Well. Good evening, everyone, and welcome to this evening's event.
Very pleased to have you here this evening. Those of you who've been coming quite regularly to the events at the Middle East
Centre this time will know that Tuesdays we've been using to invite distinguished
speakers and commentators on the Middle East and North African region to talk
about some of the important new books that have been coming out in the region.
We've been having authors in this evening.
We have another very distinguished and very respected writer and commentator on Middle East and North African region, particularly North Africa.
Hisham Allawi is a regular contributor to the media in Europe, the US and the Arab world,
including the New York Times, the BBC, Le Monde, and most notably Le Monde Diplomatique.
And in fact, just recently it was just this year,
I think his contributions to the Le Monde Diplomatique were collated into a volume entitled 25 years 25 Ideas.
I thoroughly recommend it having myself published in both English and French.
His previous books include John Elgin, Prince Barney Diary of a Banished Prince, which recounted his upbringing and experiences as a militiaman.
Abdallah Allawi in the royal household in Morocco.
A graduate of Princeton and Stanford universities in the US.
He went on to help found research institutes at both universities, the Institute for Trans Regional Study of a contemporary Middle East,
North Africa and Central Asia at Princeton, and then the Arab Reform and Democracy Research Program at Stanford University.
He also founded his own foundation, the Moody Hisham Foundation, to foster research in social sciences in the Maghreb and the Middle East.
Now, when he decided to return to academia in 2014,
we were particularly delighted that he chose to come to this university and this college to study his doctorate.
For his thesis. He decided to focus away from his native Morocco and look at two other countries in North Africa, specifically Tunisia and Egypt,
as the first two countries with experience with popular eruptions and upheavals would swiftly become known as the Arab Spring or the Arab uprisings.
Egypt and Tunisia attracted particular attention, especially as trajectories.
Their trajectories progressively diverged, with Tunisia consolidating.
Certainly for a short while, a democratic system, while Egypt reverted back into dictatorship.
Now quite a lot has been written about both countries experiences and even comparatively.
But this divergence, Dr. Allawi adopted quite an insightful and novel approach to understanding what exactly had happened
in both countries by applying a framework that was developed outside of the of the Arab world.
The idea of proactive democracy has thus been used to explain and analyse democratic transitions and indeed democratic failures elsewhere,
most prominently in Latin America, but really hadn't been applied to the Middle East and North Africa.
And this changed with Dr. Allawi's doctoral thesis, his dphil thesis,
and resulted the result was really quite enlightening and not only produced an excellent Ph.D.,
but also now a book published by St Anthony's Press in the Palgrave Macmillan series entitled Hacked Democracy in the Middle East,
Tunisia and Egypt in Comparative Perspective. And we are therefore delighted to have Hisham Allawi with us here this evening.
Thank you very much. Thank you, Professor Willis, for this very generous introduction.
You were delighted to have me here. I was honoured to be here.
And I'm extremely grateful to all the colleagues, the student body at St Anthony's and the community at large,
as well as to many of the faculty who helped me and who guided me through this endeavour,
notably yourself and of course, Professor Rogan, whose presence here, whose advice was also very valuable to me.
45 minutes we have. So I am going to walk you through at a brisk pace with the pace of the gunnery sergeant.
We'll try to do within 45 minutes, because this is really very dense.
So as you see, this is a copy, the cover of the book and ultimately over in terms of the substance of the debate
is when the prospects of of democracy and in the Maghreb and in the region,
regretfully, the democracy debate is strictly seen through the Islam democracy nexus in the West,
and that's due to this Orientalism or Oriental trope which dominates the debate and
which basically dampens all the other theses that can emerge on this discussion.
And so briefly, I will not read every bullet point because they are up there.
And for the purposes of saving time, I will just talk briefly about you and allow enough time for you to read through the the bullet points.
So Islam and democracy debate is historically seen through two angles.
The first are the sceptics and they are the example or the example by is Bernard Lewis that argues that Islam is allergic to secularism.
In fact, completely averse to secularism and democratisation requires a separation of politics from religion.
So as such, there cannot be any democracy until this issue is resolved.
On the contrary, others, of course, in its in its more extreme view, this thesis will contend that,
in fact, sometimes you need military intervention to get the region out of it backwardness.
And it's not an accident that Bernard Lewis was, in fact, the the fulcrum,
the intellectual fulcrum around which the intervention in Iraq happened in 2003,
as he was then a and adviser to both the Pentagon and the White House.
Now, on the other side of the spectrum, you have others that say this is reductionism and they are optimists at the core.
And I just chose a name here, arbitrary name. But there are others that are that belong to the category.
And as such, a DNA, for example, argues that we can reinterpret Islamic tradition and scripture to produce liberal outcomes.
In a sense, what this school of thought or what this this category calls for is essentially going back to Scripture,
looking at Scripture carefully, looking at the Hadith, giving more place and a more way to the Hadith,
and looking also at the the prophetic example of the life of the Prophet,
in which one can extract ethical and the whole dimension of ethics, which is absent from this debate.
