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Democracy and Security

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States Do Not Just Fail and Collapse: Rethinking States in the Middle East
Rolf Schwarz & Miguel de Corral
a a a

Middle East Faculty, NATO Defense College, Italy

Available online: 18 Aug 2011

To cite this article: Rolf Schwarz & Miguel de Corral (2011): States Do Not Just Fail and Collapse: Rethinking States in the Middle East, Democracy and Security, 7:3, 209-226 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17419166.2011.600581

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Democracy and Security, 7: 209226, 2011 Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1741-9166 print/1555-5860 online DOI: 10.1080/17419166.2011.600581

States Do Not Just Fail and Collapse: Rethinking States in the Middle East
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Rolf Schwarz and Miguel de Corral

Middle East Faculty, NATO Defense College, Italy The Arab Spring reinforces the argument that there is a need for a more comprehensive classication of states. The events that took place in early 2011 serve to show why certain states have developed as they have. Much of Western scholarship has failed to conceptualize this aspect of statehood and has taken Max Webers ideal-typical state as the holder of the monopoly of violence, seen as legitimate by all its people as a given. The debates have been limited to two ideal types: the strong, legitimate, and democratic state (in Western Europe and North America), and the failed and authoritarian state (in the Third World, mainly in Africa) plagued by insecurities and instability. States that t neither characterization, like most Middle Eastern states, have not been adequately treated in the debate. These are neither failed states, nor are they fully democratic. Middle Eastern states are both strong in the area of security and coercion and weak in the area of democratic representation and legitimacy, and hence ll a middle ground. But as the Arab Spring shows, this is not a permanent or viable situation, and changes can be expected. By using a more nuanced model for states, we can further understand current developments in the Middle East and infer possible trajectory of state transformation. Keywords: Arab Spring, Democracy, Middle East, State Failure, State Formation

A previous version of this article was presented at the 6th Pan-European Conference on International Relations, ECPR Standing Group on International Relations, Section 21, The Place of the Middle East in International Relations: Making Sense of Global Interconnection and Local Dynamics in Middle East Politics (Turin, September 1215, 2007). Many thanks to Martin Beck, Oliver Jtersonke, Philipp Stucki, and Chris Schnaubelt for comments and suggestions. The views expressed by the authors in this article are their own and do not necessarily reect the ofcial position of the NATO Defense College or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Address correspondence to Rolf Schwarz, Middle East Faculty, NATO Defense College, Via Giorgio Pelosi 1, 00144 Rome, Italy. E-mail: rolf.schwarz@graduateinstitute.ch; migueldecorral@gmail.com

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INTRODUCTION
Today, the sovereign equality of states seems a far cry from the reality of international relations. World politics is witnessing new forms of governance structures that reect a range of de facto holders of sovereign powers within states (warlords, local gangs and militias, private military companies, and so on), as well as substantial asymmetries of power among sovereign states. Sovereignty seems today no longer as inherently territorial, nor as exclusively in the hands of states. Practice shows that for centuries sovereignty has been divided among a variety of actors and shared by them in constellations that often transcended territorial boundaries, and that has been violated in theory and practice.1 De facto sovereign control can also be held by various actors and not only by states, as witnessed in several Middle Eastern countries; most prominently Iraq2 but also Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan, and Libya. Globalization has weakened the state and led to weak states in the Middle East,3 failed and fragile states in Sub-Saharan Africa,4 and intermediary states in Latin America and Southeast Asia.5 Given this global trend one may speak of the emergence of persistent state weakness in todays world.6 But despite this, many countries limp along chronically weak and fragile, but do not fully collapse.7 The recent Arab Spring shows that while state institutions have displayed their frailty and regimes have been violently contested, most states, with the exception of Libya, have not yet collapsed. Yemen and Syria are extremely fragile, as civil war is looming, and might slip into collapse. Max Weber famously dened the state as a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory,8 but he never took for granted that all states were in reality strong and controlling their territory; rather it was legitimacy that set states apart from other forms of coercion and violence. Hence Webers focus remained on the difference between legitimate domination (Herrschaft) and coercive power (Macht) in the exercise of sovereign state functions.9 This distinction has however remained outside of much Western scholarship, which has conceptualized and measured variations in states in distance to the ideal type, and which has remained bound by a normative model of what the state and its relations to society should be rather than what it is.10 Empirically, tremendous variations exist among states concerning actual state control of society, the distribution of resources, and the exercise of political power within states (democratic or authoritarian). Terms such as weak,11 quasi,12 fragile,13 and failed14 states were introduced into the academic usage in order to account for the phenomena that many real states fell short of the Weberian standard and were meant to help bridge the gap between reality and the ideal. These debates have largely been limited to two ideal types: the strong, legitimate, and democratic state in Western Europe and North

