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Democratization theory
and the “Arab Spring”
Alfred Stepan and Juan J. Linz
Alfred Stepan is Wallace Sayre Professor of Government and founding
director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration, and
Religion at Columbia University. Juan J. Linz is Sterling Professor
Emeritus of Political and Social Science at Yale University.
More than twenty-five years have passed since the publication of
Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Prospects for Democracy, the
four pioneering volumes edited by Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe C.
Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead that inaugurated third-wave democratization
theory. More than fifteen years have passed since the 1996
publication of our own Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation:
Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe.
Looking back, what do we find useable or applicable from works on
democratization from this earlier period, and what concepts need to be
modified? In particular, what new perspectives are needed in light of the
recent upheavals in the Arab world?
Here we focus on three topics that have been illuminated by the events
of the Arab Spring: 1) the relationship between democracy and religion,
especially in the world’s Muslim-majority countries; 2) the character of
hybrid regimes that mix authoritarian and democratic elements; and 3)
the nature of “sultanism” and its implications for transitions to democ-
racy.
Conflicts concerning religion, or between religions, did not figure
prominently in either the success or failure of third-wave attempts at
democratic transition. The Roman Catholic Church of course played
an important and positive role in the democratic transitions in Poland,
Chile, and Brazil. But conflicts over religion, which were so crucial in
Europe in earlier historical periods, were not prominent. For this and
other reasons, religion was undertheorized in scholarly writing about the
third wave. Yet the hegemony, perceived or actual, of religious forces
over much of civil society in the Arab world, especially in the countryJournal
of Democracy Volume 24, Number 2 April 2013
© 2013 National Endowment for Democracy and The Johns Hopkins University Press
16 Journal of Democracy
The Seymour Martin Lipset Lecture on
Democracy in the World
Alfred Stepan delivered the ninth annual Seymour Martin Lipset
Lecture on Democracy in the World on 13 November 2012 at the
Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C., and on November 15 at the
Centre for International Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs
at the University of Toronto. The text of his lecture was coauthored
with his longtime collaborator Juan Linz, Sterling Professor Emeritus
of Political and Social Science at Yale University, who was unable to
be physically present for health reasons. Linz had been a student of
Lipset, just as Stepan had been a student of Linz. This led Linz, in a
message that was read to the audience prior to the lecture, to refer to
Stepan as “Lipset’s intellectual grandchild.”
Seymour Martin Lipset, who passed away at the end of 2006, was
one of the most influential social scientists and scholars of democracy
of the past half-century. A frequent contributor to the Journal
of Democracy and a founding member of its Editorial Board, Lipset
taught at Columbia, the University of California–Berkeley, Harvard,
Stanford, and George Mason University. He was the author of numerous
important books, including Political Man, The First New Nation,
The Politics of Unreason, and American Exceptionalism: A DoubleEdged
Sword. He was the only person ever to have served as president
of both the American Political Science Association (1979–80)
and the American Sociological Association (1992–93).
Lipset’s work covered a wide range of topics: the social conditions
of democracy, including economic development and political culture;
the origins of socialism, fascism, revolution, protest, prejudice, and
extremism; class conflict, structure, and mobility; social cleavages,
party systems, and voter alignments; and public opinion and public
confidence in institutions. Lipset was a pioneer in the study of comparative
politics, and no comparison featured as prominently in his
work as that between the two great democracies of North America.
Thanks to his insightful analysis of Canada in comparison with the
United States, most fully elaborated in Continental Divide (1990), he
has been dubbed the “Tocqueville of Canada.”
The Lipset Lecture is cosponsored by the National Endowment
for Democracy and the Munk School, with financial support this year
from the Albert Shanker Institute, the American Federation of Teachers,
the Canadian Embassy in Washington, and the Canadian Donner
Foundation. To view videos of the Lipset Lecture from this and
past years, please visit www.ned.org/events/seymour-martin-lipset-
lecture-series.
17Alfred Stepan and Juan J. Linz
side, had no parallel in the third wave. Thus the central role that Islam
has played in the Arab Spring presents students of democratization with
a novel phenomenon, and prompts them accordingly to come up with
new concepts and fresh data to shed light upon it.
Samuel P. Huntington argued controversially that religion, especially
Islam, would set major limits to further democratization. That suggested
to one of us (Alfred Stepan) the idea of exploring what democracy and
religion need, and do not need, from each other in order that each may
flourish.1
Stepan argued that neither la¦cité of the French sort (generally
recognized not merely as secularist but as positively antireligious), nor
a type of secularism that decrees a complete separation between religion
and the state, was empirically necessary for democracy to emerge.
What was needed for both democracy and religion to flourish? The
answer was a significant degree of institutional differentiation between
religion and the state. This situation of differentiation Stepan summed
up as the “twin tolerations.” In a country that lives by these two tolerations,
religious authorities do not control democratic officials who
are acting constitutionally, while democratic officials do not control religion
so long as religious actors respect other citizens’ rights. Many
different patterns of relations among the state, religion, and society are
compatible with the twin tolerations. There are, in other words, “multiple
secularisms.”
