Structure, Situation And Actors: A Research On The Political Transition Of The Middle East And North Africa Arab Region

At the end of2010, there was a political upheaval in the Middle East and North Africa(MENA),which continues today and spreads to almost the entire Arab world. It was stemed from a incident ofa Tunisian young man’s self-immolation, which finally lit the fire of public anger that had beenrepressed for a long time in the MENA region under strongman politics. Like dominoes the stormquickly spread across the MENA region, and brought a profound historical changes. It blewwrinkled dictatorship that appeared stagnant in the Arab region, and brought some possibility to thedemocratic transiton in the MENA region, where many researchers were not optimistic. However,the social movement, which was called “Arab spring” by many western media, resulted in differentpolitical consequences in different countries with the same historical and cultural background inMENA region. Among these countries where a series of social protest movement occurred,fiveauthoritarian systems including Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Syria and Libya receiveded the greatestimpact. Meanwhile, Gulf monarchies such as Saudi Arabia and Bahrain restored the original rulingorder in different ways after experiencing short-term social oscillations. All five countries areIslamic authoritarian countries; except Syria’s Bashar-Assad, who was inherited his father’s powerin2000, the other4countries’ rules had lasted for more than20years; there were serious problemsexisted in economic development in spite of a certain growth. On the political transition, this papertries to analyze those authoritarian counties with the same cultural background where to obtain thesimilar conditions for transitions, actors’ different strategy choice and the process, performance andfuture of this political transition. In the political transition process, different strategies of the fivecountries’ actors, caused different concrete transformation way: rulers of Egypt and Tunisia quittedpolitics; Yemen’s ruler step down through negotiations; large-scale civil war broke out in Syria andLibya, and Syria’s civil war continued today.; different transition path resulted in totally different performance and future. This paper aimed to analyse what specific transition process guide differentcountries to different future and the meaning of actors’ strategy choice.This paper contains7parts altogetherThe introduction part mainly discusses the research background, theoretical basis, researchdesign and methods; clearing about the theoretical value and practical significance of this study;proposing the research idea and main problems needed to be solved.The first chapter summarizes the research of political transition and democratization in MiddleEast; pointing out that before2010”Middle east exceptionalism” had been the mainstream view ofwestern democracy studies.Although democratization of the Middle East and the Islamic world hasreceived some results, such as Turkey’s democratic achievements, the absence of Middle East in“The third wave” of democratization further strengthened the bias that the democracy is not suitablefor the MENA region.. Although there are some bias,the research of democratization in MENAregion still have gotten some progress and some relatively concentrated core themes. Theoreticaltopics, such as the hardships of political democratization in the region, the relation between theIslamic tradition and democratization, and the factors and conditions of the political democratization(including petroleum resources, economic development level, the public attitude, civil society, thetypes of government and geopolitical landscape, etc) has been widely discussed. The accumulationof related literature has also reached a high level. While in China related research is relatively weak,and high quality researches about political transition in MENA region are rare.The second chapter is the important part of the full text. The author tries to build the theoreticalframework for political transition:“Structure-Actors-Process-Performance”. Democratization cycletheory and democratization condition theory belong to the structure analysis of political transition,which mainly analyzed the influences of structural factors, including economic, cultural tradition andsystem.”Actors-Process-Performance” is the process analysis of political transition, which points outvarious actors and their strategy choices constructing the path, the way,the process, and ultimatelyaffecting the performance of different countries’ political transition. Structural conditions act keyrole in political transition, however the actors and their behavior are the decisive factors for politicaltransition process and results.The third chapter explains the structure of political transition in Middle East and North AfricaArabia country: strongman-authoritarian system which is prevalent in this area.This part analyses the types of authoritarian system, reasons and characteristics of authoritarian; How deeply affections todemocratic political culture which made by cultural tradition including Islamic revival movement,“God’s sovereignty”, Clerical and Tribal politics; under the authoritarian regime, whether economicdeveloped or not, the regime would face the dilemma, that we called the paradox of development,and abnormal economic development would cause political crisis; at the same time, dominancehierarchy was very luxury while people’s life was very difficult which was reported through Internetand Al jazeera etc caused more and more emotions of struggle.In fourth chapter, the author analyses the decisive influence of actors and their behavior and itsconsequences on the path of political transition, through actors’ action strategy. Among these actorsin regime authorities including political leaders, political parties, the army and the police, the actionselection of the leaders and the army is the key to the event, which decides the cost of the transitionand whether or not democracy system can be established and consolidated. Protest groups playedimportant part in those events, and we can say if there was no mass struggle, authoritarian regimewould not collapse.But protest groups are not the decisive factor in this process.In fact,in MENAregion, the oppositions have been active in the political stage, and political changes in the situationsince the end of2010, giving them a chance to claim the regime, however, the oppositions have a lotof problem in themselves: Libya “National Transitional Council” with the support of the west worldwas hard to overthrow Gaddafi’s dictatorship; Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt obtained powerthrough elected and soon lost power only a year later; there were chaos in the opposition in Syria, etc.Anyhow as a important actor for this event the political opposition were winners. as anotherimportant actors External forces couldn’t be ignored in political transition, and its interventionplayed a key role in some countries, such as Libya,however in others they made situations morecomplicated, such as Syria. So, different strategy choices of the actors in the transition processshaped the unique transition path and the way in different countries.The fifth chapter analyzes incomes and costs of the political transition, and the performance andprospect in this region. The pain from political transition brought endless damage, either economic,social, or potential psychological, and also opened the infinite possible in the future. In a shorttime,it is hard to assert that a particular state gets success or not from political transition,either toforward whether there is sunshine avenue or hard edge of democracy, but the experiences andlessons are very precious. The part of conclusion summarizes the basic idea of the whole paper, and analyzes influenceand revelation of this political transition in this region for developing countries. At the same timethinking about the political transition of gain and loss in the MENA region is a precious wealth forChina who is in the great historical turning point of the modernization.