Jordan in Transition: From Hussein to Abdullah 9781626372665

Citation preview

JORDAN

IN

TRANSITION

JORDAN IN

TRANSITION

FROM HUSSEIN

TO

ABDULLAH

CURTIS R. RYAN

b o u l d e r l o n d o n

Published in the United States of America in 2002 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU © 2002 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ryan, Curtis R. Jordan in transition : from Hussein to Abdullah / Curtis R. Ryan. p. cm. Included bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-58826-103-4 (alk. paper) 1. Jordan—Politics and government—1952–1999. 2. Jordan—Politics and government—1999– 3. Jordan—Economic conditions—20th century. I. Title. DS154.55.R93 2002 956.9504—dc21 2002069817 British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the United States of America

∞

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984. 5

4

3

2

1

To my parents, Gary and Roberta Ryan

Contents

ix xii

Acknowledgments Map of Jordan

1 The Emergence of Modern Jordan

1

2 Political Liberalization and Elections

15

3 Economic Adjustment and Political Stability

47

4 From War to Peace: Jordan’s Changing Foreign Policy

67

5 From Hussein to Abdullah: The Succession

87

6 Jordan’s Continuing Transition

109

Bibliography Index About the Book

141 151 159

vii

Acknowledgments

As this book about transitions was being published, I was beginning a transition of my own, starting a new job at Appalachian State University (ASU) in North Carolina. I already owe thanks to my new colleagues at ASU for making my transition as smooth as possible. Much of the research and writing for the book took place while I was teaching at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia. I owe thanks to all my friends, colleagues, and students at Mary Washington College, who helped me in so many ways during my seven years there. This book is based on original field research carried out in Jordan in 1992–1993, 1997, 1999, and 2001. As a result, I owe thanks to countless Jordanians who gave me their time, knowledge, and hospitality. A small fraction of these individuals are listed and acknowledged in the bibliography as official interviewees, but most are anonymous for the purpose of citation. I am grateful to them all, including the Sbeih family of Amman, who treated me as a son and brother during my yearlong stay in the kingdom in 1992–1993. The book was truly a labor of love, as Jordan has become a kind of second home to me. During some of my trips there I stayed and worked at the American Center for Oriental Research (ACOR), and I thank the entire ACOR staff and especially directors Pierre and Patricia Bikai. As a Fulbright Scholar in 1992–1993, I was based at the Center for Strategic Studies (CSS) at the University of Jordan. I thank the entire CSS staff for their assistance and their humor. And during that year, as well as in all subsequent trips, I am especially indebted to the support and generosity of Mustafa Hamarneh, director of the CSS, who helped me

ix

x

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

launch the very first set of interviews and who really helped me get my research under way for this book. I also thank Hani Hourani and the staff of the Al-Urdun al-Jadid (New Jordan) Research Center for their excellent work. As the bibliography makes clear, I have benefited greatly from the impressive work of both Al-Urdun al-Jadid and the CSS. I thank my editors, Bridget Julian and Shena Redmond, for agreeing to take on this project, for prodding me to finish, and for generally being such knowledgeable and enjoyable editors to work with. Thanks also to Jason Cook for excellent copyediting, which certainly made my life easier, and to Stephen Hanna (of Mary Washington College), who assembled the political map of Jordan included in the book. Over the years I have also benefited from the insightful commentary of several scholars who have responded to written and orally presented versions of various parts of this book. I therefore extend especially warm thanks to (in alphabetical order) Janine Clark, Greg Gause, Scott Greenwood, Kimberly Katz, Ellen Lust-Okar, Marc Lynch, Salam Noor, Glenn Robinson, Jillian Schwedler, and Quintan Wiktorowicz. In addition to these wise souls, all of us who have ever worked on Jordanian politics owe an enormous debt to the person who is in my view simply the dean of Jordanian studies, Laurie Brand. No one has published more extensively on Jordanian politics or been more generous with suggestions and insights. The members of the Southeast Regional Middle East and Islamic Studies Seminar (SERMEISS) have for more than a decade listened patiently to countless discussions of Jordanian politics, and have always provided a warm, welcoming, and insightful forum for the analysis of all things about the Middle East. Among the founders of that great organization, I especially thank Herb and Taffy Bodman, who dragged me along to my first SERMEISS meeting in 1990 and who have helped keep me actively involved ever since. My cat, Kimba, both helped and hindered the writing process by occasionally strolling across my computer keyboard or randomly swatting at the “delete” key. I would like to blame him for any errors, but that probably wouldn’t be convincing, so apparently I will have to take all responsibility. Most of all, I thank my wife, Alison, for her unwavering warmth and support and for putting up with the many stages of this project and helping me see it to fruition.

Note: In the transliteration of Arabic terms, initial ayns and hamzas have been omitted; these diacritics have been included only if they appear within a name or term.

Damascus

LEBANON

SYRIA IRAQ Mediterranean Irbid

Sea

Mafraq

Tel Aviv WEST BANK

Azraq

Madaba

Jerusalem Dead Sea

GAZA STRIP

Zarqa

Salt

Karama Amman

JORDAN

xii

Kerak Karak

ISRAEL

Tafila

SAUDI Ma'an Ma‘an

EGYPT

ARABIA

Al Quweira Aqaba

Sea

Gulf of Aqab a

d Re

Jordan

Al Mudawwara Map by: Stephen P. Hanna MWC Cartography Laboratory Basemap: ESRI Data and Maps, 1999

1 The Emergence of Modern Jordan

In February 1999, King Hussein Ibn Talal of Jordan died after years of battling cancer. The king’s funeral drew political leaders and dignitaries from all over the world to Jordan’s capital, Amman. This massive entourage of world leaders ranged from President Bill Clinton of the United States, to Prime Minister Tony Blair of the United Kingdom, to such political rivals of the king as President Hafiz al-Asad of Syria. Presidents, prime ministers, emirs, and kings joined in the procession, providing a vivid symbol of the geopolitical importance attached to Jordan under King Hussein. The death of the Jordanian monarch, who had ruled the Hashimite throne since 1953, was certainly a dramatic and historic turning point for the kingdom and to a large extent for the region as well. King Hussein had ruled Jordan for forty-six years. Indeed, Hussein had ruled for so long that he had developed a local, regional, and even global reputation as the great “survivor” of Middle East politics. Most Jordanians had known no other ruler in their lifetimes. Hussein’s death in 1999 marked the end of an era in some respects, and the beginning of a major transition in the kingdom. But at the time of King Hussein’s death, Jordanian politics was also marking the tenth year of a program of political and economic liberalization. The succession within the monarchy marked not the first major transition in years, but rather the fourth. The kingdom had already begun a comprehensive process of transition in its economy, its domestic politics, and its foreign policy. Specifically, Jordan had since 1989 begun a difficult program of economic adjustment and restructuring, while also embarking on a process of political liberalization and democratization. Shortly thereafter, in 1

2

JORDAN IN TRANSITION

1994, Jordan signed a full peace treaty with the State of Israel. Together these changes signaled an almost wholesale transformation in the kingdom’s domestic and foreign policies, and it is this series of dramatic transitions that form the core topics addressed in this book. Understanding these transformations, I argue, is essential to understanding Jordanian politics today. In the chapters that follow, I examine specifically the four dramatic transitions in Jordanian politics that began roughly in 1989 and carried the kingdom into the twenty-first century. These four transitions include: 1. A program of political liberalization and democratization, beginning in 1989, in which civil society began to expand through legalized political parties and associations, loosened government restrictions on the media, and a series of national parliamentary elections—a process that the Hashimite regime heralds as the most extensive in the Arab world. 2. A program (largely at the behest of the International Monetary Fund [IMF]) for economic austerity and restructuring, also since 1989, as Jordan began its adjustment to globalization and the political economy of a new world order. 3. The major shift in Jordan’s foreign policy and international relations from alliance with Iraq to full and formal peace with Israel in 1994. 4. The 1999 succession in the monarchy itself, for the first time in almost half a century, from King Hussein to his son, King Abdullah II. In this book I explore each of these major transitions in Jordanian politics in turn, and also examine how each transition is linked to, and affects, the others. It is also important to note, however, what this book is not about. It is not, for example, intended to provide exhaustive or encyclopedic coverage of Jordanian political history, or even of every possible angle of Jordanian politics. Instead I focus only on the specific topics of Jordan’s four transitions, which I suggest are paramount concerns and issues in understanding Jordanian politics, both at home and abroad, in the early twenty-first century. In my analysis of the topics examined in this book, I draw on field research and interviews conducted in Jordan mainly in 1992–1993, 1997, 1999, and 2001. I argue throughout this book that economic crises led the regime to liberalize internally. This was a reactive and defensive maneuver designed to secure the survival of the Hashimite monarchy itself. This

THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN JORDAN

3

political economy of regime security was so important, in fact, that it led the regime to reassess its domestic politics, its economic underpinnings, and its foreign relations. These economic crises helped pave the way for political liberalization, economic adjustment, and international realignment toward formal peace with Israel. With the death of King Hussein, elite alignments shifted slightly as the various actors in Jordanian politics attempted to maintain their power and privilege under a new monarch, while others have attempted to gain a greater voice in Jordanian politics, perhaps for the first time. The transitions are therefore closely linked to each other. Economic crises triggered political liberalization, but later a more stabilized economy—undergoing a continuing IMF restructuring effort—has since the initial opening taken priority over democratization. Similarly, Jordan’s foreign relations and external alliances are also largely economically motivated, with the understanding that this too is a matter of regime survival. This was certainly the case with the regime’s decision to press forward with a formal peace treaty with Israel. The 1994 peace treaty, like the IMF austerity program, has been a major source of domestic opposition ever since. Precisely for that reason, the regime has at times stalled the political liberalization process. And since 1994 there are signs even of political deliberalization. Thus the difficulties of economic adjustment, coupled with domestic opposition to the regime’s accommodation to Israel, have together actually held back further political liberalization. While Jordan’s foreign policy, economic adjustment, and political liberalization are clearly linked, it is political liberalization that has taken a back seat to these other goals, which in part were designed to secure the hold of the monarchy and to provide for a stable and smooth succession. Having achieved this, with the accession of King Abdullah II in 1999, the key questions for Jordan remain how the new monarch and his regime will affect, and be affected by, the other three transitions. The chapters that follow examine respectively the issues of political liberalization (Chapter 2), economic adjustment (Chapter 3), peace with Israel (Chapter 4), and succession in the monarchy (Chapter 5). Finally, the book turns to the status and prospects for each of the major transitions in Jordanian politics under King Abdullah II (Chapter 6), as he ascended the throne in 1999 and has since solidified his own regime within the Hashimite monarchy. Since I believe strongly that political liberalization remains the least complete of Jordan’s four transitions, I will—in Chapter 6—examine not only the status of the above transitions under the Abdullah regime, but also provide an analysis of three challenges to the future of political liberalization in the kingdom. These

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JORDAN IN TRANSITION

challenges include: questions of civil society and press freedoms, questions of ethnic politics and national identity, and finally, questions of gender equality.

THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN JORDAN Like many other postcolonial states in the Middle East, the Hashimite Kingdom of Jordan has largely artificial boundaries, drawn by European imperial powers. The European powers, particularly Britain and France, divided the territories of much of the Middle East between themselves as the previous empire, that of the Ottoman Turks, collapsed in the wake of World War I. As part of the Sykes-Picot wartime agreement between Britain and France, the territory that is now modern Jordan came under British tutelage. And in 1921, having secured the League of Nations’ official mandate for the territories of Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq, the British government created the Emirate of Transjordan through agreement with its new ruler, Amir Abdullah (later King Abdullah I). When King Abdullah II ascended the throne seventy-eight years later, in 1999, he became only the fourth king in Jordan’s Hashimite dynasty, a relatively modern creation on the world stage. The Hashimites only emerged as rulers in Jordan in the 1920s, having earlier ruled the Hijaz territory of western Arabia. While this is an important point in understanding the political development of Jordan, it is not necessarily unique, even in the Middle East, where most of the monarchies have modern roots. Contrary to popular assumptions, these monarchies are no more culturally rooted in the Middle East than are the various other regime types and political systems. As Lisa Anderson has argued in her study of the resilience of monarchy in the region, “monarchy as currently understood in the Middle East is no more indigenous than liberal democracy.”1 While the monarchies in Morocco and Oman indeed emerged before the establishment of European hegemony in the region, most of the other ruling dynasties owe their current form, as leaders of nations, to the European imperial era. Anderson makes the point more strongly: The prevalence of monarchy in the Middle East is best understood as a reflection of the vagaries of historical accident—particularly British imperial policy—and the imperatives of historical process—notably the formulation of new states and the building of new nations in the

THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN JORDAN

5

realms until recently ruled by the Ottoman Empire and its neighbors. That is to say, the monarchies of the region were initially instruments of European imperial policy.2

In Anderson’s view, these monarchies were uniquely capable, as a regime type, to construct “traditional” ties and bargains with key social forces, and then to move on to the project of state-building and regime maintenance. In the case of Jordan, Amir Abdullah’s Hashimite family actually hailed not from Jordan itself but from Mecca in western Arabia. The Hashimites had fought with the British in the “Great Arab Revolt” against the Ottoman Turkish Empire during World War I. But shortly after the war ended, the Hashimites were defeated and expelled from Arabia by their rivals the Saudis, who ultimately carved out the modern kingdom of Saudi Arabia, to which they attached the family name. In the postwar mandate period, the British government decided to install two brothers of the House of Hashim, Abdullah and Faysal, in their mandates of Jordan and Iraq respectively.3 This move was in large part intended as a reward for Hashimite support in the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire during World War I. The British thus established new borders—and new dynasties—in some of their new imperial territories, including Hashimite monarchies in both Transjordan and Iraq. The latter dynasty was overthrown and eliminated in a bloody coup in Baghdad in 1958, but in the early twenty-first century the Hashimite monarchy continued both to reign and to rule in Jordan. Since its perhaps inauspicious beginnings, Jordan has developed into a modern state that has long defied predictions of its imminent demise. What began as the British Mandate of Transjordan in 1921 evolved into the Emirate of Transjordan and following independence from Britain in 1946, finally evolved into its current form as the Hashimite Kingdom of Jordan since 1949. Jordan can therefore be seen—at least in its origins—as among the most artificial states in the modern Middle East. Over time, however, a sense of nationhood and national identity has developed within the kingdom so that the notion of “Jordanian” does carry very real meaning for many Jordanians.4 In the years that followed the foundation of the state, King Abdullah forged the country of Jordan from the British Mandate of Transjordan. But it was his grandson, Hussein, who as king himself (1953–1999) led Jordan’s political development, created many of its institutions, and ensured that the Western great powers would view the kingdom as having vital geopolitical and geostrategic importance in

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JORDAN IN TRANSITION

both the Cold War and the Middle East peace process. From the foundation of the Hashimite state onward, Jordan maintained close strategic ties to Britain.5 After World War II, and with the onset of the Cold War, Jordan also established stronger links to the United States, as the Western powers came to view Jordan as a conservative bulwark against communism and radical forms of pan-Arabism, and as potentially a moderating element in the Arab-Israeli conflict. King Hussein played on these concerns and his regime’s conservative and anticommunist credentials to solidify ties with the United States in particular.6 From its emergence as an independent state, Jordan has held close ties to powerful Western states and has in fact depended heavily on foreign aid from these countries to keep the kingdom afloat.7 In addition to its longstanding reliance on powerful external allies, the Hashimite monarchy has throughout its existence pointedly emphasized its Islamic lineage. King Hussein in particular made frequent reference to the Hashimite family line descending directly from the prophet Muhammad. But beyond this emphasis on a religious and cultural source of legitimacy, the monarchy also established itself immediately as the premier and centralized political power in the emerging Jordanian state. At the time of the initial organization of the Jordanian state, the nation itself was new and based on artificial boundaries, which therefore included disparate groups of settled and nomadic peoples on both the East and West Banks of the Jordan River.8 This did not amount to a political void, but nonetheless civil society, like the economic basis for the new state, was weak. The emerging state almost immediately filled these gaps itself. Jordan’s new government began the process of establishing a large role for the public sector in the economy (a legacy undergoing transformation only today), ensuring a similarly large role for the military in backing the political regime, and finally co-opting the fragmented aspects of much of society into the new Hashimite political order.9 With this process well under way through the efforts of King Abdullah I, King Hussein would later develop the power of the state still further while also allowing intermittent and minimal levels of pluralism.10 Given its location, Jordan was from its emergence under the British deeply involved in the various dimensions of the Palestinian-Israeli and broader Arab-Israeli conflicts. By the time of Jordanian independence in 1946, tensions were peaking in neighboring Palestine between Jews and Arabs over the issue of Zionist versus Palestinian aspirations to full statehood. When the United Nations voted to partition Palestine between the two peoples in 1947 and Israel declared its independence the follow-

THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN JORDAN

7

ing year, Jordan’s Arab Legion was one of the Arab armies that attacked the new state, joining fighting that had already begun between the two communities. In that hard-fought campaign—a defeat for the Arab forces—Jordan’s Arab Legion held on to East Jerusalem and the West Bank. In what remains one of the most controversial moves in the history of modern Middle East politics, King Abdullah formally annexed the West Bank to his Jordanian kingdom in 1950. The debate ever since has turned on whether Abdullah’s move preserved Arab territory from complete Israeli control, or whether he had foreclosed the possibility of a smaller Palestinian state by annexing the territory.11 Abdullah paid for that decision with his life, when he was gunned down outside the Al-Aqsa Mosque in East Jerusalem by a Palestinian nationalist in 1951. Standing beside him that day was his grandson and the future king, Hussein. He too had been hit by the assassin’s bullets, but the one that hit him did no harm, as it amazingly ricocheted off a medal on the young Hussein’s chest. Hussein’s biographers would later make much of that story, so embedded in symbolism for the Hashimite monarchy.12 This soon became the stuff of legend: the martyred founder of the regime, the assassination at one of the holiest of Islamic sites, and the deflected bullet that marked the beginning of the “survivor” image so associated with Hussein throughout his long reign. After a brief transitional period in which his father, Talal, was judged mentally unfit to rule, Hussein became king in 1953.13 Thus for most of Jordan’s modern history (1953–1999) it knew only one king as architect of the kingdom’s domestic development and of its foreign policy. Hussein consolidated the Hashimite regime in Jordan and defended it against internal and external challenges, neither of which were in short supply. Jordan’s very centrality in Middle East politics and geography has also carried with it a real strategic vulnerability. In the 1950s, when the kingdom was still young and viewed by many pan-Arab nationalists as an artificial “paper tiger,” some Jordanian officials feared that another regional conflict might eliminate the Hashimite state entirely. Jordanians did not want their country to become the “Belgium of the Middle East.” And they had in mind here not the strong and independent contemporary Belgium that serves as focal point and headquarters to the economically powerful European Union, but rather the vulnerable Belgium of 1914 and 1940—a battleground for more powerful neighbors. In some ways, that same image from the kingdom’s early days reemerged in the 1990s with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the ensuing Gulf crisis. It revived the old English-language pun in some Jordanian political circles that Jordan lay “between Iraq and a hard place.”

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JORDAN IN TRANSITION

In the 1950s, Arab politics became intensely radicalized, with the Cold War and Arab-Israeli conflict looming large in political discourse. Radical trends from communism to pan-Arab nationalism (of both Ba‘thist and Nasserist varieties) were at their peak, challenging the legitimacy of Western-leaning conservative monarchies like Jordan.14 In 1957, Hussein headed off an attempted coup d’état and used the opportunity to solidify Hashimite royal control and largely shut down the power of a tumultuous parliament. That same year, a bloody military coup overthrew the Hashimite monarchy of King Hussein’s cousin, King Faysal II, in Iraq. The new regime in Baghdad killed the king and his family before consolidating control over the country. Only months earlier, the two Hashimite monarchies had briefly allied with one another, in a failed effort to enhance their security. But it was the seemingly stronger of the two, in Iraq, that was gone by the end of the year. With that event in mind, the Hashimite regime in Jordan had little tolerance for pluralist politics or domestic opposition. Fearing for its own survival, King Hussein’s regime had by 1957 thwarted a military coup, but then used that event as the pretext for ending one of the kingdom’s most politically open eras. To strengthen the hold of the monarchy, the regime disbanded parliament, banned political parties, and in essence closed the door on liberalization for many years to come. By the late 1960s the regime was forced to focus outward once again, as regional tensions escalated especially between Israel and the Nasser regime in Egypt. Those tensions soon led to the defining event of the decade: the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, also known as the Six Day War. The conflict began when Israeli forces launched a surprise attack (which they viewed as a preemptive strike) on Arab forces in Egypt and Syria, effectively destroying the Arab air forces while they were still on the ground. With no air support, the land battles that followed produced an overwhelming Israeli victory in a mere six days not only against Egypt and Syria, but also against Jordan, whose forces had joined the war effort to aid its Arab allies.15 That fateful decision and the complete failure of the Arab war effort led to Israeli occupation of the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the Golan from Syria, and East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan. In less than six days, Jordan had lost some of its most prized territory, including the agriculturally rich West Bank and the more religiously significant East Jerusalem. East Jerusalem includes all of the old city of Jerusalem, which in turn comprises the Muslim holy sites of the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque in addition to the Western Wall of the ancient Jewish temple and the Christian Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

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The loss of this city and even the entire West Bank was not, however, the only concern for the Jordanians. As in the war of 1948, tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees poured across the border into Jordan in June 1967, changing the demographics and ultimately the domestic stability of the kingdom.16 That uneasy situation collapsed in September 1970, when guerrilla forces of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) fought the royalist forces of the Hashimite government. This Jordanian civil war, called Black September by Palestinian nationalists and White September by some Transjordanian nationalists, resulted in a bloody Hashimite victory and the expulsion of PLO guerrilla forces from Jordan. What looked like a particularly vicious internal struggle had become internationalized, however, when Syrian forces launched an unsuccessful invasion of northern Jordan in support of the PLO. Both the United States and Israel threatened to intervene, signaling their support for the Hashimite regime. Those very threats, and more importantly the efforts of the Jordanian army, forced the Syrians to withdraw. The Hashimite state ultimately defeated the PLO forces, continuing a military campaign against them through the summer of 1971, which violently crushed and expelled PLO guerrilla forces from the kingdom. For some Palestinians and Jordanians, the bitterness of that conflict still remains. While the estimated percentages vary greatly, it is clear that more than half the population of the kingdom today is of Palestinian origin. Although this West Bank/East Bank ethnic divide is sometimes overstated, it remains a significant feature of Jordan’s society and political economy, and of the Jordanian state itself. Much of the Jordanian government, public sector, and military is dominated by East Bank Jordanians, while much of the private sector is dominated by Palestinians. Before 1970 the Hashimites had regarded their monarchy as more solidly a union of West and East Banks, and had striven for some level of balance in the political system. But this general ethnic division of labor (so to speak), and hence of political power, became more pronounced in the wake of the 1970–1971 conflict within the kingdom. The question of JordanianPalestinian relations has always been paradoxical. Many Palestinian nationalists never forgave the Hashimites for the annexation of the West Bank, for being too conciliatory toward Israel, and for Black September. Transjordanian nationalists respond that Jordan is the only Arab state to give Palestinians citizenship. That latter point is the one that has risen to the forefront of contemporary politics in Jordan. The debate today is about full citizenship, and to what extent there is a Palestinian-

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Transjordanian divide; to what extent Palestinians fail to enjoy full citizenship rights; and to what extent Palestinians are loyal citizens of the Hashimite Jordanian state. It is difficult to imagine a more contentious and touchy issue within Jordanian politics today (see Chapter 6). Following the disastrous 1967 war, the Hashimite regime continued for two decades to maintain its claim to the West Bank and East Jerusalem. But in 1988, in the midst of the first intifada—the Palestinian uprising against Israeli rule—the monarchy renounced these claims and turned instead toward consolidating its rule east of the Jordan River. Indeed, the kingdom remained under martial law from the time of the 1967 war until it was lifted in 1992 as part of the overall political liberalization process. In October 1973, with the kingdom still recovering from an international war in 1967 and a civil war in 1970, Egyptian and Syrian forces launched an initially successful surprise attack on Israel—an event known variously as the Yom Kippur, Ramadan, or October War. Having lost all of the West Bank and East Jerusalem to Israel just six years earlier, Jordan stayed largely out of the 1973 conflict. As Egypt and Syria fought Israel on northern and southern fronts, Jordan never opened an eastern front and instead sent a small contingent of troops to aid Syria in its attempt to recover the Golan. What is perhaps most amazing about those years is that Jordan survived at all as a state and as a Hashimite monarchy despite international wars, civil war, and revolutions toppling monarchies in neighboring states (including the 1958 overthrow of the Hashimite regime in Iraq). Awareness of this strategic vulnerability led Jordanian policymakers to focus on ensuring international allies and domestic military prowess despite the small size of the state and its government coffers. Many regimes may fear external conflict or internal upheaval, but for the Hashimite regime these have not been hypothetical. Yet since the early 1970s, Jordan’s vulnerability seemed to decline. With the Hashimite defeat of Palestinian guerrillas in the 1970–1971 Jordanian civil war, PLO military forces were expelled from the kingdom (many to an already unstable Lebanon), in effect lessening the threat of a second PLO-Hashimite struggle over the kingdom itself. Similarly, when the largest of the Arab “frontline” states, Egypt, signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, it changed the strategic equation by limiting the possibility for another full-scale Arab-Israeli war. It seemed virtually impossible for an Arab military coalition to form without Egyptian participation. Egypt had made peace with Israel; Jordan had no interest in renewed hostilities; and Syria, which desperately

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desired to retrieve the Golan, was not in a position to go it alone against Israel. Although Jordan was widely regarded by Western powers as a moderate state in Middle East politics, it did not follow the Egyptian lead and conclude its own peace treaty with Israel. Domestic and regional constraints proved too great, and thus the Hashimite regime drifted away from Egypt and instead aligned more closely with Iraq and Saudi Arabia, both highly critical of Egypt’s separate peace.17 In the 1980s the Jordanian regime appeared to be far more concerned with the strategic and perhaps internal challenges posed by the new revolutionary regime in Iran. Having toppled the shah in 1979 and established the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Islamic fundamentalist regime of Ayatollah Khomeini was viewed by the Hashimite monarchy as deeply threatening.18 Certainly, distant Iran posed no direct military threat to Jordan. But the Hashimite regime focused instead on Iran’s potential threat to Jordan’s domestic politics and economic stability. Iran was a successful example—and indeed an active supporter—of the overthrow of conservative pro-Western monarchies. Revolutionary Iran therefore seemed also to threaten the Persian Gulf monarchies. This perception of a threatening and hostile revolutionary Iran was one reason why the six Persian Gulf monarchies formed themselves into an alliance in 1981, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). But any threat to these oil-wealthy kingdoms indirectly affected Jordan as well, since the GCC states were major suppliers of financial aid and oil to the Hashimite Kingdom. Thus when Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, King Hussein’s regime supported Baghdad for all eight years of the war, and indeed Jordan came to serve as Iraq’s main supply source (through its port of Aqaba and its overland trucking routes).19 Yet despite the regime’s continuing concern with security threats, these no longer seemed to include serious fear of invasion or war on any of Jordan’s borders. The regime had throughout its existence viewed security as a domestic and economic, as well as an external and military, issue. But by the early 1980s the external-military dimensions appeared to be declining in importance relative to concerns for the economic security of the regime and concurrently for Jordan’s domestic stability.

