Why monarchies persist: balancing between internal and external vulnerability
HILLEL FRISCH
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We did some edition by rationally reducing the text - a long academic one - to keep the most relevant parts. The sign [...] indicates where parts have been removed. We also added some subheadings.
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Source:
Review of International Studies (2011), 37, 167–184, publication of the British International Studies Association. First published online 1 Sep 2010
Abstract. Why have absolutist monarchies in the past three decades survived when so many succumbed to coups and revolution in the past? The rulers’ use of divide-and-rule and balancing strategies as Lust-Okar and Jamal noted recently, served as a partial solution.
Overlooked in the literature on the persistance of monarchies was how these mechanisms, which reduce the leader’s domestic vulnerability, mark his offensive capabilities to cope with centralising, more effective and threatening neighbours. To cope with this trade-off between internal and external vulnerabilities, monarchs and leaders of other Third World states have been involved in a two-level game of ‘omnibalancing’ – allying with strong outside powers when possible while continuing to employ divide-and-rule and balancing techniques domestically. Only resource-rich or strategically located monarchies can enjoy such protection which is why most of monarchies that have persisted are located in the Middle East.
Introduction
At the end of the twentieth century, one could count ten absolute monarchies in the world. Eight of them are located in the Middle East, concentrated in a land mass that represents less than ten per cent of the earth’s surface and less than five per cent of the world population. All told, more monarchies in the Middle East
have survived (8) than have succumbed to military coups or revolution (5). The monarchies that have survived are Morocco, Jordan, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. The monarchies that have succumbed to military coup or revolution are Egypt (1952), Iraq (1958), Yemen (1962) Libya (1969) and Iran (1979). These basic facts raise yield two questions:
1) What explains the resilience of existing monarchies? And
2) Why is the Middle East, one of the more turbulent areas in the world, home to most of them out of all
proportion to the area’s demographic and physical dimensions?
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Most of the answers to date have sought answers to these questions exclusively in the domestic arena. The persistence of monarchy is usually, though not exclusively, explained by divide-and – rule and balancing strategies. Yet how can one discuss the monarchies’ survivability as a one-level game when most of the monarchies that survived did so in the Middle East where they have been threatened so persistently by strong revisionist and centralising states?
Both Syria and Egypt, (albeit through terrorism), threatened the Jordanian monarchy at the height of the Arab Cold War. In 1960, a bomb exploded in the Jordanian Prime Minister’s office killing him and several of his staff. In September 1970, Syria attacked Jordan along its northern border just as the Hashemite Kingdom was quelling a PLO-led insurrection within the Kingdom.1 Egypt helped destroy the Yemeni dynasty in the Arab Cold War between 1962–1968, centralising Iraq occupied Kuwait in 1991 and threatened Saudi Arabia.2 The Islamic Republic of Iran supported subversion amongst the considerable Shiite populations of Bahrain and Kuwait in the 1980s and bolstered its presence in the the Abu Musa and Tunb islands claimed both by Iran and by the United Arab Emirates.3
Empirically these cases suggest a linkage between an internal policy of balancing, which solves the domestic security problem but creates vulnerability in the face of external centralising states. In short, the persistence of monarchies is not a one but two-level game.
[...]
Existing explanations for the persistence of monarchies
Lisa Anderson is one of the first scholars to address the question why monarchies have persisted in the Middle East. According to Anderson, monarchies in the Middle East are not the traditional and religiously based monarchies, which had been swept away by political modernisation but new entities the West had created during the Age of Imperialism. She then claims that they represent a stage of state formation in the Arab word comparable to European State building during the era of Absolutism. Just as monarchies were the ideal regime then so do they play the same historical in the Arab world today.17
Centralisation - the major culprit of the downfall
‘On the one hand, centralization of power in the monarchy was necessary to promote social, cultural, and economic reform. On the other hand, this centralization made it difficult or impossible the expansion of the power of traditional polity and the assimilation into it of the new groups produced by modernization.’18
In [t]his account, the centralisation and modernisation of the political system engenders resistance amongst the landowners and clergy who are the monarch’s traditional allies. But the new middle class that emerges in the course of state-sponsored reforms typically does not reciprocate with gratitude. Often they will go even so far as joining a broad coalition against the reforming monarch that includes their enemies and the King’s former allies, the landowners and clergy.
[...]
Huntington thirty years ago predicted the demise of monarchies in light of the monarch’s dilemma, which centralisation and reform created. Faced with this dilemma he would become dependent on the army for maintaining his power only to become its victim. Existing monarchies, he reasoned, would disappear as they did in Europe and most other places in the world.
