Andrew G. Mandelbaum on 05 May 2007
Theres a relatively new weekly called the Democracy Digest that Michael Allen is editing for the Transatlantic Democracy Network. Its well worth checking out. This weeks focus is Morocco and its faux process of democratization; a very good overview of the situation there for the non-Morocco expert. I wanted to share a couple of brief comments, but before I do, Id like to point out that Michael Allen is owner of one of the Georgetown Democracy Studies Programs possible tee shirt quotations. At a conference on Tom Melia’s “Democracy Bureaucracy”, Allen said that democracy promotion is the labor of Sisyphus.Indeed, Michael, as we finish up our final papers, the Democracy Studies students share your sentiments.
The Morocco article highlights the existence of red lines that serve to thwart democratization as well as the makhzen, which, in my own conception, is an elaborate system of rules, procedures, and elites that assist the king to execute the royal agenda. Guilain Denoeux, in an article cited in the Democracy Digest piece, talks of the systematic corruption and implicit prohibition of the term corruption that was still in place by the mid-1990s. In his article Islam and the State, Mohammed Tozy writes: …there appears to be a common desire among the parties to reshape the entire institutional space where politico-reloigious competition takes place. A sort of complicity has arisen between the different actors in order to promote the raison detat and to assure control of the civil society.
All this funny stuff is not random. Rather, its indicative of an informal agreement between king and subjects that establishes appropriate vernacular and decorum for the kingdom’s political actors. This social contract was, in the past, represented in the baya, the traditional oath of allegiance, which dons the king “sacred legitimacy.” Tozy said as much in his definition of this “sacred pact…a place in the hierarchy of norms and political actors, a capacity for a transhistorical symbolism, a standard by which laws are made or undone.” The pervasiveness of this informal sector really depletes the formal political system of legitimate authority. As a result, elected officials cannot govern effectively and the king retains all power - which is why I claim “Morocco’s not Democratizing.”
Despite this talk of “sacred authority,” its important not to give the king too much credit for his role as Amir al-Mouminin (Commander of the Faithful). Mohammed VI is hardly an alim (religious scholar), and everone knows it. Abdeslam Maghraoui has convinced me that the baya has become little more than a ceremony bent on convincing the masses that important people bow down to the king so they should too. The king does not possess experiential capital; just the illusion of legitimacy.
The Democratic Digest article suggests that the monarch’s “privileged religious status also acts as a red line against the contagion of radical Islam.” But I’m not so sure that this is the case. Radical Islam is pervasive and the lack of Islamist extremism is, I think, more due to the work of the security services (translation: repression), the existence of opportunities for extremism abroad, and the inclusion of Islamists into the political system.
None of these steps are long term solutions to Islamist extremism; they’re really just buying time. The first two points are fairly self-explanatory, so I’ll once again (see my last post) raise the participation issue. Bringing Islamists into the political system is a good thing, please don’t get me wrong. But electoral politics in autocratic polities do not allow for the full scale of moderating procedures and habits present in democratic systems. If Islamists cannot obtain their goals via the political system, then they are eventually going to decide that participation ain’t worth it. Furthermore, if the supporters of the PJD, the “Islamist” party, do not perceive that they are gaining anything, they will feel marginalized and, most likely, shift their support to more subversive elements. Ill sketch this thought out in more detail in sha’ allah, but that’s just a little food for thought until I finish my finals.
