PSC 321 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Habib Bourguiba, Chadli Bendjedid, Ahmed Ben Bella
18 May 2018
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“The Growth of State Power in the Arab World: The single-party regimes”
Introduction
● Specific reasons for administrative expansion
○ The implementation of programmes of land reform in a number of Arab countries
in the 1950s
○ The apparent failure of the private sector to meet the challenge of development in
the early independence period
○ The sudden exodus of many hundreds of thousands of foreign officials,
businessmen, and agriculturalists that took place in Egypt during the Suez crisis
of 1956 and in French North Africa immediately after the end of colonialism
● Oil wealth also played its part, financing the development plans of populous countries
like Algeria and Iraq and forcing the rulers of the smaller desert states like Libya, Saudi
Arabia and the Gulf shaikhdoms to begin to create modern systems of administration
and to spend part of their new wealth on programmes of welfare for their own citizens
● Focus of this chapter is the administrative expansion and control as it affected those 5
well-populated Arab countries that came under the control of one-party regimes
dedicated to state-led development under the banner of some form of Arab socialism:
Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Tunisia
Expansion in the size of the state apparatus and of its ability to regulate and control
● The first country to experience a large-scale bureaucratic expansion was Egypt
○ Immediate attention was to increasing the strength of the police and public
security
○ The new regime also took steps to institute measures of economic development
based on ideas that had been elaborated by some of the more radical civilian
politicians in the last years of King Farouk’s monarchy
○ The nationalizations of foreign property during the Suez invasion then produced a
further stimulus to state-led development, culminating in the first 5-year plan, and
the nationalizations of Egyptian private banks, factories, and other enterprises
● In Syria the main period of expansion took place in the 1960s as the result, first, of the
export of Egyptian systems of economic and political management during the brief
period of the United Arab Republic, then of the statist policies of the Ba’th Party onwards
● Much the same process took place in Iraq after the revolution of 1958, in Tunisia
between 1956 and 1960, and in Algeria after independence in 1962
○ The only significant difference was the the Tunisian regime made a determined
effort to limit the size of the army as a way of preventing possible coups,
something that the Algerians nor the Iraqi could afford to do
● An important component in state expansion was the increased spending on education
and welfare
● The process of expanding administrative control can also be seen at work in policies
towards agriculture and industry
○ The regimes inn all 5 Arab countries took quite considerable amounts of rural
land into public ownership, usually as part of a programme for expropriating the
larger estates for redistribution to small proprietors and landless peasants
○ This didn’t always work though, in many countries only parts of the land was
redistributed, much of it remained under state control and was used by the
central government to extend its power into rural areas
● Programmes of nationalization and large-scale industrialization provided the state with
further opportunities for expansion and control
○ Only later did the problems inherent in such a strategy - the drain on scarce
currency reserves to buy foreign machinery and raw materials, the lack of
attention to agriculture and exports, the problems of managing huge industrial
plant - begin to demand serious attentions
● The whole process of expanding state involvement in the economy was justified by the
need for rapid development and for a more equitable distribution of a rising national
income
○ This provided an important source of legitimation for the regimes, as well as
allowing them to bolster their authority and to reduce the possibility of challenge
by asserting the expertise of their official scientists and planners
● Emphasis on socialist planning provided an essential ingredient for the public ideology of
regimes heavily embarked on statist, integrative programmes of national development
and control
● Management of so large an apparatus with such extensive commitments gave the small
numbers of individuals at the apex of each regime enormous power
○ The result was authoritarianism
● Authoritarian systems are different from totalitarian ones, however, as they lack the
powerful institutions that would be needed to control or to transform society by means of
bureaucratic methods alone
● The ideal strategy for an authoritarian regime is to destroy those that it cannot control,
and to remake and reorder those that it can
○ This as the policy first employed in Egypt and Tunisia, whose societies were
relatively homogeneous and where bureaucratic structures were already well
developed by the time the Nasser and Bourguiba regimes came to power
○ Once in place, such a structure was used not only to ensure the controlled
collaboration of the groups in question but also to define the way in which they
were able to present their demands and to be represented politically at the
national level
● Eventually all regimes used the mechanism of the land reform and the cooperative to
create new institutions at a local level to represent state control
● Another type of strategy was used to extend state control supervision over both the
educational and legal systems and the religious establishment
○ For the educational system, this was done with a national curriculum and either
forbidding student political activity or steering it into safer channels
○ The legal system was shrunk
○ Religion was not a huge obstacle to state control
■ The countries relied on two important legacies from the Middle East’s
19th century past
● The Ottoman practice of bringing the religious establishment
under state control
○ Ex: Algeria’s establishment of a ministry of traditional
education and religious affairs
● The use of the dominant modernist strand in Sunni Islam to obtain
official legitimation for state policy
○ President Nasser’s ability to obtain a fatva (religious
opinion) justifying many of his major policy decisions
● Classes did exist as political actors, whether in an active manner, where a sense of
common consciousness is present, or in a more passive way, as when a whole elite
chose policies based clearly and obviously on the notion of private, rather than public,
property
● Once the 5 Arab regimes had managed to consolidate themselves, only 2 presidents,
Ben Bella and Chadli Benjedid of Algeria, were ousted by their colleagues, and only two
others, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr of Iraq and Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia, were eased out
towards the end of their lives by ambitious younger men
○ On the evidence so far, death is the only certain way in which, in an authoritarian
system, a president’s rule can be brought to an end
● Nevertheless, presidents could not do exactly what they wanted, and their power was
subject to significant constraints
● The president presided over a state apparatus that consisted, in the first instance, of its
major component institutions: the military, the party, the security services, the
bureaucracy, and the economic enterprises
● The state itself then provided the major arena for political activity; it combined all the
major institutional actors involved in national issues and the distribution of national
resources
● The more durable of the major regime politicians inevitably became patrons of quite
large networks of clients
○ This is a reminder that patronage can be a two-way process
The Political Role of Classes and other Social Groups in Homogeneous and Divided Societies
● Ana analysis of the role of classes and other social groups within authoritarian systems
presents particular problems
○ In some cases, particular classes were either destroyed or very much reduced in
economic and social power (ex: the large landowners in Egypt, Iraq, and Syria)
○ In others, parties, associations and unions that might otherwise act as vehicles
for class politics were either banned or reorganized as part of the apparatus of
state control
● Working-class activity in the state sector has been difficult to discern
○ In Egypt workers were often able to obtain sufficient independence from official
control
● An identification of the political role of the middle class depends largely on being able to
establish a link between the continued existence of private property and the political
Document Summary
The growth of state power in the arab world: the single-party regimes . The implementation of programmes of land reform in a number of arab countries in the 1950s. The apparent failure of the private sector to meet the challenge of development in the early independence period. The sudden exodus of many hundreds of thousands of foreign officials, businessmen, and agriculturalists that took place in egypt during the suez crisis of 1956 and in french north africa immediately after the end of colonialism. Oil wealth also played its part, financing the development plans of populous countries like algeria and iraq and forcing the rulers of the smaller desert states like libya, saudi. Arabia and the gulf shaikhdoms to begin to create modern systems of administration and to spend part of their new wealth on programmes of welfare for their own citizens. Expansion in the size of the state apparatus and of its ability to regulate and control.
