During the last 20 years, the Iranian economy has had to adjust to a revolution, an eight-year war with Iraq, economic isolation and the collapse of its oil revenues. As a result, Iran witnessed the complete undoing of its gains in per capita income from the boom years of the 1970s. The generation of Iranians who grew up before the revolution, at a time of steadily increasing incomes, view the last 20 years of decline and stagnation with disbelief. For the new generation, which came of age after the revolution, the pressing issue is not past losses but the current reality of stagnation and unemployment: One in four Iranian youths cannot find jobs.
Neoliberalism is a triumph of the political imagination. Its achievement is double: While narrowing the window of political debate, it promises from this window a prospect without limits. On the one hand, it frames public discussion in the elliptic language of neoclassical economics. The collective well-being of the nation is depicted only in terms of how it is adjusted in gross to the discipline of monetary and fiscal balance sheets. On the other, neglecting the actual concerns of any concrete local or collective community, neoliberalism encourages the most exuberant dreams of private accumulation — and a chaotic reallocation of collective resources.
Just as European missionaries were the spiritual handmaidens of nineteenth-century colonialism, so has the International Monetary Fund (IMF) assumed a modern-day mission in support of world trade, finance and investment. The mission aims to convert the benighted heathen in developing countries to the enlightened religion of the free market, whose invisible hand guides self-interest toward the best possible outcome. Once expected to join world Christendom after their conversion, penitent countries today have structural adjustment programs (SAPs) to guide them to their place in the global economy.
Since the early 1970s the working class and peasantry of the Middle East have been socially reorganized while their political salience has been reconfigured. These processes are associated with a transition from economic nationalism, industrially biased statist development and populist politics toward integration into the world economy, encouragement of private enterprise and upward redistribution of the national income. The timing, motivation, extent and economic and political consequences of this transition have been uneven, but the general trend across the region is apparent.
The effect of economic restructuring on women was the focus of a two-day workshop at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies in 1998, entitled “Women and Economic Restructuring in the Middle East: Gender, Jobs and Activist Organizations.” Participants [1] agreed that restructuring both helps and hurts women, depending on specific economic, social and political conditions in individual countries, as well as prevalent ideologies regarding gender and class. Women of the Middle East-North Africa region constitute only a small part of the salaried labor force, attend school for fewer years than males and have a far higher rate of illiteracy.
A growing network of labor and human rights activists, women’s and indigenous people’s groups and grassroots movements is shaping a transnational consensus on global economic reform that challenges the ideological and programmatic triumph of neoliberalism over the last two decades. These activists reject liberal economists’ claims that unregulated private markets and free trade will inevitably guarantee prosperity for all. Rather, they maintain that market-led globalization has exacerbated global inequalities and poverty, heightened economic volatility and fostered local dependence on global corporations and financial markets.
Asia’s developing economies pose challenging questions for the left’s conception of the relationship between the state and development in this era of global capitalism. Neoliberals often cite East Asian economies as proof of the validity of their laissez faire development theories because they achieved high growth and technological development in a market framework. But a combination of state intervention and market discipline was actually behind the relative successes of these economies.
This issue of Middle East Report presents critical — and timely — analysis of the impact of neoliberal economic policies in the Middle East and North Africa. Authors representing a variety of disciplines and viewpoints explore the dilemmas confronting progressive forces searching for alternative programs to restore growth and promote equity.
After making my way through the rubble and squalor of the overcrowded refugee camp near Beirut’s International Airport, I arrived half an hour late for my appointment with Umm Muhammad, a local living repository of Palestinian folk song traditions.
I came to know Ghada, a young Palestinian village woman, during my 14 months of fieldwork in her village in the West Bank. Ghada’s village, located south of Bethlehem, is home to approximately 3,000 residents, all of whom are Muslims. Ghada gained notoriety in the village and the surrounding communities after she attempted to stab an Israeli soldier at the Israeli army-controlled checkpoint on the road that links Bethlehem to Jerusalem. This checkpoint marks the dividing line between the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Israel’s pre-1967 borders. Although the whole area was still under Israeli military occupation when Ghada attempted her attack, the Bethlehem area has, since 1996, been under partial control of the Palestinian Authority.
Upon hearing a Dutch diplomat recite a dismal litany of statistics indicating the current social and economic plight of most Middle Eastern states, a Jordanian academic heaved a sigh. “This is a triple tragedy,” she said. “Not only are the figures bad, but they have to be collated by foreign agencies while governments in the region keep people in the dark.”
A second round of fighting between Eritrea and Ethiopia in February found the political positions of the former allies little changed from their opening salvos the previous June, but overwhelming Ethiopian numbers — troops and arms — finally forced the Eritreans to accept an American-backed “peace plan” on Ethiopian terms. Meanwhile, not only had the levels of firepower intensified, but also the stakes, in a bitter dispute that has already had a profound impact on regional alignments and development prospects. Tragically, it appears to be a repeat performance of earlier battles in the 30-year contest over Eritrea’s independence, which ended in 1991.
I recently informed an editor of a national news program about a delegation of Nobel laureates who planned to visit Iraq in March. He responded that “Iraq’s not on the screen now that the bombing has stopped.” A puzzling response, since on that very day, the US had bombed seven sites in Iraq.
I read the "Chart on National Elections in the Middle East" (MER 209) with keen interest, having worked for some time on the Yemeni electoral and political systems. I noticed a factual error regarding the Yemeni executive and legislative systems, which I would like you to correct. The last line of the chart indicates that the Consultative Council is part of the National Assembly. As a matter of fact, the Consultative (or Advisory) Council is not a second chamber of the Yemeni parliament and therefore has no legislative power. It is also not a new institution (as is sometimes stated in the Yemeni press), but was established in 1979 in the former Yemen Arab Republic.
People throughout the Middle East have long contended with political systems that neither represent them nor serve their interests. With the advent of neoliberalism as the world’s defining economic trend, however, governments and citizens alike in the Middle East are now subject to a global economic regime impervious to local needs, aspirations and limitations.
Barbara Daly Metcalf, ed., Making Muslim Space in North America and Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
Rodinson Banned at AUC
In his first televised interview in late 1996, just months after taking office, an avuncular-looking Necmettin Erbakan seemed unsurprised at a question about his taste in clothing. “Mr. Prime Minister, we hear that you favor ties by the Italian designer Versace,” said commentator Mehmet Ali Birand. “What is it about Versace that you like?” His half-smile unfading, Turkey’s first-ever Islamist prime minister answered that “this particular Western designer seems to have borrowed from Islamic aesthetics and Oriental patterns.”
Some of the material in this issue of Middle East Report was generated at the October 2-3, 1998 conference on “Multi-Party Elections in the Arab World: Controlled Contestation and Opposition Strategies,” which as organized by MERIP board members Marsha Pripstein Posusney and Jillian Schwedler. The conference was sponsored by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University in cooperation with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. We are grateful to these institutions for enabling us to publish the excerpts below.
On April 27, 1997, Muhammad Zabara stood outside a polling station in the old city of Sanaa. In a neatly pressed suit and tie, his short hair and mustache freshly trimmed, he greeted voters who had turned out for Yemen’s second post-unification parliamentary elections. A team of Western election monitors approached him and asked whether he was a candidate. In English, he answered that he was the district’s candidate from the Yemeni Reform Group, a conservative party with an Islamist agenda. “But Ahmad Raqihi is the Islamist candidate for this district,” said one of the monitors, referring to Zabara’s main rival, who dons a turban and beard. “You don’t even look like an Islamist.” [1]
