In The Arab Winter Steven J. King adopts and extends the work of Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter on democratic consolidation to shape a persuasive framework for the systematic analysis of the uprisings that swept the Middle East and North Africa in 2011 and, in particular, the bleak aftermath that ensued in almost every case. O’Donnell and Schmitter conceptualized democratic transitions as involving a sequence of negotiated pacts—military, political and economic. To these, King adds what he terms “nation-state” and “transitional justice, human rights. and rule of law” pacts. The former, he argues, is necessary because the “Arab Spring” unfolded in places where Weberian states could not be taken for granted; the second is a necessary response to the level of political violence and repression both before and after the uprisings. With these five pacts at the heart of his analytic framework, King proceeds to offer a theoretically grounded, empirically rich analysis of political life in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen. Drawing on wide reading, he describes the process of authoritarian breakdown, democratic transition, and challenges to these processes.
King’s account of the role of the political pact in democratic consolidation is especially insightful. In the case of Tunisia, agreements in 2003 and 2005 between the main Islamist party, Ennahda, and the secular opposition to Ben Ali were crucial in establishing the basis for cross-ideological cooperation after the fall of the old regime. In Egypt, by contrast, Islamist–secular solidarity broke down early. King illustrates how overreach by the Muslim Brotherhood after the fall of Mubarak was met with hostility by its erstwhile secular allies, who increasingly turned to undemocratic methods in an effort to unseat the Islamists, ultimately culminating in support for military intervention. In Libya, national unity and state capacity issues severely constrained hopes for a democratic bargain. As King observes, in Libya transitional elites took power “without a modern state” (p. 189). The level of national disunity ultimately resulted in the emergence of two rival centers of government in Tripoli and Tobruk. In Yemen, somewhat paradoxically, King suggests that the goal of a political pact was, in fact, achieved in the form of the coalition government that followed the fall of Ali Abdullah Saleh, in which the former ruling party and the opposition coalition shared power equally. However, the pact was fatally flawed by its exclusion of significant regional actors in the north and south of the country.
King’s account of the “Nation-State and Weberian State Pact” is particularly telling. He concludes that, despite some challenges, both Tunisia and Egypt constituted fully realized nation-states. However, the same cannot be said of either Libya or Yemen, which has had enormous, if negative, consequences for prospects of democratic transition. Post-Qaddafi governments never managed to secure their authority over the country’s fragmented armed groups, thus preventing the emergence of a Weberian state capable of monopolizing the use of violence. In Yemen, the state was largely absent in many parts of the country and had no role in many “ungoverned dark spaces” (p. 232).
King’s analysis of the failure to address socioeconomic distress by transitional regimes is central to his bleak prognosis for prospects for democratic transition. Egypt faces massive socioeconomic challenges, and for most Egyptians, their situation now is worse than before the 2011 uprising. The Libyan status quo is one of resource competition in the context of political strife and “inoperative institutions” (p. 198), whereas Yemen’s problems are even more deep-seated. Anticipating the dismissal of the government and the suspension of parliament earlier this year, King argues that the failure to secure a socioeconomic pact is the greatest threat to democratic consolidation in Tunisia.
Equally bleak is his analysis of prospects for transitional justice, human rights, and the rule of law. In Egypt, any such hopes have been crushed by Sisi’s coup and the “brutal, military-led reconstruction and deepening of the most reviled elements of Mubarak’s regime” (p. 143). Violent conflicts in Libya and Yemen are utterly incompatible with the norms of justice and human rights, and even in Tunisia, the “hijacking” of the transitional project by old elites constitutes a serious threat to democratic consolidation.
The Arab Winter has many strengths, not least its broad scope and clear presentation and dissection of the issues that have, in most instances, prevented any possibility of democratic consolidation in the aftermath of the 2011 uprisings. However, some aspects of King’s approach are puzzling. His starting point is that democratic transition has failed to materialize into democratic consolidation in at least three of the four countries on which he focuses. To achieve democratic consolidation, societies in transition must create national unity, place professional militaries under civilian control, and rationalize bureaucracies while institutionalizing political democracy. To establish the rule of law and protect human rights, states in transition should dismantle and reconstruct the judiciary and the security sector from a “brutal instrument of internal repression” to “a neutral political authority that protects citizens’ rights and safety” (p. 22). Although all this is indeed desirable, it sets a very high bar for democratic consolidation in the Arab world.
There is a related question regarding King’s core assumption that the uprisings were directed toward the achievement of democratic outcomes in the first place. The preponderance of evidence as presented by King is that pro-democratic forces during and after the uprisings were significantly weaker than other actors. In the case of Egypt, King suggests, somewhat benignly, that the military in early 2011 “seemed to have accepted as inevitable a transition from military to elected, civilian rule” (p. 112). But this is contradicted by the early assumption of control of the transitional process by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. Other actors—whether the Muslim Brotherhood in power, or secular forces who turned to extraconstitutional activity and, ultimately, the military that removed the elected Islamist government from office—were at best ambivalent regarding democracy. Elsewhere, the weakness of democratically oriented actors is even more stark as the aftermath of brief democratic moments in Libya and Yemen testifies.
There is also a somewhat tautologous aspect to the argument on nation-state pacts, one of King’s additions to O’Donnell and Schmitter’s schemata. Although Tunisia and Egypt conform to the Weberian and nation-state types, neither Libya nor Yemen do, as King makes evident in his discussion of both countries. Small wonder then that transitional elites in both countries failed to secure the sort of nation-state and Weberian state pact that King proposes as essential to democratic consolidation.
Finally, while the strength of the book lies in its systematic treatment of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya. and Yemen, the chapter on broken states, although insightful throughout, sits somewhat uneasily next to the others. The detailed and nuanced analysis of the first four settings is here replaced with much briefer consideration of Iraq, the Islamic State, and Syria. The selection of these cases is puzzling. Iraq’s democratic transition began not in 2011 as a result of domestic popular mobilization but was externally driven and followed the US-led invasion of 2003. Quite how the Islamic State fits into the overall analytic framework is not at all clear. Syria most certainly does and would have justified the sort of extended analysis that King devotes to the first four countries.
Overall, however, in The Arab Winter, King has done an impressive job, not merely in reviewing what we know to date about how the 2011 uprisings came about but also in providing the basis for a deeper understanding of their outcomes.