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America,15 and the weak and authoritarian state in the developing world, mainly in Africa. States that t neither characterization, like most Middle Eastern states, have not been treated in the debate. These are neither failed states, nor are they fully democratic. Most Middle Eastern states are both strong (in the area of security) and weak (in the area of representation and political legitimacy). In some cases (Tunisia and Egypt), we have seen moves toward more representation, but outcomes are still uncertain. In other cases (Libya and Yemen) we have seen the likely emergence of a failed state, indicating the severe fragility of state institutions. These remain exceptions. Most Middle Eastern states are in a middle ground and as such perhaps not so exceptional in a global context. Weak and fragile states are common phenomena and perhaps should be seen as the norm.16 They do not necessarily monopolize legitimate violence but rather broker an elite consensus in which armed groups tolerate domestic peace in exchange for rights to extract rents.17 If this consensus breaks downs on account of political or economic grievances, instability will reign. This could either lead to a renegotiation of the social contract, as in Egypt and Tunisia, or to failure and outright violent confrontation, as in Libya and Yemen, and possibly also Syria. Failed states can be found in the Middle East, as latest developments show. However, they remain rare as weak/fragile states (such as Syria, Mauritania, or Lebanon) have not yet fully collapsed, as did Iraq in 2003, Lebanon in 1975, or Libya in 2011. Much has been written about the exceptionalism of the Middle East, and many authors have claimed that Islamic culture and Islamic political thought are seen as the prime reason why Middle Eastern states differ from Western states. Indeed, there are solid theoretical reasons for this, as Islam does not separate state and religion, and no distinction between public and private spheres exists.18 Islamic principles demand a concrete role of the state in shaping society and in the conduct of public lifethe principle of commanding right and forbidding wrongand thus put an emphasis on divine, rather than popular, sovereignty.19 Nevertheless, political behavior and attitudes are to a large extent adaptive to social settings and shaped by political context, and seeing Middle Eastern states only through a culturalist perspective misses important aspects. Therefore we concentrate on a functional reading of the state, focusing on the states capacity to provide public goods to its population. Viewed through this angle, there is a wide variance concerning the future of Middle Eastern states. Arab states, for the most part, stand apart from the strong and democratic states in Europe and North America but also from the collapsed states in Africa. As seen by events in the Arab Spring, some states have moved toward democratization but will inevitably face difculties due to their weak institutional structures. Others will remain resilient, yet authoritarian, while some will remain weak and fragile, yet will avoid immediate collapse.

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MAKING STATES WORK

This analysis suggests that a more nuanced understanding of statehood based on the form and the performance of the state is necessary. Statehood should be seen as a continuum ranging from an ideal-type strong state on the one hand (as found in the Euro-Atlantic area), to a patrimonial failed state (such as those found in Africa, but also in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, and Yemen) that lacks state infrastructure and who may be violently contested by various non-state actors. In between lie various types of states that differ qualitatively from these two extremes. The form of the state (failed, weak/fragile, rentier, reformed, or strong) is linked to the performance of the state in three functions, namely in its security,20 welfare,21 and representation22 function.23 The distinction is reminiscent of earlier classications, such as that of Barnett,24 who lists three objectives of the state, namely war preparation, economic development, and political stability, or that of Czempiel,25 who offers three policy domains in which the state operates: security, economic well-being, and system of rule (Herrschaft). More recently a typology of four dimensions of statehood, including economic, security, social, and political, was proposed.26 While there is considerable overlap between these classications, minor differences exist as to the various elements. Furthermore, the legitimacy of states is judged by their citizens in terms of the performance of core functions. If the state fails to fulll oneor in some rare cases allof its functions it will equally lose its legitimacy. This allows differentiating between cases of functional state failure and institutional state collapse: state institutions can persist even while the state fails to fulll its key attributed functions. The genocide that took place in Rwanda in 1994 was not enabled or produced by the Rwandan state disintegrating or ceasing to exist, as is often assumed. On the contrary, the genocide was produced by highly disciplined agents of the state who pursued the task of murdering many of its people with hideous efciency.27 There was hence no state collapse, but state failure, when the Rwandan state, run by Habyarimanas successor, was defeated and displaced in mid-1994 by the Rwandan Patriotic Front. This focus on the performance of statesso far only crudely captured in International Relations (IR) theory as state strength and state weakness points toward a typology of statehood used by some authors.28 The resulting taxonomy can replace the simple North-South bifurcation between strong and weak states, as illustrated in Table 1.29 State re-formation in Table 1 denotes the process through which a reconceptualizing of state functions occurs: it describes changes in the public conception of what it means for the state to full its core functions. States are consistently attempting to modernize and thus change their respective degree of statehood. For example, this could see a shift from the modern Weberian

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Rethinking States in the Middle East Table 1: Degrees of statehood. Degree of statehood Functions Security Welfare Representation State Formation Strong state X X X Reformed state X X State Re-formation Rentier state X X Weak/ Fragile state X Failed state

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State Failure

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Note. Adapted from Rolf Schwarz, The Political Economy of State-Formation in the Arab Middle East: Rentier States, Economic Reform, and Democratization, Review of International Political Economy 15 (2008): 603.

