Civil society in authoritarian structures
An important feature of the Arab state came into being by the penetration of civil society and the transformation of its institutions – educational, cultural, religious – that have become mere extensions of state apparatus-es. For example, under Egypt’s three military rulers, the officers’ corps has become almost a separate caste, living in their own enclosed world of subsidised housing and recreational facilities, just as political independence led to modern-day institutionalisation of families and social networks of tribes and religious or ethnic constellations. Contentious voices also resonate because the exclusionary structure of governance does not reflect the diversity of the population. Contrary to popular images, Arab societies are not homogeneous in ethnicity or religion (Hassan 1999).
Gerber (1987), inspired by Barrington Moore,1 elaborates a series of hypotheses about the significance of the Ottoman rural structures, particularly the absence of a major landed aristocracy, for the nature of modern states, social transformation and revolutions in the Middle East. The absence of a landed upper class in the region up to 1900, and the weakness of this class when it finally did emerge, explains the absence of a coherent basis for the development of a democratic polity. The introduction of the Land Property Law in 1894 in Egypt is a case in point.2 The law was too arbitrary and lacked the time and space to develop and create a landed class equivalent to that of feudal nobility in Europe. This might explain the speed in implementing the land reform that was put forward by Nasser on July 1961.
The meaning of the state in the day-to-day life of ordinary Arabs, and its absence in the discourse of politics, is important in this context. While the Arabic Maghreb3 countries are relatively homogeneous in religious terms, and while the state does not necessarily contradict with ethnic origin (ie, Arab and Berber) and religion, the Mashreq (the Arab world from Egypt eastward to the Arabian Peninsula, Syria and Iraq) is highly heterogeneous. Many diverse ethnic and religious groups inhabit the state with unmistakably parochial communal loyalties that are often in conflict with the loyalty demanded by the state. Thus, the projected image of the Arab regional system is one of bewildering complexity (Hermassi 1987).
Every political crisis in the Arab world reveals the fragility of the state and its incoherent political institutions. The establishment of the state of Israel, the expulsion of the Palestinians, and the persistent military conflicts in the region all have contributed to a widespread siege mentality and belligerent political discourse. Perhaps most importantly, Western cultural symbols, modes of production and social values aggressively penetrated the Arab world, seriously challenging inherited values and practices, and added to a profound sense of alienation.
Within authoritarian cultures, where the political system is immersed in patron-clientalism and coercive interrelationships with the population, individuals who may be alienated by the state seek to find refuge from oppressive political structures. In such circumstances, Robert Putnam (1993) asserts, it is usually difficult for people to pursue the impossible dream of cooperation in the absence of social capital, the most effective precondition for civic engagement and cooperation for mutual benefit. Civic engagement is an emanation from the social and human capital of the society that ultimately becomes a personal attribute of individuals within the same society. As such, people are capable of being socially reliable, simply because they are implicated in these norms and in the trustworthy civic networks within which their behaviour is internalised and ingrained (Eisenstadt and Roniger 1984). Further, Putnam (1993, p 187) argues:
Stock of social capital, such as trust, norms, and network, tend to be self-enforcing and cumulative. Virtuous circles result in social equilibria with high levels of co-operation, trust, reciprocity, civic engagement, and collective well being. Defection, distrust, shirking, exploitation, isolation, disorder, and stagnation intensify one another in a suffocating miasma of vicious circles.
Thusly viewed, authoritarianism is in part the result of both the kind of state-led economic development that occurred from the 1950s until the middle of the 1970s, and of the resilience of old classes, the adaptability of the new middle classes, and their consequent ability to thwart state policies. After all, authoritarianism cannot escape the logic of politics; on the one hand, where an authoritarian state is poorly institutionalised and enmeshed in clientelist relations with the society it governs, the imperative of political survival will significantly subvert political reforms. What makes these states unique are the ways these regimes penetrate their societies to implement policies and their ability to buffer their societies against pressures from regional and international systems. Following this logic, the Gulf States are a case in point: oil wealth has undoubtedly served to buffer the external pressures on regimes’ political capacity. The ruling families have been able to justify their existence and project support to their legitimacy by insuring that oil wealth has benefitted the populations.
The civil society, one could argue, became with time increasingly ineffective in shaping and formulating the state’s policy choices. The UN Development Program’s Arab Human Development Reports in the last few years, which have analysed what remains the only substantially unchanged region of the world, is a paragon of virtue. These reports illuminated in a chilling detail, as was stated in the 2002 report, the “deeply rooted shortcomings of the Arab institutional structures” that hold back human development in the era of globalisation. They pointed further to the ‘freedom deficit,’ gender inequality, low levels of health care, education and information technology usage, and high unemployment that indicate clearly that the Arab world lags far behind the pace of global change.
Re: Civil War in Libya
Originally Posted by Leet Eriksson
Reply With Quote
The rest = 
Bookmarks