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Liberalization and Foreign Policy, by Miles Kahler, editor
4. Democratization and Foreign Policy in the Arab World: The Domestic Origins of the Jordanian and Algerian Alliances in the 1991 Gulf War
Lisa Anderson
On August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait, sparking a major international diplomatic, and ultimately military, campaign to restore the sovereignty of Kuwait and the status quo ante in the Middle East. Although the United States led the opposition to Iraq, American president George Bush made a concerted and remarkably successful effort to create and sustain an international coalition; the United Nations provided the auspices for the military campaign, and more than a dozen countries contributed military equipment and personnel to the war effort.
For the countries of the Arab world, both the Iraqi invasion and the subsequent efforts to reverse it created profound dilemmas. The Iraqi occupation of Kuwait constituted a challenge to the norms of sovereignty and self-determination with which the countries of the region had operated for decades. American leadership tarnished the effort to liberate Kuwait, however, for not only was the United States unwilling to apply equal pressure on Israel to relinquish control of occupied territory but, as the sole remaining superpower, the United States was suspected of harboring hegemonic ambitions in the region. Seeing themselves threatened from both sides, and under immense pressure from both Iraq and the United States to join their respective camps, the countries of the Arab world divided. Those in the Gulf stood with Kuwait and the United States, providing funds, troops, and staging areas for the war effort. At the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula, however, Yemen opposed the war and supported Iraq. In the Levant, Syria and Egypt joined the American-led coalition, while Jordan and the PLO opposed it, as did all the countries in North Africa.
This pattern of alliance not only posed very serious real-world political puzzles for policy makers but created equally knotty theoretical questions for political scientists: how can we explain the decisions of the various governments to take up the side that they did? More specifically, how can we account for the fact that the more liberal its domestic political regime, the more likely was an Arab state to support autocratic Iraq against the United States-led coalition? The answer proposed here construes these alliance decisions as foreign policy ramifications of political competition in the early stages of democratization by weakly institutionalized and dependent authoritarian regimes.
Most discussions of alliance behavior begin with the regional and international balance of power or, in Stephen M. Walt's reformulation, balance of threat. 1 From this perspective, the serious danger that Iraq posed to its neighbors, as evidenced not only by its invasion of Kuwait but by the preceding decade's war with Iran, should have provoked those neighbors to ally with the United States. Yet, although Syria and Egypt behaved as predicted in the Gulf War, Jordan and Algeria did not. What factors might have intervened?
Walt suggests that weakness may incline a state to bandwagon--that is, to ally with the threatening state rather than against it--and certainly by most measures Jordan, if not Algeria, is a relatively weak state. Yet weak states look for strength; "only when their decision can affect the outcome is it rational for them to join the weaker alliance." 2 Since from the time the United States first came upon the scene it was by far the strongest combatant, by this standard the Jordanian decision to stand by Iraq can only be considered "irrational."
Before resorting to characterization of policy and policy makers in the Arab world as irrational--a temptation to which American policy analysts succumb surprisingly frequently despite its strong odor of both political ethnocentrism and theoretical sour grapes--we might examine the considerable literature in contemporary political science devoted to the myriad ways in which domestic political characteristics contribute to and account for international outcomes.
Among the more provocative of these examinations of the domestic sources of international politics have been the various explanations proffered for the empirical observation that democracies do not go to war with one another. Ideological convergence, institutional transparency, and mass participation have all been said to discourage mutual hostilities between democracies. 3 Unfortunately, however, the relationship between democracy and peace appearsto hold only for stable, consolidated democracies; as Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder have shown, while the condition of democracy may be positive for peace, the process of democratization augurs far better for belligerence and warlike behavior. This they attribute to political competition among old and new elites for mass support; once mobilized, masses are often difficult to control, and "war can result from nationalist prestige strategies that hard-pressed leaders use to stay astride their unmanageable coalitions." 4
Does political democratization have discernible foreign policy effects short of the actual outbreak of war, in alliance formation? Certainly there was an ideological convergence in the way the Arab states chose up sides in the Gulf crisis, but it was a virtually perfect refutation of the proposition that ideological similarity contributesto foreign policy consensus. In fact, the more democratic an Arab regime, the more likely it was to support Iraq. Only quasi-democratic Egypt took the predicted stand in supporting the coalition. For the rest, it was the authoritarian Gulf monarchies and Syria that were the stalwarts of the American-led coalition, while the recently liberalized regimes of Jordan, Yemen, Tunisia, and Algeria supported Iraq. These cases, where the rulers faced elected officials (and defeated candidates) prepared to question their policies--foreign and domestic--closely and often in municipal councils, national parliaments, and the press, confound the predictions of the conventional theories of both alliance behavior and the democratic peace.
Like making war, making alliances is profoundly influenced by the particular dynamics of transitional or democratizing regimes. The introduction of democratic political institutions alters not only the procedures of decision making but the substance as well, by expanding the issues available for discussion and broadening the universe of possible participants. Even when the actual outbreak of hostilities is thousands of miles away, as for Algeria, or the military capacity of the state is not in doubt, as for Jordan, foreign policy decisions reflect the often transient enthusiasms and resentments of the newly joined domestic political debates as much as they indicate calculated assessments of national interest.
For both policy makers and international relations theorists, the conclusion that domestic democratization complicates foreign policy making may be discomforting. As Michael Hudson has suggested, "There is some plausibility in the realist view that American interests are better served by undemocratic Arab regimes, on the grounds that authoritarian rulers could pursue regime interests without the distraction of unruly and unfriendly public opinion." 5 Although there are many good reasons to promote political democratization in the Arab world and elsewhere, the expectation that domestic institutional convergence will necessarily produce compatible foreign policies should not be among them.