I'd like to clarify one important points about Islamic history,
and that it is very hard to overlap who is very hard to to transpose the Western
experience to the MENA region for the simple reason that secularism never emerged
in the region until basically until the more direct contact to the protectorates
and colonialism with the West and after the Western domination of the region,
then we begin to see questions of secularism emerge for the simple reason that the state monopolised the role as sole interpreter of the religion,
whereas before you had basically all of society,
whether in where I'm in it, which is that aspect of life which deals with institutions and societal relations and the private sphere,
which has to do with the worship, if you will, the transcendental link with God.
These two dimensions were entirely up to the private person or to groups or to the state,
provided that groups and individuals respected the precepts of Islam and hence it was up to the Ulama to regulate that space.
It was not a state, it was a regulated state.
And who could intervene on those two spectrum? And hence the problem of secularism or secularisation never posed itself in the same way in our region.
So. As a result of that, I you know, I propose a new framework as as Professor Willis suggested, and that's bringing politics before it.
Theology. That's my position.
In other words, as president, you framed the Islam democracy nexus is a theological question and that may take generations to resolve.
And theological contestations disputation is about whether Islam is compatible to democracy or not is a matter that can take literally,
you know, centuries to resolve itself. And even then they may not these issues may not resolve themselves.
So in the real world scenarios, regardless of interpretations about Islam, politics comes to the forefront.
And if anything, the Arab Spring is another example by itself, because the Arab Spring erupted into into the political sphere unannounced.
And basically it has to the problem politics is here.
What do we do? Every time there is a demonstration or every time there's a lot to be enacted by a new parliament,
we're going to go back into these debates, politics.
The fluidity of politics cannot accommodate this reality which is present and which has forced itself upon the lives of people.
Rather, people have forced it on the on society.
So what is the basic element or the elements to our present?
In the Arab Spring style revolutions, the austere regime suffers popular breakdown.
We see that in Tunisia and we've seen that in Egypt. But these regimes, as we have learned, never go away.
They stay in the background and they lurk in the background.
In the case of Egypt, they've stayed very robustly in the form of state institutions and of state organisations.
But in the case of Tunisia, they've known, you know, a kind of shock and awe experience.
So they've kind of destabilised. But, you know, as soon as they're given the occasion, they come back to the forefront to play a role in politics.
But in that interim, what this is my my major thesis and it's an assumption and I know some would challenge me on that is the following.
In the MENA region, during such transitions,
two political forces will compete for power and that Islamists and secularists and each has an incompatible vision for the political order.
Secularists. No place for religion in the future.
A new regime. While Islamists see that the Hakimi of God, that is God's sovereignty, must be the central axis around which politics organises.
I contend that this is the salient cleavage in all these societies.
This is the same cleavage that will rise to the surface no matter what happens.
That's again, an assumption I have in the study. And of course,
it can be challenged and we will we will discuss it and see its its its validity and we'll put it to the test as we go along in our discussion.
So the for the process banana Tunisia and the and the post-Mubarak regime furnished to great studies.
Why? Because they happened at the same time. One is a case that succeeded relatively, although now Tunisia is doing some backsliding by two.
But I will briefly discuss why, for me,
this does not invalidate the fact that it still succeeded as an electoral democracy, not a consolidated democracy.
And on the other hand, is the post-Mubarak regime, which, as you all know, has known an interruption by the military.
The military have ceased or have basically stepped in to put a halt to the experiment.
So I begin by introducing this new term about that to democracy.
And my acting or pets are essentially ways or refer to bargaining mode bargaining arrangements
that have proliferated in the eighties and nineties in the third wave of democratisation.
What Huntington, Samuel Huntington calls the third wave of democratisation in the eighties and nineties,
essentially in Latin America and some places in Asia,
a few countries like maybe South Korea and in the southern Mediterranean, talking essentially about Portugal, Greece and Italy, also Spain.
And that negotiated bargaining or that way of approaching democratisation has been very prevailing during that time.
And it refers to essentially bargains between ferocious rivals.
And here I say to myself, and this is the big leap, this is the contribution of this book,
that after all, this is not something we can apply only to the divide left and right.
We can apply it to the divide, secularists and Islamists, even if if the terms of the debate are not about economics, but they are about ideas,
norms that are deeply held by the actors, i.e. wanting religion outside of politics like for secularists,
or wanting religion at the heart of politics like for Islamists.
So I think maybe there's something to look at there. Maybe the fact that have worked in Latin American can apply to Islamists and secularists.
And once these pacts start or kick in, then the whole idea,
as I see in my last bullet point of institutions that come out and organisations that come out and the nature of the
new regime that takes shape is in fact subsidiary to the pact which begins which inaugurates the political process.
Note a very important term here and maybe that term is about is toleration.
Now toleration refers to agreeing on laws.
It's not tolerance. Tolerance is the acceptance of other the acceptance that there may be another point of view that
can come afterwards toleration in accepting our rules that we're going to apply to all of us.
