Ideological Legitimacy - Crises of Former Sources of Legitimacy in the Arab World

2.2.2. Crises of Former Sources of Legitimacy in the Arab World

2.2.2.3. Ideological Legitimacy

While ideology is a very general term, the ideologies Hudson identified as sources of legitimacy in the Arab world had their heyday in the middle of the 20^th century. They can be specified in the context of social revolutions as different shades of

39 In order to determine the existence of a crisis, it is a more reliable way to look at the manifestation of a crisis than just to register decreased state spending, as Richter (2007: 192) proposes.

inspired Pan-Arabism (Hudson 1977: 20ff.). Emma Murphy distinguishes between anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism, Arab nationalism and populism as shared values that used to generate ideological legitimacy (Murphy 1998: 73ff.). While in terms of realpo-litik, ideology had already given way to pragmatism during the 1970s and 1980s, the crisis that gave the final blow to ideological legitimacy arrived with the fall of the Sovi-et Union and the end of the Cold War. The reversal of economic policies such as im-port-substituting industrialization and alignment with Western countries lent a hollow sound to previous rhetoric.

It is somewhat demanding to discern the manifestation of a crisis of ideological legiti-macy. One indicator might be a changed regime discourse that increasingly neglects ideology, especially when this ideology used to be central for the regime. If the discrep-ancy between regime action and discourse becomes too blatant, this might lead to a cri-sis. In the public space, a debate on the appropriate ideological orientation of the regime is a very strong indicator for a crisis, given the ample opportunities for control over the media in the Arab world. However, this could also serve to justify a shift towards an alternative ideology. On the addressees’ side, emerging alternatives to the former ideo-logies are an important indicator for a crisis. Most prominently, ever since the 1970s, a revival of religion has been observed throughout the region (and in other parts of the world, for that matter). The dominant argument is that Islam, especially in its political activist form, has filled the vacuum left by the demise of Socialism and Pan-Arabism.

The discernable growth and strength of Islamic movements might serve as an indicator for ideological crisis in this respect. Public demonstrations demanding political reform on the basis of Islamic values prove the loss of state hegemony in terms of agenda set-ting and the spreading of norms.

The recent development can be seen as paralleling social movements in the demising Ottoman Empire, when transnational actors started oppositional activism based on an ideological amalgam of Islamism and nationalism in the sense of anti-imperialism. The crucial and striking difference, however, is that nowadays there is no alternative ideolo-gy that appeals to the masses. In earlier times, Islamist transnational actors competed with liberal, nationalist and communist groups – even though their popularity was rather limited. The advent of an ideological crisis of legitimacy therefore seems likely and hard to avoid. Still, the Arab uprisings challenge the idea that there must be an ideology in order to achieve mobilization.

39 2.2.2.4. Religious Legitimacy

Religious legitimacy refers either to the perception of the ruler as a religious authority or to the use of religion as an ideological and/or institutional foundation of the state. For the first case, in the Arab states as part of the Muslim world the element of legitimacy that applies is descent from the prophet’s family, which the monarchs of both Morocco and Jordan claim for themselves. While such a claim leaves few possibilities for dispute – as long as the according historical narrative is plausible or at least widely accepted – there are further ways of appealing to the pious populace. Another way of meeting the people’s expectations is the public display of the ruler’s piety by the performance of religious rites such as the pilgrimage to Mecca or public prayer, especially during Ram-adan. A further common element is the integration of sharia law into a state’s legal system. This is the case in most Arab states, especially in domains where sharia law provides detailed regulations, which primarily concerns personal status law.

However, this source is in danger as soon as the divergence between the elites’ rhetoric and their own behavior is perceived as unbearable, which was the case in Saudi Arabia.

When rulers literally gamble away their moral and thus religious credibility, a crisis might occur. The 1979 attack on and occupation of the Grand Mosque in Mecca was the most obvious example of such a crisis. It is somewhat hard to measure a lesser crisis of religious legitimacy, but it might exist whenever citizens start to pray in illegal mosques and join outlawed Islamist parties or demonstrations. However, the mere existence of a strong Islamic movement doesn’t constitute a crisis as long as it acts within the limits set by the regime, as some sort of loyal opposition. But if Islamist activists call for the overthrow of a ruler who tries to use religion as a source of legitimacy, as was the case in Saudi Arabia in 1979, we can certainly speak of a crisis.