To explore this argument further, in the following pages I examine the causes and consequences of political democratization in the Arab world generally and then pursue the specific consequences of that process for foreign policy in the Jordanian and Algerian reactions to the Gulf War.
Democratization in the Arab World: Causes and Consequences
By world standards, the Arab world is not a region widely renowned for liberalism in either politics or economics. 6 The occasional and hesitant efforts of the last two decades to privatize centralized economies and to democratize authoritarian politics received what was, by and large, the scant attention they deserved. 7 Nonetheless, by 1990 the region was a far cry from the anti-imperialist era of the 1950s and 1960s, when the nonaligned socialisms of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and Algeria's Ahmed Ben Bella categorically rejected liberal politics and market economics. From the dramatic (if less than thoroughgoing) reversal of Nasser's foreign and domestic policies by his successor Anwar Sadat in the 1970s to the Algerian government's recognition of dozens of political parties and independent newspapers in the late 1980s, there was ample evidence of the growth of interest in liberal political and economic ideas and institutions during those two decades.
Although the causes for this shift were various--and no doubt included reasons as simple as changes in global intellectual fashions 8 --two important dimensions bear on the policy consequences of political democratization and economic liberalization in the Arab world. First, to the extent that the democratizing countries have had no prior experience with democratic institutions, their introduction is likely to occasion political instability considerably greater than the routinized uncertainty associated with consolidated democracy. 9 Second, to the extent that the political economy in which liberalization takes place is not characterized by competitive market relations, the introduction of democracy will precipitate rather than reflect the organization of societal interests, thus amplifying the instability and ambiguity of domestic political coalitions.
As far as the first dimension is concerned, a crude but useful distinction should be drawn between regimes that have had some prior experience with democratic institutions and those--far more plentiful in the Third World--that have none. 10 To attain comparable degrees of liberality, polities that have already experienced some measure of liberalism or democracy have fewer adjustments to make than their wholly "preliberal" authoritarian counterparts. At least some of the existing interests, institutions, and ideologies will have been formed by and remain compatible with liberal democracy, and its reinstitution may be accomplished by relatively small-scale adjustments.
By contrast, in the transition from authoritarian regimes without liberal or democratic antecedents, the effects of democratization will necessarily be of a greater magnitude. Existing interests, institutions, and ideologies may find themselves competing with entirely new forces, including those created by the democratization itself. The immediate effect of the introduction (as opposed to the reintroduction) of new interests, institutions, and ideologies in the process of democratization is likely to be more rather than less uncertain, unstable, and passionate politics, both at home and abroad.
Moreover, the relative absence of competitive markets in the Arab world heightens the association of democratization and instability. Not only has the Arab world had scant exposure to liberal or democratic politics--the competitive politics of the interwar period in French Algeria and British-dominated Egypt and Iraq having been projections of European debates and requirements far more often than genuine expressions of domestic interests and ideas 11 --but the post-World War II international political economy of the region also discouraged open domestic politics and market economics. The mechanisms by which the new states were inserted into the international economy and political system facilitated imposition of repres sive, centralized domestic regimes. As a result, the institutional apparatus of the previous regime is less important than might be the case elsewhere. Whether formally a monarchy, as in the Jordanian case, or a single-party socialist government, as in Algeria, the political regimes are poorly institutionalized, relatively unresponsive to domestic constituencies, and unusually reliant on external financing of the distributive policies and coercion by which they control, rather than respond to, popular opinion.
Since the wane of European imperialism in the region, rulers availed themselves of their pivotal position in the two-level game of simultaneous domestic and foreign policy making to maintain themselves in power. 12 These rulers profited from their control of valuable human and natural resources and of geographical locations of strategic value in the Cold War to obtain revenues from international markets and patrons. These revenues in turn permitted them to act domestically as distributors of externally generated resources rather than as managers of production or extractors of surplus. 13 As such, they could--and did--demand political acquiescence in return for the distributed goods and services.
It is in this context that the quite specific causes and implications of economic liberalization and political democratization in the Arab world must be understood. By and large the trends toward more democratic politics and liberal economies have reflected the exhaustion of external sources of state revenue--thanks to the end of the Cold War foreign aid, decline in oil prices, attainment of international credit limits, et cetera--and the consequent inability of the state elites to sustain existing distributive programs. These difficulties were long in the making, and some of the region's countries, such as non-oil exporting Egypt and Tunisia, were required to begin economic and political liberalization programs in the early 1970s. It was the oil glut and the worldwide recession of the mid-1980s, however, that brought the problems to a head in much of the region. In the cases considered here, for example, the decline in oil prices and the consequent drop in Arab aid and in remittances from workers in Europe and the Persian Gulf wreaked havoc in already troubled economies. Despite Algeria's hydrocarbon exports, for example, the country's debt service as a percentage of exports grew from slightly over 3 percent in 1970 to 25 percent in 1980 to nearly 55 percent in 1986 and 77 percent in 1988. By the beginning of that year, the growth rate of both Algeria and Jordan was negative and Jordan's remaining foreign exchange reserves covered less than two weeks of imports. 14 Economic reform was unavoidable, and both Algeria and Jordan initiated structural adjustment programs that implied major reorganization of the ownership of productive resources and substantial belt-tightening for consumers. In shrinking the public sector and encouraging the market, economic liberalization was to serve two purposes for the state elites simultaneously. It held out the institutional and ideological possibility of relieving the state of its self-imposed distributive obligation at home, while also positioning those elites to make a case for more external aid in the new, post-Cold War liberal international political economy.
