Introduction
At the end of 2010, a wave of
revolutions known as the Arab Spring began in Tunisia and spread throughout
the Middle East in the following year. Protestors were not only calling for an
end to political oppression but the creation of more robust welfare states
(Massoud, 726-39). A half century prior to these revolutions, authoritarian
regimes in the region had consolidated their power through the creation of social
welfare programs, but benefits were usually distributed asymmetrically to strategic
groups that were loyal to the state. Furthermore, many states in region began
to retrench some welfare programs in the 1980’s due to problems with debt,
growing populations, and unstable oil prices (Richards, et al, 50-57, 84-89).
Governments started to rely more on Islamist charity networks and non-governmental
organizations to fill the gap left by retrenchment. As a result, regimes in
the region lost much of their legitimacy, and they depended heavily on
political oppression to maintain their hold on power. While some states
collapsed in 2011 in response to the protests, others were able to weather the
storm and survive. This leads us to the following set of questions: how do Middle
Eastern welfare states differ from other regions of the world, what are the
differences between welfare states within the region and why, to what extent
did states engage in retrenchment at the end of the twentieth century, and
what effect did retrenchment have on political stability in the region?
To answer these questions, I analyzed
six academic works from the political science literature on the topic. These
works are as follows: (1) “A Comparative Welfare Regime Approach to Global
Social Policy” by Geof Wood and Ian Gough, (2) Social Dictatorships: The Political Economy of the Welfare State in the
Middle East and North Africa by Ferdinand Eibl, (3) “Bricks and Mortar
Clientelism: Sectarianism and the Logics of
Welfare Allocation in Lebanon” by Melanie Cammet and Sukriti Issar, (4) "Straddling Two
Continents and Beyond Three Worlds? The Case of Turkey's Welfare Regime" by
Martin Powell and Erdem Yoruk, (5) "Economic Reform, Social Welfare, and
Instability: Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia, 1983-2004" by Hamed el
Said, and (6) “Militarizing Welfare: Neo-liberalism and Jordanian policy” by
Anne Marie Baylouny. These works will be compared and contrasted to identify
points of agreement and contention within the literature.
Comparing the Middle East with Other
Regions of the World
Geof Wood and Ian Gough, in their
article “A Comparative Welfare Regime Approach to Global Social Policy,”
attempted to create a system for classifying all welfare states throughout the
world including countries in the Middle East (Gough and Wood, 1696–1712). According
to Wood and Gough, some of the earliest scholars who attempted to classify
welfare regimes, such as Gosta Esping-Andersen in his 1990 book The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism,
focused almost exclusively on welfare states in developed countries. Andersen grouped
wealthy nations into three types of welfare states: Social Democratic,
Conservative (Corporatist), and Liberal. While all three welfare regimes
differed in terms of the generosity of the benefits distributed to the
population, what they all shared in common is that they had industrialized economies,
they provided social safety nets for the poorest members of society, and they
had difficulty retrenching benefits once they were created due to electoral
competition. Furthermore, the creation of welfare states was partly a bottom-up
process where the mobilization of left wing movements like labor unions placed
pressure on states to redistribute wealth. While this model of the welfare
state fits in well with the developed world, it does not adequately describe
many of the welfare states found in the developing world. What about states
that are authoritarian and less developed economically? To address this
problem, Wood and Gough added two new categories that describe other types of
welfare states: informal-security regimes and insecurity regimes. In
informal-security regimes, authoritarian and semi-democratic states
asymmetrically distribute welfare benefits to groups that are part of the
regime coalition. Groups that are left out or only receive a meager amount of
benefits from the state are dependent on their extended families, remittances, or
charity networks for welfare services. In insecurity regimes, weak states lack
the capacity to distribute welfare benefits to the population at all and often
act in a predatory manner. Citizens living in these unstable regimes are often entirely
dependent on either family networks or NGO’s and IGO’s to receive assistance. In all three types of welfare states, the
capacity of the state and the regime type affect the distribution and extant of
welfare benefits, which in turn affects socio-economic indicators of
wellbeing.
To group countries into these three
broad regime types—social welfare regimes, informal-security regimes, and
insecurity regimes—Wood and Gough conducted a cluster analysis of 61 countries
with data from 2005. To operationalize the size, scope, and quality of the
welfare state, they gathered data on the amount of money that each government
spent on education and health as a percentage of GDP, the amount of inflow of
international aid and workers’ remittances, and national scores on the United
Nation’s Human Development Index, which is a composite measure of GDP per
capita, life expectancy, and the amount of years children spend in school. The
author than labeled each country in terms of whether they were high, medium, or
low on each of these measures of the welfare state. Finally, a qualitative
analysis was conducted of each region of the world to determine how to classify
different states. Western countries were grouped as having social welfare regimes,
and they were put into sub-groups such as Social Democratic, Conservative, and
Liberal. A few states in the Middle East such as Tunisia were also fitted into
this category as were some countries in Latin America and East Asia. However, most
states in the Middle East and South Asia as well as some countries in Latin
America and East Asia were grouped under the label informal security regime.
