And Nation-Building in the Mediterranean and the Middle East”, Rome July 4-5, 2003

PEACE-, INSTITUTION- AND NATION- BUILDING IN THE MEDITERRANEAN AND THE MIDDLE EAST TASKS FOR TRANSATLANTIC COOPERATION EDITED BY ROBERTO ALIBONI Authors Roberto Aliboni is Vice President at the IAI and Head of the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Program in the same Institute Jarat Chopra is Professor of International Law at Brown University, Rhode Island (USA), and the Principal Advisor on third party intervention to the Negotiations Affairs Department of the Palestine Liberation Organi- zation Mohammed S. Dajani is Director of the American Studies Institute at Al-Quds University, East Jerusalem, and Director of Technical Assistance and Training Department at the Palestinian Economic Council for Development and Reconstruction (PECDAR) Laura Guazzone is IAI Scientific Consultant and Professor of Contemporary History of the Arab Countries, University of Rome I Tim Niblock is Director at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter Marina Ottaway is Senior Associate at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington DC Cristina Paciello is Phd candidate at the University of Florence Acknowledgments The paper by Roberto Aliboni and Laura Guazzone will be published as an article in the forthcoming is- sue of Mediterranean Politics vol. 9, no. 1 (Spring 2004); the IAI would like to thank the Frank Cass pu- blishing house for permitting its publication here. The papers by Tim Niblock, Marina Ottaway and a short version of the paper by Jarat Chopra will be published by The International Spectator, Vol. XXXVIII, n. 4, 2003. These papers were presented to the Conference on “Tasks for transatlantic cooperation. Peace, Institu- tion, and nation-building in the Mediterranean and the Middle East”, Rome July 4-5, 2003. IAI would like to thank the German Marshall Fund of United States, the NATO Division of Public Di- plomacy, and the Ford Foundation Cairo Office for their generous support. IAI Quaderni Direzione: Roberto Aliboni Segreteria di redazione: Sandra Passariello Tipografia Città Nuova della P.A.M.O.M., Via S. Romano in Garfagnana, 23 - 00148 Roma - tel. 066530467 – 2 – Index Preface ............................................................................................................................. 5 1. Democracy in the Arab Countries and the West, by Roberto Aliboni and Laura Guazzone .................................................................... 7 2. Promoting Economic and Political Reconstruction in the Middle East: Room for EU-US Cooperation? by Tim Niblock ........................................................................................................... 19 3. Nation-building in the Greater Middle East: The View from Washington, by Marina Ottaway .................................................................................................... 29 4. Palestinian Authority Reform: A Key Ingredient to Peace Diplomacy, by Mohammed S. Dajani............................................................................................ 39 5. Third Party Intervention in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, by Jarat Chopra ......................................................................................................... 49 Appendix 1 Peace-, Institution- and Nation-Building in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, A Conference Report, Rome, 4-5 July 2003..................................................... 67 Appendix 2 Activities of the IAI project on Transatlantic Perspectives on Relations across the Mediterranean border ............................................................................... 89 – 3 – Testatina Preface This paper, published in the English series of the IAI Quaderni, presents the proceedings of the conference on “Peace-, Institution-, and Nation-Building in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Tasks for Transatlantic Cooperation” held by IAI in Rome on 4-5 July 2003 within the framework of its “transatlantic relations” programme. In recent years, the Middle East and Mediterranean have played a growing role in transatlantic relations. To a large extent, this is due to the growing commitment of the American administration towards the Greater Middle East region. In spring 2003, this commitment led to the US attack and overthrow of the Ba’ath regime in Iraq with a view to establishing a democracy in that country and promoting political and economic reform throughout the region. This move was predicated on a sharp and pro- found change with respect to previous US policy, which attributed more importance to sta- bility than to political reform. As is well known, this new policy has given way to a hea- ted and at times bitter debate within the transatlantic community and brought about un- precedented splits