Insofar as the governments abandoned their historic role as providers for the citizenry, however, ideological and institutional space opened for development and expression of alternative interests. Of particular importance in the Arab world was the appearance of a private regional economy based upon the resources of private capital and labor in the major oil-producing countries. The "dependent bourgeoisie" created by the privatization of state enterprises may not initially have had a significant impact on government policy in their own countries, but through regional investment and philanthropy they were instrumental in providing funds for oppositional political movements throughout the region. 15 Similarly, the remittances of laborers working in both the oil-producing states of the Middle East and, to a lesser extent, the industrial economies of Europe have provided resources for nongovernmental, often oppositional, political organizations.
Although the development of these organizations and ideologies was facilitated by the democratization policies of the governments, they are not necessarily liberal or democratic themselves. The domestic, and indeed, foreign constituencies for liberal and democratic political platforms in the Arab world have been strikingly frail. Although there are small political movements espousing democratic (and more often social than liberal democratic) positions, they have received little support abroad, even from erstwhile patrons of democratic causes. 16 In fact, as many observers have remarked, among the most important beneficiaries of democratic institutional reform in the Middle East have been Islamist movements whose political (though not necessarily economic) platforms are avowedly illiberal. 17 Insofar as the state elites espouse liberal economic programs and policies--whether out of conviction or convenience--the political opposition is likely to coalesce around anti-liberal political ideologies, not only for the purposes of "product differentiation" but also because economic liberalization is associated with the end of egalitarian distributive policies and the introduction instead of preferential treatment for relatively well-endowed segments of society at the expense of the "popular sectors." As a result, the short-term consequence of political democratization in conjunction with economic liberalization has been to enhance the position and amplify the voice of those who oppose the very policies from which they are benefiting.
Moreover, in much of the Arab world, Islamist political movements have been the best-organized, most-efficient, and most-scrupulous providers of social services, including health insurance, education, garbage collection, and so forth. In both word and deed, they are articulate critics of government waste and corruption. The Islamist capacity to fill these roles is in large part a legacy of the era when state ownership and management extended to virtually all realms of social and economic life and only the mosque was left outside state control to wither, or so it was then thought, as an anachronism in the modern world. The unintended consequence of this neglect was that devotional life was one of the few areas of human endeavor that remained unsullied by the failures of the regimes, its resources available for mobilization as those failures became increasingly apparent. The Islamist movements therefore constitute one of the very few genuine expressions of civil society in the Arab world, and because of the nature of the states within and over which they contest, they have had little experience of political democracy or liberalism.
Thus, even if in the long run the experience of political freedoms and economic liberties makes democrats of us all--and that remains to be seen--for the foreseeable future the domestic and foreign policies of the states of the Middle East will be profoundly shaped by the dilemma of democratization that evokes an antidemocratic response. This is likely to produce ambivalent and contradictory policy, both at home and abroad, as state elites argue for the necessity of authoritarian interventions in democratic processes in order to "save democracy from itself." 18 Moreover, democratic governments, particularly relatively wealthy and powerful democratic governments, like that of the United States, will be the object of appeals for support from both sides, as the ostensibly liberal governments argue for the need for uncritical support of their regimes to guarantee stability, and apparently nondemocratic oppositions promote pressure on those same regimes to ensure continued adherence to democratic procedures.
The complicated, ambiguous, and often contradictory politics produced by democratic transitions in polities for which both liberal political institutions and market economies are novelties are illustrated in the complex reactions of Jordan and Algeria to the dilemma posed by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent United States-led efforts to reverse it.
Jordan: The "Liberal Monarch" Betrays His Erstwhile Patrons
The Jordanian experiment with political liberalization and democratization began in April 1989, when countrywide rioting, touched off by cuts in consumer subsidies, brought down the cabinet and led the government to rethink its domestic political arrangements. 19 Barely a year later--but after press censorship had been relaxed, the political role of the security services curtailed, and hotly contested parliamentary elections held--the country faced a major foreign policy dilemma. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 and the subsequent swift deployment of hundreds of thousands of American troops in Saudi Arabia in what proved to be the prelude to a fullscale war to liberate Kuwait pitted the Jordanian regime's traditionalforeign backers--the Kuwaitis, Saudis, and Americans--against a regime in Iraq whose political rhetoric and military potential held considerable appeal for the ordinary citizen. That the Jordanian government's early attempts to mediate ultimately gave way to a decided tilt toward Iraq proved very costly economically, as the United States and its coalition partners cut aid to Jordan and enforced economic sanctions on Iraq that further damaged the Jordanian economy. The policy probably saved the crown, however, winning the Hashemite monarch (and, perforce, the monarchy) widespread domestic support in a part of the populace long reluctant to endorse either the dynasty or the king.
The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan was originally created from political remnants of World War I. Carved by the British from its Palestine Mandate in part to provide a kingdom for Amir Abdallah, the son of an important British ally in World War I and brother of the British-installed ruler in Baghdad, Jordan had little intrinsic political or economic rationale. Accorded independence after World War II, Jordan captured the contiguous areas of Palestine that were not occupied by Israeli forces in the war of 1948--the West Bank, which was promptly annexed by Abdallah--and fell heir to hundreds of thousands of refugees, who were granted citizenship. 20
Ruled since the early 1950s by Abdallah's grandson, the current King Husayn, Jordan relied on foreign subsidies of its budget from the very outset. Thanks to its crucial geostrategic location, the British, then the Americans, and after the oil booms of the 1970s, the Saudis and Kuwaitis provided subventions that supplemented revenues derived from the country's only other significant resource: the export of skilled labor to the oil-producing countries of the Gulf and elsewhere.
