Political Parties in the Middle East

Siavush Randjbar-Daemi, Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Lauren Banko

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429749766
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This comprehensive collection addresses the important question of political parties in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Written by historians, political scientists, and sociologists of the region, the book provides a pertinent analytical framework to understand the often complex and turbulent histories of these political parties, their role within the region, and their prospects in the wake of the post-2011 Arab Uprisings. The authors explore a rich and varied range of case studies including Iran, Turkey, Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon, and Morocco.

This book examines where political parties and organizations have been crucial to shaping contemporary historical events and political contestation, but also highlights their shortcomings and failures to deliver on the ambitions and hopes they had often evoked amongst their supporters. Furthermore, it looks at how political parties and their activities have intersected with important issues and themes such as gender, human rights, international solidarity, revolution and social transformation, and sectarian identity.

This book will be of great interest to students and researchers of political science, particularly within the MENA region. It was originally published as a special issue of the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies.

1 Introduction

Siavush Randjbar-Daemi, Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi and Lauren Banko

The evils of political parties are all too evident; therefore, the problem that should be examined is this: do they contain enough good to compensate for their evils and make their preservation desirable?¹

Simone Weil

The first decades of the twenty-first century, like the previous one, have already witnessed protests, uprisings, rebellions, armed insurrections and calls for revolution, all of which forcefully underscore the ongoing and tumultuous re-negotiation of the relationship between state elites and societies in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). From the major urban conurbations of Egypt to the more insular quarters of Morocco, from the Pearl Roundabout of Manama to the city squares of central Tehran, all have witnessed the concerted efforts of disaffected citizens aspiring to transform the prevailing relationship between government and the governed.² The erstwhile social compact, upon which state elites and apparatchiks had long counted and sought to preserve intact, found itself cast to the wind leaving many befuddled and bemused and at a loss of how to respond to or understand the current conjuncture. The current volume initiates an investigation into the various histories, disparate roles and political articulations of the political party in the Middle East over the last century and in light of these revolutionary (and counter-revolutionary) times.

Political parties are complex organizational machines which tend to escape easy categorization and elude any single explanatory framework.³ A pervasive feature of modern political systems, they have long been regarded as an essential ingredient of representative parliamentary democracy and its cognates. This is even while the latter can hardly be said to exhaust political parties’ multifarious roles, forms and functions. In modern Western political history, parties have generally been thought of as one of the key sites of organized political activity for antagonistic elites, and more recently the middle and working classes, and held to be essential in the process of defining the leading political issues of the day. In the words of Cavatorta and Storm: ‘Parties, in short, aggregate and articulate the interests of the citizenry and formulate political programmes, thereby strengthening their voice’. Moreover, ‘they are better at aggregating interests, coordinating decision-making in parliament, and at ensuring vertical accountability, that is, when power is necessarily delegated from the citizenry to a select group of representatives’.⁴ But parties cannot and should not be viewed as passive reflections of a series of disembodied and unmediated interests, which they proceed to merely aggregate and represent. Thus, according to de Leon, Desai and Tuğal, clearly taking inspiration from the work of Laclau and Mouffe and their conception of ‘political articulation’, rather than inert reflections of extant social preferences and identities, political parties should be understood as crucial ‘agencies that structure social cleavages’.⁵ Or, alternatively, we might say, channelling Laclau and Mouffe in their classic work, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, ‘politico-hegemonic articulations retroactively create the interests they claim to represent’.⁶

In their myriad and diverse struggles, parties along with their representatives and members have fought for limitations to absolutism, the defence of private property and entrenched hierarchies, parliamentary representation and the extension of the franchise, workers’ rights, and land and wealth redistribution, often transforming the institutions of political rule, social reproduction and societal cleavages in the process. Nevertheless, as should already be clear enough, the notion that parties are the standard-bearers of the ineluctable march of democracy has long ceased to be a convincing proposition.

In the aftermath of World War I, the states comprising the MENA region, both independent and under forms of colonial rule, began to increasingly experience patterns of political mobilization and participation that resembled those which had become commonplace in metropolitan centres, which had overseen the region’s uneven incorporation into the world economy and had ensured its subordination to Europe’s competing global empires.⁷ Where people and social groups had previously pursued political activity by means of secret societies, or redress through traditional associations such as guilds, village elders, urban notables and the clergy,⁸ with the advent of the modern era, the political party came to be viewed as an ever-more appropriate and efficacious means of orienting and channelling political action, dispensing patronage and articulating political demands.⁹

