The Modern Middle East (41 page)

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.”
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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.

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, stateled 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.

On the surface,
mukhaberat
states look civilian. The military’s control over and presence within the state have become less erratic, more subtle, and, despite an apparent decrease in the number of army officers within the state, more pervasive. From a Weberian perspective, one might say that the military’s rule has become routinized, having assumed a “pattern of normative rules” that have bestowed it with a new and seemingly permanent sense of “legality.”
²⁵
The state has retained its essential dependence on the military. But it has also increasingly civilianized itself, thereby enhancing its legitimacy among the population and ensuring its permanence. Virtually all heads of state in this category come from military backgrounds: presidents Hafiz Al-Assad, Ben Ali, Zeroul (Algeria), and al-Bashir (Sudan) all held the rank of general within the army. Before becoming Sadat’s vice president in 1975, Hosni Mubarak was the commander of the Egyptian air force. But apart from special occasions, hardly any of these leaders were seen or photographed in their military uniforms.
²⁶
There was also a notable decline in the number of other policy makers from military backgrounds. In the wake of the 1967 War, for example, 65.4 percent of President Nasser’s cabinet members came from the military. By contrast, fewer than 13 percent of all Sadat’s cabinet members had military backgrounds, and the figure for Mubarak’s cabinets was only 10 percent.
²⁷

The once highly visible, active presence of the military in the higher echelons of the state gave way to pervasive reliance on the military in more
subtle, often nonpolitical ways. Beyond weapons procurement and small-arms manufacturing, the armed forces of Syria, Iraq (before the U.S. invasion), Sudan, and Egypt all became involved in a variety of economic ventures, ranging from fruit processing to running outlet stores and construction.
²⁸
Even after the 2011 uprisings, the armed forces still received the largest share of the national budget, retained a strong and visible presence in the country (on street corners, highways, and intercity roads), were generally viewed positively in society, and continued to enjoy special privileges (in the form of housing, special officers’ clubs, and cooperative shops). The
mukhaberat,
meanwhile, were everywhere, or at least were thought to be everywhere, although the state went to considerable pains to maintain a semblance of democracy. At times, even loyal opposition parties were allowed to function. The parliament met regularly and discussed peripheral policy issues. And pro forma presidential elections were held according to the cycle mandated by the constitution.