Democratization beyond Capitalist Time: Temporalities of Transition in the Middle East after the Arab Uprisings

Abstract

Trapped in the premises of the transition ‘paradogma,’ democratization and authoritarian persistence literature are limited by a linear and continuous understanding of time, a gradualist view of transition, and a procedural definition of democracy. These analytical and normative strictures are compounded by a methodological nationalism that prevents an appreciation of how global factors shape the parameters for political transformation in the contemporary Middle East. Inspired by Gramsci’s theory of history, this article seeks to move beyond these limitations and explore the prospect of transition as rupture, away from democratization as strategy for ensuring duration of capitalist time, and toward democratic transition as epochal change beyond capitalism. By counterposing the effects of the two globalizations and the decolonization in between on the prospects of political transformation in the Middle East, this article argues that the Arab uprisings provide an opportunity for thinking globally and rupturally about political time, transition and democracy in the region.

Key Words:

• Absolute historicism
• Arab uprisings
• Democratization
• Gramsci
• Time
• Transition

Notes

1 See, for example, Alfred Stepan & Juan Linz (2013) Democratization Theory and the ‘Arab Spring’, Journal of Democracy, 24(2), pp. 15–30; Ahmed Ibrahim Abushouk (2016) The Arab Spring: A Fourth Wave of Democratization?, Digest of Middle East Studies, 25(1), pp. 52–69; and Philippe Schmitter & Nadine Sika (2017) Democratization in the Middle East and North Africa: A More Ambidextrous Process?, Mediterranean Politics, 22(4), pp. 443–463.

2 Joshua Stacher (2012) Adaptable Autocrats: Regime Power in Egypt and Syria (Stanford: Stanford University Press); and Steven Heydemann & Reinoud Leenders (eds) (2013) Middle East Authoritarianisms: Governance, Contestation, and Regime Resilience in Syria and Iran (Stanford: Stanford University Press).

3 This article takes a comprehensive definition of democratization, which includes both the first-generation approach informed by modernization theory and the more elite-centred ‘transitology’ approach. See Terry L. Karl & Philippe Schmitter (1991) Modes of Transition in Latin America, Southern and Eastern Europe, International Social Science Journal, 128(2), pp. 267–282. Similarly, authoritarian persistence literature encompasses all approaches emphasizing continuity in and adaptation of authoritarian rule, in the form of ‘resilience’, ‘upgrading’ or ‘learning’. See Ray Hinnebusch (2006) Authoritarian Persistence, Democratization Theory and the Middle East: An Overview and Critique, Democratization, 13(3), pp. 373–395; Steven Heydemann & Reinoud Leenders (2011) Authoritarian Learning and Authoritarian Resilience: Regime Responses to the ‘Arab Awakening’, Globalizations, 8(5), pp. 647–653.

4 See Guillermo O’Donnell & Philippe Schmitter (1986) Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press); and Karl & Schmitter, Modes of Transition.

5 Robert Dahl (1989) Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press), p. 221.

6 Antonio Gramsci (1975) Quaderni del carcere [Prison Notebooks], 4 Vols (Turin: Einaudi), p. 1744. See also Peter Thomas (2009) The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism (Leiden: Brill), pp. 152-153.

7 Antonio Gramsci (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Q. Hoare & G. Nowell-Smith (London: Lawrence &Wishart), pp. 465. See also Adam D. Morton (2007) Unravelling Gramsci: Hegemony and Passive Revolution in the Global Political Economy (London: Pluto Press), pp. 15–38.

8 Jean Grugel & Matthew L. Bishop (2013) Democratization: A Critical Introduction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 75–96. For each tradition, see respectively Stepan & Linz, Democratization Theory; Jason Brownlee, Tarek Masoud & Andrew Reynolds (2013) Why the Modest Harvest?, Journal of Democracy, 24(4), pp. 29–44; and Jamie Allinson (2015) Class Forces, Transition and the Arab Uprisings: A Comparison of Tunisia, Egypt and Syria, Democratization, 22(2), pp. 294–314.

9 Eva Bellin (2012) Reconsidering the Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Lessons from the Arab Spring, Comparative Politics, 44(2), pp. 127–149; and Brownlee et al., Modest Harvest.

10 Morten Valbjørn & André Bank (2010) Examining the ‘Post’ in Post-Democratization: The Future of Middle Eastern Political Rule through Lenses of the Past, Middle East Critique, 19(3), pp. 183–200.

