this masked significant variation at the national level in terms of legislative provision (or otherwise) for civil society activism. In a number of countries, including Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon, Jordan and 168

Civil society in the MENA

Yemen, the legal frameworks within which civil society operated were permissive to varying extents. In Morocco, the 1958 law regulating CSOs, was amended in 2002 and in 2006 to make it easier for associations to register and operate. The law provided for a “declaratory” regime under which organizations simply declare their existence to local authorities, secure a provisional receipt to operate, and a permanent one after a maximum of 60 days. Post-unification Yemen enshrined freedom of association in the constitution of the new state. The 2001 law on associations and foundations is the most enabling law governing CSOs in the Arabian Peninsula. The law provides for a simple registration process. On receipt of an application to register, the Ministry of Pensions and Social Affairs has one month in which to accept or reject the application. If the application is not dealt with in this time, it is deemed to have been accepted. In Algeria, by contrast, the law states that an association cannot be set up without securing the necessary permit and fulfilling the relevant administrative requirements. However, the state can reject an application for a permit where a proposed association’s work is deemed “detrimental” to the national struggle for liberation. Even following registration, the state monitors CSOs and can require the courts to suspend or disband an organization deemed to be breaking the law. No appeal is possible against such a judicial ruling (Cavatorta and Durac 2010). In Jordan, the 2008 law on societies replaced legislation enacted in 1966 which permitted extensive government interference in the affairs of CSOs. The new law, as subsequently amended, guaranteed the right to hold meetings and to establish societies, syndicates and political parties, provided that their objectives are lawful, their methods peaceful and their by-laws not contrary to the constitution. However, three broad restrictions apply: the law gives significant discretion to the government, and ultimately the royal court, in granting authorization to associations; the authorities retain significant and restrictive supervisory powers over associations, reflecting regime concerns about security; the Ministry of Social Development can suspend the board of any association and replace it with its own interim appointees. While a great deal of the academic and policy focus in the MENA has been on CSOs with broadly political aims, these constitute a minority of the sector. Hawthorne (2004) identifies five “sectors” of civil society in the post-Cold War Middle East. The most active and widespread of these is the Islamic sector, made up of a wide range of organizations and movements whose common aim is the upholding and propagation of Islam. The second sector, non-governmental service organizations (or service NGOs), provides a range of services that complement or sometimes substitute for government services and are more acceptable to governments than Islamic organizations. The third sector, membership-based organizations, includes labour unions, professional syndicates and chambers of commerce. The fourth sector consists of associations whose objective is the promotion of solidarity. This includes mutual aid societies, artists and writers organizations and youth organizations. Finally, the fifth sector consists of organizations which seek to promote democratic concepts among their fellow citizens and press their governments to adhere to democratic norms. Hawthorne (2004) observes that a “very tiny percentage” of associative life takes place within this sector because the groups involved are significantly smaller in number than those in the other sectors. One clear consequence of this is the fact that, despite the enormous increase in the numbers of CSOs in the Middle East and the range of their activities following the end of the Cold War, the impact on political structures was minimal. Notwithstanding the expectation, implicit, if not explicit, in much analysis, that a robust and proliferating civil society would promote democratic political reform, the reality was very different. Hawthorne (2004) noted that, contrary to the optimism predicated on its democratizing potential, civil society did not make a real dent in the Arab world’s “durable authoritarianism.” Yom (2005) cited the “icy reality” that nearly two decades after scholars noted its “rejuvenation,” civil society had not yielded any results in 169

Vincent Durac

pushing Arab states towards democratic transition, while al-Najjar wrote in 2008 that “it is rare to find anywhere in the region a civil society capable of imposing its will and wishes, or even making an impact on government decision-making.” The ineffectiveness of civil society in the region in political terms has been the subject of an increasingly critical academic literature in which two broad and complementary strands can be identified. The first of these focuses on the relationship between the state and civil society in the Middle East. The second addresses a set of issues to do with the character of civil society in the region.

Civil society and the state A number of writers have noted that the relationship between civil society and the state in the Middle East is very different from that posited in the ideal-type of civil society. According to Rosenblum and Post (2002), it is the responsibility of the state to provide a legal framework within which civil society can operate. From this perspective, the state is conceived as a neutral actor overseeing civil society, providing a framework for its functioning and resolving any difficulties that flow from this. However, in the Middle East, this is typically not the role performed by the state. As Yom (2005) points out, civil society grew not because the state retreated but because authoritarian incumbents deployed a new tactic of control—granting concessions too mild to produce a systemic change but enough to merit symbolic applause at home and abroad. Thus, the emergence of a space for civil society activism in the region was not a consequence of bottom-up mobilization but of top-down and regime-led processes of political liberalization which had as their fundamental objective regime maintenance and not political reform or democratization. Regime efforts to contain and co-opt civil society take a number of forms, from what Wiktorowicz (2002) refers to as “administrative repression” to the “colonization” of the civil society space to outright repression. In Jordan, Law 33 of 1966 prohibits the use of nongovernmental organizations for political gains. The law provides the state with the power to regulate the minutiae of organizational activities and establishes “mechanisms for surveillance” to maximize social control. The most important requirement is that the organization must maintain a detailed record of all its activities, to be submitted in an annual report to the state (Wiktorowicz 2000). Even in those states with more permissive legislative frameworks, significant restrictions on the operations of CSOs remain (ICNL 2017a). Morocco’s otherwise liberal provision for the registration of CSOs contains express limitations. Associations may be denied legal status if “it is founded on a cause or with an objective that is illegal, contrary to good morals or that aims at undermining the Islamic religion, the integrity of the national territory or the monarchical regime, or that calls for discrimination.” Yemen’s law of 2001 provided for up to 1 year’s imprisonment for a number of offences including undertaking activities that are “in excess of the purposes for which the association or foundation was established” (Durac 2013). However, relations between civil society and the state are not simply antagonistic. A great deal of civic activism takes place in sectors where civil society and the state share similar goals or are otherwise interlinked. CSOs in the Arab world tend to lack autonomy from the state. The service NGO sector is often an extension of the state. Some service NGOs receive significant government funding producing a situation where competition for funding creates pressure to conform to what is “acceptable activism” (Altan-Olcay and Icduygu 2012). Other civil society actors, such as labour unions, chambers of commerce, and professional associations, rely on the state to promote their economic interests (Hawthorne 2004). These intertwining relationships between state and civil society are also characteristic of the Islamic sector. In some contexts, Islamic CSOs have been supported by governments as counterweights to 170

Civil society in the MENA

secular opposition forces. Turkish CSOs that share the ideology of the ruling party enjoy a disproportionate level of state support (Doyle 2016). In others, they originate in conservative religious organizations that may have no interest in challenging established governments. State penetration of civil society often goes much further than this, extending to what has been characterized as the colonization of what should be an independent space. A recurring feature across the region is the creation by regimes or by figures closely associated with them of organizations that are labelled as constituent elements of civil society, but which lack any of the meaningful attributes of a CSO. In Syria, the wife of Bashar al-Asad was the initiator and patron of the Syria Trust, a large development organization which purported to promote the values of individualism, freedom and creativity. Suzanne Mubarak, the wife of the former Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, established or chaired a number of CSOs focused on the education of poor children amongst other objectives. Leila Trabelsi, wife of former Tunisian president Ben Ali, founded an association to help secure employment for disabled people, as well as SAIDA, which was an initiative to improve cancer treatment in the country. Jordan’s queens and princesses “manufactured” royal NGOs (RONGOs) to serve as partners for internationally sponsored projects in fields ranging from environmental protection to family law (Carapico 2014), while the wife of the King of Morocco, Princess Lalla Salma, is closely involved with the Association Lalla Salma Contre Le Cancer. Finally, when it is deemed necessary, states resort to outright repression in order to suppress the challenge of civil society. Some have outlawed independent civic activity entirely; others permit it under severe restrictions, including limiting the work of CSOs to social welfare provision or cultural activities, excluding political activities. In much of the region, CSOs, particularly those working on human rights, are characterized as destabilizing instruments of subversion intent on undermining national sovereignty (Wiktorowicz 2002). This has led the security services to target civil society activists and their activities. The staff of CSOs are investigated and applications for registration are rejected on security grounds, while regimes use emergency laws, harassment by security forces and arrests to isolate those whose activity is deemed unacceptable and to deter others who may contemplate doing the same (Hawthorne 2004).

The weakness of civil society However, the failure of civil society to mount an effective challenge to incumbent regimes across the Middle East is not solely attributable to the overweening power of the state. A number of commentators have drawn attention to specific characteristics of civil society in the region that have contributed to its ineffectiveness in mounting a challenge to autocratic regimes. Civil society organizations suffer from low levels of popular legitimacy, which stems from a number of causes. In the case of some, this has to do with their close relationship with or penetration by the state; for others, it has to do with the extent of their dependence on foreign donors. Both of these are exacerbated by the limited resources available to CSOs in the Middle East. CSOs often exhibit low levels of tolerance for the viewpoints of others, limited commitment to democratic norms either internally or in terms of broader ideology and, in many national settings, are characterized by ideological and other fragmentation, limiting the possibility for cross-ideological co-operation and further reducing the capacity of civil society more broadly to resist co-option and penetration by the state. In many countries, as seen above, CSOs operate within political and legislative frameworks in which their organizational independence is severely circumscribed and the space for civic activism strictly delimited by the state. While service-oriented CSOs may have close links with the state and rely on it to significant degrees for funding, political CSOs have been characterized 171

Vincent Durac

by their dependence on foreign sponsors, having strong support abroad but shallow roots at home, allowing them to be easily discredited by hostile governments as agents of foreign powers (Langohr 2004). For example, in 2002, the Egyptian civil society activist, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, was sentenced to 7 years in prison having been charged with receiving foreign funds without government permission, tarnishing Egypt’s image abroad and embezzling grant money from the European Commission. Furthermore, notwithstanding the expectation that a burgeoning civil society would be positively correlated with effective pressure on autocratic regimes for democratic political reforms, the place of democracy in the discourse and practice of CSOs in the region has been the subject of critique. In early studies of the development of civil society in the post-Cold War Middle East, both al-Sayyid (1993) and Norton (1993) identified lack of tolerance—the willingness to accept disparate political views and social attitudes—as a key feature of public life. Norton argued that civility is a quality that is missing in large parts of the Middle East. Hawthorne (2004) questioned the extent to which CSOs in the Middle East adhere to democratic norms. Islamic organizations are ambivalent about democracy, even if liberal Islamic perspectives have emerged in some contexts. Cavatorta (2006) contrasted the commitment of the Moroccan Jamiat al-Adl w’al-Ihsan to “procedural democracy” with the organization’s lack of internal democracy and illiberal positions on personal rights, which suggested that it was “far from the democratic, responsive and open organization” it claimed to be. More broadly, Altan-Olcay and Icduygu (2012) analyzed the results of a large-scale survey of civil society which included Turkey, Egypt and Lebanon, concluding that in many cases democracy was not always practised internally even when organizations professed to the promotion of the values of tolerance and democracy. In most states in the region, civil society is further characterized by a divide between the Islamic sector and pro-democracy organizations. In Algeria, “ideological competition” between secular activists and Islamists undermines any potential for co-operation across both sectors of civil society. From the point of view of the regime, the tension between the two is beneficial because ultimately secular organizations will support the regime if Islamists begin to gain political influence. In Morocco, while there has been some convergence of interests between secular and Islamist CSOs on the issue of human rights, on others the two sectors are far apart. Thus, while short-term cross-ideological co-operation is possible, the forging of long-term alliances for the purpose of transforming the political system is not. The underlying pattern is the same elsewhere in the region (Cavatorta and Durac 2010). “Political” civil society is also weakened by the fact that many organizations are simply focused on single-issues, such as respect for human rights, limiting their capacity to mobilize a broader set of constituencies around the larger goal of regime change (Langohr 2004). The pervasive weakness of civil society in the face of autocratic states has led some to conclude that, far from representing a challenge, civil society can in practice constitute a pillar of support for regimes. Heydemann (2007) identified appropriating and containing civil society as the first of five key features of what he calls “authoritarian upgrading,” a new model of authoritarian governance that emerged in a number of Arab states as regimes adapted to pressures for political change by developing strategies to contain and manage demands to democratize.

Civil society in the Middle East after the 2011 Uprisings According to Langohr (2004), the “Herculean” task of replacing authoritarian regimes is simply too much for CSOs. She argues that the focus on the democratic potential of civil society has diverted attention away from political parties which are better suited to challenge such regimes. Hawthorne (2004) also observes that optimism regarding the potential of civil society to effect 172

Civil society in the MENA

political change was misplaced. Rather, she argues, democratization in authoritarian contexts cannot occur without real politics or without conflict. These views appear particularly prescient in the light of the Arab Uprisings which witnessed popular mobilization across the region in late 2010 and early 2011. What was noticeable about the Uprisings, which forced the departure of long-standing autocratic leaders in four Arab states and appeared to threaten regime change in several others, was the fact that established civil society groups, including Islamists, were absent from anti-regime mobilizations, particularly in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria. Indeed, such organizations were as surprised as the regime leaders by the initial protests. In Egypt, when members of the Muslim Brotherhood belatedly joined the anti-regime protest movement, they did so having initially adopted a cautious stance and even then only under pressure from younger members. In Tunisia, the involvement of civil society in the anti-Ben Ali mobilization was limited at first. While members of CSOs, particularly the labour movement, did participate, they did so in an individual capacity and not as official members of the association to which they belonged (Cavatorta 2012). Elsewhere, CSOs were involved in attempts to stabilize new governments in Libya and Yemen while there was civil society involvement in protests in Morocco and Jordan. However, the driving force behind the Uprising came from what Yom (2015) refers to as “the realm of informality”—everyday citizens who, linked by technology and united by common norms, managed to challenge dictatorial regimes to the extent that civil society alone had rarely achieved. In the post-Uprising setting, with the success of counter-revolutionary forces, civil society has come under attack in several states in the region, further undermining its capacity to mount a challenge to autocratic regimes. The June 2013 “foreign funding” case in Egypt is illustrative of this trend. Some 43 local and foreign staff from international NGOs were sentenced to between 1 and 5 years imprisonment for a number of infringements, including “managing unlicensed branches” of their organizations, “conducting research, political training, surveys and workshops without licenses,” “training political parties” and “illegally receiving foreign funding” (Hellyer 2015). Subsequent changes to the law have tightened restrictions on civil society. The 2015 law on terrorism systematically “conflates crimes committed by violent groups with citizens’” and NGO activities when their use of freedom of expression and association collide with official policies (Hamzawy 2017). In December 2017, the Egyptian Ministry of Social Solidarity announced the drafting of implementing regulations for a new and extremely restrictive civil society law. CSOs of all types must register under the law and comply with its provisions. In Algeria, a new law on associations created additional restrictions on freedom of association, giving the government broad discretion to refuse to register associations and denying them an adequate remedy to repeal any such rejection. The law also gives the government the power to suspend an association’s activities or dissolve it on vague grounds, places restrictions on the founders of associations making it difficult for associations to receive foreign funding and imposes heavy fines and criminal penalties for members or leaders of informal associations (ICNL 2017b). In Yemen and Syria, violent conflict has placed civil society activists at risk to the extent that some groups have ceased to function (Yom 2015). However, the picture regarding civil society activism is not uniformly bleak. Moghadam and Mohr (2015) discuss how women’s organizations were at the forefront of calls for more expansive women’s rights and political representation in both Tunisia and Morocco after 2011 while Dalmasso (2014) analyzes the role of two Moroccan CSOs—the Organisation Marocaine des Droits Humains (OMDH) and the Association Democratique des Femmes de Maroc (ADFM) in the constitutional reform process that followed protests in February 2011. She argues that both organizations have been able to obtain what sectors of Moroccan society consider democratic victories, such as more rights for women and the selective recognition of human rights violations during 173

Vincent Durac

the previous regime. However, as Dalmasso (2014) notes, their success was not least because both organizations adopted an “apolitical” stance towards the broader question of the political system in the country as a whole. The limited role of civil society in promoting or contributing to political change has led some to call for a reconceptualization of the concept. Cavatorta (2012) suggests that it is necessary to broaden the definition of civil society in order to examine where the societal challenge to authoritarianism comes from. Such a redefinition should avoid the assumption that civil society has exclusively liberal-normative connotations and recognize that it is not just about formal hierarchical structures and organizations. The first point recalls a theme in the pre-2011 academic discourse on civil society in the Middle East and beyond, which rejected the assumption that civil society, democratization and democracy were intrinsically linked. Kopecky and Mudde (2003) argued that civil society could be both strong and “uncivil” at the same time. They called for a radical readjustment of the conceptual understanding of civil society, which would recognize that there is no straightforward relationship between CSOs and their effect on democracy. “Civil” movements are not, by definition, good for democracy or democratization just as “uncivil” movements are not by definition bad for democracy or democratization. What is key is the interaction between CSOs and their environment, including other CSOs and the state. Thus, empirical research on civil society should study the nature of the relationship between CSOs and democracy rather than assuming it (Kopecky and Mudde 2003). A reconceptualization of civil society requires the recognition that civic activism in the region, as demonstrated by the course of the Arab Uprisings, is not limited to formal organizations and structures. As Challand (2011) observes, there may be more to civil society than its organized form. Yom (2015) proposes that the concept, freed of its formalistic and Westernoriented boundaries, should include not just physical organizations but the informal sector that spawned the Uprisings in the first place. This would admit of a wide variety of forces that are missed by analyses that are founded on the “old criteria” of ideological orientation, organizational resources and opportunity structures. The fluidity of such a reconceptualization is captured in Geha’s (2016) study of Libyan civil society in 2011 in which “[e]veryone was a member of civil society.” She argues for a “disconnection” between what academics look for in defining civil society and what activists in Libya were constructing for themselves, concluding that civil society is not a set of organizations but is rather “a space for people to meet, interact and voice their priorities” (Geha 2016).

Conclusion A reconceptualization of civil society, as ideologically neutral, amorphous and not intrinsically linked to physical institutions and organizations may be a useful means of capturing the diversity of civic activism in the contemporary Middle East that more static understandings cannot comprehend. It could lead to a greater understanding of political dynamics as they are in the region rather than as outsiders might want them to be. Finally, an amorphous understanding of civil society is also helpful in making sense of the kind of political activism that sparked the 2011 Uprisings. However, adopting this approach would require acknowledgement that civil society, thus reconceptualized, is also unlikely to be the vehicle for the political transformation of autocratic states in the MENA, in the absence of mechanisms for the translation of that amorphous political participation into organizations and institutions with popular legitimacy, capable of making meaningful demands of those states and ensuring the achievement of those demands. 174

Civil society in the MENA

References Abdel Rahman. M. (2002), “The politics of ‘un-civil’ society in Egypt,” Review of African Political Economy, 91, 21–35. Al-Najjar, B.S. (2008), “Civil society in the Arab world: A reality that needs reforming,” Contemporary Arab Affairs, 1:1, 43–54. Al-Sayyid, M.K. (1993), “A civil society in Egypt?” Middle East Journal, 47:1, 228–41. Altan-Olcay, O. and A. Icduygu (2012), “Mapping civil society in the Middle East: The cases of Egypt, Lebanon and Turkey,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 39:2, 157–79. Berman, S. (1997), “Civil society and political institutionalization,” American Behavioral Scientist, 40:5, 562–74. Browers, M.L. (2004), “Arab liberalisms: Translating civil society, prioritising democracy,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 7:1, 51–75. Browers, M.L. (2006), Democracy and Civil Society in Arab Political Thought: Transcultural Possibilities, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Carapico, S. (2000), “NGOs, INGOs, GO-NGOs and DO-NGOs: Making sense of non-governmental organizations,” Middle East Report, Spring, 214, 12–5. Carapico, S. (2014), Political Aid and Arab Activism: Democracy Promotion, Justice and Representation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cavatorta, F. (2006), “Civil society, Islamism and democratisation: the case of Morocco,” The Journal of Modern African Studies, 44:2, 203–22. Cavatorta, F. (2012), “Arab Spring: the awakening of civil society. A general overview,” IEMed Observatory of European Policies, accessible at http://www.iemed.org/observatori-en/areesdanalisi/documents/ anuari/med.2012/arab-spring-the-awakening-of-civil-society.-a-general-overview Cavatorta, F. and V. Durac (2010), Civil Society and Democratization in the Arab World, London: Routledge. Challand, B. (2011), “The counter-power of civil society and the emergence of a new political imaginary in the Arab world,” Constellations, 18:3, 271–83. Chambers, S. and J. Kopstein (2001), “Bad civil society,” Political Theory, 29:6, 837–65. Dalmasso, E. (2014), “Apolitical civil society and the constitutional debate in Morocco,” in eds, L. Anceschi, G. Gervasio and A. Teti, Informal Power in the Greater Middle East: Hidden Geographies, London: Routledge. Doyle, J.L. (2016), “Civil society as ideology in the Middle East: A critical perspective,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 43:3, 403–22. Durac, V. (2013), “Entrenching authoritarianism or promoting reform: Civil society in contemporary Yemen,” in ed, F. Cavatorta, Civil Society Under Authoritarian Rule: A Comparative Perspective, London: Routledge. Edwards, M. (2004), Civil Society, Cambridge: Polity Press. Geha, C. (2016), “Understanding Libya’s civil society,” Middle East Institute, accessible at: http://www. mei.edu/content/map/understanding-libya-s-civil-society Hall, J. (1995), “In search of civil society” in ed, J. Hall, Civil Society: Theory, History, Comparisons, Cambridge: Polity. Hamzawy, A. (2017), Legislating Authoritarianism: Egypt’s New Era of Repression, Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, accessible at: http://carnegieendowment.org/2017/03/16/ legislating-authoritarianism-egypt-s-new-era-of-repression-pub-68285 Hawthorne, A. (2004), “Middle Eastern democracy: Is civil society the answer?,” Carnegie Papers: Democracy and the Rule of Law Project, 44, 1–26. Hellyer, H.A. (2015), “Civil society,” Adelphi Series, 55:453–4, 131–50. Heydeman, S. (2007), “Upgraded Authoritarianism in the Arab world,” Brookings Working Paper, accessible at http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2007/10/arabworld International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL) (2017a), “Civic freedom monitor: Morocco,” accessible at: http://www.icnl.org/research/monitor/morocco.html International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL) (2017b), “Civic freedom monitor: Egypt,” accessible at: http://www.icnl.org/research/monitor/egypt.html. Kamali, M. (2006), Multiple Modernities, Civil Society and Islam: The Case of Iran and Turkey, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Kamrava, M. (2007), “The Middle East’s democracy deficit in comparative perspective,” Perspectives on Global Development and Technology, 6:1, 189–213. 175

Vincent Durac

Keane, J. (1998), Civil Society: Old Images, New Visions, Cambridge: Polity Press. Kopecky, P. and C. Mudde (2003), “Rethinking civil society,” Democratization, 10:3, 1–14. Kumar, K. (1993), “Civil society: An inquiry into the usefulness of an historical term,” The British Journal of Sociology, 44:3, 375–95. Langohr, V. (2004), “Too much civil society, too little politics: Egypt and liberalizing Arab regimes,” Comparative Politics, 36:2, 181–204. Mardin, S. (1995), “Civil Society and Islam” in ed, J. Hall, Civil Society: Theory, History, Comparisons, Cambridge: Polity. Moghadam, V.M. and E. Mohr (2015), “Women’s Rights organizations and democratic transitions: North Africa and Southeast Asia compared,” Middle East Institute, accessible at: http://www.mei.edu/ content/map/women’s-rights-organizations-and-democratic-transitions-north-africa-and-southeastasia-compared Norton, A. (1993), “The future of civil society in the Middle East,” Middle East Journal, 47:2, 205–16. Rosenblum, N.L. and R.C. Post (eds, 2002), Civil Society and Government, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wiktorowicz, Q. (2000), “Civil society as social control: state power in Jordan,” Comparative Politics, 33:1, 43–61. Wiktorowicz, Q. (2002), “The political limits to nongovernmental organizations in Jordan,” World Development, 30:1, 77–93. Yom, S. (2015), “Arab civil society after the Arab Spring: Weaker but deeper,” Middle East Institute, accessible at: http://www.mei.edu/content/map/arab-civil-society-after-arab-spring-weaker-deeper Yom, S. L. (2005), “Civil society and democratization in the Arab world,” Middle East Review of International Affairs, 9:4, 14–33.

176

13 The Arab Spring is not lost Moral protest as the embodiment of a new politics Larbi Sadiki and Layla Saleh

Introduction Porous borders are the pathways for the travel of the idea of “protest” and its discontents. Communication and information technologies have carried and inflected the presence of “peoplehood” in various directions and milieus. While agency was the instrumental factor in revolutions, including the Arab Uprisings, the technologies deployed in them helped instil, cultivate, and socialize an ethos of dissent. A self-conscious awareness of agency was produced through both the medium and the message. Peoplehood has been an ideal pursued by the young citizens of the postcolonial Arab state in recent years. Despite the unevenness of the distribution of the fruits of globalization, local social contexts are increasingly connected to global events and trends. In the Maghreb, particularly Tunisia and Morocco, the call to protest is being heeded. Those who are still awaiting the benefits of bygone independence and the recent promise of the Arab Spring are concentrated in the peripheries of the postcolonial state. Tunisia’s paradoxical fate after the ousting of Ben Ali is anchored in the youth bulge that demands attention after decades of marginalization in such peripheral regions. Tataouine in southern Tunisia has become a hotspot of the dismissal of the formal sphere of politics. Citizens have exercised their capacity to mobilize collectively in a successful bid to occupy and disrupt the shared spaces that bring ordinary people, the state, and multinational corporations together in an uneasy asymmetry (Souissi 2017). A democratizing of the access to these spaces is accompanied by the demand for jobs in the region’s lucrative oilfields. Morocco’s al-Hoceima region has experienced a similar mobilizing of citizens at the periphery of the globalized form of the nation-state in its postcolonial variety. Direct protests seek to redraw the borders of power between the Makhzan core and the Berber periphery. However, it would be simplistic to reduce the current popular upheaval to an ethnic conflict between Arab and Berber or to understate the economic discontent. The most compelling interpretation arises from an approach combining the global travel of ideas, people, and goods on the one hand and a new politics from below. “Peoplehood” (henceforth, al-hirak) in the Moroccan context is paradoxically the culmination of apathy towards the formal manifestations of politics and the pursuit of justice and dignity (Alami 2017). Non-violent protests in al-Hoceima show the intensity of the interconnectedness and awareness of protesters to a global language of dissent inflected in local contexts. 177

Larbi Sadiki and Layla Saleh

This chapter explores the “Arab Spring” popular Uprisings sweeping the MENA region since late 2010 to explore moral protest as a dynamic of new politics “from below.” The threefold argument presented here begins with a conceptualization of the bottom-up “protest politics” as al-hirak, an agential Arab peoplehood dissenting against authoritarianism, manifesting in various modes and to various effects across the Arab geography (Sadiki 2016). Clearly, this hirak and its impact has been far from uniform, in some cases featuring concurrence between state and society (e.g. Tunisia) while incongruous and violently countered by state elites in others (e.g. Egypt and Syria). Second, the chapter emphasizes the continuity and permanence of moral protest and its emancipatory content as a defining feature of al-hirak, despite cases of polarization and even fragmentation spanning state and society. The contention here is that this normative terrain, a moral workshop of sorts, opens up an arch of possibilities that did not exist prior to 2011. Its implications for challenging dawlat al-ikrah (the coercive apparatus of the authoritarian state) are profound. Third, the chapter calls for a rethinking of the social and political upheavals of the past 7 years, away from a prevalent “Arab Winter” narrative that considers the regionwide protests of 2011 and 2012 a fleeting aberration aborted by resurgent authoritarianism, civil conflict, and state breakdown dotting the map of Arab politics. A stock-taking that emphasizes “publics” rather than the institutional and organizational trappings of the state can equip scholars to identify and begin to analyze what are arguably persistent disruptions of the socio-politicaleconomic (dis)order. Here lies the potentially deep, if long-term, impact on the distribution of power and resources across the Arab world.

Al-hirak: “peoplehood” in the Arab Spring The distinctly Arab Spring-type revolts of 2011 and the events that attended upon them have set the stage for polarization of state–society power relations within and between states in the region. The fragmentary nature of this moment marks the new politics evident across the region’s vast geography. The twin protest-contest dynamic and explosion of violence has left an enduring mark. The Arab Spring cannot be oversimplified by reducing it to manifestations of “hungry mobs” or “street politics” (Sadiki 2009). It is indirectly a public opinion barometer that speaks to important issues of distribution of power and wealth. For example, the Arab Human Development agenda is noted for glaring deficits in need of urgent attention. They include deficits in inclusiveness, freedom, equality, empowerment, and knowledge (UNDP 2003). The emerging trends that are driving the process of change—for and against stability—be they violent or non-violent, spontaneous or planned, top-down or bottom-up, and motivated by domestic or external agenda-setting, all point to a heightened state of polarity in state–society relations. The centre and margin seem to be locked into a kind of logic of rivalry. As a result of the Uprisings, the political margin has rekindled the practice of speaking back (dissent and protest) or striking back (with physical force). The political margin has always challenged the centre, emerging every now and again when the state retreats or is complacent (Sadiki 2000). Non-state actors have been potent, e.g. the Muslim Brotherhood spread from Egypt to Arab and non-Arab locales during the twentieth century. Externally, the Arab Spring has created openings for discourses and forces that have produced (ideologically and materially) transnational entanglements. The “fallout” from these entanglements has complicated the region’s politics. The proliferation of non-state actors, flowing from new national politics, has its imprint all over the chessboard that is the Middle East, seeking to transform the game with nonconventional gambits. The peoplehood (al-hirak), is today on full display, taking both civic and unruly permutations (Sadiki 2016). For example, its drive to change the political landscape in the Arab Middle East on behalf of the forces of re-Islamization has, from the outset, accompanied 178

The Arab Spring is not lost

the Arab Uprisings. It has manifested itself within non-state actors, namely Islamists who have indelibly imprinted on the Arab Spring, either as legal or illegal agents of change. These unruly permutations seem to outweigh the impact of secularist forces and are checked only by forces of the so-called “deep state” (the armed forces) in countries such as Egypt and Syria. Peacefully and violently, Islamist non-state actors have contributed a great deal to the drive to reconfigure power in the Arab Middle East. Political activity revolving around the poles of ruly and unruly forms by non-state actors using violent and non-violent methods, as well as combinations of the two (Hizbollah and Libya Dawn) propelled to prominence in the Arab Spring has not been uniform. Neither have been its effects. It has led to a state of affairs which includes longstanding regimes falling (such as those of Ben Ali, Gaddafi and Mubarak), those stubbornly holding on to power (such as Asad and Bouteflika), and others co-opting opposition movements (King Mohamed VI).

Peoplehood: the periphery “can’t speak” The postcolonial ruling houses in the Arab world, elites associated with the military bureaucracy and comprador capitalist groups are complicit in exploiting the working poor in both the centre and the periphery. They control financial, technical and coercive resources. The centre–periphery model in which various globalized systems are entangled (Wallerstein 1974; Amin 1978; Frank 1978) is used here as a metaphor to refer to the asymmetrical structural power relations within postcolonial Arab states. Charles Tripp (2006) connects the uneven power relations with the modelling of the postcolonial Arab state by colonial powers on the modern European Westphalian examples—though these are increasingly discredited. The postcolonial ruling elite that inherited power from the colonisers engineered unequal state–society relations. The entire new statist foundation was built to control resources (e.g. politics, coercion, education and bureaucracy) and distribute goods (e.g. employment, status, power etc.) (Tripp 2006). This neutralized the traditional power-holders, pushing them to the periphery of polity and economy. In the same vein, Chalmers Johnson’s (1982) outline of the anatomy of what he calls the “developmental state” approximates this in terms of economic planning. It displays features of a strong state, acting autonomously of society, and having the means to control and determine the content and direction of economic development. But the neat characterization of the postcolonial Arab state as a “strong” entity in control of a “weak” society is problematized (Ayubi 1995). The Arab Spring has not landed from the “moon.” It has been incubated in a matrix of dynamics that has, since the 1990s, seen the profusion of protests, emergence of countervailing forces and discourses from below. The postcolonial ruling elite relied on the classic divide and rule policy to sustain their political and socioeconomic dominance over postcolonial societies. This fragmentation has come to haunt them. The very weakness of a fragmentary society that the postcolonial Arab state has, since its genesis, relied on for control, became a site of resistance and even de-nationalization. The forces, voices, and discourses relegated by the centre to the margins of power refused to be side-lined and silenced. The periphery was refashioned into a site of visibility not invisibility, struggle not passivity, and resistance not acquiescence. Even the return to “primordial” networks of solidarity facilitated the creation of civic spaces empowering society—at the expense of the state. From this angle, the Arab Spring has been in the offing since before 2011. The void of power (the peripheral sites abandoned by the state) was turned into a power of the void (the peripheral forces and voices that re-organized themselves) to strike back at the state (Sadiki, Wimmen and Al-Zubaidi 2013). Thus, the notion of “peoplehood” is used here as a way of contextualizing the trend of rising sites of anti-systemic struggles in the Arab region. The periphery is the space from which 179

Larbi Sadiki and Layla Saleh

society has launched its uprisings, revolts and self-organization into a formidable adversary to the central core, the authoritarian state (dawlat al-ikrah). This is what has given birth to a historical moment of “peoplehood,” literally a “wave” of dynamically revolutionary change in the Arab Middle East. These bottom-up revolts happened in societies such as Egypt, Libya, Syria and Yemen, where in the 1950s and 1960s army-led revolutions and coups unseated monarchical power-holders. The tensions that have historically characterized the centre–periphery dyad have set into motion processes that signal the return of the periphery to politics in challenging the authoritarian state. A great deal of the conflict to be generated over the next decade will be produced by the resistance to change by this “over-stated Arab state” (Ayubi 1995), which has historically invested itself with all the attributes of power (mostly coercive, but in varying degrees financial, legal, tribal, ideological, informational, social, etc.) and has allocated little or no shared-space for normalizing state–society relations. It has left even less space for societal contests of state power. In the resulting power vacuum since 2011, power is clearly up for grabs and the contests and counter-contests take many forms, ranging from civic (political, transparent, peaceful and legal) to unruly (secret, violent and illegal). Varying degrees of this power vacuum grip many an Arab polity and society. It is pronounced and unfolding in some (populist republics), and latent in others (monarchies).

Al-hirak: agential enactment of moral protest The Arab Spring’s ongoing seismic political activity continues to be marked by contests at the boundaries of state authority/power and societal reclamation of some of that power. It is here that the normative element of this sustained peoplehood—as an ethos of dissent against dictatorship and resistance to authoritarianism—must be stressed. Al-hirak is diverse and varies in substance, impact and sustainability across the Arab Middle East. Largely, it points to emerging, ongoing, hidden or dormant attempts, below the level of the state, by society to carve out a space for occupying vacuous sites of power. These struggles for power include the realm of coercion, as exemplified by al-Qaida/Nusra, Houthis, ISIS and affiliates. However, these violent strands of hirak do not preclude civic struggles such as for good government and more equitable distribution. It is within these unoccupied sites that power seems to be susceptible to renegotiation, contest, protest and anti-systemic challenges. By and large, these are the sites where society (civic and uncivil, legal and unruly) strikes back. This struggle manifests itself, on the one hand, as an urge to invent the vocabulary of self-recognition and self-existence as well as the attendant thought-practice for speaking to and responding to the decaying authoritarian postcolonial state (newly emerging democratic discourses, forces and voices; Islamist and secular, liberal and illiberal). Alternatively, the contest is to cohabit or populate the unoccupied sites of power, as the new legitimate power holder and claimant (e.g. militias in Libya, Houthis in Yemen, ISIS in Syria and Iraq). These altercations are ongoing, as indicated by the US declaration in early 2018 that the international coalition had defeated ISIS on the ground in Iraq and Syria (White House 2018), for instance. The extent to which territorial control wrested from the state or from its other challengers (e.g. anti-regime Syrian militias) in unruly, violent permutations of the hirak is constantly in flux. What is sustained in this new bottom-up politics of peoplehood, however, is the normative element of what is arguably a region-wide, locally manifested, movement of peoplehood inscribing the Arab geography. The crux of al-hirak is public mobilization and organization through self-configuration and reconstructions of a brand of political organization, run by the people and driven by their quest for equality and dignity. In the quest for freedom and dignity 180

The Arab Spring is not lost

(hurriyyah, karamah), al-hirak is society’s agential deployment against the “occupiers” of the authoritarian state. Peoplehood facilitates practices whereby bottom-up notions of sovereign identities and participatory citizenship are engendered informally in the public squares of protest. Central to al-hirak is the people’s coming together to ephemerally substitute the authoritarian regimes’ practice, thought and language of controlling power. Peoplehood thus invents new conceptions of political practice (peaceful protest, civic organization, armed resistance and leaderless-ness), thought (a stress on social justice and radical change), and terminology (a mantra of freedom, dignity, public solidarity, revolution and uprising’s martyrs). Thus, the regimes’ routinized notions of stability, loyalty and deference, for instance, are traded for spontaneously conceived practices, thought and language. Stability cedes to fluidity, loyalty gives way to hostility and rebellion, and deference to resistance. To borrow a term from Paulo Freire’s (2000) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “critical consciousness” is thus forged and invented in the public squares of protest as a necessity to counter the hegemonic order with action, thought and all kinds of signifiers of opposition and resistance.

Freedom and dignity for “the people” A youth empowered by education but disempowered by marginalization can be the spark that ignites social upheaval and social tension. This proved to be the case as regimes flouted the socalled “bread contract” in Tunisia and Egypt and many an Arab polity in the two decades leading up to the Arab Spring. Fiscal, political and social adjustments put in place by Tunisia’s ruling elites to implement conventions of the “Washington consensus” proved disastrous for most in the country. A subsequent decrease in subsidies, privatization, poor convertibility of the dinar, land sales to foreign owners, tourist resort leasing, nouveaux riches consumption patterns, big business commissions, business monopolies and corruption became unsustainable and unpalatable for the politically and economically marginalized. Models of development and distribution in the coastal and northern regions left the centre and the south behind, prompting the riots of Sidi Bouzid (Sadiki 2010). These, of course, set in motion nation-wide protests culminating in the Tunisian revolution and eventually, the Arab Spring. The language of peoplehood suffuses the protest politics of the region, most dramatic in the early days of the Uprisings. Key to understanding this new politics is attempting to give meaning to the word “people”—in politics as well as in the arts—in every sphere where peoplehood must mean sovereign, sublime, ennobled and sacred. The phrase “al-sha’b yureed” became a linguistic mainstay of the popular Uprising sparked in Tunisia. It quickly spread among the throngs of hundreds of thousands singing it in chorus in Tunis, Cairo, Sanaa and Damascus. As an expression of will, determination and invincibility, it represented a range of possibilities long absent or suppressed for Tunisians or Arabs broadly. “The people’s will” came to indicate various modes of being, expression (speaking, writing and chanting), political positions (approving and opposing) and formal and informal political practice (demonstrating, sit-ins and voting) (Sadiki 2012). Phrases such as “Tunis hurra”(Tunis—or Syria, or Egypt, or Libya), etched in revolutionary graffiti, conveys a common drive and objective: emancipation from authoritarianism. Such pronouncements point to a new state of being, post-“barrier of fear,” but also to an ethos of dissent that has come to shape the contours of popular expectations. The rallying cries of freedom and dignity are self-renewing significations reflecting the collective psyche of the contagion of peoplehood “caught” by the Arab body-politic. This is an expectation for the construction of an entire system seeking to make official the values of freedom, dignity, equality and good governance, translating them from revolutionary standards into structural features of a new political 181

Larbi Sadiki and Layla Saleh

system. Importantly, defiance for bread and resistance for freedom are inseparable (Sadiki 2012). Denials of these appeals can foment resistance, often directed against the state. Transgressions on people’s collective sense of freedom may also instigate publicized rejection of non-state actors, as in altercations and popular protests against al-Qaida affiliate al-Nusra in northern Syria (Cambanis 2016). Wendy Pearlman has drawn on the Syrian case to show how moral identities and individuals’ value systems motivate protest, intensifying to become drivers of further dissident action (2016). Courage, joy, faithfulness to belief systems, celebrations of agency and solidarity-triggered postures of sacrifice are central to explaining the striking acts of bravery characterizing protest in the face of regime repression (Pearlman 2016). Likewise, Karin Fierke points to the limits of rationalist approaches in explaining the numerous publicized and poignant instances of “political self-sacrifice” in the Arab Spring. For her, the “principled mobilization” of non-violence is an exercise of agency and a democratic posture whereby ordinary people bypass both individual-level fear and structural-level institutional constraints to restore dignity and long-denied sovereignty. By relaying the injustice suffered by their communities through reverberating messages, including public suicides, people act as if they are free in the pursuit of that very freedom (Fierke 2013). Here the significance of Tunisia as an “early driver” of the Arab Uprisings is key. Mohammad Bouazizi, the university-educated street vendor who set himself on fire and set the Arab Spring alight, intended his act of lunacy and courage to be a public signal of resistance and disobedience. It was live political theatre in which he tragically played out his own death with a message: resistance, or demise, was a requirement for self-liberation. Fellow Tunisians, then millions across the Arab geography, quickly picked up his message. His dramatic self-immolation as tragic protest put an end to political quietism as the modus operandi of Arab publics. Bouazizi thus became the twenty-first century’s own Tiananmen tank-man, his image hearkening back to an earlier symbol of non-violent resistance in 1989 (Sadiki 2011). Such moral audacity translated into sacrificial acts in pursuit of the public good, in a common struggle against authoritarianism and injustice, has come to define other revolutionary symbols. Such actions cumulatively suggest how people of ordinary, non-elite pedigree can rise above the ordinary when the surrounding environment heaves with change. Individual agency meets shifting “structural” winds favouring transformation. This long catalogue features some activists who are still living; others killed only to live eternally as martyrs: Khalid Said of Egypt, Fathi Tarbil of Libya and Hamza al-Khatib of Syria. A capacity for self-sacrifice in the quest for dignity elevates them to the roster of revolutionary legends (Sadiki 2011). Making meaning out of tragedy has thus become central to this new bottom-up ethos and politics of peoplehood. Buckner and Khatib (2014) suggest that the construction of the “Arab Spring martyr” inverts the notion of victimhood into individual agency in service of dignity and freedom. Social media aided this linking of local (e.g. Islamic) and global (human rights discourse) scripts. The resulting frame became a common mobilizing thread in the narrative of anti-systemic struggle across the Arab world (Buckner and Khatib 2014). A panoply of iconic images and video snapshots together form a revolutionary speech “collage” emblematic of the Arab Spring. These include the Tunisian man shouting in the street, Ya Twensaa, Ben Ali hraab! (Tunisians, Ben Ali has fled!). This solo act of political theatre, now a revolutionary “classic” video scene helped introduce the Maghreb (West) to the Mashreq (East), energizing region-wide solidarity among Arab publics (Sadiki 2013). Other snapshots of this revolutionary fervour include a Syrian man recounting Asad security forces’ transgressions, crying bitterly, “I am a human being, not an animal—and all these people are like me!” (YouTube 2012). These short clips, widely circulated through adept use of social and traditional media including al-Jazeera, introduced lone cries of long-endured injustice. 182

The Arab Spring is not lost

They relayed an emotive appeal and affective resonance of a thirst for freedom recognizable to fellow compatriot Arab audiences. An Uprising made by the Arab world’s little peoples, Tunisia’s revolution initiated a genre of protests across the map of the Arab Spring. It migrated across a vast terrain of Arab sub-cultures and sites of struggle within months of the departure of Ben Ali in January 2011. From Sanaa to Tunis, despite diversity, a unifying cultural filter of protest and transition took shape. Travelling to Egypt, the Arab revolutions were notable as the boundaries between stage (protest) and performance were blurred considerably. Bahrainis, Syrians and Yemenis added to the spectacle. Morally, these “protest-carnivals” (a la Bakhtin) summoned communal solidarity. Public displays of sit-ins, street prayers, street-like choirs, open-air dancing and singing became emblematic of a new politics. The people were at once performers and spectators of their own euphoric and jubilant protests. Together they formed a multi-vocal critical mass followed by tippingpoint potency. The resulting situation approximated a dynamic and people-owned space animated by aspirations of freedom, and largely sustained by equality. Secondary identities blended together, subsumed under a unique display of one-ness as re-imagined free and equal people (Sadiki 2013). Local creativity, a non-violent proclivity, an inclusive, loosely conceived national unity and a resolve for autonomy in a struggle for emancipation alongside fellow Arab publics (Saleh 2016) thus became a travelling ethos of revolutionary hirak. This peoplehood proved to be a style of politics with outsize impact, ultimately forcing out Mubarak, Ali Abdullah Saleh and leading to Gaddafi’s fall and eventual death in Libya.

Top-down vs. bottom-up change: the limits of state-centred analysis of the Arab Uprisings The argument made here is that the region-wide Arab Spring that began in 2011 persists at the level of continuous—not terminated—informal, bottom-up political activity propelled by moral protest. Such a conclusion is distinct from analysis fixated on the state and institutions. This pattern may be admittedly difficult to discern in examinations of top-down politics that have dominated the academic scene for years. Thus, theses of authoritarian “resilience” have dogged the Middle East for the greater part of Middle East history (Anderson 1991). A range of theoretical approaches, ranging but not limited to modernization theory to culturalist explanations, institutionalism to rational choice theory, have offered various explanations for the resilience of authoritarianism in the Arab world (Hinnebusch 2006). Decades of policy-influenced research limited in scope and explanatory capacity have sought to answer the question framed as an Arab immunity to democratization, often attributed in some form to Islam (Anderson 2006). Scholars have placed much less emphasis on the ways in which formal and informal politics operate separately, in tension, or in tandem, arguably necessary for fully grasping processes of popular challenges to state authority in Arab politics (Anceschi, Gervasio and Teti 2014). Any analysis focusing on bottom-up processes such as the “bread riots” spurring liberalizing political reforms, in anticipation of the popular mobilization of the 2011 Uprisings (Sadiki 2000) has been an exception to this overarching trend. Thus, the potent force of popularly demanded political change in the Arab world appears to have taken many scholars and policymakers by surprise. Howard and Walters (2014) point out that a myopic focus on barriers to democratization and the sources of authoritarian resilience crowded out most scholars’ interest in non-elite politics, rendering them unprepared to explain or predict the explosion of popular politics of 2011. After a spate of academic musing reacting to the Uprisings, some have reflected on the explanatory power of Middle East scholarship in its examination of the drivers and potential for political change to suggest more complexity than typical democratization vs. authoritarian 183

Larbi Sadiki and Layla Saleh

resilience frames allow (Valbjorn 2015; Whitehead 2015). Yet such valuable self-critiques do not appear to have staved off the return to more institutionalist approaches to the Uprisings. This is despite calls by some scholars to focus on ongoing processes of informal political activism in the Arab world (Khatib and Lust 2014). The institutionalist bent begins for some in assessing not just diverging outcomes of the Arab Spring but also in gauging the initial 2011 protests themselves. Yet attempts to distinguish socio-political from economic drivers and outcomes arguably create over-simplistic binaries. Crowds of protesters across the region chanted hurriyah and karamah—seeing freedom (to be systematized through a democratic system) and dignity (to be achieved through distributive justice) as interlocking aims. It is important to note, as Dawn Brancati (2016) does, that the Arab Spring protests were not uncommon, but in good company among the hundreds of democracy protests around the globe since 1989. Favouring a minimalist definition of democracy to distinguish “democracy protests”—those specifically demanding elections or objecting to falsified voting results—may facilitate large-N cross-national and longitudinal statistical analysis. Yet isolating these from other “anti-government protests” carries an institutionalist bias that may oversimplify or dichotomize both protest demands and outcome trajectories. In such an analysis, for instance, Tunisia and Libya are not considered cases of “democracy protests” (Brancati 2016)—for many, a counter-intuitive classification. Similarly, investigating the impact of democracy protests and testing for democratic reforms or transformations only 1 year after the coded protests does lend itself to cross-national statistical analyses (Brancati 2016). But this tendency to consider the 2011 Uprisings as nearly one-shot protests or a discontinuous series of events is an over-simplification. To this end, Jillian Schwedler warns against the scholarly temptation for categorizations based on comparisons limited to states, or those seeking to distinguish discrete movements and explore their “positive” or “negative” incidence or their “success” or “failure.” These classifications, she says, may overlook connections within and between movements and political processes in and outside the Arab region, failing to examine deeper dynamics of the still-ongoing Arab Uprisings with no determinable or single outcome thus far (Schwedler 2015). The contention here is that the protests that erupted across the Arab region in 2011 represent a rupture in Arab politics and society. Yet their momentum is arguably continuous; its impact, due to regional and international structural factors as well as agential repressive responses by regimes, is varied and unsettled as of yet. This same institutionalist focus and attention to elite-level politics and formal institutions that largely failed to foresee the Arab Uprisings has offered a narrative of the collapse of the Arab Spring. Accompanying the fixation on a failure to institutionalize the calls for hurriyah and karama is an obsession with time. The clock ticks as 2 years pass, then, 3, 4, 5 and 6 since the 2011 protest wave: where are the Arab democratic transitions? Tardy, and unlikely to materialize: thus, the Arab Spring is no more. Such assessments thus conclude that popular demands for freedom, dignity and social justice have been snuffed out. Expressions of aspirations for democracy have been displaced by the overpowering destruction of civil wars, sectarian conflict, meddling regional and international powers, and a return of the terrorist plague. An “Arab Winter,” gloomily declared by some observers as early as a year into the Uprisings (Byman 2011), has settled in. Even accounts acknowledging the agency of Arab publics in challenging the authoritarian status quo in the region decry the misery of an Arab Spring that “seems to have brought nothing but woe.” Only Tunisia can cautiously claim a degree of freedom: no other state has seen a “happy ending” (The Economist 2016). The prime culprit here is the “naivety” of both demonstrators and Western optimists for failing to grasp Arab state “fragility” and authoritarian regime’s “vicious determination” to maintain or regain their iron grip on power. The enactment of peoplehood in Arab public squares is thus trivialized into the “theatrics [of] toppling tyrants” that cannot usher in lasting, meaningful change. Only the “institutional building blocks” of 184

The Arab Spring is not lost

representative law-making systems, human rights protections, and formalized accountability mechanisms can establish good governance—and here, there is no “success” yet. Perhaps the “next uprising” will usher in these necessary and lasting changes! (The Economist 2016). Orientalist (Said 1978) undertones inflect other assessments with scepticism and pessimism. One scholar has gone so far as to call the Arab Uprisings a “false dawn” in which “romantic[ally]” envisioned and “much-anticipated transitions to democratic political systems in the Middle East never materialized” (Cook 2017: 6). These were not revolutions. Thus the repressive ruling tactics characteristic of new or improved coercive systems led by strongmen such as Sisi in Egypt, or the violent “chaos” of institution-less Libya have put to bed the “distant thwarted dream” of democratic change (Cook 2017: 8). The current nightmare is attributed to vaguely defined “continuity” of political systems, institutions and a national identity void in a region long administered by authoritarian power structures (Cook 2017: 9). Middle Eastern politics as usual, in other words, prevails to become a politics worse than usual. In this reading, the mobilization of 2010–13 was a brief anomaly punctuating the darkness of dictatorship in what US President Donald Trump has recently called a “troubled place” likely impervious to American attempts to “make it better” (The New York Times 2018). Even some evaluations of the Arab Uprisings acknowledging that they are not yet completely quashed stress a chilled descent into an Islamist-hued “Arab Winter.” Gilbert Achchar presents a stark tale of the return of the patrimonial “old regime,” itself battling “Islamic fundamentalists.” These two poles form two counter-revolutionary tides each buttressed by regional actors (the UAE vs. Qatar and Turkey) that have incapacitated the radical social revolutionary mobilization of the Arab Spring. “Tactical alliances” between Arab leftist forces and some “Islamic fundamentalist” groups including the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots, as with “the devil” if necessary without any illusions of angelhood, may represent the only possible alternative to counteract the old regime’s resurgence. Doing so may possibly allow for the resuscitation of a revolutionary fervour that must be guided by new leadership to rescue Arabs from the “inferno of the clash of barbarisms” (Achcar 2016: 172).

One hirak, divergent patterns The above section suggested that exclusive attention to state institutions (democratic vs. authoritarian-coercive) and exercise of a Weberian mandate (territorial control) paint an incomplete picture of the Arab Uprisings. Thus, two main problems emerge in analyses that declare the “death” of the Arab Spring or promulgate an “Arab Winter” narrative. An abbreviated time frame for investigation is compounded by a downplaying of the significance of the continuity of moral protest and bottom-up dissident praxis across the Arab world. But the point here is not a denial of structural (regional and international) obstacles, nor an underestimation of the authoritarian pushback standing in the way of institutionalizing Arab popular demands. Steven Heydemann and Reinoud Leenders identify various tactics and strategies borne of “authoritarian learning” since 2011. These include redistributive handouts, an emphasis on the costs of dissidence in political discourse, and the formation or the nurturing of alliances—or client relationships—both cross-regional (Egypt and the UAE) or international (Syria and Russia). Such adaptations have facilitated the survival and tenacity of the coercive state since 2011. Lessons learned by Arab dictators also include reliance on contending regional powers (Saudi Arabia and Iran), an activation of sectarian narratives, and a calculated (not irrational) use of violent repression (Heydemann and Leenders 2011). But the suggestion is that more deliberate scrutiny of a persistent peoplehood—to counteract dawlat al-ikarah, including its newly schooled elites— does in fact indicate a pattern of ongoing dissidence in which protest-qua-protest has been a 185

Larbi Sadiki and Layla Saleh

stunningly consistent feature of the Arab political scene. This is not an incidental or residual outcome of a resurgent authoritarianism and return of the authoritarian state. It is instead the lively, agential carving out of political space confirming the stamina and staying power of bottom-up resistance across a multiplicity of country contexts, including their recalibrating coercive power apparatuses. Yet the hirak explored above reflects a unity of popular aspirations played out, tried and retried by publics against a diversity of country contexts. Divergent outcomes thus call for some parsing and reflection. Perhaps the key differentiating factor across various Arab Spring locales is the translation of bottom-up dissident demands for more equitable distribution of power and resources into formal political institutions. The extent to which the state exercises its Weberian function, i.e. its coercive capacity, with or without reference to laws made credible and legitimate through systems and procedures of non-discrimination and due process, is key. Here Tunisia, with its popularly elected parliament and president and its democratic constitution protecting civil and political freedoms, has clearly gone further in the institutionalization of its hirak than any other Arab state. In the pursuit of normalizing relations and levelling the playing field between state and society, legal mechanisms that hold the coercive state or dawlat al-ikrah in check thus make all the difference. Where the hirak of 2011-onwards has not been reflected in institutional gains, the cards remain stacked against society in favour of the state. In early 2018, such is the case for most other countries in the region, even those witnessing sustained protests where publics distinctly demanded the restoration of their human rights-birthrights: freedom, dignity and social justice. A failure thus far to deliver institution-building is explicable by a range of related factors and structural arrangements. The persistence of the “deep state” in Syria, Egypt and Algeria has ensured its unchecked use of coercion and violence against dissidents or members of the broader populace—alleged or suspected dissidents. Thus, the armed forces’ use of repression is unrestricted by any laws ensuring the welfare and well-being of citizenry and residents, “antiterrorism laws” notwithstanding. The deep state may be bolstered by foreign cash injections or bilateral assistance, as in Egypt. Reliance on foreign militias and direct military intervention on behalf of the mukhabarat regime is decidedly excessive in Syria’s internationalized war of the state against ruly and unruly dissidents. The militarization of Syria’s hirak, too, has been fomented by arms transfers, the mushrooming of militias both foreign and national, and the rise of ideologically based “rogue” groups such as ISIS and the constantly mutating NusraTahrir al-Sham. In Algeria, a combination of redistributive patronage politics, cosmetic “pseudodemocratic” reforms, and efficient and tactical use of coercion has kept the authoritarian state in play despite scattered but continued protests (Volpi 2013). Makhzan patrimonial politics in Morocco have so far won the day even after the constitutional reforms put in place by the monarch subsequent to the 2011 protests. The divisive politics of sectarianism and tribalism in Lebanon and Yemen respectively has largely been in favour of the state, even fragmented and paralyzed as the case may be. Lebanon’s yet-unsolved garbage crisis that spurred the 2015 “YouStink” protest movement is still in play, with some activists even throwing their hat in the May 2018 parliamentary election ring (Samaha 2018). Hints of a new intifada in Palestine, including the “Great March of Return” in Gaza (Middle East Monitor 2018) emerged with a new momentum in the months after the Trump administration’s announcement of moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem in late 2017. Yet the pilloried Palestinian polity remains an obstacle difficult to surmount. Indirect effects of the Arab Spring’s hirak have included appeasement tactics by the counter-revolutionary state seeking to placate local pressure within their borders (welfare handouts in the Gulf states) or outside them (Saudi Arabia and the UAE in Egypt). Some top-down reforms, long-overdue, also seem to be taking shape, as in the 186

The Arab Spring is not lost

lift on the women’s driving ban in Saudi Arabia as well as other reforms laid out in the Saudi Vision 2030 (Revesz and Stevenson 2017). But this exploration of the adaptive capacities of dawlat al-ikrah does not preclude the persistence of some degree of popular mobilization resisting marginalization and exclusion. This, in fact, is the crux of the matter. The most recent Arab Human Development Report notes that structural and institutional barriers to “positive engagement in the [Arab] public sphere” include limited political freedoms and power-sharing and the non-implementation of existing laws. Constraints on voting and the freedom of association are particularly noteworthy (UNDP 2016: 63). Thus, engagement in the public sphere through “unconventional or informal channels”—both peaceful activism and militancy—may be more attractive to many in the Arab world (UNDP 2016: 64), particularly the youth who face heightened political, social, and economic exclusion. In Tunisia, for instance, the publics, mostly the country’s youth, who engineered the revolution, continue to stage mini revolutions in protest at similar marginalization, injustice and lack of government response that was previously experienced under Ben Ali. The difference is that today they can speak freely and protest without too much of a hindrance in most areas. Youth in towns such as Gafsa, Benguerdane, Metlaoui, Kasserine, Tala or Sidi Bouzid can see no horizon, particularly as unemployment remains stubbornly high. Thus, as the state reproduces and creatively upgrades its coercive and repressive capacities, so does the hirak re-emerge, recalibrate and above all, endure in some form. In Morocco, the King has been unable to contain a dissenting rif. Protests are still a frequent occurrence in Algeria, where plummeting oil prices strain government spending and unions mobilize in objection to exacerbated economic pains (Chikhi 2018). In some cases, the hirak has marched onwards as armed resistance to the state, as in the insurgency in Egypt’s Sinai. In Libya, Syria and Yemen, manifestations of al-hirak in the periphery include militia structures of governance and coercion that have emerged parallel to the state. Here rebel governance in collaboration with foreign sponsorship enacts or re-enacts the politics of identity as exclusionary and sectarian. This divisive trend taps into solidarities narrower than the “national” al-sha’b prevalent in protest demands by residents to vote freely for their local council representatives in Northern Syria’s Saraqeb, for instance (Abdul Rahman 2017). Internationalized violence may still be interspersed with the occasional protest, such as demonstrations on either side of the intractable Saudi-led war against the Houthis in a Yemen stricken by a humanitarian crisis. A sometimes fragmented and dispersed hirak continues to feature somewhat contradictory expressions of ruly and/or unruly, civic and/or un-civic, resistance against the authoritarian state.

Conclusions This chapter has argued that studies of the Arab Spring must turn the analytical lens downward, to Arab publics and their bottom-up political activity that crested as it rose to meet the institutional architecture of a fraying and perhaps “expired” postcolonial Arab state. Arab peoplehood, a solidaristic mobilization against the authoritarian state whose tentacles have extended into political, economic and ideational realms, has been a clearly identifiable phenomenon with diverse yet continuous manifestations since 2011. Through localized, indigenous forms of expression, Arab thuwwar from Cairo to Sanaa at once invoke and share in what they consider to be universal values and aspirations: a thirst for freedom and dignity. Such a hirak, the innovatively expressed, travelling “peoplehood” of both un-civic (violent) and civic mobilization of Arab publics, appears variously. It includes the occupation of public spaces in protests of chanting and singing, sit-ins, boycotts, an expansive “revolutionary media” utilizing traditional and new media sources, music, graffiti, art and even literature. It reflects and self-consciously 187

Larbi Sadiki and Layla Saleh

projects the ethos of national independence, inclusiveness, and pluralism as modes of resistance against the authoritarian Arab state. The end game is the political manifestation of revolutionary demands of hurriyah and karamah. To varying degrees, this dissidence has become self-renewing as it grates against the re-generating and morphing dawlat al-ikrah. Thus, concrete transnational political effects result, as secular and Islamist non-state actors challenge and unseat authoritarian practices and rulers. ISIS loots, shoots, and beheads across the Arab world, spurring Western-led international responses that appear to, on balance, (re)prioritize counterterrorism over democracy promotion. A divergence of Arab Spring outcomes, in other words, is symptomatic of, rather than coincidental to, the contagious Arab peoplehood. This “workshop” of normatively hued, moral protest has not yet been shut down, despite the spread of internationalized and militarized mobilization that has seemingly lost is local bearings. Shifting the analytic paradigm from a perennial search for the state to a focused exploration of publics is thus necessary. A continuous hirak spanning both the fits and starts of moral protest and “unruly” violent resistance as by militias against the state can thus be discerned. Certainly, the majority of Arab Spring locales, mired in polarization both ideological and violent, appear far from institutionalized “democratic transitions.” Social, political and economic exclusion continue to plague the region, perhaps most acutely affecting and disillusioning its vast youth population (UNDP 2016). But the dawlat al-ikrah that has returned with a vengeance, from Egypt to Syria and back is no more stable, no more “robust,” than it was before 2011. “Upgraded” mechanisms and tools of coercion relying more and more heavily on international sources of funding, arms supplies, and even occupation from Yemen to Syria to Libya are no guarantors of stability. States unravelling institutionally and territorially are thus on the edge, and combustible. Deprivation and repression continue to feed the drive to moral protest amongst the millions of marginalized who have heard the sounds of their own voices, so to speak, to demand greater social, political and economic inclusion. Countless lines of the Arab Spring “story” have yet to be written— as agential publics contest and re-contest the state. Importantly, the initial thrust of the Arab Uprisings, the largely peaceful protests of 2011, have become a “protest monument” of sorts, for millions of marginalized Arabs from Morocco to Yemen. The region-wide thawrat have become an indelible precedent in Arab collective memory, not just a “moment” of cascading peoplehood as the Arab Spring spread, but a travelling, self-renewing, sometimes (disingenuously) re-appropriated1 narrative of people power and potential at long, postcolonial last. The train has left the station, so to speak, with popular agency as the locomotive. The engine may stutter, it may veer off-track at times, and co-opting actors, including local and foreign militias, may hijack a car or a few. However, state–society relations are being reconfigured beyond the old defence mechanisms employed by the state to contain dissidence through either cooperation or coercion. Moral protest persists in all the “initial” Arab Spring states: this dynamic of a new politics from below appears here to stay. Paramount to the still-open trajectories of socio-political and economic upheaval kindled by ordinary, non-elite dissenters is the experimentally yet powerfully enacted peoplehood whose transformational promise extends beyond any single cry of hurriyah or tart warning scrawled on a schoolyard wall. Al-sha’b yureed, whistles the train: exact destination unknown. One train on the move, with many junctions, each with its own journey experience . . . challenging today and for the duration students of Arab politics to decode the many signals it sends out.

Note 1 As in al-Qaeda’s adoption and adaptations of revolutionary discourse in Syria. See Abazaid (2016). 188

The Arab Spring is not lost

References Abazaid, A. (2016), “Tahawwulat Khitab Tandhim al-Qa’ida fi Soorya [The Transformations of al-Qaeda’s Discourse in Syria],” Omran Center for Strategic Studies, accessible at: https://www.omrandirasat.org/ Abdul Rahman, S. (24 July 2017), “Min Waqa’i’ Araba’t Ayyam fi Saraqeb” [From Four Days’ Events in Saraqeb], Al Jumhuriya, accessed 30 July 2017, accessible at: https://www.aljumhuriya.net/ar/38504 Achcar, G. (2016), Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in the Arab Uprising, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Alami, A. (28 August 2017), “Morocco’s rif activists ‘fighting for our nation,’” Al Jazeera, accessed 28 February 2018, accessible at: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/08/morocco-rifactivists-fighting-nation-170827124952352.html Amin, S. (1978), The Arab Nation: Nationalism and Class Struggles, London: Zed Press. Anceschi, L., Gervasio, G. and A. Teti (eds, 2014), Informal Power in the Greater Middle East: Hidden Geographies, London: Routledge. Anderson, L. (1991), “Absolutism and the resilience of monarchy in the Middle East,” Political Science Quarterly, 106:1, 1–15. Anderson, L. (2006), “Searching where the light shines: studying democratization in the Middle East,” Annual Review of Political Science, 9, 189–214. Ayubi, N. (1995), Overstating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East, London: I.B. Tauris. Buckner, E. and L. Khatib (2014), “The martyrs’ revolution: the role of martyrs in the Arab Spring,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 41:4, 368–84. Brancati, D. (2016), Democracy Protests: Origins, Features, and Significance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Byman, D. (2011), “After the hope of an Arab Spring, the chill of an Arab Winter,” Brookings Institution, accessed 16 April 2018, accessible at: https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/after-the-hope-of-thearab-spring-the-chill-of-an-arab-winter/ Cambanis, T. (29 March 2016), “The Syrian revolution against al-Qaeda,” Foreign Policy, accessed 11 April 2018, accessible at: http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/03/29/the-syrian-revolution-against-al-qaedajabhat-al-nusra-fsa/ Chikhi, L. (21 February 2018), “Protests by teachers, health workers spread in Algeria,” Reuters, accessed 22 April 2018, accessible at: https://www.reuters.com/article/algeria-protests/protests-byteachers-health-workers-spread-in-algeria-idUSL8N1Q80XR Cook, S.A. (2017), False Dawn: Protest, Democracy, and Violence in the New Middle East, Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Fierke, K.M. (2013), Political Self-Sacrifice: Agency, Body and Emotion in International Relations, Cambridge and New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Freire, P. (2000), Pedagogy of the Oppressed, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Frank, A.G. (1978), Dependent Accumulation, New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Publishers. Heydemann, S. and R. Leenders (2011), “Authoritarian learning and authoritarian resilience: regime responses to the ‘Arab awakening,’” Globalizations, 8:5, 647–53. Hinnebusch, R. (2006), “Authoritarian persistence, democratization theory and the Middle East: An overview and critique,” Democratization, 13:3, 373–95. Howard, M.M. and M.R. Walters (2014), “Explaining the unexpected: Political science and the surprises of 1989 and 2011,” Perspectives on Politics, 12:2, 394–408. Johnson, C. (1982), MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy 1925–1975, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Khatib, L. and E. Lust (2014), Taking it to the Streets: The Transformation of Arab Activism, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Middle East Monitor (20 April 2018), “Four dead, dozens injured as Gaza protests continue for the fourth week,” accessed 22 April 2018, accessible at: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/201804202-dead-dozens-injured-as-gaza-protests-continue-for-fourth-week/ Pearlman, W. (2016), “Moral identity and protest cascades in Syria,” British Journal of Political Science, doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123416000235. Revesz, R. and C. Stevenson (27 September 2017), “Saudi Arabia lifts ban on women’s driving,” The Independent, accessed 19 April 2018, accessible at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/saudiarabia-women-drive-decree-a7968846.html Sadiki, L. (2000), “Popular uprisings and Arab democratization,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 32:1, 71–95. 189

Larbi Sadiki and Layla Saleh

Sadiki, L. (2009), Rethinking Arab Democratization: Elections without Democracy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sadiki, L. (27 December 2010), “Tunisia: The battle of Sidi Bouzid,” Al Jazeera, accessed 5 April 2011, accessible at: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2010/12/20101227142811755739.html Sadiki, L. (29 December 2011), “The Bouazizi ‘Big Bang,’” Al Jazeera, accessed 5 April 2018, accessible at: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/12/2011121713215670692.html Sadiki, L. (15 January 2012), “Tunisia: Portrait one of a revolution,” Al Jazeera, accessed 5 April 2018, accessible at: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/01/2012114121925380575.html Sadiki, L. (13 April 2013), “Revolution as a carnival,” Al Jazeera, accessed 5 April 2018, accessible at: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/01/2013114895747883.html Sadiki, L. (2016), “The Arab Spring: ‘The people’ in international relations,” in ed, L. Fawcett, International Relations of the Middle East, pp. 324–55, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sadiki, L., Wimmen H. and L. Al-Zubaidi (2013), Democratic Transition in the Middle East: Unmaking Power, Abingdon: Routledge. Said, E. (1978), Orientalism, New York, NY: Vintage Books. Saleh, L. (2016). US Hard Power in the Arab World: Resistance, the Syrian Uprising, and the War on Terror, London: Routledge. Samaha, N. (15 March 2018), “Lebanon Elections pit old guard against new movement,” Al-Monitor, accessed 23 April 2018, accessible at: https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2018/03/newlaw-2018-parliamentary-elections-civil-dynasties-lebanon.html Schwedler, J. (2015), “Comparative politics and the Arab Uprisings,” Middle East Law and Governance, 7:1, 141–52. Souissi, Z. (17 May 2017), “In marginalized south Tunisia, Unrest over gas tests government,” Reuters, 28 February, accessible at: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tunisia-protests/in-marginalized-southtunisia-unrest-over-gas-tests-government-idUSKCN18B0VA The Economist (6 January 2016), “The Arab Winter,” The Economist, accessed 16 April 2018, accessible at: https://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21685503-five-years-after-waveuprisings-arab-world-worse-ever The New York Times (13 April 2018), “President Trump on Syria strikes: Full transcript and video,” The New York Times, accessed 16 April 2018, accessible at: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/13/world/ middleeast/trump-syria-airstrikes-full-transcript.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSou rce=story-heading&module=a-lede-package-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news Tripp, C. (2006), Islam and the Moral Economy, pp. 13–5, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (2003), Arab Human Development Report 2002: Creating Opportunities for Future Generations, New York, NY: United Nations Publications. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (2016), Arab Human Development Report 2016: Youth and the Prospects for Development in a Changing Reality, 15 February, accessible at: http://www.arab-hdr. org/reports/2016/english/AHDR2016En.pdf Valbjorn, M. (2015), “Reflections on self-reflections—on framing the analytical implications of the Arab Uprisings for the study of Arab politics,” Democratization, 22:2, 218–38. Volpi, F. (2013). “Algeria versus the Arab Spring,” Journal of Democracy, 24:3, 104–15. Wallerstein, I. (1974), The Modern World-System, New York, NY: Vintage Books. Whitehead, L. (2015), “On the ‘Arab Spring’: Democratization and related political seasons,” in ed, L. Sadiki, Routledge Handbook of the Arab Spring, pp. 17–27. London: Routledge. White House (30 January 2018), “President Donald J. Trump’s state of the union address,” accessed 11 April 2018, accessible at: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-jtrumps-state-union-address/ YouTube (2012), “Man Yatathakar al Soori elli Qal An Insan Mani Hayawan” [Who remembers the Syrian who said, ‘I am a human being, not an animal?’], YouTube, accessed 11 April 2018, accessible at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Htw-7e1OTg&t=24s

190

14 Tunisia’s “civic parallelism” Lessons for Arab democratization Larbi Sadiki

Introduction Transitologists have often fallen into the habit of categorizing non-Western polities in terms of their divergent degrees in approximating or contradicting with Western norms of good government. The tenor of the discussion in this article1 is that Tunisia’s status as the Arab Spring’s birthplace does not warrant viewing it through an “exceptionalist” lens. The article departs from the conception of Tunisia’s fledgeling democratization as a politically and legally transformative historical élan, propelling the North African country’s polity and society toward a form of “democratic learning.” I take this democratic reorientation not to be flawless. More importantly, I view it to constitute evidence of “constructivist,” openended, and dialogic democratic learning. In sticking to the paper’s logic of a constructivist route of democratization, I stress its two-fold content. Constructivist is used here to mean the experiential dimension (local thought-practice) related to how societies and polities engage democratization. Very parsimoniously, where constructivism is concerned, the stress is on: 1) local contexts and agents of democratization who through a dynamic process socially construct knowing and learning of good government in keeping with the linguistic, historical, cultural, geographic and human “scape”; and 2) the meanings, filtered through local experience (practical) and knowledge (ideational), which societies attribute to democratization (Steffe and Gale 1995). Then I proceed to sketch the outlines of what I view to be “civic (or democratic) parallelism.” It refers to a dual route of transition, driven by both state and society. Thus, it sets in motion a dynamic in which processes, mobilization, ideas and voices from above and from below partner in democratic learning.2 I use “civic parallelism” as a vista for exploring the democratic acquisition of good practices (Inter-Parliamentary Union 2006) (e.g. bargaining politics, consensus-building), still unfurling in Tunisia since 2011. I illustrate this concept with respect to the experience of several MPs from Ennahda. The closing analysis thus explores how members of the Islamist political party engage in and acquire new skills related to democratic learning through the institution of parliament.

191

Larbi Sadiki

Foregrounding knowledge: democratization vs. “democratic learning” Context, agency and learning The Arab Uprisings of 2011 suggest the imperative to go beyond a vision of the political in which the Arab and the Muslim “other” are boxed as democratic outcasts. The civic and democratic realms are arenas for not just “testing” Western ideas and value systems. Also, and most importantly, they must redeem the endeavours of indigenous knowing and knowledge practices to “decolonize” knowledge-making. The critical task is one of highlighting the primacy of didactic processes when exploring issues of knowledge, agency, specificity and democratic learning as vistas for interpreting the possibility of not only the political but also the democratic in non-Western settings. Democratization is refigured here in terms of priorities bringing to bear questions on human agency, local knowledge practices and ethics about equal access to freedoms, principles of equal opportunity in the quest for justice and even psychological rewards of satisfying aspirations for cultural self-determination. The concern with Arab democratic knowledge derives from an assumption of knowledgemaking as being adaptive. The notion of an all-knowing indigenous “knowledge-keeper” holds no water. At the same time, neither the Arab nor the Muslim world is an “empty space,” a tabula rasa. Whatever inscriptions obtain from the search for or encounter with “democracy” will not start with a clean slate. Durable imprints mark out any knowledge repertoire. These imprints do provide the “filter” through which accounts, beliefs and justifications of the old and the new, and the local and the global, are vetted. Another assumption guiding the enterprise at hand is the rejection of universal rules and laws. Democracy may be a universal good, but operationalizing it cannot escape the linguistic, cultural, historical and power-based facts specific to the host context. One key idea is that knowledge-making calls for contextualization and historicization. Democratic knowledge is no exception. In practice, democratization often takes place in contexts in which it is a discursive construct with meaning that is made in and through language, speech, political ferment and inevitably ideology. When Islamists, secularists, leftists or pan-Arabists speak about democracy, they do so in narratives and texts, which are tainted by their political and ideological preferences, no matter what. In the same vein, democratization promoters, intellectuals and practitioners are implicated in knowledge–power dynamics that call for critical assessment of the knowledge practices that underpin their thought-practices of democracy. Thus, the Arab Spring erupts at a historical juncture when the utility and explanatory power of Western transitology is subject to revision and problematization. Thomas Carothers and Whitehead, among others, have been ahead of the learning curve in this respect. The former translates the mood of problematization without equivocation: “it is time to recognize that the transition paradigm has outlived its usefulness and to look for a better lens” (Carothers 2004: 168). For the latter democracy operates with knowledge. It is “anchored through the invocation of practical knowledge and a deliberative filter or collective deliberation.” He champions in democratization its indeterminacy: “democratisation can only come about through a lengthy process of social construction that is bound to be relatively open-ended” (Whitehead 2002: 30).

The politics of democratic knowledge Democratic knowledge, theoretical or practical, is not neutral. It is implicated in the web of power relations that is moulded by knowledge or, in turn, moulds it. Students of democratic transition are writing at least two narratives of democracy. One is about the civic “West,” and 192

Tunisia’s “civic parallelism”

the other is about the uncivil “Orient,” the realm bereft of the building blocks of “civic culture.” What has dramatized the schism is the combined oversimplification of both Orientalism and Occidentalism. The two narratives of a hegemonic speaker whose position departs from the pride of possessing democracy and a subaltern defensively seeking to write and speak back sum up the idea of the “twain never meet.” Like Foucault’s “insane” or “prisoner,” the Arab “non-democrat” is a discursive formation, a peculiarity, a perversity, not devoid of the entanglements of knowledge and power, a subjectivity reconstituted within their attendant discourses. Along the same lines of profiling the “prisoner,” the “Oriental” is objectified in knowledge and discourse practices as mostly inhospitable to democracy or civil society. A paradigm alternatively situating Arab “democratic learning” at the centre of analysis becomes an alternative to both the essentialist reductionism of “political culture” approaches as well as teleological Western “transitology” perspectives that equally struggle to account for the 2011-Arab Uprisings. Democratic learning is conceived here as an open-ended, constructivist, agential process through which skills, values, ethics and practices associated with democracy are acquired and cultivated through local knowledge systems (both theoretical and practical), filtered through the local social imaginary (Sadiki 2015). Exploring democratization thus presents a vigorous challenge to the reigning politics of democratic knowledge production. An examination of Tunisia’s “civic parallelism” through its processes of parliamentization will illustrate this analytical approach to Arab democratization.

Background: Tunisia’s political-historical lineage History-making in Tunisia displays a diversity of influences (Perkins 2004). The birth of the Arab Spring in Tunisia must be contextualized within this line of thinking that corroborates one idea: Tunisia is not an “empty space.” The Uprising in 2011 has had analogues such as in the 1864 anti-Bey uprising of Ali Bin Ghdhahim staged against high taxes. Similarly, promulgation of the constitution in early 2014 has a historical precedent in the 1861 constitution. In one sense, a difference in circumstances has not lessened the values that have historically shaped the Tunisian imagination: revolt (injustice in 1864 and 2011) or good government (constitutions of 1861 and 2014). The 1857 “Fundamental Pact,” from whence the conception of the constitution followed in the country’s political history, provided the foundation for republican ideas in the 1950s. The seeds sown by Khayr al-Din for creating a constitutional monarchy had to wait a hundred years to be institutionally consummated. In 1957, the country’s first president, Habib Bourguiba, abolished the monarchy and established a republic. Bourguiba’s imprint on steering a pro-Europe trajectory of nation and state-building was informed by his forebears’ convictions about the necessity of taḥrīr (liberation) and tanwīr (enlightenment). The constitutional heritage informed the nationalist movement’s struggle for independence. The designation of the first and longest-surviving political party, the “Destour” or “Constitutional Party” was not merely a rhetorical flourish. It was a meaningful moment of resumption of the painstaking and rudely interrupted reform (by the 1864 anti-tax uprising coupled with palace intrigue, and then in 1881 by French occupation) movement engineered by Khayr al-Din and the first wave of Tunisian renewal. Postcolonial rule, the last decade of Bourguiba’s rule, and Ben Ali’s dictatorship (1987–2011) represent intervals in the longstanding quest for renewal in Tunisia. Democratizing after longstanding authoritarian rule is no easy feat—the example of Brazil is instructive (McCann 2008). Given the historical continuity and pedigree of the reformist movement, the 2011 Uprising almost found a logical space for staging the Arab world’s most sustained and successful display of anti-systemic people’s power. It was an emancipatory historical 193

Larbi Sadiki

moment enacted on behalf of ideas and values (good government, constitution-bound rule, councils, justice, freedom and equality) that have been in gestation since the nineteenth century.

Tunisia’s democratization: germination Tunisia’s new constitution and electoral law have laid a preliminary foundation for the long process of democratization. Tunisia adopted its new constitution on 27 January 2014. The Arab world has never had a democratic polity—Kuwait, Lebanon and Morocco have had worthy approximations. Seven years on after the 2011 Uprising, oil-poor Tunisia is emerging as the region’s promising case of democracy-building/learning. That is, to lay a strong foundation for pluralizing processes and openings—in civic, social, cultural, political and economic terms. Political renewal and democracy may function as Tunisia’s “oil,” in more than one way, to support a self-governing polity, society and economy. Whilst the completion of Tunisia’s construction of the legal framework for democratizing the country bodes well for the long and arduous task of building a truly democratically governable society (Johnson and Nakamura 1999), there are still challenges ahead (Marzouki 2013).

Specificity vs. “exceptionalism” of the Tunisian experiment In any democratization process, the challenge is always how to construct a system that is durable, neutral and a guarantor of equal opportunity. During such a process, institution-building must measure up to the imposition of checks on the winners, without compromising political opportunity for the losers. For “transitologists,” from Guillermo O’Donnell to Laurence Whitehead, neither uncontested definitions of democracy nor universally applicable methods of democratic transitions are ponderable in a multicultural world (O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986; O’Donnell, Schmitter and Whitehead 1986). Similarly, there are no single and fixed means for measuring democratization. For instance, what Freedom House quantifies as evidence of democratization, more often than not misses the “qualitative” mark, as Sarah Bush (2017) notes with regard to the “metrics” of democracy. Tunisia is a long way from being a democracy (Redissi and Zghal 2012). However, it has openings, which are solidifying democratic learning, or the intellectual and practical capacities, skills, ethics and processes of civic habituation and socialization. As opposed to linear “democratic transition,” democratic learning is an open-ended, constructivist, interactive, cross-cultural and reflexive process rooted in local knowledge (Sadiki 2015). The country’s acquisition of the electoral “toolkit” made up of the election commission and the election law more or less seeks to close the legal circle begun with the process of constitution-making. By any standards, the 2014 democratic constitution measures up to the task of guarantor of equal opportunity (M’rad 2014). It enshrines gender equality, pluralism, rule of law, and has clear provisions for equal distribution for individuals and regions. It has an emancipatory and inclusive content that guards against oppressive and exclusionary tendencies, preventing the return of dictatorship. The National Constituent Assembly (NCA), 2011–14, was instrumental as the engine house of Tunisia’s democratization, during the transitional period. This is a key specificity that distinguishes Tunisia from faltering neighbouring democratization processes. By voting via secret ballot and by a two-thirds majority on the election commission or Instance Supérieure Indépendante pour les Elections (ISIE), the NCA was able at the time to lend credibility to the democratization process and legitimacy to the election body. The voting process tested the NCA members’ professionalism to the hilt: they had to vote on each commissioner individually. That in itself represented an exercise in democratic learning. 194

Tunisia’s “civic parallelism”

Voting mostly meritorious individuals replaced appointment of state cadres according to patronage-clientelism exercised during the ousted dictator’s rule, 1987–2011. Such as exercise also tested the neutrality and durability of the entire interim system tasked with facilitation of transition. What has been evident for several years is adherence to the declared rules of democratic engagement, solidification of dialogical know-how and evolution of multi-partisan consensus (Murphy 2012), reinforced by the NCA’s ability to instil a learning process during the selection of the nine ISIE commissioners. Navigating that learning curve propelled the NCA to rise above narrow partisan interests in the voting of the ISIE’s president, law-maker Shafiq Sarsar. Sarsar was entrusted the important post with an absolute majority. In the foreseeable future, the electoral toolkit seems, at least theoretically, geared towards living up to the minimalist requirements of procedural democratization, forming a salient feature of Tunisia’s incipient democratic transition. Arguably central to this transition is a polity’s ability to build consensus. This has thus far promoted the skill of both secularists and Islamists to make compromises, again integral to Tunisia’s experience in democratic learning (Piser 2016). This partly rebuts Orientalist arguments of Islamists’ disapproval of democracy (Krämer 1993). Consensus-building has thus attracted recent scholarly interest in the Tunisian context (McCarthy 2019). In particular, the country’s Islamists impress not only when it comes to making concessions (such as during 2014 on the adoption of the new constitution) (Amara 2012), but also choosing the right timing for doing so. The necessary human capital is undergoing a fundamental reconstruction, which is part and parcel of the transformative élan. Electoral consolidation is another facet of Tunisia’s continuous democratic learning. The political system that is emerging right now cannot be simplified into a form of “competitive authoritarianism” (Levitsky and Way 2002). Nor is it a simple case of “upgrading authoritarianism,” reproducing the old system through superficial reforms (Heydemann 2007). The processes in place, which underpin democratic learning, neither mask deeply embedded vestiges of a deep state nor call for premature celebration of a Tunisian “exceptionalism.” There is promise in Tunisia’s transition—not on electoral and teleological accounts. Such potential is of interest even to international policymakers (Marzo 2019)—this is so even if the case for democracy remains “elusive” in the Arab region, as deemed, for instance, by Brownlee and Masoud (2015).

