Civil Society and Political Change in Morocco

James N. Sater

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134126453
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia africana

Taking Morocco as its focus, this book looks at the political change in the country since 1990. It places particular emphasis on key topics, such as civil society, human rights and reform, as vital issues for understanding the developments in the contemporary Middle East.

1 Introduction

This study is about civil society and the public sphere, and how both concepts apply to Morocco. Both concepts are used in order to explain how political change occurs as a result of domestic discourses. The central question that this book aims to answer is whether new organizations of civil society constituted a factor in its own right that had contributed to political change in Morocco.

Political change is defined more broadly than the ‘formal’ aspect of democratization, which is the narrow focus on the negotiation process between the monarchy and opposition parties. Instead, being part of what may be called ‘substantive’ democratization, political change in Morocco is understood as citizens’ increased participation in public affairs, which results in a redefinition of the relationship between the governors and the governed.

In order to examine the research question, it is important to clarify which social groups can be considered new, what is meant by the term ‘civil society’, and which concepts are used in this study to understand political change. At the same time, the question is connected to a number of hypotheses, which will be examined in this case study. The first one is connected to the appearance of these new groups. Why did they suddenly appear in Morocco? This needs to be analysed in relation to the Moroccan political system, and my first hypothesis is that they have appeared as a result of the failures of an ‘old’ political system to accommodate social interests and grievances. The second hypothesis concerns their impact on the political system. Which realm of the state and its institutions is primarily affected by these groups’ activities, and why should the state react? It is my hypothesis that these groups are able to initiate discourses, which challenge the state’s hegemony, i.e. the state’s discursive presence in civil society, ideologically and institutionally. Reacting to this challenge to its hegemony, the state uses a variety of strategies: accommodation, appropriation, and the definition of boundaries beyond which a public discourse and a public challenge to the state’s hegemony are prohibited. This happens through the state’s monopoly over the means of coercion. These strategies require the state’s engagement in these discourses that challenge the state’s hegemony, with the exception of the state’s use of coercion and direct censorship. The most central hypothesis to be tested is, then, whether this participation of the state in discourses is changing the state’s hegemony, as well. Therefore, as a catalyst for political change, this participation is changing the relationship between the state and the society, as well.

In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, there have been three major approaches to civil society. The first approach resembles Western images of Arab-Islamic society and believes that Islamic belief systems and patriarchal tribal social organization obstruct values such as tolerance, civic values, and personal freedom. Therefore, ‘Arab civil society’ is considered to be an oxymoron. The rise of Islamic revivalist movements and puritans advocating Islamic law is understood as Muslim resistance to modernity. A second view has become associated with the concept of corporatism, which was borrowed from analyses of Latin America. Corporatist tendencies are processes in which the state dominates any kind of economic and civic participation: centralization, one-party rule, pervasive state security establishments, and co-optation of independent trade unions and other groups that express their independence vis-à-vis dominant state structures and regimes in place. The third school of thought equates civil society with Western-style formal nongovernmental organizations (NGO) in the private and voluntary sector. In policy circles as well as among scholars concerned with democratic transition, it is assumed that these NGOs foster political liberalization and democratization ‘from the bottom up’ or ‘from the grass-roots level’.¹ NGOs’ independence vis-à-vis the regimes, and their opposition to them, are the defining characteristics of this civil society.

Objectives

By linking civil society to the public sphere, this study aims to bridge the gap between the latter two approaches and accounts for a reciprocal dialectic between the state and the civil society. In the following sections, of which the aim is to define civil society by linking it to the public sphere, it will be illustrated that these two approaches fall into two greater paradigms of civil society, of which the roots date back to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. I have classified them as ‘Civil Society as Opposition to the State’ and as ‘Civil Society as Intermediary between State and Society’.

Second, in order to answer the research question, this study aims to analyse the development of groups of civil society in relation to the state since the mid- 1980s. It will examine the pre- and post-independence period, in order to provide the background for civil society development since the mid-1980s. The use of historical material aims at illustrating the existence of an ‘old system’, in which state–civil society relations existed. It will then be shown that when some organizations changed key aspects of their political activity, and when they changed their relation to the state, this prompted the state to change some of its strategies of ‘containing’ these organizations, as well.

Third, it is the aim of this study to show how political change can be conceived of through private citizens’ commitment to, and engagement in, the public sphere. It will be shown that this engagement in the public sphere has been possible due to the existence of ‘new’ organizations of civil society, and it is therefore one outcome of civil society’s interaction with the state.