So again, keep in mind for your own use,
the distinction between between the two here are some very important historical that the democracies
I only want to show three because I think they're emblematic of the eighties and the sixties.
The what is the first on your left up above is the pact between Nelson Mandela and Frederik de Klerk.
It's in 1994 and it is between a basically repressed population of blacks and the supremacist movement on the other side,
which is basically exercise hegemony over the rest of society.
But still behind that is still the distinction between left and right,
because those holding most of the resources of the countries were then the white population.
And the black population, of course, has known a lot of prejudice, economic prejudice.
Then you have the Pinochet pact with the opposition.
It happened in 1979. I use that for a simple reason because it is the only case I, I know of where it's not the pact, where it's a it's a referendum,
the referendum of 1979 that inaugurated and the transition after the after Pinochet lost that referendum, which he thought he would win.
Then they began bargaining for the future of the transition.
And of course, you have the mother of all pacts here is in 1975, and you have Franco and Juan Carlos in the picture.
That is a transition that has many comprising elements to it.
One is left and right divide. One is also the heart of Europe is very important and also the restoration of the monarchy.
This is not the monarchy conducting the pact, but in fact the monarchy coming resurrected from that is the case of restoration.
There are others we could have gone for, but this is not about that.
Very briefly, just to to remind those of you who know who know about this theory and just to introduce those who don't,
the essential dynamics here is between the regime and the opposition and those that begin negotiations are essentially the left wing of the right,
the left wing, because they are closer to the to the right wing of the opposition.
And they are the soft liners on the regime that feel that that that regime has no future, that essentially it's important to see beyond.
The regime is to negotiate and they want an exit out.
And you have the moderates in the opposition who are not diehard militants and who would like to give certain guarantees and assurances
to the regime so it can exit from the scene and and everybody can get started with the business of building the new the new order.
If this were to bring us back to the old slide before them.
Frederik de Klerk there would be no place for Pik Botha in this scheme of things because he was simply just too radical in the same way.
There would be a place for Walter Sisulu who had the place.
But no matter how respected and how established maybe somebody like Stephen Biko was in the beginning of the pact in South Africa,
he would maybe wouldn't have had a place in the at the table had you lived.
You, of course, died in 1978, I think. So how do past work again?
Remember it. We'll come back to this. The pacts are between Islamists and secularists.
Now, we're now past the third wave where some would say we're still in the third wave, but we're not in the Latin American or African context.
We're now 20 years ahead and we've resurrected with the exhumed respected theory framework, and we are now putting it to the test.
So keep in mind, as the first bullet point says, Islamists and secularists are in the background.
So how do these pact work? For that to succeed, you need three conditions.
You need ideological polarisation.
That is, you need to have two actors on on both sides and occupy diametrically opposed poles in the spectrum of ideology.
And their conflict is intractable. They just cannot resolve this conflict.
It's just they are too opposed. But again, ideological polarisation is got to be acute.
It cannot be severe. If it's severe, then the situation is unresolved and it cannot be resolved.
And it's the case of Algeria between the office and the military that led to the bloody decade or the decade of civil war.
Another example is Guatemala, where simply they were.
The polarisation was not only acute but severe.
And then you have parity of power. The more the more equal footing these actors are on the basis of of power, the more there is,
the more there's an encouragement, the more they are induced to begin the packing process.
And then there's normative dissension. Normative dissension is a very difficult term, but I'll try to summarise.
We may agree all that we want a democracy, but we may have disagreements.
Shall we take federalism instead of a unitary state?
Shall we adopt a proportional representation instead of a winner past the post?
Shall we discuss, you know, decentralisation rather than decentralisation?
These are examples of normative dissension, and they can be really nagging problems.
They can be so, so powerful that they can that their shadow can loom heavily on a transition.
And then you can you basically have a stalemate and that that induces people to negotiate.
Paradoxically, the more present these three parameters are in combination or independently,
the more encouraged you are, and the more the necessity to enter into a pattern, into a pact, a transition.
So the theory goes, of course, these are conditions for fact.
You know, beyond this and we'll talk about this, there's structural parameters that have to do with the country in particular.
Does the country have high levels of education? Education? Is the economy low performing?
Does it have distributive functions? And are there inequalities?
Is the army in the barracks or is it present in public life?
Those are all background conditions which facilitate the transition to a transition,
but they are not the conditions for pact with the pact to begin with.
These are the patterns. So the theory goes once you begin your pact, once you resolve this,
then people after are habituated and start to negotiate to go about the business of conducting politics.
You conduct politics in a normal day to day life,
and you're habituated to the fact that every five years in the month of June or September, you need to have an election.
If you're going to change something substantial about the constitution, you need a referendum.
That's what I mean by habituation. So.
The critical issue here about about parking conditions.
Polarisation, apparently, and normative division are necessary to create the deadlock between Islamists and secularists.
That's what I said before. And this is the critical juncture that forces and rivals to recognise the logic of that.