strong state to a reformed state. This occurred in many European states in the 1990s and the rst decade of the twenty-rst century, when the state withdrew from its welfare function and citizens were asked to take on more private responsibility in that domain. Tunisia and Egypt, prior to their respective revolutions, were also considered reformed states. Now, in their process of democratization, the two states are attempting to further legitimize their representative institutions. Reconceptualizing of state functions can also occur if, for example, rentier states that are initially able to fully distribute welfare benets to its citizens have to, through a scal crisis, reduce their welfare functions. Thus, they would either become a reformed state or a weak/fragile state. Most Arab states in the late 1980s t that pattern of a rentier state in scal crisis. They had to readjust their welfare functions, renegotiate the classic formula of no taxation, no representation, and ultimately widen their political legitimacy, thereby affecting the representation function of the state. Some succeeded, but opened space to non-state groups, mainly Islamist groups, which lled the gap and gained legitimacy by providing socioeconomic services the state no longer could provide. In the long term this strengthened representation but weakened security. Focusing on a new functional understanding of statehood allows to highlight where most Arab states are strong (security function and, in times of oil booms, welfare function) and where they are weak (representation function and, in times of scal crises, welfare function). The shift from one form to the other and the renegotiation of statesociety relations risks bringing about violent transitions. Reform and political change can be expected in times of declining resources or in times of scal crises. This was the case during the revolutions in both Tunisia and Egypt. As global food prices increased, people could no longer accept the inefciency of their government to provide basic necessities. This simple fact, compounded by the lack of democratic representation, led to the uprisings that saw the removal of President Ben Ali, in Tunisia, and President Mubarak, in Egypt, from power. While political change has indeed occurred, this might be unsustainable, as the accompanying scal

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base of the state has not been expanded. Simply changing the head of state does not ensure that the state will become a genuine democracy. Regarding the three categorizations that lie between the extremes of the strong state and the failed state, the examples of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen can best illustrate why such taxonomy is essential in IR scholarship. Furthermore, they can demonstrate the argument that Middle East states are indeed different and do not t in the Weberian classications of states. Egypt is the prime example of a reformed state. On a security level, the North African state is extremely strong, being the tenth largest military in the world.30 It has 468,000 active personnel, 479,000 reserves, and 397,000 paramilitary forces.31 Over the last 30 years, the United States has given Egypt $1.3 billion per year in military aid.32 The large military and paramilitary forces have kept the country stable, especially since the 1979 Peace Treaty with Israel. Egypt is not a wealthy state by any means, and it has no vast amounts of natural resources, differentiating its governance to that of rentier states in the Gulf. Due to the lack of resources, the Egyptian government has had to tax its population, and thus the people have gained some modest form of representation in parliament and government. However, the Egyptian state under Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak insufciently provided welfare to its citizens. Rapid urbanization in Cairo brought about the development of slums, and of course, a remarkable amount of poverty. Around 25 percent of the population under 25 is unemployed in Egypt and has grim prospects for employment.33 Government inefciency to address the rampant poverty and the welfare services demanded by the population, such as basic food and water, sanitation, health clinics, and educational facilities, led to the development of signicant non-state actors in the country. The most recognized, the Muslim Brotherhood, is incredibly popular not only due to its doctrine of Islam as the Solution, but also due to it providing basic services to the population.34 The lack of welfare provisions was one of the main forces driving the Egyptian Revolution, as food prices rose and the government could not placate an already poverty stricken population. Also, the unbalanced taxationrepresentation social contract, encapsulated by a corrupt and authoritarian regime, which many in the population did not feel represented their interests, was a major reason of the Egyptian Revolution. Gulf States exemplify the rentier state paradigm; due to the resources available to the state, there is no inherent need to tax the population. Saudi Arabia, which has a large military comprised of 233,500 active personnel35 that fully protects the sovereignty of the state, fulls the security functions in the Weberian denition of statehood. Also, the state has the capacity to provide welfare to the population. As noted previously, there is no need for the state to tax the population, and thus in the past, the social contract of taxation for representation was completely nonexistent. However, due to the demands of the population, there is a glimpse of a shift from the traditional

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no taxation, no representation social contract, as there will be, once again, municipal elections in the country. Saudi Arabia, even after protests in early 2011, is still viewed as a strong monarchy in the Gulf region, which looks as though it will continue its authoritarian rule unchallenged. Yemen is the best illustration for a weak/fragile state that has recently slipped into state failure. Tribes and non-state actors are strong and place limits on the reach of state authority. Legitimacy and public trust in the armed forces is low, and thus the public relies on tribes and extended family to provide for security, especially in remote areas. The reach of the states armed forces does not extend far beyond the capital Sanaa. And while 80 percent of the armed forces are located in urban areas throughout Yemen, only 25 percent of the total population lives there, leaving a majority of the population outside of the states reach. This means that the authority of the central government is limited to the capital and the major cities and does not extend across the whole country. Thus, while plagued by a general political legitimacy decit, Yemen has recently been subject to three converging security challenges that have weakened state authority further and opened questions about coming state failure.36 In the North of Yemen, the Houti rebellion has waged since 2004 and has recently brought instability that has spilled over into neighboring Saudi Arabia. In the South, calls for secession have been heard, awakening remembrance of the civil war that had plagued Yemen in 1994. In addition to this, Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula has made Yemen its central area of operations, and terrorism has struck the country on several occasions, including through the bombing of foreign embassies and the kidnapping of Western tourists. This triple challenge has strained the already weak institutions and has highlighted the dangers of a political system that builds on security, surveillance, and tribal connections without developing the proper accountable institutions. While providing faint security, Yemen has failed. Recent events in the country highlight this, as there have been bloody protests demanding the removal of President Saleh from power, and even an attack on President Saleh that left him severely wounded and forced him to leave Yemen and seek medical treatment in Saudi Arabia. Despite months of divide, Yemen has not yet collapsed. The ongoing political crisis and the looming civil war might lead to collapse in the near future.

