North Africa's Arab Spring

George Joffé, George Joffé

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317985167
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Landeskunde

This book addresses issues surrounding the evolution of the Arab Spring in North Africa. After a general introduction and explanation of the events on a region-wide basis, it turns to examine aspects of each of the countries concerned. The role of the Muslim Brotherhood during the Nasser regime and in the contemporary situation is compared, together with an analysis of the emergence of new political parties in Egypt. The book analyses the links between social media and satellite television during the revolution in Egypt. This is followed by a study of the intellectual and cultural background to the Tunisian revolution and an analysis of the new political parties in Tunisia. It also looks at the revolution process in Libya and concludes with a study of why there was no revolution in Algeria and how the Moroccan monarchy was able to sideline those who challenged it at the price of constitutional changes that are essentially cosmetic.

This book was originally published as a special issue of The Journal of North African Studies.

Introduction

George Joffé

University of Cambridge, UK

 

The events of late 2010 and early 2011 in North Africa have ushered in profound changes in political processes in the Arab world and in our understanding of them. Not only did they give the lie to a widespread assumption amongst policy analysts and, to a lesser extent, amongst academic commentators, that these processes differed fundamentally from what has occurred elsewhere, but they also demonstrated that popular ambitions in the Arab world differed little from those elsewhere as well. Ironically enough, in view of the endless analysis of politics in the Middle East and North Africa in recent years, commentators turned out to be generally ill-prepared to respond to these momentous events.

This publication is an early attempt to contribute to the growing debate about what these events may eventually mean. Early ideas of a ‘domino effect’ have now been set aside, for it is clear that some attempts to transform regimes through peaceful mass demonstration have ended in tragedy, whilst others have been adroitly managed by the regimes they challenged. And, in at least three cases – Libya, Yemen and Syria – peaceful challenges to established governments have been met with the full force of state violence, whilst in the Gulf monarchic conservatism has ensured political stasis. Instead, it has become evident that the demonstrations themselves were merely the prologues to complex and lengthy processes of transition that may take years to be completed, in which positive outcomes are not inevitable.

North Africa, where these events began, has been the cockpit in which all four alternatives have emerged. Alongside democratic success in Tunisia and partial success in Egypt, civil war erupted in Libya whilst the Moroccan monarchy successfully managed popular discontent and Algeria, with the memory of its own civil war in the 1990s, sought to pretend that little had changed. North Africa, too, was the test-bed for a new kind of intervention by external powers, the implications of which are still unclear. The engagement of NATO, with United Nations sanction and Arab League approval, in the conflict in Libya has resurrected the debates of the past decade, particularly in the Arab world, about the motives and intentions of Western powers in a region of crucial global importance because of its location and energy resources.

Indeed, the issue of Western engagement now hangs over discussion, particularly in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, about the future course of political transformation. Europe, in particular, has had to revise its assumptions about the role of political Islam – a phenomenon not prominent in the actual challenges to regimes but certain to play a major role in the political transformations that have followed them. Then there is the difficult problem of migration and European policies of securitisation in which, in the past, Brussels has expected North African states to act as its first line-of-defence in return for adopting their narratives of threat. Behind both concerns is an even more fundamental problem; the European vision of the development process and of the political changes that were intended – and expected – to form part of it. The simple fact has been that that vision has failed and new and more egalitarian concepts of engagement will be needed.

Many of these themes are addressed in the chapters of this book, even if the wider issues of the global implications of the events that generated them have been set to one side. They will, no doubt, form part of the debate for geo-politicians and specialists in international relations in the years to come. Instead, we have focussed on the North African region itself, in order to try to understand how the dramatic changes of the first nine months of 2011 were initiated and have developed. Indeed, the Maghrib and Egypt provide a very appropriate environment for such enquiries because the initial stages of transition there have been completed, allowing us to draw preliminary conclusions about what has happened.

Thus, in the initial chapter, George Joffé tries to draw together a narrative of the events of the first half on 2011 throughout the region of North Africa before other contributors move on to consider individual countries. Anne Alexander, for example, examines the way in which the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has adjusted to the realities of power, both under Nasser and now with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces whilst Daniel Tavana analyses the complex manoeuvring around the electoral process there. Mohammed Nanabhay and Roxane Farmanfarmaian investigate how social media were exploited during the Egyptian revolution and how they were replicated on satellite television, thus giving us a unique insight into the role that this played in January and February 2011.

Alia Brahimi considers events in Libya and the factors that led ineluctably to the fall of the Qadhafi regime whilst Medhi Mabrouk considers the complex background to Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali’s downfall in Tunisia. The actual elections in Tunisia in late October 2011 and the complicated negotiations that preceded them form the subject of Duncan Pickard’s analysis. John Entelis explains why it was that the regime felt no need to make political concessions to Algerians once it had conceded the economic demands made in mass demonstrations at the start of the year. The volume concludes with a subtle study by Driss Maghraoui of the way in which the Moroccan monarchy, the makhzen, was able to finesse the demands of the movements leading mass demonstrations there, effectively marginalising them and re-asserting its own centrality to the political process in Morocco.

Of course, much more remains to be said and will, no doubt, be debated in the coming months as more information emerges about what actually happened during what has proved to be the most tumultuous year in North Africa since the violence of Algeria’s civil war in the 1990s. However, unlike that occasion in which, despite massive loss-of-life, a regime was able to successfully reassert itself, 2011 saw the actual destruction of two regimes and the partial reconstruction of a third. There has not been so extreme a reordering of political structures in the region since independence was achieved in the 1950s and 1960s. The contributions to this book have sought, in short, to begin the process of understanding how and why this has occurred.