According to Michael Herb the persistence of the monarchies has little to do with the virtues or pitfalls of centralisation as it has to do with dynastic solidarity. Herb basically applied the idea that it takes a jama‘a, a small loyal nucleus of closely intertwined people to rule a Middle Eastern state.22 For Van Dam in Syria,
it ‘is the village that rules the state’,23 in Iraq it is the jama‘a based on a tribe, and in the monarchies it is the family that ‘allows this narrow regime coalition to channel family disputes into patterns of constructive competition’.24
One can hardly doubt the importance of this particular iron law of oligarchy but once again does it really explain for example the fall of either the Shah or the Ethiopian emperor?25
The persistence of monarchs has been linked to wealth generated by oil
Anderson has suggested that oil-wealth might explain the lack of democratisation in the Middle East – a phenomenon with obvious implications on the persistence of monarchies. Other scholars claim that oil states were able to buy domestic peace by creating elaborate welfare states.26 Ample funds allowed the state to coopt the opposition. This is, however, an inadequate explanation, for it may be argued on the basis of the second Gulf War that increasing wealth makes for increasing external vulnerability.
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Oil wealth, certainly does not explain the survival either of the Moroccan monarchy that rules over a population greater than Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states combined, or that of the Jordanian monarchy. Both are countries only modestly endowed by nature. Jordan is by world standards classified as a lower-middle class state with a per capita income of 1,300 dollars (significantly higher though if corrected for purchasing power parity) and Morocco with a 700 per capita GDP, is situated on the upper edges of the low-income countries. Both states have faced ‘bread’ riots, Morocco’s riots being more frequent and more severe.28
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In explaining the enigma of the political stability of the Gulf monarchies in one of the most regionally unstable areas in the world, Daniel I.Byman and Jerrold D. Green also mention ‘divide-and-rule measures’ as one of,
albeit, six strategies they employ to maintain internal stability.’33
Pluralism as a strategy
To avoid the centralisation trap, the monarchies encouraged both political and social pluralism. On the social level, the monarchy, unlike the radical nationalist and one-party regimes which tried to create a standardised ‘new Arab socialistman’, accentuated differences between social groups within society.
On the political level, they encouraged a variety of political forces, often tolerated parliamentary life and when that was too threatening, permitted its continuation within professional and labour unions.
By contrast the radical Republican states developed one-party systems. The promotion of social and political pluralism enables the monarchy to play off sides and stave off the crystallisation of broad-based coalitions against their rule. As John Waterbury, in his classic study on the Moroccan monarchy has demonstrated, the monarch is then able to play the role of arbiter between the various factions.34 [...] As Lucas has noted, ‘monarchs often present themselves as the defender of their kingdom’s minorities (Christians, Berbers, etc.) and of tribal pluralism.
The case of Morocco
Morocco’s efforts to maintain the plural nature of Moroccan society is also reflected in its civil service which is as much tribal as it is civil, especially in the lower rungs. Local officials are called qaids or tribal chiefs. These are terms that reflect to what extent they are rooted in traditional society.42 The monarchy traditionally allocates positions in the local public bureaucracy with the aim of maintaining the segmented nature of Moroccan society.
Morocco is noted in the Arab world for the strength and duration of its political parties. The Istiqlal (Independence) Party, the National Union of Popular Forces (NUPF) and the Socialist Union of Popular Forces (SUPF), an offshoot of the NUPF, were established in 1943, 1959 and 1972 respectively and have been active ever since.45 The latter was markedly less tolerated by the monarchy than the other parties.
Since 1997, however, Abd al-Rahman Yusfi, a founder of the SUPF and former opponent of the monarchy who had spent more time in prison than in parliament, serves as the Moroccan Prime Minister.46 The liveliness of its Moroccan parliament, albeit suspended several times in the 1960s and 1970s, is unrivalled in the Arab world.47
In the 1990s
Pressures in the 1990s, with the fall of the Soviet Union to liberalise have ironically reinforced mechanisms of fragmenting and of balancing forces, thus enabling the monarch to play his role of arbiter with even greater ease.
Lust-Okar and Jamal [...] show how monarchies adopt electoral systems that both maximise and balance the number of opponents. First-past-the-post electoral rules, smaller districts, more electoral seats portional to the population and low thresholds, increase both the number of candidates contesting the elections as well
as the parties to which they belong.48 This is borne out by comparing Morocco and Egypt; in the 1997 elections in Morocco there were eight effective parties compared to two parties in Egypt in the 1995 elections. Once again, Lucas wryly notes that ‘The opposition becomes just one among many social groups participating in politics. This allows the regime to pick and choose its partners from the diverse social field.’49
Political participation in elections also acts as a safety valve. In Morocco, the leftist and nationalist opposition can cohabit with the royalist parties rather than fight them and the regime on the street.50
[...]
The most important ramification remains balancing the opposition. In Morocco, it occurs between nationalists and socialists and royalists and independents [...] With increasing fragmentation and balancing
‘potential opponents to the regime can be turned into mere opponents to the
government of the day – not to the monarch.’53
Frequently, policies to promote social, electoral and party pluralism are
intertwined.
END OF PART ONE
Go to part TWO ( to be released soon)
