Not beyond but away from the regime paradigm: from an a-spatial to a spatial analysis of political transition

In the area study of the Arab region, the question of the ‘regime’ and its willingness and/or resilience to a ‘democratic’ transition has dominated the study of political change over the last 20 years. Even longer ago, in the heyday of the liberal modernization theory, questions of regime change and democratization in the Arab region were already at hand, albeit in a different context. Democratization theories can be viewed as an offspring of modernization theory. The latter has, since the late 1950s, provided a popular framework of analysis of Third World politics in Western social science (Guaz- zone & Pioppi, 2009b). The narrative of modernization theory has evolved around the assumption that political trajectories in the rest of the world would eventually follow the trajectory of the core-countries of European (and Western) modernity. Contempo- rary narratives on globalization have the same structuring characteristics. Just as in the old story of modernity, Doreen Massey argues, contemporary globalization is also

a tale of “inevitability” (Massey, 2005: 82). Therefore, ever since the end of the cold War and the euphoria about the so-called “end of history” (Fukuyama, 1989), scholars on Arab politics have wondered about the exceptional position of the Middle Eastern region during the third wave of democratization – which actually started already in the 1970s but really took of with the transitions in Eastern Europe during the 1990s (Hun-

tington, 1991). 15 From then on, it was said, “democracy ceased being a mostly Western phenomenon and “went global”” (Diamond, 2010). Yet, the Arab region seemed to be somehow bypassed. As Larry Diamond has put it:

By the time the Journal of Democracy began publishing in 1990, there were 76 electoral democracies (accounting for slightly less than half the world’s indepen-

dent states). By 1995, that number had shot up to 117 – three in every five states. By then, a critical mass of democracies existed in every major world region save

one – the Middle East. Moreover, every one of the world’s major cultural realms had become host to a significant democratic presence, albeit again with a single exception – the Arab world. Fifteen years later, this exception still stands (Ibid.:

As a result, over past two decades, the authoritarian persistence and resilience of Arab regimes was considered both symptomatic of, and responsible for, the crisis of social,

15 With regard to the recent social upheavals in the region, we see many commentators and political analysts making the comparison with Eastern Europe and the revolutions that started in 1989. Many observers are now speculating about the Arab region’s own Berlin-Wall moment.

26 Method, fieldwork and critique as methodology

political and economic development in the region (Parker, 2004). Indeed, as Parker notes, the resilient nature of the ‘Arab regime’ in the face of a prolonged crisis of political legitimacy “has come to constitute a, if not the, central theme in contemporary political sociology of the Middle East” (Ibid.: 1). Explanations ranged from an emphasis on culture and/or religion (Huntington, 1993; Lewis, 2001), to the nature of the economy and the dependency on rents such as oil and foreign aid (Beblawi, 1990; Luciani, 1990), to the involvement of foreign imperial powers (e.g. the US) who supported authoritarian leaders to serve their interests (Quandt, 2001), to the internal regime survival tactics and domestic political structures (Brumberg, 2002; Brownlee, 2002; Ghalioun, 2004;

Albrecht & Schlumberger, 2004), and finally, to the lack of a vibrant, independent and democratic civil society (Kamrava & O Mora, 1998; Hawthorne, 2004; for similar per-

spectives on Morocco, see for example Maghraoui, 2002; Cavatorta, 2005; Ottaway & Riley; 2006; Joffé, 2009). Additionally, some have investigated the particular characteristics of authoritarian rule in the Arab monarchies (L Anderson, 2000; Ottaway & Dunne, 2007). Yet, despite this very broad range of explanations, the preoccupation

with the nature of the ‘regime’ can be divided into two, at first sight, opposing bodies of literature. First, especially during the 1990s, a what Morton Valbjørn and André Bank typified as ‘democrazy’ branch of Middle East scholarship emerged, character- ized by so-called willing ‘democracy-spotters’ (Valbjørn & Bank, 2010). This body of

literature emerged in the wake of scholarship that engaged with the study of the third wave of democratization. Formulated on the basis of the experiences in Latin-America and Eastern Europe, “transitology” postulated the possibility of a linear transition from authoritarianism to liberal democracy, depending on the existence of structural precon- ditions, rational choice of the ruling elites and, of course, a free market (Guazzone & Pioppi, 2009b: 2; see also Schmitter & Karl, 1994). The ambition for area specialists was to demonstrate that the Arab region was subject to the same global logics as else- where (Valbjørn & Bank, 2010). Lise Storm, for example, has argued that contrary to the beliefs of many scholars at the time, Latin America succeeded in undergoing a transition to democracy, so why couldn’t sceptics about the MENA-region be wrong? As such, she argued that:

My book takes the position that the development of democracy in the MENA cannot be categorically dismissed. Moreover, although these countries are lagging far behind the countries of most other regions, some democratic development has indeed taken place. Although it may seem to some scholars that the countries in this particular region are not moving towards democracy (…), I maintain that just because the movement has been rather limited and slow it does not mean it should not be studied (Storm, 2007: 5; emphasis added).

