The concept of “statist” systems adequately explain the slow progress of democratization in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East

By Michele Boselli

“There is a widespread illusion shared by the leaders in the North and the South which pretends to believe that economic development produces in itself a virtuous circle that leads to freedom and democracy. But this not true or so automatic. And I believe, as the Indian economist and Novel-prize laureate Amartya Sen, that the exercise of the fundamental civil and economic liberties in a clear framework of the rule of law, far from being an optional is an essential component of development”..

With these words, on 25 March 2002, former European Union Commissioner for humanitarian aid Emma Bonino introduced the central and most stimulating part of her lecture at the American University in Cairo on the necessity to globalise democracy and human rights. Bonino continued her dissertation citing another economist, Chilean Hernando de Soto, in order to demonstrate how the poor populations of the underdeveloped nations would indeed have the resources to escape hardship, but they are prisoners of poverty because of bureaucracy, corruption and uncertainty of right.

The considerations that follow aim to reflect on the issue of the statism obstructing democracy in two regions, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, usually regarded as exceptional in comparison with the process of democratisation in the rest of the world. As John Wiseman explains in chapter 11 of Democratisation, a statistic relation is universally recognised between the level of economic development and the presence (or absence) of democracy, but this relation “is not so automatic”, as Bonino said in her lecture.

In it, bureaucracy, corruption and uncertainty of right are presented as the factors which obstacle the economic development in the Third World. In the recently published UNDP’s (the United Nation’s Development Programme) Arab Human Development Report 2002, these factors are identified as freedom deficit, imposed ignorance and women’s condition. In both works, it impresses the similarity between Bonino’s first sentence (“There is a widespread illusion [that] economic development produces in itself a virtuous circle that leads to freedom and democracy”), and the report’s conclusion: “a virtuous circle [has to be created] in which economic growth favours the human development and vice versa” (as reported in the Corriere della sera, 3 July 2002).

It is true that there are African countries particularly deficient on natural resources, but there are other countries rich of natural resources, where the economic development has been precluded by a very bad administration: political élites used bureaucratic structures to reward their clients in order to conserve their support. In one word: clientelism, which has led to the swelling of an enormous apparatus, unproductive and corrupt. Obviously damaging the economic development.

It is interesting to observe that this has happened in equal measure independently by the ideological model which different African countries inspired themselves to during the Cold War. In countries following the socialist model, nationalisations were the instrument for the state to control the economy, but in capitalist countries the statist domination was no different in forcing aspirant entrepreneurs seeking licences of import/export, foreign currency, grants and contracts, etc., through the government’s Caudine Forks.

Very often the political-bureaucratic élites were the ones to benefit of their control on the state in order to develop their own business. In this way the political power preceded and made possible to gain economic power through the control of the means of production. Moreover, there statal of bureaucratic middle class were structurally weak because in competition along personalised ethnic, religious and linguistic lines: these “weak” authoritarianism explains why the model of authoritarian economic development successful in Asia failed instead in Africa.

But with the end of the 1980s and the Cold War – which coincided with the post-independentist periods and during which the USA and the USSR demonstrated to be very generous with the friendly regimes regardless of how they opposed their citizens -, Africa found itself in an even more marginal position. The disengagement of the superpowers meant for the African dictators the lack of external support against oppositors inside, after a decade in which their regimes endured an increasing crisis of legitimacy.

In fact, on top of the political reasons (abuse of human and civil rights) causing the alienation on immense slices of population, exasperation rose for the economic failure of these regimes, which justified the closure of political confront precisely because such closure was claimed to assure a prosperity and economic development which didn’t come. At the same time, the conditions imposed by international economic and financial institutions for investment and economic aid forced a reduction of the role of the state in the economy, and subsequently its ability to earn clientelist consent through the distribution of favours, leaving the increasingly vulnerable authoritarian regimes exposed to the internal pushes towards democratic restructuration.

Coming now to the analysis of these processes in Middle East countries, in chapter 13 of Democratisation Simon Bromley  explains that there are three main structural parameters in order to classify and distinguish them: their social structure at the moment of the formation of the modern state; the impact of international factors like their historical relationship with foreign powers; and finally the availability of resources for the state, in particular in countries which have been large producers of oil from the post-war period onwards. Based on these criteria we can classify Middle East countries in the three following groups.

