The Modern Middle East (51 page)

Often the big man, “the boss,” began to make big mistakes.
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The biggest mistake, of course, was for the president to start believing in his own centrality to the country’s political stability and future destiny. Dismissive and deeply suspicious of their peoples, the presidents all too often began believing their own rhetoric. As one observer has noted in relation to Tunisia, “Ben Ali’s was a particularly insulting dictatorship,” one in which the state-run media and all its other agencies participated in producing a cult of personality. The president’s portraits were everywhere, the media lauding his every initiative, “with Ben Ali the ever avuncular and enlightened ruler.”
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Saddam Hussein is said to have remarked in the late 1980s, “The law is anything I write on a scrap of paper.”
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In Syria, Assad made sure that all combat units were commanded by an Alawi and that none of their equipment was moved without his permission.
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The predominant features of these “presidential monarchies,” particularly in Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria, included a repressive and highly robust security apparatus that stifled dissent and spread fear across society; a cult of personality that placed the leader, and at times his family, above all else, representing the leader as indispensable to the nation’s progress and well-being; and a token republicanism symbolized by pro forma elections with foregone conclusions.
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A pyramid-like structure therefore emerged in which the president’s office, at the apex, relied on a network of intelligence agencies, the police, senior members of the armed forces, and crony capitalists, followed by the main agencies of civilian administration—such as ministries and provincial governorships—and centers of ideological legitimation and control, the most important of which were universities, a tame judiciary, and an equally tame religious establishment.
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In Syria, the military, the ruling elite, and the secret police became so intertwined that it became “impossible to separate the Assad regime from the security establishment.”
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Members of the president’s family were frequently deeply involved in various state-related business ventures. Sons and other relatives of the president became “part of a single team dedicated to the promotion of mutual family interests.”
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In Egypt, the wealth of President Mubarak and his family was estimated at anywhere between $40 and $70 billion, and
thirty-nine of his son’s associates are alleged to have made on average $1 billion each.
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In Tunisia, Ben Ali’s extensive network of close relatives who benefited from commercial deals simply became known as “the Family.”
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In Syria, the president’s cousin Rami Makhlouf was said to control as much as 60 percent of the country’s economy.
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Such presidential systems often displayed a deep contradiction, on the one hand centralizing power within a presidency intimately embedded within the armed forces or the police, while on the other hand relying on the legitimizing powers of the constitution and regularly held parliamentary elections.
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Such a contradiction resulted in five basic weaknesses: problems of political management; the emergence of a large crony sector; the system’s inability to incorporate the young into its political and ideological projects; the regime’s limited capacities to respond to domestic crises; and a preoccupation with stability at almost all costs.
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Whenever the state was faced with a crisis, its default response was to become more repressive. Over time, “security states” emerged with highly uneven consequences for their citizens, allowing great freedoms and opportunities for enrichment to a few but closing off most life chances to others.
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Presidents, meanwhile, became increasingly more convinced of “the myth of their own governing skills and so on their own indispensable role as guardians and promoters of their country’s security and national progress.”
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One of the interesting features of a number of the security states was the retreat of the army out of actual institutions of power, especially the executive, and its return to the barracks. Steadily, the army, from which most presidents originally hailed, became depoliticized and professionalized, replaced instead by the police and the intelligence services as the primary supporting pillar of the state.
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The replacement of the military with the police as one of the primary sources of regime support meant the state’s continued reliance on repression as its default posture in relation to society. In fact, as the president’s powers increased, so did his reliance on the police and intelligence agencies.
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In Egypt, as the military pulled back from politics and as the police steadily took over the buttressing of the political system, the popularity of the military was somewhat restored and that of the police increasingly declined.
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Under Mubarak, the Egyptian military became more involved in economic and business matters, acquiring its own commercial interests.
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In Algeria, President Bouteflika similarly oversaw a steady demilitarization of the state machinery in the 1990s, reinstating instead the executive presidency as the supreme arbiter of policy debates and conflicts of interest.
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The Algerian military, of course, sought to push
back against curbs on its powers, ultimately unsuccessfully, having to contend with Bouteflika’s reelection in 2004 and again in 2009.

