More importantly, the royal family relies on the profoundly salient and resonant tradition of tribalism, portraying itself as the embodiment of traditional and tribal values, practices, and heritage. The bureaucratization of the monarchy and its transplantation into opulent palaces have not destroyed its ability to manipulate social and cultural norms that are valued—often romanticized—by society. In Saudi Arabia, the royal family has the added advantage of claiming the guardianship of Islam and its two holiest sites.77 With its survival not seeming threatened by forces that can easily be subdued through repression, the monarchy has little reason or incentive to liberalize or even to make a pretense of liberalizing.
The structural differences between the oil monarchies and the civic myth monarchies are striking. Neither Jordan nor Morocco has the institutional characteristics that would enable it to easily ride out economic or political crises. Both, especially Jordan, lack the resonant tribal tradition that has expedited the state-building process in the oil monarchies. Monarchy has, in a sense, seemed less “natural” to these states than it has in the Arabian peninsula. Therefore, Jordanian and Moroccan claims to legitimacy based on traditional authority come into even sharper contradiction with the realities of modernity than is the case in the oil monarchies. To this category also belonged Iran’s Pahlavi dynasty, which ultimately collapsed despite its best efforts at balancing traditional politics with modern economic and sociocultural development. Moreover, the monopoly over state institutions by the Jordanian and Moroccan royal families has been incomplete because of their comparatively small size.
While fragile, the ensuing civic myth monarchies have generally shown staying power so long as rent revenues continue flowing into the economy. In recent decades, however, declining rents have exacerbated the structural limitations of the two states. Within this context, in the mid-1990s the Jordanian and Moroccan monarchies initiated some liberalization efforts. These moves were designed to transform the monarchies’ legitimacy from one based on anachronistic claims to traditional authority into one that would be increasingly democratic. As we saw earlier, the reforms in Morocco were more substantive and, as a result, more effective in shielding the state from serious disturbances in 2011–12.
For Jordan, the problem of creating a civic myth supportive of the monarchy has been particularly acute. In the oil monarchies, state building occurred concurrently with the formation of a national identity. In fact, the two processes complemented and reinforced one another. Even the existence of many foreign nationals throughout the Persian Gulf countries, countered by some of the most stringent citizenship laws in the world, has not hampered the evolution of, say, Saudi, Kuwaiti, or Qatari identity. In Jordan, however, the process of state formation, from the 1920s until full independence from Britain in 1948, took place during the steady dissolution of Palestine and the growth of a sizable Palestinian community in Jordan. By and large, the Jordanian state is still trying to carve out a distinct sense of Jordanian national identity and nationalism. Only in July 1988 did King Hussein renounce any claims to Palestine and decide to end the subsidies he had paid to the West Bank for years. Time and again, the security of King Hussein’s reign was threatened because of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Given that Jordan has a population that is at least 60 to 70 percent Palestinian in origin, geographic proximity to Palestinian territories, and a history of clashes with Palestinian (and Israeli) forces, the question of its national identity and the ultimate legitimacy of the monarchy before the citizenry is not yet settled.
This problem is compounded by two additional developments. First, in Jordan the state and the ruling family have no tangible tribal and/or religious reference points to serve as sources of traditional legitimacy and support. The Jordanian state tries actively to perpetuate national and historic symbols that are meant to enhance the legitimacy of the regime. For example, the colors of the Jordanian flag represent Hashemite rule as part of a much longer historic tradition. King Hussein often appeared in public and in photographs wearing the bedouin headgear (kaffiya). Other forms of creating and reinforcing nationalist symbols—naming public buildings and monuments after the king, celebrating national holidays, manipulating school textbooks for political purposes—abound. But these and other efforts are mostly symbolic, often grounded in the state’s interpretation of reality rather than in reality itself. In the past, bedouin tribes in the southern parts of the country have shown loyalty to the king. However, as their extensive participation in the riots of 1989 demonstrated, this loyalty is based more on the strength of economic patronage than on blood ties and kinship. In the oil monarchies, clientelistic bonds play an important role in linking the tribes to the royal family. The royal family itself has extensive tribal connections, maintained by ʿasabiyya (blood ties and relations of mutual support). The Jordanian monarchy, however, does not have access to vast oil revenues. The rentier political economy on which it relies is at best indirect and is often frequently affected negatively by developments in the international political economy beyond its own control (e.g., remittances sent home by Jordanians working in the Persian Gulf oil monarchies). Instead, to ensure the loyalty of the country’s southern tribes, it must make a greater effort to emphasize the royal family’s tribal and religious roots.
