Democracies, it is often assumed, do not wage war on each other, since they are made up of institutions through which international conflicts can be peacefully mediated and resolved.1 The absence of “democratic peace” in the Middle East, as chronicled in the preceding chapters, results from the region’s main political dilemma, namely the absence of democratic political institutions. In fact, as we have seen so far, in the Middle East the state and war have historically assumed a symbiotic relationship: war has been waged by Middle Eastern states, and these states have in turn been shaped by war. By the end of the twentieth century, state formations in the Middle East had come to reflect the imperatives of military security as safeguarded throughout the political arena. Various conceptions of “national security” became the overriding concern of state elites and the institutions they crafted for governing. Real or imagined threats to national security, and the near-constant drumbeats of one war or another, helped foster oversized states for which notions of civil liberties and democracy became irritants, even outright threats, that diverted resources and attention from the far more urgent task of defending the motherland. With only a few exceptions, therefore, nondemocratic states in the Middle East have become the norm and, as chapter 8 explains, have so far kept the prospects for democracy at bay. The question of democracy and the prospects for and patterns of democratization in the Middle East are explored in that chapter. Here we examine the historical and political dynamics that have given rise to the varieties of nondemocratic, or at best quasi-democratic, political institutions found throughout the Middle East.
Middle Eastern states can be classified into four ideal types: exclusionary, inclusionary, sultanistic, and quasi-democratic.2 Exclusionary states survive primarily by excluding the masses from the political process. They are “praetorian” dictatorships built on repression, relying on policies that stifle not only dissent but also other unauthorized expressions of political opinion by social actors.3 Up until the 2011 uprisings, Algeria, Egypt, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen belonged in this category. Only two of these states, Algeria and Sudan, relied solely on sheer repression to stay in power, and the Sudanese state did so only in the south. Most of the other authoritarian dictatorships managed to manipulate enough social dynamics to reign over largely placated and effectively repressed societies. Inclusionary states, on the other hand, thrive on populism, perpetuating and then relying on a myth of popular participation in order to survive. But their populism varies greatly in nature and in degree, and they may in fact be more exclusionary in reality than in appearance. Ruling for more than forty years, within a couple of decades of having come to power Muammar Qaddafi had turned Libya into a far more exclusionary than inclusionary state. With wars subsiding and the list of enemies nearing exhaustion, it became harder for the Libyan state to sell the myth of revolutionary democratic inclusion to the populace. From the very start, Saddam Hussein’s rule in Iraq tended to be just as autocratic as it was populist, although to the bitter end he held on to the illusion of including the masses in the Iraqi body politic. During the First and to a lesser extent the Second Republic, Iran also had an inclusionary state, although the dynamics characterizing the country’s Third Republic are decidedly different.
Sultanistic states are the monarchies of the region—Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, and Morocco—although Jordan and Morocco differ fundamentally from the rest in that neither has a wealthy economy or the benefits of a political history that makes the state seem almost a “natural” corollary of social forces.4 Thus they have to rely more on a deliberately propagated civic and political-historical myth. But this “civic myth” has been subject to a variety of challenges, especially from the emerging urban middle classes. As we will see later, in the late 1980s and early 1990s the correlation between structural characteristics and liberalization seemed the strongest in this category of Middle Eastern states. Having neither the vast riches enjoyed by the wealthy oil monarchies nor the historical reservoir of tribal and traditional legitimacy, when confronted with structural difficulties (such as economic downturns or international crises) the civic myth monarchies were more likely to resort to liberalization as an option, even if only as a survival strategy. Chapter 8 charts the halted liberalization processes of both states. For a variety of reasons, Jordan’s liberalization became comparatively “frozen,” while Morocco’s continues to proceed, albeit slowly.
Finally, in three Middle Eastern countries—Israel, Lebanon, and Turkey—the state has conventionally been given the label democratic. In all of these, democratic institutions and practices have been part of the political landscape, even if in the latter two on a sporadic and imperfect basis. Of the three states, Israel comes closest to approximating a liberal democracy, but even it places significant limitations on the scope and nature of its citizens’ democratic liberties. For these and other reasons explored below, all three of the Middle East’s democracies are best categorized as quasi-democratic.