The obvious problem with the transitologist’s representation and perception of political change is that it is presented as a process disembodied from space. The transition

paradigm tells us a story about the inevitability (and glorification) of the global logics – read Western logics – to which the Arab region is equally – eventually – subjected.

Consequently, the possible differences between countries and political systems around the globe will then be explained as if some countries and/or systems are just “behind” (Massey, 2005: 5). According to Doreen Massey, these kinds of political and academic narratives do not allow us to imagine other (non-Western) countries and political forces

Method, fieldwork and critique as methodology 27

in the world to have their own specific trajectories, their own particular histories, and the potential for their own (different) futures. Within the transitologist’s perspective

the research cases are not recognized as coeval others, but rather as cases situated on

a logical historical timeline, arguing that those who are ‘behind’ are merely situated at an earlier stage. Allegedly, there is only one possible narrative on political change. The study of these so-called countries that are ‘lagging behind’, then comes down to

a simple question, as for example the one Storm (2007: 163) poses herself in the case of Morocco: “Today, fifty years after independence, how far has Morocco come?” 16 The assumed unavoidability of the global logics (i.e. contemporary globalization) are

usually framed within a simplistic and automatic association between democracy and the free market, and even more astonishing, accompanied by the assumption that anti- systemic projects (e.g. communism or Islamism) are, in advance, uncritically regarded as non-democratic (Ibid.: 184, footnote 1, and 194, footnote 61). From a more critical

point of view, this belief in capitalist modernization and unification, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall, is inspired by what Guy Debord called, “the current ideology

of democracy – in other words, (…) the dictatorial freedom of the Market” (Debord, 1995: 9; see also below). Moreover, this kind of ideological perspective is what Massey labelled as an a-spatial perspective on politics because the cosmology of the one and only possible narrative obliterates the multiplicities and the contemporaneous hetero- geneities of space (Massey, 2005). A-spatial because spatial difference is convened into a temporal sequence. The French philosopher Michel de Certeau warned us that by privileging progress (i.e. time), the conditions of its own possibility (space itself) tend

to be forgotten. Space then becomes the blind spot of both scientific and political tech- nology (De Certeau, 1984: 95; see also Lefebvre, 2003). This is exactly what happened

with modernist theories like transitology. Different ‘places’, Massey argues, are then interpreted as mere different stages in a single temporal development (e.g. modernization theory) (Massey, 2005: 68). Potential differences in political, social and economic trajectories are occluded and every country in the world is assumed to follow “the same (‘our’) path of development” (Ibid.:82). 17

Still, according to Valbjørn and Bank, transitology must be credited because it nuanced the then prevalent neo-Orientalist presumptions about Islam’s inherently undemocratic

nature and the problematic picture of the Middle East as an immutable region. 18 How- ever, at the turn of the new millennium, the transitologists have been met with growing criticism within the area study of the Middle East. With regard to the political situation, this region still seemed to be “the least free region of the world” (Valbjørn & Bank, 2010: 187). Even the optimism about Morocco, long considered as an exception to

16 To prove their point, and make it more ‘scientific’, scholars on transitology often reduce the complex question of democracy to some quantifiable parameters which can be measured (e.g. transparent elections). 17 Additionally Massey argues that the effect of such a narrative is very political: “because space has been marshalled under the sign of time, these countries have no space – precisely – to tell different stories, to follow another path. They are dragooned into line behind those who designed the queue”. Ironically, Massey adds that – and this will also be part of my central argument in this study – “not only is their future thus supposedly foretold but even this is not true, for precisely their entanglement within the unequal relations of capitalist globalisation ensures that they do not ‘follow’. The future which is held out as inevitable is unlikely to be reached” (Massey, 2005: 82).

18 Although, in the aftermath of 9/11 we have seen a strong comeback of neo-Orientalism and culturalist

explanations of Middle East Politics (cf. Zemni, 2006a).