Electoral and constitutional gains The opening articles of the new constitution of 2014 enshrine the principle of free and fair elections. They hold to democratic definitions and principles that outlaw exclusion and abuse of the electoral process, and ensure principles of transparency, secrecy of the ballot and impartiality of those who oversee the administration of polls. The law, adopted by the NCA on 1 May 2014, is impressive for its conceptual clarity and upholding the principles of transparency. For instance, it distinguishes between “election campaign” and “election period.” Such a distinction is built into the legal text as a mechanism for establishing the “dos” and “don’ts” that relate to when electoral publicity, for instance, begins and ends. The so-called “period of silence” compels all those contesting elections to cease from any type of advertising that promotes parties and candidates. Ideology may be receding as a politically divisive battle line. Equal access to national media is, at least in theory, guaranteed in the new constitution. Publicity and funding from foreign sources are outlawed, in theory at least. The exception is specific to elections held abroad for expatriate communities. Even here, there is an insistence on the use of Tunisian resources. This is a provision for levelling the playing field. Note that state funding is given to all those contesting elections and is refundable in the case where a party or a candidate achieves less than 195

Larbi Sadiki

3 per cent of the vote in any local or national poll. Article 6 excludes members of the Armed and Security Forces from voting. This exclusion, which is revisable once democratization is consolidated, has not extended to the old guard from the former ruling party. There seems to be convergence amongst major political parties that inclusiveness of former Ben Ali politicians (including the country’s current democratically elected president) may be a plus for the democratization process. It is without a doubt a major concession for which all former regime victims, most notably the Islamists, are to be lauded. Tunisia has therefore skipped so-called “lustration,” purification, as it were, of the newly built political system. The spirit of the election law is inclusiveness and yet it is the rules guiding exclusion that seems to recur within the text. There is, for example, the intended rejuvenation of the political class—23 is fixed as the age for parliamentary candidacy (Article 19). Article 20 stipulates the exclusion from the parliamentary candidacy of judges, diplomats and governors unless they resign from their posts first. Dual membership of government and parliament is outlawed, a measure that applies to other situations where clash of interest may compromise neutrality and professional conduct (Articles 35–8). Similarly, Article 40 sets the conditions for seeking the highest office in the land—the presidency. Candidates may stand at the age of 35, which is almost unique in the Arab region where there are republican systems. However, there is the proviso that the candidate must be Muslim, and must not carry dual citizenship. This is not specific to Tunisia—yet, the point is that inclusiveness and exclusiveness intertwine in what is largely a progressive election law. However, in a country where 99 per cent of the population is Muslim, the stipulation that the president must be Muslim may be interpreted as tautological. Receding ideology is conspicuously obvious. Testament to this is the facility created by leftist trade unions, civil society groups, including the Tunisian Bar association, to prop up the official legal democratic process from below by engaging with Islamists, for instance. A noteworthy example is the National Dialogue facility. The forum has considered, for instance, whether to hold parliamentary and presidential elections simultaneously. Such a semi-formal forum has served as a support system to the official processes of institution-building. Thus, should the official framework and institutions derail or contort, responsibility is voluntarily taken up by weighty stakeholders from within civil society. Yet few can be more aware than Tunisians of the tremendous challenges ahead, namely durable economic growth to sustain transition and meet the demands of a youthful population (Zaman 2019). The aspirations of poor regions also have to be addressed (Sadiki 2019). A huge backlog in job creation, infrastructure and sanitary needs can threaten democratization. Again, there is plenty to learn from the Latin American experience (Remmer 1990). Thus far, Tunisia’s transition has been solely focused on acquiring the building blocks of political—as opposite economic—equality. A specificity of Tunisia’s democratic learning is what I have called “civic parallelism.”3

Civic/democratic parallelism As illustrated in Figure 14.1 below, civic parallelism best describes Tunisia’s democratic learning so far. This dynamic introduces a didactic structure which locks polity and society into a field of democratic learning characterized by, firstly, collective ownership (i.e. partnerships) of the democratic process and, secondly, by bifurcated civic or political engagement. It is both top-down and bottom-up: it partakes of quasi-forms of pouvoir (state/top-down) and contre-pouvoir (society/bottom-up). Elites should not be the sole drivers of the democratic process; an argument rehearsed in other regions, such as Latin America (Higley and Gunther 1992). This captures the specificity of the Tunisian example. The North African country has experienced a learning curve as far as engendering democratic citizenship. The states still fare better than society within 196

Tunisia’s “civic parallelism”

State: Top-Down

Value: Mediatory + Advocacy Politics

ELECTORAL

-2011 Elections -2014 Presidential+ Parliamentary Elections Value: Formal Political Participation

Society: Bottom-Up

DIALOGIC Quartet (Ruba’iyyah): UGTT+ONAT+LDTH+ UTICA

MULTI-PARTISANSHIP -Ettakatol -UGTT/Unions -Islamists (Nahda) -Secularists (Nidaa Tunis) -Congress for the Republic th -October 18 Forum (Pre-Revolution) -Carthage Declaration (2016) Value: Pact-Making

CIVIC PARALLELISM: TopDown + Bottom-Up Democratic Route Salient Features: State and society working together to engender democratic identities and citizenship. State is balanced by countervailing civic forces Value: Democratic Learning ANOMIC: MORAL PROTEST -Haute Instance Pour la Realisation des objectifs de la revolution (state) -Protection of Revolution League -Kasbah Protests Value: Revolutionary Ethos, Peoplehood

COALITIONAL

-Quartet -Troika -Popular Front (Hamma Hammami + Leftists) -Republican Coalition (Aljomhouri) -Unity Governments (2011+ 2014)

Value: ConsensusBuilding

LEGALPARLIAMENTARY -2011 National Constituent Assembly -2014 Constitution -2014 Parliament Value: Representative+ Democratically Elected

Figure 14.1  Civic parallelism in Tunisia’s transition

the existing power equation. However, the system has some balance within it. Power does not reside fully within a single locus, empowering both state and society yet negating each, i.e. its capacity to monopolize the content, form, and direction of the democratic process. Parallel democratic construction seems to be built into the civic institution-building process. This affects the self-generating capacity and thus durability of the system. There is a quasidispersion of power. State and society are interlocked into the ongoing interplay of exchange, toleration and contestation, rivalry and complementarity, sustaining the dynamism at the crux of politics itself. Integral to this is how formerly antagonistic forces are balancing one another: secularists with Islamists, North with South, men with women, systemic with anti-systemic, formal with informal, centre with periphery, workers with white-collar, etc. Democratization generally tends to generate some kind of political stability. But one dimension of the specificity of Tunisia’s transitional route is that the system has acquired a form of healthy instability. 197

Larbi Sadiki

Its ongoing popular mobilization and peoplehood (hirak) (Sadiki 2016) generates political engagement to keep the system in a state of flux and a constant search for renewal. The use of the term “system” is deliberate here: in Tunisia, the state has not faded. But also discernible are elements of a “non-system”: non-state actors, the periphery, elements of anomie, workers, students and impoverished regions. These various players have inputs into the dynamic engendering democratic identities and citizenship. This may be designated as a form of new politics in Tunisia. Six salient features characterize Tunisia’s civic parallelism, illustrated in Figure 14.1. Some tend more towards society (bottom-up), others toward the state (top-down), but this categorization is not rigid. The legal-parliamentary and electoral features of Tunisia’s transition have set the country on a solid route to institution-building. Further, the country’s democratic parallelism is dialogic, with formerly opposed, mutually exclusive political actors coming together and having commonly vested interests in the viability and continuity of the political system. It is multi-partisan, as new partnerships are hammered out within and between state and society, respectively. At the level of the state, resulting partnerships include the Troika, the first post-revolution government formed after the 2011 elections. Tunisia’s emerging civic parallelism is also coalitional. The presence of instability prompts a constant search for a shared position, leading different political actors to drop partners and adopt new ones. Within society, notable partnerships include the so-called Ruba’iyyah (Quartet) consisting of the Tunisian Union of Commerce, Business and Artisans (UTICA), the Tunisian Human Rights League (LDTH), the National Order of Tunisian Lawyers (ONAT), and the Federated Union of Tunisian of Workers (UGTT). The advancing force of advocacy and mediatory politics by non-state actors is an oncoming “train” that has partly conditioned the system’s political behaviour to popular pressure and inputs. After the assassinations of 2013, for instance, leftist parties mobilized the street as one way to force the hand of the state in pursuing the killers and weakening the Troika (The Guardian 2013). In a reliance on formal–informal tools and forums for deliberating on public matters, former antagonists have been able to minimize inter-party hostility and contain potentially dangerous tension. This has helped build bridges of multiparty mutual trust and values of interdependencies, especially on redistributive issues (political and socio-economic), along otherwise ideologically framed interests amongst secularists and Islamists, etc. What makes this significant in the Tunisian case is that it helps construct a wide and diverse cross-section of political positions as anchorage to political deliberation and policy formulation. Here moral protests and politics of polarization have been at the forefront of informing the various publics, especially in the absence of an established and reliable media sector. Polarization and protest have helped initiate multi-stakeholders political processes. For, they contribute to inform the various publics and plug them into the ongoing tension and the key issues driving and shaping multiparty and political power in Tunisia. Noteworthy here is the secularist–Islamist mutual toleration in the formal organization of politics, inviting much scholarly attention. In the context of the Arab Spring, this dynamic of coexistence of Islam and democracy is dubbed as “twin toleration” by Stepan (2012). A caveat is in order with respect to the final feature of what is called here Tunisia’s “civic parallelism.” The terms “anomie” and “anomic” suggest a brand of politics fraught with instability and bereft of rules of engagement, including moral standards. Yet, moral protest is taken here to mean the presence of uprisings and anti-systemic activities, all of which are intended to “infuse” a dosage of morality into polity and society. Hence, the aspirations made popular by the Arab Uprisings from 2011 and beyond, which have propagated values such as dignity, freedom, and social justice (Quwaydar 2011). The continuity and permanence of moral protest and its emancipatory content has been a defining feature of Tunisia’s hirak, despite cases of polarization and even fragmentation spanning state and society (Sadiki 2016). 198

Tunisia’s “civic parallelism”

The normative element of this sustained peoplehood—as an ethos of dissent against dictatorship and resistance to authoritarianism—is noteworthy. Against the stalled and regressed political transitions of its neighbours, what makes Tunisia distinctive is its state and society come together to work in tandem. The resulting dynamic blends formal and informal political actors, processes and fledgeling institutions. With its popularly elected parliament and president and its democratic constitution protecting civil and political freedoms, the North African country has gone further in the institutionalization of its hirak than any other Arab state. In the pursuit of normalizing relations and levelling the playing field between state and society, Tunisia’s civic parallelism propels democratic learning forward.

Democratic learning: perceptions of Islamist parliamentarians Consensus and coalition-building The corpus of data used includes responses from 14 Ennahda parliamentarians. In these responses, data was gathered via interviews in Hammamet, Tunisia between 21–3 May 2016, during the party’s 10th Congress. Of note, the discussions I had covered a plethora of issues, also touching on parliamentarization, as a process that eases post-Ben Ali Tunisia into democratic learning. Questions sought to 1) examine the extent to which parliament as a democratically elected institution is contributing to democratic capacity-building; 2) helping establish whether the new values practised by MPs are significantly different in substance or in the political devices used. The responses share the same rhetorical references (e.g. over-use of the notion of unity and plurality). Moreover, they give the impression that parliament is the most important institution created by the country’s incipient democratization. The MPs may have naively neglected the role of individuals leading political parties (such as Nidaa Tounes and Ennahda itself) or other civic actors (including the Federated Unions of Tunisian Workers, the UGTT). What derives from the responses points to salient features that characterize Tunisia’s “civic parallelism.” Consensus-building has long been identified by scholars as key to the functioning of democratic political systems (Putnam, Leonardi and Nanetti 1994) and policymaking (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993). Yet, consensus-building is arduous, time-consuming, far from a “panacea” for political disagreements (Innes 2004). Thus, political actors will choose to engage in this practice when they “are not satisfied with their options working alone or with a few others and where significant problems that they all care about demand solution,” when they have exhausted “traditional decision making processes,” and when they confront “controversies and differences in values and understandings” (Innes 2004: 15). These contexts of consensus-building are applicable to Tunisia’s transition. Indeed, respondents’ answers suggest that the specificity of Tunisia’s democratic learning process—what I call here “democratic parallelism”—of Tunisia’s transition, has resulted from parliament operating as a “consensus-building” chamber. All 14 respondents agree that the feature of consensus-building has deepened parliamentarization. Moreover, in a search for consensus between the diverse democratically elected parties, representatives “learnt” not to always toe the party line. Thus, the search for consensus sometimes divided a given party—and Ennahda has had a share of this political development. So, within parties, there are issues that forced the re-thinking of difficult questions. This called for rising above strictly ideological party divides. The rhetorical device “wifaq” (agreement) refers to the necessity of adopting dialogic positions—as vs. political posturing—when engaging in resolving big issues of common interest to all Tunisians, with formerly opposed, mutually exclusive political opponents. Integral to this “dialogic” political sense is the ethical obligation to come together for the greater sake of safeguarding the democratic gains since the 2011 Uprising. 199

Larbi Sadiki

Thus “consensus-building” is almost invariably represented by respondents as the ethic to focus on those commonly vested interests as unifiers of the nation’s representatives. That is, the sine qua non of viability and continuity of the political system. Disparate forces belonging to different positions on the political spectrum negotiate and adopt shared platforms in a new brand of mediatory politics. Here, parliament provides the forum, legitimacy and the procedural facility. What comes across in the responses from the Ennahda deputies is valorization of coalition-building. The crux of this maharah (skill), as it is interchangeably referred to along with the term “value” revolves around the determination to view politics via a wider prism: that of al-salih al’amm (the common good). Thus, new partnerships spring up between deputies, either through parliamentary committees or ad hoc coalitions. They are hammered out in a way that mirrors the tendency in the “Second Republic” to rise above narrow ideological interests, according to all respondents. One respondent notes that they reflect the twin values of consensus and coalition-building one finds within Tunisia: constructing bridges of dialogue within and between state and society.

Dialogism and multi-partisanship In this respect, it may be pointed out that at the level of the state, resulting partnerships include the Troika. This first post-revolution government was formed after the 2011 elections and consisted of Nahda, Ettakatol and the Congress for the Republic (CPR). Within society, partnerships were forged in the so-called Ruba’iyyah (“Quartet”). This Quartet led the National Dialogue inclusively, in a model of conflict resolution owned by civic bodies and trade unions to much international acclaim including the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize4. Despite ideological tension with the left and the trade union movements, the respondents express appreciation of both. Thus, they agree that with its historical pedigree, Tunisia’s union movement is particularly noteworthy. It has been a powerful political driving force due to its credibility, following, and the autonomy to have a voice of its own, unlike in the days of Ben Ali when it was semi-dependent on the state. The Quartet thus represents how civic bodies in society came to create a counter-pouvoir, a margin of existence previously denied to society, this time carved out confidently, assertively through a form of bargain politics. Despite the fact that the overall surroundings pointed to polarization, Tunisians knew how to reinvent the wheel, converting tensions and contests into a form of constructive power. For these Islamist respondents, while the tendency towards consensus and coalition-building was an embedded trait of the country’s political culture, parliamentary learning has cemented an ethic of meeting formerly mortal foes half-way and parleying with them as a form of civic engagement. This speaks to the aforementioned idea of how instability embedded within the overall political context and ambience has galvanized relevant parties to embrace and pursue dialogic approaches, recreating and rebuilding the so-called “Second Republic.” The advancing force of advocacy and mediatory politics by ideological foes, the respondents agree, mobilized the nation’s representatives to seek compromise as a safety net for reproducing the state and its fledgeling democratic procedures, actors, and non-extremist political behaviour. If Tunisia’s politics today tend to be coalitional, it is because parliamentarization has been a formidable process of representation and reconciliation of difference, and a forum for Tunisian–Tunisian “entente.” The coalition ethic is almost—as put by one respondent—a “glue” that kept dialogue alive within parliament as well as within civil society even in times of political rifts between Ennahda and the trade unions, or between it and its partners, past (2011–4: “Troika”) and present (Ennahda-Nidaa Tounes). Interestingly, there is a recurring observation made by most of the respondents that the presence of instability has since 2011 prompted a constant search for 200

Tunisia’s “civic parallelism”

shared positions. It has led different political actors to drop partners and adopt new ones. This has been the case within parliament as well as within civil society. For instance, the Troika powers, which were dominant post-2011 elections eventually exhausted their coalition front. Nonetheless, the Troika served the purpose of stabilizing the system between 2011–14, keeping it functional and capable of political reproduction thanks to the democratic stamp of approval voters granted to the Constituent Assembly in the October 2011 general elections. Here they all stress that the parliamentary learning curve has been to “keep Tunisia talking and agreeing.” This was so even when tension ran high and when protests spread widely in the country, such as during the 2013 flashpoints when two prominent politicians of the left were assassinated. Here, informality is thus animated by the political message of society at large, including the demands of anomic actors. Moral protest, the quasi-public opinion barometer, carries over into informal discussions by public figures (e.g. parliamentarians). This is one notable specificity that marks this formative phase of Tunisia’s parliamentarization. The respondents take parliament to be the meeting place that kept Tunisia’s politics moderate and moderated by otherwise ideologically opposed deputies whose main ethic seemed to triumph for commonality. Thus, they do not tire of observing that display of coalition fronts is a common feature of the country’s new politics. Examples include al-Jomhouri, the Popular Front, and the tendency even today for Islamists and secularists to come together for the purpose of managing the business of government. For these respondents, behind the scenes it is parliament that helped hone this art of inclusiveness, emphatically transcending the exclusionary politics of the ousted Ben Ali regime. As one puts it quite powerfully, parliament as a coalition practice and institution led to the realization that no single party or one political force has the capacity of running the state, much less commanding a substantive enough following to form a government on its own. He elaborates that “Ennahda has a fixed constituency approximating one third of the voting population, but it does not have the majority needed to lead alone.” Not just a necessity but an inevitability, consensus-building is thus one of the most credibly identifiable features of Tunisia’s process of parliamentarization. Coalition fronts have been instrumental in getting smaller parties into parliament, which is both empowering and paralyzing. This space for political inclusion gives voices to otherwise marginalized in the construction of the incipient democracy. The Popular Front, for instance, nabbed 15 of the 217 seats in parliament. Relatedly, the system and its actors tend to bi-partisanship, and multi-partisanship for some of the reasons invoked earlier. This has been amenable to the major feats of the new system formalized in the democratic constitution, the electoral law and new legislation allowing for the formation of political parties (Sadiki and Boubakri 2014: 98–100). Key institutions such as the Supreme Juridical Council, the Electoral Observatory and the Truth and Dignity Commission have demanded a degree of shared platforms via different parties. The best example of this is the negotiation and drafting of the democratic constitution in 2014 that forced all actors to adopt middle-ground positions (Sadiki 2014). Tunisia’s Islamists, for instance, abandoned rigidly ideological stances on the Islamic identity of the state.

The dual nature of parliament: interplay of formal and informal The respondents note that at the level of the state can be found the same ethical toolkit for managing political difference and searching for consensus. Illustrative of this are the presidencies of Moncef Marzouki and Beji Caid el-Sebssi, one elected president by the National Constituent Assembly after the 2011 elections, the other elected directly by popular vote in 2014. Both sought to cultivate the same brand of multi-partisan politics. A notable result of this tendency 201

Larbi Sadiki

is the so-called Carthage Declaration of 2016 and resultant unity government. The agreement brought together a multitude of partners from the state (four political parties, including Nidaa Tunis and Ennahda) and within society (including the UGTT and other unions). The multidirectional flow of information, negotiation and bargaining at work here is at the core of the idea of coalition and consensus-building. Both at the level of the state and below it, powerful movements that have a capacity to garner an expansive following choose instead to work with others (e.g. Ennahda and the UGTT). This, most of the respondents add, is key to an emerging style of anti-exclusionary political leadership that is proving its worth in Tunisia’s transition thanks to the dynamism of democratically elected parliaments. Also evident is an Islamist–secularist convergence. Islamists are moderating their ideology (Sadiki 2011), but so are the secularists as both search for a middle ground. Such repositioning is specific to Tunisia’s parliamentarization: the country’s political class is no longer the sole political player. Instead, political elites engage in concessionary politics and accommodate demands from a spectrum of actors and positions. Several respondents allude to both the normative and symbolic significance of consensus and coalition-building. When pressed to explain the value of parliamentary engagement in a historical phase of democratic learning and institution-building, two elements have come to the fore. The first regards a normative aspect. The relevance of parliamentary engagement is to provide context and meaning to democratization (al-muhtawa al-dimuqrati). In practical terms, it does not only drive the message to the various social, cultural, economic, religious and political publics about how to “parley” (al-takhatub); also, and more importantly, it sends signals to these publics that conversing as a means of looking for shared ground is the alternative to discord. In other words, substantively the message is that consensus-building instructs the publics within society at large about what to do when faced with political conflict. Even if consensus-building does not detail the practical means, it points these publics into one direction: to search for shared space, language and moral disposition, to engage in conversation. This is not valorized as specifically Tunisian. Rather, it is Tunisian only in terms of the historical context of conflict prior to the revolution, such as between Islamists and leftists, and between neo-Destourians and other political publics and voices with different political leanings. Despite the short timespan of consensus-building, some of the respondents view in it as a medium of a potentially established good practice of thinking and acting available for other groups, individuals, organizations and institutions from which to glean lessons. The 18th of October Coalition (for rights and freedoms) (Hajji 2006) that preceded the revolution is invoked as an example that founded the practices of both consensus and coalition-building. Thus, what derives from this is the changing nature of the practice. Modest beginnings in organizing opposition against dictatorship begun in 2005 prior to the revolution gave way to more institutionalized practice, working in tandem with processes of democratic learning and democratization after the revolution. Thus, a second value relevant to the practices of consensus and coalition-building is its collective or shared nature. One respondent uses the phrase “common or shared value” (qimah jami’ah). A kind of glue that keeps the political publics morally “engaged,” “challenged” and “triggered” to search for the commons that increase the margin of coexistence, and, by implication, to avoid the spoilers that could bring the newly established polity unstuck. This is no easy feat. Respondents hark back to times when they lacked the know-how, much less the moral courage, to speak to former RCD members or to formerly mortal foes from the left, with whom they had ongoing battles in university campuses throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Here lies the value of consensus and coalition-building as learnt practices. They are incubated in atmospheres of divisive tendencies, at times stoked up by the Bourguiba and the Ben Ali regimes. 202

Tunisia’s “civic parallelism”

From this perspective, one can say that there is a normative side to the practices of consensus and coalition-building. Both are geared towards equipping the publics of Tunisia’s fledgeling democracy with internalizing the rules of democratic engagement. That is, the norms that govern political behaviour. The end is to establish them as practices that eventually amount to teaching the type of beliefs that can be held in high esteem as values predisposing the political and civil society for new becomings: democratic identities. It is here that some respondents seem inclined to compare Tunisia’s Islamists favourably to counterparts in the rest of the Arab region. They suggest that they have what it takes, in terms of norms and values, for facilitating Ennahda’s transition into a democratic party, itself equipped through these practices to do its share for democratic learning and democratization. Thus, they are raising the “moral” bar. They see themselves as contributing to the rise of new expectations of shared futures and matching political behaviour and values of acceptance of difference, instead of fearing it, denying it political space, or excluding it. The normative feeds into the symbolic. Here there is an additional side to these practices in the form of the building of symbols and meanings that underpin democratic learning and democratization. Consensus (tawafuq, ijmaa’) and coalition (tahaluf) enter into the political lexicon as signifiers as well as criteria. Signifiers that provide ethical tools for navigating the newly constructed political terrain hinge on shared values and futures. They become the sine qua non of political existence and membership amongst the diverse publics in Tunisia. At the same time, they acquire an additional function as criteria for judging, evaluating and interpreting democratic engagement. As signifiers, they add to the vocabulary of commonality and common memory throughout the processes of dismantling the machinery of dictatorship whilst replacing it with one that cultivates democratic identities. One respondent notes that parliament as a shared space of diversity served as a meeting place. It is, he adds, people’s individual initiatives and friendships that helped construct these dialogic and coalitional symbols and values through informal networks, an example of how relations in the private sphere cascaded over into public matters. Within this sphere, the masks came off: parliamentarians mingled socially and spoke as Tunisians not partisans, ideologues or people with politically vested interests except in the prevalence of norms that helped rebuild Tunisia along democratic routes. The obverse is true: public meetings between political opponents spilt into social interactions in the private sphere, turning the latter into a shared space for resolving conflict and problem solving. This is the biggest lesson, when respondents were asked to name one benefit, from engaging the other (political rivals and opponents) through consensus and coalition-building. They pointed to problem solving geared towards ironing out differences informally and formally; finding collective grounds for conversing informally and decision making, publicly; and understanding that all can live with difference even if multiparty trust is not at its peak. Rather than being merely a space for performing the legislative function (Baaklini, Denoeux and Springborg 1999), in this formative stage, parliament has extended to become a socializing medium conditioning MPs in dialogic practices and coalitional possibilities.

Parliamentarization via civic parallelism Tunisia’s parliament is a microcosm that captures the idea of civic parallelism. In it, we see at play the interface between the public and the private, the formal and the informal. Moreover, parliament itself within the idea of civic parallelism is an important arm of the public institutions that are equipping Tunisia with institution-building and democratization. The features of civic parallelism: dialogism; multi-partisanship; coalition-building, electoral and legal-parliamentary, kept in check by the anomic forces within society, all manifest in the parliament of Tunisia’s 203

Larbi Sadiki

Nida Tounes Ennahdha Union patriotique libre

1

8

2

1

3 3 3

1

1

Front populaire

1 1 1

Afek Tounes 1

Congrès pour la République

1

Mouvement populaire Al Moubadara

4

Courant démocratique

15

85

Tayyar Al Mahabba Al Joumhouri

16

Alliance démocratique Front du salut national Mouvement des Démocrates Socialistes La Voix des Agriculteurs 69

La Voix des Tunisiens à l'étranger Majd Al Jarid Radd Al Etibar Ettakatol

Figure 14.2  Seats in Tunisia’s new parliament elected in October 2014 Source: http://www.isie.tn/resultats/

Second Republic. The examples of the NCA in 2011 and the constitution and parliamentary and presidential elections of 2014 embody an important democratizing dimension of the country’s parliamentarization. Strong popular mandates in the elections of 2011 and 2014, even considering possible voter fatigue in 2014,5 are significant here. The drafting of the 2014 constitution involved abundant input from deputies, despite rigid ideological divides. This made the final document, constructed after many drafts, representative of the diversity of Tunisian society. Even the parties at the level of the state and elected forces did not monopolize the process. The elections demonstrate a kind of alternation of power: the Islamists led the first government. Their biggest achievement was facilitating the drafting of the constitution and partnering with secularist forces. Yet they did not fare as well in the 2014 elections, crowded out by Nidaa Tunis’s 86 seats relative to Ennahda’s 69. Particularly significant has been a consistent attitude that reflects a willingness to play by the rules of engagement—acceptance of the peaceful alteration of power, so to speak. The foregoing is at least tentatively significant in showcasing a new 204

Tunisia’s “civic parallelism”

brand of parliamentary practice and values. Thus, Tunisia’s parliamentarization has had a threefold impact, as can be garnered from Ennahda parliamentarians: 1 2 3

A medium of dialogic engagement, entrenching a practice of consensus and coalition-building A medium of deepening democratic transition in a country without democratic practices of note, as can be gleaned from the itinerary followed by the postcolonial state A process of parliamentary democratic learning

In Tunisia, three features specific to the country’s political culture should deepen and widen democratization and, above all else, help prevent the return to the executive excesses of the ousted regime. The first is the country’s evolving brand of democratic learning with its specificity of “democratic parallelism.” Perhaps the country’s competitive edge derives primarily from this Tunisian civic value. It is what led Tunisia to adopt a democratic constitution enshrining shared values—or more precisely, collectively agreed-upon rules of political engagement. This is a core adaptive achievement that has allowed for the rationalization of the revolution despite dangerous twists (two political assassinations,6 terrorist attacks (Byrne 2014), and partial return of the security agenda and apparatus to pre-revolution tactics)7 deepening a penchant for bargain politics. This brand of indigenous bargain politics has hitherto given Tunisians a democratic constitution and resulting legal foundation that speaks for rule of law, pluralism, alternation of power, reduced executive power and popular sovereignty. This legal-rational “transcript” theoretically, fulfils the institutional requirement for learning democracy—à la Tunisienne. Second is the launching of a legal organizing principle as a medium of broadening the public sphere and deepening political participation: party politics (Webb and White 2007), including its increasing professionalization (Mann 2014). The third is Tunisia’s power-sharing or so-called “Troika” dynamic, which seems likely to continue, as the 2014 elections and subsequent political alliances discussed above indicate.

Conclusion: toward a knowledge-centred approach Tunisia seems to be following a democratic route that goes beyond the trappings of “electoral fetishism” (Sadiki 2009). As the discussion on Ennahda MPs demonstrates, a Tunisian specificity is that democratic learning is being stamped with dynamically continuous social construction that is sensitive to local knowledge. This has thus far translated into the adoption of political meanings, language and skills, which politicians of all colours are carefully honing through local experience, in terms of thought and practice. The dialogical and coalitional continue to drive the process of democratic learning. The future of this incipient democracy may rest on the durability of this civic parallelism. An emphasis on democratic learning facilitates the exploration of this “toolkit” that can serve as a moderating and socializing capacity that for now, is the best hope for problem-solving in a country beleaguered by major challenges including mass unemployment and deep-rooted socio-economic inequality. This alternative to dominant “transitology” analyses has opened up a space to investigate these interdependencies underpinned by newly learnt dialogic, coalitional and pluralist know-how that may have thus far prevented Tunisia’s system from becoming paralyzed even when heavily polarized, and intermittently plagued by dangerous viscosity. “Democratic learning” can be similarly explored in other Arab contexts. Attention to subaltern voices can help scholars tease out interplays between bottom-up and top-down, formal and informal, actors, institutions in ongoing processes whose more fluid processes belie the linear trajectory of liberalization, transition, and consolidation. 205

Larbi Sadiki

Notes 1 This publication was made possible by Program grant # [NPRP9 309-5-041] from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of Qatar Foundation), with LPI Larbi Sadiki. The findings herein reflect the work, and are solely the responsibility, of the author. 2 I take democratic learning to be an “antidote” to the process of authoritarian rulers engaging politics through various tactics to learn how to reproduce their stranglehold on power as described by Dobson (2013). 3 “Civic parallelism” and “democratic parallelism” are used interchangeably throughout this article. 4 The Quartet thus facilitated the overcoming of rampant and almost-crippling polarization in the country. But that Tunisia was in fact “on the brink of civil war” between 2013–5, per the Nobel Committee’s description (The Nobel Prize 2015), is arguably an inaccurate designation and exaggeration. 5 Between 60–80 per cent in the parliamentary and presidential elections of 2014, according to Tunisia’s Electoral Commission (Sarsaar 2014: 5). 6 Leftist politician, Chokri Belaïd, of the People’s Front, was assassinated on the 6 February 2013. No one has yet been convicted of his murder even if the finger was pointed at a Salafist terrorist.Yet Belaïd favoured dialogue with all, including Nahda. His murder was calculated to plunge the country into chaos. The murder on 25 July 2013 of a second leader, Mohamed Brahmi, of the same alliance, the People’s Front, aimed at spreading chaos and derailing the process of democratization. Brahmi was a staunch critic of Islamists. See Beaumont (2013). 7 For the controversial anti-terror law passed by the Tunisian parliament in 2017 and use of torture by police, and the country’s state of emergency, see Amnesty International (2018).

References Amara, T. (26 March 2012), “Tunisia’s Ennahda: To oppose Shari’ah in constitution,” Reuters, accessible at: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-tunisia-constitutionidUSBRE82P0E820120326 Amnesty International (2018), “Tunisia 2017/2018,” Amnesty International, accessible at: https://www. amnesty.org/en/countries/middle-east-and-north-africa/tunisia/report-tunisia/ Baaklini, A., Denoeux, G. and R. Springborg (1999), Legislative Politics in the Arab World: The Resurgence of Democratic Institutions, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Beaumont P. (26 July 2013), “Tunisia: Killing of leftist leader brings secularists on to the streets,” The Guardian, accessible at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/25/tunisia-protests-killing-leader Brownlee, J. and T. Masoud (2015), The Arab Spring: Pathways of Repression and Reform, New York, NY and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bush, S. (7 November 2017), “Should we trust democracy ratings? New research finds hidden biases,” Washington Post, accessible at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/ 11/07/why-do-we-trust-certain-democracy-ratings-new-research-explains-hidden-biases/? noredirect=on&utm_term=.24f066bcdbc1 Byrne, E. (13 October 2014), “Tunisia becomes breeding ground for Islamic State fighters,” The Guardian, accessible at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/13/tunisia-breeding-groundislamic-state-fighters Carothers, T. (2004), “The end of the transition paradigm,” in Critical Mission: Essays on Democracy Promotion, Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, pp. 167–84. Dobson, W. (2013), The Dictator’s Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy, New York, NY: Anchor. The Guardian (7 February 2013), “Tunisia faces general strike after Belaid assassination sparks crisis,” The Guardian, accessed 1 May 2018, accessible at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/07/ tunisia-general-strike-assassination-crisis Hajji, L. (2006), “The 18 October Coalition for Rights and Freedom in Tunisia,” Arab Reform Initiative, accessible at: https://www.arab-reform.net/en/node/350 Heydemann, S. (2007), “Upgrading authoritarianism in the Arab world,” Analysis Paper No. 13, Washington DC: Saban Center for Middle East Policy, Brookings Institution. Higley, J. and R. Gunther (eds, 1992), Elites and Democratic Consolidation in Latin America and Southern Europe, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

206

Tunisia’s “civic parallelism”

Innes, J.E. (2004), “Consensus building: clarifications for the critics,” Planning Theory, 3:1, 5–20. Inter-Parliamentary Union (2006), Parliament and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century: A Guide to Good Practice, Geneva: Inter-Parliamentary Union. Johnson, J. and R. Nakamura (1999). A Concept Paper on Legislatures and Good Governance, New York, NY: UNDP. Krämer, G. (1993), “Islamist notions of democracy,” Middle East Report, 183, 2–8. Levitsky, S and L. Way. (2002), “The rise of competitive authoritarianism,” Journal of Democracy, 13:2, 51–65. Mann, R. (29 September 2014), “Burson-Marsteller draws ire for working with Islamist political party,” Adweek, accessible at: http://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/burson-marsteller-draws-ireworking-islamist-political-party-160466/ Marzo, P. (2019), “Supporting political debate while building patterns of trust: the role of the German political foundations in Tunisia (1989–2017),” Middle Eastern Studies, doi: 10.1080/00263206.2018.1534732. Marzouki, M. (2013), L’Invention d’une Démocratie, Paris: Éditions la Découverte. McCann, B. (2008), The Throes of Democracy: Brazil Since 1989, Halifax: Fernwood Publishers. McCarthy, R. (2019), “The politics of consensus: Al-Nahda and the stability of the Tunisian transition,” Middle Eastern Studies, doi: 10.1080/00263206.2018.1538969. M’rad, H. 2014. De la révolution à la Constitution. Paris: Nirvana. Murphy, E. (2012), “The Tunisian elections of October 2011: a democratic consensus,” The Journal of North African Studies, 18:2, 231–47. The Nobel Prize (18 October 2015), “The Nobel Peace Prize for 2015,” The Nobel Prize, accessed 4 March 2019, accessible at: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2015/press-release/ O’Donnell, G. and P. Schmitter (1986), Transitions from Authoritarian Rule. Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. O’Donnell, G., Schmitter, P. and L. Whitehead (eds, 1986), Transitions from Authoritarian Rule. Prospects for Democracy, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Perkins, K. (2004), A History of Modern Tunisia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Piser, K. (31 March 2016), “How Tunisia’s Islamists embraced democracy,” Foreign Policy, accessed 25 February 2018, accessible at: http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/03/31/how-tunisias-islamists-embraceddemocracy-ennahda/ Putnam, R.D., Leonardi, R. and R.Y. Nanetti (1994), Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Quwaydar, I. (2011), Libia: Iradat al-Taghyeer [Libya: Will to Change], Cairo: Dar al-‘Ulum. Redissi, H., Nouira, A. and A. Zghal (eds, 2012), La Transition Démocratique en Tunisie: État des Lieux, Les Acteurs, Tunis: Editions Diwen. Remmer, K. (1990). “Democracy and economic crisis: The Latin American experience,” World Politics, 42:3, 315–35. Sabatier, P. and H. Jenkins-Smith (eds, 1993), Policy Change and Learning: An Advocacy Coalition Approach, Boulder, CO: Westview. Sadiki, L. (2009). Rethinking Arab Democratization: Elections without Democracy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sadiki, L. (15 November 2011), “Civic Islamism: The Brotherhood and Ennahda,” accessed 7 May 2018, accessible at: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/20111112101016147679.html Sadiki, L. (14 May 2014), “Tunisia’s democratization taking off,” Al Jazeera, accessed 1 May 2018, accessible at: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/05/tunisia-constitution-democracy2014516161024354720.html Sadiki, L. (2015), “Towards a ‘Democratic Knowledge’ turn? Knowledge production in the age of the Arab Spring,” The Journal of North African Studies, 20:5, 702–21. Sadiki, L. (2016), “The Arab Spring: ‘The people’ in international relations,” in ed, L. Fawcett, International Relations of the Middle East, pp. 324–55, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sadiki, L. (2019), “Regional development in Tunisia: The consequences of multiple marginalization,” Policy Briefing, Brookings Doha Center, accessed 25 January 2019, accessible at: https://www.brookings. edu/research/regional-development-in-tunisia-the-consequences-of-multiple-marginalization/ Sadiki, L. and A. Boubakri (2014), “Political organization in the Middle East and North Africa,” Taiwan Journal of Democracy, 10:1, 98–100.

207

Larbi Sadiki

Sarsaar, S. (2014), “Final report on the legislative and presidential elections in Tunisia, 2014,” Independent High Electoral Commission, accessed 4 March 2019, accessible at: http://www.isie.tn/wp-content/ uploads/2015/04/rapport-isie-2014.pdf Steffe, L.P. and J. Gale (eds, 1995), Constructivism in Education, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers. Stepan, A. (2012), “Tunisia’s transition and the twin tolerations,” Journal of Democracy, 23:2, 89–103. Webb, P. and S. White (eds, 2007), Party Politics in New Democracies, New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Whitehead, L. (2002), Democratization: Theory and Experience, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zaman, A. (23 January 2019), “Tunisia’s democracy on life support as politicians squabble,” Al-Monitor, accessed 24 January 2019, accessible at: https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2019/01/ tunisia-democracy-life-support-revolution-economy.html

208

Part III

Trans-state politics: The political economy and identity contexts

15 The Middle East and North Africa in the lens of Marxist International Relations theory Jamie Allinson

The history of Marxist research in International Relations1 theory and the MENA region reveals something of a gap between two distinct bodies of thought. On the one hand, scholars working both in English and French and in the languages of the Middle East have adopted Marxist frameworks for understanding the specificities of state and society in the Middle East (see Amin 1976, 1988; Ayubi 1995; Batatu 2004; Bromley 1994) and in turn influenced Marxist theory beyond the region2. On the other hand, Marxists outside of the Middle East—reflecting the post-Cold War concentration of imperialist powers on the region—have conducted debates about the relationship between capitalism and the states system with reference to events in the Middle East but not a theory of the specific character of that relationship in the region (see Callinicos 2003, 2007, 2009; Harvey 2003; Wood 2005; Hardt and Negri 2000). This dichotomy reflects a broader problem, with IR theory as a whole and not just its Marxist variant, which Justin Rosenberg refers to as “the classical lacuna” (Rosenberg 2006: 310). This “lacuna” refers to the separation of geopolitical-external logics of explanation from sociological-internal ones—seen as a particularly risky distortion in regions, such as the Middle East, where the formation of the states’ system itself was both born of external intervention and deeply intertwined with “domestic” social change. In essence, all of the Marxist research discussed in this chapter grapples with this problem. However, a group of scholars influenced by the idea of “uneven and combined development” (UCD) have attempted to move beyond the dichotomy in the study of the Middle East by arguing that there are no purely “internal” social relations, nor asocial external ones—and that the Middle East is therefore not as exceptional as has been made out (see Allinson 2016; Matin 2006, 2007, 2011, 2013a, 2013b; Nisancioglu 2014; Tansel 2015, 2016). The challenge to understanding posed by this dichotomy sharpened with the Uprisings and revolutions of 2011 in the Arab world, leaving Marxists divided between those who identified with the Uprisings as class-driven revolts (“domestic” social change) and those who saw in them, especially in Syria and Libya, imperialist attempts (“external” geopolitics) to continue the US “regime change” efforts of the early 2000s. The aim of this chapter is to provide a survey of Marxist approaches to the study of International Relations theory in the Middle East, within the context of the on-going dilemma sketched out above. Rather than cover the various themes of Middle East international relations (Palestine and Zionism and Islamism etc.) the chapter first presents Marxism as an IR approach, 211

Jamie Allinson

and the particular contribution of Marxists from the Middle East, such as Samir Amin and Nazih Ayubi to that intellectual tradition, as well as that of the most well-known IR scholars to have researched the Middle East through a Marxist lens, Fred Halliday. The chapter then considers the expansion of debates around capitalism and the states system at the turn of the twenty-first century, sparked by US intervention in the Middle East, and how these related to scholarship on the region itself. The chapter then discusses attempts to overcome the “classical lacuna” by use of the framework of UCD. In the final section, the chapter considers responses in Marxist scholarship to the revolutionary Uprisings of 2011 and their aftermath. Although Marxist elements are often incorporated into IR frameworks of analysis of the Middle East (see Hinnebusch 2003, 2011) and there is considerable overlap with, for example, feminist work on the region (see Said, Meari and Pratt 2015), this chapter will focus on works with an explicitly Marxist focus and their implications for IR scholarship on the Middle East.

Marxism, dependency and the Middle East Marxism has been seen by realist IR scholars such as Ken Waltz as the epitome of “second image” theory (Waltz 1959: 125–6). That is to say, being concerned with social relations within societies, Marxists have little to say about relations between them. In this sense, Marxism can be seen as at one pole of the dichotomy drawn between domestic, social forms of explanation and geopolitical-external ones. However, as noted below, there is in fact a long tradition of Marxist theory that attempts to grapple with this dichotomy, in which theory from and about the Middle East has played a central role. Before examining these, a brief presentation of the basic concepts of Marxism may be necessary.3 Marxism is a “materialist” form of theory: that is, it seeks explanations in the material conditions of humans, “both those which they find existing and those produced by their activity” (Marx and Engels 1999). This basic proposition often leads to the accusation that Marxism is a kind of economic reductionism, explaining all phenomena by reference to immediate economic interest and groups formed around such interests (i.e. classes). In a field such as IR, wherein conflicts appear to concern power and security, or a region such as the Middle East, where forms of non-economic linguistic or religious identity seem to hold such great sway, this criticism may seem debilitating. Marxism is not, however, a theory of “economic reductionism” but rather one of how “economies” come to exist, function and persist, about how “surplus” is “pumped out” through the “direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers” (Marx 1978: 927). There are different forms of society based upon different such relations— these are the “modes of production.” Marx was mainly concerned with the capitalist mode, in which the direct producers—workers—are neither owned nor own the means of production and hence their exploitation is concealed by the wage they receive in return for using those means of production to produce surplus value for the capitalist. Marxists after Marx have been fundamentally concerned with two questions regarding international relations: 1) what is the relationship between capitalism (a social system) and the international system of states and 2) why and how did capitalism expand into non-capitalist societies? Since the Middle East was both victim of rivalry between the Great Powers of the early twentieth century, and the site of “late-developing” capitalism, it is no surprise that theorists from the region made great contributions to answering these questions in their own context. The most influential of these has been Samir Amin and his reworking of the dependency theory. To explain Amin’s contribution, one must first understand the intellectual and historical context. Born in Cairo in 1931, Amin both experienced and saw the end of direct European 212

The MENA and Marxist IR theory

colonialism in the Arab world. His work is both motivated by and offers lessons to the anti-colonial struggle and its inheritors, particularly as he built upon the theory of imperialism elaborated in earlier form by Vladimir Lenin (Matin 2007) and Nikolai Bukharin (Bukharin 1973). Although Amin has differences with other dependency theorists (see for examples, Frank 1971, 1978, 2010; Hopkins 1982; Wallerstein 1974) there is a common thread: the division of the states of the world into an economic hierarchy of core and periphery (possibly with the inclusion of a “semi-periphery”) in which the former dominates the latter. Samir Amin’s work concerns how the periphery came to occupy its position and how it can escape. Samir Amin’s chief contribution was two-fold: first was the conception of a “tributary mode of production,” in which the Islamic Middle East played a central role, and second, that distinct national societies are best conceived as “social formations” in which different modes of production are contained. The tributary mode “adds to a still-existing village community a social and political apparatus for the exploitation of this community through the exaction of tribute” (Amin 1976: 13). The pre-capitalist era was characterized by three centres of such tributary power: in China, India and the Islamic Empires of the Middle East. In this model, Europe was itself a periphery of the Eurasian tributary systems, and the feudalism of Western Europe simply a variant of the overall tributary mode (1988: 5–7). However, Amin argues, the non-European world has been relegated to peripheral status under capitalism thanks to “unequal exchange.” Unequal exchange, for Amin, means the difference between the “rate of surplus value” (essentially, the profits of capitalist enterprises) in the Global North and the Global South because of the lower level of wages in the latter even for commodities produced at the same level of productivity. For example, if textiles are produced in Egypt using the same machinery and techniques as they are in France—and the products sold for the price determined by the world market—but with wages in Egypt five times lower, the resulting extra 80 per cent profit that capitalist investment in Egypt gains, Amin counts as a “transfer of value” from the periphery to the core. Unequal exchange, for Amin, therefore refers not simply to terms of trade that disadvantage agricultural products or raw materials in comparison to manufactured goods, but to higher levels of exploitation of labour in the South (Amin 1976: 143–9). Amin also makes an argument that is echoed in other Marxist theories of the Middle East, and indeed the broader post-colonial world. This is to draw a historical distinction between Western Europe, in which capitalism conquered social formations in their entirety and replaced pre-existing modes of production, and peripheral social formations in which capitalism does not occupy the entire social space but is integrated with pre-capitalist forms depending upon the timing and nature of the “external attack” of European colonialism. This integration of capitalist and pre-capitalist modes of production renders the “economic system of the periphery” subordinate to the “dominant metropolitan bourgeoisie” (1976: 294). For example, in Egypt after the defeat of Muhammad ‘Ali’s attempt to establish national economic independence in the early nineteenth century, a ruling class of largely foreign origin used the inherited bureaucratic power of the Mamluke and Ottoman states to transform the countryside into “latifundia” for cotton export on the world market (1976: 303–4). Amin’s recommendation therefore is for peripheral states to “delink” themselves from the global economic system that subordinates them (1988, 1990). The key concepts of the capitalist peripheralization of the Middle East, and the hybridity of social forms in the region, appear in an even higher theoretical register in the work of Nazih Ayubi. Often thought of as a scholar of the comparative politics of Arab states, Ayubi’s work defies such categorization, the central processes and dynamics of Arab state formation he identifies being both “external” and “internal.” Ayubi takes a materialist approach, primarily influenced by (certain interpretations of) the work of Louis Althusser and Antonio Gramsci (1995). Ayubi’s specific concern is why Arab 213

Jamie Allinson

states in particular seem “so easily able to switch regional and international alliances” (1995: 1). Ayubi, like Amin, eradicates the border between internal and external relations in the social formations of the Middle East by extending the idea of the “articulation” of modes of production, drawing on an extensive debate in the general Marxist literature (Alavi et al. 1982; Foster-Carter 1978; Laclau 1977; Wolpe 1980). As with Amin, Ayubi argues that modes of production in the Middle East are often not singular and uni-dimensional but rather are articulated (i.e. two or modes can often coexist and interlink); and (b) that in many Middle Eastern social formations there is little correspondence among the various ‘instances’ or manifestations of structural power in society. (1995: 26) Ayubi adopts this approach to argue that in the Arab state modes of production, coercion and consent are dislocated or non-correspondent (1995: 27). For “classical Marxism” modes of production such as feudalism or capitalism correspond to certain forms of coercive power and ideological legitimation: the “economic and technical elements” of the capitalist mode of production, for example, would be expected to be accompanied by the political form of the legal-rational state, and cultural elements such as the liberal conception of the free individual (1995: 27–8). Thus phenomena such as clientelism and patronage reflect, according to Ayubi, how “some of the coercive and/or persuasive aspects of the ‘lineage mode of production’ may continue to survive even when the economic (e.g. pastoral) base of such a mode might have declined or even disappeared” (1995: 28). The “lineage mode of production” means the organization of nomadic pastoralists into competitive groups based on—real or ideologically maintained—kinship ties (1995: 53). It is the nature and origin of these “instances” that render Ayubi’s theory one of IR rather than just domestic political structure. This dislocation and articulation means that the state faces great difficulties mobilizing a “historic bloc” that would embed its rule in civil society: on the one hand the state therefore becomes fierce but brittle in its relations with internal society and “circulationist” (in the sense of redistributing rents acquired from outside) in its external relations (1995: 25). The succession of anti-colonial, or “pan” (pan-Arab, pan-Islamist) ideologies that have arisen in the region should therefore be seen precisely as attempts to “interpellate” a “historic bloc” of classes around a particular conception of the state, society and individual: the result of which, if successful, is the “integral state” (1995: 8). The Arab state in particular is thus caught between its “circulationist” role, mainly facilitating the flow of capital out of and between countries, and the various forms of indigenous reaction to that role. If Ayubi and Amin represent the high watermark of scholarship understanding state–society relations in the Middle East using a Marxist framework, we must turn elsewhere for work that sets the international relations of the region in a global context. The most notable of these is Fred Halliday. Halliday, in his prolific writings across three decades, both contributed to an attempt to reconstruct historical materialism in IR (1994, 1999, 2002b), the Middle East as a region (1995, 2002a, 2005) or particular countries within it (1979, 1990). However, these two aspects of Halliday’s work—although undoubtedly informing each other—did not come together in a systemic framework. The key themes of Halliday’s intellectual project were expressed in his first major work Arabia without Sultans, the fruit of a long personal engagement with the Dhofari rebels of Oman in the People’s Front for the Liberation of the Arab Gulf (PFLAG) (2002a: 1–5). Although expressed in more explicitly Marxist terms in his early works, these remained a constant throughout his work: the rejection of culturalist explanations—“mystified flummery”—for the politics of the 214

The MENA and Marxist IR theory

region and the need to replace these with a universalist, materialist method, and to defend these against what he saw as new variants of arguments based on cultural authenticity (1993). In this, and his support for the 1991 Gulf War and castigation of the Western Left for what he saw as accommodation to Islamism (2011), Halliday continued the tradition of his teacher Bill Warren, the iconoclastic Marxist who argued that imperialism, far from retarding development, was a progressive force in promoting it (Warren 1980: 9). The Middle East, Halliday argued was distinguished by being the site, not of straightforward confrontation between power blocs, but of “regional manoeuvre and initiative” by “states and social movements” especially during the Cold War (2005: 97). Halliday’s contributions to IR in general were linked to his studies of the region: most of all, his contention that revolutions were international in both their causes and effects but unjustly ignored by IR theory, was informed by his work on Iran and Yemen (1999: xv). “Uneven and combined development” was the “inescapable context” for this significance, but Halliday did not elaborate further on this theoretical insight in relation to the Middle East or broader IR (1999: 319). If Fred Halliday’s work was characterized by a wealth of empirical research, with less concentration on theory-building, the opposite may be true of Simon Bromley, whose concise book Rethinking Middle East Politics, repays reading some decades after its publication. Bromley, like Halliday, focuses on the state formation process in the region, with an approach of “analytical universality” without any assumption of “empirical homogeneity” (Bromley 1994: 99). Bromley sets materialist parameters for any such account of state formation in the Middle East, which he argues did not differ significantly from that in other areas of the Global South: that it must “relate the development of the state apparatus to the changing nature of those social relations which govern the material production of the society concerned” and that the resulting patterns of state formation are shaped by integration into the world market (1994: 99). For example, in the cases of Iraq, Syria and Egypt in the immediate pre-independence period “urban-based absentee landlords” dominated the social formations in alliance with the British or French colonial power, setting the stage for the intertwined struggles for national liberation and economic redistribution that gave birth to radical Arab nationalist regimes. In the Arabian Peninsula, by contrast “the elite was tribal” (and owed its position to continuing British support) providing the point of origin for the Saudi and Gulf monarchies (1994: 84).

The Iraq War of 2003 and the Middle East and North Africa in international relations The scholars surveyed above (with the exception of Bromley) largely represent a generation concerned with providing a Marxist analysis of the Middle East and North Africa as a region in its own right. Their roots lay in the anti-colonial, socialist and youth movements of the 1960s and their research on the subordinate position of the Middle East was explicitly linked to the global context provided by those movements and the Cold War order against which they rebelled. In this section, I consider a later genre of Marxist work on the Middle East and North Africa—or rather work in which the region features heavily in arguments about the global system. This revival of Marxist IR scholarship occurred around and in response to the US-led war on and occupation of Iraq in 2003, and the unprecedented mass anti-war mobilizations it provoked. The debates below therefore primarily refract arguments about the global relationship between capitalism and the states system through the experience of the Middle East circa 2003 rather than being theories about the region itself. It is necessary to outline some of the contexts in which this body of theory emerged and for which it is itself an explanation. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union 215

Jamie Allinson

encouraged the belief that Marxism was dead as an intellectual and political project—despite the long dissociation of Marxist theory from the ossified state structures of the USSR. It also resulted in a unipolar world dominated by the United States. Conflict in that world, it was argued by policy intellectuals such as Francis Fukuyama or Samuel Huntington, would derive not from the clash of opposing social and economic orders and their motivating ideologies, but from cultural holdouts against the expansion of the dominant liberal, democratic and capitalist model. War and insecurity would occur, but these would be wars over values, not territory, power or economic interest; with the expansion of the liberal model, a state of peace amongst a world of democracies might eventually be reached. The Middle East and North Africa as a region came to represent an obstacle to this process. Largely untouched by the “wave” of transitions to parliamentary democracy in the rest of the Global South and Eastern Europe in the 1980s and 1990s, home to “rogue states” and terrorist groups that rejected the new global order, the region itself became seen as a problem in need of international management. The opening salvo of this effort might be seen as the Gulf War of 1991 against Iraq, under the direction of US President George Bush culminating in the invasion of the same country by his son, President George W. Bush in 2003. Such was the context for a revival of Marxist interest in international relations, essentially revolving around the old question of the relationship between capitalism and the states system. This was posed anew by the paradoxical nature of the US war on Iraq in 2003: simultaneously displaying features of classical inter-state war, colonial occupation and liberal war for values. To explain the actions of the US in the Middle East would then inform a Marxist understanding of the relationship between capitalism and the states system as whole. In broad outline, there were two sides to this debate: first those who saw the unprecedented military and economic dominance of the US, together with the expansion of global capital under the banner of free-market neo-liberalism, as heralding a new kind of system in which the “logics” of capital and state were divorced (Harris 2004; Lacher 2002; Lacher and Teschke 2007; Robinson 2007). In the argument, for example, of William Robinson, the US invasion of Iraq represented an “attempt to play a leadership role on behalf of transnational capitalist interests” rather than in competition with other states (Robinson 2007: 20). Second were those Marxists who defended the existence of such a fusion, albeit with some degree of autonomy in the interlinking of these “two logics” (Ashman and Callinicos 2006; Callinicos 2007, 2009; Harvey 2003). For this side of the debate, the Iraq war represented not an instance of US hegemony, shoring up the capitalist system as a whole, but rather competition with other capitalist powers. Particularly influential on the latter argument was the thesis put forward by the Marxist geographer, David Harvey. Harvey argued that the war on Iraq represented a “new imperialism”: the link between capital and state was not severed, or overcome by the former at the expense of the latter but reinstated in a new way (Harvey 2003: 29–36). Harvey’s argument is a complex one, but his direct explanation for the 2003 war is relatively simple and familiar: it was to control the supply of oil in the global market to ensure US leverage over competitor states such as China (2003: 19–24). Other Marxists, such as Ray Kiely, contest this claim on the basis that control of Iraqi oil neither provided such leverage nor could have been expected to do so: the motive for the invasion deriving from “Washington’s policing role in an increasingly integrated international economic order based on sovereign nation-states” (Kiely 2006: 216). The debate thus revolves around a restatement of the “Lenin–Bukharin” version of imperialism, in which the interests of capital and states—or as Harvey puts it the two logics— are merged with belligerent results (2003: 33–4). This argument was put even more strongly by Alex Callinicos, who argued that the explanation for the US invasion of Iraq required a “Realist moment” (albeit no more than a moment) in Marxist theory (Callinicos 2005: 307). 216

The MENA and Marxist IR theory

The idea here is that the strategic—rather than directly economic—logic of the inter-state system is incorporated into the “set of determinations” specific to the capitalist mode of production. Since the late nineteenth century, in this argument, the interests of “state managers”— policymakers and leaders—have become fused with those of capital accumulation, because only through the successful pursuit of the latter can states maintain themselves in a capitalist system (Callinicos 2009: 81–5). The 2003 Iraq war thus led to an expansion and revival of Marxist theory in international relations, most especially the Marxist theory of imperialism. However, this scholarship was largely concerned with US policy in the Middle East, rather than the international relations of the Middle East as such. The lines of this debate, particularly that over whether late-capitalist imperialism is constituted by a single-pole, the USA or whether it was characterized by renewed competition between powers such as the USA and Russia with reverberations in the region, was to return with a vengeance in the aftermath of the revolutionary Uprisings of 2011. Before examining the Marxist response to those events, however, a necessary detour must be taken into that scholarship that seeks to resolve the “classical lacuna” in the study of Middle East IR by means of “uneven and combined development.”

UCD and the international relations of the Middle East The debates amongst Marxists on the relationship between capitalism and the states system led to a revival of the concept of “uneven and combined development” associated with the Russian Revolutionary Leon Trotsky (1972: 29–38), and of particular interest to scholars of the Middle East. The concept, originally introduced to provide a strategic understanding for Russian revolutionaries, has been extended since in both its chronological scope (see Callinicos and Rosenberg 2008; Matin 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2013a; Rosenberg 1996; Rosenberg 2006) and problem area (Lacher and Teschke 2007 Trotsky’s concept began from the recognition of the international character of the world capitalist system. He argued that Russia’s minority working-class movement could successfully bypass the supposedly indispensable stages of bourgeois democracy and capitalist development and reach a stage from which it would promote socialist revolution internationally. The essence of Trotsky’s argument might be summarized as the interaction of different patterns of social relations in a given society (or rather “social formation”) under the impact of the global expansion of capitalist social relations such that the distinct character of the resultant “combined social formation” itself feeds back into the system of geopolitical competition that originally produced it. UCD, especially in the version associated with Justin Rosenberg thus offers a way of uniting social and geopolitical modes of argument (Rosenberg 2006: 8). For example, in the case of Russia, the mode of production capitalism encountered was (in Trotsky’s words) feudalism. The political apparatus of that mode was simultaneously strengthened and undermined by the penetration of capitalism. The exigencies of Russia’s self-preservation compelled the Tsarist state to industrialize producing the concentrated and combative working class that would eventually overthrow that very state. The outcome, according to Trotsky, was to generate the conditions for the political crisis of the revolution that itself became a further source of international conflict (Trotsky 1997 [1930]: 33–5). The Russian experience was paralleled in the distinct trajectories of social conflict in late-developers and consequently the international management and effects of these crises in “countless mini czarisms” (Rosenberg 1996: 12). How does this claim relate to MENA? UCD does not subordinate social to “international” explanation or vice versa. Rather it seeks to explain the international relations of the Middle 217

Jamie Allinson

East through the combined social formation brought about by the “whip of external necessity” (see Turner 1999: 60–2, for a related argument). UCD thus offers historical sociological explanations but of forces that are themselves “internationally” constituted. Thus, in uneven and combined development the fusion of dissimilar social structures (or modes of production) within a single formation represents the composite effect of geopolitical-military pressures, establishing trajectories of social struggle that then feed back into “international relations.” The parallels between uneven and combined development, and the theoretical frameworks described above, such as that of Samir Amin, will no doubt be clear. What distinguishes uneven and combined development, however, is in seeing the various attempts at “catching up” in the Global South—proposed by Amin and other dependency theorists as a policy choice for newly independent states—as responses to the “whip of external necessity,” engendering new combined social formations in which the latest conquests of capitalist technique and structure root themselves into the pre-existing relations, transforming and subjecting them and creating peculiar relations of classes. There is an emerging body of work on UCD in the Middle East. This includes the history of Iran (Matin 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2013a, 2013b), Jordan (Allinson 2016) and the middle to late Ottoman Empire (Nisancioglu 2014; Tansel 2015, 2016). Matin argues that UCD is a trans-historical phenomenon, in particular with reference to Qajar Iran composed of “a combination of different forms of authority (corresponding to different modes of socio-economic organization) ruling over a particular geopolitical space” and relating to “the (pre-existing) social reproductive texture” without fundamentally transforming it (Matin 2007: 429). Matin extends this analysis to the history of modern Iran, rejecting the “internalist” account of the Iranian revolutions of 1906–11 and 1979 (2006, 2013a). Rather than simply applying to, for example, the partial capitalist industrialization of Russia under Tsarist autocracy, UCD extends back even to the imposition of tribal nomadic rule over “Iran’s primarily agrarian society” (2006: 430). Allinson takes a somewhat different tack in seeking to explain the post-independence geopolitical alignments of the weak and generally externally dependent Jordanian state (Allinson 2016). Whereas existing accounts sought explanations in precisely the dichotomy described above, between socially embedded Western and dis-embedded Arab states, Allinson argues that these alignments derive ultimately from the combined nature of the Jordanian social formation and its social struggles (2016: 15–8). This combined social formation, Allinson claims, can be traced back to a particular “mechanism of combination” resulting from the incorporation of the sub-Damascene steppe lands into a system of the capitalist world economy and sovereign states in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (2016: 43–4). That mechanism comprised the replacement of “brotherly tribute” (khuwwa) taken by pastoral nomadic groups from settled cultivators, with external subsidy mediated through the recruitment of such groups into the armed forces under the British mandate (2016: 69–70). It was the replacement of this subsidy that came to be the heart of disputes over Jordan’s international alignment, reflecting a simultaneously “social” and “geopolitical” relationship. The integration of pastoral nomads into the Jordanian state by means of the armed forces created a social base for the Hashemite regime: but, being supported financially first by Britain and then by the US, it simultaneously formed a link with the global capitalist system. Kerem Nisancioglu and Cemal Burak Tansel, focusing on the pivotal late Ottoman period, extend the argument that uneven and combined development predates the capitalist era, establishing a move towards a more post-colonial perspective. Nisancioglu argues, contra the existing account by which capitalist relations and the sovereign state system penetrated the Ottoman sphere from without, that the competitive role of the Ottoman Empire in the early modern period was materially significant for the rise of capitalism itself (Nisancioglu 2014). For Cemal 218

The MENA and Marxist IR theory

Burak Tansel, Marxist IR theory has displayed a “deafening silence” towards the experience of the “non-West” and especially the “intervention by or interaction with domestic actors, conditions and structures” in the transformation of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. The intervention and interaction here refer to the “active agency” of Ottoman social forces and state actors, which Tansel argues, should be given a far more prominent place in discussions of UCD in the region (Tansel 2015: 97; see also 2016).

Marxism, international relations and the Arab Uprisings of 2011 The upheavals that shook in the Middle East from the end of 2011 should have provided fertile ground for Marxist scholarship of the international relations of the region. The initial response to the revolutionary outburst was that the conventional assumptions of Middle East studies and IR had to be re-thought. The prima facie parallels (as well, of course, as very significant differences) of the dynamics of the Arab Uprisings with previous revolutionary waves, their evident relation to years of socio-economic injustice, their striking passage across borders, and the consequent embroiling of external powers as military actors, seemed to offer an almost textbook case for Marxist analysis to form part of that process. However, this promise was not to be achieved—reflecting, perhaps, the deep crisis into which the region sank, rather than the emergence of any new form of emancipatory politics. Savage internationalized civil wars in Libya, Yemen and most of all Syria; the retrenchment of powerful and brutal counter-revolutions in Egypt and Bahrain; and the rise of the reactionary politics of the so-called “Islamic State” across the region obstructed such an outcome. To some degree, this confusion reflected a return of the same problem of “internal–external” with which we opened this chapter: once the Uprisings spread from firm Western allies such as Tunisia, Egypt and Bahrain to notionally “anti-imperialist” regimes such as Libya and Syria, Marxists (both within and without the region) were fractured between those who prioritized opposition to US imperialism (sharpened by the experience of 2003, which thereby led them to play down the importance and indigenous character of the Uprisings), and those who identified with the popular Uprisings against regimes of any type. Marxists of the former kind tended to be concentrated outside of the region and be scholars of US imperialism rather than the Arab world as such—a perspective reflected in the leading journals of the Anglophone Left, based in the US and concerned first and foremost with American power. Thus Perry Anderson, long a lodestar for the Anglophone intellectual Left, in his magisterial survey of US foreign policy and its thinkers, dedicates almost no space to the indigenous factors for the Uprisings, reducing them to “a crop of . . . positive developments for the US” (Anderson 2015: 141)—in itself a far from adequately defended proposition. More robust analyses have been provided by two Marxist scholars in particular, both based at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London: Gilbert Achcar and Adam Hanieh. The latter has provided an analysis of a region much neglected in Marxist scholarship of the Middle East, and one that has played an increasingly important role since 2011: the Gulf states, oil producers or otherwise. Hanieh argues that one can no longer treat the economies of the region as separate blocs from which the Gulf can be excluded as a consequence of their linkage to global markets through oil rent: rather a class of “Khaleeji (Gulf) capital” interpenetrates all of the ruling classes of the Arab states (Hanieh 2011: 103–4, 2013: 136–41). These Gulf capitalist classes form not just a “regional” but a “domestic” factor in the politics of Arab states, especially in the fiscal and political crises issuing from the Uprisings of 2011. The different national versions of khaleeji capital are, as all capitalist classes, in competition with each other—for example in the contest between Qatar and Saudi Arabia for regional influence played out most notably across 219

Jamie Allinson

Egypt and Syria (2013: 262). Such blocs of Gulf capital played an important role in driving, and defending, the neo-liberal policies adopted since the 1970s (2015: 159–62). Hanieh rejects the dichotomy between “state” and “civil society,” in which the latter is seen as the repository of progressive free-market rationality smothered by the former—the solution to the region’s problems thereby being more free-market “neo-liberal” policies (2013: 6–8). Emphasizing both the continued centrality of imperialism, and the restructuring of regional states to pursue neo-liberal policies even further removed from public scrutiny, Hanieh traces the origins of the Uprisings of 2011 to those policies rather than simply the absence of democratic governance (important though that is) in the region (2013: 14–5). A similar point is made in research making use of neo-Gramscian frameworks to account for the origins and course of the Egyptian revolution in particular, and its relationship to external pressure and international financial institutions (see De Smet 2016; Roccu 2013). Gilbert Achcar, author of numerous books on the Middle East from a Marxist perspective (Achcar 2002, 2004, 2010, 2013, 2016), characterizes the Uprisings of 2011 and their subsequent dynamics as a region-wide battle between revolution and counter-revolution—or rather two forms of counter-revolution, the “secular” authoritarian anciens regimes and the various forms of Islamism (Achcar 2016: 8–10). These regimes represent for Achcar—by contrast to Hanieh who tends to stress the commonality between capitalism in the Middle East and elsewhere—a particular “modality” of the capitalist mode of production, in which the patrimonial nature of the state has blocked and fettered development, leading to the parlous economic situation behind the Uprisings (2013: 20–30). These counter-revolutionary forces to whom Achcar points, amongst them the Gulf states, Iran, and the “Islamic state,” represent not only ideological trends, Islamism or sectarianism, but the competition of different ruling classes and imperialist powers in the regional system to co-opt or repress revolutionary movements (2016: 10–6). Primary amongst these are the chief source of regional counter-revolutionary power, Saudi Arabia, backer of the Sisi coup regime in Egypt, and funder of sectarianizing trends in the Syrian opposition (2016: 9–10). Iran, the other petro-Islamist contender for hegemony in the region, played a similar role in backing the Asad regime to the hilt (2016: 10). However, Achcar also identifies a third pole, associated with Qatar, Turkey, the Muslim Brotherhood and—at least in the case of Egypt—the United States (2016: 67–70). Moreover, the role of Russia, as an external imperialist force backing the counter-revolutionary Asad regime in Syria in concert with Iran, is also emphasized by Achcar—this sets his analysis apart from, for example, that of his former collaborator Noam Chomsky (2016: 19). Within the landscape of the post-2011 Middle East, wherein the Uprisings have brought about neither popular revolutionary regimes nor even (with the possible exception of Tunisia) limited and constitutional “bourgeois democracy,” the phenomenon of the “Islamic State” has proved particularly difficult for Marxists to analyze. Pre-existing Marxist analyses of Islamist movements, developed with a view to providing a political strategy in the face of those movements, varied from seeing them as a form of anti-imperialist resistance, to a variegated phenomenon dependent on their class position to consistent forces of reaction. The extreme cruelty of the Islamic State group, its outright exterminationist Sunni chauvinism, and focus on the destruction of revolutionary popular movements in Syria rather than the Asad regime has led even Marxist traditions that once shied away from the concept of “Islamofascism” to discuss the group in such terms (Alexander 2015; Naisse 2015). The situation is complicated by the embroiling of Islamic State in a strategy of regional and global polarization: the entry of simultaneous military campaigns by both the US and Russia, as well as Iran, the primary sponsor of anti-ISIS militia forces in Iraq. This is a situation difficult to understand purely within the lens 220

The MENA and Marxist IR theory

of inter-imperialist competition and/or class struggle. Although Marxists have provided introductions to analysis of the Islamic State (Sulehria 2015; Hanieh 2015) that set its rise within the context of the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary dynamics since 2011, fuller work is yet to emerge. Nonetheless, the concept of UCD has been used to explain the Egyptian counterrevolution of Abdelfattah el-Sisi, demonstrating how the inheritance of Nasserist “catch-up” developmental nationalism provided the wider social base of support for the coup against the Muslim Brotherhood in 2013 (Allinson 2019).

Conclusion This chapter has sought to provide a survey of Marxist research on the international relations of the Middle East and North Africa—at least that part of it that is widely available in English. As we have seen, the Middle East in Marxist studies—as for other theoretical traditions in international relations—provided an especially marked disjuncture between geopolitical and social modes of explanation. This has been particularly important for Marxist research on the Middle East, given the long and continuing history of external imperialist intervention that has been constitutive of the states system in the region; at the same time the political economy of late-developing capitalism and consequent explosive class struggles has shaped and continues to shape ruling regimes and their geopolitical orders.

Notes 1 In this chapter, “IR” and “International Relations” refer to the scholarly discipline, and “international relations” without capitalization to the phenomena studied by that discipline. 2 Needless to say, there is a wide-ranging Marxist literature on the social structures of the Middle East and North Africa and the relationship between these and the international relations of the region in Arabic, Persian and other languages. Since this chapter is intended a research survey in English for undergraduate and post-graduate students, that material will not be (directly) covered here: however as recommendations for the Arabophone reader, Mehdi ‘Amil’s Fi-l-Tanaqud (On Contradiction) (Al-Farabi, Beirut 1973) and Fi-Naamat al-Intaj-al-Kuluniyali (On the Colonial Mode of Production) (Al-Farabi, Beirut 1976) provide significant (and dense) contributions to Marxist theory that in many ways predate and prefigure the discussion of articulation of modes of production. For surveys of Marxist and Marxist-influenced thought in Arabic in particular, see Chapters 7 and 8 of Ibrahim Abu-Rabi’ Contemporary Arab Thought: Studies in Post-1967 Intellectual History (Pluto, London 2003). Readers may also find useful the special section on “The Arab Left in Egypt and Lebanon” in Arab Studies Journal, 24:1 (Spring 2016), edited by Sune Haugbolle and Manfred Sing. 3 The corpus of works by Marx and Engels, let alone their followers and epigones, is of course vast. The interested reader should consult the primary texts, especially Capital Volume 1, and The German Ideology—for Marxism as it relates to IR, Anthony Brewer’s Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Survey (Routledge, London, 1980), and the collections Marxism and World Politics: Contesting Global Capitalism edited by Alex Anievas (Routledge, London 2010) and Historical Materialism and Globalisation edited by Hazel Smith (Routledge, London 2002) will be useful.

References Achcar, G. (2002), The Clash of Barbarisms: The Making of a New World Disorder, London: Routledge. Achcar, G. (2004), Eastern Cauldron: Islam, Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq in a Marxist Mirror, London: Pluto Press. Achcar, G. (2010), The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives, New York, NY: Metropolitan Books. Achcar, G. (2013), The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising, London: Saqi. Achcar, G. (2016), Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in the Arab Uprisings, London: Saqi. 221

Jamie Allinson

Alavi, H., Burns, P.L., Knight, G.R., Mayer, P.B. and D. McEachern (eds, 1982), Capitalism and Colonial Production, London: Croon Helm. Alexander, A. (2015), “ISIS and counter-revolution: towards a Marxist analysis,” International Socialism, 145, accessible at: http://isj.org.uk/isis-and-counter-revolution-towards-a-marxist-analysis/ Allinson, J. (2016), The Struggle for the State in Jordan: Social Origins of Alliances in the Middle East, London: I.B. Tauris. Allinson, J. (2019), “Counter-revolution as international phenomenon: The case of Egypt,” Review of International Studies, 45:2, 320–44 Amin, S. (1976), Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism, New York, NY: Monthly Review Press. Amin, S. (1988), Eurocentrism, New York, NY: Monthly Review Press. Amin, S. (1990), Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World, London: Zed Books. Anderson, P. (2015), American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers, London: Verso. Ashman, S. and A. Callinicos (2006), “Capital accumulation and the state system: Assessing David Harvey’s The New Imperialism,” Historical Materialism, 14:4, 107–33. Ayubi, N. (1995), Overstating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East, New York, NY: St Martin’s Press. Batatu, H. (2004), The Old Social Classes and The Revolutionary Movements in Iraq: A Study of Iraq’s Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of Its Communists, Ba‘athists and Free Officers, Vol. 2, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bromley, S. (1994), Rethinking Middle East Politics: State Formation and Development, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bukharin, N. (1973), Imperialism and World Economy, New York, NY: Monthly Review Press. Callinicos, A. (2003), The New Mandarins of American Power: The Bush Administration’s Plans for The World, Cambridge: Polity Press. Callinicos, A. (2005), “Response to Alexander Anievas,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 18:2, 306–9. Callinicos, A. (2007), “Does capitalism need the state system?” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 20:4, 533–49. Callinicos, A. (2009), Imperialism and Global Political Economy, London: Polity. Callinicos, A. and J. Rosenberg (2008), “Uneven and combined development: The social-relational substratum of ‘the international’? An exchange of letters,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 20:4, 533–549. De Smet, B. (2016), Gramsci on Tahrir, London: Pluto. Foster-Carter, A. (1978), “The modes of production controversy,” New Left Review, 1:107. Frank, A.G. (1971), Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America, London: Pelican. Frank, A.G. (1978), Dependent Accumulation and under-Development, London: Macmillan. Frank, A.G. (2010), “The development of under-development,” in eds, S.C. Chew and P. Lauderdale, Theory and Methodology of World Development: The Writings of Andre Gunder Frank, London: Palgrave MacMillan. Halliday, F. (1979), Iran: Dictatorship and Development, London: Pelican. Halliday, F. (1990), Revolution and Foreign Policy: The Case of South Yemen 1967–1987, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Halliday, F. (1993), “‘Orientalism’ and its critics,” British Journalism of Middle East Studies, 20:2, 145–63. Halliday, F. (1994), Rethinking International Relations, London: Macmillan. Halliday, F. (1995), Islam and the Myth of Confrontation: Religion and Politics in the Middle East, New York, NY: I.B. Tauris. Halliday, F. (1999), Revolution and World Politics: The Rise and Fall of the Sixth World Power, London: Macmillan. Halliday, F. (2002a), Arabia Without Sultans, Vol. 2, London: Penguin. Halliday, F. (2002b), “From historical sociology to international sociology,” in eds, J.M. Hobson and S. Hobden, Historical Sociology of International Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Halliday, F. (2005), The Middle East in International Relations, Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. Halliday, F. (2011), “The left and the jihad,” Open Democracy, accessible at: https://www.opendemocracy. net/globalization/left_jihad_3886.jsp Hanieh, A. (2011), Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Hanieh, A. (2013), Lineages of Revolt: Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East, Chicago, IL: Haymarket. 222

The MENA and Marxist IR theory

Hanieh, A. (2015), “A brief history of ISIS,” Jacobin, accessible at: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/12/ isis-syria-iraq-war-al-qaeda-arab-spring/ Hardt, M. and A. Negri (2000), Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harris, N. (2004), “All Praise War!” International Socialism, 102, accessible at: http://pubs.socialistreview index.org.uk/isj102/harris.htm Harvey, D. (2003), The New Imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hinnebusch, R. (2003), The International Politics of the Middle East, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hinnebusch, R. (2011), “The Middle East in the world hierarchy: Imperialism and resistance,” Journal of International Relations and Development, 14, 213–46. Hopkins, T.K. (1982), “The study of the capitalist world-economy,” in eds, Wallerstein et al. Hopkins, World Systems Analysis: Theory and Methodology, pp. 9–39, London: Sage. Kiely, R. (2006), “United States hegemony and globalisation: What role for theories of imperialism?” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 19:2, 205–21. Lacher, H. (2002), “Making sense of the international system; the promises and pitfalls of contemporary Marxist theories of international relations,” in M. Rupert and H. Smith, Historical Materialism and Globalisation, pp. 147–65, London: Routledge. Lacher, H. and B. Teschke (2007), “The changing ‘logics’ of capitalist competition,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 20:4, 565–80. Laclau, E. (1977), Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Populism, Fascism, London: New Left Books. Marx, K. (1978), Capital, London: Penguin. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1999), The German Ideology, student edition, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Matin, K. (2006), “Uneven and combined development and ‘Revolution of backwardness’; The Iranian Constitutional Revolution 1906–11,” in eds, B. Dunn and H. Radice, 100 Years of Permanent Revolution: Results and Prospects, pp. 119–33, London: Pluto Press. Matin, K. (2007), “Uneven and combined development in world history: The international relations of state-formation in premodern Iran,” European Journal of International Relations, 13:3, 419–47, doi: 10.1177/1354066107080132. Matin, K. (2009), “Lost in translation: Modernity, ‘the international’ and the making of ‘revolutionary Islam’ in Iran,” Modernity and the Global Social Hierarchies Workshop, Cornell University. Matin, K. (2011), “Decoding political Islam: Uneven and combined development and Ali Shariati’s political thought,” in International Relations and Non-Western Thought: Imperialism, Colonialism and Investigations of Global Modernity, London: Routledge. Matin, K. (2013a), Recasting Iranian Modernity: International Relations and Social Change, London: Routledge. Matin, K. (2013b), “Redeeming the universal: Postcolonialism and the inner life of eurocentrism,” European Journal of International Relations, 19:2, 353–77. Naisse, G. (2015), “The ‘Islamic State’ and the counter-revolution,” International Socialism, 147, accessible at: http://isj.org.uk/the-islamic-state-and-the-counter-revolution/ Nisancioglu, K. (2014), “The Ottoman origins of capitalism: Uneven and combined development and eurocentrism,” Review of International Studies, 40:2, 325–47. Robinson, W. (2007), “Beyond the theory of imperialism: Capitalism and the transnational state,” Societies Without Borders, 2:1, 5–26. Roccu, R. (2013), “David Harvey in Tahrir Square: The dispossessed, the discontented, and the Egyptian Revolution,” Third World Quarterly, 34:3, 423–40. Rosenberg, J. (1996), “Isaac Deustcher and the lost history of international relations,” New Left Review, I:125, 3–15. Rosenberg, J. (2006), “Why is there no international historical sociology?” European Journal of International Relations, 12:3, 307–40. Said, M.E., Meari, L. and N. Pratt (2015), Rethinking Gender in Revolutions and Resistance: Lessons from the Arab World, London: Zed Books. Sulehria, F. (2015), “Nothing mysterious about Islamic State,” The News on Sunday, accessible at: http:// tns.thenews.com.pk/nothing-mysterious-islamic-state-interview-gilbert-achcar/#.V6hkRZMrK8U Tansel, C.B. (2015), “Deafening silence? Marxism, international historical sociology and the spectre of eurocentrism,” European Journal of International Relations, 21:1, 76–100. Tansel, C.B. (2016), “Geopolitics, social forces and the international: Revisiting the ‘Eastern Question,’” Review of International Studies, 42:3, 492–512. 223

Jamie Allinson

Trotsky, L. (1972), The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects, New York, NY: Pathfinder Press. Trotsky, L. (1997 [1930]), History of the Russian Revolution, London: Bookmarks. Turner, M.M. (1999), The Expansion of International Society? Egypt and Vietnam in the History of Uneven and Combined Development, London: London School of Economics, International Relations. Wallerstein, I. (1974), The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European WorldEconomy in the Sixteenth Century, New York, NY: Academic Press. Waltz, K.N. (1959), Man, The State and War, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Warren, B. (1980), Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism, London: New Left Books. Wolpe, H. (1980), The Articulation of Modes of Production: Essays from Economy and Society, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Wood, E.M. (2005), Empire of Capital, London: Verso.

224

16 Oil and the rentier state in the Middle East Thomas Richter

Introduction The rentier state has become an established concept in comparative politics and political economy alike.1 Originally an artefact of studying oil-rich countries in the Middle East, this approach started to diffuse within political science and economics along three dimensions in the late 1980s. First, scholars focusing on other world regions picked up the idea of the rentier state and applied it to their respective areas. Second, the concept’s main arguments have been utilized to examine government income from many natural resources other than oil. Third, given the extensive rise of statistical analysis in the social sciences, oil income has gained wide prominence in quantitative scholarship as an easily testable factor with potentially broad leverage across a variety of fields. Today, the rentier state approach is one of the rare examples of an initially specific Middle Eastern approach spreading and eventually becoming popular within mainstream academia and even public discourse. Contemporary academic literature in various fields use disparate vocabularies to describe the relationship between income from selling oil in world markets—or more generally speaking from hydrocarbon production—and social, political or economic outcomes. The usage of each specific term slightly differs with regard to focus and discipline. For instance, rentierism is used as a very general term in order to describe the relevance of oil income and often other income from natural resources or market manipulations for economic and political developments (e.g. Jenkins et al. 2011). The term resource curse, however, is primarily employed in two different meanings: first, it highlights the potentially destabilizing influence of oil revenues as prominently outlined in the literature on civil war and social conflict (e.g. Basedau and Lay 2009). Second, it points to the many failures of economic development within resource-abundant countries (Auty 1993; Ross 1999). The meaning of paradox of plenty (e.g. Karl 1997), nowadays not often applied, resembles that of resource curse. For the sake of clarity and focus, in this article, I use the term rentier state in order to highlight and discuss the historical origin, the consequences and the mechanisms linking government income from producing and selling oil as well as other hydrocarbon resources such as natural gas2 upon a given state’s institutional structure. As I will argue further below, the causal consequences of oil income are best described as perpetuating existing social structures, political 225

Thomas Richter

institutions and ethnic cleavages. Within democracies or autocracies, government-controlled oil income helps strengthen existing power structures. Oil can protect authoritarian rule but may also help stabilize democracy. Within hybrid regimes or deeply divided societies, oil income facilitates existing cleavages, dispute and conflict.

Oil in the Middle East and North Africa The recent history of state building in the MENA region is to a great extent shaped by oil. Oil became the main source of energy production for all industrialized economies across the globe after World War II. Countries with major deposits of hydrocarbon resources therefore acquired historically unseen amounts of state income. Based on that income, state building was initiated by political elites ranging from traditional tribal families in the Gulf to revolutionary army officers in Libya or left-wing anti-colonial movements such as in Algeria. It is this historical coincidence that gave rise to the development of the rentier state in the MENA region after World War II. Oil was discovered in Iran by the British and later in most of the other countries in the Middle East.3 Between the 1930s and the late 1960s globally operating and privately-owned companies controlled global oil production and income. Among them were Anglo-Persian Oil (today British Petroleum, BP), Royal Dutch Shell and five American firms—of which today ExxonMobil is the most prominent successor. Controlling over 80 per cent of global reserves, the domination by these so-called “seven sisters” lasted until the early 1970s. With the rise of OPEC, a multilateral governmental organization consisting of governments of major oil-producing countries, the time of state domination within the global oil market began.4 Starting in 1971 with Algeria, government after government throughout the Middle East and North Africa nationalized oil production. After that major change took place, crude oil prices reached unprecedented levels. The oil price revolution was born, leading over the next decade to an enormous transfer of capital from the industrialized world into the state coffers of oil-producing states. Figure 16.1 summarizes the evolution of the price of crude oil between 1956 and 2016. As this data shows, during the 1970s, the oil price revolution took place in two major steps 120.00 100.00 U.S. Dollar 2016

80.00 60.00 40.00

2016

2013

2010

2007

2004

2001

1998

1995

1992

1989

1986

1983

1980

1977

1974

1971

1968

1965

1962

1959

1956

20.00 0.00

Figure 16.1 Crude oil price in US dollars, 2016 (deflated using the Consumer Price Index for the US), 1946–2016 (BP 2017) Source: BP 2017.

226

Source: Richter and Lucas 2016. KSA = Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, UAE = United Arab Emirates

Figure 16.2 Hydrocarbon income as a per cent share of total revenue for GCC member states, 1973–2006 (Richter and Lucas 2016) KSA = Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, UAE = United Arab Emirates

Thomas Richter

between 1971 and 1980, followed by a two-decade-long low-price period between 1986 and 2004. Oil prices only started to rise again during the middle of the first decade of the 2000s. This second high-price period was followed by another steep decline. On 23 June 2014, a barrel of crude oil (about 159 litres) was still being traded at a price of $111.18 at the futures exchange in Dubai. By the end of 2014, the price had dropped to $53.76 per barrel—meaning that the most important income source of all oil-producing countries had seen its value halved in just six months. Since then, oil producers have been facing another period of lower oil prices that could have far-reaching consequences for government budgets and economic, social and foreign policies (Richter 2017). Historical data from the GSRE dataset (Richter and Lucas 2016) demonstrates the enormous role that income from hydrocarbons has played for some of the countries in the MENA region.5 Figure 16.2 summarizes the share of hydrocarbon rents as a share of total government revenues for the six member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). It is striking to see that the degree of oil income has been above 50 per cent of total government revenues for every one of these countries. This highlights the extraordinary importance of hydrocarbon resources for the development of these states.

The idea of the rentier state and its evolution as an analytical concept While the main idea of rents as unearned income goes back to the forefathers of economic thinking such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx,6 the rentier state approach began to gain prominence only as part of the oil-dependent state building that had been taking place in the MENA since the early 1970s. In a comprehensive summary of the emerging oil-rich states in this region—especially Iran—Mahdavy (1970: 428) defined rentier states as “those countries that receive on a regular basis substantial amounts of external rent.” Going back to the monopolization of the export of oil by state organizations, Mahdavy pointed to several major consequences of the domination of oil revenue in the Iranian state budget since the late 1940s. He drew attention to the expansion of large public expenditure programmes and above-average public sector growth, which eventually led to a fortuitous étatism, making the government the dominant actor within the economy. While local economic structures also depend directly on the oil industry, he argued that “[i]t is through the expenditure side rather than through the inter-industry relationships of the oil industry with the rest of the economy that the mechanism works” (Mahdavy 1970: 432). Originally thought of as a simple description of economic consequences, Mahdavy also pointed to a second aspect, which relates to the political consequences of the inflow of rents into the state budget. A government that can expand its services without resorting to heavy taxation acquires an independence from the people seldom found in other countries. However, not having developed an effective administrative machinery for the purposes of taxation, the governments of rentier states may suffer from inefficiency in any field of activity that requires extensive organizational inputs. In political terms, the power of the government to bribe pressure groups or to coerce dissidents may be greater than otherwise. By the same token, this power is highly vulnerable since the stoppage of external rents can seriously damage the government. (Mahdavy 1970: 466–77) As striking as these observations read today, they remained largely unnoticed within the framework of contemporary discussions at that time. It was only 10 years later that Delacroix (1980) argued that rentier states—or in his words, distributive states—make up a previously unnoticed 228

Oil and the rentier state

category of peripheral states in the international system. Originally intended as a critique of neo-Marxian developmental thinking, he explicitly pointed to the possibility of massive capital accumulation by otherwise underdeveloped oil exporters, especially in the Middle East, a major consequence of which has been high levels of per capita economic growth. In addition to that, and perhaps more importantly, Delacroix argued that in their role as the engine of socio-political development within rentier states, class relations are decreasing in influence. This makes state building within this category of states quite distinct from the European experience of class-based political evolution. More than 15 years after Mahdavy’s astute observations, Beblawi and Luciani (1987) further sharpened the debate on the rentier state. These two authors presented a number of ideas developed on the thesis that the export of oil and the distribution of oil revenues by the Gulf states has—probably through the establishment of a rentier mentality (Beblawi 1987: 52)—led to a comparatively low degree of political mobilization, which ultimately explains the lack of democracy in the MENA region. During the 1980s and early 1990s, a number of authors extended the Beblawi and Luciani argument, pointing to the transnational distribution of oil revenues among Arab states. This “system of petrolism” (Korany 1986) has worked through two major channels: first, grants given by oil countries in the Gulf to some of the poorer Arab states such as Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Syria and, second, labour migration, when large numbers of citizens from the poorer Arab states were hired to work in Arab oil-producing countries. This transnational redistribution of oil money also contributed to the stabilization of oil-poor authoritarian Arab countries. It is in this context that revenues from sources other than oil have also been characterized as detrimental to raising the degree of popular accountability in the Middle East and North Africa. In a nutshell, and leaving aside variations within the literature which connect (oil) rents to economic growth and violent conflict, the rentier state approach argues that the availability of hydrocarbon rents leads to different political structures, political processes and political outcomes compared to cases where economic profits prevail. As rents are not a result of complex, organized capitalist production, they do not have to be reinvested in the production process. Consequently, they are completely at the disposal of the ruling regime, can be allocated for purely political motivations and are often used without considering long-term economic needs. Political behaviour, as well as the evolution of political structures and institutions of rentier states, should then be interpreted as a function of these specific rent revenues (Beblawi and Luciani 1987: 8; Schmid and Pawelka 1990: 91). The core element of this rent-driven political evolution is the lack of structural necessity to reinvest resources in order to maximize societal surplus. Therefore, it is argued that the access to rents has made especially Middle Eastern states less reliant on modern and more complex forms of extracting domestic societal resources, such as taxation. Thus, those states become less responsive to the demands made by society than is the case in economies with complex forms of production. Instead, social classes such as the bourgeoisie and the working class are weak and are patronized and co-opted by ruling regimes. Such reasoning accounts for two crucial observations: 1) the missing back-linkage between the ruler and the ruled (“no participation without taxation”) and 2) the lack of intent to introduce consistent and lasting economic policies according to capitalist standards. However, the slogan “no participation without taxation” is just one side of the coin. As Luciani (1987: 68) has pointed out, rents are also the primary precondition for allocation—in other words, distribution—within rentier states. That is, rents are widely used to buy political consensus. Rents are therefore the most prominent prerequisite for the achievement of acceptance both by legitimization7 through the allocation of material resources (the non-coerced way) and by repression or the threat of such through the maintenance of an apparatus of organized state coercion (the coerced way). 229

Thomas Richter Table 16.1  Contextualizing the rentier state approach Taxation State spending

Low

High

Low

Weak state

Predatory state

High

Rentier state

Welfare state

Given that the combination of a low degree of taxation and a high degree of state spending is the core feature of a rentier state, eventually this characteristic needs to be contextualized at a more abstract level, as shown by Table 16.1. A further discussion of the broader consequences of this more general characterization of stateness for outcomes like regime type, democratization, economic growth, social conflict or government efficiency, to name just a few, would exceed the scope of this contribution. However, it is important to keep in mind that the rentier state approach represents only one specific combination of two general dimensions of stateness: different degrees of taxation and state spending. To highlight another important scholarly debate on the rentier state, a distinction is sometimes made between pure or first-order rentier states and semi- or second-order rentier states (Beblawi 1987; Schmid 1991; Beck 2009). The latter category includes countries with low or no oil revenues such as Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia and Yemen, while the former consists of classical oil states such as the smaller Gulf monarchies and Saudi Arabia, but also includes countries such as Algeria, Iran, Iraq and Libya. From an analytical point of view, it seems to make sense to assume that different levels of rent revenues explain different levels of legitimacy and/or stability among authoritarian regimes. However, suggested thresholds for differentiating between rentier and semi-rentier states seem to be chosen rather arbitrarily. The most prominent example is Luciani’s (1987: 70) measure that at least 40 per cent of state revenues in the form of (oil) rents constitute a rentier state, or in his words an “allocation state.” He gives no reason for why a country becomes a rentier state at exactly this point. An alternative way of looking at the question of whether different levels of oil rents have different political effects would be a systematic comparison of oil-rich and oil-poor countries over a longer period of time, looking at specific political problems in order to identify systematic differences in different policy fields. However, to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever conducted such a time-consuming exercise.

