The Arab Uprisings

Transforming and Challenging State Power

Eberhard Kienle, Nadine Sika

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780857729033
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

The uprisings which spread across the Middle East and North Africa in late 2010 and 2011 irrevocably altered the way in which the region is now perceived. But in spite of the numerous similarities in these protests, from Tunisia and Egypt to Yemen and Bahrain, their broader political effects display important differences. This book analyses these popular uprisings, as well as other forms of protest, and the impact they had on each state. Why were Mubarak and Bin Ali ousted relatively peacefully in Egypt and Tunisia, while Qadafi in Libya and Saleh in Yemen fought violent battles against their opponents? Why do political transformations differ in countries that were able to shed their autocratic presidents? And why have other regimes, including Morocco and Saudi Arabia, experienced only limited protests or managed to repress and circumvent them? Looking at the aftermath and transitional processes across the region, this book is a vital retrospective examination of the uprisings and how they can be understood in the light of state formation and governmental dynamics.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Nadine Sika and Eberhard Kienle

In spite of numerous similarities, recent forms of contestation in the various Arab countries and their broader political effects display important differences. For instance, incumbents fell quickly in Tunisia and Egypt, while they (have) managed to cling on for a considerable length of time in Libya and Syria. Protests were overwhelmingly peaceful in the former two countries but, as they dragged on, turned increasingly violent in the latter two. In Tunisia and Syria they started in peripheral areas of the state, while in Egypt they began in the capital city, partly reflecting the roles of different social groups and constituencies. In the meantime developments in Tunisia have turned into a democratic transition of sorts, while Egypt may return to a different form of authoritarian rule.

Why were Mubarak and Bin Ali ousted rather peacefully in Egypt and Tunisia, while Qadafi in Libya and Saleh in Yemen fought violent battles against their opponents? Why do political transformations differ in countries that were able to shed their autocratic presidents? And why have other regimes, including Morocco and Saudi Arabia, experienced only limited protests or managed to repress and circumvent them?

This volume analyses the recent popular uprisings commonly referred to as the Arab Spring and their impact on politics and polities in the light of the ‘nature’ of the states concerned. Differences in terms of contestation, regime response, and the ensuing political dynamics seem to reflect the historical processes that have shaped states, societies and political economies. The relatively smooth process of change in Tunisia may reflect the relative success of state and nation-building strategies pursued over centuries by ruling groups that tended by and large to rule over the same territory and the same population. Put differently, Tunisia comes close to the nation state defined as a legally established entity whose boundaries coincide with those of an imagined community that commands the ultimate loyalty of its members.¹ In contrast, Libya, Yemen and Syria are ‘territorial states’ whose boundaries do not coincide with those of an imagined community. Instead, they include a variety of loyalty groups that also frequently extend beyond state borders.²

The literature on the recent protests has mostly focused on similarities rather than differences among Arab regimes. For instance, it put considerable emphasis on the crisis of authoritarianism that had developed throughout the region.³ Similarly, it stressed the importance of economic and social grievances, in particular related to poverty and inequality,⁴ and popular mobilization and collective action against the backdrop of social movement theories that have been much debated.⁵ It largely ignored an older literature that had already related politics to differences at the level of state formation.⁶ Analysing recent events in the light of long-term transformations will not only help to contextualize past and current developments, but also allow us to avoid more outlandish guesses about likely developments in the future.

Processes of state formation may indeed account for many of the differences that have marked events and developments since 2010. In many cases, decolonization left

Arab states … formally independent and sovereign, [but] hardly any of them unconditionally accept[ed] the legitimacy of its own statehood. The fact of the matter is that these states have, for a good part of the twentieth century, been caught up in the pull and push of conflicting forces, some coming from domestic centrifugal sources such as ethnic and sectarian divisions and some from the universal forces of pan-Arabism and pan-Islam, both of which draw away from the legitimacy of statehood enjoyed by these countries.⁷

In the Levant and the broader Fertile Crescent, the imperial powers drew the boundaries of the political entities that later were to become independent states in line with the reach of their own power and influence. By implication, they created entities unable to accommodate existing solidarities and patterns of exchange. In some areas like Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco, processes of state formation had preceded the arrival of the imperialist powers. However, even in these cases the latter were essential at least in endorsing and consolidating the boundaries of the emerging states. In the Arab parts of the Persian Gulf the British often propped up fragile rulers and again defined the boundaries of the areas they allowed them to administer.

Processes of state formation also had an impact on the types of political regimes (or ‘forms of government’) that came to dominate the entities concerned. Although partly endogenous, the processes of state formation were influenced, and in some cases even initiated, by foreign powers. The Moroccan and the Egyptian monarchies had taken shape before the physical arrival of the French and the British, who nonetheless remodeled them before endorsing them as their local agents. Mutatis mutandis, the same applies to the monarchies in the Gulf and their former counterpart in Tunisia. As to the Hashemite monarchies, they were part and parcel of the demiurgic creation of Iraq and (Trans) Jordan by the British, while the Syrian republic was a product of the French mandate.