28 Method, fieldwork and critique as methodology

the wider authoritarian trend in the region, was shattered to pieces with the obvious return to authoritarian politics and the repression against the Islamist opposition after the violent suicide bombings in Casablanca in 2003 (Zemni, 2006b; Zemni & Bogaert, 2006; Catusse, 2008). Indeed, some scholars proclaimed the “end of the transition paradigm” and thought it was time for the “democracy-promoting community” to realize that the label of “transitional countries” was no longer applicable to many countries in the world, not in the least to the Arab countries (Carothers, 2002). This gave rise to a branch of Middle East scholarship that tried to bring the area study into the “era of post-democratization” (Valbjørn & Bank, 2010). Valbjørn and Bank argue that this branch denounced the transitologist’s perception of “political development within a pseudo-universalist, teleological and normative autocracy/democracy scheme”. They critiqued the limited scope of these studies which was based on the question “how far a particular society has come in a universal democratic transition to the ‘post-historical’ era” (Ibid.: 187). The way out of this normative connotation, i.e. framing it as a process towards more democracy, was done by redirecting the focus from “something desirable but absent” (democracy) to a concern for “what in fact is going on” (Ibid.: 188; some examples are Brumberg, 2002; Brownlee, 2002; Maghraoui, 2002; Volpi, 2004; Al- brecht & Schlumberger, 2004; Cavatorta, 2005; Joffé, 2009). Post-democratization, so it was said, spends more attention to the actual political developments in the particular countries that were at scrutiny:

This critique derives from observations of how the Arab Middle East, after more than a decade of countless nominal reform initiatives, continues to be predomi- nantly authoritarian. The natural answer from this perspective to the question of ‘what in fact is’ will be ‘authoritarianism’. Instead of posing questions about reasons for the ‘failure of democratization’ (i.e. the absence of something desirable) we therefore should seek to get a better understanding of the ‘success of authoritarianism’ (i.e. something actually present). This change of perspective has given rise in recent years to a major and fertile debate on Arab authoritarianism, its renewal, resilience, persistence, endurance, robustness, durability and sustenance (Valbjørn & Bank, 2010: 189)

Yet, if the seemingly more objective question of “what in fact is” is reduced to the seemingly simple answer “authoritarianism”, they still seem to suggest implicitly that Arab political systems are somehow objecting certain global forces or a global logic. The basic underlying question that informs both these two so-called opposing bodies of literature actually remains the same: what about the condition of (liberal) democracy in the Middle East region? Of course, Valbjørn and Bank try to put forward as convincing as possible that one has to make a distinction between “optimistic expectations (i.e. democratic transition) and the depressing reality (i.e., the persistence of authoritarianism)” (Ibid.: 188). But it is exactly their framing of authoritarianism as a “depressing reality” which makes them not necessarily less normative than the so-called democracy-spotters. As such, in the post-democratization era, the question of authoritarianism, whether they like it or not, is still regarded as a residual category or phenomenon – i.e. as the absence of democracy (Parker, 2004). A substantial problem with their approach is not so much their critique on theories of democratization, but rather their own uncriti- cal stance towards (liberal) democracy itself, and above all the neglect of the underly-

Method, fieldwork and critique as methodology 29

ing forces that undermine it everywhere in the world (to use Debord’s remark: they are not free of the current ideological dimension of democracy either). Following up on Massey’s insight on single temporal perspectives and a-spatial frameworks, post- democratization studies have the tendency to categorize ‘regimes’ in a similar way:

As the number of countries falling in between outright dictatorship and well- established liberal democracy has swollen, political analysts have proffered an

array of “qualified democracy” terms to characterize them, including semi-democracy, formal democracy, electoral democracy, façade democracy, pseudo-

democracy, weak democracy, partial democracy, illiberal democracy, and virtual democracy (Carothers, 2002: 10).

Everything between the two extremes (whatever they may actually represent) is then situated within the “grey zone” (Ibid.). The post-democratization literature thus has a similar a-spatial view of political trajectories, maybe not in the sense that it focuses exclusively on ‘catching up’ (or why Arab regimes are not catching up), but more in the form of a narrative which implicitly suggests a distinction between ‘good democracy’ (we) and ‘bad authoritarianism’ (the depressing reality). In contrast, the spatial view of people like Massey and other critical thinkers, tries to intervene in or supersede this ‘dichotomy of (Western) logic’ (authoritarian/democratic) and analyze the dynamics of “neither A nor B” (Agamben, 2009: 20). The same counts for my own methodology:

to use Agamben’s reasoning again, it is attested above all through the “disidentification and neutralization” of the binary logic (either A or B). Yet, from an a-spatial point of

view, the ways out of the binary logic are indiscernible since they cannot be grasped