The authoritarian, nationalist and modernising regimes of Egypt, Iraq and Syria, which followed the path undertaken before the Second World War by two big non-Arab countries in the region: Turkey and Iran. These authoritarian-modernising regimes were founded on a nationalist development firmly guided by the state, aimed at overthrowing influence and the old social classes: the city notables and tribal chiefs who dominated the political life by the clientelist distribution of benefits to the peasants and other workers who in turn provided them political support. Egyptian President Nasser described this state of affairs in 1957, after taking it over:

“What is democracy? We were supposed to have a democratic system during the period 1923 to 1953. But […] landowners and Pashas ruled our people. They used this kind of democracy as an easy tool for the benefit of feudalism. You have seen the feudalists gathering the peasants together and driving them to the polling booths. There the peasants would cast their votes according to the instructions of their masters […]”

in a second category of regimes, such as the Jordan monarchy and the Lebanese consociativism, the absence of oil as well as of a landed class made the role of the state more limited in controlling society, therefore allowing a relatively higher degree of political pluralism. In Lebanon in particular, consociativism provided for the allocation of political seats proportionally to the main religious groups.

Finally, there are purely rentier regimes such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, which not only lacked a landed class but did not even show any meaningful socio-economic force before the formation of the modern state, and developed almost exclusively on the oil income. The limited social basis of these regimes and the fact that the state takes control the entire resources explains why there was no room for the emergence of independent forms of political participation.

This state pf affairs, in which great part of the entrances of the state were not generated from productive activities of the population, implied a representativeness and legitimation very different from the cases in which states tax the productive activities of their citizens: according to the (reversed) principle of “no taxation without representation”, to the states that do not even need to develop representative institutions.

Moreover, the oil factor and the Arab-Israeli conflict determined in the region a huge interest by the superpowers: by the Soviet Union in encouraging a communist economy and a single-party system; on the other hand the USA in discouraging reforms for fear of losing access to oil fields, but in doing so reinforcing the authoritarian regimes.

Simon Bromley and, to a lesser extent, the author of chapter 14 of Democratisation, Nazih Ayuby, do not support a supposed Middle East’s exceptionality in the process of democratisation. According to them, the exceptionality is only in the times and the fragility of the democratisation process, but not in its absence or rejection in comparison with other regions of the planet. The diversity is rather the one identified by Bonino in the opening: in the Middle East the relationship between socio-economic modernisation and the development of liberal democracy is neither so automatic or so simple.

This is demonstrated by the opposite examples of Saudi Arabia, which has achieved high levels of modernisation since a long time, but failing any meaningful democratisation, and on the other hand Turkey, which began to move towards a satisfactory level of democratisation before catching up with the standards of modernization commonly belied necessary.

If Kemalist Turkey between the two world wars was to be of inspiration to the authoritarian regimes of Egypt, Iraq and Syria, these were very different from it and instead more similar to Lebanon in lacking the landed class overthrown by the revolutionary nationalists in the three above-mentioned countries.

That’s why the role of the state in the economy turned out to be more limited. For Lebanon and Turkey the absence of a revolutionary mobilisation also meant indifference to the Soviet model of planned economic development, and above all was crucial for both these countries the lack of oil which instead determined the underdeveloped representativeness in the rentier states. The outcome was an appreciable degree of separation between the state and the control of the economic resources, allowing a certain margin of political manoeuvre: where capitalist development happened outwith the rigid control of the state, bourgeoisie and working class gave birth to independent organisations which began to develop into a civil society.

Continuing to move, albeit laboriously, towards the consolidation of a liberal democracy, Turkey demonstrates that Islam does not constitute in itself a barrier to democracy (thus causing depression to the advocates of a monoreligious European fortress). We are reminded of that by today’s news of the resignation of Turkey’s Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit, whom I met in 1993 along the then Prime Minister Tansu Ciller (a woman) to gain their support for the establishment of an International Criminal Court on former Yugoslavia.

There are today Islamists convinced that the Muslim shura is roughly the equivalent of modern democracy, in giving people the right to choose who represent and govern them, as well as the right to practice free thought and the rights of opinion and opposition, accepting therefore the contemporary concept of political party. Indeed, since in many Arab countries Islamists constitute the main opposition groups, they have become actors in the very same process of democratisation. In Algeria the Muslim movement is undemocratic, but its rise has revealed the equally undemocratic character of the government.

More generally, in the whole region the increase of these movements is not due to technological contents but it rather goes interpreted as a reaction to the total statal occupation of the economy. Only time will tell us if Islamists will become a democratisation force in the long term. Meanwhile, it can certainly be concluded that “statist” systems adequately explain the slow progress of democratisation in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.

Reference:

- David Potter et al., Democratisation, Polity Press Cambridge and The Open University

- Emma Bonino, We need the Globalization of Human Rights and Democracy, American University in Cairo, English Public Lecture Series, Cairo 25 March 2002

- Rima Khalaf Hunaidi et al., Arab Human Development Report 2002, UNDP as reported in the International Herald Tribune, 2 July 2002, Corriere della sera, 3 July 2002, and The Economist, 6-12 July 2002