This term fits even the EU democracies. France retains a highly separatist,
somewhat religion-unfriendly pattern of secularism with roots
in the French Revolution. Germany, like Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands,
and Switzerland, displays a very different pattern of state-religion
relations that in German law is called “positive accommodation.” In the
German case, this includes a state role in collecting taxes for the Roman
Catholic and Lutheran churches. The twin-tolerations model, of course,
can incorporate countries with established churches—overall, a third of
the EU’s 27 member states have established churches, with the Lutheran
Church filling this role in Denmark, Finland, and Sweden, as well as the
non-EU states of Iceland and Norway. All the varieties of secularism in
Europe are consistent with religious toleration and democracy.2
The crucial point is that multiple forms of secularism can be friendly
to democracy and the twin tolerations. It should be better known than it
is—particularly in most Arab countries—that close to 300 million Muslims
have been living under democracy for each of the past ten years
in the Muslim-majority countries of Albania, Indonesia, Senegal, and
Turkey. If one adds the roughly 178 million Muslims who are natives of
Hindu-majority India, the total number of Muslims living in democracies
outside the West begins to approach half a billion. The Indian experience
may be of particular interest, for it means that India had to be historically
imagined—not to mention governed for the last six decades—as a
democracy that incorporates a huge number of Muslim citizens.
18 Journal of Democracy
India provides strong evidence against the presumption that there is
something “exceptionalist” about Muslim attitudes toward democracy.
In a recent survey with 27,000 respondents, India’s Hindus and Muslims
alike reported themselves as supporters
of democracy at an equally high
71 percent.3
Nearby in overwhelmingly
Muslim Pakistan, the cognate
figure was a mere 34 percent. That
Indian Muslims should back democracy
at more than twice the rate of
their coreligionists who live just
across the border—in a country with
a far more checkered democratic history—underlines
the great political
contextuality of religion.
With that in mind, we should look at the Muslim world’s newly emergent
democracies (Indonesia and Senegal, for example) and ask first if
there have been any new conceptual emphases in Islamic political theology
that have aided democratization in these places. Next, we should ask
whether any new public policies regarding religion have been friendly to
the twin tolerations while assisting democracy’s rise.
On the conceptual and theological front, we note a growing emphasis
on the importance of the Koranic verse (2:256) that categorically asserts,
“There shall be no compulsion in religion.” And as the Indonesian
civil society leader, politician, and political scientist Amien Rais points
out: “The Koran does not say anything about the formation of an Islamic
state, or about the necessity and obligations on the part of Muslims to establish
a Sharia or Islamic State.”4
Indonesian Muslim leaders say things
like this often in order to argue against the imposition of shari‘a in their
country. To date, none of the Muslim-majority democracies has established
shari‘a as its legal code, and none has made Islam its established
religion.5
We can draw similar examples from Tunisia, which in 2012 became
the first Arab country in more than three decades to receive a ranking
of 3 or better for political rights on the 7-point Freedom House scale
(in which 1 is most free and 7 is least free). Many pan-Arabists or panIslamists,
not to mention backers of a global Islamic caliphate, often
voice doubts about the legitimacy of individual states and the value of
democracy in them. Yet in Tunisia as in Indonesia, some influential
Islamic advocates of democracy have used the key Koranic concepts
of consensus, consultation, and justice to argue that democracy will be
most effective and most legitimate if it relates to the specificities of its
citizens’ histories in a particular state. For example, Rachid Ghannouchi
of Ennahda, Tunisia’s governing Islamist party since 2011, frequently
says that his party should embrace the historic specificity that Tunisia
Close to 300 million
Muslims have been living
under democracy for each
of the past ten years in the
Muslim-majority countries
of Albania, Indonesia,
Senegal, and Turkey.
19Alfred Stepan and Juan J. Linz
for more than sixty years has had the Arab world’s most progressive and
women-friendly family code.6
Another concept that is becoming important in Tunisia is not “secularism”
as such (in Arabic the word for secularism, almaniyah, carries
antireligious overtones), but rather the concept of a civil state (dawla
madaniyah) instead of a religious state. In a civil state, religion (in keeping
with the twin tolerations) respects democratic prerogatives—the
people are sovereign, and they make the laws. Yet a civil state also respects
some prerogatives of religion and its legitimate role in the public
sphere. In a May 2011 interview, both Ghannouchi and Tunisia’s future
prime minister, Hamadi Jebali of Ennahda, spoke extensively of the political
imperative of a “civil state.”7
What are some of the public policies and practices that have encouraged
mutual respect between religion and democracy in Indonesia, Senegal,
and also India?
