Civil Society and Democratization in the Arab World

The Dynamics of Activism

Francesco Cavatorta, Vincent Durac

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136963377
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte des Nahen Ostens

The transition paradigm has traditionally viewed civil society activism as an essential condition for the establishment of democracy. The democracy promotion strategies of Western policy-makers have, therefore, been based on strengthening civil society in authoritarian settings in order to support the development of social capital -to challenge undemocratic regimes.

This book questions the validity of the link between an active associational life and democratization. It examines civil society in the Arab world in order to illustrate how authoritarian constraints structure civil society dynamics in the region in ways that hinder transition to democracy. Building on innovative theoretical work and drawing on empirical data from extensive fieldwork in the region, this study demonstrates how the activism of civil society in five different Arab countries strengthens rather than weakens authoritarian practices and rule. Through an analysis of the specific legal and political constraints on associational life, and the impact of these on relations between different civic groups, and between associations and state authorities, the book demonstrates that the claim that civil society plays a positive role in processes of democratic transformation is highly questionable.

Offering a broad and alternative vision of the state of civil society in the region, this book will be an important contribution to studies on Middle Eastern politics, democratization and civil society activism.

1
Civil society in the Arab world

In an article for the Journal of Democracy in 2000, Laith Kubba proclaimed that the ‘awakening of civil society’ in the Arab world would be the decisive factor in challenging the authoritarian regimes in the region and eventually leading the Arabs to the ‘promised land’ of democratization. This belief in the positive role of civil society activism stemmed from three factors. First and foremost was the acceptance of the theoretical assumption that civil society activism is per se conducive to democratization where authoritarianism exists and to the maintenance of democracy where democracy already exists (Putnam, 2000). In this respect it is worth mentioning that, according to the dominant normative understanding of the concept, ‘without a well developed civil society, it is difficult, if not impossible, to have an atmosphere supportive of democracy’ (Entelis, 1996: 45). Second, the historical experience of processes of democratization in the 1980s and early 1990s seemed to prove the assumption correct, as the cases of Eastern Europe and Latin America are very rarely analysed without mentioning the importance of civil society in restoring democracy in both regions. In fact, ‘Eastern Europe and Latin America … can in a sense claim “ownership” of the revival of the civil society idea in the 1980s.’ (Glasius et al., 2004: 3). Finally, the majority of countries in the Arab world had seen the emergence of a significant number of civil society organizations engaged in the promotion of very diverse issues ranging from human rights to governmental accountability and from business transparency to environmental protection (Howe, 2005). This prompted the genuine belief that ‘the explosion’ of civil society activism was the precursor and the necessary factor for democratic political change in the region. Thus, assumptions about the crucial role of the link between civil society and democratic governance within democratic theory, the example of Eastern Europe and Latin America, and the ‘arrival’ of civil society activism in the Arab world, combined to strengthen the belief that the way to Arab democracy passed through strengthened civil society organizations. This has proven to be one of the most important policy approaches of international donors, as the need for Arab democratization has preoccupied and still preoccupies the international community and particularly the Western world. It is believed that the lack of democratic governance and respect for human rights in the region lead to instability, economic underdevelopment and, crucially, political violence, both at the domestic and international level. In order to transform the authoritarian regimes of the region into acceptable democracies (i.e. not ruled by Islamist parties), the international community has focused its attention on building democracy from below, through the building-up of civil society, understood as a sphere of liberal and democratic learning. The focus on the linkage between civil society and democratization has not, however, gone uncontested.

Within democratic theory, the assumption that civil society is per se a positive development leading to democratic governance, or to the strengthening of democratic rule where it already exists, has come under severe criticism (Encarnacion, 2006). In addition, the experiences of Eastern Europe and Latin America have been empirically re-evaluated and a degree of scepticism has emerged regarding the actual importance of civil society activism in transitions to democracy in both regions (Tempest, 1997). Finally, the explosion of civil society activism in the Arab world itself has met with considerable scepticism from regional experts, who interpret it in the following terms: a creation of the regimes in place in order to display some liberal traits that would satisfy the international community (Wiktorowicz, 2000); a depoliticization of important issues (Langohr, 2004); a safe haven for liberal activists who are marginalized by Islamist activism in the wider society and are in need of new channels of communication with the regime (Cook, 2005). The absence of meaningful democratic changes in the Middle East and North Africa, despite almost two decades of engagement with and support for civil society activism, is a testament to the practical failure of such a policy approach when it comes to macro-political outcomes.

