North Africa

Politics, Region, and the Limits of Transformation

Yahia H. Zoubir, Haizam Amirah-Fernández

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415429207
• eBook ISBN: 9781134087396
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: International Economics
• Index: Economics

This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the contemporary Maghreb. Made up of contributions from leading academics in the field, it highlights specific issues of importance, including international and security affairs.

With profiles of individual countries and regional issues, such as migration, gender, integration, economics, and war in Western Sahara, as well as a section dealing with international relations and the Maghreb, including US and EU foreign policy and security issues, North Africa: Politics, Region, and the Limits of Transformation is a major resource for all students of Middle Eastern Studies and North African Politics.

Part I
The Maghreb States

The Limits of Transformation

1 Democratic Desires and the Authoritarian Temptation in the Central Maghreb¹

John P. Entelis

Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia (as well as Libya and Mauritania, the two other members of the Arab Maghreb Union) stand at a crucial crossroads in their political evolution as they face simultaneous challenges from domestic, regional, and global forces. Despite all surface appearances to the contrary, all three central Maghrebi states are governed autocratically. As such, they will be unable to meet the upcoming threats to their political stability, social cohesion, cultural integrity, and economic viability. One result will be increased domestic, regional, and global tensions as militant forces seep through these sociopolitical fault lines, finding support from and identification with similarly discontented co-religionists living in Europe. Terrorism is the most extreme manifestation of this diffused discontent made “legitimate” through an Islamic idiom of martyrdom.

The demands for political pluralism, democracy, and transparency continue to make themselves felt both within and outside society² The Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative³ is but one important and highly visible such effort originating from Washington, but similar appeals derive from diverse sources including international human rights organizations, NGOs, domestic political opponents both secular and Islamist, multilateral lending institutions, and regional groupings like the Arab League, which has produced three scathing reports, co-published with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), on the absence of political freedoms in all of the Arab world.⁴

Economically and socially as well, the demands for visible improvements in living standards and the quality of life cut across diverse social classes and occupational groupings. Despite repeated promises by ruling elites of significant improvements in macro- and microeconomic performance through accelerated structural adjustments, expanded privatization efforts, increased foreign direct investment, implementing transparency and the rule of law, rooting out corruption and nepotism, and creating an overall environment conducive to productive human effort, the full potential of all three Maghrebi economies remains unrealized.

These combined failures in the political and socioeconomic spheres have impacted negatively on migration flows and levels of foreign remittances. Such disruptions in critical financial life-lines have disoriented co-religionists on both sides of the Mediterranean as Maghrebis surviving precariously in ghetto-like suburbs outside large, prosperous European cities mirror the situation of many of their Arab brothers and sisters living in the “homelands.”⁵

Such conditions of political oppression, social marginalization, economic deprivation, and cultural alienation, whether perceived or real, have created a wide-ranging landscape of disaffected young people ever ready to engage in militant activity often catalyzed by religious invocation and Islamist appeal, inspiring, among the most fanatical of them, a sense of martyrdom justifying the use of terror, including suicide bombing.⁶

Thus, there now exists a complex and intricate web of interrelated forces connecting autocratic political orders with anemic levels of socioeconomic development impacting most directly on a broad swathe of alienated and angry youth at home and abroad who find salvation in the cathartic appeals of a puritanical Islam communicated in the militant language of the urban mosque and the charismatic imam.⁷

To the extent that the West in general and the United States in particular are perceived as deeply implicated in the maintenance of this “unjust” system based on “oppression” and “exploitation,” they will be the natural targets for terrorists and terrorism. If this cycle of violence rooted in a complex interdependency is to be broken, it must begin with political change in the Maghreb itself.

This chapter’s principal finding sees no fundamental political change taking place in any of the three North African countries in the near or intermediate future.⁸ Indeed, rather than “transitions to democracy” occurring, as many have suggested and even more have hoped, a “robust authoritarianism” has been maintained. At the same time, however, a vibrant civil society is also emerging which potentially can serve as the natural challenge to the autocratic state and thereby facilitate the evolution of a political society within which democracy can be nurtured, liberal or otherwise.⁹ Yet, to date, the state has succeeded in manipulating, co-opting, or coercing civil society’s most politically potent organizations—mass-based political parties both secular and Islamist.¹⁰

Despite the current preoccupation among academics and analysts with “democratic transition” in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), no such transition has taken place anywhere in the region, if only because the necessary precondition—the collapse of authoritarianism—has yet to take place.¹¹ Save for the fully democratic election of non-state actor Mahmoud Abbas as president of the Palestinian Authority on 9 January 2005, and the relatively democratic election of Abdelaziz Bouteflika in 2004,¹² no Arab leader has ever arrived to national-level power democratically. It is thus premature to assess the conditions for either democracy’s emergence or its eventual consolidation when political power remains firmly in the hands of the authoritarian state best represented by the tripartite pillars of control and coercion—the military, the business technocracy, and the executive, whether presidential or monarchical.

To be sure, the system’s harshest features have been softened through the establishment of so-called “liberal autocracies,” “illiberal democracies,”¹³ or “quasi-democracies” involving “guided pluralism, controlled elections, and selective repression”¹⁴ as currently in evidence, for example, in Jordan, Morocco, Yemen, Kuwait, Algeria, and Egypt. Yet, in the final analysis, and despite a multitude of separate and overlapping domestic pressures and external incentives for substantive democratic change, power remains as it always has—in the hands of the unaccountable few governing over the unrepresented many.

