POLITICS GOVERNANCE STATE-SOCIETY RELATIONS

POLITICS, GOVERNANCE, AND STATE-SOCIETY RELATIONS
Protestors filled Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt on April 8, 2011. Photo credit: Jonathan Rashad/Flickr.
The corporatist systems of Arab autocracy, sustained
by rents, ideology, and occasional coercion, were
challenged at the end of the twentieth century by
the emergence of three major forces: a massive
demographic bulge of young people on the cusp
of adulthood; the push and pull of local economic
stagnation and global economic integration;
and a radically new information environment
generated first by satellite television and then by
the Internet and mobile technology. These forces,
in combination, fatally undermined the ability
of the region’s governments to deploy ideology,
rent-based patronage, and selective coercion to
maintain consent for their rule.
• The large numbers of young people needing
education, health care, and jobs challenged
already-creaking state services and forced
an end to the expectation (touted by some
governments but often more theoretical than
real) that university graduates would earn
lifetime employment in the public sector.
• The forces of economic globalization challenged
(and increased the costs of) the subsidies on
food, fuel, and other staples that many regional
governments used to sustain public support
and mitigate economic inequality, while the
onset of the global recession in 2008 reduced
state revenues, especially to non-oil economies
like Egypt’s. 8 Thus, as Hafez Ghanem illustrates
8 Challenges to state sovereignty and state effectiveness due
to globalization are a constant feature of twenty-first-century
global politics. Economic globalization, the expansion of
international norms on internal governance and individual
rights, the rise of non-state actors with policy influence from
multinational corporations to nongovernmental organizations,
the revolution in information technology—all these and other
global forces have eroded the ability of twenty-first-century
states to govern their domestic affairs independently. But the
implications of these forces for the Middle East have been
uniquely destabilizing, because the states of the Middle East
were ill-prepared to absorb the forces of globalization, and
because the impact of these global factors were compounded
by additional, region-specific challenges to state governance
that made it hard for states to adjust without upsetting their
own domestic political order.
Globalization’s impacts on state-society relations are
especially challenging for autocratic regimes. States in the
twenty-first-century world, and perhaps especially in the
twenty-first-century Middle East, have a dwindling ability to
impose order on their societies. Yet, citizens expect order
and state effectiveness, and increasingly they demand that
it be provided with a degree of transparency and fairness. In
an era of empowered individuals and non-state actors, and
disempowered but still essential states, it seems that stability
and economic success require a more complex, inclusive, and
12 ATLANTIC COUNCIL