Thus, the role of civil society in the potential democratization of the Arab world is highly controversial from a scholarly and a policy-making point of view. Such controversy has generated a number of important studies that are largely anchored to the wider literature on democratization and theories of transition. This study, while reliant on many of the insights that the literature on democratization provides, attempts to go beyond its rather narrow confines and, building on the idea of post-democratization, presents, through a number of case-studies, a picture of civil activism and its dynamics as they are, and not of how they should be. When examining the Middle East and North Africa there is often the tendency to look at all phenomena through the prism of democratization, while neglecting the possibility that they might not be linked to it in any meaningful way. It is more productive to analyse existing political dynamics to see how they might inform our understanding of the region without necessarily linking this to a normatively-driven vision of what we might wish to see. Specifically, in focusing on civil society activism, it is particularly important to examine critically the normative meaning that is attached to the concept, because it represents an obstacle to a more genuine, and hopefully more neutral, understanding of the dynamics of civil society in the Arab world and beyond.

All this does not amount to passing over the very significant debates that have occurred around the definition and conceptualization of civil society, its ‘exportability’ to non-Western contexts and its linkage to questions of democracy and democratization. These debates inform our study and are crucial in setting out the terms and framework of our empirical inquiry, particularly because different understandings and ‘translations’ of civil society shape the very dynamics of the activism we examine. However, the study is primarily concerned with presenting empirical findings regarding the activism of civil society without specifically linking to its asserted normative value and its perceived inevitable linkage to democratic governance. This is because civil society activism under authoritarian constraints presents different theoretical challenges (Jamal, 2007) and offers a potentially different picture of how civil society activism occurs and plays out.

