When Victory Is Not an Option

Islamist Movements in Arab Politics

Nathan J. Brown

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780801477720
• eBook ISBN: 9780801464362
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Parties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Throughout the Arab world, Islamist political movements are joining the electoral process. This change alarms some observers and excites other. In recent years, electoral opportunities have opened, and Islamist movements have seized them. But those opportunities, while real, have also been sharply circumscribed. Elections may be freer, but they are not fair. The opposition can run but it generally cannot win. Semiauthoritarian conditions prevail in much of the Arab world, even in the wake of the Arab Spring. How do Islamist movements change when they plunge into freer but unfair elections? How do their organizations (such as the Muslim Brotherhood) and structures evolve? What happens to their core ideological principles? And how might their increased involvement affect the political system?

In When Victory Is Not an Option, Nathan J. Brown addresses these questions by focusing on Islamist movements in Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, and Palestine. He shows that uncertain benefits lead to uncertain changes. Islamists do adapt their organizations and their ideologies do bend—some. But leaders almost always preserve a line of retreat in case the political opening fizzles or fails to deliver what they wish. The result is a cat-and-mouse game between dominant regimes and wily movements. There are possibilities for more significant changes, but to date they remain only possibilities.

1

PARTIALLY POLITICAL MOVEMENTS IN SEMIAUTHORITARIAN SYSTEMS

Over the past generation, Arab politics has begun to open up. And some Islamist movements—particularly those modeled on Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood—have poured into the resulting gaps. How has politics changed them?

In a variety of Arab political systems, space for political speech and even activity has become more open but is still very constrained, and limits can be ruthlessly enforced. These changes were deeply entrenched long before the revolutionary upheavals of 2011; indeed, it is not yet clear how much would-be revolutionaries and reformers, as bold as their efforts have been, will overcome deeply institutionalized patterns of governance. Most Arab systems still inhabit a halfway house of semiauthoritarianism. Neither fully authoritarian in all the harshness that term has come to imply nor meaningfully democratic in allowing people to select their rulers, Arab political systems from Morocco to the Gulf passed in the last decades of the twentieth century into a semiauthoritarian era.

In this era, the opposition can organize to run in elections, but it cannot win them. Social services formally provided by the state have been taken on by a welter of movements, voluntary grassroots associations, and professionalized nongovernmental organizations, but regimes become suspicious and repressive when such social activity is linked to political opposition. The rules of political life are constantly rewritten, opportunities open and close irregularly, “red lines” are as brutally policed as they are mercurial in their meaning, and rulers seem steered rather than governed by laws they themselves have often written. But for all the limited and ambivalent nature of liberalization in the Arab world, there is still a notable change from a generation ago: some opposition activity is possible.

That space for political opposition helped launch some of the upheavals of 2011, but we are not primarily focusing on those events or on the possibilities for democratic politics that they have opened. Instead of speculation about the future, we are concerned with semiauthoritarianism as it has been operating, and we are especially focused on its effects on Islamist movements.

Islamists have sought to grasp the opportunities that result from semiauthoritarian politics, most publicly and dramatically in the electoral realm. Throughout the Arab world, Islamist political movements alarm some and excite others when they enter the electoral process. The thrill and fear have increased markedly in recent years. As new electoral horizons have opened, Islamist movements have moved toward them. But the new opportunities, while real, are kept within bounds. Elections are freer, because they include more serious contestants. But they are not fair, because only incumbents can win.

How are Islamist movements affected when they plunge into these freer but unfair elections? How much and how deeply are their organizations changed? What happens to their core ideological principles? This book shows that a specific but influential and widespread kind of Islamist movement (a broad and engaged movement modeled on Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood) will seize the political opportunities presented to it. Such a movement will invest seriously in politics, molding its structure and program in substantial ways in the process. But such investment will go only so far. Because the rewards of politics are limited, and because the movements are concerned with far more than politics, Islamist leaders try to leave a line of retreat. They invest, but they do not irrevocably commit.

When given uncertain and shifting opportunities, Islamist movements with broad agendas will invest much more in politics. They will develop their programs and their organizational capabilities in ways that are designed to take advantage of the more open environment, to an extent. They will form political parties when allowed to by law, but they will keep them on a short leash. And they will issue programmatic statements designed to assure potential supporters and calm potential opponents, but they will balk at giving detailed answers to some of the most difficult political questions that confront them. Islamist movements have broad and diverse agendas; semiauthoritarian politics encourages them to focus on political participation but gives them little reason to commit fully to a political path.

In short, we will see that Islamist movements reach for uncertain benefits by making uncertain changes. They adapt their organizations and bend their ideologies, but they are wary about the possibility that the political opening will fizzle or fail to deliver what they wish. The result is a cat-and-mouse game between dominant regimes and shrewd movements.

