Arab spring, act two-Are the Arab monarchies next?
As the chaotic transition towards democracy continues in North Africa and
Yemen, the fighting in Syria is intensifying. And, less noticed, opposition
to the Arab monarchies is growing.
by Hicham Ben Abdallah El Alaoui
January 2013
The Arab Spring is not an outcome, it is a process. For those countries at
the forefront of regional transformation, the fundamental question is can
democracy become institutionalised? Though progress has been uneven and the
outcomes of many state-society struggles have yet to be resolved, the answer
is a cautious yes. In at least a few countries, we are witnessing the onset
of democratic institutionalisation: whether the process of reform and
transformation spreads to other parts of the Middle East depends on many
factors - religious tensions, political mobilisation, regime adaptations,
geopolitics. Meanwhile North Africa provides the most promising preview of
the future.
Democratic institutionalisation means the healthy convergence of politics
around three arenas of competition: elections, parliaments and
constitutions. When these institutions are robust and durable, then the
democratic governments they engender are relatively safe from radical
groups, reactionary forces and authoritarian backsliding (due to
alternation: democracies that uphold the rule of law and hold regular
elections require that power alternates between competing parties).
In Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, this process is unfolding, if at an unsteady
pace ( <
http://mondediplo.com/2013/01/02arab#nb1> 1). All three have had
founding legislative elections that were far more competitive and
pluralistic than those held in their authoritarian past. In Tunisia, the
project to re-craft the national constitution nears completion by the
Constituent Assembly, which itself was the product of electoral competition.
The crisis there has two dimensions: the new government's passivity in
response to Salafist violence (which came to an end after the attack on the
US embassy in Tunis) and the delay in getting economic reform under way,
especially in the poorest regions. In spite of often acute tensions and
conflicts between different political interest groups, all but the tiniest
minority have accepted that democracy is now the name of the game.
In Libya, the post-Gaddafi political order has been rockier, with armed
militias initially fighting amongst themselves (
<
http://mondediplo.com/2013/01/02arab#nb2> 2), while in Egypt, presidential
elections resulted in the ascension of the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohammed
Morsi. Once in office, Morsi asserted civilian power over the military by
dismissing Field Marshall Tantawi. This was a crucial step towards
redefining civilian-military relations in a historically praetorian state.
In these transitional states, most political actors recognise the new
reality - except of course hardliners and extremists, such as some Salafists
and defenders of the autocratic past. But the new reality does not mean that
these institutionalising democracies will become liberal democracies. The
democrats of the Arab Spring did not embrace revolution to advance
liberalism - which many in the West may see in the Arab context as advancing
the cause of gender equality, unshackling censorship of pornography and
other "immoral" materials, and otherwise widening the boundaries of
expression. Liberalism is in truth a body of political thought that may give
preeminence to the individual and freedom, but can only emerge from a later
stage of democratic consolidation. It will not result from an early showdown
between secularists and Islamists, and compromise on such values at this
nascent stage is unlikely.
The priority for these transitioning states is not ideational, but rather
the continued struggle towards institutionalisation. Democracy does not
require that every citizen and every party embrace the same ideological
framework, but rather that democratic rules and procedures become the
definitive rules of the game. Even the Islamists are discovering that
electoral triumphs require more than slogans: like democratic governments
elsewhere, they need to deliver the goods through governance and policy, not
empty promises of bliss and orthodoxy.
The Islamist apparition
From America to Europe, policymakers and publics alike were shocked to see
Islamist parties like the Nahdha movement in Tunisia and the Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt emerge as winners of revolutions they did not trigger.
However, fears of Islamisation must be tempered by several realities.
Western observers often forget that Islamists have no symbolic monopoly over
the interpretation of Islam in the public sphere. In Egypt, classical
educational institutions like Al-Azhar University and doctrinal sects like
the Sufis frame faith and politics in ways distinct from Islamists. Within
the broad Islamist category, the Brotherhood and more hardline Salafists
clash over major issues and disagree about numerous religious tenets. The
decentralised and horizontal freedom given by Islam to the individual
believer ironically sabotages those who seek to dominate religion for their
own political gain.
And though the Islamist trend encompasses groups ranging from social service
providers to extreme Salafist voices, its mainstream face that will shape
politics in most transitional countries - the Muslim Brotherhood - is no
revolutionary vanguard. The Brotherhood did not support Iran's call for
Islamic revolution against the region's secular dictatorships after 1979.
Nor did they embrace Osama bin Laden's call to replace politics with jihad
in the late 1990s.
Third, Islamist victories have hardly been sweeping, so Islamism cannot be
taken as the unambiguous voice of the Arab masses. The Muslim Brotherhood,
and to a lesser degree the Salafists, dominated the first post-Mubarak
elections by winning over 300 out of 500 parliamentary seats. Yet their
popularity has faded since 2011, and the result of the June 2012
presidential contest was stunning: Morsi barely achieved victory over Ahmad
Shafik, a symbol of the old autocracy who secured nearly half the popular
vote.
