Civil Society, Social Movements, and the Arab Uprisings of 2011 PDF

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Civil Society, Social Movements, and the Arab Uprisings of 2011 Joel Beinin Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History Stanford University © August 2013 During the 1990s, a broad neo-Tocquevillian consensus crystalized among Western policymakers, scholars, and dono...

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Civil Society, Social Movements, and the Arab Uprisings of 2011

Joel Beinin Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History Stanford University © August 2013

During the 1990s, a broad neo-Tocquevillian consensus crystalized among Western policymakers, scholars, and donors affirming that, “dynamic civil society represented the sine qua non of democracy.”1 Larry Diamond, a leading exponent of this consensus and a proponent of democracy promotion by public and private US agencies, argues, based on the examples of the Philippines, South Korea, Chile, Poland, and others, that, “in a number of prominent cases, civil society has played a crucial role, if not the leading role, in producing a transition to democracy.”2 Consequently, “building civil society” was embraced and funded by USAID, the EU, the UNDP, and private foundations as the strategy for democracy promotion in the Arab region. Advocates of this view typically regard non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as the quintessential expressions of associational life and an “emerging” civil society. Definitions of civil society are diverse, and the concept is often deployed imprecisely, rendering it of dubious analytical utility. Nonetheless, this consensus motivated a profusion of academic and policy literature and the emergence of a new object of analysis – comparative transitions to democracy (transitology) based on the premise that there are identifiable patterns and preferred sequences of transition.

1 Sean L. Yom, "Civil Society and Democratization in the Arab World," Middle East Review of International Affairs 9, no. 4 (2005): 15.

Larry Jay Diamond, Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 235. 2

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Applied to the Arab region, there was a widespread assumption that autocratic regimes were liberalizing and civil societies (however defined) were emerging.3 However, “civil society organizations” and authorized opposition political parties (not considered part of civil society in some definitions, but often considered a sign of democratization by transitologists) played only a small role in mobilizing the demonstrations and occupations of public space that were the emblematic expressions of the Arab uprisings of 2011. Many NGOs, trade unions, professional associations, and political parties recognized or tolerated by the old regimes eventually joined in. But in no case did they initiate the mobilizations. Why did Arab civil society organizations fail to play a decisive role in this conjuncture? First, the claim that “building civil society” is a strategy for democracy promotion has been over-stated. Freedom of association is undoubtedly an essential feature of a democratic polity. But, NGOs and similar forms of association should not be fetishized or taken out of their historical and political contexts. Not all associations embrace democratic Rex Brynen, Bahgat al-Korany, and Paul Nobel (eds.), Political Liberalization and Democratization in the Arab World, 2 vols. (Boulder, CO: Lynee Reinner, 1995, 1998) and August Richard Norton (ed.), Civil Society in the Middle East, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1994, 1996) offer an array of examples. For critiques of this trend see Maha Abdelrahman, Civil Society Exposed: The Politics of NGOs in Egypt (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2004); Francesco Cavatorta, Civil Society and Democratization in the Arab World: The Dynamics of Activism (London: Routledge, 2011); Yom; Quintan Wiktorowicz, "Civil Society as Social Control: State Power in Jordan," Comparative Politics 33, no. 1 (2000): 43-61; Thomas Carothers, "Think Again: The Concept of Civil Society is a Recent Invention," Foreign Policy, no. Winter (1999-2000). http://carnegieendowment.org/pdf/CivilSociety.pdf 3