Finally, most states in Sub-Saharan Africa as well as a few states in the
Middle East like Gaza, Sudan, and Afghanistan were classified as being insecurity
regimes.
Wood and Gough’s classification
system aligns with many of the main themes found in the political science
literature on welfare states in the Middle East. For example, in Oliver
Schlumberger’s edited work Debating Arab Authoritarianism:
Dynamics and Durability in Nondemocratic Regimes, several writers analyzed the different ways in which authoritarian
leaders have utilized the asymmetrical distribution of welfare benefits to
ensure regime survival.[1]
The profits from oil rents and foreign aid have been distributed to regime
loyalists in the military, the police, the bureaucracy, and urban workers in
the formal sector. Furthermore, other
articles in Schlumberger’s book show how many citizens in the region who are
left out of the welfare state obtain financial support from Islamist charity
networks and relatives who work in oil rich Gulf countries.[2]
States in the region relied on these organizations and workers’ remittances to
provide welfare services and poverty relief when the state could not afford it.
While Wood and Gough’s classification
system provides an empirical basis for classifying welfare regimes in the
Middle East, there a number of methodological and theoretical problems. The
author’s measurement of public welfare spending, which focuses on education and
health, only captures two parts of the welfare state. Spending on transfer
payments such as social security, unemployment, and family benefits are not
part of the measurement. Stephen Haggard and Robert Kaufman, in the book Development, Democracy, and Welfare States,
show that countries that spend substantially on education do not necessarily
expend a lot of resources on transfer payments. This was true of developmental
states in East Asia (Haggard and Kaufman, 114). There is also a problem with
the classification system. One can make the argument that informal security
regimes constitute a type of welfare state as the government is distributing
substantial benefits to at least part of the population. However, labeling insecurity
regimes such Afghanistan as having a welfare state is more problematic since
the state is distributing very few resources to the public. Wood and Gough may
be theoretically stretching the concept of the welfare state with this concept.
Furthermore, Wood and Gough’s classification system cannot explain variation in
the size of welfare states between authoritarian countries that have similar
levels of economic development. Regime type and state capacity does not explain
all of the differences between welfare states in the developing world. Informal-security
regimes in the Middle East differ from one another in terms of the generosity
of welfare state benefits and the percentage of the population in which they
distribute resources. Why is this the
case?
Explaining Divergence in Middle Eastern
Welfare States
Ferdinand Eibl, in a dissertation
titled Social Dictatorships: The
Political Economy of the Welfare State in the Middle East and North Africa,
analyzes this problem and asks the following research question: why do
authoritarian states in the Middle East with similar levels of economic
development have differences in the extant and scope of the welfare benefits
they provide? (Eibl, 16) While choosing proper case studies for his analysis,
Eibl leaves out very wealth rentier states in the Arab Gulf and Libya, which
have a large amount of oil reserves, very small populations, and welfare
spending that is similar to developed countries (Eibl, 46-53). Furthermore,
weak states suffering from political instability—such as Yemen, Lebanon,
Palestine, Sudan, and Iraq—are also not included either due to their low levels
of economic development or their high levels of internal political violence. Leaving
out these outliers, Eibl conducted a small-n qualitative and quantitative study
on the following lower-middle income (GDP per capita of $3,000 to $10,000 per year)
countries: Tunisia, Iran, Algeria, Morocco, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt. While
some of these countries do have substantial amounts of oil, their populations
are too large for development to depend on fossil fuels alone. In the middle of
the twentieth century, all of these states experimented with import-substitution
industrialization, but their industrial sectors were hampered by clientelism. Large
businesses became dependent on state protection for survival, and economic
growth stagnated by the 1980’s (Richards, et al., 24-27). This means that state
resources for redistribution are more limited in comparison with developed
countries. Despite having similar levels of economic development, these states
have substantial differences in terms of the size of their welfare states.
