Will the Middle Class Save the Middle East?
The theory seems perfectly straightforward: At some point those who are doing reasonably well economically begin to want greater control over the governing order and press for a stronger voice in this domain—indeed, greater “democratic” involvement in the overall political system. Immediately, though, a host of questions arises. If it is an economic stake that triggers the drive toward democratic inclusion, is it control over private property that creates the democratic impulse or is it freedom of contract, access to public goods, or a quest for social security? If we call this grouping the “middle” class is it some interstitial position or role that is crucial—even some fear of slipping down to the bottom, some resentment of those farther up the scale—or is the primary motivation to solidify existing gains or perceived entitlement through political power? Indeed, what does “middle class” really mean? Is it literally being situated between other entities or does it have distinctive characteristics—even universal characteristics—that transcend relative placement? And if there is sufficient specificity as to its definition, at least for a given country and time, what is its shape and political prospects in the Arab nations of North Africa and the Middle East at present?
At a time when a number of the countries in the region are teetering on the edge of chaos, returning to military dictatorships, or mired in pseudo-democratic structures, asking whether the middle class will be their political salvation may seem misplaced or naive. Yet many outsiders continue to base their hopes for the region on the middle class and to back their belief with aid programs and seminars that connect this hope with the allied concept of the rule of law. They are even prepared to tell themselves that some intermediate autocratic step may be necessary to address security concerns while the middle class develops to the point where it can seek democratic inclusion. Since the policies of America in particular seem to favor such a combination of sociological predictability and free market inevitability, it is important to question the premises and historical validity of this assumption, particularly inasmuch as it remains a vital part of the ideology—indeed the mythology—of Western approaches to the peoples and polities of the region.
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Western historians, philosophers, and politicians who assume that the middle class is indeed vital to the development of democracy often begin with Aristotle’s assertion that “surely the ideal of the state is to consist as much as possible of persons that are equal and alike, and this similarity is most found in the middle classes; therefore the middle-class state will necessarily be best constituted in respect of those elements of which we say that the state is by nature composed.”1 Not everyone agrees. Karl Marx, building on Malthus’s discussion of “the middle regions of society,” was hardly a proponent of middle-class democratization, although he did grudgingly admit, in The Communist Manifesto, that, “historically, it has played a most revolutionary part. The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. . . . The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely fabricated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization.” Of course Marx thought the bourgeoisie would disappear when class conflicts lead to the fulfillment of the masses’ best interest. Max Weber was also one who argued that a bureaucratic order based on the rational calculation of means to ends was no guarantee of participatory rule by the fullest array of candidates. But most Westerners continue to assume that democracy comes not from the margins but from the very middle of society.2
Support is usually drawn from further reference to ancient history. In the archetypal example, as Josiah Ober has argued, classical Greece, far from being impoverished, was characterized by a density of population, urban concentration, and relatively equitable wealth distribution such that upwards of 20% of each polis achieved “a level high enough above subsistence to qualify as at least minimally decent.” This “middling” class (as Ober calls it) came about through heavy investment in human capital, the reduction of time spent searching for information and connections, and the sharing of new institutions across competing political entities. Equal access to these institutions—coupled with the separation of personality from political role, security against arbitrary seizure of property, and incentives to learn practical and public skills (including service as jurors, magistrates, etc.)—led to a veritable “market in institutions.”3
Tracing a causal link between the rise of such a middle class and the development of democratic institutions, however, poses problems for both theory and practice. Is it imperative that one achieve a “take-off” level of economic well-being before developing institutional constraints? Is separating personality from institutions indispensable to participatory governance or the formation of a government of limited powers (if these are indeed the defining features of a democracy)? Must one subscribe to a belief system that balances individual achievement with collective leveling (whether by taxation or social pressure) if one is to avoid Aristotle’s assumption that, as between the very rich and the very poor, “the former turn more to insolence and grand wickedness, and the latter overmuch to malice and petty wickedness”? And if we in the West wish to encourage democratic development worldwide how can we be sure that we are not simply extending our own mythic experience—whether it embraces the notion that democracies never make war against one another or that, as President Barack Obama said in his Nobel address, “we’er all basically seeking the same things”—when we promote international aid or militarized nation building?