“by means of bivalent caesurae” (Ibid.: 20). 19

Additionally, the intrinsically interesting question posed by Valbjørn and Bank about “what in fact is going on” doesn’t seem to be able to break loose from an endogenous and regime-centred perspective on political change. The problem is not so much that current post-democratization or post-transition paradigms are wrong about the authoritarian character of politics in the Arab World, the real problem is that their own under- standings of contemporary neoliberal globalization and of the liberal myths about free- market democracy are actually obfuscating many of the political transformations in the region (thus what is really going on), and above all, neglect the complex dynamics of power behind these changes. For example, both transitologists and post-democratization scholars still view “the regime” as the key to understand Arab political life. In fact, these approaches ultimately erected a stereotype of the “Arab regime” that actually got in the way of understanding the complexity of social forces that are manifesting themselves in the current political orders of the region (Parker, 2006: 84). Regimes are typically considered as power-centres that control both the state and domestic society. As a result, the scope of the regime’s power is than considered as something congruous with the cartographic boundaries of the national state.

In Morocco, the regime is often equated with the makhzen. Literally, the word makhzen

19 Here, I am using a particular insight of Agamben, not necessarily the general idea of his book. With the expression “neither A nor B” Agamben refers to the neutralization of the dichotomy between the general and the particular through what he defines as the ‘paradigm’.

30 Method, fieldwork and critique as methodology

– derived from the verb khazana, to hide or preserve – can be translated in English as “magazine” (warehouse, depot) (Claisse, 1987). It referred to the place where the sul- tan’s taxes were stored during the period before the French Protectorate (1912-1956). Traditionally, the term makhzen became a synonym for the royal family, its entourage and the apparatus of the pre-modern state. Today, the term is still used in common par- lance and has become a – sometimes vague and polymorphic – concept to denote central power (the regime) in Morocco (Ibid.; Catusse, 2008: 19). Without going too much into detail, today, the makhzen still represents and denotes the ruling clique around the

royal family (i.e. the royal advisors, the ulama 20 , the superior army officers, the eminent families, leading business men, etc.) (Claisse, 1987). 21 Yet, Myriam Catusse raises the concern that a one-sided focus on the makhzen in order to understand the nature of Moroccan politics has often obstructed political analyses – both inside and outside aca- demia – to really grasp the complexity of political forces and political transformations in contemporary Morocco. Moreover, the continuous and obvious political dominance of the monarchy and the makhzen has often created the false impression that there are no other sources of power and that nothing really changed in Morocco over the course of the last few decades (Catusse, 2008: 27; see for example Entilis, 2007).

Additionally, the stereotype of “the regime as a black box that contained the institutional programming of a society” has also created the assumption that the regime controlled the state, and consequently, the Arab state has often been depicted as a coherent entity that claimed the control over its territory and the society within its national borders (Parker, 2006: 97). In this view, regime power emerges from an institutional core which exerts, via direct intervention, its hegemony over subordinated institutions, spaces and scales. In this view, the regime is still presented as the privileged site of

political formation, intervention and inquiry (see more specifically chapter 5), while Arab states are seen as bounded entities, with their own internally generated authentici- ties, and defined by their difference from other geographical imaginations of space, that are obviously situated on the outside (Massey, 2005). ‘Other’ social forces that some-

how impact on regime-politics (e.g. US-support and Western imperialism, the capitalist market, EU-democracy promotion policies, etc.) are than often categorized as the external dimension(s), the external context or the international factors (cf. Cavatorta, 2004; 2005). Insofar as the dynamics of globalization are taken into account, they are considered to be subordinated and subjected to endogenous political legacies of state building and regime consolidation (Parker, 2009). In contrast, my own approach leans strongly on the approach elaborated by, amongst others, Christopher Parker. The underlying proposition of his critique is that contemporary dynamics of (neoliberal) globalization have highlighted serious shortcomings in current mainstream analyses’ capacity to identify and study political change in the Arab region (Parker, 2004; see also Parker, 2006; 2009; Zemni & Bogaert, 2009; Bogaert 2011; Bogaert & Emperador, 2011).

20 The ulama are the religious authorities 21 This didn’t mean that the makhzen was perceived as a static system. It evolved constantly and new

influential actors were drawn in, while others could lose their prominent status. Allain Claisse notes, for example, that due to economic liberalization in the 1970s and the 1980s, many emerging business elites worked their way into the sphere of influence of the monarchy. The same counts for the emergence of new state-technocrats (cf. chapter 3). For more detailed information on the makhzen see Waterbury (1970), Leveau (1985) and Claisse (1987).

