Struggles under authoritarianism: Regimes, states, and professional associations in the Arab world

International Journal of Middle East Studies

Volumn 39, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 53-76

  Moore, Pete W ^a   Salloukh, Bassel F ^b  

^a CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b LEBANESE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY   (Lebanon)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

AUTHORITARIANISM; CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK; DEMOCRATIZATION; POLITICAL REFORM; REGIONAL POLITICS;

ASIA; EURASIA; JORDAN; KUWAIT [MIDDLE EAST]; MIDDLE EAST; SYRIAN ARAB REPUBLIC;

EID: 34249062334     PISSN: 00207438     EISSN: 14716380     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S002074380700253X     Document Type: Article

References (127)

1. See John Waterbury, "From Social Contracts to Extraction Contracts: The Political Economy of Authoritarianism and Democracy,"
2. Lisa Anderson, "Prospects for Liberalism in North Africa: Identities and Interests in Preindustrial Welfare States,"
3. and Clement M. Henry, "Crisis of Money and Power: Transitions to Democracy?" in Islam, Democracy, and the State in North Africa, ed. John P. Entelis (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1997);
4. Anoushiravan Ehteshami and Emma C. Murphy, "Transformation of the Corporatist State in the Middle East," Third World Quarterly 17 (1996): 753-72.
5. See Eberhard Kienle, "More than a Response to Islamism: The Political Deliberalization of Egypt in the 1990s," Middle East Journal 52 (1998):219-35;
6. Laurie A. Brand, "The Effects of the Peace Process on Political Liberalization in Jordan," Journal of Palestine Studies 28 (Winter 1999): 52-67;
7. Quintan Wiktorowicz, "The Limits of Democracy in the Middle East: The Case of Jordan," Middle East Journal 53 (1999): 606-20;
8. Daniel Brumberg, "Authoritarian Legacies and Reform Strategies in the Arab World," in Political Liberalization and Democratization in the Arab World: Theoretical Perspectives, ed. Rex Brynen, Bahgat Korany, and Paul Noble (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1995), 229-59;
9. and Glenn E. Robinson, "Defensive Democratization in Jordan," International Journal of Middle East Studies 30 (August 1998): 387-410.
10. See Marsha Pripstein Posusney and Michelle Penner Angrist, ed., Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Regimes and Resistance (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2005);
11. Jason Brownlee, "... And Yet They Persist: Explaining Survival and Transition in Neopatrimonial Regimes," Studies in Comparative International Development 37 (Fall 2002): 34-63;
12. Michael McFaul, "The Fourth Wave of Democracy and Dictatorship: Noncooperative Transitions in the Postcommunist World," World Politics 55 (January 2002): 212-44;
13. Gerardo Munck, "The Regime Question: Theory Building in Democracy Studies," World Politics 54 (October 2001): 119-44;
14. Michael Herb, All in the Family: Absolutism, Revolution, and Democracy in the Middle Eastern Monarchies (Albany, N.Y: State University of New York Press, 1999);
15. and Michael L. Ross, "Does Oil Hinder Democracy?" World Politics 54 (April 2001): 325-61.
16. This typology derives from Robert Dahl's, Polyarchy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1971).
17. See, respectively, Richard Augustus Norton, ed. Civil Society in the Middle East, vols. 1 and 2 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995, 1996);
18. and Quintan Wiktorowicz, "Civil Society as Social Control: State Power in Jordan," Comparative Politics (October 2000): 43-61.
19. Peter Gourevitch, Politics in Hard Times: Comparative Responses to International Economic Crises (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 230.
20. Charles C. Ragin, "Tuning the Tables: How Case-Oriented Research Challenges Variable-Oriented Research," Comparative Social Research 16 (1997): 27-42.
21. Of course as ideal types there is no claim here that contestation and coordination are mutually exclusive. The judgment on outcome is an assessment of which best describes association state relations over the past two decades.