First, all three actively contribute to the celebration of more religions
than does Western Europe. For example, Denmark, France, Germany,
the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland decree a combined total of 76
religious holidays on which workers, by law, enjoy a paid day off. Every
such holiday comes from the Christian calendar; none are for minority
religions. Indonesia, by contrast, has six such official Islamic holidays,
and seven additional holidays to cover days sacred to such minority religions
as Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, and Hinduism. Senegal
has seven public Islamic holidays, and six for the less than one-tenth
of the population that is Roman Catholic. Senegal also subsidizes pilgrimages
to Rome for Catholic citizens. India has five official Hindu
holidays, and ten to accommodate its many minority religions. All three
countries also offer state funding to different religions, especially for
religious schools and hospitals.
India, Indonesia, and Senegal also embrace greater degrees of policy
cooperation between the state and religion than would be found under
French-style la¦cité or even U.S. doctrines of church-state accommodation.
In all three countries, discussions between religious authorities and
representatives of the democratic state have often led to policy consensus.
In both Indonesia and Senegal, education-ministry specialists
have worked with Islamic authorities to agree on mutually acceptable
curricula, accreditation standards, and texts on the history of religion
and Islam. One happy result has been that more parents than ever are
choosing to send their daughters to school. Among Indonesians aged 11
to 14 today, 96 percent of boys and 95 percent of girls are literate.
In Senegal, the state asked the secretary-general of the National Association
of Imams to inquire whether there is a Koranic basis for female
genital mutilation (FGM). After study, the secretary-general sent all the
Sufi orders a 43-page report saying that nothing in the Koran or early
Islamic sources commands this custom or even indicates that it was ever
20 Journal of Democracy
practiced in the families of Muhammad and his companions. The imam
concluded by asserting that a proper understanding of Islam required all
imams to cooperate with state officials in a joint campaign—its effectiveness
later certified by the UN—to combat FGM.8
Such examples put in question the political wisdom of John Rawls’s
injunction to take religion “off the political agenda” lest it interfere with
the “overlapping moral consensus” that democracy requires. If democracy-inhibiting
religious arguments are already on the political agenda,
should Muslim leaders and activists who favor democracy not vigorously
enter the public arena to show, from within their own tradition,
that Islam and democracy are in fact compatible? Moreover, would it
not be a good thing if more people in Arab countries—where “secularism”
is too often seen as intrinsically hostile to religion—knew of the
progress that Indonesia and Senegal have made toward relating religion,
state, and society in ways that are friendly to both Islam and democracy?
Hybrids: The Case of Egypt
In our earlier work we listed five regime types: democratic, authoritarian,
totalitarian, posttotalitarian, and sultanistic.9
To this roster we
now propose adding a sixth type, the “authoritarian-democratic hybrid”
regime. Like totalitarianism and posttotalitarianism, this is a “historically
constructed” category devised to take into account a newly emergent
phenomenon seen today in the Arab world and beyond.
No Arab country—not even Syria, and still less Egypt, Libya, or Tunisia
under the dictatorships of Mubarak, Qadhafi, and Ben Ali—has
ever had a fully institutionalized totalitarian regime as we define it.
Therefore, the term “posttotalitarian” does not apply to Arab countries
where dictatorships have fallen.10
Such countries can no longer be adequately characterized as authoritarian
or sultanistic, either, and they are not (or not yet) democracies—hence
the “authoritarian-democratic hybrid” label. This concept
is obviously a close relation to regime types that other scholars have
called “competitive authoritarian” or simply “hybrid.”11
We prefer the
lengthier term “authoritarian-democratic hybrid” because it calls attention
to the unusual condition of the countries so labeled: They are places
where most major actors believe that they will lose legitimacy and their
followers’ support should they fail to embrace certain core features of
democracy (such as elections to produce the leaders of government),
while believing at the same time that they must also retain (or at least
allow) some authoritarian controls on key aspects of the emerging polity
if they hope to further their goals and (again) retain their supporters.
It is possible that we will eventually stop calling this a “regime type”
because it fails to last or become institutionalized. In that case, “situation”
would be a better word. In the early 1970s, Juan Linz called military rule
21Alfred Stepan and Juan J. Linz
in Brazil (a rule that began in 1964 and mixed authoritarian with democratic
features) a “situation” and predicted that it would never manage to
institutionalize itself. In a rare case of political science directly influencing
political practice, it appears that the military regime’s chief strategist,
General Golbery do Couto e Silva, saw an advance copy of Linz’s article
and was influenced by it to persuade his colleagues that they should begin
slowly to extricate themselves from government while they were still able
to control the pace and circumstances of their withdrawal.12
It is highly possible that many of the Arab world’s current “hybrids”
will also turn out to be passing “situations” rather than entrenched “regimes.”
The evolutionary possibilities include, as in Brazil from 1974 to
1989, a transition toward democracy. Yet should the coercive apparatus
find it too difficult and distasteful to coexist with democratic elements
(as happened in Algeria in 1991), there could also be a transition, via a
military coup or some other means, toward full-fledged authoritarianism.