The Authoritarian Impulse

Michael Hudson’s prescient observation about Arab politics made 30 years ago is still fully applicable: “The central problem of government in the Arab world today is political legitimacy. The shortage of this indispensable political resource largely accounts for the volatile nature of Arab politics and the autocratic … character of all present governments.”¹⁵

Numerous scholars have sought to explain this legitimacy deficit and the concurrent durability of authoritarianism in the Arab world by identifying a number of overlapping causal and contributing factors. These conditions revolve around several broad categories of interpretation—economic explanations,¹⁶ cultural causes,¹⁷ political determinants,¹⁸ patterns of societalstate formation,¹⁹ the role of religion,²⁰ and gender-based factors.²¹ Despite the current appeal of culturally based explanations for the authoritarian impulse, most analysts privilege more complex dynamics “involving economic growth and stagnation, social-structural transformation, state formation and institutional inertia, and ideological transformation.”²²

The strength, coherence, and effectiveness of the state’s coercive apparatus serve to highlight the “robustness” of authoritarianism. It is this robustness that provides the most useful framework of analysis in attempting to explain North Africa’s enduring authoritarianism. What are the broader comparative and theoretical assumptions about state capabilities, and will they help explain the sustainability of the security establishment (mukhabarat) in the face of internal challenges and external pressures?

Focusing on the enabling capabilities of the national security state, Eva Bellin identifies the following determinative conditions: the status of a country’s fiscal health, including access to rentier income in the form of oil and gas resources, geostrategic utility, and control of crucial transit facilities; the level and kind of international support networks; the degree of institutionalization of the military and whether it operates according to legal–rational criteria or patrimonial ones; the existence of popular political mobilization; and the use of perceived or real threats to state security.²³

These do not encompass the full universe of possible reasons why North African authoritarianism remains so robust but they do identify critical structural factors that transcend issues of culture, history, personality, or religion that have often been invoked by analysts trying to explain MENA’s non-democratic “exceptionalism.”²⁴ One researcher has usefully summarized this overall pattern by stating that

a set of interdependent institutional, economic, ideological, social, and geostrategic factors has created an adaptable ecology of repression, control, and partial openness. The web-like quality of this political ecosystem both helps partial autocracies to survive and makes their rulers unwilling to give up final control over any strand of the whole.²⁵

Each of the variables identified above applies to the Maghreb.

Fiscal Health

It has been shown from experiences in Africa and elsewhere that there is a direct link between the state’s coercive capabilities and the maintenance of fiscal health. The mukhabarat cannot long endure if it lacks the financial resources to pay its soldiers, purchase arms, upgrade equipment, maintain supplies, and acquire externally gathered intelligence data. When presumedto-be-strong states began to collapse in Africa, for example, as Bellin reminds us, it was because prolonged fiscal crisis had “hollowed out” the coercive apparatus of the state.²⁶

In North Africa, while economies underperform and human and material resources are underutilized, the overall fiscal health of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia is sufficiently robust to sustain more than adequate expenditures on security apparatuses. In fact, the Maghreb ranks noticeably above average in the proportion of gross national product (GNP) spent on security, approaching 5 percent in 2000 as compared to the global average of 3.8 percent.

Rentier income derived from such critical resources as oil and gas enables strong states to sustain elaborate coercive structures even if a country’s overall economic health is poor, as the case of Algeria so clearly demonstrates. While Morocco and Tunisia may lack these valuable resources in large enough quantities to make a financial difference, other strategic rents such as foreign aid, tourism revenues, remittances from abroad, and so forth serve the same function of insuring that the state will pay itself first, including covering the costs of maintaining bloated military and security forces.²⁷

It should be noted that “strong” states are being defined in a narrow coercive sense not as possessing enduring political legitimacy. Indeed, Ayubi’s distinction between a “strong” state and a “fierce” state applies directly to the North African situation. As with the rest of the Arab world, the Maghreb state “is not a natural growth of its own socio-economic history or its own cultural and intellectual tradition.”²⁸ Instead, the North African state can better be understood as “fierce” since, in order to preserve itself, it resorts to the use of raw power as its default function. It is not “strong,” because the Maghreb state “lacks the infrastructural power that enables [it] to penetrate society effectively through mechanisms such as taxation. [It also] lacks ideological hegemony (in a Gramscian sense) that would enable it to forge a historic social bloc that accepts the legitimacy of the ruling stratum.”²⁹

The state’s “fierce” attributes are reinforced by its rentier status that enables the country’s fiscal health to remain disconnected from society’s productive economic forces, yet directly tied to the international political economy with its critical hydrocarbon lifeline. The connection between abundant oil rents and the aggrandizement of the authoritarian state, at the expense of an autonomous civil society, cannot be overemphasized. Sadiki summarizes this relationship accurately when he writes:

[T]he huge returns from external oil rent have contributed primarily to aggrandizement of the state… This aggrandizement applies to both oil producers and non-producers. The former directly accrue billions of petrodollars from external oil rent. The latter…profit from the Arab oil boom.… This latter group has become partly rentier economies. They rent labor, skills, and expertise to the scarcely populated Arab oilproducing states and thereby earn billions of dollars in remittances. Transfers of millions of Arab petrodollars either in the form of aid or investment are another factor in the equation. Petrodollars have endowed the Arab state with an independent resource to cement and reproduce itself.³⁰

The current situation in Algeria best supports the observation Sadiki makes in the passage cited above. The huge hydrocarbon revenues in recent years have strengthened the authoritarian regime’s repressive capabilities. They have also helped the regime elicit the international support that it had lacked throughout the 1990s.

International Support

More than any other world region, the MENAs sustained authoritarianism has been shaped by the successful maintenance of international support networks. While the Middle East portion of MENA has exploited these networks more extensively than the Maghreb, the latter has become a critical staging area in the fight against Islamic terrorism. Representativ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of illustrations
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART I The Maghreb States: The Limits of Transformation
• PART II Regional Issues in the Contemporary Maghreb
• PART III Strategic and Security Relations of the Maghreb
• Bibliography