During the mid-1950s, when much of the Arab world was swept by mass mobilizations in the name of anti-imperialism, King Husayn--newly on the throne and still in his early twenties--was challenged by a leftist labor movement and Arab nationalist political parties who contested the legitimacy not only of the monarchy as an institution but of the very existence of an independent Jordanian--as opposed to a greater pan-Arab--state. Having everything to lose in permitting such sentiments to be voiced, heard, or empowered, the king declared martial law and outlawed political parties in 1956. For all intents and purposes, that was the end of legal competitive political life until the 1980s. Although there were carefully managed parliamentary elections in the 1960s, even they ended with the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in 1967.
The relative success of the Jordanian government through the 1960s and particularly the 1970s in obtaining foreign support, and the regime's relatively liberal economic policies, which permitted workers abroad to invest their earnings profitably in Jordan allowed the country's citizens, particularly its elite, to occupy themselves with improving their financial condition. In a situation that would have looked very familiar to the author of the Eighteenth Brumaire, the wealthy "accepted the lack of opportunities for political participation in exchange for a political and economic atmosphere ensured by the government that was conducive to making money." 21
The deal began to break down in the mid-1980s when the government's capacity to renew its externally based revenues appeared to be exhausted. The country's failure to join the Camp David peace process deprived it of American aid; the drop in world oil prices cut into the government's foreign subsidies while also hurting the private-sector recipients of remittances from workers in the Gulf. By the middle of the decade the government had resorted to borrowing abroad, and there were hesitant moves toward the revival of political life--Parliament was recalled in 1984 and elections held for the seats vacated by deaths in the interim. At the same time, however, press censorship remained tight, and government surveillance of political activists was stepped up.
By January 1989 the government defaulted on its foreign debts, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) intervened to assist in rescheduling; it was as part of the IMF agreement that the consumer subsidy cuts leading to the rioting and subsequent political opening that year were made. In the meantime, the king had also made an important political concession that was to make political liberalization markedly easier. In the summer of 1988, in response to the Palestinian uprising known as the intifadah, he had relinquished Jordanian claims to the West Bank, not only setting the stage for the eventual independence of the territory under Palestinian rule but also solidifying his claim to the continued independent existence of a now smaller but more cohesive Jordanian entity under the Hashemite dynasty. With the Palestinian issue and its accompanying evocation of Arab nationalist themes defused, the challenges that might be posed in the ordinary course of open competitive politics were far more likely to center on issues of policy than on questions about the regime and the dynasty or about the boundaries and the composition of the state.
By mid-June 1989, the government had declared its intention to hold parliamentary elections; by August, it was announced that the polling day would be in November. Although martial law was not lifted and political parties remained banned, the regime did suspend many of the regulations censoring the press, and it permitted party activists to run for election. Freedom of expression and assembly was well exercised, as posters festooned the landscape and rallies were held throughout the country. The outcome of the elections came as a surprise to many analysts: the Muslim Brotherhood won about thirty of the eighty seats. The Brotherhood was one of the very few legal political organizations, which greatly enhanced its ability to get out the vote, but subsequent municipal and professional association elections suggested that the Islamist strength was neither overwhelming nor uniform throughout the society. Nonetheless, the Islamists were permitted to take their seats, and the new cabinet included five Islamist members. Thus by the time the Iraqis invaded Kuwait, Jordanians had begun to experience a fair measure of political freedom. As a result, they felt free to express their opinions of the Gulf crisis, and more important, they expected government policy to reflect those opinions.
There was relatively little disagreement in Jordan about the developments in the Gulf. The general consensus was strong sympathy for the Iraqi position. It derived from several very widespread and long-standing beliefs crossing ethnic Palestinian/Jordanian cleavages as well as left/right ideological divides. In a stance born of older Arab nationalist positions, many people felt that the dispute was an intra-Arab one that should have been resolved by Arab councils, and they were therefore antagonistic toward the side--in this instance the Saudis and Kuwaitis--that called in outside assistance. This aversion to what was perceived as outside intervention was heightened by the perception on the part of leftist nationalists that the United States was merely acting as an imperial power, propping up compliant oil-producing regimes. Islamists also objected, though on different grounds: Saudi responsibility for the holy places of Islam should have precluded the stationing of non-Muslim troops in the kingdom.
In addition to the ideological consensus on this issue, many Jordanian citizens--mostly but not exclusively of Palestinian origin--had had personal experience in the Gulf that discouraged support for Kuwait and its allies, Although hundreds of thousands of Jordanian Palestinians profited handsomely from long work and residence in the Gulf, particularly in Kuwait, they had come to resent the social and political distinction maintained by the ruling families between citizens and noncitizens, as well as the often cavalier lavishness with which Gulf royals spent both privy purses and public funds while others in the Arab world--notably but not exclusively Palestinians--suffered. Finally, among Palestinians particularly, while there was little outright admiration for Saddam Husayn or his Iraq, there was also the widespread conviction that Iraq was Jordan's principal protector against aggression by Israel.
Based as they were in long-standing sentiments--Arab nationalism, leftist anti-imperialism, Islamic pride--these attitudes were not unlike the public opinion that had been ignored by the monarchy for decades. Indeed, had the Jordanian monarch had the financial resources to buy acquiescence in a pro-Kuwait "monarchical solidarity" policy, he might have attempted it. By August 1990, however, it was apparent that he did not have reliable sources of such funds: Kuwait, Libya, and Algeria had already reneged on their promised support in the mid-1980s, the United States had already halted aid to Jordan for political reasons at least once after Camp David, and the international creditors were unsympathetic to political contingency as a rationale for more debt. More important, in an ironic reversal of the Brumairian formula, the king had already decided to trade in his foreign policy freehand for greater access to local wealth. Foreign policy was now at the service of domestic needs rather than the reverse, and the electoral coalition to which the prime minister was accountable after the 1989 parliamentary elections--"a coalition of disparate political groups and individuals, among them the Muslim Brotherhood" 22 --dictated support of Iraq and alienation of the United States.