Why do hybrid situations (if not hybrid regimes) come into being?
Recent historical events such as the fall of communism, the entry of ten
former communist countries into the EU, the demise of military governments
in Latin America, and the aspirations raised by Tahrir Square do
not mean the “end of history” and the reign of full democracy. Yet in
countries such as Egypt, they have fueled a growing sense of the dignity
of the individual, of people as citizens rather than mere subjects, and
of democratic practices as things that are normally expected. In this
new world, passively accepting for sixty years in a row one military
officer after another as Egypt’s ruler is no longer possible. The three
major players left standing after the last of those three officers (former
Air Force general Mubarak) fell—the Supreme Council of the Armed
Forces (SCAF), the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), and secular liberals—
would have lost much of their legitimacy, and many of their followers,
had they failed to embrace central democratic tenets such as reasonably
competitive elections for the key offices of state. (Without relatively
free elections, of course, a regime would not even qualify as hybrid, but
would simply be authoritarian.)
Yet the generals, the Brotherhood, and the liberals all wanted to protect
themselves in certain areas by placing limits on the right of democratic
institutions to make public policy. Soon after Mubarak’s fall,
many of the young secular liberals who had filled Tahrir Square began
to argue that the MB was so strong and so fundamentally undemocratic
that core liberal-democratic values could only be saved if secular liberals
cut a deal with a nondemocratic source of power—the military.
Many liberals argued that the military should help structure, or even
write, the constitution before elections for the Constituent Assembly, or
at the very least appoint a committee of experts to draft the constitution
so that the Brotherhood could not constitute a majority.13
For its part, the SCAF supported the holding of elections and im-
22 Journal of Democracy
plicitly agreed, at a price, to maintain some controls on any Islamist
majority that elections might produce. Only weeks before the 26 November
2011 parliamentary elections, the SCAF released the infamous
“Silmi Document” asserting a variety of military prerogatives not found
in any democracy. For instance, the document’s ninth article flatly asserted
that the SCAF “is solely responsible for all matters concerning
the armed forces, and for discussing its budget. . . . [the SCAF] is also
exclusively competent to approve all bills relating to the armed forces
before they come into effect.”
The Muslim Brothers, meanwhile, partly because they felt under attack
from secular liberals, began early on to enter into understandings with the
military. In keeping with these, the MB backed the generals’ unilateral
decision to hold a constitutional referendum on the heels of Mubarak’s
resignation, and kept silent about several incidents during the last three
months of 2011 in which soldiers and police killed protesters, including
at least 28 Coptic Christians. In return, the Brothers were allowed to take
a historic step by assuming partial leadership of a controlled democracy.
More than is commonly understood, the cost of the Brotherhood’s
gains (which included the elected presidency of Egypt) included a special
position for the military in the new constitutional order, the economy,
and regional government. The new constitution, largely written
by the MB, stipulates a number of arrangements not normally found in
democratic constitutions. For example, the document decrees that the
defense minister must be a serving military officer (Article 195); provides
for a National Defense Council comprising eight uniformed officers
and seven civilians that votes on the military budget (Article 197);
and gives the armed forces the right to try civilians in military courts for
crimes that “harm the Armed Forces” (Article 198).
Much has been made of President Mohamed Morsi’s decision to sack
certain key generals. Less has been made of his decision to name many
of these cashiered officers to influential economic posts—overseeing
the Suez Canal, civil aviation, and the extensive network of militaryrun
factories—from which they can work to secure the armed forces’
already huge influence over the Egyptian economy. Moreover, instead
of following Indonesia’s example and making regional executives elected,
Egypt has adopted a constitution that is silent on regional elections.
Retired military officers continue to fill many powerful regional posts.
Such are the ways of an authoritarian-democratic hybrid state.
What Was Different in Tunisia?
Unlike Egypt, postdictatorial Tunisia, despite a destablizing assassination
in February 2013, has so far managed to avoid the strong admixture
of authoritarianism that makes a hybrid situation or regime. The initial
reasons for this were three. First, the leaders of the Ennahda party,
23Alfred Stepan and Juan J. Linz
which was at one time close to the Muslim Brotherhood, since the early
1980s increasingly came to resemble Indonesia’s major Islamic groups
in arguing that democracy was not only acceptable, but necessary. This
eventually facilitated collaboration between Ennahda’s Islamists and
secular liberals from other parties in joint efforts against Ben Ali.
Second, due to highly innovative “pacts” formed between secularists
and Islamists before the transition started, there was a kind of inoculation
against the intense fear of democracy’s consequences that drives hybrid
authoritarianism. Each of Tunisia’s two secular authoritarian presidents,
Habib Bourguiba and later Ben Ali, deliberately mobilized fear.