Following World War II and the gradual retreat of direct imperial tutelage in tandem with the onset of the global Cold War, this trend gathered pace and saw radical projects such as Arab nationalism, Baʿathism, Communism and Nasserism sharply rise in influence and transform their societies in the process.¹⁰ The chief concerns of this epoch included the quest for Arab unity, national independence and the overturning of the traditional sources of social power and elite rule which were often locked into a relationship of reciprocity or dependency vis-à-vis the imperial mandate and/or colonial state.¹¹ The region was changed irrevocably in an era which witnessed the flourishing of strong aspirations for decolonization and non-alignment, and enormous socio-economic and structural transformations upending the social power of traditional notables and the landed classes. These objectives often came to fruition through strong and charismatic leaders and the one-party states they led, all the while grounding claims to legitimacy in the mobilization of wide-ranging coalitions of groups enveloping the intelligentsia, members of the new professional classes and state bureaucracies, recent urban migrants and the peasantry.¹²

In the aftermath of the defeat of the Arab front in June 1967, the Palestinian cause for national liberation assumed a more independent line as evidenced by the early politics of Fatah,¹³ while Israel’s party system found itself forced to come to terms with a rapidly shifting demography and at times a capricious proportional representation system under the shadow of a military occupation penetrating virtually all facets of public and everyday life.¹⁴ By contrast, following the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the consolidation of the Islamic Republic, Iran saw the birth of intra-elite factional contestation labouring under the imprimatur of theocratic rule, and has subsequently struggled to institute a stable party political system. What we have often been faced with instead are loose electoral coalitions which, despite some degree of ideological and political coherence, tend to be heavily reliant on personal relationships and alliances which can change and disappear almost as quickly as they appeared.¹⁵ Meanwhile, elsewhere in the MENA, Islamist organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, despite their longevity, sought to persevere in debilitating authoritarian contexts through the cultivation of welfare regimes and solidarity networks to permeate the population at the grassroots level.¹⁶ In both cases, these varied proponents of political Islam eschewed the single-party model, which was abandoned in Iran after 1987, when the Islamic Republic Party fell prey to internal in-fighting and found itself unable to forge a centralized party and accompanying bureaucracy through which to rule.¹⁷ This panoply of party systems, and their relationships with modern state institutions such as the civilian bureaucracy and army, as well as with the old and new social classes, has until very recently largely evaded comprehensive assessment or an integrative analytical framework.¹⁸

Needless to say, the wave of upheavals which swept across the MENA region following January 2011 has led to significant challenges concerning the place and the continued relevance of political parties. As social movements, both informal and highly integrated, take centre-stage in this profoundly networked information age,¹⁹ the role and function of the political party as gatekeeper to the levers and trappings of power are often considered to have been eroded and markedly diminished. While the post-2011 Arab uprisings may well have marked the weakening of the party political form as it had hitherto stood, the counter-revolutions which almost invariably followed reaffirmed the importance of highly regimented, hierarchical and, often, militarized organizations to political outcomes in evolving social conflicts. The Green Movement of Iran and the Tahrir Square protests, commonly seen by participants and observers alike as shunning structured political organization and leadership, made them all the more unpredictable.²⁰ More sceptical voices were, however, quick to point out the inherent limitations and inability of such movements to overturn decades-long and deeply entrenched structures of political and economic domination confronting the popular-democratic upsurge.²¹ The tenor of the ongoing debate over democratic confederalism and the political model and form of collective self-government inspired by the ideas of Abdullah Öcalan and Murray Bookchin, and embodied in the Democratic Union Party (PYD) in Rojava or northeastern Syria, despite its idiosyncratic nature, would appear to only confirm the suspicions of those who were doubtful so-called ‘leaderless movements’ could realize the larger and deeper structural changes aspired to by their participants and well-wishers.²² Finally, the apparent sectarianization of several geopolitical conflicts in the region has been strongly linked to political groupings and mobilizations by identity entrepreneurs along confessional lines, in turn posing the question as to whether the ‘sectarian party’ is here with us to stay.²³ In short, the debates over the nature, function and efficaciousness of political parties, and their relationship to processes of democratization, authoritarian rule, ethnic and sectarian identity, class struggle and economic transformation, are a long way from being satisfactorily resolved.

These broad reflections on past and present forms of party political organization in the Middle East were the initial impetus for a conference supported by the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World (CASAW) and convened at the University of Manchester on 28–29 January 2016. Several of the artic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Political parties in MENA: their functions and development
• 3 Protesting gender discrimination from within: women’s political representation on behalf of Islamic parties
• 4 ‘We wander in your footsteps’—reciprocity and contractility in Lebanese personality-centred parties
• 5 The party, the Gama’a and the Tanzim: the organizational dynamics of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s post-2011 failure
• 6 Party and governance in the Arab republics
• 7 The origins of Communist Unity: anti-colonialism and revolution in Iran’s tri-continental moment
• 8 Political Parties and Women’s Rights in Turkey
• 9 The historical emergence and transformation of the Moroccan political party field
• 10 The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine during the First Intifada: from Opportunity to Marginalization (1987–1990)
• Index