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EXPLAINING MIDDLE EASTERN STATES

There are a variety of reasons as to why Middle Eastern states are, for the most part, in that middle ground between the two extremes of a strong state and a failed state. Major factors include the emergence of non-state actors, who are especially prevalent throughout the region due to many governments inability to provide basic functions to their populations. These actors have replaced the state in many ways, but this has not necessarily meant state collapse.

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Many states in the developing world have seen parallel developments, as in the Arab World recently, that all differ markedly from the historic path of state formation in Europe.37 These states have not been able to create the state capacity that would allow them to fulll state functions such as taxation and the provision of public goods. While much of this weakness went unnoticed as long as they possessed enough external revenues, states became vulnerable when they ran out of resources and when they had to adjust to cutbacks in public services and welfare provisions. As pressures for integration in a globalized world have risen, so have economic activities become detached from sovereign states. As a consequence, many a states ability or willingness to tax its population has waned. The void left behind by the retreat of the state in delivering public services has been lled in many instances by private actorsnonstate groups, civil-society networks, warlords, and others. Not only have these groups started to tax their constituents, but they also provide basic state functions such as health care and education. Actors such as Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hamas, although in the West seen as extremist Islamist groups, are viewed in their country as groups that readily provide the population with basic necessities and who give the underrepresented population a voice.38 New governance patterns seem to be emerging as a reaction to the withdrawal of the state and the emergence of non-state actors.39 This has been called the new Middle Ages,40 as the rise of private statelets that coexist in a delicate, often symbiotic relationship with a larger state: In the cities of the developing world, groups ranging from criminal gangs to Islamist civil-society networks have assumed many of the functions that states have abandoned, funding their operations through informal taxes as well as proceeds from the drug trade, human trafcking, and money laundering.41 In Lebanon, a chronically weak state, different armed groups and militias exist, and despite the end of the civil war (19751991), still put a limit on the reach of the Lebanese armed forces. In the South, Hezbollah has created a state within a state, and provides many state-like functions in the area of social services, health care, and of course security, and in the Palestinian camps, groups like Fatah al-Islam control large parts of the security sector and have engaged in the past in violent combat with the Lebanese armed forces. In Iraq and Afghanistan, insurgencies waged over the past decade have underlined the weakness of state authority and the difcult task of reconstructing a state and capable armed forces in a postconict society. And despite these enormous challenges, most Middle Eastern stateswith the exceptions of Yemen and Libyahave not succumbed to state failure and state collapse. Middle Eastern states may be weak and undemocratic, but they are surviving. They must be set apart from the strong and democratic states that emerged in early modern Europe and North America, but they must also be distinguished from the failed and collapsed states in Africa. Despite expectations of full-blown upcoming collapse, even weak/fragile states like

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Syria and Yemen have not yet succumbed to outright state collapse,42 and Lebanon, despite its many power centers, has lingered on as a state. What accounts for this? Why have states not just collapsed in view of their apparent weakness? Is this stability of weak states an ephemeral phenomenon and are the states of the region prepared for large governance crises, such as those currently taking place? To answer these questions, a look at European history helps. The rise of the modern state in early modern Europe was accompanied by the power to tax people and to extract nancial and human resources from society. Through this it became necessary for absolutist monarchs to extend rights of representation in government to those capable of paying the taxes necessary to nance wars they wished to ght. The expansion of political rights to the gentry, the bourgeoisie, and later the working class thereby became associated with states whose relative legitimacy permitted them to raise more taxes and build greater military capabilities. The much larger and technologically sophisticated armies sponsored by these states also required more developed and effective administrative structures to extract resources. The use of these enhanced capabilities to execute successful wars then led to even greater administrative and political capacities to tax and extract other resources. Thus, for centuries, wars, conicts, and armed violence were the driving force in building viable, legitimate, and democratic states on the European continent.43 The logic that drove state formation in Europe, namely the interplay between war and state making, was not able to unfold fully in the Middle East and other world regions due to the high degree of outside penetration. The effects of military competition had required European states to organize themselves effectively internally and hence contributed to the emergence of a few centrally organized state bureaucracies. The highly asymmetrical competition between Middle Eastern states and outside great powers effectively hindered the same effect.
When the ferocious men and women who built Britain, the United States, Germany Italy, France and Russia used advantages over their neighbors for territorial aggrandizement and the construction of great national states, there was no external club of preexisting great powers able to penetrate their continents and enforce paralyzing fragmented status quo on behalf of civilized norms of interstate behavior.44

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Several other factors blocked the war makes states process and produced a mixture of strong and weak states in the Middle East. Firstly, excess oil revenue in the hand of the state reduced the state necessity to extract resources (taxation) from its own population. Second, rentier states had the privilege to distribute and allocate excess oil revenues according to political considerations and without reference to economic consideration. Third, a high level of rentierism had a negative effect on the human, social, and economic