Similarly, the Nahdha Party controls 40% of the Tunisian Constituent
Assembly - not enough to survive without a coalition with powerful secular
and leftist forces. In Libya, the Muslim Brotherhood's Justice and
Construction Party barely won 10% of seats in the June 2012 elections for
the General National Congress.
Many Islamists are being transformed by the democratic process of inclusive
contestation, however reluctantly they entered this new arena. In Egypt, how
to integrate the well-organised Muslim Brotherhood and its more hardline
Salafist cousins into the long-term democratic game takes precedence. The
reality is that Islamists cannot take power by force; the Brotherhood is a
well-mobilised social movement but it lacks coercive muscle.
The September 2012 uproar over the anti-Islam film The Innocence of Muslims
provides yet another way to poke holes in the Islamist apparition. The
episode forced wider Islamist forces to put a clear distance between
themselves and the more radical groups. And many leaders protested against
the film by invoking such legal concepts as defamation rather than resorting
to the canon of sharia law's proscription of blasphemy.
The secular pretext
Still, it would be remiss to ignore that the central message of many
Islamists is to implement the pillars of Islam more strongly in Arab-Muslim
societies in accordance with sharia. The Brotherhood is no liberal
organisation and for that reason, many secularists have become fearful of
theocracy should they attain complete power. The key is to remember that the
Islamist majority, represented by the Brotherhood and other mainstream
groups, can "internalise" democratic norms in a way that preserves the
importance of religious identity while still preserving the institutional
rules of electoral competition and consolidating the gains made through
regime transition. One does not need a cadre of western-educated liberal
ideologues to create democracy: democracies emerged without democrats in
Portugal and Spain in the 1970s, and then much of Latin America throughout
the 1980s as what Samuel Huntington called the Third Wave of Democratisation
unfolded ( <
http://mondediplo.com/2013/01/02arab#nb3> 3). The logic of
democracy is agreeing to disagree within an institutional ecology bounded by
accountability and pluralism - because the alternative is perpetual
instability, conflict and stalemate.
Once democracy institutionalises, so that most political groups can accept
the inviolability of elections and participation, citizens and politicians
can engage in civic debates about transforming state and society into more
(or less) liberal forms. This means that countries like Libya, Tunisia and
Egypt need not be thoroughly "secularised" to quicken their transitions to
democracy. Secularism almost never preceded democracy in the western
experience.
Youth protesters - mostly urban, largely middle-class, and decidedly secular
in the sense of not being members of any Islamist group - led the regional
wave of revolutions. Today though, these youth movements have been
marginalised in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, and with it their particular
vision of a more secular democratic future, because they failed to organise
a cohesive political front once authoritarianism collapsed. Whereas
Islamists took advantage of the resulting vacuum to mobilise (with varying
electoral results), the youth movements refused to enter formal
institutional politics.
This has had destructive consequences. By emphasising "the street" (the idea
that grievances should be expressed by loud contentious protests rather than
the quieter, more structured rules of electoral politics), these secular
youths have gained little formal power and virtually no representation in
new democratic institutions such as parliaments and popular councils.
Street politics have a dual function. They allow ordinary people to serve as
civic watchdogs of the state (the January 25 Revolution in Egypt happened
only because students, workers and other middle-class citizens could crowd
into urban centres in defiance of central authority and demand more rights).
However, constant protesting cannot replace the institutional rhythms of
democratic elections and political campaigns, because the very act of
protest implicitly rejects the legitimacy of the system - and democracy
consolidates only when most accept its legitimacy.
What these youths must do to prolong their contribution to the Arab Spring
is to align their interests with nascent institutions. The time has come to
invest their energies, and the spirit of their activism, into formal
politics such as parliaments and consultations. They can also act as
surrogates for a new political scene that encourages the expression of
religious opposition, nationalist tendencies, secular trends and centrist or
centre-left values that span the entire spectrum of society. Uncontrolled,
street protests can even undermine the best of policies. Unless these
popular interests can be institutionalised into the system, there is a
danger that a well-organised minority could rise to power, silence the
moderate majority and slide the state back into authoritarian practices.
This is a recurrent theme in the aftermath of the Third Wave of
Democratisation: autocrats often find ways to subvert new democratic
institutions. The greatest danger in the Arab world is not a return to the
old model of personalistic dictatorships, whose time has passed; rather, it
is the rise of new authoritarian systems based upon oligarchic coalitions
that manipulate democratic institutions.
Those left behind
Like all moments of historical change, the Arab Spring has created as many
losers as winners. The secular youth movements discussed earlier are a
prominent example. Yet another losing faction is the intellectual elite
class, who have repeated the mistakes of their predecessors in failing to
link the concrete concerns of localities and communities with their academic
ideologies and grand visions.
