Since at least the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 1991 Gulf war, pundits have been expecting the democratisation of the Middle East. Today, Washington has put the issue at the top of the global agenda. Those anticipating democratization have, however, generally been disappointed. But it is less some exceptional cultural resistance in the Middle East, than the region's experience of state building amidst unfavourable structural conditions, that has largely defeated or deterred experiments with democracy.
The circumstances in which the regional states system was imposed under Western imperialism--according to the interests of the West, not the desires of the indigenous populations--inflicted Middle East states with liabilities making democratization very difficult. Because arbitrarily-imposed borders fragmented what had once been a cultural unity into often-artificial states, pre-existing sub-state (tribe, sect) and supra-state identities (Arabism, Islam) continued to powerfully compete with the new states for mass loyalties. An inevitable result of this forced fragmentation of the Arab world into a multitude of small weak states was that the main popular political movements—pan-Arabism and political Islam—prioritized identity and unity over democratisation and where they came to power they sought legitimacy not through democratic consent but by championing identity against imperialism. In the West it was usually the case that the solving of the national problem preceded and was a precondition for democratization. For, without a secure national identity, competitive politics may exacerbate social divisions while the strong hand of a leader above ethnic or religious divisions may be seen as the most workable solution. Democracy has worked best in those Middle East states, such as Turkey and Israel, where indigenous leaders were able to carve out their own territory, one more congruent with national identity. Another consequence of artificially imposed boundaries was that irredentism (dissatisfaction with the incongruence of identity communities with a claimed territory) was built into the very fabric of the states system. The consequent desire to revise borders caught the states in an acute security dilemma in which each perceived the other as a threat. Where, largely on the Arab-non-Arab fault lines of the Middle East, irredentism has been militarised—issuing in the Arab-Israeli and Gulf wars--this has naturally fed the rise of national-security states hostile to democratisation.
In Barrington Moore’s famous aphorism: “No bourgeoisie, no democracy.” A capitalist class is widely thought to be the powerful independent force which could extract democracy from the state or at least balance state power sufficiently to allow space for civil society. But in the Middle East an accumulation of factors has kept the bourgeoisie weak: the pre-modern state's hostility to private property in land and to the accumulation of merchant wealth; imperialism’s ruining of local industries and reduction of the Middle East to the status of a raw material exporter in the global economy; the parallel formation of large unproductive landed classes in control of much of national wealth and having little incentive to invest; the consequent smallness of the organized working class, another social force that was instrumental in democratisation in the West; and the revolutions which swept away what industrial bourgeoisie had managed to emerge in a wave of nationalizations.
As a result of the weakness of the capitalist class, the military, being the best organized force in society, widely came to substitute for the bourgeoisie in the leadership of development. The state became the main entrepreneur and investor and to the extent it allowed or fostered a private capitalist class, this class was dependent on the state for much of its business and often took a rent-seeking "crony capitalist" form. As the state took over or owned much of the economy, people became dependent on it for their livelihoods and were deterred from demanding democratisation. Not only identity but also “bread” was put before “freedom.”
Finally, the stuff of authoritarian state building was available. Indigenous traditions of political association were readily adapted to authoritarian state formation. The historic strength of nomadic tribalism, reinforced by the region’s mosaic of minorities, gave special strength to “small group” loyalties and politics. While the pervasiveness of such loyalties made it harder to construct broad-based civil society or strong political parties, assabiya (exclusionary group solidarity) was widely manipulated by authoritarian state builders to construct cores of loyal followers who they placed at the levers of state power. Moreover, the socialization transmitted by the patriarchal family was arguably congruent with patrimonial rule at the state level: just as the father expects obedience in the family so the ruler does in the state. A kinship culture is especially compatible with the use of clientalism as a form of political linkage between elites and masses. But what has happened in the Middle East is that "traditional" assabiya and clientalism have been fused with imported "modern" political technology which give the state domination over society: the rational bureaucracy, the Leninist party-organization, corporatist syndical associations and modern surveillance techniques. This has produced hybrid states significantly more robust than their pure “traditional” or “modern” types would likely be. Finally the exceptional access of the Middle Eastern state to unearned outside resources—that is, “rent”-- whether Cold War patronage (aid and cheap arms) or oil revenues, provided resources for authoritarian state building. Rent was crucial to the construction of large state structures and to the servicing of the clientele networks by which opposition was coopted and mass constituencies fostered. Rent also meant the state enjoyed exceptional autonomy of indigenous society: it did not need to reach the sort of social contract reached in democracies where the people enjoy representation in return for taxation; rather, in an alternative sort of tacit contract, citizens trade their political acquiescence for economic entitlements provided by the state.
In conclusion, the authoritarian states of the region are not, as naïve advocates of democratization seem to think, somehow unnatural or lacking congruence with their environments; rather, they represent a successful adaptation to their particular environment. As long as their congruence with their environment persists they will remain effective obstacles to democratisation; the latter in turn, can only proceed if environmental change disrupts this congruence.
JIME Center.All rights reserved.