Our interest is in semiauthoritarianism, a political form very much alive in the Arab world. But even where it has fallen, its effects may linger. The upheavals of 2011 will likely have real and profound effects on the dynamic between regime and movement, but they may not have sudden ones. As scholars have long noted, the breakdown of an authoritarian system (and presumably a semiauthoritarian one as well) is not the same as the construction of a democratic one. Movements accustomed to cautious investment in semiauthoritarian politics may be tantalized by the opportunities presented by regime change but they may also be wary of the uncertainty. And they are also likely to find that converting their movements into structures designed for democratic politics a complicated project. In short, our findings about Islamist behavior under semiauthoritarian regimes might actually outlast those regimes.

The political activity of Islamist movements in the Arab world hardly wants for attention. But much of the public discussion—not only in Western policy circles but also in Arab intellectual debates—focuses on their democratic credentials: how sincere are Islamists about playing the democratic game? The question is an odd one: there simply has been no democratic game to play. We need to focus less attention on how much democracy lies in the hearts of Islamist leaders. And indeed, recent scholarly approaches have developed an alternative approach: rather than use the beliefs or ideologies of Islamists as the starting point for explanation, they turn matters around and ask what effect the political system has on Islamist movements. In its simplest form, this leads to what is often called the “inclusion-moderation thesis”—that including Islamist leaders in the political process will produce democratic Islamist movements.

Thus, while policy discussions often see Islamist ideology as a cause, scholars are more likely to see it as an effect—and to see elections and political participation as a particularly important way of modifying ideologies and programs. As Güneş Murat Tezcür claims, “the crucial variable affecting prospects for democratization in hybrid or authoritarian regimes in the Muslim world is the institutional characteristics of the ruling regimes rather than the ideological commitments of the opposition.”¹ The scholarly preference has begun to have some limited effect on broader public and policy discussions, with growing interest in Western capitals in what seems to scholars an overly crude version of the inclusion-moderation thesis (based, often, on an understanding of western European history and the conversion of groups on the radical left and right to tamer electoral parties). Thus, in 2005, President George W. Bush publicly mused, however briefly, about the possibility of electoral participation moderating Hizbullah before seeming to revert to the position that the party had to moderate before it could be considered a participant:

I like the idea of people running for office. There’s a positive effect when you run for office. Maybe some will run for office and say, vote for me, I look forward to blowing up America. I don’t know, I don’t know if that will be their platform or not. But it’s—I don’t think so. I think people who generally run for office say, vote for me, I’m looking forward to fixing your potholes, or making sure you got bread on the table. And so—but Hezbollah is on the terrorist list for a reason, and remain on the terrorist list for a reason. Our position has not changed on Hezbollah.²

Viewing Islamist ideology (and organization as well) as effect will prove very useful, and most of this book will follow that path. There are limits to the approach—we will see that the general sense of mission for Islamist movements is still an important part of the explanation for their behavior; that Islamist actors with different missions follow different paths; and thus that Islamists are not only creations of their political environment. But if this book participates in a broader scholarly inclination to tilt toward viewing Islamists as effect, it must still be noted that the inclusion-moderation thesis, especially in many of its cruder forms, can lead us to overlook critical features both of semiauthoritarian politics and of Islamist movements. We will certainly draw on the findings of those who explore inclusion and moderation, but we will refine both the arguments and the terms in fundamental ways.

“Moderation” means many things that are not always clearly related and are too rarely specified (it can refer to changes in positions on women’s rights, the willingness to recognize Israel, nonviolence either in practice or in doctrine, acceptance of electoral defeat, embracing liberal values, and cooperating with U.S. foreign and security policy). It is generally based on a fairly facile use of historical analogies rather than sustained analysis (and its opponents respond with equally facile historical retorts, leading to what I term “analogy mongering” in Chapter 3), and the mechanisms by which it might operate are often unexplained and unexplored.³

Most important for present purposes, it all too often makes two implicit assumptions: that “inclusion” is in democratic elections and that movements are enticed to change as part of an effort to win. Neither of these assumptions holds for the Arab world, where the elections have not been fully democratic and Islamists usually make quite clear that they are not seeking a majority. Thus this book will begin with an attempt to recast some scholarly approaches to make them more suitable for the current inquiry.

Rather than use terms that have shifting and often unspecified meanings, we will focus on the politicization of Islamist movements—the extent to which they focus their energies on participation in an existing political system, within the rules and boundaries set by that system. Terms such as “inclusion” and especially “moderation” are infused with hidden normative assumptions and often devoid of fixed meaning. Past writings using such terms are useful, and we will draw on them heavily. But rather than struggle to express ourselves in a set of categories invented for political parties in democracies, we will focus on “politicization” in a way that better captures the realities of semiauthoritarian political systems (which offer only a limited role for opposition movements). More important, the most intensive debates within Islamist movements are usually not over “moderation” but instead over how much to commit a movement to a political path. So again, “politicization” captures the reality experienced by the actors.

