65 How do the new ruling elites set about reorganising the economy to meet the unfulfilled aspirations of their populations? This question is pressing. The ‘authoritarian upgrading’ that Steven Hyderman identified as a key strategy for regime survival across the Middle East during the 1980s and 1990s placed limited economic reforms at its centre. Using the rhetoric of neoliberalism to ingratiate themselves with the United States and the international community, Middle Eastern dictators sought to jettison the costly developmental promises which had once been key to their legitimation. As the state retreated from the economy, the indigenous bourgeoisie were brought back in; crony capitalists became a crucial, if junior member, of the ruling elite. This turn to neoliberal justifications for continued rule created an influential group of economic entrepreneurs who remain dominant in key sections of the Egyptian and Tunisian economy. Authoritarian upgrading also transformed the barriers between the public and the private, the state and the economy. This part- privatisation of powerful sections of the ruling elite became a region-wide phenomenon. However, post- regime change the legacy of this process is most problematic for the political transition in Egypt. For a brief but crucial period of time, the Egyptian military were celebrated by protestors in Tahrir Square for not unleashing their coercive power in support of Mubarak’s continued rule. However, this act of omission was in part at least motivated by the threat the revolution posed to their economic interests. Mubarak’s son Gamal was attempting to expand the grip of his own group of crony capitalists over the economy, thus encroaching on the military’s own economic fiefdoms. The Janus-faced relationship that Field Marshall Muhammed Hussein Tantawi and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces have had with the Tahrir protestors since the removal of Mubarak has alternated between celebration and repression justified by sinister but hidden foreign conspiracies. This political schizophrenia is shaped by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces’ desire to protect their control over up to 40 percent of the Egyptian economy. It is essential to understand the role and influence of crony capitalists empowered by the old regimes because they may act as a counter- revolutionary force, as has been the case in Egypt. A coalition of commercial interests, threatened by meaningful economic change could bring together the crony capitalists of the old regime with their allies and business partners still embedded in the highest ranks of the state’s bureaucracy. Alternatively, and more likely, as has already happened in Egypt, major indigenous economic interests may use their collaborators within the state to place clear limits on how transformatory the post-revolutionary governments can be. This issue will overtly or covertly dominate the path regime transition takes, because the shock troops of those revolutions, the young people of Egypt and Tunisia, were motivated in large part by their own economic exclusion. The flagrant corruption of the old ruling elite had publicly expanded the chasm between the haves and have-nots within society. The post- revolutionary regimes have not to date shown any clear idea, beyond the neoliberal orthodoxy parroted by their predecessors, about how they will deliver meaningful growth. Mubarak and Ben Ali were partially successful in delivering economic growth, opening their economies to foreign direct investment and multi-national companies. However, the positive results of such neoliberal expansion were not felt across society. The urban poor did not benefit from the infitah and the state-employed middle class were directly targeted by it. Neoliberal reforms produced a politically connected but small nouveau riche , with the majority of the population excluded and increasingly resentful. The transitional governments need to reformulate economic policies in a way that delivers meaningful growth to this previously alienated majority. This is especially problematic in Egypt, which has demographically passed the peak of its youth bulge, placing increasing numbers of young people on the job market. If the government fails to deliver hope to this section of society, there will be the temptation to revert to the tried and tested mechanisms of blaming uneven economic growth on the vagaries of the market. Coercion will then once again become the main tool used to demobilise an alienated youth, exposed to but excluded from the benefits of transnational capitalism. The problems surrounding the delivery of meaningful economic growth leads on to Lawson’s third point, the lack of ‘contemporary revolutionary ideologies’ binding these movements together and the fact that 66 they have ‘... little sense of what an alternative order would look like once such processes have taken place’. The internationally dominant cliché of an Arab Spring revolutionary was a young, network-savvy, college- educated member of the middle class. As Stein points out, the role that Facebook and other new technology played in the revolutions was much more complicated and inconclusive. The ‘demonstration effect’ which drove protest from Tunisia into Libya and Egypt and then on into the Gulf was powered by an older form of technology, satellite television. Al Jazeera was heralded as revolutionary when it launched in 1996. However, its long-terms effects may if anything have been more influential. Broadly comparable to the Sawat al-Arab radio station under Nasser, Al Jazeera and other Arab satellite stations played a key role in recreating a region-wide Arab public sphere, which amplified the demonstration effect of Ben Ali’s departure. Furthermore, beyond a collective sense of endeavour and empowerment, the movements of the Arab Spring were not united by a concrete or programmatical agenda for post-regime change transformation. The results of the Egyptian elections certainly proved that Tahrir was not Egypt, but also went on to demonstrate that neither was Cairo. The dominance of Islamist Parties in the elections, taking 67 percent of the vote, came as no surprise. The Muslim Brotherhood were able to protect and even foster their nationwide organisation under the rule of both Sadat and Mubarak. The years of brutal suppression alternating with toleration and cooptation turned the Brotherhood into a cautious and, given its origins and early ideology, a comparatively moderate organisation. The size of its presence in parliament and its organisational ability has given it the capacity to counter-balance the Egyptian military and win early victories in the war of position that is now shaping the transition. That said, the Muslim Brotherhood’s ‘auto-reform’, its transition under state repression from a militant revolutionary organisation to one committed to democracy, has not given it a clear or insightful programme for the transformation of the Egyptian economy in a way that can meet the aspirations of its voters or the third of Egyptian society aged between 15 and 30. There is a danger, as Fatima El-Issawi points out in her chapter on Tunisia, that the pressing demands for economic transformation will be sidelined