Defining civil society

Civil society as opposition to the state

The use of the concept of civil society in transitional politics has been related to the analysis of opposition to authoritarian states. According to Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter a ‘resurrection of civil society’ is likely to occur when an initial political opening has taken place.

Once something has happened – once the soft-liners have prevailed over the hard-liners, begun to extend guarantees for individuals and some rights of contestation, and started to negotiate with selected regime opponents – a generalized mobilization is likely to occur.²

This is reminiscent of classical liberal social contract theories of civil society, as they were formulated in Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1792). Civil society became to be seen as a means of defence against potential abuse by political leaders. As such, it was a concept for the description of a new European civilization and it expressed this civilization’s consciousness and self-confidence as to its own possibilities, in contrast to the absolutist non-productive and non-inventory state.³ It was linked to the economy, because civil society’s dynamic and possibilities came from within the productive sector. In the nineteenth century, de Tocqueville became one of the most explicit theorists of a civil society, which should function as counterweight to the state to ensure the freedom of citizens. According to de Tocqueville, in pursuit of equality, citizens empowered the state to undertake the widespread provision of public goods. But in doing so, they surrendered a measure of liberty, which would allow ‘the administrative suffocation of civil society’ and descent into ‘relations of political dependence’.⁴

In the MENA region, this theoretical identification of civil society as a counterweight to the state has been particularly prominent. Guided by normative assumptions about ‘civility’, some authors connected civil society directly with a pro-democracy movement. According to Ibrahim, for example:

The linkage between civil society and democratization should be obvious. Democracy after all is a set of rules and institutions of governance through a peaceful management of competing groups and/or conflicting interests. Thus the normative component of ‘civil society’ is essentially the same as that of ‘democracy’.⁵

The most influential approach to civil society in the Middle East stems from the civil society project organized at New York University from 1991 to 1994 under the programme director Augustus Richard Norton, of which the results were published in two edited volumes of Civil Society in the Middle East. Norton claims that there is no direct link between civil society and democracy: ‘societies do not take two tablets of civil society at bedtime and wake up the next morning undergoing democratization’.⁶ Nevertheless, he contends that a liberal civil society provides both the structural underpinning of representative democracy and the terrain on which an organized working class can develop. For him, civil society is grounded in free economic markets and the quest of the bourgeoisie for political differentiation from the state. It is, therefore, indirectly the force that is pushing for democratic transition.⁷ He argues against the view that civil society is ‘deficient, corrupt, aggressive, hostile, infiltrated, co-opted, insignificant, or absent’,⁸ claiming that these are general views of Middle Eastern civil society. As Norton takes on board Edward Shil’s principle of civility and ‘tolerance’,⁹ the Islamic movement does not fit into his concept and remains excluded.

Civil Society is more than an admixture of various forms of association; it also refers to a quality, civility, without which the milieu consists of feuding factions, cliques, and cabals. Civility implies tolerance, the willingness of individuals to accept disparate political views and social attitudes, to accept profoundly important idea that there is no right answer.¹⁰

Other authors have criticized this approach. Beckman, for instance, points out that as shorthand for all kinds of associative life, civil society tended to generate a circular reasoning with regard to democratization.

[I]t promotes a dichotomized view of state–society relations which obstructs an understanding of the way in which they mutually constitute each other; it tends to downplay the existence of a variety of civil societies, their internal contradictions, and the fact that they are not necessarily supportive of democratization, in a liberal sense.¹¹

Thus, if only the features of associative life that are supportive of a liberaldemocratic project are considered civil society proper, then the hypothesis of a link between civil society and democracy becomes, in mathematical terms, an identity function. Moreover, civil society is then put into the static frame of predefined values, which obstructs an analysis of the very same features of state–society relations. Thus, when analysing civil society, one needs to keep in mind that generally speaking non-democratic regimes do also have a stratum of supportive elements that constitute a political discourse outside the immediate reach of the state (i.e. civil society). Here civil society may take patriarchal, Islamic, Christian, communist, or fascist forms. As Beckman argues:

Even if we restrict ourselves to looking at groups in society which we think have a particular potential for supporting democracy, we need to have an open mind on their contradictory and changing nature. They may, at different points in time, either be supportive, indifferent, or hostile to the democratic project. For instance, a group may oppose military dictatorship but may decide to work with factions of the military which are considered more sympathetic to its group’s interests. Most likely, such a line will be contested both within the organization and from outside. So, who is to be considered part of civil society and who is not?¹²

For the purpose of this study, an identification of civil society in this sense would be analytically restrictive. It would focus only on those associations that are clearly identified as representing an opposition to the state. It would consequently produce an analysis in which these associations, through their opposition values, contribute to political changes, in so far as they would constitute a societal core of democratic values. It would thereby provoke a representation of civil society within a harmonious model, analytically changing the perspective with which this study tries to capture the dynamics of state–civil society relations.