As a result, at least in the early stages of political liberalization and at least on an emotionally charged issue of war and peace, the foreign policy of Jordan took turns that struck many observers as "irrational"--erratic, unpredictable, inconsistent, even counterproductive. Gone were the relatively stable, compliant foreign policy positions of a rentier state well supplied by the international community and international market with the funds by which the regime might guarantee that there would be, among other things, no popular resistance to those very foreign policies. The Jordanian position in the Gulf War was very much a reflection of popular domestic sentiment freely expressed.
Algeria: A "Liberal President" Disappoints Potential Allies
The Algerian government's opposition to the United States-led war against Iraq might have been less unexpected than Jordan's, given Algeria's long history of revolutionary anti-imperialism, but in fact it too reflected domestic political pressure far more than historical gov ernment ideology. 23 Indeed, the government's careful, legalist reading--opposed to both the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the American resort to arms to reverse it--was consistent with an interest in moving away from its reputation for "tiers-mondiste" solidarity with anti-imperialism and toward a less ideological engagement with international markets and political powers. This careful calibration was derailed by the very widespread popular support for Iraq in Algeria. Like its Jordanian counterpart, the Algerian government might have been able to ignore that public opinion had it not been for its extremely tight financial circumstances and the challenge from an opposition party--the Islamist Front Islamique du Salut, or FIS--that quickly pressed the government to take a hard-line anti-coalition position. That the FIS itself was required by public sentiment to abandon its initial sympathy for Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, long its principal source of moral and financial support, was one of the reasons for its vociferousness on the subject and contributed to a domestic political competition in which foreign policy became a litmus test of domestic political accountability and popularity.
Although Algeria had been ruled by the very antithesis of a monarchy--an avowedly socialist single party, the Front de liberation nationale, or FLN--since its independence from France in 1962, Algeria's liberalization began much the way Jordan's did, and for many of the same reasons. Like Jordan, the Algerian state and economy of the post-independence era of the 1960s and 1970s depended upon externally generated revenues. For Algeria, however, foreign aid was less important than the revenues from export of hydrocarbons, principally gas, and the independent Algerian government quickly developed a capacity to respond adroitly to the international market while simultaneously controlling nearly every aspect of economic behavior domestically. In part as a response to the exigencies of life after 130 years of French rule and a revolution that took a million lives, the Algerian polity and economy were highly centralized, bureaucratized, and authoritarian. A military coup in 1965 had overthrown the populist Ahmed Ben Bella and installed the technocratic authoritarian rule of the dour Houari Boumedienne. When Boumedienne died in 1978, his successor, Chadli Benjedid, was also selected by and from the army and the ruling party. Although Benjedid's regime was marked by a mildly less repressive atmosphere, structurally it remained a centralized single-party authoritarian regime. In fact, it was not apparent, even then, that there was a genuinely viable alternative. 24
During the 1970s, the gas revenues financed an ambitious and ultimately only partly successful industrial development program and subsidized egalitarian distributive policies, while very rapid population growth was partly offset by the export of labor to Europe. The glut on the world petroleum market in the mid-1980s led to sharply lowered gas revenues, however, and to a European recession that reduced employment opportunities both in Europe and at home. By 1988 the government conceded a negative growth rate, said that unemployment probably exceeded 30 percent of the active labor force, and abandoned its historical commitment to simultaneous, single-minded, and monolithic pursuit of social welfare and economic development. In an effort to stave off IMF intervention, the government undertook its own structural adjustment program, announcing cuts in consumer subsidies in October 1988. Riots broke out throughout the country in response to the announcement, and they were brutally suppressed by the army, called out for the first time since independence.
Within several months, however, President Benjedid declared that a new constitution, providing for freedoms of expression and association (and thus permitting political parties), would be presented for popular vote; it was duly ratified in February 1989. Within the following year more than fifty political parties had registered, including the FIS, the first legally recognized Islamic party in the Arab world. In June 1990, Algerian and foreign observers alike were stunned when municipal and provincial elections widely judged to have been without significant irregularities produced a massive victory for the FIS and a resounding defeat for the ruling FLN.
Sixty-five percent of the eligible voters turned out, and FIS captured 55 percent of that vote, compared to 31 percent for the FLN. Most observers argued that much of the FIS support was a protest vote against thirty years of rule by a single party grown old and corrupt; the FLN's claim to legitimacy as the spearhead of the revolution against France carried little weight among the 75 percent of the population that was under thirty years old. Nonetheless, it was also apparent that FIS did have significant numbers of supporters, for whatever reason, and many in Algeria feared the prospect of FIS in power at the national level. The legislative elections scheduled for June 1991 were therefore anticipated with considerable anxiety on all sides.
It was in this context that Algerians greeted the news of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 and the subsequent stationing of American troops in Saudi Arabia. As the party of protest, the FIS might have been expected to support Iraq, but its initial reactions to the crisis reflected the political constraints imposed by its financial ties to the Gulf monarchies, and at the beginning of the crisis the party leadership backed Saudi Arabia and attacked Iraq for having invaded Kuwait, 25 a position that proved to be at odds with popular opinion. For most Algerians, as indeed for most North Africans, the Iraqi challenge to the wealthy and powerful of the Gulf and the world mirrored a domestic debate that pitted the numerous disadvantaged against a small wealthy and corrupt elite.
