The Arab Spring and the Geopolitics of the Middle East: Emerging Security Threats and Revolutionary Change

Emerging Security Threats and Revolutionary Change

Amr Yossef, Joseph Cerami

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781137504074
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137504081
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this study, which highlights a renewed emphasis in international affairs on regional studies, the co-authors provide an assessment of the revolutionary changes in the politics and security of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

1

The Original Sin: The Failure of the Arab State

Abstract: This chapter argues that the “authority vacuum” that followed the revolutions against Arab authoritarian regimes – affecting state’s ability to deliver public services which influenced citizens’ human and state’s national security – is the symptom rather than the cause of the current turmoil. Arab populations protesting in 2011 against poverty, corruption and poor services, are now facing worse conditions than those they have protested against. The original sin is the failure/ weakness of the post-colonial Arab state in its pursuit of modernity. Arab republics, set up by revolutions/ coups in the 1950s and the 1960s, promised to establish a modern, democratic state based on socio-economic justice. Nevertheless, four decades later, Arab states were still lagging behind in economic and political development, social justice, and the provision of services. Injustices were kept silent by the heavy hand of the regimes which, once challenged or toppled, gave way to the current turmoil.

Yossef, Amr and Joseph R. Cerami. The Arab Spring and the Geopolitics of the Middle East: Emerging Security Threats and Revolutionary Change. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137504081.0004.

1.1Legitimacy or capacity of the state?

Conventional wisdom explains the turmoil that spun out of control in the Arab world after its Spring revolutions in terms of the lack of democracy and liberal traditions in addition to the incohesivness inherent in the Arab state which is itself a novel creation by colonialism and where political identity follows tribal, ethnic, and religious lines rather than the modern, nation-state line. In essence, this wisdom resonates with the words of Elie Kedourie: “the nation-state in the Middle East is an idea that bristles with difficulties. Not only is the idea of a nation itself by no means simple and straightforward ... but also the very notion of a state is quite difficult to fit into the political thought that is traditional to the Middle East, namely, Muslim political thought.”¹ This school of thought, though plausible to a certain extent, presents only a partial explanation for the events that preceded and those that followed the Arab Spring, which are strongly linked.

It is important at the outset to spell out clearly that a state’s stability relies on two main pillars: legitimacy and capacity. The conventional school of thought stresses the element of legitimacy while this chapter challenges this view and stresses instead the element of capacity. This latter notion has received several definitions and expressions in the Middle East studies literature. As Joachim Ahrens put it, governance refers, in essence, to two of the most basic questions posed by political scientists “Who governs?” and “How well?” The former question concerns the issues of power and legitimacy, while the latter is concerned with good government that is associated with “effective institutions, equitable policy outcomes, capacity to adapt to changing conditions, [and] participation and satisfaction of citizens in decisions affecting them.”²

Similarly, according to Saad Eddin Ibrahim, true representation of the society’s constituencies and ambitions is a “necessary condition” for the stability of the state and the ruling regime, though “sufficient conditions” for this stability exist when the state represents institutions able to provide services, protection and fair distribution of resources.³ In a similar vein, Nazih Ayubi wrote:

[T]he state allocates all kinds of value in society: it allocates not only (economic) resources but also (moral) values ... This has been particularly prominent in the case of radical, populist regimes. If such states fail – as did most of Arab countries – in achieving their developmental promises, for which they claim they have allocated the society’s resources, then the society’s response is likely to present itself either in an attempt to appropriate from the state part of its enlarged economic domain (i.e., via privatisations) and/or in an attempt to regain part of the ‘moral capital’ for the direct benefit of the civil society (as represented, for example, by the Islamist groupings).⁴

Between Arab states and their populations since the 1950s existed a working “unwritten social contract” according to which the society refrains from practicing politics in return for receiving from the state several other non-political demands, in terms of services and benefits.⁵ This arrangement became especially relevant after the collapse of Arab nationalism’s appeal, as a legitimizing tool, following the catastrophic defeat of June 1967. In Ibrahim’s view, along with oppression and political blackmail, Arab regimes employed also “efficiency in solving problems,” in areas such as housing, employment and infrastructure, to enhance their legitimacy.