11 Rex Brynen, Bahgat Korany & Paul Noble (eds) (1995) Political Liberalization and Democratization in the Arab World (Boulder: Lynne Rienner); and Augustus R. Norton (1993) The Future of Civil Society in the Middle East, Middle East Journal, 47(2), pp. 205–216.

12 Jason Brownlee (2007) Authoritarianism in an Age of Democratization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Oliver Schlumberger (ed.) (2007) Debating Arab Authoritarianism: Dynamics and Durability in Nondemocratic Regimes (Stanford: Stanford University Press); and Stacher, Adaptable Autocrats.

13 Morten Valbjørn (2014) Three Ways of Revisiting the (Post-)Democratization Debate after the Arab Uprisings, Mediterranean Politics, 19(1), pp. 157–160.

14 Mohammed Ayoob (2005) The Muslim World’s Poor Record of Modernization and Democratization: The Interplay of External and Internal Factors, in S. Hunter & H. Malick (eds) Modernization, Democracy, and Islam (Westport: Praeger), p. 187.

15 Lucan Way & Steven Levitsky (2007) Linkage, Leverage, and the Post-Communist Divide, East European Politics and Societies, 21(1), pp. 48–66.

16 Such an approach is at the heart of political development theory, heavily influential in the late 1960s and 1970s. See, for example, Paul Cammack (1994) Political Development Theory and the Dissemination of Democracy, Democratization, 1(2), pp. 353–374. Then, the extent to which even the past of core countries on which these theories draw is an idealised version of the actual past is the subject of a great study in historical sociology: See Sandra Halperin (1997) In the Mirror of the Third World: Capitalist Development in Modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).

17 Stepan & Linz, Democratization Theory; and Abushouk, The Arab Spring.

18 Lisa Anderson (2006) Searching Where the Light Shines: Studying Democratization in the Middle East, Annual Review of Political Science, 9, pp. 189–214.

19 Schmitter & Sika, Democratization, pp. 457–458.

20 Andrea Teti (2012) What Lies Beyond the Wub: The Challenges of (Post)Democratization, Middle East Critique, 21(1), p. 18.

21 Michel Camau (2002) Sociétés civiles ‘réelles’ et téléologie de la democratisation [‘Real’ civil societies and the teleology of democratization], Revue Internationale d’Economie Politique, 9(2), pp. 213–232; and Teti, What Lies Beyond, pp. 18–19.

22 See respectively Elie Kedourie (1992) Democracy and Arab Political Culture (Washington, Washington Institute for Near East Policy); Hisham Sharabi (1988) Neopatriarchy: A Theory of Distorted Change in Arab Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press); and Samuel Huntington (1984) Will More Countries Become Democratic?, Political Science Quarterly, 99(2), pp. 193–218.

23 Simon Bromley (1994) Rethinking Middle East Politics (Austin: University of Texas Press).

24 Yahya Sadowski (1993) The New Orientalism and the Democracy Debate, Middle East Report, 183, pp. 14–21.

25 Hazem Beblawi & Giacomo Luciani (eds) (1987) The Rentier State (London: Croom Helm).

26 For instance paying insufficient attention to the cases of Arab democracy, such as Lebanon, and to the cases in which political opening, if not necessarily democratization, was shut down with vast international support, as in Algeria in the 1990s.

27 Visible especially in the proliferation of democracies ‘with adjectives’ to describe limitations of third-wave democracies. See David Collier & Steven Levitsky (1997) Democracy with Adjectives: Conceptual Innovation in Comparative Research, World Politics, 49(3), pp. 430–451.

28 Eva Bellin (2004) The Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East, Comparative Politics, 36(2), p. 143.

29 Kimberly Hutchings (2008) Time and World Politics: Thinking the Present (Manchester: Manchester University Press), p. 5.

30 Teti, What Lies Beyond, p. 12.

31 Morten Valbjørn (2015) Reflections on Self-Reflections: On Framing the Analytical Implications of the Arab Uprisings for the Study of Arab Politics, Democratization, 22(2), pp. 218–238.

32 Schmitter & Sika, Democratization, p. 443.

33 Robert L. Sims (1976) García Márquez’ ‘La Hojarasca’: Paradigm of Time and Search for Myth, Hispania, 59(4), pp. 810–819.

34 Morten Valbjørn (2012) Upgrading Post-Democratization Studies: Examining a Re-politicized Arab World in a Transition to Somewhere, Middle East Critique, 21(1), p. 27.