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development of a country. While the economic benets from oil revenues were only short-lived, the long-term consequences were market distortions, corruption, unproductive economic sectors, and the absence of autonomous social groups. All three aspects underline that rentier states differ drastically from states whose role is to collect taxes. The process through which war-makers are civilianized due to their need to forge a symbiosis with nascent civilian state-makers never materializes. Rather, rentierism leads to the emergence of weak states in two ways: economically and politically. Economically, rent-based state formation leads to particular institutional structures within rentier states. The allocation of rents follows political criteria (loyalty, proximity to rulers, family relationships) and thereby leads to a reinforcement of traditional loyalties and a lack of bureaucratic state capacity. It is not position but proximity that determines access to resources and privileges and hence the welfare of citizens. While most development theories focus on formal institutions within countries (parliaments, the judiciary, political parties, trade unions), the bulk of transactions occur in rentier states in the informal realm. In the Arab world, the informal nature of politics, the patrimonial nature of social interactions, and the role of informal institutions is central. Social interaction and decision making in all elds of politics are determined by highly elaborate networks of patrons and clients, by rent-seeking, by informal group structures, and neopatrimonialism. Particularly important in this context is the notion of wasta, the Arabic term for intercession, or mediation, which is the social mechanism that determines allocation decisions in society, economy, and politics. Rather than labor, personal capacity, or merit, it is the personal contact to political decision makers that determines and facilitates how resources are allocated and thus how the material well-being of the individual, the family, the clan, etc., is secured. Material well-being thereby does not only imply the successful pursuit of material benets, but also embraces nonmaterial enhancements (jobs, positions, licenses, access to information). The result is a reversal of the genuinely capitalist relations between labor, productivity, and prot.45 Wasta is an economic activity, which involves investments in personal relations and gains in terms of allocation of resources. Allocation networks build on existing cultural context but function along modern channels. Rent allocation preserves these, but does not create them. The preservation of tradition occurs within the vicinities of modern state institutions. The use of tradition within a formally modern system creates additional transaction costsfor besides investing in personal relationships, entrepreneurs have also to invest in the formal regulationand hinders the implementation of economic reforms. Societal norms and lack of economic development are clearly linked. Politically, a rentier political bargain is stable only as long as sufcient resources are available. In times of abundance (oil booms) it hinders the emergence of independent political interests demanding democratization and strengthens the autonomy of the state toward society.46 A vibrant civil society

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is unlikely to emerge, and nongovernmental interests are usually organized around the states allocation system. A high level of rentierism positively affects the function of the modern state in providing welfare and wealth to its citizens. The high level of wealth and welfare allocation in rentier states has led to an implicit social contract that substitutes political rights for stateprovided welfare, as well as to the co-optation of strategic social groups. The expenditure side of rentier states displays a state-building agenda of creating societal peace and legitimacy through welfare allocations. While this informal social contract may only be sustainable as long as there are enough resources to be allocated both for the state bureaucracy and for the whole of society, the chances for political change increase if the state fails to fulll its part of the social contract and thereby fails to fulll its welfare function. In order to avoid state failure, the state has to react to societal demands and broaden its representative function, which includes changes in its foreign policy. In the Middle East, the consolidation of states saw a reconguration when economic resources were no longer forthcoming. This gave rise to the retreat of the state from its core functions and imposed a renegotiation of statesociety relations. Where the state lacked revenues to allocate welfare benets to society at large, or where it withdrew from its welfare commitments, non-state actors lled the gap. In many cases, they provided alternative avenues for political protest, such as Islamist movements.47 Such is the case in Egypt with the Muslim Brotherhood, which is immensely popular among many of due the fact they provide basic services that the government seems unwilling or incapable to provide.48 In some cases non-state actors even challenged the states monopoly of violence; this was the case in Algeria, where the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) took over many social services abandoned by the state and challenged the state violently.49 This was also the case in Yemen, where a withdrawal from state-provided welfare lead to the civil war in 1994 and became of the underlying causes of the Houti rebellion in the north. The linkage between welfare and representation has to be constantly renegotiated. The prime considerations in this context become budget security,50 the acquisition of new revenues, and the maintenance of the states allocation power in the face of weak infrastructural power. Institutions of statehood exist but serve the purpose of allocation, patronage, and distribution of welfare. They are informal in nature and describe tacit social rules that structure social, economic, and political interactions. Informal does not make a judgment on the legal and nonlegal nature of the rules. But it highlights that while seemingly similar, institutions function differently. In all this, many Middle Eastern states differ from the ideal-typical strong and democratic Western state as well as from the collapsed states in Africa. When states in the Middle East have failed, as in Yemen and Libya, they have lacked legitimate political representation and welfare, and have tried to cling to oppressive security as a form of governance.

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DANGER OR HOPE AHEAD?NEW AUTHORITARIANISM OR PROSPECT FOR DEMOCRATIZATION?

