BOOK
REVIEW Mainstream political science
masks Western clientelism The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents For
Life by Roger Owen
Reviewed
by Kaveh L Afrasiabi
This book's public
relations campaign credits it with "exposing for
the first time the origins and dynamics of a
governmental system that largely defined the
Middle East" until the recent Arab Spring.
That is a bit too much credit. Bereft of
original insights, Roger Owen's book actually
rehashes familiar pre-existing literature on
"monarchical presidencies" in the Middle East, in
a journalistic narrative that lacks an overarching
theoretical framework.
The book's rather
egregious theoretical deficit once again reminds
us of the need for a much more parsimonious
explanation that
would not conflate the
key dependent and independent variables or
explanandum.
Unfortunately, this is
precisely what Owen does throughout a book focused
on the exclusionary, corrupt and repressive modes
of governance in many parts of the Arab Middle
East, by the sheer absence of any in-depth
examination of the role of foreign influence and
dependency in perpetuating those authoritarian
regimes and, at the same time, causing a source of
their legitimacy crisis.
Although it was published
recently, this book devotes little time to the
political dynamic of Arab revolts that have led to
the downfall of several such life-time
presidencies, including Egypt, Libya and Tunisia,
while challenging others, such as in Yemen and
Syria.
There is not one chapter devoted to
the politics of challenge from below that exploded
the grand delusions of those permanent
presidencies, which sat at the pinnacle of client
states backed by hegemonic Western powers lacking
any interest in a change of a political status quo
serving their interests.
Indeed, the very
concept of a client regime seems foreign in this
mainstream narrative, which almost exclusively
focuses on the above regimes' elaborate security
apparatuses, patronage systems, economic controls,
and the like, without any mention of the structure
of political dependency, ie, clientelism, that was
a constant factor in Hosni Mubarak's Egypt or Ben
Ali's Tunisia.
In the light of an
irrefutable mass of empirical evidence, this
durable dependency syndrome has to be taken as a
key variable on an analytical level. Yet Professor
Owen, a British historian and currently the A J
Meyer Professor of Middle East History at Harvard
University, rarely inconveniences his mainstream
narrative with critical scrutiny that would expose
the scope and depth of external sources of harsh
authoritarianism imposed on Arab societies from
the without.
Take the case of Egypt, dealt
with in multiple chapters in Owen's book, although
without once referring to the WikiLeaks
revelations that Mubarak was an "indispensable
Arab ally" and that the US had "astonishingly
intimate military" relations with Mubarak's army,
thus giving the US such "tangible benefits" as
"priority access to the Suez Canal and Egyptian
airspace".
Unfortunately, readers looking
for a systematic examination of this important
issue in the book will be frustrated. Instead,
they are offered passing references, for example
to the George W Bush administration's
de-prioritizing of democracy for the sake of the
"war on terror". These are given the same level of
importance as, say, Mubarak's "extraordinary
physical revival after an operation". (Pg 72)
The author's discourse on the paramount
role of security forces in keeping the life-time
Arab presidents in power focuses too much on the
problems of succession and the like and too little
on the scope of human-rights abuse and brutality
that, again, were captured in a (WikiLeaks
released) March 2009 dispatch by the US ambassador
to Egypt regarding "routine and pervasive" police
brutality.
To be sure, this book is not
altogether oblivious to the Arab dictators'
pattern of using external threats to garner
military and foreign aid form the West. But,
again, the narrative's problem is theoretical in
nature and raises questions about a rudimentary
methodological and analytical framework that
constantly treats (former) leaders such as Mubarak
or Yemen's ousted president Ali Abdullah Saleh as
if by and large they were not entirely independent
actors.
Instead of adopting this as a
given, a more critically-inclined narrative would
have posed such problematic assumptions for
empirical tests. No wonder such apt terms as
"Western-backed dictators" are discretely removed
in favor of alternative, less offensive
descriptions that, in effect, whitewash the long
legacy of Western interventionism in the politics
of the Middle East.
The book's exclusion
of the external dimension of authoritarian Arab
rule has important analytical consequences in
terms of its presentation of the Arab political
systems, then and now after the tumultuous
triggers of the Arab Spring, their legitimacy
deficits, and their sources of power. A major
lacunae in this narrative is a separate chapter
devoted to the Western pattern of exclusionary
politics in the Middle East, which remains
unchanged in Persian Gulf region even though it
has experienced certain adjustments with respect
to Egypt and elsewhere.
It comes as little
surprise, then, that the book is equally
unsatisfying when it comes to the discussion of
Arab client states in Persian Gulf, such as
Bahrain. In addition to giving undue credit to the
repressive ruling family, the brief section
devoted to Bahrain actually makes the empirical
error of attributing the Bahrainis' national
opposition simply to "poor Shiite rural
population". (Pg 136)
Unsurprisingly,
there is no mention of Saudi Arabia's military
intervention in Bahrain to quell the national
protests.
Similar problems handicap the
book's discussion of the pattern of authoritarian
rule among the Palestinians, although to his
credit Owen mentions the "huge imbalance of power"
between Israel and the Palestinian Authority,
which has "made everything subject to powerful
Israeli interests - usually backed by the US and
often by the European Union". (Pg 166).
But even here, there is not any discussion
of the free elections in the Gaza Strip that
brought Hamas to power, much to the chagrin of US
and Israelis who then opted for a collective
punishment of Gazan population, a policy that
seriously backfired with the pro-Palestinian
Egyptian masses. Nor does Owen bother to go beyond
asymmetry of power and delve into the intricacies
of repression and resistance in the occupied
territories - that favor centralized, and often
secretive, Palestinian rule.
In
conclusion, the multiple problems with this book
mentioned above simply alert us to the set limits
of mainstream Western political science that
claims to enhance our knowledge of why the Arab
Spring erupted and why Middle East democratization
from below has had a delayed appearance. This
tends to obfuscate and prevent a decent
appreciation of the structures of clientelism that
have historically paved the way to the region's
status as a "subordinate sub-system" in global
politics.
To reach that level of
understanding, an alternative study of the
international relations of the Middle East state
systems is required, which is fundamentally
lacking in Owen's book.
The Rise and
Fall of Arab Presidents For Life by Roger Owen
(Harvard University Press, May 2012). ISBN-10:
0674065832. Price US$24.95, 220 pages.
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