No. When you read through this slide, I'd like you to begin with the second bullet point.
So. You can ask, you can say, well, you know, if that thing if the texting trends anthology framework has ceased to exist,
will not cease to exist, but has taken a backseat after the nineties, then where hasn't gone?
Where has it gone? Why can't we not talk?
Why can't we not apply the other frameworks of trans ontology like coloured revolution to this area of the world, to the region?
Why do we have to go all the way back to back? Sure you're missing something here.
And my and my replica to that is as follows colour coloured revolutions which have basically checkered,
which have basically spread like wildfire through Eastern Europe.
They had a logic and the logic was the following.
Basically, the regime in place was a single party regime that got all its all its support from Moscow.
And after the Soviet Union collapsed, essentially it was left orphaned with no with no help.
So all these regimes, all of these simply found themselves bankrupt, both politically and economically.
There was no reason to act because these regimes were bankrupt.
They had basically to exit the scene and people came up en masse against them in the street.
And that's what they called colour revolutions now.
Many of these regimes of regime release did manage to organise themselves in another party called Renew.
Or you could. They came up with fancy names, but they were all about old communist academies and organised themselves and decided
to run the state in a different way using liberalised economies and so forth.
But within the framework of another regime and they basically dominated politics.
Now these regimes tried to dominate politics by creating a competitive authoritarian regime, that is, regimes that allow for elections to happen.
But the playing field is so much slanted in favour of the dominating party that that party state of politics for maybe five parliamentary cycles,
even three five cats, Romania, Bulgaria, all those countries of late or late comercio collapse of the communist regime.
Competitive authoritarianism. And then, after comparative materialism, you have a democracy.
Now, why is that not possible in the Arab world? I say it's not possible because regimes in the region are hegemonic.
They will never allow and they do not allow for a critical mass of freedom in the society.
Freedom is not democracy. You can have democracy.
Either you have it or you don't. But you can have regimes that have on a spectrum have different shades of liberty, different indexes of liberty.
And the more a country is free, the more you have the prospect of a competitive authoritarianism.
So that leading to democracy is not the case of hegemonic autocracy.
There is no genuine competition. No. That doesn't mean, theoretically, that these regimes are the one that we see now that are authoritarian,
cannot take the competitive authoritarian route.
It's just empirically they don't do it.
Now, we can debate, you know,
for a long time if it makes more sense or not to take that route of competitive authoritarianism, then to lose everything.
The point is, is that empirically, statistically, they don't do it.
And this is an empirical observation that I basically collected and registered and built upon my thesis.
Why comparative authoritarianism.
Here is the legacy of the Cold War. It's a legacy that has come about due to the collapse and the demise of the Communist Party.
The hegemonic autocracies of the Middle East are legacies of the colonial era.
They are legacies of the colonial struggle in which certain elites have won and have essentially shepherded the state after independence.
And hence there are entrenched regimes. Many of these regimes feel that their resolve, that is to protect the state, to protect the independent state.
They are the, if you will, the Praetorian Guard of the new regime,
the Algerian military, the Egyptian in the Egyptian republic, the army and so forth.
They are hegemonic actors. So here's my argument about these transitions in the Middle East.
So we have a transition. First, you have a rupture. You have people on the street that demand change.
Sooner or later, the regime cannot deal with that. Repression is not enough.
You have a rupture after the political deadlock immediately after.
You have mutual recognition of all the actors at the table and they begin to be bargaining.
And then you have the democratic transition, which begins plug in Tunisia here.
And you can see what happened after the deadlock immediately goes.
Then you have actors at the table, another being the Islamists, the other components through the other elements.
The other victors of the transition also sit around the table and start to discuss the democratic transition and issues.
And then institutions become to to emerge. It's important to realise that after the democratic transition you can have a second round of tests.
That is, you can hit an impasse after your first power sharing agreement and then be forced by political deadlock to again begin a pact.
But the important thing is to realise that the more these paths go on, the more a transition is frozen.
It's not a good sign to have more than two pacts within it to transition.
That means that society is left behind and that the elites are basically finding ways
to perpetuate their place in the shape so that that involves opposition forces,
not the regime in the beginning. Then the regime comes in like immediate tourists or like in Egypt.
This is a big difference in Latin America. The military was negotiating to leave.
It was an education. They negotiated with the opposition to leave power and to leave power with guarantees.
Here, the negotiations between opposition and the regime members is to stay in power.
Possibility to stay in power. So it's very hard to explain this without going into much detail.
But you will see this playing out as it takes.
It takes form in the next slide. So this is the case of Tunisia.
Remember Tunisia? Ben Ali exits the scene and you have the opposition emerging.
Nahda, which is the Islamist group. Lulu, she comes back from exile.
The networks reconstitute around him and you have two others CPR and intercut with these are the
secular trends and that is equivalent to the initial starting point of the Jasmine Revolution.
Then you have another the Islamists in CPR backing.