To operationalize the size and scope
of the welfare states in each of his case studies, Eibl measured their total
spending on welfare as a percentage of government expenditures as well as spending
on health, education, and social security individually (Eibl, 54-95). While Tunisia,
Algeria and Iran (post 1979) have spent an average of 45 to 50 percent
approximately of public spending on health, education, and transfer payments
over the last half century, Egypt and Syria spent only 20 to 35 percent, and
Jordan, Morocco, and Iran (pre-1979) spent only 10 to 20 percent. Furthermore,
Tunisia, Algeria, Iran (post 1979) and Egypt provide welfare benefits more
broadly across the whole population whereas the other states do not. What
explains these differences?
Eibl created a complex theoretical
framework to answer this question. He claims that differences in these welfare
states are explained by the process of regime formation following independence from
colonial powers in the 1950’s (Eibl, 104-122). In situations where elites were
divided after independence—like in Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria—politicians
and military officers who were competing for power needed to make alliances
with social groups outside of the state and expand their governing coalition in
order to overcome their rivals. For example, Habib Bourgiba of Tunisia defeated
his political opponents by making an alliance with the country’s largest labor
union, the UGTT. Once Bourgiba came into power in 1956, he substantially
expanded the size of the welfare state to strengthen his base of support. He
did not create a democratic social pact but an authoritarian bargain where labor
unions and public sector workers traded economic benefits for political
freedom. However, in states where elites remained united and traditional
monarchies survived—such as in Morocco, Jordan, and Iran (pre 1979)—they ended
up with very weak welfare states since political leaders saw no need to expand
the size of the ruling coalition to stay in power. Only members of the
bureaucracy, the police, and the military benefited substantially from the
redistribution of resources in these states.
Furthermore, states that were
involved in foreign conflict after independence were less likely to invest in
welfare and more likely to spend it on the military (Eibl, 138-57). Egypt,
Jordan, and Syria were involved in several foreign wars with Israel from 1948
to 1973. Furthermore, Iran (post 1979) fought a long war with Iraq from 1980 to
1988. These conflicts substantially increased the power of the military within
the political system. To prevent coup d’états, authoritarian leaders distributed
substantial amounts of benefits to military officers and their families in the
form of salaries, healthcare, education, housing, and transport, and more money
was also spent on weapons and troops. The use of state resources to satisfy
military leaders to prevent a coup is called coup proofing by James Quinlivan
(Quinlivan, 1999). This trade off in favor of guns over butter led to less spending
on the welfare state. Regimes were able to justify less spending on welfare in
the name of national survival. A partial exception to this is Iran. Its large
natural resource endowment along with high oil prices in the early 1980’s
allowed the country to pay for an increase in military expenditures while simultaneously
expanding the welfare state.
Finally, states that have salient
social cleavages—such as Syria and Jordan—were less likely to create robust
welfare states after independence (Eibl, 122-137). A salient social cleavage is
when there is political tension between ethnic or religious groups.
Furthermore, the minority group either has to be demographically large enough
to challenge the power of the majority, or the minority actually rules over the
majority. In regimes with salient social cleavages, authoritarian leaders can
distribute less resources to a smaller percentage of the population and still
maintain their base of support. In other words, ethnic identities are manipulated
to divide and conquer. Syria is an excellent example of this phenomenon.
Following independence from France in 1945, Syria’s political stability was
disrupted by several wars with Israel and an extensive number of coups from the
1950’s to the 1960’s. By 1969, a military officer named Hafez al Assad, a
member of Syria’s Alawite minority, centralized his control over the country.
Welfare benefits and jobs in the military and bureaucracy were
disproportionally distributed to the Alawi, an ethnic group that only made up
ten percent of the population approximately, and the regime used its small but
strong base of support to suppress the Sunni Muslim majority. Meanwhile, countries with a more homogenous
Arab Sunni population such as Egypt tended to distribute welfare benefits more
broadly across the whole population.
After measuring these independent
and dependent variables, Eibl conducted a series of multivariate regression analyses. He concluded that a combination of elite divides, military conflict,
and social cleavages determined the size of welfare states after independence,
but once welfare states were created, they tended to remain remarkably stable
over the following half century. Political scientists call this path
dependency. Once the welfare regime was formed,
the ruling coalition blocked future changes to the welfare state.
