By 1997, the year the World Bank published its World Development Report entitled The state in a changing world, the international financial community had come to realise that neo liberal economic reforms required strong, active states to regulate local markets and integrate them with international ones. Markets were not self regulating, and spatial metaphors between the public and private sectors were misleading. States could not simply 'shrink’ as market forces took over, as some neo liberal fundamentalists urged. 17 The World Bank now recognised that states, while getting out of most businesses, had to remain in the very important business of regulating them, requiring stronger, more flexible, responsive and adaptable administrations. States with limited administrative capacities were now increasingly challenged not only to carry out market friendly economic policies but also to develop their 'governance’ capabilities. In effect the new national sovereignties were now threatened not only with international market forces but also with political reform. In this sense globalisation had finally come full circle from the nineteenth to the twenty first century.
This time, as in the late nineteenth century, some Muslim intellectuals, particularly in the Arab world, joined international calls for good governance. Arab social scientists, writing the first Arab Human Development Report in 2002 on behalf of the United Nations Development Programme, urged reform to make up the region’s 'freedom deficit’ and in effect equated good gover nance with constitutional democracy. The Muslim governments, like those that survived the nineteenth century onslaught, continued their defensive modernisation while playing, against criticisms of lamentable human rights records, on the popular identification of globalisation with imperialism, a defensive tactic reinforced by the Bush administration’s initiative of 'regime change’ in Iraq (2003 ).
The Freedom House data used by the writers of the Arab Human Development Report point to a 'freedom deficit’ not only in the Arab world but in the much larger Muslim regions as well. While a 'third wave’18 of
17 Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and its discontents (New York, 2002).
18 Samuel P. Huntington, The third wave: Democratization in the late twentieth century (Norman, OK, and London, c. 1991).
Democratic transitions spread full 'freedom’ to almost half the countries of the world, only ten of the forty six majority Muslim countries tracked by Freedom House qualified as electoral democracies in 2004; and only two, Mali and Senegal, with populations of respectively 11.7 and 10.2 million, were rated fully 'free’. Some 188,960,000 Muslims (of a total of almost 1.5 billion) lived in 'fTee’ countries, but mostly as minorities in India, the EU, the Americas and, according to Freedom House, Israel.19 Muslim countries became principal targets for governance reform if not outright regime change.
Hossain Mahdavy already recognised part of the problem in the late 1960s, at about the time Islamist politics were surfacing in response to the crushing Arab defeat at the hands of Israel in the Six Day War of June 1967 and also, more generally, to the 'convulsions of modern times’.20 At a conference held at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, in July 1967 Mahdavy, introducing the modern period, took issue with any suggestions of 'an Islamic theory of underdevelopment’ and presented his alternative, a seminal article about economic development in 'rentier states’. Easy oil rents, by circum venting 'direct exploitation of the people’ by taxes and industrial discipline, could facilitate
Socio political stagnation and inertia A government that can expand its services without resorting to heavy taxation acquires an independence from the people seldom found in other countries [with] the power of the government to bribe pressure groups or to coerce dissidents the tempta tions for a government bureaucracy to turn into a rentier class with its own sources of income are considerable.21
Hazem Beblawi, Giacomo Luciani and others easily converted Mahdavy’s explanation of the Middle East’s lacklustre economic development into explanations for enduring authoritarianism in the region. In 2005 Algeria, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Yemen, seven of the sixteen most populous members of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (excluding Uganda, a member since the days of Idi Amin despite its small Muslim minority) qualified as rentier states by receiving well over half of their revenues from oil and gas exports. Egypt, with Suez Canal tolls as well as significant oil revenues and substantial foreign assistance, could also qualify as
19 Freedom House, Freedom in the world 2005, assorted charts, pp. 6 7, Www. freedom house. org/research/freeworld/2005/charts2005.pdf (retrieved 24 July 2005).
20 L. Carl Brown, Religion and state: The Muslim approach to politics (New York, 2000), pp. 123 33.
21 Hossein Mahdavy, 'Introductory remarks’, and 'The patterns and problems of economic development in rentier states: The case of Iran’, in M. A. Cook (ed.), Studies in the economic history of the Middle East (London, 1970), pp. 263, 437, 466 7.
World History