Summarizing the results of the previous subchapters, table 2.2 lists the different sources of legitimacy as well as the likeliness and manifestations of their possible crises.

Table 2.2: Crises of Classical Sources of Legitimacy in the Arab World Source Likeliness and type of crisis Manifestation of crisis

tradition low: crisis of succession power struggles, popular de-mands for a republic

religion medium: growing incongruence of regime’s and citizens’ norms

low in rentier states: decline of state revenues

reduction of social expenditures high in semi-rentier states:

increas-ing external debt, state bankruptcy

bread riots, calls for accountabil-ity

2.3.THE ARAB UPRISINGS AS A CRISIS OF LEGITIMACY

The following subchapter first sketches out some general consequences the Arab upris-ings had for the question of legitimacy and then relates the crises back to the different sources of legitimacy. It goes on to discuss scholarly assessments of these new devel-opments, touching upon the question what role regime types played in general. Finally, some of the literature that continues to study authoritarian strategies of political rule is presented, including some of the more innovative research that seeks to account for re-cent phenomena.

The Arab uprisings had an ambiguous effect on politics. On the one hand, new political norms became viral. Even though the transformation processes in other Arab states did not necessarily result in democratization, the long-held perception that only authoritari-anism was a viable form of political rule in the region faded away. The political analyst Muhammad Abu Rumman spoke of an “Arab democratic wave” in his column in the Jordanian independent daily newspaper Al-Ghad (31 March 2011). A new principle of legitimacy that had only been evoked in top-down discourse before now became tangi-ble for Arab citizens to claim themselves. On the one hand, this meant that it became harder to censor open resistance against autocratic rule. On the other hand, the unrest

and civil war that soon emerged in other countries made it clear that the costs of depos-ing rulers have been very high and might be too high even for reform activists.⁴⁰

Depending on what kinds of protests took place, the intensity of the crisis of legitimacy rose. Economic protests resulted in the least intensive crisis of legitimacy. But frequent-ly, political added to economic grievances. It was yet a further step to call for an over-throw of the political structures than for mere changes within an existing regime. Relat-ing the demands voiced durRelat-ing the protests back to the straightforward classification of political systems, it becomes obvious that generally speaking, the resource-poor repub-lics were most affected by protests during which the people demanded the fall of the regime (Arabic: isqat an-nizam). Not only were different regimes more or less prone to crisis, but also the respective governments’ strategies for managing the Arab uprisings diverged in the various settings. Figure 2.2 below roughly illustrates the main tenden-cies that characterize the protests in Arab countries with different regime characteristics that also correspond to certain combinations of sources of legitimacy.

Figure 2.2: Regime Types and Intensity of Crisis during the Arab Uprisings Monarchy Rich Monarchy Poor Republic Rich Republic Poor

Saudi Arabia Jordan Algeria Tunisia

Kuwait Morocco Iraq Egypt

Bahrain Libya Syria

Oman Yemen

Regimes that have survived the uprisings tend to be found on the left side and in the middle. On the “stable” side, it is hard to study crises when there is little indication for

40 For one of the first comprehensive accounts of the regional “tidal wave” and reverse developments cf.

Lynch (2012b).

Intensity of crisis Economic protests Economic and political

protests: reform

Economic and political protests: revolution

their existence in the first place.⁴¹ A higher degree of crisis management is necessary when protests actually take place than in the low-intensity cases.

As this figure shows, the sources of legitimacy described above are in some respects still relevant for understanding the Arab world. They especially help explain the level of protests and intensity of the existing crises of legitimacy. However, they are neither intended nor fit to grasp newer strategies of political rule that are part of recent and on-going events. The choice of strategies is contingent upon many different factors, such as structural constraints and the preferences of actors involved. While a clear analytical separation would be desirable, the factors that make a crisis more or less likely also play a role in the decision through which strategies the crisis is solved.