The Arab Spring in North Africa: origins and prospects

George Joffé

Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS), University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

The insurgencies in Tunisia and Egypt – the Jasmine and the Tahrir Revolutions – seemed to offer great hope of the outbreak of democratic change in the Middle East and North Africa in what has come to be called the ‘Arab Spring’. However, the civil war in Libya and the ongoing crises in Yemen and Syria suggest that overall regional change may prove to be more difficult to achieve. In fact there are quite specific reasons why insurgencies occurred in three North African states and not in the remaining two states and why their outcomes have been so different. The causes for the insurgency are similar – they lie in the global economic crisis and in the neo-patrimonial political natures of regional states – but the outcomes differ because two of the states concerned were liberalising autocracies and the third – Libya – had resolutely rejected any political or social domestic competitors to its hegemonic political discourse and practice. Even the liberalised autocracies face very different futures for, in Tunisia a whole system has been removed whilst in Egypt, the regime rejected its figurehead in order to preserve the regime itself. Ironically enough, the authorities in Tunisia attempted a similar course of action but were unable to impose themselves on the revolution that had occurred.

I realized only two decades later the momentous power of such a moment – how an egregious act can electrify a population until then ambivalent, and convince them that a confined dispute between political forces carried implications worthy of drawing them out of their living rooms, into the fray.¹

One of the great ironies of the art of political and economic forecasting is that forecasters virtually never anticipate the timing of major events. They may well know and even expect that certain types of paradigm shifts² are going to take place in international relations but they cannot identify the precise moment when they will occur, nor can they recognise the catalysing event that makes such a shift possible. The recent events at the start of 2011 in North Africa seem to fall within this category of unpredictability; most observers knew that change of some kind was inevitable but nobody knew when it would happen, nor were they aware of the events that would spark the process off. Most striking of all, few observers realised the vulnerability of the autocracies that existed there and the fragility they would demonstrate when challenged.

One of the major reasons for this has recently been provided by Nassim Taleb and Mark Blyth³ when they pointed out that socio-political and financial-economic systems are ‘grounded in complexity, interdependence and unpredictability’.⁴ When such systems are artificially constrained by policy initiatives designed to ensure stability, they are ultimately rendered extremely fragile by the risks and challenges that accumulate but are not released because of this search for stability – by domestic regimes and their external supporters as well. Ultimately, such systems become ‘prone to Black Swans – that is they become extremely prone to large-scale events that lie far from the statistical norm and were largely unpredictable to a given set of observers’.⁵ In other words, the accumulated tensions and challenges that have not been resolved but, instead, artificially repressed in the search for stability erupt in unpredictable ways and with unpredicted consequences.

In the wake of such events, policy-makers often seek to attribute blame for the failure to anticipate the Black Swans that have occurred; pointlessly since, by their very nature, they are unpredictable except for the fact that the dominant purpose of policy – stability – has in itself been a primary progenitor of the crises that erupted. In addition, Taleb and Blyth point out that subsequent analysis usually identify catalysts as causes thus preparing the way for the next catastrophe.⁶ Thus, the recent crisis in North Africa has been explained away by the global food price crisis and the support given by the West to the regimes that have now been displaced by anxieties over political Islam, whereas the evidence seems to suggest that the real driver for the insurgencies in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya has been the contempt and repressiveness with which the Mubarak, Ben Ali and Qadhafi regimes treated the people over whom they ruled.

This article seeks to demonstrate that, although economic circumstances have formed an essential background to the events took place in North Africa in the first eight months of 2011, they are not a complete explanation in themselves. Instead, it has been the discordance between the claims made by regimes as part of the process of seeking to legitimise themselves and the reality of regime repression and contempt that has been the real driver of the process. In short, their refusal to tolerate active popular political participation in the process of governance would act as the driver for the crises they faced, once the appropriate catalyst could be found. And the nature of the catalyst, of course, explains the timing of the crises that occurred. That nature, in itself, also reflects the consequence of regime repression and, ironically enough sometimes, concessions to political openness that some regimes have demonstrated in recent years.

Indeed, the evolution of the crises in each state has been a function of the actual political natures of the regimes themselves for, despite their intense political repressiveness, the Ben Ali and Mubarak regimes in Egypt and Tunisia, rather like the Bouteflika regime in Algeria but quite unlike the regime in Libya, had increasingly allowed significant space in recent years for a degree of popular social and economic autonomy of expression and action. This was allied to processes of restricted political liberalisation, designed never to threaten regime control. They were, in short, ‘liberalised autocracies’, in the term invented by Daniel Brumberg⁷ or ‘illiberal democracies’, as Fareed Zakaria had termed them some years earlier.⁸ This meant, however, that, contrary to the conclusions reached by Daniel Brumberg in 2002, where permitted civil society institutions were part of the package of autocratic regime maintenance, when the final confrontation came with the authoritarian state, autonomous institutions existed to mobilise social movements that could successfully challenge the regimes in question. It was only in Libya, where a full autocracy, unprepared to make political concessions of any kind, had been in operation that radical political change could only result in civil war.

The economic background

Even if economic issues were not the proximate cause of the insurgencies and revolutions that we have witnessed, they certainly formed part of the background. This was particularly true of the global spike in food and energy costs that occurred in the second half of 2010 and which paralleled the situation in 2008. The immediate effect of this was a dramatic escalation in food and energy prices in the region, which had a direct impact on populations already living close to the poverty line, such as many in North Africa. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, since July 2010, prices of many cereals and other foodstuffs have risen dramatically. Prices of maize increased 74%; wheat went up by 84%; sugar by 77% and oils and...