And after backing, the regime starts to build its own its own institution.
Then you have the second part that comes along a CPR are basically voted out and that Tunis, which rallies around Beji Caid Essebsi,
who is basically a figure of the Bourguiba regime, who stayed clean and who basically was able to rally around him, the old regime elements.
So you see how the old regime comes. It's not about extrication.
These are not like Pinochet or actors, you know, and the the cleric who basically backed to exit the scene.
That happens between Islamists and secularists on the nature of institutions.
But the old regime always comes back to the forefront, using sometimes another disguise.
So I will take some time to briefly explain here what happened in 2011.
When you have your you have been in leaves in January.
As soon as you read all of these political actors, we see there is no path.
They all called these together. In the beginning, there's no back because all of them cooperate.
Is thought about power sharing. Always cooperate why? They cooperate for a simple reason.
They want to make sure the old regime does not come back.
They want to make sure security services don't come out of their police stations, start beating up people and beat any comes back from Saudi Arabia.
So they all coolies. They create this this est of the divide out there.
I will show what is actually good or evil to show.
And then basically they establish a roadmap on how to go for the future.
So the road map is creating a national constituent assembly in which that constituent assembly is going to have an
election and and the parties will occupy seats proportionally to the electoral gains of that electoral exercise.
That's what happens.
Beginning 1211, these elections are held for the National Constitution Constitutive Assembly, I believe, in October or November of 2011.
So we're just at the bottom of that arrow where the where the sphere of the arrow is situated.
And Islamists, when the lines you know, the lines portion of that body immediately as soon as that happens, we have we have a problem.
Why? Because. The that I of an Islamist party is to make sure that Sharia remains in the constitution and that religion
stays in the public space and that religion stays at the heart of political life and public life.
So very early just here, I'm here, I'm here.
And that line over there takes us to the euro.
And you have the secularists on the other side represented by C.P.R., and it's a cartoon.
And they say, no, this is normal. We're talking about we want a a state development in civil state.
2012 is punctuated by three different conflicts.
One is the conflict of the place of Sharia in the Constitution.
Two, the role of women. And thirdly, which is a which is an extension of the first.
It's about blasphemy. Now.
Strangely enough. And this is this was the point at which I realised that eureka, my thesis in it was all coming together.
I realised that I made the right bit. At that moment that precise moment that the end of 2012.
Another. Basically relinquishes every single demand.
It abandons the place of Sharia in the Constitution. It abandons, in fact, all reference to Sharia in the Constitution.
It also abandons the idea of complementary roles for women and men, for the role of women in society in abundance.
And it abandons that lesson. So I ask you rhetorically the question why would a political actor.
Why would a political actor who just won a major political victory relinquish it and retreat on the basic tenets of his platform?
Why would he retreat? And the reason why he retreats is this.
And I go back to it. It's this acute ideological polarisation.
It's unwinnable. Neither realises that it cannot win, that this is a battle, that it's not winnable.
And at the end of the day, if you persist in demanding and keeping those demands on the agenda,
basically that all political actors, both political actors risk self any relation.
So it's. Hard core realist thinking.
It's not about religion. It's about survival. And as you see, religion comes after, or rather, politics comes before.
So he concedes that the crisis for the movement at that time, end of 2012, it subsides a little bit.
Come 2013 and the crisis ignites again because there's so much doubt and scepticism on the
part of the of the country that this is tragic cynicism on the part of the Islamists.
They want to pull the rug under our feet later. And 2013, you have two events,
which is the death of two or the assassination of two of two political figures who are in the secular ESCAP Shukri Belaid and have a brother.
And you have also something which is very important. You have these literally floods of jihadis going from Tunisia to fight with Daesh.
So you have this happening in the Tunisian context.
And again, polarisation ignites and we're asking out of in rather more concessions.
But what more can another do? Enter the quartette the quartette enters at in March 2013.
It enters into the political scene and organises.
In fact, it's an auxiliary mechanism of the passing itself.
Backing is taking place. But here you have a structured platform for a four pack.
In my view. Before 2013, when I came to the realisation that another retreat,
that the victor retreat basically and gave away has been one of the findings that I found, and I got this from from the president.
MARZOUKI in an interview. He told me, yes, well, you call this pecking order.
This is interesting. Packaging comes from London. I didn't know that, but we negotiated.
And I said how? I said it was every Friday I brought people into the presidential palace and we negotiated different things.
And we we basically agreed on things. And then Tuesday have everybody think for the weekend, during the weekend and absorb this during the weekend.
And Tuesday, we had the secretarial office,
our rapporteur that would see would verify that all that we agreed on was basically put into motion and implemented.
So there you go. The pact is there. Because, by the way, ladies and gentlemen, attacks are either secret or they're open.
In the case of Spain, they were open. They were detached in a Mingora, and it was open.
In the case of other in other places, there were secret.
They were like like Oslo, done in in a in a hallway someplace, but their text nonetheless.
So I was seeing it, in fact, function. So 2013.
