Israel And Distinguishing Between Hostile States
August 1, 2012 § Leave a comment
There were two articles published yesterday on the topic of Israel’s security in the wake of the Arab uprisings that arrived at polar opposite conclusions about the behavior Israel should expect from new Islamist governments. One was authored by me in the National Interest and I argue that massive economic crises and the renewed focus on quality of life issues that comes with elections have created a situation in which Israel’s Arab neighbors have too much on their plates to be thinking about causing trouble for Israel (the argument is longer and more nuanced than the one sentence summary, so please click over to the National Interest and read the whole thing). Writing in the Daily Beast at Open Zion, Benny Morris comes to the opposite conclusion, arguing that Israel is now “the most dangerous place for Jews in the world.” Looking at recent developments in the region, Morris sees things as follows:
But for Israel the “Arab Spring” represents a dramatic, abrupt tightening of the noose. The takeover of the Gaza Strip by Hamas; the ongoing takeover of Egypt by the Brotherhood, traditionally an advocate of Israel’s destruction; the gradual subversion by Islamists of Hashemite control in Jordan; the Hizbullah dominance of Lebanon; and the current overthrow of the Assad regime in Syria all represent a tightening of the siege.
As Jeremy Pressman breaks down in a thorough fashion at Mideast Matrix, the reason Morris and I view Israel’s security situation so differently is because I am looking at material interests and capabilities and Morris is looking at ideology. For Morris, ideology outweighs every other consideration, and Islamism is a monolithic entity, the same in Iran as it is in Egypt. No matter what else is taking place, Morris sees Islamic fundamentalists joining hands to jump at the opportunity to destroy Israel. As Pressman rightly points out, Morris’s argument is difficult to test since Islamists are not actually controlling Egypt (the military is still very much running the show), Jordan, and Syria at the moment, but there is a reason that he and I differ over how to view emerging Islamist governments in Arab states, and it has to do with how one views ideology and ideological states.
There is something ironic for me about the fact that I am downplaying the role of ideology here since the thrust of so much of my non-blog writing is about how ideology is often a controlling variable in a variety of situations. My dissertation argues that ideology operates as a constraint on successful democratic transitions, and I have theorized that the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia was pushed out the door so quickly because the military and regime softliners did not see an emerging ideological threat (although their calculation was incorrect). In the case of new Arab Islamist governments looking to confront Israel, however, ideology is not a particularly important factor, which Morris does not grasp because he fails to distinguish between variants of ideology and their purpose.
Morris looks at Iran, which is an Islamist regime dedicated to Israel’s destruction, and assumes that every other Islamist government is going to behave in an identical fashion. The problem with this view is that while the Muslim Brotherhood is indeed very hostile to Israel, it misses some extremely important context. The Iranian regime is one that uses ideology as a source of legitimation; it’s argument for existing is that it governs a revolutionary state, the aim of which is to spread the Islamic revolution beyond its borders. Despite its parliamentary and presidential elections, it makes no real pretense to legitimating itself through democratic institutions and is run by unelected and unaccountable officials. Ideology is both its primary purpose and primary source of legitimacy, and thus if it does not act to carry out its ideological mission at all times, it endangers its very existence; when ideology is used as a source of regime legitimacy, fealty to the ideology is crucial for the regime to maintain its rule. In this sense, ideology becomes its primary interest to be advanced and it can take precedence over material concerns.
Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood (to the extent that the MB actually controls anything) is theoretically also an Islamist state, but its relationship to ideology is not the same as in Iran. The MB government in Egypt does not use ideology as its source of legitimacy even though it is an ideological movement. The MB ran for office in free and fair elections and campaigned on a host of promises to improve the economy, eliminate corruption, and increase transparency. In other words, it subjected itself to the people’s will as a way of creating legitimacy and it appealed to a host of material, rather than ideological, concerns. Not only does the MB not need to justify everything it does from an ideological perspective, it would be devastating to its long term prospects if it did. When it comes to confronting Israel, the MB will do so in a number of lower grade ways since it is a popular stance and also fits in with the party’s ideology, but it is not going to launch a war at the expense of its economic and political goals.
I do not mean to downplay in any way the hostility that the Muslim Brotherhood and other related Sunni Islamist groups harbor toward Israel. I do not view the MB as a benign reformist movement (or even necessarily a democratic one at heart rather than out of convenience) and the Israeli government is correct to be vigilant in not letting down its guard. This is not the same thing though as being on constant alert for invading Islamist armies willing to sacrifice their entire existence for a chance to kills Israeli Jews. Ideology is an extremely powerful force, but in order to understand how and why, it is necessary to get a handle on the different ways that ideology operates to shape events rather than taking a Manichean worldview that sees every situation involving Islamists as identical. Iran presents a real danger to Israel arising from its ideological worldview, but new Arab Islamist governments do not.
