The Political Economy of the Post-Arab Spring

1 Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. XXXVIII, No.3, Spring 2015 The Political Economy of the Post-Arab Spring Robert Looney* Introduction As of early 2015, it has been slightly over four years since the Arab Spring movement began sweeping the MENA region. While predictions of Middle East events have always been difficult,1 this has been especially the case with regard to events associated with the Arab Spring and its aftermath. A sampling of predictions show that many were way wide of the mark2 —the monarchies would be easily overthrown, democracy would be finally established throughout the region, economic growth would become more inclusive, and new social pacts between the surviving autocratic regimes would replace those that had become unsustainable. One reason for these failed predictions for the region as a whole is that often they do not take into account the region’s diverse political/socioeconomic settings. One solution has been to divide countries into more homogenous groupings. From an economic perspective MENA countries are often divided into two broad groupings—oil exporters, and oil importers, with each setting possessing its one dynamic3 . Political scientists on the other hand feel more comfortable focusing on regime type—democracy, or autocratic to provide insights as to the critical forces driving events. *Robert Looney, Ph.D.distinguished professor, Naval PostGraduate school in Monterey, CA. He has written twenty books on various aspects of development together with articles appearing in a number of scholarly journals, he edited the Handbook of Emerging Economics, published in 2014 by Routledge International Handbooks . 1 F. Gregory Gause II, “Why Middle East Studies Missed the Arab Spring: The Myth of Authoritarian Stability,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2011 http://www.foreignaffairs.com/ articles/67932/f-gregory-gause-iii/why-middle-east-studies-missed-the-arab-spring 2 Kevin Connolly, “Arab Spring: 10 Unpredicted Outcomes,” BBC News: Middle East, December 12, 2013. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-25212247 3 The approach taken by the International Monetary Fund in its Regional Economic Outlook Series. Cf IMF, Learning to Live With Cheaper Oil Amid Weaker Demand, January 2015. http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/reo/2015/mcd/eng/mreo0115.htm 2 A second, and related, reason that may account for the rash of poor predictions of Arab Spring outcomes is the tendency to focus either on the political4 or economic forces5 playing out. For many observers, the secular decline in governance6 and the increase in corruption, crony capitalism,7 together with the promise of democracy was seen as the driving force in the uprisings. Others8 have stressed that economic issues were fundamentally more important—lack of integration into the global economy9 , high unemployment, inability to undertake comprehensive economic reforms,10 underdevelopment of private sector activity11 , failure to develop a competitive manufacturing sector12 , and the resulting widening income and wealth inequalities and the failure to converge13 with the more advanced counties all created the conditions for the uprisings, and go a long way in explaining subsequent developments. A complete list of forces at work prior and after 2011 are beyond the scope of this paper. However, the left portion of Figure 1 summarizes the more important ones. As the following sections show, a blending of the economic and political explanations into a political economy approach provides a useful framework for tracking, understanding and assessing events in the region. 4 Cf. Mark Lynch ed., The Arab Uprisings Explained: The New Contentious Politics in the Middle East, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), and Marc Lynch, The Arab Uprising: The Unfinished Revolutions of the Middle East, (New York Public Affairs Press, 2013). 5 Ania Thiemann, The Arab Spring: The Economic Causes Underlying the Crisis, (Paris: OECD, December 2011) 6 Robert Looney, “Governance-Constrained Growth in the MENA Region,” in Abbas Kadhim ed., Governance in the Middle East and North Africa: A Handbook, (London: Routledge, 2013). 7 Antonio Nucifora, Erik Churchill and Bob Rijkers, “Cronyism, Corruption, and the Arab Spring: The Case of Tunisia” in Index of Economic Freedom 2015 (Washington: Heritage Foundation, 2015). http://www.heritage.org/index/book/chapter-4 8 Mohsin Khan, The Economic Consequences of the Arab Spring, The Atlantic Council, February 2014...