Getting to Pluralism: Political Actors in the Arab World

By Marina Ottaway and Amr Hamzawy

Pluralism in the Arab world has not yet matured into functional democratic politics. While ruling establishments, Islamist movements, and secular parties have introduced a much greater degree of pluralism into Arab societies, the imbalance of power and interdependence among these actors limits both the degree of political diversity and its

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carnegie Endowment For International Peace
• Release date: Nov 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780870032752

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© 2009 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data

Getting to pluralism : political actors in the Arab world / Marina Ottaway and Amr Hamzawy, editors.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-87003-244-8 (pbk.) — ISBN 978-0-87003-245-5 (cloth) — ISBN 978-0-87003-275-2 (e-Book) 1. Arab countries—Politics and government—1945– 2. Islam and politics—Arab countries. 3. Political parties—Arab countries. I. Ottaway, Marina. II. Hamzawy, Amr. III. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. IV. Title.

JQ1850.A91G38 2009

320.917’4927—dc22

2009017313

Cover design by Naylor Design, Inc.

CONTENTS

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Acknowledgments

Foreword

Introduction:

Pluralist Politics in Undemocratic Political Systems

Marina Ottaway and Amr Hamzawy

1. Incumbent Regimes and the King’s Dilemma in the Arab World: Promise and Threat of Managed Reform

Michele Dunne and Marina Ottaway

2. Fighting on Two Fronts: Secular Parties in the Arab World

Marina Ottaway and Amr Hamzawy

3. Islamists in Politics: The Dynamics of Participation

Amr Hamzawy and Marina Ottaway

Conclusion:

Old Actors and New Arenas

Amr Hamzawy and Marina Ottaway

Index

Contributors

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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This volume is the outcome of several years of research, including analysis of documents, research trips involving dozens of conversations, and several structured conferences organized by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the Middle East, in Europe, and in the United States.

In the process, we have accumulated a large debt of gratitude to innumerable individuals who have given generously of their time to answer our questions and share their views with us. We hope that this book will convince them that the time they devoted to helping us was not wasted.

We would also like to express out thanks to our colleague Nathan J. Brown, who partnered with us in the research on Islamist movements before returning to his positions as professor of political science and international affairs and director of the Institute for Middle East Studies at the George Washington University. Nathan remains a valued partner and a member of the greater Carnegie family.

Thomas Carothers, as vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, provided support and encouragement for the project all along.

Many Carnegie junior fellows have contributed to the research over the years. Dina Bishara, Mohammed Herzallah, and Adriana Qubaia in Washington and Bassam Moussa in Beirut deserve special thanks for their efforts, as do the members of the publications department, who ensured a smooth and for us painless production process.

Finally, we want to express our gratitude to Saad Mehio and his assistant, Rony Abdelnour, who supervised the translation of the book into Arabic and edited the text. Their efforts have made it possible for us to achieve the goal of simultaneous publication of this volume in both English and Arabic.

Amr Hamzawy

Carnegie Middle East Center

Beirut

Marina Ottaway

Middle East Program, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Washington

FOREWORD

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Since its founding half a dozen years ago, the Carnegie Endowment’s Middle East Program has made political change in the Arab world the central focus of its work. As though turning a microscope lens to higher and higher magnification, scholars in Washington, D.C., and at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, Lebanon, focused first on political change and democracy promotion in historical and broadly comparative terms, examining conditions and trends in the Middle East as compared to the rest of the world. They then analyzed the implications for governments outside the region that wish to support political liberalization. More recently, and in progressively greater detail, this extraordinarily productive team of Arab, American, and European scholars has zeroed in on identifying the key political actors in the region (including those one would expect to be important but aren’t), analyzing the balance of power among them and describing the prospects for future change.

Uncharted Journey (2005) examined the full range of actors in Arab society, from moderate Islamists and governing regimes, to civil society and women’s movements, and then offered recommendations outsiders willing to be involved for the long term might follow to achieve constructive change. The team then tested its conclusions through a country-by-country analysis across the Middle East, covering the Gulf states, the Maghreb, and the heart of the Arab world. The results were published in Beyond the Façade: Political Reform in the Arab World (2008). The authors found cosmetic change, orchestrated from the top but strictly limited to prevent any meaningful redistribution of power away from the ruling regimes. Notwithstanding the high-flown democratic change rhetoric of the middle years of this decade, they found no fundamental political progress in any of the ten countries they examined in depth.

This volume turns back to a focus on the important political actors, which authors Marina Ottaway and Amr Hamzawy believe are only three: ruling establishments, liberal or leftist secular political parties, and moderate Islamist groups (those that have renounced violence in favor of participation in their country’s politics). Right away this list contains a powerful conclusion: that civil society is not now, and is not likely soon to be, a key player in the Arab world. This includes both politically active NGOs and the much ballyhooed Arab street, which, they point out, has not been a major political actor … since the end of the colonial period. The key reason for the political stagnation that characterizes the region is not, they believe, Arab cultural exceptionalism or the result of pervasive conflicts that plague the Middle East, but an entrenched imbalance of power among these three that none of them is strong enough, or motivated enough, to break.

