Foreign Policy
By Daniel Brumberg – (…) The single-king monarchies of Morocco and Jordan have had much more success in exploiting the institutional and symbolic advantage of monarchial rule by comparison to the competing-princes model of Qatar, Kuwait, or Saudi Arabia. But even if the built-in mechanism of princely competition has created a more fragmented ruling elite, this somewhat cumbersome mechanism has nevertheless helped to sustain the protection rackets in all three countries. Morocco’s recent experience suggests that monarchies — particularly single king systems — are capable of reinventing protection racket politics with far more panache than their presidential analogues.
Seeking to distinguish himself from the Mubaraks and the Ben Alis — and thus get a jump on the opposition — in June King Mohammed VI backed constitutional amendments which somewhat enhanced the authority of the parliament, but re-secured his supreme position as “Commander of the Faithful.” Not surprisingly, the Islamist Justice and Development Party embraced this compromise once the King promised that the revised constitution would keep Islam as the basis of national identity. This bargain may have appalled many secular Arab and ethnic Berber elites. But until both groups can be assured that full scale democratization will protect them as efficiently as Morocco’s liberalized autocracy, they are likely to back a jiggering of the old system rather than take to the streets en masse to demand a revolution. In Morocco, the tacit consensus of all key parties required for sustaining autocracy is yet to fall apart.
These mechanics have analogues throughout the globe, particularly in what Larry Diamond has called “hybrid regimes.” Instead of reducing the fate of these regimes to some metaphysical choice between staying out of history or joining it, it is far more useful to see them as part of a multitude of evolving histories that defy easy platitudes about the past or the future. In this sense the Arab Spring is part of a narrative that is both very particular and universal. Although global forces have their role to play, the diverse fates awaiting the region’s autocrats is rooted in local dynamics that will play out in ways that are still untold.
Daniel Brumberg is co-director of Democracy and Governance Studies at Georgetown University and senior advisor at the United States Institute of Peace.
