Muslim Democratic Parties in the Middle East: Economy and Politics of Islamist Moderation
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Muslim Democratic Parties in the Middle East: Economy and Politics of Islamist Moderation
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Overview
A. Kadir Yildirim and other scholars have used the term “Muslim Democrat” to describe moderate Islamist political parties, suggesting a parallel with Christian Democratic parties in Europe. These parties (MDPs) are marked by their adherence to a secular political regime, normative commitment to the rules of a democratic political system, and the democratic political representation of a religious identity.
In this book, Yildirim draws on extensive field research in Turkey, Egypt, and Morocco to examine this phenomenon and assess the interaction of economic and political factors in the development of MDPs. Distinguishing between “competitive [economic] liberalization” and “crony liberalization,” he argues that MDPs are more likely to emerge and succeed in the context of the former. He summarizes that the broader implication is that the economic liberalization models adopted by governments in the region in the wake of the Arab Spring have significant implications for the future direction of party systems and democratic reform.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253023292 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Series: | Middle East Studies |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
A.Kadir Yildirim is a research scholar at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy.
Read an Excerpt
Muslim Democratic Parties in the Middle East
Economy and Politics of Islamist Moderation
By A. Kadir Yildirim
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2016 A. Kadir YildirimAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-02329-2
CHAPTER 1
A Social Theory of Muslim Democratic Parties
In this chapter, I introduce a socioeconomic theory of Muslim democratic parties (MDPS) on which the rest of the analysis in this book will rest. The primary goal of this chapter is to identify the actors, preferences, and political contexts in which the moderation effect of economic liberalization is likely to come about as it relates to Islamist parties. I develop my socioeconomic theory of MDPS by building on social cleavages in the Middle East principally between the center — a cluster of secular groups with economic and political power at their disposal — and the periphery — the rest of the society with an Islamic identity but lacking the means to reach political and economic power. Even though social cleavages are an important factor in analyses of political parties, they are largely underutilized in Middle Eastern studies. To this end, I first identify the preliberalization interests and preferences of peripheral Islamic groups, which readily follows from the exclusion of these groups from the economy and politics. This is because Islamist discourse claims to represent the political preferences of peripheral groups.
In the second part of this chapter, I continue discussing economic liberalization as a political process and the leverage that decision makers have in shaping the course of liberalization reforms. In this, I underscore the distinctive forms that economic liberalization may take and discuss two ideal types of economic liberalization models: competitive liberalization and crony liberalization. Competitive liberalization refers to the idea that liberalization reforms offer economic opportunities to those peripheral groups who were excluded from such opportunities in the preliberalization period. Utilizing such opportunities, peripheral businesses (small and medium enterprises [SMES]) find a chance to grow and enjoy economic benefits. In turn, peripheral businesses experience a transformation in their political preferences to reflect the new socioeconomic conditions offered by competitive economic liberalization. Crony liberalization, on the other hand, is the ideal type that enables members of the center (the political and economic elite) to continue their dominance by choosing which elements of economic liberalization to implement. Such leverage over the course of economic reforms ensures the continuation of the preliberalization political economic structure.
The last part of the chapter identifies two categorical responses to impending liberalization reforms by Islamist parties contingent on the kind of liberalization. Briefly stated, I test two sets of hypotheses. First, if there is competitive liberalization, then I expect to observe changes in the interests and preferences of SMES toward a more democratic political system, a liberal economy, and a social role for Islam. In this context, MDPS are more likely to rise and prosper electorally due to the overlap between peripheral preferences and their discourse. Alternatively, if there is crony liberalization, then I expect to observe no change in the political and economic preferences of the periphery. In this case, I expect to see Islamist parties remaining the major political representative of the peripheral groups. Overall, MDPS depend on the strength of the competitive economic model.
Social Cleavages
Social cleavages and class conflict are a persistent element of politics in the Middle East. Without integrating social cleavages, we stand to miss a very critical dynamic of Middle Eastern and Islamist politics. Cleavages offer valuable information on sources of social conflict within a society and on the potential for the politicization of issues via political parties. Social cleavages are also important for another reason. They inform us of issues and actors within a given political context with which to analyze dynamics of change in societies that face major transformations such as globalization. The dynamic nature of society and the actors therein require careful analysis of underlying cleavages in order to trace the origins and causes of change.
For the purposes of the analysis here, a social cleavage can be defined as a division in a society between two different groups that hold opposite views on a particular issue. This division is deemed both fundamentally important to the way society is envisioned and critical for the interests of both groups. It may take the form of an identity conflict, as in the case of secularism-religion divisions, or more of an economic one, such as the conflict between business and labor.