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values and practices, and associational life has flourished in undemocratic societies.4 Prior to the 1994 genocide, “Rwanda had the highest density of associational life in sub-Saharan Africa.”5 Even in the paradigmatic case of Poland, as elaborated below, a closer examination raises questions about the efficacy of this strategy. Second, in contrast to the conventional wisdom of transitology, democracy often emerges from the mobilization of social movements and explicitly political struggles that involve considerable instability, violence, and even civil wars, and not from licensed, and therefore necessarily limited, opposition to authoritarianism.6 Arab advocacy NGOs did succeed, to varying extents, in propagating the discourse of universal human rights. Yet, those NGOs tend to be staffed by a predictable group of cosmopolitan, middle class professionals socially distant from the majority of the population. They easily learned, if they did not already know, to speak a language familiar to Western governments, academics, journalists, think tanks, and funders. Most such NGOs do not have the capacity or the mission to mobilize popular opposition to regimes. They cannot be a substitute for political parties, movements, and ideologies. Consequently, when the Arab uprisings erupted, advocacy NGOs could

Simone Chambers and Jeffrey Kopstein, “Bad Civil Society,” Political Theory, 29 (No. 6, 2001): 837-865 cite post-1918 Italy, Weimar Germany, Communist Yugoslavia, and post-1989 Russia as examples. 4

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Michael Edwards, Civil Society, (Cambridge: Polity Press), 2009, 53.

The classic examples are Great Britain, the United States, and France; more recent ones include Ireland, Haiti, and Nicaragua. 6

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not serve as social movement organizations capable of framing the demands of insurgents. Third, “building civil society” was conjoined with the consolidation of the neoliberal “Washington Consensus” symbolized by the ascension to power of Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain (1979) and Ronald Reagan in the United States (1980). The “unholy trinity” of international financial institutions – the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization – sought to roll back European social democracy, the American new deal, and economic nationalism in the global south.7 In the Arab region, large public sectors, commodity subsidies, and subsidized social services were targeted for elimination by the international financial institutions backed by the US government. Civil society organizations were hailed as institutions that would assume the responsibilities abandoned by shrinking states. In so far as Arab authoritarian regimes (Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan) adopted neoliberal economic restructuring as their lodestar, opposition to its consequences – especially by movements of workers – made important contributions to fostering the culture of protest that targeted Arab autocrats in 2010-11. However, NGOs, especially those funded and supported by programs like the Middle East Partnership Initiative or the National Endowment for Democracy and similar EU

7 Richard Peet, Unholy Trinity: The IMF, World Bank, and the WTO (London: Zed Books, 2009).

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institutions were not positioned to oppose neoliberalism. Some explicitly supported it. NGOs that did criticize neoliberal policies, like the Egypt’s Center for Trade Union and Workers Services or the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights had few resources and were subjected to repression. Tunisia’s trade union federation, the Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail (UGTT), was also brought to heel after it opposed an early version of neoliberalism in the 1970s.

Civil Society and Democratization in Poland Michael Bernhard, an authority on democratization in Eastern Europe, agrees with Diamond that the Polish Solidarity trade union was an example of “building civil society” leading to democratization. Bernhard’s definition of civil society emphasizes the active role of the state in establishing its institutional and legal framework. For its agents to constitute a civil society they need the sanction of the state; the public space must be guaranteed as a realm of freedom from the state by the state itself. Thus civil society, as well as the private sphere, must be legally separated from the state by law, and the actors within it must be guaranteed specific personal and group liberties…8 This is similar to Diamond’s widely quoted definition of civil society.9 The salient difference is Bernhard’s greater emphasis on the state’s active role in legitimating and legally regulating civil society Michael Bernhard, "Civil Society and Democratic Transition in East Central Europe," Political Science Quarterly 108, no. 2 (1993): 309. 8

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Diamond, 221.

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associations. I would add that the separation between states and civil societies is relative, not absolute. States and their agents actively and continually intervene in civil society by establishing the ground rules according to which trade unions, professional syndicates, and other associations may function, seeking to ensure that the constituted order and its hegemonic ideology are perceived as legitimate. Variations in the extent and the severity of regulation and discipline of civil society by states typically reflect the qualitative difference between authoritarianism and democracy. Bernhard maintains that Poland is exceptional because civil society did lead the transition to democracy there. But for East Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia he argues that the emergence of civil society did not precede the demise of authoritarianism; it developed subsequently. This is consistent with the views of Theda Skocpol and others who argue that civil society is more likely to develop in already democratic states rather than to generate transitions from autocracy to democracy.10 A recent Ph.D. thesis based on a quantitative analysis of sixty-nine countries concurs: … after two decades of enthusiasm it is becoming clear that civil society does not live up to the high expectations. The empirical evidence of civil society’s contribution to democracy is mostly confined to transition periods…. In addition there is a growing Theda Skocpol, “How Americans Became Civic,” in Civic Engagement in American Democracy, ed. Theda Skocpol and Morris P. Fiorina, (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1999), 27-80. 10

