From the perspective of approaches focusing on political culture or social movements, Jordan seems an unlikely candidate for political liberalization. Yet, it has experienced the most far-reaching liberalization of any Arab country. By viewing the transition process as an unfolding series of bargains between government and opposition elites, this study accommodates both the reality that the decisions taken at each step reflected the self-interested calculations of a small group of people and the equally undeniable fact that those calculations were forged in a historical and normative context that constrained certain options while fostering others. This study traces the predispositions and calculations that propelled government and opposition elites from one decision locus to the next to illustrate how the interaction of a monarchy and an Islamist-dominated opposition actually promoted the initiation of political liberalization in Jordan and how the subsequent practice of political contestation generated a momentum of its own.
An influential approach in the scholarship has stressed the ‘robustness of authoritarianism’ in the Arab world. While this approach has generated a rich research programme yielding valuable insights, it has also contributed to a widespread tendency to downplay the significance of the 2011 uprisings. A perspective that is broader both temporally (going back to the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire’s collapse) and spatially (to include Turkey, another successor state to that same empire which may serve as a useful negative case) can illuminate not only variations between regional states, but also convergences – such as the expansion of political mobilization and participation, or the emergence of Islamism versus secular nationalism as a key axis of ideological conflict – that suggest less pessimistic conclusions about the prospects for democracy in the longer-term future.
The currently governing Turkish AK Party’s reformist agenda at home and its increasingly assertive policies abroad, like the “soft” and “hard” power elements of its foreign policy, reflect a remarkable coherence and continuity in the political vision of the party leadership. That vision—a contemporary manifestation (sometimes described as “neo-Ottomanism”) of an older tradition of Islamic realism—is explicated through a detailed analysis of the speeches and writings of the main AK Party leaders, as well as of their opponents within the Islamist movement, and correlated with actual policy practice. It is further suggested that the AK Party’s preoccupation with its traditional secular-nationalist (Kemalist) adversaries has left it unprepared to confront an even more formidable looming challenge: liberalism.
One hundred years after its establishment, the Turkish Republic remains an international actor of considerable geopolitical and also analytical consequence. As with all such actors, the exercise of its growing power is shaped by tension between rest and motion, structural parameters and human agency, and domestic and interstate dynamics. Utilizing some key insights of Thucydides and Ibn Khaldun, this essay will consider the interplay of these factors through a case study of the AK Party’s foreign policy. Special attention will be devoted to the increasingly fraught relationship with the United States, a dynamic illuminated, it is suggested, by considering the evolution of American attitudes toward Egypt in the 1950s and 1960s.
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