Michel Camau suggests taking the crises of legitimacy as the point of departure for studying the prevention and management strategies that incumbent elites employ (Camau 2012). However, he differentiates between crises of legitimacy – which all re-gimes suffer from, at least in the eyes of some – and crises of legitimation. The latter exist when large parts of the population engage in open contestation and seek revolu-tionary change, therefore only Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen and Syria fall in this category (ibid.).

After the Arab uprisings, a debate quickly emerged, of course guided by the public, whether the post-democratization strand of literature was still relevant or, given the col-lapse of authoritarian regimes, based on wrong assumptions. As in several countries the durability and stability of authoritarian rule had suddenly come to an end, many schol-ars claimed that it had been grossly overestimated in the strands of research discussed above (see e.g. Gause 2011a, 2011b; Teti 2012; Pace & Cavatorta 2012). Various new and long neglected objects of study came center stage. Among them were the conten-tious politics of both well-known and new social actors, including political parties, un-ions and online activists.⁴² Some of these works focused on economic grievances, ways of mobilization and the role of new technology. In a different vein, the military gained new prominence as an object of research.

As one of the proponents of post-democratization literature (cf. Valbjørn & Bank 2010), Morten VALBJØRN critically reviewed the previous research agenda and found that by

41 In the opposite cases of regime breakdown, manifold variables play a role and are of greater relevance than the last few decisions taken by an almost ousted ruler. Moreover the effects of such strategies can better be studied when they are not lost in turmoil.

42 The revised edition of Beinin and Vairel’s (2013) work on social movements is one case in point.

and large, “this strand within Middle East scholarship has not become obsolete”

(Valbjørn 2012: 26). Especially the fact that processes of democratization are much more rare than other forms of regime change leads to his “less optimistic” outlook, as-suming less change than continuity for the near future (Valbjørn 2012: 29). While on the level of possible research interests and relevance of topics a broader perspective on politics seems to be appropriate, one desiderate now is “to understand how the changed regional and domestic contexts and the general politicization affect the choice of re-gime survival strategies, including their potential for success” (Valbjørn 2012: 33). This is also the point of departure of this thesis. Especially for the “null cases” without major changes, which Bellin refers to as “a ‘silent spring’ in the Arab world, […] there is no better place to begin to explain their incidence than in the persistence of authoritarian-ism literature” (2012: 143).

Also in the francophone political science, a 2012 special issue of Revue Internationale de Politique Comparée continues to analyze legitimation strategies of authoritarian re-gimes, including comparisons of Egypt and Morocco as well as of Oman and Bahrain (Valeri 2012), in order to explain the latters’ resilience (see Gatelier & Valeri 2012).

One argument VALERI brings forward is that the former scattering of the opposition in Bahrain now prevents a negotiated exit strategy even for the king (2012: 117). The per-sonal legitimacy of the rulers of Oman and Bahrain has suffered as they were perceived as being disconnected from the population (ibid.: 119). Finally a strategy in Oman is to stress the existing stability as a comparative advantage in the region (ibid.: 122).

One current discussion in the literature that has gained new prominence in the context of the Arab uprisings revolves around the question whether monarchies have an advantage over republics, and if so, why. Sean Yom and Gregory Gause deny any monarchical legitimacy with reference to the overthrown Arab kings of the 1950s and 1960s and seek to falsify the existence of traditional legitimacy altogether by hinting at previous crises of legitimacy during the tumultuous 1970s (2012: 77f.). They attribute monarchic stability to three factors that are mainly valid for the Gulf monarchies: the existence of historical cross-cutting coalitions, the availability of hydrocarbon rents, and foreign pa-trons (Yom & Gause 2012: 81-84). According to their findings, at least two out of the three factors are present in every Arab monarchy, with foreign patrons being the com-mon element in all of the cases (cf. table 2 in ibid.: 86). While empirically the analysis is certainly valid and points at important issues, the argument the authors want to make

is not convincing at all, but rather backfires. None of the elements that are supposed to account for royal “exceptionalism” is in any way specific to monarchies. Instead, they can also be found in Arab republics (and may serve to explain their stability in some cases as well). So in order to back their theoretical claims, the authors should rather have compared monarchies with republics in order to carve out the crucial differences between these regime types.