While Eibl’s model has a lot of
explanatory power, there are some potential flaws with his theory. His model
involves only a top-down analysis of the welfare state. He discounts the role
that ideology and social movements played during the process of regime
formation in the 1950’s. In Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, and Syria after
independence in the 1950’s, new authoritarian regimes came into power following
a period of political protest and revolution (Hinnebush, 201-216). These protests
were led by a small but growing urban middle class consisting of white collar
professionals, blue collar factory workers, small shop owners, and political
Islamists. These groups called for the end of colonialism, the downfall of
pro-Western monarchies, economic development, and a more equitable distribution
of state resources. Even though army officers in some of these countries were able
to use this social unrest to overthrow pro-Western governments and establish
military dictatorships, they had to satisfy these mobilized actors if they
wanted to stay in power. Arab military dictators in this era such as Egypt’s
Gamal Abdel Nasser eventually came around to promoting socialist ideology to justify
authoritarian rule. These military dictators created republican political
systems with fixed elections, and they enacted socialist economic reforms
including land redistribution and the nationalization of large swaths of the
economy. Meanwhile, the monarchies that survived in Morocco, Jordan, and Iran
(pre-1979) successfully suppressed political dissent, made alliances with
Western powers, and promoted liberal economic policies (Richards, et al,
311-316). In other words, there were ideological differences between the
monarchies and military dictatorships that could partly explain the differences
in the distribution of welfare. Eibl ignores this historical narrative and
views political developments in the 1950’s as a game between small groups of
elites contesting for power while the masses remained passive.
Since Eibl’s analysis downplays the
impact of informal social movements on welfare provision, his model cannot
explain the development of welfare programs in countries like Lebanon and
Palestine. Melanie Cammett and Sukriti Issar, in the article “Bricks and Mortar
Clientelism: Sectarianism and the Logics of
Welfare Allocation in Lebanon,” analyze the impact of Islamist
political movements on the provision of welfare in Lebanon over the last two decades
(381-421). Since independence, the Lebanese state has been incredibly weak
partly due to the country’s extensive number of ethnic groups—nineteen in
total, including Christians, Sunni Muslims, and Shi’a Muslims—with none of the
ethnicities constituting a majority of the population. The constitution, which was established under
French colonial rule in 1926, gave disproportionate power to the Maronite
Christians, who only now constitute approximately a third of the population.
The constitution also significantly disenfranchised Shi’a Muslims. Following
independence in 1943, seats in parliament were allotted based on ethnicity with
the President always being a Christian and the Prime Minister always being a
Sunni. Needless to say, this system failed to keep the country politically stable.
The movement of the Palestinian Liberation Organization into Southern Lebanon
in 1970 and the rapid growth of the Shi’a population destabilized the country’s
delicate ethnic balance, and the country collapsed into a civil war form 1975
to 1991. Since then, the Lebanese state has been incredibly ineffective in
terms of providing services. Furthermore, its sovereignty has been abused by a
mix of regional and global hegemonic powers that have sought to manipulate the
country’s politics. Based on Eibl’s theoretical model, welfare provisions in
Lebanon should be very weak due to the countries intense social cleavages, lack
of natural resource endowments, and the persistent of military conflict.
However, the Lebanese population actually does relatively well in terms of GDP
per capita, life expectancy, and literacy in comparison with most of the
region. The reason why is that religious charity networks, NGO’s, and wealthy
businessmen, with the support of foreign aid, have stepped in to fill the gap
left by the state over the last half century.
The importance of these social movements in Lebanese welfare provision
contradicts Eibl’s theoretical framework.
According to Cammett and Issar, Islamist
social movements differ substantially from one another in terms of the type of services
they provide and to whom they provide those services. They theorize that the
socioeconomic and political context in which these groups formed and developed
will influence how they distribute resources. Cammet and Issar are interested
in the following research question: which Islamist charity networks in Lebanon
provide services to a more diverse section of the population and why? To answer
this question, they conducted a qualitative and quantitative analysis of two of
Lebanon’s largest Islamist organizations: Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran
and much of Lebanon’s Shi’a population, and the Future Movement, which is supported
by Saudi Arabia and much of the country’s Sunni population.
To analyze the impact these groups have on Lebanese
society, Cammet and Issar measured the amount of hospitals, schools, and
healthcare clinics built by both Hezbollah and the Future Movement in each of
Lebanon’s electoral districts. They also conducted surveys in each electoral
district to find out what percentage of each ethnic group was utilizing these
institutions. What they found was that the Future Movement was providing nearly
fifty percent of its services to non-Sunnis whereas Hezbollah was providing
only ten percent of its services to non-Shi’a. Based on an historical analysis
of the formation of these two groups, Cammet and Issar concluded that it was
the structure of the country’s political institutions that shaped the difference
in behavior. Lebanon’s constitution provides more incentives for Sunnis to
participate in electoral politics. The Future Movement had a greater desire to
build cross-cutting ties with other ethnic groups as a result. Furthermore,
Hezbollah came into existence in the middle of the Lebanese civil war in 1982.