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body of evidence of the negative impact of civil society on democracy…. The…institutional perspective… argues that democratic institutions precede civil society in time, and provide the grounds for civil society to flourish….11 According to Bernhard, a Polish civil society began to emerge in 1976 with the formation of the Workers Defense Committee to support striking workers. It went into occultation with the repression of the 1976 strikes and was briefly reconstituted during the strike wave of the summer of 1980, when Solidarity was established. At its September 1981 congress Solidarity adopted a republican political program, that is, it called for regime change. This led to the suppression of Solidarity and civil society with the declaration of martial law in December 1981. But in late 1988, shielded by Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika policy, the state negotiated with Solidarity and ultimately legally recognized Solidarity and other independent movements and allowed them to legally contest partially free elections [in June 1989]. This development reinstitutionalized civil society after an eight year hiatus.12 Bernhard’s claim for the Polish case can only be sustained by a historical ellipsis. He recognizes that there was not a continuous development of civil society from the establishment of the Workers Defense Committee in 1976 to the founding of Solidarity in 1980 to the Yevgenya Paturyan, “Civil Society and Democracy: The Country Level Interrelations and the Individual Level Impact,” Ph.D. thesis, Dept. of Political Science, Jacobs University, Bremen, 2009.

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Bernhard: 316-17.

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fall of the Communist regime in 1989. He acknowledges that only “[b]y treating martial law as a temporary interruption [can] the Polish democratic transition… be understood in fairly linear terms.”13 This omits much that a proper historical analysis requires. Moreover, according to Diamond’s distinction between civil society and political society, by adopting a political program in 1981 and by competing in elections in 1989, Solidarity actually became a component of political society because it sought, and achieved, “not only a democratic transition, but control of the state.”14 Regardless of how one defines Solidarity and its historical role, the international context for regime change in Poland was critical. Solidarity received enormous support from the Catholic Church and the West – including some $50 million from the United States.15 The Soviet Union’s unwillingness to intervene militarily, as it did in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, was decisive. Even if one fully accepts Diamond and Bernhard’s argument, it is not clear that absent this international context “building civil society” would have succeeded in democratizing Poland.

13

Ibid.

14 Diamond, 223. Carothers, 19 also considers political parties to be outside the realm of civil society.

Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), 589.

15

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The example of Poland and its neighbors indicates the problems of “civil society” as an analytical concept. The claims for its capacity to generate a transition to democracy are inflated. Multiple and slippery definitions permit all “good” institutions to be included. A fetishized focus on civil society can result in inadequate consideration of historical details and broader contexts, and most importantly, political struggle.

Arab NGOs The original impetus for the proliferation of NGOs in the Arab region was the political defeat of the Arab new left and the Islamic revival in the 1970s and 1980s. This led to the retreat of the urban intelligentsias from secular party politics. Leftists and liberals who sought to continue political activity founded and joined advocacy NGOs promoting human rights, prisoners’ rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, workers’ rights, etc.16 Despite, the proliferation of Arab NGOs and other forms of association, authoritarian Arab regimes were fairly effective in blocking the emergence of truly independent organizations of any sort. Except for the qualified success of human rights and women’s rights NGOs and trade unions in Morocco and Bahrain, forms of association tolerated by autocratic Arab regimes never became effective, enduring structures of 16 Joe Stork, "Three Decades of Human Rights Activism in the Middle East and North Africa: An Ambiguous Balance Sheet," in Social Movements, Mobilization, and Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa, 2nd ed., ed. Joel Beinin and Frédéric Vairel(Stanford, CA: Stanford Univesity Press, 2013).