TRANSITIONS SINCE 1989 Given this brief overview of Jordanian political history, the focus of this book begins with the late 1980s and the transition to the 1990s—a transition that was by no means smooth. The regime’s concerns for sta-

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JORDAN IN TRANSITION

bility were underscored dramatically in 1989 by domestic unrest triggered by an economic austerity program initiated under the aegis of the International Monetary Fund. The domestic crisis was followed a year later by a crisis in the regional system when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. But Jordan managed to survive both the internal and external upheavals, and by 1994 had made peace with Israel and even reestablished its alliances with Western powers such as Britain and the United States, while also slowly reaching rapprochement with the Persian Gulf monarchies. Throughout this period, a key theme in Jordanian politics has been the political liberalization process itself. That process began in the heat of another crisis, this time economically generated, when the IMF austerity measures led to political upheavals within Jordan. With the intifada raging west of the Jordan River, and domestic unrest erupting in Jordan itself, King Hussein initiated a series of measures to address public demands for change, and to reestablish the stability of the regime. The rather painful process of economic adjustment and change, begun in the late 1980s, led in large part to the political opening since 1989. That very opening helped reestablish the regime’s base of domestic support, thereby shoring up its stability and allowing it to sign a controversial peace treaty with the State of Israel in 1994. Today, all these questions and issues remain at the very heart of Jordanian politics, and are essential to understanding the kingdom’s politics and policies both at home and abroad. In the chapters that follow, I examine in turn the transitions toward political liberalization and democratization (Chapter 2), economic adjustment (Chapter 3), shifting international alliances and peace with Israel (Chapter 4), and finally the transition in the monarchy itself from King Hussein to King Abdullah II (Chapter 5). The final chapter examines the prospects for these transitions and for Jordanian politics under King Abdullah, as well as the challenges facing the new regime and the country in the early twenty-first century.

NOTES 1. Lisa Anderson, “Absolutism and the Resilience of Monarchy in the Middle East,” Political Science Quarterly 106, no. 1 (1991): 3. 2. Ibid., p. 3. 3. Previously, Faysal had, for five months in 1920, briefly ruled Syria before being expelled by the French. 4. See, for example, Schirin H. Fathi, Jordan: An Invented Nation? Tribe-State Dynamics and the Formation of National Identity (Hamburg, Germany: Deutches

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Orient Institut, 1994). For two excellent analyses of the historical construction of Jordanian identity and of current debates about changes in that identity today, see, respectively, Joseph A. Massad, Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); and Marc Lynch, State Interests and Public Spheres: The International Politics of Jordan’s Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 5. On the emergence of modern Jordan and the Hashimite state, see Mary C. Wilson, King Abdullah, Britain, and the Making of Jordan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 6. Douglas Little, “A Puppet in Search of a Puppeteer? The United States, King Hussein, and Jordan, 1953–1970,” International History Review 17, no. 3 (1995): 512–544. 7. For a recent study of Jordanian policy, see Asher Susser, Jordan: A Case Study of a Pivotal State (Washington, D.C.: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2000). See also Robert Stephens, “Jordan and the Powers,” in Patrick Seale, ed., The Shaping of an Arab Statesman: Abd al-Hamid Sharaf and the Modern Arab World (London: Quartet Books, 1983), pp. 39–60. On U.S.-Jordanian relations specifically, see Madiha Rashid al-Madfai, Jordan, the United States, and the Middle East Peace Process, 1974–1991 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 8. There are several excellent historical analyses of the peoples and emerging society of what would become Transjordan. See especially the essays in Eugene Rogan and Tariq Tell, eds., Village, Steppe and State: The Social Origins of Modern Jordan (London: British Academic Press, 1994); Raouf S. Abu Jaber, Pioneers over Jordan: The Frontiers of Settlement in Transjordan, 1860–1914 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1989); and Norman N. Lewis, Nomads and Settlers in Syria and Jordan, 1800–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). On the geographic and demographic dimensions of state and society in the emerging Jordan, see Michael R. Fishbach, State, Society, and Land in Jordan (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2000). 9. See the detailed analysis in Laurie A. Brand, “‘In the Beginning Was the State . . .’: The Quest for Civil Society in Jordan,” in Augustus Richard Norton, ed., Civil Society in the Middle East, vol. 1 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995), pp. 148–185. 10. On this balancing act, see the analysis by Peter Gubser, “Jordan: Balancing Pluralism and Authoritarianism,” in Peter J. Chelkopwski and Robert J. Pranger, eds., Ideology and Power in the Middle East: Essays in Honor of George Lenczowski (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1988), pp. 89–114. 11. Avi Shlaim, Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). 12. Among the biographies of King Hussein, see Roland Dallas, King Hussein: A Life on the Edge (London: Profile Books, 1999); James Lunt, Hussein of Jordan (London: Macmillan, 1989); and Peter Snow, Hussein: A Biography (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1972). 13. On the transition from King Abdullah to King Hussein, see Robert Satloff, From Abdullah to Hussein: Jordan in Transition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 14. Malcolm Kerr, The Arab Cold War: Gamal Abd al-Nasir and His Rivals, 1958–70 (London: Oxford University Press, 1970). 15. Samir Mutawi, Jordan in the 1967 War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 16. On Palestinian-Jordanian tensions and conflicts in these years, see Clinton Bailey, Jordan’s Palestinian Challenge, 1948–1983: A Political History (Boulder:

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Westview Press, 1984); and Uriel Dann, King Hussein and the Challenge of Arab Radicalism, 1955–1967 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 17. On inter-Arab relations from independence until the early 1980s, see Alan R. Taylor, The Arab Balance of Power (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1982). 18. Author interviews with former prime ministers Zayd al-Rifa‘i and Mudar Badran, Amman, 1993. 19. W. Andrew Terrill, “Saddam’s Closest Ally: Jordan and the Gulf War,” Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies 9, no. 2 (1985): 43–54.

2 Political Liberalization and Elections

Jordan’s process of political liberalization and democratization began defensively in 1989 as a then precarious regime responded to rioting and political upheavals in many parts of the country. The waves of political unrest had been triggered by an International Monetary Fund (IMF) austerity program in the spring of 1989. The kingdom had reluctantly agreed to the IMF adjustment measures following a prolonged economic crisis that included the rapid devaluation of the Jordanian dinar, a skyrocketing national debt, and rising inflation and unemployment. But the policies intended to address the economic crisis set off a corresponding political crisis as rioting spread from the south of Jordan to parts of the capital. The reductions in state subsidies on staple foods and other goods had led to rapid price increases just as many Jordanians were already having trouble making ends meet. What dismayed many in the regime itself was the fact that the riots had broken out in areas that were traditionally most supportive of the Hashimite monarchy. The violence had not emerged from areas that were largely Palestinian or Islamist, but rather from Transjordanian communities usually seen as unalterably royalist. That ethnic and political dimension to the unrest jolted many in the regime into initiating a sudden flurry of reforms. Out of this sequence of negative developments emerged the liberalization and democratization process itself, as the regime attempted to mollify its domestic critics and open the system to more meaningful levels of political participation than had been the case thus far. I argue first that Jordan’s political liberalization began reactively and defensively and that it was driven by economic pressures that in 15

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turn produced a political opening based on a political-economic calculus for regime survival.1 Second, the process was initiated from above, not from a broad-based social movement from below, and even then only under severe economic constraints and a corresponding level of domestic unrest that had shocked the regime into action. The economic determinants and defensive nature of Jordan’s political opening have received some attention in the literature as both Laurie Brand and Rex Brynen have emphasized the key role of Jordan’s weakened political economy.2 Both have attributed the shift to the broader contraction of the regional oil market, and with it Jordan’s linked and semi-rentier economy, dependent as the Jordanian economy was on external sources of income (rents) such as worker remittances and foreign aid from the oil economies of the Gulf. When the regional economy contracted, so too did Jordan’s domestic economy and government revenues, forcing the regime to open up. Malik Mufti has added an additional layer to these explanations, showing how the actual liberalization process involved extensive bargaining between elites regarding the depth and direction of the political opening.3 Mufti also underscores the important point that in Jordanian politics the line between government and opposition is often spanned by negotiations and understandings between elite factions. The “opposition” Muslim Brotherhood has, for example, historically supported the Hashimite monarchy, which in turn has allowed the Islamist movement to operate effectively as a loyal opposition. These explanations are, in my view, complementary and each in its own way touches back on earlier findings in the literature on democratic transitions, which tended to emphasize both the political economy and elite bargaining aspects of such transitions.4 Thus I argue that Jordan’s political opening emerged based on the political economy of Hashimite regime survival, but that thereafter elite bargaining was indeed essential in shaping the specific nature of the project. Now, years after the start of Jordan’s democratization program, the question still remains just how deep and authentic this process has been. The first full parliamentary elections since the 1960s were held in November 1989 with additional elections in 1993 and 1997. In absolute terms, one might well argue that political liberalization in Jordan has been limited indeed; but relatively speaking—when comparing Jordan to other states in the Arab world, for example—Jordan’s democratic experiment appears to have gone farther than that of virtually any other Arab state.5 To its credit, the process included the loosening of government restrictions on the media, the lifting of martial law, the return of parliamentary elections, and the legalization of political parties.

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Regime supporters and insiders emphasize a very positive interpretation based on relative comparisons to such Arab neighbors as Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. Former prime minister Ahmad al-Lawzi, for example, in a moment of enthusiasm and hyperbole remarked that “on the whole, I don’t think that even the Prophets Jesus or Muhammad could bring about a faster movement toward democracy.”6 Regime critics, in contrast, see much of the political opening as mere cosmetic overhaul. For many in the Jordanian opposition, “democratization” has not lived up to its name, and had even begun to backslide following the 1994 peace treaty with Israel (and vocal domestic opposition to that treaty) with matters reaching an impasse during the 1997 elections.7 Clearly this is an issue that generates considerable emotion and passionate—if often opposite—interpretations. But how far has political liberalization gone in Jordan? More specifically, has the electoral process indeed provided meaningful avenues for political participation in the kingdom? And does this process amount to genuine “democratization” or to something considerably less ambitious? This chapter addresses these questions and provides an empirical analysis of the liberalization process with emphasis on the parliamentary elections of 1989, 1993, and 1997.8 In addition, this chapter addresses the larger issue of Jordan’s overall political liberalization effort, by providing an analysis of what all three elections—taken together—can tell us about the state of parliamentary democratization in Jordan. In the sections that follow, I address each election in turn. The analysis of Jordan’s parliamentary democratization, however, must be seen as simply part of an overall political liberalization process. Examining the elections and parliament can provide some insight into the formal and procedural aspects of democratization. But as this analysis will also make clear, the informal and nongovernmental aspects of democratization are just as important to any hope for full democracy in the kingdom. A full conceptualization of democratic life, for example, would include informal mechanisms for participation in the public sphere, particularly in the form of civil society. That very concept—civil society—has developed into a major topic in both scholarly research and political activism. Civil society refers to the development of independent voluntary organizations and enhanced opportunities for public sphere participation on the part of citizens.9 Specifically, this usually entails a focus on the emergence of nonstate actors such as political parties and interest groups, and therefore pluralism in the form of various types of autonomous associations. But civil society also includes an emphasis on the increasing ability to

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debate political issues openly in the public sphere. The idea of civil society, then, suggests that the concept of “development” be viewed not just in terms of economic growth, nor even in terms of the democratization of formal government institutions, but also as increased personal and societal freedoms.10 These freedoms in turn imply a greater role for the press and other information media.

THE THIRD WAVE? DEMOCRATIZATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST Throughout the 1990s many political scientists and political activists heralded the “third wave” of democratization that had swept over much of Latin America and Eastern Europe.11 The question for students of Middle East politics, and indeed for citizens in Middle East countries, has since then remained whether the Middle East would be next. There have indeed been noticeable shifts toward political liberalization in many countries in the region, including Jordan, but they have all come from above and all have been far more limited in scope than those that transformed the political systems of Latin America and Eastern Europe. In the Middle Eastern context, these shifts do not concern regimes being swept away, nor mass social movements. Rather, the limited democratization processes in the region have been largely initiated defensively by regimes experiencing severe constraints economically. These are highly controlled political liberalization programs, which are intended to broaden the domestic political base for ruling regimes through increasing levels of inclusion while simultaneously containing demands for greater participation. The motivation for liberalization or democratization in the region appears to lie mainly in the desire of Middle East regimes to release social pressures in order to remain in power. Mehran Kamrava has argued convincingly that most liberalization programs in the Middle East amount simply to “modified formats” and “safety valves” for continued governance. There is not, for example, a pattern of mass social movements demanding radical change across the region. Rather, regime elites themselves are using political liberalization in order “to make entrenched authoritarianism appear more palatable and less abrasive.”12 As Kamrava also points out, the act of liberalization may then actually make more genuine democratization far less likely, as the regime reconstructs itself and its institutions to better contain popular pressures for more meaningful change. And the modern Middle East has seen a wide range of shifts, from liberalization in

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Lebanon, Morocco, and even Iran, to explicit deliberalization or the retrenchment of authoritarian regimes in Algeria, Egypt, and Tunisia. Jordan in many respects seems to lie ambiguously between these poles. Its liberalization process initially appeared to be more extensive than that of any other Arab country, but since the mid-1990s deliberalization has also taken place, pulling Jordan in the opposite direction. The regime began to pull back from full liberalization only a few years into the process. But societal groups themselves tend to have far more ambitious goals for democratization in Jordan, and these groups continue to press the regime for more reform. The transition continues largely as a struggle between political elites, inside and outside the regime, over the depth and breadth of democratization in the kingdom. This point is underscored even within civil society itself, which is usually seen in the literature as a key component of meaningful democratization. Indeed, civil society can be just that, but it can also be used far more cynically as a form of social control. Quintan Wiktorowicz has argued that civil society in the form of organizational pluralism may not translate into democratic empowerment. In the Jordanian case, he argues, the new organizations that emerged with political liberalization soon found themselves “imbedded in a web of bureaucratic practices and legal codes which allows those in power to monitor and regulate collective activities.” In this context, Wiktorowicz concludes, “civil society institutions are more an instrument of state social control than a mechanism of collective empowerment.”13 I argue, however, that even if the state’s intentions and motivations are cynical or self-serving, the very act of political liberalization changes the political space, creating the possibility for a broader public sphere and the development of a stronger civil society. This point is also supported by Jillian Schwedler’s work on civil society, and indeed in earlier writings from Karl Marx to Antonio Gramsci.14 The state may thus be by far the main actor on the Middle East political stage, but it is by no means the only actor. Political parties, associations, interest groups, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) may therefore all come with their own agendas and goals, with no implication that these would match those of the regime itself. In addition to these more organizational forces, there remain informal networks of individuals pressing for change, including in gender relations in the private as well as public spheres. Despite the top-down nature of the liberalization process, and despite its severe limitations, the political space that has been opened does include individuals and organizations that are dedicated to pushing for real and much deeper levels of democratization

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than the regime itself seems inclined to pursue. The question is whether such groups can effectively challenge or reform the enormous power of the Jordanian state. At present the answer would certainly appear to be no. But if a significant number of elites themselves joined this movement, the nature of Jordan’s liberalization would dramatically change. The remainder of this chapter explores Jordan’s liberalization experience through the lens of its national parliamentary elections. Each election serves as a benchmark in modern Jordanian history, providing opportunities to examine the interplay between these formal aspects of democratization and the informal aspects, including especially the development of political pluralism and civil society in the kingdom.

THE POLITICAL SYSTEM AND THE 1989 ELECTIONS Since the start of the liberalization process in Jordan, the democratic electoral process at the national level has been restricted to voting for members of the lower house of parliament. Jordan has a bicameral legislature, with a royally appointed forty-member upper house (Majlis al‘Ayyan, or House of Notables or Senate), and a popularly elected eighty-member lower house (Majlis al-Nu’ab, or House of Representatives). In 2001 the number of parliamentary seats in the lower house was expanded from eighty to one hundred four, but for all three elections examined in this chapter, the number of parliamentarians remained at eighty. This process of limited electoral democratization has not, however, extended to the executive branch of government. The prime minister remains a royal appointee, and cabinet ministers are not necessarily drawn from among the elected members of parliament. In some respects, as in many other political systems, the upper house is designed to serve as a check on the lower house of the legislature. Indeed, even the leadership of the two bodies underscores this point, for the speaker of the house of representatives is elected from and by members of the house, while the speaker of the senate (sometimes referred to as the president of the senate) is appointed by the king. Perhaps not surprisingly, the senate president tends to be a conservative royalist drawn from one of the more powerful families in the kingdom. The membership of the senate is constitutionally required to consist of top regime veterans. The constitution, for example, notes that senate membership is only to be extended to former prime ministers or other ministers, ambassadors, former top military officers, and so on. As a

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result, the senate often appears to be a who’s who—or who was who— of Jordanian politics. This chamber remains unaffected by the political liberalization process, at least institutionally. And if anything, it has been used by the regime as a check on the limited power of the lower house. After the 1989 elections, for example, the regime formalized a rule requiring the senate to approve all bills from the lower house. This in effect allowed the regime to use the senate to veto bills that the monarchy opposed. The parliamentary aspect of democratization and elections has therefore focused squarely on the lower house. At the time of the 1989, 1993, and 1997 elections, the eighty members of the lower house were divided among twenty-one multimember constituencies. Of that total number, the regime reserved a number of seats for specific minority constituencies, all of which have traditionally been strong supporters of the Hashimite monarchy. These include six seats for the rural bedouin, nine seats for the Christian community, and three seats for the Circassian and Chechen communities collectively. Jordanian opposition figures, especially those from Jordan’s majority Muslim community, have long argued that rules such as these overrepresent ethnic and religious minorities. In contrast, many members of these minority communities see the reserved seats as critical to the preservation of their rights. Whether this minority provision was really designed to protect minority rights or simply to bolster the regime, the debate remained moot for decades since Jordan held no national elections between 1967 and 1989. The electoral suspension had followed Jordan’s defeat in the Six Day War and its loss of the West Bank and East Jerusalem to Israel. But twenty-two years later, in the aftermath of the IMF riots and the regime’s promises of new elections, the new parliamentary electoral campaign got under way. In the 1989 parliamentary elections approximately 650 candidates competed for the eighty seats in the lower house.15 Political parties, however, remained banned under Jordanian law, as they had been for more than thirty years. Although all candidates ran at least theoretically as independents, both leftist and Islamist opposition—based in outlawed and hence underground political parties—fielded candidates. But of all the sources of opposition in Jordan, the Muslim Brotherhood (AlIkhwan al-Muslimun) was by far the best organized, having long enjoyed a kind of winking relationship with the regime as Jordan’s largest and most tolerated opposition group.16 The secular left, in contrast, remained largely in disarray, divided into numerous factions, and in general appeared to have been caught off guard by the sudden announcement of elections.

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Still, despite the official ban on parties and the abrupt and limited nature of the liberalization process, the political opposition fared far better than expected. The well-organized campaign of the Muslim Brotherhood ran a list of twenty-six candidates only, of whom twentytwo were elected along with twelve independent Islamists.17 Secular leftist and pan-Arab nationalist candidates did not score quite as imposing a victory, yet they did still take thirteen seats. Of these, nine were nationalists and four represented the more radical left.18 What was most noticeable, however, was that once again all eighty parliamentarians were male. Jordanian women had received the right to vote in 1974, yet because no national elections were held until 1989 this election represented the first time that women could vote or run for office. And although Jordanian women amounted to more than 50 percent of the electorate, they composed only 2 percent of the candidates for parliament, with none winning. The only candidacy that appeared to stand a chance of victory was that of Tujan al-Faysal, a Circassian candidate from Amman’s third district. As an outspoken advocate of women’s rights, however, Faysal became the target of a particularly vicious Islamist campaign to thwart her candidacy. The Islamists even went so far as to bring her to court on charges of “apostasy.” The charges were later dropped, but ultimately her candidacy failed and no women were represented in the new parliament.19 Overall, following the 1989 elections at least forty-four members of the new Jordanian parliament could be viewed (albeit to varying degrees) as members of the political opposition. When the religious right and secular left were united, that amounted to a clear parliamentary majority. In actual practice, however, the conservative and centrist parliamentarians who made up the balance of parliament frequently played each opposition wing against the other, preserving a centrist proregime bloc despite opposition electoral gains.20 To the surprise of no one, the office of prime minister was not offered to anyone in the political opposition. What was surprising and even disappointing to many in the opposition was the king’s decision to appoint a veteran politician to the post: Mudar Badran. The public and parliamentary disappointment was palpable, for much speculation had focused on the idea of at least “new blood” in the prime ministry—that is, if not an opposition figure, then at least an individual representing a new generation of leadership. Instead, the king appointed Badran, a consummate Hashimite regime insider. Badran had previously served as head of the dreaded General Intelligence Directorate (GID), or Mukhabarat, and served twice before as prime minister (1976–1979

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and 1980–1984). In addition, his new appointment required him to move from his post as chief of the Royal Hashimite Court. In effect, he simply changed positions with the king’s cousin, Sharif Zayd Ibn Shakir, who had served as caretaker prime minister for the elections. Ibn Shakir went to the royal court, while Badran took office as prime minister. Following a surprisingly difficult and acrimonious parliamentary debate, Badran was confirmed by parliament as the new prime minister. Conscious of opposition accusations of corruption and cronyism in Jordanian politics, Badran put together a cabinet that included more than just veterans of previous cabinets. He even reached out to the Muslim Brotherhood by offering the Ikhwan four cabinet positions. The Ikhwan, however, refused the offer and held out in its demand for six posts, including the Ministry of Education. It ended up with none, as the prime minister turned instead toward other elements of the new parliamentary opposition, and brought three independent Islamists into his cabinet. In addition, he brought in two members of the Democratic Bloc—a loose parliamentary grouping of leftists, liberals, and panArab nationalists.21 The number of independent Islamists in the cabinet was later expanded to six. Having consolidated his government, the prime minister quickly undertook a series of initiatives that surprised and pleased his critics. Badran moved to extend the nascent atmosphere of political openness by freeing forty-nine political prisoners, loosening government oversight of the press, reducing the role of the Mukhabarat in political life, and returning thousands of passports that had been confiscated from dissidents.22 The political liberalization process thus seemed to be achieving some real and tangible results. And given its impressive showing in the polls, the Islamist movement attempted to make use of its numbers to achieve its goals. These included, at first, the application of Islamic law, or sharia, in Jordan, which the government was unwilling to comply with. But the Muslim Brotherhood members in parliament persisted at least in trying to secure positions in the government. Although the first Badran cabinet included no Muslim Brotherhood members, it was more diverse than usual, and clearly included figures from the “opposition” Islamist movement. Despite a relatively successful electoral process, the period that followed the 1989 elections was anything but placid. Barely nine months after Jordan elected its first new parliament in more than twenty years, Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait, triggering the 1990–1991 Gulf crisis and war. The Hashimite regime attempted to remain on the

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fence between its Iraqi and U.S. allies, among others, while winning for itself only international recrimination and even economic retribution in the form of halted aid payments from the United States and the Persian Gulf monarchies. This economic blow was compounded by the expulsion of almost half a million Jordanian and Palestinian workers and their dependents from the Gulf. The Gulf “returnees” initially placed great strains on the kingdom’s housing and social services. But eventually, Jordan survived the trauma of the Gulf War and even rebounded relatively quickly from its harsh economic impact. King Hussein’s policies at the time may have won him few friends in the Gulf or the West, but his stance earned him overwhelming support at home. And it was then, when the regime might otherwise have been most vulnerable, that the monarchy deftly turned the situation to its advantage by playing on growing public support to pass the new National Charter (Al-Mithaq al-Watani). The National Charter in a sense placed the regime’s official stamp of approval on the liberalization process and made clear that parliamentary elections, a freer press, and the restoration of multiparty politics would be the basis for a new phase in Jordanian political life. In creating the charter, King Hussein had convened a broad cross section of Jordanian society, including key opposition figures from the religious right to the secular left, to iron out what amounted to a new social contract. Many in the opposition viewed the National Charter as a victory for democracy and pluralism in Jordan, but it also represented a triumph for the monarchy. The Hashimite regime had managed to set the terms for political participation and opposition in Jordanian politics for the foreseeable future. Pluralism and greater levels of political participation would be possible, but only in exchange for Jordan’s continuing existence as a monarchy of the Hashimite royal family. Opposition would be tolerated, but only loyal opposition.23 It was during this period, at the height of the Gulf crisis in January 1991, that the Islamists demonstrated their increasing power by securing several powerful positions, including even the education ministry. This session of parliament thus began in the midst of extreme tension in the region, after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait but before the U.S.-led attack on Iraq. In that tense context Abd-al Latif Arabiyyat, a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood, was elected Jordan’s first Islamist speaker of the house of representatives. Prime Minister Badran, reshuffling his cabinet, brought five Muslim Brotherhood members into his government, including Abdullah Akaylah as minister of education. This high level of Islamist participation in powerful parliamentary and cab-

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inet positions did not, however, last long and was indeed subject to at least some public backlash in response to assorted measures aimed at introducing sex segregation in some ministries, in schools, and so on. Six months later, both the Islamists and the Badran government had been pushed out by the king and a new, more liberal government was installed under Prime Minister Tahir al-Masri. Unlike the Badran government before him, the reform-minded Masri formed a cabinet made up largely of centrist, liberal, and even leftist ministers—but no Islamists. The Islamist movement therefore turned its sights on Masri and within six months had threatened a vote of no confidence, which they credibly argued would have brought down the government. Prime Minister Masri opted to resign. Having been excluded from the government, the Islamists nonetheless demonstrated their power within parliament. But their ability to force the collapse of government was predicated on other factors as well, including broader public and parliamentary opposition to direct peace talks with Israel. And it was Masri’s government that bore the brunt of that opposition when King Hussein decided that Jordan would participate in the 1991 Madrid peace conference in the aftermath of the Gulf War. In addition, Masri was the first self-identifying Palestinian to serve as Jordanian prime minister, and that ethnic factor alone incurred the hostility of many conservative Transjordanian nationalists in parliament. Masri’s appointment as prime minister had in some ways seemed to mark a new era in Jordanian politics—one in which a liberal, a reformer, and a Palestinian could achieve the top governmental position. But that era quickly ended as a coalition of parliamentarians— Islamists, conservative Transjordanian nationalists, and even pan-Arab nationalists (opposed to the peace talks)—united in their opposition to the Masri government and in effect brought it down. Their reasons may have differed, but in the end Masri was seen as too liberal, or too secular, or—even more disturbingly—too Palestinian. Within a few years, however, the former prime minister would be back, elected to the 1993–1997 parliament and in its first session elected speaker (soundly defeating, perhaps ironically, one of his most vocal Islamist critics, Abdullah Akaylah). Certainly the regime never intended for the reform process to be so comprehensive as to change fundamentally the nature of Jordan as a Hashimite monarchy. Nor did it intend to extend the liberalization process to the executive branch of government in general. Rather, the program of political change remained focused specifically in the legislative wing of government and even there was restricted to one of the

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two houses of Jordan’s national parliament. All this was clear before the 1989 poll results, however, and thus it is essential to consider also the depth of change even within these rather limited parameters. And here the process appears to take on more authenticity. Within this context of limited liberalization, the elections did indeed appear to be free and fair overall and yielded far greater opposition representation than the regime had ever intended. The political liberalization process and the 1989 elections may not have represented a full-blown democratization movement, but they did at least mark a clear shift toward a state-society relationship that allowed for greater citizen participation and a reduction in government oversight of political life. This was perhaps most obvious in the press, which took to heart the political opening and the lessening of government restrictions on the media. Numerous alternative weekly and daily newspapers appeared on Jordanian newsstands, while established papers began to develop more depth to their coverage and even began reporting critically on the performance of various government ministries. In many respects, the period immediately following the 1989 opening marked the freest period in the modern history of the Jordanian media. And in 1992, following the adoption of the National Charter, the regime made the important additional moves to deepen the overall democratization by lifting martial law (in place since 1967) and removing the ban (since 1957) on political parties in the kingdom. These measures in turn spurred an absolute flurry of political activity and increasingly open political discussions in the press.

THE NEW ELECTORAL LAW AND THE 1993 ELECTIONS In the increasingly open and pluralistic political atmosphere, political parties began to form or in some cases reemerge from decades of underground activity. More than twenty political parties were legalized by the Ministry of the Interior by the time of the 1993 elections.24 Perhaps as a measure of some level of public excitement about the liberalization process, voter turnout for the elections increased from 41 percent in 1989 to 47 percent in 1993.25 While that amounted to a significant increase, half of Jordan’s eligible voters stayed away from the polls. Despite having a wide variety of political parties to choose from, most voters appeared to vote for candidates they knew or who they felt would serve their constituency, regardless of party platform or ideology.

