Full text of DOI:10.1111/1468-2346.00183

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State of the art
Rentiers and autocrats, monarchs and
democrats, state and society: the Middle East
between globalization, human ‘agency’,
and Europe
GERD NONNEMAN
Middle East politics and policy concerns
The key concerns—both policy-oriented and conceptual—in work on the
politics of the Middle East since the late 1980s have been economic and political
liberalization/democratization (or the absence thereof), and security, both
domestic and international, along with the continued focus on the Arab–Israeli
theatre. There has been an increasing recognition that these issues are strongly
interrelated. ‘Gulf security’, for instance, has at its heart the interlinked
components of domestic stability and perceived regional threats. The former
raises questions of the sustainability of the rentier social contract, the nature of
‘oil monarchies’, the impact of ‘Palestine’ on regime legitimacy, and the Islamist
political menus; the regional threat perception also turns on the themes of
‘Palestine’ and ‘Islam’, in addition to that of regional adventurism driven by
domestic insecurities (as in the case of Iraq)—insecurities in turn generated at
least in part by inadequate state and regime legitimacy. The Arab–Israeli theatre
in itself, in addition to its regional implications, raises questions about the nature
of Israeli democracy, as well as about the prospects for democratization in the
mooted Palestinian state. Europe, the Arab world’s neighbour, cannot avoid
concerns over economic and political instability in the region spilling over into
increased migration flows and possibly related political activity within Europe—
apart from having substantial economic reasons for engagement with the
region. These concerns in turn have become translated into a desire to see
economic and political reform take place—although policies in both respects
remain fraught with inconsistencies. And all of this is occurring against the
background of ‘globalization’—both in terms of the spread of the discourse of
political liberalization and, of more immediate importance, the growing hold of
liberal market economics and rules in the international political economy.
Middle Eastern economies are being driven towards, at least, tentative measures
of economic liberalization, both by internal economic weaknesses and by
external pressures. In turn, this is resulting in pressures on the unwritten ‘social
contracts’ and hence on the existing political dispensations.
International Affairs 77, 1 (2001) 141-162
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Gerd Nonneman
The new academic mood of the 1990s
With the end of the Cold War and some signs of (very limited) political and
economic liberalization in the region, attempts were made to challenge the
consensus reigning among social scientists not specializing in the region—as
well as among many ‘Orientalists’—that the Middle East was ‘exceptional’ and
unlikely to develop democratic politics, due to cultural and historical factors as
well as the political economy of rentierism. Increasingly, possibilities for
economic as well as political development in the region were explored, by
Western and Middle Eastern social scientists alike; pragmatic new versions of
the previously ideological goal of regional integration were put forward; and
new avenues were sought to resolve the Arab–Israeli conflict—all of this in the
context of the changing international, and hence domestic, political economies.
Some of this was directly policy-driven: the European Commission had already
in 1991 commissioned a large study bringing these themes together, in which an
international group of social scientists and practitioners concluded that a
European policy in support of political reform, sub-regional economic integra-
tion, and involvement in resolving the Palestine conflict was both desirable and
1
feasible.
For a number of years, the Centre for Arab Unity Studies (Beirut), the Arab
Thought Forum (Amman), and Cairo’s Al-Ahram Centre for Political and
Strategic Studies had already been bringing together thoughtful work by a
number of Arab social scientists such as Saad Eddin Ibrahim, but it was not until
the publication in 1994 of Democracy without democrats? under the direction of
Ghassan Salamé, that a thorough conceptual re-examination of the theme of
democratization in the Middle East was made available in English (with the
benefit of bringing together French and Arab, as well as American, British,
2
German and Italian new scholarly perspectives). Meanwhile, two other
3
collective projects, directed respectively by Niblock and Murphy, and Harik
4
and Sullivan, had resulted in a long-overdue examination of the linkages
between, as well as the nature of, economic and political liberalization in the
region. These, like the Salamé volume, built on a marriage of conceptual and
empirical investigation, bringing together social science theory and Middle East
area expertise—a combination that had too often been lacking. Much work on
the politics of the Middle East had either been empirical only, or ideological-
normative, or ‘Orientalist’ in its assumptions and its absence of political (or even
social) science background. On the other hand, most of the conceptual and
comparative work on political transitions and democratization either ignored
1
Published in a second edition as Gerd Nonneman, ed., The Middle East and Europe: the search for stability
and integration (London: Federal Trust, 1993).
Ghassan Salamé, ed., Democracy without democrats? The renewal of politics in the Muslim world (London: I. B.
2
Tauris, 1994).
3
Tim Niblock and Emma Murphy, eds, Political and economic liberalisation in the Middle East (London:
British Academic Press, 1993).
Ilya Harik and Dennis Sullivan, eds, Privatization and liberalization in the Middle East (Bloomington:
4
Indiana University Press, 1992).
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Rentiers and autocrats, monarchs and democrats, state and society
the Middle East altogether or dismissed the region as an exceptional and hope-
5
less case.
This inadequate integration of theory and area expertise, where the Middle
East is concerned, has also been in evidence in other aspects of politics and
international relations—although here too the past decade has seen a modest
6
renaissance. Given these past lacunae, the 1999 volume Area studies and social
science: strategies for understanding Middle East politics, edited by Mark Tessler,
should become required reading for anyone teaching or conducting research on
the subject: by picking up the lenses of the different social science disciplines
relevant to studying any region, and viewing the Middle East through them, the
contributors succeed in demonstrating that attempts to understand the region
without bringing area specialization and social science together must in many
7
respects fail. The quest for social science theory, by the same token, has much
to learn from specialist work on the Middle East.