Civil society as an intermediary between state and society

Authors who do not adhere to a dichotomizing view of state–civil society relations take a different view. Hegel was the first of these.¹³ He sought to incorporate associations into the activities of the state in an attempt to prevent unconstrained liberalism through a recreation of Plato’s republic. In contrast to his liberal, mostly Anglo-Saxon, contemporaries, Hegel did not believe in the harmonious human condition. Instead, he regarded civil society as inherently unstable and conflicting, because of the competitive interplay of private interests and market forces. He argued that ‘civil society cannot remain “civil” unless it is ordered politically, subjected to “the higher surveillance of the state”’.¹⁴

Similarly, the leading twentieth-century writer on civil society, Antonio Gramsci, opposed a dichotomous view of civil society and the state. Indeed, connecting civil society within Marxist parameters to the superstructure, Gramsci views civil society within the realm of the state. Echoing Hegel’s ideas of state–civil society relations, Gramsci defines civil society as ‘the political and cultural hegemony, which a social group exercises over the whole of society, as the ethical content of the state’.¹⁵ In his view, civil society is dominating and preceding the state. The medium of state power – domination and coercion – needs to be sustained through hegemony.¹⁶ Because of this, Gramsci describes civil society as the ‘powerful system of fortresses and earthworks’ situated behind the state, giving the state its stability and power.¹⁷ The close interrelatedness of civil society and the state finds its theoretical concept in the ‘integral state’. Here, Gramsci suggests that ‘by “State” should be understood not only the apparatus of government, but also the “private” apparatuses of “hegemony” or civil society’.¹⁸ In another passage, he contends that the state is ‘the entire complex of practical and theoretical activities with which the ruling class not only justifies and maintains its dominance, but manages to win the active consent of those over whom it rules.’¹⁹ This can be summarized with his famous statement that the ‘State = political society + civil society, in other words hegemony protected by the armour of coercion’.²⁰ It should be noted, however, that in this expression, political society takes the function of the conventional understanding of the state, i.e. the institutions of state power. Gramsci does not claim that civil society is part of the state sphere proper,²¹ but rather that for a proper understanding of state power, hegemony and the institutions of civil society have to be taken into account. Gramsci’s discussion of the institutions of state power, i.e. the state in the conventional understanding, or what he calls in various passages ‘political society’ supports this view. In his view, all powers are also subject to hegemony (and civil society), but in different degrees and in the following order: (1) legislature, (2) judiciary, and (3) executive. Commenting on the judiciary as a special case, he contends that

lapses in the administration of justice make an especially disastrous impression on the public: the hegemonic apparatus is more sensitive in this sector, to which arbitrary actions on the part of the police and political administration may also be referred.²²

Here, hegemony in civil society means that state power is subject to some form of public scrutiny, which as a whole determines the character of the integral state, or the state in Gramsci’s sense. This means, however, that power in the integral state is divided into state power proper, i.e. coercion/domination, and hegemony and cannot be conceived of in a simple descending state toward society (top to down) fashion.

Applying Gramsci’s framework of the state to the Middle East, Ayubi argues that due to the lack of any class hegemony, politics in the MENA region has been characterized not by an orderly process of aggregating demands, but rather by acts of capturing the state and acts of resisting to its attempts at controlling the populace through its means of administration and policing. He states his two main hypotheses, thus:

Once in power the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Acronyms and abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Civil society in Morocco literature survey
• 3 Civil society and public sphere under the ‘old system’ (~1574–1984)
• 4 The pressure for public space (1985–93)
• 5 The consolidation and mobilization of civil society under the ‘new system’ (1993–2002)
• 6 The state’s discursive and strategic reactions
• 7 Summary and conclusion: Civil society, hegemony and the public sphere in Morocco
• Notes
• Bibliography