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Most importantly, however, the various political parties contested the 1993 elections on the basis of a new “temporary” electoral law. The earlier electoral law had allowed each voter as many votes as there were representatives for his or her district. For example, voters in Ma‘an in 1989 could vote for up to five candidates to represent their governate in parliament. In that election, the Muslim Brotherhood proved to be the only truly organized political movement, and indeed the only one with the political savvy to work the system to its advantage. In some areas, the Ikhwan ran lists of candidates up to the exact number of seats for a given district. In this way, the Brotherhood was able to exploit the plurality-based electoral system to win twenty-two out of the twenty-six seats that it had contested. Government officials argued that this amounted to representation well above the Muslim Brotherhood’s actual share of the national vote, and so in 1992 the regime issued a new electoral law. In the 1993 elections the government closed the 1989 electoral loophole and replaced it with the oneperson, one-vote law and also with adjusted new districts that disproportionately favored traditionally progovernment areas. These included rural rather than urban districts, for example, and the new law also continued the practice of reserving seats for Chechens and Circassians (three seats), Christians (nine seats), and bedouins (six seats). Five hundred thirty-four candidates competed for the eighty available parliamentary seats, with only twenty-five of the previous eighty parliamentarians returned to office. Only three women contested seats, as opposed to twelve in the previous election, but this time a woman won—Tujan al-Faysal, the candidate who had been so vigorously opposed by the Muslim Brotherhood in 1989. This time, despite similar levels of harassment, Faysal won the Circassian seat in Amman’s third district, becoming the first woman in Jordan’s lower house of parliament.26 For their part, the Islamists fared less well, dropping from twenty-two to sixteen seats for the Muslim Brotherhood (now represented by its new political party—the Islamic Action Front (IAF; Jabha al-‘Amal al-Islami)—and from twelve to six seats for independent Islamists. This drop may have been due in part to public disapproval of restrictive social legislation that the Islamists had backed in parliament. It is far more likely, however, that the more important variable was the change in the electoral law itself, both in terms of the one-person, onevote provision and in terms of changed electoral districts. The new districts had vastly different populations, and effectively underrepresented large urban (and mainly Palestinian) populations while favoring more rural and traditionally pro-Hashimite constituencies. This is made espe-

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cially clear when one considers that the Islamist percentage of the popular vote actually increased between 1989 and 1993, while the number of Islamist seats in parliament plummeted.27 The changing electoral fortunes of the Islamists were also made clear in the election of Masri as speaker, as opposed to his Islamist opponent. Partly in response to the decline in its parliamentary power, the Islamic Action Front began to splinter. The IAF had billed itself as the united voice of both the Muslim Brotherhood and independent Islamists. But shortly after the election, many independent Islamists chose to become truly independent, resigning from IAF membership. If the religious right had lost power in the 1993 election, the secular left had somehow managed to fare even worse. While the left had appeared entirely disorganized in 1989, by 1993 it had created far too many party organizations. As a result, leftist candidates often split their votes, resulting in limited leftist party representation once again in the 1993–1997 parliament. In fact, party representation of any kind was fairly limited. Of all eighty deputies to the new parliament, only thirtyfive represented political parties. The remaining forty-five winning candidates had all run as independents. Thus the dust had barely settled from the 1993 elections before the Jordanian party spectrum began to shift in response to electoral misfortune. Parties rose and fell as Jordan’s myriad political parties engaged in a seemingly endless dance of forming, merging, splintering, and reforming. Many Jordanian party officials themselves acknowledged the fluid nature of the new party system, but argued that such fluidity was a byproduct of the recentness of the political opening. Eventually, they asserted, the parties would coalesce into a smaller set of more coherent and distinct units.28 One of the more disturbing trends that marked this period in the liberalization process, however, was the heightening of ethnic tensions between Transjordanians and Palestinians. The surprise 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) served as the catalyst for this renewed friction in Jordanian society. The surprise announcement had angered King Hussein and the Jordanian government, which after years of being warned not to deal unilaterally with Israel felt sidelined and indeed sideswiped by the announcement. For some Transjordanian nationalists, this translated into renewed resentment of Palestinians in the kingdom in general, whose loyalties they saw as split, and hence questionable. By October 1994, however, Jordan had not only completed its own bilateral negotiations with Israel, but had also signed a formal peace treaty with the Jewish state. That, in turn, angered many Palestinians in the kingdom

POLITICAL LIBERALIZATION AND ELECTIONS

29

and certainly the assorted unilateral moves angered pan-Arab nationalists of either ethnicity. This is not to imply that the 1993 and 1994 events in the regional peace process had triggered uniform sets of group responses, which then divided Jordanian society. The ethnic division was certainly already in place, and for many Jordanians it remained of limited importance before and after these events. The key point remains, however, that for more hard-line Transjordanian or Palestinian nationalists in the kingdom, the level of tension concerning loyalties and citizenship rights had clearly increased. Opposition parties of both groups mobilized against the treaty. In the November 6, 1994, vote in parliament to ratify the treaty, the motion passed fifty-five to twenty-three. The votes against were based solidly among members of parliament from the religious right, the secular left, and pan-Arab nationalists. Having proven completely unable to block the treaty, however, the Jordanian opposition shifted its strategy to prevent full “normalizaton” between Jordan and Israel, by voting in most professional associations to block transnational and functional ties with Israeli counterparts. This enhanced level of antagonism between government and opposition continued well beyond the 1993 election. But in a conciliatory sign King Hussein in 1996 appointed Abd al-Karim al-Kabariti—a reformer—to lead Jordan’s government. Kabariti’s appointment was heralded as a progressive move by many not just because the new prime minister had a reputation as a kind of liberal-centrist reformer, but also because he was of a younger generation than most Jordanian prime ministers. And Kabariti’s appointment followed the tenures of a series of conservative prime ministers—Zayd al-Rifa‘i, Abd al-Salam al-Majali, Sharif Zayd Ibn Shakir, and even Mudar Badran. Kabariti immediately embarked on a campaign against corruption. But the timing of the new prime minister’s appointment also coincided with the regime’s clear intent to increase the role of the Mukhabarat in public life (in the aftermath of the peace treaty and opposition hostility to it) while also pursuing further the IMF adjustment program (see Chapter 3). Thus the reviews of the Kabariti government tended to be mixed, with many in the opposition crediting the prime minister with a real dedication to further pluralism and democratization, while paradoxically also allowing the Mukhabarat to expand its role in Jordanian political life. The 1993 elections helped institutionalize the electoral process itself as a now recurring theme in Jordanian political life. In addition, the lifting of martial law and the legalization of political parties certainly deepened the process of liberalization and pluralism in Jordanian

30

JORDAN IN TRANSITION

politics. But the parties did not capture the imaginations or loyalties of most Jordanians at this early stage, and more importantly, the new electoral law was viewed by many Jordanians as circumscribing the possibilities for democratic and parliamentary opposition in the kingdom. As a strong indicator of this, the controversy over the electoral law continued straight into and through the next round of elections, held four years later in 1997. As the 1997 electoral campaign approached, parties continued to shift positions and form new alliances. By the time the elections were actually held, however, much of what had appeared most promising about Jordanian liberalization seemed to have changed for the worse.

THE OPPOSITION BOYCOTT AND THE 1997 ELECTIONS The November 1997 elections were held in an atmosphere of new restrictions on the press and other political rights. Even more important for the electoral outcome, party alienation had reached such depths that the opposition organized a boycott of the elections, thereby throwing into question the credibility of the electoral process as well as that of the new parliament itself. The boycott began with four leftist parties in July 1997, but they were joined that same month by the Islamic Action Front, by far the largest of Jordan’s political parties. By the end of the month, five pan-Arab nationalist parties announced that they too would join the boycott of parliamentary elections to be held in November. In general, the grievances of all ten of these opposition parties were essentially the same. All were opposed to the continuing process of normalization of relations with Israel, but the impetus for the boycott itself was not this specific policy issue—since these parties had been on record as opposing the Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty even before it was signed in 1994. Rather, the immediate cause for the boycott was the set of “temporary laws” and other measures that the regime had begun implementing in the summer of 1997. These included new restrictions on public assembly, freedom of speech, and press and publication. The crisis had been brewing since before the 1993 elections, when Jordan’s opposition had welcomed the opportunity to form parties and participate more fully in electoral politics, but it had also been sharply critical of the electoral law and its clear progovernment biases. In 1997 the opposition parties were still demanding the repeal of the one-person, one-vote electoral law and its new and uneven districts. But in the

POLITICAL LIBERALIZATION AND ELECTIONS

31

meantime, the regime had apparently taken the 1993 election results as a kind of mandate for major changes in Jordanian policy, especially its decision to pursue a peace treaty with Israel. In contrast, the opposition parties were virtually uniform in their rejection of the peace treaty, in their hostility toward government and IMF-mandated economic austerity measures, and in their discomfort with the Hashimite regime’s renewed warm relationship with the United States. The disillusionment within the opposition also included the limitations on the liberalization process itself. Yet eight years of political opposition in parliament had not managed to change the regime’s stances on any of these large policy issues. And so as the 1997 electoral campaign loomed, parliamentary and party efficacy had already become quite low. As opposition criticism of the regime’s policies increased, the government added to its own legitimacy crisis by issuing a series of new regulations to curb dissent. These regulations included restrictions on rights of assembly and free speech, in addition to specific new rules for the press that were decreed in the summer of 1997. Presumably in an effort to quiet the publications most critical of the regime, the new rules called for extensive capital holdings and licensing requirements for papers to continue publishing legally. By September 1997 the government had suspended fifteen weekly papers, although it specifically refrained from moving against the IAF newspaper, Al-Sabil. Even after the elections, the government proceeded in its legal maneuvers against several publications, when it revoked the licenses of fourteen of the fifteen suspended papers. The restrictions on the press were perhaps all the more disturbing given how much the media had opened up since the liberalization program began. The regime had started to relax its restraints on the press in 1989, and almost immediately numerous new magazines and newspapers appeared on the newsstands. This led in particular to an upsurge in weekly newspapers and tabloids, some of which were affiliated with newly formed political parties (after 1993), while others were politically independent and focused largely on sensationalism. Some of the more politicized tabloids, such as the very popular Shihan, were extremely daring in their stories and quickly earned the opprobrium of government officials. But while some journalists pushed the parameters of the new liberalization, others—especially in the well-established newspapers— continued to practice self-censorship, printing government press releases as fact and drawing most other news from news wire services. The main Arabic dailies—such as Al-Ra’y and Al-Dustur—remained fairly conservative and conventional, while the English-language daily

32

JORDAN IN TRANSITION

Jordan Times and the weekly English-language Star tended to dive more deeply into occasional investigative journalism and sometimes probing editorials. With the 1997 decrees, however, even this level of media openness appeared to be under attack. International human rights organizations, such as Human Rights Watch, were sharply critical of the new regulations, noting especially their timing just in advance of the November 1997 elections.29 Most weekly newspapers, including Jordan’s vibrant tabloid industry, were forced to shut down operations under the draconian new financial rules that effectively eliminated truly independent weekly papers. The various opposition parties, from secular left to religious right, argued that the regime’s policies had created a crisis in public confidence, a crisis that was compounded by the government’s refusal to consider the opposition’s demands that Jordan change major foreign and domestic policies. Against this backdrop, the leftist and Islamist opposition parties joined together to boycott the 1997 round of elections. They were soon joined, somewhat surprisingly, by one of the centrist parties, the Future Party (Hizb al-Mustaqbal), whose members included several former cabinet ministers. The boycott gathered still more steam by mid-August, when eighty well-known political figures added their names officially to the boycott list.30 These included two former prime ministers, Ahmad Ubaydat and Tahir al-Masri. Ubaydat had served both as prime minister and before that as head of Jordan’s intelligence service. Masri too had briefly served as prime minister, had put in many years as foreign minister, and had also served in the 1993–1997 parliament, including a stint as its speaker. The symbolism here was powerful indeed, for Ubaydat was well-known for his Transjordanian nationalist views, while Masri was probably the most well-known Palestinian politician in the kingdom. Masri and Ubaydat coordinated their elite-of-the-elite boycott campaign, and surprised the regime with their announcement. Masri in particular argued that had they been able to wait longer, before publishing their list of officials, they would surely have gained several hundred more signatures.31 Both Ubaydat and Masri paid a political price for their opposition even after the 1997 elections. On November 22, 1997, when the king appointed the new forty-member upper house of parliament (which customarily includes all former prime ministers), both Ubaydat and Masri were left off the list. In an equally telling omission, the upper house also included no Islamists.32 The addition to the boycott of such prominent former regime officials strengthened it greatly. Yet the government refused to accede to any of the opposition demands, although it did engage in high-profile

POLITICAL LIBERALIZATION AND ELECTIONS

33

dialogues with key opposition figures, particularly in the IAF. In a policy speech in Jerash in late September, King Hussein made clear that he had no intention of revoking the one-person, one-vote electoral law, that Jordan would continue the process of normalizing relations with Israel, and that economic adjustment would proceed apace. He further stressed that the electoral boycott by the opposition parties was their choice and that it therefore did not compromise his regime’s commitment to democracy and pluralism.33 The strongly worded speech made clear that although the regime did indeed encourage the opposition parties to return to the electoral campaign and contest the elections, no concessions would be made to achieve that end. By early October, with the elections barely one month away, the opposition boycott showed signs of faltering. Ishaq Farhan, leader of the IAF, responded to the king’s Jerash speech with a softened single demand. The IAF now asked not that the entire electoral law be repealed, but that it be changed to a one-person, two-votes system. This, he argued, would allow the crisis to pass and the opposition to resume participation in the campaign.34 Voices from the secular-left opposition also suggested that a postponement or temporary revision of the electoral law could indeed clear the air and give the whole electoral process greater legitimacy. But many of the secular-left parties still made clear that their grievances were not limited to the electoral law, and that ultimately the policies of economic austerity and peace with Israel would have to be reassessed.35 Neither the left- nor the rightwing opposition parties got their wish, and the elections took place as scheduled on November 4, 1997. Although the regime refused to buckle before any of the opposition demands, it was clearly stung by repeated charges of electoral irregularities even before the elections took place. In order to go to the polls, Jordanian voters needed to present a government-issued voter card. The voter card amounted to a ballot, but some voters reported receiving several voting cards, while others received none. In addition to such glitches on the part of the government, some candidates were charged with hoarding, forging, or hiding large numbers of voting cards. In response to widespread discussions in the Jordanian press about such alleged acts, the regime appointed an official spokesperson for the elections—just one week before they were to take place. The spokesperson, Mazen al-Armuti, himself a well-known face in the media, became the lead figure in the government’s public relations campaign to spruce up the image of the electoral process, both in response to the charges of irregularities and in response to the opposition boycott.36

34

JORDAN IN TRANSITION

While the boycott did not deter the regime from holding the elections as scheduled, it did—as expected—have a strong effect on the nature of the campaign itself. The tenor of the entire campaign was simply bland, leading many in the Jordanian media to predict that only an equally bland parliament could result. Before the campaign, Jordan had experienced no shortage of crises or other dramatic events: from the controversial peace treaty with Israel to the bread riots. Yet the campaign of 1997 ultimately centered not on the peace treaty or on unpopular economic austerity measures, but rather on the boycott itself. The nature of the elections had itself become the main campaign issue. In addition, the government’s ban on public demonstrations and party rallies, coupled with its close inspection (and often rejection) of campaign banners, only added to the general banality of the campaign. Government officials were particularly active in taking down and confiscating anti-Israeli banners and posters.37 What was missing was substantive discussion of social, economic, and political issues. Many candidates instead opted for generic and innocuous slogans and little or no identifiable political platform. Few should have been surprised by the election results. The thirteenth parliament of the Hashimite Kingdom of Jordan was a virtual sweep for political centrists, proregime conservatives, and tribal candidates (see Table 2.1). Most of these were independents and indeed only five of the eighty seats in parliament were taken by candidates representing political parties. Tribal or clan-affiliated candidates fared particularly well, taking more than half of the seats in parliament. While the Islamists could certainly be viewed as losers in the election, due simply to their lack of participation, six of the thirty independent Islamists who did contest the elections won their seats. Only four seats went to candidates that identified themselves as leftists, one of whom represented a party: Khalil Haddadin of the Jordanian Arab Socialist Ba‘th Party. While the secular left and religious right had little to cheer about in the electoral results, women of any political persuasion had still less. Of the seventeen women who contested the elections, none won seats to parliament. This meant, of course, that Tujan al-Faysal, the only woman to win a seat to the previous parliament, lost her reelection campaign.38 Even with the electoral boycott, the main proregime party to participate in the elections—the National Constitutional Party (NCP; Hizb al-Dusturi al-Watani)—failed to take eight of the ten seats it officially contested. The dismal showing of the NCP, a party led by the prime minister’s own brother, Abd al-Hadi al-Majali, was particularly interesting, since

35 Table 2.1

The 1997 Elections and Jordan’s 13th Parliament

District

Name

Seat Designation

Amman—1st

Rashid al-Baraysah Khalil Atiyah Hamada Faranah Abd al-Majid al-Aqtash

Muslim Muslim Muslim Muslim

Muhammad al-Kuz Muhammad al-Thwayb Ali Abu al-Raghib Ra‘ad al-Bakri Lutfi al-Barghuthi Khalil Haddadin Nayif Mula

Muslim Muslim Muslim Muslim Muslim Christian Circassian

Birjis al-Hadid Hamad Abu Zayd Muhammad Abu Hudayb Ahmad Uwaydi al-Abbadi

Muslim Muslim Muslim Muslim

Ahmad al-Ajarmah Asaf Abd Rabu al-Asaf Munir Subar

Muslim Muslim Circassian

Madaba

Muhammad al-Azaydah

Muslim

Irbid

Ali Abu Rbayha Nashat Hamarnah Muhammad Bani Hani Muhammad Bataynah Abd al-Rauf Rawabdah

Muslim Christian Muslim Muslim Muslim

Majid Ababnah Sami Khasawnah Salih Sha’wata Kamel al-Umari Abd al-Razzaq Tbayshat

Muslim Muslim Muslim Muslim Muslim

Raji Haddad Riadh Uthman Miflah Ruhaymi Khalid Tarawnah Amjad Majali

Christian Muslim Muslim Muslim Muslim

Ayad Adhaylah Abd al-Hadi al-Majali

Muslim Muslim

Muhammad Amr Riad Sarih Mansur Ibn Tarif

Muslim Muslim Muslim

Abdullah Zurayqat Nazih Ammarin

Christian Christian

Amman—2nd

Amman—3rd

Amman—4th Amman—5th

Jerash Kerak

Notes Independent Independent Independent Islamist (formerly with Muslim Brotherhood) Independent Independent Former cabinet member Independent Islamist Leftist/Ba‘thist Former government official “Tribal” leader “Tribal” leader Independent Conservative, ultranationalist “Tribal” leader “Tribal” leader Former government minister Islamist; former IAF member “Tribal” leader Leftist/former Ba‘thist “Tribal” leader “Tribal” leader NCP; former government minister “Tribal” leader “Tribal” leader Arab nationalist “Tribal” leader Former government minister Independent “Tribal” leader NCP “Tribal” leader “Tribal” leader; former ambassador “Tribal” leader NCP; former government minister “Tribal” leader “Tribal” leader “Tribal” leader; former government minister “Tribal” leader Independent continues

36 Table 2.1

continued

District

Name

Seat Designation

Ma‘an

Ahmad Sulayman Abu Uqla Walid Awajan Nayif Hilalah Muhammad al-Badri Ziad al-Shwaykh Nu’man Ghwayri Muhammad Khalaylah Mikhlaf Zawahrah Adnan Mirai Bassam Haddadin Mansur Murad Abd al-Karim al-Dughmi

Muslim Muslim Muslim Muslim Muslim Muslim Muslim Muslim Muslim Christian Circassian Muslim

Muhammad Abu Alim

Muslim

Nawaf al-Khawaldah Muhammad al-Awran

Muslim Muslim

Abdullah Akaylah

Muslim

Sudki al Shibabat Salih al-Jabur Ghazi al-Fayez Sa’ad Hyal Srur

Muslim Bedouin Bedouin Bedouin

Dayfallah Ku‘aybar Abdullah al-Jazi

Bedouin Bedouin

Aqaba Zarqa

Mafraq

Tafileh

Central Bedouins Northern Bedouins Southern Bedouins

Bakhit al-Manay‘a Hazem Mumani Ahmad Annab Ridha Haddad Ramtha & Fawaz Zu‘bi Bani Kinana Ghazi Ubaydat Usama al-Malkawi Kura & Northern Mijhem al-Suqur Jordan Valley Yusuf Shraydah Balqa Muhammad Ra‘fat Ajlun

Bedouin Muslim Muslim Christian Muslim Muslim Muslim Muslim Muslim Muslim

Ghaleb al-Zu‘bi Mahmud Kharabshah Abd al-Razzaq Ansur Salamah al-Hiyari Hashim al-Wakid Samir Kawar

Muslim Muslim Muslim Muslim Muslim Christian

Fawzi Tu‘aymah

Christian

Notes “Tribal” leader “Tribal” leader “Tribal” leader Independent Independent “Tribal” leader “Tribal” leader “Tribal” leader Independent Leftist Leftist “Tribal” leader; former government minister “Tribal” leader; former government minister “Tribal” leader “Tribal” leader; pan-Arab nationalist Islamist; former IAF member “Tribal” leader “Tribal” leader “Tribal” leader “Tribal” leader; former house speaker “Tribal” leader “Tribal” leader; former government minister Islamist “Tribal” leader “Tribal” leader “Tribal” leader “Tribal” leader Independent Independent “Tribal” leader Independent Islamist; former Muslim Brotherhood member “Tribal” leader “Tribal” leader Independent “Tribal” leader “Tribal” leader Former government minister Independent

Sources: Al-Ra’y, November 5, 1997; Jordan Times, November 5, 1997; The Star (Amman), November 8, 1997; Jordan Information Bureau (Embassy of the Hashimite Kingdom of Jordan, Washington, D.C.); and Hani Hourani, Ayman Yassin, Lola Keilani, Lana Habash, and Terre Lore, eds., Who’s Who in the Jordanian Parliament, 1997–2001 (Amman: Al-Urdun al-Jadid Research Center, 1998).

37

POLITICAL LIBERALIZATION AND ELECTIONS

Table 2.2

Political Trends in the Jordanian Parliament

Political Trends Islamists (total) Muslim Brotherhood/IAF Independent Islamists Traditionalists, conservatives, and Jordanian nationalists Leftists and pan-Arab nationalists

1989 Election

1993 Election

1997 Election

34 22 12

22 16 6

6 0 6

33 13

51 7

68 6

Sources: Kamel S. Abu Jaber and Schirin H. Fathi, “The 1989 Jordanian Parliamentary Elections, Orient 31, no. 1 (1990): 67–86; Abla M. Amawi, “The 1993 Elections in Jordan,” Arab Studies Quarterly 16, no. 3 (summer 1994): 15–27; Hanna Y. Freij and Leonard C. Robinson, “Liberalization, the Islamists, and the Stability of the Arab State: Jordan as a Case Study,” The Muslim World 86, no. 1 (1996): 1–32; Jordan Times, November 5, 1997; The Star (Amman), November 8, 1997; Jordan Information Bureau (Embassy of the Hashimite Kingdom of Jordan, Washington, D.C.); Hani Hourani, Ayman Yassin, Lola Keilani, Lana Habash, and Terre Lore, eds., Who’s Who in the Jordanian Parliament, 1997–2001 (Amman: AlUrdun al-Jadid Research Center, 1998); and Hani Hourani, Hamed Dabbas, and Mark PowerStevens, eds., Who’s Who in the Jordanian Parliament, 1993–1997, translated by George Musleh (Amman: Al-Urdun al-Jadid Research Center, 1995).

the party had the advantage of the electoral boycott by most other parties and since it had positioned itself as the “party of the regime.”39 The lack of ideological diversity in the new parliament becomes clearer if the 1997 results are compared with those of the 1989 and 1993 elections (see Table 2.2). Few parties have been represented in any of these three parliaments (since most successful candidates ran as independents), but nonetheless there was a broader range of political tendencies in both the 1989 and 1993 parliaments than there was after 1997. As Table 2.2 makes clear, the most dramatic decline has been that of the Islamists—in the form of either the Muslim Brotherhood or the Islamic Action Front—whose parliamentary delegation included twenty-two members in 1989, sixteen in 1993, but none in 1997. Independent Islamists did manage to hold on to six seats, ensuring at least minimal representation for the religious right in parliament. But the IAF, Jordan’s largest political party, would have to make its presence known outside the legislature throughout the term of the new parliament, from 1997 to 2001. On the other side of the opposition aisle, leftist candidates who broke from the boycott managed to hold on to only six seats, but their numbers had been low even in previous parliaments. The secular left has seen its always small parliamentary contingent gradually shrink. In contrast, the number of traditional and conservative members of parliament jumped from a bare majority of fifty-one in 1993 to an over-

38

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whelming majority of sixty-eight following the 1997 election. This grouping—though proregime—ranged in viewpoints from centristconservative to ultranationalist. Of the three elections, however, the 1997 polling—coupled with the slanted electoral law and the opposition boycott—delivered the most conservative and proregime parliament since the liberalization process began, with correspondingly the smallest number of opposition figures to date. The 1997 electoral campaign and its outcome suggested a clear step backward from the previous round of elections. However, this viewpoint is shared by many Jordanian analysts themselves—and was openly expressed in various publications.40 As has been generally true throughout the liberalization process, the English-language papers tend to be more daring in their criticism than the generally pliant Arabic-language dailies. But given the new restrictions on the press, even these remained cautious in their analyses. Still, one such assessment of the 1997 elections, carefully written to attribute its views to anonymous observers, suggested that while the 1989 elections led to a relative strengthening of civil society organizations and to weakening tribal and blood bonds, the 1993 one-person, one-vote formula led to the re-emergence of old values that played a major role in this year’s elections. This, observers say, meant that Jordan will enter the 21st century with a 13th century tool, the 13th parliament.41

Other analysts were similarly pessimistic in their assessment of the electoral outcome, as well as of the government media and civil liberties restrictions that had preceded the polling. In another carefully written understatement, Osama al-Sharif, editor of Jordan’s English-language newsweekly, the Star, noted that with international censure over regressions in press freedom and other public liberties, added to the heavy tribal influence marking this year’s ballot, after years of democratic reforms aimed at institutionalizing a civil society, the 1997 elections cannot claim to represent the apex in the democratic transition in Jordan.42

While one should perhaps not read too much into the 1989–1997 electoral results on the issue of “tribalism,” it is nonetheless clear that in 1997, with most political parties simply absent from the voting, many voters may have opted for candidates on the basis of clan or tribal

POLITICAL LIBERALIZATION AND ELECTIONS

39

linkages. In addition, given only one vote, voters may have fallen back on clan and family affiliation, not because of a resurgent tribal affinity, but because it seemed the safest strategic course of action. In the 1989 elections, in contrast, voters had several votes to cast and may have been more likely to vote strategically by casting their ballots for assorted candidates: some based on clan or tribal affiliation, some based on ideological affinity, and some based on individual candidate platforms. I argue that it would be a mistake to read either the 1989 results as a decrease in “traditional” voting patterns or the 1997 results as an increase in same. Rather, the key variable explaining these different results is simply the changing nature of the electoral system itself and the opposition’s response to it. An examination of some of the voter turnout figures only adds to the general thesis that Jordan’s liberalization process is moving anywhere but forward. Unenthusiastic assessments of the electoral process in Jordan’s own press, for example, tended to place particular emphasis on the low levels of voter participation in the 1997 polling. The overall turnout for the 1997 elections was only 44 percent of all registered voters.43 This was a drop from the 47 percent turnout in 1993, but an increase over the 41 percent turnout recorded in the 1989 elections.44 Government officials suggested that the still mediocre turnout figures were attributable in part to particularly bad weather on election day. It is perhaps more likely, however, that more significant causes of low voter participation included the impact of the electoral boycott itself as well as general voter apathy. Some of the specific voter turnout patterns are, however, worth noting and certainly illustrate the point that Palestinian, urban, and proIslamist voters were generally least likely to go to the polls, while rural, proregime, and East Bank Jordanians were especially likely to participate. For example, voter turnout was higher in rural districts and lower in urban districts. The lowest turnout figures were recorded in some of Jordan’s most densely populated areas, such as Zarqa and even Amman itself. Towns in the south of Jordan with large Transjordanian populations saw high levels of turnout, such as Tafila with 72 percent. This stands in contrast to predominantly Palestinian urban areas such as Amman’s second district, which recorded only a 26 percent turnout.45 Similarly in Zarqa, which is regarded by many as an Islamist stronghold, voter turnout was a paltry 29 percent. These figures not only demonstrate the sharp differences between some districts, but also stand in contrast to the 1993 results in the same constituencies. Thus Amman’s second district declined from 66 percent turnout in 1993 to

40

JORDAN IN TRANSITION

26 percent in 1997, while Zarqa declined from 67 to 29 percent in the same period.46 As the turnout figures suggest, disillusionment with the parliamentary democratization process appears to be far higher for urban Palestinians and Islamists than for rural or East Bank Jordanian voters. It would be a mistake, however, to read into these figures the idea that only Palestinian or Islamist voters are disillusioned with the parliamentary democratization process. Regardless of its precise cause, the overall low turnout certainly suggested a low level of public enthusiasm and confidence in the electoral process, and simply underscored the low sense of political efficacy felt by many in the Jordanian electorate. And that cannot be read as a ringing endorsement of what had begun in 1989 as a very promising process of political liberalization.