35 Hutchings, Time, p. 5.

36 Kurt Weyland (2012) The Arab Spring: Why the Surprising Similarities with the Revolutionary Wave of 1848?, Perspectives on Politics, 10(4), pp. 917–934.

37 Larbi Sadiki (2009) Rethinking Arab Democratization: Elections without Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. vii.

38 Ibid, p. 458.

39 Ironically, unlike in Italian, English language internalizes this teleology, as it uses cork to refer to both the raw material (in Italian, sughero) and its most common final product (tappo). See Antonio Gramsci (1975), Quaderni del carcere, 4 Vols. (Turin: Einaudi), p. 1450.

40 Antonio Gramsci (2007) Prison Notebooks, Vol. 2, edited and translated by J. Buttigieg (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 232.

41 Roberto Roccu (2017) Passive Revolution Revisited: From the Prison Notebooks to Our ‘Great and Terrible World’, Capital & Class, 41(3), pp. 537–559.

42 Gramsci, Quaderni, p. 1744. See also Peter Thomas (2009) The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Heegmony and Marxism (Leiden: Brill), pp. 152–153, which draws a parallel between Gramsci’s fare epoca and Benjamin’s Jetztzeit.

43 David Harvey (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell), pp. 240–242.

44 Gramsci, Quaderni, p. 1437.

45 Adam D. Morton (2007) Unravelling Gramsci: Hegemony and Passive Revolution in the Global Political Economy (London: Pluto Press), pp. 24–36.

46 See Sara Salem’s contribution to this special issue.

47 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Vol. 3, p. 345.

48 Gramsci, Quaderni, p. 1625.

49 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, vol. 3, p. 126.

50 Avi Shlaim (1995) War and Peace in the Middle East (London: Penguin), p. 11–13.

51 Roger Owen & Şevket Pamuk (1998) A History of Middle East Economies in the Twentieth Century (London: I.B. Tauris), p. 6.

52 Juan R. Cole (1999) Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East: Social and Cultural Origins of Egypt’s ‘Urabi Movement (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press).

53 Eric Davis (1983) Challenging Colonialism: Bank Misr and Egyptian Industrialization (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

54 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Vol. 3, p. 252.

55 Ilya Harik (1985) The Origins of the Arab State System, International Spectator, 20(2), pp. 20–32.

56 See Alina Sajed on Third Worldism in this special issue.

57 See Sara Salem’s considerations on the hegemony of the Nasserist project in Egypt until the late 1960s in this special issue.

58 Sadiki, Rethinking, p. 211.

59 Sara Salem (2018) Reading Egypt’s Postcolonial State Through Frantz Fanon: Hegemony, Dependency and Development, Interventions, 20(3), pp. 428–445.

60 Samir Amin (2012) The Reawakening of the Arab World: Challenge and Change in the Aftermath of the Arab Spring (New York: Monthly Review Press), pp. 168–228.

61 For a definition, see Anthony G. Hopkins (2018) American Empire: A Global History (Princeton: Princeton University Press), p. 19.

62 Adam Hanieh (2018) Money, Markets and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

63 Marco Lagi, Karla Z. Bertrand &Yaneer Bar-Yam (2011) The Food Crisis and Political Instability in North Africa and the Middle East, New England Complex Systems Institute, 28 September. Available at: http://necsi.edu/research/social/food_crises.pdf.

64 Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) (2014) Arab Middle Class: Measurement and Role in Driving Change (New York: United Nations).

65 Facundo Alvaredo, Lydia Assouad & Thomas Piketty (2017) Measuring Inequality in the Middle East 1990–2016: The World’s Most Unequal Region?,WID. World Working Paper Series, 2017/15, Paris.

66 Silvia Colombo (2018) Political and Institutional Transition in North Africa: Egypt and Tunisia in Comparative Perspective (London: Routledge).

67 Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyn Huber-Stephens & John Stephens (1992) Capitalist Development and Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press), p. 8.

68 ESCWA, Arab Middle Class.

69 Alvaredo et al., Measuring Inequality.

70 Radhika Desai (2013) Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire (London: Pluto Press).

71 Mike Davis (2006) Planet of Slums (London: Verso).

72 Roberto Roccu (2013) David Harvey in Tahrir Square: The Dispossessed, the Discontented and the Egyptian Revolution, Third World Quarterly, 34(3), pp. 423–440.

73 With reference to Lebanon, see Bassel Salloukh’s contribution to this special issue.