Second, there is the interrelated problem of a ruling family that is too small either to dominate state institutions or to form a pervasive corporate identity of its own. Named after the monarchy, the country’s official designation is, indeed, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Nevertheless, the actual significance of this is nothing like the naming of Saudi Arabia after Ibn Saud. More important, the ruling family’s small size has from the beginning forced it to rely on loyalists, professional technocrats, and even Palestinians to staff key state institutions such as the Foreign Ministry, the Defense Ministry, and the Prime Ministry. Before Crown Prince Hassan was removed as the designated heir and replaced by Prince Abdullah, he was somewhat active in state affairs. However, he did not hold any formal cabinet portfolios or command positions within the armed forces.78 Iron-ically, Prince (now King) Abdullah, King Hussein’s son, who was not the heir apparent until two weeks before his father’s death in February 1999, commanded his own unit in the army. In fact, the constitution of 1952, which is technically still in effect, stipulates that authority be jointly exercised by the king and a bicameral legislature (Majlis al-ʾUmma). While this provision of the constitution was virtually ignored until the early 1990s and the king’s powers remained paramount, the loyalty of those in sensitive state positions could not always be counted on, as represented by attempted coups by some military officers in the 1950s and 1960s.
The predicament of the Moroccan monarchy is only slightly different. As we saw in chapter 3, Morocco, unlike Jordan, has had a long dynastic tradition, steeped in and justified by the Kharajite branch of Islam. Monarchy was restored after the end of protectorate rule by France and Spain from 1919 to 1956, but with powers far surpassing those of prepro-tectorate days. The monarchy’s supreme political and religious positions were enshrined in the 1962 constitution, and the three subsequent constitutions written since then—in 1970, 1972, and 1992—have altered the political balance only marginally.79 In theory as well as in practice, the king considers himself the supreme religious and temporal authority of the land, “above other institutions and above any juridical order, including that of the Constitution itself.”80 In this respect, the monarchy relies on an invented political tradition, as the pre-1912 sultanate was ruled in tandem with the ulama. In fact, power sharing between the ruler and others survived well into the 1940s and 1950s, when, during the independence movement, Mohammed V cooperated with and endorsed the nationalist Istiqlal Party’s manifesto calling for the establishment of a democratic monarchy upon independence. Today, however, few Moroccans are reminded of this aspect of the independence movement.
Nevertheless, given the long religio-political tradition of sultanistic rule in the country, the Moroccan mon
archy has had an easier task of crafting legitimacy on traditional grounds than the Hashemites in Jordan. The problem has been the monarchy’s inability to count on the absolute loyalty of some of the key institutions in the state. Like the Jordanian monarchy, the Moroccan royal family is too small to enable it to place princes in control of the armed forces and other important state institutions. Instead, the country’s two most recent monarchs, Kings Hassan and Mohammed VI, have used favoritism and patronage to ensure the loyalty of senior figures and the armed forces. During the “state of emergency” that lasted from 1965 to 1971, the army emerged as the bulwark of the regime, repressing the Istiqlal and other parties with considerable efficiency. But this did not prevent attempted military coups from taking place in 1971 and 1972. At this time the king felt compelled to initiate a rapprochement with the political parties, thus inaugurating what he called Hassanian democracy.
Hassanian democracy soon proved to be little more than a political ploy, as evident from this description of the role the king envisioned for opposition parties in his new, democratic order: “If we were in opposition, we would say, ‘We are before anything else servants of the king, who is the king of all Moroccans.’”81 In 1985, Istiqlal left the government and, with other parties, demanded that real reforms be implemented. By the early 1990s the monarchy could no longer ignore the demands of the “opposition” political parties inside and outside the parliament. The old political formula that had placed the king and his legitimacy above and beyond everything but God no longer worked. Despite his best efforts at keeping the parties from developing a life of their own, King Hassan had failed to create a docile “loyal opposition.” New parliamentary elections were held in July 1993 amid much popular excitement. The results were far from a landslide victory for the opposition but were sobering enough that the monarchy realized the necessity of sharing power with the opposition.82 The alternance of 1997 was part of the same pattern.
In 1999, the Middle East’s two remaining civic myth monarchies (along with Bahrain) weathered a most serious challenge when the long-reigning monarchs who had come to personify the political system passed away and were succeeded by their sons in orderly and smooth transitions. In February 1999, Jordan’s sixty-four-year-old King Hussein died after a long battle with cancer and was succeeded by his son, King Abdullah II (b. 1962). Morocco’s King Hassan II (b. 1929), who had reigned since 1961, died of a heart attack the following July and was succeeded by his oldest son, Mohammed VI (b. 1963). A similar transition occurred in Bahrain, where Sheikh Isa ibn-Sulman al-Khalifa (b. 1934), who had ruled the island nation since 1961—Bahrain gained its independence from Britain in 1971—died in March and was succeeded by his son, Sheikh Hamad (b. 1950). In all three cases, the institutional viability and strength of the monarchy were tested, and then proven, during the transition. Perhaps the biggest potential threat to the monarchy arose in Jordan, where, because of an apparent family feud, King Hussein abruptly replaced his brother with his son as the crown prince only two weeks before he died. Nevertheless, as subsequent events have shown, the Jordanian monarchy remains on solid institutional grounds, and the deposed Prince Hassan has not challenged Abdullah II’s rule. Of course, the 2011 Arab uprisings changed matters for all regional actors concerned, especially for Bahrain and to a lesser extent for Jordan and even Morocco.