CONCLUSION In assessing the depth and breadth of political liberalization in Jordan, it is virtually impossible not to return to the issue of relative as opposed to absolute change. Government officials tend to opt for the former criterion, noting that despite assorted setbacks Jordan’s program of liberalization has surpassed that of all its Arab neighbors and even of most states elsewhere in the Arab world. They note that political parties are now legal, elections are held on a regular basis, and martial law has not returned. All this is true. Political life in Jordan did indeed change greatly even in the short period from 1989 to 1997, but some of that political liberalization and reform has either stalled or backslid in the last several years. The regime’s credits include several rounds of national parliamentary elections, the legalization of parties, the lifting of martial law, and the relative openness of the Jordanian press. This includes not only formal institutional changes through parliament and elections, but also the informal and nongovernmental aspects of civil society through a strengthened press, and the emergence—and indeed proliferation—of political parties, professional associations, and other interest groups. But if these can be listed as the regime’s credits, its debits actually touch on many of the same issues. Perhaps first and foremost among these is the controversial nature of the electoral law—which is designed essentially to ensure the incumbency of a proregime majority in parliament since 1993. This electoral law, combined with the 1997 electoral boycott by the majority of Jordan’s political parties, cast doubt

POLITICAL LIBERALIZATION AND ELECTIONS

41

not only on the electoral process, but also on the representativeness of the 1997–2001 parliament. Certainly centrist, conservative, and tribal groups in Jordanian society were well represented in parliament, as long as they were men. In addition to the absence of women, few voices from the secular left or the religious right were heard in parliamentary debates.47 The government could of course blame the opposition for this lack of representation, since these parties themselves chose to boycott the electoral process with very predictable results. But this may simply beg the question: Why did the opposition feel compelled to boycott the process? Clearly part of the answer pertains to specific policy differences, but another part can be found in more general concerns over the legitimacy of the process itself. With such a limited presence in the 1997–2001 parliament, Jordan’s political parties—like parliament itself—continued to be weak. That very weakness in some respects left the political field open to the growing strength of Jordan’s professional associations, which in turn had become a power base for the Islamist movement in the kingdom. The Islamic Action Front, the political party designed to bring together the Muslim Brotherhood and independent Islamists, had of course boycotted the 1997 polls. But its members had won the elected leadership positions for most of the professional associations, providing the movement with an alternative institutional base. And indeed throughout the tenure of the 1997–2001 parliament, the voices of at least the Islamist political opposition would be heard far more often from the professional associations than from the still weak political parties. Almost ten months after the election, in a sign of possible reconciliation at least with the highest-level elites who had joined the boycott, King Hussein changed his earlier decision and appointed both Tahir al-Masri and Ahmad Ubaydat to the senate.48 Masri was elected shortly thereafter to be deputy speaker of parliament. But overall, and if one examines the program of political liberalization in absolute rather than relative terms, the signs of backsliding in Jordan’s liberalization process can only be seen as ominous. This was particularly clear in the government’s declining tolerance for dissent after the signing of the 1994 peace treaty with Israel. That foreign policy transition, from official state of war to full and formal peace with Israel, is the subject of Chapter 4. There remains, however, a kind of disconnection between state and society in Jordan regarding the past and present status of democratization. What many government officials saw as an essentially complete reform process, its opposition saw as barely a beginning. And in addition to this clear disjuncture between

42

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the regime and its opponents, the more disturbing question remained whether Jordanian political life was reverting to its pre-1989 status. That may be an overstatement, but with government moves against select publications, and against select political dissidents, it is a question worth asking.49 I return to this question and other issues of political and economic liberalization in Chapters 5 and 6, which examine the transition within the monarchy itself and Jordanian politics since 1999.

NOTES 1. This chapter draws in part on a shorter, earlier analysis: Curtis R. Ryan, “Elections and Parliamentary Democratization in Jordan,” Democratization 5, no. 4 (1998): 194–214. On the defensive quality of the Jordanian opening, see Glenn E. Robinson, “Defensive Democratization in Jordan,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 30, no. 3 (1998): 387–410. 2. Laurie A. Brand, “Economic and Political Liberalization in a Rentier Economy: The Case of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan,” in Iliya Harik and Denis J. Sullivan, eds., Privatization and Liberalization in the Middle East (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 167–188; Rex Brynen, “Economic Crisis and Post-Rentier Democratization in the Arab World: The Case of Jordan,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 25, no. 1 (1992): 69–97; Rex Brynen, “The Politics of Monarchical Liberalization: Jordan,” in Bahgat Korany, Rex Brynen, and Paul Noble, eds., Political Liberalization and Democratization in the Arab World, vol. 2, Comparative Experiences (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1998), pp. 71–100. 3. Malik Mufti, “Elite Bargains and the Onset of Political Liberalization in Jordan,” Comparative Political Studies 32, no. 1 (1999): 100–129. 4. See, for example, the various books in the O’Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead series of studies on democratization, in particular their summation and theoretical conclusions in Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter, eds., Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions About Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); and Terry Lynn Karl, The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and Petro-States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 5. There is broad consensus in this literature on the reactive and defensive nature of Jordan’s democratization process and even on the economic constraints that prompted the domestic unrest as well as the liberalization process itself. For analyses of Jordan’s democratization process and its limits, in addition to the above citations, see Mehran Kamrava, “Frozen Political Liberalization in Jordan: The Consequences for Democracy,” Democratization 5, no. 1 (1998): 138–157; Katherine Rath, “The Process of Democratization in Jordan,” Middle Eastern Studies 30, no. 3 (1994): 530–557; and Quintan Wiktorowicz, “The Limits of Democracy in the Middle East: The Case of Jordan,” Middle East Journal 53, no. 4 (1999): 606–620. 6. Author interview with Ahmad al-Lawzi, Amman, April 10, 1993. 7. In my assessments of Jordanian democratization I have drawn on interviews with Jordanian government officials, scholars, leaders of secular and Islamist oppo-

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sition parties, and journalists. Interviews were conducted in Jordan in 1992, 1993, 1997, 1999, and 2001. 8. See, for example, Kamel S. Abu Jaber and Schirin H. Fathi, “The 1989 Jordanian Parliamentary Elections,” Orient 31, no. 1 (1990): 67–86; and Abla M. Amawi, “The 1993 Elections in Jordan,” Arab Studies Quarterly 16, no. 3 (summer 1994): 15–27. 9. See Augustus Richard Norton, ed., Civil Society in the Middle East, vols. 1–2 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995); and Jillian Schwedler, ed., Toward Civil Society in the Middle East? A Primer (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1995). 10. In this sense, the civil society literature dovetails with reassessments of international development theory, particularly in the form of Amartya Sen’s work. See Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Anchor Books, 1999). 11. Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). 12. Mehran Kamrava, “The Middle East and the Question of Democracy,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Chicago, 2001, p. 2. 13. Quintan Wiktorowicz, “Civil Society as Social Control: State Power in Jordan,” Comparative Politics 33, no. 1 (2000): 43. 14. Schwedler, Toward Civil Society in the Middle East? 15. Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), Jordan: Country Report no. 1 (1990): 7. 16. On Islamist opposition in Jordan, see Hanna Y. Freij and Leonard C. Robinson, “Liberalization, the Islamists, and the Stability of the Arab State: Jordan as a Case Study,” The Muslim World 86, no. 1 (1996): 1–32; Glenn E. Robinson, “Can Islamists Be Democrats? The Case of Jordan,” Middle East Journal 51, no. 3 (1997): 373–387; Lawrence Tal, “Dealing with Radical Islam: The Case of Jordan,” Survival 37, no. 3 (1995): 139–156; and Quintan Wiktorowicz, “State Power and the Regulation of Islam in Jordan,” Journal of Church and State 41, no. 4 (1999): 677–696. See also the extensive studies by Marion Boulby, The Muslim Brotherhood and the Kings of Jordan, 1945–1993 (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1999); and Quintan Wiktorowicz, The Management of Islamic Activism: Salafis, the Muslim Brotherhood, and State Power in Jordan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). 17. The independent or Ikhwan affiliation of some of these parliamentarians was debatable. Thus others have put the numbers at twenty-one for the Ikhwan and thirteen for independent Islamists. See Abu Jaber and Fathi, “1989 Jordanian Parliamentary Elections,” pp. 81–83. 18. These included three Ba‘thists, one communist, and one representative each for the Jordanian wings of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). EIU, Jordan, p. 7; and Abu Jaber and Fathi, “1989 Jordanian Parliamentary Elections,” p. 81. 19. Abu Jaber and Fathi, “1989 Jordanian Parliamentary Elections,” pp. 80–81. 20. These divisions were made evident immediately following the polling, in the election for the new speaker of parliament. Splitting their votes, both the Islamist and leftist/nationalist candidates for the speakership were defeated, leaving Sulayman Arar, the candidate of the centrists, conservatives, and of the regime itself, to take the speakership in a final vote of forty-four to thirty-six. EIU, Jordan, p. 8.

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21. Ibid., pp. 8–9. 22. Lamis Andoni, “Jordan: Badran’s Skillful Game,” Middle East International, December 15, 1989, pp. 8–9. 23. Mary C. Wilson, “Jordan: Bread, Freedom, or Both?” Current History 93, no. 580 (February 1994): 87–90. 24. For Jordanian assessments of the kingdom’s emerging party spectrum, see Ahmad Abu Khusa, Al-Dimuqratiyya wa al-Ahzab al-Siyasiyya al-Urduniyya [Democracy and Jordanian Political Parties] (Amman: Middle East Publishing Company, 1991); Marwan Ahmad Sulayman al-Abdalat, Kharita al-Ahzab alSiyasiyya al-Urduniyya [Map of Jordanian Political Parties] (Amman: Dar al’Ubra, 1992); Sulayman Sways, “Kharita al-Ahzab al-Siyasiyya fi al-Urdun” [A Map of Political Parties in Jordan], Al-Urdun al-Jadid (1990): 122–141; and Ranad al-Khatib Iyad, Al-Tayarat al-Siyasiyya fi al-Urdun wa Nas al-Mithaq al-Watani alUrduni [Political Tendencies in Jordan and Text of the Jordanian National Charter] (Amman: Al-Matba‘a al-Wataniyya, 1991). Each of these studies was published before the political parties law emerged in 1993. It had long been anticipated. After 1993 the Al-Urdun al-Jadid Research Center began publishing a series of studies of parties, elections, civil society, and democracy in Jordan, including Hani Hourani, Talib Awad, Hamad al-Dabbas, and Amr Shanikat, eds., Al-Ahzab al-Siyasiyya alUrduniyya [The Jordanian Political Parties] (Amman: Markaz al-Urdun al-Jadid li al-Dirasat, 1993). For Jordanian assessments of the democratization process more generally, see, among others, Husayn Abu Ruman, ed., Aqd Min al-Dimuqratiyya fi al-Urdun [A Decade of Democracy in Jordan (1989–1999)] (Amman: Markaz alUrdun al-Jadid li al-Dirasat, 2001); Sashban Khulayfat, Al-Dimuqratiyya fi alUrdun [Democracy in Jordan] (Amman: Dar Afaq, 1993); and Tariq Khuri, Mustaqbal al-Urdun: Al-Dimuqratiyya, al-Huwiyya, al-Tahdiyyat [The Future of Jordan: Democracy, Identity, Challenges] (Amman, 1990). 25. Wilson, “Jordan,” p. 90. 26. Tujan al-Faysal was the first woman elected to parliament, but not the first to serve. Layla Sharaf, a former cabinet official and widow of Prime Minister Abd al-Hamid Sharaf, was already serving in the appointed upper house of parliament. On Faysal’s struggles in several elections, and on women in Jordanian politics more generally, see Laurie A. Brand, Women, the State, and Political Liberalization: Middle Eastern and North African Experiences (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 27. Freij and Robinson, “Liberalization,” p. 28. 28. Author interviews with officials charged with registering new political parties, Amman, February 1993. 29. Human Rights Watch, Clamping Down on Critics: Human Rights Violations in Advance of the Parliamentary Elections (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1997). 30. Sana Kamal, “Election Boycott Widens,” Middle East International, August 29, 1997, p. 10. 31. Author interview with Tahir al-Masri, Amman, July 14, 2001. 32. Middle East Economic Digest (MEED) 41, no. 49 (December 5, 1997): 16. 33. Ra’id al-Abed, “King’s Jerash Speech Sends Strong Message to Islamists,” The Star (Amman), September 25, 1997. 34. Ibid. 35. Francesca Ciriaci, “Islamist Says Postponing Elections Is One Way of Getting Out of Dilemma,” Jordan Times, October 8, 1997.

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36. “Government Launches PR Campaign to Fend Off Allegations of Election Irregularities,” The Star (Amman), October 30, 1997. 37. Rageh Omaar, “Elections a Tribal Affair,” Middle East International, October 24, 1997, pp. 4–5. 38. She did not, however, take the loss lightly and charged that the results must have been rigged. In 1998 the case remained in the courts. Rana Husseini, “Toujan Faisal Blames Loss on Vote Rigging,” Jordan Times, November 6, 1997. 39. “Jordanians Elect 13th Parliament,” Jordan Times, November 4, 1997. 40. Author interviews with Jordanian journalists, Amman, May 1997. 41. Yasser Abu Hilaleh, “When Tribalism Takes Over Urbanism,” Jordan Times, November 6, 1997. 42. Osama al-Sharif, “Notes from the Levant: Putting Jordan’s Democracy on the Stand,” The Star (Amman), November 6, 1997. 43. Francesca Ciriaci, “44% Turn Out at Tuesday’s Polls,” Jordan Times, November 5, 1997. 44. “Results of Jordan’s Parliamentary Elections,” Jordan Information Bureau, Washington, D.C., www.jordanembassyus.org. 45. Ciriaci, “44% Turn Out.” 46. “Results of Jordan’s Parliamentary Elections.” 47. As the 1997–2001 parliament convened, the newly elected deputies—perhaps self-conscious about public concerns that they represented an entirely pliant proregime lot—launched into spirited criticism of current and recent Jordanian governments. Still, most of the criticism centered on “acceptable” topics such as poverty and unemployment, with few deputies attacking more controversial issues such as economic restructuring or peace with Israel. See Jordan Times, January 15, 1998, and The Star (Amman), December 18, 1997. 48. Ibtisam Awadat, “Senate Appointments Signal a Mood of Reconciliation,” The Star (Amman), September 15, 1998. 49. See, for example, the analysis of Lamis Andoni, “Jordan in Crisis,” Middle East International, October 10, 1997, pp. 17–18; and Lamis Andoni, “Jordanian Elections—Setback for Democratization,” Middle East International, December 5, 1997, pp. 19–20.

3 Economic Adjustment and Political Stability

For most indebted countries in the Middle East and throughout the developing world, globalization is a dominant theme that tends to entail questions of economic liberalization and particularly structural adjustment programs (SAPs).1 These neoliberal policies are, of course, strongly associated with the “Washington Consensus,” which seems to emanate as a virtual mantra from governments and financial institutions in Washington, London, Paris, and other Western capitals as well as from the dominant international economic institutions of the global political economy.2 Given its ever increasing association with these national and institutional power centers in world politics, Jordan has thus found itself correspondingly under pressure to conform to their economic norms, including a series of structural adjustment programs. From a political perspective what is most interesting—and most troubling—about economic adjustment programs is their frequent correlation with political instability and unrest. For that reason, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has long remained one of the most controversial institutions on the world stage. To some governments, it represents a key source of financial survival, to others a hated and powerful economic overseer akin to a thuggish loan shark. It is the latter more pejorative image of the IMF that seems to resonate more clearly with the general public throughout Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. And certainly in the politics of everyday life in Jordan, the public hostility toward the IMF and its programs is clearly evident.3 This negative image is due in large part to the social and political costs associated with economic adjustment—and the Jordanian experience

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with IMF austerity and adjustment programs has certainly done little to soften that image. The Jordanian government implemented in April 1989 an IMFsponsored economic adjustment and austerity plan with violent results. Riots erupted and then spread across the country. Seven years later, in August 1996, the Jordanian government once again complied with IMF guidelines, leading to another political upheaval. While the two incidents appear identical in terms of government policy and public response, they differ considerably in terms of the state’s reaction to the unrest. In 1989 the Hashimite regime scrambled to make concessions, but during the later 1996 instability King Hussein stood behind the government and offered no concessions—to the contrary, he threatened to use any means necessary to quell the disturbances. This chapter analyzes the connections between economic adjustment and political instability in the Jordanian context, with particular emphasis on the startling differences in Hashimite regime responses to the upheavals of 1989 and 1996.4 The economic adjustment process is, I argue, intricately and cumulatively linked to the kingdom’s other transitions—in terms of both domestic political reform and foreign policy shifts (including peace with Israel), circumstances that changed considerably between 1989 and 1996. These policies were intended to ensure the long-term survival of the Hashimite regime. Over time this amounted to an increasingly ambitious transformation as the regime laid the foundation for the survival of Hashimite Jordan in a post–Cold War, post–Gulf War, and even post–King Hussein world. It is the success of this comprehensive “realignment” process that explains the different government reactions to unrest in 1989 and 1996. Unlike the weakened and precarious regime that had confronted the 1989 upheavals, the solidified and strengthened Hashimite state of the late 1990s proved far less amenable to making concessions. In the sections that follow, I turn first to an overall examination of the Jordanian economy, then to a comparative analysis of the 1989 and 1996 adjustment and instability experiences.

THE JORDANIAN ECONOMY Given its minimal resource endowments, the Hashimite Kingdom of Jordan has throughout its history been dependent on foreign assistance to keep its economy afloat.5 With limited arable land and chronic problems of adequate water supply, agriculture remains a small part of Jor-

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dan’s overall economy. Indeed, given the small agricultural base in the country, Jordan imports far more food than it exports. This pattern applies more broadly as well, since a chronic trade deficit is a standard feature of the Jordanian economy. But with limited resources, a small population, and hence a small base for domestic consumption of goods, it is not surprising that Jordan’s economy experiences a permanent trade imbalance.6 Like the agricultural sector, the manufacturing base is also small, with the bulk of the economy concentrated in the service sector. The kingdom has few natural resources, but does manage to exploit those minerals it does possess, particularly phosphates and potash. It also manufacturers and exports cement and fertilizers. Most production has been confined to large public companies. These state-owned enterprises (SOEs) include each of these key industries. The public sector also retains control of such additional enterprises as Royal Jordanian Airlines and the Telecommunications Corporation. Many of these public-sector companies are noted for their inefficiency, and not surprisingly in recent years the kingdom has been under considerable international pressure from its creditors to pursue a process of privatization as part of the overall strategy of economic liberalization. Jordan’s main resource has been and remains its people. Both the Palestinian and Transjordanian communities within the kingdom have very high levels of education. As a result, Palestinians and Transjordanians have been able to take advantage of skilled labor and service-sector job opportunities in other countries in the region, especially those in the Gulf. Worker remittances are thus a major component of the Jordanian economy. So many Jordanians work out of the country, in fact, that the kingdom is a major labor importer as well as a labor exporter. Workers from Sudan and especially Egypt, for example, work in many of the lower-skilled jobs within the kingdom, while Jordanian citizens are more likely to work in private or state businesses, in the skilled service sector, or in jobs in the Gulf states. The economy thus features simultaneously high levels of both labor immigration and labor emigration. For Jordanian policymakers, the maintenance of aid sources and of access to foreign labor markets tends to take priority over concerns about agriculture, manufacturing, or foreign trade. As one Jordanian economic policymaker emphatically noted, “all the trade agreements put together are small fries. The key factors are aid and labor remittances. It explains our relations with the West. It explains our relations with the Arabs. It explains everything.”7 With foreign aid remaining a

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large part of state revenue, and hence a critical source of state expenditures, the Jordanian economy is highly vulnerable to regional and global tensions affecting its labor and aid partners.8 Jordan is a semi-rentier economy, meaning that it relies heavily on external sources of income or “rents.” There is a qualitative difference between countries relying on the domestic generation of revenue through taxation and those that rely on external sources of income. A state that extracts significant revenue from its domestic tax base is in a very different political position in state-society relations than one that can “avoid” its own society and draw on income besides taxation. The implication is that rentier and even semi-rentier states are to some extent insulated from domestic pressures for political change.9 There is an enormous literature now on the idea of the rentier state, and a few scholars have also skillfully brought the semi-rentier concept to bear on countries like Jordan.10 But the classic examples of fully rentier states remain the Gulf oil monarchies. The rentier idea is thus usually associated with extensive natural resource endowments and extractive industries. But in the Middle Eastern context, with the regional political economy of oil, even non-oil states have become deeply linked to the overall petroleum economy. Jordan is thus a semi-rentier economy not because of its own minimal oil (it remains an importer) but rather because major sources of both its expatriate remittances and foreign aid are based in the Gulf oil states. Although Jordan’s IMF economic adjustment and austerity program was implemented in April 1989, the roots of that policy may be found far earlier in the 1970s and Jordan’s incorporation into the regional political economy of oil. Following the first oil shock in 1973, the regional petroleum economy boomed, yielding ample opportunities for small states like Jordan to obtain considerable access to Gulf labor markets and to Gulf sources of foreign aid. The steady rise in income from remittances and aid in the 1970s also included a rise in Jordan’s foreign exchange reserves, yielding the odd pairing of the usual trade deficit, with an actual balance of payments surplus. Jordan’s economy has for the entire history of the kingdom been dependent on various sources of foreign aid, including that from the United Kingdom and later from the United States.11 But when the oil revolution transformed the regional political economy, Jordan too was deeply affected. Although not an oil producer itself, Jordan had become increasingly attached to, and dependent on, the regional political economy of oil by virtue of its main export: people. Palestinian and Jorda-

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nian workers flocked to the Gulf states, to work the oil fields as skilled laborers and also to fill key professional positions from engineers, to bankers, to teachers. The kingdom came to rely increasingly on these Gulf connections as a means to maintain Jordanian employment, as a source of labor remittances, and as the font of considerable Arab foreign aid to Jordan as a frontline state in the conflict with Israel. At the 1978 Baghdad summit of the Arab League, for example, wealthy Arab states promised to extend far more aid to Jordan, largely to ensure that the kingdom would not follow Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s lead in signing a separate peace with Israel. Jordan may not have had peace, but the regime and to some extent the society benefited from the oil boom of the 1970s and hoped to carry that boom into the 1980s.12 As the Gulf economies boomed, so did Jordan’s state coffers. But correspondingly, the change in the regional oil economy during the 1980s hit Jordan particularly hard. With the Iranian revolution in 1979 and the 1980 Iraqi invasion of Iran, the oil market experienced the second global shock, which was at first a mixed blessing for Jordan, since the same circumstances led to enhanced economic ties to Iraq. As the Gulf war escalated in the 1980s, Iraq no longer had use of its own ports and hence came to rely on Jordan’s Red Sea port of Aqaba for access to the sea and to imported goods, including Jordanian agricultural products and manufactured goods. Even those goods that were not purchased directly from Jordan had to be unloaded in the Jordanian port and shipped overland across Jordan to Baghdad. This economic relationship with Iraq was not, however, enough to buoy the Jordanian economy; rather it served as a kind of vital crutch just as the regional economy declined. The global economy was still reeling from the effects of the second oil shock that followed the Iranian revolution in 1979 and the onset of the Iran-Iraq war the following year. This economic jolt, combined with global changes in oil markets, signaled the beginning of a contraction of the oil economy. For Jordan, this resulted not only in declining labor remittances, but also in declining Arab bilateral aid, just as the kingdom’s economic planners had established Jordanian government spending at levels that anticipated greater, not lesser, amounts of Arab aid.13 With continual shortfalls in the national budget throughout the 1980s, Jordan increasingly resorted to external borrowing. As remittances and aid declined, the national debt steadily rose and became increasingly difficult to service. By 1988, Jordan’s debt was twice its gross domestic product (GDP).

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ECONOMIC ADJUSTMENT AND POLITICAL UNREST, 1989 Halting attempts at minor economic restructuring had begun by the mid-1980s, but it was not until March 1989 that the government of Prime Minister Zayd al-Rifa‘i felt compelled to turn to the IMF and the World Bank to renegotiate and reschedule Jordan’s debt payments.14 The depth of the economic crisis became clear as Jordan stopped making payments entirely on bilateral government loans. With no choice left but to seek new terms for its debt repayments, the regime agreed to a five-year plan for economic adjustment and stabilization. In return, the IMF agreed to grant Jordan $125 million in credit in addition to more than $100 million in loan money to come from the World Bank over a two-year period. Since the IMF’s main concern was with Jordan’s enormous budget deficit, the austerity plan included in its key provisions steps to cut government expenditures as dramatically as possible.15 As one economic minister of that period noted: With the oil bust because of the Gulf War, there was a cash crisis in the public and private sectors. In 1989 the JD [Jordanian dinar] crashed. Hence the economic opening. The burden had to be shifted to the private sector. It was no longer about distributing gains, but about distributing pains. So democracy was introduced to help ration the remaining pie and its sacrifices. . . . That painful experience of low foreign reserve levels still haunts Jordanian policy makers. They vow that it will never be allowed to happen again. The JD became the Baal of all economic idols.16

While Jordan’s raw economic indicators make clear the regime’s increasingly dire economic position, a number of other factors are worthy of note. The economic constraints themselves helped compel the regime to make some significant foreign policy adjustments, and these were further spurred by developments beyond the kingdom itself. In 1987, for example, the West Bank and Gaza Strip exploded into active resistance against Israeli occupation in what came to be known as the Intifada. As the level of violence and unrest in the occupied territories continued, King Hussein finally acceded to the policy recommendations of many top Jordanian policymakers, by formally renouncing the Hashimite monarchy’s claims to the West Bank. At least some of those who urged the king to sever ties with the West Bank argued that such a move was necessary to allow the regime to focus on political consolidation and economic renewal in what they viewed as “Jordan proper.”17

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In 1989, Jordan also announced the formation of a new Arab political alignment and economic bloc—the Arab Cooperation Council (ACC; Majlis al-Ta‘awun al-‘Arabi)—comprising Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, and North Yemen (later unified Yemen). Among the factors motivating the formation of the ACC was the need to deepen economic relations with Egypt and Iraq, and also to band together four economically indebted states as a kind of collective lobby group for aid from the Gulf states.18 While the ACC had motivations in domestic politics and strategic concerns, it was also seen by the regime as one more step in its process of political and economic restructuring for the kingdom’s longterm survival.19 Within months of the formation of Jordan’s new political-economic alignment, the regime implemented its austerity program with unexpectedly violent results. The public response to the new austerity measures and the resultant price hikes was swift and dramatic. Prices rose sharply for such goods as fuel, hard and soft beverages, and cigarettes. Rioting began in the town of Ma‘an, in the south of Jordan, and resulted in police intervention. At least seventeen people were injured in the melee that ensued.20 The high level of public anger, however, was not aimed only at the latest government economic austerity policies. Rather, the austerity program might better be seen as the final straw for many Jordanians. Public discontent focused not only on the price hikes for fuel and other products, but also on broader and more endemic issues such as longterm political and economic mismanagement. Even before the 1989 riots, the person and government of Prime Minister Zayd al-Rifa‘i had come to be associated in the public mind with cronyism and corruption. And it was Rifa‘i who would bear the brunt of public anger once the unrest began. For many years after the 1989 riots, Rifa‘i—whose father and grandfather had, like him, served many times each as prime minister—had still not returned to any cabinet post, much less to the prime ministry. Eight years later, however, Rifa‘i did receive a royal appointment to Jordan’s upper house of parliament following the 1997 elections. He was soon thereafter named speaker of the senate.

