Oliver Schlumberger: Rents, Reforms, and Authoritarianism in the Middle East
The two questions dealt with in this contribution are: (1) Have rents been a decisive factor in the political and economic development in this region?; and (2) how does the socio-political order in Arab countries influence the impact of rents or, from the an opposite perspective, how does the existence of rents and rent-seeking influence the mode of governance?
In common with other regions of the world, the majority of Arab economies have undergone deep structural reforms. With the aim of establishing market economies akin to those in OECD countries, macro -economic stabilization and structural adjustment programmes have been implemented according to the recipes of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. But while the economies of these countries have been thoroughly restructured, market economies have not been established. In all cases, the implementation of reforms has been subjugated to the national regimes’ priority of hanging on to political power maintenance. While the oil-rich monarchies of the Arab peninsula and Libya continue to follow the ‘rentier-state’ pattern and have not experienced the same depth of economic reform as their oil -less counterparts, hybrid economic orders have emerged in the non-oil economies. They display some of the external outer features of market economies, but function according to a decisively different logic.
As for political development, both monarchical and republican Arab regimes have managed to survive as rulers. Certainly, differences exist between different countries in terms of freedom, but the common denominator for the region is the durability of authoritarianism. Rents have played an important role in regime elites’ power maintenance, albeit in an indirect fashion: They have enabled the persistence of a societal rent-seeking that takes place in predominantly informal patterns through hierarchical patronage networks. The continuous influx of rent income accruing directly to the regimes enables them to maintain the neopatrimonial structures which stabilize their rule and allows them to avoid economic collapse. In other words, such income has helped to prevent the emergence of autonomous social forces, let alone counter-elites independent of the regime. Dominant patterns of authority within society, finally, are congruent with those in state-society relations and contribute further to the exceptional resilience of authoritarian rule in the region. In the Arab world, therefore, the political priority of regime maintenance has clearly shaped the path of economic development, and not vice versa. The unique combination of high levels of rent income with the above-mentioned socio-political factors renders democratization very difficult. | ||||
| © Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung | net edition: gerda.axer-dämmer | 04/2006 | 
Top | ||