and the newly empowered but largely inexperienced political parties will fight over secondary issues, such as dress codes and the policing of morality, which they have clear positions on but which of themselves do not deliver hope for meaningful change or prosperity. The final issue surrounding the outcomes of the Arab Spring is the coherence of the old ruling elites and their ability to suppress or buy off the challenges they faced. In two of the four regime changes, the removals of Ben Ali and Mubarak were facilitated by the fracturing of the ruling elite. In Tunis, Rachid Ammar, the Army Chief of Staff refused to open fire on the demonstrators in a similar way to Tantawi in Cairo. This left the armed forces in both countries intact and in a central position to influence the shape of the transition. In Libya, the country’s armed forces were overcome through the heavy and extended support of NATO. The nature of that support led to a fracturing of the state’s security forces but this was mirrored by the highly fractured nature of the militias fighting to remove Gaddafi. In Yemen, whilst the figurehead of the regime has been removed, competition for power between tarnished former elites dominates the political landscape. Without key defections from within the higher echelons of the ruling elite or extended external military support, the youthful revolutionaries at the centre of the Arab Spring have proved unable to remove any other ruling elites across the Middle East. A year and a half after the start of the Arab Spring, successful revolutions have proved comparatively rare, even at the centre of what Perry Anderson labelled a ‘new concatenation of political upheaval’; comparable to the Hispanic American wars of liberation that started in 1810, the European revolutions of 1848-9 and the fall of the Soviet backed regimes in Eastern Europe during 1989-91. Against this background, it is now possible to start a discussion about what the aftermath of the Arab Spring may look like, what the long term effects of this movement could bring. As things stand, the Spring has given rise to three broad sets of outcomes. The first contains the majority of states in the region, and represents little or no change. From Saudi Arabia to Jordan, the ruling elites have managed through adjustments to their ruling strategies to stay in power and face down 67 the protestors. The second category of outcomes indicates a more evenly balanced contest between those mobilising for change and the regime (or remnants of the regime) themselves. This has however caused the countries concerned to descend into civil war. As things stand both Libya and Syria are in this category with Yemen a clear contender to join. Finally, there are those countries which are in the midst of a largely peaceful transition after regime change, Egypt and Tunisia. The first category of states, those where the regimes have survived the challenge of popular protest, could be understood as embarking on a new round of ‘authoritarian upgrading’. As the Arab Spring spread across North Africa and into the wider Middle East, ruling elites set about a reassessment of their formula for continued rule. This involved adjusting the balance between William Quandt’s four pillars of authoritarianism, ‘ideology, repression, payoffs, and elite solidarity’. In Bahrain, the Al-Khalifa ruling elite faced the most serious and sustained challenge to their rule in the Gulf region. As Christian Coates-Ulrichsen demonstrates in this report, their response was to unleash a sustained barrage of repression against those involved in the demonstrations. Thus ‘the Bahraini government mercilessly pursued all forms of dissent, detaining doctors and lawyers merely for treating or representing detainees, suspending opposition political societies and arresting their leaders’. Once the ruling elite’s primacy had been secured, they embarked upon a post-facto attempt to downplay, justify and minimise the brutal suppression they unleashed. A ‘National Dialogue’ was set up but the main opposition parties were deliberately under-represented, which begs the questions of who is allowed to be a member of the nation and what the dialogue was for? The regime then set up the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry, which to the surprise of many, turned out to be both independent and an inquiry! The report concluded that the authorities had indeed used excessive force and torture. It also undermined the ruling elite’s central explanation for the protests, finding no evidence of Iranian involvement. The aftermath of the protests in Bahrain has left the government desperately trying to re-establish its international legitimacy but continuing to repress the majority of its population. The balance of forces within the country, especially in the wake of Saudi intervention in support of the Al-Khalifas, means the regime itself faces no direct threat to its continued rule. However, in the aftermath of its extended and brutal crackdown, its carefully constructed decade-long attempt to portray itself as an open, fairly liberal base for multinational companies operating in the region lies in tatters. The population has become increasingly divided as the regime pandered to sectarian division as part of its survival strategy. This has solidified its base amongst the minority Sunni section of the population but may well constrain the regime’s room for manoeuvre as Bahraini society is further partitioned. The second category of states that have emerged from the Arab Spring are those that have descended into civil war, Libya and Syria. In the case of Libya, it is still not clear whether the highly precarious post- regime change situation will revert to civil war or stabilise into a potentially sustainable transition. The fact that Libya today has all the prerequisites of a failed state springs from the legacies of Gaddafi’s rule, the way regime change was realised, and the actions of politicians and militia leaders in its aftermath. When he was murdered, Gaddafi bequeathed to the Libyan population a malfunctioning state, with weak governmental institutions and little or no civil society. Still traumatised by the extended quasi-imperial occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, the leading proponents of military support for regime change in Paris, London and later Washington, were determined to limit involvement in terms of both ‘boots on the ground’ and overt military assistance. The historical legacy and the nature of NATO’s actions has left a post-Gaddafi Libyan regime with spurious legitimacy and little capacity to influence events on the ground. Ranj Alaaldin, in this report, quite rightly describes the National Transition Council now seeking to run Libya as suffering from a ‘series of deficiencies’ a ‘democratic deficit’ and a number of geographical as well as secular-Islamist divisions. To add to the country’s current woes, the International Crisis Group estimates that real military power lies with anything up to 100 militias containing 125,000 armed Libyans. This situation of a weak and under-legitimised government seeking to impose control over a myriad
Posted on: Sun, 24 Aug 2014 13:01:47 +0000
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