ECONOMIC ADJUSTMENT, 1996 In August 1996 the Jordanian government implemented its second major economic adjustment program, again in cooperation with the International Monetary Fund. The motivation this time was not as dire as that surrounding the 1989 austerity measures. Rather, the new

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round of economic changes amounted to simply the second phase of the original program. Much had occurred since 1989: the Gulf crisis and war in 1990–1991, a new round of parliamentary elections in 1993, and the signing of the peace treaty with Israel in 1994. From 1989 to 1991, the kingdom had reeled under economic hardship, domestic unrest, and a regional crisis in which Jordan’s attempt at a middle ground had lost it the economic support of the Gulf states and its Western allies. But in the second three-year period, 1992–1994, the kingdom had realigned just as dramatically: stabilizing its economic situation, abandoning its political alignment with Iraq (and even permitting Iraqi opposition to organize in Jordan), achieving rapprochement with the United States and most Gulf states, and finally signing the peace treaty with Israel.21 Having recovered from the domestic and regional crises that marked the beginning of the decade, and having consolidated its key international political and economic relationships, the regime turned again toward domestic economic adjustment. The Jordanian government had, in effect, agreed to sign on as an enthusiastic participant in the post–Cold War and post–Gulf War new world order—a world order that appeared to be predicated on at least nominal political liberalization and also on more significant levels of economic liberalization. In its attempts to streamline its budget and bring its deficit more completely under control, the Jordanian government chose to focus once again on the bane of the IMF and other international creditors: domestic subsidies. The decision to target the bread subsidy in particular was also influenced by the abrupt rise in international wheat prices in 1995, from $175 to $280 per ton.22 But since the 1996 program emerged in a less constrained economic atmosphere than had the earlier round of adjustments, it is particularly interesting that the public response so closely resembled that of 1989, with riots in the streets and calls for the government’s resignation. This is perhaps still more intriguing when one considers that, unlike the abrupt austerity measures of 1989, the 1996 version appeared to approach virtually in slow motion. National attention had been focused on impending new economic austerity measures for weeks before they were actually implemented. The economic adjustment program had in fact been the main focus of media attention and of parliamentary debates. Indeed, the prime minister himself had made a point of holding a news conference as early as July 11, 1996, to explain his policy decisions and allay public fears.

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The message of the news conference, however, appeared to change as it wore on. At first, Prime Minister Abd al-Karim al-Kabariti seemed to indicate that no changes at all were to occur: The government will not lift the subsidy given to Jordanian citizens. The government will not lift the subsidy to the Jordanian citizens as long as I have the honor of being in charge. I stress to you that this subsidy will not be affected at all and that citizens will not bear any additional burden to obtain their daily bread.23

At first, this seemed to indicate that the government had abandoned its plan to lift the subsidy; however, Kabariti was carefully allowing for the subsidy to be removed, so long as it was not “affected” and so long as Jordanians were in some way compensated. In response to a reporter’s question, the prime minister modified his point to say that “there will be no lifting of the bread subsidy without supporting the citizens in return for this decision.” And still later he stated that “there will be a lifting of the bread subsidy, and the citizen will be paid the difference in prices, and this difference will exceed the increase in prices.”24 The press conference itself reflected the careful approach that the government attempted to take, by shifting even in its own use of language from outright denials that there would be any change, to vague allusions to minor levels of change, to stressing that—yes—there would be a change, but citizens would be amply compensated for it. The government did indeed have every intention of doing away with the subsidy, but it also had a plan to soften the blow on the Jordanian public. Prime Minister Kabariti attempted to make the compensation plan as clear as possible: Let me explain the mechanism. We will pay the difference in the price of bread to all civil servants—the Armed Forces and the government—through a cost of living allowance. This will become part of the state budget. There will be legislation to show that there is a cost of living allowance equivalent to the percentage we will pay to the citizen: 1.28 Jordanian dinars for each member of the family regardless of age. Those who do not work in the public sector and the Armed Forces, and those who have ration cards will be paid through the Supply Ministry or the Jordanian Banks.25

He added that any who did not have ration cards would be able to apply for them, and that the government had no intention of excluding Pales-

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tinians in the various refugee camps in Jordan. The very fact that the government bothered to hold a press conference at all reflected the changes that had taken hold in Jordan’s political liberalization process since the previous economic crisis. What was perhaps the most striking part of the news conference, however, was not the banter between the prime minister and reporters, but rather the personal intervention of King Hussein. While Kabariti was speaking, the king entered the room and literally as well as symbolically stood behind his prime minister. The king later made clear his support for Kabariti’s economic reform efforts, even referring directly to the 1989 riots and appealing for public cooperation with the economic adjustment process in order to avoid a repeat of the earlier unrest. In an equally important substantive and symbolic move, the king also made a point of making a high-profile visit to the headquarters of the Jordanian armed forces to discuss the same issue and make clear his support for the government’s decisions.26 While the government did attempt to provide ample warning of its impending economic changes, and even some level of compensation, the real effects on ordinary Jordanians were nonetheless severe. Compensation or not, bread prices more than doubled, and people feared that when prices stabilized they might amount to as much as a 300 percent increase. The compensation program itself was also problematic, since the approximately $1.80 per Jordanian per month allowance was essentially offset by similar increases in the prices of dairy products. Wheat prices had affected not only bread, but also animal fodder and thus indirectly dairy prices as well.27 Before the implementation of the economic adjustment program, parliament took up the issue of the bread and fodder subsidies in its special summer session. The opposition bloc of twenty-two Islamist deputies, sixteen of whom were members of the Islamic Action Front (IAF), strongly opposed the government’s plan to lift the subsidy and decided to boycott parliamentary sessions that the prime minister was to attend. In their absence, Prime Minister Kabariti railed against them, referring to the boycott itself as a form of “corruption.”28 The Islamists, in turn, condemned the government as incompetent and unresponsive to parliament and called for the prime minister to resign. But ultimately the IAF boycott tactic failed. The Islamists had intended to deny the prime minister the needed quorum for any parliamentary votes, but the voting proceeded without the IAF deputies and their allies. In the subsequent motion against the government’s price hikes on bread and fodder, only twenty-three of fifty-two deputies voted for the alternative

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proposal offered by parliament’s own committee. Ironically perhaps, if the IAF deputies had shown up, their additional twenty-two votes would have reversed the outcome.29

DÉJÀ VU? THE PUBLIC RESPONSE, 1996 Within a few days of the implementation of the new adjustment program, Jordanians began to feel the effects of the price increases. With the lifting of the subsidy the cost of bread, a dietary staple, had more than doubled. Again people took to the streets and again the riots began in areas that were not hotbeds of Islamist or Palestinian nationalist activity (two traditional foci of opposition in Jordan). Rather, as with the 1989 riots, the violence began in towns in the south of Jordan that had long been viewed as strongholds of support for King Hussein and his regime. The demonstrations began in Karak, but soon spread to Ma‘an and Tafila, and later even to the downtown market area of Amman itself. In Karak, demonstrations turned violent as police intervened. The vision of demonstrators and riot police clashing invoked for many Jordanians the imagery of the Intifada, complete with stones flying in one direction and tear gas canisters in the other. Indeed, for many Jordanians, the king’s televised speech threatening to use an “iron fist” to put down “sedition” also recalled the Intifada.30 The government soon called in the regular army, and armored vehicles began to roll down the streets of Karak as the army imposed a curfew on the city. Before the unrest came to an end, the rioters had turned their anger on targets that seemed to reflect public hostility toward economic privation and government power. The casualties here were not individuals, but property. The demonstrators set fire to several government offices, a private bank, and numerous cars.31 Although the public response to economic austerity was strikingly similar in 1989 and in 1996, the broader economic circumstances were significantly different. While the macroeconomic indicators in 1989 showed that Jordan’s debt was twice its GDP and its budget and balance of payments deficits were virtually out of control, by 1996 these economic figures had been trimmed down considerably, and the kingdom’s macroeconomic picture showed a fairly clean bill of health. Why, then, did the new program elicit similar levels of hostility and violence on the part of the public? One key reason may be found still within the context of the aggregate economic indicators themselves— not for what they say, but for what they do not say. Although Jordan’s

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economic statistics were far more robust in 1996 than they had been in 1989, they do not reveal, at least at face value, that the reduced budget deficit had resulted in part from reduced government spending in specific areas. But this meant in practical terms that public-sector salaries had not increased significantly, and that they had certainly not kept up with the cost of living. In addition, the tightened government budget had resulted in fewer available public-sector jobs. Following its first IMF adjustment program, the kingdom had managed to appeal to more foreign investors, again padding the economic statistics. But many of the visible effects of increased investment remained confined to middle-class and upscale neighborhoods in Amman, and were certainly not felt in towns in the south, such as Karak, Ma‘an, and Tafila. Just as the economy appeared to be improving, according to the aggregate statistics, many Jordanians found that—often for the first time—they had to commute to the capital to find work. And since the Gulf War, the usual external safety valves—such as labor migration to the Gulf, or jobs in export industries connected to Iraq—were largely cut off. Nor had the peace treaty with Israel made up for these losses in the public eye. The peace had been marketed to the public as the source of a coming investment and trade boon, but the real results were minimal and here too restricted largely to the capital.32 It is not a coincidence that the riots occurred in places largely left out of Jordan’s improving economic fortunes.

THE GOVERNMENT RESPONSE, 1996 In response to the political upheaval, the government reacted with force. Security forces intervened immediately, clashing with demonstrators. By the time the regular army moved in, and the demonstrations had been brought under control, numerous arrests had been made. The government claimed that only 120 people were detained, while Karak residents interviewed by Western reporters put the number at closer to 500 for their city alone. King Hussein televised a national address, threatening to use an “iron fist” and any other means necessary to restore order.33 The king also made a veiled threat regarding broader penalties in terms of the political liberalization process itself, by describing himself as uneasy over the state of Jordanian “democracy,” and suggesting that it was being used by subversives as a shield for their activities.34

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But in addition to resorting to outright coercion, the king attempted to appease public frustration by traveling immediately to each of the cities involved in the riots. In Karak, Hussein was greeted with chants of “Long live the king, and down with Kabariti!” reflecting—as in the earlier riots—public wrath vented at the head of government, but not at the head of state. Just as Prime Minister Rifa‘i was blamed for the economic hardship in 1989, so Prime Minister Kabariti bore the brunt of public anger in 1996.35 This is not to say that the king escaped blame; far from it. But at least at the public level—and in the king’s presence—it was the prime minister who was the target. To some extent, the king enjoyed greater political legitimacy in 1996 than he had in 1989, still drawing in part on his popular stance during the Gulf War and the opening of the political system to limited amounts of democratization. But none of the economic and political changes of the 1990s had panned out to meet the full expectations of the public, and thus one should not underestimate the level of public dissatisfaction with the unfulfilled promise of economic change, political liberalization, and peace. Still, from street demonstrators to members of parliament, calls abounded for the prime minister’s resignation. But unlike the 1989 riots, this prime minister was not immediately sacked. To the contrary, Kabariti vociferously defended his economic policies as necessary medicine for the Jordanian economy and he steadfastly refused to resign. Unlike Zayd al-Rifa‘i in 1989, Kabariti in 1996 found himself publicly defended by the king himself. The king stated his support not only for the prime minister, but also for his economic policies, suggesting that the previous years of bread subsidies had been “a mistake.”36 As the government and the monarchy closed ranks, the king, prime minister, and other government officials also made a point to focus the blame on outside agitators, on internal subversives with foreign ties, and even on Saddam Hussein. The king suggested on television that pro-Iraqi Jordanians were at work. Similarly, Prime Minister Kabariti argued that “the Iraq Ba‘th Party was somehow very much involved in fomenting the riot that started in Kerak.” And another government official noted that “it is no secret that President Saddam Hussein would like to undermine Jordan’s stability and that Iraq has many supporters in Jordan waiting for the right moment to move.”37 The government thus charged that these subversives had indeed made their move. During a special meeting with members of parliament, the king continued the theme of local elements with foreign ties in which he disparaged the

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“old schools of the 1950s.” In fleshing out this apparent allusion to panArab nationalist intrigues, the king added that “one cannot be a good citizen if he or she lacks a sense of national belonging.”38 Lower-level government officials would take that point further, suggesting that the rioters were simply acting “anti-Jordanian.”39 The government’s focus then shifted, perhaps inevitably, to the Jordanian Arab Socialist Ba‘th Party, the pro-Iraqi version of that party in Jordan, which had won one of the eighty seats in the 1993 parliamentary elections. The party’s member of parliament, Khalil Haddadin, denied any involvement by the party but noted that many Ba‘th Party members were detained by security forces.40 In interviews with the press, the party’s spokesperson, Ahmad al-Najdawi, noted the ideological affinity between the Jordanian and Iraqi Ba‘th Parties, but strongly denied any political connections to Baghdad and any role in fomenting the bread riots.41 The Ba‘thists were not the only group that found itself to be the target of the government sweep. According to at least one analyst, the majority of detainees were leftists and nationalists of various types. But what is striking about the government crackdown is that another source of opposition was treated almost benignly: the Islamists. In his televised speech, the king had even suggested that the Islamist opposition had behaved responsibly, unlike the allegedly pro-Iraqi and/or leftist demonstrators. Yet the Islamists had been among the regime’s most vocal opponents before the bread subsidy was even lifted, and they would soon prove themselves to be less than pliant in the upheaval that followed.42 Despite what may have been an attempt on the part of the regime to split the opposition between secular left and religious right, both wings of the parliamentary opposition banded together to demand the return of the bread subsidy and the resignation of the Kabariti government. The government, however, pushed forward even months after the riots, with its accusations of external links to Jordanian parties, and focused specifically on the main secular leftist parties: the Jordanian Arab Socialist Ba‘th Party, the Progressive Arab Ba‘th Party, the Democratic Popular Unity Party, and the People’s Democratic Party (better known as Hashd). Specifically, the government accused each of the four parties of violating the political parties law, which prohibits parties from maintaining foreign links and receiving funding from abroad.43 The government followed through with its accusations by bringing lawsuits against each of the four parties, which constituted the main secular-left parties in the eleven-party opposition bloc in parliament. The bloc itself was led by the Islamic Action Front, yet the IAF

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was essentially excluded from the government’s criticism and from legal charges. Still the opposition front essentially held together, and in the wake of the August 1996 riots Islamists, leftists, and pan-Arab nationalists continued to call for the resignation of the government. Rather than acceding to parliamentary opposition demands for the sacking of the government, the king instead dissolved the current session of parliament, thereby denying the opposition the parliamentary floor as a forum for criticizing the government. Thus unlike Rifa‘i, Kabariti did manage to hang on for many months after the 1996 crisis. But parliamentary opposition remained so strong that by 1997 it became difficult for the government to get anything done. In March 1997, Prime Minister Kabariti resigned and the king eventually replaced him with Abd al-Salam al-Majali, the same man whom Kabariti had succeeded. And although Majali soon found that he too would have considerable difficulty dealing with an increasingly recalcitrant parliamentary opposition, the economic adjustment program remained in place.

CONCLUSION The comparison between the IMF riots of 1989 and 1996 shows that although the economic plans were similar, and public hostility and the riots themselves were virtually identical, the state’s reactions varied considerably. In 1989 the king had made a point of being out of the country when the IMF austerity measures were implemented, only to return to severe social unrest. The king’s distance from the events—calculated or not—allowed the monarchy as well as the public to place the blame on the Rifa‘i government. But the monarchy had been clearly and deeply shaken by the depth of public anger, and quickly made a series of concessions to mollify the populace: sacking the prime minister, reshuffling the cabinet, and perhaps most importantly, calling new elections for the first time in more than twenty years. In 1996, in contrast, the regime maintained its support for the prime minister and his government as well as its “iron fist” policy in putting down the riots. In addition, the monarchy made repeated charges of external subversion and internal sedition, with particular focus on secular leftist political parties. In the 1989 riots, these parties still operated underground. But in 1996, as legal parties, many with seats in parliament, they found themselves the targets of government lawsuits over alleged illegal “foreign links.”

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In 1989, at least some good came of the political explosion, since it was the catalyst for more genuine attempts at liberalization and democratization. But in 1996, even though the regime managed to weather the political unrest, serious questions remained. The government stayed its course on economic adjustment, despite public and parliamentary opposition. Jordan’s more open and dynamic press in many cases criticized the government considerably in 1996, in contrast to the wholesale subservience of the Jordanian media in the earlier crisis. Yet the very openness and depth of the stinging criticisms of government policy—regarding economic austerity and also relations with Israel— proved too hard-hitting for the monarchy, which by late summer of 1997 had pushed through a series of measures to stifle media criticism through elastic and vague rules about “national security” matters. For the most part, however, the regime appeared to see the crisis as over by the fall of 1996. But here lies the main disconnect between the regime and the people: many in the public saw the riots as symptomatic not only of economic concerns, but also of something bigger. Jordan had realigned its international position considerably between 1989 and 1996. The regime that had won so much public support for its stance during the Gulf War had now become a sharp critic of the Saddam Hussein regime, allowing Iraqi opposition groups and even high-ranking exiles refuge in the kingdom. In addition, Jordan had mended all fences with the West, achieved rapprochement with most Gulf monarchies, and concluded a full peace treaty with Israel. Jordan had realigned itself wholesale toward Western and pro-Western states and had, in effect, signed on as an enthusiastic participant in the neoliberal world order. Its acceptance of the norms of this new world order— some level of political liberalization, free markets, privatization, and economic adjustment—earned it the praise and support of the world’s key financial institutions (and Jordan’s main creditors), from the IMF to the Paris Club. From the government’s perspective, this realignment was entirely successful. But for many in Jordanian society, the regime’s policies too often sounded like a sellout. Just as many at the top of the regime felt more comfortable and secure than ever, the riots should have made clear that the rest of the country did not share this optimistic view. The disconnect becomes clearer in light of differing beliefs: regime officials appear to believe that economic adjustment is nonnegotiable and that political liberalization has essentially run its course, whereas many outside government see economic adjustment as having gone too far already, and political liberalization as only just beginning. This differ-

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ence in views of the past, present, and future of the kingdom was certainly reflected in the 1996 riots, but it is not over. Indeed, the opposition boycott of the November 1997 elections suggested that the disconnect continued. And the later 1998 riots in Ma‘an over Jordan’s role in yet another U.S.-Iraqi crisis only underscored the deeper tensions within the kingdom. The precariousness of state-society relations within Jordan was rendered all the more salient in the late 1990s given the continuing illness of King Hussein and the looming prospect of political succession within the kingdom. That succession has, of course, since taken place, in February 1999. But the key issue then and now remains one of identifying and recognizing the nature of the challenges facing Jordan in the twenty-first century. The regime and its opposition clearly have different views of Jordan’s needs. But the 1996 riots were symptomatic of anger and resentment over far more than the price of bread.44 It is difficult to overestimate the depth of disillusionment within Jordan regarding the economy, the political liberalization process, and peace with Israel. It would be a mistake for the Hashimite regime to assume that the “bread riots” were only about bread. In the next chapter I turn to another major source of controversy in Jordanian politics: the peace treaty with Israel.

NOTES 1. This chapter expands on an earlier analysis. See Curtis R. Ryan, “Peace, Bread, and Riots: Jordan and the International Monetary Fund,” Middle East Policy 6, no. 2 (1998): 54–66. See also Lamis Andoni and Jillian Schwedler, “Bread Riots in Jordan,” Middle East Report 201 (October–December 1996): 40–42. 2. See in particular the discussion by Karen Pfiefer, Marsha Pripstein-Posusney, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, and Steve Niva, “Reform or Reaction? Dilemmas of Economic Development in the Middle East,” Middle East Report 210 (spring 1999): 14–16; and indeed this entire Middle East Report special issue on economic adjustment. 3. Here I am referring to experiences in talking to countless Jordanians in everyday interactions, in numerous field research visits from 1989 to 2001. 4. For an analysis of economic adjustment and political stability more generally, see Henry S. Bienen and Mark Gersovitz, “Economic Stabilization, Conditionality, and Political Stability,” International Organization 39, no. 4 (1985): 729–754. 5. Khalil Hammad, “The Role of Foreign Aid in the Jordanian Economy, 1959–1983,” in Bichara Khader and Adnan Badran, eds., The Economic Development of Jordan (London: Croom Helm, 1987), pp. 11–31; and Fawzi Khatib, “Foreign Aid and Economic Development in Jordan: An Empirical Investigation,” in

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Rodney Wilson, ed., Politics and the Economy in Jordan (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 60–76. 6. For analyses of the Jordanian economy, see, for example, Kamel S. Abu Jaber, Matthes Buhbe, and Mohammad Smadi, eds., Income Distribution in Jordan (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990); Omar Marashdeh, The Jordanian Economy (Amman: Al-Jawal Corporation, 1995); Michael P. Mazur, Economic Growth and Development in Jordan (London: Croom Helm, 1979); as well as the essays in Khader and Badran, Economic Development of Jordan, and Wilson, Politics and the Economy in Jordan. 7. Author interview with an economic adviser to Prime Minister Sharif Zayd Ibn Shakir, Amman, April 7, 1993. 8. Gil Feiler, “Jordan’s Economy, 1970–90: The Primacy of Exogenous Factors,” in Joseph Nevo and Ilan Pappe, eds., Jordan in the Middle East: The Making of a Pivotal State (Portland, Oreg.: Frank Cass, 1994), pp. 45–60. 9. On the rentier concept, see Hazem Beblawi and Giacomo Luciani, eds., The Rentier State (London: Croom Helm, 1987). 10. Rex Brynen, “Economic Crisis and Post-Rentier Democratization in the Arab World: The Case of Jordan,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 25, no. 1 (1992): 69–97; Laurie A. Brand, “Economic and Political Liberalization in a Rentier Economy: The Case of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan,” in Iliya Harik and Denis J. Sullivan, eds., Privatization and Liberalization in the Middle East (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 167–188; and Michel Chatelus, “Rentier or Producer Economy in the Middle East? The Jordanian Response,” in Khader and Badran, Economic Development of Jordan, pp. 204–220. 11. On Jordan’s economy and government policies, past and present, see the excellent collection of essays assembled by the University of Jordan’s Center for Strategic Studies: Mustafa B. Hamarneh, ed., Al-Iqtisad al-Urduni: Al-Mushkilat wa al-Ifaq [The Jordanian Economy: Problems and Horizons] (Amman: Center for Strategic Studies, 1994). 12. See, for example, Government of the Hashimite Kingdom of Jordan, Five Year Plan for Economic and Social Development, 1981–1985 (Amman: National Planning Council, 1981). 13. Interviews with Jawad al-Anani, former Jordanian minister of industry and trade, of labor, and of supply, Amman, April 10, 1993, and with economic advisers to the prime minister, Amman, April 7, 1993. Anani later served as deputy prime minister and chief of the Royal Hashimite Court. For his own assessments of Jordanian economic issues, see Jawad al-Anani, “Adjustment and Development: The Case of Jordan,” in Said al-Naggar, ed., Adjustment Policies and Development Strategies in the Arab World (Washington, D.C.: International Monetary Fund, 1987), pp. 124–148; and Jawad al-Anani, “Falsafa al-Iqtisad al-Urduni bayn al-Fikr wa al-Tatbiq Khilal Nisf al-Qarn al-Maadi” [Jordanian Economic Philosophy Between Thought and Application During the Last Half Century], in Hamarneh, AlIqtisad al-Urduni, pp. 92–96. 14. Author interview with Zayd al-Rifa‘i, Amman, March 29, 1993. 15. Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), Jordan: Country Report no. 2 (1989): pp. 10–11. 16. Author interview with Jawad al-Anani, economist, former minister, senator, and chief of the Royal Hashimite Court, Amman, July 13, 2001. 17. Author interviews with Jordanian foreign ministry and former cabinet officials, Amman, March 1993.

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18. Mohammad Wahby, “The Arab Cooperation Council and the Arab Political Order,” American-Arab Affairs 28, no. 2 (1989): 66; and Laurie A. Brand, Jordan’s Inter-Arab Relations: The Political Economy of Alliance Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 230, 235. 19. See Curtis R. Ryan, “Jordan and the Rise and Fall of the Arab Cooperation Council,” Middle East Journal 52, no. 3 (summer 1998): 386–401. 20. EIU, Jordan, p. 5. 21. Significantly, in the midst of the August power struggle between the government and Islamist-led opposition in parliament, Prime Minister Kabariti held a summit meeting in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, to enhance economic links between the two countries. Al-Ra’y, August 14, 1996. 22. Sana Kamal, “Jordan: Bread Subsidy to Go,” Middle East International, August 2, 1996, p. 11. 23. News conference by Jordanian prime minister Abd al-Karim al-Kabariti, Amman Radio Jordan Network, July 11, 1996, Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS-NES-96–135). 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Kamal, “Jordan: Bread Subsidy to Go,” p. 11. 27. Sana Kamal, “Jordan: The Price of Bread,” Middle East International, September 6, 1996, pp. 13–14. 28. Jordan Times, August 15–16, 1996. 29. Ibid. 30. Author interviews with Jordanian journalists, Amman, May 1997. 31. Jamal Halaby, “More Jordanians Riot in Bread Price Protest,” Washington Post, August 18, 1996. 32. Pamela Dougherty, “Les Emeutes du pain a Kerak: Une réponse au programme d’ajustement structurel en cours en Jordanie (un apercu général)” [The pain of adjustment: Kerak’s bread riots as a response to Jordan’s continuing economic restructuring program (a general overview)],” Jordanies no. 2 (December 1996): 95–99. 33. Jamal Halaby, “More Jordanians Riot in Bread Price Protest,” Washington Post, August 19, 1996. 34. Gellman, “Bread-Price Riots Pose Challenge,” Washington Post, August 19, 1996, pp. A1–A12. 35. Halaby, “More Jordanians Riot.” 36. Gellman, “Bread-Price Riots.” 37. Quoted in Jack Redden, “Detentions Follow Riots in Jordan,” Washington Post, August 20, 1996, p. A18. 38. Kamal, “Jordan: The Price of Bread.” p. 14. 39. Author interviews in Amman, May 1997. 40. Redden, “Detentions Follow Riots.” 41. “Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party Denies Accusations,” The Star (Amman), August 22, 1996. 42. Kamal, “Jordan: The Price of Bread.” 43. “Government Gets Ready to Hunt Down Parties with ‘Foreign Links,’” The Star (Amman), December 5, 1996. 44. The Washington Post quoted Kerak mayor Ahmad Mahadin during the 1996 crisis as saying: “If the government continues its iron fist policies, there will be an explosion a thousand times more powerful than the one that already took place.” Redden, “Detentions Follow Riots.”

4 From War to Peace: Jordan’s Changing Foreign Policy

In the often tumultuous politics of the Middle East, the Hashimite Kingdom of Jordan has long been seen as a survivor against great odds—from repeated wars to internal unrest. Under King Hussein (1953–1999) and under King Abdullah II (since 1999), Jordan has steered a cautious and ultimately successful course in international relations, largely by relying on a conservative foreign policy and the support of international allies. This chapter examines Jordan’s foreign policy decisionmaking to explain the dramatic shift in Jordanian relations from alliance with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to peace and full alignment (if not formal alliance) with Israel.1 Linked to this realignment, I argue, are Jordan’s ever warmer relations with the United States and Turkey, as well as key international institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and even the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This chapter examines the sources of Jordanian foreign policy in an effort to move beyond explanatory models that see Jordanian foreign policy either as a pawn of the great powers or as simply the whim of a king.