They fought other militias in Lebanon as well as the Israeli military along
Lebanon’s southern border. While the Hariri family did have connections with
Sunni militants, these militias disbanded following the end of the civil war in
1991. However, Hezbollah continued fighting with the Israelis well after the
Lebanese civil war ended in 1991. They were the only militia not to disarm. Since
Hezbollah started as a militia and continues to act as one, they have required
greater ethnic solidarity within the group, and welfare benefits have been
provided mainly to members of the organization and the Shi’a community. Based
on Cammet and Issar’s analysis, the nature of Islamist charity networks is
affected by the institutional context in which they operate.
Of course, Lebanon is an extremely
unusual outlier. The generous welfare provisions provided by both Hezbollah and
the Future Movement has far more to do with international politics—specifically,
aid from Iran and Saudi Arabia—than it does with domestic politics in Lebanon. Lebanese
politics is also partially democratic and the power of the central government
is almost non-existent in certain parts of the country, which created more
space for civil society groups to operate. In most other states in the region,
Islamist organizations do not have nearly as much leeway or resources to
provide the same amount of services as Hezbollah or the Future Movement. The
only other part of the Middle East that shares some similarities with Lebanon in
terms of the welfare state dynamic is the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, where
Islamist groups such as Hamas and IGO’s such as the United Nations Relief and
Works Agency have provided a substantial amount of welfare services for
Palestinians in the absence of strong state actors (Robinson, 2004; and
Baylouny, 2008).
There are other interesting outliers
in the region that do not fit in well with Eibl’s theoretical model. Martin
Powell and Erdem Yoruk, in "Straddling Two Continents and Beyond Three
Worlds? The Case of Turkey's Welfare Regime," attempt to classify Turkey’s
welfare state, which they label as a hybrid between Europe and the Middle East
(Powell and Yoruk, 85-114). Unlike
Eibl’s case studies, Turkey was never colonized by the British or the French.
Turkey emerged from World War I as an independent state, and they were able to
promote industrialization through import-substitution earlier than other
countries in the region. The lack of easy access to oil or transport rents also
incentivized the Turkish government to invest in economic diversification. Given
its closer proximity to markets in Europe, the country was eventually able to
develop an export-based industrial economy. Furthermore, Turkey’s political
system promotes more equitable gender relations than the rest of the region due
to the legacy of the country’s founder Mustapha Kamal (Ataturk), who imposed
strict secular policies during the process of regime formation in the 1920’s.
While most of the Middle East can be characterized as neo-patrimonial due to
the dominance of men in the workplace and the unequal distribution of welfare
benefits to males, Turkey is an outlier in the region.
However, Turkey also has several
qualities that make the country similar to other states in the Middle East. For
one, the military has played a powerful rule in Turkish politics throughout the
country’s modern history. Political instability caused by a conflict with Greece
during the country’s war of independence in the early 1920’s, the nearly
continuous conflict with the country’s Kurdish minority in the East, and
conflict over the status of the island of Cyprus has increased the political
power of the military within the system. From the 1920’s to the 1990’s, the
armed forces saw itself as the guardian of Turkish nationalism and Ataturk’s
secular values, which needed to be protected from internal and external enemies
(Richards, et al, 291-92). Furthermore, the Turkish military has a significant
amount of resource capacity due to aid from the United States and their
membership in NATO. As a result, the Turkish military has frequently intervened
in the Turkish political system and civil society to suppress minority groups,
journalists, political Islamist movements, and communists. They overthrew
democratically elected governments in 1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997 (Richards, et
al, 316-17). While a welfare state was created and expanded beginning in the
1950’s, benefits were asymmetrically distributed to members of the military,
the bureaucracy, and urban workers in the formal sector.
However, following a democratic
transition in the early 2000’s, a more robust welfare state reminiscent of
regimes in Southern Europe was created. The center right Justice and Development party
won elections in 2002 partly on the basis of promising to expand welfare
benefits to people in rural areas. The Turkish people now almost all have
access to healthcare, education, and social security. While these developments
are positive, the power of Islamist social movements has grown within Turkish
society over the last decade to the detriment of gender equality. President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, a political Islamist, has reversed much of Ataturk’s secular
legacy in the last few years. Furthermore, Erdogan has also reversed the course
of Turkey’s democratic transition since 2011 and has been moving the country
back towards authoritarianism. How do we
classify this regime?
