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| Volume IX, September 2002, Number 3 |
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| EXCERPT: Political Succession in the Middle East |
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The following briefs were presented in a workshop on "Political Succession in the Middle East" at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, September 1, 2001, in San Francisco. Louis J. Cantori, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Augustus Richard Norton, Boston University, were the conveners of the Conference Group on the Middle East, which issued this report.
INTRODUCTION
Louis J. Cantori
The violence of international relations in the Middle East stands in striking contrast to the orderly political succession and relatively high degree of domestic political stability in the region, Algeria being the single extreme exception. In what follows, it will become evident that longevity of leadership, peaceful political succession and domestic political stability are the survival attributes of the security state in a region characterized by the constant threat of violence. This political "peace" and emphasis on survival is directly related to the fact that the Middle East has not developed. "Why not the Middle East?" asks the World Bank. The Middle Eastern security state is developmentally stagnant.
Political succession is not political transition. It is the replacement of one ruler by another who emerges precisely because he is a guarantor of the sovereignty of the state and the maintainer of the domestic distribution of power and resources (see Carapico and Robinson below). Political transition suggests movement from one status to another, e.g. from authoritarianism to democratization, from state capitalism to market economics or from underdevelopment to development. These transitions are not occurring in the Middle East.
The single most important explanation for the orderliness of Middle Eastern political succession is the intimacy of the relationship between the state and the ruling class. As Jacoby points out, this pattern has its origins in the centuries-long conditioning of the political formula of the Ottoman Empire, in which the ruling class was kept in a dependency relationship to the state. This class, unlike its counterpart in Europe, was never permitted to establish organic roots in society from which it might develop the capability to challenge central authority. In the early history of the modern republics, the ruling class operated as a kind of political coalition of diverse social and political factions, often grouped in a single political party. As time has passed, however, this group basis has been replaced by narrower economic and political power interests. It has transformed from a coalition of forces to a coalition of interests (see Lust-Okar and the case of Syria, but note Shehata's conclusion regarding Egypt and the possible accession by Mubarak's son). But, as Carapico points out, what is perhaps occurring, in effect, is the perpetuation of the legitimacy of the coup that founded the republic in the first place. The "revolution" of 1952 in Egypt was actually a military coup d'état. It can be called a revolution, in that the composition of the ruling class was fundamentally altered and Egypt was propelled in a radically different political direction. Again, on the Ottoman model, one ruling class was replaced by another. A revolution thus occurred, and political succession therefore represents the further institutionalization of the "revolution."
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