how occupy wall street fell in love with itself – Pages 6-7
JANUARY 2013 N o 1301
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Are the Arab monarchies next? As the chaotic transition towards democracy continues in North Africa and Yemen, the fighting in Syria is intensifying.
And, less noticed, opposition to the Arab monarchies is growing
ALBERTO MAGNELLI – ‘Active Ghosts’ (1938)
Give us your money
BY SERGE HALIMI
Today’s emerging powers are not worthy successors to their anticolonialist, anti-imperialist ancestors. The countries of the South control a growing share of wealth, which is only proper, but its distribution is so inequitable that income differences are even greater in South Africa and China than in the US. The money is more often spent on buying western prime assets and luxury goods than on improving the living conditions and health of the Indian, Chinese, Arab or African people.
This is a return to the age of the robber barons. At the end of the 19th century, powerful and notoriously rapacious industrial dynasties rose in America, including those of John D Rockefeller, J P Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt, which gradually took over from the old European families in oil, transport and banking. These transatlantic competitors were initially at each other’s throats, but they gradually joined forces, exploiting workers all over the world, extravagantly enriching their shareholders and exhausting the earth’s resources.
Gulf State rulers and Chinese, Indian or Russian oligarchs now dream of taking over – and joining forces – in the same way. Like the American tycoons, they like to lecture others. The Indian billionaire Lakshmi Mittal, when asked about France’s hastily abandoned plan to nationalise one of his industrial sites in Lorraine, said it would have amounted to a “great leap backward” and warned that “an investor might well think twice before putting his money in France” (1). And the Russian prime minister commented on a French tax increase: “Every Russian citizen, from those on low incomes to the super-rich, pays a tax of 13%. … ‘Oligarchs should pay more’, we are told. But we do not want capital to flow out of the country and into the shadow financial system” (2). China also defends pro-market doctrines, and its president was openly relieved when the right won the Greek elections in June; the head of China’s principal sovereign wealth fund, with shares in GDF Suez, is fiercely critical of “obsolete social laws” in Europe that “encourage laziness and indolence rather than hard work” (3).
British historian Perry Anderson recalls that at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, France, Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia established the Concert of Europe to prevent war and crush revolution. He suggests the world order is now ruled by another, informal, pentarchy: the US, EU, Russia, China and India. This conservative Holy Alliance of competing and complicit powers dreams of stability, but the world it is creating guarantees that there will be more economic upheavals, which will generate social revolts whatever the alliance may intend.
TRANSLATED BY BARBARA WILSON (1) Interview in Le Figaro, 13 December 2012. (2) Interview with Dmitry Medvedev, Le Figaro, 26 November 2012. (3) See Martine Bulard, “La Chine, la crise et les fraudeurs”, Planète Asie, 14 November 2011; blog. mondediplo.net
Inside this issue
Syria’s Alawites: still the president’s men? by sabrina mervin Page 4
Mali, a country divided by philippe leymarie Page 4
Enter China’s new photographers by philippe pataud célérier Page 8
BY HICHAM BEN ABDALLAH EL ALAOUI
The Arab Spring is not an outcome, it is a process. For those countries at the forefront of regional transformation, the fundamental question is can democracy become institutionalised? Though progress has been uneven and the outcomes of many state-society struggles have yet to be resolved, the answer is a cautious yes. In at least a few countries, we are witnessing the onset of democratic institutionalisation: whether the process of reform and transformation spreads to other parts of the Middle East depends on many factors – religious tensions, political mobilisation, regime adaptations, geopolitics. Meanwhile North Africa provides the most promising preview of the future.
Democratic institutionalisation means the healthy convergence of politics around three arenas of competition: elections, parliaments and constitutions. When these institutions are robust and durable, then the democratic governments they engender are relatively safe from radical groups, reactionary forces and authoritarian backsliding (due to alternation: democracies that cherish the rule of law and hold regular elections require that power alternates between competing parties).
In Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, this process is unfolding, if at an unsteady pace (1). All three have had founding legislative elections that were far more competitive and pluralistic than those held in their authoritarian past. In Tunisia, the project to re-craft the national constitution nears completion by the Constituent Assembly, which itself was the product of electoral competition. The crisis there has two
Hicham Ben Abdallah El Alaoui is a board member of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, Stanford University; chairman of the board of the Center on Climate Change and the Challenge to Human Security, University of California; and adviser to Human Rights Watch
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dimensions: the new government’s passivity in response to Salafist violence (which came to an end after the attack on the US embassy in Tunis) and the delay in getting economic reform under way, especially in the poorest regions. In spite of often acute tensions and conflicts between different political interest groups, all but the tiniest minority have accepted that democracy is now the name of the game.
In Libya, the post-Gaddafi political order has been rockier, with armed militias initially fighting amongst themselves (2), while in Egypt, presidential elections resulted in the ascension of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi. Once in office, Morsi asserted civilian power over the military by dismissing Field Marshall Tantawi. This was a crucial step towards redefining civilian-military relations in a historically praetorian state.
In these transitional states, most political actors recognise the new reality – except of course hardliners and extremists, such as some Salafists and defenders of the autocratic past. But the new reality does not mean that these institutionalising democracies will become liberal democracies. The democrats of the Arab Spring did not embrace revolution to advance liberalism – which many in the West may see in the Arab context as advancing the cause of gender equality, unshackling censorship of pornography and other “immoral” materials, and otherwise widening the boundaries of expression. Liberalism is in truth a body of political thought that may give preeminence to the individual and freedom, but can only emerge from a later stage of democratic consolidation. It will not result from an early showdown between secularists and Islamists, and compromise on such values at this nascent stage is unlikely.
The priority for these transitioning states is not ideational, but rather the continued struggle towards institutionalisation. Democracy does not require that every citizen and every party embrace the same ideological framework, but rather that democratic rules and procedures become the definitive rules of the game. Even the Islamists are discovering that electoral triumphs require more than slogans: like democratic governments elsewhere, they need to deliver the goods through governance and policy, not empty promises of bliss and orthodoxy.
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Upstairs, Downstairs: life in service by veronica horwell Page 14
