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Minority politics in the Middle East and North Africa: the prospects for transformative change
Eva Pföstl and Will Kymlicka
This special issue explores the prospects for what Jacob Mundy calls âtransformative minority politicsâ in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region â that is, a form of minority politics that strengthens democratic reform in the region, and that helps deepen a culture of human rights and democratic citizenship. The cases examined in the special issue include the Amazigh in North Africa, the Copts in Egypt, the Kurds in Iraq, the Palestinians in Israel, the âminoritarianâ regimes in Syria and Bahrain, and the various ethnic minorities in Iran. In this introduction, we try to situate this debate in a larger historical and international context, identifying some of the factors that might help support a new transformative minority politics in the region, while also emphasizing the factors that have inhibited it in the past, and why they remain powerful.
In the MENA region, as in much of the postcolonial world, ethnic politics is widely seen as a threat to social cohesion and political stability, if not outright secession and irredentism, and authoritarian rulers have justified their repressive rule in part on the grounds that they alone can contain this threat. While democratic reformers often criticize authoritarian regimes for exaggerating the threat posed by ethnic politics, these reformers have themselves typically been ambivalent, if not hostile, to the political mobilization of minorities. At best, ethnic-based movements are seen as fragmenting the forces for democratic reform, and at worst, are seen as opportunistic actors who will betray the broader reform movement if promised token particularistic benefits. In short, the spectre of minority politics is seen as reinforcing older authoritarian, clientelistic or patriarchal political tendencies.
As a result, projects of democratic reform in the MENA region have said little about the place of minorities and minority rights in their vision of reform, implying that these issues are best deferred to some indefinite future. While many people agree that the Arab Spring is, in some sense, a âbattle for pluralismâ,1 there is reluctance to discuss what this pluralism might actually mean for the political claims of minorities, for fear of triggering divisive conflicts and undemocratic tendencies.
Is there an alternative? Can we imagine what Jacob Mundy (2010) calls âtransformative minority politicsâ â that is, a form of minority politics that strengthens democratic reform in the region, and that helps deepen a culture of human rights and democratic citizenship? The goal of this special issue is to explore whether this is indeed a realistic prospect in the Middle East and North Africa. The cases examined in the papers include the Amazigh in North Africa, the Copts in Egypt, the Kurds in Iraq, the Palestinians in Israel, the âminoritarianâ regimes in Syria and Bahrain, and the various ethnic minorities in Iran.2
In this brief introduction, we try to situate this debate in a larger historical and international context, identifying some of the factors that might help support a new transformative minority politics in the region, while also emphasizing the factors that have inhibited it in the past, and why they remain powerful.3 As our authors show, the barriers to a new minority politics are multiple and deeply rooted, and it would be naive to ignore or minimize them. Indeed, well-intended but ill-informed international efforts by scholars or activists to promote minority rights can backfire if they ignore these factors. Yet new possibilities for transformative minority politics may be emerging, and as GĂŒldem BĂŒyĂŒksaraç puts it in her contribution to this special issue, if we take due âethnographic careâ, there may be ways that scholarship can help identify and sustain these possibilities.
Setting the context
Since the Arab Spring, the MENA region has become the new front line in the struggle for democratization and for open societies. As the experience of other regions has shown, one of the most significant challenges facing democratization relates to minority rights. This challenge is perhaps greater today than ever before, in part due to changes in the broader international context. We live today in a world that is saturated with a global discourse of diversity and pluralism, strongly shaped by Western liberal-democratic experiences of minority and indigenous rights, which frames these rights as a natural and appropriate extension of existing human rights principles, and as essential features of any decent state (Kymlicka 2007). This is reflected, for example, in the 1992 UN Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities and the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.4
These normative expectations are increasingly applied to the Middle East. Indeed, as Elisabeth Picard (2012, 67) notes, âfor every state of the Middle East, respect for minority rights has become â together with womenâs rights â the barometer of a successful transition to democracyâ. And we can find increasing examples of minority elites in the MENA region invoking these international norms to justify their claims. Compared to earlier waves of democratization, the broader international context now encourages and legitimates minority political mobilization.
And yet this global discourse of minority rights and multiculturalism is strongly resisted in many MENA countries, and repudiated as a foreign and divisive influence. Throughout the region, minorities remain âmarked citizensâ whose political mobilization is viewed with distrust if not outright repression.5 Indeed, the minority issue remains a taboo topic in many countries.