Setting aside the polemical claims by American politicians that they are working to help the middle class—for which, during the Obama administration, there was even a White House Middle Class Task Force headed by the vice president—and surveys that show the vast majority of Americans think they occupy that strata, the very definition of middle class is remarkably fluid even among those social scientists who have studied the subject. A Brazilian economist thus describes the members of this class as “people who are not resigned to a life of poverty, who are prepared to make sacrifices to create a better life for themselves and who have not started with life’s material problems solved because they have material assets to make their lives easier.”4 Others argue that middle-class status begins when roughly a third of one’s income remains for discretionary spending after basic needs for food and shelter are provided. A number of sociologists distinguish various categories of middle-class existence along dimensions of control of power or the cultural symbols by which their society identifies and orients itself.5 Thus when we begin to approach the literature on the Middle East we are often faced with vague or conflicting definitions of the very subject of investigation.6 Perhaps a useful point of entry here are the analyses offered in several recent studies of the middle class in the Middle East, studies that, in rather different ways, are grounded in the belief that the development or lack of development of a middle class is crucial to the political future of the region.
Vali Nasr is dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, a member of the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board, and a former advisor to the U.S. senior representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Amb. Richard Holbrooke. In his book, Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World, Nasr claims that there does indeed exist a “rising middle class” in the Middle East. Arguing that “the tide has already turned against extremism,” Nasr believes the battle is really about access to free markets: “If that battle is won by private-sector business leaders and the rising middle class tied to them, then progress with political rights will follow.” Recalling that the Prophet said “the merchant is the beloved of God,” he sees pious businessmen as the true supporters of modernity, such that if the Middle East is to become democratic “it will have to be transformed by the capitalist revolution.”7
Nasr begins by looking at Dubai, which might seem a prime example since it is not dependent on oil revenues and has, though rather unevenly, undergone phenomenal growth. But in 2008–9 the property bubble burst: Foreign workers were heading home at the rate of 5,000 per day, many abandoning cars at the airport. In the years since that Great Recession, Dubai has slowly recovered but it still remains anything but typical: 85–90% of its population is comprised of foreigners who can never receive citizenship, much of its wealth comes from monies funneled to it from abroad, and its combination of playboy haven and uncompleted building projects bespeaks not the formation of a hardworking business class but the development of a precarious brand that cannot easily be replicated elsewhere in the region.8
Nasr’s example of Iran is more apt. Here, he claims, over half of the population is middle class or above. Moreover, it was this class that he says supported the Islamic revolution but then lost control of it. Following the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989, the governments of Presidents Akbar Ali Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami encouraged business growth until the Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Hosseini Khamenei sensed that a rising middle class might also begin demanding changes in society and government. Stalled in their effort to become part of a global business world the Iranian middle class, like those of a number of other countries, eventually allied itself with an authoritarian regime rather than take up an intermediate role between the state and the fundamentalists.
The one success story to which Nasr points would appear to be Turkey. Ataturk, of course, operated under the slogan “For the People, Despite the People,” thus not so much exemplifying the natural yearning of a middle class for democracy as the forced elimination of preexisting cultural forms. For all its supposed success Ataturk’s secularist model failed elsewhere, says Nasr, because it bred dependence on the state rather than genuine entrepreneurship. That many of the current regime’s supporters are pious businessmen is no contradiction. If the business class is allowed greater attachment to global markets, as Nasr says is true of Turkey, it will not be secularism that triumphs but the sort of business-oriented religiosity that characterized the Scottish Enlightenment.9 Yet the political party most identified with this class in Turkey has, by Nasr’s own account, largely fallen into the hands of tycoons. In many respects, then, economic progress and intermittent democratization have run on parallel tracks and their connections do not point in a simple causal direction.