Measuring the impact of oil income In the existing literature on the rentier state, four main indicators are used to measure the impact of oil rents. None of them measures the true amount of oil income controlled by governments. First, World Bank data on oil rents is based on a calculation of average world prices minus average country-specific production costs (plus a normal return to capital) multiplied by the annual country-specific amounts of oil or gas production (Hamilton and Clemens 1999: 339; The World Bank 2015). This data, which has been available since the late 1990s, comes with a number of more general problems: A) Production costs for oil and natural gas are estimated only at average levels and not at marginal levels. B) Production costs are often calculated at one fixed point in time. C) For many countries, the average and fixed costs of neighbouring countries are used. D) Some countries sell hydrocarbons on domestic markets below world prices and therefore obtain comparatively less income. Overall, the World Bank data tends to overestimate the level of state rents for countries with higher-than-average production costs or high levels of internal usage, while they underestimate state rents for countries where production costs are 230

Oil and the rentier state

below average. It is therefore hard to say how the data on rents is misleading (biased) without knowing the country- or location-specific marginal production costs and the price levels on domestic markets. Second, relying on the share of oil exports as a percentage of GDP (oil dependence) creates additional problems. Oil dependence very likely overestimates the influence of oil in poorer and more conflict-prone countries (Ross 2015: 242), since these societies are less able to absorb fuel production due to lower demand and the absence of refining capacity. From a conceptual point of view, it seems that oil dependence is inadequate for measuring what the original rentier state theory proposed with regard to state–society relations: the idea that government-controlled resource rents free the government from societal pressure by permitting it to avoid taxation and/or feed citizens (or social groups) is an argument essentially based on individual preferences or calculations (Smith 2017). Therefore, indicators based on per capita values are conceptually more suitable to estimate for these relationships.8 Third, Haber and Menaldo’s (2011) and also Ross’s (2013) data on oil and natural gas income are calculated by multiplying the volume of oil and gas production in each country-year by the respective unit value (Haber and Menaldo 2010: 14–20). This data, often used in the most recent literature on the rentier state (e.g. Andersen and Ross 2014; Wright, Frantz and Geddes 2015), systematically overestimates the true amount of hydrocarbon rent available to governments’ budgets since no country-specific or production-site-specific production costs are deducted. Apart from the operationalization issue, all historical data on oil and gas income based on production or export levels suffer from an additional validity problem if they are used as a proxy for state hydrocarbon rents. They do not adequately account for the most significant structural change in international oil markets: between the late 1960s and the late 1970s almost all oil producers nationalized the oil companies operating within their borders (Andersen and Ross 2014: 1000–3). Previously, transnationally operating and vertically integrated companies had extracted the majority of rents. As a result of the new policies, national governments became the main recipients of massively increased oil and gas revenues. Data on oil income based on the volume of production or exports do not adequately depict this shift.9 Fourth, there is an only recently released source, the GSRE 1.0 dataset, that contains unique indicators of state rents from the production, export and sale of oil and natural gas.10 State rents—defined as payments into the fiscal coffers of the state above the sum of unit production costs and a return to capital—are found at different places throughout government budgets. Many state rents are budgeted under non-tax revenues. For instance, oil royalties—either a fixed amount or a fixed share of income from the sale of each barrel of oil—are usually budgeted under this category. Also, revenues from transporting oil or natural gas, such as transport or pipeline royalties, are often added here. An exclusive focus on non-tax revenues, however, ignores the fact that primary-commodity-exporting companies—regardless of whether they are privately or state-owned—pay large amounts of taxes. This corporate taxation is most often budgeted under direct tax revenues. In some cases, special export taxation on selected primary commodities exists; this is then budgeted under taxation from international trade. The GSRE state hydrocarbon rent indicators attempt to gather all of these different payments emanating from the production and export of oil and natural gas into a single annual amount. While this indicator tries to capture the official amounts of hydrocarbon rents, it potentially underestimates the amount of rents available to governments, since it omits off-budget accounts (Ross 2013: 59–62). Strictly speaking, the GSRE data capture the minimum amount of hydrocarbon income a regime has at its disposal. The GSRE indicator is probably the most well-founded estimation currently available in terms of assessing the share of oil income a given government has at its own disposal. 231

Thomas Richter

Deficits and extensions of the rentier state approach Debating the rentier state after the publication of the seminal volume by Beblawi and Luciani (1987), the academic literature has highlighted a number of important aspects pointing to deficits, clarifications and extensions of the rentier state approach. Among them are most importantly 1) a discussion about scope conditions, 2) the formulation of causal mechanisms 3) and the importance of other windfall gains with characteristics potentially similar to those that come with oil.

Scope conditions of the rentier state approach While the classical Middle Eastern version of the rentier state claims that a certain amount of rents explains the stability of authoritarian regimes to a sufficient degree, it took until the late 1990s before a number of contributions began to highlight the fact that this is not universally true, given the experience of different regions or other periods of time (Beck, Boeckh and Pawelka 1997; Waldner 1999; Schlumberger 2006; Peters and Moore 2009). Research focusing on Latin America has, for instance, prominently pointed to the different development paths across countries in this region, as in Venezuela and other countries oil rents supported an elitenegotiated democratization (Karl 1997; Dunning 2008). In another still small but growing group of scholarly work, a more fundamental contribution was made by challenging the argument that especially oil rents are a sufficient condition for authoritarian survival. Based on Waldner’s (1999: 107) observation that “the presence of externally derived wealth makes certain arrangements possible but does not dictate their establishment,” these scholars look at time-dependent effects of, for instance, the level of oil rent revenues. For example, Smith considered the interaction of oil exports and delayed development. As he argues, “oil’s effects depend largely on when regimes gain access to oil rents, not whether they do” (Smith 2006: 59). Three more specific contributions from among MENA scholarship are especially worth mentioning. All three highlight the scope of the rentier state approach looking at empirical evidence from the region from which this theory was originally developed. First, Kiren Chaudhry’s work (1989, 1997) on the impact of oil rents upon economic policy making in Saudi Arabia after the oil price decline in 1984 highlights that fiscal autonomy based on oil rents does not translate into higher state capacity throughout the economic crisis. During economic boom times, the highly autonomous rentier state in the Saudi kingdom created distributive institutions in order to buy political support, which reproduced existing social and political structures. During times of economic bust, however, these same institutions resisted state reform based on exactly these social and political linkages. Chaudry’s work demonstrates an important scope condition of the rentier state approach: State autonomy, in theory assumed to be high due to the fiscal independence of the state from societal sources, is often constrained by pre-oil social and political ties. Second, Steffen Hertog’s contribution (2010a, 2010b) highlights that even within the structures of highly dependent rentier states that rely heavily on state distribution (examples are Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates), profitable and well-managed state-owned enterprises can develop. This is an empirical puzzle, which under the orthodoxy of neoclassical liberalism no one would have thought realistic. However, if market-oriented management is equipped with enough autonomy in its daily operations within these companies and additionally “receives clear incentives from a strictly limited, coherent set of high-level principals in the political regime” (Hertog 2010a: 263), efficient state-owned enterprises may emerge even within rentier states. Third, the work on Middle Eastern monarchies has prominently highlighted that high oil income in combination with the political domination of dynastic family rule has historically 232

Oil and the rentier state

resulted in a jointly sufficient condition that explains the survival of authoritarian regimes (Herb 1999; Bank, Richter and Sunik 2015). As the qualitative comparative analysis of Bank, Richter and Sunik also reveals (2015), even rentier states controlling large amounts of oil income could collapse if the contextual conditions permitted. The fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979 and most recently Libya under Gaddafi in 2011 illustrate the historical possibility of rentier state breakdown. The literature on oil-rich monarchism, therefore, most clearly demonstrates that the causal effects of oil income for the development of authoritarian regimes need to be contextualized within existing political and social structures. The independent effects of oil rents are uncertain. Only jointly with other characteristics does oil become a sufficient condition for the survival of authoritarian rule. Ignoring this complexity was probably among the biggest fallacies of the early literature on the rentier state.

Tracing causal mechanisms During the founding period of the rentier state approach, there was often a lack of precision and clarity as to the exact causal mechanisms. How precisely, for instance, does high oil income translate into authoritarian stability or cause a lower degree of democracy? Michael Ross, in his seminal piece “Does oil hinder democracy?” (2001), provided a fundamental contribution to this debate by clarifying some of the possible ways to link oil rents to the absence of democracy. First, what Ross calls the rentier effect (2001: 332–5)—through which the availability of oil rents relieves social demands for more political accountability—comes through three different channels: A) Sufficient oil rents alleviate governments from having to tax their citizens. Lower taxes per capita will therefore reduce the likelihood of popular demands for more transparent and representative political institutions. B) High oil rents provide governments with opportunities for mass co-optation, in that they spend money on patronage, public employment and social welfare in order to create acceptance and even loyalty. This in turn helps to reduce potential pressures for non-democratic regimes to democratize. C) High oil income creates large and dominant states, which serves to reduce the formation of independent social groups; this runs counter to European history, where democracy developed due to the competing influence of independent social groups. A second major mechanism of the rentier state highlighted by Ross relates to repression (2001: 335–6). Oil wealth permits the build-up of military capacity and supports the creation of a national security state, which then rejects or threatens to reject social demands for an increase in accountable governance. A third causal mechanism Ross suggests points to the lack of the development of higher social complexity within society and is therefore called the modernization effect (2001: 336–7). Based on Inglehart’s version of modernization theory (1997), this mechanism assumes a country democratizes based on increasing levels of education and rising occupational specialization. Ross suspects that economic development based on the wealth of oil rents usually comes without higher levels of education and especially without occupational specialization among citizens. Economic growth within rentier states will therefore not lead to increasing demands for democracy. The most recent empirical accounts—most of them large-N statistical analyses—do mostly confirm Ross’s main expectations and analyses. A political resource curse indeed exists, especially with regard to the period after the wave of nationalization of oil industries during the early 1970s. Authoritarian regimes holding large amounts of oil rents are therefore less likely to democratize (e.g. Lall 2016; Wiens, Poast and Clark 2014). What remains entirely unknown, however, is through which of the above causal mechanisms this effect travels. To the best of my knowledge, there is no empirical study testing these mechanisms comprehensively.11 233

Thomas Richter

Other types of windfall gains A short literature survey reveals that there is much more than oil that qualifies as rent or, as an economist would say, a windfall gain. Going back to David Ricardo and Karl Marx, to name just the two most prominent among many writers, rents flow from the incompleteness of markets and from payments to the owner of land or property—with absolute rent being the basic level of this payment and differential rent being the payment for land of higher-than-average productivity, not including any return on additional investments in improving this land. Most of the existing literature concentrates rents from selling oil exclusively as the main factor shaping the political characteristics of a given regime. More generally speaking, a total of at least four different types of rents can be distinguished.12 (1) Raw material rents—income from selling natural resources and/or raw materials in international markets. Oil income or rent is just the most prominent example within this category. (2) Location rents—income from the ownership of necessary and important transport routes or infrastructure facilities, such as the Suez Canal and oil pipelines; this category also includes some tourism sector income.13 (3) Strategic or political rents—income from geopolitical or strategic geographic and/or political positions and behaviour, such as the (non)alignment with international or regional powers or simply the (lack of) support for specific political or ideological positions of other states; it also includes income from foreign aid received on solid developmental and moral grounds. (4) Migration rents—income from the participation of labour forces in other markets than the home market. Migration rents are rents because of their characteristic of being a transnational transfer between countries. The recipient of the transfer invests only marginal labour or capital in order to receive such payments. Theoretically speaking, a state combining low taxation with high government spending, a rentier state, could develop based on all of these different types of rents. The only condition that needs to be fulfilled is, however, that the respective government be able to siphon these resources into state coffers. There has still not been any comprehensive discussion about the consequences of the availability of alternative rents and their control by the state for political outcomes such as authoritarian survival or democratization. While there is only one single contribution addressing the degree and latitude of the diversity of rentierism in the MENA region (Jenkins et al. 2011, 1971–2008), none of the diverse and most likely contradicting impacts upon social, economic and political outcomes have been addressed. The only exception to this is an emerging quantitative literature on foreign aid, which for instance addresses questions such as under what conditions foreign aid fosters democratization (e.g. Wright 2009; Bader and Faust 2014) or helps to secure political survival (e.g. Licht 2010; Ahmed 2012).

Conclusion The rentier state provides an important analytical tool for explaining the consolidation and stable reproduction of authoritarian modes of governance in the MENA region and beyond. Its core message—that oil income, or, more generally speaking, a given government’s revenue from the hydrocarbon sector, provides leverage for political survival—is intriguing. While the broader idea of the rentier state helps to understand many political aspects of countries in the MENA region, the approach is especially helpful as an important theory in order to explain the persistence of authoritarian regimes. Even though the theory was 234

Oil and the rentier state

originally developed around cases from the Middle East and North Africa, it is striking to see that over time the rentier state has developed to become one of the most prominent globally applied political economy approaches, being widely discussed among academics and practitioners. However, recent scholarship has tremendously advanced the applicability of the approach. Especially the discussion about scope conditions—whose main contributions have come from Middle Eastern scholars—has revealed that looking at oil rents alone might lead to the oversimplification of the causal role of income derived from oil. The causal consequences of oil flowing into a state’s coffers are therefore probably best described as perpetuating existing social structures, political institutions and ethnic cleavages. Since oil met different authoritarian institutions at different points in time throughout the MENA region, its causal role is often jointly entangled with specific social and political constellations. It is the set of these constellations that needs much more careful investigation in the future study of the rentier state.

Notes 1 See Ross (2013), who provides the most comprehensive account of oil income and its impact upon state policies. 2 I do not discuss the potential difference between the influence of oil income versus natural gas income. 3 There are only four MENA countries in which no substantial amounts of oil have been discovered: Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Morocco. 4 An informative summary of the history of oil and the consolidation of the Middle Eastern state system is provide by Luciani (2013). 5 The dataset is available at the following website: https://www.gsre.info. 6 Since rents are, by definition, a surplus higher than the minimum that the receiver would have accepted given alternative opportunities (Buchanan 1980: 3), they typically do not originate from investment or labour—in the capitalist sense of the word—but are generated as the result of natural advantages and organizational skills. 7 There is an important difference to be made between legitimization and legitimacy.While the latter can be understood as an ideal-type, the former refers to the process or strategy to achieve legitimacy. 8 Even though Smith’s (2017) suggestion to calculate the leverage of rents understood as the share of fuel income to GDP per capita is probably closest to the idea that one should look at the rulers’ ability to use oil income in order to shape society, it suffers from similar validity problems to those described below, as it is also based on conventional data on fuel production. 9 Haber and Menaldo, however, do provide a more direct measurement of natural resource rents within government budgets. Their indicator of fiscal reliance—the percentage of government revenues from oil, gas, or minerals—includes taxes, royalties, dividend payments, and direct transfers paid by the resource sector to the government (Haber and Menaldo 2010: 3). As they themselves admit, data on fiscal reliance are limited to only 16 major oil producers and is available only as a percentage of total government revenues. 10 The GSRE dataset can be accessed from the following website: https://www.gsre.info. 11 To be more precise, Ross (2001) does test these mechanisms, but not in one integrated model and, most problematically, using incomplete data, which leaves a lot of potential variation unexplored. 12 This classification is based on Richter (2007). Earlier summaries of different types of rents can be found in Mahdavy (1970), Beck and Schlumberger (1999), Moore (2004) and Schwarz (2008). 13 On the formation of rents in the tourism sector see Richter and Steiner (2008).

References Ahmed, F.Z. (2012), “The perils of unearned foreign income: Aid, remittances, and government survival,” American Political Science Review, 106:1, 146–65. Andersen, J.J. and M.L. Ross (2014), “The big oil change: A closer look at the Haber–Menaldo analysis,” Comparative Political Studies, 47:7, 993–1021, doi: 10.1177/0010414013488557. 235

Thomas Richter

Auty, R.M. (1993), Sustaining Development in Mineral Economies: The Resource Curse Thesis, London and New York, NY: Routledge. Bader, J. and J. Faust (2014), “Foreign aid, democratization, and autocratic survival,” International Studies Review, 16:4, 575–95, doi: 10.1111/misr.12158. Bank, A., Richter, T. and A. Sunik (2015), “Long-term monarchical survival in the Middle East: A configurational comparison, 1945–2012,” Democratization, 22:1, 179–200, doi: 10.1080/13510347.2013.845555. Basedau, M. and J. Lay (2009), “Resource curse or rentier peace? The ambiguous effects of oil wealth and oil dependence on violent conflict,” Journal of Peace Research, 46:6, 757–76. Beblawi, H. (1987), “The rentier state in the Arab World,” in eds, H. Beblawi and G. Luciani, The Rentier State, pp. 49–62, London and New York, NY: Croom Helm. Beblawi, H. and G. Luciani (1987), “Introduction,” in eds, Hazem Beblawi and Giacomo Luciani, The Rentier State, II, pp. 1–21, London and New York, NY: Croom Helm. Beck, M. (2009), “Rente Und Rentierstaat Im Nahen Osten,” in eds, M. Beck, C. Harders, A. Juenemann and S. Stetter, Der Nahe Osten im Umbruch: Zwischen Transformation und Autoritarismus, pp. 25–49, Wiesbaden: VS-Verlag. Beck, M., Boeckh, A. and P. Pawelka (1997), “Staat, Mark und Rente in ser sozialwissenschaftlichen Diskussion,” in eds, A. Boeckh and P. Pawelka, Staat, Markt und Rente in der internationalen Politik, pp. 8–26, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Beck, M. and O. Schlumberger (1999), “Der Vordere Orient: Ein entwicklungspolitischer Sonderfall? Rentenökonomie, Markt und Liberalisierung,” in eds, H.-G. Wehling and P. Pawelka, Der Vordere Orient an der Schwelle zum 21. Jahrhundert. Brüche und Kontinuitäten, pp. 57–79, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. BP (2017), Statistical Review of World Energy June 2017, London: BP. Buchanan, J.J.M. (1980. ), “Rent seeking and profit seeking,” in eds, J.M. Buchanan, R.D. Tollison and G. Tullock, Toward a Theory of the Rent-Seeking Society, pp. 3–15, College Station: Texas A & M University Press. Chaudhry, K.A. (1989), “The price of wealth: Business and state in labor remittance and oil economies,” International Organization, 43:1, 101–45, doi: 10.1017/S0020818300004574. Chaudhry, K.A. (1997), The Price of Wealth: Economies and Institutions in the Middle East, Cornell Studies in Political Economy, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Delacroix, J. (1980), “The distributive state in the world system,” Studies in Comparative International Development, 15:3, 3–20. Dunning, T. (2008), Crude Democracy: Natural Resource Wealth and Political Regimes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haber, S. and V. Menaldo (2010), Appendices to: Do Natural Resources Fuel Authoritarianism? A Reappraisal of the Resource Curse. Haber, S. and V. Menaldo (2011), “Do natural resources fuel authoritarianism? A reappraisal of the resource curse,” American Political Science Review, 105:1, 1–26, doi: 10.1017/S0003055410000584. Hamilton, K. and M. Clemens (1999), “Genuine savings rates in developing countries,” World Bank Econ Rev, 13:2, 333–56. Herb, M. (1999), All in the Family: Absolutism, Revolution, and Democracy in the Middle Eastern Monarchies, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Hertog, S. (2010a), “Defying the resource curse: Explaining successful state-owned enterprises in rentier states,” World Politics, 62:2, 261–301. Hertog, S. (2010b), Princes, Brokers, and Bureaucrats: Oil and the State in Saudi Arabia, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Inglehart, R. (1997), Modernization and Postmodernization. Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in 43 Societies, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jenkins, J.C., Meyer, K., Costello, M. and H. Aly (2011), “International rentierism in the Middle East and Africa, 1971–2008,” International Area Studies Review, 14:3, 3–31, doi: 10.1177/223386591101400301. Karl, T.L. (1997), The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and Petro-States, ed, M. Kahler, Vol. 26, Studies in International Political Economy, Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles, CA, and London: University of California Press. Korany, B. (1986), “Political petrolism and contemporary Arab politics, 1967–1983?” Journal of Asian and African Studies, XXI:1–2, 66–80. Lall, R. (2016), “The missing dimension of the political resource curse debate,” Comparative Political Studies, September, 0010414016666861, doi: 10.1177/0010414016666861. 236

Oil and the rentier state

Licht, A.A. (2010), “Coming into money: The impact of foreign aid on leader survival,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 54:1, 58–87. Luciani, G. (1987), “Allocation vs. production state,” in eds, H. Beblawi and G. Luciani, The Rentier State, pp. 63–84, London: Croom Helm. Luciani, G. (2013), “Oil and political economy in the international relations of the Middle East,” in ed, Louise Fawcett, International Relations of the Middle East, pp. 103–26, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mahdavy, H. (1970), “Patterns and problems of economic development in rentier states: The case of Iran,” in ed, M.A. Cook, Studies in the Economic History of the Middle East from the Rise of Islam to the Present Day, 428–67, New York, NY and Toronto: Oxford University Press. Moore, M. (2004), “Revenues, state formation, and the quality of governance in developing countries,” International Political Science Review, 25:3, 297–319. Peters, A.M. and P.W. Moore (2009), “Beyond boom and bust: External rents, durable authoritarianism, and institutional adaptation in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan,” Studies in Comparative International Development, 44: 3, 256–85. Richter, T. (2007), “The political economy of regime maintenance in Egypt: Linking external resources and domestic legitimation,” in ed, O. Schlumberger, Debating Arab Authoritarianism: Dynamics and Durability in Non-Democratic Regimes, pp. 177–93, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Richter, T. (2017), “Structural reform in the Arab Gulf states—limited influence of the G20,” GIGA Focus Nahost, 3. Richter, T. and V. Lucas (2016), GSRE 1.0—Global state revenues and expenditures dataset, Cologne: GESIS Data Archive, doi: 10.7802/1290. Richter, T. and C. Steiner (2008), “Politics, economics and tourism development in Egypt: Insights into the sectoral transformations of a neo-patrimonial Rentier-State,” Third World Quarterly, 29:5, 935–55, doi: 10.1080/01436590802106080. Ross, M.L. (1999), “The political economy of the resource curse,” World Politics, 51:2. Ross, M.L. (2001), “Does oil hinder democracy?” World Politics, 53:3, 325–61. Ross, M.L. (2013), The Oil Curse: How Petroleum Wealth Shapes the Development of Nations, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ross, M.L. (2015), “What have we learned about the resource curse?” Annual Review of Political Science, 18:1, 239–59, doi: 10.1146/annurev-polisci-052213-040359. Schlumberger, O. (2006), “Rents, reform, and authoritarianism in the Middle East,” International Politik und Gesellschaft, 2, 43–57. Schmid, C. (1991), Das Konzept des Rentier-Staates: Ein sozialwissenschaftliches Paradigma zur Analyse von Entwicklungsgesellschaften und seine Bedeutung für den Vorderen Orient, Münster: Lit. Schmid, C. and P. Pawelka. (1990), “Der Moderne Rentier-Staat im Vorderen Orient und seine Strategien der Krisenbewältigung,” in eds, P. Pawelka and A. Maho Aves, Arabische Golfstaaten in der Krise, pp. 91–117, Frankfurt (Main): RG Fischer. Schwarz, R. (2008), “The political economy of state-formation in the Arab Middle East: Rentier states, economic reform, and democratization,” Review of International Political Economy, 15:4, 599–621. Smith B. (2006), “The wrong kind of crisis: Why oil booms and busts rarely lead to authoritarian breakdown,” Studies in Comparative International Development 40:4, 55–76. doi:10.1007/BF02686303. Smith, B. (2017), “Resource wealth as rent leverage: Rethinking the oil–stability nexus,” Conflict Management and Peace Science, 34:6, 597–617. doi: 10.1177/0738894215609000. The World Bank (November 2015), “World development indicators: Oil rents (% of GDP),” accessible at: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PETR.RT.ZS Waldner, D. (1999), State Building and Late Development, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wiens, D. Poast, P. and W.R. Clark (2014), “The political resource curse an empirical re-evaluation,” Political Research Quarterly, 67:4, 783–94, doi: 10.1177/1065912914543836. Wright, J. (2009), “How foreign aid can foster democratization in authoritarian regimes,” American Journal of Political Science, 53:3, 552–71, doi: 10.1111/j.1540-5907.2009.00386.x. Wright, J., Frantz, E. and B. Geddes (2015), “Oil and autocratic regime survival,” British Journal of Political Science, 45:02, 287–306, doi: 10.1017/S0007123413000252.

237

17 Divergent development in Egypt and the Gulf Rodney Wilson

The period since the Arab Spring has at best witnessed stagnation in the economies of the Middle East and North Africa and in many instances has seen economic destruction. The economic aims of the Arab Spring protestors are less attainable than ever as unemployment has worsened, economic growth has collapsed and corruption and inequalities persist (Campante and Chor 2012). Violent protest, anarchy, sectarian wars and on-going terrorism have unsurprisingly, indeed inevitably, caused severe economic disruption and many look back at life under the autocratic regimes of Presidents Ben Ali, Gaddafi, Mubarak and Asad as being much better economically; viewpoints supported by World Bank and IMF economic data (World Bank 2016). During the Arab Spring the economic failures of Tunisia, Egypt and Syria were contrasted with the relative successes of Saudi Arabia and the other economies of the Gulf Cooperation Council. The economic performance of the Arab monarchies far exceeded that of the Arab republics. The dramatic fall of oil prices and government revenues since 2014 has however revealed the fragility of these economies. The challenges these governments now face in maintaining and increasing well paid jobs for their own citizens threatens the social pact which ensured that the monarchies were tolerated, even respected, in return for delivering on at least partially inclusive economic development. Although there is no immediate threat to political stability in the GCC, the situation in the Arab Spring countries is a warning of the fate they could suffer unless they rise to the economic challenges. It is easy, indeed, tempting, to depict doomsday scenarios for the whole MENA region with failed states, dysfunctional economies, dismal employment prospects and a continuing mass exodus to Europe and beyond as the youth seek better futures elsewhere. Most observers see no end to the sectarian conflicts in the region and the precedent of hundreds of years of religious wars in Europe is not encouraging. Nevertheless, the last century of economic change in the MENA region contains lessons for what policy works and what fails, even in the most difficult of circumstances. The aim of this chapter is to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the economies of the Middle East. The limited size of the economies inhibits development, with only Saudi Arabia being a member of the G20 grouping of the world’s largest economies, while Egypt, despite its population of more than almost 100 million, fails to qualify. Greater regional integration in the 238

Development in Egypt and the Gulf

Middle East can overcome size limitations and result in economies of scale, but sectarian differences preclude this. Even the economies of the Gulf Cooperation Council have become more fragmented with Saudi Arabia and the UAE severing links with Qatar. Endemic corruption also weakens the economic development of the Middle East, which is reflected in poor scores in ease of doing business indices. Countries such as the UAE and Bahrain are shown to have better rankings than the major states such as Egypt, Algeria or Iran. One response to corruption has been for businesses to stay clear of governments and avoid being enumerated. This accounts for the high level of informal economic activity, often involving entrepreneurship and innovation, which can be regarded as an economic strength in the region. Perceptions of well-being are relatively higher in the GCC that can also be viewed as a source of resilience. Although manufacturing does not appear to be strong, with development many GCC economies have leapfrogged into being successful service economies without having to pass through an industrialization phase. The experience of regional growth poles such as Dubai has proven especially encouraging. Elsewhere such strategies have been less successful, notably in the case of Egypt, which is discussed here.

Weak economic co-operation and integration The regional economy of the Middle East remains highly fragmented, indeed with the collapse of countries such as Syria, Iraq and Libya, even national economies have been subject to fragmentation. Regional organizations such as the Arab League have failed to promote economic integration, and there is nothing in the MENA region resembling the European single market (Fawzy 2002). There is little mobility of labour, and it is notable that refugees from Syria saw their future in Europe rather than in the Arab countries of the Gulf where they were not welcome and had no hope of being granted work or residence permits. It seems that sharing a common language and being a Sunni Muslim counts for nothing in Saudi Arabia and the other GCC states. The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which encompasses all Muslim majority countries, has been unable to bridge the sectarian divide between Sunni and Shia. Saudi Arabia objected to Obama’s relaxation of sanctions on Iran and in January 2016 ended diplomatic relations, a move immediately followed by its GCC allies, UAE and Bahrain (Schulberg 2016). Even if political relations improved the potential for intra-regional trade in the MENA remains low as most exports are accounted for by oil and gas, the main destination being China and other Asian countries. Imports also largely originate in Asia, including consumer goods and capital equipment. Countries such as Saudi Arabia have been moving up the value chain with petrochemicals increasingly important rather than simply exporting crude oil, but these are also supplied to global markets rather than to the MENA region which lacks the industrial base to further process downstream products. There is some intra-GCC trade in construction supplies and electricity now that the transmission system is interconnected, but this does not extend to Egypt, by far the most populous Arab economy. As the countries of the GCC have become more integrated into the global economy, regional links have mattered less. Whereas in the 1960s and 1970s much of the expatriate labour, which accounted for the major proportion of the workforce was Arab, and Iranians worked in the oil fields of the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, subsequently most of the workers have come from South Asia and the Philippines (Baldwin-Edwards 2011). The Palestinians and Egyptians who worked as civil servants and teachers have long since not had their work permits renewed and have been replaced by GCC citizens. Private sector businesses find it cheaper to employ South Asian expatriates who are willing to work longer hours than GCC citizens. The manual jobs on construction sites that GCC citizens regard with disdain are largely undertaken by 239

Rodney Wilson

Bangladeshis and Nepalese, while occupations such as serving in restaurants or domestic helpers are deemed too low status for GCC women, and hence are largely dominated by Filipinos. There is a complete lack of capital market integration in the MENA, with no markets in Iraq or Syria, and the lack of currency convertibility in Egypt and Iran make foreigners unwilling to invest. In the GCC in contrast there is free convertibility and stable currencies pegged to the United States dollar, apart from Kuwait that maintains a trade-weighted basket. Egypt has long sought to attract investment from the GCC, dating from the infitah open door policy of President Sadat in the 1970s but Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states are sceptical regarding Egypt’s economic prospects, the most publicized project being funding for a new administrative city, the last thing Egypt needs (Abé 2015). The view is that President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has even less economic knowledge and no coherent strategy compared with his military predecessors. As a result, foreign direct investment from the GCC, which might have flowed into Egypt, goes instead to London, New York, Singapore and Hong Kong.

Regional transportation infrastructure Multinational development institutions such as the World Bank have increasingly financed improvements to transportation networks as a means of facilitating market integration and economic growth. China’s high growth has been facilitated by massive investment in transportation infrastructure (Liu 2010), and such investment is now to be extended through the Chinese initiative in establishing the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.1 There has been much discussion in the Middle East about establishing a trans-border infrastructure, but there are no examples of such schemes being successfully implemented. The Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development has financed infrastructure investment within, but not between, its member states.2 The most ambitious regional transportation project is to establish a railway system linking five of the six GCC economies and running from Kuwait to the UAE. The section within the UAE, known as Etihad (Union) Rail was approved in 2009 and construction is currently proceeding on the Dubai–Abu Dhabi section, with links to the Dubai metro.3 The UAE network will link Mussafah, Khalifa Port, Jebal Ali Free Zone, the Port of Fujairah and Saqr Port with completion scheduled for 2018 although there will be subsequent testing of rolling stock before operations start. The railway is primarily for freight, with environmental benefits in terms of reducing CO2 emissions with each train replacing 300 trucks. The section through Saudi Arabia will connect with the existing Dammam–Riyadh service and the proposed land-bridge to Jeddah, which in turn connects with the new Haramain High-speed Railway designed to replace the buses transporting pilgrims to and from Makkah and Madinah. For the railway to be successful it will be necessary for Saudi Arabia to streamline its customs procedures as although the GCC agreements provide for free trade and a customs union, trucks often face considerable delays. Although there is potential for passenger transportation on subsections of the GCC railway system, including Dubai to Abu Dhabi, the distances and times involved are likely to deter most passengers from taking longer journeys. Budget airlines such as Flydubai and Jazeera of Kuwait have already captured much of the passenger market and the rail operators are unlikely to be able to offer competitive fares. Beyond the GCC the most notable transport link is the proposed bridge connecting Egypt with Saudi Arabia across the Red Sea at the entrance to the Gulf of Aqaba. This project was announced in April 2016 during King Salman’s five-day visit to Egypt to meet President el-Sisi.4 The bridge and associated work on the causeway will be financed by Saudi Arabia for an undisclosed sum and in return designated the King Salman Bridge. 240

Development in Egypt and the Gulf

Independent estimates suggest a cost of $3–4 billion and a construction period of 7 years.5 The project is estimated to create 320,000 jobs in Egypt’s troubled Sinai region, but it is unclear how many will be temporary during the construction phase and what will be the number of permanent jobs.6 Controversially the agreement with Saudi Arabia involves the handing over to Saudi Arabia of two islands, which Egypt has controlled since the Nasser era, Tiran and Sanafir. This transfer of sovereignty has been condemned by opposition members of the Egyptian Parliament who were not informed in advance of the agreement.7 The danger is that Saudi Arabia will gain sovereignty of the islands without financing the construction of the bridge given its budgetary squeeze with low oil prices. Egypt’s economic weakness is resulting in an asset sale with adverse long-term political consequences (Barfi 2016). The benefits from the bridge are doubtful, as although it would facilitate Egyptian exports to the GCC, the reality is that Egypt has a minimal share of the GCC market and has little to offer in comparison to Asian exporters. Another supposed benefit is that Saudi tourists would be attracted to Egypt, but most are more interested in travelling to Europe or South East Asia. Furthermore, Saudi tourists have bad experiences with the bridge to Bahrain as many have had their vehicles vandalized by disaffected Shia youths. Although sectarian differences are not an issue in Egypt, the general lack of security and hostility to GCC nationals is unlikely to encourage visitors. It is also suggested that the bridge could facilitate Egyptians travelling to Saudi Arabia for Hajj and Umrah. In practice, most now travel by budget airlines or go on low-cost packages that include charter airfares and accommodation. Overland transport would be slower and more expensive. There is also the issue of adverse environmental consequences of the causeway, which has been previously proposed, but rejected on these grounds. An environmental audit would certainly be desirable, but none is proposed. There are also likely to be concerns in Israel and Jordan. The bridge will be 100 metres high so shipping bound for Eilat and Aqaba could pass beneath, but such a structure could be seen as a security threat by these two neighbouring states that would not derive any benefit.

Informal economic activity Official data excludes a substantial part of economic activity in MENA economies such as Egypt, Iraq and Syria as much business is un-enumerated (Charmes 2012). Only in the GCC does official data capture what is happening, partly because the banking systems are more developed, with most payments recorded electronically whereas transactions are more often cash based in countries such as Egypt. Furthermore, the state subsidies for employers hiring local citizens are transferred after official applications, and government databases contain records of all work permits issued to foreign nationals and employment levies on non-citizens, which help fund the employment of local citizens in the private sector. There are strong incentives to be included in the systems, which mean the data collected is comprehensive, reliable and trustworthy. In the case of Egypt, economic statistics are much less creditable partly because many small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) seek to minimize tax payment or evade taxes entirely and corruption is endemic. Female employees are often unrecorded, partly because of cultural factors, but also out of a desire to avoid reporting their miserable, indeed shameful, wages (Tzannatos and Kaur 2003). As Syria, Iraq and Libya have become failed states, with governments controlling very limited areas of territory, official data at best records only a very small proportion of economic activity, but how little it is impossible to estimate. In Iraq the autonomous region of Kurdistan now compiles its own economic data, which is undoubtedly more accurate than the statistics compiled in Baghdad.8 241

Rodney Wilson

The economy of the ISIS phenomenon The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) did not publish economic statistics, but records were kept of payments by businesses in the substantial territories ISIS controlled. These payments were regarded as taxes by the jihadists or extortion through protection money by enemies of the Caliphate (Lakshmanan 2015). Many of the administrators in Mosul were former Ba‘thists who worked for the government of Saddam Hussein. They served the Caliphate, which benefited from their local knowledge and administrative experience. The formalization of the economy of the Caliphate was a long-term aim, with the immediate priority being the security and defence of the new state. Order was maintained by coercive methods, but it would be incorrect to depict the Caliphate as anarchic. Its markets were informal, but they worked, and goods and services were traded as before with no shortages of foodstuffs or items for every-day living (Hansen-Lewis and Shapiro 2015). Although there were checkpoints on the road network of the Caliphate where money was sometimes requested for passage, the areas controlled by the jihadists in many respects constituted a common market comprising the areas of westward Iraq and eastern Syria. Goods moved relatively freely, there were no capital controls and labour immigration by like-minded people was encouraged, with no work permits required. Although the Caliphate had some of the fiscal characteristics of a state, there was no common currency or monetary policy and multiple currencies were used, including Iraqi dinar and Syrian pounds, but also Turkish lira, Euros and even Saudi riyal. Rates were entirely market driven with exchange companies competing with each other for business. Oil revenues were a significant source of income for the Caliphate, but the decline in oil prices and bombing of oil facilities negatively affected this. In short, the Caliphate was the ultimate informal, market-driven economy, serving the needs of its Sunni Arab population and their guest jihadists better than the Alawite Asad regime or the Shia dominated Baghdad government. There were few impediments to business within its territory. In one sense the territories had been economically liberated from the stifling government controls, which were inherited from the Ba‘thist socialist era. Re-intergrating the territories that comprised the Caliphate back into Syria and Iraq will be problematic.

Ease of doing business Given the current minimal growth, stagnation or even economic decline, there is much pessimism about future development in the MENA region. Governments lack the resources to spur development through infrastructure expenditure and even in the Gulf, with lower oil revenues, there have been political pressures to maintain current expenditures on the civil service and military personnel with investment taking the squeeze. The slowing down of investment expenditure and the delays in project implementation will inevitably have a negative effect on growth and impede economic diversification, a key policy objective for the oil-dependent economies of the MENA region. Although the budgetary constraints on MENA preclude the use of macroeconomic stimulus packages to raise short-term growth, supply-side reforms are much cheaper and can bring greater long-term benefits. Foremost are policies to encourage private enterprise by creating a more favourable environment in which businesses can operate. In the rankings for the ease of doing business, the MENA region fares badly in relation to other regions (see Table 17.1). Even the UAE, the regional leader, remains a long way behind Singapore and New Zealand,

242

Development in Egypt and the Gulf Table 17.1  Ease of doing business rankings Country

Rank

Start-up

Electricity

Registration

Credit

UAE Bahrain Oman Tunisia Morocco Saudi Arabia Kuwait Jordan Iran Egypt Algeria

 31  65  70  74  75  82 101 113 118 131 163

 2 12 15  6  1 10 14  5  4  3 13

 1  8  6  3  4  2 16  5 10 18 17

 1  2  5  9  7  4  6 13 10 15 18

 3  5 10 10  5  1  5 18  3  1 14

Source: World Bank Group, Doing Business, June 2015.

the global leaders.9 Yet providing fast licencing for start-ups, avoiding delays with construction permits and rapid registration costs little. Being able to supply electricity of course has costs, and underdeveloped banking systems are clearly an obstacle to providing credit, but it is worth noting that credit does not seem to be a problem for Egypt which ranks favourably in this criteria.10 In the case of Iran, the easing of sanctions may help increase oil revenues, but will do little to help economic diversification or the private sector given its poor rating for ease of doing business. Doing business is of course more difficult in countries where there is widespread corruption. Ultimately it is ordinary citizens as consumers and taxpayers who bear the cost of bribes which are added into the pricing of goods and services (Bishara 2011). Corruption not only adds to transaction costs, but also reduces choice, as reputable companies may simply refuse to do business in corrupt environments as it undermines the reputation of the companies involved, resulting in long-term damage. There is also evidence that corruption reduces tax revenue in the MENA region, siphoning off resources that could help finance development projects (Imam and Jacobs 2014). It is important not to generalize about corruption in the Middle East, depicting governments in the entire region as being subject to bribery and business dealings being inherently dishonest. Admittedly the failed states including Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Libya are perceived as being amongst the most corrupt globally, but the issue of causality is debatable; was governance failure a cause or an effect of corruption? There is also the question of whether contamination spreads into contiguous states. High levels of corruption in Lebanon might be seen as supporting this hypothesis, but Jordan’s success in reducing corruption despite its troublesome neighbourhood and the hosting of huge numbers of refugees suggests the contrary. The favourable position of Qatar and the UAE in the global rankings demonstrates what can be achieved by transparency in the award of government contracts and highly professional independent auditing, helped by the use of electronic records for all transactions and the minimization of cash payments. Regulatory diligence by the Capital Markets Authority in Saudi Arabia and sound corporate governance over many decades have enhanced the business reputation of the Kingdom and contributed to its favourable Transparency International scores (Al-Janadi, Rahman and Omar 2013) (see Table 17.2).

243

Rodney Wilson Table 17.2  Corruption perception scores Rank

Country

2012

2013

2014

2015

 22  23  45  48  50  55  60  76  88  88  88 123 130 154 154 161 161

Qatar UAE Jordan Saudi Arabia Bahrain Kuwait Oman Tunisia Egypt Algeria Morocco Lebanon Iran Syria Yemen Iraq Libya

68 68 48 44 51 44 47 41 32 34 37 30 28 26 23 18 21

68 69 45 46 48 43 47 41 32 36 37 28 25 17 18 16 15

69 70 49 49 49 44 45 40 37 36 39 27 27 20 19 16 18

71 70 53 52 51 49 45 38 36 36 36 28 27 18 18 16 16

Source: Transparency International, Berlin, 2016.

Economic diversification into services Historically economic development was seen as associated with structural change, notably the rise of industry and the decline of agriculture as workers moved from the countryside to urban areas where productivity was much higher. The growth of manufacturing, particularly heavy industry, was seen as an inevitable accompaniment to economic modernization. Rural areas were seen as backward, while the cities were regarded as offering many more opportunities. However, although economic models such as that espoused by Lewis were found to have some validity in countries such as Egypt, it is evident that the MENA region today requires a different paradigm of development (Mabro 1967). The high shares of GDP accounted for by industry in the MENA region largely reflect the significance of oil and gas rather than the development of manufacturing. Nevertheless, attributing industry as a mere consequence of geology would be simplistic as oil and gas production concerns more than basic extraction, in particular substantial investment which is required for secondary and tertiary recovery (Cleveland and Kaufmann 1991). Governments in the GCC have played an important policy role in creating a favourable environment for long-term investment, in contrast to Iran where oil production still relies on historical investment undertaken during the time of the Shah, or Algeria where oil companies will only get involved if they are offered substantial risk premiums. Economic policies in the GCC have encouraged value added through the development of refining and petrochemicals, but elsewhere in the MENA region a lack of confidence has inhibited such developments. Countries are ranked by the share of services in Table 17.3, as this sector accounts for much more employment than industry or agriculture. Agriculture in Saudi Arabia is high-tech and on an industrial scale but employs few people. Outside the GCC traditional agriculture remains as there has been a lack of rural investment, but even if this were rectified it might result in job destruction rather than employment creation. Modernization of agriculture and industry 244

Development in Egypt and the Gulf Table 17.3  Sector shares of GDP Country

Services, per cent

Industry, per cent

Agriculture, $

GNI per capita, $

Lebanon Jordan Tunisia Morocco Iran Egypt Algeria Saudi Arabia Kuwait Oman

69.7 66.4 61.9 57.7 52.4 45.6 43.3 41.1 35.3 33.4

24.8 29.8 29.3 29.3 38.2 39.9 45.7 56.9 64.3 65.3

5.5 3.8 8.8 13.0 9.3 14.5 8.6 1.9 0.4 1.3

17,590 11,910 11,020 7,290 16,590 10,260 13,380 51,320 79,850 33,690

Source: World Bank Data, 2016.

can increase employment in the service sector and indeed as more tasks are outsourced and there may be potential in the MENA region for offshoring in services (Blinder 2006). Services encompass many activities from professional business services such as auditing and consultancy to more menial jobs such as cleaning or serving in restaurants. The services category is sometimes regarded as a residual, being secondary to supposedly more productive activities such as industry and agriculture. Such a view is simplistic however as services can be just as productive as other economic activities, but have the advantage of flexibility and being able to respond quickly to whatever opportunities arise without the need for high levels of investment. Human rather than physical capital is the key component for services, an input in plentiful supply in the MENA region, although the skill of the potential workforce needs to be better aligned with the jobs available. The MENA economies most dependent on services are Lebanon and Jordan, two countries without oil but with strong small and medium sized enterprises. Tourism was a major generator of service sector income in the past, but more recently perceptions of security risks have deterred many visitors, even though it is neighbouring countries that are unsafe, rather than Lebanon or Jordan. Fortunately, remittances to both these relatively small economies have helped propel the private sector forward at the microeconomic level and resulted in SMEs prospering despite the macroeconomic and political constraints. Both Lebanon and Jordan have long experiences of “brain drains” as there are limited opportunities domestically for well-qualified and competent professionals (Beine, Docquier and Rapoport 2008). However, those expatriates working in the Gulf cannot obtain citizenship and retain their links to Jordan and Lebanon to which they ultimately retire. This helps the services sector as they extend and modernize their family homes with very favourable multiplier effects for local businesses.

Perceptions of well-being Table 17.3 shows gross national income (GNI) per capita for MENA economies with Kuwait being highest ranked followed by Saudi Arabia. This is usually regarded as a measure of living standards and possibly economic development but in the GCC it largely reflects oil and gas production and prices. The UAE and Qatar are not included because of the issue of counting local citizens or the expatriate majority, which has an enormous effect on the per capita GNI figure, but is meaningless from a development perspective. Doubts about the usefulness of per capita 245

Rodney Wilson

GNI resulted in international development organizations deploying other measures, notably the United Nations Human Development indices (McGillivray and White 1993), but this has also been much criticized (Srinivasan 1994). Given all the pitfalls, rather than attempting to measure gross national income, attention has now been switched to perceptions of well-being through sample surveys. The Happy Planet index also includes accurate hard data on life expectancy together with environmental footprint measures that rank sustainability. Well-being does not necessarily correlate with financial income, but it helps, as does the security associated with low crime rates. Unsurprisingly the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait rank highest for well-being reflecting the reasonable income enjoyed by local residents, the opportunities open to them and the well-established community networks within and between families that enhance security and give a sense of belonging. The level of well-being in the UAE is higher than that for the United Kingdom and the same as that for the United States and New Zealand and only one point below Ireland. Denmark and Canada top the global rankings (see Table 17.4).11 Life expectancy has increased significantly in the MENA, the major factor being reductions in infant mortality. As elsewhere many people are living into their 80s and beyond, and it is only in poorer countries such as Egypt and Yemen that life expectancy is below global averages. In the GCC, longevity is more a matter of lifestyle, with unhealthy dietary choices and lack of exercise accounting for premature mortality as in many western countries (Galal 2003). The ecological footprint is surprisingly low in the MENA region, although highest in oilexporting economies such as Saudi Arabia with associated industries that result in significant carbon emissions. Qatar, UAE and Bahrain have relatively high footprints for their size, although the creation of communities using only renewal energy, such as Masdar in Abu Dhabi, demonstrates that sustainability and climate change is being treated seriously by policymakers (Nader 2009). Elsewhere in the MENA region the favourably low ecological footprints reflect the lack of energy-intensive industry and relatively low household energy consumption despite the use of air conditioning.

Table 17.4  Happy Planet indices Country

Well-being

Life expectancy

Footprint

UAE Saudi Arabia Qatar Kuwait Jordan Algeria Lebanon Iraq Iran Bahrain Morocco Syria Egypt Yemen

7.2 6.7 6.6 6.6 5.7 5.2 5.2 5.0 4.8 4.5 4.4 4.1 3.9 3.9

76.5 73.9 78.4 74.6 73.4 73.1 72.6 72.8 73.0 75.1 72.2 75.9 65.5 65.5

8.9 41.0 11.7 9.7 2.1 1.6 2.8 1.4 2.7 6.6 1.3 1.5 2.1 0.9

Source: New Economics Foundation, London, 2016. (Data for 2012)

246

Development in Egypt and the Gulf

Poles of economic growth It is evident that economic development is becoming more divergent in the MENA region as although all states have experienced considerable change during the last half-century, some such as Yemen remain underdeveloped while others such as the UAE have become notable development successes. The differences are increasing not only between states, but also within states, as leading urban conurbations thrive while much of their hinterlands remain neglected. Economic development has become more exclusive rather than inclusive, with growing income and wealth disparities that inevitably bring social tensions. The historical economic poles in the MENA region such as Baghdad, Aleppo, Cairo and Medina were all primarily trading rather than manufacturing centres, unlike the economic poles elsewhere in Asia (McDonald, Robinson and Thierfelder 2008). It can be argued that the comparative advantage of the MENA region historically was in services rather than industry or agriculture. Trading was viewed as a productive activity, and those engaged as merchants in exporting and importing goods produced elsewhere were highly respected. The organizing of trading caravans across the deserts of the region required logistical and planning skills, as did the stocking of dhows for sea transportation. The pricing of goods sold in the souks required knowledge of markets and negotiating skills. These attributes were passed from generation to generation and disseminated from the growth poles to more peripheral centres through a type of trickle-down effect (Wilson 2013). Dubai has undoubtedly become by far the most dynamic growth pole in the MENA region, a world-class city to rival or even surpass Singapore and in some respects London. There is much that can be learnt from its experience, one issue being whether it is a one-off success or if its model for development can be replicated elsewhere in the MENA region (Hvidt 2009). Dubai has always benefited from its location near the mouth of the Gulf and the gateway to the Indian sub-continent (Pacione 2005). With the development of air transport, it became a transit stop on the routes between Europe, Asia and Australia. The launch of Emirates Airlines in 1985 was timely as it coincided with the economic upturn in Asia and the start of a period of rapid growth. With competent and ambitious management, low landing charges, cheap fuel and competitive tax-free salaries, Emirates became a significant challenger to European based airlines on Asian routes (O’Connell 2006). The Emirates airline has subsequently become the leading international carrier, with Terminal 3 at Dubai International Airport being the most used global transport hub. The airline accounts for around 10 per cent of economic activity in Dubai. For GCC nationals and foreigners Dubai has become the destination of choice in the Middle East, in some ways similar to Las Vegas, but without the gambling (Schmid 2009). By 2015 Dubai had 428 hotels with 64,800 beds and there are plans to increase capacity substantially by 2020 when the Emirate will host the World Expo. In 2016 there were 87 new four- and five-star hotels under construction with more than 27,000 rooms in the pipeline. Year-round events encourage visitors, not least the annual shopping festival, when the malls showcase their brands, and world-class sporting events. Dubai is by far the major centre in the Middle East for conventions and exhibitions, accounting for over 80 per cent of all exhibition space in the GCC. Critics have long argued that Dubai is a bubble economy, excessively reliant on real estate, which must eventually burst (Renaud 2012). Admittedly, but not surprisingly, as an outward oriented city it suffered a serious recession in the aftermath of the global financial crisis with dramatic falls in property prices and the near financial collapse of major construction companies. Financial assistance from Abu Dhabi provided a lifeline however, and investor confidence was soon restored. Lessons were learnt and property prices partially recovered. Dubai can now be regarded as a mature economy that is well diversified. The fall in oil prices in 2014–15 did not 247

Rodney Wilson

directly affect the Emirate that has little oil remaining. Inevitably, indirect effects as headwinds from its Arab neighbours negatively impact on growth (Kerr 2016). Dubai is well hedged, however, as trade and investment ties with Iran remain in place. Furthermore, Dubai is no mere regional centre but has grown into a global hub connecting Asia, Africa and Europe and even the Americas.

Egypt’s economic performance The greatest disappointment in terms of development underperformance has been Egypt, once the hub of the Arab world, but now largely isolated and no longer regarded as of strategic significance. Its income disparities are enormous, with no detailed figures on the rich, most of whom pay little or no tax. Over 40 per cent of the population live in abject poverty, defined as having to subsist on less than $2 per day. The poor have not benefited from development as most of the gains have gone to the elite, especially the well-connected and high-ranking military officers. These disparities are not new, as they date from the Sadat era in the 1970s, and were an important factor in causing the Arab Spring unrest. However, under President Sisi, a former Field Marshall and head of the military, inequality has worsened. Despite gross domestic product growth of over 5 per cent in 2018 and 2019, economic conditions do not bode well for the future. Egypt is dependent on oil exports, remittances and tourist spending. Oil reserves are very limited in comparison to the Arabian Peninsula and remittances are falling because of the oil rich countries replacing foreigners in employment with local citizens. Tourists are apprehensive about being attacked by Islamic militants. This presents balance of payments problems, especially as imports are over twice the value of exports. Egypt has again resorted to borrowing from the IMF, but the disbursements are subject to tough conditions including the phasing out of subsidies which benefit the poor, and the funding has to be repaid rather than coming in the form of grants. For the moment, the majority of Egyptians have acquiesced to the reforms including the introduction of value-added tax to reduce the fiscal deficit. Corporate taxes were reduced to improve conditions for investment, but this has largely benefited the business elite. While memories of the unsuccessful Arab Spring and the incompetence of the Islamist government of Mohamed Morsi remain strong, further mass protests are unlikely. Nevertheless, the threat remains, as the costs of the economic reforms are high, and any benefits are likely to be very long-term.

Conclusions The endless stream of bad political news from the MENA region has resulted in many analysts despairing that economic development will ever be possible. Certainly, security is a precondition for economic development as is stable and sustainable political governance. In the present circumstances, meaningful economic development in Syria, Iraq, Libya and Yemen looks problematic. In contrast, ease of doing business and well-being survey data reveals a promising picture for the GCC and Jordan despite negativity from other MENA states. Dubai’s experience is especially encouraging, though not easy to emulate.

Notes 1 http://www.aiib.org/html/aboutus/AIIB/?show=0. 2 http://www.arabfund.org/. 248

Development in Egypt and the Gulf

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

http://www.etihadrail.ae/en/about/etihadstory. Ahram, Cairo, 9 April 2016. Stratfor Global Intelligence, 18 April 2016. Arab News, Jeddah, 18 April 2016. Ahram, Cairo, 11 April 2016. http://www.kurdistaninvestment.org/economy.html. http://www.doingbusiness.org/rankings. For a guide to how the rankings are made see Distance to Frontier and Ease of Doing Business Ranking, World Bank Group, 2016. 1 1 http://www.happyplanetindex.org/data/.

References Abé, N. (5 November 2015) “The Pharaoh’s dream: Sisi wants a new capital city for Egypt,” Spiegel International. Al-Janadi, Yaseen, Rahman, R.A. and N.H. Omar (2013), “Corporate governance mechanisms and voluntary disclosure in Saudi Arabia,” Corporate Governance, 4:4, 25–35. Baldwin-Edwards, M. (2011), Labour Immigration and Labour Markets in the GCC Countries: National Patterns and Trends, Kuwait Programme on Development, Governance and Globalisation in the Gulf States, London School of Economics. Barfi, B. (15 April 2016), “Egypt for sale,” Project Syndicate, Washington, DC. Beine, M., Docquier, F. and H. Rapoport (2008), “Brain drain and human capital formation in developing countries: Winners and losers,” The Economic Journal, 118:528, 631–52. Bishara, N.D. (2011), “Governance and corruption constraints in the Middle East: Overcoming the business ethics glass ceiling,” American Business Law Journal, 48:2, 227–83. Blinder, A.S. (2006), “Offshoring: the next industrial revolution?” Foreign Affairs, 85:2, 113–25. Campante, F.R. and D. Chor (2012), “Why was the Arab world poised for revolution? Schooling, economic opportunities, and the Arab Spring,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 26:2, 167–87. Charmes, J. (2012), “The informal economy worldwide: Trends and characteristics,” Margin: The Journal of Applied Economic Research, 6:2, 103–32. Cleveland, C.J. and R.K. Kaufmann (1991), “Forecasting ultimate oil recovery and its rate of production: Incorporating economic forces into the models of M. King Hubbert,” The Energy Journal, 17–46. Fawzy, S. (2002), “The economics and politics of Arab economic integration,” Research Paper No. 66, Egyptian Centre for Economic Studies. Galal, O. (2003), “Nutrition-related health patterns in the Middle East,” Asia Pacific Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 12:3, 337–43. Hansen-Lewis, J. and J.N. Shapiro (2015), “Understanding the Daesh economy,” Perspectives on Terrorism, 9:4, 1–14. Hvidt, M. (2009), “The Dubai model: An outline of key development-process elements in Dubai,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 41:3, 397–418. Imam, P.A. and D. Jacobs (2014), “Effect of corruption on tax revenues in the Middle East,” Review of Middle East Economics and Finance, 10:1, 1–24. Kerr, S. (9 March 2016), “Oil rout and global volatility take toll on Dubai,” Financial Times. Lakshmanan, I.A.R. (10 June 2015), “Mafia meets the IRS: Islamic State’s artful blend of extortion and taxation,” Bloomberg Business. Liu, S.-l. and A.-g. Hu (2010), “Transport infrastructure and economic growth: Perspective from China’s regional disparities,” China Industrial Economics, 4, 14–23. Mabro, R. (1967), “Industrial growth, agricultural under-employment and the Lewis model: The Egyptian case, 1937–1965,” The Journal of Development Studies, 3:4, 322–51. McDonald, S., Robinson, S. and K. Thierfelder (2008), “Asian growth and trade poles: India, China, and East and Southeast Asia,” World Development, 36:2, 210–34. McGillivray, M. and H. White (1993), “Measuring development? The UNDP’s Human Development index,” Journal of International Development, 5:2, 183–92. Nader, S. (2009), “Paths to a low-carbon economy: The Masdar example,” Energy Procedia, 1:1, 3951–8. O’Connell, J.F. (2006), “The changing dynamics of the Arab Gulf based airlines and an investigation into the strategies that are making Emirates into a global challenger,” World Review of Intermodal Transportation Research, 1:1, 94–114. 249

Rodney Wilson

Pacione, M. (2005), “Dubai,” Cities, 22:3, 255–65. Renaud, B. (2012), “Real estate bubble and financial crisis in Dubai: Dynamics and policy responses,” Journal of Real Estate Literature, 20:1, 51–77. Schmid, H. (2009), Economy of Fascination: Dubai and Las Vegas as Themed Urban Landscapes, Berlin: Gebrüder Borntraeger Verlagsbuchhandlung. Schulberg, J. (5 January 2016), “How relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran reached a breaking point,” Huffington Post. Srinivasan, T.N. (1994), “Human development: a new paradigm or reinvention of the wheel?” The American Economic Review, 84:2, 238–43. Tzannatos, Z. and I. Kaur (2003), “Women in the MENA labour market: An eclectic survey,” in Women and Globalization in the Middle East, pp. 55–72, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Wilson, R. (2013), Economic Development in the Middle East, second edition, pp. 10–11, London and New York, NY: Routledge. World Bank, (January 2016), “Regional integration and spill-overs: Middle East and North Africa,” World Economic Outlook, pp. 131–7.

250

18 Studying identity politics in Middle East international relations Before and after the Arab Uprisings Morten Valbjørn

Introduction Identity politics is far from a new topic in the study of the international relations of the Middle East, which is a region that has famously been described as “dripping with identity politics” (Telhami and Barnett 2002a: 3). Thus, strong attention to competing identities of various forms has figured as almost the defining feature of the study of Middle East politics. Against this background, it is natural to ask whether there is much more to say about Middle East identity politics, and to what extent it makes sense to speak about “new” identity politics in the wake of the Arab Uprisings. This chapter argues that there is indeed more to say. This is partly because various classic issues have gained new importance, though some with a new “twist”; and partly because a range of novel issues have emerged concerning (the study of) Middle East identity politics, not only “out there” (in the Middle East), but also “in here” (within academia). In the following, this argument will be further unfolded in two steps. The first part of the chapter outlines four prominent features of the pre-2011 debate on identity politics in Middle East international relations. The chapter then turns to the era following the Arab Uprisings and shows how the soul-searching and self-reflections among Middle East scholars about the continuing relevance of previous approaches to and understandings of Middle East politics can also be identified in relation to debates about the study of identity politics in the Middle East. The chapter suggests that while identity politics is still important in the study of Middle East politics, it is possible to detect a number of changes working at three different levels of abstraction. The first concerns the debate about dimensions of continuity and change in various identities “out there,” e.g. the relative importance of different territorial, sub- and supra-state identities. Another level concerns the debate on how scholars can analytically best grasp current identity politics and where in academia to look for analytically useful tools, e.g. what is on offer from IR, Middle East studies, ethnic studies, religious studies and other disciplines. The last level redirects attention from identities “out there” to identities “in here,” as reflected in a novel interest in how scholars’ own identities, shaped not only by their disciplinary training but also their cultural–institutional setting, may impact how they study identity politics in the Middle East. 251

Morten Valbjørn

Debating identity politics in Middle East international relations before the Arab Uprisings According to Hinnebusch (2005: 151), “Middle East area specialists have always acknowledged the importance of identities for an understanding of the region,” and, in the view of Telhami and Barnett (2002a: 1), “no student of Middle East international politics can begin to understand the region without taking into account the ebb and flow of identity politics.” Against this background, it is hardly surprising that “much of the political history of the Middle East has been told with reference to political identities” (Ibid: 2). In simplified terms, the “classic” debate on identity politics before the beginning of the Arab Uprisings in 2011 can be divided into four clusters of debates, concerning i) whether and how a stronger cross-fertilization between IR and Middle East studies can benefit and enrich the identity debates within both fields of study, ii) the specific composition of different kinds of identities in the Middle East across time and space, iii) the origins of these identities and iv) whether the presence of multiple kinds of identities has set the Middle East apart from how international relations work elsewhere.1

Middle East studies and IR: a shared interest in identity, but in different ways The first cluster is related to how the “ship of culture and identity” (Lapid 1996: 3) entered the “port” of IR theory in the early 1990s and soon became the “conceptual shooting star” within this field of study (Berenskoetter 2017: 1). While the “cargo” of this ship had been traded in the Middle East “bazaar” for a much longer time, the new shared interest within these two fields—IR and Middle East studies—in the study of identity politics raised the question about whether and how a stronger cross-fertilization could benefit our understanding of international relations in the Middle East and more broadly. Barnett (1998: 238), for instance, suggested that “international relations theory can help us to better understand the making and unmaking of Arab politics . . . and its making and unmaking can help scholars of international relations theory think more analytically and creatively about global politics.” A closer look at how IR and Middle East scholars had discussed identity politics reveals at the same time how a stronger dialogue between these two fields of study might carry a number of promises, but also how it faced a range of obstacles. Middle East scholars had traditionally produced a trove of good but often quite descriptive accounts of how identity politics affect international relations in the Middle East (Kerr 1965; Seale 1965; Brown 1984, 2001), which, as noted by Barnett and Telhami, would have benefited from some of the theoretical tools offered by IR. While the identity debate within the latter field of study may have been more theoretically informed and better linked to currents in broader social theory, IR was in another sense quite narrow in how the identity question was approached. Since the rather late arrival of the “ship of culture and identity,” much of the identity debate had narrowly revolved around the ideational/materialist nexus. Combined with a tendency within large parts of (mainstream) IR to perceive the “international” in universalist, global- and state-centric terms (Buzan and Wæver 2003; Valbjørn 2008), this resulted in a rather narrow focus on whether the most important global structures were material or intersubjective (Wendt 1999) and whether and how the foreign policy of a given state was influenced by the national identity of that state. However, implications for international relations of a possible incongruity between state and nation, the presence of international actors identifying with (more) sub- and supra-state identities, or tensions between global and regional intersubjective institutions/structures associated with conflicting norms about appropriate behaviour were given far less attention. In contrast to 252

Identity politics in Middle East IR

IR, these issues had always figured prominently in the Middle East debate, which in this way also had something to offer the broader and more general debate on identity politics in international relations. While these differences provided an argument for why a stronger dialogue between IR and Middle East studies could enrich the identity debate within both fields of study, the very same differences were also often highlighted in discussions about why the real exchange had been rather limited. Thus, in the 1990s, IR and Middle East studies were often considered to be positioned in different “camps” in the Middle East-specific part of the broader Area Studies Controversy (for an overview, see Valbjørn 2004b, 2003; see also Beck 2002; Gause 1999; Gerges 1991; Korany 1991, 1999b; Anderson 1990; for an early example, see Binder 1958). This controversy referred to a basic tension between regional specialists—with a background in, for instance, Middle East studies —and “discipline-oriented” social scientists, such as those from IR theory, about what should constitute the approaches by which scholars construct knowledge about different parts of the world (Tessler et al. 1999: vii). While the former group emphasized contextualized knowledge and paid close attention to the more idiosyncratic features of “their” own region, the latter group was more comparative and looked for general patterns and universal logics. As a consequence, each camp perceived and approached the Middle East quite differently: while area specialists, following Bill’s (1996: 506) classic desert metaphor, tended to content themselves with gathering different grains of sand in the Middle East desert, to IR theorists the region appeared mostly as large dry blurs of desert. In fairness, this picture of how the Middle East was studied was always a bit of a caricature. This became even more obvious at the turn of the new millennium. The decade before the Arab Uprisings saw a growing number of calls for getting beyond the Area Studies Controversy in favour of more cross-fertilization between IR and Middle East studies (Korany 1999b; Nonneman 2001; Telhami and Barnett 2002a; Valbjørn 2003, 2004b; Fawcett 2005b; Teti 2007). Moreover, it offered a range of innovative and sophisticated studies that successfully combined state-of-the-art IR theories with deep knowledge about regional affairs, illustrating why and how studies placed in the IR/Middle East studies nexus can improve our grasp of the role of identities in the Middle East while also helping us to think more creatively about identity politics in international relations generally (among others, Telhami and Barnett 2002b; Lynch 1999; Stetter 2008; Buzan and Gonzalez-Pelaez 2009; Fawcett 2005a; Gause 2010; Ryan 2009; Halliday 2005; Salloukh and Brynen 2004; Barnett 1998; Hinnebusch 2003; Barnett and Solingen 2007; Bilgin 2004a).

Debating the composition of different kinds of identities in the Middle East One of the ways that discussions of identity politics among Middle East scholars have traditionally differed from the broader field of IR concerns the former group’s attention to the role of different kinds of identities in Middle East international relations. While the Middle East, like the rest of the world, is divided into territorial states, students of the Middle East had a long tradition of arguing that territorial state identities in “their” region were challenged by other identities emerging from above and below, making it impossible to simply assume a state/nation fit. Hinnebusch (2005: 153), for instance, argued that “the relative incongruity between state and identity is perhaps the most distinctive feature of the Middle East state system,” and other scholars pointed to how the Middle East in this regard stands out not only in comparison to Europe but also other parts of the world such as Africa (Gause 1992: 444; Barnett 1995; Telhami and Barnett 2002a: 9). 253

Morten Valbjørn

This classic attention to various kinds of identities, however, did not translate into much consensus as to how the specific identity composition of the Middle East looked. In simplified terms, the debate was divided into three strands. Some perceived the Middle East as a mosaic of sub-state identities, so that states were nothing but what Tahseen Bashir famously called “tribes with flags,” for which reason any real understanding of the region would require knowledge about the Middle East’s “tribal DNA” (Salzman 2008; Salamé 1994). Others saw the region as defined by a single monolithic identity. Islam, for instance, was perceived as the source of a common supra-state identity, uniting Muslims across state boundaries into a single community of faith (the ummah) and making the Middle East into the core of an “Islamic civilization” (Lewis 1965; Huntington 1996; Tibi 2000) or part of an “Islamic international society” (Hashmi 2009). Another prominent supra-state identity was Arabism. Thus, the existence of some degree of shared language, history and culture gave rise to the view that the Arabic-speaking part of the Middle East constituted variously a “pan-system,” where a single Arab nation existed behind the façade of existing territorial states (Khalidi 1978); a “vast sound chamber” in which currents and thoughts resonated across state frontiers (Noble 1991); an “Arab public sphere” (Lynch 2006) or an “Arab international society” (Valbjørn 2009). Finally, there were also those who questioned the importance of supra- and sub-state identities by referring to the existence of, among others, Egyptian, Syrian, Iraqi, Jordanian, Iranian, Tunisian, Moroccan, Turkish and Yemeni nationalisms (Harik 1985; Jankowski and Gershoni 1997). While pure “either/or” versions of these three strands did exist, most of the debate took its point of departure in the acknowledgement of the simultaneous presence of multiple kinds of identities (Halliday 2000; Phillips 2012). This view was also supported by various public opinion polls. They showed how many respondents in the Middle East identified with their own country, but at the same time stressed an identity as Muslim/Christian and/or as Arab, and how these multiple identifications affected their views on international actors and events (Zogby 2010; Furia and Lucas 2006). At the same time, these polls showed how the relative importance of different kinds of identities varied in time and space. Against this background, for instance, it was debated in which parts of the Middle East the territorial state identity was most contested. Usually, the non-Arab part of the region was considered more successful in establishing a state/nation fit than the Arab one, where the Arabist notion about some sort of united Arab nation had been important. This view was, however, not unchallenged. Thus, others argued that the state/nation misfit was just different in places like Iran, Israel or Turkey. From this perspective, the Arab world represented an example of “one nation/many states,” whereas the non-Arab states were perceived as examples of “many nations/one state,” as all of them had unfinished tasks of integrating minorities (Hinnebusch 2005; Patel 2010). In addition, it was also often stressed how the Arab world was far from uniform as the relative importance of an Arab identity compared to territorial state identities varied considerably among the Arab states (Hinnebusch 2003). In addition to spatial variance, this discussion about the relative importance of various kinds of identities also had a temporal dimension. A very prominent theme in this regard concerned the question of the future of Arabism and whether after Nasser it made sense any longer to speak about a distinct “Arab” dimension to Arab politics (Green 1986). This debate can also be divided into three major strands. According to the first, the 1967 Arab debacle marked the beginning of the end of Arabism as such, and over time an increasingly “post-Arab” Middle East was expected to resemble a “normal state system” defined by the very same raison d’état logics as anywhere else (Ajami 1978; Faksh 1993; Mufti 1996). Another strand agreed that Arabism had become obsolete, but instead of a “normalization” of the Middle East, new kinds of supraand sub-state identities, based on Islam, tribe or ethnicity, were expected to replace Arabism (Tibi 1997; Nasr 2007). A final strand took issue with the representation of the Middle East as 254

Identity politics in Middle East IR

“post-Arab” by pointing to how large parts of the population in the Arab countries, according to public opinion polls, still considered themselves to be Arab, how Arabism comes in forms other than Nasserist “pan-Arabism” (such as “cultural” and “political Arabism”), and how the rise of new Arab media such as al-Jazeera had made the classic notion about “the Arab sound chamber” relevant again. From this perspective, the Arab world was rather defined by the co-existence of Arab and territorial state identities and the presence of an “Arab public sphere” existing in parallel with the territorial state system (Lynch 2006; Valbjørn 2009; AbuKhalil 1992; Telhami 1999).

Ancient or modern roots of multiple identities Just like the future configuration of various identities was contested, so was the question of how the origins and evolution of various kinds of identities should be explained. This debate was usually presented as taking place between a primordialist and a modernist position, though the latter happened to be much more populous and diverse than the former (Saideman 2002; Halliday 2000). According to the primordialist—or perennialist—position, territorial state identities were new and superficial and far less important than allegedly deep-seated and basically unchangeable supra-/sub-state identities that supposedly could be traced back to ancient times. In the debate about the origins of Arab nationalism, Viorst (2006: 9), for instance, argued that “Arab nationalism, by any definition, was born in the arid desert of Arabia in the seventh century,” and the prominent Arab nationalist figure, Sati al-Husri, famously argued that any native Arabic speaker “is an Arab regardless of his own wishes” (cited in Dawisha 2003: 72). In contrast, sub- and supra-state identities were perceived from a modernist perspective as no less modern or changeable than territorial state identities. Thus, the specific composition of identities in the Middle East was perceived as an outcome of the transformations associated with the emergence and evolution of the modern Middle East. While most Middle East scholars subscribed to this latter position, this view was, at the same time, marked by considerable internal diversity. An agreement that Arab nationalism was a modern phenomenon which should be dated no earlier than the end of the nineteenth century, for instance, gave rise to a considerable debate on the relative importance of a variety of factors associated with the emergence of the modern Middle East. These included i) geopolitical changes, for example the weakening and collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the implementation of the mandate system; ii) the establishment of new states, some of which were artificial constructs with borders cutting across existing communities; iii) the spread of new modern ideas, ideologies and norms, such as nationalism and self-determination; iv) the emergence of new media such as newspapers and the radio along with novel means of transport, connecting Arabs across the newly erected borders and contributing to new trans-Arab processes and the rise of a new “imagined community” of Arabs; v) the expansion of educational opportunities and rising levels of literacy; vi) social changes and the emergence of new social classes, giving rise to new kinds of nationalist movements; and vii) the outbreak of wars, conflicts and revolts, including the 1936–9 Arab revolt in Palestine and the 1948 Arab–Israeli war (Khalidi et al. 1991; Barnett 1995; Dawisha 2003; Hinnebusch 2005; Lawson 2006; Valbjørn 2009).

Identity politics and the (un)exceptional international relations of the Middle East In addition to these debates on the configuration and origins of various kinds of identities in the Middle East, a great deal of energy before 2011 was spent debating whether and, if so, how 255

Morten Valbjørn

the presence of multiple kinds of sub-, supra- and territorial state identities had set the Middle East apart from the working of international relations elsewhere. In simplified terms, this debate took place along a continuum, where the Middle East at one extreme was perceived as a “region like no other” in the sense that the regional identity configuration had given Middle East international relations completely unique dynamics that general IR theories could not grasp. According to Lewis (1965: 115), the notion of foreign policy, for instance, was a European concept “alien and new in the world of Islam,” and following Bozeman (1994 [1960]: 362; see also Khadduri 1965; Tibi 2000), “contemporary Muslim approaches to the conduct of international relations . . . are anchored in the history of the medieval Muslim Empire” and in her view, “efforts to understand this section of the present society of nations have to begin, therefore, with an analytical scrutiny of the early records of the dar al-Islam as an international community.” At the other end of this continuum, the Middle East was regarded as “a region like any other,” so that general IR theories were just as applicable here as anywhere else. Based on a very global-centric version of neo-realism, Birthe Hansen (2001), for instance, argued that the important dynamics of Middle East international relations could be explained by the distribution of (material) power at the global level, whereas regional actors and the regional configuration of identities were not attributed any significance. In his seminal study on the Origins of Alliances, Stephen Walt (1987) assigned the regional level greater importance, but like Hansen, he maintained that the Middle East could be grasped by theoretically generalizable neorealist principles. However, it was in between those extremes that most of the debate among Middle East scholars took place. Generally, from this middle-ground perspective, the Middle East was perceived to be “like but not same as” other regions, and the ambition was to navigate between the pitfalls of being blinded by or blind to the implications of the region’s distinct identity configuration (Valbjørn 2004a). This ambition was reflected in a quite nuanced debate, where the main focus turned from whether to when, where, and how various kinds of identities influenced the dynamics of Middle East international relations. As for the question about where and when, one strand directed attention to how foreign policy directions were affected by the extent to which identities were satisfied or frustrated by new state boundaries and the nature of the social forces incorporated in a regime’s ruling coalition (Hinnebusch 2003, 2011; Hinnebusch and Ehteshami 2002; Stein 2012). Another strand emphasized the level of state (de)formation in the sense that higher degrees of “stateness” were assumed to make foreign policy elites less vulnerable to supra-/sub-state challenges, whereas state weakness or failure was expected to increase the salience of these identities (Mufti 1996; Gause 1992; Salloukh and Brynen 2004). Yet another strand brought attention to how the long-term outcome of identity-driven foreign policy depended on its congruency with the material balance of power in the region and the changes in the degree of global systemic pressure (Hinnebusch 2009). When it comes to the question of exactly how the composition of identities influenced dynamics in Middle East international relations, it is possible to identify a range of suggestions. Among the most far-ranging, the relative importance of different identities was considered crucial for how actors conceive of the international and answer fundamental questions such as “What is a threat?” and “Who is threatening and against whom?,” which again influences what is considered (un)thinkable and (im)possible in international relations (Bilgin 2004a, 2004b). If identities influence our basic notions about (in)security and the international, this may also carry implications for various strands in the broader field of IR: the varying strength of the Arabist idea that all Arab territorial states belonged to the same Arab nation, for instance, made the classic notion in (realist) IR that states should be guided by “the national interest” far less obvious. 256

Identity politics in Middle East IR

Similarly, the constructivist point about how our identity informs our understanding of our interests becomes much more complex if states have more latent identities, such as Iran, where the importance of an identity as Persian, Islamic or Shiite has varied over time (Barnett 1998; Maloney 2002; Ehteshami 2002). Another strand in this debate turned greater attention to the question about how identities may constrain or enable the way international actors pursue their interests—regardless of where these come from. Following sociological role theory, identities were perceived as social roles associated with norms about appropriate behaviour, which an actor had to apply in order to be recognized as possessing a certain identity (Barnett 1998, 1996). In this way, depending on the identity, certain forms of behaviour could impose costs, making actors hesitant to or even refrain from following what, from a narrow materialist perspective, might have been perceived as the most rational form of behaviour. A classic example is King Hussein’s decision in 1967 not to counter the Egyptian/Syrian threat to Jordan through an open alliance with Israel, as this would have been at odds with the “Arab norm” at that time and hence undermined the legitimacy of the Hashemite monarchy (Lynch 2002; Bank and Valbjørn 2010). In addition to constraining behaviour, at the same time it was pointed to how certain identities could also enable specific kinds of behaviour. What was described as “a habitual willingness to act across borders that seems unparalleled elsewhere in the non-European world” (Owen 2000: 74) was attributed, for instance, to the influence of Arab nationalist ideas about the existence of some kind of “Arab nation” in enabling ambitious Arab powers to meddle in the domestic affairs of other Arab states based on claims of protecting a “common Arab interests” (Valbjørn 2009). This points to an important feature of how the role of identity politics was traditionally debated among Middle East scholars. While emphasizing various kinds of identities, it was also stressed that a shared identity or notions about special bonds by no means had to lead to co-operation or consensus regarding the behavioural expectations associated with a specific identity. On the contrary, when it comes to how an Arab supra-state identity influenced Middle East international relations, it was stressed that a common interest had given rise to an intense inter-Arab rivalry, which had played out differently than rivalries between Arab and non-Arab actors (Korany 1999a). While the latter often took the form of “hot” militarized interstate warfare, as reflected in the Arab–Israeli conflicts and even more in the Iran–Iraq war, inter-Arab rivalries were instead often described in terms of an “Arab Cold War” defined by a complex interplay between domestic and regional theatres, where “soft power” derived from ideological appeal and from being perceived as protecting Arab interests often constituted a more important commodity than “hard” military power (Barnett 1998; Valbjørn and Bank 2012). While the notion of an “Arab Cold War” was originally coined by Kerr (1965) to describe the dynamics of 1950–60s Arab politics, it re-emerged in the new millennium as part of a debate about what the regional reactions to the 2006 Summer War between Israel and Hizbollah could tell us about the role of identity politics in Middle East international relations following the 2003 Iraq war. Most observers agreed that the region, at that time, was marked by a bipolar pattern between a “moderate/status quo/pro-US camp” including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel, and a “radical/resistance/anti-US” camp counting Iran, Syria, Hizbollah and Hamas. However, observers differed when it came to whether regional dynamics were best grasped by a “moderate/radical,” “Westphalian,” “Shiite Crescent” or “New Arab Cold War” narrative, each of which assigned varying importance to (different) supra-/sub-state identities (Valbjørn and Bank 2012, 2007; Susser 2006; Gause 2007). This issue would become even more prominent in the wake of the Arab Uprisings, where the notion about some kind of “regional cold war” re-emerged as a frame to grasp key dynamics in regional politics. 257

Morten Valbjørn

A new Middle East—a new kind of identity politics? The Arab Uprisings, which began in early 2011, have not only impacted the Middle East, but also left their mark on the scholarship about the region, which has been preoccupied with discussing the Uprisings and their implications. Initially, much of the debate revolved around the immediate and underlying causes of the Arab Uprisings, their nature, and the reasons for the different trajectories in various Arab countries. Later, the debate took a broader perspective, focusing on the wider (analytical) implications of the Arab Uprisings for the (study of the) Middle East. One dimension in this debate concerns the question of whether and, if so, how we are witnessing the emergence of a genuinely “new Middle East.” In the beginning, this debate confirmed Halliday’s (2002: 235) observation—originally made in the context of the 9/11 debate—that “there are two predictable, and nearly always mistaken, responses to any great international upheaval: one is to say that everything has changed; the other is to say that nothing has changed.” Subsequently, many observers have become more attentive both to the continuity in allegedly large changes and to changes in apparent continuities. This discussion about the “newness” of the “new Middle East” also carries implications for another dimension of the debate about the outcome of the Arab Uprisings. It concerns their broader analytical consequences for Middle East scholars’ way of studying the region. In other words, in order to grasp a (more or less) “new Middle East,” to what extent is it necessary to reject, revise or revisit some of the past theoretical approaches to and understandings of Middle East politics? Since the beginning of the Arab Uprisings, these questions have led to a considerable degree of soul-searching and self-reflections among Middle East scholars (Gause 2011; Pace and Cavatorta 2012; Valbjørn and Volpi 2014; Valbjørn 2015; Schwedler 2015). In view of its prominence in Middle East scholarship, it is hardly surprising that the debate about the role of identity politics in the (new) Middle East has also been influenced by these self-reflections. Thus, it has been asked whether identity politics is still important, and if so to what extent does it make sense to speak about “new” identity politics, making it necessary to revise our approaches and ways of thinking about the topic? These questions have been addressed at different levels of abstraction, where focus spans from the role of identity politics “out there,” i.e. in the Middle East, to “in here,” i.e. among scholars within academia.

Continuity and change in the composition of identities “out there” The first level concerns the debate about dimensions of continuity and change in the importance of various kinds of identities “out there” and is closely related to the classic debate about the composition of different kinds of identities in the Middle East. This debate has evolved in stages. Initially, it revolved very much around the question of whether territorial state identities had replaced the former role of sub- and supra-state identities. In this way, it resembled the classic discussion about “(the myth of) the end of Arabism,” which has been going on since 1967. Proponents of the view that in the “new Middle East” state and the nation had at last reached a fit would point to the fact that Tahrir Square in early 2011 was full of protesters with Egyptian flags demanding influence in their own country. This illustrated, the argument went, how Arabs in the twenty-first century first and foremost identified with their own country, rather than some sub- or supra-state identity (Hadar 2011). Others suggested that the fact that the Arab Uprisings had resonated around the “Arab sound chamber” was an expression of how Arab politics still carried a distinct Arab dimension, and some even prophesied the emergence of a new kind of Arabism (Khanna 2011; Seale 2011; Sawani 2012; for a balanced overview, see Phillips 2014). 258

Identity politics in Middle East IR

Soon, however, this part of the debate about the composition of identities following the Arab Uprisings was replaced by growing attention to how a possible fragmentation of the “Arab public sphere” (Lynch 2015) and weakening of the Arab dimension of Arab politics did not necessarily have to mean that territorial state identities had become stronger or that some of the themes in the classic debate on identity politics in the Middle East had become obsolete. In line with Lynch’s (2013a: 3) statement that “a number of deeper trends have come together in recent years to give frightening new power to identity politics writ large,” various kinds of sub- and supra-state identities other than the Arab have received increasing attention since 2011. Some observers noted how Iran—before the Arab Uprisings reached Syria—tried to frame the protests as a distinct “Islamic” phenomenon directly linked to the Islamic revolution in Iran 32 years before (Soage 2017). Others have focused on the revival of various sub-state identities based on tribe or ethnicity. This has been reflected in the re-emergence of the debate about whether Arab states are nothing but “tribes with flags” and in discussions about whether we are about to witness “the end of Sykes-Picot” in the sense of a break-up of the existing Middle East state system (Miller 2013; Wright 2013; Goldberg 2014; Heydemann 2013; Gause 2014b). Still, others have suggested that the defining feature of identity politics in a “new Middle East” will be what Abdo (2017) has coined the “new sectarianism” and others have described as a process of “sectarianization” (Hashemi and Postel 2017). Sectarian politics in terms of a Shia/Sunni schism had already been a topic in the debates on identity politics in the decade before the Arab Uprisings, where it was discussed whether the notion of a rising “Shiite Crescent” was a myth or reality (Maoz 2007; Gause 2007; Susser 2006; Nasr 2007; Valbjørn and Bank 2007). The post-2011 debate, however, differs from the previous version as even former sceptics now acknowledge that sectarianism has become “a real factor in politics” (Gause 2013; cf. Gause 2007). This view is also supported by various polls. In addition to documenting a growing concern about sectarianism among populations in the Middle East, they also point to how people increasingly identify themselves in sectarian terms and are split along sectarian lines when it comes to how they perceive regional conflicts and actors (Pew Research Center 2014, 2016; Zogby 2013; Munich Security Conference 2018: 41). While this contrasts with the decade before 2011, where for instance Nasrallah of the Shiite Islamist Hizbollah figured as the most popular person in the Sunni Arab world (Valbjørn and Bank 2007), an acknowledgement that sectarianism has become a factor still leaves room for disagreements. Instead of debating whether the notion of a Shia/Sunni schism is real or nothing but a myth, the current debate on sectarian politics revolves to a larger extent around questions about why sectarianism has (re)emerged as an issue, how this impacts various dynamics of regional politics and relates to more conventional forms of geopolitics and how important the Shia/Sunni divide is compared to other forms of identity politics, including intra-Sunni/Shia divisions (Lynch 2013b; Stein 2017; Gause 2017, 2014a; Salloukh 2013; Hinnebusch 2016; Valbjørn and Hinnebusch 2019). Compared with the debate on identity politics in Middle East international relations before 2011, it is at this first level thus possible to identify dimensions of both continuity and change. As before, identities other than the territorial state identity are receiving much attention and the exact composition of different kinds of identities in the region is still an important but contested topic. However, compared to the classic debate, an Arab supra-state identity plays a far less prominent role today, and Western as well as Arab commentators, policymakers, analysts and academics have, as Wehrey (2013: 13) notes, instead been almost fixated on Shia/Sunni sectarianism. These dimensions of continuity and change are reflected, for instance, in the current debate on how regional rivalries can be grasped as some sort of new regional cold war. On the one hand, the concept of a regional cold war has re-emerged and become one of the most popular frames 259

Morten Valbjørn

to grasp key dynamics. As in the pre-2011 versions of this debate, this current rivalry is defined by a complex interplay between regional and domestic theatres linked by supra-state identities: regional powers are confronting each other through proxy wars in weak states with permeable borders where supra/trans-state identities are used by these regional powers to interfere in local conflicts, while local actors use these identities to attract support from the outside. On closer inspection, the current debate on regional cold wars is, however, not identical with the classic variant. The latter was mainly about inter-Arab relations within the context of an Arab suprastate identity. Conversely, the current debate focuses to a much larger extent on the rivalry between (non-Arab Shia) Iran and (Arab Sunni) Saudi Arabia. This rivalry has been labelled not only a “new Arab Cold War’,” “the Arab Cold War redux” or the “third Arab Cold War’,” but also as a “sectarian/Shia–Sunni/Iranian–Saudi/regional/Islamic/Middle Eastern” cold war (Ryan 2012; Hinnebusch 2016; Stephens 2017; Hanau Santini 2017; Gause 2014a; Salisbury 2015; Koelbl et  al. 2016). These differences in the identity prefix raise the question about whether the content of (supra-state) identities makes a difference for how regional cold war rivalries are played out, which is an issue that relates to some of the more theoretical debates that have (re)emerged in the wake of the Arab Uprisings (Valbjørn 2019).