MAKING JORDANIAN FOREIGN POLICY For most of Jordan’s history, there has been little opportunity for domestic institutions or interest groups to affect foreign policy. Jordanian policymakers, however, may have been influenced at times in a less formal sense by public opinion—even in a monarchy and a largely centralized and historically authoritarian system. As a country in which 67

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the monarch rules as well as reigns, the Jordanian political system provides for a preponderance of power in the hands of the king. For this reason, analysts had long examined the personality and ideas of King Hussein as virtually the sole ingredients in Jordanian foreign policy.2 But while it would be impossible to ignore the role of the monarch as the most prominent architect of Jordanian policy, it is important to bear in mind that he does not act alone. The king is advised by officials in the Royal Hashimite Court, or Diwan, as well as by the prime minister, cabinet ministers, specialists in various fields, and less official—but sometimes more powerful—personal confidantes. Still, the core foreign policymakers are a small and relatively cohesive group. Thus this circle will at all times include the king in the paramount position, accompanied by trusted confidants and advisers—regardless of their official institutional positions. And at times this circle may be so small that it will actually exclude both the prime minister and foreign minister, much less other cabinet members. Historically, these cabinet officials have existed to implement the decisions of the palace.3 Contrary to what one might expect from its portfolio, the Jordanian foreign ministry is among the least influential institutions in Jordanian foreign policy. The foreign minister and his ministry have virtually no role in the decisionmaking process, and little role even in advice or consultation. Instead, the foreign ministry has a predominantly executive function. It is charged with the implementation of decisions that have already been made elsewhere. In addition, the foreign minister has the role of representing Jordan abroad, and articulating its foreign policy to other countries. Yet even this role is often circumscribed by the king, who frequently prefers his personally designated envoys to carry out this function of representing the kingship and Jordanian policy. These representatives are most often selected from among trusted advisers in the royal court.4 Thus any institutional chart of the policymaking establishment would be a snapshot only, and would not reflect the importance of informal access to the king and the influence of less official but key advisers and decisionmakers. Very often these trusted confidants of the king occupy various positions and portfolios throughout their careers, yet with no real change in their policy role. This is particularly true of policy advisers who have been groomed in the ranks of the Diwan, occupying positions from chief of the Royal Hashimite Court to national security adviser, and later taking portfolios as cabinet ministers and perhaps eventually prime minister. Many Jordanian prime ministers have originally made their marks within the regime as head of the

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General Intelligence Directorate (GID), better known as the Mukhabarat. This career path was especially followed during the Cold War years, and Jordanian prime ministers often continue to exercise influence even after retirement, as members of Jordan’s upper house of parliament, or senate. By 1989, however, there were signs that this high level of royal autonomy might be challenged as the process of political liberalization got under way. As discussed in Chapter 2, the Hashimite state loosened restrictions on the media, held the first full parliamentary elections in more than twenty years, and by the end of 1992 had lifted martial law, legalized political parties, and promulgated a new National Charter emphasizing political pluralism. As the democratization process increased, particularly with national elections in 1989, the lower house of parliament became more dynamic than at any time since the 1950s. By 1993, with the legalization of more than twenty political parties, many parliamentarians hoped to increase the role of the legislative branch of the Jordanian state in the policymaking process. Traditionally, however, the role of parliament in Jordanian foreign policy has been minimal, and often nonexistent, partly because it has often not been in session. Parliament was suspended, for example, after the 1967 war—ostensibly because it was difficult to represent fully the Palestinians of the West Bank in the national parliament while the West Bank remained under Israeli occupation. But other considerations included the regime’s concerns about domestic stability, which in part had led to the suspension of parliament (recalled only in 1984) and the declaration of martial law (in place since 1967 and ended only in 1992). Yet even after 1984, parliament has rarely played a role in formulating foreign policy. Even on occasions when the king and lower-house representatives appeared to be working in opposite directions, such conflicts have been tilted in the king’s favor by the always loyal and submissive role of the upper house. Throughout the 1990s, however, including the 1990–1991 Gulf crisis and war, a newly active parliament openly called for a greater role in Jordanian policy. In addition, the proliferation of new newspapers, magazines, political parties, and professional associations provided opportunities for Jordanians to give voice to their views and their demands for the state’s policies.5 Still, Jordanian foreign policy has traditionally been formulated mainly, if not solely, by the king and a small circle of advisers. But since 1989, members of parliament have been increasingly open and vocal about their views on Jordanian policy. Similarly, the emergence of civil society, especially after 1989, has seen increasingly open dis-

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cussion in the media, in interest groups, in professional associations, and in political parties about the appropriate policy paths—domestic and international—for the Jordanian state. As the empirical analysis will demonstrate, the main power for policy formulation remains concentrated in the hands of the monarchy, with foreign policy the most prized preserve of all royal roles, but public opinion does seem to be making itself increasingly heard. In the sections that follow, I first describe the nature of Jordan’s dramatic foreign policy transitions since 1989, and then provide an explanation for these changes through three levels of analysis: the international arena, domestic politics, and the individual role of the king.

SHIFTS IN JORDANIAN FOREIGN POLICY SINCE 1989 In the 1990s, Jordan made several major changes in its foreign policy. Chief among these, of course, was the regime’s decision to sign a full and formal peace with the State of Israel in 1994. This, however, soon affected Jordan’s other alignments. Within two years, Jordan’s longstanding alliance with Iraq began to rupture, leading to a de facto Jordanian dealignment from Iraq and to a realignment toward such nonArab countries as Israel and even Turkey. It is worth considering just how dramatic these shifts really are— both in Jordan’s foreign relations and indeed in the Middle Eastern regional alliance system as a whole. For just a few years earlier, in 1991, a U.S.-led coalition had attacked and defeated the forces of Saddam Hussein following the August 1990 Iraqi invasion and conquest of Kuwait. The Iraqi invasion had triggered a regional crisis resulting in a massive realignment among regional alliance partners.6 Most Arab states opposed Iraq and joined the coalition, including Egypt, Syria, and all the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). The GCC emerged in 1981 as an alliance of the six Persian Gulf monarchies: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. In 1990, as the anti-Iraq coalition continually expanded, the Hashimite Kingdom of Jordan remained noticeably absent from its ranks. The Jordanians had remained out of the war, urging a peaceful solution that was not to be.7 When Iraq invaded Kuwait, Jordan declined to join the U.S.-led coalition. But the kingdom also called for Iraqi withdrawal, maintained its recognition of the al-Sabah government of Kuwait, and rejected the Iraqi claim of annexation. Many individual Jordanians volunteered to

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defend Iraq, but the Jordanian armed forces remained strictly neutral and did not fight alongside the Iraqi army. Critics saw Jordan’s fencestraddling position in 1990 as pro-Iraq. In Western capitals, the predominant hawks argued that Jordan had allied itself with Saddam and against its longstanding friends in the West as well as against pro-Western regimes in the Arab world. Those more sympathetic to Jordan viewed its position as the definition of a balanced stance. But Jordan’s position bespoke its extreme vulnerability both domestically and regionally, and no choice was without heavy costs. As a result of these calculations, Jordan attempted to steer a middle course: it refused to join the coalition, but also refused to support militarily its “ally” in Iraq.8 The regime’s cautious stance kept King Hussein’s domestic popularity intact, but Jordan suffered severe economic repercussions. To the United States and its allies, Jordan remained Iraq’s closest ally, and the kingdom paid a heavy economic price for U.S. and GCC displeasure with its decision to maintain its alignment with Iraq. Aid from the United States, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia was abruptly halted. Exports to and from most Arab countries also declined rapidly. The port of Aqaba was eventually all but shut off to commercial traffic, leading to a sharp decline in port revenues as well as in goods entering the country. Jordan’s much needed tourism income effectively evaporated. Finally, angry Gulf states—first Saudi Arabia and then liberated Kuwait—expelled several hundred thousand Jordanians and Palestinians working in their countries. After the Gulf War, Jordan was largely isolated regionally and globally, and Jordanian policymakers realized that the kingdom’s road to recovery lay in the usual place: its geostrategic role and its critical importance to any hope for Arab-Israeli peace. In 1991, in the immediate aftermath of the Gulf War, Jordan quickly agreed to participate with the Palestinians in a joint delegation to the regional peace conference in Madrid. But having used that political compromise to begin the multilateral negotiations, Jordanians and Palestinians soon formed separate delegations for further bilateral and multilateral talks. This key departure point came in 1993 with the surprise announcement of the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinians.9 The two sides had negotiated secretly to reach the accords, setting the stage for direct talks thereafter. The accords surprised and even angered the Jordanian government—at least at first. If Oslo amounted to a breakthrough for the Palestinians and Israelis, it also seemed to be a blow to Jordan’s role in the peace process. Before Oslo, Jordan had been able to play on its role as sometime-spokesperson for the Palestinians, despite Arab League accep-

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tance since 1974 of the principle that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. Since the United States and Israel refused to talk with the PLO, Jordan had remained a major interlocutor between the United States, Israel, and the Palestinians (although not without considerable Palestinian resentment of the continuing Jordanian role). And indeed, many on the right wing of Israel politics continued to view Jordan, by virtue of its large Palestinian population, as a de facto Palestine, notwithstanding both Hashimite and PLO hostility to that notion.10 Jordanian decisionmakers feared that their regional importance might have been compromised in the stroke of a pen at Oslo. Unlike Egypt and Syria, Jordan was not involved in the peace process in large part to gain back territory lost in the disastrous 1967 war. Quite the contrary, Jordan had renounced its claims to the West Bank in 1988 and was viewed by virtually no one as a serious military threat to Israel. That last move may have set the ball rolling toward Oslo and what at first appeared to be Jordanian marginalization in the peace process. But the Jordanian response was swift to a point that is actually stunning. By 1994, Jordan had concluded not simply a set of accords, but a full and formal peace treaty with the State of Israel. Thus for the first time since 1948, Jordan had conclusively moved from a status of official belligerency toward a legalized peace with Israel.11 Following the signing of its 1994 treaty with Israel, the Jordanian government grew steadily more critical of Saddam Hussein’s regime. By January 1996 the government allowed Iraqi opposition groups to open offices in Amman. King Hussein and Jordanian officials met with Iraqi opposition leaders in London in early 1996, and the king met personally with Jalal Talabani, leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), and Mas‘ud Barzani, leader of the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP). The PUK and the KDP remain today two of the largest Kurdish opposition organizations in Iraq. The kingdom also granted political asylum to Iraq’s highest-ranking defectors ever, including daughters and sons-in-law of Saddam Hussein. Some of these defectors, like the Kamil brothers, shocked Jordan by returning to Baghdad, where they met a grisly end. But less than a month later, Jordan granted asylum to another high-level defector, General Nazar Khazraji, who had served as chief of staff for the Iraqi army in the late 1980s.12 In 1997, Jordan reinforced its new international alignments and further distanced itself from Iraq, by becoming the only Arab country to send observers to joint U.S.-Israeli-Turkish naval exercises. President Clinton praised Jordan’s new anti-Iraqi stance and announced that

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U.S. fighter squadrons would be deployed in Jordan to monitor the nofly zone in southern Iraq.13 Jordan developed closer bilateral ties with each of the three states in the U.S.-Israeli-Turkish strategic alliance. Indeed, in November 1996 the U.S. government declared that Jordan would henceforth be regarded as a “non-NATO ally,” an unusual status in effect granting Jordan “priority consideration” for future arms and military aid requests.14 The kingdom further extended its bilateral military ties with Turkey, while vociferously denying that military cooperation with Turkey amounted to a Jordanian-Turkish alliance. In 1996, Jordan and Turkey signed a defense accord, and in 1998 the two countries conducted joint military exercises. In 1999, Jordan enhanced its NATO connection by sending Jordanian troops to participate in Egyptian-NATO military exercises in the western desert of Egypt.15 Jordan’s policy shifts since 1990 have been nothing short of dramatic—from the Gulf War, to peace, to realignment again. During the 1990–1991 Gulf War, as the region experienced one of the most comprehensive realignments ever, Jordan stood firm as one of the few states not to realign. It is for that reason that the kingdom’s later decisions are particularly striking and intriguing. A global crisis and regional war had not persuaded the kingdom to budge, yet less than four years later it signed a full peace treaty with Israel. By 1996 the Jordanian-Iraqi rift was so great that Iraqi opposition groups were allowed to set up headquarters in Amman and high-level Iraqi defectors were entertained in Hashimite palaces. And yet by the end of the decade, under King Abdullah II, Jordanian policy had shifted once again toward full rapprochement, not only with Iraq, but also with Syria. Having described Jordan’s major foreign policy and alliance shifts since 1990, I now turn to an examination of the two most dramatic turning points: the 1990–1991 Gulf War and the 1994 peace treaty with Israel. In each case, I examine the policy shift in terms of three key sets of factors and three levels of analysis influencing Jordanian foreign policy: external and international politics, domestic politics, and the individual role of the king.

INTERNATIONAL POLITICS AND JORDAN’S CHANGING FOREIGN POLICY The August 2, 1990, Iraqi invasion of Kuwait jolted not only the Persian Gulf but the entire regional system. In many respects, the invasion itself brought a violent end to one crisis—a local one between Iraq and

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Kuwait—and instead immediately triggered a much larger regional and global crisis. If Saddam Hussein had been counting on a bipolar Cold War system holding the United States in check, he had tragically miscalculated the responses of both the United States and the collapsing Soviet Union. Within the regional system, the invasion triggered the most dramatic regional realignment since Anwar Sadat signed the 1978 Camp David Accords with Israel. One might have expected that Jordan, particularly as a small and militarily vulnerable state, would of course have balanced against the power of Iraq. Saddam Hussein’s military had, after all, just invaded a small Arab monarchy and conquered it within a day. There was only one more small monarchy bordering Iraq, and that was Jordan itself. But the kingdom maintained its alignment with Iraq, refusing to join the U.S.-led coalition. Theories of international alliance behavior tend to suggest that states in general have two major alliance options: to balance against a threatening state or to bandwagon with it.16 But Jordan’s actions clearly did not amount to balancing. Nor was it maintaining its alignment with Iraq in order simply to balance against a more threatening Israel. Iraq was not seen as threatening because it was Jordan’s closest ally, while Israel was not threatening because the two states had been at peace since 1973, and Israel clearly viewed Jordan as a moderate and fairly friendly state. The only real threat at the system level was the threat of direct Israeli-Iraqi confrontation, which presumably would be fought in Jordan. Fear of Jordan becoming an Israeli-Iraqi battleground did in part lead the Jordanian regime to try desperately to avoid a regional war over the Gulf crisis.17 In terms of regional alliances, the bloc of six Persian Gulf monarchies—the Gulf Cooperation Council—coalesced against Iraq, with Saudi Arabia in particular calling for and receiving U.S. military help. One of the other regional alignment blocs, the Arab Cooperation Council (ACC), had been formed largely through Jordanian efforts just over a year before the invasion. The ACC included Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, and Yemen, and was designed to facilitate political and economic cooperation.18 The ACC had barely broached the subject of more meaningful security cooperation when one of its members invaded Kuwait, and neglected to inform the others of its belligerent designs.19 While the Egyptians renounced the alignment, sided with the United States and the GCC, and sent combat troops to Saudi Arabia, Jordan attempted to hold the ACC together. But even Syria, a state not known for its pro-Western policies, had joined the U.S.-led coalition against Iraq and sent troops to the Gulf. Ultimately the ACC collapsed

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and while many Arab states joined the U.S.-led coalition against Iraq, Jordan attempted to steer a middle course that ultimately alienated the kingdom from its allies in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Gulf states. The context of these Jordanian decisions is vital to understanding the Jordanian position, especially the key Jordanian role in forming the ACC. In addition, it is important to note that the ACC itself built on the already existing Jordanian-Iraqi alignment, which had begun as early as 1978.20 By the time of the August 1990 invasion, Iraq had become Jordan’s most vital ally, especially in economic terms. During Iraq’s eight long years of war with Iran, Jordan had served as Iraq’s major gateway for supplies.21 Jordan’s economic linkages to Iraq had become so deep that they ultimately acted as strong constraints on the regime’s room for maneuver. By 1990, Iraq was the largest source of Jordan’s imports (17 percent) and the main destination for its exports (23 percent) as well as its main source of oil, most of which was sold to the kingdom well below market prices.22 Jordanian decisionmakers were certainly influenced and constrained by the public response in favor of Saddam Hussein in Jordan’s streets, but they were also concerned that turning against Iraq would mean losing the country’s largest local ally, its largest trading partner, and its main source of oil imports.23 While these external links continued to pull Jordan toward Iraq, other ties nonetheless pulled in the opposite direction. By maintaining alignment with Iraq, the kingdom alienated its other key economic allies, each of which delivered a sharp economic blow: the United States ceased its foreign aid to the kingdom temporarily, while Saudi Arabia and other GCC states cut off aid and oil supplies, and then deported hundreds of thousands of Jordanian and Palestinian laborers. The economic concerns and external constraints were severe, but they cut in both directions, leaving the decisive factors in Jordan’s policy largely on the domestic political level. Thus external factors provided powerful constraints, but were not in and of themselves determinate in Jordan’s foreign policy decisions in the Gulf crisis. In the immediate aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, Jordan found itself in unaccustomed isolation. Its only remaining ally lay largely in ruins. While the United States resumed aid flows to the kingdom, Jordan’s relations with Egypt, Syria, and the six GCC monarchies ranged from cold to hostile. The 1991 Madrid peace conference therefore provided the Jordanians with a crucial opportunity. The kingdom was eager to participate and played on its geopolitical status as vital to Arab-Israeli peace. The peace conference served as Jordan’s conduit to

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return to the regional system and recoup some of its diplomatic and economic losses. But the more dramatic turning point came in 1994, when Jordan moved well beyond the loose multilateral discussions at Madrid and concluded a full peace treaty with Israel. Several external factors appeared to influence the nature and timing of the Jordanian decision to make peace with Israel. First among these was the 1993 Israeli-PLO accord, which at first appeared to leave the Jordanians on the sidelines but was soon grasped as offering an opportunity for them to make their own, more comprehensive, agreement. The presence of the Israeli-PLO negotiation muted previously dominant domestic and regional constraints on the regime’s ability to conclude a full peace treaty. Second, Jordanian willingness to press forward in the peace process was propelled still further by U.S. political pressure coupled with economic incentives to achieve a major breakthrough on the Jordanian-Israeli track. Third, the regime had concluded that the above opportunities would lead to tangible material gains from Israel and from Western allies that would in turn serve to mollify any domestic skepticism or criticism as well as outweigh any hostility from Syria. These external factors each may have contributed to the Jordanian decision to break from its well-established pattern of tacit understanding with Israel, and to turn instead toward full and formal peace between the two countries. This may explain the timing of the agreement, but the zeal with which the Hashimite monarchy strode toward a full treaty was strongly influenced by the economic needs of the kingdom and hence of the domestic stability of the regime.

DOMESTIC POLITICS AND JORDAN’S CHANGING FOREIGN POLICY Domestic factors appear to be vital in explaining Jordan’s decision both toward war in the Gulf and toward peace with Israel. But these factors were significant in very different ways. The 1990–1991 Gulf crisis occurred in the context of severe domestic vulnerability for the Hashimite regime, while by 1994 the kingdom had managed to solidify its domestic support base and then use that to achieve peace with Israel as a virtual fait accompli. The 1990–1991 Gulf crisis could not have come at a worse time for the Jordanian regime. On the domestic front, the kingdom had been rocked by political upheavals following the implementation of an Inter-

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national Monetary Fund (IMF) adjustment and austerity program. The IMF riots certainly underscored the regime’s economic and domestic political vulnerability. But that negative event also had yielded something positive: the initiation of a program of political liberalization that led to parliamentary elections and looser restrictions on the media. As a result, Jordan’s position during the 1991 Gulf War was deeply rooted in economic problems and domestic politics—including its nascent “democratization” program.24 This included loosening restrictions on the press and allowing for parliamentary elections in which opposition Islamist candidates fared very well. Both parliament and the Jordanian public adopted far more clear and unequivocal pro-Iraq positions than did the monarchy during the Gulf crisis. Thus while foreign policy remained the province of a small clique, the regime did appear to have been strongly affected by domestic public opinion. Jordanian policymakers felt that they had few choices in 1990 and 1991, and that dealignment away from Iraq was not among them.25 The new domestic political constraints had ironically been brought on by the liberalization process itself. The context had changed from people in the streets in 1989 calling for major changes in the government and its policies to people in the streets in 1990 calling for the regime to stand by its ally, Iraq, against a coalition of foreign forces. Iraqi president Saddam Hussein had clearly captured the sympathies of a vocal segment of the Jordanian public. Numerous street demonstrations, speeches on the floor of parliament, and articles in newly established newspapers and magazines all indicated a popular outpouring of enthusiasm for Saddam Hussein. Jordan’s foreign policy decisions must be seen against this backdrop of change. Domestic opinion, now able to be more vocal than ever before, was in large part supportive of Saddam Hussein against any outside coalition.26 The 1990 Gulf crisis had come at a particularly vulnerable time for the regime, following closely the IMF riots and the nascent stages of political liberalization. But the regime had emerged with a far more solid base than before, and the king’s stance during the crisis, while vilified in the Gulf and the West, had gained the monarchy a tremendous amount of popularity and legitimacy at home.27 It was from this strong domestic foundation that King Hussein’s regime turned toward the post–Gulf War resuscitation of the Arab-Israeli peace process. With the revival of the peace process in the post–Gulf War era, Jordan was able to reestablish some of its economic and political ties to the United States, but not yet to the Gulf states. The kingdom’s increasing indebtedness and chronic deficit suggested the need for a longer-term

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solution. The connection between economic well-being and political stability was not lost on government officials, particularly since the unrest of 1989. They knew that the atmosphere of positive feeling toward the monarchy following the Gulf War would not last forever unless the economic situation quickly improved. Despite Jordan’s continuing economic interdependence with Iraq, alignment with a now isolated Baghdad was certainly not going to solve Jordan’s economic dilemmas. And Saddam Hussein’s reckless invasion of Kuwait had made Iraq appear to be a less than reliable ally upon which to rest Jordan’s hopes for the future. The Jordanians sought a real breakthrough in the peace process not only for its own sake, but also for the economic windfall that they believed would follow from peace. That windfall was expected to mollify regime critics and further co-opt regime supporters.28 The treaty was indeed expedited by the Hashimite regime itself, but with little warning or preparation within Jordanian domestic politics. The treaty even today appears to have far more critics than supporters within Jordan, and it remains a sore point in the struggle between state institutions and Jordan’s emerging civil society of independent interest groups and parties.29 But despite this resentment of both the treaty itself and the exclusive nature of the decisionmaking that had led to it, the regime argued then—and argues now—that formalizing peace between countries that had not actually fought in decades was long overdue. Palestinian opposition (both within the kingdom and without) had long been cited as the key obstacle preventing King Hussein from making peace, including in the wake of the Egyptian-Israeli Camp David Accords of 1978. But Oslo institutionalized direct Israeli-PLO negotiations in the 1990s, and for the Jordanian regime this served as something of a green light. With the PLO no longer seen as the obvious source of criticism of any Israeli-Jordanian collusion, and having already renounced ties to the West Bank (thereby removing the thorniest issue from the table), little except domestic opposition seemed to hold the Hashimites back. And that opposition was only able to mobilize once the process appeared to be largely complete. Having secured its treaty with Israel, the Hashimite regime then sought to market this as the source of a new economic boom in Jordan.30 Indeed, the regime appeared to have used the upsurge in its domestic popularity from the Gulf War to push through the peace treaty with Israel, over the objections of most political parties and many professional associations. This in turn suggested that despite political liberalization foreign policy remained largely an area of royal privilege. The

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expected great upsurge in economic well-being, however, never happened and hence opposition to the treaty festered still further. While some elite constituencies such as the military enjoyed the fruits of enhanced military linkages to the United States and even to other NATO countries, many other constituencies within Jordanian society felt no noticeable benefits from peace and in fact resented Jordan’s closer ties to the United States, Israel, and even Turkey. Jordan’s vocal opposition presses, its political parties, and its professional associations could not stop the treaty, but they did mobilize to stall or prevent normalization of relations between Israeli and Jordanian society. The regime responded not so much by joining the debate but by issuing new and restrictive press laws in 1997. In the parliamentary elections later that year, the eleven-party opposition coalition boycotted the polls, yielding a relatively pliant but unrepresentative parliament for 1997–2001. Domestic politics mattered a great deal to both key foreign policy decisions. In 1991, public opinion factored heavily into regime decisionmaking, but only because of the nascent political opening. Public opinion was overwhelmingly supportive of Iraq, and the political liberalization process had given Jordanians the ability and the means to make their voices heard, just as the regime was at one of its weakest points ever. But by 1994, domestic politics mattered more in the sense of domestic political economy. The regime saw the treaty as essential to the full restoration of its political-economic ties to the world’s most powerful states and institutions. A regime much “recovered” and strengthened since its 1989 scare then overrode public opinion—at least the opinion in opposition to the treaty—to secure longer-term economic gains and regime security. The only remaining question was that of the personal role of the king in this process.

THE ROLE OF THE KING Given the nature of the Jordanian political system, the most critical individual-level factor in Jordanian foreign policy is of course the role of the king. From 1953 to 1999, King Hussein ruled the Hashimite Kingdom of Jordan and served as the main decisionmaker in Jordanian foreign policy. And indeed of all policy areas, foreign affairs remained the most solidly based in royal hands throughout his long tenure. However, the very length of King Hussein’s reign meant that Jordan’s policy orientation remained steady and consistent. Under Hussein,

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Hashimite Jordan maintained a conservative and cautious foreign policy that included reliance on powerful Western states, especially the United States and the United Kingdom. In addition, while he professed to be committed to pan-Arab and pan-Islamic unity, Hussein was not remotely sympathetic to radical versions of either Arab nationalism or Islamism. His commitment to the Muslim holy places in Jerusalem, however, was genuine. And Hussein throughout his life believed that the Hashimite royal house, direct descendants of the prophet Muhammad, had a special responsibility to Jerusalem. There were many times, of course, when that very conviction proved an irritant to both Israel and the PLO. In the Cold War, Hussein ensured that Jordan would remain solidly in the Western camp, opposed to the Soviet Union and to ideological movements from communism, to Ba‘thism, to Nasserism, to Islamism. Hussein and many Jordanians saw his grandfather, King Abdullah I, as the founder of the nation, and Hussein as the builder of the modern state. The core goal of Jordan’s foreign policy under Hussein—especially as a state that was small, economically poor, and militarily weak—was the preservation and survival of the Jordanian state and its Hashimite monarchy. Jordan’s policy during the Gulf War was not about realignment, but about attempting to maintain all of Jordan’s alignments, including with Iraq. King Hussein’s regime had put a great deal of effort into maintaining the Jordanian-Iraqi relationship since the alignment first began to emerge at the 1978 Baghdad summit of the Arab League. The relationship was tested almost immediately when Iraq went to war with Iran in 1980, but throughout the 1980s the alliance only grew stronger. Still, in 1980, when King Hussein first made clear that Jordan would back Iraq in its war with Iran, he ran against the grain of Jordanian public opinion, at least initially.31 Many viewed the new Iranian regime with approval, as having toppled an authoritarian monarch seen as too close to the West. For Hussein, the Khomeini regime was a clear and demonstrable enemy to moderation, monarchy, pro-Western policies, and now to Jordan’s most powerful Arab ally, Iraq. King Hussein persuaded his advisers of the wisdom of his decision, and eventually public opinion united behind him.32 By 1990 that same ally had now triggered a regional and global crisis. Given Jordan’s economic dependencies, its domestic vulnerability, and the clear signals of public opinion through countless street demonstrations, Hussein may have felt that few choices remained. But the key

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issue in his personal approach seemed to rest on the future of the state itself. The fear of war escalating beyond the Gulf was very real, and Hussein feared for the nation. But given the violent unrest at home just a year earlier, he may also have feared for the monarchy. He chose ultimately to run with, rather than against, the tide of public opinion, with a view to preserving the Hashimite state.33 Hussein used his personal diplomacy in unsuccessful bids to thwart a major conflict, shuttling to Washington, D.C., and several Arab capitals. Ultimately the war did come, but not the feared escalation to Jordan itself. When the smoke from the Gulf War began to clear, Hussein found himself more popular at home than ever before, and he immediately used that status to achieve his longstanding goal of peace with Israel. The difference this time was the sudden solidity of his domestic base and also the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO. With the PLO negotiating directly with Israel, the fear of Palestinian hostility within the kingdom declined in importance. Indeed, given the sudden announcement of the Oslo Accords, the window of opportunity just as suddenly presented itself. This may explain not only Hussein’s determination to achieve a peace treaty, but also the speed with which it was accomplished in 1994. Hussein’s motivations for peace therefore appear to have been multiple: to counter any reduction of Jordan’s strategic role and the aid packages that came with that role; to utilize his own buoyed popularity from the domestically popular Gulf War stance to conclude a peace that the Hashimites had desired for decades; and to use speed to preempt both domestic and regional opposition to the move (and hence to present critics with a fait accompli). If King Hussein appeared to be running behind his people during the Gulf War, he now appeared to be running well ahead of them in expending some of his “popularity capital” on a long-sought goal of full peace with Israel. Finally, it is worth noting that King Hussein’s cancer had been detected years earlier. He had returned to Jordan in the fall of 1992, after extensive medical treatments in the United States, to a triumphant welcome and a massive outpouring of popular support. But the experience had to underscore for him his own mortality. Thus I argue that Jordan’s rapid work toward a peace treaty, and the solidification of the kingdom’s key alliances, were in large part intended to provide for a stable succession. The question had for decades remained whether anyone besides King Hussein could possibly risk a peace treaty with Israel. Was any possible successor likely to have the strength and legitimacy

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to achieve peace? Hussein rendered the question moot by rapidly pushing through the treaty only five years before he suffered a cancer relapse and died following a second round of treatments. Another key set of factors in Hussein’s peace treaty decision may have included the king’s personal rapport with the key Israeli leaders at the time, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. The alternative political leadership in Israel included such hawkish and more militant figures as Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon, both of whom later became prime ministers of Israel. Hussein may therefore also have wanted to conclude an agreement with political leaders he felt more comfortable dealing with. Hussein did indeed seem to see the treaty as a vital link to secure the long-term viability of the state and hence of the Hashimite monarchy itself, and also as essential to a stable and smooth succession in the kingdom.