In this regard, the crisis in legitimacy has pushed some portions of Arab societies to give up Arab nationalism and search instead for a different reference of meaning, loyalty and legitimacy in other forms, religious, tribal, sectarian or ethnic. Given the violence that erupted in the Arab Spring countries over religious, tribal and ethnic divisions or affiliations, much ink has been spilled repeating the argument on the artificial nature of state in the Arab world in which legitimacy has always been based on these aforementioned lines rather than central, nation-state authority. This argument, however, appears to overlook three important aspects of the sub-state “divisions” in the Arab world. First, as Ilya Harik argued two decades ago challenging the well-established view, Arab countries constituted genuine, old states that go back to the 19th century or much older. Only the Fertile Crescent states (with the exception of Lebanon) were carved by the European colonial powers from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire. With the exception of Syria, the other three cases in this study (Egypt, Tunisia and Libya), which were also the first in the Arab Spring wave of revolutions, had old states within the bureaucratic-oligarchy type in which the authority was held by an urban military caste helped by an extensive administrative apparatus.⁶

The second aspect relates to the nature of these divisions’ existence. Tribes, sects and ethnicities have coexisted peacefully for centuries within the territory of each of the respective Arab states which historically have not constituted a central government, nation-state authority, such as Libya and Syria. The concept of a “tribe” has often been erroneously used to refer to autonomous, uncompromising social units, loyalty to which relies solely on family and blood-ties, where in fact tribes shared some powerful unifying factors as well, particularly religion (predominantly Islam) and economic interdependence, which in themselves were usually used by the central authority as means of social and political control.⁷ That is to say that the mere existence of these affiliations, even when strong as they are already so in several other regions in the world, does not inevitably replace the legitimacy of the state unless these affiliations are combined with other factors that push in this direction. In Bassem Tibi’s view, the reason the Arab Middle East failed in what Europe has succeeded, that is attaining “cultural homogeneity by melding various ethnicities into single nations,” is not only uneven industrialization and modernization, but also state failure:

The newly established nation-states have failed to cope with the social and economic problems created by rapid development because they cannot provide the proper institutions to alleviate these problems. Because the nominal nation-state has not met the challenge, society has restored to its pre-national ties as a solution, thereby preserving the framework of the patron-client relationships.⁸

The final aspect relates to the observation that it was the political regimes that have contributed to maintain these divisions. Employing deliberate policies of discrimination and cooptation, these regimes instrumentalized existing tribal, ethnic and religious divisions in society in a typical divide-and-rule fashion. Dismantling the country’s nascent political and economic institutions, Qaddafi started with abolishing the tribe as a legal institution and ended up making it a formal partner in the political process by establishing the so-called Social People’s Leaderships within the regime’s plethora of committees. However, that was neither equal nor efficient. On the one hand, the Qaddafi regime, despite the oil riches that allowed an extensive welfare system “has done little ... to foster sufficient political and economic development to guarantee that the current high standard of living will be sustainable.”⁹ On the other hand, the tribes that supported the regime and were used to protect it, the Qaddadfa, Warfalla and Muqarha, were economically and politically rewarded, whereas “the large number of tribes ... stayed aloof from the regime even if not necessarily acting against it. The latter were relatively marginalized and suffered economic hardship and political exclusion.”¹⁰ A clear example is Libya’s East, where Qaddafi feared rebellion, that faced systematic economic underdevelopment as punishment.¹¹ This, in turn, resulted in having the individuals in the majority of tribes continue to depend on the tribe as the guaranteed provider and protector, therefore re-producing the old nature of the tribe as a unit for social control, social referenc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  The Original Sin: The Failure of the Arab State
• 2  Inward-Directed Security
• 3  Outward-Directed Security Threats
• 4  Redemption? The Geopolitics of MENA and Mediterranean Security
• Conclusion
• Index