across the Atlantic as well as in the European Union. The conference took into consideration a number of key issues relating to the Greater Middle East (the Mediterranean and the Middle East in the European geopolitical vision) and the new US policy: democracy promotion, nation-building, political reform and development policies to support it, and the role of third parties in the special case of the Israe- li-Palestinian conflict. These issues were discussed by a distinguished group of Europeans, Americans and representatives of the Middle East and Mediterranean regions with a view to underscoring the possibilities for transatlantic cooperation in a context of divisions and disagreements. The IAI takes the opportunity to express its deep gratitude to the German Marshall Fund of the United States, which supports the IAI’s entire programme on transatlantic relations; the NATO Division of Public Diplomacy; and the Ford Foundation Cairo Office, which contributed specifically to the organization of this conference. – 5 – Testatina 1. Democracy in the Arab Countries and the West Roberto Aliboni and Laura Guazzone This paper takes into consideration two main issues: (a) the status of the debate on Arab democracy and its weak dynamics; (b) the role of the West in fostering or promoting democracy in the Arab world. It concludes by providing some recommendations about the appropriate framework in which a credible and more effective Western policy to promote democracy in the Arab world can be pursued and shared by the parties involved. 1. The Mixed Record of Democratisation in the Arab World Many Arab countries have experienced a degree of political liberalism at some point in their contemporary history – most notably Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Moroc- co, and Syria. But none of these experiences has given rise to full-fledged democratic systems, which are in any case a recent and precarious achievement anywhere in the world. Nevertheless the debate about and actual experience of liberalism has a long and diverse history in the Arab countries and cannot be started “from scratch” [Hourani 1962; Binder 1988]. The first Arab experience with liberalism was in the constitutionalist era under Ot- toman dominance (1870s-1910s); the second was with parliamentarism under colonial dominance (1920s-1950s). Later on, some countries – particularly Egypt – experienced different waves of political liberalisation and de-liberalisation. A third and much debated “liberal age” started from around the end of the 1980s and is still in progress. From that date, most Arab countries adopted a few more liberal policies in the political and economic domain – often conceded under popular and international pressure – that contributed to giving the impression of a widened public sphere or, as it was more often phrased, of an Arab world in transition to democracy. From the second half of the 1990s to present, however, the new more liberal policies have been stalled, withdrawn or circumvented in most countries and it has became apparent that Arab regimes have failed to democratise and, in some cases, have become even more repressive and unaccountable. There is now a growing consensus that it was wrong in most cases to classify recent chan- ges in Arab political regimes as a “transition to democracy” [Salamé 1993; Ayyubi 1995; Korany 1998; Schlumberger 2000], at least in the more technical sense [Carothers 2002]. Significant change did indeed take place in Arab regimes, but it consisted of a modernisa- tion of authoritarianism demanded by fiscal and legitimacy crises coupled with globalisa- tion pressures [Albrecht, Schlumberger 2003]. This change seems to have given rise to a hybrid kind of regime variously known as “semi-authoritarianism” or “liberalised auto- cracy” [Ottaway 2003a; Brumberg 2003]. Ruled by modernised elites able to manipulate façade democratic institutions in order to stay in power, liberalised autocracies now exist in Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait and Bahrain alongside the more “traditional” – 7 – Roberto Aliboni and Laura Guazzone secular or religious authoritarian regimes in Syria, Tunisia, Libya and Saudi Arabia. In other words, in today’s Arab world there are neither democratic systems nor democra- tising regimes, there are instead many kinds of autocracies, each functioning differently within the general framework of authoritarianism. For instance, in all liberalised autocracies there is a similar trend of ruling elites coopting new social segments to control the pri- vatising economy according to a pattern dubbed “from plan to clan”; the trend may be similar, but the beneficiary groups are different and differently aggregated from country to country [Ayyubi 1995, pp. 403-409; Ferrié 2003, pp. 22-29]. There is also a growing consensus

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