QUASI DEMOCRACIES
It is a given that not all democracies are equally democratic, some being more true to the essence and spirit of democracy than others. For a variety of reasons, some democratic systems place institutional limitations on the scope and nature of the political rights and liberties they grant to their citizens. The degree to which civil liberties are curtailed and the reasons for their curtailment differ from case to case and depend on specific historical and political circumstances. However, these democracies often feature a plethora of official or unofficial political “red lines” that the electorate cannot cross. These red lines might be drawn around certain broad issues, such as the overall ideological character of the state, or around the participation of specific groups in the political process, such as various ethnic or religious minorities. Seldom are these restrictions outlined in the constitution or in any of the other legal frameworks on which the state relies. They are, nevertheless, widely observed and guarded by state actors and by other self-ascribed guardians of the state, whether the armed forces or specific elite groups. By and large, the electorate is also mindful of the boundaries beyond which it should not step, although at times it is willing to risk pushing the boundaries to see what happens. Despite the existence of the institutions and practices of democracy, therefore, such democracies often place obvious political restrictions around certain issues or specific groups. For this reason, they might be best classified as “quasi democracies.”
There is a subtle but important distinction between quasi democracies and democracies that are “partial” or “incomplete.” As chapter 8 discusses, processes of democratic transition are often fraught with tension and conflict among state leaders, whose loss of institutional or ideological cohesion, or both, paves the way for competing groups to press their demands on the state. While the state is in the process of transition, its nondemocratic elements and features continue to resist giving up power. The ensuing political system is full of contradictions, at least temporarily, until its precarious “negative balance” is tipped one way or another. Some aspects of the state, such as elections to the parliament, are very democratic, while others, such as nonelected figures’ continued hold on power, are highly undemocratic. This makes the system at best a partial democracy. In chapter 8, we examine the emergence of such a political system in contemporary Iran. In these partial democracies, the contradictions are institutional; some of the institutions of the state are democratic, others are not. This is not the case in quasi democracies, in which existing political institutions tend to be uniformly democratic, except, of course, for the armed forces. Here the system’s contradictions are not institutional. Instead, they revolve around the larger political culture that informs and guides the broader understanding of the permissible forms and limits of political participation. Democracy exists for some but not for others. Some political issues are open for discussion; others are not. As we will see below, these quasi-democratic systems are the sort found in the Middle East, especially in Israel, Lebanon, and Turkey.
Several interrelated and reinforcing dynamics result in a political system developing into a quasi democracy as opposed to a more “viable” democratic polity.83 Three factors stand out: age, institutional design, and the political role of the middle classes. To begin with, quasi democracies all tend to be rather young political systems in historical terms, with their establishment traceable to no more than one or at most two generations of political leaders. By itself, age is not a determinant of the nature of a political system. However, especially in democracies, where the deliberately crafted institutions of the political system need time to settle into their mutually dependent, countervailing relationships, age and experience can be highly stabilizing, maturing factors. With time, imperfect democracies can—though not all will—work out their internal contradictions. In the American democracy, for example, with time, a serious secessionist movement was suppressed (the Civil War of 1860–63), slavery was outlawed (Thirteenth Amendment, in 1865), voting rights were extended to blacks (Fifteenth Amendment, in 1870) and then to women (Nineteenth Amendment, in 1920), and racial inequities were targeted for change (the civil rights movement of the 1960s).
The Middle East’s three existing democratic systems are all relatively recent in historical terms. Israel has the oldest uninterrupted democracy, dating back to 1948. Lebanon’s fragile democracy, which took shape after the country’s independence in 1943, was shattered in 1975, not to be reconstituted until the civil war ended in 1990. Turkey’s first democratic elections were held in 1950, but there were military coups in 1960, 1971, and 1980. Another “silent coup” occurred in 1997, when, f
rom behind the scenes, the military forced the resignation of the sitting prime minister.
Age is only one factor pushing an emerging democratic system in the direction of limited democracy. Many west European democracies are equally young but are quite vibrant and are free of the built-in institutional limitations that saddle quasi democracies. The circumstances that give rise to a democratic system, and the larger sociopolitical and diplomatic context within which that system is established, are even more important. Viable democracies tend to have their genesis in society and are often initiated “from below.” A relatively wide coalition of social actors puts pressure on the state and, if successful, forces it to democratize. As we shall see in chapter 8, the depth of civil society is a crucial determinant of the viability and vitality of a democratic political system. Quasi democracies, in contrast, tend to come “from above.” They are often initiated either by state actors themselves for the specific purpose of protecting their privileges, as in Turkey, or by social elites, for whom the protection of privilege also emerges as an important priority, as in Lebanon. The political system thus crafted, democratic as it may be, also reflects an institutional imperative to protect the privileged position of certain elements in society, such as the armed forces (in Turkey and Israel), prominent social elites (in Lebanon), or dominant ethnic groups (the Jews in Israel and the Turks in Turkey).
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