22. Thomas Carothers, "The End of the Transition Paradigm," Journal of Democracy 13 (January 2002): 5-21.
23. Philippe Schmitter, "The Consolidation of Democracy and Representation of Social Groups," American Behavioral Scientist 35 (March June 1992): 422-49.
24. See Zayd Hamza, "al-Infitah al-Siyasi wa ada' munazzamat al-niqabiyya wa-l-mihaniyya," in al-Masar al-dimuqrati al-Urduni...ila ayn?!, ed. Hani Hourani (Amman: Al-Urdun al-Jadid Research Center and Sindbad Publishing House, 1996), 157-63;
25. "'Udwiyat al-niqabat," paper presented at the Conference on Professional Syndicates, Urdun al-Jadid Research Center, Amman, 1998;
26. Ninette S. Fahmy, "The Performance of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Egyptian Syndicates: An Alternative Formula for Reform?" Middle East Journal 52 (1998): 551-62;
27. Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, "Islamic Mobilization and Political Change: The Islamist Trend in Egypt's Professional Associations," in Political Islam, ed. J. Beinin and J. Stork (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1997);
28. Mustapha K. El Sayed, "Professional Associations and National Integration in the Arab World, with Special Reference to Lawyers Associations," in Beyond Coercion: The Durability of the Arab State ed. Adeed Dawisha and I. William Zartman (London: Croom Helm, 1988);
29. Nina Sovich, "Palestinian Trade Unions," Journal of Palestine Studies 24 (Summer 2000): 66-79;
30. and Sami E. Baroudi, "Economic Conflict in Postwar Lebanon: State-Labor Relations Between 1992 and 1997," Middle East Journal 52 (Autumn 1998): 532-50.
31. For examples see Brumberg, "Authoritarian Legacies," and Ehteshami and Murphy, "Transformation of the Corporatist State," 753-72;
32. Nazih N. Ayubi, Over-stating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 1995), chaps. 6 and 7;
33. and Raymond A. Hinnebusch, "The Political Economy of Economic Liberalization in Syria," International Journal of Middle East Studies 27 (August 1995): 305-20.
34. Stephan Haggard and Robert R. Kaufman, "Economic Adjustment and the Prospects for Democracy," in The Politics of Economic Adjustment, eds. Stephan Haggard and Robert R. Kaufman (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 327.
35. With what John Waterbury has termed "extraction contracts." Waterbury, "From Social Contracts to Extraction Contracts."
36. There is some confusion in terms in the case of Kuwait where professional associations lack strict legal status and, hence, Kuwaiti associations are labeled nawādin (clubs) and jam'iyyāt (societies).
37. Charles Lindblom, Politics and Markets: The World's Political-Economic Systems (New York: Basic Books, 1977).
38. Claus Offe, "Political Authority and Class Structure: An Analysis of Late Capitalist Societies," International Journal of Sociology 1 (1972): 73-105;
39. and Disorganized Capitalism: Contemporary Transformations of Work and Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985).
40. Philippe C. Schmitter and Wolfgang Streeck, "The Organization of Business Interests: Studying the Associative Action of Business in Advanced Industrial Societies," Max-Plank-Institut für Gesellschaftforschung, Discussion Paper 99/1 (March 1999).
41. Robert Vitalis and Steven Heydemann, "War, Keynesianism, and Colonialism: Explaining State-Market Relations in the Postwar Middle East," in War, Institutions, and Social Change in the Middle East ed. Steven Heydemann (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2000).
42. Martin W. Wilimington, The Middle East Supply Centre (Albany, N.Y: State University of New York Press, 1971);
43. and Abla Amawi, "State and Class in TransJordan: A Study of State Autonomy" (PhD diss., Georgetown University, 1993).
44. Philippe C. Schmitter, "Transitology: The Science of the Art of Democratization?" in The Consolidation of Democracy in Latin America ed. Joseph Tulchin (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1995), 24.
45. It is worth noting that in none of our cases have Islamist organizations challenged for the leadership of a peak business association.
46. A. J. Meyer, Middle Eastern Capitalism: Nine Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), 41.
