5 - Bully praetorian states

Summary

Egypt, Tunisia, and the area controlled by the Palestinian Authority are not ruled from bunkers by elites beholden to clans, tribes, or other traditional social formations. In the case of Egypt and Tunisia, and the prospective Palestinian state, the ruling elites are at once both more narrowly and broadly based. Their rule rests almost exclusively on the institutional power of the military/security/party apparatus, but because these elites are not drawn from a clearly identified social formation, they are at least not unrepresentative of their relatively homogeneous political communities. Since the state provides the primary underpinning for these regimes, they have relatively little incentive to build and maintain ruling coalitions based in their respective political societies. The rulers of each of them seem content to restrict their extra-state coalition-building to the placation of rural and traditional elites. Rent-seeking arrangements with crony capitalists are more for the purposes of serving state-based patronage networks than for broadening ruling coalitions.

The differences between bunker and bully praetorian republics, other than that of the key issue of the lack of autonomy of the bunker states from social formations, are not great. The leaders of Egypt and Tunisia, having not been forced to forge societal as opposed to state-based coalitions to come to or maintain their power, lack the political legitimacy that flows, as Max Weber described, from tradition, charisma, or rational-legal procedures.