What Democracy Is, and Is Not
June 18, 2012 § 3 Comments
I know I should be writing about Israel or Turkey (and Turkey has plenty of interesting stuff going that I want to get to, particularly surrounding the elusive Fethullah Gülen and Prime Minister Erdoğan’s very public invitation for him to return), but I can’t stop watching what is going on in Egypt. Just as voting got underway yesterday in the second round of Egypt’s presidential election – voting which was hollowed out by the dismissal of parliament last week – the SCAF issued a constitutional declaration expanding the military’s powers over the president and the constitution writing process. Among other things, the SCAF gave itself veto power over any new constitutional elements proposed by the Constituent Assembly, which it has also given itself the power to appoint, and required the president to get its approval before going to war. In a nutshell, the SCAF essentially institutionalized its position as sitting above the rest of the political system with oversight of all relevant executive, legislative, and judicial bodies, and is unquestionably the highest power in the land irrespective of who the next or future presidents are. Some are looking at this as a preemptive strike against a Morsi presidency, and that may well have been the point, but these moves make democracy in Egypt an absolute and complete impossibility no matter how many free and fair elections take place down the road.
It’s worth thinking a little about why this is. This same issue comes up with regard to Iran, where people sometimes claim that Iran is a democracy or somehow more democratic than its Arab neighbors because it has an elected president and legislature with campaigns that feature genuine choices in the voting booth. This claim is utterly false. Despite its elections, Iran is not a democracy because even a minimalist electoral democracy is about much more than just elections, and Egypt today officially entered a pattern in which it too cannot attain democratic status unless the new constitutional provisions are discarded. Neither Iran nor Egypt have what is called vertical accountability, meaning that there is an unelected group that has a reserved domain of power and that stands above elected officials without being accountable to the electorate. In Iran that group is the Guardian Council and the Supreme Leader, and in Egypt it is now the SCAF. The elected president of Egypt is subject to a military veto, and the military is accountable to nobody. Egypt can hold elections every four years that are unassailably free and fair with regular transfers of power between parties, and none of it will matter because Egypt will still not be democratic.
In a way, what has taken place in Egypt is a lot more problematic than the type of military coup seen in Turkey or Latin American countries during the latter half of the last century. When the military intervenes in politics to depose an elected civilian government, it often does whatever it feels needs to be done and then returns to the barracks. As was the case in Turkey, this did not mean that another coup would not happen in ten years, but at least in the interim civilian politics was given a chance, albeit with the omnipresent specter of the military hovering over the proceedings. In Egypt, however, the SCAF is not simply intervening in civilian politics; it is establishing a permanent military veto and permanent martial law that will exist in conjunction with civilian politics. Even if the military does not ever actively remove the president, the president cannot go to war without the SCAF’s approval or do anything to curb the military’s power to indiscriminately arrest civilians or remove SCAF oversight of the legislative process. This is more insidious than a temporary military coup, because it permanently cements the subordination of elected officials to unelected generals. As much as the military was preeminent under Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak, this is a step even farther, since now the military will be actively involved in governing. Nobody should fool themselves about what it means should Morsi actually be declared the winner of yesterday’s election; just because he wins and Shafiq – widely presumed to be the SCAF’s favored candidate – loses does not make for a triumph of democracy, or even a glimmer of hope. There is no democracy in Egypt, and that won’t be undone through the process of elections.
One final thought about Egypt and democratic transitions. For the last year and a half, it has been fashionable to talk about Egypt’s transition or Egypt’s emerging democracy. Neither of these terms was ever accurate. A democratic transition is a frustratingly nebulous concept, and there is no good way of measuring when one has actually occurred and a state has crossed some magic threshold. That said, there are a couple of baseline definitions one might use. One (from O’Donnell and Schmitter) is the interval between the original political regime and the one that replaces it. Did that ever happen in Egypt? To my mind, the answer is a resounding no. Mubarak is gone, but his regime never went anywhere. His defense minister and army chief of staff have been running Egypt under the guise of the SCAF, and his last prime minister just participated in a two man runoff to become the next president. That is not a regime change, or even a change of government. There has been no interval between political regimes in this case since the original regime has not been replaced or even deposed.