Revisiting old partners and introducing new friends If identity politics is still relevant in the “new Middle East,” but with a different configuration of (supra/sub-state) identities, this poses the question of how the implications for Middle East international relations can be best grasped analytically and whether our existing theoretical approaches are still useful or need to be revised. Since the Arab Uprisings, these questions have been examined in a debate that involves old partners as well as new friends. As explained above, the IR/Middle East studies nexus experienced a growing vitality in the decade before 2011, which saw a range of innovative and sophisticated studies that successfully combined state-of-the-art IR theories with deep knowledge about regional affairs. Much of the early work on the Arab Uprisings, however, was based on a fertile dialogue between Middle East scholarship and comparative politics rather than IR (Schwedler 2015; Valbjørn 2017). But more recently the IR/Middle East studies nexus appears to have been revitalized, as expressed in various conferences and publications on how IR theory can contribute to a better understanding of the international dimension of the Arab Uprisings and how insights from the Middle East can enrich broader debates in IR (POMEPS 2015; Lynch et al. 2017). Such a dialogue between IR and Middle East studies on the role of identity politics following the Arab Uprisings has already produced a range of studies drawing on different strands in IR. Gause and Salloukh, for instance, have combined insights from neo-classic realism with Middle East studies’ attention to supra-state identities in their accounts of how regional powers use sectarianism in a basically geopolitical rivalry that is played out through proxies in various domestic theatres (Salloukh 2017, 2013; Gause 2014a). Elsewhere, Gause (2017) has observed that neither a sectarian nor a materialist balance of power logic can account for the “under-balancing” by other regional powers against Iran, and shown how this puzzle can be explained through Haas’ theory of “ideological polarity,” originally developed based on insights from European great powers after the Napoleon Wars and the interwar years. Other scholars have drawn on historical sociology. Stein (2017), for instance, has developed an identity–ideology framework that refines and nuances our understanding of the ideational drivers of foreign policy, alliance choice and regional order in general, and shows against this background the utility of the notion of “ideological co-dependency” in explaining Iran’s alliance with Syria. Still others have introduced the Copenhagen School’s 260

Identity politics in Middle East IR

theory about securitization in the debate about sectarian politics. Based on a study of the securitization of sectarian identities by Saudi Arabia and Hizbollah, Darwich and Fakhoury (2016, see also Mabon 2019) examine the process by which such identities become security issues and sources of conflict. Still other scholars have combined insights from a variety of IR theories as a way of grasping how identity politics matters in current regional politics. As a way of understanding “the new Arab wars,” Lynch (2016), for example, combines a constructivist emphasis on ideas, a realist focus on states, and proxy war, network, civil war and insurgency theory and several domestic–international linkages. In a similar way, Hinnebusch (2015, 2016) has introduced a “multivariate synthetic approach” that draws on neo-classic realism, constructivism, English School theory, IPE and historical sociology to account for international relations in a “new Middle East” marked by “transnational identity wars and competitive interference.” While the above list of examples of recent studies emerging from IR/Middle East studies illustrates how it can still be useful to engage with “old” dialogue partners, at the same time some of the studies drawing on IR theories have been charged with not taking religious and other identities sufficiently seriously. Part of the debate on Shia/Sunni sectarianism, for instance, has been criticized for explaining sectarianism away in the sense that the phenomenon is reduced to factors exterior to sectarian identity politics itself (Malmvig 2015). Against this background, there is an emerging interest among some Middle East scholars in exploring whether and how insights from debates in religious and ethnicity studies as well as from the current broader IR debate on the role of religion in international relations can provide useful analytical tools to recognize in a non-essentialist way how (religious) identities can be more than a mere tool in Middle East international relations. This is for instance the case in the aforementioned debate on whether and how the current regional rivalries can be grasped as some sort of new “regional cold war.” The major part of this debate has only emphasized the role of supra-state identities— and weak states—without paying much attention to whether it makes a difference if this rivalry is best described as an Arab, sectarian, Shia–Sunni, Iranian–Saudi, regional, Islamic or Middle Eastern regional cold war. Partly inspired by Brubaker’s (2015) distinction from ethnicity and religious studies between a “diacritical” and “normative ordering” dimension of religious identities, some have called for more attention to whether the classic “Arab” cold war is comparable to the current “regional cold war,” where the Arab dimension is less prevalent, and whether in conflicts like the Syrian, which is marked by multiple proxy wars, it matters that different external actors are employing different kinds of identities when they try to mobilize local proxies (Phillips and Valbjørn 2018; Valbjørn 2019).

On how scholarly identities “in here” shape how we understand identity politics “out there” As earlier mentioned, the “ship of culture” arrived earlier to Middle East studies than IR, but in the 1990s identity politics quickly became the “conceptual shooting star” within the latter field of study (Berenskoetter 2017: 1). In addition to explorations into the role of identity politics in international relations “out there”—often separate from but at times in dialogue with Middle East scholars—the last two decades have also witnessed a more inward-looking and self-reflexive way among IR scholars of discussing identity politics, as reflected in calls for a “global IR,” a growing attention to “geo-cultural epistemologies” and a search for “non-/post-Western” approaches to international relations (Acharya 2014; Tickner and Wæver 2009; Tickner 2003; Hellmann and Valbjørn 2017). In the wake of the Arab Uprisings, this trend—at last—also seems to have caught the interest of some Middle East scholars.2 261

Morten Valbjørn

The original impetus for this more self-reflexive interest in the role of identity politics “in here” (in academia) is often associated with Cox’s (1981: 128) famous remark about how ”theory is always for someone and for some purpose. . . There is accordingly no such thing as theory in itself divorced from a standpoint in time and space.” This is related to Hoffmann’s (1977) famous statement about how IR appears to be an “American social science” and Wæver’s (1998) suggestion that “IR might be quite different in different places.” In particular, since the turn of the new millennium these observations have given rise to a multidimensional debate in the broader field of IR about a) whether IR was made “by and for the West” (Barkawi and Laffey 2006) and what this means for our way of studying and understanding international relations, i.e. how have some issues/forms of knowledge been considered more important/legitimate than others; b) whether and how it is possible to identify substantially different ways of studying international relations elsewhere; i.e. is the “international” imagined in identical ways everywhere and is “security” perceived differently in different places?; and c) which kinds of strategies are more likely to make IR theory genuinely international, not only as regards what is studied but also when it comes to how and by whom; i.e. how can the “non-West” to a larger extent become a “producer of knowledge” rather than being only an “object of knowledge,” and how can insights from different places be connected in a genuinely international debate? (Tickner 2003; Hellmann and Valbjørn 2017). At first sight, considering the global prominence of Said’s (1978) critique about the “Western” production of knowledge about the “East,” one might expect the study of Middle East international relations to be one of the fields where concerns about the identity politics within the community of knowledge production (“in here”) would have received considerable attention. This has, however, been far from the case. According to the TRIP survey on theory and practice of international relations around the world, the Middle East may figure as one of the most studied regions “beyond the West” (Kristensen in Valbjørn and Hazbun 2017), and Middle East specialists over the years have produced a rich and increasingly sophisticated literature on identities “out there.” Yet, scholars of Middle East international relations have only to a limited extent reflected on whether and how political, cultural and professional identities have shaped their scholarship and influenced how identities “out there” are approached, theorized, discussed and evaluated— and the Middle East has likewise been almost absent in the broader “post-Western” IR debate, which instead has been occupied by discussions about Chinese, Indian or Latin American IR. To the extent that scholarly identities “in here” have been debated among Middle East scholars, it has mainly been related to the aforementioned (and in reality very US-centric) Area Studies Controversy between generalists and regional specialists on how to study “regions.” However, the role of “geo-cultural epistemologies” (Tickner and Wæver 2009) and “the cultural– institutional context” (Jørgensen and Brems Knudsen 2006) have only received very limited attention. As a reflection of this, questions about how Middle East international relations has been studied within the region itself or whether for instance American and European Middle East scholars differ in how they approach the region have only rarely been addressed (among the exceptions, see Korany 1986, 1999b; Dessouki and Korany 1991; Abu Jaber 1991; Korany and Makdisi 2009). Partly as an outcome of the aforementioned soul-searching among Middle East scholars following the Arab Uprisings, however, there are signs of an emerging interest in parts of Middle East scholarship in this way of discussing the role of identity politics in (the study of) international relations. In addition to studies on the geopolitics of knowledge and postcolonial agency, this trend includes reflections on the “politics of insecurity” viewed from Beirut, discussions of how security in the Arab world and Turkey is “differently different,” examinations of “Arab scholars’ takes on globalization” or how Iranian scholars are “theorizing international relations” and more recently a manifesto for a “Beirut School of critical security studies” 262

Identity politics in Middle East IR

(Hazbun 2017, 2013, Bilgin 2012, Hasan and Momani 2012, Moshirzadeh 2018, Abboud et al. 2018). Moreover, various workshops have brought together leading figures from global/postWestern IR with Middle East scholars, in order to compare how IR is studied and taught in American, European and different Middle Eastern contexts, and discuss how private experiences, institutional contexts, geo-cultural locations, disciplinary training and the encounter of specific influential persons/books have influenced their intellectual journey as scholars (Valbjørn and Hazbun 2017; Hazbun and Valbjørn 2018).

Still dripping with identity politics . . . The study of Middle East international relations has—to paraphrase Telhami and Barnett— traditionally been “dripping with identity politics.” In view of the changes the Middle East has experienced since the beginning of the Arab Uprisings and the associated soul-searching among Middle East scholars about the consequences for the study of Middle East politics, this poses the question of whether there is more to say about Middle East identity politics and to what extent it makes sense to speak about a kind of “new” identity politics today. This chapter has explored these questions in two steps. Following an overview of how identity politics in Middle East international relations was discussed before the Arab Uprisings, the chapter turned to how identity politics is currently debated in Middle East scholarship. The chapter found that while identity politics is still important in the study of Middle East international relations, it is possible to detect a number of changes working at three different levels of abstraction. When it comes to identity politics “out there” (the first level), the classic issue of the configuration of different kinds of identities and their implications for the dynamics of international relations still figures prominently. At the same time, it is generally believed that the exact composition of identities has changed, most obviously in terms of a decline in the importance of an Arab identity, whereas sectarian identity politics is regarded to have become more important. As regards the question of how to study and explain current identity politics (the second level), the IR/Middle East studies nexus does still have much to offer, but at the same time it is possible to detect a growing interest in whether the specific nature of different supra/sub-state identities makes a difference and how religion in particular can be taken more seriously in non-essentialist ways. Finally, it is possible to detect a new trend in the debate on identity politics, where focus is redirected from identities “out there” to “in here.” This is reflected in a novel interest in how scholars’ own identities, shaped not only by their disciplinary training but also their cultural– institutional setting, may impact how they study identity politics in the Middle East.

Notes 1 A more detailed account of past discussions about identity politics in the study of Middle East international relations can be found in Valbjørn (2015), which this section draws on. 2 This section draws on Valbjørn and Hazbun (2017).

References Abboud, S., O. S. Dahi, W. Hazbun, N. S. Grove, C. Pison Hindawi, J. Mouawad and S. Hermez (2018), “Towards a Beirut School of critical security studies”, Critical Studies on Security 6:3, 273–295. Abdo, G. (2017), The New Sectarianism: The Arab Uprisings and the Rebirth of the Shi’a-Sunni Divide, New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Abu Jaber, K. (1991), “Strategic studies and the Middle East—a view from the region,” in eds, E.L. Sullivan and T.Y. Ismael, The Contemporary Study of the Arab World, Alberta: University of Alberta Press. 263

Morten Valbjørn

AbuKhalil, A. (1992), “A new Arab ideology? The rejuvenation of Arab nationalism,” Middle East Journal, 46:1, 22–36. Acharya, A. (2014), “Global International Relations (IR) and regional worlds,” International Studies Quarterly, 58:4, 647–59. Ajami, F. (1978), “The end of pan-Arabism,” Foreign Affairs, 57:2, 355–73. Anderson, L. (1990), “Policy-making and theory building: American political science and the Islamic Middle East,” in ed, Hisham Sharabi, Theory, Politics and the Arab World: Critical Responses, pp. 52–80, London: Routledge. Bank, A. and M. Valbjørn (2010), “Bringing the (Arab) regional level back in. . .—Jordan in the new Arab cold war,” Middle East Critique, 19:3, 303–19. Barkawi, T. and Mark Laffey (2006), “The postcolonial moment in security studies,” Review of International Studies, 32:2, 329–52. Barnett, M. (1995), “Sovereignty, nationalism, and regional order in the Arab states system,” International Organization, 49:3, 479–510. Barnett, M. (1996), “Identity and alliances in the Middle East,” in ed, P. Katzenstein, The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics, pp. 400–47, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Barnett, M. (1998), Dialogues in Arab Politics: Negotiations in Regional Order, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Barnett, M. and E. Solingen (2007), “Designed to fail or failure of design? The sources and institutional effects of the Arab League,” in eds, A. Acharya and A.I. Johnston, Crafting Cooperation: Regional Institutions in Comparative Perspective, pp. 180–220, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Beck, M. (2002), “Von theoretischen Wüsten, Oasen und Karawanen—Der Vordere Orient in den Internationale Beziehungen,” Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen, 9:2, 305–30. Berenskoetter, F. (2017), “Identity in international relations,” in eds, R.A. Denemark and R. MarlinBennett, The International Studies Encyclopedia, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Bilgin, P. (2004a), Regional Security in the Middle East: A Critical Perspective, London: Routledge Curzon. Bilgin, P. (2004b), “Whose ‘Middle East’? Geopolitical inventions and practices of security,” International Relations, 18:1, 25–41. Bilgin, P. (2012), “Security in the Arab world and Turkey—differently different,” in eds, A.B. Tickner and D. Blaney, Thinking International Relations Differently, pp. 27–47, New York, NY: Routledge. Bill, J.A. (1996), “The study of Middle East politics, 1946–1996: A stocktaking,” Middle East Journal, 50:4, 501–12. Binder, L. (1958), “The Middle East as a subordinate international system,” World Politics, 10:3, 408–29. Bozeman, A. (1994 [1960]), Politics and Culture in International History, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Brown, L.C. (1984), International Politics and the Middle East, London: I.B. Tauris. Brown, L.C. (2001), Diplomacy in the Middle East—the International Relations of Regional and Outside Powers, London: IB Tauris. Brubaker, R. (2015), “Religious dimensions of political conflict and violence,” Sociological Theory, 33:1, 1–19. Buzan, B. and A. Gonzalez-Pelaez (eds, 2009), International Society and the Middle East: English School Theory at the Regional Level, New York, NY: Palgrave. Buzan, B. and O. Wæver (2003), Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cox, R. (1981), “Social forces, states and world orders: Beyond international relations theory,” Millennium, 10:2, 126–155. Darwich, M. and T. Fakhoury (2016), “Casting the other as an existential threat: The securitisation of sectarianism in the international relations of the Syria Crisis,” Global Discourse, 6:4, 712–32. Dawisha, A. (2003), Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dessouki, A.E.H. and B. Korany (1991), “A literature survey and a framework for analysis,” in eds, B. Korany and A.E.H. Dessouki, The Foreign Policy of Arab States: The Challenge of Change, pp. 8–24, Boulder, CO: Westview. Ehteshami, A. (2002), “Chapter 13: The foreign policy of Iran,” in eds, R. Hinnebusch and A. Ehteshami, The Foreign Policies of Middle East States, pp. 283–309, London: Lynne Rienner. Faksh, M.A. (1993), “Withered Arab nationalism,” Orbis, 37:3, 425–38. 264

Identity politics in Middle East IR

Fawcett, L. (ed, 2005a), International Relations of the Middle East, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fawcett, L. (2005b) “Introduction,” in ed, Louise Fawcett, International Relations of the Middle East, pp. 1–13, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Furia, P.A. and R.E. Lucas (2006), “Determinants of Arab public opinion on foreign relations,” International Studies Quarterly, 50:3, 585–605. Gause, F.G. (1992), “Sovereignty, statecraft and stability in the Middle East,” Journal of International Affairs, 45:2, 441–69. Gause, F.G. (1999), “Systemic approaches to Middle East international relations,” International Studies Review, 1:1, 11–31. Gause, F.G. (2007), “Saudi Arabia: Iraq, Iran, the regional power balance, and the sectarian question,” Strategic Insights, 6:2. Gause, F.G. (2010), The International Relations of the Persian Gulf, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gause, F.G. (2011), “The Middle East academic community and the ‘winter of Arab discontent,’” in ed, E. Laipson, Seismic Shift—Understanding Change in the Middle East, pp. 11–27, Washington DC: The Henry L. Stimson Center, accessible at: http://www.stimson.org/images/uploads/research-pdfs/ Academic_Community.pdf Gause, F.G. (8 June 2013), “Sectarianism and the politics of the new Middle East,” Brookings Upfront Blog, accessible at: http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/up-front/posts/2013/06/08-sectarianism-politicsnew-middle-east-gause Gause, F.G. (2014a), “Beyond sectarianism: The new Middle East Cold War,” Brookings Doha Center— Analysis Paper, No. 11, accessible at: https://www.brookings.edu/research/beyond-sectarianism-thenew-middle-east-cold-war/ Gause, F.G. (20 May 2014b), “Is this the end of Sykes-Picot?,” Washington Post—The Monkey Cage, accessible at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/05/20/is-this-the-end-ofsykes-picot/ Gause, F.G. (2017), “Ideologies, alignments, and underbalancing in the new Middle East Cold War,” PS: Political Science & Politics, 50:3, 672–5. Gerges, F. (1991), “The study of the Middle East international relations: A critique,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 18:2, 208–20. Goldberg, J. (19 June 2014), “The new map of the Middle East,” The Atlantic. Green, J. (1986), “Are Arab politics still Arab?” World Politics, 38:4, 611–25. Hadar, L. (1 March 2011), “Burying pan-Arabism,” The National Interest. Halliday, F. (2000), “The Middle East and the nationalism debate,” in ed, F. Halliday, Nation and Religion in the Middle East, pp. 31–54, London: Saqi Books. Halliday, F. (2002), “A new global configuration,” in eds, K. Booth and T. Dunne, Worlds in Collision— Terror and the Future of Global Order, pp. 235–44, New York, NY: Palgrave. Halliday, F. (2005), The Middle East in International Relations: Power, Politics and Ideology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hanau Santini, R. (2017), “A new regional Cold War in the Middle East and North Africa: regional security complex theory revisited,” The International Spectator, 52:4, 93–111. Hansen, B. (2001), Unipolarity and the Middle East, New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. Harik, I. (1985), “The origins of the Arab state system,” The International Spectator, 20:2, 20–32. Hasan, W. and B. Momani (2012), “Arab scholars’ take on globalization,” in eds, A.B. Tickner and D. Blaney, Thinking International Relations Differently, pp. 228–49, New York, NY: Routledge. Hashemi, N.A. and D. Postel (eds, 2017), Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East, London: Hurst Publishers. Hashmi, S. (2009), “Islam, the Middle East and the pan-Islamic movement,” in eds, B. Buzan and A. Gonzalez-Pelaez, International Society and the Middle East: English School Theory at the Regional Level, pp. 170–200, New York, NY: Palgrave. Hazbun, W. (2013), “The geopolitics of knowledge and the challenge of Postcolonial Agency: International relations, US policy, and the Arab world,” in ed, G. Huggan, The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, pp. 217–34, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hazbun, W. (2017), “The politics of insecurity in the Arab world: A view from Beirut,” PS: Political Science & Politics, 50:3, 656–9. Hazbun, W. and M. Valbjørn (2018), “The Making of IR in the Middle East: Critical Perspectives on Scholarship and Teaching in the Region”, APSA-MENA Newsletter, 5: Fall, 5–9. 265

Morten Valbjørn

Hellmann, G. and M. Valbjørn (2017), “Problematizing global challenges: Recalibrating the ‘inter’ in IR theory,” International Studies Review, 19:2, 279–82. Heydemann, S. (May 2013), “Syria’s Uprising: Sectarianism, regionalisation, and state order in the Levant,” FRIDE Working Paper, 119. Hinnebusch, R. (2003), The International Politics of the Middle East, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hinnebusch, R. (2005), “The politics of identity in the Middle East international relations,” in ed, L. Fawcett, International Relations of the Middle East, pp. 151–71, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hinnebusch, R. (2009), “Order and change in the Middle East: A neo-Gramscian twist on the international society approach,” in eds, B. Buzan and A. Gonzalez-Pelaez, International Society and the Middle East: English School Theory at the Regional Level, pp. 170–200, New York, NY: Palgrave. Hinnebusch, R. (2011), “Empire and state formation: Contrary tangents in Jordan and Syria,” in eds, S. Cummings and R. Hinnebusch, Sovereignty After Empire: Comparing the Middle East and Central Asia, pp. 263–81, Edinburgh and New York, NY: Edinburgh and Columbia University Press. Hinnebusch, R. (2015), The International Politics of the Middle East, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hinnebusch, R. (2016), “The sectarian revolution in the Middle East,” R/evolutions: Global Trends & Regional Issues, 4:1, 120–52. Hinnebusch, R. and A. Ehteshami (eds, 2002), The Foreign Policies of Middle East States, London: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Hoffmann, S. (1977), “An American social science: International relations,” Daedalus, 106:3, 41–60. Huntington, S.P. (1996), The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York, NY: Touchstone. Jankowski, J. and I. Gershoni (1997), Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Jørgensen, K.E. and T.B. Knudsen (eds, 2006), International Relations in Europe: Traditions, Perspectives and Destinations, London: Routledge. Kerr, M. (1965), The Arab Cold War, 1958–1964: A Study of Ideology in Politics, London: Oxford University Press. Khadduri, M. (1965), “The Islamic theory of international relations and its contemporary relevance,” in ed, J.H. Proctor, Islam and International Relations, pp. 24–39, London: Pall Mall Press. Khalidi, R., Anderson, L., Muslih, M. and R.S. Simon (1991), The Origins of Arab Nationalism, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Khalidi, W. (1978), “Thinking the unthinkable: A sovereign Palestinian state,” Foreign Affairs, 56:4, 695–713. Khanna, P. (20 April 2011), “The coming Arab renaissance: Forget Gamal Abdel Nasser—The time for Arab unity is now,” Foreign Policy—Argument, accessible at: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/ articles/2011/04/20/the_coming_arab_renaissance?page=full Koelbl, S., Shafy, S. and B. Zand (9 May 2016), “Saudi Arabia and Iran: The cold war of Islam,” Spiegel Online, accessible at: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/saudia-arabia-iran-and-the-newmiddle-eastern-cold-war-a-1090725.html Korany, B. (1986), “Strategic studies and the Third World: A critical evaluation,” International Social Science Journal, 110, 547–62. Korany, B. (1991), “Biased science or Dismal art? A critical evaluation of the state of the art of Arab foreign policies analysis,” in eds, E.L. Sullivan and J.S. Ismael, The Contemporary Study of the Arab World, pp. 181–205, Alberta: The University of Alberta Press. Korany, B. (1999a), “The Arab world and the new balance of power in the new Middle East,” in ed, M.C. Hudson, Middle East Dilemma: The Politics and Economics of Arab Integration, pp. 35–59, London: IB Tauris. Korany, B. (1999b), “International relations theory: Contributions from research in the Middle East,” in eds, M. Tessler et al., Area Studies and Social Sciences: Strategies for Understanding Middle East Politics, pp. 149–57, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Korany, B. and K. Makdisi (2009), “Arab countries: The object worlds back,” in eds, A.B. Tickner and O. Wæver, International Relations Scholarship Around the World, pp. 172–90, New York, NY: Routledge. Lapid, Y. (1996),“Culture’s ship: Returns and departures in international relations theory,” in eds, Y. Lapid and F. Kratochwil, The Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory, pp. 3–20, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. 266

Identity politics in Middle East IR

Lawson, F. (2006), Constructing International Relations in the Arab World, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lewis, B. (1965), The Middle East and the West, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Lynch, M. (1999), State Interests and Public Spheres: the International Politics of Jordan’s Identity, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Lynch, M. (2002), “Jordan’s identity and interests,” in eds, M. Barnett and S. Telhami, Identity and Foreign Policy in the Middle East, pp. 26–57, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lynch, M. (2006), Voices of the New Arab Public: Iraq, al-Jazeera, and Middle East Politics Today, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Lynch, Marc (2013a), “The entrepreneurs of cynical sectarianism,” in ed, POMEPS, POMEPS Studies 4: The Politics of Sectarianism, pp. 3–6, accessible at: https://pomeps.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/ POMEPS_Studies4_Sectarianism.pdf Lynch, Marc (23 May 2013b). “The war for the Arab world,” Marc Lynch’s Blog at Foreign Policy, accessible at: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/05/23/war_for_the_arab_world_sunni_shia_hatred Lynch, M. (2015), “The rise and fall of the new Arab public sphere,” Current History, 114:776, 331–6. Lynch, M., Ryan, C. and M. Valbjørn (2016), The New Arab Wars: Uprisings and Anarchy in the Middle East, New York, NY: Public Affairs. Lynch, M. et al. (2017), “Symposium: The Arab Uprisings and international relations theory,” PS: Political Science and Politics, 50:3. Mabon, S. (2019), “The end of the battle for Bahrain and the securitization of Bahraini Shi’a”, Middle East Journal, 73:1 29–50. Malmvig, H. (2015), “Coming in from the cold: How we may take sectarian identity politics seriously in the Middle East Without playing to the tunes of regional power elites,” POMEPS Studies, No. 16. (International Relations and a new Middle East), pp. 32–36. Maloney, S. (2002), “Identity and change in Iran’s foreign policy,” in eds, S. Telhami and M. Barnett, Identity and Foreign Policy in the Middle East, pp. 88–116, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Maoz, M. (15 November 2007), “The ‘Shi’i Crescent’: Myth and reality,” Brookings Institution Saban Center Analysis Paper, accessible at: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/11_middle_ east_maoz.pdf Miller, A.D. (27 February 2013), “Tribes with flags: How the Arab Spring has exposed the myth of Arab statehood,” Foreign Policy, accessible at: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/02/27/ tribes_with_flags_arab_spring_states?page=full Moshirzadeh, H. (2018), “Iranian scholars and theorizing international relations: Achievements and challenges”, All Azimuth: A Journal of Foreign Policy and Peace, 7:1, 103–120. Mufti, M. (1996), Sovereign Creations: Pan-Arabism and Political Order in Syria and Iraq, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Munich Security Conference (2018), “Munich security report 2018: To the brink—and back?” MSC, accessible at: http://www.report.securityconference.de/ Nasr, V. (2007), The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future—with a new Afterword, New York, NY: W.W. Norton. Noble, P. (1991), “The Arab system: Pressures, constraints, and opportunities,” in eds, B. Korany and A.E.H. Dessouki, The Foreign Policies of Arab States, pp. 49–102, Boulder, CO: Westview. Nonneman, G. (2001). “State of the art—rentiers and autocrats, monarchs and democrats, state and society: The Middle East between globalization, human ‘agency,’ and Europe,” International Affairs, 77:1, 141–62. Owen, R. (2000), State, Power and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East, London: Routledge. Pace, M. and F. Cavatorta (2012), “The Arab Uprisings in theoretical perspective: An introduction,” Mediterranean Politics, 17:2, 125–38. Patel, D.S. (2010), “Identity and politics,” in ed, M.P. Angrist, Politics & Society in the Contemporary Middle East, pp. 133–53, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Pew Research Center (2014), “The Sunni-Shia Divide: Where they live, what they believe and how they view each other,” PEW FactTank, accessible at: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/06/18/ the-sunni-shia-divide-where-they-live-what-they-believe-and-how-they-view-each-other/ Pew Research Center (7 January 2016), “The Middle East’s sectarian divide on views of Saudi Arabia, Iran,” PEW FactTank, accessible at: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/01/07/ the-middle-easts-sectarian-divide-on-views-of-saudi-arabia-iran/ Phillips, C. (2012), Everyday Arab Identity: The Daily Reproduction of the Arab World, London: Routledge. 267

Morten Valbjørn

Phillips, C. (2014), “The Arabism debate and the Arab Uprisings,” Mediterranean Politics, 19:1, 141–4. Phillips, C. and M. Valbjørn (2018), “‘What is in a name?’: The role of (different) identities in the multiple proxy wars in Syria,” Small Wars & Insurgencies, 29:3, 414–33. POMEPS (17 September 2015), “International relations theory and a changing Middle East,” POMEPS Studies, No. 16, accessible at: http://pomeps.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/POMEPS_Studies_ 16_IR_Web.pdf Ryan, C. (2009), Inter-Arab Alliances: Regime Security and Jordanian Foreign Policy, Miami, FL: University Press of Florida. Ryan, C. (2012), “The new Arab cold war and the struggle for Syria,” Middle East Report, 262, 28–31. Said, E. (1978), Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, London: Routledge & Keegan Paul. Saideman, S. (2002), “Conclusion: Thinking theoretically about identity and foreign policy,” in eds, S. Telhami and M. Barnett, Identity and Foreign Policy in the Middle East, pp. 169–200, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Salamé, G. (1994), “The Middle East: Elusive security, indefinable region,” Security Dialogue, 25:1, 17–35. Salisbury, P. (February 2015), “Yemen and the Saudi–Iranian ‘cold war,’” Chatham House—Middle East and North Africa Programme, accessible at: http://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/files/chathamhouse/field/ field_document/20150218YemenIranSaudi.pdf Salloukh, B.F. (2017), “The sectarianization of geopolitics in the Middle East,” eds, in N.A. Hashemi and D. Postel, Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East, pp. 35–52, London: Hurst Publishers. Salloukh, B.F. (2013), “The Arab Uprisings and the geopolitics of the Middle East,” The International Spectator, 48:2, 32–46. Salloukh, B.F. and R. Brynen (eds, 2004), Persistent Permeability? Regionalism, Localism, and Globalization in the Middle East, Aldershot: Ashgate. Salzman, P.C. (2008), “The Middle East’s tribal DNA,” Middle East Quarterly, 15:1, 23–33. Sawani, Y.M. (2012), “The ‘end of pan-Arabism’ revisited: Reflections on the Arab Spring,” Contemporary Arab Affairs, 5:3, 382–97. Schwedler, J. (2015), “Comparative politics and the Arab Uprisings,” Middle East Law and Governance, 7:1, 141–52. Seale, P. (1965), The Struggle for Syria: A Study of Post-war Arab Politics 1945–1958, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Seale, P. (24 April 2011), “The New Pan-Arabism,” Agence Global. Soage, A.B. (29 August 2017), “Islamism in the Middle East sectarian conflict,” MEI—Analysis and Opinion, accessible at: http://www.mei.edu/content/map/islamism-and-sectarianism Stein, E. (2012), “Beyond Arabism vs. Sovereignty: Relocating ideas in the international relations of the Middle East,” Review of International Studies, 38:4, 881–905. Stein, E. (2017), “Ideological codependency and regional order: Iran, Syria, and the axis of refusal,” PS: Political Science & Politics, 50:3, 676–80. Stephens, M. (28 February 2017), “The Arab cold war redux: The foreign policy of the Gulf Cooperation Council States since 2011,” TCF project—Arab Politics beyond the Uprisings: Experiments in an Era of Resurgent Authoritarianism, accessible at: https://tcf.org/content/report/arab-cold-war-redux/ Stetter, S. (2008), World Society and the Middle East: Reconstructions in Regional Politics, New York, NY: Palgrave. Susser, A. (September 2006), “Aufgang des schiitischen Halbmonds—Der Krieg im Libanon under der Neue Nahe Osten,” Internationale Politik, 61:9 68–73. Telhami, S. (1999), “Power, legitimacy and peace-making in Arab Coalitions: The new Arabism,” in ed, Leonard Binder, Ethnic Conflict and International Politics in the Middle East, pp. 43–60, Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press. Telhami, S. and M. Barnett (2002a), “Chapter 1: Introduction: Identity and foreign policy in the Middle East,” in eds, S. Telhami and M. Barnett, Identity and Foreign Policy in the Middle East, pp. 1–25, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Telhami, S. and M. Barnett (eds, 2002b), Identity and Foreign Policy in the Middle East, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Tessler, M., Nachtway, J. and A. Banda (eds, 1999), Area Studies and Social Sciences: Strategies for Understanding Middle East Politics, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Teti, A. (2007). “Bridging the gap: IR, Middle East studies and the disciplinary politics of the area studies controversy,” European Journal of International Relations, 13:1, 117–45. 268

Identity politics in Middle East IR

Tibi, B. (1997), Arab Nationalism: Between Islam and the Nation-State, London: MacMillan Press. Tibi, B. (2000), “Post-bipolar order in crisis: The challenge of politicised Islam,” Millennium-Journal of International Studies, 29:3, 843–59. Tickner, A.B. (2003), “Seeing IR differently: Notes from the Third World,” Millennium-Journal of International Studies, 32:2, 295–324. Tickner, A.B. and O. Wæver (eds, 2009), International Relations Scholarship Around the World, New York, NY: Routledge. Valbjørn, M. (2003), “The meeting of the twain: Bridging the gap between Middle East Studies and international relations,” Cooperation & Conflict, 38:2, 162–73. Valbjørn, M. (2004a), “Culture blind and culture blinded: Images of Middle Eastern conflicts in international relations,” in ed, D. Jung, The Middle East and Palestine: Global Politics and Regional Conflicts, pp. 39–78, New York, NY: Palgrave. Valbjørn, M. (2004b), “Toward a ‘Mesopotamian turn’: Disciplinarity and the study of the international relations of the Middle East,” Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 14:1–2, 47–75. Valbjørn, M. (2008), “Before, during and after the cultural turn: A ‘Baedeker’ to IR’s cultural journey,” International Review of Sociology, 18:1, 55–82. Valbjørn, M. (2009), “Arab nationalism(s) in transformation: From Arab interstate societies to an ArabIslamic world society,” in eds, B. Buzan and A. Gonzalez-Pelaez, International Society and the Middle East: English School Theory at the Regional Level, pp. 140–69, New York, NY: Palgrave. Valbjørn, M. (2015), “Reflections on self-reflections: On framing the analytical implications of the Arab Uprisings for the study of Arab politics,” Democratization, 22:2, 218–38. Valbjørn, M. (2017), “Strategies for reviving the international relations/Middle East Nexus after the Arab Uprisings,” PS: Political Science & Politics, 50:3, 647–51. Valbjørn, Morten (2019), “Dialogues in new Middle Eastern politics – on (the limits of) making historical analogies to the classic Arab Cold War in a sectarianized new Middle East,” in ed., L. Kamel, The Middle East: Thinking About and Beyond Security and Stability, pp. 173–198, Bern: Peter Lang. Valbjørn, M. and W. Hazbun (2017), “Scholarly identities and the making of Middle East IR,” APSAMENA Newsletter, No. 3, Fall, pp. 3–6. Valbjørn, M. and A. Bank (2007), “Signs of a new Arab cold war: The 2006 Lebanon War and the SunniShi‘i divide,” Middle East Report, No. 242, Spring, pp. 6–11. Valbjørn, M. and A. Bank (2012)., “The new Arab cold war: Rediscovering the Arab dimension of Middle East regional politics,” Review of International Studies, 38:1, 3–24. Valbjørn, M. and F. Volpi (2014), “Revisiting theories of Arab politics in the aftermath of the Arab Uprisings,” Mediterranean Politics, 19:1, 134–6. Valbjørn, M. and R. Hinnebusch (2019), “Exploring the Nexus between Sectarianism and Regime Formation in a New Middle East: Theoretical Points of Departure.” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, 19:1, 2–22. Viorst, M. (2006), Storm over the East: The Struggle between the Arab World and the Christian West, New York, NY: Random House Modern Library. Walt, S. (1987), The Origins of Alliances, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wæver, O. (1998), “The sociology of a not so international discipline: American and European developments in international relations,” International Organization, 52:4, 687–727. Wehrey, F. (2013), Sectarian Politics in the Gulf: From the Iraq War to the Arab Uprisings, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Wendt, A. (1999), Social Theory of International Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wright, R. (28 September 2013), “Imagining a remapped Middle East,” New York Times, accessible at: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/opinion/sunday/imagining-a-remapped-middle-east.html Zogby, J. (2010), Arab Voices: What They Say to Us and Why it Matters, New York, NY: Palgrave. Zogby, J. (5 March 2013), “Looking at Iran: How 20 Arab & Muslim nations view Iran & its policies,” Zogby Research Services, accessible at: http://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/iranpollresultsreport.pdf

269

19 Arab nationalism in Anglophone discourse A conceptual and historical reassessment Jasmine K. Gani

Introduction I do not know of any seriously creditable synthetic discussions of Arab nationalism in a western language . . . which engage this historical phenomenon beyond the perspective of the moment. (Aziz al-Azmeh 2000: 67–8) Al-Azmeh’s claim nearly two decades ago still rings true. Though Arab nationalism was the major political force of the Middle East in the mid-twentieth century (Fawcett 2005: 5), dominating the intellectual landscape and adopted as the official state ideology by Egypt, Syria and Iraq, its perceived importance in Anglophone scholarship and political discourse has greatly diminished. Two main trends can be identified in this literature. First, there is a tendency to argue polemically against Arab nationalism as an ideology, without really considering its historical significance. Second, most analyses work within the constraints of Egyptocentrism when attempting to evaluate the function, successes and failures of Arab nationalism. Thus, much of the literature attaches the rise and fall of Arab nationalism to the charismatic leadership of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser (Ajami 1978; Darwisha 2003), by and large overlooking Syria’s part in the movement. This is despite the fact that the Syrian regime remains the only state to (officially) adhere to Arab nationalism as an institutionalized ideology, even throughout the recent conflict. While there is no doubt the ideology has been in decline since the Arabs’ defeat in the 1967 Arab–Israeli war, a number of scholars have gone further and argued that it was all but eliminated with Nasser’s death 3 years later and certainly after Anwar Sadat’s truce with Israel. They have argued that historical events appear to corroborate this claim: peace treaties with (or de facto accommodation of) Israel, neglect of the Palestinians and persistent inter-Arab rivalry are all cited as “proof” of the death of Arab nationalism (Ajami 1978; Ayoob 2007; Darwisha 2003; Goodarzi 2006; Humphreys 1999; Tibi 1997; Chaitani 2007). This argument is dependent on several assumptions: 1) Nasser was the chief proponent of Arab nationalist ideology, without which it was unsustainable; 2) a territorial pan-Arab union was the raison d’être of Arab nationalism; 3) a regional Arab nationalism (Qawmiyyah) was replaced by political loyalty to the state (Wataniyyah); and 4) unlike 270

Arab nationalism

European nationalisms, Arab nationalism was unable to unseat religion as the primary identity of societies in the Middle East. Further underpinning these assumptions are two conceptual positions: the first is a realist one, still the predominant theoretical approach in International Relations of the Middle East, which has its merits no doubt, but often relegates the role of ideologies as a secondary or even irrelevant factor after security and power-political interests. The second conceptual position is one inspired by Marxism, portraying ideology as an artificial construct, an “invented tradition” (Hobsbawm 1983), to be instrumentalized for the personal ambitions of authoritarian regimes. Global events that appear to validate a post-ideological era (Haugnolle 2015; Browers 2009), especially since the end of the Cold War, have also played a significant role in contemporary readings of Arab nationalism. From a pedagogical perspective, the narrative of the failure of Arab nationalism has emerged as the definitive account in much of the literature, and is consistently taught as a historical watershed on Middle East courses with little contestation—the question usually asked is not if, but rather why and how the ideology has declined. This is partly due to the dearth of scholarly material in English that offers a counter-argument or seeks to complicate received understandings of Arab nationalism, justifying al-Azmeh’s complaint. Here it should be noted that the work of Arab nationalist intelligentsia, whether historians, propagandists, ideologues or philosophers, as well as scholarly outputs in Arabic and French, help to mitigate against the criticisms of Arab nationalism made by Anglophone scholars. Moreover, even in English, there are some notable exceptions, which chart the development and nuances of Arab nationalist movements, across and within states and different strata of society through historical sociological approaches (Gershoni and Jankowski 1997; Chourieri 2005; Jamali 2012). These works do challenge a monolithic reading of Arab nationalism, highlighting the varying contexts that shaped Arab nationalist ideology in multi-faceted ways. And yet the homogenization of Arab nationalism, and a preoccupation with its failures, remain predominant in the discourse. To clarify, this is not a defence of a primordialist essentialism espoused by nationalist ideologues—that nationalisms are imagined or constructed, “rooted in modernity” or history, is a path well-trodden and exhausted by critiques (Anderson 1991; Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm 1990; Hutchinson 1987; Smith 1981, Breuilly 1993). But even so, it is also necessary to acknowledge from a historical perspective that Arab nationalism did play a crucial role in the politics of the Middle East (and of the Cold War) during the twentieth century, and arguably still persists as an influential idea beyond its failures to institutionalize. For that, and for historiographical purposes, Arab nationalism warrants a renewed assessment. This chapter offers a primarily conceptual re-evaluation of Arab nationalism that challenges redundant comparisons with European trajectories of nationalism, and interrogates an Egyptocentric account. The chapter’s critique focuses on the influential works of Bassam Tibi, Adeed Dawisha and Fouad Ajami, three sceptics of Arab nationalism who have argued persuasively that it is no longer relevant. The chapter then draws upon Syria (rather than Egypt) as a case-study to argue that Arab nationalist forces produced some important successes with a lasting influence on the region. It also seeks to restore the distinction between pre- and post-Mandate developments in Arab nationalism, a transitional phase that is often unaccounted for. Before reappraising Arab nationalism, it is worth defining what an ideology is in the first place. How do we distinguish between ideologies and mere identity on the one hand, or political philosophy on the other (Freeden 2003: 62–3). Moreover, which ideas are prioritized, and which are of secondary importance in an ideology? Ideologies are not monoliths but are comprised of both core and peripheral principles: core principles are less likely to change, being the raison d’être of the ideology, while peripheral principles are more susceptible to alteration and 271

Jasmine K. Gani

can even be discarded if considered to be less salient amid changing circumstances (Gani 2014, 2016: 8). Applying a more methodological approach to ideology, allowing for adaptation that is contingent on environmental and historical contexts, acts as a caution against absolutist claims that ideologies have entirely failed in their objectives due to a misreading of their core and peripheral principles. This is particularly relevant when evaluating the arguments of Tibi and Dawisha who collapse the distinction between the two; thus the failure to achieve cultural goals or a pan-Arab territorial union are perceived as the wholesale failure of the ideology when, in fact, these may have been peripheral goals and thus were of lesser importance, depending on the historical period one analyses. Given Tibi’s concentration on the Eurocentric roots of Arab nationalism as one of the justifications for his “failure” thesis, the following sections will explore Arab nationalism’s links with European paradigms of nationalism, identifying Western and secular strains in the ideology. The chapter will go on to highlight the divergence in core goals between Arab nationalism and its European counterparts once the former metamorphosed into an anti-colonial movement in the post-Mandate period. The final part of the chapter turns its attention to Arab nationalism in the contemporary era, to consider if it retains any relevance to regional and global politics despite the predominant belief that Arab nationalism is “dead.”

European Nationalism between culture and politics Tibi portrays Arab nationalism as an unsuccessful iteration of European nationalist ideology (1997). As such, the failure to install republicanism (and even liberalism) and secularization by those states that adopted Arab nationalism are taken to be a failure of the ideology itself. To some extent this is due to the continued reliance on George Antonius’s seminal book The Arab Awakening (1939), the first account of “Arabism” to be printed in the English language, and which promulgates a highly Eurocentric conceptualization of Arab nationalism (Dawn 2000: 41). This reliance implies that we could, therefore, simply look to the core goals of nationalism as they emerged in Europe to chart the goals, and success or failure, of Arab nationalism. However, drawing on Freeden’s distinction (1996), I argue that to rely on intellectual accounts alone would assume Arab nationalism is merely a political philosophy, rather than an ideology; to treat Arab nationalism as an ideology, one would need to measure intellectual claims against the practice of its adherents. An ideology is defined by its social expression as much as its theoretical principles (Gani, 2016). Thus, even though Arab nationalism incorporates the name, to what extent has the ideology ever constituted a form of nationalism at all? As “one of the most powerful forces in the modern world” (Hutchinson and Smith 1994: 3), nationalist ideology produced a new global norm that transferred popular and political loyalty from religion or empire to the nation (Greenfeld 1992: 3). Nationalism’s secular foundation made it the perfect political expression of concurrent Enlightenment ideals. For Rousseau and J.S. Mill, nationalism was above all an expression of loyalty to political institutions and laws holding a community together, rather than birthplace, while national symbols, history and culture were only useful insofar as they fostered loyalty to the aforementioned institutions. In turn, this paved the way for political unity and the development of civic institutions (Barnard 1988; Festenstein and Kenny 2005: 271–4). In contrast to liberal interpretations of nationalism, Herder, Fichte and Arndt argued that common political identity rested not on polity (a human construction) but shared culture and common language, deemed to reflect one’s natural, primordial state. The German historian Heinrich Von Treitschke similarly opposed the liberal-nationalist concept that a sense of 272

Arab nationalism

belonging must include freedom of association, arguing instead for the primacy of territory in defining one’s nationality (Festenstein and Kenny 2005: 274–6). Mirroring the schisms highlighted above, we can delineate two camps within twentieth-century debates on the matter, comprising of an “idealist” and culturalist approach on the one hand (Renan 1882; Toynbee 1915; Kohn 1944; Deutsch 1953), and a political, instrumentalist approach on the other (Gershoni and Jankowski 1997: ix–x; Kedourie 1961; Gellner 1983; Breuilly 1993). However, despite differing over the weight given to culture or politics, liberals, primordialists and instrumentalists all saw the cultural and the political eventually coming together in some form of republicanism that reflected popular representation, as well as political autonomy from empires and religious institutions. Ultimately, we can parse through the variations to extract the core principles of nationalism being: a common political identity, shared culture, republicanism, and loyalty to the nation that overrides other communities. Where then does Arab nationalism sit within this debate? What are the areas of overlap and divergence? Can the successes and failures of Arab nationalism be measured through the prism of the core principles outlined above? Both the cultural and republican projects can be found within the intellectual history of Arab nationalism, where a deliberate, secular and cultural project akin to and indeed borrowed from nationalist accounts in Europe is promoted. Sati al-Husri is frequently identified as a preeminent figure in the development of Arab nationalism as a cultural phenomenon. Notably, he is the focus of works by Bassam Tibi and Adeed Dawisha (Tibi 1997: 117–22; Dawisha 2003: 49–75) who use al-Husri’s vision as a yardstick for the fortunes of Arab nationalism, and a measurement of its nearness to the European model. Al-Husri leaned heavily on the form of nationalism developed by the likes of Herder, Fichte and Arndt, focusing especially on the commonality of language as the cohesive element in an Arab cultural community that would in time emerge into a united political community (Tibi 1997: xii). He argued, “people who spoke a unitary language . . . have one heart and a common soul. As such, they constituted one nation, and so have to have a unified state.” Thus, he argues, pan-Arabism emerged from the culturalist impulse (the language) of the Arab people (Al-Husri, 1974; Khadduri 1970: 201). As with European culturalist theories of nationalism, this viewpoint carried strong teleological connotations. Arab nationalist intellectuals sought to cultivate a distinct identity when they called for a secular “Arab awakening” advocating a new source of political and cultural loyalty other than religion, instigated by increased contact with Western science and secularism (Dawn 1991: 3–5; Haim 1974: 27). Other Arab nationalist intellectuals such as Rifa’ah Rafi’ al-Tahtawi, Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi and Nejib Azouri eulogized the West as an inspiration for Arab nationalism (Azoury 1905, in Haim 1974: 81), and indeed the Arab intellectual George Antonius entitled his Arab nationalist thesis “The Arab awakening” to celebrate the spread of European Enlightenment values to the Arab Middle East (Antonius 1939). On this basis, Tibi and Dawisha’s assessment of Arab nationalism against European nationalist models is justified. On this point they are joined by Rashid Khalidi, to take one example, who sees the political goals of Arab nationalism as contingent on culture, summarizing Arab nationalism as: [T]he idea that the Arabs are a people linked by special bonds of language and history (and many would add, religion), and that their political organization should in some way reflect this reality. (Khalidi 1991: vii) These definitions certainly resonate with earlier conceptualizations of Arab nationalism particularly as it emerged during the Ottoman Empire (Dawn 2000: 44); but such ideas largely existed 273

Jasmine K. Gani

in the realm of theory and philosophy, ideas held by intellectual elites whose relevance increasingly diminished after the imposition of colonial mandates in the region. In practice, the intellectual cultural movement had limited success in mobilizing popular opinion, while the republican and liberal associations, such as civil rights and representative government, were side-lined by the internal politics of Arab nationalist states and pressures of colonialism. The aforementioned scholars measure the successes of Arab nationalism by its capacity to pursue the European model of republicanism and civic institutions; they thus assert that Arab nationalism has been a failure on the domestic front. But just how representative were those intellectuals of the Arab nationalist movement in practice?

Whither the cultural and republican project of Arab nationalism? It is true the cultural emphasis of early Arab nationalist intellectuals did and still does have appeal. However, this appeal, built on secular sensibilities, is often limited to Arab elites, many of whom have been educated in the West or within Western institutions in the Middle East (Simon 1997: 87–105). The early intellectuals’ hopes for a de-Islamization of culture did not have universal traction. Similarly, attempts to translate common cultural identity into political projects have largely been fruitless. The collapse of the UAR between Syria and Egypt between 1958–61, and the ineffectual Arab League that still operates but barely registers on individual foreign policies and has little international leverage as a collective policy unit, are two examples of unfulfilled political idealism based on a united cultural (language-based) identity. Part of the difficulty for Arab nationalists in using existing culture for political goals is that it encroaches on other loyalties that have ample cultural and political substance to foster socially cohesive identities at local levels. Two such loyalties will be briefly highlighted here (although they could be broken down even further to include tribal, ethnic and sectarian loyalties), these being statist nationalism and Islam. The first concept, statist nationalism (Wataniyyah), has taken root as a by-product of practical realities. As Humphreys states: [State] boundaries that were purely colonial fictions created out of thin air in 1920 by Britain and France for their own convenience—had become sacred and immutable in 1950. (1999: 60–82) State patriotism, as an obstacle or challenger to Arab nationalism’s regionalism, is evident in all the Arab states, and most influentially in Egypt and Iraq. Humphreys argues that an Egyptian (as opposed to Arab) nationalism was crystallized by British occupation in 1882, articulating a strong sense of historical and cultural identity that had long existed within its stable geopolitical boundaries; thus, in this sense, Nasser’s Arab nationalism marked a temporary interlude before Egypt returned to statism under Sadat. Donald Reid argues that Pharaonic symbolism has provided Egyptians with a strong counter-culture (Reid 1997: 127–50), predating Arabism and connecting them to an overlapping African identity as well. Meanwhile in Iraq, though Arab nationalism was deployed to foster greater cohesion among its ethnicities and sects, ideological sentiments were to a large degree subverted under Saddam Hussein’s rule. Iraq’s adoption of Ba’thism in 1966 and Saddam Hussein’s vocal instrumentalization of pan-Arabism in his foreign policy can create confusion on this front. But as Wieland (2006: 22), Humphreys and Tripp (2002: 167–93) argue, the regime’s self-interest and “Stalinist” repression, and the alienation of the Kurdish and Shi’a populations, prevented a greater level of ideological loyalty in the country. Moreover, Iraq was just as likely to hail its Mesopotamian 274

Arab nationalism

history as its Arab one. Indeed, notwithstanding the personal, power-political rivalry between the leaders of Syria and Iraq, Syrian perceptions of Iraq as corruptors of Ba‘thist ideology (Gani 2014: 158–159; Kienle 1988) contributed to their mutual antipathy. Such counter-cultures were effectively channelled into political projects of state-building, which rivalled and hindered the intellectuals’ calls for unity based on shared Arab culture. The second challenge, Islam, has provided important cultural symbols, historical narratives and idioms, which are often used by Arab nationalists to encourage the very sentiments that its own secular, cultural discourse fails to invoke. Islam in some ways has been the more problematic of the two competing loyalties highlighted here, at least conceptually. While Arab nationalism can at least purport to be a separate political phenomenon from state nationalisms (which are at times denigrated as products of Western colonialism), its cultural symbols often collide with similar unifying concepts in Islam, such as the notion of Ummah as a community that transcends state boundaries; historical “heroes” such as Salah al-Din Ayyubi who is seen to have liberated the Arabs from the Crusaders; and even Arabic as a revered language (albeit for differing rationales). To understand the difficulty in disentangling the two, one ought to look to the lengthy and convoluted attempts by Kawakibi (1931), al-Husri (1944) and al-Bazzaz (1952) (cited in Haim 1964). For years the Syrian regime, as one example, regularly employed the above religious reference-points to simultaneously serve its ideological goals and tap into the population’s religious loyalties. It should be noted here that Islam does not necessarily provide a uniform identity that automatically fills the “cultural void” of nationalism as is argued by Islamists; indeed, it accommodates localized cultural pluralism; nor is there such a high degree of religiosity in Arab society that only an Islamic culture appeals; but it is the case that tapping into religion is often used to raise Arab nationalism’s authenticity, while paradoxically also serving to highlight its cultural limitations. In view of these obstacles, the cultural project at the heart of nationalist thought (Toynbee 1915; Kohn 1944; Greenfeld 1992), at the heart of Arab nationalist intellectual thought (for example al-Husri, Kawakibi and Azouri), and emphasized by Tibi, Dawisha and Ajami, failed to successfully convert to a political project. On the one hand, state-based nationalism obstructs the collectivization of an Arab nationalist culture, while on the other hand Arab nationalism’s symbols and emotional appeal are often affiliated to the history of Islam, reserving little for the banks of an entirely secular transnational loyalty. Where, then, does this leave the republican programme that was such a prominent component of successful nationalist movements in Europe, and which was ideologically adopted by a number of early Arab nationalist doctrines. In practice, the two nationalisms from Europe and the Arab world have diverged the most on this front. If patchy in reality, European nationalists were drawn to the concept of citizenship, and through that sought economic, political and social transformation; it often represented the emerging middle class whose social upward mobility was previously prevented by the dominance of elites seeking to preserve their influence and stake within the state (Bull 1977: 42). As Tibi notes, however, Arab nationalist states failed to bring about their intellectual and constitutional goals for domestic freedoms and representation. To take Syria as an example, the democratic process was stifled, and civilian freedoms sacrificed to safeguard the interests and authority of the regime (George 2006: 11). This divergence in the outcomes of the European and Arab nationalist movements can partly be understood by recognizing that the contexts of repression and domination that the nationalist movements sought to challenge were different in Europe and the Middle East. In Europe, the struggle for equality, representation and recognition of “the masses” was contested mostly within states through civil wars and internal revolutions; in the Middle East, and indeed throughout 275

Jasmine K. Gani

the “Third World,” nationalist movements were essentially anti-colonial with the struggle for equality and freedom transferred to a global level, contested between the local populations and their external colonizers. This is not to say that conflicts did not exist internally within the old colonial states. Certainly, in Syria, as elsewhere, there was an internal struggle between various social strata even during the mandate system, and a latent resentment towards the dominance of ruling Syrian elites, many of whom were formed through colonial rule (Khoury 1997: 287). This has since been manifested on a catastrophic scale with the Syrian conflict that began (after initially peaceful protests) in 2011. But as Halliday and Alavi argue: While the ideologies of power and opposition found in these societies are, in the first instance, concerned with internal, domestic, conflict, the issue of external relations and the role of external forces is always central and forms a vivid part of the world view that sustains such movements. (1988: 3) Such external involvement became a central feature of the Syrian conflict, despite the fact it was at first seen as a domestic affair, and reflects a continuity of outside meddling in Syria’s history (Hinnebusch and Ehteshami 2014: 231). In such circumstances, external relations and the role of foreign forces that were already central to the regime’s ideological narrative, have gained heightened importance among both the forces in power and those in opposition. Emergency Law, curtailment of individual freedoms, suppression of political dissent—all the antitheses of civic development associated with the intellectual Arab nationalist movement—are easier to justify while conflict and resistance take priority in the nationalist narrative. In practice, then, Arab nationalism has rarely reflected the Eurocentric republican ideals affiliated to its early intellectuals, stymied in large part by the very same European nations eulogised by early Arab nationalists.

The search for political autonomy: roots in anti-colonialism If one eliminates culture and republicanism as contenders, the remaining connections between Arab nationalism and broader nationalist ideology are political autonomy and secularization of politics. With the cultural project lagging behind as a predominantly elitist agenda, and the republican ideals of domestic politics having never taken off, the mobilization of Arab nationalism was overwhelmingly dependent on its political, anti-colonial credentials—it is in that form that Arab nationalism enjoyed its greatest success. Rather than positing this as a deficiency in comparison to European nationalism, as Tibi and Daweesha do, one might as well acknowledge that Arab nationalism’s main potency as an ideology was its resistance to external intervention in line with other non-aligned movements during the Cold War (Ginat 2005; Gani 2014; Sajed 2019). Indeed, the mass legitimacy of Arab nationalism in its early phase was due to its appeal to both secular and religious movements in the region. Thus while Tibi describes Husri as “the spiritual father of Arab nationalism,” while Dawisha depicts Arab unity as its foremost priority, and while it may well have been the case that the intellectual basis of Arab nationalism was originally an offshoot of a Eurocentric framework, such features receded when it came to political and popular mobilization. For all the romanticism and cultural references in Arab nationalist literature, the ideology’s principles, practical resonance and political realization has been manifested since its mobilization in the twentieth century as a struggle for political and economic autonomy from external (usually Western) domination. This was the case in the Arab revolt in 1920, the Syrian Uprising against the French 276

Arab nationalism

in 1945, the 1956 Suez crisis, the failed wars of 1948 and 1967, and—with renewed purpose, albeit in corrupted form—in the current Syrian conflict. While protests against colonial rule were widespread in Egypt during the interwar period, there is less evidence to suggest these reflected Arab nationalist grievances rather than a form of Wataniyya, or statist patriotism. The oldest and most powerful nationalist party in Egypt, the Wafd, concerned itself primarily with political wranglings within Egypt between themselves, the monarchy and the British forces (Gani 2019). It is in Syria that we find both popular and intellectual claims for autonomy and independence transcended national borders and were more closely aligned to Qawmiyya, a regional Arab identity as opposed to statism. Syrians’ greater attachment to a transnational movement in comparison to interwar Egypt was affected in no small part by the colonial dismemberment of a historical union between (what became) Syria, Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan—the European mandates had had a deeper impact on Levantine political and territorial integrity, whereas Egypt’s borders had remained largely intact. The deep aspiration for political autonomy was evident among diverse segments of Syrian society from an early stage, mobilizing the educated and urban classes (Gelvin 1997: 237; Gershoni and Jankowski 1997: 16), the ulema (Thomas, 2002), later the agricultural labourers (Seale 1988: 120), and eventually even the political and landed elite who provided patronage to anti-colonial agitation in the rural areas. A more diverse grassroots movement, who interpreted and actualized Arab nationalism in a way that was relevant to them in turn had an impact on the principles of the ideology. Intellectuals and ideologues who experienced their political awakening amidst the intense anti-colonial fervour of the 1930s and 1940s could hardly echo the lofty culturalist principles of their predecessors who eulogized the West and unwittingly justified European imperialism by lambasting their own people’s backwardness. They could not afford to alienate the peasant classes who refused to supply the colonizers. Nor could they denigrate the religious classes in the same way when some of the most vociferous opposition to colonial rule came from the ulema and the mosques (Hariri, 2015). A coalition between these disparate forces was made possible through a prioritization of anti-colonialism and solidarity with fellow Arabs opposing colonial rule. It was in such a context that Michel Aflaq and Salahaddin Bitar, two Syrian intellectuals, one a Christian and the other a Muslim, joined forces to form the Ba’th party in 1947, and after joining forces with Akram Hawrani’s socialist party became the second-largest party in the Syrian Parliament in 1954. They argued that anti-colonialism was not merely an instrumental principle en route to Arab solidarity and eventual unification; in fact in Syria, it came to be the reverse, that Arab solidarity was sought in order to close the door on external interference, and was most prized at times of opposition against an external power such as France, the US or Israel. Thus, the core principle, indeed the raison d’être of Arab nationalism, as it developed in Syria and as it was understood by the masses, was an opposition to Western hegemony and interference. Aflaq and Bitar were not the only ones to pursue anti-hegemonism in Syria’s nascent party politics; other groups emerged with affiliated goals, among whom was the aforementioned Arab Socialist Party. The socialist movement had been making inroads on the political scene throughout the 1930s, culminating in a formal party formed in 1945 by Akram Hawrani, a keen political activist from Hama (Hopwood 1988: 82–3). His agenda was opposed to “feudalist” Syrian landowners, and on several occasions was able to mobilize violent uprisings and mass demonstrations by the peasantry—an important factor in the politicization of Syria’s grassroots rural communities, which also made Hawrani and the socialists valuable allies for the Arab nationalist movement (Seale 1988: 120). With Bitar and ‘Aflaq’s Ba’th party growing in popularity, and the gradual consolidation of their Arab nationalist ideas into a more concrete ideology, they joined forces with Hawrani in December 1952—a turning-point for Ba’thism and Syrian politics in 277

Jasmine K. Gani

general. With this coalition between what Seale described as, “perhaps the most astute and the most principled men in Syrian public life” (Seale 1988: 127), domestic grievances against the corrupt French-sponsored elites were seamlessly tethered to the Arab nationalist goals of resisting foreign domination. Thus, challenging inequality at home was seen as a means of resisting imperialists abroad. Following this alliance, the Ba‘th party was able to dominate Syrian politics and crucially, the Syrian military, which drew heavily from the lower economic classes (Hinnebusch and Zintl 2015: 24). On account of this consolidation, the Ba’th party announced its three core principles: 1) “Freedom from occupation; 2) Arab independence and unity; 3) socialism at home.” While independence, freedom from occupation and socialism at home have been accounted for so far, it is worth reflecting here on the role of Arab unity in the Ba‘th manifesto. This principle of Arab unity has heavily influenced Adeed Dawisha’s critique of Arab nationalism for failing to achieve its pan-Arab goals. However, while not unimportant, Arab unity was expressed more as a political vision rather than a territorial one. Moreover, with the embedded reality of statism in the Middle East, pan-Arabism shifted from a core principle to a peripheral principle of Arab nationalism. This de-prioritization of territorial unity and cultural commonality behind anticolonialism can be gleaned from the statement of Bitar and Aflaq, who, despite including unity in their fundamental principles, explained: [W]e saw nationalism simply as a struggle between the nation and the colonizer . . . In the country those who helped the foreigner were called traitors and those who opposed them nationalists. The founders did later attach the notion of a cultural and intellectual “awakening” to their doctrine, but it was nevertheless instrumental to the struggle for autonomy and not insisted upon for its own sake, in contrast to the writings of their intellectual predecessors: To be effective, the struggle against the colonizer had to involve a change of mind and of thought, a deepening of national consciousness and of moral standards. (Aflaq, quoted in Seale 1986: 149) This is supported by the fact that even after brief pan-Arab unity failed with the break-up of the United Arab Republic between Syria and Egypt in 1961, the anti-imperialist character of the Syrian Ba’th party became even more strident. Syrian Arab nationalism did not decline due to the failure of Arab unity, but instead ushered in an even more radical Arab nationalist government in 1966. Moreover, the importance of a common Arab culture for the political agenda of the ideology remained ambiguous, reflected by the Ba’thist regime’s willingness to welcome non-Arab forces to its ideological cause. As the early social movements had demonstrated in their actions, and as Aflaq and Bitar had emphasized in their writings, the primary cause of Arab nationalism in Syria was to target the European powers. Given the practical urgency of their agenda in the face of European colonization, it decidedly overtook the original target of the early intelligentsia who had focused their animosity on the Ottoman Turks. That initial political programme never succeeded as a widespread social movement before or after the disintegration of the Empire; even if one takes the example of the Arab revolt in 1916 prior to the establishment of an anti-colonial Arab nationalism, it is worth noting that this was headed by Arab elites and only made possible by Britain’s sponsorship motivated by its own vested, imperial interests. 278

Arab nationalism

After decolonization and Israel Arab nationalism is meaningless without its ultimate goal of Arab unity. (Dawisha 2003: 12) As the quotation above indicates, Dawisha does not sufficiently account for the potency of anti-colonialism in Arab nationalist ideology, focusing rather on its failure to deliver pan-Arab unity. Arab nationalism is thus judged as deficient for not matching up to criteria that in practice had shifted from a core to a peripheral principle in the Arab nationalist project for much of the last century. Meanwhile, Tibi recognizes the anti-hegemonic character of Arab nationalism, and yet places greatest focus on the influence of the intellectual writings of European nationalists and their Arab “cousins”; considering the heavy cultural emphasis of the latter, and the republican associations of the European nationalists, it is no wonder that Tibi asserts the “death” and obsolescence of Arab nationalism in the contemporary Middle East. If it is not considered obsolete, then at best it has been viewed as a distinct “eastern” brand of nationalism, manifesting illiberal and reactionary traits due to “backwardness” before eventually arriving at its goal of emulating the West (Plamenatz 1976: 23–6, cited in Choueiri 2000: 10). Dawn challenges the above accounts by pointing out, “there probably is no nationalism that fits the common model.” (2000: 58). This is an apt observation; he prefers to expand the perimeters of nationalism altogether than to suggest Arab nationalism does not fit or has failed. I offer an alternative counter-argument. Having distilled the main objectives of Arab nationalism in praxis, it is more logical to group it with non-Western decolonizing, Third World movements, whose intellectual basis lies in the works of Marcus Garvey, Frantz Fanon and other post­ colonial scholars, who propose anti-colonialism and indeed revolution as core ideological goals (Fanon 1961, 166–99; Said 2000). Viewing Arab nationalism in the twentieth century from this perspective unshackles it from comparisons with Western national histories, varied though they may be; as such, it is more useful to define the ideology as Arab anti-imperialism than Arab nationalism. Furthermore, by paying greater attention to Arab nationalism’s core principle of freedom from the influence of external hegemonic forces, it is possible to argue that the ideo­ logy continued to be relevant and influential in the regional context far longer than it has been given credit for (Seale 1988; Ginat 2005; Gani 2014). Arab nationalist movements in different states, from a multitude of classes and religious backgrounds, arguably succeeded in the single most important goal around which the ideology was publicly mobilized in the first place: ousting European occupying forces from Arab territory. Syria achieved independence in 1946, Lebanon in 1943, Egypt in 1952 (after nominal but not effectual independence in 1922). Of course, these victories were not only due to Arab nationalist contention. But archival evidence of British, French and American exasperation with the daily, relentless, emboldened and increasingly aggressive protests and attacks against Western forces, demonstrate the direct negative impact such activities were having on Western appetite to remain in Arab lands. Thus, Arab nationalism, as a coalition of anti-colonial social movements, succeeded in their goal of official political autonomy, an achievement given short shrift by many scholars of Arab nationalism. But even so, the question remains: if anti-colonialism was, in practice, the raison d’être of Arab nationalism, could it retain any relevance after formal decolonization? Even prior to the current Syrian conflict, there are two notable factors explaining why it could and did remain relevant. The first factor is Israel. Zionism as an ideology, and later Israel as a direct neighbour, joined the ranks of Arab nationalism’s opponents in the early twentieth century. Regardless of Zionism’s internal nuances (Shanin 1988: 222–55), Arab nationalists viewed Zionism as a wholesale extension of European colonialism. Jerusalem, with its religious significance and once again seen as the 279

Jasmine K. Gani

prize to be wrestled from the control of modern-day “crusaders,” injected even greater urgency and justification for the Arab nationalist cause. The historical comparisons produced an enduring hostility, expressed initially towards Israel’s very existence, later towards its policies and interests. The later opposition towards the US and its Middle East policies is a less straightforward anticolonial stance: the US had always castigated the European powers for their colonial exploits in the region, and until the 2003 Iraq war, the US had never directly occupied Arab land. However, US support for Israel and persistent interference in Middle East politics, not least the two Iraq wars, rendered the US as “neo-colonialists.” Ba‘thism’s affiliation with socialism, in particular, provided it with yet a further rationale for Syria to oppose the US and its strategiceconomic policies even after formal decolonization, and particularly during the Cold War. Scholars have used persistent and dramatic Arab failures when confronting Israel, most notably in 1948 and 1967, to argue for the failure of Arab nationalism as a whole. Moreover, they have argued that such unequivocal defeats irrevocably undermined the credibility and potency of Arab nationalism, such that it never really recovered. If proof was needed, the actions of Egypt, the so-called leader of the Arab nationalist movement, seemed to provide it. Nasser’s much-lauded leadership qualities were rendered futile in the face of Israeli military power and prowess, his promises to defend the Arabs laid bare as empty rhetoric. If this realization was not traumatic enough for the Arab nationalist movement, his successor Anwar Sadat defected from the cause, signing a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, leaving them supposedly leaderless and without purpose. Jordan, always lukewarm in its commitment to “resistance,” took this opportunity to gradually soften relations with Israel, while the Gulf States ebbed and flowed based on their economic and diplomatic interests. Egypt’s about-turn, argued Ajami, marked the deathknell of Arab nationalism (Ajami 1978). There is no doubt that these events were a major blow to the Arab nationalist movement, but very often such analyses overlook the trajectory of Syria, and its continued adherence to the ideology. The Syrian regime’s disillusionment was matched by its fury with its Egyptian (now former) partners. These “failures,” rather than dilute Syria’s ideological commitment, appeared to spur them on with greater defiance. The loss of one regional ally from the Arab nationalist cause meant a search for new allies; in that same year, with the revolution in Iran, Syria found one.

Syria, Islamist allies and relevance today To understand why Syria, a secular Arab nationalist state, was able to forge such a close relationship with Iran, a non-Arab, Islamist state, one cannot look to unifying cultural facets, which in this case are very different. Geopolitical pragmatism provides some of the explanation (Goodarzi 2006), but we also cannot overlook their shared and overlapping ideological principles. Both regimes claimed to have built their foreign policies upon the principle of anti-imperialism, shaped by their experiences of direct or neo-colonialism by the French or British, and external interference by the United States. Both cited Israel and the US as their enemies, and targeted “reactionary” conservative Arab monarchies for criticism. Despite the Ba’thist regime’s avowal of secularism, and the religious character of the Iranian regime, this divergence did not obstruct the alliance, and still does not. This suggests the importance of secularism to Syria’s operationalization of Arab nationalism is contingent and at times peripheral. Thus, at home, Islamists were not tolerated by the Syrian regime and instead were viewed as treacherous fifth columnists with whom they vied for power (Slackman 2006). But on the regional level, we see quite a different picture emerging. Syrian support, and indeed its ideological position, has historically helped to sustain the activities of regional Islamists. The points of correlation that do not suffice at home (such as anti-hegemonism and a transnational regional 280

Arab nationalism

loyalty) form a unified and representative front in the international context. As is the case with Iran, Hizbollah and Hamas in their conflict with Israel correspond entirely with the political mandate of Ba’thist ideology. For the Palestinian militant group Hamas, this was demonstrated clearly in the conflict between Hamas and Israel in the Gaza strip, between 26 December 2008–20 January 2009. Syria was singularly outspoken among the Arab states in its unequivocal denunciation of Israel as the aggressor in the conflict. Bashar al-Asad used his meetings with then French President Nicholas Sarkozy, UK Foreign Secretary David Milliband and UN SecretaryGeneral Ban Ki-Moon as a platform to highlight Israeli culpability in the affair, differing markedly from the neutral overtures of his Arab counterparts. Khalid Meshaal, Hamas’ political leader in exile, spoke openly and unequivocally of their “defiance” of Israel from his base in Damascus. Such an association between Syria and Hamas was made deliberately obvious; in turn, the then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, pointedly did not visit Damascus on her diplomatic mission to the region during the conflict, despite Syria’s key involvement in regional affairs. By the next Gaza war in 2014, Syria was embroiled in its own devastating war and played little role in the political theatre of the Israel–Hamas dispute. But after a brief estrangement, and despite the intense vilification of Islamists at home, Syria and Hamas tentatively renewed ties in late 2017 under the common goal of maintaining an “axis of resistance” in the region. The alliance between Hamas and Syria is particularly interesting because it cuts across the sectarian lines that dominate Middle East alliances and enmities. A more prominent and uncomplicated example of Syria’s support for anti-Israeli Islamists would be its strong and consistent alliance with Hizbollah, the Lebanese militia-turned political party, closely affiliated with Iran. In these ways, the anti-colonialism of Arab nationalism that played such a central role in mobilizing vast swathes of Arab populations in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s is still remnant, both in an official capacity with the foreign policies of the Syrian regime, and via popular sentiment. Of course, one may well question the Syrian government’s opposition to Western intervention, while simultaneously inviting Russian and Iranian presence in the country, which seems to make a mockery of the regime’s fierce protection of sovereignty. But even so, it is worth remembering that it is Western intervention, not Russian activity, that helped form Syrian Arab nationalist identity and has historically been a subversive force against the interests and policies of the Syrian government. Before closing, it is worth making a distinction between Arab nationalism and Arabism; whereas the former is an ideology, the latter is not, but rather it relates to the promotion of all the cultural facets shared and expressed within Arab identity without political aims. Thus, Arabism is widespread—Arabic and Arab film, music and literature, for example, are all very popular and are shared across the region (Phillips 2012). However, if they are then harnessed for a specific political agenda, it is more often than not because they connect to anti-colonial sentiments parallel to a political, and not a culturalist, ideological vision. In fact, Arab nationalist rhetoric and activities over decades in the political realm can be attributed with reinforcing a strong Arabist identity across the region, thus—returning to our earlier discussion—the politics has shaped culture rather than the other way around. Due to its powers of mobilization, this Arabism has been co-opted by Islamists such as the Muslim Brotherhood (Gani 2019) and Hamas, despite their claims to oppose ‘Asabiyya and nationalism. Thus while such groups argue that their transnational goals are motivated by a sense of community with the Muslim Ummah, in reality their vision, contentions, activism and networks are by and large limited to the Arab Muslim world, with relatively little sustained interest in the non-Arab Muslim world that constitutes the majority of the so-called Ummah. If anything, this is even more apparent among the Arab-Islamist diaspora outside of the Middle East region, thus demonstrating that their nationalist outlook is not simply defined by geographical proximity and practicalities but 281

Jasmine K. Gani

reflects a deeper, constitutive ideological influence. In these less tangible ways, one can see the continued pervasive influence of Arab nationalism, even if some of the flagship goals such as pan-Arab unity have not been achieved. This warrants a more nuanced reading of the principles of Arab nationalism and measurements of its success, and a recognition of the continued role that states such as Syria and its allies play in maintaining the ideology’s influence in regional and world politics long after the death of Nasser and the “defection” of Egypt.

Conclusion I have argued in this chapter that Arab nationalism has, in praxis, since the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, had the greatest salience as an anti-colonial, anti-hegemonic ideology juxtaposed against external forces. While the early philosophy of Arab nationalism fit within a rubric of European nationalism, defining and evaluating the ideology by the goals of the early intellectual movement fails to take account of the shift in core and peripheral principles once the ideology was operationalized by a much broader social base. Those core principles emerged as political autonomy from global hegemonic and external influence, and freedom from occupation or imperialism—be it military, economic or political. The core goals were no longer defined by cultural renaissance or pan-Arab unity as assumed in numerous Anglophone academic works. This is borne out by the observation that, historically, if a non-Arab or non-nationalist actor supported these core principles, Arab nationalists willingly lent support and forged a strong alliance with that actor, often stronger than alliances with their Arab counterparts; this has been the case with Iran, Hamas and Hizbollah. In the same vein, if an Arab (and indeed Arab nationalist) state contravened these principles, Arab nationalist actors, such as Ba’thist Syria, were not shy to express their opposition to those states—as seen from Syria’s animosity with Egypt after its truce with Israel in 1979, its resentment of the Arab League, and disputes with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Since the core goals of Arab nationalism were not based on cultural identity, this was not a contradiction of ideology. Arab nationalists’ claims to salience have historically been carried along two paths: one cultural, the other political. The early intellectual movement gave substance and weight to the cultural project; but an inextricable connection between Arab and Islamic culture due to the region’s political history, and the obvious secularism—and indeed Westernized outlook—of the intellectual movement, meant that Arab nationalist attempts to gain legitimacy on such grounds historically proved less than fruitful except among sections of the elite. The political route, on the other hand, focusing not on domestic civil liberties but on freedom from occupation, fared much better as an inclusive umbrella movement; on a practical level, this allowed the movement to avoid drawing attention to its secular foundations, and opened the door for significant levels of co-operation between it and Islamist groups on international and regional issues. That relationship between Arab nationalism and Islamism in the Middle East is more complex than is superficially assumed (Gerges 2018). Syria’s Ba’thist movement has flitted between co-operation, coexistence or animosity vis-à-vis its Islamist rivals, a pattern of behaviour that can be explained through their mutual search for popular legitimacy at home, and a convergence in anti-imperialist “resistance” abroad.

References Al-Banna, H. (1935), Risaalat al-Ta’lim (“The Message of the Teachings”), in Majmu’at Rasail, pp. 7–33, Kuwait: International Islamic Federation of Student Organizations. Ajami, F. (1978), “The end of Pan-Arabism,” Foreign Affairs, 57:2, 355–73. 282

Arab nationalism

Al-Azmeh, A. (2000), “Nationalism and the Arabs,” in ed, D. Hopwood, Arab Nation, Arab Nationalism, pp. 63–78, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press. Al-Husri, S. (1974) Abḥāth mukhtārah fῑ al-qawmīyah al-ʿarabīyah, Beirut: Dār al-Quds lil-Ṭibāʿah wa alNashr wa al-Tawzīʿ. Anderson, B. (1991), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. Antonius, G. 1939, The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement, Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company. Ayoob, M. (2007), “Challenging hegemony: Political Islam and the North-South divide,” International Studies Review, 9:4. Barnard, F.M. (1988), Self-Direction and Political Legitimacy: Rousseau and Herder, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Benewick, R., Berki, R.N. and B. Parekh (1973), Knowledge and Belief in Politics, London: Allen and Unwin. Breuilly, J. (1993), Nationalism and the State, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bull, H. (1977), The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Browers, M. (2009), Political Ideology in the Arab World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carr, E.H. (1981), The Twenty Years’ Crisis, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Chaitani, Y. (2007), Post-colonial Syria and Lebanon: The Decline of Arab Nationalism and the Triumph of the State (Library of Middle East History), London and New York, NY: I.B. Tauris. Choueiri, Y. (2000), Arab Nationalism: A History, Oxford: Blackwell. Darwisha, A. (2003), Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair, New Jersey, CA, and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Dawn, C.E. (1991), “The origins of Arab nationalism,” in eds, R. Khalidi, L. Anderson, M. Muslih and R. Simon, The Origins of Arab Nationalism, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Dawn, C.E. (2000), “The quality of Arab nationalism,” in ed, D. Hopwood, Arab Nation, Arab Nationalism, pp. 41–61, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press. Deutsch, K. (1953), Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry Into the Foundations of Nationality, New York, NY: Technology Press of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Wiley. Fanon, F. (1961), The Wretched of the Earth, London: Penguin Classics. Fawcett, L. (2005), International Relations of the Middle East, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Festenstein, M. and M. Kenny (2005), Political Ideologies, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Freeden, M. (1996), Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Freeden, M. (2003), Ideology: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gani, J.K. (2014), The Role of Ideology in Syrian-US Relations: Conflict and Cooperation, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Gani, J.K. (2016), “The problem of ideology,” FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts, 22, Spring. Gani, J.K. (2019), “Escaping the nation in the Middle East: A doomed project? Fanonian decolonisation and the Muslim Brotherhood,” Interventions, 21:5, 652–670. Gellner, E. (1983), Nations and Nationalism, Oxford: Blackwell. Gelvin, J. (1997), “The other Arab nationalism: Syrian/Arab populism in its historical and international contexts,” in eds, I. Gershoni and J. Jankowski, Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. George, A. (2006), Syria: Neither Bread nor Freedom, London and New York, NY: Zed Books. Gerges, F. (2018), The Struggle for the Arab World: The Nationalist-Islamist Long War, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gershoni, I. and J. Jankowski (eds, 1997), Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Ginat, R. (2005), Syria and the Doctrine of Arab Neutralism: From Independence to Dependence, Brighton, Sussex: Academic Press. Goodarzi, J. (2006), Syria and Iran: Diplomatic Alliance and Power Politics in the Middle East, London and New York, NY: I.B. Tauris. Greenfeld, L. (1992), Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Haddad, M. (1991), “Iraq before World War One: A case of anti-European Arab Ottomanism,” in eds, Khalidi, R., L. Anderson, M. Muslih and R. Simon, The Origins of Arab Nationalism, pp. 121–151, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Haim, S. (1964), Arab Nationalism: An Anthology, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 283

Jasmine K. Gani

Halliday, F. and H. Alavi (eds, 1988), State and Ideology in the Middle East & Pakistan, Basingstoke and London: Macmillan. Hariri, A. (2015), “The Iraqi Independence Movement: A case of transgressive contention (1918–1920),” in F.A. Gerges, ed., Contentious Politics in the Middle East: Popular Resistance and Marginalized Activism beyond the Arab Uprisings, pp. 97–124, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Haugbølle, S. (2015), “Ziad al-Rahbani and the liberal subject,” in eds, M. Hatina and C. Schumann, Arab Liberal Thought after 1967, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Hinnebusch, R. and T. Zintl (2015), Syria from Reform to Revolt, Vol. 1, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Hinnebusch, R. and A. Ehteshami (2014), The Foreign Policies of Middle East States, Boulder, CO, Lynne Rienner. Hobsbawm, E. (1990), Nations and Nationalism since 1970, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobsbawm, E. (1983), “Mass-producing traditions: Europe 1870–1914,” in eds, E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hopwood, D. (1988), Syria: Politics and Society, 1945–1986, London: Unwin Hyman. Hopwood, D. (2000), Arab Nation, Arab Nationalism, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Humphreys, S. (1999), “The strange career of pan-Arabism,” in Between Memory and Desire: The Middle East in a Troubled Age, Berkeley CA: University of California Press. Hutchinson, J. (1987), The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism, London: Allen and Unwin. Hutchinson, J. and A.D. Smith (1994), Nationalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Keddie, N. (1988), “Ideology, society and the state in post-colonial Muslim societies,” in eds, F. Halliday and H. Alavi, State and Ideology in the Middle East and Pakistan, Basingstoke, Macmillan. 9–31 Kedourie, E. (1961), Nationalism, New York, NY: Wiley-Blackwell. Khalidi, R., L. Anderson, M. Muslih and R. Simon (1991), The Origins of Arab Nationalism, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Khadduri, M. (1970), Political Trends in the Arab World: The Role of Ideas and Ideals in Politics, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Khoury, P. 1997, Syria and the French Mandate: The Politics of Arab Nationalism, 1920–1945, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kienle, E. (1988), Ba‘th v. Ba‘th: The Conflict Between Syria and Iraq 1968–1989, London: I.B. Tauris, 1990. Kohn, H. (1944), The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Background, New York, NY: Macmillan. Phillips, C. (2012), “Team Arab: Al-Jazeera and the flagging of everyday Arabism during the 2008 Beijing Olympics,” Nations and Nationalism, 18:3, 504–26. Renan, E. (1882) What is a Nation?: And Other Political Writings, trans and ed, M.F.N. Giglioli., New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. Reid, D.M. (1997), “Nationalizing the pharaonic past: Egyptology, imperialism, and Egyptian Nationalism, 1922–1952,” in eds, I. Gershoni and J. Jankowski, Rethinking Nationalism, pp. 127–150, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Sajed, A. (2019) “Re-remembering Third Worldism: An affirmative critique of national liberation in Algeria,” Middle East Critique, 28:3, 243–260. Seale, P. (1986), The Struggle for Syria: A Study of Post-war Arab Politics: 1945–1958, London: I.B. Tauris. Seale, P. (1988), Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East, Berkeley, CA: University California Press. Shanin, T. (1988), “The Zionisms of Israel,” in eds, F. Halliday and H. Alavi, State Ideology in the Middle East and Pakistan, pp. 222–257, New York, NY: Macmillan. Simon, R.S. (1997), “The imposition of nationalism on a non-nation state: The case of Iraq during the interwar period, 1921–1941,” in I. Gershoni and J. Jankowski, Rethinking Nationalism, pp. 87–105, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Smith, A. (1981), The Ethnic Revival, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Said, E. (2000), “The voyage in: Third World intellectuals and metropolitan cultures,” in ed, D. Hopwood, Arab Nation, Arab Nationalism, pp. 79–101, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Slackman, M. (18 September 2006), “Islamist’ rise imperils Mideast’s order,” New York Times. Tibi, B. (1997), Arab Nationalism: Between Islam and the Nation-State, third edition, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Thomas, M.C. (2002), “French intelligence-gathering in the Syrian Mandate, 1920–40,” Middle Eastern Studies, 38:1, 1–32. Toynbee, A. (1915), Nationality & the War, London and Toronto: originally published by J.M. Dent & Sons Limited. Tripp, C. (2002), “The foreign policy of Iraq,” in eds, R. Hinnebusch and A. Ehteshami, The Foreign Policies of Middle East States, pp. 167–193, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Wieland, C. (2006), Syria at Bay: Secularism, Islamism and Pax Americana, London: Hurst & Co. 284

Part IV

The international politics of MENA

20 Conflict in the Middle East Francesco Belcastro

The Middle East is often defined as an “area of conflict.” Most observers link the politics of the region with issues such as war, terrorism and political instability. This characterization is not completely wrong: war has been a regular occurrence in the region, as have instances of terrorism and clashes along ethnic and religious lines. Furthermore, the Middle East as a region has not only seen a high number of conflicts since the end of World War II but also some of the bloodiest. The Iran–Iraq war (1980–88) caused over 1,000,000 casualties (Milton-Edwards and Mandaville 2008), one of the highest death tolls since World War II. By 2016 the Syrian civil war had already caused an estimated 400,000 victims, a number that appears destined to continue rising. Conflict in the Middle East is present at both inter-state and intra-state level: conflict among states and among different groups within states have both been a feature of regional politics. The roots of inter and intra-state conflict in the region are often the same. Furthermore, because of factors such as the strong interconnection among regional actors and the frailty of state borders, the line between inter and intra-state conflict in the Middle East is thin and blurred. The “Arab Spring” added a new dimension of instability to the region: the popular protests that started in December 2010 in Tunisia destabilized regimes that were previously considered among the most stable (if brutal and undemocratic) in the region. Tunisia itself transitioned towards a democratic system and other regimes such as Egypt’s managed (at least up to today) to maintain a certain degree of control over the country. Syria, Libya and Yemen, however, all descended into full-blown civil wars that saw the involvement of regional and international actors and further increased regional instability. This chapter will first look at some of the most frequently cited causes of conflict in the region. It will then move on to analyze what has been the region’s most influential and intractable conflict: the Arab–Israeli one. This conflict has profoundly shaped the politics of the region, representing a factor of domestic and regional instability from its inception in 1948.

Roots of conflict Observers have long debated what factors make the Middle East a “region of conflict.” Answers range from the weakness and scant legitimacy of the institutions (particularly the states) largely 287

Francesco Belcastro

inherited from the colonial era to the unequal distribution of natural resources. This chapter will analyze some factors that are among the most cited in the literature: state formation, external involvement, ethnic and religious divisions, regional balance, distribution of power and finally, ideology and nature of the regimes. Most of these issues are not incompatible and can be seen as interlinked.