The events that swept through the Middle East and North Africa during the rst few months of 2011 put on display the possible future of state transformation in the region. Egypt and Tunisia, while being reformed states, are moving toward becoming strong states. Of course, this will take time and there are too many variables at the moment to predict if such a shift in state transformation will occur. Nevertheless, the revolutions spoke to the demands of the people for more legitimate representation and for basic welfare services to be given to the population. In the Gulf, Libya, and Syria, people have demanded more representation, yet the protests, for the most part, have been met with repressive tactics by the state. However, the West, and especially the United States, has pushed states to consider the legitimate demands of the population and move toward providing a more equitable state of representation; such is the case of Bahrain. In Yemen, the Gulf Cooperation Council has seen the imminent danger of the country collapsing. Thus, they extended a political deal in order to save the failed state from civil war and hence stove off state collapse from the Gulf region. A complete collapse of the state would see non-state actors, such as Al Qaeda, possibly gain more prominence and inuence, perhaps resembling the situation of al-Shabab in Somalia. Libya is currently embroiled in a violent conict that resembles a civil war where opposing factions control territory. The country has collapsed altogether. Before the conict in Libya erupted, it could be argued that Qadda maintained a shadow state through his networks of patronage and oppressive security. No institutions exist or existed previously,51 and thus no welfare or representation systems were put in place. Security was scantily maintained by poorly trained military and paramilitary forces, but oppressively applied. As the country has now collapsed and is in essence divided, there is no stable security force governing the entirety of the country. Libya, after Qadda, will either see state formation or a drawn-out state collapse. Looking at the historic process of state formation in the Middle East can help our understanding of state collapse, its likelihood and nature. It can also offer more general and theoretical insights into IR theory about how states adjust their external behavior in order to assure their survival and avoid the emergence of alternative forms of governance inside their state territory. The close connection in rentier states between the economic and political foundation of the state leads to a twin phenomenon of state failure (in the representation function of the state) and life support for weak and fragile states. Were it not for the availability of external rents many weak and fragile states would probably have succumbed to institutional state collapse, even while maintaining all along a legal faade of statehood.52 Understanding

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potential for state failure must hence start with an understanding of how the three state functions interplay in a given state. Rentier states are an interesting case. They display a particular connection between them: abundant external revenues allow the provision of welfare and the acquisition of security to the detriment of representation. In times of scal crisis the state has to withdraw its welfare function and renegotiate a new equilibrium. This can take on an external strategy (revenue acquisition through foreign policy and/or war-making) or an internal strategy (economic reform and/or democratization). Both scenarios bear dangers for state failure as war-making may lead to the unmaking of the state and as economic reform might increase societal conicts. The heritage of a rentier economy, i.e., the informal nature of revenue distribution within a rentier state, bears the potential of the emergence of shadow states. Shadow states are those states that are characterized by a commercialization of politics in which a system of patronage and oppressive security maintains a minimum level of order. Foreign aid and other forms of external rents have offered state rulers wealth to distribute to loyal persons and nancial resources to create a coercive state apparatus to marginalize and control political opponents. This state apparatus has been maintained as long as revenues and rents were forthcoming. In times of scal crisis it challenged the foundations of many states: international pressures to enact economic reform and privatization measures, and cut-off patronage networks left the state apparatus weakened and some privileged private entrepreneurs strengthened, and in some cases exceeded a particular states capacity to enact reforms, thus undermining its capacity even further and encouraging neopatrimonialism to become even more rampant.53 In such a situation of economic restructuring, some state elites provoked insecurities54 and societal tensions, sold private protection in turn, and contributed in the long term to the emergence of societies that are prone to settle disputes by recourse to violence. Viewed from this angle, the operation of shadow states comprise already all the ingredients of state failure. State failurewhere it occurredwas essentially a collapse of the patronage system, which had maintained a minimum level of order and a selective form of economic welfare (for those clients of the rulers). Even where internationally mandated economic reforms have reduced the economic resources available to shadow states, nancial funds are often channeled through other means, such as non-state organizations. There is an inherent importance of maintaining the distribution of welfare benets (even at a low level) for the continuing functioning of the security of the state. Where both fall apart, as in post-2003 Iraq, the state collapses; insecurities abound and the reimposition of the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence (the rst step in process of state formation) becomes the highest priority in the reconstruction of the state, but is often very difcult to achieve.

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Gradual reform and transformation of post-rentier states is hence the key to transforming an allocation state into a taxation state and of transforming weak states into legitimate, democratic states. Effective central control of the state is a prerequisite for this.

CONCLUSION
Ultimately, when attempting to understand Middle Eastern states, the Weberian model is insufcient. Not all states t into the simplistic characterization of strong and failed states. We must recognize that varying degrees of statehood exist, and Middle Eastern states, in particular, exemplify the need for a more advanced classication. Most states in the region fall into the categories of reformed, rentier, or weak/fragile. Although there exist the rare cases of failed states, this is unusual; most states will avoid falling into either extreme of the classication. States such as Egypt and Tunisia are working to improve state institutions and functions and thus become a more strengthened reformed state. Rentier states in the Gulf will most likely persist in their modes of authoritarian governance, but will perhaps give small glimpses of political reform. Weak/fragile states such as Syria and Yemen are in the limbo stage in which they could fall either into state collapse or push ahead as they havefrail but maintaining a monopoly of security over the entirety of their territory but without resolving the underlying governance problems. Currently, the Middle East is going through a period of tremendous change. States have transformed and will continue to transform. Arab states have the possibility to democratize following the revolutions, but they will face considerable challenges due to their institutional weakness. However, most states will have to reform their economic and political policies in order to appease the populations legitimate demands for a more representative government and a more efcient welfare distribution system. Although many states may remain weak and authoritarian, they will most likely not fully collapse. Even some of the weakest states in the region, like Lebanon and Syria, seem to be able to resist multiple security challenges while maintaining some form of rudimentary statehood. Yemen has failed and might slide into complete collapse if the political deadlock remains and widespread violence becomes the norm. The situation in Libya is extremely complex, and the outcome of the current power struggle is unclear. The prospects for Libya are either a stalemate in which the country is divided or a post-Qadda scenario that either will lead toward reform at the hands of a more legitimate regime, or an even grimmer and prolonged state collapse. The events that shook the region in the early months of 2011 serve to show why a new conceptualization of statehood is necessary. While the states in the

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region are not like the countries of the Euro-Atlantic area, they are neither similar to states like Afghanistan and Somalia. Evidently, this demands that the middle ground be recognized and dened in order to better understand how states develop.

