The international dimensions of authoritarian regime stability: Jordan in the post-Cold War era.

• Author: Yom, Sean L.

INTRODUCTION

EXPLAINING THE RESILIENCE OF authoritarianism in the Middle East and North Africa has become an urgent question for comparative political scholars. (1) Few Arab political regimes pass democracy's most basic electoral litmus test--inclusive contestation and public participation in free, fair, and regular elections for offices of executive authority--much less its more substantive requirement, the enshrinement of civil liberties within legal safeguards immune to raison d'etat and other constitutional subversions. (2) Whereas much of the political science literature has explained the historical lack of regional democratization by pointing to domestic-level variables, such as Islamic culture, oil rents, socioeconomic development, and state coercion, we argue that international factors are central in understanding the endurance of Arab authoritarianism in the post-Cold War era. In a context of economic crisis and political liberalization, external support from foreign powers can strengthen the capacity of regime incumbents to maintain tight control over the democratic reform process, foreclosing the possibility of opposition victories in their struggles to capture larger slices of state power and hence ensuring continuity in the autocratic system.

Our essay utilizes the case study of Jordan to explore the explanatory link between international support and domestic regime stability. We argue that the ruling monarchy's cessation of the democratic reform program that commenced after the 1989 financial crisis is directly related to rising levels of external assistance provided by the United States and its allies. Against a backdrop of economic adjustment and civic unrest, the overarching objective of Jordanian state elites during the 1990s was to ensure that political liberalization did not spiral into an uncontrollable democratic opening that would require the surrender of decision-making privileges to an ascendant political opposition. For the US and its allies, the prospect of executive power turnover from the conservative state apparatus to a potentially hostile, Islamist-oriented ruling alternative ran counter to long-term strategic interests that required Jordan to play a vital role in American political projects across the region. When the monarchical regime signed its peace treaty with Israel in 1994 at the height of political liberalization, the U.S. and its allies began to deliver substantial amounts of diplomatic sponsorship, economic aid, and security assistance. For Western powers, sustaining the peace treaty with Israel took precedence over any desire to deepen the nascent democratic reform agenda in Jordan, since the most vocal democratic groups in the kingdom also happened to oppose the accords. For the regime, the intromission of such international support lowered the cost of domestic repression and fulfilled key political needs. By eroding the uncertainty clouding the ruling elite's political choices while also reinforcing its fiscal capacity and security sector, external assistance enabled the regime to constrict opposition mobilization without fear of international repercussions. This effect intensified after late 2001, as ready cooperation with Washington's "war on terrorism" amplified the geopolitical importance of Jordanian stability to the U.S., which gave Amman access to unparalleled volumes of economic and military support. Simultaneously, the regime continued to backslide away from its democratic reform promises. Now, nearly 20 years after its genesis, Jordan's political liberalization remains in limbo at best; at worst, it has ended.

A single-country case study cannot pose universal causal generalizations about Arab authoritarianism, a task that requires multiple cases and much more space. But one case can nonetheless generate new insight by serving as a heuristic analysis, one that inductively furnishes new theoretical knowledge about existing empirical relationships. (3) That is the intention here. By demonstrating an outcome of authoritarian stability in a context of economic crisis and political flux, Jordan's regime trajectory provide significant leverage in understanding how the external environment can influence the domestic balance of power between regime and opposition, thereby structuring the survival prospects of incumbent leaders in a context of political liberalization. In turn, this implies that the question of authoritarian persistence in the Arab region in the post-Cold War era cannot be answered in isolation of international factors. This analysis proceeds in three parts. First, it reviews the relevant literature and emphasizes the utility of studying Jordan's political experiences. Second, it explores the case, outlining how critical shifts in the international environment resulted in the decline of democratic reforms. Finally, it expounds key theoretical lessons, teasing out implications for future research regarding the connection between external factors and regime stability in the Arab world.

THE POST-COLD WAR ERA, ARAB POLITICAL REGIMES, AND JORDAN

Western academics have grappled with the study of Arab authoritarianism in the post-Cold War era. From the late 1980s onwards, many scholars began to suggest that democratic transitions in the Arab world had become inevitable. By the early 1990s, economic crises and public unrest in many Arab states compelled rulers to loosen tight restrictions on political rights, often resulting in the return of elected legislative bodies, a renaissance of civil society, and new tolerance for societal pluralism (ta'addudiya). (4) Yet scholarly optimism dissipated by the end of the 1990s, though, as democratic reforms stuttered to a halt and ruling incumbents in numerous single-party republics and dynastic monarchies found themselves secure in the halfway house of "liberalized autocracy." (5) In the post-Cold War era, the fact remains that no Arab head of state has ceded executive power to the ballot box, and few have left office through devices other than death or coup. With the possibility of democratic turnover as faint as ever, it is not the decay but the durability of Arab authoritarianism that now commands theoretical attention from comparative political scientists. (6)

Much of the literature devoted to explaining the Arab world's democratic deficit focuses on factors internal to these societies, such as Islamic culture, (7) oil rents,s and state coercion. (9) While scholars have often questioned whether these domestic variables are "compatible" with democracy, they have spent far less time theorizing how international factors have affected authoritarian regime stability. (10) Nearly 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wail, however, such an omission is inexcusable. The demise of superpower rivalry wrought titanic shifts in the international environment, not only disrupting the geopolitical alliances and economic linkages that structured much of the developing world but also marking the ideological triumph of democracy as the most viable form of political rule across the globe. With the end of the Cold War came a marked rise of Western activities to foster democratization on a transnational scale. For example, the U.S. began to employ diplomatic suasion and, in a few cases, brute military force to punish human rights violators abroad; regional organizations like the European Union used the carrot of institutional membership and the stick of aid withdrawal to nudge nearby autocrats towards reforms; and public foundations and aid agencies financed a huge network of democracy assistance programs, such as civic education and electoral monitoring initiatives. (11) By penalizing autocratic abuses, incentivizing democratic reforms, and empowering local opposition groups, these international mechanisms of democracy promotion sought to quicken regime transitions in environs as diverse as sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Eastern Europe. (12)

To be sure, the record of Western democracy promotion in developing regions has proven patchy at best, and numerous critics have underscored the substantial gaps that separated democratic rhetoric from American foreign policy practice during the 1990s. Nonetheless, the first post-Cold War decade was significant in how the basic idea of fostering democratic change abroad received unprecedented public attention for the first time with the U.S. and its European allies. (13) It is here that the Arab world appears so exceptional; for in terms of both rhetoric and practice, new Western commitments to sponsor global democratization conveniently ignored the region. Flush with victory after the Gulf War in the early 1990s, Washington could claim strategic hegemony over the Middle East for the first time. But while the specter of Soviet competition had vanished, two longstanding foreign policy goals from the Cold War had not. The U.S. still abided by its central geopolitical goals of preserving Israel's security, accomplished partly through encouraging new Arab peace accords and partly by deterring other Arab states from aggression, and protecting the flow of mostly Persian Gulf oil supplies to global hydrocarbon markets. Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, the prospect of Arab democratization clashed irreconcilably with these interests once it became clear that well-mobilized Islamist movements would be leading beneficiaries of political reforms. Searing images of the Iranian revolution, the Algerian civil war, and the Taliban regime throughout the 1990s compelled many nervous American policymakers to fear that even if Islamist groups gained power through peaceful, competitive elections, the resulting regimes would be reactionary and extremist--willing to use Arabian crude oil as an economic weapon against the West, for instance, or force progress on the Palestinian issue by threatening Israel with renewed military aggression. (14)

In reality, such hasty...