State formation Other chapters describe in detail the unique pattern of state formation in the region; this chapter will therefore only discuss it as a factor of conflict. Most scholars have identified the roots of conflict and instability in the region to be in the transition between the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of independent states (Halliday 2005). The states that were created by colonial powers were mostly weak and artificial constructs; their borders cutting across ethnic and religious lines. This aspect is by no means unique to the Middle East, but in a “region of multiple identities,” this process proved to be particularly damaging. Hinnebusch states that “the single most important factor obstructing nation-building in the region was the imposition under Western imperialism of a deeply flawed version of the Western states system” (2012: 149). Fragmented states led by leaders with low legitimacy are obviously more prone to internal conflict: to this extent, it is possible to distinguish between states that had a long history as independent entities (such as Iran or Egypt) and those that were newly established (like most of the Levant states). Elites in “artificial” entities such as Syria or Iraq had a particularly difficult task imposing their legitimacy and authority (Mufti 1996). These states were created out of a rather arbitrary division of territory between Great Britain and France, and both had a varied and mixed population. Both Syria and Iraq went through a long phase of instability and power struggles in their first years as independent states, and in both cases these long phases of instability ended when authoritarian leaders consolidated control. The regimes in power managed to keep the state together by means of repression but failed to find a long-term solution to the state formation puzzle. When the leaders were toppled by external intervention (in the case of Iraq) or challenged by internal opposition (in the case of Syria) the cleavages that were previously hidden promptly re-emerged. The presence of unresolved “national questions” has also represented a cause of intra- and inter-state conflict. The Kurds, whose right to a nation had been denied by the divisions established by the colonial powers, constitute a significant minority in several regional states. The presence of Kurdish population and separatist movements had been a factor of instability in countries such as Turkey and Iraq, but it had also been exploited as a political card in interstate relations (Stansfield 2016). Iran during the Shah years had long supported Iraqi Kurdish forces in order to undermine its rival power, Saddam Hussein’s Ba‘thist regime (Donovan 2011). Syria used its support of the Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK) in its conflicts with Turkey, and the two countries came close to an armed conflict in 1998/1999 over Syria’s hosting of PKK leader Ocalan (Hinnebusch and Tur 2013). The artificial (and sometimes unclear) border divisions also left by the colonial powers left a plethora of conflicting claims and unsolved territorial aspirations. In the Levant region virtually each state had claims over part or all of other states’ territory: the Hashemites of Jordan and Iraq claimed rights over historical Syria and Palestine (Seale 1965), and Syrian policy-makers were often wedded to the idea of a “Greater Syria” as opposed to the smaller state carved out by the colonial powers (Pipes 1992). In the Gulf region, unclear land or sea borders led to disputes (such as in the case of Bahrain and Qatar that was eventually solved by an ICJ decision) and in some cases (such as the Saudi– Yemeni border) by military clashes. 288

Conflict in the Middle East

External involvement The role of external powers in the region is not limited to the state formation process. The Middle East, since the aftermath of World War II, has been a strongly penetrated region (Ehteshami and Hinnebusch 2002). External powers have clearly affected regional dynamics and have been a cause of volatility and conflict rather than a stabilizing factor. Extra-regional actors interacted with the Middle East system in different ways: from supporting authoritarian regimes to providing weapons to regional actors and up to direct military intervention. The role of external powers after 1945 can be broadly divided into three historical phases: the first one from the immediate aftermath of World War II till the Suez crisis in 1956, the second from the Suez crisis up to the end of the Cold War, the third from 1989 up to recent days. The first phase was characterized by the decrease of European colonial influence, with France and Britain retreating from the region and the influence of the two superpowers, the USSR and particularly the USA, growing steadily. The Suez crisis of 1956, with the AngloFrench forced to stop their military enterprise by the intervention of the two superpowers, signalled the sunset of the European colonial power era and the beginning of the Cold War in the region (Rogan 2011). Throughout the Cold War years, the competition among the two superpowers strongly influenced regional politics. The USA and the USSR wrestled for regional influence, boosting their allies’ stance with aid and weapons and courting each other’s key regional partners (in some cases with a good deal of success, such as in the case of Egypt “switching” from the Soviet to the Western camp) (Gaddis 2007). Cold War competition often overlapped with regional rivalries: the USSR naturally aligned itself with the radical Arab republics while the USA built close relationships with the Gulf monarchies but also with the non-Arab states of the region. The Middle East was central in superpowers’ competition, as the region was located at the juncture of NATO and Soviet areas of influence, had significant resources as well as an important symbolic value (Sluglett 2012). The collapse of the Soviet Union meant the temporary retreat of one of the two superpowers from the region and the start of the third phase of external involvement. The 1990 Iraq war (where the US led a wide coalition to repel Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait) seemed to herald a new era of stability under American leadership (Hansen 2001). But global unipolarity did not translate into a less conflict-ridden Middle East. The US failed to facilitate a solution to the Arab–Israeli conflict, despite the near decade long Oslo process (discussed in the next section). Shortly afterwards, the 11 September attacks contributed to reshaping American policy in the region. The US-led invasion of Iraq that followed in 2003 represented an extreme example of superpower interventionism (Fawn and Hinnebusch 2006). The removal of Saddam Hussein and the substantial failure of the Iraqi state formation project led to a long phase of instability, not only for Iraq but for the whole region. Furthermore, the US and its allies continued their support of authoritarian and often increasingly unpopular regimes in the region. Two of these dictators, Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egypt’s Mubarak, were the first leaders to be ousted by the Arab Uprisings that started in late 2010. Gaddafi of Libya on the other hand was removed by a Western-led intervention in favour of the rebels that were fighting to dislodge him (Hilsum 2012). Similarly, to the case of Iraq, facilitating a smooth transition phase in Libya proved to be a difficult process, and the country reverted to a state of fragmentation and civil war. The civil war in Syria on the other hand saw the return to the Middle East scenario of Russia (McMeekin 2016). Moscow has from the beginning supported its ally Bashar al-Asad, and in September 2015 it stepped up its support by directly intervening in the Syrian civil war. The Russian air campaign is seen by several observers as the first step towards a more extensive re-engagement in the region (Kozanhov 2016). 289

Francesco Belcastro

Ethnic and sectarian divisions Several analyses of recent conflicts in the Middle East focus on the sectarian and ethnic dimension. The Syrian civil war is portrayed as a conflict between minorities and a Sunni majority, the rivalry between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Islamic Republic of Iran as a “Sunni vs. Shia” issue. The role of ethnic and sectarian divisions in the region might sometimes be exaggerated by external observers but can by no means be ignored. The Middle East is extremely varied in terms of ethnic and religious groups represented. The regional population can be divided among multiple different lines such as Arabs and non-Arabs, Shias and Sunni, “tribals” and sedentary. These cleavages, often completely ignored by the colonial powers when drawing state borders or “building” state structures, contributed to instability and intra-state conflict. Many states that are a patchwork of different ethnic and religious groups often proved to be less stable and more conflict-prone. Lebanon, possibly the country in the region with the most varied population, was engulfed in a 15-year-long civil war. The second Lebanese Civil War was fought by sectarian militias for the control of power in the country. It started in 1975 with clashes between Christian Maronite forces and Palestinian militias and their allies, and it progressively involved all of the country’s many groups. What was contested was the dominant position of the Maronite community in the country, inherited from the French colonial era (Traboulsi 2012). The Lebanese Civil War also saw the direct involvement of two of the regional powers, Syria and Israel, and significant overlapping with the Arab–Israeli conflict. The solution that was formulated and imposed by regional powers with the 1989 Taif agreements sanctioned a new distribution of power among the three main communities, Sunnis, Shias and Christian Maronites. While the accords managed to stop the armed conflict, today’s Lebanon remains a deeply fragmented and rather dysfunctional political system (Salloukh 2009). Ethnic and sectarian divisions have also been a factor in inter-state relations. The “Gulf Cold War” between Saudi Arabia and Iran is a competition among two regional powers that is undoubtedly intensified by the fact that the two countries are the main exponents of Sunni Wahabism and Shiism respectively. The “religious” dimension of this rivalry is confirmed by the fact that it exploded in the aftermath of the 1979 Iranian revolution when the Islamic revolutionary regime appeared to represent an alternative model for the region and a catalyst for its Shia population (Legrenzi and Calculli 2013). This sectarian component is also present in the region’s contemporary conflicts. The web of regional alliances of the Syrian civil war has a strong sectarian connotation: the Sunni Gulf monarchies and Erdogan’s Turkey support the (mainly Sunni) opposition while Iran is the closest ally of the country’s Alawite regime (Alawites are often portrayed as Shias, although this aspect is debatable).

Regional Structure and distribution of power The regional structure and distribution of power in the Middle East are regularly cited as sources of regional conflict and instability. The region is often described as an anarchic and “Hobbesian” one. Anarchy in any system can be portrayed as a “lack of agreed hierarchy,” and the Middle East is undoubtedly a region with a contested hierarchy. The region is a “heterogeneous” system where the key actors are profoundly different and do not share an understanding of the fundamental rules of the system itself (Aron 1966). It is also what Buzan and Waever (2003) define as a “standard” region, one where regional dynamics are defined by the interaction among different actors and not by the presence of one dominant power (as opposed to a “centred” one, where the presence of one hegemon alters the anarchic structure). This multipolar region has 290

Conflict in the Middle East

three or more states with a comparable level of military, economic and cultural power, whilst being significantly superior to any other actor in the system. The region is therefore characterized by the absence of a dominant or hegemonic power that could potentially keep the peace. Lustick (1997) in his seminal article discusses the factors that explain the absence of a great power in the Middle East. He concludes that the main factor that prevented the emergence of a great regional power (whether one of the existing states or a “super-Arab” state) is the influence of Western powers on the system. While Western European states were allowed to build up and consolidate without a high degree of external pressure, Middle Eastern states were limited by the presence and interferences of existing (mainly European) powers. Whatever the causes of this absence are, the lack of dominant powers is seen in most of the literature as an obstacle to cooperation and stability (Nabers 2010). The Middle East in particular is a region of aspiring and failed hegemons. Louise Fawcett (2013) stresses how several actors (such as Egypt or Iraq) have historically had hegemonic aspirations, while some others that would have the potential (such as Israel or Iran) are prevented by factors such as their regional isolation, domestic structure and (in the case of Israel) external dependence. Before the start of the Arab Uprising Erdogan’s Turkey, with its new policy of “Zero problems with neighbours,” was indicated by many as the power in the ascendancy in the region. But the Arab Uprising posed several serious challenges to Turkish foreign policy: from the collapse of newly established alliances to the refugee crisis and renewed Kurdish irredentism in neighbouring Syria. In the aftermath of the agreement on the Iranian nuclear deal, several observers noted how Iran was in a position to overcome its post-1979 isolation and play a more central role in the region. The prospect of a Shia crescent and of an Iranian-dominated Middle East disturbs the sleep of policymakers in Gulf capitals but appears to be far-fetched. Given the current situation, the balance of power in the region and the counter-reaction that any hegemonic bid (by Tehran or any other country) would cause, means the region is likely to remain “anarchic” for the foreseeable future. The lack of “regional consensus” and of a hegemonic power or coalition also partially explains why the Middle East has not seen the same process of “regionalism” as other areas of the world. Regionalism is “a policy-driven process in which states (and other actors) pursue common goals and policies in any given region” (Fawcett 2013: 191). In its most developed stages, regionalism is characterized by the development of regional institutions of different sorts. The Middle East has in this respect been trailing behind other regions of the world, as its regional institutions are few and poorly developed. The League of Arab States (LAS) has essentially remained a forum for debate among Arab states, and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) despite its success, appears to be rather narrow in scope and limited to a few key issues (Fawcett 2013). The Arab Uprising and the following crisis have given these organizations an opportunity to re-affirm themselves as important actors in the Middle East: LAS played a pivotal (if controversial) role in the Libyan crisis and the GCC played an important negotiation role in facilitating the handover of power by President Saleh in Yemen, but in both cases the regional initiatives failed to solve the crisis.

Other factors: ideologies and nature of regimes Several other factors are often mentioned as causes of regional conflict and instability. The influence of strong transnational ideologies throughout the period analyzed is one of these. The two main transnational ideologies are pan-Arabism and Islamism. Pan-Arabism originated at the beginning of the twentieth century but reached its political zenith in the 1950s and 1960s of the same century. It called for political unity among the people of the Arab nation (Mufti 1996). The main political representatives of this ideology were president Nasser of Egypt and the Ba‘th parties of Syria and Iraq. The decline of pan-Arabism coincided with 291

Francesco Belcastro

the rise of another transnational ideology, Islamism. Islamism can be seen as a broader set of concepts, but in all of its variations it calls for the application of Islamic values to all aspects of life (including the political sphere). Both ideologies presented a threat to the “Westphalian” system in the region, as they contested the legitimacy of the states and their leaders. Most of the opposition to established regimes in the contemporary Middle East comes from Islamic forces of different kinds: from the Muslim Brotherhood winning the first post-Mubarak elections in Egypt to the Islamist militias fighting to oust the Asad regime in Syria. Furthermore, transnational ideologies often appeared to create more competition than co-operation among states themselves. The “Arab Cold War” between Nasser and the other Arab leaders described by Kerr (1972) was one over a central position within the Arab world- in many ways over who was the champion of pan-Arabism, while Islamist regimes in the region struggle over the mantle of “most Islamic” state. The nature of Middle Eastern regimes has often been pointed to as another cause of conflict. This is based on the assumption that some regimes are naturally more aggressive than others, and therefore more likely to initiate conflict. The Middle East has been largely excluded from the “waves of democratization” of the 1960s and 1980s (Huntington 1991), and most regimes in the region are authoritarian, with several “military regimes” of some sort. The assumption that democracies are less inherently belligerent than authoritarian regimes has been long debated in the broader IR literature but appears to have no particular foundation in Middle Eastern politics, where the state probably closest to being a democratic system (Israel) has initiated more armed conflicts than any other in the region. More to the point seems to be the idea that military regimes (or regimes where the military plays an important role) are more likely to initiate conflict: such is the aforementioned case of Israel but also the case of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invading Iran in 1980 or of Egypt and Syria starting the 1973 Yom Kippur war. As outlined before, the Arab Uprisings have threatened the survival of several long-established regional regimes. It remains to be seen what the outcome of the long transitional phases will be in several Arab countries, and how this will affect regional regimes and hence the possibility of conflict in the Middle East.

The Arab–Israeli conflict Few conflicts in the world have attracted as much attention as the Arab–Israeli one. The term “Arab–Israeli conflict” refers to a set of separate (albeit connected) issues between the state of Israel and different Arab states and groups. The Palestinian–Israeli conflict is the central aspect but by no means the only one. Throughout its brief history, the state of Israel has had conflictridden relations with most of its Arab neighbours and was involved in five major armed conflicts and a high number of smaller military confrontations. The conflict strongly affected the patterns of amity and enmity in the whole region, and while its importance might have faded with the decline of Arabism, it remains a central issue in regional politics. Given the space constraints, this chapter will provide only a brief historical overview of the Arab–Israeli conflict, before looking at more contemporary aspects of the conflict.

The Arab–Israeli conflict: a brief historical overview The roots of the Arab–Israeli conflict can be traced to the emergence and development of the Zionist movement, and its clash with the Arab inhabitants of the region (Devine 2009). Zionism as a political project called for the establishment of a national state for the Jewish people and is usually associated with the figure of Theodor Herzl (Laquer 2003). Herzl, a Hungarian born 292

Conflict in the Middle East

Jewish journalist, was the founder of the World Zionist Organization and the author of Der Judenstaat (1896), a volume that can be seen as the “political manifesto” of Zionism. Helped by the successive waves of anti-Jewish pogroms and by the general situation of Jews in Eastern Europe, the Zionist movement led the relocation of Jews from different parts of the world to Palestine (Laquer 2003). During the World War I years London had committed to different (and ultimately contradictory) promises. With the 1917 Balfour declaration in particular, Britain had promised to favour the creation of a “national home for the Jewish people in Palestine” albeit “respecting the rights of the existing population” (Laquer and Rubin 2007). This promise was in stark contrast with the one made to Sharif Hussain of Mecca the previous year. In this exchange of letters, the British High commissioner to Egypt Sir Henry MacMahon promised (at least part of) the territory of historic Palestine as part of an independent Arab state in exchange for Arab support against the Ottomans (Laquer and Rubin 2007). Despite this agreement, in the aftermath of World War I, Britain proceeded to divide the region with France, denying Arab statehood. The increase in the Jewish population in Palestine and particularly the acquisition of land by the newcomers led to tension with the existing Arab population (Porat 1995). Britain (in charge of the area from 1920 onwards through a UN mandate) struggled to control the situation. European colonial rule was not destined to last for long. The Arab revolt of 1936–39 in Palestine had strong anti-colonial motives (Rogan 2011), and together with Jewish opposition to the British presence, accelerated London’s retreat from Palestine in the immediate aftermath of World War II. UN resolution 181 of 1947 was the last attempt at dividing the land into a Jewish and an Arab state; its rejection by the Palestinians and the Arab states effectively signalled the start of the first Arab–Israeli war. This conflict resulted in the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and the displacement of a big number of Palestinians (Pappe 2008). The state that won the 1948 war was the practical manifestation of the Zionist ideology. Its leader and first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, was the archetype of a Zionist: born in Poland, socialist, member of the Jewish Legion during World War I. Despite the military triumph in 1948, the first years of the state of Israel were far from plain sailing. Surrounded by hostile Arab states, Israel was born as a “war state.” It is therefore no surprise that it started the two following military confrontations with its Arab neighbours (Bregman 2010). On the 29 October 1956, Israeli forces attacked the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula, and it soon became clear that the action had been co-ordinated with France and Britain, who intervened to take over the Suez Canal (Tal 1996). The action was met with strong international condemnation, with the USSR in particular threatening to intervene in defence of Egypt. President Eisenhower of the United States also strongly opposed the military adventure, and the three war allies were forced into a rather inglorious retreat (Gerges 1994). Much more successful from Israel’s point of view was the 1967 war. Within a few days of the start of the conflict, Israel was able to take over the Sinai and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria and the West Bank (including Jerusalem) from the Kingdom of (Trans) Jordan. The 1973 Yom Kippur (or October) war, initiated by the Arab states, was the first instance in which the Israeli military machine was put in a difficult position by Arab forces (Shlaim 2000). With the help of massive arms deliveries from the United States (by then the closest ally of Israel), the Israeli army managed to stop the Arab advances and overturn the initial gains by the Arab forces. The 1973 war signalled the end of an era in the Arab–Israeli conflict. Up to this date, the conflict had mainly been between the state of Israel and the Arab states that had taken the responsibility to defend the Palestinians. From 1973 onwards the conflict became more “Palestinian– Israeli” and less “Arab–Israeli.” Within a few years, Egypt had started its process of reconciliation with Israel and the US, which would ultimately result in the 1979 Camp David Accords. 293

Francesco Belcastro

The symbol of this new phase in the Arab–Israeli conflict was Yassir Arafat, chairman of the group Fatah and leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. The journey of the PLO and of its leaders was a rough and difficult one (Sayigh 1997). Founded in 1964 by the LAS under Egyptian sponsorship, the PLO was based in Jordan after the 1967 Arab defeat. The Palestinian militias soon clashed with King Hussein and his forces and in September 1970 (the infamous Black September) the crisis escalated into a full-blown “civil war.” This confrontation resulted in the crushing of the PLO and its relocation to Beirut. Within a few years the Palestinian fighters were one of the key parties in the civil war that started in Lebanon in 1975 (Fisk 1990). Chased and defeated by the Israeli army, in 1982 the PLO leadership was forced to leave Beirut and relocate to Tunis. From the distant Tunisian capital, the Palestinian leadership could only observe the start of the Intifada (literally the “Shake off”) in 1987. This popular movement of protest against Israeli occupation started in the Gaza Strip and quickly spread throughout occupied Palestine. With the protesters mostly young and disarmed, the image of the First Intifada was that of Israeli soldiers shooting at Palestinian children throwing stones (Sayigh 1997). The First Intifada was therefore a huge PR disaster for the state of Israel. It was against the backlash of the First Intifada that Israel and the PLO (together with other Arab states) started the Oslo process (Smith 2012). The 1989 Palestinian “Declaration of Independence,” recognizing the 1948 division of the land (and therefore Israel’s right to existence), had created the basis for a negotiating process. The Oslo process lasted for most of the 1990s and resulted in the creation of the Palestinian Authority (an “embryo” of the future Palestinian state), the system still in place today. It also saw negotiations between Israel and other Arab states that resulted in 1994 in a peace agreement between Israel and the Kingdom of Jordan. The Oslo process ultimately collapsed with the failure of the Camp David meeting in 2000 (Roy 2007).

The Arab–Israeli conflict today The Oslo process represented a watershed in the history of the Arab–Israeli conflict: not only was it the most serious push towards a negotiated solution of the conflict to date, but it also created the institutional framework that is still in place today. The process had raised big expectations of a solution to the conflict, and its collapse was followed by an immediate increase in violence. The Second Intifada started after the then-leader of the Israeli opposition Ariel Sharon made a provocative visit to the Temple Mount, causing the start of clashes between Palestinians and Israeli security forces (for this reason it is also referred to as Intifada al-Aqsa). The Intifada al-Aqsa was more of a “military” uprising than the First Intifada and lasted till 2005. But the “consequences” of the Oslo process extended much further than 2005. The Oslo process institutionalized Palestinian representation by establishing the Palestinian Authority (PA), in theory creating the basis for the establishment of a Palestinian state (Meital 2006). The West Bank was divided into three zones (denominated A–B–C) under Palestinian, shared and Israeli control respectively. This solution was designed to be transitional, but the failure of the peace process and the imbalance of forces on the ground in favour of Israel allowed the latter to strengthen the grip of its military occupation in the West Bank through an aggressive settlement policy. This policy has seen an exponential increase in the number of Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, in clear violation of international law and particularly of the 1949 4th Geneva Convention whose article 49 strictly prohibits the transfer of population in territories under military occupation (UN Geneva Convention 1949). Particularly dire is the situation around Jerusalem, where the Arab Eastern part of the city is now surrounded by Israeli settlements that separate it from the West Bank (ICG 2012). Amid the failure of a series of attempts to re-start the peace process, the increase in the number of Israeli settlers threatens to seriously undermine any hope for a two-state solution. 294

Conflict in the Middle East

The aftermath of the Oslo process also saw a complete split between the two main Palestinian factions, the PLO and the Islamist movement Hamas. As a result of the 2006 “Palestinian civil war,” the PA lost control over the Gaza Strip, which remained under the control of Hamas (Ghanem 2010). Nominally “freed” after Israel’s withdrawal in 2005, Gaza has been subject to a nearly total blockade by the Israeli forces. Furthermore, in the attempt to reduce Hamas’ military capabilities and curtail the flow of rockets fired from the Strip, Israel waged four wars on Gaza within less than 10 years (2006, 2008, 2010–11, 2014) significantly worsening the economic and living situations in the Strip. Faced with the inability to obtain any real progress in negotiations, the Palestinian Authority has since 2011–12 attempted to reshape its foreign policy. This new strategy is centred around international law and the recognition of Palestinian rights and status: its most evident example has been the United Nations General Assembly vote to upgrade the status of the Palestinians to that of a “non-member observer state.” The other significant development of the last few years has been a worsening in the relation between Israel and its Western allies. Most European states appear to have grown increasingly critical of Israel policies in the occupied territories (Beaumont 2016), and the same Israeli policies have created tensions with the US, Israel’s main supporter. Israel itself is going through a phase of change, with the political balance of the country moving clearly towards the religious right. The formation of governments dominated by radical religious forces has dramatically reduced the possibilities of any progress towards the resolution of what remains the most intractable conflict in the Middle East.

Conclusion This chapter has shown how conflict and instability have been a feature of Middle Eastern politics from the beginning of the modern state system up to today. The roots of conflict and instability in the region are several: from the systemic and state-level weaknesses inherited from the colonial era to the regional distribution of power. Most of these factors are structural rather than temporary: this explains why instability and conflict have persisted in the Middle East despite changes at the regional and global level. For the same reason, it is logical to expect that conflict will not disappear from the region in the foreseeable future. Similarly, the main “patterns of competition,” from the Arab–Israeli conflict to the Saudi–Iranian rivalry, are wellestablished and unlikely to fade in the near future barring dramatic changes (but it is important to keep in mind how these are not an absolute rarity in regional politics). The Arab Uprisings have undoubtedly altered regional politics, but they have exacerbated existing divisions rather than creating new ones. It is easy to see how the Syrian or Yemeni civil war are strongly affected by the existing regional balance, but much harder to foresee the long-term effects that these changes will have on the region and on the possibility for conflict and conflict resolution. So far, the collapse of state structures in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen contributed sharply to the overall conflict and instability in the region.

References Aron, R. (1966), Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations, New York, NY: Garden City. Beaumont, P. (18 January 2016), “EU adopts resolution criticising Israeli settlement Activity,” Guardian, 5. Bregman, A. (2010), Israel’s Wars: A History Since 1947, third edition, Abingdon: Routledge. Buzan, B. and O. Waever (2003), Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Devine, D. (2009), Exiled in the Homeland: Zionism and the Return to Mandate Palestine, Austin, TX: Texas University Press. Donovan, J. (2011), The Iran–Iraq War: Antecedents and Conflict Escalation, London: Routledge. 295

Francesco Belcastro

Ehteshami, A. and R. Hinnebusch (2002), Syria and Iran: Middle Powers in a Penetrated Regional System, second edition, London: Routledge. Fawcett, L. (2013). “Alliances and regionalism in the Middle East,” in ed, L. Fawcett, The International Relations of the Middle East, pp. 185–204, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fawn, R. and R. Hinnebusch (2006), The Iraq War: Causes and Consequences, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Fisk, R. (1990), Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gaddis, J.L. (2007), The Cold War: A New History, London: Penguin Books. Gerges, F. (1994), The Superpowers and the Middle East: Regional and International Politics, 1955–1967, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Ghanem (2010), Palestinian Politics After Arafat, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Halliday, F. (2005), The Middle East in International Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hansen, B. (2001), Unipolarity in the Middle East, New York, NY: St Martin’s. Herzl, T. (1896), Der Judenstaat [The Jewish State], New York: Dover Publications. Hilsum, L. (2012), Sandstorm. Libya from Gaddafi to Revolution, London: Faber & Faber. Hinnebusch, R. (2012), “The politics of identity in Middle East international relations,” in ed, L. Fawcett, International Relations of the Middle East, pp. 148–66, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hinnebusch, R. and R. Tur (2013), Turkey–Syria Relations: Between Enmity and Amity, London: Routledge. Huntington, S. (1991), “Democracy’s third wave,” Journal of Democracy, II:2, 13–34. ICG (2012), Extreme Makeover? (I): Israel’s Politics of Land and Faith in East Jerusalem, Brussels: International Crisis Group. Kerr, M. (1972), The Arab Cold War: Gamel ‘Abd al-Nasir and His Rivals, 1958–70, third edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kozanhov, N. (2016), Arms Exports Add to Russia’s Tools of Influence in Middle East, London: Chatham House. Laquer, W. (2003), A History of Zionism, third edition, London: IB Tauris. Laquer, W. and B. Rubin (2007), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, seventh edition, London: Penguin Books. Legrenzi, M. and M. Calculli (2013), “Middle East security: Continuity amid change,” in L. Fawcett, The International Relations of the Middle East, pp. 205–21, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lustick, M. (1997), “The absence of Middle Eastern great powers: Political ‘backwardness’ in historical perspective,” International Organization, 51:4. McMeekin, S. (2016). Russia Returns to a Middle East it Never Really Left, London: Chatham House. Meital, Y. (2006), Peace in Tatters: Israel, Palestine and the Middle East, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Milton-Edwards, B. and P. Mandaville (2008), “War in the Gulf. Iran and Iraq 1980–1989,” in eds, B. Milton-Edwards and P. Mandaville, Conflict in the Middle East Since 1945, pp. 87–97, London: Routledge. Mufti, M. (1996), Sovereign Creations: Pan-Arabism and Political Order in Syria and Iraq, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Nabers, D. (2010), “Power, leadership and hegemony in international politics,” in ed, D. Flemes, Regional Leadership in the Global System, pp. 51–70, Aldershot: Ashgate. Pappe, I. (2008), A history of Modern Palestine, second edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pipes, D. (1992), Greater Syria. The history of an Ambition, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Porat, Y. (1995), The emergence of the Palestinian-Arab National Movement 1918–1929, Abingdon: Routledge. Rogan, E. (2011), The Arabs: A History, second edition, London: Penguin Books. Roy, S. (2007), Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, London: Pluto. Salloukh, B. (2009), “Democracy in Lebanon: The primacy of the sectarian system,” in eds, N. Brown and E. Shahin, The Struggle over Democracy in the Middle East, pp. 134–50, London: Routledge. Sayigh, Y. (1997), Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National-Movement, 1949–1993, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Seale, P. (1965), The Struggle for Syria: A Study of Post-War Arab Politics 1945–1958, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shlaim, A. (2000), The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, New York, NY: W.W. Norton. Sluglett, P. (2012), “The cold war in the Middle East,” in ed, L. Fawcett, International Relations of the Middle East, pp. 60–76, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, C.D. (2012), Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, eighth edition, Boston, MA: Bedfords. Stansfield, G. (2016), The Kurdish Question Revisited, London: C. Hurst and co. Tal, D. (1996), “Israel’s road to the 1956 War,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 28, 59–81. Traboulsi, F. (2012), A history of modern Lebanon, second edition, London: Pluto Press. 296

21 Regionalism in the Middle East and North Africa Louise Fawcett

This chapter aims to provide an overview, but also the tools for understanding the concept and phenomenon of regionalism in the Middle East. It tracks the progress of Middle East regionalism from its roots in the early twentieth century through to the contemporary, post-Arab Spring era. While regionalism has become an important feature of international politics since 1945, the Middle East’s record of regional organization presents a mixed picture, leading to claims that it is a region “without regionalism” (Aarts 1999). In explaining the motivations and record of Middle East regionalism, this chapter resists the easy generalization that Middle East regionalism has been a failure. As such, it avoids dependence on accounts that measure the successes and failures of regionalism against a European Union yardstick. It argues that regionalism in different world regions needs to be evaluated on its own terms and taking into account local as well as global conditions. After offering a review of regional initiatives, the chapter analyses possible explanations for regionalism in MENA in which considerations of state power and interest are juxtaposed alongside arguments that emphasize domestic considerations and identity politics.

What is regionalism and how to evaluate it? Broadly defined, regionalism involves some form of inter-state co-operation based on world regions. Such regions usually, though not always, refer to states in close geographical proximity. The Middle East region, as defined in the introduction, includes the 22 Arab-speaking states plus Israel, Iran and Turkey. Hence, in discussing Middle East regionalism, we are principally concerned with interactions involving combinations of some or all of these states. Some of the most important of these are the League of Arab States (LAS), the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU). Note that none of these organizations includes Iran, Israel or Turkey: there is no organization, which encompasses all regional states—a point further touched on below. However, regionalism also takes place between certain regional states plus outsiders, or may occur when two groups from different regions co-operate. For example, the Cold War security grouping, the Baghdad Pact (1955–79), involved both regional powers and Great Britain and later the United States when it was renamed the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO). All Middle East states, with the exception of Israel, are members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), founded in 1969, which also includes Islamic 297

Louise Fawcett

countries outside the region. All major oil-producing states are members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Iran and Turkey are members of the Economic Conference Organization (ECO), founded in 1985, an organization originally including Pakistan and Afghanistan and later extended to the Central Asian republics. Since the 1990s, the European Union has in place a number of inter-regional arrangements with the League of Arab States and the Gulf Cooperation Council and Arab Maghreb Union as well as individual states. This practice of “inter-regionalism,” widely attributable to European policy, has become more widespread and also extends beyond Europe to relationships between the Middle East and East/Southeast Asia for example (Telò, Fawcett and Ponjaert 2015). Regionalism is also used to refer to attempts that go beyond inter-state co-operation to include small state federations like the United Arab Emirates, or unity schemes like the United Arab Republic (Tripp 1995). Regionalism therefore takes on many forms and displays a variety of features covering a range of activities including economic, social, political and security co-operation; it has also changed over time with “new” regionalism identified with the opportunities of the post-Cold War period. In this sense, when thinking about regional co-operation in the Middle East, it is helpful to look at regional phenomena from a broad and flexible perspective. It is also helpful to look not only at the different initiatives within the Middle East region itself, but also to look at the state of regionalism around the world and at regionalism as a global process, which provides important context and allows for comparison and deeper analysis. Regional organization never takes place in a vacuum, but rather is informed by wider processes and patterns. A few key regional examples illustrate this point. First, the League of Arab States was among the earliest regional organizations, almost a “twin” of the UN (Moussa 2012), and arguably remains the most important organization among Arab states—at least at a symbolic level. However, it was established in a climate where other regional organizations were also in the process of formation, and against the backdrop of World War II and the United Nations, which accommodated the parallel growth of regionalism within the rubric of its Charter (Fawcett 2016). Second, the GCC, partly a response to the insecure environment created by the Iranian revolution in 1979, was established in a late Cold War environment in which there was a growth in regional security organization in regions of the developing world. Finally, a further development in regionalism after the Arab Spring, saw the adoption by the Arab League and the GCC of UN resolution’s supporting international intervention in Libya and mediation in Syria, which again needs to be understood in terms of a wider international take-up of new norms like the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P), a doctrine endorsing humanitarian intervention, which provided legitimacy to action by international and regional organizations (Bin Talal and Schwarz 2013). In respect of the progress of regionalism, therefore, the story of the Middle East needs to be told against a background of the wider “global processes of regionalism” (Farrell, Hettne and Van Langenhove 2006), which saw regionalism expand from its early bases in most world continents to a much more generalized system, comprising region-wide macro and smaller micro as well as cross-regional organizations, covering a wide range of activities. In regard to these global processes, there has been much emphasis, theoretical and empirical, on the European and North Atlantic experience in the areas of economic integration and security co-operation. Indeed, a key characteristic of studies of regionalism, and one, which will be analyzed here, has precisely been the emphasis on the European project. This is comprehensible given the early importance of the European Union in supplying a pathway to regional integration and providing the theoretical tools to explain it. This does not mean that all regionalisms are the same. The passage of time, and indeed the often-bumpy road travelled by the European Union itself suggests the need to use a wider, more critical perspective when considering other regionalisms and 298

Regionalism in MENA

to take the term global seriously. From the perspective of 2018, the state of regionalism around the world reflects the fact that the EU is but one of a variety of experiences which need to be examined in a historical and comparative context to understand the current importance of the phenomenon. This is as true for the Middle East as other regions whose experiences also merit separate attention.

The Middle East as an outlier? While observing the need for such a comparative and historical perspective, an initial observation about the Middle East should be made—one that will inform this chapter. Regionalism in MENA appears to be relatively less developed than other regions. It is seen as weak institu­ tionally and perhaps unsurprisingly also in terms of delivering basic goals as outlined in the organizations’ charters. This is an uncontroversial statement widely reflected in the literature, which, with few exceptions, provides mostly negative evaluations of Middle East regionalism (Hudson 1999: 10–1; Harders and Legrenzi 2008: 1–2). If true, this is an important finding since it may be argued that the absence of effective institutions constitutes an obstacle to improving regional security and welfare. One objective of this chapter, therefore, is to carefully scrutinize such claims, to reassess the conditions under which regionalism has proceeded and re-evaluate its performance. An immediate problem, already alluded to, is that regionalism, in the Middle East and other developing countries, often has been judged according to a yardstick provided by Western political science models and drawing on Western examples. Mainstream theories of International Relations consider power-based “realist” or “liberal institutionalist” arguments to explain co-operation, or look for evidence of a functioning international society and have tended to side-line arguments about the role of domestic politics, development and ideology, all of which may be critical in explaining the trajectory of any regional project. When looking at the Middle East, it becomes apparent that the dominant theory has been inadequate and needs supplementing; at least an analytically eclectic approach is required to evaluate how leadership, regime type, external influences and wars may influence processes of co-operation.

History and development of regionalism in MENA As suggested above and in the Table 21.1 below the Middle East is not a region without regionalism; regional initiatives have proliferated, though not always resulting in formal organization, nor successful delivery of promised Charter outcomes. However, the latter is true of most regionalisms whose progress has been far from uniform, even where circumstances have been more favourable than those of the MENA region. The table below distinguishes formal organizations from more informal regional initiatives (in italics) and externally from internally driven regionalism. While the establishment of formal organizations dates from 1945, ideas about regionalism and inter-Arab co-operation have a long history dating from the late Ottoman period where Arabs sought to organize themselves in the wake of Ottoman reforms and then following imperial breakdown where Arabs also sought to advocate Arab solutions to the issue of post-colonial statehood. Such Arab solutions, like the proposal in 1920 of Amir Faisal for a united Arab kingdom based on Syria, were often thwarted by the competing aspirations of colonial powers and by divisions among Arabs themselves, but the presence of Arab delegations at the Versailles conference and other post-war treaty negotiations saw intense discussions about desired Arab orders which have continued to influence the progress of regionalism. This next section will briefly review the major regional initiatives since 1945. 299

Louise Fawcett Table 21.1  Regionalism in MENA: a chronology 1:1: Organization/regional initiative

Start/end date

League of Arab States (LAS) LAS Common Market Proposal Baghdad Pact/Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) United Arab Republic Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Economic Conference Organization (ECO) Arab Maghreb Union (AMU) Arab Cooperation Council (ACC) Damascus Declaration Greater Arab Free Trade Area (GAFTA) GCC Customs Union Proposal Arab Peace Initiative LAS/GCC support for Resolution 1973 GCC Union Proposal Saudi–UAE Alliance

1945 1964 1955–79 1958–61 1968 1969 1981 1985 1989 1989–90 1991 1997 2002 2002 2011 2011/12 2017

1:2 Extra-Regional Initiatives/Organizations Involving Local Partners Baghdad Pact Eisenhower Doctrine Madrid Conference Euro–Mediterranean Partnership Programme (EMPP) Greater Middle East Initiative (GMEI) Mediterranean Free Trade Area European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) Union for the Mediterranean (UfM)

1955–79 1957 1991 1995 1997 2004 2004 2008

The League of Arab States1 The League of Arab States, also referred to as the Arab League, was the first formal regional organization, with the LAS Pact entering into force in 1945. From an initial six members (Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan (as modern Jordan was then known), Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Syria), the group expanded to encompass all 22 Arab-speaking states of the region with the Comoros Islands joining last in 1993. Its secretariat is based in Cairo, with a 10-year interlude in Tunis from 1979–89 when Egypt was banished from the League after signing a peace treaty with Israel; its council includes representatives of all member states and Palestine. The League is known as a “multipurpose” organization embracing different issue areas; other such organizations include the Organization of American States and the African Union. Its aims, ambitions and procedures in respect of social, economic and political co-operation are set out in its Charter (Pact of the League of Arab States 1945). In it there was, as Michael Barnett (1998: 70) notes, “something for everyone”: after a preamble which emphasizes the strengthening of links between Arab states, subsequent articles speak of collaboration and co-ordination, and of independence and sovereignty revealing the inherent tensions between these contradictory commitments. Such tensions have never been fully removed, arguably to the detriment of the organization; however, the League compromise, another scholar argues, was a starting point: 300

Regionalism in MENA

“the loose form of association provided for in the Pact represented the most that Arabs could agree on in the circumstances” (Gomaa 1977: 26). Other articles set out procedures for dealing with conflict and mediation by the Council, establishing the League’s early collective security credentials in line with the United Nations and other collective security organizations (Kelsen 1948: 783–4). After the defeat of Arab armies by Israel in 1948, a collective defence treaty was signed in 1950. The Charter also includes an “Annex on Palestine” supporting its “existence and right to independence” and making provision for a representative from Palestine at the League, until such a time as full independence was achieved. Though providing a basis for Arab solidarity on the Israel/Palestine issue, the Arab League was unable diplomatically or militarily to counter the consolidation of the Israeli state or to resolve inter-Arab divisions (Zacher 1979: 166). Indeed, most major peace initiatives in respect of the Arab–Israel question have been externally brokered. Subsequent reforms and additions to the League have been mooted, including the establishment of an Arab Court of Justice, an Arab Parliament and an Arab Charter on Human Rights. While the former has not materialized, the Arab Parliament, first discussed in 2004, held its first meeting in Cairo in 2012, while a Human Rights Charter came into force in 2008, though it remains unratified by around half of League members (Rishmawi 2010). As shall be seen in the following discussion, there are few instances where the abovementioned clauses relating to collective security and defence have been invoked and a favourable outcome ensued. In the region’s major wars, including the different Arab–Israel conflicts, the Iran–Iraq War, Gulf War of 1991, and Iraq War, the LAS has been either ineffective, divided or quiescent. Nor has the League proved to be a particularly effective vehicle for promoting economic integration, despite attempts to realize a common market, first articulated in the 1960s, or a Greater Arab Free Trade Area (GAFTA) proposed in 1997, though some progress towards this goal has been achieved. Despite regular summit meetings and some high points of Arab co-operation in its 70-year history, the League has not been a major regional actor, and has been much criticized for its record of disunity and poor governance. Notwithstanding such critiques, however, recent scholarship has argued that from a wider and longer perspective, “partial contribution to success” rather than outright failure may be a more appropriate description of the League’s record (Pinfari 2009). The League was able to play a significant negotiating role in a number of regional conflicts including the Iraq–Kuwait crisis of 1961; the Yemen civil war of 1962–67 and the Lebanese conflict of 2005–08; it intervened in many more (Nye 1971; Dakhlallah 2012). It endorsed, in 2002, a Saudi-brokered Arab peace initiative to facilitate a political settlement for Palestine (Shlaim 2000: 738–40) and in 2011 supported UN Resolution 1973 resolution on intervention in Libya. At that time, the more activist position of the League in respect of Arab Spring was a cause for celebration and speculation that the organization was enjoying a long-awaited revival (Elgindy 2012). However, any celebration of the League’s newfound roles proved somewhat premature, as despite early expressions of support for UN Resolutions on Libya and Syria, the organization has been divided over the question of how to respond to ongoing regional crises and the Iran nuclear deal of 2015. At the League’s 2017 summit in Mauritania, only 7 of 22 leaders attended. The LAS as the first, pan-Arab organization, embodying the hopes and expectations of Arab leaders and peoples, remains a flagship in the regional environment, despite widespread disappointment over what many see as its lacklustre performance. While the League has failed to serve as an umbrella organization to promote and co-ordinate further regional co-operation (as has been the case of the African Union), since its foundation there have been a series of regional initiatives, also consistent with developments in other regions and also the continuing attempts by outside powers to create a favourable economic and security environment for their interests during both 301

Louise Fawcett

the Cold War and in post-Cold War period. In terms of formal organization, the most important of these is the GCC, but the following sections consider a range of different initiatives —both internally and externally driven—with different goals and orientations. Though some only lasted a few years, like the United Arab Republic and Arab Cooperation Council, they deserve independent consideration as indicative both of the progress and state of regionalism and the particular features of the MENA case; their results are then evaluated in the final section.

Alliances, organizations and unions (1955–75) The Baghdad Pact, established in 1955, later to become the CENTO and comprising Great Britain, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and Turkey, was an effort first by Britain, then the United States to protect local security concerns through a regional alliance system, which was heavily skewed towards the interests of the Western powers (Jasse 1991). Alongside, the Eisenhower Doctrine (1957), a US presidential initiative, it was a poorly disguised vehicle for Western containment against the forces of Arab nationalism and their perceived links with the communist USSR. As such, it was viewed with increasing hostility by Arabs—many of whom increasingly favoured a non-aligned stance—and saw the first the defection of Iraq in 1959, then Iran in 1979, after which the organization folded. A very different attempt at union was that between republican Egypt and Syria in 1958, the United Arab Republic (UAR). Harnessing the popular sentiment of Arab nationalism to the charismatic leadership and actions of Egypt’s president Nasser, it could have represented an important and innovative development in political integration. However, the overwhelming dominance of Egypt—in military and security matters, for example—led to increasing tensions and the Syrians finally withdrew from the arrangement in 1961. A further effort at an Arab federation followed in 1971, this time between Egypt, Syria and Libya, and similarly failed. Ultimately, despite the popular appeal of Arabism, state sovereignty, though still a relatively new concept in parts of the region, prevailed over attempts at political union. Political union in the form of federation, however, was possible in 1971 when the United Arab Emirates (UAE) was founded following the British withdrawal from the Gulf. For the seven small emirates concerned, the UAE was a successful collective arrangement reflecting “political necessity and economic and social convenience” (Heard Bey 1999:136). The Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC), a regional economic organization consisting of major Arab oil producers, was founded in 1968. Not to be confused with the multinational organization, OPEC, which was founded in 1960, it achieved notoriety in the 1973 Arab–Israel War when OAPEC members suspended oil production in response to the perceived pro-Israeli stance of the Western powers. Their actions contributed to a ten-fold increase in oil prices in the following decade. Though OAPEC, whose initial membership of three expanded to include 11 Arab states by 1982, could have served as an effective vehicle for the co-ordination of Arab oil policies and interests, it has never again sought to use the “oil weapon” in the same way. An important cross-regional initiative originating from the same period (1969) is the OIC. Comprising 57 Islamic countries from around the world, it has acted as a forum for discussion and, occasionally, collective action on issues concerning the economics and security of its membership. Despite its symbolic importance as a pan-Islamic organization, the often-conflicting interests of its powerful member states (Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey for example) mean that difficult political discussions are often avoided (Mandaville 2019: 194). While the OIC, like the LAS, endorsed early UN Resolutions on Libya and Syria, its members were divided over issues like the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen against the Houthi Uprising. 302

Regionalism in MENA

New regional initiatives in the eighties Chronologically, the next phase in region building came in the 1980s and was marked by the establishment of three new Arab organizations the GCC, ACC and AMU, and one non-Arab one, the ECO. Of these, the GCC has undoubtedly proved to be the most significant and enduring. All marked a new trend in regionalism, which also coincided with ongoing developments elsewhere in the world. These were “sub-regional” organizations, representing a move away from a pan-Arabist agenda towards smaller, more streamlined bodies oriented towards specific states and specific functions (Ryan 1999). The GCC, comprising the six Arab Gulf states of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates was founded in 1981. In part it can be seen as a trend towards sub-regional organization developing in a late Cold War environment, showing greater assertiveness of regional players; in part a response to specific regional threats, notably the 1979 revolution in Iran, whose contagion was much feared by the Gulf leaders, and marked by its external orientation, which was pro-Western. Shared regime type (all GCC states are monarchies), historical links, together with common economic and security concerns have undoubtedly provided a useful base for functional cooperation and concerted action which has strengthened over time, though in speaking of the GCC it is still in the individual states where power resides rather than in collective institutions. In this sense, there is no obvious sovereignty pooling, yet the success of individual GCC states has been influential in creating a favourable environment for investment and trade, one that has been strengthened through a customs union establishing a common external tariff established in 2015. While the GCC Charter places emphasis on economic and social issues, mirroring aspects of the EU treaties, external security has always been an important motivating factor and despite longstanding reliance on Western support, attempts to upgrade its security have been a characteristic of the organization. After the creation of the Peninsular Shield force in 1984, attempts at upgrading included the Damascus Declaration following the Gulf War (1991), which envisaged that Gulf security would be reinforced by the powerful armies of Egypt and Syria—another move away from a LAS-centred approach. In developments following the Iraq War of 2003 and the Arab Spring Uprisings, which started late in 2010, GCC states have continued to consolidate their regional position, a reflection of an emerging power shift favouring the wealthy and relatively stable Gulf monarchies in a highly volatile regional system. In 2011, Saudi Arabia’s then King Abdullah proposed a GCC Union—a bid to strengthen the existing institutional arrangement and to “reposition” the grouping in the light of new regional threats (Coates Ulrichsen 2011). Indeed, this idea of repositioning is a useful one when considering how, since its foundation, the GCC, has sought to maximize its capabilities in a changing regional security environment. This proposal was followed up a few years later by discussions of extending GCC membership to the fellow monarchies of Jordan and Morocco, although nothing came of this. The enhanced power of the GCC grouping is particularly visible given the relative passivity of the Arab League in the light of multiple security challenges. In respect of the Arab Uprisings and their aftermath, the GCC has been more active than any other regional organization, offering support to international intervention over Libya, playing first a mediating, then an interventionist role in Yemen and in the Syrian civil war. It responded to unrest against a fellow monarchy in Bahrain by utilizing its Peninsular Shield forces to quell disorder, though this was a controversial decision internally and internationally. Diplomatic disruption within the grouping occurred after the unseating of the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt in 2013 with Qatar continuing to support the Muslim Brotherhood against Saudi opposition. In 2017, a Saudi-led “Quartet” sought further to isolate Qatar by imposing a blockade. 303

Louise Fawcett

Despite its limitations, and such rivalries, the GCC has proved to be one of the region’s most successful and resilient regional organizations and has provided a favourable environment for trade and co-operation and interaction with other world regions (Legrenzi 2011). Indeed, one recent measure of the GCC’s importance is the extent to which it has expanded economic ties with Asia and Africa in particular, breaking away from an earlier dependence on Western powers. Given the declining salience of the LAS as a pan-Arab body and the corresponding growth of the GCC, this may be further evidence that the regional balance of power is shifting and the economically powerful Arab monarchies are pulling regionalism in a new direction. The GCC was part of a new trend towards economic and security regionalism, and one which flourished in the relatively hospitable atmosphere of like-minded states with similar economic and security concerns. Less successful and enduring than the GCC, have been two groupings which also developed in the late 1980s and in line with parallel developments elsewhere. The Arab Maghred Union founded in 1989 comprising Morocco, Algeria, Mauritania, Tunisia and Libya, aimed at deepening existing economic and social ties between North African countries, and was influenced by developments in the neighbouring EU and also by an improved political climate among North African states—notably Algeria and Morocco. Though the organization achieved some early small steps towards interdependence, inter-regional trade (as opposed to trade between individual states and Europe) remains small, and continuing political differences and unrest have kept AMU leaders away from summits, hampering efforts at further political co-operation. The Arab Cooperation Council (ACC), like the Arab League, emphasized its Arab credentials, envisaging that expansion would build upon its initial membership of four Iraq, Jordan, Egypt and North Yemen (1989). Like the AMU it appears to have been influenced by promising developments in European integration and aspired to promote a parallel economic grouping. It also represented a move to reintegrate Egypt into the Arab world after its exclusion following the Camp David accords. Finally, it has been suggested that Iraqi containment was another goal. As such it was a failure since Iraq’s intervention in Kuwait followed only a year after its foundation and deeply divided the new organization, with Egypt providing support to the international coalition against Iraq, after which the organization effectively disbanded. Though it has been argued that the ACC promised to offer the region a different type of organization (Ryan 1999), it lacked a cohesive membership and the common set of security interests such as could be identified in the GCC. The Economic Conference Organization merits brief mention. Involving Iran, Pakistan and Turkey, though no Arab state, it was founded in 1985. Providing an alternative axis of cooperation for these states beyond the region, it expanded in 1991 to include Afghanistan and the new Central Asian republics. As discussed below, the ECO is perhaps symbolic of the wider problem of regionalism in MENA—that there are few effective groupings that combine Arab and non-Arab states, though efforts to promote these have been made by external powers as discussed below.

Regionalism from the 1990s Since the 1990s there have been no new MENA organizations as such, though a number of new initiatives within existing organizations, including the GAFTA proposal, Arab Peace Initiative, GCC Customs Union, as well as the collective positions taken, notably by the LAS, on the Lebanese crisis and the early post-Arab Spring events. Outside the structures of formal organization, there have been some potentially promising developments in externally driven episodes of regional co-operation. One important example was the Arab–Israel peace process initiated at 304

Regionalism in MENA

the Madrid talks in 1991, leading to the so-called Oslo accords in 1993. These were followed up by a number of promising multilateral initiatives, giving rise to hopes of a “New Middle East” in which economic co-operation would promote peace (Peres and Noar 1993). There were a series of parallel efforts by the European Union resulting from the so-called Barcelona process to further regional relationships in the Euro–Mediterranean Partnership Programme in 1995, and in a later revamped version, the European Neighbourhood Policy in 2004 (Hollis 2019). In the same year, following a G-8 summit, the US proposed the Greater Middle East Initiative aimed at expanding political participation and combatting extremism across the region. While such initiatives all represented efforts to improve regional order from the perspective of the US or European powers, their achievements mostly did not endure, nor were they translated into any local enhancement of regionalism. The European case is particularly telling given its own institutional capacity, geographical location and historical links to the region. It might reasonably be imagined that the ability of Europe to positively influence regional developments elsewhere would be greater given its proven record of successful integration—this was certainly the aspiration behind the multiple European initiatives of this period. Despite a sustained commitment to a “two-state” solution in respect of the Israel–Palestine conflict, a solution that today looks remote, and improved bilateral relations with a number of countries, it is difficult to speak of more anything more than a “modest” EU achievement (Barbé and Johansson-Nogués 2008). Given Europe’s equivocal position in respect of the Arab Uprisings—as seen in contrasting reactions to the crises in Libya and Syria—(Peters 2012: xv–xvi) and the ongoing crisis at the heart of Europe itself, whether over immigration or Britain’s exit vote—it is difficult to imagine how Europe could become an engine for regional co-operation in MENA. The same is true of international efforts generally: there is little evidence that these have been major factors in the promotion of more successful co-operation in economic and security affairs in MENA. This is particularly so given the reduced appetite for US involvement during the Obama administration and the competitive relations between the US and Russia, but also other rising powers in respect of their Middle Eastern interests. The greater empowerment of the Gulf states, though facilitated through Western support, arms and trade, is not the direct result of external action but the result also of their growing economic importance and relative political stability. In sum, the world of MENA regionalism has seen multiple initiatives from within and without. The growth of regional organizations has followed a pattern present elsewhere with a growing menu of regional options as detailed above. Externally driven multilateral initiatives in support of peace and security have also proliferated. However, in terms of measurable achievements, the results of both are disappointing: low levels of economic and security co-operation; no integration (understood as sovereignty pooling in shared institutions) and no security community contributing towards a regional peace. Despite initial optimism, the Arab Spring Uprisings and local and international responses to them did not inspire new regionalisms but rather revealed just how flimsy the existing regional architecture was. The next section considers theoretical explanations that help to provide an answer to this shortfall.

Explaining regionalism in the Middle East As noted at the start of this chapter, explanations of regionalism derived from International Relations theories typically have focused on state power and state interest and how these can combine to enhance co-operation. The “realist” version advocates that co-operation will be limited and usually short term because states wish to maximize their own interests, and will mistrust others’ intentions; “liberal” versions are more optimistic about co-operation and focus on the facilitating role of institutions. States, informed by state elites, will co-operate under certain 305

Louise Fawcett

favourable conditions because this will help them realize their aims; and institutions provide a useful forum and vehicle for effecting such co-operation. Regionalism presupposes that such institutional co-operation is possible and (usually) desirable and that states will be able agree on a set of common goals and pursue mutual interests (Fawcett 2019). In this sense, theories of international society help to fill in the gaps left by realist and liberal approaches by showing how states come to share common norms about behaviour. Theories of regionalism have recently been further supplemented by arguments that look more closely at how such norms governing state behaviour are constructed, how these may be reflections of states’ very identities and how these are important in making choices about partners and co-operation. This so-called “constructivist” turn has been relevant to the Middle East in discussing the possible roles played by Arab or Islamic identities in framing co-operation (Barnett 1998). In reviewing the state-centred cases of MENA regionalism outlined here, the case for cooperation based on common interests and institutional design looks weak (Barnett and Solingen 2007), and the case for the power-centred, instrumental approach to regionalism strong. With the fracturing of the early LAS consensus and the evident divides within the Arab and Islamic worlds—at least at the state level—the identity-based argument also appears less useful than before. Identity remains highly relevant and currently visible in the sectarian (Shi’i/Sunni/ Kurdish) divides that have been exacerbated by the Arab Uprisings and their consequences. But rather than providing an explanation for regionalism, identity appears as an instrument, one that is often manipulated by powerful states to serve their own goals, rather than a driver of co-operation (Monier 2015). From the perspective of 2019, the relative weakness of the LAS reveals the dominance of self-interest, high levels of insecurity and absence of trust—in short, the absence of any ‘security community’ (Adler and Barnett 1998)—while the GCC suggests the possibility of incremental co-operation in a smaller, though still state-oriented environment when states promote common goals over time. In both the above scenarios, the role played by great powers (or their absence) evidently matters (Lustick 1997). It has been argued that strong regional and external powers can make a difference in promoting or undermining regionalism (Fawcett 2015). It is often pointed out that the problem in MENA is that the absence of regional great powers is reflected in the absence of leadership and strong institutions. However, this argument does not seem to be a sufficient reason for explaining the failures of regionalism. There are strong regional powers: Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Turkey have been, or still are, strong powers (Furtig 2014). Both Egypt historically and more recently Saudi Arabia have been major actors in trying to drive forward a regional consensus, so the issue is not the absence of dominant states, but their inability to unite, or unite over time, effective regional coalitions. This is partly to do with the boundaries and history of the region itself, where competitive relations between Iran, Israel, Turkey and the Arab world, and between Arab states themselves, have prevailed. It also relates to the politics of external powers in promoting or impeding the rise of regional powers likely to serve or contradict their interests. In support of this claim, Hinnebusch (2015) suggests that a core–periphery perspective, which holds that regions like MENA have been subject to the structural constraints posed by hegemonic powers in the international system, is a useful way of understanding the international relations of the Middle East and one that can also explain the deficit in regional co-operation. Yet from the perspective of 2019, as the region appears less bounded by international pressures, it would appear that neither the absence nor presence of internal or external hegemons can provide a sufficient explanation for the comparative absence of regional co-operation. In looking elsewhere for explanations to explain the trajectory of regionalism, domestic politics or regime type is another important and at times neglected variable. Evidence suggests 306

Regionalism in MENA

that like-minded, particularly liberal regimes are more likely to foster co-operative arrangements. Hence the democratic nature of European states has been a positive factor in encouraging integration; in South America, the return to democracy of core states (Argentina and Brazil) was regarded as a cornerstone in the construction of Mercosur; greater liberalization in Africa has also been seen as a unifying force. There is an implication that democratic regimes do better than non-democratic ones in this regard, but this assumption needs testing in the light of the successful experiences of co-operation in parts of Asia, where consensus building (as in the ASEAN family) rather than democratization is seen as a building block of co-operation. In MENA there are diverse regime types (monarchies and republics) but mostly authoritarianism and little democracy and considerable competition between regional powers often aided and abetted by outsiders. In such a scenario, consensus building, such as was attempted in the peace process of the 1990s, or in the proposal for a Conference on Security and Cooperation in the Mediterranean seems a more promising way to think of co-operation. Such a region-wide consensus, however, is yet to emerge, and the inability to overcome regional divides remains a key obstacle. The LAS is a large group, populated mostly by authoritarian regimes, but with very different perspectives on regional order, and has hitherto failed to establish a security community even between its own members. The GCC, in contrast, enjoys greater regime cohesion, making for more streamlined procedures and has come closer to achieving co-operation, but represents only a small group of regional states. The wider point about regime type is important however: regimes that fail to make compromises and negotiate with domestic partners and opposition groups are less likely to make compromises with external partners and potential competitors (Tripp 1995), though short-term alliances of expediency are possible. Alongside regime type, leadership styles—consensual or confrontational—also matter. Most regionalisms have been influenced by charismatic leaders, and MENA is no reception—as the case of Nasser and the LAS show. Non-responsive authoritarians are much less likely to seek co-operative solutions and are more likely to impose their will on weaker partners, as illustrated by the case of Saddam Hussein’s wars. The identity variable has been mentioned above, and constructivism is critical of the limits posed by rational theories that focus on narrow interpretations of state power and interest highlighting instead how the (re)construction of state power and interest is subject to multiple influences. Critical theory more generally has something to tell us about the problems and prospects of regionalism by unpacking the very concept and content of region itself (Bilgin 2005). Rather than simply accepting the dominant narrative about the MENA region and its constituent parts—states—and asking why states in a given region do or do not co-operate, it could be more productive to re-examine both the definition and extent of the region and the actors that define it. If regions and their dominant actors are redefined along different lines as in the suggestive designation: “Muslim Middle East,” perhaps the prospects for a new narrative of co-operation between peoples could emerge. These prospects were briefly visible after the Arab Uprisings where Arab peoples sought to redefine their politics and international relations. Yet, ultimately, the traditional definition of MENA and with it, its state-like features, remains despite multiple challenges (Fawcett 2017). Even the Arab Uprisings have not led to significant redrawing of conflict and co-operation, whatever the hopes and fears of status quo and radical states and groups. So, while externally constructed notions of region, like imposed state constructions, may have hindered co-operation, we should also be wary of assuming that a people-centred approach would necessarily overcome the divisions of state-based regionalisms. Regions, like states, have become constructions of convenience, receptacles of power and identity and are designed for different purposes in a complex and interdependent world. In a world of regions still principally comprised of states it is hard to reimagine a radically different 307

Louise Fawcett

MENA configuration. What is possible is domestic transformation such that states and regimes become more accountable to their own peoples and institutions; making them more legitimate states in the eyes of their populations and the wider world and thus more effective partners in international organizations. In addition to the explanations offered above, one could add in a number of arguments about functional co-operation and spillovers associated with processes of regional integration (Haas 1958). Where the interests of states, regimes and elites align, functional co-operation and then spillovers resulting from that co-operation can readily occur. Europe is the exemplary case here where such state/elite interests and common functions aligned in early iterations of cooperation (and neo-functionalism was a mainstay of early EU theorizing). But for functionalism to work, certain conditions need to be in place: notably an alignment of interests and clearly identified functions over which to co-operate, whether in areas relating to economics, politics and security, and an institutional framework to deliver on such co-operation. As discussed above, these conditions have largely been absent in MENA. For a long time after most states achieved full independence there was little internal trade; high levels of underdevelopment, political conflict and insecurity. Regimes were concerned about their own security and survival, and regional co-operation was invariably subservient to that goal. Theoretical explanations derived from International Relations scholarship are useful in framing the debate about regionalism, but ultimately fail to deliver in respect to the trajectory of regionalism in MENA. As hinted above, multiple factors, including the changing domestic and international environments are crucial to understanding the possibilities and limitations of regionalism. Power alone is not enough unless it is power based upon regime legitimacy and supportive institutions as vehicles of economic, social and political change.

Conclusion This chapter has sought to provide an overview of Middle East regionalism within an international context in which regionalism has assumed greater importance in the structures of global governance. Regionalism in the Middle East is located within these structures, yet has developed its own pathway and unique features reflecting time and place. Major developments in the last 70 years, like the Cold War and its ending, have impacted on patterns of co-operation in MENA, as in other parts of the world. In MENA itself, while the establishment of independent states and the Arab–Israel conflict had an important impact on early efforts at regional co-operation, more recent events like the Iraq War and Arab Spring have also influenced its potential, by shifting the regional balance of power along new axes and giving rise to a more fluid and multipolar regional system. So far, this new multi-polarity has not yielded new regionalisms: for example, the kinds of greater regional projects that characterized Europe before the end of the Cold War, or East Asia since its ending. Reasons for this are many and varied and relate to domestic concerns, regional conditions and international politics alike. There is both fragmentation and competition among regional powers. States like Turkey, Iran and Israel, though all facing an array of domestic concerns, are strong states but not, at present, obvious regional leaders, nor are they embedded in local institutions, though this could change. Greater weight has been afforded to the Arab Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia, whose power and influence is reflected in the collective strength of the GCC grouping. And the GCC, to some extent, sought to lead a new “Arab” consensus. The GCC, however, like the LAS, remains a heavily statist institution with little appetite for pooling of sovereignty or deeper integration. Indeed state-centrism is a hallmark of regionalism in MENA, one that has grown as states have become more established and Arab unity has weakened. Certainly, this statist interpretation is under attack by multiple groups 308

Regionalism in MENA

and actors within and between states—as demonstrated by the massive response of Middle Eastern peoples in the Arab Uprisings. Yet it has not resulted in any major changes to the existing landscape, which is likely to remain one based upon the existing state framework. The current, more explicit emphasis on state sovereignty does not preclude regional cooperation—most regional institutions in most parts of the world are state-centric; however, it does limit its potential. In taking a critical and plural perspective on the factors driving regionalism historically and at present this chapter has sought to assess regionalism in MENA on its own terms and take a distance from models and explanations focusing on evidence of economic integration or a security community. Since 1945, there have been significant developments in regional organization in MENA and some important episodes of co-operation both in groupings like the LAS and GCC. The possibilities of externally led macro-regional projects, as in the Greater Middle Eastern, Mediterranean or European Neighbourhood initiatives, have also been discussed. However, while regionalism has been subject to multiple external influences, including those of the former colonial, then Cold War and post-Cold War powers, successful regionalism ultimately will depend upon a set of variables that are internal to the region including regime type, security and economic conditions. Multiple obstacles remain, but leaving aside unrealistic expectations of regional integration, and considering the possibilities of state-to-state co-operation and consensus building, there is no reason why the LAS or GCC, or another macro grouping could not come to provide an umbrella for regional groups such has occurred in the African Union or the ASEAN family. In 2019 contrasting views regarding regional futures prevail. The first builds upon the view of MENA as an imploding region where states are artificial constructs, where conflict and rivalry predominate and regionalism is a distant dream. Another scenario is that beyond the current turmoil of a region in flux, new political arrangements and new configurations of power will emerge with fresh opportunities for region building (Dessouki 2014). After the fall out from the Arab Spring has subsided, the region will likely reveal new avenues for consensus building and co-operation, however distant these may appear today. Developing these pathways within the evolving structures of global governance is the challenge for regional actors and external powers alike.

Notes 1 This section draws on Fawcett 2014.

References Aarts, P. (1999), “The Middle East. A region without regionalism or the end of exceptionalism?” Third World Quarterly, 20, 911–25. Adler, E. and M. Barnett (1998), Security Communities, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Barbé, E. and Johansson-Nogués, E. (2008), “The EU as a modest ‘force for the good’: The European Neighbourhood Policy,” International Affairs, 84:1, 81–6. Barnett, M.N. (1998), Dialogues in Arab Politics: Negotiations in Regional Order, New York, NY: Colombia University Press. Barnett, M. and E. Solingen (2007), “Designed to fail or failure of design? The origins and legacy of the Arab League,” in eds, A. Acharya and A.I. Johnston, Crafting Cooperation. Regional International Institutions in Comparative Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bin Talal, E.H. and R. Schwarz (2013), “The responsibility to protect and the Arab world. An emerging international norm?” Contemporary Security Policy, 34: 1–15. Bilgin, P., (2005), Regional Security in the Middle East, a Critical Perspective, New York, NY: Routledge. Coates Ulrichsen, K. (2011), “Repositioning the GCC in a changing world order,” Journal of Arab Studies, 1/2. 309

Louise Fawcett

Dakhlallah, F. (2012), “The Arab League in Lebanon 2005–2008,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 25: 53–74. Dessouki, A. (2014), “The Arab regional system: A question of survival,” Contemporary Arab Affairs, 8:1, 96–108. Elgindy, K. (2012), “A new and improved Arab League?” Brookings, accessed August 2016, accessible at: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2012/03/27/a-new-and-improved-arab-league Farrell, M., Hettne, B. and Van Langenhove, L. (2006), Global Politics of Regionalism: Theory and Practice, London: Polity. Fawcett, L. (2014), “League of Arab States,” in ed, J. Sperling, Handbook of Governance and Security, pp. 618–37, London: Edward Elgar. Fawcett, L. (2015), “Rising powers and regional organization in the Middle East,” in ed, Gaskarth, J., Rising Powers, Global Governance and Global Ethics, London: Routledge. Fawcett, L. (2016), “Regionalism: From concept to contemporary practice,” in eds, M. Aznar and M. Footer, Proceedings of the European Society of International Law 2012, 4: 7–24, Oxford: Hart Publishing. Fawcett, L. (2017), “States and sovereignty in the Middle East. Myths and realities,” International Affairs, 93:4, 789–807. Fawcett, L. (2019), “Alliances and regionalism in the Middle East,” in ed, L. Fawcett, International Relations of the Middle East, fifth edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Furtig, H. (2014) Regional Powers in the Middle East, London: Palgrave. Gomaa, A.M. (1977), The Foundation of the League of Arab States, London: Longman. Haas, E. (1958), The Uniting of Europe, Political, Social and Economic Forces 1950– 57, London: Library of World Affairs. Harders, C. and Legrenzi, M. (eds, 2008) Beyond Regionalism? Regional Cooperation, Regionalism and Regionalization in the Middle East, Aldershot: Ashgate. Heard Bey, E. (1999), “The United Arab Emirates,” in M. Hudson, Middle East Dilemma, The Politics and Economics of Arab Integration, New York, Colombia University Press. Hinnebusch, R., (2015), The International Politics of the Middle East, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hollis, R. (2019), “Europe and the Middle East,” in ed, L. Fawcett, International Relations of the Middle East, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hudson, M. (ed, 1999), Middle East Dilemma: The Politics and Economics of Arab Integration, New York, NY: Colombia University Press. Jasse, R.L. (1991), “The Baghdad Pact: Cold War or colonialism?” Middle Eastern Studies, 27:1, 140–56. Kelsen, H. (1948), “Collective security and collective self defence under the charter of the United Nations,” American Journal of International Law, 42: 783–96. Lake, D. and P. Morgan (1997), Regional Orders: Building Security in a New World, College Station, TX: Penn State University Press. Legrenzi, M. (2011), The GCC and the International Relations of the Gulf, London: IB Tauris. Luciani, G. and G. Salame (eds, 1988), The Politics of Arab Integration, London: Croom-Helm. Lustick, I., (1997), “The absence of Middle Eastern great powers: Political backwardness in historical perspective,” International Organization, 51:4, 653–83. Maddy-Weitzman, B. (2012), “The Arab league comes alive,” Middle East Quarterly, 19:3, 71–8. Maddy-Weitzmann, B. (2016), A Century of Arab Politics. From the Arab Revolt to the Arab Spring, London: Rowman and Littlefield. Mandaville, P. (2019), “Islam and International Relations in the Middle East,” in ed, L. Fawcett, International Relations of the Middle East, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moaz, Z. (2003), “The Domestic politics of regional security,” in eds, Z. Maoz, E. Landau and T. Malz, Building Regional Security in the Middle East: International, Regional and Domestic Influences, London: Frank Cass. Monier, E. ed. (2015), Regional Security after the Arab Uprisings: Narratives of Security and Threat, London: Palgrave. Moussa, A. (2012), “The UN and the League of Arab States,” in ed, P. De Lombaerde, F. Baert and T. Felicio, The United Nations and The Regions, New York, NY: Springer. Nye, J. (1971), Peace in Parts: Integration and Conflict in Regional Organization, Boston, MA: Little Brown. Pact of the League of Arab States (22 March 1945), accessible at: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_ century/arableag.asp Rishrawi, M. (2010), “The Arab Charter on Human Rights and the League of Arab States: An Update,” Human Rights Law Review, 10: 169–78. 310

Regionalism in MENA

Rogan, E. (2016), “The emergence of the Middle East into the modern states system,” in ed, L. Fawcett, International Relations of the Middle East, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ryan, C. (1999), “Jordan and the rise and fall of the Arab Cooperation Council,” Middle East Journal, 52:3, 386–401. Peres, S. and A. Noar (1993), The New Middle East, New York, NY: Henry Holt. Peters, J. (2012), The European Union and the Arab Spring, New York, NY: Lexington Books. Pinfari, M. (2009), “Nothing but failure? The Arab League and the Gulf Cooperation Council as mediators in Middle Eastern conflicts,” CSRC Working Paper, No. 45, London: London School of Economics. Shlaim, A. (2000), The Iron Wall, London: Penguin. Telò, M., Fawcett, L. and Ponjaert, F. (eds, 2015), Inter-regionalism and the European Union, Farnham: Ashgate. Tripp. C. (1995), “Regional organizations in the Arab Middle East,” in eds, L. Fawcett and A. Hurrell, Regionalism in World Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zacher, M.W. (1979), International Conflicts and Collective Security 1946–1977: The United Nations, Organization of American States, Organization of African Unity, and Arab League, New York, NY, and London: Praeger.

311

22 An exceptional context for a debate on international relations? Toward a synthetic approach to the study of the MENA’s international politics Pietro Marzo and Francesco Cavatorta

Introduction Writing in 2005, Halliday argued convincingly that the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) was undoubtedly one of the regions of the world where great power confrontation had survived the end of the Cold War. Karsh (1997) had made the same point a few years earlier and examining the international relations of the MENA in 2018 further confirms that the region is indeed central to global politics. Scholars of international politics have attempted over time to apply different theories of international relations to the region, but they have encountered a number of difficulties due to the MENA’s perceived exceptional nature. In this chapter, the focus is mainly on the penetration of external actors in the region (Brown 1984) and how MENA countries in turn exploit the international system in what can be thought of as a feedback loop between the local and the global (Cavatorta 2009). After a brief review of how theories of international relations have dealt with the Middle East and North Africa, the chapter chronologically examines some of the most important developments affecting regional politics.

The MENA and international relations: a penetrated system Discussions on the role and position of the Middle East and North Africa on the global stage inevitably begin with the creation of the modern state system in the region following the implosion of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century. While the control of this region, situated at the crossroad of different civilizations and rich in natural resources, has historically been crucial for world powers and would-be world powers, it was the decline of the Ottoman Empire that opened the door for Western powers to invade its territories. The arrival of the “West” since the mid-nineteenth century when France began to colonize Algeria led to a pattern of colonialism and exploitation that eventually resulted in the formation of the modern state system in the Middle East and North Africa. The end of World War I in particular led 312

An exceptional context for a debate on IR?

to the control of the region on the part of foreign powers, notably France and Great Britain, through the mandate system or else direct colonization. After World War II, the mutation of world order and the turnover in global and regional hegemonies decisively affected the political development of the region. While the newly formed states were able to obtain formal independence from mandate or colonial powers, the interests of foreign powers in the control of the region did not end. In fact, it could be argued that the region became even more crucial following the discovery of immense oil and natural gas reserves. The external interventions in such a “penetrated system” not only significantly impacted regional dynamics, but also constrained the choices of domestic elites more than in any other region of the world (Fawcett 2016). An examination of the contemporary political history of the region suggests an exceptional influence of the international dimension in shaping domestic outcomes. Indeed, trajectories of domestic political development and social change are best understood if read through the lenses of international politics (Carapico 2013; Yom 2015; Bush 2017). At the same time, the autonomy and agency of states in the region should not be underestimated. While international systemic pressures and the politics of great powers have impacted on and still impact the way in which regional states behave, these very same states have traditionally had the ability to withstand some of this pressure and have actually employed their resources to influence and manipulate powerful global actors.

IR theory and the region: realism and its rivals What is interesting to note is that in spite of the importance of the region for global powers and world politics from a theoretical point of view the scholarly debates in international relations theory tends to devote little attention to MENA. There are two interlinked reasons for this. First, it seems that realism dominates explanations of state behaviour in the region, and realists believe that what global powers do matters much more for the region than its own dynamics or agency. Second is that when theoretical approaches broadly falling within liberal institutionalism and constructivism are applied in the region, their limited explanatory power is such that scholars employing these approaches end up seeing the region as exceptional. This is in line with the way in which the MENA has been broadly studied, as Orientalist arguments have contributed to spreading the notion of an “exotic complexity” of the context (Lewis 2003) or the region as a monolithic “civilization” where common religious and ideological values shape state behaviour (Huntington 1993). Valbjørn (2017: 649) notes that “the Middle East has usually simply been a testing ground for allegedly universal theories and, if they did not fit, it has been the Middle East rather than the theory that somehow has been considered wrong.” In short, there is little doubt that international variables and global influences have had a decisive impact on contemporary political and social change in the region, especially in the age of globalization. Yet, contemporary theoretical debates on international relations largely ignore the international politics of the MENA region. The latter seems to be more the domain of comparative politics, political sociology and area studies scholars. In contrast, the bulk of production about international relations in the regions is highly descriptive or relies on political analysts, journalists, and think tanks, which focus on anecdotal evidence and policy recommendations whereas theoretical analyses are generally lacking.

Realism and its rivals encounter the Middle East An additional element that helps to understand the lower interest in theoretical debates on regional international relations is a global-centric approach of the dominant IR theories. 313

Pietro Marzo and Francesco Cavatorta

In the second half of the twentieth century, due to the growth of global interactions in a bipolar world, international relations “defined its boundaries” as an independent field of study within political science. The theoretical development of the discipline was particularly helpful in investigating the globalized politics in many regions of the world—that is the incorporation of much of the world into a top-down global system. Structural realism and liberal institutionalism interpreted the international dimension of politics and enhanced explanations of states behaviour in the world system. Although realism dominated the discipline, liberalism— especially since the 1970s—and later constructivism—offered competitive theoretical elaborations to stimulate the debate, but the international politics of the Middle East and North Africa, conversely, appeared immune from a dialogue among different schools of thought and realism overwhelmingly prevailed. The operations of the balance of regional power and the dynamic of transnational alliances in the region seemed consistent with realism. For instance, realist Steven Walt (1987) employed an analysis of Arab states to validate the notions of balancing and bandwagoning. Indeed, during the initial phase of the Cold War, most of the Arab states aligned themselves with one or the other superpower as a function of their national security needs and potential economic and geo-political gains from having a great power patron. The paradigm of rational actors pursuing their raison d’état within the international arena—where insecurity predominates—fitted perfectly with the majority of states’ foreign politics within the region. The dominance of the realism framework has since led some to depict Arab politics as “quintessentially realist” (Stein 2012). Interestingly realist interpretations of international politics in the region are at times in tune with the neo-Marxist approach and dependency theory. Particularly in the wake of US political, cultural and economic penetration, the MENA region became a case of “pattern of dominance” based on core-developed countries dominating less-developed peripheral states through the imposition of values, norms and practices (Ismael 1993). In this regard, Hinnebusch (2010: 19) notes that “the imposition of the state system was paralleled by the fragmentation and more thorough incorporation of the regional economy into the world capitalist system as part of the ‘periphery.’” Transnational alliances between the elites of hegemonic powers and the “dominated” Arab states ensured the survival of such a framework, and at the same time paved the way for the rise of resistance to it amongst the masses. Thus, the interesting aspect is that a neo-Marxist reading of the international relations in the Arab world does not challenge realist explanations for alliances formation, foreign policy and state behaviour. It rather offers a complementary explanation. Liberal institutionalism, however, does compete with Marxist structuralism and realism. Its proponents argue that states decrease the intensity of their conflicts and differences through institutions that allow them to co-operate, although neo-liberal scholars do not deny the presence of self-interest in international relations. During the 1980s and 1990s, liberal institutionalism (Doyle 1986; Fukuyama 1989) raised its profile because developments in institutions and international co-operation led to positive outcomes around the world (Keohane and Martin 1995). Even in the MENA, the economic opening a number of countries initiated—with Arab states participating more consistently in global trade—suggested that binding economic interests could in fact produce greater stability and positive spin-offs for inter-state relations (Aarts 1999). The proliferation of regional organizations such as the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the Arab Maghreb Union (AME), the Arab Cooperation Council (ACC),1 the growth of regional agreements and the access of a larger number of Arab states to international organizations seemed to suggest that neo-liberal institutionalism and international idealism could work in the region, bringing states to conduct informal and formal negotiation to lower tensions (Lake 2009). Yet, the argument raises considerable scepticism when applied to the MENA. The region stood 314

An exceptional context for a debate on IR?

out for the absence of successful systematic efforts at building regional co-operative agreements when it came to trade or security, in sharp contrast with similar successful efforts elsewhere across the globe. Regional institutions floundered (AME), remained ineffective (ACC), or became dominated by a single state (GCC). MENA participation in international organizations did not lead to the transfer of democratic and liberal norms. More broadly, the failure of economic shared interests to develop, retarded their potential for regional unity, contrasted with other regions of the world (Europe, Eastern Asia, Latin and Central America) as MENA states perceived their freedom of action jeopardized by the constraints that regional agreement would impose (Snyder 1997). Likewise, the costs of regional unity through institutional arrangements exceeded the gains for a national interest driven policy in an anarchic system such as MENA. Thus, the notions of anarchy, state security and self-help remained the theoretical tools through which Middle East international politics could most convincingly be examined. This dominance of realism has of course not gone uncontested and attracted some criticism for the ways scholars were taking for granted the capacity of the international system—notably the global great powers—to constrain the behaviour of states in the region, ignoring the role of local identities in shaping interactions. In this regard, a second attempt after liberalism to challenge the dominant realist paradigm came from constructivism. In the last three decades, constructivism has undoubtedly been the most potent and innovative theoretical development within the international relations discipline. It underlined the importance of reconnecting states’ behaviour in the world system with local identities and countries’ historical roots (Wendt 1992). The tenets of constructivism did not merely challenge the dominant debate between neo-liberal institutionalism and neo-realism: they urged scholars of international relations to change lenses and employ different tools of analysis for explaining international politics and states’ behaviours. The concepts of discourse, identity, and socialization became the drivers of norms, roles, and behaviours, repositioning agency in the centre of the global system. Constructivism offered a bottom-up reasoning to revisit international relations studies (Hopf 1998), as it posited that state interactions create an inter-subjective set of norms and expectations constituted by identities. Some scholars built up interesting arguments to demonstrate that the Arab world was not immune from such phenomena (Barnett 1998; Telhami and Barnett 2002; Teti 2007). However, the criticism directed against constructivist scholars—in the general debate, but particularly in constructivism applied to the MENA region—is their overestimation of the role of agency and identities in shaping the system, as compared to the material structural factors such as the global power balance. While there is agency and autonomy on the part of regional states as they are capable of influencing great powers politics (the feedback loop), this, realist might argue, should not be confused with a constructivist reading, but as an attempt of weaker states to deal rationally with the opportunities and constraints of the international system or, in structuralist thinking, an attempt of ruling elites to maintain their privileged position through alliances with foreign elites that would secure them in power and privilege. Constructivism in fact becomes problematic when used to explain the agency of smaller states, where structural and external factors largely constrain culture. More broadly, the disregard for the anarchy of the system has raised scepticism towards the constructivist approach. Hinnebusch, for instance, notes that the “constructivist attempt to prioritize identity over interests is as misguided as the materialist attempt to reduce identity to an epiphenomenon” (2003: 362). Theories that overtly challenged the dominance of realism in the MENA lacked empirical weight, decreasing the interest in a theoretical debate. The result is, critics argue, an unsystematic and descriptive academic knowledge, exemplifying a discontinuous theoretical dialogue that still examines the international politics of the MENA as a distinct territory, where the theories of international relations deviate and are incompatible with the rest of the world. 315

Pietro Marzo and Francesco Cavatorta

There is, of course, a case to be made for the peculiar nature of the region in the broader context of international relations: According to Stein (2012: 882): The region’s distinctiveness is seen to be rooted in a variety of factors including a colonial legacy resulting in unique ‘penetration’ by outside powers, a preponderance of oil resources, late development and constrained state-formation, exceptional propensity to war and conflict and—especially—shared linguistic, religious, and cultural ties that have had an unusually powerful influence on politics. What is different about the Middle East IR is not that it is sui generis, but rather that the different universal factors analyzed by different IR theories come together in MENA in a distinctive way and no one IR theory seems well equipped to fully explain all these features of the MENA region. As such, attempts to grasp the region’s complexity have inspired various eclectic approaches that seek to combine aspects of several. Hinnebusch calls for a “multivariate synthetic approach” that draws from different IR theories, including neoclassic realism, constructivism, English school theory and other approaches. A number of studies and articles have followed this proposition (Lynch 2016; Valbjørn 2017). Lynch, for instance, combined notions of ideas and identities from the constructivist school with tenets of realism and liberalist theories to explain regional politics. A more synthetic and syncretic analysis between theoretical approaches is crucial if one considers the influence of globalization on the MENA and their interplay with local structures, particularly the way the transmission of norms and values from without have provoked resistance by local identities. Reconciling all these approaches is particularly difficult, and the next sections examine the contemporary international politics of the MENA and analyzes to which degree the coexistence of approaches finds empirical validity.

Evolution of the regional system One of the dominant traits of the MENA is the presence of all sorts of armed conflicts since the formation of the modern state system until the present day. There is no doubt that the MENA has been the locus of numerous military conflicts ranging from inter-state wars to civil wars and from large-scale regional wars to low-intensity conflicts. According to Hinnebusch, in the Middle East and North Africa, conflicts are not only the product of the international anarchy dominating the regional state system, but they are due to foreign powers’ imposition of a “flawed system” going back to colonial and post-colonial times. If one does not understand the profoundly problematic nature of colonial interference, it becomes very difficult to pinpoint the real source of conflicts in the region. The political, social and economic patterns that colonialism disrupted in the development of the region are at the roots of the conflicts that characterize the Middle East and North Africa. It is important to underscore that the Western presence profoundly altered established political authorities, social interactions and economic relationships in the region. The creation of new states carved out of the fallen Ottoman Empire with little regard for local claims and demands led to the survival of considerable problems that colonial rule overshadowed and passed on. These problems—border issues, imperialist exploitation, Palestine, Israel and the control of natural resources—became increasingly important as nationalist leaders used them to mobilize consensus and power. Indeed, decolonization was soon to be followed by irredentist claims across the region by the early 1960s, sowing the seeds for future contentious politics and confrontations both between states and within them. 316

An exceptional context for a debate on IR?

International politics in MENA during the early Cold War The first generation of Arab leaders emerging from independence built its early success on promoting national identities and on rhetorical clashes with former colonial powers. The decolonization process turned into an opportunity for nationalist movements to take full control of their domestic affairs. Indeed, the majority of the leaders of the newly independent states claimed to bolster hitherto neglected internal domains such as education and trade in order to strengthen national identity (Owen 2014). The demise of King Faruq in Egypt, replaced by Nasser and the Nasserism experiment, seemed to coincide with the rollback of foreign influence. The idea of the Arab strongman taking action against colonial powers inspired people across the region. The Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser stood at the forefront of the pan-Arabic commitment in the fight against colonialism, sparking hope across the region. His intervention at the conference of the Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference in Bandung in 1955 urged MENA states to move away from the pattern of subordination to former colonial powers. It is for this reason that Nasser also directly supported the Algerian Front de Liberation National during the war against France as well as Southern Yemen’s battle for independence. At the same time, there are three points that should be taken into account when reflecting on the emergence of the Arab strongman as a bulwark against foreign interference. First, the construction of national identities and state structures in the post-colonial period was not a smooth process, and the issue of ethnic, linguistic or religious minorities was never really solved despite the attraction of pan-Arabism. The artificial borders of post-colonial states led to border wars between some newly independent countries such as that between Algeria and Morocco. Second, Arab leaders were in competition with each other despite many of them subscribing to the idea of pan-Arabism. While Nasser did seem to have the greatest following even outside his home country, in time the Egyptian leadership was challenged as other strongmen emerged elsewhere, all claiming to represent the whole Arab nation. This led to strategic rivalries rather than co-operation. Finally, post-colonial patterns of institutional development diverged considerably in the region with some countries becoming anti-imperialist pan-Arab republics linked to the Soviet Union and others becoming conservative monarchies with deep ties to the United States. The growth of the Soviet Union as a power contending US dominance in the region allowed MENA to play the two superpowers off each other; while this seemed to increase their autonomy and allowed them to extract resources from superpower patrons, over time, it also entrenched foreign powers in regional politics. For their part, the US and the Soviet Union fuelled regional conflicts by supplying weapons and providing intelligence and informal diplomatic backing to their allies in the region. This period of relative autonomy—and bargaining strength—began to crumble in the aftermath of Israel’s stunning show of superiority in the Six-Day War of 1967. The event stands as a turning point in the politics of the region, ending “Nasserism” and making Arab nationalist regimes vulnerable to the rise of a rival ideology, Islamism (Kepel 2003). The 1967 war was also a watershed for international relations, as it proved that a Western-backed militarized state, ideologically alien to the Arab world, was able to become the most powerful military actor in the regional system. The results of the Arab– Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973 were to the US means to “restore the influence it had lost with the rise of Arab nationalism” (Hinnebusch 2010: 44). Despite the temporary shockwave from the oil embargo against the West for its support of Israel, the 1970s saw leaders such as Sadat, Asad, Bourguiba, Saddam Hussein and even Qadhafi move away from notions of pan-Arabism to focus instead on safeguarding their hold on power. They gave up on territorial and regional ambitions, including the goal of ridding the region of Israel, and responded instead to a logic of “patron and client” with foreign powers, especially the US. Egypt, for instance, switched 317

Pietro Marzo and Francesco Cavatorta

international patron—from the Soviet Union to the United States—signed a peace treaty with Israel, became for a time ostracized for this across the region and focused on promoting its own national interests devoid of Nasserist rhetoric.