NOTES
1. Stephan D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 2. Rolf Schwarz and Oliver Jtersonke, Divisible Sovereignty and State Reconstruction in Iraq, Third World Quarterly 26 (2005): 643659. 3. Kristian Ulrichsen, The Durability of Weak States in the Middle East, in Persistent State Weakness in the Global Age, ed. Denisa Kostovicova and Vesna BojicicDzelilovic (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 8396; Rolf Schwarz, Introduction. Resistance to Globalization in the Arab Middle East, Review of International Political Economy 15 (2008): 59098. 4. Stein Sundstl Erikson, State Formation and the Politics of Regime Survival: Zimbabwe in Theoretical Perspective, Journal of Historical Sociology 23 (2010): 31640; Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Robert Rotberg, ed., When States Fail. Causes and Consequences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 5. Miguel Angel Centeno, Blood and Debt: War and the Nation-State in Latin America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002); Richard F. Doner et al., Systemic Vulnerability and the Origins of Developmental States: Northeast and Southeast Asia in Comparative Perspective, International Organization 59 (2005): 32761. 6. Denisa Kostovicova and Vesna Bojicic-Dzelilovic, eds., Persistent State Weakness in the Global Age (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). 7. Neil A. Englehart, Governments Against States: The Logic of Self-Destructive Despotism, International Political Science Review 28 (2007): 13353. 8. Max Weber, Politik als Beruf [Politics as a Vocation], in Gesammelte Politische Schriften, ed. May Weber (Berlin: Duncker & Humboldt, 1919), 506. 9. Max Weber, Staatssoziologie [Essays in Sociology], in Grundriss der Sozialkonomie, Vol. III, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, ed. Max Weber (Tbingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1922), 822. 10. Joel Migdal, State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Leonard Seabrooke, Bringing Legitimacy Back in to Neo-Weberian State Theory and International Relations (Canberra: Australian National University, Department of International Relations, 2002). 11. Weak states lack infrastructural power and are unable to perform core state functions throughout their territories. Weak states are disconnected from societal demands and often do not rely on domestic taxation. 12. See Robert H. Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 13. Fragile states are states that have weak structures and lack performance capacity in core state tasks; they are thus similar to weak states and only differ in the degree of

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R. Schwarz and M. de Corral their weakness. Fragile states may be on the verge of becoming failed states but may also recover from state weakness and gain in capacity to perform; Stephan D. Krasner and Carlos Pascual, Addressing State Failure, Foreign Affairs 84 (2005): 15363. 14. A failed state can be dened as a polity that is no longer able or willing to perform the fundamental tasks of a nation-state in the modern world despite maintaining international legal recognition; Rotberg, When States Fail, 6 15. Strong states are dened by possessing infrastructural power, namely the capacity of the state to actually penetrate civil society and to implement logistically political decisions throughout the realm; Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 55.

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16. Douglas North et al., Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 17. Jack Snyder, The State and Violence. A Discussion of Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History, Perspectives on Politics 8 (2010): 28789. 18. Abdulaziz Sachedine, The Role of Islam in the Public Square: Guidance or Governance? (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006). 19. Michael Cook, Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 20. Security has both internal and external dimensions. More importantly, recent debates have moved from a traditional understanding of state security to one in which the individual is the referent object of attention. It is this human security focus that we follow in this article. 21. Welfare refers to the improvement of the economic and social well-being of individuals. Nuanced disagreement exists as to whether the state should provide for welfare entitlements directly or just provide the framework under which individuals can strive to attain these. 22. Representation is most commonly associated with liberal democracies, but classical social contract theories teach us that representation must not be exclusively associated with them. Representation, hence, is encapsulated in the states relationship with its citizens through the selection of a sovereign who acts in the name of the commonwealth and who is bound by the will of the represented. 23. Jennifer Milliken and Keith Krause, State Failure, State Collapse, and State Reconstruction: Concepts, Lessons and Strategies, Development and Change 33 (2002): 75374; Rolf Schwarz, Post-Conict Peace-Building: The Challenges of Security, Welfare and Representation, Security Dialogue 36 (2005): 42946. 24. Michael N. Barnett, Confronting the Costs of War: Military Power, State, and Society in Egypt and Israel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 6. 25. Ernst-Otto Czempiel, Internationale Politik: Ein Koniktmodell [International Politics: A Model for Conict] (Paderborn: Schningh/UTB, 1981). 26. Jack A. Goldstone, Deteriorating Fragile States: How to Recognize Them, How to Help Them? (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2008). 27. Christopher Clapham, The Challenge of the State in a Globalized World, Development and Change 33 (2002): 776. 28. Christopher Clapham, Degrees of Statehood, Review of International Studies 24 (1998): 14357; Roland Dannreuther, War and Insecurity: Legacies of Northern and Southern State Formation, Review of International Studies 33 (2007): 30726; Staffan Lindberg, Forms of States, Governance, and Regimes: Reconceptualizing the Prospects