A first-rate think tank should produce work whose conclusions are directly useful to policy makers with insights equally valuable to scholars. This volume more than meets that test. If political stalemate is the central issue, then foreign efforts to promote change through development assistance or cultural exchanges or education or the various tools of programs collectively known as democracy assistance are not going to work. And, if Ottaway and Hamzawy’s conclusions are correct, their work will refocus that of many inside and outside the Arab world in seeking to understand the causes and possible fixes of the pervasive failures of governance there.

Jessica T. Mathews

President, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

INTRODUCTION:

Pluralist Politics in Undemocratic Political Systems

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MARINA OTTAWAY AND AMR HAMZAWY

The political process in Arab countries where there is a legal political life is dominated by three sets of political actors: the incumbent regimes or ruling establishments; the secular parties, that is, parties that do not find their ideological inspiration in Islam but embrace liberal or leftist ideas; and the Islamist movements that have renounced violence and decided to participate in the legal politics of their respective countries. The balance of power among these parties and the dynamics of their relationship have determined the trajectory of political change in the Arab world over the past two decades. The fact that political reforms have been few and mostly cosmetic during a time in which many countries globally experienced far-reaching transformations of their political systems is a consequence of the imbalance of power among these actors. Put simply, incumbent regimes are very powerful and the opposition is both weak and divided: Secular parties oppose the government but in the end would rather side with an adversary they know than face the challenge of dealing with one they do not know or understand, and thus fear. Islamists, for their part, have faced wide-ranging regime restrictions in some countries or remained embattled in other countries with internal struggles between hardliners and softliners. This imbalance has led to political stagnation.

Uneven Playing Fields

Not only are incumbent regimes much more powerful than the opposition, but they also have access to different means of generating power. Incumbency is a powerful tool in countries where institutions are weak, allowing leaders to take full advantage of everything the state controls to keep themselves in power. There are no legal niceties to prevent incumbent Arab leaders from using state funds or government control to ensure their own reelections and the continued hegemony of their political party, or to use the courts to reject challenges to their position. In addition to incumbency, regimes have many other tools at their disposal to retain power. Because Arab countries are not democratic—even those that have an open, official political process are at best semi-authoritarian—power is not generated simply at the ballot box. For one, security forces play a central role. While there can be endless debate and speculation about the exact balance of power between civilian and security personnel in any one Arab regime, there is no disputing that security forces are important. Regime security is as much a part of the mandate of Arab security forces as state security. In most cases, incumbent regimes are in charge of the electoral process, because elections are usually organized and controlled by the Ministry of Interior rather than by a truly nonpartisan election commission. They also control many print and broadcast media, although satellite television and the Internet have eroded the monopoly they enjoyed in the past. And although popular support is not the most important source of their power—far from it—incumbents are free to organize, hold rallies, disseminate their ideas, and broadcast their supposed accomplishments.

Opposition parties’ access to tools that spread their message and build their organizations is much more limited. With the rare exceptions of Islamist movements such as Hamas and Hizbollah that have an armed wing (not discussed in this volume), opposition parties cannot use force to win elections in the way incumbent regimes do when they arrest candidates or keep voters in opposition strongholds from reaching polling stations. They cannot prevent the government from registering its own candidates. If they choose to participate in the political process, they have to compete democratically because they cannot do otherwise. They rarely have the resources to buy votes in large numbers or intimidate voters. They cannot stuff ballot boxes because they do not control polling stations. They cannot dangle in front of would-be supporters the promise of patronage jobs. Like their counterparts in democratic countries, Arab opposition groups can woo voters only by relying on their message and organization. However, in most countries they encounter obstacles in spreading their message and building their organizations. These limits put all opposition parties at a great disadvantage vis-à-vis regimes for which winning hearts and minds is only one among many tools. Even when many political parties are present, Arab countries do not function as truly pluralistic systems.

The Challenge of Participation

For liberal and leftist parties, participating in the political process is an easy decision. Parties are machines designed to gain political support in an election process. While violence is theoretically an alternative—some communist parties in the past have upheld revolution as an ideal even while taking part in electoral politics—liberal parties that uphold democracy not as a means but as an end have no alternative to participation. Revolutionary ideals have been abandoned by all but the most radical fringe in leftist organizations. For Islamist movements, however, the decision to participate in electoral politics has been momentous and much debated. That is because Islamists do not need to participate in legal politics to survive. They can concentrate on da’wa (proselytizing) and fostering a society that lives by the tenets of Islam, even if the state remains unreformed. They can choose jihad, or holy war, as some have done. Participating in the politics of countries that