Ironically, Arab states voted unanimously for the two UN Declarations in 1992 and 2007 (Baderin 2013), yet the subsequent repression of minority activists makes clear that this ritual support for minority and indigenous rights was not intended to encourage, or even permit, public debate or political mobilization aimed at actually claiming these rights. And unlike other regional organizations, neither the Arab League nor the Organization of the Islamic Conference has attempted to develop regionally specific interpretations or action plans for minority rights.6
This is not to deny the existence of a range of minority accommodations in various MENA countries7 â however, these accommodations have rarely, if ever, had the transformative and democratizing effects that advocates of minority rights aspire to. On the contrary, they are widely seen as bribes offered by authoritarian regimes to minority elites precisely on the condition that they do not challenge authoritarian and undemocratic state structures. They are viewed, not as harbingers of or vehicles for broader democratic and human rights reforms, but as part of the architecture of authoritarian rule. Even where minority elites have initially framed their demands in more transformative terms, states have managed to divorce minority accommodations from broader social change.8 As a result, even democratic reformers in the MENA region have not made minority rights a priority.
There are many factors that explain this resistance to the new minority politics, and each of our authors identifies features that are distinctive to their particular case, but three themes emerge repeatedly in the literature and we shall look at these in turn.9
The millet legacy
First, any discussion of minorities in the MENA region is immediately interpreted in the light of the long history of Ottoman policy towards minorities, known as the millet system. Indeed, many commentators have argued that the term âminorityâ in the Arab world is simply the modern secular replacement for the term âmilletâ, and hence minority rights are assumed to be âneo-milletâ claims. Under the millet system, the Ottoman Empire recognized that the other monotheistic âpeoples of the Bookâ â particularly Christians and Jews â were entitled not only to tolerance, but to a degree of self-government and internal autonomy. This served instrumental purposes for the Ottomans, but also was seen as a requirement of Islam, since the Koran mandates that Muslim rules protect religious minorities so long as they in turn accept Muslim rule. Ottoman millets are in this sense an interpretation of the Koranic principle of dhimmi or protected religious minorities.
While some authors see the heritage of the millets as a potential constructive resource for a new minority politics (e.g. Castellino and Cavanaugh 2013; Baderin 2013), others view it as a stigma that burdens minority claims. While the millets were unusually tolerant for their historical era, they were premised on a clear hierarchy. In this dhimmi or millet system, rights and duties were apportioned based in large part upon a religious classification. There were clear distinctions between Muslims and the dhimmi, premised on the assumption that the state belongs exclusively to Muslims, who then extend protection and toleration to subordinate groups. As a result, the status of dhimmi is seen as a second-class status â what critics call âdhimmitudeâ â based on a bond of submission, as well as marginalization from the nation.
Insofar as minority claims are interpreted as claims to millet-type arrangements, they are seen as inconsistent with modern conceptions of equal citizenship, national unity and democratic accountability. Of course, contemporary international norms of minority and indigenous rights have little if anything in common with this idea of dhimmitude. On the contrary, the UN goes out of its way to emphasize that minorities must be seen as full citizens, and that minority rights are intended in part to enable minorities to fully participate in society. Yet millets remain the most salient image of minority political status in the region.10 As a result, minority politics is associated not with empowerment, participation and contribution, but rather is âassociated with legal vulnerability, political marginality, and social inferiorityâ (Longva 2012, 67).
Colonial legacy
Minority politics is also burdened with the legacy of colonial manipulation and divide-and-rule strategies. Indeed, âprotection of minoritiesâ was one of the central justifications given for colonial rule. One need not go as far as to say that the colonial powers âinventedâ the minorities they then claimed to protect, but they certainly worked diligently to harden the boundaries between ethnic and religious groups, and to discourage the formation of any unified national liberation movement against colonial rule.11 Colonial rulers not only âprotectedâ certain minorities, but also privileged some of them, both materially (e.g. by giving them easier access to schooling, and hence greater access to civil service jobs) and symbolically (e.g. by describing the minorities as more civilized or more freedom-loving), while denigrating majorities. In short, âthe figure of the âminorityâ in Middle Eastern history has served as a site for the articulation and exercise of European powerâ (Mahmood 2012, 419).
At the time of independence, therefore, majority groups sometimes saw minority groups as illegitimately privileged at best, and disloyal collaborators at worst. And, of course, foreign powers continue to exploit the minority issue in the Middle East, so that minorities continue to be seen (rightly or wrongly) as collaborators with or fifth columns for external powers that threaten the larger state (Binder 1999). As a result, the very idea of âprotection of minoritiesâ, particularly where it involves potential appeal to international actors, is seen not as a legitimate and normal form of domestic political contestation, but as a geopolitical threat to state security. Therefore, minority politics in the region remains highly âsecuritizedâ.12 To avoid accusations of disloyalty, minorities must not only vocally swear their allegiance, but may even have to renounce the very idea of minority rights. ...