Civil society, Islam and democratization
The most recent writing on the theme of liberalization and democratization in
the region also draws on a number of other key works from the 1990s focusing
on the themes of civil society and political Islam. On the former, Norton’s
8
comprehensive two-volume project on Civil society in the Middle East demol-
ished the myth that the region was uniquely lacking in such a category, while
examining the varieties and variations within it. On the role of Islam, and its
compatibility or otherwise with concepts of democracy and human rights, a
number of works had succeeded in establishing that, in terms of political
implications, there are many Islams; that there is nothing in the faith that is
intrinsically incompatible with democracy—or political participation more
5
Both the seminal work edited by Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe Schmitter and Laurence Whitehead,
Transitions from authoritarian rule: prospects for democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986),
and the 4-volume set edited by Larry Diamond, Juan Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset, Democracy in
developing countries (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1988), exclude the Islamic Middle East—the latter
explicitly so. Samuel Huntington, among political scientists, and Bernard Lewis, among Orientalist
historians, are perhaps the best-known sceptics about the region’s chances of democratization.
Particularly egregious examples of ‘orientalist’ negative stereotyping are the work of Daniel Pipes—for
instance, In the path of God: Islam and political power (New York: Basic Books, 1983)—and David Pryce-
Jones, The closed circle: an interpretation of the Arabs (New York: Harper & Row, 1989). One comparative
work that did include Middle Eastern case-studies (admittedly also showing up the limitations in political
liberalization in the cases studied) is Gerd Nonneman, ed., Political and economic liberalization: dynamics and
linkages in comparative perspective (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1996).
6
Apart from the authors included in the volumes already mentioned, exponents of this renaissance
included, among others, Lisa Anderson, Nazih Ayubi, Simon Bromley, Kiren Aziz Chaudhry, Giacomo
Luciani, Alan Richards and John Waterbury (politics and political economy); Anoushiravan Ehteshami,
Fred Halliday, Raymond Hinnebusch and Bahgat Korany (international relations); and Michael Gilsenan
and Sami Zubaida (sociology).
7
Mark Tessler, ed., Area studies and social science: strategies for understanding Middle East politics (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1999).
Augustus Richard Norton, ed., Civil society in the Middle East, vols 1 & 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1994 & 1995). An
8
excellent if brief summary has been made available in Jill Schwedler, ed., Civil society in the Middle East: a
primer (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1995).
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Gerd Nonneman
broadly; and that there are both authoritarian and pluralist strands in past and
present Islamic socio-political and legal theory as well as practice. Key contri-
9
10
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butions were those of Krämer, Ayubi, Esposito and Piscatori. These
questions were integral also to Salamé’s Democracy without democrats? volume,
and were methodically explored in the first part of an equally seminal project
coordinated by Brynen, Korany and Noble, Political liberalization and demo-
cratization in the Arab world. The first volume, Theoretical perspectives, published in
1995, was followed in 1998 by a volume of case-studies which picked up the
basic potential explanatory variables identified in the first volume: political
12
culture; political economy; civil society; and international context. Both in
the theoretical and the empirical investigations, diverging views remained over
the relative importance of these factors and over their precise nature, but I
would argue that it is nevertheless possible to discern, in this and the other
works referred to already, an implicit consensus on a number of points.
(1) Significant political changes did indeed take place in the 1990s, but the
results have been disappointing relative to the expectations at the start of the
decade;
(2) The discourse of democracy and pluralism have nonetheless become wide-
spread, although Arab political scientists and commentators have been
making a clear distinction between dimuqratiyya and ta‘addudiya (which can
mean anything from multipartyism to pluralism)—concluding that while
the latter has become more prevalent, the former is still some considerable
way off;
(3) In terms of explanations, political culture is seen as playing a role, though not
an overwhelming one; crucially, however, it is shown that there is not in
fact any such thing as an overarching Arab–Islamic political culture, and
that political behaviour and attitudes are to a large extent adaptive to social
13
settings and shaped by political context;
(4) An especially pertinent illustration of this is seen in Islamist politics: ‘the
self-described Islamist character of a movement tells us nothing useful about
14
its behaviour unless placed in the appropriate political and social context’;
(5) Different types of impulses towards liberalization can be identified—from
mass pressures (caused by changes in the implicit ‘social contract’ driven by
9
Gudrun Krämer, ‘Islamist notions of democracy’, in Joel Beinin and Joe Stork, eds, Political Islam
(London: I. B. Tauris, 1997), pp. 71–82.
Nazih Ayubi, Political Islam (London: Routledge, 1991).
For instance John Esposito and James Piscatori, ‘Democratization and Islam’, in The Middle East Journal
10
11
45: 3 (summer 1992), pp. 427–40.
Rex Brynen, Bahgat Korany and Paul Noble, eds, Political liberalization and democratization in the Arab
12
world. Volume 1:Theoretical experiences (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1995); Bahgat Korany, Rex Brynen
and Paul Noble, eds, Political liberalization and democratization in the Arab world. Volume 2: Comparative
experiences (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner: 1998).
13
Ibid., pp. 269–71.
14
Ibid., p. 271—based in large measure on the work of Krämer (especially her ‘Islam and pluralism’, in
Brynen, Korany and Noble, vol. 1, pp. 113–28) along with other case-studies.
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