The security state maintained a plethora of mechanisms for regime legitimation, including regular elections, occasional referendums, official or semiofficial human rights organizations, and, invariably, a Ministry of Social Welfare.
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But the police and the security agencies were so pervasive that often the number of people employed by them exceeded the number of soldiers in the armed forces.
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In Ben Ali’s Tunisia, an estimated 10 percent of the population were somehow sustained by employment in the state’s security services.
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Meanwhile, the government party, the Constitutional Democratic Rally, RCD, claimed a membership of two million in a country with a total population of only ten million.
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In Egypt, by the late 2000s the internal security service outnumbered active military personnel by three to one and was estimated to be an astounding 1.5 million strong.
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The state often also relied on capitalists to finance, or at least to oversee, many of the state’s development projects and initiatives. Many of these capitalists, with intimate personal ties to the president and his family members, were beneficiaries of the sale of state assets in uncompetitive bids at bargain prices.
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Egypt’s National Democratic Party became “the party of big business,” its top members being the likes of Ahmed Ezz, the steel magnate, and Taher Helmy, the president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt.
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In the 1980s and the 1990s, structural adjustment programs forced states across the Middle East to pull back from providing a number of welfare service and social programs. Often with state encouragement, as in Egypt, religious welfare and charity organizations stepped in to fill the gap and to provide services left undelivered by the state’s retreat.
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Importantly, Islamic charity and social services did not grow only in opposition to the state: as was the case in Egypt, they developed a symbiotic, mutually reinforcing relationship with it.
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Ironically, therefore, repressive authoritarianism and a vibrant civil society often coexisted side by side.
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Economic difficulties also prompted states to recalibrate their social postures in ways that served their purposes, sometimes by liberalizing but more often by falling back on their default impulse to intensify repression. The 1990s saw modest liberalization experiments of one form or another across the region. Even Saudi Arabia saw a political opening of sorts in 1992, when King Fahd announced the convening of a national consultative council.
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And in Yemen “a democratic environment was flourishing.”
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In 2005, an “Arab Spring” of sorts began unfolding in the region. Iraqis went
to the polls for the first time since the fall of Saddam; Syria withdrew from Lebanon after mass protests in downtown Beirut; Saudi Arabia staged municipal elections; and determined opposition by Egyptian activists forced Mubarak to give meaning and substance, albeit temporarily, to his promises of reforms.
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Most states responded to the economic difficulties of the 1980s and the 1990s politically, through limited openings, rather than economically, through structural adjustment programs such as reducing subsidies or shedding some of the weight of bloated bureaucracies. The structural problems of the economy therefore went unaddressed, with the state constantly searching for new ways to mask its deficiencies and difficulties. But unemployment remained a chronic problem, and with it astoundingly high levels of poverty. By early 2008, to take one example, some 40 percent of Egyptians were living on less than $2 a day.
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In 2010, Syria’s official unemployment rate was 8 percent. But independent estimates put the number closer to 20 percent.
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Given the necessities of rule, regimes across the region retained a high degree of pragmatism, using ideologies in quite instrumentalist ways. By and large, to fit the state’s changing political needs as dictated by circumstances, official ideologies were so watered down as to include nothing more than the twin pillars of development and nationalism.
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In Egypt, in the 1970s the state combined brutal repression in Upper and Middle Egypt with “a cynical bargain with some devoted enemies of the secular idea.”
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In the 1990s, it turned a blind eye toward the Islamist discourse so long as it did not directly challenge the state and its legitimacy.
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Others were less subtle in seeking to manipulate popular sentiments for political purposes. In Bahrain, throughout the 2000s the state retrenched and sought shelter in sectarianism to compensate for its diminishing support among the country’s Shiʿites. It continued to gerrymander districts and embarked on a campaign of strategic naturalization of Sunnis from neighboring states. In 2006 it refused to work with the Shiʿite Al-Wefaq Party even after the Al-Wefaq’s decision to take part in parliamentary elections had resulted in a breakaway splinter called the Al Haq.
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Not surprisingly, the Al-Khalifa monarchy’s efforts aimed at marginalizing the Al-Wefaq, which was willing to work within the system, cost the ruling family what little legitimacy it had left among the country’s Shiʿite population.
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Regardless of the robustness of its coercive apparatus, no state can rule through sheer repression alone, and it must strive to carve out for itself
some semblance of legitimacy, no matter how narrow and contrived, with some sectors of the population. In the Middle East this effort crystallized in the form of a state-imposed ruling bargain. In broad terms, this ruling bargain was an implicit understanding that evolved over time between state elites on the one hand and social actors on the other, based on which the state sought to cater to the economic, physical, and emotional needs of the populace in return for general political compliance and consent. The emerging—or, more appropriately, imposed—state-society consensus had its share of frictions, and periodic episodes of economic slowdown or outright political incapacity (as in Iran in the late 1970s, Egypt in the early 1980s, and Jordan and Morocco in the late 1980s) resulted at times in violent bouts of political instability. By and large, however, with the exception of prerevolutionary Iran, Middle Eastern states were able to effectively respond to the various crises that cropped up until the late 2000s, and, backed by a fair amount of coercion, reestablished old ruling bargains, albeit often with slightly modified reformulations.

These modified formats invariably took the shape of institutional devices aimed at broadening the scope of state inclusiveness, such as the
majlis
in the Arabian peninsula or the parliament in Morocco, Jordan, and Kuwait. But they served primarily as safety valves, institutional modifications de--signed to make entrenched authoritarianism appear more palatable. In the long run, they undermined the prospects of democratization by strengthening authoritarian elites and enhancing the institutional mechanism by which the state could respond to emerging crises and threats. Social actors, meanwhile, remained largely on the sidelines, threatened with arrests, imprisonment, and even death if they openly and directly called on state leaders to abide by the principles of democracy. The evolving “national dialogue” among activists and the literati—as carried on in journals, newspapers, and books—thus became preoccupied with evading government censorship and harassment.