Civil society, democracy and democratization

There is very little doubt that the concept of civil society has had a problematic life since it was first coined. Despite its presumed origins within Western political thinking, no clear and consensual definition of civil society exists. Instead, we find a number of definitions that vary from the liberal to the more radical one adopted in Gramscian discourse. The liberal definition of civil society, understood as ‘the zone of voluntary associative life beyond family and clan affiliations but separate from the state and the market’ (Hawthorne, 2004: 5), has, however, always played a more prominent role and is still very much the prevalent one because it emphasizes the role of the individual participating in associational life autonomously, and with a view to holding the state and ruling authorities accountable and penetrable to the concerns of society. The basic assumption is that the sphere of civil society represents a buffer to the power of the state and its arbitrary behaviour. This approach sees civil society as liberal and democratic by definition, leading to the belief that its expansion coincides with the expansion of liberal and democratic values. The liberal definition of civil society has become even more dominant over the course of the last two decades and ‘since the late 1980s multilateral development agencies, international financial institutions and nongovernmental organizations, environmentalists, feminists, neoliberals, social democrats and radical grassroots activists have all, in their own and diverse ways, appropriated the language of civil society’ (Howell and Pearce, 2001: 1). This has occurred for two interconnected reasons. First of all, in Western developed and industrialized countries, the ‘state’ has been on the retreat from both social and economic life, leaving society to regulate itself. This self-regulation of society increased the number and scope of civil society organizations, which became, in many ways, a substitute for the delivery of services and needs following the withdrawal of the state. This has led to expansion in the activities of civil society groups, particularly in the fields of development and service provision, which could be better carried out because of the proximity of these groups to the beneficiaries of such services. The increasing ‘isolation’ of the state triggered the reaction of society, which began to organize around a number of concerns and issues in order either to deal with them autonomously or pressure the state into action. This social function of civil society should not, however, hide its more political function. The ‘victory’ of liberal-democracy and the market in the struggle against all other forms of political, social and economic organizations (Fukuyama, 1992) permitted the forceful re-entry on the political scene of the concept of civil society. Groups and organizations became increasingly involved in intensely political issues such as human rights, governmental accountability and political pluralism. In this new ideological environment, civil society represented the triumph of society over the Leviathan state and therefore ‘symbolized freedom, anti-statism and democracy’ (Howell and Pearce, 2001: 2). The link between civil society and democracy has been a crucial feature in the success of the concept and it was increasingly perceived as the necessary ingredient for democracy and democratization in countries where the overbearing state was finally relinquishing its power. The intrinsically normative character of the concept was greatly emphasized throughout the 1990s, such that ‘building a robust civil society is … postulated as a precondition for democracy and democratization’ (Sardamov, 2005: 379). There is no doubt that the popularity of the concept, and the reinforcement of its normative nature, have both been greatly enhanced by the interpretation of events in Eastern and Central Europe and Latin America during the 1990s. Thus, the changes in these parts of the world constitute the second important event promoting the dominance of the liberal definition of civil society. Civil society, understood as ‘the realm of organised social life that is voluntary, self-generating, (largely) self-supporting, autonomous from the state and bound by a legal order or set of shared rules’ (Diamond, 1994: 5) becomes both a support for democracy where it exists and a catalyst for democratic change where it does not. From this, it emerges that civil society in liberal thinking has always had positive normative connotations because it is intimately associated with the most positive of political values: democracy. In democratic societies, the existence of an autonomous space between the state, the market and the family is believed to sustain the democratic political system due to its ability to bring citizens together without coercion. The voluntary nature of movements which mobilize around very different and, at times, conflicting issues and interests, allows society to develop ties that transcend kinship and that do not see the state as the ultimate provider of material goods and services. The existence of such an active civil society is interpreted as a positive development for democracy because it promotes the interaction of people in a voluntary setting, where differences of opinion have to be taken into account because such groups have diverse interests. The state does not interfere with this autonomous space where demands can develop, issues can be discussed and activities organized. Linked to this liberal interpretation of civil society as being ‘good for democracy’ is the notion of social capital, which is the way in which civil society activism enhances the internal capacity of communities to generate social well-being (Putnam, 2000). In liberal thinking therefore, all of this combines to sustain democracy and the vitality and responsiveness of democratic institutions. The validity of this causal mechanism between a strong civil society and democracy has been taken for granted in both academic and policy-making circles for quite some time. It is no surprise that the positive connotations that an active civil society has in democratic countries have been transferred to authoritarian states or democratizing countries. Following the experiences of Latin America and Eastern Europe, the transition paradigm underscored the important role of an active civil society in bringing about democratization. Indeed, for many it came to be seen as a condition sine qua non for the establishment of democratic governance. Studies on processes of democratization often highlight the strong link between the growth in civil society activism and democratic transformations, pointing to the role of independent civil society organizations in demanding, through their ability to mobilize citizens, increased governmental accountability and significant institutional reforms on the basis of the rights of the individual (O’Donnell and Schmitter, 1986). In these different contexts, the ability of independent social actors to prise away an autonomous sphere of action from the state is perceived to be vital in undermining the authoritarianism that characterizes political and social relationships. This is because a sphere free from state intervention develops and becomes an embryonic space from which to make political demands of the authoritarian political system. In addition, the ‘participants’ learn skills that can eventually be utilized in a democratizing or democratized polity as they are introduced to positive aspects of compromising and alliance-building (McLaverty, 2002).

The most prominent actors and ‘human agents’ in the struggle against authoritarian rule in Eastern Europe and Latin America were civil society groups and activists. Their engagement in the creation of networks and groups, where issues of political reform and human rights were discussed and publicized, produced a mobilization from below that eventually could no longer be suppressed, leading authoritarian ruling elites first to compromise and then to give in. In civil society mythology, it is the personal engagement of many prominent intellectuals to mobilize ordinary people around a project of peaceful radical transformation based on liberal democratic values that effectively drove the authoritarian ruling elites to introduce reforms that modified not only the structure but the nature of the state (O’Donnell and Schmitter, 1986: 49). Civil society activism, in its liberal conceptualization, had triumphed over authoritarian rule and reaffirmed the pre-eminence of the democratic values emanating from society over the powers of the state. A powerful link between civil society activism and political change was established both in research and in the popular ‘mythology’ of these transitions to democracy.