The FIS promptly reversed its position and rallied to the support of Iraq--arguing that the Gulf monarchies had abandoned their responsibilities to Islam by calling upon non-Muslims to aid them against their Muslim opponents--although the political misstep appears to have contributed to the increasingly strident demands voiced by FIS leaders that the presidential elections scheduled for 1993 be moved forward to coincide with the parliamentary elections. The party leaders also challenged the army, backbone of the national government, claiming that the failure to send reinforcements to Iraq was evidence that it was too weak and too corrupt to stand up to the imperialism of the Christian West. The publication in the FIS press of an article titled "The Algerian Army During the Gulf War: A Lion When It Battles Us, an Ostrich in Times of War" could not have been better designed to gall the military backers of the regime and did not contribute to reasoned discussion of foreign policy. 26 In response to widespread FIS-led demonstrations in May and June, President Benjedid declared a state of siege, again called out the army to disperse demonstrators, arrested the principal FIS leaders, replaced his prime minister, and postponed the legislative elections until December 1991. 27
Although the FIS was said to have lost the financial support of Saudi Arabia as a result of its position during the war, it was believed to continue to receive funds from private Saudi benefactors as well as local business interests who, as it was reported, "out of faith or opportunism are putting their money--or some of it--on an Islamic future." 28 As it turned out, the Gulf crisis had an equally murky impact on the Algerian economy as a whole. A $2.5 billion oil windfall cushioned the badly ailing economy during the early months of the crisis, but the crisis--and the domestic reactions to it--also made interna tional lenders more cautious, 29 and their reluctance to extend credit may in turn have contributed to the sentiment favoring the coup that ended Algeria's democratic experiment in January 1992.
Democratization and the Making of Alliances
The decisions by the governments of Jordan and Algeria to side with Iraq and against the United States in the Gulf War cannot be explained by international factors alone. Neither of these countries behaved in accordance with models of international politics that assume that states are unitary rational actors. In both Jordan and Algeria, foreign policy making was a reflection of very powerful domestic sentiments and constituencies.
That domestic factors play an important role in foreign policy making will surprise only the most die-hard realist theorists of international relations. More intriguing is the suggestion that democratization does not contribute to alliances with other democratic states. On the contrary, in the Gulf War lineup, liberalization was inversely correlated with selection of liberal alliance partners. This, as we have seen, is a consequence of the paradoxical advantage accruing to antidemocratic and illiberal ideologies and movements in the early stages of political liberalization or democratization in rentier states.
Becoming democratic has foreign policy consequences profoundly different from those of being democratic. Consolidated democracies may well "flock together," as may consolidated monarchies or consolidated military regimes. Indeed, measures of consolidation--domestic stability, routinization of policy-making processes--may be better predictors of foreign policy behavior than regime type alone. Interestingly, it was generally the most stable regimes in the Middle East that supported the American-led coalition against Iraq: the oldest democracies--Israel and Turkey--and the original liberalizer among the authoritarian regimes--Egypt--as well as the well-established authoritarian regimes, from Syria to the Gulf monarchies. It was the most recent liberalizers--Jordan and Algeria but also Tunisia, Yemen, and even (to an extent that certainly surprised the king) Morocco--that opposed the anti-Iraq coalition. This suggests that it is partly the instability of transition that accounts for the oth erwise anomalous outcome that democratizing regimes do not ally with democracies.
For Jordan and Algeria, as for the other recent liberalizers of the Middle East and North Africa, political democratization produced political competition in an environment in which social cleavages had previously been denied: nationalism and socialism were monolithic ideological formulations that pushed social divisions into limbo. 30 Moreover, the weakness or absence of private-sector industry, labor, or export agriculture in these international rent-based distributive states meant that independent groups of industrialists, labor unions, and agricultural exporters did not appear to argue the pros and cons of foreign policy. Adherence to conceptions of common interest, as distinct from common sentiment, was inhibited by the ideology and political economy of the nationalist, rentier regimes of the region. Liberalization therefore unleashed a politics based on grievance and desire as much as on strategic calculation.
In this context, foreign policy may become an arena on which to project and debate what are often virtually insoluble domestic dilemmas. For both the Algerians and the Jordanians, particularly the Palestinian Jordanians, the Gulf War was a dramatic enactment of their hopes and fears: Saddam Husayn served as Robin Hood; the Kuwaitis filled the role of the wealthy and cowardly nobility; and the United States, as sheriff, upheld the legal prerogatives of the undeserving nobles against the virtuous poor. That the war was far more than theater was apparent in the price Jordan and Algeria paid in foreign aid and investment withheld, but from the perspective of the ordinary citizen, this was a cost borne by the governments rather than by particular groups within the society. The link between foreign policy positions and domestic costs and benefits is intentionally obscured in distributive states, with the result that, at least in the early stages of liberalization, citizens have little basis on which to calculate the relationship.
As domestic interest groups solidify, foreign policy should become less a focus of contending passions and more the target of competing interests. By the time there are industrialists who organize in favor of trade promotion policies or who lobby for tariff protection, tourist industry representatives who want to promote good and stable relations with Europe, or labor unions looking for foreign investment in job creation, foreign policy will reflect the sober calculations of those whose livelihoods depend upon it. The condition of democracy, particularly if it is accompanied by competitive market economies, may encourage pacific foreign policy and alliances with other democracies, but at least at the outset, there is nothing about the process of democratization itself that does so.
I would like to thank Judith Goldstein and Miles Kahler for very useful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.
Note 1: Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987). Back.