Each claimed repeatedly that allowing competitive elections would bring
to power Islamists who would be at best overly tradition-bound and at
worst “terrorists.” Domestic peace, women’s rights, and secular liberals
would suffer. Tunisians heard a great deal of this, but despite it, leading
secular liberals began to ask whether they might have more in common
with at least some Islamists than with Ben Ali, and the two groups considered
(with some success) whether they could work together. Suspicions
remain, of course, but most secular liberals do not fear Ennahda badly
enough to want to use authoritarianism as a shield against it.
Third, in Tunisia by contrast to Egypt, not only civil society but political
society began to develop. Civil society can play a vital role in
the destruction of an authoritarian regime, but for the construction of
a democracy, one needs a political society. In other words, there must
be organized groups of political activists who can not only rally resistance
to dictatorship, but also talk among themselves about how they
can overcome their mutual fear and craft the “rules of the game” for a
democratic alternative.
Although Egypt arguably had a more creative civil society than did
Tunisia, the former’s specifically political society was and is woefully
underdeveloped. As late as four months after Mubarak’s February 2011
ouster, the two key social groups that had opposed him—secular liberals
and the Muslim Brotherhood—still had not held a single joint meeting
to discuss democratic governing alternatives. The Brotherhood’s website
was still displaying its 2007 draft party platform, complete with
nondemocratic features such as a rejection of the idea that a woman or a
non-Muslim (two groups comprising more than half the populace) could
ever be president of Egypt, and a recommendation that a high court
composed of and appointed by imams should be empowered to review
all new legislation to ensure its compliance with shari‘a. Small wonder,
then, that a sense of growing distrust has continued to dominate the political
atmosphere in Egypt.
In Tunisia, secular liberals and Islamists began meeting regularly
eight years before Ben Ali’s fall to see whether they could reduce mutual
fears and agree upon rules for democratic governance. That is, they
began to create a political society. As described recently in these pages,
24 Journal of Democracy
such efforts helped to lay the basis for the near-unanimity with which
the roughly 155 consensually selected members of the country’s key
post–Ben Ali reform commission voted for six major rules and principles
to govern the selection and proceedings of a constituent assembly.14
Nothing like this happened in Egypt. There, the SCAF shaped all significant
political dialogue with one unilateral communiqué after another
(more than 150 all told) over the ten months following Mubarak’s fall.
Following a free election in October 2011, Tunisia’s democratic political
society eased the formation of a three-party governing coalition.
The heads of the two largest parties, Ennahda’s Rachid Ghannouchi and
human-rights activist Moncef Marzouki of the secular Congress for the
Republic, knew each other well, having met about twenty times in London
over the eight years preceding Ben Ali’s fall.15
Tunisia’s post–Ben
Ali political society has had to struggle with numerous problems, of
course, but initially did so ably enough so that in 2012 Tunisia became
the first Arab-majority country in 37 years to receive a political-rights
score as good as 3 from Freedom House.
Hopeful Trends and Disturbing Realities
Transitions toward democracy are always filled with uncertainty.
Tunisia’s is no exception. There are worrisome as well as reassuring
trends. During Alfred Stepan’s November 2012 research visit there (his
fourth since 2011) some of the reassuring trends were as follows:
1. In separate personal interviews, most of the presidents of the largest
parties in the Constituent Assembly affirmed their expectation that,
after numerous compromises, they would be able to gather a two-thirds
majority of the Assembly behind the constitution they were writing.
2. Every major political leader expressed the belief that within eight
months of the approval of the constitution, elections would be held, and
that if the state could contain the increasing occurences of political violence
the voting would be free and fair.
3. Both governing-coalition members and oppositionists in the Constituent
Assembly implied that if Ennahda proved unable to command
another coalitional majority after these elections (there is a good chance
that it will not be able to), Ennadha would, as in any democracy, peacefully
step down, perhaps with a view to participating as a junior partner
in some new ruling coalition.
4. The draft constitution had one major issue still unresolved: the
powers of the executive. But there was growing confidence in November
2012 that an innovative and consensual solution could be found.
Ennahda preferred a British-style parliamentary system but with proportional
representation. Most of the other parties in the Constituent
Assembly argued that, since Tunisia had just had a popular revolution,
the people should have the right to play a role in choosing a president.
25Alfred Stepan and Juan J. Linz
But these parties were painfully aware that from 1956 to 2011, Tunisia
was ruled by presidents so strong they doubled as dictators. There was a
growing trend within the Constituent Assembly in favor of a new model
that we call “parliamentarized semipresidentialism” of the Portuguese
sort—that is, with a weaker president and a stronger parliament than
in France, and also with a significant role for a Constitutional Court in
adjudicating any potential conflicts between parliament and the presi-
dent.16
But there were also some disturbing realities in Tunisia that have now
contributed, as of this writing in March 2013, to what many observers
feel is the greatest challenge to confront democracy since Ben Ali’s fall:
1. Ennahda became legal only after the transition had begun. Prodemocratic
rethinking had occurred within Ennahda, but mostly among its leaders
in exile in London and Paris. Also, the hard-line secularist dictators
Bourguiba and Ben Ali had nearly destroyed Islamic education within
Tunisia, leaving a vacuum that Gulf-financed theocratic extremists rushed
to fill amid the new conditions of greater religious liberty. Unfortunately,
to date, Ennadha has not yet been able to effectively create alternative
spaces and discourses in many key mosques and neighborhoods.