To classify Turkey, Powell and Yoruk
conducted a literature review of academic works in the political science
literature written in English and Turkish. These works include large and small
n studies, global and regional studies, and individual case studies. Most
scholars have labeled Turkey as being a corporatist social welfare regime like
states in Southern and Central Europe. Some of the literature has also compared
Turkey’s welfare state with that of Israel, which also has a lot in common with
states in Southern Europe. However, numerous scholars have labeled Turkey as
being closer to the informal security regimes of the Middle East region. In
other words, there is no consensus. Case studies like Turkey make classifying regimes
in the region a difficult task. We now also face the same problem of
classifying Tunisia given its recent democratic transition, its lack of oil
rents, and the unusually generous distribution of welfare benefits to the
population (Massoud, 726-39). Tunisians and Turks have almost universal access
to healthcare, social security, and education. Would we classify these states
as social welfare regimes? While the theoretical models produced by Eibl
explain a lot of the trends in the Middle East, states like Turkey and Lebanon
do not fit neatly into his framework for understanding welfare states in the
region.
Explaining Divergences in
Retrenchment in Middle Eastern Welfare States
Within the literature on welfare
states, there are also disagreements over the extant of retrenchment from the
1970’s to the 2000’s. Some scholars, such as Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman
in the book Development, Democracy, and Welfare States, argue that
authoritarian regimes are more likely to engage in retrenchment since they face
less democratic accountability (Haggard and Kaufman, 13-17). The great majority
of scholars who study welfare states in the Middle East argue that retrenchment
was extensive (El-Said and Harrigan, 99-121). However, Ferdinand Eibl claims
that retrenchment can be as problematic for authoritarian regimes as it is for
democracies. While authoritarian leaders do not fear losing elections, they are
afraid of the possibility of a coup d’état or social protest. In Eibl’s
comparison of welfare states, he shows that spending on welfare states in
Tunisia, Egypt, Iran, Algeria, Morocco, Jordan, and Syria was remarkably
consistent once regime formation took place in the 1950’s (Eibl, 186-97). While
it is true that population growth and economic stagnation from the 1970’s to
the 2000’s made it difficult for these authoritarian regimes to maintain
spending levels on welfare services, attempts by political leaders to cut bread
and energy subsidies were often met with protests and riots as was the case in Egypt
in 1977 and Jordan in 1989. Authoritarian leaders often backed away from
welfare state retrenchment as a result. Some minor cuts were made during this
era but the structure of welfare states were kept intact. Therefore, the theory
of path dependency also applies to authoritarian regimes.
According to Eibl, the only
exception to this rule was Iran, whose welfare regime changed radically as a
result of the Islamic revolution in 1979 (Eibl, 67-71, 87-90). In the three
decades prior to 1979, Iran was ruled by the monarch Reza Shah Pahlavi, who
received substantial military support from the Americans and the British.
Facing no military challenges to his rule, the Shah distributed resources
asymmetrically to members of his inner circle in the bureaucracy and military,
and he did not bother to create a larger regime coalition. Instead, he used
coercion to suppress challenges to his rule. On the eve of the 1979 revolution,
Iran had one of the weakest welfare system in the entire region despite having
a significant amount of oil wealth. However, after the 1979 revolution and the
rise of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini used the expansion of welfare
benefits to create a larger base of support among the Iranian population.
According to Mahmoud Meskoub, the post-revolutionary Iranian constitution
guaranteed access to health and education to the entire population (Meskoub,
227-52). While Iran has yet to fully realize this goal, significant
improvements have been made in terms of access to healthcare, education, and
transfer payments over the last three decades. Iran now has one of the most
generous welfare states in the region. This shows how path dependency can be
disrupted by a major political event like a revolution.
Even though Eibl’s research provides
a much needed critique of the literature on retrenchment in the region, his
analysis arguably underestimates the amount of cutbacks that were made. Part of
the reason for this is that his measurement of the welfare state does not take
into account the government’s role as a provider of employment nor does he
consider the total percentage of the economy controlled by the state. While the
Egyptian government did not make substantial cuts to welfare as a total
percentage of spending, they did privatize over half of all government assets
from 1974 to 2011 (Richards, et al., 248-52). The Egyptian government no longer
guaranteed employment. With the exception of the Arab Gulf, most other states
in the region also stopped guaranteeing employment as a right and embraced
neoliberal economic ideology. Furthermore, Eibl’s measurement of the welfare
state ignores the fact that populations were growing rapidly in the Middle East
starting in the 1970’s. Welfare state spending needed to grow if the quality of
education and medical services were to keep up. However, spending on welfare
stagnated. As a result, the quality of public welfare services declined, and
citizens who could afford it turned to the growing number of private schools
and hospitals to receive access to quality services (Richards, et al, 228-32).
The Middle East fell behind Latin America and East Asia in terms of the quality
of education and healthcare. By downplaying the degree of retrenchment, Eibl’s
theoretical model cannot explain why growing numbers of citizens became
increasingly dependent on Islamist charity networks and remittances for
survival or why groups like the Muslim Brotherhood grew in popularity.