The Iranian Revolution, the rise of Islamism and wars of identity The decline of pan-Arabism coincided with the rise of political Islam, which transformed regional dynamics both domestically and internationally. While Islamist movements grew exponentially across the Arab world, it was in Iran where Islamism succeeded in a popular revolution. The ousting of the Shah and of what he represented at the international level—his close alliance with the United States—embodied Islamization as a means to revive the autonomous identity of the region. In the 1960s and 1970s, in countries like Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco or Jordan, the Muslim Brotherhood groups had represented alternatives to leftist political forces; the US therefore initially perceived Islam as an ideological and religious doctrine capable of competing with the anti-Western socialist influences across the region. A key US strategic asset to counterbalance a number of anti-Western forces operating across the region was the long-standing alliance with Saudi Arabia. In addition to securing a steady supply of oil to the US, the alliance gave the US a strong ally to counterbalance its regional enemies, deterring Nasserism, then Iranian expansionism and later Iraq. By backing Saudi Arabia, the US strengthened the country as the stronghold of Wahhabism, which was useful in mobilizing support against the Soviet Union after the latter invaded Afghanistan in 1979 (Cooley 2002). The Iran Revolution in 1979 changed the way in which Islamism began to be perceived, and the rise of Khomeini marked an important turning point in global politics. First, it reinvigorated the notion of umma among Muslim populations. At the popular level, the Iranian Revolution made ordinary citizens believe that it was possible to overthrow a dictator and participate in an Islamic resurgence against the West. Additionally, by mid-1980s, Soviet influence had begun to decline, and the left waned, leaving a political vacuum wherein the Iranian Revolution resonated as a call to arms against foreign powers, rejecting colonial domination and condemning both the US’s and the Soviet Union’s treatment of the Arab world as a battleground (Esposito 1990). Third, and most importantly for international politics of the region, the rise of the Islamic republic and its territorial ambitions in the region forced the United States to upgrade their support for allies in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies, Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan and Egypt. This mutually beneficial relationship was built on the shared notion that Islamism was a danger and was no longer an instrument to be used against a waning left. As Iran began to promote its Revolution abroad, targeting in particular the neighbouring Gulf states, the regional reaction did not take long to materialize, as ruling regimes felt under threat due to the growing disconnect with their own citizens. Iran’s Revolution was particularly attractive to Shia populations in the Arab world, notable, in Lebanon and Iraq. The dangers—real or perceived—of the Iranian Revolution contributed to further destabilize the region, as many Arab states began to see Iranian plots everywhere and decided to strike back. It was left to Saddam’s Iraq to “put Iran back in its place.” With financial help from oil states and US backing, Saddam invaded Iran and thus began the first Gulf war, which lasted until 1988 and devastated the two countries. However, the collaboration of Arab leaders with the West against Islamism only nursed popular resentment against foreign domination and dissent against rulers. In some ways it could be argued that this was a period of identity wars between radical Islam and its opponents that might have given impetus to constructivist accounts of regional politics. However, in good part, identities were instrumentalized in geo-political struggles such that realist accounts retained their credibility. 318

An exceptional context for a debate on IR?

The age of uni-polarity in the Middle East The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 was a world-changing event, and it led to a profound rethink of the way in which international politics worked. The influence of realism waned considerably and political developments across the world seemed to confirm the validity of other theories of international relations built broadly on liberal tenets. The “uni-polar moment” (Krauthammer) seemed to bring about the benevolent dominance of the US hegemon and it was expected that the liberal order would lead to a much more stable global political environment. There was no reason to believe that the Middle East and North Africa would deviate from this and there were therefore expectations that Arab countries would eventually democratize, that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict would come to an end, that Iran and Syria could be brought back into the international fold and that regional co-operation would contribute to kick start economic development. In short, the end of the Cold War seemed to erode the unchallenged dominance of realist anarchy in the region. For a time, it appeared that benevolent uni-polarity would be vindicated in the region. The Israeli–Palestinian peace process was launched, a number of Arab countries undertook processes of democratization, regional co-operation was enhanced, Syria was brought into the international fold thanks to its participation in the Madrid peace conference and Iran was on the verge of being welcomed back as the moderates took control of the Iranian government. Thus, the demise of bi-polarity allowed the US hegemon and its Western allies to attempt to shape the region according to “new” rules of the international game stressing multilateralism and opening to international trade. Traditional US allies opened their countries to rising globalization, binding their domestic politics to international organizations and transnational agreements, notably international financial institutions such as the World Bank which promoted the spread of neo-liberalism to the region. In Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and smaller petrol monarchies the Westernization of their economic elites deepened as they went for education in prestigious US universities. Crucially, countries that had been aligned with the Soviet bloc like Algeria and Syria started bandwagoning with the US. Thus, in the 1990s, the United States consolidated its role as the global hegemonic power. Neo-liberal economic policies, liberal internationalism, globalization and technological revolutions epitomized the project of Pax Americana in a region of the world where, formerly, countries’ foreign policies were guided by realist self-help stemming from the dynamics of bi-polar confrontation. From this, it follows that the dominant approach to the study of the region—realism—seemed to lose its unchallenged position as liberal internationalism seemed on the advance. The reality was, of course, more complex and contradictory. This was encapsulated in response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The international community, now finally freed from the mutual vetoes of the Cold War, was able to take action according to the principles of the UN Charter to ensure respect for borders and punish those who broke international law. Thus, regardless of the significance of his previous links with the US, Saddam Hussein, a US strategic asset in the prevention of Iranian ambition in the region during the 1980s (Iraq–Iran war), was severely punished for his decision to invade Kuwait. At the same time, though, as the international community was upholding the principles of international law, operation Desert Storm also demonstrated the hypocrisy of the US in punishing countries selectively—Iraq was targeted but not Israel which was also occupying territory conquered from its neighbours. In time, the contradictions between the rhetoric of liberalism and the reality of realpolitik on the part of the US and its Western allies caught up with them. During the 1990s and 2000s, both liberal internationalism and realism co-existed as theoretical frameworks to explain events in the Middle East and North Africa. Some Western core 319

Pietro Marzo and Francesco Cavatorta

foreign policy decisions in the Middle East (strategic alliances, war declaration and security issues) as well as the actions of regional actors still corresponded to neo-realism, but others such as the growth of international trade, international democratic promotion and conflict resolutions were the product of neo-liberal internationalism. The results on the ground in MENA were a complex interplay of realism and liberalism for more than two decades across the region. On the one hand, the United States and its European allies attempted to export their own norms and their ideas on democratic governance at home and multilateral co-operation abroad. On the other, the selective and self-serving way in which they did so fuelled the rise of radicalism. Ultimately, the growth of the US as the global superpower did not lead to the acceptance of its hegemony across the region. In the mid-1990s and the 2000s, the US showed a military superiority that no-one could dare challenge, prompting weaker states to respond with bandwagoning and acceptance of its dominance. Yet others reacted against the imposition of values, culture and economic relations perceived as either alien or threatening to their identities. The rise of Islamist parties, and the emergence of violent Islamist political forces need to be considered in the context of the contradictory results of Western foreign policy in the region. Most importantly, this tension became a full-fledged paradox in the years following the 9/11 attacks. This event constituted a bitter awakening for the West from unchallengeable superiority. While the US and EU states formally renewed their efforts to promote pluralism and democracy across the Arab world, informally the “blind support” to despotic incumbents remained unchanged (Durac and Cavatorta 2009) as perceived bulwarks against anti-Western Islamism as part of the “war on terror.” In short, the conflict between realist imperatives and the “normative” commitment to democracy saw security win out. In addition to strengthening authoritarian rule in the region, the policies that the international community promoted were predicated on the greater insertion of the region into the global economy. Neo-liberal policies and reforms prompted economic growth, but in authoritarian settings the benefits of such growth only accrued to the select ruling elites while the rest of the population languished in greater poverty. The 2011 revolts demonstrated that ordinary citizens were fed up with the political and economic systems they lived under.

Return to anarchy? International politics of the MENA region in the age of “multi-polarity” The revolts that criss-crossed the Arab world in 2011 renewed the debate among scholars of comparative politics and democratization. The demise of authoritarian leaders in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen and the political change that popular revolts generated in a number of other countries such as Morocco, Bahrain and Syria offered new empirical evidence to challenge theories of authoritarian resilience and the region’s inability to democratize. However, the enthusiasm for the Arab world finally embracing liberal democracy—as other regions had done before—did not last long. Indeed, political developments across the region seemed to gradually reinstate much of the pre-existing convictions about the robustness of authoritarian regimes (Bellin 2012) and the authoritarian capacity to adapt to internal challenges through “authoritarian learning” (Heydemann and Leenders 2014). The status quo ante quickly came to prevail, and where authoritarianism was not restored, civil wars resulted, as in Yemen, Syria and Libya. Only Tunisia was on the road to democracy. The post-revolutionary situation that the Arab revolts had been too early invoked as epitomizing the “1989 momentum” of the region (Kaldor 2011). Yet, Fawaz Gerges (2014), still suggested that the Uprisings marked “a psychological and epistemological rupture,” creating new patterns of contentious politics whose effects are likely to be long-lasting. 320

An exceptional context for a debate on IR?

Certainly, the revolts have caused major changes in the international politics of the region. Indeed, the collapse of strong leaders in some countries and the weakened positions of the ruling coalition in others triggered a change in the regional power balance. The vacuum of power favoured the emergence of new regional alliances and the arrival on the scene of international actors committed to challenging US uni-polarity. Some Arab states have become battlegrounds for competing international interests as rival forces battling for control inside several states sought support from beyond their borders. The Syrian civil war is the clearest demonstration of this, with the intervention of Russia indicating clearly that the region had now become a multi-polar arena of competition between great powers. The rising influence of China, particularly from an economic vantage point, is also challenging US hegemony. Against this backdrop, regional actors have emerged or have consolidated their positions. Iran has continued its process of expansion, which began with the 2003 Bush invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime, hitherto the bulwark against penetration of Iranian influence in neighbouring countries. Turkey has ambitions for leadership in the region while pursuing a foreign policy more autonomous of the West. Most importantly, Russia has benefited from the political disorder, using the favourable moment to re-acquire a degree of influence in the region. Even to the extent of becoming an amicable regional partner of traditional US allies, Egypt, Israel and Turkey. From a theoretical perspective, the MENA region is now in an era of ideological and power “multi-polarity” (Haas 2014), as the waning role of ideological compatibility among regional rivals make for unstable and shifting alliances. In this scenario, the cost of stable co-operation with an ally—either regional or international—is higher than temporary alignments according to the circumstances, which prioritize short-term security and relative gains. In this vein, some have suggested that this constitutes a return to the realist anarchical logic in which alliances largely respond to the logic of self-help and anarchy, which seem more than ever to drive international and domestic politics across the region. Regional dynamics however present some elements of novelty that challenge the classical notion of anarchy since, as Haas (2014: 732) argues, alliances across ideological lines are more difficult to achieve than realist interpretations of balance-of-power theory would predict. Thus, many countries in the region perceive Iran’s expansion in Lebanon, Yemen and Syria, along with its closer ties with Russia as the highest threat to their national security and geostrategic interest. The list includes Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Turkey, Egypt and Israel, all supported by the US. Yet, all these countries seem to be trapped in a quagmire of incompatible ideological stances, which lower the capacity to build alliances to counterbalance the growing Iranian influence. Egyptian President al-Sisi, for instance, after a harsh campaign of repression against the Muslim Brotherhood, is hesitant to co-operate with Turkey, which, along with Qatar, backs the Brotherhood. Israel’s closer collaboration with the UAE and Saudis also reveals that “power multi-polarity” spurs frameworks of interaction that are merely instrumental to short-term power balancing. The strategy of the containment of Iran, which in principle generated agreement among Sunni leaders, monarchies and militarysecular elites, was also deterred by the reluctance of Egypt and Turkey, and to a lesser extent the Gulf states, to alienate Russia. Smaller, less powerful states, such as Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Lebanon, Oman, Jordan, also respond to the logic that “power multi-polarity” imposes, conducting foreign policy with no clear ideological stance. In the MENA region, these shifting alliances and rapid fluctuations in regional and international politics find their ultimate meaning in the leaders’ concern that overt collaboration with ideological rivals may achieve short-term results at the geo-political level while later threatening domestic security and their grip on power. 321

Pietro Marzo and Francesco Cavatorta

Conclusion A relative absence of theoretical debates characterizes the study of international politics of the MENA when compared to other regions of the world. The dominant paradigm of realism has overshadowed attempts to offer complementary readings from other approaches, and even today it seems that notions of anarchy, self-help and short-term interest are central to the understanding of regional affairs. Moreover, the idea of the exceptionality of the region has distracted scholarly attention from the role that international relations schools of thought can provide, especially during critical junctures and regional shocks. A more fine-grained analysis of international politics of the region may elucidate novel insights from the region’s IR, which could contribute to the broader debate on the nature of IR. The discipline of international relations ought to be particularly interested in the global dimension of MENA politics, as the rising external intervention in the region creates a laboratory where theorizing can become innovative. In short, new studies are necessary to bring the contemporary international relations debate into the analysis of MENA regional affairs since they can stimulate creative insights useful for theoretical refinement of the discipline.

Note 1 The Gulf Cooperation Council entered into force in 1981;The Arab Maghreb Union held its first meeting in 1988, although the idea of an Organisation for North Africa dates back to early 1950s. The Arab Cooperation Council came into reality in February 1989 by North Yemen, Iraq, Jordan, and Egypt.

References Aarts, P. (1999), “The Middle East: A region without regionalism or the end of exceptionalism?” Third World Quarterly, 20:5, 911–25. Barnett, M.N. (1998), Dialogues in Arab Politics: Negotiations in Regional Order, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Bellin, E. (2012), “Reconsidering the robustness of authoritarianism in the Middle East: Lessons from the Arab Spring,” Comparative Politics, 44:2, 127–49. Brown, L.C. (1984), International Politics and the Middle East: Old Rules, Dangerous Game, London: I.B. Tauris. Bush, S. (2017), “Varieties of international influence and the Middle East,” PS: Political Science & Politics, 50:3. Carapico, S. (2013), Political Aid and Arab Activism: Democracy Promotion, Justice, and Representation, Vol. 44, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cavatorta, F. (2009), The International Dimension of the Failed Algerian Transition. Democracy Betrayed? Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cooley, J.K. (2002). Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism. London: Pluto Press. Doyle, M.W. (1986), “Liberalism and world politics,” American Political Science Review, 80:4, 1151–69. Durac, V. and F. Cavatorta (2009) “Strengthening authoritarian rule through democracy promotion? Examining the paradox of the US and EU security strategies: The case of Bin Ali’s Tunisia”, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 36:1, 3–19. Esposito, J.L. (ed, 1990), The Iranian Revolution: Its Global Impact, Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. Fawcett, L. (2016), International Relations of the Middle East, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fukuyama, F. (1989), “The end of history?” The National Interest, 16, 3–18. Gerges, F. (2014), “Introduction: a rupture,” in ed, F. Gerges, The New Middle East. Protest and Revolution in the Arab World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haas, M.L. (2014), “Ideological polarity and balancing in great power politics,” Security Studies, 23:4, 715–53. Halliday, F. (2005), The Middle East in International Relations: Power, Politics and Ideology, Vol. 4, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 322

An exceptional context for a debate on IR?

Heydemann, S. and R. Leenders (2014), “Authoritarian learning and counterrevolution,” in ed, Marc Lynch, The Arab Uprisings Explained: New Contentious Politics in the Middle East, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, pp. 75–92. Hinnebusch, R. (2003), “Identity in international relations: Constructivism versus materialism, and the case of the Middle East,” The Review of International Affairs, 3:2, 358–62. Hinnebusch, R. (2010), The International Politics of the Middle East, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hopf, T. (1998), “The promise of constructivism in international relations theory,” International Security, 23:1, 171–200. Huntington, S.P. (1993), “The clash of civilizations?” Foreign Affairs, 22–49. Ismael, J.S. (1993), Kuwait: Dependency and Class in a Rentier State, Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. Kaldor, M. (2011), “Civil society in 1989 and 2011,” Open Democracy, 7. Kepel, G. (2003), Muslim Extremism in Egypt: The Prophet and Pharaoh, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Karsh, E. (1997), “Cold War, post-Cold War: Does it make a difference for the Middle East?” Review of International Studies, 23:2, 271–91. Keohane, R.O. and L.L. Martin (1995), “The promise of institutionalist theory,” International Security, 20:1, 39–51. Lake, D.A. (2009), “Open economy politics: A critical review,” The Review of International Organizations, 4:3, 219–44 Lewis, B. (2003), What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East, New York, NY: Harper Collins. Lynch, M. (2016), The New Arab Wars: Uprisings and Anarchy in the Middle East, New York, NY: Public Affairs. Owen, R. (2014), The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life: With a New Afterword, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stein, E. (2012), “Beyond Arabism vs. sovereignty: Relocating ideas in the international relations of the Middle East,” Review of International Studies, 38:4, 881–905. Telhami, S. and M.N. Barnett (eds, 2002), Identity and Foreign Policy in the Middle East, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Teti, A. (2007), “Bridging the gap: IR, Middle East studies and the disciplinary politics of the area studies controversy,” European Journal of International Relations, 13:1, 117–45. Valbjørn, M. (2017), “Strategies for reviving the international relations/Middle East nexus after the Arab Uprisings,” PS: Political Science & Politics, 50:3, 647–51. Walt, S.M. (1987), The Origins of Alliance, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Snyder, G. (1997), Alliance Politics, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wendt, A. (1992), “Anarchy is what states make of it: The social construction of power politics,” International Organization, 46:2, 391–25. Yom, S.L. (2015), From Resilience To Revolution: How Foreign Interventions Destabilize the Middle East, New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

323

23 US hegemony and MENA Stephen Zunes

Throughout the centuries, Western empires from the Romans to the British have tried to impose their order on the Middle East and North Africa. For certain periods of time they have succeeded, only to find themselves at the receiving end of a popular and oftentimes violent backlash. Proponents of US policy argued that this would not be the case with the United States, since Americans entered the region eschewing colonial ambitions, championing the rule of law and the authority of the United Nations, and seeking economic growth and political stability. America stood out as a singular and responsible overseer, so went this argument, in using its military and economic power to ensure stability and security in the face of despots, terrorists and religious extremists. Critics of the US role, on the other hand, have pointed out that America’s overbearing power has created widespread resentment among those from the Middle East and elsewhere in the Islamic world. The chief complaints revolve around US support for repressive and corrupt regimes, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, airstrikes and other forms of military intervention, the permanent presence of US military forces in several countries, the exploitative practices by American oil companies and other corporations, the prejudicial use of the United Nations, the provision of arms and diplomatic cover for a militaristic and expansionist Israel, and destabilization efforts against internationally recognized governments.

Historic US interests and strategies in MENA Whatever the nature of the US role in the Middle East, there is little question regarding the strategic importance of the region. For more than 4000 years, the Middle East has been contested by competing great powers. At the intersection of three continents and the source of most of the world’s petroleum reserves, there is perhaps no region that the United States considers more important. The State Department once described the Middle East as “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history. . . probably the richest economic prize in the world in the field of foreign investment” (Kolko and Kolko 1972: 45). President Dwight Eisenhower referred to the region as the most “strategically important area in the world” (Spiegel 1985: 51). American oil interests, particularly in Saudi Arabia, led to an expanded US role in the region during World War II. This involvement increased still further with the close American 324

US hegemony and MENA

relationship with the Shah of Iran after the CIA restored him to the throne in 1953, supplanting Great Britain as the primary outside power in that oil-rich country. Though the British and French played a significant role in enforcing Western interests in the Middle East and North Africa for the first quarter-century of the Cold War, the United States increasingly asserted its primacy over these declining European colonial powers, particularly as left-leaning nationalist governments allied with the Soviet Union emerged in a number of Arab countries. Security in the Persian Gulf was seen primarily as a British responsibility until Prime Minister Harold Wilson announced in 1969 that Great Britain would withdraw most of its security commitments from areas east of the Suez Canal, a reflection of Britain’s declining global power as well as a result of American pressure to take on the lead role in Middle East security. Since the Vietnam War had led to a large-scale scepticism over direct US military involvement overseas, President Richard Nixon decided to engage in a surrogate strategy, announced in 1971, which became known as the Nixon Doctrine (also known as the Guam Doctrine, after the Pacific island where Nixon first announced the policy.) According to Nixon, “we shall furnish military and economic assistance when requested. . . But we shall look to the nation directly threatened to assume the primary responsibility of providing the manpower for its defense” (Nixon 1969). The Persian Gulf became the first testing ground for using a regional gendarme to promote US interests, essentially an extension of the Vietnamization programme of training and arming locals to enforce the US security agenda. The Shah of Iran owed his throne to the United States, had lots of money from the rise in oil prices with which to purchase weapons, and a desire to feed his megalomania—all of which made him a well-suited surrogate. Throughout the 1970s, the United States sold over $20 billion in advanced weaponry to the Shah (with an additional $20 billion on order.) In addition, as many as 50,000 Americans were working in Iran in the late 1970s (Maloney 2019), including thousands of military advisers and trainers—mostly working for private defence contractors—working to transform the Iranian armed forces into a sophisticated fighting force capable of counter-insurgency operations. This policy was successfully implemented when Iranian troops—with American and British support—intervened in support of the sultan of Oman against a leftist rebellion in the Dhofar province in the mid-1970s. In 1979, however, Iran’s Islamic revolution brought this policy crashing down, replacing the compliant Shah with a regime stridently opposed to Western interests. In response to this shocking recognition of the limits of the surrogate strategy, the Carter Doctrine was announced in 1980, in which the United States would no longer rely on potentially unstable allies and their armed forces, but would be able to intervene directly through the Rapid Deployment Force, later integrated into the Central Command. An agreement was reached with the Saudi government whereby, in exchange for the sale of an integrated package of highly sophisticated weaponry, the Saudis would build and pay for an elaborate system of command, naval and air facilities large enough to sustain US forces in intensive regional combat. For example, the controversial 1981 sale of the sophisticated AWACS airborne radar system to Saudi Arabia was to be a linchpin of an elaborate communications system comparable to that of NATO. According to a Washington Post report at that time (then denied by the Pentagon), this was to be part of a grand defence strategy for the Middle Eastern oil fields that included an ambitious plan to build bases in Saudi Arabia, equipped and waiting for American forces to use (Armstrong 1981). In the event of war, American forces would be deployed so quickly and with such overwhelming force that the casualty ratio would be highly favourable, and the length of the fighting would be short. The result would be that disruptive anti-war protests from the American public would be minimal. This was of particular concern since Congress had recently passed the War Powers Act, whereby the legislative branch could effectively veto 325

Stephen Zunes

a President’s decision to send American troops into combat after 60 days. Though the exact scenario in which US forces would be deployed could not have been predicted at the time, the Carter Doctrine made possible the American military and political successes in the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq. By the 1980s, both Gulf powers, Iran and Iraq, were seen as threats to US allies and control of regional oil reserves. During the Iran–Iraq War between 1980 and 1988, the United States armed one side and then the other as a means of ensuring that neither of the two countries could become dominant in the region. When the Clinton Administration came to office in 1993, the policy was shifted to that of “dual containment,” seeking to isolate both countries, which the United States saw as potentially dangerous and destabilizing forces in this strategically important region, labelling them both as “rogue states” (Zunes 1997). As defined by US national security managers, rogue states were countries that possess substantial military capability, seek the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction and violate what are seen as international “norms.” President Clinton’s first National Security Adviser Anthony Lake put the matter clearly: “our policy must face the reality of recalcitrant and outlaw states that not only choose to remain outside the family [of nations] but also assault its basic values. . . [and] exhibit a chronic inability to engage constructively with the outside world.” Lake argued further that just as the United States took the lead in “containing” the Soviet Union, it must now also bear the “special responsibility” to “neutralize” and “contain” these “outlaw states” (Klare 1994: 625). In addition to Iraq and Iran, Libya and Sudan were also widely considered as rogue states, with Syria sometimes included on the list by certain foreign policy hawks. (The only countries outside the region given such a label were communist North Korea and Cuba.) Despite legitimate concerns voiced by the US government regarding Iran and Iraq’s human rights records and violations of international norms, neither country was unique in the region in such transgressions. For example, due to its powerful armed forces, nuclear arsenal, conquests of neighbouring countries, and violations of international legal standards, a case could be made that Israel—America’s chief partner in the region and the world’s largest recipient of US economic and military support—would also fit this definition. Yet the label of “rogue state” had a clear function in US foreign policy independent of any objective criteria. Iran and Iraq were the only two countries in the Middle East that combine a large population, adequate water resources and oil wealth such as to be independent players that have the ability to challenge American hegemony in the region. These two countries were labelled rogue states ultimately because of their failure to accept the post-Cold War order that requires submitting to American strategic and economic agenda. Prior to the arrival of the regimes seen as so antithetical to American interests, these countries engaged in large-scale military procurement with the support or acquiescence of the United States as well as engaging in major human rights abuses without American objections. Once their co-operation with the United States ended and their hostility toward American interests emerged (through revolution in the case of Iran and policy shifts in the case of Iraq), their long-ignored human rights abuses and militarization became a focal point for their vilification. American officials were no longer concerned that the region might fall to Soviet influence, yet the United States also had a longstanding concern about the influence of indigenous movements that could potentially challenge American interests. There was a perception of an ongoing threat from radical forces—both Islamic and secular—as well as concern over the instability that could result from any major challenges to the rule of pro-Western regimes, even if led by potentially democratic movements. This resulted in a policy where the United States supported the maintenance of the status quo regardless of a given regime’s level of commitment to democracy or human rights. 326

US hegemony and MENA

Militarization of US policy in MENA: the invasion of Iraq In the decades following World War II, US administrations—to varying degrees—saw American dominance as exercised through multiple independent centres of power, such as the United Nations and other intergovernmental organizations, with increasing emphasis during the 1990s on the role of international financial institutions, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. International law was seen as a vehicle that would help facilitate the use of America’s preeminent military and economic power in the interest of world order. While certain elements of international law could occasionally be stretched or quietly undercut, the prevailing view in Washington had been that the United Nations system allowed for a relatively stable world order in which the United States and its allies could usually get its goals accomplished and was far less dangerous than a more anarchic system. This would change under the administration of George W. Bush, though signs of a shift began even earlier. As a result of the United States emerging as the world’s one remaining superpower following the collapse of the Soviet Union, with US military spending higher than almost all of the rest of the world’s governments combined, and with American commercial and cultural influence far greater than any other country, a sense emerged among many leading policy makers that the United States could effectively go it alone. The UN system, according to this view, was seen as a constraint and an anachronism, so the United States no longer had to play by the rules and had the right and the ability to impose a kind of Pax Americana on the Middle East and the rest of the world. This resulted in a number of other policy shifts, such as the broad bipartisan consensus in Washington (despite some occasional reservations expressed regarding some specific policies) to provide unconditional support for a series of right-wing Israeli governments in their ongoing occupation and colonization of territories seized in the June 1967 War, as well as their military offensives resulting in large-scale civilian casualties; ending support for the referendum process in Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara in favour of a dubious Moroccan-instigated “autonomy” plan; and, a series of unilateral military actions in the greater Middle East without UN authorization. In his introduction to the 2002 National Security Strategy, President George W. Bush asserted that the United States represented “a single sustainable model for national success” (Bush 2002). In particular, according to the President, I believe the United States is the beacon for freedom in the world. And I believe we have a responsibility to promote freedom that is as solemn as the responsibility is to protect the American people because the two go hand-in-hand. (Woodward 2004: 88) Historian Margaret Macmillan noted, “Faith in their exceptionalism has sometimes led to a . . . tendency to preach at other nations rather than listen to them, a tendency [to believe] that American motives are pure where those of others are not” (Hiro 2003: 388). Journalist Eric Zuesse observed how Bush “made clear right at the start that the United States had to be accepted by other nations as being not merely the first among equals, but a role apart, which simply mustn’t be judged like other countries” (Zuesse 2004: 121). Furthermore, notes Zuesse, Bush “gives every indication that he hates man-made international law, and really believes he’s serving God through his campaign to destroy and replace it by his standing above it” (ibid.: 118). The NSS also marked a more radical view of US hegemonic priorities by arguing that the United States should strike pre-emptively at any country it believes is developing biological, chemical or nuclear weapons: “America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed.” This underscores the basis of the Bush administration’s post-Iraq invasion 327

Stephen Zunes

rationale—initially backed by John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and a number of other leading Democrats as well—that while Iraq may not have actually had any WMDs, offensive delivery systems or WMD programmes, even just having the potential to develop such weapons programmes and weapons systems sometime in the future was enough to justify the invasion. The invasion of Iraq, therefore, was not a “pre-emptive” war but a “preventive war.” The 2002 NSS blurs the distinction, arguing that since it is hard to know when or how terrorists might strike, it is therefore justifiable to attack any country which might be developing weapons potential that might someday be used against US interests. Supporters of an American hegemonic order were initially able to take advantage of the very real security concerns in the aftermath of the September 2001 al-Qaeda attacks on the United States to engage in a series of policy initiatives, initially with the support of a broad cross-section of US political and intellectual opinion, which posed a direct challenge to the post-World War II international legal order. The doctrine of preventive war, the use of extraordinary rendition and torture, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, threats against Iran, the aggressive counterinsurgency operations and air campaigns in Afghanistan, the backing for some of the more militaristic and expansionist elements in Israel and related policies have served to alienate the United States from many of the governments and a large cross-section of the Middle Eastern and North African population—ironically, those whose co-operation has been most important in the struggle against terrorist groups and other extremist elements in the region. Opposition to the US hegemonic agenda is both principled—in the sense that there are serious moral and legal implications—as well as practical, particularly in the sense that the overemphasis on military means to address complex political, social and economic issues has emboldened extremists and weakened moderate voices and has resulted in a more anarchic international order which makes legitimate counter-terrorism efforts all the more difficult. Indeed, the more the United States has militarized the Middle East, the greater the threat from terrorist groups and other forms of Islamist extremism and asymmetrical warfare has become. All the sophisticated weaponry, well-trained soldiers and strong military leadership the United States may possess will do little good if there are hundreds of millions of people in the Middle East and beyond who are driven to hate Americans as a result of the misguided policies of the US government. Even though only a small percentage of the population supports the methods or ideology of these extremist movements, there will still be enough people to maintain networks of terrorists as long as their grievances resonate with large numbers. The 2003 US invasion of Iraq constituted both the most extreme effort to advance US hegemonic goals and the most significant setback to that effort. Rather than a misguided plan to eliminate (non-existent) “weapons of mass destruction” or free the Iraqi people from a dictatorial regime, the Bush administration adopted a plan for Iraq that bore a striking resemblance to the British strategy in the Middle East following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Rather than formally annexing Iraq, Britain occupied the country just long enough to establish a kind of suzerainty. Iraq was made nominally independent within a few years, but Britain could effectively veto the establishment of any unfriendly government and could dominate the economy, a system that lasted until the 1958 revolution. Under Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) chairman Paul Bremer, radical changes were imposed upon the Iraqi economy closely mimicking the infamous structural adjustment programmes shackled to indebted nations by the International Monetary Fund. These included: •

328

the widespread privatization of public enterprises, which—combined with allowing for 100 per cent foreign ownership of Iraqi companies—rendered key sectors of the Iraqi economy prime targets of burgeoning American corporations;

US hegemony and MENA

• • • • •

the imposition of a 15 per cent flat tax, which primarily benefited the wealthy and placed a disproportionate burden on the poor; the virtual elimination of import tariffs, resulting in a flood of foreign goods into the country; since smaller Iraqi companies—weakened by over a dozen years of sanctions—were unable to compete, hundreds of factories shut down, adding to already-severe unemployment; 100 per cent repatriation of profits, which severely limits reinvestment in the Iraqi economy; a lowering of the minimum wage, increasing already widespread poverty; leases on contracts for as long as 40 years, making it impossible for even a truly sovereign government to legally make alternative arrangements.

(It is noteworthy that there was one Saddam-era law that US authorities did not overturn: the ban on public-sector unions. In fact, US occupation forces on a number of occasions violently broke up peaceful demonstrations by trade union activists.) A poll taken in 2004 revealed that 65 per cent of Iraqis would prefer a largely-state controlled economy and government subsidies of basic services, while only 6.6 per cent would support a free-market system where private entrepreneurs have largely unrestricted access to the economy. Reflecting this sentiment, the original draft for the Iraqi constitution declared that “Social justice is the basis of building society,” that Iraq’s natural resources would be owned collectively by the Iraqi people, that every Iraqi had the right to work and that the government would be legally bound to provide employment opportunities to everyone. The underlying theme of the draft was that the state would be the collective instrument of the Iraqi people for achieving development. However, thanks to intense intervention by US ambassador Zalmay Khalizad, these provisions were dropped and replaced by an article that declared that “The state shall guarantee the reforming of the Iraqi economy according to modern economic bases, in a way that ensures complete investment of its resources, diversifying its sources and encouraging and developing the private sector” (Docena 2005). After years of state control under Saddam’s dictatorship, there is little question that some liberalization and restructuring of Iraq’s economy was necessary, but Iraqis resented such important issues being decided by an occupying power that clearly had a strong commercial interest in their country. Besides the continuing violence and a lack of basic services, the primary grievance of Iraqis toward the US occupation was that the Americans were seemingly trying to impose a neo-colonial agenda. Indeed, the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits occupying powers from substantially altering the economic system to their benefit. Like many Arab governments, Iraq under Saddam Hussein squandered billions of dollars of the nation’s wealth through corruption and wasteful military spending. Nevertheless, prior to Saddam’s ill-fated invasion of Kuwait and the resulting war and sanctions, Iraqis ranked near the top of developing countries according to the Human Development Index, which measures nutrition, health care, housing, education and other human needs. Not only did the US occupation fail to restore Iraqis to their pre-1991 standard of living, but most of them are poorer now than they were during more than a decade of sanctions following the devastating US-led bombing campaign of the Gulf War. A poll commissioned by the Coalition Provisional Authority asked Iraqis why they believed insurgents attack US-led Coalition forces; 78 per cent said it was because “the Coalition is trying to steal Iraq’s wealth,” more than twice the percentage who agreed with President Bush’s assertion that “they do not want democracy in Iraq” (Brookings Institution 2005). This widespread sentiment that the United States was after their nation’s wealth and putting the profits of well-connected American companies over the livelihoods of ordinary Iraqis fuelled the very armed resistance that made any attempt at rebuilding—by any economic model—virtually impossible. The resulting insurgency, sectarian conflict and government corruption (ranked by 329

Stephen Zunes

Transparency International as among the highest in the world) made Iraq an unattractive place to invest. As a result, the United States had no more success imposing its free-market utopia on the Iraqis than the Soviets had in imposing their socialist utopia on the Afghans in the 1980s. The United States also had plans for the construction of 14 large permanent military bases in Iraq, comparable to the large-scale US deployments in West Germany and Japan in the decades following World War II. This would have not only provided the United States with a strong military presence in the country with the fifth-largest oil reserves in the world, but the United States would have had large numbers of troops, facilities and deployable weapons bordering countries with the first, fourth and sixth largest reserves in the world and within a few hundred kilometres of the seventh.1 Though the United States was less dependent on Persian Gulf oil than most European or Asian countries, in the event of future trade wars with the EU, Japan or other emerging Asian economies or a strategic confrontation with China, the United States could have enormous leverage regarding access to this vital natural resource. So, while the invasion and occupation of Iraq was about oil in terms of desiring the enrichment of American oil companies, it was also at least in part about oil in terms of its role geo-strategically. In a sense, US policy towards Iraq was a return to the nineteenth-century “great game” in Southwest Asia between imperial powers, a literally reactionary foreign policy which eschewed twentiethcentury principles of international law for power politics in its crudest form. This plan, of course, never came to fruition either. The Iraqi government demanded that the United States withdraw all its forces by the end of 2011. While small numbers of US forces were allowed to return in 2014 and the US resumed airstrikes in response to the rise of the “Islamic State,” nothing close to a permanent military presence was ever established. US forces, which had been stationed in Saudi Arabia since 1990, withdrew in 2003. Small contingents remain in Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain, while troop levels in Turkey declined to 2200—well below Cold War numbers. The largest numbers of US forces, numbering less than 10,000, were in Afghanistan, largely to prevent a difficult security situation from getting even worse. A final manifestation of US hegemonic goals in Iraq were ideological, including the efforts by Bush administration officials to justify the Iraq War as a means of spreading US-style liberal democracy to the Arab/Islamic world. In effect, the United States decided that invading and occupying sovereign nations was a legitimate means of social and political engineering. Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, in an interview in the magazine Vanity Fair, emphasized that the false allegations that Iraq still had “weapons of mass destruction” was never actually the primary reason for war, but that the President saw himself in an epochal struggle against evil and wanted to reorder the Middle East (Cohen 2004). Part of this may be a reflection of the Protestant fundamentalism embraced by President Bush and others in the administration who believed in a kind of Manichean moralism that sees the world in simplistic terms of good versus evil. A revealing glimpse at the religious underpinning of the American leadership’s view of America’s destiny through the invasion of Iraq could be gleaned from the Cheneys’ 2003 Christmas card, which contains the quote, “If a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?” (Kristof 2004). President Bush was even blunter in a conversation with Mahmoud Abbas in June of 2003, when he reportedly told the then-Palestinian Prime Minister that “God . . . instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did.” Perhaps it is no accident that a number of the neoconservative intellectuals who pushed for the invasion of Iraq were Trotskyists in their youth. In both cases, they embraced a kind of a vanguard mentality which believes that an ideal system destined by history sometimes needs to be imposed by force, which will be embraced by the vast majority of the population grateful for their liberation, while the minority who do not will have to be dealt with harshly. 330

US hegemony and MENA

Yet democratization never really took place in Iraq either, and there are serious questions as to how sincere the Bush administration was in advancing it. During most of the first year of the US occupation, the US strongly opposed holding direct elections. Soon after occupying the country, the United States appointed an “Iraqi Governing Council” (IGC) as a consultative body. Initially, Washington supported the installation of Ahmed Chalabi or some other compliant pro-American exile as leader of Iraq. When that plan proved unacceptable, US officials tried to keep their viceroy Paul Bremer in power indefinitely. When it became clear that Iraqis and the international community would not tolerate that option either, the Bush administration pushed for a caucus system in which American appointees would choose the new government and write the constitution. Only in January 2004, when that plan prompted hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to take to the streets to protest the proposed caucus system and demand a popular vote, did President Bush give in and reluctantly agree to allow direct elections to move forward. Instead of going ahead with the poll in May as called for by Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and other Iraqi leaders, however, US officials postponed the elections until January 2005. They argued that there was inadequate time to register voters and that the ration lists developed during the UN-supervised Oil for Food programme were inadequate (though the voter rolls for the election were based in large part on the ration lists anyway). In the meantime, however, the dramatic growth of the insurgency during the eight-month delay resulted in a serious deterioration of the security situation. By the time the elections finally took place, the large and important Sunni Arab minority was largely unable or unwilling to participate. In most Sunni-dominated parts of Arab-populated Iraq, threats by insurgents made it physically unsafe to go to the polls. In addition, the major Sunni parties—angered by US counter-insurgency operations that killed enormous numbers of civilians during the months leading up the election—called for a boycott. Subsequent Iraqi governments have been dominated by sectarian Shia parties whose corruption and repression has largely been responsible for the large-scale violence which has plagued the country ever since.

US retrenchment and the Arab Uprisings: policy under Obama The disastrous outcome of the Iraq War tempered the more extreme hegemonic goals coming out of Washington. Barack Obama was elected President in 2008 in large part because he recognized that there were limitations to American power, particularly in regard to military force. Among the American electorate, support for military intervention and other assertions of hegemonic reach declined greatly after the invasion of Iraq. Democratic politicians who supported the Iraq War suffered politically and likely contributed to the narrow losses of the pro-war 2004 and 2016 Democratic nominees for President. Donald Trump’s disingenuous claim that he opposed the Iraq War played an important role in defeating his hawkish Republican rivals for the nomination and led enough libertarian and other anti-interventionists to support him over Hillary Clinton to have made the difference in the general election (Kriner and Shen 2017). In addition to the enormous humanitarian, fiscal, and environmental costs of the war, the invasion seriously strained relations with most of Washington’s Arab allies, lowered public opinion towards the United States in the greater Middle East to record lows and encouraged the rise of Islamist extremists. Indeed, virtually the entire political and military leadership of the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS) were Iraqis radicalized during the US occupation and counter-insurgency war, many of whom had suffered abuse in American-run military prisons. Ironically, however, the United States has used the threat from ISIS as an excuse for further militarization, military intervention and support for armed groups and autocratic governments—the very failed policies 331

Stephen Zunes

which have contributed so greatly to the region’s suffering and the rise of extremist groups. This has underscored the paradox that the greater the assertion of military force by the United States, the more rapid the decline in US influence. The level of US influence declined still further as a result of the events of 2011. There has been a longstanding tradition of those on both the right and the left to exaggerate the role the United States plays in the greater Middle East—either for good or for ill. For example, many proponents of US hegemonic aspirations in the region have tried to blame former President Barack Obama for the ongoing civil war in Syria because he supposedly failed to intervene enough through unilaterally establishing no-fly zones, engaging in airstrikes against the Syrian government or provide large-scale arming and funding for so-called “moderate rebels.” Meanwhile, some of the anti-imperialist left have blamed Obama for the war by insisting that the Syrian Uprising was essentially organized, funded, and armed by the United States as part of an agenda of “regime change” and an excuse for an increased US military presence in the region. Both versions largely ignore the agency of the Syrian people, the nature of the Syrian regime, the constellation of political and sectarian groups, and the role of other foreign actors. Indeed, the popular Uprisings which swept the Middle East—despite their failure (outside of Tunisia) to create a more democratic and stable order—served as a reminder that civil society, transnational movements, and other factors have reduced the ability of foreign governments to impact the fate of nations in the greater Middle East. Clandestine operations by intelligence agencies, secret agreements signed in European capitals and even full-scale military invasions and occupations can no longer ensure that any Western power can impose its hegemonic agenda. Claims that the United States or other Western powers were somehow responsible for the aborted 2009 pro-democracy uprising in Iran or the popular Uprisings which swept the region 2 years later are completely ludicrous. Even in cases where some Western NGOs and even Western governments may have provided some funding or workshops for civil society organizations, such assistance was no more responsible for the Uprisings themselves than was Soviet aid responsible for left-wing nationalist uprisings in the Global South in previous decades. This has not, however, prevented the United States from trying to influence the outcome of such rebellions. Indeed, whether the motivation for direct or indirect US military intervention in the greater Middle East is based on crass imperialism, sincere (if sometimes misguided) liberal internationalism, or other reasons, the United States remains the dominant outside actor in the region. While the Obama administration recognized that the reckless interventionism of the Bush administration actually hurt US strategic objectives, President Obama still saw the United States as the “indispensable nation” and still supported what amounted to a hegemonic agenda, albeit more nuanced. Despite criticisms by Republicans and some hawkish Democrats that he was being too cautious and too reluctant to use military force, President Obama ordered the bombing of no less than seven countries in the greater Middle East during his 8 years in office. Similarly, through the use or the threat of US veto power in the UN Security Council, its influential role in international financial institutions and other diplomatic efforts—as well as the US role as the principal arms supplier to the region—the Obama administration vigorously pursued an agenda supportive of its allies and interests and detrimental to perceived adversaries regardless of America’s stated support for human rights and international law. The US role in the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya was characteristic of the desire to exert American power in the region without the unilateralism and overreach characteristic of the Bush administration. Declaring that the United States was “leading from behind,” President Obama acted only after a large-scale indigenous uprising against the regime of longstanding dictator Muammar Gaddafi regime was underway, the Arab League requested and the UN Security Council approved the use of force and British and French forces demonstrated their willingness 332

US hegemony and MENA

and ability to take primary responsibility for the air campaign. The Obama administration, however, joined its NATO and Arab allies in going well beyond the UNSC mandate to provide a no-fly zone to protect civilians to instead effectively become the air force for the coalition of rebel armies. However, the subsequent collapse of the Libyan state, the ongoing violence between various armed factions and the rise of radical Islamist groups in the country has raised questions about even this relatively modest intervention. Obama himself has acknowledged the failure of the United States to play a more assertive role in trying to promote post-Gaddafi stability in the country as perhaps the greatest regret of his presidency. The Obama administration tried to walk a similarly fine line in regard to Syria’s civil war but was challenged domestically from both the right and left. Furthermore, even Syrian opponents of the Asad regime were suspicious of US motivations as a result of bipartisan policies of earlier years in which the United States employed punitive sanctions, demanded unilateral disarmament, supported the Israeli occupation of the Golan province, attacked Syrian forces in Lebanon and made a series of exaggerated and unfounded charges—along with military threats—regarding the country’s alleged culpability in terrorism and its danger to regional security. In mid-2011, after the indigenous popular nonviolent uprising had been waging for a couple of months, the State Department established a small office in Istanbul that provided workshops, information and some logistical support for some nonviolent pro-democracy activists, but it is unclear if it had much impact. As hundreds of armed militia sprung up under the loose banner of the Free Syrian Army in early 2012, several US agencies provided a limited amount of arms and funding to some “moderate” rebel factions, but a combination of their failure to gain traction militarily and some of them being incorporated into coalitions with hard-line Islamists resulted in Washington largely scuttling such efforts by 2014. Indeed, after the rise of ISIS that same year, the United States began providing arms to militiamen only if they pledge to almost exclusively fight against that Islamist cult rather than the Syrian regime. Perhaps the most significant factor the Syrian crisis has played in regard to US hegemony is that it has become the vehicle through which Moscow has reasserted its role in the Middle East. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, its former allied regimes in the region—initially Afghanistan and South Yemen, and subsequently Iraq and Libya—have fallen, with US intervention playing a role in whole or in part in three of those cases. Combined with the eastward expansion of NATO and growing US ties with some allied states in the Caucasus republics, it has led the Kremlin to reassert its perceived strategic interests by throwing its support behind the Syrian government despite the large-scale atrocities by the Asad regime. This has limited the military options the United States may have had to force regime change by military means or even to simply protect the civilian population. While Americans are understandably outraged over Russian support for a brutal and corrupt dictatorship that has been responsible for so many civilian deaths, the rationalizations for Russian policy—fighting armed extremists in a strategically important region on its southern flank where its superpower rival has had a growing military presence—is remarkably similar to the stated reasons behind US support for similarly brutal and corrupt allies in Central America during the 1980s (even though the actual extent of Moscow’s military presence in Latin America was quite minimal and the leftist movements targeted by the United States were far less threatening). Despite some domestic political posturing by those claiming otherwise, there is a reasonably broad consensus that there is little the United States can do in Syria to control the situation or even ease the suffering. Even when there is neither warfare nor Russian influence, the limits of US hegemony became apparent during the 2011 Egyptian revolution which overthrew a longstanding autocratic American ally, followed by the election of a conservative Islamist as President and the reinstallation of authoritarian military rule. Despite various conspiracy theories regarding supposed 333

Stephen Zunes

US instigation of the uprising or the military coup, policy makers in Washington were in fact scrambling to anticipate or even keep up with events, much less influence them. Despite billions of dollars’ worth of economic and military aid and decades of close military co-operation, the ability of the United States to affect the outcome of events in that nation of 80 million people was and remains minimal. With important military installations in Bahrain and an exaggerated concern over Iranian influence among that country’s Shia majority, the US government expressed little public concerns over the brutal repression by the Bahraini regime and Saudi-led foreign forces against the popular nonviolent pro-democracy movement in that island nation in 2011. However, given the determination by those monarchies to prevent a democratic opening in the Gulf, there was little the United States could have done to have prevented it anyway. Similarly, the United States had little influence in the more positive outcome in Tunisia, particularly given that France, as the former colonial power, was the dominant foreign influence. The United States did play a more active role in Yemen, however, as a stalemate developed in 2011 between President Ali Abdullah Saleh and the broad alliance of oppositionists that had staged a largely nonviolent civil resistance campaign to his authoritarian regime. Rejecting proposals by the opposition for a National Council consisting of 143 opposition representatives to form a provisional government and oversee democratic multiparty elections, the United States instead backed a Saudi-led plan by the autocratic monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council in which Saleh would be replaced by his Vice-President, Major General Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi. The result was the Houthi uprising and civil war, the devastating Saudi intervention, the growing influence of al-Qaeda and an increase in US airstrikes and commando raids. As a result, the one country that was poor and dependent enough where the United States could have potentially impacted the outcome in a positive manner by supporting pro-democracy forces, the Obama administration instead sided with the autocratic Gulf monarchs in imposing what Washington apparently believed would result in a more stabilizing transition which would enhance US influence, but which instead resulted in a dramatic destabilization and tragic humanitarian consequences.

Nuclear non-proliferation An issue through which the United States has most vigorously asserted its hegemonic agenda has been in regard to nuclear weapons non-proliferation, largely rejecting universal, law-based and reciprocal arms control agreements and instead insisting that the United States and its allies should be allowed to develop and deploy nuclear weapons and delivery systems while subjecting perceived adversaries to sanctions, threats of war and even invasion and occupation for allegedly developing even just the potential of such technologies. UN Security Resolution 687, passed in 1991, which demanded Iraqi disarmament, did so within the context of “establishing in the Middle East a zone free of weapons of mass destruction.” It was alleged violations of this resolution that the Bush administration used to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003, even though Iraq was actually in full compliance for nearly a decade prior to the war and the United States discouraged implementation of this provision. Nuclear weapon free zones (NWFZs) have been successfully established in Latin America, Africa, Antarctica, the South Pacific, Southeast Asia and Central Asia, but the United States has repeatedly blocked United Nations efforts for an international conference to establish such a regime in the Middle East. US opposition to NWFZs in the Middle East and elsewhere has stemmed largely from the desire for the United States to move its tactical nuclear weapons around the world. This is why Israel—which possesses hundreds of nuclear 334

US hegemony and MENA

weapons—is actually correct in insisting that they would not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons in the region since the US aircraft carriers first brought atomic bombs into the eastern Mediterranean in 1958. As against support for a nuclear-free Middle East, successive US administrations have either acquiesced or quietly supported the development of Israel’s nuclear arsenal. Israel continues to be in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 487 (1981), which calls on Israel to place its nuclear facilities under the trusteeship of the International Atomic Energy Agency, while Pakistan and India have been in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1172 (1998) which calls on those nations to end their nuclear weapons programmes and eliminate their long-range missiles. The United States had blocked enforcement of those resolutions, however, while demanding—under threat of war—that Iraq and Iran unilaterally eliminate their nuclear programmes. Congress went on record defending Israel’s 1981 bombing of an Iraqi nuclear reaction, demonstrating a strong bipartisan preference for selective counterproliferation over non-proliferation. Indeed, the bipartisan consensus in opposition to the United Nations or diplomatic measures was reflected in a Congressional Resolution in March 2003 declaring that—despite the successful efforts by the United Nations to eliminate Iraq’s nuclear, chemical and biological programmes in the 1990s—the United States had the right to invade Iraq on the grounds that such “diplomatic and other peaceful means alone” would not “adequately protect the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq.”2 Similarly, when a protracted British-led diplomatic effort to eliminate Libya’s nascent nuclear programme reached a successful conclusion in December 2003, a large bipartisan majority of the US House of Representatives supported a resolution which declared—in direct contradiction of American diplomats involved in the talks (Leverett 2004)—that the elimination of Libya’s nuclear programme “would not have been possible if not for. . . the liberation of Iraq by the United States and Coalition Forces.”3 The fact that having given up even the potential for a nuclear deterrent, the Iraqi government was overthrown in a US-led invasion and the Libyan government was overthrown in a US-backed uprising may have contributed to Iran’s reluctance to give up its nuclear programme. Despite Iran’s programme being civilian in nature, the potential that it could eventually branch off into military applications became a major obsession for US policy makers. Most Democrats and almost all Republicans in Congress went on record insisting that Iran must capitulate to US demands that it end its nuclear programme and opposed negotiations. In 2011, both parties in both houses of Congress passed a resolution with only a few dissenting votes insisting that the United States should not rely on deterrence to counter a nuclear-armed Iran but must instead go to war to prevent Iran from developing such weapons. According to then-senator Hillary Clinton—who never expressed objections to either Israel or India developing nuclear weapons—a nuclear Iran “must be unacceptable to the entire world” since it would somehow “shake the foundation of global security to its very core.”4 One factor often overlooked is that Article VI of the Non-proliferation Treaty—the supposed basis of US objections to Iraq and Iran’s nuclear programmes—requires countries in possession of nuclear weapons at the time of the signing to “pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.” Despite this, neither the United States nor the four other original nuclear powers have fulfilled this obligation. This underscores how the issue was never one of nonproliferation. Even if Iran indeed did intend to use the option of developing nuclear weapons, it would have almost certainly been for deterrence, given threats of regime change by the United States, the recent overthrow of governments to their immediate east and west, the existing 335

Stephen Zunes

nuclear arsenals of three neighbouring countries, and the overthrow of the Iraqi and Libyan governments after they had eliminated their nuclear programmes. It was just this potential deterrent that was so disturbing to Washington. The doctrine of “full-spectrum dominance,” initiated by the Bush administration, posits that not only should the United States prevent the emergence of another rival global superpower such as China, it should also resist the emergence of even a regional power, such as Iran, that could potentially deter unilateral US military actions or other projections of American hegemony. The real “threat” from Iran was if they achieved nuclear weapons capability it would end the nuclear monopoly in the region by the United States and its allies. Both Democrats and Republicans have long been united in their belief that no country should stand in the way of the unilateral projection of military force by the United States or its allies in the greater Middle East and that the US has the right to use military force if necessary to prevent any obstacle to its freedom of action. Obama agreed with the urgency of preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear deterrent and threatened the use of military force if necessary, but he also recognized that Iran—which has been a regional power at various times for nearly 2500 years—could not simply be bullied into submission. Furthermore, he recognized that military options would have little international support, would likely fail in their strategic objectives, and have catastrophic results. He therefore had the United States join Russia, China, Great Britain, France and Germany—with the support of the United Nations Security Council, which imposed sanctions on Iran to encourage that government to compromise—in years of painstaking negotiations eventually resulting in an agreement which allowed Iran to maintain a limited civilian nuclear programme but with sufficient safeguards to preclude the physical possibility of developing weapons, along with the most rigorous inspections regime in history to ensure their compliance. Despite this, there was strong opposition by Republicans, some Democrats, as well as Trump and others in his national security team, who repeatedly exaggerated Iran’s military prowess and support for insurgent movements. In May 2018, the Trump administration announced its withdrawal from the agreement despite Iran’s full compliance, not only re-imposing US sanctions but successfully pressuring multinational companies that do business in the United States to comply with sanctions as well. Despite the economic hardships imposed and increased threats of military action against Iran, the refusal of the Iranian government to renegotiate the deal and the lack of support for the US from any of the other parties to the agreement is yet another indication of the limitations of US hegemony.

Israel An area in which the United States has successfully exercised a degree of hegemony is in relation to Israel and Palestine, where—since the Oslo Agreement of 1993—Washington has played the contradictory role of chief mediator in the conflict and the principal military, economic and diplomatic backer of Israel, the power occupying Palestinian lands. This has included blocking enforcement of scores of UN Security Council resolutions as well as vetoing and weakening scores of others and rejecting efforts by the United Nations or other intergovernmental organizations as well as any other country from taking leadership in the peace process. In addition, both Republican and Democratic administrations have attacked the International Court of Justice and other UN bodies for documenting and passing judgement regarding ongoing Israeli violations of international humanitarian law and US political leaders across the ideological spectrum have condemned civil society efforts—such as calls for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) targeting Israel—to end the occupation. The bipartisan consensus is that any peace agreement must come only from direct negotiations between the Israeli and Palestinian 336

US hegemony and MENA

governments which—given the gross asymmetry in power between the occupier and those under occupation—essentially means no settlement is possible except what is acceptable to Israel’s right-wing government, thereby precluding the establishment of an independent viable Palestinian state alongside Israel. As a result—despite the Palestine Authority, the Palestine Liberation Organizations and the ruling Fatah party agreements to accept a Palestinian ministate in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and recognize Israel on the remaining 78 per cent of historic Palestine—there has been no peace agreement. There are serious questions, therefore, as to whether the United States even wants an equitable and lasting peace agreement, particularly in light of the important role that Israel—by far the region’s most powerful armed force—plays in advancing the United States’ longstanding strategic interests in maintaining and securing a pro-Western regional order that legitimates US influence in the region and prevents anti-Western or independent-minded challenges to that order. As such, in a region where radical nationalism and Islamist extremism could threaten US control of oil and other strategic interests, Israel has played a major role in preventing victories by radical movements, not just in Palestine but in Lebanon and Jordan as well. The Israeli air force is predominant throughout the region. Israel’s frequent wars facilitate battlefield testing of US weapons, and Israel’s arms industry has provided weapons and munitions for governments and opposition movements supported by the United States. Moreover, during the 1980s, Israel served as a conduit for US arms to governments and movements too unpopular in the United States to receive overt military assistance, including South Africa under the apartheid regime, Iran’s Islamic Republic, Guatemala’s rightist military juntas, the Nicaraguan Contras, and Colombian paramilitaries. Israeli military advisers assisted the Contras, the Salvadoran junta, and other movements and governments backed by the United States—most recently a number of Kurdish forces. The Israeli intelligence agency Mossad has co-operated with the CIA and other US agencies in gathering intelligence and spearheading covert operations. Israel possesses missiles capable of striking targets thousands of miles from its borders and has collaborated with the US military-industrial complex in research and development for new jet fighters and anti-missile defence systems, a relationship that is growing every year. Israelis have trained US forces bound for Iraq and Afghanistan in counterterrorism and counter-insurgency tactics. As one Israeli analyst described it during the Iran– Contra scandal, where Israel played a crucial intermediary rule, “It’s like Israel has become just another federal agency, one that’s convenient to use when you want something done quietly” (Frankel 1986). Former US Secretary of State Alexander Haig once described Israel as the largest and only unsinkable US aircraft carrier in the world. One of the most fundamental principles in the theory of international relations is that the most stable military relationship between adversaries (besides disarmament) is strategic parity. Such a relationship provides each opponent with an effective deterrent against the other launching a pre-emptive attack. If the United States was concerned simply with Israel’s security, Washington would maintain Israeli defences only to a level approximately equal to any combination of Arab armed forces. Instead, leaders of both US political parties have called for insuring qualitative Israeli military superiority. When Israel was less dominant militarily, there was less consensus in Washington for backing Israel. The continued high level of US aid to Israel stems less out of concern for Israel’s survival than from a desire for Israel to continue its political dominion over the Palestinians and its military dominance of the region. Indeed, history has shown that the stronger, more aggressive and more compliant with US interests that Israel has become, the higher the level of aid and strategic co-operation it receives. A militant Israel is seen to advance American interests. Indeed, an Israel in a constant state of war—technologically sophisticated and militarily advanced, yet lacking an independent 337

Stephen Zunes

economy and dependent on the United States—is far more willing to perform tasks unacceptable to other allies than an Israel at peace with its neighbours. As former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once put it, in reference to Israel’s reluctance to make peace, “Israel’s obstinacy . . . serves the purposes of both our countries best.” For example, over the objections of leading Israeli generals, the United States put pressure on Israel to launch a major—an ultimately disastrous—war on Lebanon in 2006 as an effort to destroy the missile capabilities of Hizbullah, a pro-Iranian militia, in anticipation of a thenplanned attack on Iran. The United States also successfully pressured Israel to reject Syrian peace overtures in 2007 out of concern that a return of the Golan region would boost Asad’s standing (Zunes 2007). The Trump administration’s support for Israeli colonization of the West Bank, its moving the US embassy to Jerusalem and recognizing that multi-ethnic city as solely Israel’s capital, its cutting off funding to the Palestinians, and its refusal to support an independent Palestinian state further underscored the US position that an Israel in a constant state of war would be a more reliable ally than an Israel at peace and with normalized relations with its neighbours. At the same time, the very fact that the United States has to rely on what, in the view of virtually every country in the greater Middle East, is a pariah state is indicative of the failure of hegemonic goals. Like the United States, Israel has relied on military force and unilateral initiatives in contravention of international legal norms and contrary to the human rights and wellbeing of the majority of the peoples of the greater Middle East. And, just as Israeli reliance on its vast military superiority rather than making the necessary compromises for peace is ultimately self-defeating for its security interests, the United States’ similar reliance on its military might will continue to not only undermine its hegemonic objectives but threaten its legitimate longterm security interests as well.

Notes 1 Respectively, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait and United Arab Emirates. 2 . H. Con. Res. 104, 108th Congress, 1st session, 21 March 2003. 3 H. Amdt.601 (A003), 107th Congress, 2nd session, 23 June 2004. 4 Remarks by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to the 2005 American Israel Public Affairs Committee Conference, 24 May 2005.

References Armstrong, S. (1 November 1981), “Saudis’ AWACS just a beginning of a new strategy,” Washington Post. Brookings Institution (26 September 2005), “Iraq Index: Tracking variables of reconstruction and security in post-Saddam Iraq,” Brookings Institution. Bush, G.W. (September 2002), “Introduction,” The National Security Strategy of the United States of America. Cohen R. (20 April 2004), Washington Post. Docena, H. (2 September 2005), “Iraq’s neoliberal constitution,” Silver City, NM, and Washington, DC: Foreign Policy in Focus. Frankel, G. (19 November 1986), Washington Post. Haaretz (24 June 2003), Haaretz. Hiro, D. (2003), Secrets and Lies: The True Story of the Iraq War, London: Politico’s. Klare, M. (1994), “Making Enemies for the ‘90s: The New ‘Rogue States’ Doctrine,” The Nation, p. 625. Kolko, J. and G. Kolko (1972), The Limits of Power, p. 45, New York, NY: Harper & Row. Kriner, D.L. and F.X. Shen (19 June 2017), “Battlefield casualties and ballot box defeat: Did the BushObama wars cost Clinton the White House?” accessible at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2989040 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2989040 Kristof, N. (7 January 2004), “The God Gulf,” New York Times. 338

US hegemony and MENA

Leverett F. (23 January 2004), “Why Libya gave up on the bomb,” The New York Times, p. 23. Nixon, R.M. (3 November 1969), “Address to the nation on the war in Vietnam.” Maloney, S. (2019), “Iran and America,” The Brookings Institution, accessed 24 January 2019, accessible at: https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/1979-iran-and-america/ Spiegel, S. (1985), The Other Arab-Israeli Conflict, p. 51, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Woodward, B. (2004), Plan of Attack, New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. Zuesse, E. (2004), Iraq War: The Truth, New York, NY: Delphic Press. Zunes, S. (May 1997), “The Function of rogue states in U.S. Middle East policy,” Middle East Policy, V:2. Zunes, S. (1 May 2007), “U.S. blocks Israel-Syria talks,” Foreign Policy in Focus.

339

24 Alliances and the balance of power in the Middle East Curtis R. Ryan

International relations theory has traditionally placed alliance politics at the very centre of many analyses of international or regional politics. Realist scholars, in particular, continually revised alliance theories, with assorted debates over time, but often with little reference to the Middle East. International relations theory has been, quite appropriately, accused of being too Westerncentric and even US-centric in understandings of global politics, or of being too focused on competing paradigms and schools of thought, or what is sometimes referred to as “theoretical sectarianism” (Salloukh 2015: 50). Scholars of Middle East regional politics, in contrast, have rarely associated with a single school or perspective, and have been more likely to employ a kind of theoretical pluralism or eclecticism to understand the details and nuances of regional political life, including alliances. This chapter first examines key parts of the vast literature on alliances, alignments and changing balances of power in international relations theory. Some of this literature is drawn from Western empirical evidence, some from the Middle East itself. The chapter then turns more exclusively to the region, examining regional politics and especially shifting alliances and changes over time in the regional balance of power, including the frequently shifting politics of inter-Arab relations. Together, these two broad themes—the alliance literature in international relations theory and regional alliance politics in actual practice—combine for a more comprehensive analysis of alliances and the balance of power in the Middle East. As we shall see, most scholars of the region approach these topics from several angles, drawing on multiple theoretical perspectives, but ultimately providing fuller explanations for regional political dynamics, including shifting patterns of alliances and alignments in the region, inter-Arab relations and the changing regional balance and the recurring patterns of regional “Cold Wars.”

Explaining alliances The balance of power States and policy-makers in the Middle East seem to be particularly concerned with any shifts in the regional balance of power. The balance of power is perhaps the most traditional concept in international relations theory. The idea is straightforward: that states align and realign in a 340

Alliances and the balance of power

regional system in order to achieve or re-establish equilibrium in that system. But why do this in the first place? The balance of power is, at its core, intended to keep the peace. It refers to a fairly even distribution of military power and resources, so that states essentially hold each other in check. International history is replete with examples of states attempting to rise above their neighbours, making a play to dominate a region or even larger parts of the world. This kind of imbalance of power—or of disequilibrium—threatens the security of the other states in the system, and may tip the regional imbalance toward open conflict. War, in turn, may be used (sometimes as a last resort) to defeat a would-be hegemonic power and thereafter restore equilibrium and balance to the system. Realist scholars and policy-makers tend to be particularly concerned with maintaining the balance of power and avoiding challenges to it. Realists expect states and policymakers to know this, to pay attention to changes and challenges to the balance of power, and hence to make sensible moves to restore the balance and counter hegemonic threats. Within realism, there are multiple variations on this theme. Neorealists, such as Kenneth Waltz, emphasized anarchy and system-structure as the key factors in international relations. Anarchy, the lack of a common power or government, forces states to become security-maximizers and in a sense almost security-obsessed, especially with challenges at the levels of the regional and global systems (Waltz 1979). States therefore pay attention not only to the balance of power, but also to the polarity in the system—that is, the distribution of power among states in the system, or what neorealists refer to as system-structure. This denotes how many key powers exist and therefore what kind of polarity is at work: a unipolar, bipolar or multipolar system, for example. Waltz and other neorealists expect states to use alliances to achieve a balance of power, but note that polarity breeds different types of expectations. Multipolar systems may see continual alignment and realignment, and therefore an often-shifting balance of power, as states have more alliance options but also more potential threats. Their continual readjustment produces changing regional balances and potentially an unstable regional system. For Waltz, bipolar systems, such as the contending Cold War alliance systems led by the US and the Soviet Union, for all their intense rivalry actually created stability, at least between major powers (Waltz 1979).

Balancing, bandwagoning, omnibalancing and underbalancing But would the above realist expectations apply to the Middle East regional system? Realists of all stripes see international relations as a Hobbesian world of conflict, with alliances and the balance of power temporarily keeping the peace, or perhaps restoring it after yet another war. Of all the world’s regions, the Middle East may be the most “Hobbesian” and hence most amenable to realist explanations for the behaviour of states. Yet much of the literature on the international relations of the Middle East suggests that other perspectives are sorely needed in order to fully understand regional relations. One key point of departure came from within realism itself. In his book, The Origin of Alliances, Stephen Walt applied neorealist theory to the Middle East but found that some adjustments were needed (Walt 1987). Balance of power and polarity were not enough to explain the shifting alliance dynamics associated with Middle East regional politics. States, he argued, were not just responding to power shifts, but also to perceived intentions. A balance of threats, not simply a balance of power, therefore better explained Middle East alliance dynamics over time. Walt noted that offensive capabilities did matter in state calculations, but so too did geographic proximity and perceived intentions in determining an overall balance of threats, and associated alliance shifts. Walt also observed that where states lacked the 341

Curtis R. Ryan

option to balance against threats, they could bandwagon with the threatening state in order to appease it (Walt 1985, 1987, 1988). Other realist scholars similarly made adjustments to the alliance and balance of power theories, extending the range of policy options beyond balancing and bandwagoning to include omnibalancing, buck-passing, and chain-ganging. Steven David, for example, examined relations between regional states and global powers. Developing countries, including states in the Middle East, were likely to be as concerned with internal threats to their own ruling regimes as they were with external balances of power or threats. Weaker states in particular were therefore likely to engage in omnibalancing—allying with a global power that would help a local regime counter its own home-grown or internal threats (David 1991a, 1991b). Similarly, Harknett and Vandenberg, noting the importance of internal as well as external security concerns, argued that Middle East alliances were responses not just to exogenous concerns but rather to inter-related domestic and international threats (Harknett and Vandenberg 1997). Other scholars examined different sets of policy options. Weaker states in regional systems might try to avoid all of the above behaviours, for example, and hope that other, more powerful states would counter a rising hegemonic or otherwise threatening power. This buck-passing behaviour is a gamble usually made by states desperate to avoid wars they are likely to lose. But if states are convinced that alliances are essential to ensure their own security, then they may pursue the opposite strategy, not only committing to an alliance but potentially even overcommitting. When states effectively chain-gang like this, creating firm alliances in the face of threats, they engage in a gamble of a different kind, in which allies may drag a state into a war it would otherwise prefer to avoid (Christensen and Snyder 1990). Glenn Snyder, one of the most prolific scholars of alliances (Snyder 1984, 1990, 1991, 1997), suggested that security dilemmas—a key concern in realist analyses—exist not only between potential adversaries, but also between allies. In the former version, states ensure their security through such traditional means as arms and alliances. They may enhance their military capabilities by one or both means. But the danger of the security dilemma occurs when states, in attempting to ensure their own security, instead trigger alarm in their neighbours, causing them to respond with arms buildups of their own. The security dilemma at its worst results in arms races, unstable regional or global systems or war. But as Snyder noted, even alliances see a different version of the security dilemma. The alliance security dilemma occurs for similar reasons because states have imperfect information, rely on their own threat perceptions and can never be completely certain of their own allies’ behaviour. States are then torn between two opposite potential outcomes from the “alliance security dilemma”—abandonment or entrapment—in which one’s own allies either abandon a state at its moment of greatest insecurity or entrap it in a war that it would otherwise prefer to avoid (Snyder 1984, 1997). In yet another twist within realist approaches to alliances, Schweller (2004) introduced the concept of underbalancing in which states fail to respond to a rising regional threat; that is, they do not create a countervailing alliance. Failing to adjust alliances and achieve a balance of power yields a regional imbalance, instability and a relative increase in the power of the would-be hegemon. Haas later expanded on this notion, showing that states may “underbalance” despite the power politics dimensions when they object to the ideology or regime type of potential allies (Haas 2014). Gregory Gause applies a combination of these perspectives to understand a key dilemma in Middle East regional politics—the lack of a countervailing coalition against rising Iranian power since the early 2000s. From a purely realist perspective, one might expect regional powers such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel to band together to counter Iran. Instead, Middle East politics was characterized by a missing balance of power and no coherent counter-coalition to Iran, despite Saudi attempts to rally much of the region against Iran as a longtime adversary (Gause 2015). 342

Alliances and the balance of power

Beyond realism: economic and constructivist approaches While traditional alliance theories are associated with variations of realism, there have been many challenges to these approaches. Scholars approaching the Middle East from an international relations perspective sometimes apply IR theory to the region and then make adjustments accordingly. But many specialists on the region itself have started in the opposite direction, examining the empirical evidence in regional politics, and extrapolating theoretical conclusions from the evidence. Challenging realist expectations, scholars have pointed to domestic politics and political economy as key variables determining foreign policy and alliance shifts by Middle East states. Domestic political concerns (Barnett and Levy 1991) or the “low politics” of economic well-being (Barnett 1990) can at times provide stronger explanations for foreign policy and alliance politics, than the traditional “high politics” of military capabilities and the balance of power. Laurie Brand (1994a, 1994b), in an explicitly economic approach to regional alliances, found that Middle East alliances can be rooted in budget security, that is, shoring up an economically dependent state’s revenue needs. Regional alliances were often meant to ensure economic viability, especially for smaller or weaker regional states, whose main concern was budget security, not an external balance of power or balance of threats. Jamie Allinson (2016) applies political economy in a historical sociology perspective to examine Jordanian alliance policies during the Arab Cold War period in the 1950s. His work emphasizes uneven and combined development in state formation, arguing that these historical sociological aspects are essential for understanding state policies. Foreign policy and alliance choices, he argues, are not the province of a single king or other chief executive, but rather emerge from domestic political struggles and social formations underpinning the state and regime. Other scholars challenged realism not from a political economy perspective, but from a decidedly non-material approach, examining the roles of ideas, identities and socially-constructed norms to understand alliances and the balance of power in the Middle East. Michael Barnett, in his book Dialogues in Arab Politics (1998) took a macro-level approach, examining the entire Arab regional system, but with emphasis on changing norms and ideas in Arab politics, rather than material concerns of either high or low politics. Barnett argued that decades of regional Arab politics turned not on a military balance of power, but on conflicts over the meaning of Arabism itself, and hence of state and regional identities. His constructivist approach directly challenged that of traditional realists in understanding how regional politics really works. Similarly, Marc Lynch took a constructivist approach, but from a more micro-level, examining domestic politics and debates within the public sphere in Jordan, over identities in particular, and showing how these internal and ideational dynamics caused shifts in Jordan’s national identity and in the kingdom’s perception of its own interests. Lynch’s work showed that although interests drive policy, including alliance choices, they nonetheless cannot be assumed a priori. They are not, in short, externally-generated, objective, and fixed—as neorealism would suggest—but internally-generated, subjective, and variable (Lynch 1999).

Regime security and alliances A growing number of scholars have argued that students of international relations and Middle East politics do not necessarily need to choose one particular path, school or paradigm. The most influential texts on the international relations of the Middle East, for example, draw on multiple perspectives, theories and levels of analysis in explaining regional political dynamics (Hinnebusch 2003; Halliday 2005). 343

Curtis R. Ryan

In my own work, I have tried to bring this type of approach to the study of alliance politics in the Middle East, and especially to analyses of inter-Arab relations. The key interest for any ruling regime, I have argued, is its own survival in the face of multiple potential threats or challenges. Regimes often conflate their own survival with national security; that is, they conflate the regime with the state as a whole. But the question then is not just what is the regime, but who is the regime? What is the ruling coalition made up of? And what does this constellation of elites view as essential to its own security and survival? Focusing on regime security allows us to draw insights from multiple perspectives, even providing a bridge of sorts between realist, political economy and constructivist approaches (Ryan 2009). Regime security, I have argued, is affected by both high and low politics, by military and economic considerations, and by perceptions of internal and external threats. The regime is at the nexus of these intersecting concerns, and regimes therefore use arms buildups and alliances as well to ensure both domestic and regional security, and above all, regime survival. Regimes in the Middle East in particular use alliances not just in the traditional sense, as external defence pacts, but also and perhaps even more often for domestic regime security. Alliances are in this respect transnational coalitions of ruling elites, propping each other up not only against traditional threats but also against threats from within their own societies. This emphasis on regime survival therefore also underscores the economic underpinnings of alliances, especially for weaker powers in a regional system. Alliances provide political, diplomatic and military support, as one would expect, but they also provide the economic largesse to pay off ruling coalitions of political elites, providing a key part of the economic basis for the regime’s continued rule (Ryan 2002, 2009, 2015a, 2016). Gregory Gause has also examined regional politics and alliances from a regime security perspective but has more thoroughly explored the specific issue of threat perception. Like traditional realist approaches, Gause’s work examines states, power, security and of course alliances, but he also challenges traditional realism by showing the importance of threat perception as variable rather than fixed and, in the Middle East context, rooted heavily in transnational ideologies unique to the region. “Middle East leaders,” he writes, “view external challenges to their domestic legitimacy and security, based on transnational ideological platforms of Islam and pan-Arabism, as being more serious than threats based simply upon a preponderance of military capabilities.” He continues: The trip-wire for these leaders was direct assaults on the legitimacy and stability of their ruling regimes. It was those rhetorical and subversive signals, not distributions of power, which were salient in how the leaders . . . prioritized among potential threats they faced (Gause 2003/4: 303) Gulf states in particular used these calculations to adjust their foreign policies, security policies, and alliances. In a later comprehensive study of the international politics of the Persian Gulf, Gause noted that recognition of the importance of ideas does not negate realist insights about anarchy, power and conflict in the Persian Gulf; it contextualizes those realist insights by giving us a fuller understanding of how state leaders define their interests and understand the power resources at their disposal. (Gause 2010: 243) Lawrence Rubin (2014) picked up on the theme of ideological threats and extended it to regime survival strategies including, but not limited to, alliance politics. Agreeing with Gause, he argues 344

Alliances and the balance of power

that transnational ideologies can be far greater threats to regimes than changes in regional alliances or the balance of power. He introduces the concepts of ideational balancing and the ideational security dilemma. The question is not only one of threat perception, he argues, but of threat projection, which can lead to what he calls an ideational security dilemma. As noted above, in the traditional security dilemma, one state’s attempt to increase its security tends to undermine that of others. In Middle East politics, Rubin suggests, ideological versions of the security dilemma seem to be key factors in regional politics. States often feel threatened by projected ideational challenges from other states, and respond in two ways: by attempting to shore up their own legitimacy while undermining the credibility of the challenger. This amounts to what Rubin calls “ideational balancing” in which a regime “aims to mitigate the domestic political threat from a projected transnational ideology” (Rubin 2014: 37). States are likely to see these ideational challenges as threats not just internationally but also domestically. Accordingly, regimes will respond in both the domestic and international spheres, with internal and external adjustments that “are composed of two pillars: counterframing and resource mobilization” (Rubin 2014: 37). As is true of other versions of the security dilemma, states that are in a particularly vulnerable moment domestically are also far more susceptible to these ideational security dilemma dynamics. In Middle East regional politics, regimes have often shown themselves to be almost hypersensitive to ideological challenges to their legitimacy and survival, whether these emerge internally or externally. In earlier periods of regional politics, especially during the heyday of pan-Arabism and the Arab Cold War, in the 1950s and 1960s, regimes focused not only on material military and economic challenges, but also on revolutionary notions of pan-Arabism. In more recent and indeed current politics, Islamist forces of many different forms—from the Muslim Brotherhood to more radical Jihadist movements—also challenge regimes, societies and regional security. Alliance politics and the balance of power, driven by all these many motivations noted above, often turn into a complicated juggling act, underscoring the need to understand Middle East regional politics, including alliances, from multiple interacting levels of analysis. With this in mind, Bassel Salloukh (2015) has argued that international relations in the Middle East can best be understood as a series of overlapping contests, requiring multiple levels of analysis, and insights from multiple perspectives, in order to fully understand the region, including alliances and the balance of power: Whether in the use of the region’s permeability to transnational ideological currents to advance the state’s geopolitical interests, domestic actors aligning with regional powers to balance against their domestic opponents, the “omnibalancing” choices facing regime leaders, or the regime security and ideational threats driving foreign policy choices and regional alliances, the interplay between the domestic and regional levels served the local agendas of domestic actors and the geopolitical and state-building objectives of many states in the Arab world. It also underscored the salience of immaterial, ideational threats in the making of Middle East international relations. (Salloukh 2015: 47) As the above discussion makes clear, scholars of the Middle East have certainly drawn on traditional approaches to understanding alliances and regional balances of power. But they have also moved well beyond these, and in doing so have contributed to our understanding not only of Middle East politics but also of key themes in international relations theory more broadly (Korany, Brynen and Noble 1993). The next section turns from this broader theoretical discussion to an examination of changing regional relations over time, especially in terms of regional alliances and the Middle East balance of power. 345

Curtis R. Ryan

Shifting alliances and the Middle East balance of power The Cold War and great power alliance-formation During the global Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union worked on creating alliance systems not only in Europe but also across the Middle East and throughout the postcolonial world. The superpowers struggled over various states in the region, attempting to sway them into their orbit, but the Middle East did not see the rise of Cold War alliances comparable to those in Europe such as NATO and the Warsaw Pact. In the Middle East, the “superpowers” backed opposite sides during the several Arab–Israeli wars, with the US supporting Israel and the Soviet Union supporting and supplying key Arab states such as Egypt, Syria and Iraq. These dynamics resulted in multiple overlapping versions of the balance of power—between global superpowers, between Arab states and Israel, and within inter-Arab relations. Besides the US and Russia, other global powers were also very active in the region, especially Britain and France as the main former imperial powers in the area, and this included the creation of multiple alliances between “Great Powers” and local states. In the early Cold War period, Britain established what it intended as a NATO for the region: the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), better known as the Baghdad Pact. Established in 1955, that alliance brought together the United Kingdom and regional states Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Pakistan. Britain had hoped to form a broader alliance, maintaining its own extensive influence in the region, while also thwarting Russian designs on the Middle East. Jordan, for example, was under pressure from key ally Britain to join, but also under pressure from regional and more radical Arab states not to join what they viewed as a Western imperial alliance. Underscoring the importance of domestic regime security concerns and worries over transnational ideational threats, the Hashemite regime elected not to join the alliance, despite its ties to each of the major Western powers. The Baghdad Pact technically lasted from 1955 to 1979, when it officially collapsed in the fires of the Iranian Revolution. But for most of its existence, it had been little more than an alliance only on paper. Iraq departed the alliance in 1959, following the bloody coup d’etat that destroyed the Hashemite monarchy there and established a military-backed nationalist republic. The failure of the Baghdad Pact to expand was due to the same politics that led to the overthrow and destruction of the Iraqi monarchy—a struggle between nationalist and anti-imperialist forces, on the one hand, and more conservative and often monarchical regimes backed by Western powers, on the other.

From the Arab Cold War to the Sadat realignment The 1950s and 1960s were the heyday of pan-Arabism and saw extensive ideological struggles in the region and especially in inter-Arab relations. This struggle became known as the Arab Cold War (Seale 1965; Kerr 1970). It was therefore within inter-Arab relations that we see the most fluctuation in regimes, in alliances, and in the regional balance of power. Traditionally, there was something of a political triangle of power between three key regional capitals: Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad. And over the years, various regimes from these capitals attempted to play a hegemonic role in Arab regional politics. But in the post-independence period, each of these became a focal point of pan-Arabism, with ideologically-charged military regimes taking power and intending to transform not only their own societies but also the entire region. The Arab Cold War was especially associated with the era of Egypt’s powerful and influential leader, Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasir, roughly 1954 to 1970. 346

Alliances and the balance of power

The Arab Cold War re-arranged regional alliances, as the pan-Arabist and populist republics challenged the more traditional monarchies. Pan-Arab movements held sway in Nasir’s Egypt and also in the form of Ba‘thist regimes in Syria and Iraq. Other “radical republics” later emerged in Yemen and Libya, ousting former monarchies and establishing still more military and ideological regimes to the regional mix. These tended to be anti-Western, anti-Imperial and anti-Israeli, often mixing socialist programmes with pan-Arab nationalist identity politics. Their rivals were the more conservative and pro-Western monarchies, including states like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Jordan. Prior to the Arab Cold War, many of these royal regimes had been rivals, especially the Hashemites and Saudis, but the perceived threat from Nasir and the Ba‘thist regimes seemed to hit on all key areas of concern to these regimes: the military balance, domestic regime security and transnational ideological threats. The monarchies therefore shifted from rivals to allies as they responded to the new Arab Cold War. But these dynamics did not yield two clear and consistent sets of Arab allies. Rather, while the monarchies banded together in a kind of mutual regime security alignment, the pan-Arab regimes often splintered in their alignment and turned on one another. At times they appeared to pursue their own lofty rhetoric, even unifying countries into a single unit, as in the United Arab Republic (1958–61) of Egypt and Syria. But the UAR and all other attempts at pan-Arab unification failed as regimes ultimately felt threatened by each other and failed to truly merge. The Arab Cold War was therefore in part a struggle in inter-Arab politics between radical republics and conservative monarchies, but it was also a struggle between pan-Arab regimes themselves, especially between Nasir and his Ba‘thist rivals. With the devastating loss by Arab forces in the 1967 Arab–Israeli war and later the death of the influential Nasir himself in 1970, the region entered a new and perhaps more pragmatic era. Regimes seemed to focus more on state sovereignty over pan-Arab idealism. If anything, the Middle East now seemed to be even more of a Westphalian state-centred regional system. Even another Arab–Israeli war, in October 1973, failed to transform that system. Instead, the new pragmatic and statist tendency led regimes to part from one another in terms of foreign policy and alliances (Taylor 1982). The days of unification projects seemed long over. And in contrast to the nominally pan-Arabist foreign policy of Nasir, Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat pursued a statist and Egyptian nationalist policy that amounted to “Egypt First.” In 1979, Sadat concluded a separate peace deal with the State of Israel, effectively withdrawing the most powerful Arab state from the Arab–Israeli conflict. But the Sadat initiative had another effect. It also triggered a regional realignment as Arab states ousted Egypt from the Arab League, placed an economic embargo on Egypt, and then had to re-locate the Arab League from its headquarters in Cairo to a new temporary home in Tunis. Regime security and state sovereignty, rather than panArabism, seemed to dominate regional politics in the decades that followed. But in the 1980s another regional crisis caused yet another shift in regional alliances and the balance of power. It would turn out to be one of several successive wars in the Gulf, each of which destabilized the region.

The Gulf wars and regional realignments In 1980, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein launched an invasion of Iran shortly after the Iranian Revolution overthrew the last Shah, creating the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Shah had been a close ally of the United States, and in fact the US had established what it called the “Twin Pillars” policy in which the US relied on regional powers Iran and Saudi Arabia to secure US interests in keeping the USSR at bay, maintaining local pro-US regimes, and keeping the oil lanes open especially through the Persian Gulf. But the fall of the Shah destroyed the Twin 347

Curtis R. Ryan

Pillars framework while also bringing to power a revolutionary Islamist regime, a nightmare not just for US Cold War policy-makers, but even more so for regional monarchies that had long feared this exact type of fate for themselves. The region barely had time to absorb this revolutionary shock before Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces invaded Iran, triggering a horrific war of attrition that would dominate much of the decade (1980 to 1988). The new Islamic Republic of Iran was viewed as deeply threatening by almost every other regime in the region, including Israel as well as most Arab states. The rare exception to this was Syria. The Ba‘thist regime in Damascus, arch-rival of its fellow Ba‘thist regime in Baghdad, supported Iran in its efforts against Iraq, deepening an already extensive rift between Iraq and Syria within inter-Arab relations. The only two pan-Arabist and Ba‘thist states in the region, in short, were engaged in a vicious Cold War of their own (Kienle 1990; Mufti 1996). But other Arab states, while not fans of Saddam Hussein, nonetheless rallied to support Iraq financially and with arms and supplies. Jordan’s King Hussein had no reason to love a state that had overthrown and killed his own Hashemite cousins many years before. But to Jordan and many other Arab states, especially the Arab Gulf monarchies, revolutionary Iran was a living example of a successful Islamist revolution toppling a conservative monarchy that had the backing of powerful allies including even the US. To many Arab regimes, then and now, Iran represented an existential threat to their own regime security and survival, and regional alliances would therefore be re-arranged to defend Arab regimes against this threat. As regional powers Iraq and Iran pummelled each other, with horrific loss of life on both sides, the six Arab Gulf monarchies coalesced in 1981 in a new alliance: the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). The GCC brought together Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and remained together long after the Iran–Iraq war ended. Other alliances emerged in inter-Arab relations in the 1980s, not necessarily as a counter to the oil-wealthy GCC, but instead almost mimicking the GCC format, yet with no real success. The Arab Maghreb Union, for example, brought together Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia—but the AMU remained more of a pointless regional forum than an alliance, as its members (especially Algeria and Morocco) acted most often as arch-rivals. The Arab Cooperation Council (ACC) drew together Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and Yemen, but lasted barely 3 years before the second Gulf war brought it to an end. The ACC collapsed during the 1991 Gulf War, the AMU remained an alignment on paper only, and the GCC—the strongest and most lasting of the three inter-Arab alignments, remained largely ineffective and beset by regime and royal family rivalries (Ryan 1998). When the Iran–Iraq war had mercifully ended in 1988, the region knew a mere one full year of peace—1989—before Saddam Hussein invaded yet another country. This time, instead of his failed attempt to topple the regional powerhouse of Iran, he sent his forces south, to invade and conquer Kuwait. Once again, the region was plunged into a major crisis bringing foreign as well as local powers into the fray. The US, UK and other Western powers assembled a coalition to counter Iraq. That temporary alliance drew together Saudi Arabia and the other Arab Gulf monarchies as well as Egypt and even Syria. This is why the ACC collapsed. Iraq had invaded a fellow Arab country, Egypt joined the anti-Iraq coalition, and Jordan and Yemen each attempted a neutral stance amid vain efforts to prevent another regional war. The aftermath of the 1991 war had, ever so briefly, suggested the emergence of what would have been an impressive alliance. The “Damascus Declaration” alliance included Egypt, Syria and all six states in the GCC. It brought together the wealthiest oil powers and the strongest Arab militaries—on paper. But as soon as the regime security and national security threats of the 1991 war had receded, Saudi Arabia and other GCC states cooled on the need for another 348

Alliances and the balance of power

alliance. But security and stability didn’t last for long. Once again, Iraq and the Saddam Hussein regime would be the epicentre of another regional crisis. But this time, the key policy decisions took place, not in Baghdad but in Washington, DC. In 2003, the region was shaken to its foundations by a disastrous US foreign policy decision as the Bush administration launched an invasion and later occupation of Iraq. Instead of stabilizing the region, the Iraq invasion did quite the opposite, sowing further seeds of conflict for decades to follow.

