On February 17, 2010
the Program on Good Governance and Political Reform in the Arab World at CDDRL held
its inaugural seminar with Prof. Philippe C. Schmitter, Professor Emeritus, European University Institute, Florence and Visiting
Scholar at CDDRL and Dr. Sean Yom, Hewlett Postdoctoral Fellow at CDDRL.
The seminar was
titled Exploring the missing link between liberalization and democratization
in the Middle East. The seminar
aimed to start a public discussion on one of the routine assumptions of
students of democratization, which is that there is a close, causal
relationship between liberalization and democratization. The former is said to
drive those who concede it toward convoking credible elections and, eventually,
tolerating ruler accountability to citizens. The link between those
processes of regime transformation is alleged to be the mobilization of civil
society. It has been argued that the weakness or absence of this
linkage is one (among many) of the conditions which make the polities
of the Middle East and North Africa resistant to democratization.
In his response to this argument, Philippe Schmitter began
by saying that in the work that he started on Southern Europe and Latin
America, there was a distinction between democratization and liberalization.
Once an autocratic regime enters a process of liberalization, it faces
unexpected consequences. Thus, the most vulnerable time for a regime is when it
starts to reform itself. Some of the consequences of this process are the
resurrection of civil society, more freedom of expression and movement, the
release of political prisoners and the freer operation of political parties.
Such consequences are what liberalization means.
Schmitter argued that all autocratic regimes have tried this
process, and that this process is normally triggered by divisions within the
regimes or succession struggles, where regimes feel the need to open up. The
kind of liberalization that takes place depends on the type of autocracy
present. But the objective of liberalization, Schmitter said, is to coopt and
produce a large social basis for autocracy, for example, through cultivating
political parties that agree not to be too oppositional.
Schmitter added that many autocracies are under pressure
from external regimes. Most of the countries in the Middle East have some kind
of agreement with the EU for example, which carries clauses on issues like the
rule of law. Another factor is that liberalization is selective in its
inclusion, focusing on the urban middle class. It is thus "voluntary", conceded
from above by the regime, and not based on any form of mobilization from below.
In other words, Schmitter argued that regimes choose to liberalize and are not
forced to do so. Thus, regimes are limited in their scope of liberalization
(elections for example are not always genuinely free). He then presented a
scale of measures of autocracy liberalization, saying that the most difficult
measure in the Middle East is that of releasing political prisoners, while the
easiest measure is concessions on the level of human rights.
He presented the hypothesis is that almost all efforts at
democratization are preceded by liberalization. This is triggered by the
resurrection of civil society, which itself is triggered when the costs of repression
increase quite significantly and a regime is faced with the question of is it
"better" to repress or tolerate? Often, in this case, regimes choose to
tolerate the self organization of groups that are not tolerated otherwise. But
mobilization of such groups, like lawyer groups, may lead to mobilization on
the street. Schmitter said that although Arab regimes liberalize, this kind of
process does not normally happen in the Middle East. Liberalization occurs then
declines without the regimes suffering many consequences. He finished by
stating that there seems to be something in the Middle East region that
encourages liberalization, but that leads this liberalization to decline.
Sean Yom responded by saying that for the last 10 years,
scholars of democratization literature have made ethnocentric assumptions about
this issue. He argued that it is almost assumed that democracy is easy, but
what actually happens at the end stage of liberalization is complex. He said
that if we take a historical view of the Middle East, the literature says that
regimes are durable. But countries like Iran, Iraq, Libya and Syria have all
witnessed regime termination. The dictators today in the Arab world are merely
the winners of the state-building process.
So why is liberalization not followed by democratization for these
survivors?
Yom argued that distinctive regimes have distinctive ways
through which they liberalize but not democratize. He related the lack of
democratization following on from liberalization to two key questions: Why are
there no elite splits in the public arena during times of crisis? And why has
the middle class not staked any sacrifice to demand more of a democratic and
revolutionary change?
He presented two reasons: the first is that many current
regimes have well institutionalized methods of dealing with elite splits before
they hit the public domain. Hegemonic ruling provide one such mechanism. The
National Democratic Party in Egypt, the Neo-Destur of Tunisia, and the Baath
parties in Syria and Iraq for example were able to coopt/isolate softline
elites well before their conflict became rebellion. Yom argued that in monarchical autocracies,
incumbents have just as well-institutionalized mechanisms of co-optation that
revolve around the palace; such networks were developed shortly after colonial
rule, and were designed to effectively enshrine a certain distribution of
power.
The second reason, Yom argued, lays in the nature of social
opposition. No dictator liberalizes because
they want to give up power. That is,
they do not liberalize to achieve democracy; they liberalize in order to
survive in the face of burgeoning social unrest. The problem is that in the MENA context, the
so-called "middle-sector"-labor, professionals, intellectuals, and other urban
forces-have not staked out sacrifice to their demands for greater freedom, when
push comes to shove. One reason is that
they were incorporated into ruling coalitions early on in the state-building
process, and that such early coalitional bargains that traded loyalty for
prosperity have proven durable even during economic crises in the 1980s and
1990s. For instance, large-scale
employment in the public sector to certain groups is a common side-payment. Countries like Jordan and Bahrain exploit
population cleavages (the Palestinians and the Shiites, respectively, being the
key factors), where the regimes operate an optimal mix of loyalty and
oppression/coercion. In these cases, leaders
strategically choose to incorporate different constituents into different
networks of patronage.
The presentations were followed by a question and answer
sessions where additional factors were discussed and others elaborated on, such
as the role of Islamists; authoritarian pacts with the West especially in the
cases of "countries that are too important to be politically conditioned" as
Schmitter put it, or in the case of illegal Western dealings with Middle East
states which makes it difficult for the West to present them with reform
conditions; the absence of independent middle classes; and the issue of
political prisoners, who are the hardest to coopt by any given regime, and
hence tend to be kept inside prisons.