Hamed El Said and Jane Harrigan, in
the article “Economic Reform, Social Welfare, and Instability: Jordan, Egypt,
Morocco, and Tunisia, 1983-2004,” have a far more negative view of
retrenchment’s effect on the welfare state (El-Said and Harrigan, 99-121). They
ask the following research question: what impact did IMF-structured reforms
have on welfare states and political stability in Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, and
Tunisia. Said and Harrigan measure the differences in retrenchment between
states by analyzing changes in spending on welfare and tax increases. They also
analyze the effect of retrenchment by measuring changes in poverty rates. In
addition, they conducted a historical analysis of each state. Starting in the
1970’s, all four of these countries were facing balance of payments problems
due to population growth and inefficiency in their industrial sectors
(Richards, et al, 57-65). Initially, these states tried to solve the problem by
borrowing money, but this was a short term solution. By the late 1980’s, all of
these states requested emergency assistance from the International Monetary
Fund. In order to obtain an IMF loan, governments were required to engage in structural
reform programs. These reforms were based on what academics call the Washington
Consensus. All four states liberalized
trade, decreased tariffs, privatized many state owned companies, decreased
bread and energy subsidies, and raised taxes.
The IMF encouraged spending cuts and tax increases so that states could
pay back their debt to their creditors and invest in long term development
through investments in infrastructure and human capital. States were encouraged
to cut transfer payments like subsidies on food and replace it with more
efficient means tested welfare targeting only the poorest in society.
On the one hand, part of El-Said’s
and Harrigan’s analysis conforms to Eibl’s conception of retrenchment. Attempts
to cut subsidies in these states were met with popular backlash in the way of
food riots and protests in the late 1970’s and 1980’s. As a result, reforms
were slow and periodically reversed. Furthermore, the geopolitical importance
of the Middle East meant that Western countries such as the United States
offered far more generous aid packages than other regions of the world.
Following the Camp David accords and the peace treaty with Israel, Egypt
received two billion dollars a year in aid from the United States. Furthermore,
Egypt also received a very favorable IMF deal in 1991, which included foreign
banks forgiving half of the country’s debt in exchange for the country’s
participation in the Gulf war. Jordan also received substantial aid after the
start of the Iraq war in 2003 as the country was taking in a lot of Iraqi refugees.
Nevertheless, this does not mean that no cuts were made or that taxes were not
increased at all. For example, Jordan slashed its food subsidy budget from 7%
to 1% of the total budget from 1989 to 1994, and the sales tax was raised from
7% to 13% from 1994 to 1999. From 1987 to 1992, the amount of people living in
poverty rose from 3% to 14% of the population. Morocco and Egypt experienced similar
problems during the 1990’s. In all of these countries, inflation rose rapidly
due to the floating of currencies, which led to a rise in prices for basic
necessities. Furthermore, the decline in the quality of public hospitals and
schools in Morocco, Egypt, and Jordan led to a greater reliance on the private
sector to provide these services. Almost
all elites now send their children to private schools in these three countries.
Many families grew increasingly
dependent on Islamist charity networks, which presented a direct challenge to
state legitimacy. Al-Islah in Morocco and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and
Jordan grew in popularity due to the social services they provided to people in
both rural and informal urban areas. These groups set up health care clinics
and provided goods such as food and school supplies to children. Islamist
organizations were receiving significant amounts of funding from patrons in conservative
Gulf countries such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia, who were using these groups to
increase their influence throughout the region. As a result, political Islamism
challenged the legitimacy of states in the region. While governments in Egypt,
Morocco, and Jordan occasionally allowed members of these groups to participate
in electoral politics, they never allowed them to win legislative majorities
and they periodically suppressed these movements through coercion when their
influence grew too large.
The one exception to these trends
was Tunisia. Unlike the other three states, Tunisia had more success developing
an export based industrial sector with a focus on textiles. The country had the
highest GDP per capita of the four states by the 1990’s. While the Tunisian
state did engage in IMF-based reforms in the late 1980’s and 1990’s, they did
not make significant cuts to the welfare state, and poverty did not
significantly increase like in the other three states. Furthermore, unlike
Egypt, Jordan, or Morocco, private schools and hospitals did not become a trend
in Tunisia. By the 2000’s, almost all citizens were still using public
institutions to receive these services. Since the state did not need Islamist
organizations to provide welfare services to the poor, the Tunisian government,
under the harsh rule of Ben Ali (1987-2011), had the country’s largest Islamist
organization, the Nahda party, expelled from the country. However, IMF based
reforms did lead to the privatization of much of the public sector and the
government no longer guaranteed employment. Growing levels of unemployment led
to an increase in economic inequality. This became a source of unrest among
college graduates who struggled to find jobs after graduation.