Since the advent of Arab nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s, generations of
educated elites have spoken in favour of progressive issues that have
electrified the press and wooed the middle classes. Early on, many of these
themes were oppositionist (against Zionism, imperialism, Orientalism,
capitalism and other perceived threats). There were also positive demands,
for pan-Arabism, regional justice and equality with the West. Arab
intellectuals are far more progressive than their societies but remain
crippled by their inability to organise at the grass-roots level and
translate their social influence into concrete political parties.
Another reason for the intellectual elite's marginalisation is that their
discourse of opposition could not fathom the possibility of an indigenous
revolution. Their longstanding accusations that Zionism and western
imperialism were the dual threats oppressing the Middle East were disproved
when it became clear that the real problem was not the outside world, but
the durability of authoritarianism and the lack of good governance. Some
intellectuals today have reacted so extremely to the dashing of their
expectations that they now believe the Arab Spring to be a western or
Israeli conspiracy: with the defeat of the Ba'ath regimes of Iraq and
perhaps of Syria next, the last vestiges of pan-Arab nationalism will have
disappeared.
Another reason why youth movements and the intellectual elite have failed to
capture mass support is that some of them have become extremely hardline in
their opposition to any form of Islamism; they have become secular
fundamentalists who cannot fathom the possibility of allowing even the most
moderate Islamists to play a marginal role in governance.
A third set of losers is the Arab monarchies. This may seem contradictory.
After all, no kingdom fell during the Arab Spring, and indeed a common
refrain in the western press has been that, compared to their republican
counterparts, the autocratic monarchies of the region have proven
exceptionally resilient in the face of social unrest. The reasoning
encompasses two arguments: these royal regimes enjoy a deeply rooted sense
of cultural legitimacy that resonates throughout their societies. Unlike
other authoritarian leaderships, they retain traditional acceptance with the
public given their presence before or during anti-colonial struggles. Also,
they are more adaptable, having a very flexible set of institutional tools
with which to manipulate politics that go beyond mere repression.
However, the monarchies are running on borrowed time, and most are in worst
straits than a decade ago. In Bahrain, for example, a mass uprising was
stopped only through the combined efforts of the national security forces
and the Gulf Cooperation Council's military intervention. Morocco faced
serious protests as well. There, the promise of constitutional revisions
temporarily quieted public anger, but by accepting integration without
meaningful political reform, the Islamist Justice and Development Party -
the face of parliamentary opposition - now risk losing credibility like the
rest of the political class. Moreover, the urban-rural divide is no longer
salient; dissent is now everywhere, and demands for change have cut across
old class and provincial lines.
Like Morocco, the Saudi monarchy is thickly embedded in society. Blessed by
geology, it has used its enormous oil revenues to offset overt opposition
with new welfare and development programmes, which has allowed the regime to
defer more fundamental structural reforms. The opposite is true in oil-rich
Kuwait. There, constant street protests against corruption and royal
meddling have undermined the Al-Sabah family and the December 2012 elections
were boycotted by the opposition. This tug-of-war between the monarchy and
parliament has culminated in a critical juncture: either the regime accepts
a prime minister who is a commoner, and thus beyond the emir's control, or
it must shut down parliament and backslide to authoritarianism at a very
high cost.
In Jordan, the monarchy has become suffocated by two complementary forces.
The Islamists want to preserve the monarchy, because the collapse of
monarchical rule would allow Israel to portray the East Bank as the new
alternative homeland for all Palestinians and thus justify the annexation of
the whole of the West Bank. Yet they also desire constitutional monarchy,
with greater political freedoms. The monarchy's Bedouin tribal bedrock has
become restless due to rising unemployment and corruption, which allows them
to accuse the regime of favouring the wealthier Palestinian majority.
Vested interests run deep in monarchies, because dynastic families develop
resilient connections to influential social and political groups that
provide support in exchange for patronage, such as merchants, businessmen,
farmers, tribes, and the ulama. Drastic reforms that replace absolute
monarchy with real parliamentary governance would undercut not just royals
but their commoner clients too. Second, the post-colonial and post-cold war
history of the region shows that monarchs have an aversion to transforming
their executive power into moral authority; they will only consider
constitutional monarchism after exhausting all other options and strategies.
So without a concerted popular challenge, kingships have no incentive to
bring anything more than cosmetic reforms to the bargaining table.
Once championed as moderate and adaptable regimes, the Arab monarchies now
risk squandering a golden opportunity. Though they would have to surrender
much power in a democratic transition, their institutions also have much to
contribute in helping unify their societies during times of crisis and spare
future conflict and instability.
