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. Because 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 extrastate 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 the key issue of the lack of autonomy of the bunker states from social formations, are not great. The leaders of Egypt and Tunisia, not having 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. Yasser Arafat used a combination of his coercive capacity based in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and support from Israel and the United States, as well as political alliances on the ground in the West Bank and Gaza, to assert control over Palestine. By virtue of having built those alliances and because of his historical role as state builder, Arafat personally enjoyed considerable legitimacy, but after his death in 2005, the Palestinian “state” lost much of its legitimacy. Fatah, the party he had founded, was attempting in 2010 to restore that legitimacy, but it also required credible progress toward a two-state solution. Meanwhile Iran, discussed in Chapter 7, was apparently losing any semblance of democratic legitimacy and relying ever more on police and paramilitary power like the other bully praetorians.