However, the impact that the type of political regime had on protests and subsequent developments can analytically be disassociated from their historical origins. On the face of it, monarchies weathered the Arab Spring storms better than republics, but in reality matters may be slightly more complex. Most likely the rentier monarchies survived largely unscathed thanks to the rents that they could mobilize to persuade the discontented to renew the old authoritarian bargain. The most contested monarchy has been that of Bahrain, a fading rentier state unable to defend this bargain because of a sectarian divide that heavily affects access to resources. The least contested monarchies have been those of Morocco and (to an extent) Jordan, which had put in place institutions and mechanisms underscoring their – however hollow – claim to reign but not to rule.

Like regime types (or ‘forms of government’), political economies in the sense of the political organization of economic activities are historically related to processes of state formation, but analytically distinct. Their characteristics form the third group of variables that have shaped the dynamics of protests, regime responses and ensuing political dynamics discussed in this volume. ‘Orthodox’ economic reforms imposed by external actors on political economies that had been built around important public sectors, rents, and attendant welfare regimes such as the ‘old social contract’ (and its implicit authoritarian bargain) reinforced political capitalism (or cronyism) and inequalities, thus entailing increasingly diverging interests and demands that the unaccountable rulers no longer managed to reconcile. In many ways the dynamics of global capitalism and their social and cultural ramifications eroded political regimes and even states that had suited these dynamics earlier but then failed to adapt.

Processes of state formation, types of political regimes, and features of the political economy are thus the factors that in the eyes of the contributors to this volume account for the similarities and differences that have marked the Arab Springs. The volume opens with a diachronic as well as synchronic comparison by Roger Heacock of contestation in Europe in the nineteenth century and the Arab Spring at the beginning of the twenty-first century, focusing on issues of political economy and historical sociology.

In this chapter, Heacock discusses specific features of states that had historically conditioned insurrections. Taking the revolutions of 1848 and the contrasting contexts within which the peoples of Europe rebelled, a series of models emerge: the Sicilian ‘ur-paradigm’ is that of an agricultural, in his view pre-modern, polity with significant liberal inroads; in Paris, on the contrary, a relatively advanced form of finance capital was contested by the people of a nation state in the sense of a formally established polity that coincides with an imagined community. He then carries out a similar exercise with regard to the protests of the Arab Spring, taking the Egyptian and the Syrian cases as contrasting examples. While Egypt was a comprador military dictatorship with powerful urban contestation in the form of organized labour, Syria was a minority-controlled, military-security state with an embryonic (sub-)urban proletariat and an alienated, then insurgent, rural population. Heacock correlates the European and the Arab models in terms of the depth and breadth of mobilization in the light of political economy issues and systems of rule. He then compares them to each other in the quest for broader trans-historical and trans-geographical patterns that provide insight into past, present and possible future popular explosions.

The comparison reveals a symmetrical concatenation of events in 1848 and 2011. Demographic pressures, global financial collapse and an economic downturn in the context of a liberal market order, state corruption and, finally, a series of minor events such as the dismissal of a history professor or a self-immolation provide the backdrop or enabling conditions of contestation without necessarily entailing it in any automatic sense. To conclude, Heacock insists on another parallel, namely the incapacity of the powers-that-be to anticipate major contestation and revolutions, proven if necessary by the fact that they fail to take measures to forestall them.

Elaborating on some of the political economy issues discussed by Heacock, Fred Lawson argues that academic writings on the Arab Spring fail to provide a cogent discussion of the 2008–9 international financial crisis and its impact on trade, investment and labour throughout the Middle East and North Africa. In his view, the worldwide disruption affected different Arab countries in markedly divergent ways, depending on the peculiar form and level of each country's integration into the international economy, as well as the Social Structure of Accumulation (SSA) that regulated each country's domestic political–economic order. Lawson relates these differences to the highly divergent patterns of popular mobilization and regime responses in Algeria and Yemen, two countries that so far have attracted comparatively little attention from students of the Arab Spring.

Emphasizing the limits of analyses such as these, which in his eyes belong to the realm of ‘objectivism’, John Chalcraft argues that transcending the dichotomy that opposes such approaches to ‘subjectivism’ helps to highlight the significance and role of initiative, interpretation and creativity in this major episode of political contention – without dissolving entirely the role of history and context or omitting the significance of material forms of domination. While initiative and creativity are as real as contestation and produce their effects, they do not unfold or operate in a vacuum. Transgressive contention makes use of the dissolution and disarticulation of existing hegemonic structures, the sudden appearance of new possibilities, and recombines disorganized and disarticulated elements into new patterns, introducing hitherto marginal or unknown forces into the social fray. But the success of such initiatives is limited by the material forms of domination that they confront and by no means always succeed in overthrowing.