Note 3: See, for example, Michael Doyle, "Liberalism and World Politics," American Political Science Review 80, no. 4 (1986); Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold War World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Zeev Maoz and Bruce Russett, "Normative and Structural Causes of Democratic Peace, 1946-1986," American Political Science Review 87, no. 3 (1993). Back.
Note 4: Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder, "Democratization and the Danger of War," International Security 20, no. 1 (Summer 1995): 2. Back.
Note 5: "Democracy and Foreign Policy in the Arab World," Beirut Review 4 (Fall 1992): 23. Back.
Note 6: Neither the conventional nor the technical usage of the terms "liberal," "liberalization," "democracy," and "democratization" is without ambiguities. Liberalization ordinarily denotes two processes that may or may not be associated in practice: the placing of legal constraints on governments to inhibit the arbitrary and capricious exercise of power--the conventional sense of the term in European history--and the withdrawal of government responsibility from what would ordinarily be the realm of civil society or the economy--a sense of the term somewhat more common in postsocialist transitions. Democratization, by contrast, may mean the installation and observance of institutional mechanisms, such as contested elections, associated with established democracies, or it may mean the extension of meaningful political participation to previously disenfranchised or excluded populations.
In much of the Arab world, democratization in the sense of expanding participation has been far less a critical issue than the introduction of and compliance with the liberal rights--freedom of belief, expression, association, and so forth--and institutional mechanisms--regular, free, and fair elections, judicial review, and so on--that will animate and structure egalitarian participation. For that reason, liberalization is usually viewed as a necessary condition of democratization, and I use the terms interchangeably unless a deliberate distinction is clear from the context.
See Aziz Al-Azmeh, "Populism Contra Democracy: Recent Democratist Discourse in the Arab World," in Ghassan Salame, ed., Democracy Without Democrats: The Renewal of Politics in the Muslim World (New York: Tauris, 1994); Ahmad S. Moussalli, "Modern Islamic Fundamentalist Discourses on Civil Society, Pluralism, and Democracy," in Augustus Richard Norton, ed., Civil Society in the Middle East (Leiden: Brill, 1995). Back.
Note 7: Among the recent notable exceptions are Louis Cantori, ed., "Democratization in the Middle East," American-Arab Affairs 36 (Spring 1991); Bernabe Lopez Garcia, ed., Elecciones, participacion y transiciones politicas en el Norte de Africa (Madrid: Instituto de Cooperation con el Mundo Arabo, 1991); Muhammad Muslih and Augustus Richard Norton, "The Need for Arab Democracy," Foreign Policy 83 (Summer 1991); Ghassan Salame, "Sur la causalité d'un manqué: Pourquoi le monde arabe n'est-il donc pas democratique?" Revue Francaise de Science Politique 61, no. 3 (June 1991). Back.
Note 8: One needs only to talk with Ahmed Ben Bella, returned in 1990 to political life as the head of a party in Algeria after twenty-five years of prison and exile, to be struck by the changes in the rhetoric of the intelligentsia of the Third World in the last thirty years. Once one of the principal authors of Algerian revolutionary socialism, the former president returned to lead a party that advocated liberal democracy and contests legislative elections. Personal interview, June 1, 1992, Algiers. Back.
Note 9: See Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Back.
Note 10: This distinction, too often neglected in the literature on regime transitions, between democratization and redemocratization is treated in Alfred Stepan, "Paths Toward Redemocratization: Theoretical and Comparative Considerations," in Guillermo O'Donnell, Philippe Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead, eds., Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Comparative Perspectives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). Back.
Note 11: See Ghassan Salame, al-Mujtama wa-l-dawla fil mashriq al-arabi [State and Society in the Arab East] (Beirut, 1987); Roger Owen, "The Practice of Electoral Democracy in the Arab East and North Africa: Some Lessons from Nearly a Century's Experience," in Ellis Goldberg, Resat Kasaba, and Joel S. Migdal, eds., Rules and Rights in the Middle East (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993). Back.
Note 12: See Robert D. Putnam, "Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-Level Games," International Organization 42, no. 3 (Summer 1988). The research agenda spawned by Putnam's insight about the nature of the linkages between domestic and foreign policies has been devoted largely to examination of relations among consolidated democracies, but it is nonetheless suggestive in its extension of the realms of foreign policy well beyond issues of war and peace, including international trade and alliance formation. Back.
Note 13: See, within the now considerable literature on rentier, distributive, or allocative states in the Middle East, H. Beblawi and G. Luciani, eds., The Rentier State (London: Croom, Helm, 1987). Although the small-population, large-revenue oil producers are the archetypes of this political economy, both through their regional influence and as a result of the superpower rivalry of the Cold War, the region's non-oil producers also mimicked this pattern. In Privatization and Liberalization in the Middle East (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), the editors, Ilya Harik and Denis Sullivan, argue that the continued dependence of what they call the "patron state" in the Middle East on aid from international sources was an inadvertent by-product of the state's self-appointed role as both providing welfare and generating investment in the absence of guaranteed domestic revenues. Whether the initial impetus was the availability of external revenues or the desirability of domestic distributive policies, the outcome was the same. Back.
Note 14: See Karen Pfeifer, "Algeria's Implicit Stabilization Program," and Robert Satloff, "Jordan's Great Gamble: Economic Crisis and Political Reform," both in Henri Barkey, ed., The Politics of Economic Reform in the Middle East (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992); and Laurie Brand, "Economic and Political Liberalization in a Rentier Economy: The Case of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan," and Dirk Vandewalle, "Breaking with Socialism: Economic Liberalization and Privatization in Algeria, in Harik and Sullivan, Privatization and Liberalization. Back.