47. See also Robert Springborg, "Patterns of Association in The Egyptian Political Elite," in Political Elites in the Middle East, ed. George Lenczowski (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1975), 83.
48. Terry Lynn Karl put it this way: "Simply stated, the revenue a state collects, how it collects them, and the uses to which it puts them define its nature." In The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and Petro-States (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1997), 13.
49. For a critique of this argument see Gwenn Okruhlik, "Rentier Wealth, Unruly Law, and the Rise of Opposition: The Political Economy of Oil States," Comparative Politics 31 (April 1999): 295-315.
50. This conviction is supported by conclusions in other regions that rent-seeking accompanies both patterns of underdevelopment as well as development. See Mushtaq H. Khan and Jomo K.S., ed., Rents, Rent-Seeking and Economic Development: Theory and Evidence in Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
51. Bassel F. Salloukh's interview with Ibrahim 'Izziddine. Former Ambassador, Minister of Information, and Minister of State for Prime Ministerial Affairs. Amman, 14 December 1998.
52. For a similar situation of uncoordinated business-state relations and failed reform in Chile, see Eduardo Silva, "Capitalist Coalitions, the State, and Neoliberal Economic Restructuring," World Politics 45 (July 1993): 529-59.
53. See Mustafa Hamameh, Mashru' al-mujtama' al-madani wa-l-tahawwul al-dimuqrati fi-l-watan al-'Arabi: Al-Urdun (Cairo: Markaz Ibn Khaldun li-l-Dirasat al-Inma'iyya, 1995), 85-87.
54. Salloukh interview with Zayd al-Rifa'i, former chief of the royal court and prime minister and current speaker of Majlis al-A'yan and Majlis al-Umma, Amman, 14 December 1998.
55. See Malik Mufti, "Elite Bargains and the Onset of Political Liberalization in Jordan," Comparative Political Studies 32 (February 1999): 100-129.
56. Of interest, leftist parties, represented by the "green list," voted for Islamist Layth Shbeilat. See al-Sabeel, 1 March 1994.
57. On the same theme, see also al-Sharq al-awsat, 30 March 1993.
58. Pete W. Moore, Doing Business in the Middle East: Politics and Economic Crisis in Jordan and Kuwait (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
59. See al-Safir, 11 December 1995;
60. and Lamis Andoni, "Walking a Tightrope," Middle East International 15 March 1996, 10.
61. See al-Hayat, 18 November 1999 and 22 August 2000. On the eve of the Camp David negotiations between Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak, the syndicates campaigned in support of the repatriation of Palestinian refugees to their homeland, and denounced their settlement in host countries.
62. See al-Hayat, 18 July 2000.
63. These were Ali Abu Sukkar, the president of the syndicates' antinormalization committee and secretary-general of the engineers' syndicate, Badi al-Rifay'a, president of the engineers' antinormalization committee, and Maysara Malas, president of the engineer syndicates' public freedoms committee. See al-Sharq al-awsat 25 and 27 October 2002.
64. See Jillian Schwedler, "Don't Blink: Jordan's Democratic Opening and Closing," Middle East Report Online, 3 July 2002, PIN 98.
65. King Abdullah's Jordan First Commission concluded, "The practices of professional associations and nongovernmental associations may not in any case be tinged with any specific political or ideological colour." Jordan Times, 25 December 2002.
66. Shadi Hamid, "Jordan: Democracy at a Dead End," Arab Reform Bulletin, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, May 2005.
67. Stephen Glain, "Letter from Jordan," The Nation, 30 May 2005,
68. and Neil MacFarquhar, "Heavy Hand of the Secret Police Impeding Reform in the Arab World," New York Times, 14 November 2005.
69. Democracy in Jordan, 2005, Center for Strategic Studies, University of Jordan (September 2005).
70. Massive increases in U.S. aid and implementation of a number of international economic enterprises has allowed state officials to try to bypass formal business representation in pursuit of ad hoc networks of select entrepreneurs. For instance, King Abdullah's new Economic Consultative Council was created with little of the business association representation of its 1980s and 1990s predecessors.