The discussion of social cleavages here does not serve to lay out a theory of social cleavages and party structure in the Middle East. By making use of social cleavage structures, I account for the distinctive effects of economic liberalization on Islamist parties, which will be instrumental in explaining the emergence and strengthening of mdps. Without recourse to social cleavages and socioeconomic conflicts in Middle Eastern societies, our understanding of the changes in the region would be limited at best. This is also in parallel with how democratic development in the West is usually conceived, that is, via social dynamics (Collier and Collier 1991; Deutsch 1961; Luebbert 1987; Moore 1966; Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens 1992). The parallel between the West and the Middle East in emphasizing social dynamics is critical to moving away from essentialist and culturalist perspectives, which plagued research on the politics of the Middle East for a long time (Haklai 2009).
In their pioneering study, Lipset and Rokkan (1967) present a framework to analyze how social cleavages come into existence, are politicized, and then are projected into the political arena through political parties; why certain cleavages are politicized and others are not; and which events transform the nature of cleavages once social cleavages are stabilized at some point in time. Lipset and Rokkan identify two distinct sources of cleavages, or "fundamental processes of change," to use their terminology, each producing two different social conflicts: the National Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. The National Revolution refers to the creation of nation-states, resulting in (1) a conflict between the dominant culture ("central nation-building culture") and peripheral cultures and (2) a conflict between the central government and the church. The Industrial Revolution, on the other hand, leads to (1) the conflict between industrial entrepreneurs and landed elites and (2) the conflict between owners and workers.
The edited volume by Lipset and Rokkan deals largely with the cleavages and party systems in the western hemisphere, where the origins of cleavages and their politicization take a dramatically different form than the one in the developing world. A major problem in a developing world context is the relative absence of "democratic" politics leading to questions about the viability of political parties as instruments of political representation. One way the absence of democracy might be an issue is the dominance of single-party regimes thwarting political alternatives. Also, if political parties do not necessarily serve as outlets of social conflict, how do people express their preferences, or is there social conflict at all?
As important as these fundamental issues may be, social cleavages present themselves as a pivotal departure point in conceptualizing the structure of political conflict in the Middle East; cleavages are real, and they do shape political parties. So far, as an analytical tool, social cleavages have rarely been used in studies of Middle Eastern politics. In the rest of this chapter, I identify issues that are politicized and processes of change leading to distinct social cleavages, and delineate which social conflicts emerge as a result. An extension of this analysis will illustrate the political representation of cleavages in the Middle Eastern context. To reiterate, the goal of this exercise is not providing a detailed account of political party structure in the region, but rather laying out the "overall makeup" of the emerging cleavages and party systems in the region, to use Herbert Kitschelt's terms, in order to obtain a better understanding of the moderation of Islamist parties (Kitschelt 1992, 14).
The history of the Middle East indicates one possible "fundamental process of change" creating social cleavages, and that is the political independence for the regional countries in the twentieth century. Independence movements prove instrumental for two principal reasons. First, the independence process helps crystallize the coalitions for the emerging nation. Independence movements bring certain issues to the forefront, politicizing them; distinct groups build their coalitions with diverging interests around these issues, leading to the crystallization of cleavages. Second, the moment of independence leads to the freezing of the political system due to the mostly authoritarian and military nature of the emerging regimes (Zielinski 2002). Overall, independence is key to defining the source, nature, and consequences of the cleavages emerging among social groups with implications for the prospective Islamist transformation.
The Ottoman Empire, the dominant political power in the region for several centuries and until modern times, shaped the social structures and state-society relations to the extent that most post-Ottoman nations demonstrate similar social structures and cleavages on which postindependence politics are built. As Ozbudun underscores, the state-society relationship is the most important legacy of the shared Ottoman history for the regional countries (Ozbudun 1996, 134). State autonomy, implying the state's insulation from the pressure of social groups and societal interests, marks the most commonly identified characteristic of the Middle Eastern countries. In this regard, independence movements and the accompanying crystallization of societal cleavages cannot be evaluated separately from the Ottoman legacy of state autonomy. State autonomy entails a dual structure divided between the military-bureaucratic elite along with their allies in the society and the ruled, or the subjects. The latter consisted of heterogeneous societal elements such as a rural population, small commercial interests, and various ethnic groups. In this dual structure, there were no intermediary institutions for interest representation; in other words, the society was "unincorporated" to the state. This is a reasonable assertion because there were no powerful economic interests to politically represent in the first place. In Carter Findley's terms, "Ottoman reformers did not doubt the desirability of maximizing state power" and had "faith in the rightfulness of the powerful state" (Findley 1996, 159).
The resemblance among post-Ottoman countries is striking despite the temporal difference in achieving independence across cases. The Turkish experience in political and economic modernization under Ataturk's leadership throughout the 1920s and the 1930s was closely followed by Arab experiences such as Bourguiba and Nasser two decades later, as Issawi notes: "In many respects, the Arab countries and Iran followed, one generation behind, in the footsteps of Turkey. Thus the policies of the 1950s and '60s in the Arab lands recall those of Turkey in the 1920s and '30s" (Issawi 1996, 241). Moreover, such resemblance between Turkey and Arab countries demonstrated striking similarity and continuity with the state-society relations in the Ottoman Empire rather than being completely new inventions: "Against the Ottoman backdrop, Ataturk's widely emulated expansion of the state's economic role was not as innovative as sometimes supposed.