2. Aided by the incompetence or complicity of the police, on 14 September
2012 about a thousand lightly armed Salafi radicals occupied
the outer courtyard of the U.S. embassy in Tunis for about three hours,
before reinforced security forces drove them back. More than a hundred
arrests were made. Rioters looted and burned the American Cooperative
School of Tunis on the same day. These, and other incidents intensified
criticism of the Ennadha ministers of the Interior and Justice by liberals
and secularists for what they saw as underzealous control of the Islamist
paramilitary Leagues for the Defense of the Revolution combined with
overzealous attacks on secular antigovernment protestors.
3. In a display of what Juan Linz calls “semi-loyal opposition,” the
new Nidaa Tounes party, led by Béji Ca¦d Essebsi—an elderly but charismatic
politician supported by wealthy former Ben Ali loyalists and
anticoalition secularists—staged a 23 October 2012 rally declaring that
the government had lost its legitimacy because it had failed to finish
the constitution within the promised one year following the elections
of 23 October 2011. Essebsi called for a fresh mandate to govern, to be
reached by roundtable talks held outside parliamentary channels, albeit
with discussion and ratification by the Constituent Assembly.
4. The growing crisis intensified on 6 February 2013, when a leading
critic of the government, Chokri Belaid, became the first political
activist in democratizing Tunisia to be assassinated. The killing triggered
a move by Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali of Ennahda to form a
government made up solely of nonpartisan technocrats, but his own
party would not go along with this and he resigned on February 19. In
March, however, Ennahda ceded the cabinet portfolios for Defense, Jus-
26 Journal of Democracy
tice, Foreign Affairs, and the Interior—the so-called sovereignty ministries—to
nonpartisan technocrats. The new cabinet received a vote of
confidence on March 13.
Varieties of Sultanism
Our third set of comments concerns the concept of sultanism. According
to Max Weber, “Patrimonialism and, in the extreme case, sultanism
tend to arise . . . when domination develops an administration and
a military force which are purely personal instruments of the master.”
Weber went on to emphasize the importance of the complete discretion
of the ruler in a sultanistic system and indeed built it into his definition:
Where domination “operates primarily on the basis of discretion, it will
be called sultanism.”17
This means that in extreme cases of sultanism
there is no autonomy of state careers. All officials, even generals and
admirals, are best seen as being on the “household staff” of the sultan.
The ruler’s near-complete personal discretion is a hallmark of sultanism
and one of the reasons why, in our original typology, we insisted
upon a distinction between sultanistic and authoritarian regimes. Rafael
Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961,
made his son a brigadier general when the boy was nine.18
That is sultanism.
General Augusto Pinochet, the military strongman who ruled
Chile from 1973 to 1990, could never have done such a thing—the Chilean
military had a degree of established autonomy as an institution and
would not have allowed it. Pinochet might have headed the “military as
government,” but the “military as institution” retained some of its own
ideas and organizational autonomy.19
Regimes can be almost entirely sultanistic in their characteristics or
have some, but not many, sultanistic characteristics. It is useful to view
sultanism as a continuum, for whether a regime is more or less sultanistic
will affect the potential range of transitions away from sultanism that
are open to it.
When a regime is close to pure sultanism, a relatively peaceful and
domestically generated regime change via the classic “four-player game”
of democratization theory (in which soft-liners from the regime and opposition
work together to sideline the regime and opposition hard-liners)
is virtually impossible. Once the two soft-liner camps reveal themselves,
the sultan will destroy them. Seeing this, the hard-line oppositionists will
grow even harder, vowing never to give up their arms to such a feared and
hated foe. There will either be a violent transition or no transition at all.20
Yet a regime that is less fully sultanistic might permit some autonomy
to certain business and religious groups. Such a regime also might
run into pushback from the “military as institution” if officers come to
believe that continued support for the sultan will harm their core interests.
If powerful forces from abroad (say a large neighbor or an interna-
27Alfred Stepan and Juan J. Linz
tional body) weigh in on the side of democracy, then a fairly peaceful
four-player game might ensue and lead to a reasonably rapid democratic
transition. The end of the Ferdinand Marcos regime in the Philippines in
1986 is a rare example of this.21
In general, however, a sultanistic regime
is far less likely than an authoritarian regime to give way to a peaceful,
“pacted” transition, or one that leads to democracy. The presence of a
sultan makes negotiation too difficult.
The Arab world remains predominantly nondemocratic, but none of
its nondemocratic regimes is as sultanistic as was that of Trujillo. He
treated much of the Dominican economy as his personal property, made
no distinction between his personal regime and the state, decreed dynastic
succession, and faced no coherent opposition from the military.