Method, fieldwork and critique as methodology 31

The privileging of the nation-state as the arena within or scale at which change pro- cesses – or a lack of change – are supposedly unfolding, is something I want to avoid (Parker, 2004: 22). Yet, this doesn’t mean that such an approach distances itself “explicitly from both the democratization and authoritarianism ‘paradogma’ in favor of looking above, below and beyond the level of regime”, as Valbjørn and Bank would like have us to believe (Valbjørn & Bank, 2010: 191, italics added). With this argu-

ment, they, first of all, draw the spatial imaginary of ‘the regime’ again as somehow bounded and opposed to ‘outside’ forces located above, below and beyond. 22 Secondly,

by picturing these alternative approaches as a way of looking at ‘politics beyond the regime’ – for the sake of categorization and clarification let me describe the alternative approach I refer to as a critical spatial approach – they are actually including these kind

of alternative perspectives into the vocabulary of their ‘either A or B’ scheme (included through its exclusion), while completely missing the point of an analysis that investi- gates the dynamics of neither A nor B (Agamben, 2009). The obvious and expected critique then follows that there is “a risk of ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’ if the strong focus on politics beyond the regime is at the expense of an understanding of the dynamics of the regime” (Valbjørn & Bank, 2010: 191). With this critique, one can maybe try to save the intrinsic vocabulary of “the authoritarianism strand of the post-democratization trend”, but not necessarily enhance the understanding of political change in the Middle East (Ibid.).

Furthermore, because of the prevalent assumption that the regime controls the state, theory could only explain the absence of transition in terms of a coherent state’s domi- nation over the economy and civil society (Parker, 2006: 97). It is precisely this particular conception of the regime – and by extension of the state that is controlled by the regime – that resonates with what Massey has described as the billiard-ball view of the world (Massey, 2005: 72). In this particular view, political entities such as the regime or the state are seen as bounded in their full identities and through their interaction (e.g. through inter-state relations) a clear distinct inside and outside can be distinguished. Parker explains that such a conception fails to recognize the complex ways in which state agency became enmeshed with the social complexes of capitalist agency and capital formation (Parker, 2006: 97). In contrast, many scholars with backgrounds in political geography have convincingly argued that purely national territorial conceptions of the state and state power are no longer, if indeed they were ever, able to make sense of the nature of the state. A state whose power, in reality, has been used in rather diffused, dispersed and fragmented ways can never be fully understood by focusing exclusively on the national scale (Allen & Cochrane, 2010; see also Abrams, 1988; Agnew, 1994; Swyngedouw, 2000; 2004; Brenner, 2004; Jessop, 2008).

Consequently, what this study underwrites, is not so much the attempt to study power located outside (supposedly above, below, or beyond) the regime, but the necessity to move away from both a one-sided regime centred perspective and a billiard-ball-like or state-centred view of politics in favour of new ways of thinking about (authoritarian) modalities of government. In short, this study follows approaches that favour more relational thinking, considering political space as an open construction and production,

22 Valbjørn and Bank also explicitly refer to, amongst others, Parker’s article in Political Geography (2009) to make this point.

32 Method, fieldwork and critique as methodology

with attention to institutional restructuring within a global market environment and the specific economic, social and political rationalities that underpin these transformations. This kind of more complex conception of political power – or what Parker has

called the “complexes of power” that constitute the dynamics of change – attempts to “recombine global and local, state and market, public and private, and “traditional” and “modern”” to unravel the diffuse, open, relational and sometimes contingent out- comes of political transformation behind the seemingly ubiquitous and authoritarian image of the “Arab regime” (Parker, 2004: 7). The continuity of authoritarian out- comes of political government cannot be understand by making a distinction between the regime on the one hand, and politics located somehow outside it on the other hand, but by conceptualizing the dialectical interrelation between local and global agents of transformation. The billiard-ball view of the regime occludes the social relations and political practices, and their “relentless production”, within contemporary rounds of neoliberal globalization (Massey, 2005: 82). It occludes the “spatial reach” of dialecti- cally intertwined power-geometries within and across national territorial boundaries and their momentary assemblage in particular sites, scales, spaces (Allen & Cochrane, 2010). As long as the social, economic and political crises in the Arab world are viewed as the sole responsibility and outcome of internal, endogenous dynamics related to the authoritarian persistence of the Arab regimes and their relation with their domestic Arab societies, the crucial impact of neoliberal globalization, the important political role of local agents in the production of that kind of globalization and the production of uneven development will remain obfuscated. It is my dissatisfaction with this particular tendency to understand Arab politics that has informed and stimulated my search for alternative answers and perspectives. But before I elaborate on these alternative per-

spectives on political transformation in Morocco, let me first explain how I came to my results and conclusion.

Not beyond but away from the regime paradigm: from an a-spatial to a spatial analysis of political transition