Fast forward again, big crisis emerges and then Mr. VENNOCHI does something else.
He disbands the Salafis to Salafi groups disband.
So why would he disband two groups which could have constituted for him a reservoir of political support?
It's not his ideology. Salafism is not his thing.
He's far away from it. But still, he would be antagonising his own cadres, his own rank and file by saying This is not enough.
Yet he did it. Why would he have done something like that?
Then he does something even more in the same year of 2000.
He says, I am going to accept me that Tunis, the old Banat is a Congress.
I'm going to allow them to run or else, you know, opposition that they run into.
They run for parliament, that they have political force, of course, except for those who have blood on their hands and who have committed crimes.
And it creates even an uproar for the secularists. Why would he do something like that?
The reason, again, polarisation. He wants to reassure.
He doesn't want mutual demise of the two.
Plus, there was something else Tunisia was winning on the international scene.
Tunisia was recognised as the only bright spot in the Arab world and it was getting help on the part of the internet from the international community.
Not enough, if you ask me, but this is one of the reasons why he did it.
Then he got something even more, and that's an example of acting.
He abandons the idea of premiership parliamentary system.
The secularists want presidential in the Islamists, always in the region.
Remember this do not like presidential parties because they know fielding a candidate in the context of the presidential election,
they will always lose because it's too it's too scary.
It's too divisive. So he abandons parliamentary and he goes for a semi presidential system.
So that's a major concession to. Constitution is finished in 2014.
Yup. So I want you to pay attention to this one 2014 that wins the election.
What does to do after really having gone on a campaign of denigration against.
He wins the election. He literally gets up, gets up, gives his hand or extends his hand on the other side of the aisle on this ideological aisle,
and calls him and Nucci for his government and says, I want you to participate in the government.
We will build the coalition together and you will stay with us in government.
You're not the opposition we are. You are part of the government. What did he do?
Why did he do that? Same reason.
He sees that he does not want to take the risk of actually going into the opposition and
the Islamists going into the opposition and basically risking mutual self-destruction.
Now, I want you to keep in mind, I know we're in the Middle Eastern Centre, but my group is more than Russia.
He's few. This is that the Algerian civil war has had an extraordinary influence on all Tunisians, Moroccans, Libyans and and those and everywhere.
The spectre of the civil war is very powerful in the in the collective memory or in the psyche of Maghreb citizens.
And even if the Army could not return to cannot come to power for structural reasons,
because it was it was marginalised and it wasn't just never had a role in society.
He wouldn't. All the actors had this picture in mind and for her Nucci, there was no way to risk.
So the army wasn't going to step in, but the security services were going to say, We're going to step in anyway.
We don't want this. Having lived in Algeria and then in London, he also saw how Islamism could be adapted and so forth.
For Beji, Caid Essebsi was a seasoned politician, also very experienced.
He knew that there was that spectre and he did not want another radicalised and he wanted the process to be more inclusive.
So that is an example of a path of transition that has worked.
We will come back very quickly to talk about backsliding regarding the Tunisian case now.
This is very briefly, I've explained to you, I've talked evoked all these points in great detail without showing you bullet points.
So basically it's all the steps that we talked about of the different patterning and
of the different basically the unfolding and the trajectory of the binary regime.
Here. I talk about the same thing. I have a picture here which is very dear to me.
I'll say why? Because in March of 2013,
it was a conference that we sponsored in Tunis that you the first handshake between unlucky
and veggie after the assassination of the first premier of Turkey by Shook Beneath.
Thank you in March. So it was the first time where we had participated in the acting.
You know, the quartette came in and end of that year, we the Stanford Energy Program was before.
The only difference is that, you know, the quartette got a Nobel Prize.
I was kicked out of the country. But but but it's a very it's a very important it's a very important moment for me personally.
And I, I really cherish it.
So now we're going to talk a little bit about what's happening in Tunisia, as you all know, being the smart people you are at the embassy.
From electoral democracy, we have backsliding and we have backsliding into populism.
And I think the archetype example of populism is Viktor Orban.
That's why his photo there, if someone exemplifies this, it's it's his populism, essentially.
I'll tell you a few points about it while you read through the slides.
Populism, essentially, it's about. It's about direct democracy.
It's not about representative democracy. It's about direct democracy.
It's. A ballistic leader who comes to power and who says the problem is with the elite is not with the people.
The people is virtuous. It's the elites which are corrupt. And this in this case, I say, came to power and said, look, Tunisians are virtuous,
but the real problem lies with the elites, Islamists and secularists alike.
And he basically sanctifies that.
We're basically gets the mandate from a direct exercise, a direct consultation, which is a referendum.
And. He cooks up this Internet exercise and whatever you can call it, you know, cyber exercise of elections.
And also says, look what the populace look up to say we're going to close up the press.
We're going to purge the administration from all elements that resist this noble enterprise.
And we're going to reshuffle the judiciary so that our laws passed.
The populists in general go through a very well, regimented and very well studied, you know, a script.