71. This section draws on, Jill Crystal, Oil and Politics in the Gulf: Rulers and Merchants in Kuwait and Qatar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
72. Jacqueline S. Ismael, Kuwait: Social Change in Historical Perspective (Syracuse, N.Y: Syracuse University Press, 1982);
73. and Shafeeq Ghabra, "Voluntary Associations in Kuwait: The Foundation of a New System?" Middle East Journal 45 (1991): 199-215.
74. The Constitution of Kuwait, Part III, Articles 43 and 44; Part IV, Articles 69 and 74;
75. and Ghabra, "Voluntary Associations in Kuwait."
76. Crystal, Oil and Politics in the Gulf;
77. and Ismael, Kuwait: Social Change in Historical Perspective.
78. Ahmad Daher and Faisal Al-Salem, "Kuwait's Parliamentary Elections," Journal of Arab Affairs 3, no. 1 (1984).
79. Kuwait's cooperatives are essentially grocery-store strip malls located in every district of the country. An elected board governs the cooperative's operations. Control of the cooperative affords a mini electoral base, access to profits from the cooperative's operations, and important market control over consumer-goods distribution.
80. Pete W. Moore, "What Makes Successful Business Lobbies? Business Associations and the Rentier State in Jordan and Kuwait," Comparative Politics (January 2001): 127-47.
81. Throughout this period, prominent businessmen, although failing to win parliamentary election, were nevertheless appointed to important ministry positions, in some cases directly from leadership positions in the chamber.
82. Pete W. Moore, "Rentier Fiscal Crisis and Regime Stability in the Middle East: Business and State in the Gulf," Studies in Comparative International Development 31 (Spring 2002): 34-56. The appointment of asīl merchants to cabinet positions has been a consistent feature of Kuwait governments. It has afforded the chamber elite a number of learning experiences with government service.
83. This same alliance came together in the 1990s to resist any normalization with Israel.
84. Mary Ann Tetreault, Stories of Democracy: Politics and Society in Contemporary Kuwait (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 76-100;
85. and Steve Yetiv, "Kuwait's Democratic Experiment in Its Broader International Context," Middle East Journal 56 (Spring 2002).
86. Steven Heydemann, "The Political Logic of Economic Rationality: Selective Stabilization in Syria," in The Politics of Economic Reform in the Middle East, ed. Henri Barkey (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992).
87. Steven Heydemann, Authoritarianism in Syria: Institutions and Social Conflict, 1946-1970 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press), 120.
88. The Alawis are a compact tribal/religious sect from the northern parts of Syria. They dominate government positions and account for less than 20 percent of the population.
89. For details, see Bassel F. Salloukh, "Organizing Politics in the Arab World: State-Society Relations and Foreign Policy Choices in Jordan and Syria" (PhD diss., McGill University, 2000).
90. For the teachers' syndicate, see George Jabbour, Al-Fikr al-siyasi al-mu'asir fi Suriya (London: Riad al-Rayyes lil-Kutub wa-l-Nashr, 1987), 119-26;
91. Itamar Rabinovich, Syria under the Ba'th 1963-66: The Army-Party Symbiosis (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1972), 175;
92. and Middle East Journal 18 (1964): 345.
93. Heydemann, Authoritarianism in Syria, 183.
94. Volker Perthes, "Economic Liberalization and the Prospects of Democratization: The Case of Syria and Some Other Arab Countries," in Democracy without Democrats: The Renewal of Politics in the Muslim World, ed. Ghassan Salemé (London: I. B. Tauris, 1994), 259.
95. See Middle East Watch, Syria Unmasked: The Suppression of Human Rights by the Asad Regime (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), 13-14, 85-87, and 158-60;
96. Ibrahim Hassan, "La Syrie de la guerre civile," Peuples Méditerranéens 12 (Juillet Septembre 1980): 103.
97. Alan George, Syria: Neither Bread nor Freedom (London: Zed Books, 2003), 104;
98. Patrick Seale, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East (Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 1989): 328 and 300;