Before the Arab upheavals of 2011, the regimes in Libya, Syria, Yemen,
Egypt and Tunisia all displayed (to one degree or another) some
features of sultanism. Yet if we place them on a continuum and focus on
the key variable of the “military as institution,” we can see crucial differences
that contributed to five quite distinctive outcomes.
Qadhafi’s Libya was the most sultanistic, and saw no four-player
game. Qadhafi created, dismantled, and re-created chains of commands
and security structures at will. His sons were emerging as possible dynastic
successors, and core security posts were in the hands of relatives.
Few business groups could assume any politically relevant autonomy.
It took a civil war—and massive help for the rebels in the form of a
UN-backed NATO bombing campaign—to topple the “Brother Leader.”
Weber correctly asserted that a “state is a human community that
(successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of force within
a given territory.”22
It will be a long time before such a successful
monopoly claim can be made in Libya and a useable democratic state
comes into existence throughout its territory. A reporter who had traveled
widely in the country’s interior just two months before the 7 July
2012 parliamentary elections concluded:
Libya has no army. It has no government. These things exist on paper, but in practice
Libya has yet to recover from the long maelstrom of Qadhafi’s rule. . . . What
Libya does have is militias, more than 60 of them. . . . Each brigade exercises unfettered
authority over its own turf. . . . There are no rules.23
Rebuilding (or simply building) a useable state and a coherent security
apparatus should have been the highest priority for both the interim
Libyan government and the international democracy promoters who
came to its aid. As it was, elections went forward rapidly and reasonably
smoothly. But on 11 September 2012, one or more of the militias (it may
have been Ansar al-Shari‘a) assaulted the U.S. consulate in Benghazi
and killed the ambassador as well as three other U.S. citizens. It took the
Libyan government, with some U.S. support, hours to retake possession
of the area. The Benghazi attack reveals in the harshest terms that with-
28 Journal of Democracy
out a useable state there can be no safeguards for human rights, law and
order, consolidated democracy, or effective governance. In Libya after
sultanism, all these are in desperately short supply.24
Syria under Bashar al-Assad clearly has strong sultanistic features, such
as the “dynastic” element. He “inherited” the presidency from his father
even though he was working in England as an ophthalmologist before
being summoned home for grooming as his father’s successor after his
brother, the heir apparent, died in a car crash. Still, Syria was not quite
as sultanistic as Qadhafi’s Libya. Parts of the business community and
state apparatus enjoyed at least some internal autonomy. The security apparatus,
however, has remained tightly controlled. Assad has no important
security official in whom he does not have full personal trust, which means
that nearly all must come from his own Alawite religious minority. The
Alawite dominance within the coercive apparatus signals that we are not
in Marcos or Mubarak territory here, where the organized military might
unseat the ruler. The Alawite officers who do Assad’s bidding know that
should he fall, they and their families will face mortal danger. In Syria,
there are no influential regime and opposition soft-liners to carry out semipublic
negotiations over the terms of the sultan’s exit. A civil war prevails,
with numerous fronts and competing factions fed by external supply lines.
We know of no situations where a long, complicated, and brutal civil war
has led to a cohesive state and a rapidly emerging democracy.
Mubarak’s Egypt was beginning to display sultanistic features including
extreme corruption, “crony capitalism,” and the “dynastic”
grooming of Gamal Mubarak as his father’s successor. Yet the Egyptian
military retained a good deal of institutional autonomy (far more than
its counterparts in Libya, Syria, or Yemen), and it was easily able to
protect its interests quickly and peacefully by pushing the octogenarian
Mubarak out of power and into internal exile. The military thus forestalled
the threat it feared from Gamal Mubarak, who was known for
pushing economic changes that would have threatened the military’s
vast industrial and commercial holdings. That the elder Mubarak, an
air force general himself, in some sense represented the “military as
government” made little difference when the interests of the “military
as institution” were involved. By getting rid of him, the top generals at
least temporarily enhanced their own popular prestige, as the crowds in
Cairo’s Tahrir Square chanted “The people and the army are one hand!”
Yet as we have seen, the next target of the military as institution turned
out to be full democracy, as the generals decided that slapping limits on
it was what their interests dictated in the new post-Mubarak world.
In Tunisia, the most sultanistic feature of Ben Ali’s regime was his
habit of letting his wife and her family treat the Tunisian economy as their
personal property. Yet Ben Ali’s repressive apparatus could not prevent
an underground (or exiled) political society involving all the major opposition
forces from coming into being and holding talks about what a
29Alfred Stepan and Juan J. Linz
post–Ben Ali Tunisia should look like. Hence, when he fell, a relatively
coherent and democratic alternative was on hand. Just as important, Ben
Ali had relied on the police to do his dirty work and had allowed the
small Tunisian army to remain professional. This enabled the “military
as institution” to play a crucial role in bringing the dictatorship to a quick
and nonviolent end. The army stopped the police from using lethal force
to protect Ben Ali, and then it let the sultan know that troops would not
shield him from protestors, but would assure him safe passage to Saudi
Arabia if he left immediately. Wisely, Ben Ali took the deal. Then the army—a
modest institution with few special privileges to protect—pivoted
to supporting the democratic transition rather than indulging Egyptianstyle
worries about how to safeguard its own power and perquisites.