The “Arab Spring” and a new regional Cold War The US invasion of Iraq had not only removed Iraq as a regional “balancer” against Iran but had also unwittingly elevated Iran as a Gulf and regional power, while simultaneously providing a rallying point for militant Salafi Jihadi organizations. These saw the US, European powers, Israel and Iran all as arch enemies against whom violent struggle was essential. As the region descended into ever more instability, especially after 2011, many regimes were unsure which threats were most urgent to mobilize against. Iran seemed to be an ascending power, but one with few friends. It had a de facto alliance including Syria as a state ally, while non-state actors Hamas and Hizbullah also remained part of this alleged “resistance” axis. By the early years of the “Arab Spring”—that is, the Arab Uprisings and revolutions across the region in 2011—the main feature of the regional balance of power was this: there wasn’t one. The traditional Arab power centres of Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad were now not agents of regional change but instead had themselves imploded into centres for domestic and regional struggles. Egypt’s President Mubarak was toppled in the Egyptian revolution. Iraq remained a quasi-independent state, mired in endemic terrorism and insurgency. And Syria’s revolution soon turned into a bloody civil war that threatened to drag in much of the region. The Syrian war, in fact, became the focal point of struggle in a new regional Cold War, and even of global struggles over the outcome (Phillips 2016). The war not only pitted the Asad regime against rebel forces but also saw Jihadist organizations enter the fray. Arab Gulf monarchies and the US sent arms and financial support to select rebel factions. Iran, Hizbullah and Russia all intervened directly to support the Asad regime. Overall, the Syrian war had morphed quickly from rebellion to civil war to regional conflict involving even major global powers. Despite the fact that it remained completely unresolved, the Arab–Israeli conflict had receded on the list of priorities of most regional states, as the region became embroiled in multiple civil and regional wars. Israel remained largely isolated in regional politics, seeking to maintain its peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, but otherwise using force against any signs of Palestinian resistance or uprising, and focusing on Hamas, Hizbullah and Iran all as existential threats. This, in turn, suggested an unusual twist in regional politics and de facto alignments, if not formal alliances, because other states such as Saudi Arabia shared many of the same regional security concerns as Israel. For the first time in decades, Arab states were not even going through the pretence of being concerned mainly with the Arab–Israeli conflict; instead, Israel and Arab Gulf monarchies in particular focused mainly on threats from Iran and its proxies. Interestingly, all of these states, Iran included, viewed militant Jihadist movements and even declared states such as the “Islamic State” (also known as ISIS or Da’esh) as key threats. Yet their many other points of rivalry seemed to prevent these same states from forming a truly effective region-wide coalition against groups like ISIS (Ryan 2015b). In the Arab Cold War of the 1950s and 1960s, inter-Arab relations were characterized by power struggles between “revolutionary” republics and conservative and even reactionary monarchies. The earlier Cold War had featured not only ideological conflict but also struggles to 349

Curtis R. Ryan

influence domestic politics in other states in the region, including Jordan, Lebanon and Yemen (Valbjorn and Bank 2007). Similarly, after 2011, a new Cold War emerged pitting essentially the same conservative, Western-allied, monarchies on the one side, but no countervailing coalition of military-backed regimes on the other. Instead, Saudi Arabia attempted to rally Arab monarchies together against Iran and its regional ambitions. But otherwise the dynamics are similar: power struggles, ideological and identity conflicts, and proxy wars. Many Arab regimes were concerned not only with Iranian power but also with Iranian and Shi’a influence in Arab politics (Bank and Valbjorn 2012; Ryan 2012). Arab conflicts from Iraq to Lebanon to Syria to Yemen were therefore viewed increasingly in both power politics and sectarian terms: as proxy struggles between Saudi and Iranian-led blocs in the regional balance of power as well as struggles between Sunni and Shi’a alliances within regional politics (Gause 2014; Lynch 2016; Ryan 2016). The Saudis and other GCC regimes were so alarmed at regional trends that they even reached out to other monarchies beyond the Gulf, in Morocco and Jordan, and invited them to join the GCC. Saudi Arabia also attempted to use the GCC as a tool for monarchical regime security and for counter-revolution. The GCC used its economic power as a means to dampen the fires of the Arab Spring throughout the region. The GCC used its largesse, for example, in an attempt to shore up Morocco and Jordan against popular pressures for change. The Gulf alliance also intervened militarily as an alliance to crush pro-democracy demonstrations in Bahrain, but the act itself was marketed as solidarity with a fellow Sunni regime resisting Shi’a and Iranian aggression (Ryan 2014). In the absence of a true regional balance, regional powers seemed to rise and fall in influence, including even tiny states like Qatar. When the Libyan Uprising began, Qatar led the call for international intervention. The Libyan revolution and the civil war that followed triggered an even broader shift in alliances and alignments, drawing even NATO into Middle East regional politics. NATO intervened militarily to support rebels against the Qadhafi regime, helping ensure its fall but failed (much like the US had in Iraq in 2003) to plan for the aftermath of a fallen dictatorship. Similarly, regional power Turkey played a strongly assertive role during the early years of the Arab Spring, supporting revolutions against secular regimes and the rise of new Islamist ones, especially the short-lived Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt (2012–13). But when domestic pressure and a military coup ousted the Brotherhood, it also ousted key regional allies Qatar and Turkey and replaced them with fiercely anti-Brotherhood countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The external alliances, in short, followed changes in domestic politics, even as competing regional states attempted to affect domestic political outcomes. As the Saudi–Iranian Cold War deepened in the post-Arab Spring era, the sectarianism that both states fanned continued to fester across the region. This also led to competitive interventions in varying degrees in Syria and Yemen in particular, with disastrous consequences for Syrians and Yemenis caught in the crossfire of their own warring factions and especially between outside powers (Lynch 2016). Even as wars continued in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, yet another rift emerged within one of the few alliances left standing in the Middle East: the Gulf Cooperation Council. This rift pitted Saudi Arabia and the UAE against Qatar, with the former states accusing the latter (albeit technically a GCC ally) of meddling in their domestic politics, supporting terrorism and otherwise harming regime security in their fellow Gulf states. At issue was Qatar’s controversial al-Jazeera satellite television station as well as Qatar’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood—a movement banned since 2013 by Saudi Arabia, UAE and Egypt. Qatar countered, of course, that it regarded the Saudi-backed al-Arabiyya channel also as propaganda and denounced Saudi support for Salafi groups across the region. While the GCC 350

Alliances and the balance of power

technically continued as an alliance, it was now an even hollower shell than it had been before. Bahrain seemed to cede its foreign policy to Saudi Arabia, while Kuwait attempted to act as mediator between its allies, and Oman remained almost neutral (while maintaining fairly close ties to Iran). But all these machinations seemed to underscore the premium put on regime security by each of these states, including their reads of ideational, economic and domestic political dissent as primary security threats, even stronger than external or more direct military ones.

Conclusions Even aside from intra-GCC rifts, the region’s alliance politics in the era of the Arab Uprisings were dominated by the Saudi–Iranian Cold War. But the intensity of their rivalry yielded no bipolarity of hostile but stable alliance systems. Instead, the region continued to be characterized by multi-polarity in every sense—military, economic, ideological—and a distinct lack of a balance of power. In this type of setting, alliances would continue to shift and adjust to various domestic and regional challenges to the security of the regimes that had, so far, managed to survive the Arab Spring, or which had emerged because of it. In any case, the alliance and imbalance of power dynamics suggested a lengthy period of domestic and regional instability for the region. A full understanding of these dynamics suggests the importance of the theoretical pluralism mentioned at the outset of this chapter, especially given the weakness of states and regimes, and even of the structure of the regional system, as well as resurgent debates regarding identity politics across the region (Lynch, Ryan and Valbjorn 2017). As Salloukh suggests: The return of the weak state to the Arab world and the renegotiation of new identities as a result of the interplay between domestic and geopolitical battles underscore the continued benefits of theoretical eclecticism in explaining Middle East international relations. It is far more rewarding to travel between theoretical paradigms than to engage in theoretical sectarianism. (Salloukh 2015) Scholars of Middle East international relations have indeed “mastered this kind of theoretical eclecticism,” and it is indeed essential in order to fully grasp the dynamics of regional relations, balances of power and alliance politics in the modern Middle East.

References Allinson, J. (2016) The Struggle for the State in Jordan: The Social Origins of Alliances in the Middle East, London: IB Tauris. Bank, A. and M. Valbjorn (2012), “The new Arab Cold War: Rediscovering the Arab dimension of Middle East regional politics,” Review of International Studies, 38:1. Barnett, M. (1990), “High politics is low politics: The domestic and systemic sources of Israeli security policy, 1967–1977,” World Politics, 42:2, 529–62. Barnett, M.N. (1998), Dialogues in Arab Politics: Negotiations in Regional Order, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Barnett, M.N. and J.S. Levy (1991), “Domestic sources of alliances and alignments: The case of Egypt, 1962–73,” International Organization, 45:3, 369–92. Brand, L.A. (1994a), Jordan’s Inter–Arab Relations: The Political Economy of Alliance Making, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Brand, L.A. (1994b), “Economics and shifting alliances: Jordan’s relations with Syria and Iraq, 1975–1981,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 26:3, 393–413. 351

Curtis R. Ryan

Christensen, T.J. and J. Snyder (1990), “Chain gangs and passed bucks: predicting alliance patterns in multipolarity,” International Organization, 44:2, 137–68. David, S.R. (1991a), Choosing Sides: Alignment and Realignment in the Third World, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. David, S.R. (1991b), “Explaining Third World alignments,” World Politics, 43:2, 233–56. Gause, F.G. III (2003/4), “Balancing what? Threat perceptions and alliance choice in the Gulf,” Security Studies, 13:2, 273–305. Gause, F.G. III (2010), The International Relations of the Persian Gulf, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gause, F.G. III (2014), Beyond Sectarianism: The New Middle East Cold War, Brookings Doha Center Analysis Paper. Gause, F.G. III (2015), “Ideologies, alliances, and underbalancing in the new Middle East Cold War,” International Relations Theory and a Changing Middle East, Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS) Studies, 16: 16–20. Haas, M.L. (2014), “Ideological polarity and balancing in great power politics,” Security Studies 23:4: 715–53. Halliday, F. (2005), The Middle East in International Relations: Power, Politics and Ideology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harknett, R. and J. Vandenberg (1997), “Alignment theory and interrelated threats: Jordan and the Persian Gulf Crisis,” Security Studies, 6:3, 112–53. Hinnebusch, R. (2003), The International Politics of the Middle East, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kerr, M. (1970), The Arab Cold War: Gamal Abd al-Nasir and His Rivals, 1958–70, London: Oxford University Press. Kienle, E. (1990), Ba‘th v Ba‘th: The Conflict Between Syria and Iraq 1968–1989, London: I.B. Taurus. Korany, B., Brynen, R. and P. Noble (1993), The Many Faces of National Security in the Arab World, New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. Lynch, M. (1999), State Interests and Public Spheres: The International Politics of Jordan’s Identity, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Lynch, M. (2016), The New Arab Wars: Uprisings and Anarchy in the Middle East, New York, NY: Public Affairs. Lynch, M., Ryan, C.R. and M. Valbjorn (eds, 2017), “Symposium: The Arab Uprisings and International Relations theory,” PS: Political Science & Politics, 50:3, 643–80. Mufti, M. (1996), Sovereign Creations: Pan-Arabism and Political Order in Syria and Iraq, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Phillips, C. (2016), The Battle for Syria: International Rivalry in the New Middle East, New Haven, CO: Yale University Press. Rubin, L. (2014), Islam in the Balance: Ideational Threats in Arab Politics, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ryan, C.R. (1998), “Jordan and the rise and fall of the Arab Cooperation Council,” The Middle East Journal, 52:3, Summer, 386–401. Ryan, C.R. (2002), “Jordan: The politics of alliance and foreign policy,” in ed, A.K. Jeanne, Small States in World Politics: Explaining Foreign Policy Behavior, pp. 135–55, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Press. Ryan, C.R. (2009), Inter-Arab Alliances: Regime Security and Jordanian Foreign Policy, Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. Ryan, C.R. (2012), “The new Arab Cold War and the struggle for Syria,” Middle East Report, 262, 28–31. Ryan, C.R. (2014), “Inter-Arab relations and the regional system,” in ed, M. Lynch, The Arab Uprisings Explained: New Contentious Politics in the Middle East, pp. 110–23, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Ryan, C.R. (2015a) “Regime security and shifting alliances in the Middle East,” International Relations Theory and a Changing Middle East, Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS) Studies, 16, 42–6. Ryan, C.R. (2015b), “Regional responses to the rise of ISIS,” Middle East Report, 276, 18–23. Ryan, C.R. (2016), “Shifting alliances in the Middle East,” Great Decisions, New York, NY: Foreign Policy Association, 5–12. Salloukh, B. (2015), “Overlapping contests and Middle East international relations,” International Relations Theory and a Changing Middle East, Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS) Studies, 16, 47–51. 352

Alliances and the balance of power

Schweller, R. (2004), “Unanswered threats: A neoclassical realist theory of underbalancing,” International Security, 29:2, 159–201. Seale, P. (1965), The Struggle for Syria: A Study of Post-War Arab Politics, 1945–1958, London: Oxford University Press. Snyder, G.H. (1984), “The security dilemma in alliance politics,” World Politics, 36:4, 461–95. Snyder, G.H. (1990), “Alliance theory: A neorealist first cut,” Journal of International Affairs, 44:1, 103–23. Snyder, G.H. (1991), “Alliances, balance, and stability,” International Organization, 45:1, 121–42. Snyder, G.H. (1997), Alliance Politics, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Taylor, A.R. (1982), The Arab Balance of Power, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Waltz, K.N. (1979), Theory of International Politics, New York, NY: Random House. Walt, S. (1985), “Alliance formation and the balance of world power,” International Security, 9: 3–43. Walt, S.M. (1987), The Origins of Alliances, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Walt, S. (1988), “Testing theories of alliance formation: The case of Southwest Asia,” International Organization, 42: 275–316. Valbjorn, M. and A. Bank (2007), “Signs of a new Arab Cold War: The 2006 Lebanon war and the SunniShi’i divide,” Middle East Report, 242.

353

25 War in the Middle East Raymond Hinnebusch

A war-prone region War has profoundly shaped the Middle East regional system which, as Buzan and Weaver (2003) put it, was “born fighting.” From 1946–92, 9 of 21 total inter-state wars were in MENA (Maoz 1995: 170) and in contrast to other regions inter-state wars have not declined: four of the five that broke out in the 1980s and 1990s (if Afghanistan is included in the “greater” Middle East), were in MENA, while the number of disputing dyads, fatalities and military expenditures grew (Maoz 1997: 9–18). Morgan and Palmer’s (1997) study found the Middle East contained 6 of the 13 states most involved in initiating militarized disputes and Maoz (2004) found MENA states and dyads ranked at the top of a war-proneness index covering the last two centuries. In 2012, six of the topmost militarized states in the world were in MENA—measured by military spending relative to human development and GNP (Lobe 212). With 7 per cent of the world’s population, the region accounted for 35 per cent of armed violence (Solingen 2007). MENA is now unique in experiencing inter-state wars. It is also the site of state wars against sub-state movements (such as the Israeli attacks on Hizbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza) and proxy wars of intervention (e.g. in Yemen and Syria since the Arab Uprising). Behind these numbers is the fact that the Middle East has two of the world’s most enduring conflict centres, each originating in the deleterious impact of the West on the region. The establishment of Israel at the expense of the indigenous Palestinians led to a chain of wars, each of which added new grievances and issues complicating the possibility of a resolution. In the Gulf, the struggle over oil and oil routes has been expressed in another chain of wars that can be traced back to the Western overthrow of Muhammad Mossadeq who had attempted to nationalize Iran’s oil; this was a major factor in the Iranian Revolution, which set the stage for the First and Second Gulf Wars. Conflicts over Israel and oil have tended to feed on each other, as in the 1973 oil embargo triggered by the Arab–Israeli war of that year. What this suggests is that MENA’s war proneness, far from a wholly indigenous phenomenon, is, rather, intimately connected to the role of the West in the region, specifically the flawed structures the West’s imperial powers put in place, in part meant to keep control of the oil resources. Yet, given that most of the region’s wars have been between regional states, indigenous agency matters, too, and it is necessary to consider whether regional states and their leaders are war prone. 354

War in the Middle East

A Waltzian paradigm: levels of analysis Kenneth Waltz (1959) provides, in his classic, Man, the State and War, a convenient framework that identifies three kinds of explanation for war to be found in the literature. Waltz brings these together in his three levels of analysis, the individual (agency), the state (agency) and the system (structure). The three levels correspond to major theoretical explanations for war in IR: liberalism fingers the “wrong” kind of state—non-democratic ones which are seen as war prone; neo-realism prioritizes the anarchy of the system as the origin of insecurity, with behaviour it provokes often leading to war; and classical realism looks at human nature and specifically the power-hunger of leaders as an explanation. A starting point beyond the three levels is to acknowledge the strong possibility that it is the interaction of the levels, rather than just one level that explains war. Indeed, looking closer at the three levels, it must be acknowledged that they are often difficult in practice to disentangle because each helps constitute the other: leaders (level 1) are often the product of particular states (level 2) but where leaders found regimes or lead revolutions the states are to an extent the outcome of their handiwork. But states are also are constituted by the international system as well as co-constituting the regional system. Moreover, as this suggests, it is necessary to disaggregate the system level into the global and regional levels since the latter is not simply a reflection of the former and has its own characteristics. Additionally, in the Middle East, the trans-state level—discourses and movements cutting across state borders— are uniquely powerful and must be acknowledged as a distinguishable level with structure and agency. Finally, the system has two distinguishable properties—which will be denoted here as System I and System II; System I denotes the constitution of the regional system, and its particular features, which, in turn, constitute the features of the units—the states; System II refers to the constraining/enabling feature of the system, specifically, the balance of power which shapes what states can or are likely to do at given junctures. With these caveats in mind, it is still worth asking if there is a main line of causality; toward this end, the article deploys Waltz’s framework, examining the relative contribution of the three levels separately, while remaining sensitive to their interaction and co-constitution, to get closer to exposing the mainsprings of war in the MENA region. The method followed is three-fold. First, the conceptual arguments for war proneness at each level are laid out. Then, empirical findings are presented that provide a rough estimation of the relative power of varying explanations. This is based on a preliminary attempt to assemble and code data on 19 MENA wars since the regions’ independence after World War II. These are coded according to four main variables: 1) issues at stake in the wars (arguably grievances that act as drivers of war): irredentism and territorial disputes, ideology, power competition, insecurity and resources (since more than one issue can be involved in any given war, multiple issues can be attributed to them); 2) regime types involved in wars (authoritarian republics, monarchies and democracies); 3) the systemic power balance or imbalance at the time of war; and 4) leadership (aggressive or not). The codings are matters of judgement, so I do not claim scientific validity for the results, but some very suggestive patterns are uncovered (see the Appendix for codings). Finally, qualitative case studies are used to zoom in on particularly crucial relations uncovered by the quantitative analysis. This analysis aims to test the following hypothesis, prefigured in the above introduction, specifying the relationship between the levels in the Middle East case: 1) the international imposition of a flawed regional states system engendered pervasive irredentism at the sub-/transstate levels—revisionist discourse and movements—continually reinforced by periodic external intervention; 2) where revisionist movements came to power, irredentism tended to be institutionalized at the state level in a disproportionate number of revisionist states; 3) this situation has 355

Raymond Hinnebusch

given rise to leaders who frequently both contest the regional order and also confront a security dilemma; 4) but whether war results depends on how agents, reacting to the system and its insecurity, construct particular kinds of anarchy and affect the power balance.

Explaining War: quantitative distributions of war-proneness factors State level: bellicose states? Are MENA states war prone? The Middle East contains 6 of the 13 states globally most involved in initiating militarized disputes (Morgan and Palmer 1997). The state-level explanation suggests that the way states are constructed and legitimized makes a difference for war proneness. The main exemplar of this approach is liberalism’s contested democratic peace thesis. In MENA, democracies are noticeably rare. So, is MENA war proneness down to the non-democratic regimes that dominate the region?1 Table 25.1 first tallies occasions of involvement by each regime type in the region’s 19 wars since World War II and then compares the total percentages of regime types with the percentage occasion of involvement of each type in wars.

Kinds of states and war proneness Authoritarian republics, which are a modal regime type in the Middle East, might be said to have bellicosity built-in for several reasons: it is often argued that these nationalist military regimes are war prone in that there are few checks on leaders, the military is typically the strongest interest group and might be expected to advocate force as a solution to threats, and the nationalist basis of legitimacy is likely to involve states in quarrels, especially where boundaries are recent and contested. Indeed, many Middle East states are national security states, whose raison d’etre is defence and war. As an aside, this begs the question, as to how far war is the product of these states or these states the product of a war-prone system. A second thesis is that fragmented/artificial states, suffering from identity crises and lacking legitimacy, are also prone to war since they seek it through nationalist/irredentist foreign policies against an “Other” that might unite citizens. When, as is often the case, such states are ruled by authoritarian leaderships, two war-prone factors would seem to come together. Iraq is the classic case (as will be discussed below), the epicentre of four wars.2 Finally, it is sometimes argued

Table 25.1  Occasions of war involvement by regime types Regime type and occasions of war involvement

Per cent of all regime types

Occasions of regime types involved in wars as per cent of total (48) occasions**

Democracies: 17/19 wars* of which semi-democracies: 4/19 wars of which settler irredentist democracies: 7/19 wars Authoritarian republics: 19/19 wars of which fragmented: 7/19 wars of which revolutionary: 5/19 wars Monarchies: 11/19 wars

25.9 per cent

35.4 per cent

40.7 per cent

39.6 per cent

33.3 per cent

23 per cent

*Includes the US, UK, France and Greece. **Excludes non-state movements involved in wars.

356

War in the Middle East

that revolutionary states with highly universalistic ideologies are prone to war since their leaders have a black and white ideological view of the world and seek to export the ideology of the revolution—indeed must successfully export it to sustain popular faith in the ideology; while this is more often attempted through subversion than military means, it is likely to make the revolutionary state a magnet of counter-revolutionary forces that may impose war upon it. Additionally, revolutionary regimes are often authoritarian, led by a charismatic leader on whom there are few institutional checks and the mobilization of the populace in the revolution can readily be directed into war, especially a defensive war (Halliday 1999; Walt 1992). The empirical evidence seems, on the face of it, to support the claims of war prone-ness in regard to these regimes. There were ten authoritarian republics (but, adding in Russia 11) and there were 19 instances of their involvement in the 19 wars. Fragmented/frustrated artificial states ruled by authoritarian military regimes were yet more war prone: there were only two of them, Iraq and Syria, but they were involved in 7/19 wars. Iraq, the centre of four wars, was also the aggressor in two of them. Finally, there were two revolutionary authoritarian states with a history of trying to export their revolutions that were involved in 5 of 19 wars. Khomeini’s Iran, the most clear cut case of a revolutionary state, was attacked once, by Iraq; Nasser’s revolutionary Egypt, borderline between a revolutionary and authoritarian-nationalist regime, was attacked twice—Suez in 1956 and 1967 by Israel; so revolutionary states were somewhat disproportionately involved in wars, although more as targets than aggressors. Several armed non-state movements (5)—the PLO, Polisario Front, Hizbollah, Hamas and the Houthis—were involved in 5 of the 19 wars; but since such movements are, almost by definition, formed for war-making, they are not included in our calculations on regime war-propensity. Monarchies, the other main form of authoritarian regime, appear less war prone and mostly on the defensive. This may partly be owing to the more “collective” form of leadership within extended royal families wherein consensus decision-making results in the acceptable lowest common denominator, hence likely to preclude risk-taking. Additionally, their social base is constituted of “pre-national” social forces (e.g. tribes), satisfied with the status quo and their legitimacy is based on tradition, not nationalism. Where monarchies have presided over nationally mobilized populations, they have either been pushed into wars (Egypt’s Farouk in 1948, Jordan’s Hussein in 1967) against their better judgement or have co-opted nationalist sentiment (Hassan II of Morocco’s invasion of Western Sahara could be considered an offensive war). But additionally, many are weak, even mini-states, and, depending on Western support, are status quo. There are nine monarchies and they have been involved nine times in the 19 wars; but in two cases (Jordan, Kuwait) were victims of aggression; the Moroccan invasion of Western Sahara, the most aggressive monarchic war was launched by the most “republic-like” monarchy (needing nationalist legitimacy). Saudi Arabia intervened in two internal conflicts in Yemen, attributable to its self-perception as “hegemon” of the Arabian Peninsula. Democracies are supposed to be pacific in that checks and balances and public opinion constrain war proneness. There are supposedly more checks on leaders and the citizenry, paying the costs of war, would be expected to be wary of it. The democratic pacific thesis has been criticized and, in any case, in its more statistically robust version at least, it only applies to wars between democracies, not wars with non-democracies. As Risse-Kappen (1995) observes, there have been numerous “warlike democracies” who “construct” non-democracies as the enemy “other.” Certainly, democratic peace does not hold in the Middle East region. There were only three democracies in the region, but together with the US, Britain, France and Greece, there were 17 occasions of their involvement in the 19 wars. Since the internal features of democracies (institutional checks) would appear to restrain war-making, there must be more compelling factors that override this; it is notable that in 357

Raymond Hinnebusch

wartime democracies tend to concentrate power in the executive. An alternative thesis might be that all democracies are not alike. Mansfield and Snyder (1995) have shown that democracies in the process of consolidation are actually more warlike than non-democratic states since politicians find it profitable to play the “nationalist” card in electoral competition. It is also possible that war proneness is owing to democratic deficits in MENA democracies, which are often referred to as “flawed” democracies, the implication being that if these flaws were addressed, these states would be more pacific. Turkey and Lebanon are arguably semi-democracies; hence they might be expected to be more war prone than Israel; but they were involved in only three wars, while Israel, with fuller democratic features, was involved in seven regional wars, more wars than any other MENA state. If there was ever a “warlike democracy” it is Israel. Indeed, Israel, according to Gochman and Maoz (1984), has the highest frequency of war initiations in modern history compared to its period in existence; it has been at the centre of five regional state-to-state wars and an ongoing internal war with Palestinians and with Hizbollah in Lebanon; moreover, several of its wars were with semi-democratic (at least pluralist) neighbours, notably Lebanon. It has also regularly ranked at the top of the world militarization index (Lobe 2012). This could, of course, be owing to the insecurity of its hostile environment; however, it is the case that three of Israel’s wars were arguably wars of choice or at least ones in which Israel struck first (1956, 1967, 1982). At any rate, as with the authoritarian republics, the question becomes: does insecurity generate aggression or does aggressive state behaviour create insecurity? Beyond that, however, Israel is manifestly special: it is a settler state, hence one with a certain built-in land (and water) hunger driven by the need to accommodate continuing immigration. But it is also irredentist, dissatisfied with the borders resulting from its “war of independence”; at the same time, it is a garrison state, with the whole population mobilizable for military service and highly motivated, giving it quite a power advantage over non-democratic neighbours that can make war seem advantageous and with generals frequently holding key political positions. Irredentist-settler democracies may be an exception to the expectation that democracies should be more pacific (Gerner 1991: 59; Peri 1983: 4; Jones 2001; Smith 1996: 193). Less fully democratic Turkey may be less war prone than Israel because it is a status quo state (its borders satisfy national identity). These variations among democracies cast doubt on the notion that democratic procedures deter war. 3 Thus, regime type, in sense of domestic structure, per se, has limited explanatory power since some authoritarian and democratic regimes are war prone and others not. More important for war proneness is whether a state is revisionist and this cuts across the authoritarian–democratic divide. Republics, authoritarian and democratic, often have to satisfy revisionist publics, while traditional monarchies do not. But why are publics often revisionist in MENA? To explain the incidence of revisionism, we need to look at other factors than regime type.

The states system level: MENA as a Hobbesian anarchy Structural neo-realism famously sees anarchy as the ultimate root of war. However, anarchy is universal and war is unequally distributed, so it is the type of anarchy that matters as Wendt argues.4 Moreover, within any given anarchy, the structure may facilitate or constrain war, depending on the power balance. The MENA regional system is arguably a Hobbesian-oriented anarchy that has a high propensity for war, and this is owing to the flawed construction of the regional system, which left it with several war-promoting features. Irredentism was built into the system by arbitrary imperial boundary drawing which left a high incidence of incongruity between identity/nation and state/territory (inspiring revisionist 358

War in the Middle East

pan-movements) and/or disputed boundaries.5 This created a general dissatisfaction with borders, which are frequently contested by states and trans-state movements, and hence sometimes occasions of war.6 The process also left behind two state-less peoples (Palestinians and Kurds) whose revisionism has been directly implicated in multiple wars.7 Our tally found territorial disputes, mixed with irredentism, to be the single largest driver of war, being a factor in 10/19 wars. However, irredentism is unequally distributed across the system: the most irredentist states should be—and are—the most war prone (Israel, Iraq and Syria) Ideological heterogeneity, that is, lack of shared values/norms and conflicting legitimacy principles, according to the “International Society” approach to IR, makes for a more war-prone regional system than would be so of a homogenous system.8 Conflicts of ideology and legitimacy principles are endemic to MENA. This heterogeneity originated in the British fostering of client monarchies in the region, which provoked a wave of republican revolutions against these regimes following the receding of British power in the region. For a long time, revolutionary subversion against the monarchies became the main axis of regional conflict; sometimes resulting in war, notably the 1960 Yemen war. This was superseded, notably after the Iranian Revolution, by a cleavage between regimes legitimized on secular grounds and those on Islamic grounds. This was a factor in the Iran– Iraq war. Today the conflicts of Sunni vs. Shia legitimized regimes have been expressed in proxy wars, notably in Syria and Yemen. Altogether, ideological heterogeneity was a factor in 7/19 wars. Weak economic interdependencies. In liberal thinking, economic interdependence creates shared economic interests that would be damaged in wars, and that could therefore be expected to counter these destabilizing factors and constrain war (Mansfield and Pollins 2003). MENA is notoriously lacking in such trans-state economic relations. This is also down to imperial construction of the regional states system that snapped cross-regional trading links and re-oriented them into a core-periphery dependency system. In a reaction to this dependency, the radical republics pursued state-led import-substitute industrialization behind tariff barriers that deterred the re-construction of regional trading links. Weakness of regional regimes/organization. Also, in liberal thinking, conflict can be muted by international regimes/organizations based on shared norms and providing venues for the peaceful resolution of disputes (Wulf 2009). MENA does of course have the Arab League, but it divides the Arab and non-Arab states—the most fraught fault line in the region. The League has been most effective indeed, in unifying and mobilizing the Arab states against the non-Arab ones, particularly Israel, but to a lesser degree Iran and Turkey. Among the Arab states, the League has had some impact, at least when an Arab hegemonic state—e.g. Nasser’s Egypt— acted to enforce shared norms; but generally, it has a poor track record of resolving inter-Arab conflicts (Hinnebusch 2013). Hydrocarbons as magnet for intervention. The concentration of “world” oil resources makes MENA a magnet for external intervention because economically expansive core states have unquenchable appetites for scarce resource, especially for hydrocarbons concentrated in the region (Choucri and North 1975; Klare 2001; Bromley 1990); control of oil is also geopolitically pivotal for both regional and global hegemony; hence would-be regional and global hegemons collide over control of oil in MENA. The Middle East is, therefore, susceptible to centre-periphery resource wars because it is the epicentre of world oil: 3/19 wars can be seen as oil wars. Put together, these five features of the system have tended to generate a more Hobbesian anarchy with higher enmity, insecurity and war proneness than would otherwise be the case (see Table 25.2 for a tally of the incidence of the various systemic factors behind wars). 359

Raymond Hinnebusch Table 25.2  Features of regional systems, issues at stake or motives driving wars 1 2 3 4 5

Territory/irredentism: 10/19 wars Ideological heterogeneity: 7/19 wars Resources: 3/19 wars* Power: 10/19 wars** Security: 5/19***

*Counting the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the US-led counterattack on Iraq as separate wars. **Offensive realist drives for regional or global hegemony acted out in the region (wars of choice). ***See below for discussion of power and of security.

System level II: state reactions to anarchy Realist rules: how states react to this Hobbesian anarchy will help explain the likelihood of war. On the one hand, the system shapes its units, the states. The insecurity of anarchy socializes all states into realist rules, notably to build up sufficient deterrent power against threats and to match ends and means, i.e. not to overreach. The socialization mechanism is that those who violate realist rules suffer disasters in war and learn the hard way, with reckless leaders unlikely to survive, and this experience generates norms of behaviour that are generalized (Waltz 1979). In MENA the classic example of this was the way the Arab nationalist states, driven by ideology, provoked a more powerful Israel in 1967 and suffered such total defeat that the leaders responsible were soon succeeded by more cautious and realist successors (Sadat and Asad). War proneness and the variations of realist balancing. However, anarchy can stimulate two quite different kinds of realism, defensive power balancing and offensive hegemony-seeking and the distribution of these may explain war, and thereby reproduce or dilute Hobbesian anarchy.9 Defensive power balancing ought, in principle, deter war if each state properly balances against threat and if those threatened combine in alliances against offensive states; hence a system of defensive power balancers ought to be relatively more peaceful. This does not mean there will be no war: checking aggressive states may in fact require a war. Moreover, if states underbalance or free ride, counterbalancing alliances may fail to deter aggressors; thus, no effective coalition could effectively deter Iraq from its invasion of Kuwait. And, even defensive balancing can generate a security dilemma, a scenario in which all states seeking their own security, e.g. via arms races, make all less secure: in such a situation crisis can generate a high chance of misperception (exaggeration of threat) that could lead to a war that nobody wanted or which each felt was forced upon them.10 The insecure situation leads to behaviour that inadvertently leads to war. The coding of MENA wars, however, shows that few wars were mostly unwanted or accidental and defensive (perhaps 5/19) with the big majority driven by deep-seated animosities, grievances and ambitions. The alternative strategy for dealing with insecurity is so-called “offensive realism.” In a multi-polar system, in this view, insecurity leads the regional great powers to maximize their power in a competition for hegemony (power). Typically, MENA hegemony-seekers normally seek regional leadership in the name of a revisionist pan-ideology, such as Arabism or Islam. So, offensive realists, usually stronger powers and often revisionist, are likely to incite war and a system of offensive realist powers to be highly war prone. To be sure, offensive realist powers are likely to provoke defensive counterbalancing, but stopping such hegemonic bids typically takes a war. Thus, for example, in the 1980s, three offensive realist states, Israel, Iraq and Iran all bid for hegemony; all failed but in trying provoked two wars—the Iran–Iraq war and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Altogether more than half of MENA wars (10/19) involved rivalries over hegemony (power). 360

War in the Middle East

Explaining when wars happen: power imbalances The distribution of power. The drivers and issues of war are not enough to explain why wars happen at particular times and places. For realist thinkers, the systemic distribution of power either facilitates or inhibits war. When a stable power balance exists, no state can count on winning, hence, rationally, ought to avoid war; while if a state thinks the power balance is in its favour, it may see war as rational. Such calculations can include anticipated future shifts in the power balance that may provoke war—as in power transition theory--when a rising second rank power is closing the gap with a formerly dominant power; one or the other may think it best to strike while it has the advantage.11 MENA’s susceptibility to power imbalances. In MENA, power imbalances are typical for three reasons. The creation of small, weak states beside large/strong ones (Kuwait and Iraq). Arms races can upset the power balance and are ubiquitous in the region which is the world’s most militarized: regional states have exceptional access to revenues (foreign aid or oil) and patrons willing to provide arms. Finally, internal state weakness, above all civil wars and failing states, invite competitive intervention and proxy wars. There were 10/19 wars that were facilitated by an obvious power imbalance. Two others had elements of power transition between rival hegemons (Egypt and Israel in 1967, Iran and Iraq in 1980). The conclusion is inescapable: the instability of the power balance in MENA has been a pervasive war-enabling factor in the region. As the next section, suggests, the global level power balance also matters. The global power balance and MENA’s variable vulnerability to global intervention. Conflicts in the Middle East spill out in global consequences—energy insecurity, terrorism—and hence are magnets for a disproportionate amount of global level military intervention. Whatever the intention of the interveners, intervention is a major destabilizing factor, responsible for several recent wars, notably those over Iraq. However, the region’s vulnerability to external intervention has varied: the global balance of power may be permissive of or obstruct such intervention, deterring or facilitating wars. Neo-structural realists have long debated which distribution of global power is more or less war prone, with each configuration of polarity—multi-polar, bi-polar and unipolar—having its advocates as most likely to facilitate war or peace.12 But these accounts do not examine the relationship between global level polarity and regions. Much depends on which type of polarity is most likely to enable global intervention. MENA has experienced all three kinds of global power distribution, multi-polarity (until 1956) bi-polarity (1957–90) and unipolarity (1990–2010), hence its relative war proneness under each is worth exploring. As regards a periphery region like MENA, under bi-polarity, the very global character of the two superpowers rivalry would tend to draw them into regional conflicts; yet at the same time, each superpower would tend to check the interventionist impulse of the other and also restrain their regional clients. Under multi-polarity, rivalry might be less intense than under bi-polarity, but balancing against intervention is likely to be less effective. Under unipolarity, there is no check on interventionism, but also, insofar as a hegemonic power controls the region, regional conflicts might be muted. The Middle East experienced global multi-polarity under British hegemony (1946–56) during which there were 5 wars/15 years, equalling 0.33 wars/year; the bi-polar period (1957–89) in which 9 wars occurred over 32 years equalling 0.28 wars/year; and the uni-polar period of US hegemony (1990–2010) 6 wars in 20 years = 3 wars/year. Thus, bi-polarity, a period of lesser intervention, experienced slightly fewer wars, but there seems otherwise little to choose between the three in terms of war frequency in MENA. It is worth noting however that wars 361

Raymond Hinnebusch

are perhaps more likely when the global order is in transition from one system to another and that wars cap the transition: thus, the Suez War was launched as a multi-polar order was giving way to bi-polarity and the war itself decisively ended multi-polarity in MENA; the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait took place as bi-polarity was giving way to unipolarity and helped tip the power distribution toward the latter. It is telling that MENA has been the site of 4/5 of the world’s post-Cold war inter-state wars, owing to regional–US struggles over oil resources in which there was no check of US interventionism. This record suggests that MENA is likely to be more peaceful under a global power distribution that deters intervention—bi-polarity—and less peaceful under one that is permissive of it.

The individual level: political leaders’ traits Human nature presumably must have some bearing on war, but as Freud argued, humans have both aggressive and co-operative sides; which dominates depends on circumstances. More useful in the Middle East, where multiple peoples lay claim to the same “ancestral land” and irredentism is widespread might be Lorenz’s (1963) territorial imperative, the claim that individual aggression is triggered when the perceived home territory is under threat. But, in this respect, human nature ceases to be the decisive variable and the historical narrative of dispossession, or subordination, then becomes a factor in socialization of the younger generation. Where people have such historical memories, they are more likely to perceive high levels of threat or nurse intense grievances: when such peoples are also highly mobilized and politically conscious, they can be constituencies for nationalist policies that end in war. The Israelis and Palestinians stand out in this respect. War-making is, however, the business of political leadership, not ordinary people. One could argue that the power struggle for leadership selects out all but the most successful competitors, risk-takers with a well-developed “will to power,” either self-confident or those seeking to compensate through power for feelings of inadequacy. Getting and keeping power is a particularly harsh struggle in MENA such that those that reach the top and survive are likely to be among the most aggressive personalities in society or at least be prone to risk-taking. Risk-taking13 and lack of empathy for the “Other” are both likely to lead to miscalculation, especially in times of crisis, when decision-makers are under pressure and may operate in an environment of low information.14 Aggressiveness is of course relative and hard to measure and in this study coding of aggressive leadership has relied not on personality studies but assessments of leaders behaviour and the bar has been set high: leaders have been coded as aggressive if they attack first in a war which appears to be a war of choice or who are involved in more than one war. On this basis, aggressive leadership appeared to be a salient factor in only 5/19 cases. Two were cases where the leader’s rise to power was pivotal in the decision to attack first when the attacking state was not under serious threat: in the 1956 Suez War, when the removal of the dovish Sharett by the hawkish Ben Gurion was a condition of the war and the rise of Begin/Sharon to power in Israel which brought to power leaders spoiling for a fight which was realized in their invasion of Lebanon. Two wars involved the same first attacker (Saddam Hussein in his 1980 attack on Iran and his 1990 attack on Kuwait). George W Bush is coded aggressive for his war of choice on Iraq in 2003. Thus, aggressive and risk-taking leadership is obviously not uniform across the board in MENA and rather, there is considerable variation in leadership traits. One possibility is that this is owing to variations in the road to power under different kinds of regime types. In the Middle East, the road to power and staying in power is a particularly harsh struggle in the authoritarian republics where power has often been taken by force such that the winners and survivors would need to be Machiavellian types: some combination of the aggressive lion (Saddam) or the wily 362

War in the Middle East

fox (Asad, Sadat). Saddam Hussein is the obvious example of an aggressive leader, having fought his way to power first as a street fighter, and then as a Stalinist-like organizer; but he appears to be an extreme case. Where leadership is hereditary, as in the monarchies, and in democratic polities where power is acquired by peaceful transfers, less aggressive personalities may emerge at the top. That similar regime types do not, however, shape uniform ruling personalities is evident by comparing cases such as Syria and Iraq, very similar leader–army–party authoritarian regimes that profess the same ideology of Arab nationalism and were even ruled by branches of the same Ba‘th party. In both, leaders rose to power from the lower strata of society and their socialization took place in the heady days of Nasserism. Both were men of pride and self-confidence, intolerant of opposition. Both enjoyed near-absolute power over foreign policymaking. But there the similarity ends. Their foreign policy decisions could hardly have led to more contrasting outcomes. In Syria, Hafiz al-Asad turned his state from a victim of stronger neighbours into a formidable player that was generally thought to punch above its weight in foreign affairs; Iraq, on the other hand, enjoyed the most balanced combination of power resources in the Arab world, but, Saddam Hussein, in the course of two devastating wars, dissipated these resources and turned Iraq into a victimized pariah state. Do the personalities and attitudes of the leaders explain a significant part of this different outcome? Syria’s ability to avoid overt defeat in war was owing in good part owing to Asad’s prudent conduct of foreign policy, the chess-player who carefully calculated each move, matched means and ends and resorted to proxy wars rather than direct confrontation (Seale 1988: 492–5; Maoz 1988: 32–4, 41–2). By contrast, Saddam repeatedly miscalculated the situation or mis-played his hand in invading two neighbouring states (Marr 1985: 218–20). He underestimated Iran’s ability to recover from the disarray of its revolution and also the US and Western reaction to his invasion of Kuwait, perhaps because they had built him up against Iran. He may have thought the US would acquiesce because of US ambassador April Glaspie’s remark that Washington considered the dispute with Kuwait to be an inter-Arab matter and the assurances he gave her that Iraq respected US oil interests in the region. On the basis of the Vietnam experience, Saddam believed the US could not sustain casualties, and that airpower was of limited importance, but the parallel of Vietnam and Iraq was faulty. He either miscalculated the reaction of states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which had been recent close allies against Iran, or falsely believed that the pro-Saddam acclaim of the Arab street would deter their timid rulers from taking the side of the US. He also falsely believed the Soviets would block an American intervention and was astonished and outraged that they took the American side against their old ally. Leadership does indeed matter: the differential results of the policies of Asad and Saddam validate the realist maxim that success in international politics depends on the prudent and effective use of power. And the differences in Asad’s and Saddam’s uses of power appear as largely a function of the leader’s personalities, such that concern with leadership psychology and perceptions—the idiosyncratic factor—seems justified. But it appears to be the least powerful level of explanation: after all, the study found only five instances of notably aggressive leaders in 19 wars. Moreover, the roles of leaders are sharply constrained by the conditions—both internal (state) and external (system)—in which they operate. Thus, it appears that only if conditions for and against war are balanced at the other two levels, will the war proneness of the leader likely make a difference.

Toward understanding the interaction of man, the state and system: testing the lines of war causality The foregoing analysis provides some highly suggestive data on the factors driving war: the ultimate mainline of causality originates at the system level, particularly how it was constituted as 363

Raymond Hinnebusch

war prone at its founding; the system in turn shapes the states, often in ways that promote war, and they in turn shape leaders; but the actions of leaders are, in turn, constrained by the systemic power balance at a given time. There are also, however, several lines of secondary feedback; thus, war-prone states and leaders, especially offensive realists, reproduce the initial war-prone characteristics of the system. On the other hand, defensive realists that balance against threats can help dilute the opportunities and incentives of war. In order to explore in more depth these inter-relations, it is necessary to move beyond the foregoing semi-quantitative analysis and deploy a case study method. Two case studies of iconic wars by the two most war-prone states will be assessed, namely Israel in the 1967 war and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. The aim of the comparison will be to bring out the similarities and variations in the MENA region’s road to war.

Israel’s Wars: the case of the 1967 Arab–Israeli war The irredentism built into the flawed states system imposed on the region after World War I was epitomized by the conflict over Palestine, perhaps the single factor that has most profoundly shaped Middle East international politics. This conflict originated in the rise of the Zionist movement whose profoundly irredentist project was to literally recreate an “old nation” on the ruins of a newly awakening—Arab Palestinian—one; the Zionist project meant two peoples claiming the same land and conflict between incoming settlers and the Palestinian community was inevitable. Zionist emigration provoked the political arousal of the Palestinian community and engendered a distinct Palestinian identity. When the British withdrew from Palestine in 1948, and the Palestinians rejected a UN resolution partitioning Palestine at their expense, the Zionists declared the founding of the state of Israel. The armies of Arab states intervened, ostensibly to rescue the Palestinians, but failed; Palestinians thereafter became a displaced people, an irredentist force agitating in inter-Arab politics for a return to the status quo ante. Many Israelis were also left dissatisfied—in their case with the borders of the new state, and the continued Arab control of parts of Palestine (and beyond) that were seen as the territory of ancient Eretz Israel. Although initially a minority, militant nationalists became a pressure group for the completion of the Zionist project requiring, at the least, the incorporation into Israel of Judea/Samaria—before 1967 the Jordanian-controlled “West Bank” of the Jordan River. This ideology was congruent with an expansionist impulse literally built into the fabric of Israeli’s identity. Israel considers itself not an ordinary state or a Middle Eastern society but the territorial base of world Jewry, the Diaspora, a sense of trans-national kinship which has no exact parallel in world politics (Brecher 1972: 38). Although only about 17 per cent of Jews lived in Israel in 1966 (2.3 million out of 13.4 million), it was, in principle committed to their “ingathering”: according to the Law of Return, Diaspora Jews have an automatic right of citizenship (Peri 1983: 44; Gerner 1991: 59), and Israeli policy actively promoted Jewish emigration. Absorbing a growing population in an arid land led Israel to seek greater control over regional water resources, initiating projects to divert the waters of the Jordan River in the 1960s that the Arabs took as a provocation and a bid to further immigration. This pressure for more land and water was reinforced by the irredentist ideology of the Israeli political right. Other unfinished business left over from Israel’s “war of independence” were contested borders which, overlapping with the refusal of the Arabs to accept its legitimacy, together made for continual clashes between Israel and its Arab neighbours. The country’s first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, followed a policy of employing superior military force to extract recognition and normalization of relations on Israel’s terms. Incursions by displaced Palestinians, armed or not, across Israel’s new borders with Jordan and Egypt were met by massive retaliation against 364

War in the Middle East

these countries. Continual disputes between Israel and the Arab states over poorly demarcated borders, de-militarized zones (established in the truce ending the 1948 war), and water rights regularly escalated into military clashes, particularly on the Syrian–Israeli frontier. The periodic clashes with neighbouring Arab countries which Israeli policy promoted inflamed panArab nationalism that preached the idea of a common Arab nation united against Israel and its Western backers. They contributed to the rise of more radical Arab governments more motivated and better equipped to confront Israel, and made trusteeship of the Palestine cause a prize sought by states vying for pan-Arab leadership (Brecher 1972: 251–90: Roberts 1990: 17–21; Smith 1996: 157–9; Walt 1987: 57). Security was, therefore, foremost on the agenda of the new state because, although the military capabilities of the Arab states were modest, Israel’s small geographic space, its lack of readily defensible borders, especially with Jordan, of strategic depth and its encirclement by a hostile Arab world with ten times its population, led to a sense of permanent siege (Brecher 1972: 552; Gerner 1991: 44). Even though Israel had defeated its divided Arab neighbours more than once, the loss of even one war could spell national extinction. Israel’s frontiers were uniquely vulnerable; in particular, the Jordanian-controlled West Bank was a salient protruding into Israel from which an Arab thrust to the sea could cut it in two. As such, Israeli elites were, from the end of the 1948 war, looking for an opportunity to achieve what they considered defensible borders. In the 1956 Suez War, Israel aimed partly at border adjustment and also at the seizure of Egyptian territory as leverage to force a peace treaty on the Egyptian government. Moreover, the potential of Arab demographic and resource superiority shaped Israeli security doctrine and military practice in a way that was likely to provoke war. Because Israel’s superiority was problematic if the Arab forces effectively combined and forced a multifront war on it, preventing such a combination was a constant of Israeli policy and this required a pro-active military stance. Additionally, because Israel, being reliant on mobilization of reserves, could not sustain a prolonged war without great damage to its economy, wars had to be won quickly through overwhelming force. Moreover, because, given the vulnerability of its indefensible borders, Israel could not afford to fight a war on its territory; it had to take one into the enemy’s territory before it could threaten the homeland. These vulnerabilities resulted in a doctrine favouring a “pre-emptive” (first strike) strategy that aimed at quickly smashing the enemy and, in a multifront war, allowing one to be neutralized in order to cope with the other/s. Any sign of Egyptian success in uniting the Arab states and, particularly co-ordinating with Syria and Jordan, was, for Israel, a casus belli justifying a first strike: the Israeli 1967 first strike, responded to such an emerging scenario (Brecher 1972: 51, 67). The 1967 war is especially revealing of the mainsprings of Israel’s wars since it is often depicted as a war over security in which tiny Israel triumphed over a larger aggressive Arab war coalition. The reality is much more complicated since irredentist expansionism had long been on the agenda of the more hawkish Israel politicians who saw in the looming war the opportunity to realize their ambitions. However, it is true that in the immediate term, it was security needs that most commanded a consensus among Israeli decision-makers; and the crisis on the eve of the war came to be seen by Israel’s militant leaders as a double opportunity to both establish secure borders and to satisfy their irredentist ambitions. The 1967 war crisis was provoked when in May 1967 Israeli retaliations for guerrilla incursions by Syrian-backed Palestinians climaxed in an Israeli threat to attack and overthrow the Syrian regime. The Soviet Union prodded Nasser to deter Israel and, as leader of the Arab world, he felt obliged to do so. Nasser realized the power balance, with his best forces tied down at the time in Yemen, was unfavourable and did not, therefore, want a war, but he could not remain passive. This was a function of the irredentism built into the region wherein the dispossession of 365

Raymond Hinnebusch

the Palestinians was a source of wide grievance in Arab opinion; to be a pan-Arab leader meant defending the Palestine cause, but given the power imbalance in Israel’s favour, Arab leaders including Nasser generally confined themselves to rhetoric. In this case, though, Nasser went a bit further: he asked UN peacekeepers to withdraw from the Sinai and sent troops into the peninsula as a deterrent and with defensive instructions which assumed an Israeli first strike. Israel abandoned plans for an attack on Syria but began a counter-mobilization that put it in a position to launch a more general war (Sela 1998: 91–3; Gerner 1991: 71; Gerges 1994: 213; Stein 1991). Nasser could have de-escalated, but he allowed himself to be pushed into further brinkmanship by the expectations raised by his own nationalist rhetoric. Seeing a chance to win political victory and perhaps extract some concessions from Israel on the Palestinian issue, he closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, thus reversing a concession he had been obliged to make at the end of the Suez War. Popular euphoria that the Arabs were finally confronting Israel swept the front-line states into a defence pact encircling Israel, making the option of a pre-emptive strike increasingly attractive to Israeli decision-makers. In Israel, the crisis raised the public’s sense of threat to its maximum: Egyptian mobilization, the closing of the straits and the three-front Arab alliance, gave the Israeli hawks their casus belli. Once Israel began to mobilize, at economic cost, it would not wait long for diplomacy to raise the closure of the Straits. The actual military threat to Israel was moderate: Nasser had no intention of striking first while the Israeli generals were confident of victory and the CIA equally expected Israel would readily prevail. The real threat was political: a superpowerbrokered resolution of the crisis that could strengthen Nasser and further embolden the Arabs (Gerner 1991: 71–2; Smith 1996: 199). For the Israeli hawks, the crisis was less a threat than an opportunity—to smash Nasserist Egypt and the pan-Arab movement while Israel still had military superiority, to achieve secure borders, to demonstrate military dominance, force the Arabs to accept Israel and, for some, such as Menachem Begin, to realize Eretz Yisrael. Preemption was Israel’s historical strategy, and the main restraint on it had always been fear of the international repercussions, but in June 1967 the international situation was unusually permissive, with the US Johnson administration sympathetic to Israel’s situation (Sela 1998: 91–3; Barnett 1998: 146–59; Smith 1996: 196–202; Peri 1983: 244–51). Israeli elites were, nevertheless, initially divided on the eve of 1967 over policy toward the Arabs and the decision for war was, in some ways, a product of intra-elite power rivalries. An activist camp, dominant in the military, and led by disciples of Ben Gurion, such as Moshe Dayan, the hero of the Suez campaign, Yigal Allon and Shimon Peres, saw the Arabs as an implacable enemy and Nasser as the new Hitler (Brecher 1972: 552). At the same time, the irredentist Herut party of Menachem Begin was growing in influence as a pressure group for expansion and also had its advocates in the military (Brecher 1972: 247; Roberts 1990: 36; Smith 1996: 192). The 1967 war conquests provided an opportunity to realize Israel’s expansionist ambition, which was explicit and institutionalized in the Herut party but latent throughout Israeli society (Smith 1996: 193). A moderate tendency in Israeli elite thinking, normally a minority view but temporarily on the ascendancy in the mid-1960s, was more prepared to seek accommodation with the Arabs and argued against military actions that could alienate Israel’s supporters in the West. The cautious and pragmatic Levi Eskhol, Prime Minister in 1967, was closer to the moderate camp. The Ben Gurionist hawks, who had split from the ruling Mapai party, used their image as war heroes, to paint the pragmatists as soft on the Arabs. Backed by the military establishment, they used the May 1967 crisis leading up to the war to demand key cabinet positions in a national unity government from which they would push Eshkol into a first strike. Moshe Dayan became Defence Minister while Begin was also co-opted into a national unity government. While the hawks were planning a war to enlarge Israel’s borders, Eshkol 366

War in the Middle East

wished to rely on American diplomacy to defuse the crisis and was averse to a pre-emptive strike. However, he succumbed to military pressure, and the hawks took charge of the actual military decision-making (Peri 1983: 244–51; Kimsche and Bawly 1968: 45, 57, 62, 69). The 1967 war was the product of a convergence of forces on several different levels. The root cause lay in a protracted conflict of sub-state ethno-nationalisms which had become institutionalized in rival states: the creation of a settler state with built-in insecurity and expansionist impulses, pursuing a strategy of force to impose acceptance by its neighbours, and, in the process only inflaming their resentment. In these conditions, war was always likely, but it was the dynamics of the state system—a fluid imbalance of power in Israel’s favour, an “unstable strategic environment” and international permissiveness—which allowed the war to happen at this particular time. The power transition theory arguably held: the superior power, Israel, anticipated that rising Arab power would at some point approach parity; hence it made sense to demolish the enemy while Israel was still considerably superior in military capability. The war was not, of course, inevitable and, on the contrary, resulted from leadership choices; hence it can only be fully understood by factoring in the level of domestic politics, and leadership ambitions, perceptions and miscalculations. In this respect, regime type differences did not have the effect on these decisions that might theoretically be expected. In authoritarian Egypt, popular opinion pushed Nasser into a war he did not particularly want, while in democratic Israel war resulted from intra-elite rivalries, in which the hawks took advantage of public fears to seize the levers of command from the more dovish Prime Minister.

Iraq’s wars: the case of the invasion of Kuwait Saddam’s Hussein’s decision to invade Kuwait provoked the Second Gulf War, but this was not a purely idiosyncratic choice for Iraqi state formation had produced a kind of state with war proneness built-in. The very weakness of Iraq at its birth as a state produced a reaction, a drive to overcome this weakness at home and abroad, which turned Iraq, in Mufti’s words (1996: 220–30), into a “war state.” But how far was war a function of regime type or of other factors? Iraq’s weakness was a function of its formation as an artificial state, arbitrarily carved by Great Britain out of conquered Ottoman domains and combining three distinct regions which shared no history of statehood or common identity—the Sunni Arab centre around Baghdad, a majority Shi’a south and the Kurdish north. None of Iraq’s pre-Ba‘th regimes found a viable statebuilding formula that could stabilize this centrifugal society. The monarchy, resting on a thin stratum of landlords and tribal chiefs and lacking popular support and nationalist legitimacy, was only kept in power by the British; ironically, the one issue which united most of Iraq’s disparate politically active population and produced the 1958 revolution was opposition to British tutelage. The 1958 revolution marked the mobilization of the masses into politics, but the military regimes that emerged from it were too fragmented and vulnerable to repeated military coups to build the institutions needed to incorporate the mass public; their attempts to stay in power by balancing competing forces resulted in fragile regimes barely controlling a country seemingly made ungovernable by the rival mobilization of Shi’a communists, Arab nationalists, Ba‘thists and the Kurdish KDP (Batatu 1978; Bromley 1994: 135–8; Mufti 1996: 98–167). All this only changed after the second Ba‘th regime, which seized power in a 1968 coup, finally found a workable power formula. First, the Ba‘thist leadership, a product of a decade of unrestrained power struggle, was convinced that only utterly ruthless treatment of opponents could defeat the endemic rebelliousness of Iraqi society. Moreover, the man who survived the post-1968 power struggles within the regime, Saddam Hussein, an urban guerrilla turned Stalin-like organizer, was arguably the “fittest” to survive in this environment. To consolidate 367

Raymond Hinnebusch

his position, he relied on kin and sectarian assabiya to construct a patrimonialized power centre while purging rivals and forging new instruments of power. The Ba‘thization of the army and intensive intelligence surveillance rid the officer coup of factionalism and finally put an end to the age of coups; the army’s massive increase in size gave the regime increasing control over Iraqi territory. In a burst of organization building, the Ba‘th party expanded from a conspiratorial group into a 500,000-member institutionalized and penetrative Leninist apparatus with another million supporters or sympathizers (Mufti 1996: 204) The 1970s nationalization of the oil industry and the oil boom put soaring oil revenues in the hands of the government: its share of GNP doubled from 39 to 60 per cent and its share of investment from 50 to 70 per cent (Mufti 1996: 202–3). This control of the economy gave the regime massive patronage resources, enabled bureaucratic expansion which recruited nearly a million state workers dependent on the government for their livelihoods, and provided the wherewithal for crash modernization in which infrastructure—roads, telephones doubled—and state penetration of society increased. Oil relieved the state of the need to extract taxes, giving it considerable autonomy. It also allowed the public sector to remain dominant in an age when economic liberalization was on agendas across the region. Although private crony capitalism was encouraged among regime clients, the party and the regime’s clientelist networks remained ladders of political recruitment from plebeian strata, diluting the consolidation of state elites into a new bourgeoisie. No bourgeois class formed to balance the state elite or with a stake in economic infitah (opening) as in Egypt where this class helped subordinate nationalist ambitions in order to participate in the world economy (Bromley 1994: 139–41). Lacking a class base, the regime remained threatened by deep-seated sectarian-ethnic cleavages, which, in the absence of a secure Iraqi national identity, could only be contained by extraordinary means. Autonomous civil society was eradicated, and citizens incorporated in all-encompassing totalitarian structures of control, co-opted by material benefits and the developmental achievements of the regime, or demobilized by fear enforced by a vast network of informers and a pervasive secret police. State patronage was used to divide the population, favouring or disfavouring groups on the basis of perceived loyalty (Bromley 1994: 139). All opposition from the Kurdish or Shia communities was brutally repressed; indeed, during the Iran–Iraq war, 250,000 Shia supposedly of Iranian origin were expelled to Iran, Kurdish villages suspected of rebellion were razed and relocated, and mass killings were carried out (Mufti 1996: 229–30). At the same time, Arab nationalist ideology was used to legitimize the state, in the first instance to consolidate a Sunni support base, but also to bridge the gap with the Shia. Many Sunnis felt a limited affinity for a separate Iraqi state in which, indeed, they were a minority and found pan-Arabism a much more attractive identity. Paradoxically, the regime also secured support from Sunnis by exploiting the threat to the integrity of the secular state and its officially dominant Arabism from Kurdish separatism and emerging Islamist Shia groups inspired by Iran. Some Shia were attracted by upward mobility through state jobs and by their systematic recruitment into the ruling Ba‘th party, which promoted the Arab identity they potentially shared with the Sunnis. The Iran–Iraq war was the test of this control strategy. That the majority of the population and the bulk of wartime conscripts were Shiite and hence possibly susceptible to the appeal of Iranian revolutionary Islam against their own Sunni-dominated secular state, was the regime’s potentially fatal liability. Yet there were no Shi’a uprisings or defections to Iran during the war even in the face of major defeats (Gause 1991: 17). Iraq’s state formation had several key consequences for its foreign policy. First, the credibility of its state-building Arab nationalist ideology required Iraqi leadership on the pan-Arab stage. Iraqi leaders, from the very founding of the state, imagined that Iraq had the potential to be the Prussia of Arab politics, but for years this role fell to Egypt while Iraq was preoccupied with 368

War in the Middle East

instability at home. With the rise of the Ba‘thists to power an ideological thrust was given to the notion that the arena of political competition was not within a single state, but a contest for panArab leadership; once they consolidated the state at home, they started to act on these ambitions in the region (Mufti 1996: 194), and when Egypt dropped the banner of Arabism after its 1979 separate peace with Egypt, Iraq saw an opportunity to take over the role. In the run-up to his invasion of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein tried to seize the banner of pan-Arabism by demanding a new oil embargo of the US until it changed its pro-Israel policy; an end to all foreign bases and treaties (specifically of the Gulf States) and that the Gulf oil states share their wealth with the rest of the Arab world. After all these demands were rebuffed by the Arab powers aligned with the US, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, Saddam started looking for an opportunity to force his leadership on them: the invasion of Kuwait appeared to be a way to do so. The second consequence of state formation for foreign policy was that the arbitrary drawing of Iraq’s borders inflamed territorial revisionism in Baghdad. In particular, Iraq’s southern and south-eastern borders with Iran and Kuwait were forced on it by Britain explicitly to limit its access to and power projection in the Gulf, its economic lifeline. Moreover, recurrent Iraqi leaders, from King Ghazi to Abd al-Karim Qasim, contested Kuwait’s independence, insisting it had been a part of Iraq under the Ottomans until separated under British tutelage. The disputed and ill-defined Iran–Iraq border along the Shatt al-Arab put Iraq into permanent conflict with a more powerful Iran against which it was mostly on the defensive. Iran, under the Shah, supported Kurdish insurgency against Baghdad that forced Iraq to accept a 1975 readjustment of the boundary to its disadvantage. This situation both generated considerable insecurity in Baghdad and inflamed irredentist grievances that Saddam would harness in the invasion of Iran (1980) and then Kuwait (1990) (Frankel 1991: 17–18; Tripp 2001: 168, 170, 179–82). Third, the Ba‘thist regime, which always rested on a military pillar of power, created, during the Iran–Iraq war, an enormous, professionalized military machine with some 4 million soldiers under arms at the end of the war. It was, moreover, well equipped with advanced weapons financed by oil or debt and provided by Western states seeking profits or anxious to see Iran contained. What had once been a defensive Iraq, barely able to control its own territory against Kurdish insurgency, was, by the end of the Iran–Iraq war, in a position to pursue an activist foreign policy against weaker neighbours. Fourth, as a result of the Iran–Iraq war, Iraq’s massive build-up of military power in excess of its own substantial economic base during the war had bankrupted it and left it deeply indebted to both Western and Gulf Arab creditors, including Kuwait; at the end of the war, it discovered its access to foreign imports were restricted and the leverage of its rich Gulf funders was enhanced. Moreover, Saddam perceived the Gulf states to be over pumping oil in excess of their OPEC quotas, thus driving down the price of oil and Iraq’s revenues at a time when it needed high oil prices for economic recovery. For Saddam, the invasion of Kuwait appeared to be a solution to his economic problems. In summary, therefore, the view that a certain bellicosity was built into the Iraqi state appears convincing; yet, this was owing as much to international factors—how this state was constituted from without, as it did to Iraqi agency. In Iraq’s case at least, war proneness may have been exacerbated by authoritarian institutions, but it had much deeper roots in the arbitrary creation of the state and its boundaries, leading to the incorporation of revisionist forces into the state that were the deeper drivers of bellicosity. Moreover, war was in good part a function of the extreme imbalance of power in the Gulf resulting from the way Britain had forged weak mini-states (with enormous oil resources) alongside much larger potentially powerful states (Iraq and Iran). Finally, additional factors, specifically Saddam’s pan-Arab ambitions, the Kuwait–Iraq conflict and Iraq’s economic vulnerabilities helped create the environment in which the decision to 369

Raymond Hinnebusch

invade could seem rational; still, other Iraqi leaders had always acted more cautiously; Saddam’s history of risk-taking and bellicosity arguably tilted the balance toward war.

Comparing Israel and Iraq In both cases, the ultimate war proneness originated in the constitution of the regional system in a way that created states at odds with neighbours over borders and territorial claims, driving revisionist ambitions which made the external environment a source of high insecurity for all states. Nevertheless, the environment did not dictate war, and these two states became offensive rather than defensive realists because their distinctive formation experiences had built exceptional war proneness into them. What made them different from other less war-prone regional states had little to do with regime type: they were at opposite ends of the democratic-authoritarian spectrum. It was not the democratic features of Israel that made it war prone except to the considerable extent democratic outcomes reflect faithfully the combination of insecurity and irredentism in public opinion that had tended to empower hawkish politicians and marginalize the doves. This is turn originated in Israel’s character as a settler state, alienated from and rejected by its environment and with a built-in appetite for more land and water and an irredentist drive to bring territory into congruence with an identity constructed from selective historical memories. In Iraq’s case the state formation strategies followed to deal with identity fragmentation, combined with irredentist grievances widespread in society, generated a war-prone state; the authoritarian distribution of power—lack of checks on war-prone leader—merely allowed war if the leader wanted one. Actual war, as opposed to war proneness, has, however, to be explained by looking at the strategic situation—that is, how states responded to the Hobbesian anarchy in which they were situated. Somewhat similar to the distinction between defensive and offensive realist states, Janice Stein (1993: 56–7) distinguished between unwanted wars of vulnerability in which external and domestic threats combine in such a way to make war or at least brinkmanship seem the least costly course, and sought after wars of opportunity in which elites believe a power advantage will allow them to make gains through the use of force. Both the 1967 and 1990 wars are surely mixed cases. For Israel, 1967 was a war of opportunity in the tactical sense but of vulnerability in the strategic sense: an opportunity to end Israel’s strategic vulnerability, by acquiring more defensible orders and to force its acceptance in the regional arena. For Saddam Hussein, the invasion of Kuwait appeared an opportunity to assume the banner of pan-Arab leadership and to reverse the vulnerabilities he faced from the fact that the Iran–Iraq war had left him weakened and indebted. However, war was still far from inevitable and depended on the balance of power. The 1967 war was a function of the power transition scenario: the Israeli war leaders saw the power balance as shifting and calculated that they needed to strike when they had the advantage; the 1990 war was an outcome of an extreme power imbalance between the militarily Iraqi giant and the Kuwaiti midget. Leadership also mattered: the Israeli hawks had to push the doves aside before they could launch a war and a different Iraqi leader than Saddam might have had a more cautious view of the wisdom of invading Kuwait.

Conclusions Middle Eastern war, in the most immediate sense, is driven from the second level, by the abundance of revisionist states. Classical realism’s revisionist–status quo distinction appears fundamental. But revisionism needs explaining. It is not a function of regime—democratic or authoritarian— type; but of the regional systems’ construction as a Hobbesian anarchy, in which pervasive irredentism from the poor fit of state and identity; disputed boundaries; and the heterogeneity 370

War in the Middle East

of regime legitimacy principles drive conflict, and there are few trans-state economic interests or shared norms to mute them. Exacerbating regional instability is the struggle over oil resources between regional and global powers. These factors generate pervasive security dilemmas and offensive realist struggles over hegemony. But why a particular war erupts at a particular time depends on factors at the first and third level. The power balance may deter or enable war. If the other levels are permissive, having a risk-taker or ideologue in power may trigger war.

Appendix: Middle East wars (since 1945): an empirical survey War

Leadership Aggression1

Issues at Stake

Regime Types involved2

Power imbalance or power transition3

1948 Arab–Israeli war 1956 Suez War 1963 Yemen Egypt–Saudi proxy War 1963 Algeria–Morocco War 1967 Arab–Israeli War 1973 Arab–Israeli War 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus, war with Greece 1975 Moroccan invasion of Western Sahara 1977 Egypt–Libya War 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon 1980-88 Iran–Iraq War 1990 Iraq invasion of Kuwait

No Yes No

territory, irredentism power ideology, security

D–D–M–M D–D–D–RR RR–M

no imbalance power imbalance no imbalance

No No No No

territory, ideology security, territory territory irredentism

AR–M D–RR–AR–M D–AR–AR D–D

no imbalance power transition? no imbalance no imbalance

No

territory/irredentism

M–SM

power imbalance

No Yes

ideology/power power/irredentism

AR–AR D–D–SM

power imbalance power imbalance

Yes Yes

AR–RR AR–M

power transition power imbalance

No No

power, ideology power, resources, irredentism, ideology resources, power power

D–AR AR–AR

power imbalance no imbalance

Yes No No

power, resources security; irredentism security, irredentism

D–AR D–SM D–SM

power imbalance power imbalance power imbalance

No

power, ideology

no imbalance

No

security, power, ideology

M–M–AR– RR–D–D–AR M–M–SM

1990 First US–Iraq War 1994 North–South Yemen War 2003 Second US–Iraq War 2006 Israel–Hizbollah War Gaza Wars (2008, 2012,2014) 4 2012–2016 Syrian War Saudi–Emirati–Yemen Intervention

power imbalance

1 Leadership war proneness is coded for leaders who were involved in more than one war or who attacked first when the power balance was sharply in their favour—that is “wars of choice.” 2 D = democracy; AR = authoritarian republic; RR = revolutionary republic; M = monarchy; SM = sub-state movement. Sub-state movements (SM) are omitted from the tallies on regime involvement in wars. Authoritarian republics (AR) and Revolutionary Republics (RR) are counted together under authoritarian republics in the main tally in Table 25.1 but with a sub-category of revolutionary republics noted. Note that the same country can be counted twice under different regimes: thus, Egypt appears under monarchy (under Farouk in the first Arab–Israeli war), revolutionary republic (under Nasser) and authoritarian republic (after Nasser). Syria is counted as a semi-democracy in the first Arab–Israeli war. 3 Power imbalance is coded only where such an imbalance is obvious and significant. 4 The Gaza wars are treated as a continuous war interrupted by truces.

371

Raymond Hinnebusch

Notes 1 Analysts are divided over how much and what difference regime type makes to war proneness with Maoz and Russett (1993) summarizing the evidence for and Rosato (2003) against the Democratic Peace thesis while Peceny, Beer and Sanchez-Terry (2002) find evidence that authoritarian regimes are peaceful toward one another. 2 Assuming the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (1990) can be distinguished as a war from the US 1991 attack on Iraqi forces in Kuwait. 3 The robust claim of democratic peace theory is less embracing—only that democracies do not attach each other. Still, it is part of the theory that the structural checks and balances in democracies makes going to war harder. 4 Constructivists, notably Wendt (1992), argues that anarchy, far from uniform, can take different forms, ranging typically from Lockean or Grotian forms in which states respect each other’s interests and can co-operate and Hobbesian ones in which enmity and the expectation of war is high. This is congruent with the International Society (English School) approach, with e.g. Bull (1995) arguing there is an anarchic society (not a state of nature but something that evolved over time) which shares common interests and values and bound by common rules and practices, including the conduct of war. Adib-Moghaddam (2003) applies this approach to the Gulf. 5 According to B. Miller (2006, 2009) incongruence of state and nation may result from a situation of one state, many sub-state identity communities or one supra-state community, many states; or a spill over of identity groups across borders; and intensifies the security dilemmas since borders are contested. According to Holsti (1996), the creation under colonialism of new unconsolidated states lacking legitimacy has meant the spread of war, e.g. ethnic wars or wars of separatism. This spills over into inter-state conflict because 65 per cent of primordial groups have kindred in adjacent states. 6 Vasquez and Henehan (2010) and Vasquez (Vasquez 2003: 123–52, 295) showed territorial disputes had a higher chance that other issues of escalating to war and that the dominant issue underlying wars to be territory. Maoz (1989) found that the entry of new states into the international system, involving securing a physical location, is associated with war. Buzan and Waever (2003: 22–6) claim the Middle East has since independence been in transition from a pre to a Westphalian era, a period in which war is endemic—until and if borders are sorted out. 7 Pearson and Rochester (1992: 292) report on evidence that levels of frustration are very high among those deprived of their land. 8 Halliday (1994), pp. 94–123, and Werner (2000), find that war is less likely among similar regime types with similar legitimacy principles. 9 Mearsheimer (2001) argues the case for offensive realism, namely that the anarchic structure of world politics forces states to seek security through power maximization, and great powers all seek hegemony; A similar thesis is that war results from struggles for hegemony—for control of economic resources and power to make the rules (Modelski 1978).The defensive realism of Waltz (1979) and Walt (1987) thinks anarchy leads states to act defensively, cautiously, as status quo powers preserving security rather than seeking power. 10 On wars from security dilemmas in MENA, see Stein (1991) and Shlaim (2001: 236, 242) 11 The main argument is between classical balance of power theorists such as Morgenthau and power transition theorists such as Organski and Kugler (1980); Lemke (2002) applies power transition theory to regions, including MENA. J. David Singer “(1981) finds the evidence inconclusive and John A Vasquez (1993), notes that the power transition effect is not very strong, only resulting in war about half the time. 12 Deutsch and Singer (1964) claimed multi-polar systems were the most stable, with cross-cutting cleavages making it unlikely the same states would line up opposed on all issues. Mearsheimer (2001: 43–5) argued that unbalanced multipolarity—a system with many powers and a rising potential hegemon is the most insecure situation. Waltz argued that bi-polarity was the most stable system as the two superpowers effectively balance each other and police their own blocs (1964). Birthe Hansen (2000), in line with hegemonic stability theory, claimed unipolarity kept the peace while Waltz (1993) saw it as highly unstable since there would be no check on the power of the American unipole. 13 Chong (2018) found risk taking leadership associated with weak states’ initiating of territorial disputes from 1816 to 2001. 14 For arguments that Middle Eastern wars have often resulted from miscalculations, see Parker (1993) and Popp (2006). 372

War in the Middle East

References Adib-Moghaddam, A. (2003), The Cultural Geneology of Anarchy in the Persian Gulf, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barnett, M. (1998), Dialogues in Arab Politics: Negotiations in Regional Order, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Batatu, H. (1978), The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Brecher, M. (1972), The Foreign Policy System of Israel, London, Oxford University Press. Bromley, S. (1990), American Hegemony and World Oil: The Industry, the State System and the World Economy, Oxford: Polity Press. Bromley, S. (1994), Rethinking Middle East Politics, Oxford: Polity Press. Bull, H. (1995), The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, second edition, London: Macmillan Press. Buzan, B. and O. Weaver (2003), Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chong C. (1 September 2018), “Territorial dispute initiation by weaker states,” The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 11:3, 339–72, https://doi.org/10.1093/cjip/poy009 Choucri, N. and R.C. North (1975), Nations in Conflict: National Growth and International Violence, San Francisco, CA: W.H. Freeman. Deutsch, K.J. and D. Singer (April 1964), “Multipolar power systems and international stability,” World Politics, 16:3. Frankel, G. (1991), “Lines in the sand,” in eds, M. Sifry and C. Cerf, The Gulf War Reader, pp. 16–29, New York, NY: Times Books. Gause, F.G. III (1991), “Revolutionary fevers and regional contagion: Domestic structures and the export of revolution in the Middle East,” Journal of South Asian & Middle East Studies, 14:3, 1–23. Gerges, F. (1994), The Superpowers and the Middle East: Regional and International Politics, 1955–1967, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Gerner, D. (1991), One Land, Two Peoples: The Conflict over Palestine, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Gochman, C.S. and Z. Maoz (1984), “Militarized interstate disputes, 1816–1976: Procedures, patterns and insights,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 28:4, 585–616. Halliday F. (1994), Rethinking International Relations, London: Macmillan. Halliday, F. (1999), Revolution and World Politics, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Hansen B. (2000), Unipolarity and the Middle East, Richmond: Curzon. Hinnebusch, R. (2013), “Security conceptions and practices in the Middle East: The case of the Arab League,” in eds, S. Aris and A. Wagner, Regional Organisations and Security Conceptions and Practices, London and New York, NY: Routledge. Holsti, K.J. (1996), The State, War and the State of War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jones, C. (2001), “The foreign policy of Israel,” in eds, R. Hinnebusch and A. Ehteshami, The Foreign Policies of Middle East States, pp. 115–39, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Press. Klare, M.T. (2001), Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict, New York, NY: Metropolitan Books. Kimsche, D. and D. Bawly (1968), The Sandstorm: The Arab Israeli War of June 1967: Prelude and Aftermath, London: Secker and Warburg. Lemke, D. (21 January 2002), Regions of War and Peace, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lobe, J. (2012), “Israel ranked world’s most militarised nation,” Interpress Service, accessible at: http://www. ipsnews.net/2012/11/israel-ranked-as-worlds-most-militarised-nation/ Lorenz, K. (1963), On Aggression, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Mansfield, P. and B.M. Pollins (eds, 2003), Economic Interdependence and International Conflict: New Perspectives on an Enduring Debate, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Maoz, Z. (June 1989), “Joining the Club of Nations: Political development and international confect, 1816–1976,” International Studies Quarterly, 33, 199–231. Maoz, Z. (1995), “Domestic norms, structural constraints, and enduring rivalries in the Middle East, 1948–1988,” in eds, D. Garnham and M. Tessler, Democracy, War and Peace in the Middle East, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Maoz, Z. (March 1997), “Regional security in the Middle East: Past trends, present realities, future challenges,” The Journal of Strategic Studies, 20:1, 1–45. 373

Raymond Hinnebusch

Maoz, Z. (2004), “Pacificism and fightaholism in international politics: A structural history of national and dyadic conflict, 1816–1992,” International Studies Review, 6:4. Maoz, Z. and B. Russett (September 1993), “Normative and structural causes of democratic peace, 1946–1986,” The American Political Science Review, 87:3. Marr, P. (1985), The Modern History of Iraq, Boulder, CO: Westview. Mearsheimer, J. (2001), The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, New York, NY: W.W. Norton. Miller, B. (2006), “Balance of power or the state to nation balance, explaining Middle East war propensity,” Security Studies, 15:4, 658–705. Miller, B. (2009), “Between the revisionist and the frontier state: Regional variations in state warpropensity,” Review of International Studies, 35, 85–119. Modelski, G. (April 1978), “Long cycles of global politics and the nation state,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 20:2, 214–35. Morgan, C.T. and G. Palmer (1997), “A two-good theory of foreign policy: An application to dispute initiation and reciprocation,” International Interactions, 22:3, 225–44, doi: 10.1080/03050629708434890. Mufti, M. (1996), Sovereign Creations: Pan-Arabism and Political Order in Syria and Iraq, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell U. Press. Organski, A.F.K. and J. Kugler (1980), The War Ledger. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Parker, R. (1993), The Politics of Miscalculation, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Pearson, F. and J.M. Rochester (1992), International Relations, New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. Peceny, M., Beer, C.C. and S. Sanchez-Terry (March 2002), “Dictatorial peace?” American Political Science Review, 96:1. Peri, Y. (1983), Between Battles and Ballots: Israeli Military in Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Popp, R. (2006), “Stumbling decidedly into the Six-Day War,” Middle East Journal, 60:2, 281–309. Roberts, S.J. (1990), Party and Policy in Israel, the Battle between Hawks and Doves, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Rosato, S. (November 2003), “The flawed logic of democratic peace theory,” The American Political Science Review, 97:4, 585–602. Risse-Kappen, T. (1995), “Democratic peace—warlike democracies? A social constructivist interpretation of the liberal argument,” European Journal of International Relations, 19:3, 5–49. Seale, P. (1988), Asad: The Struggle for the Middle East, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Sela, A. (1998), The End of the Arab-Israeli Conflict: Middle East Politics and the Quest for Regional Order, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Shlaim, A. (2001), The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, London: Penguin. Singer, J.D. (1981), “Accounting for international war: The state of the discipline,” Journal of Peace Research, 18:1. Smith, C.D. (1996), Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. Solingen, E. (November 2007), “Pax Asiatica vs. Bella Leventina: The foundations of war and peace in East Asia and the Middle East,” American Political Science Review, 101:4, 757–80. Stein, J.G. (1991), “The Arab-Israeli War of 1967: inadvertent war through miscalculated escalation,” in eds, A. George et al., Avoiding War: Problems of Crisis Management, pp. 126–59, Boulder, CO: Westview. Stein, J. (1993), “The security dilemma in the Middle East: A Prognosis for the Decade Ahead,” in eds, R. Brynen, B. Korany and P. Noble, The Many Faces of National Security in the Arab World, pp. 56–75, Boulder, CO: Westview. Tripp, C. (2001), “The foreign policy of Iraq,” in eds, R. Hinnebusch and A. Ehteshami, The Foreign Policies of Middle East States, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Press, 167–92. Vasquez, J. (2003), The War Puzzle, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vasquez, J. and M.T. Henehan (2010), Territory, War, and Peace, London and New York, NY: Routledge. Walt, S. (1987), The Origins of Alliances, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Walt, S. (1992), “Revolution and war,” World Politics, 44:3, 321–68. Waltz, K. (1959), Man, the State and War: A Theoretical Analysis, New York, NY: Columbia. Waltz, K. (1979), Theory of International Politics, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Waltz, K. (1964), “The stability of a bi-polar world,” Daedelus, 93, 881–909. Waltz, K. (1993), “The emerging structure of international politics,” International Security, 18, 44–79. Werner, S. (2000), “The effect of political similarity on the onset of militarized disputes, 1816–1985,” Political Research Quarterly, 53:2, 343–74. Wendt, A. (1992), “Anarchy is what states make of it: The social construction of power politics,” International Organization, 46, Spring: 391–425. Wulf, H. (2009), “The role of regional organisations in conflict prevention and resolution,” in ed, H. Wulf, Still Under Construction: Regional Organisations’ Capacities for Conflict Prevention, INEF Report, no. 97, Institute for Development and Peace, pp. 5–19, Duisburg: University of Duisburg-Essen. 374

26 International relations of the Gulf From stable rivalry to spreading instability Matteo Legrenzi and Fred H. Lawson

International politics in the Gulf region entails two overlapping sets of relations: one among the states situated along the shores of the Gulf itself, and another between these littoral states and external great powers. The former arena consists of fluctuating configurations of antagonism and alignment, as Iran, Iraq and the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Oman) take steps to maximize their security relative to one another. The latter has for the past quarter-century been anchored by the bilateral protectorates that the United States constructed with each of the GCC countries in the immediate aftermath of the 1990–91 war for Kuwait (Lawson 2004). These two dynamics intersect differently depending on how power is distributed among the Gulf states. Prior to 2003, the Islamic Republic of Iran stood opposed to both Iraq and Saudi Arabia, even as the GCC states—with the notable exception of Oman—kept their distance from Baghdad, due to Iraq’s August 1990 invasion and occupation of Kuwait (Sanad 1994; Fuertig 2007). Moderate and consistent Saudi animosity toward Iran did not prevent Qatar, the UAE and Oman from dealing with the Islamic Republic according to their own respective interests, and each of these governments made occasional overtures to Tehran. At the same time, the smaller GCC states found their capacity to pursue foreign policy initiatives tightly constrained by their status as nascent protectorates of the US. The conjunction of regional bi-polarity, setting Saudi Arabia against Iran, and the GCC’s subordination to Washington ensured that, despite occasional outbursts of bellicose rhetoric, the vagaries of Gulf diplomacy did little to disrupt regional stability. Following the destruction of the Ba‘th Party-led regime in Baghdad, the structure of international relations in the Gulf started to change. Antagonism between Iran and Iraq all but vanished, leaving Saudi Arabia at a distinct strategic disadvantage as Baghdad haltingly resumed its place in the regional order. At the same time, the differential in power between Saudi Arabia and the other GCC states steadily diminished, making it more feasible for the latter to cultivate closer ties to Tehran. Furthermore, the maturing of their respective protectorates with the US enabled the smaller GCC states to undertake foreign policy initiatives in their own interest. Taken together, these developments marked a shift toward multi-polarity in the region, which became more pronounced as the Gulf security complex expanded to incorporate the South Caucasus and the southern end of the Red Sea. 375

Matteo Legrenzi and Fred H. Lawson

Rise of the smaller GCC states As the twenty-first century entered its second decade, the smaller GCC states had managed to narrow the gap in power and prestige that had long separated them from Iran and Saudi Arabia, as well as from Iraq in the period before 1991. This trend was most clearly evident with respect to Qatar and the UAE, both of which had started to wield considerable influence in regional and international affairs, independent of their connections to Riyad. But the rise of the smaller GCC states was discernible with regard to Oman and Kuwait as well. Qatar’s emergence as an influential player in Gulf and Middle Eastern affairs has been extensively documented (Kamrava 2013). Officials in Doha voiced strong support for Iran’s right to engage in a large-scale nuclear research programme. Qatar’s ruler (amir), Hamad bin Khalifah al-Thani, assured Iranian Foreign Minister ‘Ali Larijani in July 2009 that “Iran is always our friend and we won’t allow any ill-willed person to create problems between us.” (Fars News Agency 6 July 2009) The chief of the general staff of the Qatari armed forces and the Iranian Minister of Defence subsequently set up a variety of mechanisms to co-ordinate their security policies. In early 2010, the two governments agreed to work together “to combat terrorism and promote [bilateral] security co-operation” (Cafiero 2012). These initiatives accompanied a dramatic increase in the size of the Qatari navy and air force. Annual defence spending jumped from $500 million in 2011 to $1 billion in 2013 and was anticipated to exceed $3.5 billion by 2015. Qatar’s ability to stand up to Saudi Arabia was due in large part to the dynamics of Doha’s strategic partnership with Washington (Lawson 2016). US officials allocated increasing resources after 2005 to strengthen the protectorate arrangement that had taken shape between the two states during the 1990s. By 2010, the massive air base at al-‘Udaid had become the command centre for all surveillance and combat operations undertaken by the US Central Command, not only in the Gulf but also in Afghanistan (Blancgard 2012). The growing indispensability to the US armed forces of al-‘Udaid and the adjacent supply depot at Camp al-Sailiyyah encouraged the Qatari leadership to pursue a more active policy toward the 2006 war in southern Lebanon than Washington would have preferred, and to step up diplomatic and financial backing for the Islamic Resistance Movement (Harakah al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah, HAMAS) in Palestine as well. As it became less tightly constrained by the Qatar–US protectorate, Doha adopted a more assertive posture in regional affairs. The amirate went further than most Arab countries in advocating international military intervention in Libya in 2011 and dispatched fighter-bombers and Special Forces personnel to support the armed opposition to the regime headed by Muammar al-Qaddafi (Steinberg 2012; Nuruzzaman 2015). After the ouster of Egypt’s President Husni Mubarak, Qatar supplied a massive injection of funds to the new Muslim Brothers-dominated government in Cairo, and Amir Hamad travelled to the Egyptian capital twice to confer in person with Mubarak’s successor, Muhammad Mursi. The Qatari ruler also paid an official visit to Gaza, the first head of state to set foot on the territory after it came under the control of HAMAS. These initiatives alienated Qatar from Saudi Arabia. Doha expressed notable reluctance to go along with Riyad’s plans to strengthen the institutional structure of the GCC. In addition, Qatari officials displayed a degree of warmth toward the Muslim Brothers in Libya, Egypt, Syria and Yemen that infuriated their Saudi counterparts, who openly charged that all of the major problems plaguing the Middle East could be attributed to the disparate branches of that particular movement (Al Qassemi 2013; Roberts 2014; Binhuwaidin 2015; Lacroix 2014). Comity in the relations between Doha and Riyad gradually deteriorated and finally collapsed 376

International relations of the Gulf

in March 2014, when Saudi Arabia pulled its ambassador out of Qatar and persuaded the UAE and Bahrain to follow suit (al-Rasheed 2014). Despite a hasty reconciliation with the other GCC member-states, Qatar continued to pursue a foreign policy agenda that kept it at loggerheads with Saudi Arabia. The authorities in Doha undertook negotiations with officials in Ankara concerning the establishment of a permanent Turkish military presence in Qatar. In late September 2015, Doha concluded a pact with Tehran, according to whose terms the Iranian navy would be allowed to operate in Qatari territorial waters in the event that either state found itself threatened by an outside power. Meanwhile, the amirate’s armed forces took delivery of a half dozen German-made Leopard 2 main battle tanks, a handful of self-propelled howitzers and two dozen French-made Rafale fighter-bombers. Qatar was not the only GCC state that began to challenge the regional predominance of Saudi Arabia during the 2010s. The UAE baulked at Riyad’s proposals to transform the GCC into a more amalgamated entity (Ibish 2017). The federation nevertheless sent a dozen warplanes to provide air support for the opposition militias fighting against al-Qaddafi, and also contributed a contingent of 500 military police to the Saudi-led Peninsula Shield operation that intervened to crush large-scale popular protests in Bahrain in the spring of 2011 (Guznasky 2014). UAE fighter-bombers attacked Libya once again in August 2014, this time operating in conjunction with Egyptian military aircraft. Neither Abu Dhabi nor Cairo gave advance warning to Riyad—or to Washington—of its plans to carry out the latter attack (Bienaime and Rosen 2014). The Cyrenaica-based Libyan National Army that received UAE and Egyptian tactical support subsequently battled Tripoli-based and Qatar-backed Islamist militants for control of the country. By late 2014, the UAE had become actively involved on Saudi Arabia’s southern flank. Contingents of the UAE armed forces took up forward positions in Djibouti, although these units relocated to the Eritrean port of Assab during the spring of 2015, and transformed that sleepy harbour into a bustling deep-water transhipment facility and tactical airbase (Ibish 2017: 33–4). More importantly, the UAE convinced the authorities in Asmara to lease it the strategically situated Hanish Islands. UAE commanders subsequently established a modern training camp for the Somali armed forces and entered into negotiations with the autonomous administration of Somaliland to secure access to the port at Berbera (The National (Abu Dhabi), 13 May 2015; Ibish 2017: 34). Saudi officials belatedly responded by entering into negotiations with the government of Djibouti for a military facility of their own at the southern end of the Red Sea (Huliaras and Kalantzakos 2017: 66). Besides Qatar and the UAE, Oman undertook policies that worked at cross-purposes to Saudi security interests. Officials in Muscat pointedly avoided criticizing the Iranian nuclear research programme and stepped up commercial and financial transactions with the Islamic Republic, at times doing so in ways that contravened the strictures of the international sanctions regime. After 2010, the Omani authorities permitted Iranian warships to call at ports in the sultanate, and the two countries’ navies periodically carried out joint exercises in the Gulf of Oman (Vincent 2013; Guzansky 2015; Cafiero and Yefet 2016). Economic and military connections with Tehran put Muscat in a position to act as an intermediary between the US and the Islamic Republic during the months leading up to the July 2015 nuclear agreement known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (Al-Bolushi 2016). Like Qatar and the UAE, Oman refused to go along with the institutional deepening of GCC integration envisaged by Saudi Arabia (Al-Rasheed 2013). Unlike Doha, which contributed a token force to the Saudi-led intervention in the civil war in Yemen, Muscat kept its distance from the military campaign against the radical Islamist movement called the Supporters 377

Matteo Legrenzi and Fred H. Lawson

of God (Ansar Allah, also known pejoratively as the Houthis), despite the danger that the fighting might spill across the border into Oman’s southern Dhufar province (Al-Bolushi 2016: 395). Omani officials attempted to mediate between the Saudi-led coalition and the assortment of armed factions that were battling Yemen’s nominal President, ‘Abd Rabbu Mansur Hadi, but these efforts accomplished little besides “provok[ing] displeasure among the other Gulf countries, particularly Saudi Arabia” (Al-Bolushi 2016: 396). By the end of 2016, the exasperated Omanis started to denigrate the Saudi-led intervention as no more than “a sectarian project [designed] to confront Iran” (Colombo 2017). Kuwait adopted a more ambivalent set of policies vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia. On the one hand, it gave up its long-standing posture of strict neutrality regarding the internal affairs of Middle Eastern countries and joined Riyad in aligning itself with the post-Mursi leadership in Cairo (Kareem 2014). On the other hand, the amirate refused to back the institutional strengthening of the GCC and embarked on a rapprochement with Iran at the same time that relations between Riyad and Tehran were deteriorating. (Cafiero 2016; Al-Hayah (Beirut), 3 June 2014). Kuwait announced in May 2017 that it would invest $100 million to enlarge the existing cargo ports on its territory, so that these facilities could handle the flow of goods from the People’s Republic of China that had started to flood local markets in Iran and Iraq (Al-Diyyar (Beirut), 29 May 2017). Taken together, these trends illustrate the fundamental transformation that has occurred in the structure of international relations in the Gulf. The era of Iranian–Saudi domination of the region drew to a close at about the same time that the popular Uprisings of 2010–11 swept across the Middle East and North Africa. In the aftermath of the Uprisings, the smaller GCC states could no longer be expected to defer to or rally behind Riyad as a matter of course. The rise of the smaller GCC countries infused regional affairs with a greater degree of strategic uncertainty and made it imperative for Saudi policy-makers to devote more care to the management of relations with the kingdom’s putative allies, even as the range and intensity of external threats confronting the kingdom surged.