99. and Hanna Batatu, Syria's Peasantry, the Descendants of Its Lesser Rural Notables, and Their Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 270, for the figure for the pharmacists. Batatu, using figures provided by the Committee for the Defense of Freedom and Political Prisoners in Syria and its Geneva-based organ, al-Minbar, provides lower numbers: 79 engineers, 57 doctors, and 25 lawyers.
100. See Batatu, Syria's Peasantry, 270 and fn. 49, 383.
101. Hinnebusch, "The Political Economy of Economic Liberalization in Syria," 312.
102. For the views of the main architect of economic liberalization, see Muhammad al-'Imadi, Dawr al-qita' al-khass wa-l-mushtarak fi 'amaliyyat al-tanmiya (Damascus: Wizarat al-Iqtisad wa-l-Tijara al-Kharijiyya, 1986);
103. and Syria's Experience in Trade Liberalization and Policies of Economic Reform (Damascus: Ministry of Economy and Foreign Trade, 1994).
104. For details, see al-Hayat, 26 April 2000;
105. Hinnebusch, "The Political Economy of Economic Liberalization in Syria" and "Syria: The Politics of Economic Liberalisation," Third World Quarterly 18 (1997);
106. Heydemann, "The Political Logic of Economic Rationality," 11-39;
107. Eberhard Kienle, ed., Contemporary Syria: Liberalization between Cold War and Cold Peace (London: British Academic Press, 1994);
108. and Hans Hopfinger and Marc Boeckler, "Step by Step to an Open Economic System: Syria Sets Course for Liberalization," British Journal of Middle East Studies 23 (November 1996): 183-202.
109. Heydemann, "The Political Logic of Economic Rationality," 20.
110. One of the prominent leaders has been independent industrialist Riad Seif, a businessman not connected to any of the business associations.
111. One could add that regimes desired so called "minimal winning coalitions." See David Waldner, State Building and Late Development
112. and John Waterbury, Exposed to Innumerable Delusions: Public Enterprise and State Power in Egypt, India, Mexico, and Turkey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
113. See Robert Bianchi, Unruly Corporatism: Associational Life in Twentieth Century Egypt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
114. See also the updated argument in "Interest Groups and Politics in Mubarak's Egypt," in The Political Economy of Contemporary Egypt, ed. Ibrahim M. Oweiss (Washington, D.C.: Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, 1990), 210-21.
115. Marsha Pripstein Posusney, Labor and the State in Egypt: Workers, Unions, and Economic Restructuring (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 93.
116. See Hamarneh, al-Urdun, 81.
117. Ghurfat Tijarat wa Sina'at al-Kuwait, Al-Qanun wa-l-nizam, 1993.
118. Islamist candidates took control of the state-employee labor unions. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Islamist candidate lists consistently ran for election to all associations, save the chamber of commerce. See Ghabra, "Voluntary Associations in Kuwait."
119. See Kathleen Thelen and Sven Steinmo, "Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics," in Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis, ed. Sven Steinmo, Kathleen Thelen, and Frank Longstreth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 13.
120. Ibid., 10.
121. Adam Przeworski, "Some Problems in the Study of the Transition to Democracy," in Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Guillermo O'Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 52.
122. Janet Landa, "Culture and Entrepreneurship in Less-Developed Countries: Ethnic Trading Networks as Economic Organization," in The Culture of Entrepreneurship, ed. Brigitte Berger (San Francisco, Calif.: ICS Press, 1991);
123. and Susan Greenhalgh, "Networks and Nodes: Urban Society in Taiwan," The China Quarterly 99 (September 1984).
124. Mahmud Faksh, "The Alawi Community of Syria: A New Dominant Political Force," Middle Eastern Studies 20 (April 1984): 529-52.
125. The revolt was spearheaded by the urban Sunni Muslim Brotherhood.
126. The "Jordan First" campaign reflected this underlying motif.
127. Mary Ann Tetreault, "Kuwait's Annus Mirabilis," Middle East Report Online, 7 September 2006.