While El Said’s and Harrigan’s
analysis demonstrate that there was significant retrenchment in many Middle
East states, there are some problems with their theoretical model. They claim
that the International Monetary Fund’s proposed reforms led to growing rates of
poverty, but is this a fair charge against the IMF? It is possible that the
rate of poverty would have risen regardless of their influence. Growing
populations and economic stagnation meant governments in the region were going
to struggle with maintaining welfare spending even if the IMF never pressured
these governments to make spending cuts. States in the Middle East turned to
the IMF precisely because they could no longer obtain loans from foreign banks.
By blaming international institutions like the IMF for cuts to welfare spending
and economic problems, authoritarian governments in the region have found convenient
scape goats for redirecting the blame. What is not emphasized here is that economic
development was hampered by poor governance, authoritarianism, and clientelism
in the proceeding decades. However, one can also make the argument that the IMF
was not only interested in straightening out budgets and moving countries out
of a fiscal crisis but in promoting neoliberal economic ideology. It is
possible that the IMF may have made these economic crises worse than they would
have been. However, El Said and Harrigan never attempt to disentangle the
influence of the IMF from domestic political and economic factors that could
have caused the rise in poverty rates.
Regardless of who is to blame for
the negative consequences of retrenchment, spending cuts and privatization led
to political instability in these countries. Authoritarian regimes in the
region began to rely more heavily on the armed forces and the police to protect
their positions of power. Consequently, the welfare benefits for the military
and police in these countries actually increased even while the welfare
expenditures for other groups declined. Anne
Marie Baylouny, in the article “Militarizing Welfare: Neo-liberalism and
Jordanian policy,” conducted a qualitative analysis of changes to Jordan’s
welfare state from the 1980’s to the 2000’s (Baylouny, 2008). In the 1950’s,
Jordan created a very weak welfare regime that provided asymmetrical benefits
to the police, military, and bureaucracy. Government positions were staffed by members
of tribes from the East Bank of the Jordan River that were loyal to the monarchy.
Palestinian refugees, who were from the West Bank and consisted of
approximately half of the Jordanian population after 1967, received very few
benefits from the Jordanian government and were dependent on United Nations
relief aid for education and healthcare. Palestinians were often barred from
various public sector jobs in spite of the fact that they were better educated,
more urban, and more entrepreneurial. East Bankers remained loyal to the
monarch due to the benefits that were provided. However, problems with
government debt in the 1980’s led to retrenchment. After the start of IMF
restructuring program in 1989, the state cut benefits and jobs in the public
sector for most East Bankers, which led to political unrest. As Islamist
movements like the Muslim Brotherhood grew in popularity, the Jordanian
government began investing more in its military to suppress growing opposition
to the state. While spending on education, healthcare and transfer payments
declined as a percentage of GDP, spending on the military rose. Means tested
welfare and charity networks were not enough to prevent poverty rates from
increasing substantially. Similar trends took place in other states in the Middle
East in the decades prior to the Arab Spring.
Conclusion
A lot of work needs to be done to
improve our theoretical understanding of welfare states in the Middle East.
There are many methodological and theoretical problems in much of the
literature. For example, Baylouny’s article provides relevant information on
the retrenchment of Jordan’s welfare state, but his methodology is purely
descriptive in nature and does not provide a theoretical framework for understanding
retrenchment. Too many journal articles that discuss the topic of welfare
states in the Middle East lack theoretical sophistication. Claims are often
made about causality without properly conceptualizing and operationalizing
terms or controlling for confounding variables although Ferdinand Eibl’s
dissertation is an exception to the rule. More work needs to be done to
standardize data collection, construct theoretical models and test them using
multivariate regression analyses. Furthermore, there is considerable gap in the
literature on the issue of retrenchment in the Middle East. To the best of my
knowledge, there are no comparative works that explain why certain types of welfare
programs are more likely to be retrenched than others in Middle Eastern states.
How well would Paul Piersen’s model of welfare state retrenchment apply in an
authoritarian setting (Piersen, 13-26)? In light of the recent wave of
political unrest that has affected the Middle East, it is critical that we gain
a better understanding of welfare states and retrenchment in the region.
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[1]
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in Nondemocratic Regimes, edited by Oliver Schlumberger. Stanford
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[2]
Wegner, Eva. "Islamist Inclusion
and Regime Persistence: The Moroccan Win-Win Situation," ibid, 75-89;
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