Each group of states has a markedly different historical genesis. Most Middle Eastern monarchies are colonial constructions, although indigenous historical and political forces eventually severed the connection with the colonial power. Some of the monarchies fell to revolutions and became, at least initially, inclusionary. These included Nasser’s Egypt after 1952, Qaddafi’s Libya (1969–2011), the Islamic Republic of Iran from 1979 until about 1997, and “revolutionary” Iraq from 1958 into, with some interruptions, the 1990s. Other monarchies, notably in Morocco and Jordan and in the Arabian peninsula, have managed to stave off revolutions and have remained sultanistic. A number of other inclusionary states—postindependence Algeria, Habib Bourguiba’s Tunisia, Hafiz Al-Assad’s Syria, the Egypt of Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak, and Sudan—steadily lost their populist zeal and, with their revolutions increasingly institutionalized, became more and more exclusionary. By itself, historical genesis does not guarantee the political longevity of autocracies. What appears to be key is the evolution of the institutions of repression and their ability to suppress or manipulate society.
Before each of the regime categories is examined in greater detail, a couple of cautionary notes are in order. First, the categories outlined here are ideal types. It is extremely rare to find a state that fits entirely within one category and has no characteristics in common with a state belonging to a different category. This holds especially true for the Middle East’s nondemocratic states, which often employ a combination of political and economic formulas—such as charisma and repression, exclusion and patronage, or religiosity and modernity—to stay in power. For example, almost all the sultanistic states of the region are exclusionary also. While sultanistic states rely heavily on tradition as a source of political legitimacy, all have poor human rights records and will not hesitate to quell political opposition by whatever means necessary. Similarly, while the Tunisian state remained essentially exclusionary under Ben Ali’s rule, in the late 1980s it embarked on a number of highly successful populist campaigns aimed at boosting the popularity of the state in general and of President Ben Ali in particular.5 Political repression and exclusion have long been staples of Bahraini and Saudi politics, especially since the polarizing Shiʿa-Sunni tensions following the Iranian revolution.6 And Iran, with its unusual mix of open parliamentary politics, revolutionary flavor, and theocratic underpinnings, could just as validly be placed in the exclusionary category as in the inclusionary or even quasi-democratic category. What is important is the degree to which a state exhibits the characteristics that predominate in one category as opposed to another: the Iranian state, especially during the First and Second Republics, was more inclusionary than anything else; President Ben Ali’s Tunisia was more exclusionary than populist; the states of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Qatar are more sultanistic than exclusionary; and so on.
Second, these categories are far from static, and states frequently move from one to another. The states’ transformation from one type to another—especially from �
��inclusionary” to “exclusionary,” or, put differently, from “revolutionary” to authoritarian—may occur as a result of institutional evolution and change, or, as appears to be the case in the aftermath of the 2011 uprisings, may come through radical transformations and sudden ruptures with the past. Institutional change usually occurs as a result of one or any combination of three developments. In instances where institutions are not yet firmly entrenched and remain secondary in power and influence to personalities, they remain malleable and are susceptible to the purposive actions of individuals. The Kuwaiti National Assembly, for example, is often the scene of vibrant debates that push the boundaries of acceptable politics and unspoken red lines. But it continues to remain subservient to the wishes of the emir, Sheikh Sabah, who can dismiss and on occasion has dismissed the parliament for overstepping its prerogatives.7
There are instances in which institutions develop a life of their own, however, and change as a result of their own internal inertia. These types of endogenously generated changes often occur steadily and gradually, and frequently come about as a result of “path dependency.”8 In broad terms, path dependency refers to cases where an initial decision, or a path chosen, leads to subsequent decisions and paths at the expense of other, possibly more efficient or desirable ones. In a number of Middle Eastern countries in the 1980s and the 1990s, for example, especially in Egypt and Syria, and later on in Algeria, state authoritarianism morphed from being military reliant to becoming increasingly dependent on the police and the intelligence services.9 The initial decision by the executive to suppress its opponents remained intact even if the institutions enforcing the decision changed.