There are three important implications that derive from accepting the existence of a strong link between civil society activism and the processes of democratization of the 1980s and 1990s. From a theoretical point of view, the notion that civil society carries a positive normative value has become even more widely accepted, so as to constitute an almost unquestionable consensus. The liberal conception of civil society had always had a distinctive normative value and the lessons from the processes of democratization of the 1980s and 1990s strengthened this positive normative character. It follows that the growth of civil society activism in any context has been perceived as an inherently positive development. If it were taking place in a democratic setting, it would end up strengthening the democracy in question. If it occurred in an authoritarian setting, it contributed to the demise of authoritarianism by pitting the state against the democratic values of society, which would, in the end, prevail. The second important implication of the triumph of civil society is that it occurred in contexts where effective political parties, bar the dominant and authoritarian one, were largely absent from the public sphere. In both communist countries in Eastern Europe and military dictatorships in Latin America, political party life had been emptied of its real substance. While political parties did exist and were allowed to operate, they were hollow shells operating under severe constraints and did not carry out the functions that political parties have in working democracies. Political parties in authoritarian settings are usually the vehicles for personal advancement; have little or no social base, and are tolerated only because they do not represent a threat to the ruling regime. It is precisely because of the combined presence of discredited parties and the absence of truly popular parties that civil society was able to emerge as the locus for political opposition, where voices of dissent could be heard and where a counter-culture of democratic and liberal organizations could find strength. This second implication is very significant because it seems to indicate that the presence of functioning opposition political parties is not necessary for processes of democratization to begin and that society is capable of finding alternative ways to have its voice heard. Thus, the weakness of political parties in the Arab world (Willis, 2002) does not in theory prevent the possibility of democratization. A third implication of the success of civil society has to do with the notion of alliance-building and the role it plays in the paradigm of transition to democracy. For the opening of a process of democratization to be temporarily successful, the opposition has to be somewhat united, overcoming the differences between radicals and moderates and making common demands on the regime. Under any authoritarian regime, many different opposition currents exist, whose political actions and stances are derived from a range of different ideologies and belief systems. The game is indeed played by more than one opposition actor and unity of the opposition only occurs at a time when all the different groups, or at least the vast majority of them, representing a large sector of society, pool their resources together to pressurize the regime into making the necessary concessions that will make it possible for them to compete legitimately for power. Once open competition is guaranteed, the different opposition groups will go their separate ways and compete against each other. The starting assumption is that all genuine opposition groups in an authoritarian regime suffer from the same constraints on their activities. Their publications are suppressed, members are jailed without trial or harassed, activities (marches, meetings) are either banned or disrupted and, more significantly, political demands for change ignored. It follows that actors finding themselves in such a situation would attempt to pool their resources in order to achieve their common minimal goal: the removal of the current regime. In this respect, the ideology they subscribe to, the policy preferences they have and the vision of society they hold should theoretically be put on the backburner in order to achieve the goal of legitimately expressing such preferences. Coalition building, no matter how loose the coalition might be, would seem to be the top priority. The evidence from a number of case studies confirms the validity of such behaviour by opposition actors thereby reinforcing the view that civil society has a positive normative value attached to it. Writing on the Czechoslovakian transition, Olson (1997) points out that all the opposition groups and formations

were submerged [ … ] in the formation of the Civic Forum of Prague, and the Public against Violence in Bratislava. Both were amorphous reform groupings, united for the single purpose of removing communists from power. Having quickly achieved their goal, they as quickly lost the source of their cohesion.

The same trend towards unity is evident in Poland where the so-called opposition ‘lay left’ were joined by Catholic activists within the group established prior to the arrival of Solidarnosc on the scene. Solidarnosc itself was a collection of different groups with different agendas, but with the common goal of removing the communists from power (Stokes, 1993). The subsequent divisions within the movement testify to the heterogeneity of the trade union and its leaders. Latin America was no different. The Chilean opposition was also able to achieve a degree of unity to remove Pinochet. It brought together a number of different social movements and political actors with very little in common but their preference for a plural political system (Oxhorn, 1995). Thus, the implications of these events for the concept of civil society and for its application is that a tendency towards unity develops, despite ideological and policy preferences differences. It means that where openings of some sort exist and where opposition actors formally subscribe to a political platform and course of action aimed at regime change, civil society activism once again performs its normative role.

In conclusion, it can be convincingly argued that the role of civil society in democratic countrie...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Politics
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of organizations – interviews
• Introduction
• 1 Civil society in the Arab world
• 2 Associational life under authoritarian constraints
• 3 Algeria
• 4 Morocco
• 5 Jordan
• 6 Yemen
• 7 Lebanon
• 8 The dynamics of civic activism in the Arab world
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index