Nasr’s faith in the almost ineluctable move from commerce to democracy suffers from its very imprecision. Not only are terms never defined but comparative examples—like Latin America in recent times—are anything but clear-cut. His faith in Hume’s assertion that commerce encourages moderation, that the middle class has no interest in extremism, or that it is only dependence on the state that has undermined economic development are cast in a framework that lacks institutional and cultural analysis. With hardly a reference to other Arab countries and absent a fuller social analysis, the result is more akin to that of neoconservative dogma and liberal hopes than a solid argument based on a wide range of Middle Eastern cases.
Francis Fukuyama offers a similarly generalized view of democratic development, one that incorporates an evolutionary view of the sort popular history writers often favor. He characterizes the middle class as composed of those whose occupation and educational level and ownership of housing or goods are significant enough to be threatened by the government, and in the defense of which, particularly if they become the majority, they will develop the democratic values of greater political participation, individual freedom, and toleration of differences.10 While not specifically analyzing the Middle Eastern countries in detail, his faith in the middle classes as the engine of democratic progress suffuses his work.
The timing of the spread of democracy in different countries therefore depended on the changing relative positions of the middle class, the working class, landowning elites, and the peasantry. Where the old agrarian order was built around large landowners dependent on servile labor, a peaceful transition to democracy became particularly difficult. But in almost all cases the rise and growth of middle-class groups was critical to the spread of democracy. Democracy in the developed world became secure and stable as industrialization produced middle-class societies, that is, societies in which a significant majority of the population thought of themselves as middle class.11
In his review of Fukuyama’s book, John Gray, noting the insupportable evolutionism of the author’s approach to grand history and describing the work as “a morass of intellectual confusion and category mistakes,” notes the fallacy in stressing the inevitable relation of the middle class to democracy:
Fukuyama believes democracy is the only system of government with a long-term future, a familiar idea emerges: as societies become more prosperous, the growing global middle class will demand more political freedom and governmental accountability. Effectively a restatement of Marx’s account of the historical role of the bourgeoisie, it is an idea we have all heard many, many times before. In fact the political record of the middle classes is decidedly mixed. In Europe, throughout much of the 20th century, many middle-class people reacted to economic and political crisis by embracing the enemies of liberal democracy—fascism, communism and ethnic nationalism. Rightly, Fukuyama expresses some concern about the impact on the quality of political life of a middle class that is shrinking rapidly under the effects of globalisation and technological change. But even when the middle class was stronger than it is today, it has rarely acted as deus ex machina for democracy.12
If Nasr is insufficiently clear about the structures that affect democratic growth and Fukuyama’s evolutionism is equally imprecise, Steffen Hertog’s Princes, Brokers, and Bureaucrats: Oil and State in Saudi Arabia is far more circumstantial.13 On its face it may not seem to speak to issues of the middle class. Yet it is precisely in such details of political organization that clues to the formation and dependence of such a class may lie. Having worked as a consultant to bureaucracies in Saudi Arabia, Hertog offers a highly detailed and analytically sophisticated view of why certain political and economic reforms that may bear on democratization have succeeded in Arabia and others have not.
Contrary to the usual image of an oil-rich state necessarily resulting in a centralized and bloated bureaucracy of limited institutional design, Hertog argues that the Saudi state is like a hub-and-spoke arrangement in which the center is crucial but coordination is weak. The results are quite varied: Some government offices operate well while others lag in efficiency and innovation. Each unit is really a compact clientele structure in its own right, such that even though the state as a whole may rely on extra-territorial sources of income it is largely fragmented within, each of the bureaucracies forming “statelets within the state.” No crosscutting groups materialize within this pattern—neither merchants, nor tribes, nor clerics—each being co-opted to a degree by the patronage and licensing of the state, on the one hand, and the obligations tying each individual to his or her particular patron, on the other. The result is not a stultifying array of hidebound agencies but a heterogeneous assemblage displaying quite variant efficacy and vigor. Hierarchy exists, but given the mini-constellations below them elite control is weak, inactivity is difficult to punish, information is more likely to flow to one’s boss than to one’s peers, corruption is far less the problem than coordination, and there is little horizontal pressure leading to the emergence of interest groups.