A third and final way in which institutions are likely to change is through forcible collapse, as was the case in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya in 2011. In all three cases, some of the most central institutions of the (pre-uprising) state succumbed to pressures from below and collapsed, only to be reconstituted later through elections, political choices, and constitutional engineering. Although these types of radical breaks with the past are relatively rare, the tumultuous politics of the Middle East has brought a fair number of such ruptures to the region, beginning, most recently, with the 1978–79 Iranian revolution and continuing with the 2011 Arab uprisings and the 2011–13 civil war in Syria. Especially in the immediate aftermath of such major changes, many of whose political and institutional consequences take time to unfold, it is difficult to firmly place a state in one category as opposed to another. What follows, therefore, is an analysis of broad categories of Middle East states as they evolved mostly until 2011. How these states eventually emerge out of or in response to the Arab Spring is a question only time can answer.
EXCLUSIONARY STATES
Middle Eastern praetorian dictatorships are comparatively benign. In other parts of the developing world, the scope of dictatorial regimes may range anywhere from weak kleptocracies (Mabuto’s Zaire) to predatory regimes (Duvalier’s Haiti) and highly repressive bureaucratic-authoritarian systems (in South America before the early to mid-1980s). By contrast, most exclusionary regimes in the Middle East simply try to exclude from the political process social actors who are not already part of or affiliated with the state. Of course, political exclusion is guaranteed through repressive means, with each state relying on an extensive network of intelligence agencies (mukhaberat) that, as in Al-Assad’s Syria, often also watch over one another.10 But repression is only implicit in the political equation. In fact, a surprising number of dictatorial regimes in the Middle East often allow the expression of discontented opinion over nonstate matters. Most Middle Eastern states—especially Iran, prerevolutionary Egypt and Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Kuwait, and to a lesser extent Saddam’s Iraq—have allowed critical (even satirical) reporting by the media on local officials and local issues such as housing shortages, high prices, and mismanagement.11 In Egypt, the judiciary enjoys considerable independence from the executive.12 In Tunisia, despite significant constraints instituted by President Ben Ali from the late 1980s and 1990s onward, “opposition” parties (with the exception of the Al-Nahda) managed to maintain a skeletal existence.13 Furthermore, Middle Eastern exclusionary states do not tend to be radically transformative, as were the formerly communist states of eastern Europe or authoritarian South America. Instead, most are interested in fostering gradual, even controlled social and economic transformations that do not disrupt their monopoly on political power.
From a historical perspective, the exclusionary states of the Middle East appear to have undergone three stages of state formation. In the first stage, state institutions had to be built from scratch from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. This task was undertaken under the direct supervision or indirect tutelage of Britain and France (Algeria in 1830; Tunisia in the 1880s; Sudan in the 1890s; Egypt beginning in 1914; Syria after 1920).14 Once the foundations for a state were laid, a second stage started in the 1950s and 1960s, when what by then had become “traditional” states were overthrown and “modern,” transformative ones were inaugurated. The takeover by Colonel Nasser and the Free Officers in Egypt started the phenomenon in 1952, to be followed in 1956 by Tunisia’s independence from France, the 1958 coup by Abd al-Karim Qassem and his Free Officers in Iraq, Algeria’s independence from France in 1962, the Baʿthist coup in Syria in 1963, the so-called October Revolution in Sudan in 1964, and the coup in Libya by Muammar Qaddafi and his Free Officers in 1969.