CONCLUSION Jordan’s policies are intended not just to ensure the security of Jordan as a state, but also to ensure the survival of Jordan as a Hashimite monarchy. This was clearly a paramount concern in both the 1990–1991 Gulf crisis and the 1994 peace treaty. Since the treaty with Israel, Jordan has enhanced its ties to Turkey, the United States, and the European Union, as well as to Israel itself. I argue that these elaborate new alignments and foreign policy arrangements were designed to see to it that Jordan could survive into the twenty-first century as a Hashimite monarchy even after the succession from King Hussein’s rule. This analysis has also underscored the point that it is impossible to consider Jordanian foreign policy without taking into account the kingdom’s sense of its own political, economic, and military vulnerability. Yet given its geopolitical importance from the Cold War through the regional peace process, Jordan has not only survived but also managed to play a role in regional affairs that seems to belie its relatively weak status. Under King Abdullah II, Jordan’s international role and global activism—including its participation in UN peacekeeping operations— have only increased in the early twenty-first century. Jordan’s new alignments cannot be seen only in the light of traditional theories of alliance, for Jordan was not really using its new alliance partners to balance against regional threats. The kingdom may have seen its Israeli, U.S., and Turkish connections as enhancing its

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external and regional security. But the Jordanians attempted to establish alliances with the strongest military and economic powers available, while also attempting to mollify their hard-line critics in Baghdad and Damascus. In a sense, it seems that the Hashimite regime did not read the script. It clearly now sees regional alignment politics as not necessarily a zero-sum proposition even in the tumultuous international relations of the Middle East. Rather, Jordan has tried to create positive-sum conditions so that increasing cooperation with one set of allies does not mean conflict with former allies. This was particularly noticeable after 1999 under King Abdullah, who even managed to reestablish relatively warm relations with both Iraq and Syria. Perhaps more importantly, Jordan’s willingness to undergo repeated IMF structural adjustment programs, its signing of a peace treaty with Israel, and its increasing military cooperation with Turkey have all combined to produce several economic rewards from the West. In 1994 the United States and major European creditors agreed to write off $833 million of Jordan’s debt. The Paris Club of creditors, similarly, agreed to reschedule Jordan’s remaining debt four times between 1989 and 1997. Also in 1997, Jordan signed a partnership agreement with the European Union (EU), which is intended to be the foundation for a Jordanian-EU free trade arrangement by 2010. Finally, in 2000, Jordan joined the World Trade Organization, while in 2001 the kingdom secured a free trade agreement with the United States.34 The kingdom’s policy of realignment must be seen as truly comprehensive, and in terms of levels of analysis, domestic regime security certainly seems to be the main force driving these decisions—the Hashimite regime shows every sign of understanding regime security in both internal and external, military and economic, terms. But of these components, the shift appears to have been toward increasing emphasis on the domestic and economic dimensions of the regime’s security and survival, and even its external alliances are driven mainly by these concerns. King Abdullah II and his regime appear to see their security as best guaranteed in the twenty-first century by limited and manageable political liberalization at home, peace and enhanced relations with Israel, military cooperation with Turkey, rapprochement with Iraq and Syria, and increased economic and military links to the United States. Jordan’s foreign policy strategy also includes full membership in—and compliance with the neoliberal rules of—the dominant states and institutions of the global economic regime: the United States, EU, IMF, World Bank, and WTO. Jordan has steadily increased its global role by active participation in UN peacekeeping operations throughout the

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world. Under King Abdullah, Jordan’s regime and state survival strategy is based ultimately on accommodating entirely to globalization, as Jordan under the Hashimite regime adjusts to—and allies with—the dominant states and institutions of a twenty-first-century neoliberal order.

NOTES 1. This chapter draws in part on Curtis R. Ryan, “Alliances and Jordanian Foreign Policy,” in Jeanne A. K. Hey, ed., Explaining Small State Foreign Policy (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, forthcoming 2003); Curtis R. Ryan, “Between Iraq and a Hard Place: Jordanian-Iraqi Relations,” Middle East Report 215 (2000): 40–42; and Curtis R. Ryan, “Jordan in the Middle East Peace Process: From War to Peace with Israel,” in Ilan Peleg, ed., The Middle East Peace Process: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), pp. 161–177. 2. See, for example, Khalid Ibrahim al-Arabuti, Fikr al-Husayn fi al-Mizan [Hussein’s Thought in the Balance] (Amman, 1992); Uriel Dann, King Hussein’s Strategy of Survival (Washington, D.C.: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1992); and Mohammad Ibrahim Faddah, The Middle East in Transition: A Study of Jordan’s Foreign Policy (London: Asia Publishing House, 1974). Others have erred on the other side, giving little or no credit to Jordanian policymakers, while crediting Israel with effectively bailing out the Hashimite regime and ensuring its survival. See, for example, Asher Susser, Jordan: A Case Study of a Pivotal State (Washington, D.C.: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2000). 3. Author interview with Adnan Abu Awdah, Amman, 1993. See also the discussion of foreign policymaking in Samir Mutawi, Jordan in the 1967 War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 4. Author interview with former foreign minister Marwan al-Qasim, Amman, 1993. 5. For an extensive discussion of the emerging civil society and public sphere debates within Jordan over the nation’s interests, policies, and identity, see the analysis in Marc Lynch, State Interests and Public Spheres: The International Politics of Jordan’s Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 6. Curtis R. Ryan and David L. Downie, “From Crisis to War: Origins and Aftermath Effects of the 1990–91 Persian Gulf Crisis,” Southeastern Political Review 21, no. 3 (1993): 491–510. 7. For analyses of Jordan’s Gulf War position by Jordanian scholars, see Kamel S. Abu Jaber, “Jordan and the Gulf War,” in Tareq Y. Ismael and Jacqueline S. Ismael, eds., The Gulf War and the New World Order (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1994), pp. 366–382; and Mustafa B. Hamarneh, “Jordan Responds to the Gulf Crisis,” in Phyllis Bennis and Michel Moushabeck, eds., Beyond the Storm: A Gulf Crisis Reader (Edinburgh: Cannongate, 1992), pp. 228–240. 8. For other analyses of Jordan during the Gulf War, see Laurie A. Brand, Jordan’s Inter-Arab Relations: The Political Economy of Alliance Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 284–295; and Lynch, State Interests and Public Spheres, pp. 140–165.

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9. Author interview with former foreign minister Kamel Abu Jaber, Amman, July 13, 2001. 10. Aharon Klieman, “Israel’s ‘Jordanian Option’: A Post-Oslo Reassessment,” in Ilan Peleg, ed., Middle East Peace Process, pp. 179–195. 11. For other analyses of Jordan’s peace treaty with Israel, see Yehuda Lukacs, Israel, Jordan, and the Peace Process (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997); and Lynch, State Interests and Public Spheres, pp. 166–197. 12. Andrew North, “Another Defection,” Middle East International, March 29, 1996, p. 13. 13. Andrew North, “Confusion on Iraq,” Middle East International, March 15, 1996, pp. 10–11. 14. Sana Kamal, “Election Boycott Widens,” Middle East International, August 29, 1997, p. 10. 15. Jon Gorvett, “Facing a Dilemma,” The Middle East (London), September 1998, pp. 15–16. 16. This is particularly associated with the neorealist school of thought, as represented by Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: Random House, 1979); and Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987). A major alternative perspective that emphasizes political economy rather than the external “balance of threats” is that of Brand, Jordan’s Inter-Arab Relations. 17. Author interviews with Jordanian foreign policy officials, Amman, 1993 and 2001. 18. Mohammad Wahby, “The Arab Cooperation Council and the Arab Political Order,” American-Arab Affairs 28, no. 2 (1989): 61–66. 19. For a more detailed analysis, see Curtis R. Ryan, “Jordan and the Rise and Fall of the Arab Cooperation Council,” Middle East Journal 52, no. 3 (summer 1998): 386–401. 20. On the development of Jordanian-Iraqi relations up to the Gulf War, see Amatzia Baram, “Baathi Iraq and Hashemite Jordan: From Hostility to Alignment,” Middle East Journal 45, no. 1 (1991): 51–70. 21. W. Andrew Terrill, “Saddam’s Closest Ally: Jordan and the Gulf War,” Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies 9, no. 2 (1985): 43–54. 22. Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), Country Profile: Jordan (London: EIU, 1991), p. 28. 23. Author interviews with Jordanian foreign policy officials, Amman, 1993 and 2001. 24. Richard Harknett and Jeffrey Vandenberg, “Alignment Theory and Interrelated Threats: Jordan and the Persian Gulf Crisis,” Security Studies 6, no. 3 (1997): 112–153. 25. Author interviews with Jordanian foreign policy officials, Amman, 1993 and 2001. 26. This was evident even in my personal experience, having been in the northern Jordanian city of Irbid at the time of the invasion. Immediately thereafter pictures and posters of Saddam Hussein appeared in countless shop windows, while almost daily demonstrations backing Iraq and denouncing Western intervention were held at Yarmouk University in the city. 27. See the analysis by Laurie A. Brand, “Liberalization and Changing Political Coalitions: The Bases of Jordan’s 1990–91 Gulf Crisis Policy,” Jerusalem Journal of International Relations 13, no. 4 (1991): 1–46.

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28. Author interviews with Jordanian foreign policy officials, Amman, 1993 and 1997. 29. Lynch, State Interests and Public Spheres. 30. Allison Astorino-Courtois, “Transforming International Agreements into National Realities: Marketing Arab-Israeli Peace in Jordan,” Journal of Politics 58, no. 4 (1996): 1035–1054. 31. Jordanian support for Iraq was critical throughout the long war with Iran, but primarily in logistical terms, and not in active military support. Jordan did not send its regular army troops to fight beside its ally, although the regime did organize and send a largely symbolic volunteer force—the 2,000-strong Yarmuk Brigade—to Iraq. This, however, was the entire extent of Jordanian direct military support to Iraq during eight years of war. It is also important to note that the Yarmuk Brigade did not have combat duties. On Jordan’s political and economic support role in the Iraqi war effort, see Terrill, “Saddam’s Closest Ally.” 32. This pro-Iraqi and anti-Iranian initiative was led very directly by King Hussein himself. Looking back on that time, Prime Ministers Zayd al-Rifa‘i (1973–1976, 1985–1989) and Mudar Badran (1976–1979, 1980–1984, 1989–1991) both stressed the accuracy of the king’s longer-term vision in contrast to what they saw as a public failure to appreciate the threatening nature of the Khomeini regime. Author interviews in Amman with Zayd al-Rifa‘i, March 29, 1993, and Mudar Badran, March 31, 1993. 33. Author interviews with Jordanian foreign policy officials, Amman, 1993. 34. Peter Kiernan, “Special Report: Jordan,” The Middle East (London), September 1998, pp. 29–31.

5 From Hussein to Abdullah: The Succession

The period 1989–1999 was one of the most pivotal in the history of the Hashimite Kingdom of Jordan. In that mere ten-year span, Jordanian politics went through no fewer than four major transitions. These include the political liberalization process, the economic adjustment program, the realignment toward peace with Israel, and finally the transition within the monarchy itself from King Hussein to King Abdullah II in 1999. This chapter examines the royal succession from Hussein to Abdullah, including the surprise change in the line of succession just days before King Hussein’s death. The chapter then links this regime change to the broader theme of domestic political reform by providing an analysis of the 1999 elections—the first under King Abdullah. These elections, coming only months after the royal succession, provided a measure of the depth of Jordan’s political liberalization at the time of the succession and at the ten-year mark for the liberalization process itself. The very nature of the democratization process was designed to shore up the long-term viability of the monarchy, by establishing a new social contract between the Hashimite state and Jordanian society. Yet paradoxically the drive for pluralism, civil society, and political liberalization also simultaneously challenged the traditionally dominant role of the monarchy in Jordanian politics. Unlike the reigning, but not ruling, monarchies of many of Europe’s industrial and postindustrial democracies, the monarchies of the Middle East both reign and rule. But Jordan remains a unique case even in the Middle Eastern context. Much of the debate about monarchies in the region, and especially about their survival into the twentyfirst century, has centered on explanations that apply only partially to 87

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the Jordanian case. The two main approaches rest alternatively on the political economy concept of the rentier state (discussed also in Chapter 3) and on the alternative approach of what Michael Herb calls “dynasticism.” In the rentier framework, regime survival is a structural phenomenon in which monarchies that can rely on exogenous forms of financial support or “rents” are able to co-opt and buy off potential opposition, by sharing the spoils, so to speak, without extracting revenue directly from society. The shorter version of this argument is more straightforward: no taxation, no representation. Hence the oil-wealthy monarchies of the Gulf hold on to power by providing extensive benefits to the full citizens (and mainly the male citizens) of their realms, without taxation, thereby avoiding calls for greater participation in political decisionmaking. In a recent challenge to this argument, Michael Herb has contended that the rentier idea is overblown at best, and that the real factors here are not exogenous at all, but rather are rooted in the development of the familial monarchy itself. The key to monarchical survival in the Gulf, in his view, is not oil wealth, but dynasticism. Herb makes restrictive use of the term “dynastic monarchy” in describing these political systems, using it not just to refer to hereditary monarchy in general. In Herb’s framework, dynasticism refers to monarchies where all the key institutions are directly controlled by members of the royal family itself, and thus refers to a political system in which “the members of the ruling families monopolize the highest state offices, including the premiership and the portfolios of Interior, Foreign Affairs, and Defense.”1 The royal families of the Gulf managed to take direct control of all key levers of state power, moving beyond the primary positions of king, sultan, and emir and into the positions of prime minister, cabinet minister, and so on. In the Jordanian case, the monarchy has certainly been the most powerful institution in the country’s political life. But the Hashimites, while powerful, do not have family members as prime minister or any other minister, as officials in the ministries, or as members of parliament. Hashimite royals do, however, play key roles through patronage of various societies, organizations, and institutes—thereby also maintaining considerable royal influence and control. Just as important, many of the princes of the Hashimite house have been moved through the ranks of the key support institution for the state: the armed forces. Yet the Hashimites are simply not as personally omnipresent at every functional area of government, as is generally the case of royal families in the Gulf. The same could be said for a few other outlying cases, such

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as Oman and Morocco. Still, Jordan is not the classic rentier state either. It does not have the massive petroleum reserves that the Gulf monarchies enjoy. It has, however, relied on exogenous financial support—derived not from natural resources, but from foreign aid from its key allies. Hashimite survival as a state, and as a monarchy, has been the result of a combination of these factors. Herb’s dismissal of the power of rents notwithstanding, exogenous sources of revenue certainly can help a regime stay in power. These material bases, however, are not foolproof, and much will still depend on the agency of the monarchy itself. Although the Hashimites do not fit Herb’s model of dynastic monarchy, they have survived by establishing a ruling coalition based on several sectors of society (not just the bedouin sector) and then cultivating and indeed constructing extensive symbols of legitimacy that shift with the social context. The Hashimites have based their survival not only on the support of the bedouin tribes of Jordan, but also on that of Christians, Chechens, Circassians, and other minorities in the kingdom, as well as segments of the kingdom’s large Palestinian population. While opposition to the monarchy can be found in any of these groups, the broader point is that the regime relies on a great deal of support from each of these constituencies. Jordanian politics has never been simplistically aligned in such a way that Transjordanians all support the monarchy, while Palestinians all oppose it. In addition to these ethnically or religiously based domestic constituencies, the Hashimite monarchy has throughout its tenure relied on the central institutional support of the armed forces—on which the monarchs have lavished extensive royal patronage. The regime has allowed avenues of participation, within strict parameters, for both Islamists and secularists, Transjordanians and Palestinians, Muslims and Christians. In almost every case, however, what is especially noticeable within Jordan is that each of these communities tends to see its counterpart as coddled by the regime. The charge is not only that the regime overly favors the alternative ethnic or religious community in question, but also that the regime is doing so at the expense of one’s own group. In his research on bedouin communities, supposedly the most fiercely loyal and unquestioning communities within Jordanian politics, Andrew Shryock has shown that these same bedouins often see Hashimite policies not as pluralist inclusion, but as a “divide and rule” strategy. This model for Hashimite-regime domestic support was begun under King Abdullah I, but was developed and finessed by King Hussein in particular. As Shryock suggests:

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Throughout the last decade of “democratic reform” in Jordan, Hussein moved confidently between political modernity and what supposedly came before it (and would supposedly persist in spite of it). Wherever this royal procession went, Hussein had crafted a persona appropriate to that place, and nothing stopped him from assuming several identities at once: civil libertarian, dynast, leader of the tribes, protector of the Palestinians (and Circassians and Chechens and Christians), custodian of Jerusalem’s holy places, descendant of the Prophet, cosmopolitan, anglophile, supporter of secularist trends.2

The monarchy has survived through cultivating a broad domestic support coalition (even if these bases of support are not themselves united) while also relying on external financial support from powerful international allies. The regime has further linked the development of Jordanian national identity itself to the Hashimite royal family through the latter’s central and symbolic role, as Hashimite royalist identity predates the creation of the state as well as the creation of Jordanian nationhood itself.3 Finally, and especially at times of severe political and economic constraints, the regime has also on occasion shifted its domestic political tactics to allow for periods of greater political liberalization.

STALLED POLITICAL LIBERALIZATION AND KING HUSSEIN’S ILLNESS When the kingdom held its 1999 municipal elections, merely months after the royal succession, it marked the tenth year of the overall liberalization process—even if that process had regressed considerably after 1994. Full national parliamentary elections in Jordan only reemerged in 1989, following a more than two-decade hiatus in the wake of the 1967 war. The trigger event was the imposition of an economic austerity plan sponsored by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (see Chapter 3), which led to the outbreak of rioting across the country. The riots, against both economic hardship and political corruption, prompted a shaken regime to respond with promises of elections and political reforms to begin that same year. The first of these elections took place in November 1989, and yielded a lower house of parliament in which Islamists and other opposition candidates were well represented. By the time of the next round of elections, in November 1993, the regime had lifted martial law and its longstanding ban on political parties. More than a dozen newly legalized parties contested the 1993 elections, with the Islamists faring more poorly on their second attempt at national par-

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liamentary power, due in part to a public backlash against unpopular Islamist legislation in the previous parliament, but mostly to adjustments in the electoral law that limited each voter to one vote, with unevenly representative districts. By August 1996 rioting again erupted in the south of Jordan as the regime implemented its second IMF-sponsored austerity program. As in 1989, riots broke out in Kerak, Ma‘an, Tafila, and elsewhere, but they were not quite as widespread or violent. They did, nonetheless, demonstrate clearly the level of public dissatisfaction over key issues of state policy—from economic reform, to the pace of political liberalization, to foreign policy issues such as Jordan’s relations with Israel. In response to mounting criticism, the regime backpedaled in the process of political liberalization by issuing a new set of restrictive guidelines for the press. Jordan’s print and television media had opened up considerably since the reform process began in 1989, yielding one of the most open societies in the Arab world. For that reason, however, many Jordanian journalists viewed the regime’s new media restrictions as draconian.4 These restrictions were rescinded in 1998. Domestic disaffection over the electoral and press laws continued to increase within Jordan, and ultimately eleven opposition parties, led by the Islamic Action Front (IAF; Jabha al-‘Amal al-Islami), organized a boycott of the November 1997 parliamentary elections.5 The opposition demanded that the electoral law be changed, that press freedoms be restored, and that normalization with Israel cease. None of these demands were met by election day, and so Jordan’s 1997–2001 parliament included few members of either the Islamist or the leftist opposition. Instead, with most of Jordan’s parties sitting out the electoral process, the new parliament was tilted heavily toward conservative proregime figures. Thus although the regime could then expect to deal with a far more pliant parliament, it did so at the cost of setting back the minimal gains that had been made in Jordan’s program of political liberalization. The friction between the government and opposition continued long after the 1997 electoral boycott itself, and it is this antagonism that formed the domestic political backdrop to the 1999 succession. As the standoff between the regime and opposition parties continued, King Hussein’s long-term battle with cancer took a severe turn for the worse. The king had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphatic cancer and had first begun receiving cancer treatments in 1991. In 1992 he had surgery to remove cancerous tissue from one of his kidneys. But by the fall of the same year, Hussein had returned triumphantly to Jor-

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dan accompanied by a massive outpouring of public support, having apparently conquered his cancer. The king, as usual, piloted his own jumbo airliner, and was shown on Jordanian television landing at the Amman international airport, waving from the pilot’s window after the jet had touched down. Television and radio then covered every inch of the slow journey via motorcade back to Amman and through the streets of the capital. The scene itself was striking as the motorcade weaved through throngs of cheering Jordanians, standing ten to twenty deep along the sides of the road for miles. Banners welcoming the king hung over the streets and adorned almost every public building along the entire stretch of the journey. Eventually, Hussein climbed out of the Mercedes, driven by his brother, Crown Prince Hasan, and sat on the hood of the car waving to the crowds for the rest of the trip to the palace. Among the many striking features of that scene was the genuine depth of feeling on the part of so many Jordanians. These were not the kind of official and state-orchestrated crowds that can be found in, say, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. There was a palpable feeling of relief among many Jordanians that the king was well and the fears of succession were suspended. Even the omnipresent hit song of the time, “Hashimi, Hashimi,” suggested the overwhelmingly nationalist and royalist wave of support. Cassettes of assorted new nationalist songs (including “Hashimi, Hashimi”) were readily available for sale. Many of those songs referred to King Hussein by the title given to fathers (abu) and coupled with the name of their firstborn son: in this case, Abu Abdullah. The king’s illness had of course set off a great deal of speculation about the possibility of political succession. Yet much of this remained discreet and the subject of private, not public, discourse. Rami Khouri, a newspaper columnist who also had his own television talk show, discovered the limits of what seemed to be the acceptable range of discussion when he published a 1992 column on the subject, prior to the king’s return to Jordan. Khouri had loosely suggested that one possibility might be for the king to abdicate, allowing for a smooth, clear, and unchallenged political succession.6 The article prompted outrage among many royalists and a torrent of letters to the editor against Khouri’s article—and against Khouri himself. But the debate was put aside when the king returned showing every sign of being vigorous and healthy. The disease returned in 1998, forcing the king to resume more rigorous cancer treatments at the Mayo Clinic in the United States. The king had sent a letter to his appointed regent, Crown Prince Hasan,

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explaining his condition. The letter was published in whole or in part in many Jordanian newspapers, a public level of disclosure unusual for regional politics. In many of Jordan’s neighboring countries, for example, the health of the president or king is closely guarded information. To Jordan’s north, in Syria, speculation about President Hafiz al-Asad’s health had gone on for decades without any confirmed information, even regarding the president’s heart attack in 1983. To the south, in Saudi Arabia, King Fahd Ibn Abd-al Aziz was known to be ill for years, with Crown Prince Abdullah essentially governing the country on a daily basis. But this too was kept essentially secret, which makes King Hussein’s decision that much more striking. In July 1998, in a much anticipated speech broadcast by satellite link from the United States, the king addressed the Jordanian nation. Many Jordanians, in the speculative and anxious period that preceded the broadcast, feared that the king would announce that his illness was terminal, or that he planned to abdicate the throne, or both. Although no such announcements followed, the king did explain in great detail the seriousness of his cancer and the medical procedures that he was undergoing in hopes of a cure.7 In contrast to his counterparts in many Middle East regimes, the Hashimite monarch had opted for a full and frank disclosure about his health to the entire country. While the address was presumably meant to reassure the nation, it naturally also prompted still more speculation about succession to a king who had ruled since 1953. Most Jordanians had lived under no other ruler, and in the minds of many, Jordan seemed virtually to be equated with King Hussein or with the monarchy. Indeed, the country itself had largely been created for the Hashimite monarchy after World War I. Concern over the future of Jordanian politics and policy could be found not just in Jordan itself, but also among the many people in the region who might be affected by such a change. The prospect of succession was of interest not only to royalist Jordanians or to supporters of the king, but also to allies and adversaries in the kingdom and beyond. At the time, the scenario had seemed fairly predictable, since Jordan had a clear constitutional mechanism for succession. During his six-month absence from Jordan in late 1998, Hussein had appointed his brother, Crown Prince Hasan, regent of the kingdom. This was a routine role for Hasan, although the medical treatments made this by far one of the longest periods in which the crown prince would manage the kingdom’s affairs in the absence of Hussein. Born in 1947, Hasan had served as crown prince since 1965, when King Hussein had amended the constitution to allow his brother, rather than his son, to take on this

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role. At the time, King Hussein had only one son, Abdullah, who was then only three years old. Hasan was thus essentially king-in-training for more than three decades. The two factors that seem to be written about most regarding Hasan are his clear intelligence and capability, and his personality. Press reports for decades tended to refer to Hasan as a Harvard- or Oxford-educated intellectual (he went to Oxford, not Harvard), a characterization much resented by Hasan himself for its implication that he was cold or aloof. But the theme persisted for years, with none questioning his intelligence, few questioning his abilities, but many making the almost standard commentary that he lacked his brother’s populism or knack of connecting with the grassroots. In retrospect, many Jordanians argued that Hasan had made enemies during his long tenure as crown prince, especially in the palace itself among younger princes, who saw themselves as viable contenders for the throne. But still, as Jordanian journalist Mariam Shahin noted as late as September 1998, there remained “a general consensus that Crown Prince Hasan, 51, was not only the anointed successor but one which would be the most welcomed by the enlightened and economically powerful sectors of society.”8 Many affluent Palestinians and Transjordanians, as well as many of Jordan’s minority groups—Circassian, Chechen, Christian—did indeed support Hasan and fully expected him to become the next king. And certainly Jordan’s powerful Western allies and even the Israeli government felt well acquainted with Hasan and very comfortable with the idea of him serving as Jordan’s next king. In contrast, Iraqi newspapers published attacks on Hasan, whom they regarded as too favorable to Israel. Adel Darwish and fellow journalist Mariam Shahin even argued further that Iraqi agents, based in Amman, had helped fuel the rumor mill against Hasan, for his failure to say enough against sanctions and Western military attacks on Iraq.9 Still, as the officially designated heir to the throne for a full thirty-four years, Hasan was obviously seen as the king’s most likely successor. Despite Hasan’s clear official status as crown prince, signs of contestation over the succession itself had appeared years before Hussein changed the line of succession. This was perhaps inevitable in a hereditary monarchy in which the ailing king, Hussein, had had four wives (three divorces) and had eleven children, not all of whom were considered contenders for the throne. But the speculation tended to revolve around the idea of a second succession, of who would take the Hashimite throne after Hasan. The issue concerned not just the multiple claimants to future leadership, but also the multiple branches of the family. If Hasan were to take the throne, would the next succession then