Another definition (from Przeworski) is that a transition has occurred once a state has arrived at the point where no actor can intervene to reverse the outcome of the formal political process, and the transfer of power occurs from a set of people to a set of rules. I don’t think anyone would seriously argue that this ever occurred in Egypt post-January 2011. Clearly the military has stepped in on a number of occasions to reverse the outcome of formal politics, with yesterday and last week being only the latest and most egregious examples. Egypt has also not really come close to vesting power in a set of rules rather than in the SCAF. It is tempting to describe what has just taken place as an aborted transition, but that implies that a transition was in process against all evidence to the contrary. The old regime has been in power from the start, and just signaled that it has no intention of giving that power up, no matter who wants to call himself president of Egypt. There are lots of different definitions for what constitutes a democracy and plenty of vigorous debate over what is required, but as things stand today in Egypt, it is not a democracy and did not undergo even a limited transition, and pretending otherwise is an exercise in futility and false hope.
Predicting the Outcome of the Arab Spring
March 30, 2012 § 3 Comments
I am once again going to step away from Israel and Turkey because I cannot let Walter Laqueur’s piece in World Affairs on misplaced optimism about the Arab Spring go uncommented upon. Laqueur’s argument is that most observers assumed that democracy was going to sweep the Middle East, which is now apparently not going to happen, and so we must ask why the chances against that happening were ignored. He cites the writing of Roger Cohen and Nick Kristof as leading the optimistic charge, and says that Westerners mistook Arab dissatisfaction with the status quo as a desire for democracy and universal human rights, and that “it should have been clear that the odds against the emergence of a democratic order in the foreseeable future in the Arab world were impossibly heavy.”
Agreed, I am 100% on board with this last observation. The problem is, by focusing on the reporting of a couple of New York Times columnists, Laqueur makes the same mistake that they committed in that he misses the big picture, which is that plenty of people made it very clear that the odds of democracy emerging were depressingly slim. Just because high profile journalists ignored the vast array of expert opinion that was out there at the time does not mean that we can somehow alter reality and act as if Kristof and Cohen represent the consensus opinion of the world. If you are looking for contemporary warnings from the leading ranks of Middle East analysts that democracy in Egypt was not imminent, you can try this or this or this. Just because Kristof and Cohen chose to ignore the vast weight of history and the crushing burden of institutional legacies in favor of the heady optimism of Tahrir Square protestors does not mean that there needs to be soul searching on the part of anyone save columnists who parachute into the midst of a revolution and deign to explain what is going on to the world without taking a step back to consider the various structural constraints that are constantly shaping the political sphere. Democracy does not happen overnight; it emerges following a long and difficult path in which literally thousands of little things have to go right, and even then it is a long shot unless the underlying conditions for democracy to flourish are present. I do not mean to take anything away from the thousands of Egyptians who demonstrated in Tahrir and elsewhere, standing up to Mubarak’s goons and then to the army in order to nurture a dream of a better political and social order. Their presence was and is remarkable, but it is not enough to make democracy appear out of thin air, not when there are so many countervailing forces pushing back.
Folks who study and write about the Middle East professionally are not surprised at what is taking place today. I am certainly no expert, just a small voice on the periphery, but even I saw what was coming. One of the main premises of my dissertation (which is merrily underway and nearing completion), which I came up with for the first time in the fall of 2007, is that Tunisia has long been the only Arab state in which conditions are favorable in almost every respect for democracy and that there is a particular ideological legacy that has been holding it back. On the day that Ben Ali fell, I argued in Foreign Policy that Tunisia is unique and that it was unlikely that any other Arab dictators would be joining Ben Ali soon. That prediction was obviously (and happily) wrong, but only because my language was far too imprecise. What I should have written, and what I have argued long and loudly ever since, is that other Arab regimes were unlikely to be replaced, and indeed anyone who has followed events in Egypt knows that Mubarak may be gone but the authoritarian regime has remained right where it always was. In February 2011, I wrote the following in a short essay that I could not convince anyone to publish: “In Egypt, the military’s interests are too bound up with those of the regime to let it be overtaken, and as seen by events in Tahrir Square, where the army allowed violence to flare up but has now acted to simply keep both sides apart, the army is neither on the side of the demonstrators nor a force for democracy. In Syria, civil society is far weaker than in Egypt, making mass demonstrations difficult to sustain, and the army has a history of firing on civilians, unlike the Egyptian military. In short, Arab regimes and militaries are remarkably resilient and protective of their interests, and the chances of an outbreak of successful revolutions or democratic transitions are slim at best.” In hindsight, some parts of this are more correct than others – demonstrations have been going on in Syria for over a year, and Egypt and Libya carried out revolutions with varying degrees of success – but underlying analysis was right on point, which was not to expect democracy outside of Tunisia any time soon. I am not reprinting my thoughts from the first months of 2011 to make myself seem particularly prescient, but to highlight the fact that anything but the most shallow analysis easily led to a more pessimistic conclusion than the optimism Laqueur describes as widespread. Laqueur wants observers to reassess how their wishful thinking impacts their analysis, but the truth is that it is not Middle East analysts who got history wrong, only the wishful thinkers who moonlight as analysts.