Rethinking States in the Middle East for Democratic Consolidation in Africa, International Political Science Review 22 (2001): 17399. 29. In rare cases there exists the possibility of state collapse. State collapse is the breakdown of state institutions and the emergence of a situation that resembles an all out war. Its symptoms are anarchy, lawlessness, and widespread violence that threaten surrounding states and regions. This was the case in Lebanon in 1975, Iraq post-2003, and, most recently, Libya in 2011. State failure is different, as it entails poor governance and inadequate, incompetent, or abusive national authority structures, but not necessarily the complete breakdown of institutions; Rolf Schwarz, NATO and Prevention of State Failure: An Idea Whose Time Will Come?, Contemporary Security Policy 31 (2010): 33962.

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30. IISS, The Military Balance 2010 (London: The International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2010). 31. Ibid. 32. US Department of State, Background Note: Egypt [2010], http://www.state. gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/5309.htm (accessed May 23, 2011). 33. Schumpeter, Young, Jobless, and Looking for Trouble, The Economist, February 3, 2011, http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2011/02/youth_unemployment (accessed May 21, 2011). 34. Miguel de Corral, Dont Ignore the Muslim Brotherhood, The Jerusalem Post, March 1, 2011, http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id= 210399 (accessed May 23, 2011). 35. IISS, Military Balance 2010. 36. Christopher Boucek, Yemen: Avoiding a Downward Spiral, Carnegie Papers, September 2009, http://www.carnegieendowment.org/2009/09/10/yemenavoiding-downward-spiral/29j (accessed May 18, 2011); Ginny Hill, Yemen: Fear of Failure, Chatham House, 2008, http://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/ les/public/Research/Middle%20East/bp1108yemen.pdf (accessed May 18, 2011). 37. Keith Krause, Insecurity and State Formation in the Global Military Order: The Middle Eastern Case, European Journal of International Relations 2 (1996): 31954; Rolf Schwarz, Rule, Revenue and Representation. Oil and State Formation in the Middle East and North Africa (Geneva: Graduate Institute of International Studies, 2007); Georg Srensen, War and State MakingWhy Doesnt It Work in the Third World?, Security Dialogue 32 (2001): 34154; Brian D. Taylor and Roxana Botea, Tilly Tally: War-Making and State-Making in the Contemporary Third World, International Studies Review 10 (2008): 2756. 38. de Corral, Dont Ignore the Muslim Brotherhood. 39. Philip G. Cerny, Neomedievalism, Civil War and the New Security Dilemma: Globalisation as Durable Disorder, Civil Wars 1 (1998): 3644; Batrice Pouligny, Civil Society and Post-Conict Peacebuilding: Ambiguities of International Programmes Aimed at Building New Societies, Security Dialogue 36 (2005): 42946. 40. John Rapley, The New Middle Ages, Foreign Affairs 85 (2006): 96. 41. Ibid., 102. 42. David Hughes, Yemens Problems are the Regions Problems, NATO Review 4 (2010), http://www.nato.int/docu/review/2010/Yemen/Yemen_region_problems/EN (accessed May 18, 2011). 43. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 9901990 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990).

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R. Schwarz and M. de Corral 44. Ian Lustick, The Absence of Middle Eastern Great Powers: Political Backwardness in Historical Perspective, International Organization 51 (1997): 675. 45. Eva Bellin, Stalled Democracy. Capital, Labor, and the Paradox of State-Sponsored Development (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002); Oliver Schlumberger, Arab Political Economy and the European Unions Mediterranean Policy: What Prospects for Development?, New Political Economy 5 (2000): 24768. 46. Michael Ross, Does Oil Hinder Democracy?, World Politics 53 (2001): 32561. 47. Quintan Wiktorowicz, ed., Islamic Activism. A Social Movement Theory Approach (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). 48. de Corral, Dont Ignore the Muslim Brotherhood. 49. Pradeep K. Chhibber, State Policy, Rent Seeking, and the Electoral Success of a Religious Party in Algeria, Journal of Politics 58 (1996): 12648. 50. Laurie Brand, In Search of Budget Security: A Reexamination of Jordanian Foreign Policy, in Diplomacy in the Middle East: The International Relations of Regional and Outside Powers, ed. L. Carl Brown (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2001), 13958. 51. Daniel L. Byman, Qaddas Legacy, Brookings Institution, February 24, 2011, http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2011/0224_libya_byman.aspx (accessed May 20, 2011). 52. Jackson, Quasi-States; Rotberg, When States Fail. 53. Jean-Francois Bayart et al., The Criminalisation of the State in Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 1999); Neil Cooper, Picking Out the Pieces of the Liberal Peaces: Representation of Conict Economies and the Implications for Policy, Security Dialogue 36 (2005): 46378; Beatrice Hibou, From Privatising the Economy to Privatising the State: An Analysis of the Continual Formation of the State, in Privatising the State, ed. Beatrice Hibou (London: Hurst & Co., 2004), 147. 54. William Reno, The Politics of Insurgency in Collapsing States, Development and Change 33 (2002): 83758.

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