In an environment of such “segmented clientelism” even businessmen find themselves consuming policy rather than lobbying for it, often choosing to move around the bureaucracy through their own connections, at home and abroad, rather than coordinate internal pressures. In what might, then, appear to be a disjointed system, what one actually encounters is a nested set of distinct bodies, each of which may bear the mark of the lassitude or energy of its central figure but none of which reaches across the lines of its own client structure to form impersonal groups pressing for greater political inclusion. Thus where Nasr sees incipient democratic institutions being assembled by historical forces that transcend particular cultures Hertog demonstrates that any such arrangement is utterly contingent and in no way points in any given direction. Indeed, his analysis suggests that economic position within the country’s strata is less crucial than the mechanisms of incorporation in a culturally distinctive type of bureaucracy.
Hertog’s assessment meshes well with the findings of other scholars. In her Barriers to Democracy Amaney Jamal, for instance, shows how the Palestinian government has co-opted those very associations that might constitute the basis for democratic reform.14 Whether by reinforcing vertically structured patronage networks or through state-sponsored NGOs (which someone has humorously denominated “NoGOs”), the associational life many see as forming the grassroots basis of democratic governance is subverted by the central government. True, the lawyers in Cairo and Pakistan have occasionally stood up as a group against the powers that be, and religious brotherhoods and mosque groups may appear to satisfy Tocqueville’s belief that it is in such groupings, “by the reciprocal influence of men on each other,” that “feelings and opinions are recruited, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed.” But on their own and in the face of state-controlled security and resources, the ability of these associations to counter the daily need to build a durable network of one’s own renders them merely the sites for replicating vertical ties. And when an entire sector of the population is cowed or driven out collective formation becomes virtually impossible.
This was certainly the case in Iraq, as indicated by Deborah Amos in her Eclipse of the Sunnis: Power, Exile, and Upheaval in the Middle East.15 For as we are reminded by the author, who reports regularly for National Public Radio, over two million people have been forced from the country as the result of sectarian violence, over 70% of whom were the very professionals vital to a middle class. If there was a surge in Iraq, she quips, it was out of Iraq. Were it not for the killings one could laugh at the death lists that included people guilty of eating a kind of bread not used in the Prophet’s day, or the forced closure of vegetable stands displaying together (male) cucumbers and (female) tomatoes. The exiles in Syria (who are denied the right to work and are subject to visa renewals every ninety days, many of whom fled again after civil war broke out) and those in Jordan (which started to close its borders after the Amman hotel bombings of 2005) constitute a “middle-class exodus” unprecedented in the Arab world and now find themselves reduced to political impotence and near poverty.
Notwithstanding her lucid and engaging description of their plight, Amos may focus too much on artists and intellectuals who speak English rather than a broad range of cases. She has the journalist’s habit of combining angle (the underreported exiles’ story), anecdotes (believable because she figures as an eyewitness in most of them), and little-known statistics (15% of the exiles are Christians, in 2009 Iraq was ranked the fourth most corrupt country in the world, and in the same year more Iraqis were still leaving the country than returning). Along the way we learn that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki wanted the Syrians to arrest sixty-five Iraqi émigré actors when he visited the country, that housing pressure created by the exiles has made it extremely difficult for middle class Jordanian newlyweds to find apartments, that the UN sanctions that began in 1991 all but impoverished the Iraqi middle class, and that many of the women exiles have descended into the sex trade. And all of this before the military successes of the Sunni fundamentalist “Islamic State” began dividing the country (and obliterating the border to Syria) in 2014. There is, however, no indication why one should believe that, were they able to do so, returning exiles would press for democratic reforms or that their economic position alone would contribute to this impulse.