The paradox
The geopolitical dimension of the Arab Spring has created a stunning
paradox. Consider how it began: as a primarily local and then national-level
phenomenon, it made itself heard as a call for justice and dignity by
encouraging citizens to resist authoritarian brutality. Within months, it
had morphed into a second stage of regionalisation. No longer a purely
domestic act, it spread a common set of principles and values across
borders. This diffusion transcended the well-known "Al-Jazeera effect"
because it encompassed not simply new forms of communication but an entirely
new framework of contentious activism. This new regional discourse, shared
through social technologies and strengthened with every media broadcast,
drew upon classic concepts of pan-Arab unity but rejected any firm ideology
in favour of a more simple and shared frustration for authoritarian
governance, and a powerful yearning for citizenship.
We are now, however, at a third stage in which this regional wave has become
internationalised along sectarian and geopolitical cleavages; the Arab
Spring now represents not just domestic and regional politics but also an
international arena of confrontation. The Bahraini uprising began this
process in spring 2011, when the sectarian nature of its Shia-dominated
opposition put the ruling Sunni monarchy in the camp of larger fellow Sunni
countries and its western allies, a strategic front led by Saudi Arabia, the
US and Turkey, not to mention less overt intervention from Israel.
Inversely, the popular opposition was associated with the "radical"
transnational Shia bloc of Iran, Syria and Hizbullah. The Syrian civil war
accelerated this process but through an inverse dynamic. There, it was
social opposition that became associated with the "moderate" camp of Sunni
powers and their western allies, while the embattled autocratic regime of
Bashar al-Assad entrenched its position with the transnational Shia
alliance.
In 2012 these sectarian and geopolitical dimensions reinforced each other in
an iterative way, giving the Arab Spring truly global implications. Saudi
Arabia, Turkey, the US and Israel do not want Iran, Syria and Hizbullah to
gain strategic predominance in the region. This rivalry has nearly
transformed the sectarian division from simmering tensions to imaginary
warfare with potentially dangerous consequences. Extremely polarising
characterisations prevail, as many in the West now describe the Sunni states
- especially the monarchies - as bulwarks of stability and moderation,
whereas the Shia are extremists, destabilising and militant. Needless to
say, this conflict also serves the domestic interests of its proponents.
Once internationalised, the geopolitical echo of the Arab Spring has however
returned to the domestic level of democratising states like a boomerang, and
in a manner few could have predicted. Iran, Syria and Hizbullah have
attempted to force the transitional regimes of Tunisia, Libya and Egypt to
make the hard choice of joining their camp, while the pro-western Sunni
alliance has also exerted pressure to win over these new regimes and their
foreign policy alignments. Paradoxically, such exogenous strains have only
strengthened these new regimes by convincing them to adopt a neutral foreign
policy stance and take more seriously the process of institutionalisation.
The threat of regional instability has rejoined their internal efforts to
bolster domestic stability. For instance, Morsi's much-publicised
presentation at the Non-Aligned Movement meeting in Iran last August showed
that Egypt was taking a modest stance in the region.
In comparative terms, the new regimes in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt are
creating a restrained position that rejects sectarian incitement, extreme
religious interpretations and geopolitical entanglements in favour of
flexibility and pragmatism. Above all, they desire domestic stability, and
they see these two competing sides as obstacles in the course of building
new democratic political orders.
This paradox (that international conflict can bolster the stabilisation of
democratic politics at the domestic level) is quite novel in modern Middle
East history. In the past, systemic battles pitted the West and its Arab
allies against ideological coalitions framed as destructive and subversive
to the region (the communist threat posed by Nasser and Brezhnev, Ayatollah
Khomeini's Islamic revolutionary creed, Bin Laden's jihadist campaign). The
current regional alignment is far more nuanced. Even at its peak, no outside
actor could frame the Arab Spring as a coherent ideological flood associated
with any evil empire, opposing superpower or radical organisation. It grew
as an indigenous force before becoming entangled in geopolitics.
The confrontation between Sunni and Shia will be crucial to the future.
However much it may be manipulated from outside, it is a clash which is
likely to multiply the fault lines and cloud the horizon of the Arab Spring.
( <
http://mondediplo.com/2013/01/02arab#nh1> 1) See Alain Gresh, "
<
http://mondediplo.com/2012/11/02egypt> Gulf Cools Towards Muslim Brothers",
Le Monde diplomatique, English edition,November 2012.
(2 <
http://mondediplo.com/2013/01/02arab#nh2> ) See Patrick Haimzadeh,
"Libyan democracy hijacked <
http://mondediplo.com/2012/10/05libya> ", Le
Monde diplomatique, English edition, October 2012.
( <
http://mondediplo.com/2013/01/02arab#nh3> 3) Samuel P Huntington, The
Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, University of
Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1991.
------------[ Sent via the dehai-wn mailing list by dehai.org]--------------
Received on Mon Jan 07 2013 - 19:02:12 EST