Neither the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the Prague Spring of 1968,
nor Poland’s Solidarity in 1981 succeeded in immediately creating a democracy.
Yet each of these historic movements eroded forever the legitimacy
of the dictatorial regime that it challenged. We think that the events
of the Arab Spring at the very least have made Arab “presidents for life” increasingly
unacceptable, and the dignity of citizens increasingly desired.25
NOTES
1. Alfred Stepan, “Religion, Democracy, and the ‘Twin Tolerations,’” Journal of Democracy
11 (October 2000): 37–57. For a longer version, see Alfred Stepan, “The World’s
Religious Systems and Democracy: Crafting the ‘Twin Tolerations,’” Arguing Comparative
Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 213–54.
2. Alfred Stepan, “The Multiple Secularisms of Modern Democratic and Non-Democratic
Regimes,” in Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen,
eds., Rethinking Secularism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 114–44.
3. See Alfred Stepan, Juan J. Linz, and Yogendra Yadav, Crafting State Nations: India and
Other Multinational Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 70–71.
4. Mirjam Künkler and Alfred Stepan, “An Interview with Amien Rais,” Journal of
International Affairs 61 (Fall–Winter 2007): 205–18.
5. Stepan, “The Multiple Secularisms of Modern Democratic and Non-Democratic
Regimes,” 117.
6. Alfred Stepan, “Tunisia’s Transition and the Twin Tolerations,” Journal of Democracy
23 (April 2012): 94–97.
7. Stepan, “Tunisia’s Transition.”
8. For more detail on these and other examples of policy cooperation between religious
and state officials in Indonesia and Senegal, see Alfred Stepan, “Rituals of Respect: Sufis
and Secularists in Senegal in Comparative Perspective,” Comparative Politics 44 (July
2012): 379–401.
9. Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation:
Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1996), 38–65.
30 Journal of Democracy
10. Although Qadhafi and Saddam Hussein at times had totalitarian ambitions and installed
some totalitarian features in their respective regimes, neither boasted the institutional
or ideological resources that sustained the totalitarian regimes of Hitler, Stalin, or Mao.
11. For valuable reviews of this literature, see Nicolas van de Walle, “Between Authoritarianism
and Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 23 (January 2012): 169–73; and
Leonardo Morlino, “Are There Hybrid Regimes?” in his Changes for Democracy: Actors,
Structures, Processes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 48–76.
12. Juan. J. Linz, “The Future of an Authoritarian Situation or the Institutionalization
of an Authoritarian Regime: The Case of Brazil,” in Alfred Stepan, ed., Authoritarian
Brazil: Origins, Policies, and Future (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 233–54.
13. The Carnegie Endowment’s “Guide the Egypt’s Transition” blog highlighted the
persistence of this hybridity by noting on 4 October 2011 that “In general, liberal parties
would like the constitution to be written before elections take place, fearing that a postelection
constitution-making process will be dominated by Islamists.” See http://egypt-
elections.carnegieendowment.org/2011/10/04/constitutional-principles.
14. Stepan, “Tunisia’s Transition,” 91–97.
15. Alfred Stepan, personal interview with President Moncef Marzouki, Tunis, 1 November
2012.
16. For a more extensive theoretical and comparative discussion of “parliamentarized
semi-presidentialism,” see Alfred Stepan, ed., Democracies in Danger (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2009), 11–14.
17. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther
Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 231–32.
Emphasis in original.
18. Jonathan Hartlyn, “The Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic,” in H.E. Chehabi
and Juan J. Linz, eds., Sultanistic Regimes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1998), 97.
19. For the political importance of this distinction, see “The Military as Institution
Versus the Military as Government,” in Alfred Stepan, The Military in Politics: Changing
Patterns in Brazil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 253–66.
20. The best comparative analysis of the obstacles to achieving peaceful, negotiated,
democratic exits from sultanism is Richard Snyder, “Paths Out of Sultanistic Regimes:
Combining Structural and Voluntarist Perspectives,” in Chehabi and Linz, eds., Sultanistic
Regimes, 49–81.
21. See Mark R. Thompson, “The Marcos Regime in the Philippines,” in Sultanistic
Regimes, 206–30.
22. See his “Politics as Vocation” in H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max
Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 78. Emphasis
in original.
23. Robert F. Worth, “In Libya, the Captors Have Become the Captive,” New York
Times Magazine, 9 May 2012.
24. On the requirement of “stateness” for all these values, see Linz and Stepan, Problems
of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, chs. 1 and 2.
25. Roger Owen, The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2012).