Saudi Arabia in the maelstrom As Iran and Iraq became more closely aligned with each other beginning in 2003–04 (Ehteshami 2003; Taremi 2005) and particularly after the departure of US troops from Iraq in December 2011, Saudi Arabia confronted a burgeoning number of severe external threats. Tehran kept accelerating its intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) programme and intimated that Saudi Arabia would be a primary target for such weapons. At the same time, Riyad faced a growing danger to the north, after a collection of predominantly Shi’i paramilitary formations, which had mobilized in response to the spring 2014 advance of the Islamic State (al-Dawlah al-Islamiyyah) into western Iraq, took up positions along the Saudi–Iraqi border. Even more pressing was the threat emanating from Yemen, where the Supporters of God joined forces with soldiers loyal to former President ‘Ali ‘Abdullah Salih to seize control of Yemen’s northern and central provinces and then launched a major assault against the southern metropolis of Aden.

Threat from Iran In early October 2015, Iran tested an upgraded version of the Shahab-3 missile, code-named the Emad. This IRBM boasted a range of 1700 kilometres and incorporated an electronic guidance system that made it possible to strike targets with a degree of accuracy that was unprecedented for missiles manufactured in the Islamic Republic (Qaidaari 2015). In addition, US officials 378

International relations of the Gulf

warned that the Emad had the capacity to carry a nuclear warhead. The initial test of the missile occurred shortly after a senior Iranian commander told reporters that Iranians must not be afraid of enemy threats. We won the [1980–88] war with Iraq with the least [sophisticated kinds of] military equipment, but if [the Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei gave the orders today to attack Saudi Arabia, we have 2000 rockets ready to set off from Isfahan. (Middle East Monitor October 3 2015) Another type of improved IRBM, the Ghadr-110, was launched over the Arabian Sea in late November 2015 (Pandey 2015). Complaints from Washington and European capitals that these tests violated United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1929 and 2231, as well as the spirit—if not the actual letter—of the July 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, prompted President Hassan Rouhani to issue a directive to Iran’s Ministry of Defence to speed up the deployment of locally produced IRBMs (The National December 31 2015). On 5 January 2016, Iranian state television broadcast images of the Speaker of Parliament Larijani touring an underground IRGC storage facility that appeared to be fully stocked with Emad missiles; the first public display of the next generation of IRBMs, the two-stage Simorgh, took place a month later. The firing of the Simorgh that was scheduled for early March failed to occur (Deutsche Welle January 5 2016), although multiple tests of single-stage Qadr-F, Qadr-H and Qiam-1 missiles were carried out that month (Bronk 2016; Abedin 2016). September 2017 saw the testing of yet another upgraded IRBM, the Khorramshahr, which was reported to have a range of 2000 kilometres and the capacity to carry multiple warheads (Reuters September 23 2017).

Threat from Iraq Even as Iran ramped up its potential to inflict missile strikes against neighbouring states, Saudi Arabia found itself endangered as a consequence of developments in Iraq. The kingdom had managed to keep its northern neighbour at arm’s length as violence swept across Iraq’s western al-Anbar province during the winter of 2013–14. It did so by providing encouragement—and small amounts of material and financial support—to local tribal forces, which acted as a counterweight to the predominantly Shi’i militias that were attempting to extend the control of the central government throughout the overwhelmingly Sunni marches of al-Anbar (Carey 2014). In the wake of the Islamic State’s offensive the following spring, however, militia commanders close to Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki turned their anger and frustration in the direction of Riyad (Nazer 2014). Saudi officials riposted by increasing their support for tribal leaders opposed to the Islamic State and then deployed 30,000 troops to guard the frontier (Al-Buluwi 2014a; Spencer 2014). The heightened military presence in the border zone prompted fighters loyal to al-Maliki to launch a mortar barrage against Saudi outposts in early July 2014 (Reuters July 8 2014). Following this incident, Saudi commanders started to construct a heavily fortified fence along the border, complete with thermal imaging devices and infrared cameras. Another attack against Saudi troops—this time by Islamic State cadres—took place in January 2015 (McDowall 2015). By the end of May, the Islamic State had been driven out of the southern districts of al-Anbar province by the loose collection of pro-government militias called the Popular Mobilization (Al-Hashd al-Sha’bi), operating alongside the better equipped, Iransponsored Party of God Battalions (Kataib Hizbullah) (Al-Quds al-‘Arabi June 1 2015). The Party of God Battalions asserted that al-Anbar constituted a vital logistical link between Iran and 379

Matteo Legrenzi and Fred H. Lawson

Syria, which needed to be secured by a permanent garrison; it then deployed short-range missile batteries southeast of the city of al-Ramadi and aimed them in the direction of Saudi territory. Heightened operations on the part of pro-Iranian forces based in southern Iraq set the stage for a crisis between Tehran and Kuwait that September, in which a group of Kuwaiti citizens was charged with planning an armed insurrection with the assistance of Iranian embassy personnel (Al-Safir (Beirut), September 9 2015, ). Soon after taking up his post in December 2015, Saudi Arabia’s new ambassador to Baghdad gave an interview to Iraqi television, in the course of which he remarked that the Popular Mobilization should turn the battle against the Islamic State over to Iraq’s regular armed forces, so as not to inflame inter-sectarian animosity any further (Al-Jazeera January 24 2016). Members of the Iraqi national assembly complained that the ambassador was meddling in domestic politics, and the foreign ministry warned that if he continued to “interfere” in the country’s internal affairs, he would be declared persona non grata. The incident, which happened shortly after Saudi Arabia executed the prominent Shia dissident Nimr al-Nimr, sent anti-Saudi sentiment soaring among Iraqi Shi’is (Mamouri 2016). The Iran-backed Bands of the People of Truth (‘Asaib Ahl al-Haqq) and Badr Organization (Munazzamah al-Badr) demanded that Baghdad sever diplomatic relations with Riyad in response to al-Nimr’s execution. The former organization had already threatened to dispatch units of its newly formed Special Forces into Saudi territory to destroy unspecified facilities if al-Nimr were put to death (Al-Quds al-‘Arabi February 11 2016). As tensions mounted between Riyad and Iraq’s predominantly Shi’i militias, the Saudi armed forces organized a large-scale military exercise at the northern end of the Gulf that involved GCC, Egyptian, Jordanian, Tunisian, Senegalese and Pakistani troops. The manoeuvres, designated Northern Thunder, included “direct offensive missions in the management of guerrilla operations” (Al-Quds al-‘Arabi February 9 2016). The Party of God Battalions and the Popular Mobilization’s Abu Fadl al-‘Abbas Battalions responded by reinforcing their positions along Iraq’s southern border (Al-‘Ubaidi 2016). Representatives of the Popular Mobilization then travelled to Damascus to confer with Syrian officials about how best to manage their common security interests (Al-Akhbar (Beirut), February 17 2016). These moves accompanied reports that the IRGC’s elite Jerusalem (al-Quds) Force had moved into positions in southern al-Anbar province, and had displaced Iraq’s regular army from districts close to the border (Al-Sharq alAwsat (London) February 27 2016).

Threat from Yemen Meanwhile, the threat emanating from the south intensified (Hokayem and Roberts 2016–17). Officials in Riyad charged that the Islamic Republic played an increasing role in sponsoring the activities of the Ansar Allah (Houthis) during the course of 2013–14 (Terrill 2014; Salisbury 2015; Zweiri 2016; Juneau 2016). In March 2015, the Saudi army and air force units, joined by contingents of the armed forces of the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Sudan, Egypt and Morocco launched a large-scale offensive in Yemen, which succeeded in preventing the Ansar Allah from taking control of Aden. Fierce resistance from the Ansar Allah and Salih loyalists stopped the Saudi-led expeditionary force from advancing into the southern provinces of Lahij, Dali’ and Abyan, however, and the Saudi-led campaign was quickly bogged down. The stalemate allowed Islamist militants affiliated with the Islamic State to join the battle, some of whom were reported to have co-ordinated their operations with Saudi and UAE commanders on the ground (Al-Muslimi 2015; Rafi 2015; Al-Hammadi 2016). By collaborating with radical Islamists, UAE forces were able to recapture extensive areas of Lahij and Abyan from 380

International relations of the Gulf

the Houthis, although rivalry between the newly arrived militants and the Yemeni branch of al-Qa’idah (Ansar al-Shari’ah, previously known as al-Qa’idah on the Arabian Peninsula), generated a flurry of attacks not only against Saudi and UAE troops, but also against the remnants of Yemen’s regular armed forces and the local defence forces that backed President Hadi (Naylor 2015; Al-Falahi 2015). After establishing a foothold in Lahij and Abyan, fighters affiliated with the Islamic State pushed northward into the provinces of Shabwah, al-Jawf and Marib, adjacent to Saudi territory. Remnants of Yemen’s regular armed forces blocked these militants, and at the same time prevented the Houthis, from establishing control of the wastelands along the border, but Saudi-sponsored forces proved less successful in dislodging the Houthi–Salih alliance from the fertile highlands of Taizz and Ibb provinces (Al-Jazeera December 18 2015; Schmitz 2016). Unable to advance into these central areas, the pro-Hadi coalition found itself surrounded in Aden and al-Hawtah, the capital of Lahij province, where its troops were subjected to repeated attacks from the local al-Qaidah branch, the Islamic State and other Islamist militants (Alwly 2016; Ghobari and Bayoumy 2016). Moreover, disagreements between Saudi and UAE commanders concerning which radical Islamists to tolerate enabled the Islamic State to expand its operations into additional areas along the Saudi border during the winter of 2015–16 (Arrabyee 2016b). It was under these circumstances that Saudi Minister of Defence Muhammad bin Salman al-Sa’ud announced that Riyad intended to sponsor the creation of a broad coalition of Islamic countries to combat global terrorism (Nazer 2015). How exactly the coalition might be structured, and just which countries would constitute its members, remained unclear. Provisional lists of prospective member-states conspicuously excluded Iran, Iraq and Syria, prompting observers to note that the grouping displayed a pronounced anti-Shi’i bent. One prominent Saudi commander nevertheless told reporters that it would be possible for the Islamic Republic to join the coalition, just as soon as Tehran demonstrated that it was no longer a sponsor of terrorist organizations (Fouad 2015). By early 2016, pro-Hadi forces in Yemen had begun to work closely with the Southern Resistance movement (al-Hirak al-Janubi), whose platform—which called for the restoration of a substantial degree of administrative autonomy for the country’s southern provinces—fit uneasily with Saudi Arabia’s long-term security interests (International Crisis Group 2016; Partrick 2016). The leverage exercised by the Southern Resistance aggravated friction among the diverse components of the Saudi-led alliance, and gave the al-Qaida forces an opportunity to capture al-Hawtah and Zinjibar, the capital of Abyan province, as well as the pivotal Aden suburb of al-Mansurah (International Crisis Group 2016: 19; Ghobari and Bayoumy 2016). President Hadi tried to restore unity among his putative allies in early February 2016 by appointing moderate southerners to senior ministerial posts (Al-Falahi 2016), but this move did little to brighten the government’s prospects (Nasser 2016; Abdul-Ahad 2016; Arrabyee 2016a). UAE forces carried out a succession of joint operations with southern-based forces during the spring of 2016, which ended up expelling al-Qaida and the Islamic State from al-Hawtah and Zinjibar, as well as from the ports of al-Mukalla and al-Shihr in Hadramawt province. In the wake of these successes, leaders of the Southern Resistance announced plans for the southern provinces to “disengage” from the Republic of Yemen (Al-Akhbar May 20 2016). Calls for southern autonomy accompanied widespread protests in Aden over the Hadi government’s inability to maintain a reliable supply of electricity. UAE commanders then organized a local military formation to protect Hadramawt and stood by as activists convened a General Congress that called for the creation of an “independent province” in south-eastern Yemen. 381

Matteo Legrenzi and Fred H. Lawson

A counter-congress organized by pro-Saudi Hadrami notables in Riyad fell flat (El Yaakoubi 2017) even as UAE companies stepped up investments on Socotra Island, east of al-Mukalla in the Arabian Sea (Samir 2017). After President Hadi dismissed prominent figures in the Southern Resistance from their ministerial posts in May 2017, these leaders set up a Transitional Council and declared that the new body was going to “manage the provinces of the south and represent them domestically and internationally” (Al-Hammadi 2017; Forster 2017).

Crisis over Qatar Roots of the crisis Events in Yemen set the stage for a severe crisis between Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which erupted in the late spring of 2017. The crisis no doubt reflected long-standing grievances related to the activities of the al-Jazeera television network and the Qatari government’s persistent support for the Muslim Brothers (Hassan 2017; Khan 2017b; Ghitis 2017b; Zafirov 2017). But it was more profoundly sparked by Riyad’s recognition that Saudi Arabia was no longer capable of exerting firm command over the regional policies of its GCC partners. In late January 2017, Kuwait’s Foreign Minister Sabah Khalid al-Sabah had travelled to Tehran to explore the possibility of greater economic and security collaboration between Kuwait and Iran. Shortly thereafter, the UAE took part in military exercises with the Israeli air force under the auspices of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Alarmed by these initiatives, Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Defence Muhammad bin Salman threatened to ramp up the kingdom’s ongoing strategic rivalry with the Islamic Republic. “We know that we are a target of the Iranian regime,” he explained to a national television audience, “and we will not wait for the battle to come to Saudi Arabia. We will work for it to take place there, inside Iran” (Ghitis 2017a; Nuruzzaman 2017). At the end of May, a television station owned by Muhammad bin Salman reported that the ruler of Qatar, Amir Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, had referred to the radical Lebanon-based Islamist movement the Party of God (Hizbullah) as a “resistance” movement, rather than a terrorist organization, and had made similarly complimentary comments concerning the Islamic Republic of Iran. The allegations were taken up by mass media based in the UAE. Saudi and UAE officials subsequently blocked access to all Qatar-based internet sites and ordered their respective ambassadors to leave Doha. A group of Saudi Arabia-based descendants of the eighteenth-century Islamic reformer Muhammad bin ‘Abd al-Wahhab even demanded that Tamim’s hereditary link to that august reformer be revoked (Rai al-Yawm (London) 30 May 2017). In early June, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain imposed a land and sea blockade around Qatar and warned air traffic in and out of Doha to keep out of the air space of those three countries (Khan 2017a; Browning 2017). Members of the Turkish national assembly expressed strong support for Qatar as the crisis took shape, and in early June voted to send the first contingent of Turkish troops to the new military base that was being built for them outside Doha. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan spoke out against the blockade and held unexpected talks with Iran’s Foreign Minister Muhammad Javad Zarif, reportedly at Zarif’s request (Zaman 2017). The meeting took place as Islamist militants carried out co-ordinated assaults against government buildings in Tehran, which Iranian officials blamed on Saudi Arabia. Ankara then announced that an additional 2500 Turkish troops would be airlifted to Qatar and that the two states’ armed forces would carry out joint air and land exercises. Iranian commanders complemented this move by deploying two warships to positions along the coast of Oman. Perhaps in retaliation for this deployment, but 382

International relations of the Gulf

more probably due to the elevated level of stress that pervaded the region, Saudi patrol boats opened fire on an Iranian fishing vessel. Shortly afterwards, the Saudi navy intercepted three IRGC speedboats that it claimed were preparing to sabotage production facilities at the Marjan oil field (O’Conner 2017). These incidents prompted Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-‘Abadi to undertake a diplomatic initiative to defuse regional tensions. During talks with King Salman bin ‘Abd al-‘Aziz al-Sa’ud, it was agreed to create a bilateral commission to co-ordinate Saudi and Iraqi efforts to combat terrorism. Al-‘Abadi’s visit was followed by trips to the kingdom by the Iraqi Minister of the Interior, Qasim al-‘Araji, and the influential Shi’i populist leader Muqtada al-Sadr. Al-Sadr travelled on to the UAE, where he met with his one-time political ally Ahmad al-Kubaisi. In mid-August, officials in Riyad announced the formation of a joint council to promote trade and investment between Saudi Arabia and Iraq. The announcement was followed by the reopening of a key crossing station on the Saudi–Iraqi border that had been closed since the late summer of 1990. The 2017 confrontation between Saudi Arabia and the UAE on the one hand and Qatar, Turkey and Iran on the other consequently engendered a marked warming of relations between Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

Entry of Turkey and Iraq Turkish and Iraqi intervention in the Saudi Arabia–Qatar crisis reflected a broad shift toward active involvement in Gulf affairs on the part of both countries (Hursoy 2013). Ankara’s heightened engagement with the region was openly encouraged by Qatar, which shared both the Turkish government’s affinity for the Muslim Brothers and its antipathy toward the reimposition of military rule in Egypt (Al-Buluwi 2014b). Turkish activism was tolerated as well by Iran, which not only saw Turkey as a potential partner in its resurgent rivalry with Saudi Arabia but also expected improved relations with Ankara to reduce the chances that unanticipated threats to the security of the Islamic Republic might coalesce in the South Caucasus (Sadri 2012; Dorraj and Entessar 2013; Idiz 2014; Kraus and Souleimanov 2016; Tsereteli 2017; Gurbanov 2017; Kamrava 2017). Turkey’s role in the Gulf expanded during the June 2017 crisis, when the Turkish national assembly authorized components of the country’s armed forces to maintain their presence in Qatar for the ensuing 10 years. A revised security pact between Ankara and Doha provided for the creation of a joint military force and combined headquarters, in which a Qatari major general would exercise command over 500–600 Turkish troops (Tastekin 2017). A separate agreement accorded Turkey’s gendarmerie primary responsibility for training Qatar’s military police. Closer ties between the two states prompted government-sponsored media outlets in Saudi Arabia and the UAE to claim that President Erdoğan had started to lose his political legitimacy at home and was governing Turkey in an increasingly erratic and dictatorial fashion (Al-Khatib 2017). At the same time that Turkey boosted its involvement in the region, Iraq took steps to reclaim an active role in Gulf affairs. Saudi Foreign Minister ‘Adil al-Jubair had visited Baghdad in February 2017 and met with Iraqi Prime Minister al-‘Abadi to discuss potential areas of mutual co-operation. His arrival was welcomed by prominent Sunni political figures, even though it elicited profound scepticism from influential Shi’i leaders (Al-Hatlani 2017). The trip prompted the Iraqi government to dispatch a high-ranking delegation to Riyad, and in March 2017 the Iraqi foreign ministry claimed that Saudi Arabia had pledged to write off the outstanding debt of $30 billion that Iraq had run up during the 1980–88 war with Iran. Saudi officials promptly denied that any such debt forgiveness was under consideration. 383

Matteo Legrenzi and Fred H. Lawson

Aftermath of the 2017 crisis Emergent multi-polarity in the Gulf raised the overall level of uncertainty and inter-state friction throughout the region in the wake of the June 2017 crisis over Qatar. The impact of this shift in the distribution of power was most clearly evident in Yemen, where Iran stepped up its involvement on the side of the Houthis. Greater Iranian intervention in the conflict prompted the Houthis to engage in bolder attacks against Saudi Arabia, most notably by means of missile strikes against targets located deep inside Saudi territory. Meanwhile, UAE actions in Yemen’s southern provinces not only posed an increasing challenge to Riyad’s underlying interest in restoring order to a unified Republic of Yemen with its capital in San’a, but also threatened to destabilize the border area between Yemen and Oman. Advanced Iranian weaponry had started to show up in the hands of the Houthis during the spring of 2017. Anti-tank batteries, anti-ship missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles began to be employed against Saudi and UAE forces in increasing numbers and with growing effectiveness (Saul, Hafezi and Georgy 2017). At the same time, missile attacks against Riyad and the Saudi industrial city of Yanbu’ grew more frequent: one such strike took place in mid-May, another two in late July, two more in early November and one in mid-December. King Khalid Air Base outside the southwestern Saudi city of Khamis Mushait was targeted in late September. January 2018 saw missile attacks against the southern Saudi cities of Najran and al-Jizan, as well as a further strike against Riyad. UAE commanders kept up their support for southern separatists in Yemen as the Qatar crisis escalated. As a result, pro-autonomy demonstrations in Aden, al-Hawtah and al-Mukalla became larger and better organized (Al-Jazeera 13 May 2017; Al Qalisi 2017). More important, UAE backing encouraged the Southern Transitional Council to turn against the moderate Islamist, pro-government Reform Party (Hizb al-Islah), at the same time that officials in Riyad were taking the awkward step of aligning themselves with that same Muslim Brothers-oriented movement—despite the kingdom’s profound distaste for the Brothers. Efforts to reconstruct the UAE–Saudi–Reform Party coalition in December 2017 proved unsuccessful (Mahmood 2017; Partrick 2017). A month later, reports circulated that the UAE had set up a local militia on Socotra Island and persuaded the governor to hold a referendum on whether or not to break away from Yemen (Al-Khabar al-Yemeni 10 January 2018). Units of the Saudi armed forces responded to the tightening of the UAE’s grip in the south by advancing into Yemen’s far eastern province of al-Mahrah and taking control of its capital al-Ghaida, the port town of Nishtun and several border crossings into Oman (Suwaidan 2018). This offensive generated alarm in Muscat, where it was feared that the Saudi military presence in al-Mahrah might precipitate dissension among the tribespeople who lived on both sides of the largely unsupervised frontier (Cafiero 2018; Ardemagni 2017).

Expansion of the Gulf security complex Rivalry in the Gulf had an increasing and more sustained impact on two adjacent geographical zones as the 2010s went by. Strategic competition between Iran and Saudi Arabia had spilt into the South Caucasus almost immediately after the dissolution of the Soviet Union but escalated sharply in the years after 2010. At the same time, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE jockeyed with one another for influence in Northeast Africa. These inter-regional interactions not only intensified existing antagonisms and alignments but also pulled additional states into the Gulf-centred security complex. Tehran re-engaged with the countries of the South Caucasus in the wake of a string of initiatives by the State of Israel, which included cultivating military and economic ties to Azerbaijan 384

International relations of the Gulf

(Souleimanov 2012; Ehrmann, Kraus and Souleimanov 2013; Cutler 2013). The Islamic Republic also looked to Azerbaijan to supply fighters for the Tehran-sponsored militias that moved into Syria during 2014–15 (Souleimanov 2014). Efforts to forge closer connections to Baku became more pressing for the government in Tehran as popular restiveness re-emerged in predominantly Azerbaijani districts of northern Iran. In April 2015, Iran’s Minister of Defence travelled to Baku and proposed to set up a new bilateral commission to co-ordinate security policies. The proposal included an offer to provide a range of Iranian-made weapons to the Azerbaijani armed forces (Lomsadze 2015). The rapprochement between Iran and Azerbaijan continued with an October 2017 visit by two Azerbaijani warships to the Iranian naval base at Enzeli on the Caspian Sea and culminated in the initial meeting of the Joint Working Group on Military Cooperation at the end of that month (Kucera 2017; Shiriyev 2017). Iran’s activities in Azerbaijan attracted the attention of the GCC states. Saudi Arabia and the UAE ordered armaments from Georgia’s state munitions company in early 2016. The authorities in Doha welcomed Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev in February 2017, and two months later greeted Armenia’s President Serge Sargsyan—who arrived from an official visit to the UAE. Riyad then dispatched the head of the kingdom’s newly-created ministry for Gulf affairs to Baku on three separate occasions that spring (Kucera and Sanamyan 2017). The second half of 2017 brought overtures from the Saudi leadership to both Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. In response, Iran deployed an upgraded missile corvette at Enzeli, increasing to six the number of ships in its Caspian Sea flotilla. Meanwhile, the effects of the crisis between Saudi Arabia and Qatar percolated into Northeast Africa. Eritrea, Djibouti and Somaliland expressed support for Riyad in the confrontation, while Ethiopia and Somalia did their best to remain neutral. Doha responded by pulling out its peacekeeping forces from a disputed island on the border between Eritrea and Djibouti, and Eritrean forces further inflamed the situation by encroaching on the territory claimed by Djibouti (Al-Jazeera 16 June 2017).

Conclusion At the heart of current international relations in the Gulf lies the long-standing rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Yet this rivalry no longer totally eclipses all other inter-state antagonisms and disputes in the region. Qatar and the United Arab Emirates have emerged as autonomous actors, whose policies at times conflict with the expressed interests of policy-makers in Riyad. Turkey and Iraq have become active participants in Gulf affairs as well. The emergence of a multi-polar order in this part of the world, along with the incorporation of the South Caucasus and Northeast Africa into the Gulf regional security complex, has sharply increased the frequency and severity of inter-state crises and complicated the problems associated with managing regional alignments. As governments throughout the region continue to acquire larger arsenals that consist of increasingly sophisticated armaments (Al-Makahleh and al-Makahleh 2018), the prospects that some previously manageable confrontation will spiral into actual warfare become more pronounced.

References Alwly, A. (18 January 2016), “Assassinations, chaos cripple Yemen’s Aden,” al-monitor.com. Abdul-Ahad, G. (18 February 2016), “The city where war is the best employer: Life in liberated Aden,” The Guardian. Abedin, M. (17–23 March 2016), “Iran displays ‘deterrence power,’” Al-Ahram Weekly. 385

Matteo Legrenzi and Fred H. Lawson

Al-Bolushi, M. (2016), “The effect of Omani-Iranian relations on the security of the Gulf Cooperation Council countries after the Arab Spring,” Contemporary Arab Affairs, 9:3, 391. Al-Buluwi, A. (25 June 2014a), “Saudi Arabia sees allies among Iraq’s Sunni tribes,” al-monitor.com. Al-Buluwi, A. (1 April 2014b), “The Saudi-Turkey Cold War for Sunni hegemony,” al-monitor.com. Al-Falahi, A. (30 November 2015), “Islamic state extends its tentacles into Yemen,” al-monitor.com. Al-Falahi, A. (10 February 2016), “Why Yemen may not be heading for a split,” al-monitor.com. Al-Hammadi, K. (3 February 2016), “Yemen: Salih activates al-Qa’idah card in South,” Al-Quds al-‘Arabi, mideastwire.com. Al-Hammadi, K. (12 May 2017), “Aden’s ousted governor announces formation of ‘transitional council’ opposed to legitimate authority,” Al-Quds al-‘Arabi, mideastwire.com. Al-Hatlani, I. (18 April 2017), “Is Saudi Arabia really willing to normalize ties with Iraq?” al-monitor.com. Al-Khatib, M. (26 May 2017), “Hidden cause of Qatari-Saudi conflict,” Al-Nashra (Beirut), Mideastwire.Com. Al-Makahleh, S. and M. al-Makahleh (27 February 2018), “Saudi Arabia and the UAE heat up their arms race with Iran,” foreignpolicyblogs.com. Al-Muslimi, F. (8 July 2015), “The southern question: Yemen’s war inside the war,” Diwan. Al Qalisi, M. (14 July 2017), “Massive protests in Aden to support separate rule for South Yemen,” The National. Al Qassemi, S.S. (23 January 2013), “Qatar’s Brotherhood ties alienate fellow Gulf states,” al-monitor.com. Al-Rasheed, M. (6 March 2014), “Saudi-Qatar tensions divided GCC,” al-monitor.com. Al-Rasheed, M. (9 December 2013), “Omani rejection of GCC union adds insult to injury for Saudi Arabia,” al-monitor.com. Al-‘Ubaidi, M. (16 February 2016), “Tensions on Iraqi-Saudi border with launching of ‘Northern Thunder’ exercises,” Al-Quds al-‘Arabi, mideastwire.com. Ardemagni, E. (28 December 2017), “Emiratis, Omanis, Saudis: The rising competition for Yemen’s Al Mahra,” blogs.lse.ac.uk. Arrabyee, N. (19 February 2016a), “Rising extremism in Yemen,” Sada. Arrabyee, N. (3 March 2016b), “Saudi Arabia’s unholy war,” Sada. Binhuwaidin, M.M. (2015), “Essential threats to the security of the GCC countries in the post Arab Spring era,” Digest of Middle East Studies, 24, Spring, 15–18. Bienaime, P. and A. Rosen (6 November 2014), “The most powerful army you’ve never heard of,” Reuters. Blanchard, C.M. (2012), “Qatar: Background and U.S. relations,” CRS Report RL 31718, Congressional Research Service, Washington, DC. Bronk, J. (9 March 2016), “Iran’s missiles: How big a threat to regional rivals?” Al-Jazeera. Browning, N. (5 June 2017), “Arab powers sever Qatar ties, widening rift among U.S. allies,” Reuters. Cafiero, G. (25 June 2012), “Is Qatar’s foreign policy sustainable?” Foreign Policy in Focus. Cafiero, G. (4 December 2016), “Who in the GCC wants a union?” al-monitor.com. Cafiero, G. (1 February 2018), “Saudi, UAE involvement in Eastern Yemen unsettles Oman,” al-monitor.com. Cafiero, G. and A. Yefet (2016), “Oman and the GCC: A solid relationship?” Middle East Policy, 23, Fall. Carey, G. (10 January 2014), “Unrest in Anbar reflects tense Iraq-Saudi relations,” The National. Colombo, S. (2017), “Foreign policy activism in Saudi Arabia and Oman: Diverging narratives and stances towards the Syrian and Yemeni conflicts,” International Spectator, 52:2, 65. Cutler, R.M. (15 May 2013), “Facing growing Iranian threats, Azerbaijan deepens ties to Israel,” Central Asia and Caucasus Institute Analyst. Dorraj, M. and N. Entessar (2013), “Iran’s Northern exposure: Foreign policy challenges in Eurasia,” Occasional Paper No. 13, Center for International and Regional Studies, Doha: Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar. Ehrmann, M., Kraus, J. and E. Souleimanov (2013), “The Iran-Israel-Azerbaijan triangle: Implications on regional security,” Revista Estudos Politicos, 6. Ehteshami, A. (2003), “Iran-Iraq relations after Saddam,” The Washington Quarterly, 26, Autumn. El Yaakoubi, A. (3 May 2017), “UAE builds up Yemen regional army but country fragments,” Reuters. Forster, R. (2017), “The Southern transitional council: Implications for Yemen’s peace process,” Middle East Policy, 24, Fall. Fouad, A. (22 December 2015), “What’s Saudi’s new Islamic coalition really up to?” al-monitor.com. Fuertig, H. (2007), “Conflict and cooperation in the Persian Gulf,” Middle East Journal, 61, Fall. Ghitis, F. (11 May 2017a), “Is the diplomatic tide shifting in the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran?” World Politics Review. 386

International relations of the Gulf

Ghitis, F. (1 June 2017b), “After Trump’s visit, a feud breaks out among the Gulf states,” World Politics Review. Ghobari, M. and Y. Bayoumy (9 February 2016), “Wave of Aden killings tests Gulf role in Yemen,” Reuters. Gurbanov, I. (24 July 2017), “Revitalizing the military dimension of the Azerbaijan-Georgia-Turkey tripartite partnership,” Central Asia and Caucasus Institute Analyst. Guzansky, Y. (October 2014), “Defence cooperation in the Arabian Gulf: The Peninsula Shield Force put to the test,” Middle Eastern Studies, 50, 650. Guzansky, Y. (2015), The Arab Gulf States and Reform in the Middle East, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hassan H. (20 May 2017), “Qatar’s troubles are rooted in its support for Islamists,” The National. Hokayem, E. and D.B. Roberts (December 2016–January 2017), “The war in Yemen,” Survival, 58. Huliaras, A. and S. Kalantzakos (2017), “The Gulf states and the horn of Africa: A new hinterland?” Middle East Policy, 24, Winter, 66. Hursoy, S. (2013), “Turkey’s foreign policy and economic interests in the Gulf,” Turkish Studies, 14. Ibish, H. (6 April 2017), “The UAE’s evolving national security strategy,” Issue Paper No. 4, The Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. Idiz, S. (20 May 2014), “Turkey locked in regional rivalry with Iran, Saudi Arabia,” al-monitor.com. International Crisis Group (9 February 2016), “Yemen: Is peace possible?” Middle East Report, No. 167. Juneau, T. (2016), “Iran’s policy towards the Houthis in Yemen: A limited return on a modest investment,” International Affairs 92, 657–58. Kamrava, M. (2013), Qatar: Small State, Big Politics, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kamrava, M. (ed, 2017), The Great Game in West Asia, London: Hurst. Kareem, M. (20 February 2014), “Kuwait abandons regional neutrality, back Egypt’s Sisi,” al-monitor.com. Khan, T. (5 June 2017a), “UAE and Saudi Arabia cut ties with Qatar and shut air, land and sea access,” The National. Khan, T. (30 May 2017b), “Renewed tensions with Qatar arise from old, unresolved issues,” The National. Kraus, J. and E. Souleimanov (2016), “A failed comeback? Understanding Iranian policies in the South Caucasus,” Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, 18. Kucera, J. (11 October 2017), “Azerbaijani navy visits Iran for first time amid warming ties,” eurasianet.org. Kucera, J. and E. Sanamyan (9 June 2017), “Will the great Gulf game spill over into the Caucasus?” eurasianet.org. Lacroix, S. (20 March 2014), “Saudi Arabia’s Muslim Brotherhood predicament,” Washington Post. Lawson, F.H. (2004), “Political economy, geopolitics and the expanding US military presence in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia,” Critique, 13, Spring. Lawson, F.H. (2016), “Qatar’s security alignment with the United States: Strategic constraint or facilitating condition?” Camillas Journal of International Relations, 5. Lomsadze, G. (21 April 2015), “Iran offers guns and friendship to Azerbaijan,” eurasianet.org. Mamouri, A. (25 January 2016), “Widespread Iraqi anger threatens Saudi ties,” al-monitor.com. Mahmood, A. (14 December 2017), “UAE and Saudi Arabia hold talks with Yemen’s Al Islah party,” The National. McDowall, A. (5 January 2015), “Three Saudi guards killed in suicide, gun attack on Iraq border,” Reuters. Nasser, A. (21 January 2016), “How long can Saudi Arabia afford Yemen war?” al-monitor.com. Naylor, H. (13 November 2015), “Yemen is turning into Saudi Arabia’s Vietnam,” Washington Post. Nazer, F. (25 June 2014), “Saudi Arabia threatened by ISIS advance in Iraq,” al-monitor.com. Nazer, F. (20 December 2015), “Is Saudi Arabia building an ‘Islamic NATO’?” al-monitor.com. Nuruzzaman, M. (2015), “Qatar and the Arab Spring: Down the foreign policy slope,” Contemporary Arab Affairs, 8:2. Nuruzzaman, M. (20 May 2017), “Are Iran and Saudi Arabia heading toward war?” informedcomment.com. O’Connor, T. (19 June 2017), “Saudi Arabia claims to arrest Iranian military elites ‘attacking’ oil fields,” newsweek.com. Pandey, A. (8 December 2015), “Iran test-fires another mid-range ballistic missile, possibly breaching UN sanctions,” International Business Times. Partrick N. (12 February 2016), “Saudi Arabia’s problematic allies against the Houthis,” Sada. Partrick, N. (18 December 2017), “The Saudi and Emirati conundrum after Saleh,” Sada. Qaidaari, A. (20 October 2015), “What’s so special about Iran’s latest missiles?” al-monitor.com. Rafi, S. (16 October 2015), “Saudis desperate as they are not winning the war in Yemen,” Asia Times. Roberts, D.B. (August–September 2014), “Qatar and the Brotherhood,” Survival, 56. 387

Matteo Legrenzi and Fred H. Lawson

Sadri, H.A. (September 2012), “Iran and the Caucasus states in the 21st Century,” Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, 14. Salisbury, P. (February 2015), “Yemen and the Saudi-Iranian ‘cold war,’” Middle East and North Africa Programme, London: Royal Institute of International Affairs. Samir, M. (6 April 2017), “After it flourished at the UAE’s hands, MB continues to lie about Abu Dhabi’s role in Socotra,” Al-Fajr, (Cairo), mideastwire.com. Saul, J., Hafezi, P. and M. Georgy (21 March 2017), “Iran steps up support for Houthis in Yemen’s War,” Reuters. Sanad, J.S. (1994) “Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and UAE’s political orientations,” Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, 18, Winter. Schmitz, C. (1 February 2016) “Yemen on a road to nowhere,” Washington, DC: Middle East Institute. Shiriyev, Z. (1 November 2017), “Iran and Azerbaijan boosting military ties,” eurasianet.org. Souleimanov, E. (8 February 2012), “Is Azerbaijan becoming an area of confrontation between Iran and Israel?” Central Asia and Caucasus Institute Analyst. Souleimanov, E. (2 May 2014), “Azerbaijanis volunteer in Syria conflict,” Central Asia and Caucasus Institute Analyst. Spencer, R. (3 July 2014), “Saudi Arabia sends 30,000 troops to Iraq border,” Telegraph. Steinberg, G. (February 2012), “Qatar and the Arab Spring,” SWP Comments, No. 7, Berlin: Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik. Suwaidan, D. (11 January 2018), “Saudi invasion of al-Mahrah: A Salafist ‘princedom’ on Oman’s border?” Al-Akhbar, accessible at: mideastwire.com. Taremi, K. (2005), “Iranian foreign policy towards occupied Iraq, 2003–05,” Middle East Policy, 12, Winter. Tastekin, F. (16 May 2017), “If push comes to shove, will Turkey defend Qatar against Iran?” al-monitor. com. Terrill, A. (2014), “Iranian involvement in Yemen,” Orbis, 58, Summer. Tsereteli, M. (17 February 2017), “Weaker Turkey leaves the South Caucasus without strategic actor,” Central Asia and Caucasus Institute Analyst. Vincent, T.A. (2013), “A new era: The Iranian navy, operational expansion and soft power,” St Antony’s International Review, 9:1, 134. Zafirov, M. (2017), “The Qatar crisis: Why the blockade failed,” Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, 11. Zaman, A. (7 June 2017), “Turkey scrambles for regional footing as Qatar Debacle Expands,” al-monitor. com. Zweiri, M. (2016), “Iran and political dynamism in the Arab world: The case of Yemen,” Digest of Middle East Studies, 25, Spring.

388

Index

Page numbers in italics denote a figure, bold a table. Names beginning al– are entered under second part of name al-Abadi, Haider 383 Abbas, Mahmoud 330 Abboud, Sam 72 Abdo, Geneive 259 Abdullah, Emir 131 Abdullah II, King of Jordan 79, 80, 116 Abdullah, King of Saudi Arabia 303 Abu Dhabi 89, 94, 95, 240, 377 Achchar, Gilbert 185, 219, 220 Aden 42 al-Afghani, Jamal al-Din 160 Afghanistan: ECO member 298, 304; military interventions 318, 328, 330 Aflaq, Michel 277, 278 al-Ahmar, Ali Mohsen 120, 124 al-Ajami, Fouad 280 al-Ajami, Muhammad 78 AKP (Justice and Development Party) 109, 137, 145, 148n31, 158, 161 Alavi, Hamza 276 Albrecht, Holger 59, 103 Algeria: Arab uprisings 59; civil society activism and laws 172, 173; Islamic social activism 158, 159; leadership legitimacy 108, 110n10; National Liberation Front (FLN) 137, 140, 317; post-Arab uprising politics 186; regime, Islamist challenges 47, 148n30 al-hirak (peoplehood): awareness of agency 177; coercive factions 180; dissent/protest, state management strategies 185–187, 187–188; identity/value systems and protest politics 181–183, 198–199; institutional narratives of negativity 183–185; political agenda 180–181; post-Arab uprising motivation 178–179; societal dynamics of dissent/protest 179–180, 187–188 al-Jazeera TV 77, 95, 182–183, 350, 382 al-Khalifa, Hamad bin Isa 79 alliance politics: Arab Cold War 346–347; Arab uprisings and power imbalances 349–351; balance of power 340–341; bandwagoning

341–342; budget security 343; Cold War global powers 346; constructivist view 343; economic approach 343; Gulf wars and regional realignments 347–349; ideational balancing 345; omnibalancing 342; polarity 341; realist approaches 341–342; regime security 344–345; security dilemma 342, 360; underbalancing 342 Allinson, Jamie 218, 343 Allon, Yigal 366 al-Nour Party 145, 156–157, 159–160 al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula 89, 381 Altan-Olcay, Ozlem 172 Althusser, Louis 213 Amin, Samir 212–213, 218 Anderson, Benedict 100 Anderson, Perry 219 Ansar Allah see Houthis Antonius, George 272, 273 Arab Cold War: inter-Arab rivalries 45, 257, 290, 292, 346–347, 349–350; Islam, divided interpretation 161; post-Arab uprising debate 259–260, 350 Arab Cooperation Council (ACC) 304, 314–315, 348 Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development 240–241 Arab Human Development Report (UNDP) 71, 187 Arabism: identities 254–255, 258; ideology 281; political co-option 281–282 Arab-Israeli conflict: 1967 war, conflict dynamics 364–367; 1973 Yom Kippur war 34, 293, 317, 360; Arab-Israeli wars 293; colonial linked origins 292–293; Oslo process 294–295, 304–305; see also pan–Arabism Arab League see League of Arab States Arab Legion 131 Arab Maghreb Union (AMU) 297, 298, 304, 314–315, 348 389

Index

Arab nationalism, Anglophone discourse: Arabism’s co-option 281–282; diminishment related arguments 270–271; Eurocentric republicanism dropped 275–276; European template and intellectual arguments 272–274; ideology, defining traits 270–271; Islam, political value 275; Israel, regional opposition 279–280; nationalist culture, goal obstacles 274–275; political autonomy movements 276–279, 282; statist patriotism 274, 277; Syria and Islamist allies 280–281 Arab Socialist Ba‘th Party 52, 137, 277 Arab uprisings: academic analysis, findings limitations 183–185; al-hirak, citizens’ new agency 178–179; “Arab Winter” narratives 184–185; cyberactivisism 72; Marxist scholarly analysis 219–221; monarchies, activism and state reactions 73–81; “political self-sacrifice” 182; protest politics, shared expression 181–183; regime challenges 30–31, 47–48; republics, authoritarian collapse factors 70–72; state system impacts 36, 320–321; Tunisia’s democratic transition 81–83 “Arab Winter” narratives 184–185 Arafat, Yassir 294 Arndt, Ernst 272 al-Asad, Bashar 53, 61, 103, 130, 281 al-Asad, Hafez 44, 130, 317, 363 authoritarian republics: Arab uprisings and impacts 59–60, 71, 320–321; competitive authoritarianism 141–142; founding military takeovers 116; military’s bureaucratic integration 117–118; monarchies, common denominators 54–55; populist to postpopulist strategies 68, 71; regime building 28; revolutionary paths 32–33; war proneness 356, 356–357 authoritarian rule: authoritarian resilience 55–58; authoritarian upgrading 58, 59; breakdown and democratic transition 81–83; electoral authoritarianism 30; legitimacy challenges 100–101; neo-patrimonialism 4, 24–25, 56; praetorianism 100; regime building 28, 29; regime maintenance 46; resilience factors 55–58; state formation trends 4–5 authoritarian upgrading: Arab Spring, contribution to 67; authoritarian resilience 30, 58; definition and main features 68–69; elites and political coercion 69–70; regime tactics 59 autocracy promotion 57–58, 62–63, 64n17, 69 Ayubi, Nazih 4, 29, 213–214 Azerbaijan 384–385 al-Azmeh, Aziz 270 Azouri, Nejib 273 Badr Organization 380 Baghdad Pact 33, 297, 302, 346 390

Bahrain: Arab uprisings, state reactions 49, 59, 70, 72, 78–79, 121; British protectorate 1881 42; Iran terror link claims 90; leadership legitimacy claims 106; Salafis parties 156; Saudi-Qatar crisis 382; terrorism related policies 89; US influence 334 Bands of the People of Truth 380 Bank, André 233 al-Banna, Hassan 155–156 Barnett, Michael 252, 263, 300, 343 Bashir, Tahseen 254 Ba’thism: founding principles 277; regime adoptions 27, 53, 274, 277–278, 367–368 Beblawi, Hazem 229 Bedouin tribes, MENA politics: Arab state, Allied deception 127–128; British rule, Transjordan 130–131; Jordanian alliances 131–132; Law of the Tribes repeal 130; Lebanese marginalisation 128–129; Lebanon citizenship 132; origins and societal organization 126–127; Syria, Asad’s support 130, 132–133; Syria, French rule divisions 129–130; Syrian uprising, opposing allegiances 133–134 Begin, Menachem 362, 366 Bellin, Eva 69–70 Ben Ali, Zine El Abidine: Arab uprising ousting 48, 82, 289; Arab uprising, reaction to 70, 72; dictatorship 64n14, 193; military role 118 Ben Gurion, David 293, 362, 364, 366 Berman, Sheri 166 Bin Laden, Osama 89 bi-polarity, regional 33, 361–362, 372n12, 375 Bitar, Salahaddin 277, 278 Bouazizi, Mohamed 72, 182 Bourguiba, Habib 193, 317 Bozeman, Adda 256 Brancati, Dawn 184 Brand, Laurie 343 Bratton, Michael 56 Bremer, Paul 328–329, 331 British policies, MENA region: Arab support, WW1 42; Baghdad Pact 297, 302, 346; mandate system flaws 42, 288, 359, 361, 367; Palestine and Zionist activism 293; Persian Gulf protectorates 42; post-1918 Arab state deception 127–128, 293; Wilson’s security withdrawal 325 Bromley, Simon 153 Browers, Michaelle 167 Brownlee, Jason 57, 69, 195 Brubaker, Rogers 261 Buckner, Elizabeth 182 Bukharin, Nikolai 213, 216 Bush, George 216 Bush, George W. 216, 327–328, 330, 362 Bush, Sarah 194 Buzan, Barry 3–4, 290, 354, 372n6

Index

Caid el-Sebssi, Beji 201–202 Callinicos, Alex 216–217 Carapico, Shelia 168 Carothers, Thomas 192 Carter, Jimmy 325 Cassani, Andrea 102 Cavatorta, Francesco 172, 174 Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) 297, 302 Challand, Benoit 174 Chambers, Simone 166 Chaudrey, Kiren 232 Cheney, Dick 330 Churchill, Winston 130 civil society, MENA region: activism weaknesses 171–172; Arab uprising activism and after 172–174; concept, Western bias 167; democracy, divergent relationships 165–167; Islamic society activism 167–168; political activism ineffective 169–170, 172; reconceptualization argument 174; state led relationship 170–171; state legislative provisions 168–169, 170, 173; Tunisia’s democratic transition 200–201; West’s politized support 168, 172 Clinton, Hillary 331 conflict in Middle East, causes: Arab-Israeli conflicts 292–295; authoritarian regimes 292; ethnic and sectarian divisions 290; external power interventions 289, 361–362; regional dynamics of power 290–291; state formation, post-colonial 288, 316; transnational ideologies 291–292 Congress for the Republic (CPR) 147n11 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) 106–107, 108, 110n9 Cox, Robert 262 Cyprus 42 Da’esh see Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) Dalmasso, Emanuela 173–174 Damascus Declaration 303, 348–349 Darwich, May 261 Davidson, Christopher M. 91 David, Steven 342 Da’wa Party 46, 47 Dawisha, Adeed 273, 275, 276, 278, 279 Dawn, C. Ernest 279 Dayan, Moshe 366 defensive power balancing 360 Delacroix, Jacques 228–229 democratic transition: democracy, context and agency 192; democratic knowledge, politics of 192–193; pacts, key feature 67, 81; Tunisia, post-Arab uprisings 81–83, 194–205, 197, 204, 206n6 Deutsch, Karl 372n12

Dhofar Liberation Front 88 Dubai 88, 93, 94, 240, 247–248 Dukalskis, Alexander 99 Eckstein, Harry 57 Economic Conference Organization (ECO) 298, 304 economic development, MENA region: co-operation and integration obstacles 239–240; corruption perceptions 243, 244; ease of doing business 242–243, 243; economic data inaccuracies 241; economic diversification 244–245, 245; growth disparities 247–248; ISIS’s economic mechanisms 242; living standards and well-being 245–246, 246; post-Arab uprising challenges 238; transportation infrastructure projects 240–241 Egypt: activism and social media 92, 93; Arab-Israeli War 1973 34, 293, 317, 360; Arab nationalism, regional impacts 27, 33–34, 45, 317, 346–347; Arab uprising, political aftermath 47, 70, 94–95, 123–124, 321, 350; authoritarian regime building 28; authoritarian restoration 36; Camp David Accords 280, 293; civil society activism and laws 173; economic data discrepancies 241; economic development disparities 248; GCC support withheld 240; ideological contestations 45; Islamic social activism 159–160; Islamist parties rise, post-2011 145, 148n31, 149n32; Israeli peace treaty 347; jihadism 157; leadership legitimacy 108; Libyan civil war interventions 377; military strategy, post-Arab uprisings 120, 121, 122, 123–124; Muslim Brotherhood 48, 60, 122, 123, 145, 159–160; Nasser coup 1952 52, 116; regime controlled military 118; Sadat peace treaty 34, 280, 317–318; Salafis parties 145, 156–157; Saudi-Egypt bridge controversies 240–241; Sisi coup and regime politics 48, 60–61, 64n15, 123, 221; statist patriotism 274, 277; supra-state identity 27; US influence 36, 333–334; Wafd 140; warlord’s power brokering 23, 25, 41–42; war proneness 357; see also Nasser, Gamal Abdel Egyptian Islamic Jihad 157 Ehteshami, Anoushiravan 69 Eisenhower, Dwight 293, 324 electoral authoritarianism 30, 141 Elias, Norbert 41 Emirates airline 247 Ennahda 71, 82, 145, 156, 199–200 Erdogan, Recep Tayyip 58–59, 109, 291, 382, 383 Eskhol, Levi 366–367 European Union 168, 298–299, 305 external–internal nexus 41–42, 45–47 391

Index

Facebook 72, 75, 77, 91, 92, 93 Fakhoury, Tamirace 261 Fawcett, Louise 291 Faysal, Emir 127, 129, 130–131 Fergany, Nader 71 Fichte, Johann G. 272 Filiu, Jean-Pierre 90 Fishman, Robert 64n1 Fragile States Index 62 France 42, 127–128, 129–130, 144, 288 Frantz, Erica 100 Freeden, Michael 272 Fromkin, David 3 Fukuyama, Francis 216 Gaddafi, Muammar see Qaddafi, Muammar Gama’a Islamiyya 157, 161 Gause, Gregory 260, 342, 344 Geddes, Barbara 63 Geha, Carmen 174 Gellner, Ernest 127 Gerschewski, Johannes 99 Ghaith, Nasser bin 75 Gilley, Bruce 101, 102 Glaspie, April 363 Glubb, John Bagot 131 Gochman, Charles 358 Gramsci, Antonio 166, 213 GSRE dataset 231 Gulf Civil Society Forum 93 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC): Arab uprisings, reaction to 36, 49, 73, 79, 291, 303, 350; economic and security issues 303–304, 314–315, 348–349; formation 35, 298, 303; global economics prioritized 239–240; investment policies 244, 304; Jordan/Morocco membership offer 95–96, 303; members’ Iranian relations 375; Qatar centred rift 350–351; railway system project 240; regional links 297, 298, 307, 308; Saudi Arabian dominance challenged 375–378 Gulf monarchies: Arab Spring activism, state reactions 73–81, 93–96; economic protests 88; education and communication controls 90–91; Gulf capital 219–220; oil revenues and security 34, 49, 232–233; opposition and protest containment 87–88; political parties, legitimatization tool 141–142, 147n10; post-Arab uprising politics 36, 49, 59, 350; regime legitimacy 53–54; regime maintenance 46–47, 87, 321, 347, 348; religious opposition, tolerance to crackdowns 88–90; rentierism 73; republics, common denominators 54–55; state survival 28–29, 32, 33, 52; war proneness 356, 357; Web 2.0 applications, citizen access and activism 91–93; Western allies and protection 35–36, 54, 289, 319–320 392

Haas, Mark 321, 343 Haber, Stephen 231, 235n9 Hadi, Abedrabbo Mansour 61, 334, 378, 381, 382 Haig, Alexander 337 Halliday, Fred 214–215, 258, 276, 312 Hall, John A. 167 Halpern, Manfred 146 Hamad ibn Khalifah al-Thani 77, 376, 382 Hamas: election success 145; Gaza strip conflicts 281, 295; Qatar links 376; “Resistance Axis” 36, 161, 257, 281, 349 Hamid, Shadi 156 Hanieh, Adam 219–220 Hansen, Birthe 256, 372n12 Happy Planet Index 245, 246 Harknett, Richard 342 Harvey, David 216 Hawrani, Akram 277 Hawthorne, Amy 169, 172–173 Hegel, Georg 166 Henehan, Marie 372n6 Herder, Johann G. 272 Hertog, Steffen 232 Herzl, Theodor 292–293 Heydemann, Steven 59, 68–69, 72, 172, 185 Hinnebusch, Raymond: conflicts, colonial origins 288, 316; constructivism criticisms 315; identity politics 252, 253; IR, multivariate synthetic approach 261, 316; legitimacy and leadership 102; post-populist authoritarianism 68; regionalism, core–periphery perspective 306, 314 Hirschkind, Charles 160 Hizbollah: election success 145, 148n31; Islamist party 138; Qatari allegations 382; “Resistance Axis” 36, 48, 161, 257, 281, 349; Syrian regime support 49, 72; US backed offensive 338 Hoffman, Stanley 262 Holsti, Kalevi J. 372n5 Houthis 187, 380–381, 384 Howard, Marc M. 183 Humphreys, Stephen 274 Huntington, Samuel 53, 216 Husri, Abu Khaldun Sati 255, 273, 276 Hussein, King of Jordan 116, 131, 257, 294, 348 Hussein, Saddam: aggressive leadership 362–363, 367–368; corrupt regime 329; external illegitimacy 103; Iran/Iraq war 347–348; Kuwait invasion 319, 348; regime building 45, 118; regime maintenance 307, 317 Ibn Khaldun 3, 22, 126 Ibrahim, Saad Eddin 172 Icduygu, Ahmet 172 ideational balancing 345 ideational security dilemma 345

Index

identity politics, Middle East and IR studies: academic importance 252; approach differences 252–253; Arab uprisings’ impact 258–263; Area Studies Controversy 253; global/post-Western approaches 261–263; identities, multi-faceted 253–255; identities, origins/evolution debates 255; post-Arab uprisings, composition debate 258–260; regional dynamics and interpretation 255–257; research diversification 260–261; sectarian politics 259 ideological heterogeneity 359 imperialism, MENA region: ethnic abandonment 31, 359; flawed restructuring 25, 31, 42, 52, 288, 312–313; post-1918 Arab state deception 127–128, 293 international relations, MENA region: Arab revolts and multi-polarity age 320–321; constructivist view 315; early Cold War 317–318; historical overview 312–313; Iran’s Revolution, regional response 318; liberal institutionalism 314–315; limited approaches 313; multivariate approach 316; realism framework 313–314; US hegemony, bi-polar reactions 319–320 Iran: Azerbaijan cooperation 384–385; Baghdad Pact 302, 346; Bahrain’s terror link claims 90; Egypt, post-uprising links 94; GCC state relations 375; history, Marxist analysis 218; inter-Arab rivalries 290, 369; Islamic Republic, regional threat 347–348; Islamic Revolution 30, 34, 52, 318; Islam, interpretation of 161; Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action 336, 377, 379; leadership legitimacy claims 108, 109, 161; MENA status 51; missile upgrades 378–379; nuclear programme, US objections 335–336; Oman’s positive relations 377; post-uprising influence 321; Qatar’s positive relations 376, 377; regime building 30, 32; Republic’s political reconfigurement 154–155; “Resistance Axis” 36, 161, 257, 281, 349; rogue state, US defined 326; Saudi-Qatar crisis 382–383; Shar’s US dependency 325, 347; war proneness 357; Yemeni civil war involvement 384 Iran-Iraq war: casualties 257; causes 35, 359; Iraq’s conscripts 368; offensive hegemony-seeking 360, 369; US hegemonic policies 326 Iraq: authoritarian regime building 28, 45, 46, 367–368; Baghdad Pact 302, 346; Ba’thism adoption 27, 53, 274, 367–368; British ‘mandate’ strategy 328, 367; Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) 328–329; external illegitimacy 103; Hussein’s leadership 363, 367–368; Hussein’s regime erosion 46, 72, 274–275; Kurdistan political rivalry 147n10; Kuwait invasion 319, 363, 369–370; leadership legitimacy 107; nationalist coup (1958) 52, 116, 367; pan-Arabism ideology 291, 347, 368–369; regime controlled military 118, 368; religious

identities 26, 368; rogue state, US defined 326; Saudi border tensions 379–380; Saudi-Qatar crisis 383; Saudi talks 2017 383; US invasion, post-occupation failures 328–331, 349; war proneness 357 Iraq War 1990-91 35, 289 Iraq War 2003 35, 215–217, 289, 349 irredentism 4, 31, 358–359, 364, 372n5–6 Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS): affiliates, Yemeni civil war 380–381; economic mechanisms 242; Marxist analysis 220–221; post-Arab Spring insurgency 123–124, 180, 186, 349; post-Iraq War insurgency 329, 331–332; regional vision 61–62; Saudi Arabian attacks 379 Islam in MENA politics: academic approaches 153–154; Arab Cold War 161; Ba‘th Party recognition 158; international arena 160–161, 162; Iranian Revolution, regional response 318; Islamist movement to state control 154–155; “language of politics” 158; Nasser’s recognition 157–158; pan-Islamism 160, 292 Islamist movements, MENA politics: Islamization of economic/societal provision 158–160; jihadism 157, 349; Muslim Brotherhood’s progress 155–156, 318; Oman’s stance 377–378; oppositional strategies 155–157, 161, 320; regimes, ideological challenges 45, 47; shared aspiration 155 Ismailis 26 Israel: Arab-Israeli conflicts 292–295; Arab-Israeli War 1967, conflict dynamics 364–367, 370; Arab-Israeli War 1973 34, 293, 317, 360; Arab nationalist opposition 279–280; Lebanon invasion 35; MENA status 51; nuclear facilities, UN violations 335; party politics 147n10; postArab Spring politics 349; regime building 28, 32; US policies 327; US, strategic ally 336–338; war proneness 358; Western criticisms 295 Johnson, Chalmers 179 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action 336, 377, 379 Jordan: Arab uprisings, reaction to 49, 73, 79–80; Ba’thism adoption 27; British rule, Transjordan 130–131; civil society activism and laws 169, 170; GCC membership offer 95–96, 303; identity politics 257, 346; Israeli relations 280; leadership legitimacy claims 106–107; military reliance 116; PLO conflict 294; political coercion 69; service industry reliance 245; war proneness 357; West-centric allies 47, 218 Kamali, Masoud 167 Kamrava, Mehran 166–167 Karsh, Efraim 312 Kawakibi, Abd al-Rahman 273, 275 Kerr, Malcolm 257, 292 393

Index

Khalidi, Rashid 273 al-Khalifa, Hamad bin Isa 79 Khalizad, Zalmay 329 Khatib, Lina 182 Khayr al-Din 193 Kiely, Ray 216 Kienle, Eberhard 70 Ki-Moon, Ban 281 “King’s dilemma” 28, 53 Kissinger, Henry 338 Kopecky, Petr 174 Kopstein, Jeffrey 166 Kumar, Krishan 165 Kurds: imperialist abandonment 31, 359; political exploitation 274, 288; political rivalry, Iraq 147n10; Turkish conflicts 108 Kuwait: Arab uprisings, reaction to 49, 73, 76–77; British protectorate 1899 42; constitutional legitimacy 106; Gulf state relations 378; Iraqi invasion 348, 363, 369–370; Salafis parties 156; war proneness 357; Western protection 36, 47, 319 Kuwari, Ali-Khalifa 77 Lacroix, Stéphane 156–157 Lake, Anthony 326 Langohr, Vickie 69, 172 Lawrence, T.E. 127, 129 League of Arab States (LAS): aims and procedures 300–301; Egyptian expulsion 347; limited regional powers 239, 274, 291, 306; membership 297, 300; regional order 307, 359; regional security involvement 301, 304; UN resolution support 298 League of Nations 42 Lebanon: Bedouin tribes marginalised 128–129; consociational democracy 30, 290; ideological contestations 45, 290; Israeli invasion 2006 35, 338, 358, 360, 362; leadership legitimacy claims 108, 109; protest management 186; religious identities 26; service industry reliance 245; state identity 27; war proneness 358 Leenders, Reinoud 185 legitimacy: concept, interpretation and application 98–100; external, benefits/risks 103–104; input and output forms 101–104, 103, 109; legitimation 98–99; state/nation, citizen perceptions 100–101, 101, 109–110 legitimacy and leadership, MENA states: Arab Spring perceptions 104, 106, 110; atypical states 108–109; charisma 102, 107; external legitimacy, benefits/risks 103, 107; GCC members claims 106, 109; hereditary succession 102, 107; input, representative/congruent 101–102; non-GCC monarchies 106–107, 109; output, performance and co-option 102, 104; presidential states, no plausible claims 107–108, 394

109, 288; religious ideology 102; sham elections 107; state claim patterns 104–105, 105 Lenin, Vladimir 213, 216 Lewis, Bernard 256 Libya: Arab uprising impacts 70; authoritarian regime building 46; coup d’état 1969 52, 116; external illegitimacy 103, 108; Gulf states’ civil war interventions 376, 377; leadership legitimacy 107; military fracture, post-Arab uprisings 120, 122, 124; NATO interventions 72, 332–333, 350; Qaddafi’s military control 117; rogue state, US defined 326; state collapse, post-Qaddafi 62, 122, 289 Linz, Juan 60 Lorenz, Konrad 362 Luciani, Giacomo 229, 230 Lust, Ellen 144, 146 Lustick, Ian 291 Lust-Okar, Ellen 69 Lynch, Marc 261, 316, 343 MacMahon, Henry, Sir 127, 293 Macmillan, Margaret 327 Macron, Emmamuel 144 Mahdavy, Hussein 228 Mahmood, Saba 160 Mair, Peter 139 al-Maliki, Nuri 379 Mansfield, Edward 358 Maoz, Zeev 354, 358, 372n6 Mardin, Serif 167 Marquez, Xavier 99 Marxist International Relations theory, MENA region: Arab uprisings 2011, scholars’ analysis 219–221; capitalist peripheralization 213, 314; dichotomy of approach 211; hybridity of social forms 213–214; Iraq War of 2003, initiation arguments 215–217; Marxism concepts 212; scholarly contributions 212–215; state formation process 214–215; uneven and combined development concept 217–219 Marzouki, Moncef 201 Masoud, Tarek 159, 195 Matin, Kamran 218 Mearsheimer, John 372n9 Menaldo, Victor 231, 235n9 MENA state system: Arab uprisings and impacts 36; imperialist and liberal oligarchic order 32; irredentism and conflict 4; Islamic empires and Western impositions 3–4; neo-patrimonialism 4; origins and features 31–32; pan-Arab revolutionary paths 32–34; post-populist regimes 35; regional instability and conflicts 34–35; “Resistance Axis” 36; state formation trends 4–5; system levels 5–6; system resilience 5; West-centric globalization 35–36 Meshaal, Khalid 281

Index

military, role in Arab politics: Arab uprisings, varied reactions 119–120; Gulf monarchies agendas 116; post-Arab uprising, agendas and transitions 120–122; post-independence republics 115–116; regime security and bureaucratic integration 116–118; renewed militarism, 2011- 122–124; self-legitimacy 121; socio-cultural status 118–119 Miller, Benjamin 372n5 Milliband, David 281 modernization theory 153 Moghadam, Valentine 173 Mohr, Elizabeth 173 monarchies see Gulf monarchies Morgan, T. Clifton 354 Morocco: Arab uprisings, reaction to 49, 73, 80–81; civil society activism and laws 169, 170, 172–173; GCC membership offer 95–96, 303; leadership legitimacy claims 106–107; marginalized citizens’ new agency 177; military reliance 116; Party of Justice and Development (PJD) 81, 138, 145, 148n31; party politics 147n10; political coercion 69; populist politics 145–146; protest management 186; state identity 27; war proneness 357; West-centric allies 47 Morsi, Muhammad 74, 95, 123 Mubarak, Hosni 48, 70, 94–95, 103, 123, 289 Mubarak, Suzanne 171 Mudde, Cas 139, 174 Mufti, Malik 367 Muhammad Ali 23, 25, 41–42 Muhammad VI, King of Morocco 80–81, 96 multi-polarity, regional 35, 308–309, 320–321, 361–362, 376–378, 384–385 Murphy, Emma 69 Mursi, Muhammad 60, 376 Muslim Brotherhood: Arab uprising protests 173; Egypt, post-Arab uprising 48, 60, 122, 123, 145, 350; Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) 145, 148n31, 159–160; Kuwait activism 76; pressure group to political party 155–156; Qatar’s support 77, 88, 95, 350; Sisi coup, Saudi support 74; Syrian uprising, 1978-82 46, 47; UAE policy changes 89, 95; US perceptions 318 al-Najjar, Baqer S. 170 Nasser, Gamal Abdel: Arab Cold War 45, 346–347; Arab-Israeli War 1967 365–366; Arab nationalism, Israeli defeats 280, 360; authoritarian regime building 28; charismatic leadership 100, 307; Islam, political recognition 157–158; Law of the Tribes repeal 130; nationalist coup 1952 52, 116; pan-Arabism ideology 33, 291, 317; pan-Islamist opposition 160

National Liberation Front (FLN) 137, 140, 317 neo-patrimonialism 4, 24–25, 56 Nidaa Tounes 145 al-Nimr, Nimr 380 Nisancioglu, Kerem 218 Nixon, Richard 325 Norton, Augustus R. 172 Obama, Barack 331–333, 336 Occidentalism 193 O’Donnell, Guillermo 81, 194 offensive hegemony-seeking 360 Oman: Arab Spring activism, state reactions 73, 74–75; British protectorate 1891 42; Dhofar rebellion 88, 325; regional assertiveness 377–378; state identity 27 omnibalancing 342 Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) 239, 297–298, 302 Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) 302 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) 298 Orientalism 153, 193 Oslo process 294–295, 304–305 Ottoman Empire 22–24, 41 Ottomanism 24 Pakistan 298, 302, 304, 335, 346 Palestine: Arab-Israeli conflict 293–294; ArabIsraeli War 1967, conflict dynamics 364–367; British policies 42; citizen protests limited 186; imperialist abandonment 31, 359; Nasser’s recognition 33; Oslo process 294–295; peace agreement, US interference 336–337; see also Hamas Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) 140, 294, 295, 337 Palestine War 28, 32 Palmer, Glenn 354 pan-Arabism: alliance politics 345, 346–347; military and new republics 116–119; panArab revolutionary paths 32–34, 291–292; post-Ottoman movements 26–27; supra-state identity 254 pan-Islamism 160 paradox of plenty 225 Parti Authenticité et Modernité (PAM) 145–146 Parti Istiqlal 147n10 Parti Socialiste Destourien (PSD) 140 Party of God Battalions 379–380 Party of Justice and Development (PJD) 81, 138, 145, 148n31 patrimonial rule 24 Pearlman, Wendy 182 Peres, Shimon 366 Perlmutter, Amos 100 395

Index

Piscatori, James 160 political parties, Middle East: citizen’s postuprising mistrust 142–144; competitive authoritarianism 141–142; definition, status and relevance 137–138; electoral authoritarianism 141; Islamist exclusion and rise 142, 145, 148n30–31; local context influences 138–142; nationalism to regime-opposition systems 139–141, 147n10, 147n11; neo-secular/ populist 145–146, 149n37; party families 138–139, 146n3; populist strategies 144; protoparties 137; Salafis parties 145, 149n32; single party states 140 political regimes, MENA region: Arab socialism 54; Arab uprisings and impacts 58–62; authoritarian resilience 55–58; authoritarian upgrading 58, 59; democracy prevention, foreign priorities 57–58, 62–63; Fragile States Index 62; ISIS’s regional vision 61–62; monarchies/republics, traditional divides 53–54; non-authoritarian 51; patriarchal societal structures 56–57; political regime defined 64n1; post-independence transformations 52; postpopulist orientations 54; regime convergence processes 54–55; rentierism 57; statehood re-examined 61–62, 63 Popular Mobilization 379, 380 populist authoritarian regimes 29 post-populist authoritarianism: authoritarian upgrading 30; radical/conservative policy convergence 54–55; state bourgeoisies and mass austerity 29, 35, 68; uprisings, crony-capitalism protests 71–72 Post, Robert C. 170 Power2Youth 143 praetorianism 100 “presidential monarchy” 4, 55 Pripstein-Posusney, Marsha 69 Putin, Vladimir 58 Qaddafi, Muammar: authoritarian regime building 46, 117; coup d’état 1969 52; leadership legitimacy 103, 317; ousting, Western intervention 72, 289, 332–333 Qasim, Abd al-Karim 52, 369 Qassim, Isa 79 Qatar: Arab Spring activism, state reactions 73, 77–78; British protectorate 1916 42; corporate reputation 243; GCC political rift 350; Libyan uprising 350; Muslim Brotherhood support 77, 88, 95, 303, 376, 382; regional assertiveness 376–377; Saudi-Qatar crisis 382–383 Qutb, Sayyid 156, 157 regime building, MENA region: authoritarian maintenance 46; legitimacy, ideological challenges 47, 100–101, 344; military and new 396

republics 115–118; oppositional forces 44–45; regime erosion 46; regime security and alliances 344–345; socio-political spheres, control of 44 regionalism, MENA: Cold War alliances 302; externally led, 1990s initiatives 304–305; geographic, political and religious links 297–298; global processes 298–299; League of Arab States 300–302, 359; limitations of Western model 299, 305–306; new organizations 1980s 303–304; organizations/initiatives post-1945 299, 300; post-Arab uprisings 307; power base and relations 306, 308–309, 359; regime type and cohesion 306–307; theoretical approaches 305–308 Reid, Donald 274 rentierism 30, 35, 57, 68, 73 rentier state and oil: causal mechanisms 233; concept and application 225–226, 228, 234–235; income distribution and political control 228–230, 230; non-oil windfall gains 234; oil income and state economics 226, 226–227, 228, 232; oil rent, impact measurement 230–231, 235n8–9; oil revenues and security 359; state autonomy and regime stability 232–233 resource curse 225, 233 Rhodes, R.A.W. 99 Rice, Condoleezza 281 Richter, Thomas 233 Risse-Kappen, Thomas 357 Robinson, William 216 rogue state, US defined 36, 216, 326 Rosenberg, Justin 211, 217 Rosenblum, Nancy L. 170 Ross, Michael 231, 233 Rubin, Lawrence 344–345 Russia, imperial 23, 42, 213, 217 Russian Federation: Asad regime support 72, 185, 220, 289, 333, 349; autocracy promotion 57; Libyan civil war 62; post-uprising influence 321; see also Soviet Union Sadat, Anwar: assassination 157; GCC relations 240; Israeli peace treaty 34, 280, 347; statist patriotism 274, 347; US alignment 317–318 Sahwa project 143 Sahwa movement 88–89, 156, 157 Said, Khalid 182 Salafis parties 145, 149n32, 156–157 Saleh, Ali Abdullah 61, 120, 334 Salloukh, Bassel 260, 345, 351 San Remo Conference 1920 42 Sarkozy, Nicolas 281 Sarsar, Shafiq 195 Sartori, Giovanni 137 Saudi Arabia: Arab-Israeli War 1973 34; Arab uprisings, reaction to 49, 59, 73–74, 350;

Index

corporate reputation 243; Egyptian uprisings, political stance 94; GCC dominance challenged 375–378; GCC union proposal 303; ideological contestations 45; ideological legitimacy claim 106, 155; inter-Arab rivalries 290; Iran’s missile threat 378–379; Iraq border tensions 379–380; Iraqi talks 2017 383; Islam, interpretation of 161; pan-Islamism 160; Qatar and GCC rift 350; Qatar crisis 382–383; regime survival tactics 28–29, 33; Sahwa movement 88–89, 156, 157; Saudi-Egypt bridge controversies 240–241; sectarian discrimination 239; South Caucasus links 385; state formation and Islamic ideology 154–155; terrorism related policies 89; US security alliance 34, 36, 318, 319–320, 325–326; West-centric allies 47; Yemeni civil war threat 380–382, 384 al-Sa’ud, Muhammad bin Salman 381, 382 al-Sayyid, Mustapha 172 Schlumberger, Oliver 59, 103 Schmitter, Philippe 81, 194 Schwedler, Jillian 184 Schweller, Randall 342 Scott, James 127 Seale, Patrick 278 security dilemma 342 Sharif Husayn ibn Ali 127, 293 Sharon, Ariel 294, 362 Singer, David 372n12 Sisi, Abd al-Fattah: Egypt, post-Arab uprising 48, 60–61, 122, 123–124, 321; GCC support withheld 240; populist politics 149n37; Saudi support 74 small group politics 24 Smith, Benjamin 232, 235n8 Snyder, Glenn 342, 358 social fields, contextual properties 42–44, 43 social media: Arab uprisings, protest tool 72, 75, 76, 77, 92, 182–183; Web 2.0 applications and citizen access 91–93 Southern Resistance 381–382 Soviet Union: Cold War alliances 289, 317, 346; collapse, effect on republics 35–36, 54, 289, 318, 319; support for Nasser’s Egypt 33, 365 state building, context and processes: economic constraints 47, 50; external subvention, prevention dilemmas 45–47; ideological and identity divides 45, 50; legitimacy challenges 47, 49–50; monopolization of socio-political spheres 44; regimes and oppositional forces 44–45; regime-society relations, contentious politics 47–49, 179–180; social fields, contextual properties 42–44, 43, 49 state, defining challenge 40–41 state formation, Middle East: Arab uprisings 30–31; authoritarian regime building 28, 29; Imperialist flawed practices 25, 52, 288,

290; Islamic political-culture impacts 24–25; local warlords and power brokering 23, 25, 41–42; monarchies, survival tactics 28–29, 32; nationalist proposals 25–26; nation-building obstacles 26–27, 288, 316; oligarchy to military instability 27–28; Ottoman Empire’s structural legacy 22–24; Ottoman governance 41; post-1918 ‘mandate system’ 42, 288, 312–313; post-populist regimes 29, 30; regime challenges, Islamic and democratic 29–30 state system levels 5–6 Stein, Elizabeth A. 100, 260, 316 Stein, Janice 370 Stepan, Alfred 198 Sudan 326 Suez Crisis 1956 33, 289, 293, 362, 365 Sultanistic state 22 Sunik, Anna 233 Supporters of God 377–378 supra-state identities: Islamic faith 254; panArabism 26–27, 254, 255; political Islam 34, 254; post-Ottoman 24 Sykes–Picot Agreement 1916 42, 127–128 Syria: Arab-Israeli War 1973 34; Arab uprisings and impacts 36, 48–49, 61, 70, 72, 186; authoritarian regime building 28, 45, 46; Ba’thism adoption 27, 53, 277–278; Bedouins, Asad’s links 130, 132; Bedouins, conflicting allegiances 133–134; external illegitimacy 103; Hafez al-Asad regime 44, 45, 363; identity issues 27; ideological contestations 45, 275–276; Iran and Islamist allies 280–281, 348; Islam, Ba’th Party recognition 158; Islamist uprising, 1978-82 46, 47; leadership legitimacy 107, 288; military, controlling strategies 118, 120, 121, 124; pan-Arabism ideology 291, 347; post-2011 civil war 48–49, 124, 287, 349; post-independence coup 52, 116; “Resistance Axis” 36, 161, 257, 280–281; Russia, civil war interventions 289; Shia identities 26; US’s civil war activities 333; war proneness 357 Tahtawi, Rifa’ah Rafi’ 273 Tansel, Cemal Burak 218–219 Telhami, Shibley 252, 263 Terbil, Fathi 182 ‘t-Hart, Paul 99 Tibi, Bassam 272, 273, 275, 276, 279 Tilly, Charles 4 Trabelsi, Leila 171 traditional monarchies 127 trans-state identities 26 Treitschke, Heinrich von 272–273 tribes, MENA see Bedouin tribes, MENA politics Tripp, Charles 179, 274 Trotsky, Leon 217 Trump, Donald 185, 331, 336, 338 397

Index

Tunisia: activism and social media 92, 93; Arab Spring, protest origins 71–72, 173, 181–183; Arab uprisings 47; authoritarian regime building 28; democratic transition 31, 48, 51, 60, 81–83, 186; Ennahda, political rise 145, 148n31, 156; Islamic social activism 159; leadership legitimacy 107, 108; marginalized citizen’s new agency 177, 187; military agenda 118; military strategy, post-Arab uprisings 121, 122; political history of reform 193–194; political parties 137, 140; populist politics 145–146; post-uprising mistrust 143; post-uprising politics 58; Western perspectives 64n14 Tunisia, democratic transition: Carthage Declaration, 2016 202; civic parallelism 196–199, 197; consensus and coalition-building 199–200, 202–203; constitutional foundations 194; continuous democratic learning 194–195, 205; derailment attempts 205, 206n6; dialogue and multi-partisanship 200–201; electoral and constitutional systems 195–196; National Constituent Assembly (NCA) 194–195; parliamentarization and its impact 203–205, 204; parliamentary engagement, shared space 201–203; Ruba’iyyah (Quartet) partnership 198, 200; Troika partnership 198, 200, 201 Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT) 71, 83, 198 Turkey: autocratization process 58–59, 64n13; Baghdad Pact 302, 346; Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (CHP) 140; Gulf, expanded role 383; Islamist parties, changed fortunes 148n31; leadership legitimacy claims 108; MENA status 51; nationalism 26, 140; post-Arab uprising politics 36, 291, 321, 350; Saudi-Qatar crisis 382, 383; semi-democracy 30, 32, 33, 147n10; war proneness 358; Young Turks movement 24 Twitter 72, 75, 91, 93 ulama, societal role 22, 167 underbalancing 342 uneven and combined development (UCD) 211, 217–219 uni-polarity, regional 319–320, 361 United Arab Emirates (UAE): Arab Spring activism, state reactions 49, 73, 75–76, 95, 377; corporate reputation 243; Egyptian uprisings, political stance 94–95; formation 302; positive well-being 246; Qatar and GCC rift 350; regional assertiveness 377; religious opposition, regime policies 89; Saudi-Qatar crisis 382; South Caucasus links 385; Yemeni civil war involvement 380–382, 384 United Arab Republic (UAR) 27, 274, 278, 302, 347 United States (US): anti-US protests 74, 77; autocracy promotion 57; Carter Doctrine 398

325–326; Central Treaty Organization 297, 302; Gulf monarchies as allies 54, 77, 240; Gulf security role 34, 317, 318, 330; Iraq War 2003, Marxist analysis 216–217; Islamist perceptions, post-1979 318; MENA, 1990s hegemon 319–320; MENA, military interventions 35–36, 72, 289, 293; MENA regional initiatives 168, 305; National Security Strategy 327–328; Nixon Doctrine 325; Qatar’s strategic links 376; regime legitimacy, external source 107; Saudi Arabia’s security alliance 34, 318, 325–326; Suez Crisis 1956 293; Syrian/Iranian anti-US rhetoric 280; “Twin Pillars” policy 347–348 US hegemony, MENA region: Arab uprising claims 332; Cold War security strategies 324–326, 346; Iran/Iraq, regional threat 326, 335–336; Iraq, post-war occupation failures 328–331; Islamic extremists and insurgency 329, 331–332; Israel as strategic ally 336–338; Libya, NATO intervention 332–333; militarization post-2002 327–328; nuclear weapons non-proliferation 334–336; Obama’s policies and critics 332–333; oil interests 324–325; post-Arab uprising influence 333–334; Syrian civil war 333, 349; UN relations 327 USSR see Soviet Union Valbjørn, Morten 313 VanDenBerg, Jeffrey 342 Van de Walle, Nicolas 56 Vasquez, John 372n6 Viorst, Milton 255 Wæver, Ole 4, 262, 290, 354, 372n6 Wahhabism 155 Waldner, David 232 Walters, Meir, R. 183 Walt, Stephen 256, 314, 341–342 Waltz, Ken 212, 341, 355, 372n12 war, regional propensity: Arab-Israeli War 1967, conflict dynamics 364–367, 370; causal paradigm, analysis levels 355–356; global powers and polarity 361–362, 372n12; Hobbesian anarchy led system 358–359, 360, 360, 370–371, 372n4–6, 372n9; Iraq’s Kuwait invasion, conflict dynamics 367–370; Israeli/ Iraqi, conflict comparisons 370–371; leadership behaviour and traits 362–363; MENA statistics 354; Middle East wars 1945- 371; power imbalances 361; realist balancing 360; state/ regime type and war involvement 356, 356–358 Washington Consensus 68, 181 Weatherford, Stephen 102 Weber, Max 22, 40–41, 44, 56, 82, 98 Wendt, Alexander 358, 372n4

Index

Westphalian states system 3–4 Whitehead, Laurence 81, 192, 194 Wickham, Carrie 159 Wieland, Carsten 274 Wiktorowicz, Quintan 170 Wilson, Harold 325 Winner-Take-All systems 69 Wolfowitz, Paul 330 World Bank 131, 168, 230–231, 319

384; external illegitimacy 108; military fracture, post-Arab uprisings 120, 121, 122, 124; pan-Arabism ideology 347; post-Arab uprising politics 61, 70, 122, 334, 378; post-independence coup 52, 116; state identity 27; Yemeni Socialist Party (YSP) 140 Yom, Sean 168, 169–170, 173, 174 Young Turks movement 24

Yemen: civil society activism and laws 169, 170, 173; civil war 2015–, regional threat 380–382,

Zionism 292–293 Zuesse, Eric 327

399