Political Economy
Egyptian Privatization
After decades of delay, privatization in Egypt is now taking off. [1] Since 1993, 119 of 314 state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have been fully or partially sold. [2] These have been mainly manufacturing ventures, but the government has also pledged to offer utilities, public sector banks and insurance companies, maritime and telecommunications firms and leading tourist hotels. In May 1998, the International Monetary Fund, long skeptical of the Mubarak regime’s commitment to privatization, pronounced itself satisfied with the program’s progress. Measured in terms of annual privatization receipts as a percentage of GDP, their report noted that Egypt ranks fourth internationally, trailing only Hungary, Malaysia and the Czech Republic.
Labor and the Challenge of Economic Restructuring in Iran
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.
How Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan and Even Egypt Became IMF “Success Stories” in the 1990s
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.
The Working Class and Peasantry in the Middle East
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.
Alternatives to Neoliberalism
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.
Reform or Reaction?
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.
Room to Breathe
Less than a block from the seventeenth-century walls that surround Rabat’s medina (old city) is the Association Tamaynut. Inside the three-room office one can attend meetings, listen to lectures and participate in passionate discussions. A young man, Ibrahim, is there every weekday from morning until night. One of Morocco’s many thousand unemployed college graduates, he spends his free time doing volunteer work that he finds gratifying.
Two Faces of Janus
Eight years after the end of the war in Lebanon, the discrepancy between free minds and free markets is growing ever sharper. Since 1992, Lebanon’s billionaire prime minister, Rafiq al-Hariri, has been the individual most responsible for outlining an economic program for the post-war era. The prime minister has not hidden his admiration for laissez faire principles. In contemporary Lebanon, however, the free market is a most uncertain quantity.
Historical Road Maps for the “New World Order”
Peter Gran, Beyond Eurocentrism: A New View of Modern World History (Syracuse University Press, 1996).
Diminishing Possibilities in Algeria
Selima Ghezali was born in Bouira, Algeria in 1958. After obtaining a degree in literature, she began working as a teacher of French at the Khemis el-Khechna high school, where she was active in the General Union of Algerian Workers. In the 1980s, Ghezali joined the Algerian feminist movement then fighting the implementation of Algeria’s repressive family code. She later became president of the Women’s Association of Europe and North Africa and chairwoman of the Association pour l’Emancipation des Femmes (Association for the Emancipation of Women).
Myths and Money
“The price of prosperity has already been paid,” read an ad that Lebanon’s Investment Development Authority ran in the summer of 1996. “Now is the time to harvest.” The ad also mentioned, euphemistically, that the price had been “a period of unrest.” The message was meant to convince international investors that Lebanon has reemerged as a stable location for big finance and capital. At the same time, it reflected the feeling of many Lebanese that the civil war (1975-1990) had been due to external, regional, rather than internal, domestic circumstances, and that Lebanon therefore ought to be compensated for all the suffering.
Syria Between Two Transitions
In the recent years, Syria has inhabited the two processes of fundamental transition. The first is a transition from a statist economy to a greater liberalization or, to use a more accurate term, intifah (open-door policy). The second of these transitions is from a state of belligerency with Israel to one of coexistence with the possible eventuality of peace. Although not organically linked, the two reinforce one another. The interplay among the dynamics both have created profoundly shapes state and society in Syria, as it has the politics of the Eastern Mediterranean.
The Saudis, the French and the Embargo
The successful maintenance of a near total embargo on Iraq owes to a number of factors, ranging from geography to post-Cold War global economies. Iraq’s limited access to the sea can be easily monitored, while its record of regional aggression has deprived Baghdad of local friends. Despite some breaches of the export embargo involving high-ranking officials in both countries, Iran is not going to give Iraq much economic relief. The same goes for Syria. Turkey and Jordan, Iraq’s two lifelines to the outside world, cannot risk more than limited and calibrated breaches of the embargo because of their own susceptibility to US pressures.
Politics in the Middle East
Elie Kedourie, Politics in the Middle East (New York: Oxford, 1992).
Roger Owen, State, Power and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East (London: Routledge, 1992).
From the Editors (September/October 1994)
The question of population and development needs to be framed first and foremost as a question of equity. The articles in this issue address explicitly the matter of gender equity in families and societies, in ways that challenge the notion that Middle Eastern birth and fertility rates can be neatly attributed to Islam and Muslim cultures. Beyond this, we insist that the underlying theme is resource equity. As Philippe Fargues notes, the so-called demographic crisis in many Middle Eastern societies today is a social crisis, arising from the demand for more equitable access to jobs, schooling, housing and health care.