Amos is no more to be criticized than others for not seeing the twists and turns that have taken place in Iraq and Syria since her book was published. The rise of sectarian groups belies any claim of permanent eclipse, and the claim by the Islamic State leaders, backed by their territorial gains and transnational claims, only shows the fecklessness of any predictions for the region. Whatever else, though, the displaced middle class of Iraq, like that of the mid-economic Syrians, is either irrelevant to the civil conflict or is in no position to press for democratic reforms.
We are left, then, not only with conflicting definitions of the middle class (thus making direct comparisons difficult) but with a questionable claim that, however defined, in any given part of the Middle East such a class actually exists. A number of analysts finesse the issue by simply looking at each country and determining who is in the middle by the standards of developing countries generally. Using this standard the proportion that is in the middle has grown to a little over half of the population of the full range of developing countries in recent years, a goal achieved not by slow gain but in distinct spurts. Thus in places like China or India the surge has been dramatic. Progress in the Middle East, by comparison, has been less impressive. But of equal importance is that even if “middle class” describes an income level it invariably is accompanied by modulations in attitude, outlook, and values so that, as one commenter has put it, the category is “more sociological than logical.”16 Indeed, if we view the category and its connection to political reform together a serious question arises as to whether it even applies to the situation of a number of parts of the Arab world in any useful way.
It may put the matter too strongly but I would suggest that with the possible exceptions of Turkey, Iran, and Lebanon there is no middle class in most of the Middle East, especially among the Arab countries. Previous scholars who have made the same claim have attributed the failure to develop a bourgeois class to such factors as the lack of Islamic legal provisions supporting corporate structures, urban elites who could simply rely on regularly extracting payments from the peasantry, or the absence of a church structure that could be emulated by professional or trade groups.17 However, my reason for suggesting that no middle class is to be found in most of the Middle East focuses on two ingredients I think are necessary if the idea of a middle class is to be a useful analytic concept, one that is more than an ideal type or taxonomic convenience. The first is that one must have a fair chance of passing one’s social status or economic position along to the next generation, and the other is that the class must possess a significant degree of resource independence such that it is not the mere instrument or creation of the state and subject to its arbitrary manipulation. Each of these features requires some elaboration.
If, generally speaking, in the Arab world each person must fabricate a network of personal alliances and if, as the Arabs say, three days after his death, his property dispersed and his alliances dissipated, a man no longer exists, then it is very difficult, short of being very rich or powerful indeed, to pass one’s network along to another. Unable to do so those in the middle are particularly vulnerable to rising and, more importantly, falling in the socioeconomic order, and since neither education nor kinship is a clear guarantee against such movement the ability to maintain the features of a class easily slips through one’s fingers. Moreover, many of those in the middle in the Arab countries are there at the instigation and sufferance of those controlling government handouts and positions. Without an independent base such a middle class is without resources of its own and as a result lives largely as a handmaiden of those who control the levers of state power. In the absence of these two definitional features it can, therefore, be argued that a true middle class is rare in the Arab world and the Middle East more generally, and that whatever the merits of an argument that democracy will grow out of such a class, the sheer absence of that class vitiates any realistic expectation that democracy will, for this reason, manifest itself anytime soon.
Each of the works that has been discussed here does, however, at least focus our attention of what it might mean to speak of a middle class in the Middle East and, if it is not from this segment of society, whether other groupings might offer some chance for democratic reform. For even if a middle class fails to develop or is not the group from which change can be expected this may not be the only source from which democratic impulses may stem.
Women are another possibility. Women have not only taken their places in many Middle Eastern bureaucracies and limited their birth rate through later marriage and birth control but have contributed to some noteworthy advances in the reform of family law and even property law. Whether it is in microfinance or dress, Quranic interpretation or media exposure, women in the region may gain more control of their finances and their fates in ways that build important changes from the ground up. In that sense it is at least possible that they could substitute for class formation to a limited degree. In the 1920s the Soviets tried to use the Muslim women of central Asia as a kind of “surrogate proletariat.”18 The men, however, reacted sharply, even in some cases violently, against this intrusion into family life. But with far more Arab and Iranian women now in the workplace the situation could have quite different consequences. On the negative side, however, women’s presence in an unsegregated public sphere could, once again, constitute a threat to male authority and yield few political dividends for society as a whole.
