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The rise and decline of the populist social contract in the Arab world

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  • Hinnebusch, Raymond

Abstract

The wave of populist authoritarian republics (PA) established in the Arab world in the 1950s–1960s legitimized themselves by a combination of nationalism, developmentalism and populism. Their reneging on this contract goes far to explaining the Arab Uprisings half a century later. PA regimes, with initially little popular support, needed, as part of their struggle to consolidate power at the expense of the old oligarchy and other rivals, to incorporate the middle and lower classes into a cross-class coalition. They developed a tacit populist social contract in which their putative constituencies were offered social-economic benefits in return for political support; this accorded with the inherited moral economy of the region in which government legitimacy was conditional on its delivery of socio-economic equity and justice. Additionally, however, authoritarian populism was made possible by developments at the global level such as bi-polarity, which enabled political protection and economic assistance from the Soviet bloc, and the developmentalist ideology that corresponded with the Keynesian era of global economic expansion in which the power of finance capital was balanced by labour and the regulatory state. However, by the eighties, Keysianism had been superseded by neo-liberalism, driven by the restoration of the global dominance of chiefly Anglo-American finance capital. This global turn was paralleled by the exhaustion of the statist-populist development model in MENA. The demands made on MENA governments by international financial institutions for privatization were used by regime elites to foster crony capitalism as they and their cronies acquired public sector assets; in parallel pressures for structural adjustment legitimized enforcing austerity on the masses: in essence regimes started to renege on the populist social contract. The Arab Uprising was a direct consequence of this. Evidence for this claim is adduced from public opinion polling, the timing of the uprising and the especial vulnerability of the region’s republics to the uprising.

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  • Hinnebusch, Raymond, 2020. "The rise and decline of the populist social contract in the Arab world," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 129(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:129:y:2020:i:c:s0305750x19303092
    DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2019.104661
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    3. Auktor, Georgeta Vidican & Loewe, Markus, 2021. "Subsidy reforms in the Middle East and North Africa: Strategic options and their consequences for the social contract," IDOS Discussion Papers 12/2021, German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS).
    4. Ragui Assaad & Caroline Krafft & Colette Salemi, 2023. "Socioeconomic Status and the Changing Nature of School-to-Work Transitions in Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia," ILR Review, Cornell University, ILR School, vol. 76(4), pages 697-723, August.
    5. Georgeta Vidican Auktor & Markus Loewe, 2022. "Subsidy Reform and the Transformation of Social Contracts: The Cases of Egypt, Iran and Morocco," Social Sciences, MDPI, vol. 11(2), pages 1-22, February.
    6. Ibrahim, Solava, 2021. "The dynamics of the Egyptian social contract: How the political changes affected the poor," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 138(C).
    7. Gasmi, Farid & Kouakou, Dorgyles & Noumba Um, Paul & Rojas Milla, Pedro, 2023. "An empirical analysis of the social contract in the MENA region and the role of digitalization in its transformation," TSE Working Papers 23-1423, Toulouse School of Economics (TSE).
    8. Sobhy, Hania, 2021. "The Lived Social Contract in Schools: From protection to the production of hegemony," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 137(C).
    9. Loewe, Markus & Zintl, Tina & Houdret, Annabelle, 2021. "The social contract as a tool of analysis: Introduction to the special issue on “Framing the evolution of new social contracts in Middle Eastern and North African countries”," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 145(C).

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