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oppositional mobilization or democratization during the era of ascendant Arab authoritarianism. NGOs deemed improperly “political” according to the very restrictive legislation governing them were routinely dissolved. If and when NGOs did threaten them, the regimes changed the rules of the game. The existence of what transitologists, funders, and Arab human rights defenders called “civil society” and the large number of “civil society organizations,” was not an index of democratization. Maha Abdelrahman concludes that in Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt, civil society was characterized by authoritarian and repressive tendencies. Moreover, its organizations, such as NGOs, …often actively engaged in reproducing unequal relations and an unjust status quo rather than providing alternatives to existing systems of power.17 Quintan Wiktorowicz concurs that in Jordan (as well Egypt, Morocco and Algeria before 1992, and I would add Tunisia, Yemen, and Syria before 2011) civil society organizations…were embedded in a web of bureaucratic practices and legal codes which allows those in power to monitor and regulate collective activities….Under such circumstances, civil society institutions are more an instrument of state social control than a mechanism of collective empowerment.”18

17

Abdelrahman, 1.

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Wiktorowicz: 43.

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Vickie Langohr goes further to claim that the proliferation of NGOs and the creation of a permitted and closely supervised sphere of public activity may have contributed to depoliticization by providing middle class professionals with a relatively safe arena of activity which did not involve mobilizing significant elements of the population in demonstrations or campaigns that directly challenged the regimes.19 Writing shortly before the 2011 uprisings, Shadi Hamid, an energetic supporter of funding Arab NGOs and active engagement in democracy promotion by private U.S. foundations and quasi-governmental agencies confirmed Langohr’s argument. [E]ven pro-democracy NGOs are not, in fact, prodemocracy NGOs. Democracy entails “alternation of power,” but most NGOs that favor democratization do not do anything that can be construed as supporting a change in regime.20 The combination of effective authoritarian power and the inherent limits on the mobilizational capacities of NGOs prevented them from playing an active political role or imagining how to undertake a transition from autocracy to democracy regardless of the sincere democratic aspirations and good work of their staffs. A partial exception to this pattern is trade union and labor movements. Although in the 2000s workers typically did not call for regime change, their mobilizational Vickie Langohr, "Too Much Civil Society, Too Little Politics: Egypt and Liberalizing Arab Regimes," Comparative Politics 36, no. 2 (2004). 19

20Shadi

Hamid, “Civil Society in the Arab World and the Dilemma of Funding,” Brookings Institution, October 2010, http://www.brookings.edu/research/articles/2010/10/middle-east-hamid

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capacity and the clear link between workers’ economic demands and the neoliberal policies of Arab authoritarian governments made the contestations of workers a salient component of the culture of protest that emerged in the 2000s and culminated in the uprisings. The following comparative survey of NGOs and labor movements in Egypt, Tunisia, and Bahrain demonstrates this argument.

NGOs in Egypt In the mid-1990s there were at least 15,000 and perhaps as many as 28,000 NGOs in Egypt; by 2008 the number had reached 30,000. About 43 percent were Islamic associations; 9 percent were Coptic associations; and 25 percent were community development associations, which are quasi-governmental entities. There were also business associations and several dozen secular, liberal, and left-oriented advocacy NGOs. The Ministry of Social Affairs (now the Ministry of Social Solidarity and Justice) registers and licenses NGOs and monitors their budgets and activities as stipulated by the quite restrictive Law on Community Associations and Foundations (Law 84 of 2002; previously NGOs were regulated by Law 32 of 1964). Business associations, while subject to the same requirements, were treated with a lighter hand.21 Among the prominent advocacy NGOs are: The Arab Women’s Solidarity Association (established in 1982), the New Woman Research 21

Abdelrahman 2004, 6-8.

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