Note 15: Relatively little of this activity had been formally studied or even documented, but on banking see the work of Clement Henry Moore, particularly "Les enjeux politiques des reformes bancaires au Maghreb," Annuaire de l'Afrique du Nord 26 (1987), and "Islamic Banks and Competitive Politics in the Arab World and Turkey," Middle East Journal 44, no. 2 (Spring 1990). Back.
Note 16: It is of note that both Human Rights Watch, the New York-based human rights monitoring organization, and the American government-supported National Endowment for Democracy began their work on the Middle East only after they had established programs virtually everywhere else in the world, viewing the complexities of the region as particularly intractable. As a result of this international posture of skepticism, local human rights organizations and democratic activists have not had the same international moral and material support in the Middle East as their counterparts have enjoyed elsewhere in the world. Back.
Note 17: The economic platforms of most Islamist movements in the Middle East are vague, but apart from (usually symbolic) measures to accommodate Islamic prohibitions on the taking of interest, they are ordinarily quite compatible with liberal economic policies, including respect for private property and market relations. The economic programs of the Islamist movements reflect their social bases as much as their doctrinal heritage, and in a number of Middle Eastern countries, including Syria and Iran, Islamists found significant support among the middle-class merchants and industrialists.
It should also be noted that although some activists, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, are quick to evoke the age-old battles of the Crusades, the Islamist movements are not in principle anti-American or anti-Western. Most of the Islamist movements oppose the status quo and the international order that upholds it, making them hostile to the United States. As the willingness of the Islamists to cooperate with the United States against the Soviets in Afghanistan should have made apparent, however, they will find friends where they can.
See Moussalli, "Fundamentalist Discourses"; Lisa Anderson, "Obligation and Accountability: Islamic Politics in North Africa," Daedalus 120, no. 3 (Summer 1991). Back.
Note 18: This was the rationale for the January 1992 military coup that suspended the legislative elections in Algeria. See below. Back.
Note 19: Much of this section draws upon Laurie A. Brand's excellent discussion in "Liberalization and Changing Political Coalitions: The Bases of Jordan's 1990-1991 Gulf Crisis Policy," Jerusalem Journal of International Relations 13, no. 4 (Spring 1991): 1-46. See also Brand, Jordan's Inter-Arab Relations: The Political Economy of Alliance-Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Back.
Note 20: Jordan was the only country in the Arab world to accord the refugees from Palestine citizenship, which led to the accusation against the Hashemites that their policy toward Palestine and the Palestinians has been one of self-aggrandizement at the expense of the Palestinian national movement itself. It has also contributed to the ambiguity about the composition of, and tensions within, Jordan's domestic population, for "native East Bankers," citizens of Palestinian origin--before and after 1948--refugees from the 1967 war and Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and West Bankers themselves all have claims on, and grievances against, the Hashemite monarchy. Back.
Note 21: Brand, "Jordan's Inter-Arab Relations," p. 14. Back.
Note 22: George Hawatmeh, "Jordan: Standing Up to the Right," Middle East International 403 (June 28, 1991): 10. Back.
Note 23: For background on Algeria's democratic experiment, see Bradford Dillman, "Transition to Democracy in Algeria," and Robert A. Mortimer, "Algerian Foreign Policy in Transition," in John P. Entelis and Phillip C. Naylor, eds., State and Society in Algeria (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992); Dirk Vandewalle, "Breaking with Socialism: Economic Liberalization and Privatization in Algeria," in Harik and Sullivan, Privatization and Liberalization. Back.
Note 24: As Michael Hudson has put it, "Some social scientists wondered, and continue to wonder, whether Algeria possessed even the potential for civil society, in light of its long history of French settler colonialism and the further social pulverization that was said to have accompanied the struggle for independence" ("After the Gulf War: Prospects for Democratization in the Arab World," Middle East Journal 45, no. 3 [Summer 1991]: 414). Back.
Note 25: Belkacem Iratni and Mohand Salah Tahi, "The Aftermath of Algeria's First Free Elections," Government and Opposition 26, no. 4 (Fall 1991): 474. Back.
Note 26: This point was brought home to me by Remy Leveau. See his essay "Algerie: Des adversaires ˆ la recherche de compromis incertains" (prepared for the Western European Union Institute for Security Studies, March 1992). Back.
Note 27: Ultimately, FIS's victories in the first round of balloting on December 26, 1991, raised the possibility that they would have such a commanding majority in Parliament that they would be able to amend the constitution, conceivably to create an Islamic state and end contested elections. Although President Benjedid appeared to feel that his constitutional power to dissolve Parliament was adequate protection against such an effort and that "cohabitation" was a worthwhile experiment on behalf of liberal reform, the army did not agree, and in January he was asked to resign. His erstwhile prime minister and defense minister declared a state of emergency, suspended the elections, and ultimately outlawed the FIS, arresting more than ten thousand FIS supporters and sympathizers and interning them indefinitely without charge. See "Human Rights in Algeria Since the Halt of the Electoral Process," Middle East Watch 4, no. 2 (February 1992); "Le drapeau des islamistes flottera-t-il sur l'Algerie?" Jeune Afrique 1618, January 9, 1992, and subsequent reports. Back.
Note 28: Tom Porteous, "The Crisis in Algeria: What Chance Democracy?" Middle East International 404 (July 12, 1991): 17. Back.
Note 29: Francis Ghilles, "The Impact of the Gulf War on the Maghreb Economies," Middle East International 399 (May 3, 1991): 27. Back.
Note 30: One might even say that, to these authoritarian regimes, the model of the "rational unitary actor" is as seductive as it is to the realist theorists of international relations. Back.
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