We're not going to go through it now. But basically it says. You know,
this is a case of direct exercise in democracy and basically does away with all of the
safeguards of democracy that have to do with separation of powers and oversight mechanisms.
The problem with the Tunisian democracy and I state with them, it's not that the transition did not work.
The transition worked and Tunisia became an electoral democracy.
The problem is the consolidation is sinking the roots of that democracy so that no other player contests it.
So there's it becomes the only game in town. That's what consolidation works.
And here there's been a failure of consolidation and not of transition.
That is something I had to add in the book because I was comforted by that, because, of course, this backsliding came after just after COVID.
Now we go to Egypt. I'm going to take 5 minutes to go through this because it's a simpler case.
The regime, Mubarak, basically is overthrown by a massive street mobilisation.
And what emerges is basically Muslim Brotherhood and the secular civil groups.
And on the one side is the Egyptian military.
So I struggle a lot with that. How can there be polarisation?
How can there be all these all these conditions when you have a third player here,
which is basically foreign or alien to this Puerto relations spectrum, the military.
And the way I resolved that by saying, look, when there was pressure one, there was pressure to break the legacy of the old regime, the military.
It wasn't in its role as the relay of the old regime.
It was simply. The guarantor of peace and social peace and stability.
But. What emerged to the surface with this faultline was this fracture between the Muslim Brotherhood and the secularists counterparts.
And in fact, it's a fracture that, Steve, the military never would have wanted to relinquish power.
It would have probably found any good excuse to come back to power.
But the point is, it was there was push back in the beginning.
It was in retreat. All these actors gave it the possibility to come back to the scene.
Let me go very fast through this transition, through the as chemists we see the stoichiometry, the chemical reaction of the trajectory.
So the Muslim Brotherhood, on the one hand, and civil society advocates begin to discuss, you know, in the future transition.
I'll remind you that in all of these transitions, it was the street, it was the youth calling for establishment of universal values that won the day.
But they didn't they didn't preserve the tradition, the transition for themselves.
They just retreated into the roles of observation.
That's a digression. It's also digression. It's an important point, which which you got to keep in mind all the time.
So what happens in 2011, 2011?
But just like in the Tunisian case, all of the actors coalesced together because they want to make sure the old regime does not come back.
They want to make sure that Mubarak stays in Sharm el-Sheikh or wherever he was and that the old regime does not come back.
So there's a glow to revolutions when it happens in Tunis.
Everybody everybody's happy, everybody's uplifted, everybody's elated.
That's something that's characteristics until the hard problems settling.
Then you have immediately after you have the beginning of the political process that begins,
the Muslim Brotherhood turns to the military and tries to accommodate the military.
And basically the military tell the Muslim Brotherhood to agree with the Muslim Brotherhood to ram through a constitution,
to impose a constitution while the civil state advocates wanted a Tunisian type transition.
And that this got us thinking we need time, we need consensus politics.
We need to deliberate on these things. There's no need rushing. The Muslim Brotherhood ran a constitution through.
And with this this constitution, essentially, it keeps the causes of Sharia on the cause, which are identity politics.
So it does the contrary of what the Tunisian authorities do.
So you have no backing there. It's a clear case and it satisfies the military, but basically giving it all the, you know,
enclaves of military sovereignty, concerning budgets, concerning its role in the protection of the nation and so forth.
So. That's the moment. The thing that has been missed and it's a tragic moment.
That was the moment, really the moment where everything went off the rails.
Then we come to elections at the end of that year, at the end of 2011, had, if you remember, elections that were played out in several tours.
It was a very complicated scheme, a very complicated institutional design.
Anyways, by 2012, January 2012, the Islamists had won a major victory.
In fact, they had won proportionally more than the Tunisians had won in their national assembly.
So in January 2012, the Islamists were at that point, it was bound to happen.
The military started seeing that, you know, this was a threatening actor.
So failure of acting in the first instance, in the first occasion created two things downstream.
One, it alienated the civil advocates, which were which could have helped the Muslim Brotherhood.
And it also basically sow doubt in the in the Egyptian military, which did not want to see they were not going to let,
you know, Mubarak come and to see these Islamists come to power, even if there it was a imperfect but democratic election.
I am going in brushstrokes because you have to understand, as in every transition context here, there is a lot of a lot of events.
It's very fluid. There are a lot of movements and counter movements and everything has to do about identity politics, about economics and so forth.
You can you imagine you people know what a transition is all about.
So I'm proceeding with large brush strokes. Then in June 2012.
Morsi run for is in for the election. I think it was, yeah.
June 12 as well. Morsi runs and wins.
Here's another error which Egypt should have never run for the election because it was his pledge for the Islamist would never run.
Yet they ran for election and they won by immediately after.
Within weeks the military could not wait anymore and it basically forced the
judiciary into coming out with a decree that the old parliament would be dissolved,
the parliament in which the Islamists had won. Then we enter.
This is the second case of failed back when the Islamists won the election.