In the second stage of formation, these states had several significant features. Most notably, all originated from the ranks of the military and continued to rely heavily on the armed forces to carry out their domestic as well as international agendas. Equally important was their initially inclusionary and populist nature, mobilizing citizens for a variety of state- sponsored projects that ranged from the nationalization of foreign and private industries to land reform, the sponsoring of ambitious economic development projects, and, of course, the liberation of Palestine. The coups that brought these states to power were invariably represented to the public as “revolutions,” and in almost every state a Revolutionary Command Council became the fount of all power. A “ruling bargain” emerged in which the state promised to provide for the prosperity and security of citizens in return for their political quiescence.15 Existing bureaucratic institutions were revamped and reorganized, and new ones were created and staffed by high school and university graduates and army officers. Thus the edifice of the state became pervasive, bloated, and omnipotent. The Egyptian bureaucracy, which had employed 250,000 individuals in 1952, swelled to around 1,200,000 employees by 1970.16 The number of state-owned corporations also jumped from one in 1957 to sixteen in 1970.17 In Sudan, the total number of state employees grew from 176,408 in 1955–56 to 408,716 in 1976–77.18 In Algeria, the reign of President Houari Boumedienne, from 1965 to 1978, came to be known as the “bureaucratic dictatorship,” during which statist policies similar to those of Nasser were carried out.19
The third stage in the formation of exclusionary states began in the mid- to late 1970s. This stage came about as a result of the necessity of employing economic and political survival strategies. Populist authoritarianism under the aegis of the military had failed, and significant structural changes were needed if the state were to remain in power.20 Economically, state-led growth had resulted in the neglect of the agricultural sector and increasing dependence on food imports, the running up of budget deficits and inflation, and a failure to eliminate social and economic inequalities.21 As we will see in chapter 10, structural readjustments, known in the Arab world as infitah, started to form the main thrust of the economic policies of states considered “socialist” (e.g., Algeria and Syria) as well as “pro-Western” (e.g., Egypt and Tunisia, among many others). At the same time, the military found it more and more difficult to justify its highly visible presence in the state, especially considering its defeat in the 1967 War against Israel and its lack of a tangible victory in 1973. Reflecting on Egypt, Fouad Ajami writes: “In defeat,
the socioeconomic ascendancy of the military became unbearable, and the dormant resentments of the civilian graduates toward their military counterparts came to the surface.”22 Similarly, state mobilization attempts began to wane, and the all-embracing political parties established for such purposes became sluggish and increasingly irrelevant. These included the Neo-Destour Party in Tunisia, the Arab Socialist Union in Egypt, the National Liberation Front in Algeria, and the Baʿth Party in Syria (and Iraq).
Also responsible for ushering in the third, formative stage of exclusionary states was the removal from office of the main architects of the second stage. Boumedienne died in office in 1978, paving the way for Chadli Benjadid to initiate economic reforms and end Algeria’s international isolation. Nasser’s death in 1970 gave Sadat a free hand to pursue radically different policies, highlighted by the new president’s own flair for the dramatic. Sadat’s death in 1981 pushed the Egyptian state even further away from its once-pervasive Nasserism.23 In Tunisia, Bourguiba was removed from office in 1987, and the new president, Ben Ali, initially introduced a series of political and economic liberalization measures. Even the Syrian Hafiz Al-Assad, in power from 1970 to 2000, substantially altered his regime’s domestic and international postures in the late 1980s.
There was more to this phase than the rise of new personalities who governed through old political formulas. With each new personality came a new style, a new set of agendas, and, concurrent with evolving economic and international developments, a new outlook, domestically and internationally. Most importantly, the nature and functions of the military within some exclusionary states changed. In some states, the military assumed an increasingly background role, and the state’s authoritarian policies were instead maintained through greater reliance on professional technocrats and the intelligence services. Egypt, Syria, and Tunisia belonged to this category of “intelligence” or mukhaberat states. These states pursued a policy of political demobilization of their citizens, thus designing their institutions accordingly.24 In a few other countries, however, in each case for very different reasons, the military continued to dominate the state. This group included Algeria during its civil war in the 1990s, where in 1992 the military decided to abort the democratization process and instead rule directly, and Sudan, where a civil war along geographic and religious lines continued to ravage the country. In Algeria, it was only after the 2004 presidential election that the reelected president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, himself a former career army officer, was able to tip the balance of civil-military relations in the country in favor of the former.
The Modern Middle East - A Political History Since World War I (Third Edition) Page 29