Focusing on the much debated difference between monarchies and republics, Thomas Demmelhuber confirms that the type of political regime did impact on politics in and after the Arab Spring. However, he also argues that beyond such differences, the state as a normative frame of reference is central to the understanding of political change and its nature. Moreover, the ways in which power is exercised, different pathways of state-building and the related patterns of social interaction are essential for understanding the resilience – in particular of the Gulf monarchies – that his argument focuses on. By elaborating on these factors he provides a more complex explanation for the survival of these monarchies than traditional rent-based approaches with their widely acknowledged analytical limits beyond the macro-level.

Discussing the same issue from a slightly different angle, Alain Dieckhoff also concludes that the distinction between monarchies and republics is too simple to explain trajectories of regime survival, transformation or even demise. He contends that different monarchies utilized different coping strategies for survival. For instance, the Gulf monarchies were able to hand out material benefits to their nationals, which in return afforded them at least a semblance of legitimacy. Less well-off monarchies carefully crafted limited reforms that entailed a degree of political decompression without weakening their own positions. They could call elections all the more easily, because unlike republics, their seat of power by definition remains shielded from elections. Contrary to the ‘King's Dilemma’ famously discussed by Samuel Huntington, the combination of ultimately unaccountable power and a degree of popular participation is thus a valid option for monarchies in order to survive.

The two concluding contributions return to broader differences that mark societal and economic transformations in the various Arab states, in particular issues of state formation and state ‘reformation’ and their impact on popular protests, regime responses and the ensuing political dynamics.

Eberhard Kienle first distinguishes between (i) countries in which large-scale peaceful contestation has rapidly entailed major forms of regime transformation either without violence or with a relatively limited degree of it (even though these transformations may have been thrown into question by subsequent and more violent events) and without foreign intervention; (ii) others where more limited peaceful contestation has led the rulers to concede equally limited political adjustments; (iii) yet others where initially peaceful contestation was met by violent repression that either led to a prolonged stalemate marked by temporary or continuous fighting between the incumbents and their challengers, or was followed by overt foreign intervention to resolve the impasse; and (iv) countries where contestation has remained narrowly circumscribed if at all it occurred, and political regimes remained basically untouched. He then relates these different trajectories to regime types or ‘forms of government’, including Dieckhoff”s distinctions between different types of monarchies, societal cleavages, income from rent, and in particular processes of state formation that in some cases reach back to the eighteenth century.

Finally, Nadine Sika analyses processes of state formation in more recent periods, mainly the post-colonial era in the 1940s, 1950s and even beyond. She argues that the co-optation of a range of societal groups and actors by the regimes, the growth and use of their coercive apparatuses and their international relations were the most decisive factors accounting for the different political trajectories in and after the recent uprisings. The rather peaceful departure of Mubarak in Egypt on the one hand, and the civil war in Syria on the other, reflect differences at these three levels; the attempts by both regimes to establish their hegemony over the public sphere and to control the economy have not attenuated these differences.

The contributions to this volume were initially drafted for a workshop that the editors convened at the 14th Mediterranean Research Meeting in Mersin funded by the University of Mersin and the Mediterranean Programme of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute in Florence. The contributions and introduction were copy-edited by Virginia Myers while references and transliterations were standardized by Alaa el-Mahrakawy and Dina Agha.

Notes

1 Lisa Anderson, ‘Absolutism and the Resilience of Monarchies in the Middle East’, Political Science Quarterly 106, no. 1 (1991), pp. 1–15.

2 Bahgat Korany, ‘Alien and Besieged Yet Here to Stay: the Contradictions of the Arab Territorial State’, in Ghassan Salame (ed.), The Foundations of the Arab State (London: Croom Helm, 1987), pp. 47–74.

3 See for example, Robert Springborg, ‘The Precarious Economies of Arab Springs’, Survival 53 (2011), pp. 85–104; Ellen Lust, ‘Opposition Cooperation and Uprisings in the Arab World’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 38, no. 3 (2011), pp. 425–34; Jason Brownlee, Democracy Prevention: The Politics of the US–Egyptian Alliance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Mark Hass and David Lesh, The Arab Spring: Change and Resistance in the Middle East (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2013); Rex Brynen et al., Beyond the Arab Spring: Authoritarianism and Democr...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Comparing Incomparables: The Spring of Peoples and the Fall of States – 1848 and 2011
• 3. Revisiting the Political Economy of the Arab Uprisings: Algeria and Yemen Compared
• 4. What Difference Does Contestation Make? Agency and its Limits in the Arab Uprisings
• 5. The Gulf Monarchies: State-building, Legitimacy and Social Order
• 6. The Resilience of Arab Monarchies and the ‘Arab Spring’: A Comparative Approach
• 7. Popular Contestation, Regime Transformation and State Formation
• 8. Arab States, Regime Change and Social Contestation Compared: The Cases of Egypt and Syria
• Back cover