The causal link between a middle class and democracy thus remains at best unproven. Nasr goes farthest in making the connection: “There is ample evidence that what is true of the rising middle class in the Middle East [and Pakistan] is that given the chance to pursue business growth without stifling government control, a capitalist flourishing will follow, and a thriving middle class will serve as the impetus for moderation and democracy.” Moreover, he says (2009, 256), “the West can help this development by encouraging states to loosen their hold on their economies and free their markets. We have to accept that this is the necessary historical process that the Middle East must go through if it is to get to the next stage—the Holy Grail of freedom and prosperity.” Fukuyama raises this set of assertions to the level of an almost ineluctable evolutionary scheme which only foolishness could derail. It is the other authors cited, though, who, less bound by ideology, highlight contributing factors that in any given situation may indeed lead to greater representation but from which no universal pattern can be drawn. Their studies remind us that separating institutions from personalities is difficult to come by in the Middle East if it means risking one’s carefully constructed network of kin and associates against impersonal bureaucracy, or sacrificing the social pressures of one’s own community for the insecurities of the global market.
In understanding the connection of economics to democracy the criteria and definitions we choose may reveal a fuller range of relevant factors, but we can just as easily be led into some form of reductionism. The assertion that insecurity of property has precluded the development of democracy in the Middle East, that the regimes of the area have made people “docile and acquiescent,” or that Islam is antithetical to the democratization of religious interpretation are far too one-dimensional to constitute adequate accounts. Similarly the payment of taxes may lead to a vested interest in governmental participation, but this hardly explains why historically burdened lower classes have seldom risen up to demand some form of democracy. And the absence of certain legal tools—corporations, interest-bearing instruments, etc.—may affect exchange, but one cannot say that their relative absence in Islamic law creates autocracy when issues of trust and the interchangeability of obligations are given insufficient attention by analysts. Indeed is it not worth asking whether it is vital to any middle class that they be able to pass their status along to the next generation, something that may be more difficult when security is based on personally fashioned connections rather than transferable property?19 And when, as noted earlier, an Arab friend quipped that bribery was their form of democracy because it meant you could undercut the commands of a big man by bribing someone lower down to do the opposite thus placing a limitation on power, was he not expressing a vision of democracy that requires some local rather than universal appreciation?
The uprisings of the Arab Spring in 2010–11 cannot be characterized as stemming simply from the middle class. Those who took to the streets of Tunis or Cairo, Benghazi or Manama came from a variety of economic backgrounds and confessional subdivisions. They may all wish in time to have many of the characteristics of people in the middle class of other nations but such factors as the general sense of frustration with corruption, unemployment, and wealth discrepancy played a far more important role than can be attributed to middle-class identity alone.
Barrington Moore’s simple proposition “no bourgeois, no democracy” may appeal to free marketers and neocons as much as to liberal ideologues and those struggling out of poverty. But keeping state intrusion out has been enormously difficult. A report by the Economist on the developing nations and the middle class claimed that for the first time nearly half of their populations have surged into that category. But the report also pointed out that the middle class is not a homogeneous group, such that the middle classes that have developed as a helpmate to the state may behave very differently than those based on the private sector.20 Similarly, ignoring the cultural meaning attached by people of the region to concepts of power, representation, and legitimacy in favor of the imagined prerequisites to universal democratization is unlikely to produce useful guidance.21 What one takes away, then, from these and similar studies is that the course does not run true from economic well-being to political form and that the messy contingencies of local circumstance must be addressed in each Middle Eastern country and beyond if we are to comprehend the means by which a people acquire greater participation in governance and a fairer distribution of its powers.