Protest and Democracy by Moises Arce

Author:Moises Arce
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: political science
Publisher: University of Calgary Press
Published: 2019-05-28T17:33:58+00:00

On the Eve of the Arab Spring(s): Widespread Socioeconomic and Political Grievances

On the eve of the Arab Spring, objective socioeconomic and political conditions in the region were ripe for oppositional mobilization. Initially, in the early postcolonial Arab world, many of the regimes had formulated “nationalist-populist social pacts” with their populations—a series of implicit, informal, but collective agreements specifying the norms and institutions that would underpin relations between these regimes and their societies. Heydemann (2007) has outlined several features of these postcolonial pacts that include: a preference for redistribution over growth; a preference for states over markets; a preference for protecting local markets from global trade; and an emphasis on the organic unity of the polity. The key to these informal agreements was both their reciprocal nature—bringing state and society together into a series of mutually binding obligations—and their relative success. Early on, the Arab world was able to boast some impressive results. These included high rates of economic growth and significant steps, such as land reform, toward redressing some of the huge imbalances of wealth and power in the region that had grown up during the colonial period. Such redistributive successes were financed by the influx of significant amounts of both strategic and financial rent from investment and/or bilateral aid flowing from oil revenues.

Recent decades, however, have seen the substance of these “pacts” whittled away as the regime’s informal redistributive commitments have given way to increasing economic and political concentrations of power. While the regimes have shown remarkable “adaptive capacities,” keeping some of the normative and institutional elements of the founding pacts while creating new, more narrowly based and hegemonic governing arrangements, the substance of these informal pacts have gradually been emptied by a variety of processes (Heydemann 2007; Heydemann and Leenders 2013). I will touch on three such processes, which I argue have been particularly important in laying fertile soil for the Arab Spring revolt. They include: 1) the turn towards neoliberal economic policies in the region and the resulting increase in poverty levels, unemployment, and concentrations of wealth; 2) the narrowing of political networks of power in the region—as symbolized by the increasingly prevalent move toward family rule, if not dynastic succession, among the republics as well as the monarchies; and 3) the increasing reliance of all regimes on the coercive and surveillance power of their police and security forces.

Theoretically, the neoliberal turn in the Middle East was designed to raise productivity and improve living standards, especially in rural areas where many countries in the region were felt to have a comparative advantage. The reality, however, was quite the opposite. Despite the rigorous and “exemplary” implementation of market-oriented reforms in Tunisia, for example, conditions for the majority living in the rural and semi-urban peripheries were described as a “nightmare,” featuring as they did increased levels of poverty, rising levels of land concentration, and decreasing levels of employment. As noted by one analyst, “the workers have become beggars” (Droz-Vincent 2011a, 130). In Egypt, Lesch (2012) wrote of similar effects

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