In his statistical cross-time analysis, Victor Menaldo finds that “political instability for the MENA monarchs is considerably less frequent than for the republics. The only ex-ception is 1955 to 1957 and 1972 to 1975” (2012: 709). Tribalism as the most important feature of a “unique political culture has provided the region’s monarchs with legitima-cy” (ibid.). Argumentation-wise, his analysis does not offer any convincing further ex-planation that can be used in the following.⁴³ Sean Yom stresses the kings’ autocratic statecraft, particularly their ability to stand above politics and therefore better manage the opposition (2012: 3). Michael Herb (2012) deconstructs the claim that oil is the monarchies’ stabilizing factor through empirical counterevidence. Instead, he adopts a legitimation-oriented view by hinting at tradition, and conversely also explains the Bah-raini uprising through a lack of legitimacy. He suggests the kings’ “ability to promise reform” as an outstanding element in that they have leeway for making credible conces-sions on the long and fictitious road towards constitutional monarchy. Moreover, Herb prominently brings up the matter of intra-regional comparison as “the sense amongst their citizens that […] monarchical rule was better than the republican alternatives” be-cause it delivers “less-bad results” (Herb 2012). Both in terms of the intensity of the crisis and of the consequences, the patterns are relatively clear: demands were framed in a more uncompromising way in republics, and all forced regime changes happened in republics. Nevertheless, monarchies were affected by protests, due to a regional conta-gion which in itself is worth studying.

Kurt WEYLAND (2012) offers an explanation for the fast spreading of protests across the Arab region that is informed by cognitive psychology and posits causal mechanisms on the individual level. The “heuristics of availability and representativeness” are two inferential shortcuts that replace rational decisions in situations of dramatic and sudden events like the Arab uprisings (Weyland 2012: 921). In the heuristic of availability,

43 Especially the way in which he measures tribalism, as an agricultural variable denoting the time that has passed since the Neolithic Revolution, seems somewhat far-fetched (Menaldo 2012: 716).

“[s]tunning events have an excessive impact on perception and thinking, leading people to overestimate their likelihood” (ibid.). The representativeness heuristic has two rele-vant effects: it makes people “believe that patterns visible in limited samples are ‘repre-sentative’ of the whole population” (ibid.). The second effect is the representativeness of the example they see in other contexts, leading them to overestimate similarities and discard relevant differences that make the same event unlikely in their own case. Ac-cording to Weyland and grounded on empirical evidence, the Tunisian model of depos-ing a president was emulated by Egyptians against all odds. Such a decision for protests despite unfavorable circumstances is especially likely when the protest movement lacks an organizational leadership that would act much more rationally (ibid.: 922ff.). While the protesters in Egypt also achieved their primary goal, the cognitive heuristics are held responsible for rather futile demonstrations in other Arab countries: the structural con-straints and differences were underestimated under the impression of the sudden Tunisi-an Tunisi-and EgyptiTunisi-an examples. This micro-level approach helps explain why the protests spread so quickly across the region, but were mostly unsuccessful. Another mechanism accounting for failed protests is the perception by elites that is also informed by the events in other countries, leading them to adapt their tactics as to prevent similar devel-opments (ibid.).

In a similar vein, LEENDERS AND H^EYDEMANN (2012) add a regional dimension to Social Movement Theory to explain the onset of protests in Darʻa in Syria. They argue that Syrians perceived of external events in Tunisia and Egypt as of changing opportuni-ty structures in their own countries (Leenders & Heydemann 2012: 141). The authors stress how important it was for protesters to actually frame the developments in neigh-boring countries as new domestic opportunities (ibid.: 143).

In an earlier contribution, HEYDEMANN AND LEENDERS (2011) had already gone be-yond mainstream works on the Arab uprisings in not only studying the uprisings, but also the “regime responses” in the sense of authoritarian learning. They detected conta-gion effects not only with the protesters who had real examples of achieving change, but also learning effects among those rulers who tried to deal with the political crises and aimed at stabilizing the situation. One of their arguments is that in the cases of delayed protests, the rulers had the opportunity to learn from their overthrown peers and were

Im Dokument The Arab Uprisings as Crises of Legitimacy. Success and Failure of Strategies of Political Rule in Jordan and Algeria (Seite 46-56)