They should have halted and say, wait a minute, we're not going to field a new runner for the elections.
We're just going to wait and see and we're going to sit all down together and see what they did.
They ignored everything and they continue and they put the the army against them, openly against them and the seculars against them.
So what, he wins the election. The judiciary comes up with a decision basically to annul the parliament that was already in place and so forth.
How does Morsi react? Morsi reacts by basically coming out with a decree that says, my decisions, presidential decisions, trump everything else.
Period.
Presidential decrees, no matter what they are, take precedence over any other juridical or legal documents emanating from under any other institution.
By that time, everybody's screaming foul play.
The civil state advocates basically are begging the military to intervene.
It took from 2012 that situation festered until the coup came along, basically one year afterwards.
And one year is nothing. Two things happened very fast.
Morsi could not govern because the deep state was sabotaging everything, whether in labour unions, whether in demonstrations, whether in gas supply.
There was the debacle around the his trip to Iran.
Then you had another variable coming in, which basically was a geopolitical element.
You had Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, who wanted to derail this experiment at all costs.
So two cases of failed packing. And coming back to the structural reality here.
Someone you know who knows these two countries would say, well, wait a minute, you're comparing oranges and apples.
You're comparing the Egyptian case where there's an Egyptian military and where there's structural
parameters basically are stacked against the success of the transition with a case which is rather,
you know, which is much more encouraging than Tunisia has a potential from the beginning of leading to a transition.
And I say yes, but it proves my my argument about what a transition succeeds under.
And furthermore, had the Muslim Brotherhood really battered with the civilians really badly,
it would have been impossible for the military to overthrow that that regime in the way the regime needed a pretext, needed more than a pretext.
It needed an alibi for the safeguard of the nation. And the Islamists gave it that alibi by not acting.
So that's how I worked around this. And again, with another case,
these two these two cases of the deterrence that the that the pact could have constituted vis a vis the Egyptian military and how one,
you know, would factor in would place the military in this broader framework.
These are two instances where, again, I said Eureka.
And by that time I went to see Michael Anderson.
Michael, if you got everything and it was for we always, you know the video because it was it was it was Latin it's neutral here in Oxford.
Say Viva on revival.
So so there we go. It was a viva and it was the key.
So let me wrap up now, because you have learned I've read you through all basically, I walk you through it.
I think you would more helpful than than than reading through the bullet points.
This is what happened in a nutshell.
As for the Tunisian case, I am I'm outlining here the details of the Egyptian transition or lack thereof, and the second failed coup.
So I'm going to end with this slide.
These are the contributions. This book makes a modest but a concrete and palpable contribution, I would say, without being immodest.
First, I assume I excavate like an archaeologist, these theories of patting.
And I say, look, they can be applied to not only the fracture of of left versus right, but Islamist versus not Islamists.
And this is what's happening in the country. So this is how it works.
New power sharing. Okay. Contrarily, contrary to other instances or backing, this is the but not about the regime exiting.
This is about regime wanting to perpetuate, to stay in the game.
And it's about the other actors recognising that the regime wants to stay in the initiative,
nab problems, the regime want to stay in the game and they have the power to stay in the game.
Well, your idea should well, let's see how long we can stay and and who wins in the end.
But after the risk of self demise passive for reasons in the past.
No, this is the last slide. Yeah. Revolutionary dynamics.
I talk about it about this and then the determines to successful pact.
It's nothing to do with prior secular an Islamic tradition or culture, but it has to do about the conditions, about the institutions we create.
It's about the bargains we strike. As we've seen in the Tunisian case.
It's about a new Shia saying, look,
I am going to abandon certain direct references to Sharia and I'm going to we're going to keep the first clause of the Constitution,
which talks about the religion of Tunisia, a state being Islamic, and the religion and its religion is Islam and its ambiguity.
What are we talking about? Religion of state or are we talking about the religion of nation?
Fall back on that. That's a part.
So that's what it's about is the institution conditions which Islamist insecure is engage one another as relative as relative equals.
So there it is. And I'm pretty much sure that there will be a second time around for the Arab Spring.
It's a question of debate whether the Arab Spring is finished or not or whether there'll be a new wave, call it a new wave, a new Arab Spring.
But essentially the problems are still there and regimes are not performing and people have realised that they
have power and that they have a say in the process and sooner or later they will take to the streets again.
And I think given the constellation of forces and given the parity between forces, I think something a framework like this can be helpful.
Thank. Thank you so much for for a wonderful lecture.
And it actually is an element of nostalgia thing.
This is it remembers the discussions we had. And you remember that I was a little bit sceptical of some elements of that.
And you convinced me at the time and you further convinced me again,
and it actually added even more to the arguments I remember from that time and also
given us a perspective on the future and particularly what's going on in Tunisia,
which makes a lot of sense given what what you've said here,
which actually the power of your explanation goes beyond even when into what has happened in Tunisia since 2021.
But thank you very much for that. Thank you all very much for coming. And thank you, Jim Galloway.