Nor were the Middle East's most advanced assertions of the state's economic role, as in Nasser's Egypt, totally divorced from Ottoman antecedent. ... The distressing clarity with which continuities emerge in the economic history of the last two centuries — once changes in the terms for certain phenomena have been noted — spotlights how difficult it will be for most of the region to achieve high levels of economic development" (Findley 1996, 172).
The road to independence in many ways was a process both unifying and divisive at the same time. Independence was politically unifying because distinct social groups downplayed their differences in background and ideology in an effort to establish a front against a common enemy, that is, the occupying forces as in the case of Turkey or colonial powers as in the cases of Egypt and Morocco. The temporary unification enabled various factions to more forcefully confront colonial powers. However, factions were also clearly separated from each other in critical ways. Most important among such differences were their vision of the character of the prospective nation-state and distribution of power and resources within this new polity. While mostly secular military leadership was taken by the socialist-leftist ideas of their time such as Nasser and Ataturk, Islam constituted one of the main alternatives constraining the ubiquitous reach of secular ideologies. Factions' fundamental difference on ideology also extends to how they view the postindependence political regime and what modernization means. Especially crucial was the secular conceptualization of the modernity for the whole state and society as opposed to an Islamic one. This proto-cleavage on the secularism-religion dimension broadly overlaps with the second dimension, which is the distribution of political-economic power and resources in the society. Though lines were less clearly articulated, still, most secular-minded groups were closer to the epicenter of political and economic power, and most Islamic groups were distant from such centers of power.
Political preferences of distinct social groups follow readily from their socioeconomic interests. Secular groups envisioned a future with an economic structure ensuring continuity in the existing system. Parties with a leftist and revolutionary propensity, emphasizing strong state control over economic activity, were a match made in heaven for seculars. The Islamic constituency, in contrast, viewed parties with an Islamic undertone, Islamist or otherwise, more in line with their political interests.
The immediate aftermath of independence in almost all regional countries saw consolidation of two overlapping proto-cleavages. In most cases, groups with a more secular mindset with direct or indirect military affiliation assumed power in the postindependence period. Their leadership during the independence movement certainly facilitated postindependence ascendance to power. Throughout this period secular groups were able to utilize their proximity to economic and political power to effectively marginalize and exclude other groups from decision-making mechanisms. The control over political power facilitated the control over economic power and helped in "creating a national bourgeoisie which would support the state" (Chaudhry 1994, 6). The social groups that associate themselves more with Islam and less with secularism are also the groups that saw themselves being excluded from obtaining real social, economic, and political power.
One of the best studies on the evolution of social cleavages in the Middle East is that of Serif Mardin (Mardin 1973). The model Mardin offers deals, in essence, with the distribution of socioeconomic power in the Turkish state and society in a historical perspective from the nineteenth century into the twenty-first century and its reflection on the political space. Throughout the modern era, sociopolitical conflict in the Ottoman Empire and the new Turkish state is shaped along the competition between two broad groups: center and periphery. Even though the conceptualization was introduced to analyze Turkish politics, I find it useful for the broader set of Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East as we observe state-society relations and social cleavages being structured along the same lines.
According to this framework, the center of the society is composed of the secular elite commanding the political system and economic power, and it portrays itself as the sole modernizing force in the country. The center, in this formulation, represents the secular elite dominating political and economic centers of power. In a stylized reading of pre-reform political economy, the center is composed of various social elements such as the political elite, bureaucracy, military, big business, and urban middle and upper classes. Secularism stands out as the identifying characteristic of the center, and members of the center make up the relative minority in the society.
The periphery, by contrast, is not a homogenous bloc. Peripheral groups, by contrast, are identified by their marginalization and exclusion from political and economic power. Islam, regardless of cultural, ethnic, or socioeconomic status, defines the contours of the "peripheral" identity. The periphery is left out of the political decision-making mechanism and the economic suzerainty of the state and is on the recipient end of the modernization project, living mostly in the suburbs of major cities and rural areas. Small and medium enterprise (sme) owners, who survive outside the network of state protection and promotion, constitute an important element of the periphery. The conflict between the center and the periphery, in this regard, revolves around two cleavages: secularism-religion and socioeconomic power. Even though the two dimensions are analytically distinct, when projected onto the political space, they create a "unidimensional competitive space" as a result of "elective affinities" afforded by the overlap between the two dimensions (Kitschelt 1992, 14).
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: Muslim Democratic Parties
1. A Social Theory of Muslim Democratic Parties
2. Modeling Economic Liberalization in a Comparative Perspective
3. From the Periphery to the Center: Competitive Liberalization in Turkey
4. Stuck in the Periphery: Crony Liberalization in Egypt
5. Pathways from the Periphery: Competitive Liberalization in Morocco
Conclusion
Appendix: List of Interviews
Notes
Bibliography
Index