The politics that interests us is very focused in nature: participation in officially sanctioned institutions and procedures. This is how the movements themselves tend to use the term; the question for them is how hard to play by the rules of a game they have little control over. They argue that political activity is best viewed in service of their general mission; when participating in politics, they are pursuing the same goals as they do when they preach, educate, meet, study, or serve the poor. But if their mission is constant, they still view politics as a distinct realm, in part because regimes make it one by their restrictive rules and practices.

The issue of political participation is a surprisingly difficult one, both for the participants (Islamist leaders) and for the external observers (the scholarly community). Members of the first camp encounter difficult problems when they approach semiauthoritarian politics; those in the second camp have problems for a different set of reasons: they enter the quest for understanding with a set of conceptual and theoretical tools that were designed for very different settings. Let us begin by considering the difficulties for each in turn.

Why Is Islamist Politicization under Semiauthoritarianism Difficult in Practice?

In one sense, the phenomenon of Islamists running for office in the Arab world is a hoary one: the founder of the oldest and largest movement, Hasan al-Banna of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, filed for parliamentary election in 1942 before withdrawing and actually ran (unsuccessfully) in 1945. In other Arab countries—ranging from Jordan and Yemen to Syria and Kuwait—Islamist movements participated in elections almost as soon as they were able. Even in Iraq, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority, Islamists dubious about the moral authority of the political system have competed in elections.

But there has been a qualitative and a quantitative shift in Islamist electoral participation in recent years. Earlier generations of leaders and activists dabbled in elections as a sideline to their main activities; their ideological diffidence toward democratic institutions and practices was marked; and many leaders showed strong ambivalence even to the word “democracy” itself. By contrast, today’s leaders speak routinely of “a strategic choice” to commit to democracy and claim not only to support democratizing reforms at the national level but to practice democracy in internal operations. And just as impressive is their performance at the ballot box. In many cases, the number of votes they receive and seats they win seems to be limited primarily by the existing regime’s shamelessness in manipulating the rules and results and the movement’s own interest (or lack of interest) in winning.

Indeed, for all their increased interest in participation, Islamist movements in the Arab world only rarely enter an election to win it. That would be naive; in many Arab countries, the most reliable and stable electoral rule is that the opposition cannot win. But Islamists run even though losing is foreordained. Actually, they go further: they generally do not even contest a majority of seats. Islamist leaders turn the necessity of losing into a virtue, citing the slogan “participation not domination” (al-musharika la al-mughaliba).

Nevertheless, using whatever spaces the admittedly feeble electoral mechanisms of the region offer has potentially deep implications for these movements, and even deeper ones for the societies in which they live. For the movements, politicization—the decision to dedicate resources to elections, the move to form structures that resemble electoral parties, the effort to craft platforms and appeal to new constituencies, the development of new appeals and programs, the attempt to comply with onerous and restrictive laws, and the almost inevitable emergence of new leadership groups grounded in parliaments—can have profound effects on both their ideology and their organization.

The broader society finds Islamist movements difficult to integrate as normal political actors, for two reasons. First, no matter how peaceful their means, the movements offer not only a set of alternative policies but also a different vision of society. Because of the deep gulfs separating them from regimes (and even from other opposition actors), the movements, as much as they may accommodate themselves to the existing political rules on a practical and ideological level, still pose a strong challenge. They appear to be anti-system parties no matter how obedient their behavior.

Second, the movements have not been operating in democratic systems. Instead, their commitment to electoral politics has taken place under regimes that do not allow the opposition to win and allow electoral mechanisms to operate in a highly restricted fashion. Ruling elites resist accepting any political actors they cannot control, co-opt, contain, or manipulate. The question so often posed—are Islamist movements truly democratic or really revolutionary?—is in a fundamental sense based on an inaccurate understanding of semiauthoritarian regimes: instituting democracy would itself be revolutionary. To put it differently, any genuinely democratic party in the Arab world is in many respects an anti-system party. It should therefore be no surprise that in a few cases Islamist movements, with their deep social roots, have found that intensifying their democratic commitments can actually make them more threatening to existing regimes.

Why Is Islamist Politicization under Semiauthoritaria...

Table of contents

• Preface
• 1. PARTIALLY POLITICAL MOVEMENTS IN SEMIAUTHORITARIAN SYSTEMS
• 2. RUNNING TO LOSE?
• 3. BEYOND ANALOGY MONGERING
• 4. THE MODEL AND THE MOTHER MOVEMENT
• 5. THE MODEL IN PRACTICE IN FOUR SEMIAUTHORITARIAN SETTINGS
• 6. CAN ISLAMISTS PARTY?
• 7. IDEOLOGICAL CHANGE
• 8. ARAB POLITICS AND SOCIETIES AS THEY MIGHT BE
• 9. ISLAMIST PARTIES AND ARAB POLITICAL SYSTEMS AS THEY ARE
• Bibliography