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pass to his own son, Rashid (as Hasan presumably would have preferred), or to one of Hussein’s sons? Of these latter contenders, three were widely seen as the most viable: Ali, Hamza, and Abdullah. Each had a different mother, and Abdullah was often regarded popularly as the least likely of the three to take the throne. In public discussions, which after 1989 were increasingly open on the topic, emphasis often turned on the Arab as well as Muslim credentials of potential successors. Born in 1962, Abdullah was the son of Hussein and his second wife, Toni Gardiner, who was British and had converted to Islam and taken the name Muna. Even today, critics of King Abdullah are apt to see him as supposedly “half Arab,” which they seem to see as significant. Similarly, critics of Prince Hamza argue that as Queen Noor’s son (and despite being King Hussein’s openly favored son) he too was only half Arab, since his mother (formerly Liza Halaby) was an American, although of Lebanese decent. In the early 1990s the popular choice seemed to be Prince Ali, the son of the late Queen Alia (killed in a helicopter crash in 1977), who was of Palestinian origin. Over time, however, King Hussein’s closest companion among his offspring was certainly Hamza. And so public speculation generally shifted from Ali to Hamza as the most likely and even popular choice for future king. But despite these more popular discussions, then-prince Abdullah did at least have a strong popular base in the armed forces, where he had made his career. On the other hand, despite his army connections and his status as the firstborn of Hussein’s sons, Abdullah had virtually no political experience and no political support base of his own—at least not in the civilian sector. Given the enormous importance of the armed forces as a pillar of the Hashimite regime, it is worth noting that Abdullah was popular in the military, whereas Crown Prince Hasan had little if any personal connection to the armed forces. But Hasan did have extensive political experience and many supporters, if also many critics, in the regime. Having served as crown prince for so long, however, and despite the assorted speculation about future successions, most observers were shocked when the king returned to Jordan in January 1999 to change the succession. In February 1999, Hussein’s doctor’s announced that a second bone marrow transplant had failed, and with it went the last hopes for a recovery. Within days, on February 7, 1999, the king died, but not before shifting the line of succession, for the first time in thirty-four years, from his long-serving brother, Hasan, to his son Abdullah (now King Abdullah II). Issuing a long and somewhat rambling letter to his

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brother (published soon after in its entirety in the Jordanian press), King Hussein justified his abrupt decision as a return to the provisions of the Jordanian constitution, which does indeed call for succession from father to eldest son. Abdullah had been appointed crown prince once before, shortly after his birth in 1962. He had then remained officially in line for the throne until 1965, when domestic and regional political unrest prompted the king to appoint an adult successor. Various failed assassination attempts against Hussein had in particular led the king to choose his brother as his most capable successor. After thirty-four years of service, and having been groomed as successor and king throughout that period, Hasan was nonetheless abruptly and none too politely forced aside in January 1999. The king’s justification for this rested not only on the constitutional provisions (which could have been satisfied by a shift many years earlier), but also on alleged “meddling” by the crown prince and, perhaps more importantly, by members of his entourage and staff. In his lengthy missive to his brother, Hussein accused Hasan of politically motivated maneuvering in pushing aside and replacing key military officers, ambassadors, and other government officials. “I interfered from my hospital bed,” Hussein wrote to Hasan, “to prevent any interference in the affairs of the Arab Army through the changes that appeared to me to be a settling of accounts and the pensioning off of efficient men with uncontested loyalty.” He continued, “I used my powers as supreme commander to the Armed Forces to prevent any arbitrary measures in the Army that might lead to fragmenting and politicizing it.”10 According to some palace sources, the king had become particularly angry not only at changes in military and civilian personnel, but also at more subtle perceived affronts to Queen Noor and other members of Hussein’s family. Sources closer to Hasan, in contrast, argued that these shifts were routine and would have occurred under any circumstances. Some suggested that the rambling and accusatory tone of the king’s letter might even be due to his deteriorating medical condition and misinformation about what was actually happening in the palace.11 But King Hussein’s letter also indicates that the differences over the succession had emerged much earlier, and had continued unresolved throughout the 1990s. “We differed later and are still differing,” Hussein wrote, “on the matter of succession to the throne and to whom it would be transferred after you. You adamantly rejected any discussion of this issue until you took over and you yourself decided who would succeed you.”12 This, I argue, indicates a stronger clue to the

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central motivation in changing the succession, that Hussein may have been concerned mainly with preserving the monarchy in his immediate family line. He had envisioned that the throne would pass first to Hasan, and then to Hussein’s son Hamza (Queen Noor’s eldest son) when he was older. Some sources argued that Hasan insisted on the second succession remaining in his own line, while Queen Noor actively lobbied for Hamza’s interests.13 King Hussein had also proposed creating a committee within the royal family to discuss these matters and pave the way for a smooth succession, but this seems to have only opened rifts between contenders and palace factions. Hasan and Hussein appear to have differed on whether such a mechanism was necessary at all, and this too may have deepened the divide between them. All of this, of course, was immersed in factional rifts within Jordanian palace politics, and hence sounds similar to what Cold War analysts used to refer to as “Kremlinology” in trying to comprehend complex and secretive political maneuvering within the Soviet state. As such, it remains a fuzzy picture at best, and I cannot presume to draw any firm conclusions here. But the more important point is the result: the succession to the throne not of Hasan, or even of Hamza, but of Abdullah. Abdullah was indeed a surprise choice. But he had previously been designated successor, he was Hussein’s firstborn son, and he was generally highly regarded in Jordanian society. Hence many Jordanians welcomed the announcement, even if they were puzzled and troubled over the timing and circumstances surrounding the shift. Abdullah had little political experience, but had made a career as a military officer. Following the 1996 bread riots (in response to the IMF austerity measures), Abdullah had been named commander of Jordan’s newly formed special forces, and was put in charge of the security of the monarchy itself. Abdullah’s opponents then and now tended to criticize his youth, his lack of political experience, and even his command of classical Arabic. His supporters emphasized his military experience and the fact that at thirty-eight he was more than twice the age his father had been on assuming the throne in 1953. In 1999, when the king appointed Abdullah crown prince, Hussein also named him regent. The king then flew back to the United States for the last time. Some supporters of the former crown prince viewed the loss of even the regency as a final insult to Hasan.14 Merely weeks later, in February 1999, Hussein died and Abdullah ascended the throne. In his first official act, King Abdullah II appointed his half brother Hamza crown prince and heir to the throne, in accordance with his father’s last wishes.

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Opposition parties wasted no time in lobbying the new king to open up the political system, to resume the pace of political liberalization, and to reform the electoral laws. King Abdullah made a point of meeting not only with many opposition party officials, but also with the leaders of Jordan’s professional associations in what he called a “national dialogue.”15 Given the relative weakness of the Jordanian party system, the professional associations had become collectively a potent alternative force and an institutional base for opposition within Jordanian politics. And merely months after the succession had taken place, the kingdom held municipal elections throughout the country.

THE 1999 MUNICIPAL ELECTIONS Given these many trials and transitions—from the emergence of the liberalization process, to the electoral boycott, to the accession of a new king—both regime and opposition came to view the July 1999 municipal elections as a critical marker of the state of liberalization in the kingdom. In July 1999, Jordanians again went to the polls to vote in nationwide municipal elections as part of what the Hashimite regime heralds as the most successful political liberalization program in the entire Arab world. Many in the Jordanian opposition, however, have tended to see the liberalization program as largely cosmetic—as a screen, perhaps, to shield the regime from its own society and to satisfy the “democratic” leanings of Jordan’s many international creditors. Unlike the major national elections of 1989, 1993, and 1997, however, the elections of 1999 were not for the national parliament, but rather for local municipal positions—in town councils, mayorships, and so on—across the kingdom. If not for the timing, these elections would probably have been seen as local by-elections of limited interest. Yet both regime loyalists and their opponents agreed on why these elections were so important, and why they amounted to a test of the state of liberalization in Jordan: 1. They were the first elections since the accession of the new king, Abdullah II. 2. They were the first elections since the opposition had boycotted the national polls in 1997 (casting doubt on both the electoral process and the parliamentary outcome). 3. They essentially marked the ten-year anniversary of the start of the liberalization process itself.

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Regime loyalists hoped that the opposition parties would return to active participation, thereby helping to legitimize the local elections. Prime Minister Abd al-Rauf al-Rawabdah and other regime officials, in fact, referred continually to what they termed Jordan’s “national democratic wedding.”16 Opposition parties, in turn, argued that if the elections were free and fair, then they should yield significant opposition representation and would hence represent a return to the path of liberalization. Having boycotted the 1997 national elections, most opposition parties viewed the more local 1999 elections as a test of strength— of specific parties, of the party system, and of the possibilities for democratic opposition in Jordan. Activists in many opposition parties hoped that the 1999 elections would witness a shift in power from candidacies based on family or clan affiliation to political parties. Both the secular left and religious right called for a “post-tribal” approach to political participation and governance. Yet the majority of municipal seats went once again to independent candidates—often sponsored by their family or clan yet independent of any specific party. While this outcome reflects the continuing distrust of parties in much of the Jordanian electorate, especially in rural areas, it also reflects the weakness of the parties and the party system itself. Most Jordanian political parties can be correctly criticized for having unclear platforms and limited organization. Indeed, most of the myriad political banners that appeared during the campaign touted either a name with no platform, innocuous slogans, or even foreign policy initiatives for what were local municipal elections. Many banners, for example, urged closer relations with Arab states and an end to normalization with Israel—topics not likely to be addressed in any town council in the kingdom. Initially, the assorted opposition parties from the secular left to the Islamist right had attempted to form a united front to present a common list for the local elections. But negotiations failed to iron out the many difference between the parties and ultimately a slate of leftist and Arab nationalist parties did join forces, while the largest party organization, the Islamic Action Front, contested the elections on its own. Ultimately the IAF emerged as the clear victor among the opposition parties, while the left continued to languish. IAF candidates swept the elections in their traditional strongholds of Zarqa and Rusayfa, while winning both the mayorship and four of the eleven council seats in Irbid, another traditional stronghold. They won five of the twenty available seats in the Amman city council and IAF candidates even took a majority of seats (six out of eleven) in the city of Madaba—a town with a strong Chris-

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tian heritage.17 The IAF had from the beginning eschewed campaigning in rural areas, regarding these as bastions of “tribalism,” and instead pursued a cities-only strategy that appeared to have paid off. Immediately following the elections, the Islamists quickly claimed victory, praised the elections as generally free and fair (albeit with complaints about irregularities in specific polling areas), and announced their demands for further reform. Having done so well in the municipal elections, the IAF quickly staked out its positions regarding participation in the national parliamentary elections then scheduled for November 2001. The IAF first urged that the Amman city council vote be restructured so that most or all of its forty seats would be directly elected, replacing the current system in which twenty seats are elected, while twenty more—plus the Amman mayor—are royal appointees. Perhaps even more importantly, the IAF, like the other opposition parties, reiterated its demand that the electoral law be reformed—with the one-person, one-vote provision abandoned and electoral districts redrawn so that populations matched representation.18 Still, while the IAF remained the strongest political party in the kingdom, its victories must also be compared with the rather unimpressive statistics on voter turnout. Each of the major Islamist victories occurred in districts with among the lowest turnout in the country. On election day none of the major Islamist strongholds had achieved even a 50 percent turnout, despite the national holiday. These areas included Jordan’s three largest urban centers: Amman (26 percent turnout), Zarqa (33 percent), and Irbid (45 percent), areas with particularly large Palestinian populations.19 While the Islamist victories were due largely to superior organization and high levels of participation from party loyalists, the low level of turnout in these and other urban areas throughout the kingdom cannot be read as a mandate for the IAF, or for the electoral process itself. Many urban Palestinians in particular seem to have forgone these elections, while rural “East Bank” Jordanians were more likely to vote. This can be traced in part to low feelings of efficacy, especially among Palestinians who view the state as largely the bastion of Transjordanians.20 This may have been the case especially in the low turnout in largely Palestinian districts within Amman itself. It may also suggest that the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic Action Front—both traditional advocates of Palestinian causes—had lost some of their influence among Palestinian voters. But the lack of enthusiasm was not confined to one ethnic community. The overall low turnout had in fact led government officials to keep the polls open for a second day.

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Even with two days of holidays and open polls, however, most Jordanians “elected” to stay home. Unlike the electoral successes of Islamist candidates, Jordanian women of all political persuasions fared very poorly in the 1999 elections, which show an unfortunate consistency with the national parliamentary elections of 1989, 1993, and 1997 in terms of political representation for women. The voting franchise in Jordan was extended to include women only in 1973, but since no new elections were held until 1989, women were unable to exercise their right to vote or run for office until that time.21 In 1993, Tujan al-Faysal made global headlines as the first woman elected to Jordan’s lower house of parliament. But in the 1997 elections, Faysal lost her seat and indeed not a single women was elected to parliament. One might be tempted to argue that women’s electoral empowerment might logically start at the more local level, working its way up to the higher levels of the national political system over time. Similar arguments have of course been made in regard to women candidates in the United States. And indeed, women in the United States have been more successful in state-level and gubernatorial elections than in congressional (and especially Senate) elections. Yet this process has been painfully slow in the United States, with Congress and certainly the White House remaining bastions of male power. But in the Jordanian case, there appears to be little reason for optimism on either the local or the national front. While women’s political representation and electoral success have been dismal at the national level, the trends are barely more promising at the local level. In the 1995 municipal elections, for example, nine women were elected to town councils. In the same year, Iman Futaymat had become the first woman mayor in Jordan (in Khirbat al-Wahadna in northwest Jordan). But in 1999, Futaymat lost her position to a male challenger. Elsewhere in Jordan, women candidates won only eight town council seats and no mayorships. The odds were stacked against many of these candidates from the beginning, as only 44 women campaigned against almost 5,000 men.22 This was not due simply to lack of interest, however. In some places, such as Zarqa, Jordan’s second largest city, all party blocs refused to allow women candidates on their ballots.23 Ultimately, the tally of all national seats showed that women held 8 council seats, while men held 2,038.24 After the elections, disappointed women activists pushed for changes in the system itself to remedy the problem of underrepresenta-

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tion. In the immediate aftermath of the electoral campaign, for example, the Jordan National Committee for Women met with the speaker of parliament and other officials to urge them to support a quota of seats for women in the next Jordanian parliament. The bleak, gendered results of several rounds of parliamentary and municipal elections had led many supporters of women’s candidacies to the conclusion that only a legal quota would provide the needed breakthrough for women in the kingdom. Such a provision is not without precedent in Jordan. In the current system, the 104 members of the lower house of parliament are divided among 45 multimember constituencies. Of that total number, the regime reserves a number of seats for specific minority constituencies, all of which have traditionally been strong supporters of the Hashimite monarchy. These include six seats for the rural bedouin community, nine seats for the Christian community, and finally three seats for the Circassian and Chechen communities collectively. When Tujan al-Faysal became the first woman in the lower house of parliament in 1993, she won in a Circassian seat. The initial response to the quota proposal was, however, not promising. Abd al-Hadi al-Majali, speaker of parliament and a leader of the conservative and proregime National Constitutional Party (NCP; Hizb al-Dusturi al-Watani), suggested that the time was not yet right and that women had to “work harder.”25

CONCLUSION One can easily enough come up with a negative spin on the whole process of liberalization at the time of the monarchical succession, as the reasons for pessimism are indeed ample. Among these is the continuing weakness of the party system and of viable opposition messages or organizations. This leaves Jordanians with limited alternatives, and as the turnout figures show, many Jordanians continue to have little faith in the electoral process at any level. In a tragic caricature of Jordan’s alleged “tribalism” (which amounts simply to the continuing emphasis on family and clan ties, rather than identification with national political parties), the election in the town of Yarqa was marred—and indeed halted—by shooting between rival clans. Some reports suggested that the incumbent mayor had himself started the shooting, and in the exchange of fire that followed, a member of each clan was killed while many more were wounded.26 Aside from the Yarqa violence, however, the rest of the country appeared to have maintained order and safety during the polling. But

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for some democracy activists, other acts of violence seemed more ominous. On the day before the election, a journalist for the independent daily Al-‘Arab al-Yawm was dragged from his car and beaten by unknown assailants. Days after the election, the event appeared to repeat itself, this time with the victim being a political cartoonist for the daily Al-Dustur.27 While the events may have been isolated, they led to speculation and fear among some journalists that this amounted to a growing atmosphere of intimidation.28 But such fears must also be understood in the context of the changing conditions for the press in the kingdom. The initial political liberalization program had indeed led to a loosening of government restrictions on the media. But since the restrictive press and publications law passed in 1997, the state has attempted to curb the “recklessness” of weekly tabloids and rein in the mainstream press. Some Jordanian journalists have even argued that the Mukhabarat (General Intelligence Directorate) has infiltrated the popular and sensationalist tabloid Shihan, transforming it into a tame imitation of its former self.29 English-language papers such as the Jordan Times and the Star had to reintroduce a certain amount of caution or self-censorship, while the leading Arabic dailies Al-Ra’y and Al-Dustur remained far more pliant to the government line. Independent papers, however, such as the popular daily Al-‘Arab al-Yawm, had been able to exercise a greater degree of freedom. But as many Jordanian journalists pointed out, once a story appeared in Al-‘Arab al-Yawm, it became in effect fair game for even the most cautious papers.30 If the press had begun to experience the limits of the regime’s patience for criticism, the scholarly community was not far behind. The most telling marker here occurred on the second day of national elections. Just as the newspaper headlines reported the victories of Islamist and independent candidates, so too did they report the forced resignation of Mustafa Hamarneh, director of Jordan’s Center for Strategic Studies (CSS) at the University of Jordan.31 Hamarneh had taken the center from a small three-room operation to become a major center for scholarly research. The CSS had in fact become one of the few centers for independent public opinion polling in the entire Arab world. But that may have proven too much for hard-line regime conservatives, as pressure was brought to bear on the center. The CSS, while serving a critical role in Jordan’s developing civil society, had angered some government officials with its published polls and research findings. When the government claimed that unemployment remained as low as 17 or even 10 percent, for example, the cen-

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ter’s copious labor studies suggested a figure considerably higher, closer to 27 percent.32 In addition, the center’s published polls on government popularity, Jordanian-Palestinian relations, and attitudes toward the political liberalization process may have taken their toll and tested the patience of more conservative government elites.33 Hamarneh had been pushed out of the center, possibly at the behest of the prime minister and the Mukhabarat, but he was later reinstated in his post. It remained unclear, however, whether this in turn signaled that liberal elements in the regime had won a victory, or whether regime conservatives had simply made their point. The context of the change, however, suggests that the former interpretation may not be overly optimistic. When conservative prime minister Abd al-Rauf al-Rawabdah was replaced by the more liberal Ali Abu al-Raghib, King Abdullah moved personally to reinstate Hamarneh as director of the CSS. In my analysis of the 1999 elections and the state of Jordan’s political liberalization, I have suggested many reasons for pessimism, but there are at least some reasons for optimism. As most Jordanian newspapers themselves noted in their election-analysis editorials, the most promising aspect of the elections may simply have been the return of the opposition. Unlike the national parliamentary elections in 1997, the 1999 municipal polls witnessed no electoral boycott. While electoral participation remained low in most urban areas (particularly those that are predominantly Palestinian), rural voters did come out in force— notably blocking traffic in many areas as they crowded around the polling stations. An observer in Zarqa (33 percent turnout) might therefore have left the polls seeing them as something of a sham; but in places such as Jerash (61 percent), Mafraq (53 percent), and Wadi Musa (76 percent, the highest turnout), voters were clearly energized by the campaign.34 Despite the continuing restrictions on the print media and the even more stale television news in Jordan, however, journalists individually continue to push the limits of the liberalization process. The Englishlanguage Jordan Times, for example, has repeatedly printed stories critical of the practice of “honor killings” in Jordan and has also decried the feminization of poverty in the kingdom.35 Other critical pieces continue to appear occasionally in French-language publications, such as the Le Jour section of the Star.36 Furthermore, it is worth questioning the long-term viability of government restrictions on the media in a country where the number of satellite-dish owners is expanding at a rapid pace, particularly for middle- and upper-class Jordanians. The authorities can censor Jordanian

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television programs, but they cannot change the countless international programs accessible through satellite dish. And unlike some countries, Jordan has placed no restrictions on the Internet and thus many affluent Jordanians are daily tapping into e-mail and cyberspace. There is clearly a class gap here, as there is in Western countries, since most Jordanians do not have such access to alternative sources of news and information. Still, there is something strikingly odd to observe in a government that tries to rein in one television station while the numbers of satellite dishes and Internet cafes continue to increase in Amman, Irbid, Madaba, Aqaba, and elsewhere. Even Jordan’s Mukhabarat has its own website. It is difficult to be optimistic about the depth of change that has taken place in the kingdom. The question remains whether the political opening has stalled entirely, or whether it may resume its progress toward deeper liberalization. The answer, of course, ultimately lies in the future as Jordan’s political transition continues to unfold. But a key factor affecting Jordan’s political liberalization—and its economic and foreign policy transitions—will certainly be the role of King Abdullah himself. In his rhetoric, certainly, the king has sounded far more progressive than the status quo–oriented old guard he inherited from his father. But can a monarch, indeed, be “progressive”? In Jordan, and now following monarchical successions in Bahrain and Morocco, many democracy activists hope that the answer is yes. In the final chapter, I turn to Jordan’s politics and transitions since 1999, and especially to its hopes for greater levels of democratization in the early years of the reign of King Abdullah II.

NOTES 1. Michael Herb, All in the Family: Absolutism, Revolution, and Democracy in the Middle Eastern Monarchies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), p. 8. 2. Andrew Shryock, “Dynastic Modernism and Its Contradictions: Testing the Limits of Pluralism, Tribalism, and King Hussein’s Example in Hashimite Jordan,” Arab Studies Quarterly 22, no. 3 (2000): 72. 3. On the social construction of Jordanian national identity, see the excellent studies by Marc Lynch, State Interests and Public Spheres: The International Politics of Jordan’s Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); and Joseph A. Massad, Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). 4. Author interviews with Jordanian journalists, Amman, May 1997 and July 1999.

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5. For analyses of the Islamist movement in Jordan, see Marion Boulby, The Muslim Brotherhood and the Kings of Jordan, 1945–1993 (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1999); and Quintan Wiktorowicz, The Management of Islamic Activism: Salafis, the Muslim Brotherhood, and State Power in Jordan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). 6. Rami G. Khouri, “Jordan’s Opportunity: Where History and Elegance Coincide,” Jordan Times, September 8, 1992. 7. Mariam Shahin, “The Man Who Would Be King,” The Middle East (London), September 1998, pp. 11–12. 8. Ibid., p. 11. Although Shahin’s article, “The Man Who Would Be King,” is mainly about Hasan, the large photo prophetically gracing the title page of the piece is not that of Hasan, but of the man who instead would succeed Hussein, then-prince Abdullah. 9. Adel Darwish and Mariam Shahin, “The End of an Epoch,” The Middle East (London), March 1999, p. 4. 10. King Hussein’s letter to Prince Hasan was printed in the various Jordanian newspapers and broadcast on national television (January 25, 1999). Text available at www.kinghussein.gov.jo/speeches_letters.html. 11. Author interviews, Amman, June 1999. 12. King Hussein’s letter to Prince Hasan. See also the discussion in Sana Kamal, “Jordan: The King Strikes Back,” Middle East International, January 29, 1999, pp. 4–5. 13. Author interviews, Amman, June 1999. 14. Kamal, “Jordan.” 15. Al-Ra’y, March 25, 1999. 16. See, for example, the coverage in Al-‘Arab al-Yawm, July 15, 1999. 17. Al-Ra’y, July 17, 1999; and Al-‘Arab al-Yawm, July 15, 1999. 18. Al-Dustur, July 26, 1999. 19. Jordan Times, July 15–16, 1999; The Star (Amman), July 21, 1999. 20. Author interviews, Amman, June 1999. 21. On movements and organizations for women’s empowerment, see the chapters on Jordan in Laurie A. Brand, Women, the State, and Political Liberalization: Middle Eastern and North African Experiences (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 22. Rana Husseini, “Blazing the Trail,” Jordan Times, July 14, 1999. 23. Jordan Times, July 17, 1999. 24. Jordan Times, July 18, 1999. 25. Jordan Times, July 26, 1999. 26. The Star (Amman), July 21, 1999; Jordan Times, July 15–16, 1999. 27. Jordan Times, July 24, 1999. 28. Author interviews with Jordanian journalists, Amman, July 1999. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Jordan Times, July 15–16, 1999. 32. See Center for Strategic Studies (CSS), Unemployment in Jordan—1996: Preliminary Results and Basic Data (Amman: CSS, 1997). 33. Some of the results of the CSS polls have been assembled and analyzed by Maher J. Massis, “Jordan: A Study of Attitudes Toward Democratic Changes,” Arab Studies Quarterly 20, no. 3 (summer 1998): 37–63. The CSS studies of Jordanian-Palestinian relations led to the publication of the monograph: Mustafa Hamarneh, Rosemary Hollis, and Khalil Shikaki, Jordanian-Palestinian Relations:

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Where To? Four Scenarios for the Future (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1997). 34. Jordan Times, July 17, 1999; The Star (Amman), July 21, 1999. 35. At the time of the 1999 elections, stories covering these topics were prominently displayed, but more often in the English- rather than Arabic-language press. See, for example, Rana Husseini, “Courts Sentence Man to One Year After Killing Sister with Car, Three Men to Five Months After Shooting Woman,” Jordan Times, July 31, 1999; and Hind-Lara Mango, “The Face of Poverty: Growing More Feminine by the Day,” Jordan Times, July 29, 1999. 36. See the critical analysis of democratization in Jordan by Suleiman Sweiss, “Quel bilan? Dix ans de ‘process démocratique’” [What balance? Ten years of the “democratic process”]. For a defense of press freedom and a highly critical analysis of the ambiguities of the current press law, see the discussion by veteran Jordanian journalist Sa’eda Kilani, “L’Eternel dilemme: Presse, publications” [The eternal dilemma: Press, publications]. Both articles appeared in the French-language Le Jour section of The Star (Amman), July 15, 1999.

6 Jordan’s Continuing Transition

The accession to the throne of King Abdullah II, following the death of his father, King Hussein, was clearly a major event in the history and politics of the Hashimite Kingdom. But as the preceding chapters have demonstrated, the succession also came roughly ten years into a broader set of changes in Jordan’s economy, domestic politics, and foreign policy. This chapter draws some conclusions about the status of each of these transitions thus far, while also offering some necessarily preliminary conclusions and prognoses regarding the early years of the Abdullah regime in Jordan. Drawing anything beyond preliminary conclusions about Abdullah’s regime would be similar to having completed an assessment of King Hussein’s regime in 1955 or 1956. In analyzing contemporary Jordanian politics, however, I am interested not only in the monarchy itself, but also—and indeed mainly—in the broader political issues confronting state and society in Jordan. This book has focused on four major transitions in Jordanian politics, all of which are rooted in the political economy of regime survival for the Hashimite monarchy. As I have argued throughout, Jordan’s political liberalization process began as the regime reacted to the April 1989 social and political upheavals around the country. This unrest was itself triggered by the kingdom’s dire economic circumstances, made worse by the introduction of a painful International Monetary Fund (IMF) austerity program. Since that time, Jordan has undergone a series of transitions, from political liberalization (Chapter 2), to economic adjustment (Chapter 3), to a foreign policy shift toward formal peace with Israel (Chapter 4), and finally to the succession in the monarchy from King Hussein to King Abdullah II (Chapter 5). In this concluding 109

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chapter, I briefly return to each of the continuing transitions—foreign policy change, economic adjustment, and political liberalization—as they have been affected by the fourth transition, the shift to the Abdullah regime. In these concluding assessments, I also return to the original argument that has guided this book throughout; that is, that economic constraints pressed the regime to open up the political system in order to reestablish its own basis for legitimacy and survival. These economic constraints also forced the regime to reassess in a wholesale manner the economic basis, domestic politics, and foreign policy of the kingdom—to some extent with the looming royal succession in mind. But the political liberalization process remains the least complete of these transitions. This process appears to have stalled, or is at least slow and limited in its scope and depth, despite the fact that it is in many respects the centerpiece that links all the others. And therein lies the problem. Political liberalization, and certainly with it more genuine democratization, has simply been a lower priority for the regime than the other transitions. The royal succession from Hussein to Abdullah was completed remarkably smoothly, despite even the abrupt change of successor seemingly at the eleventh hour. Similarly, the IMF economic adjustment program and privatization campaign proceeded apace, while the peace treaty with Israel continued to hold even in the face of the collapse of the regional peace process and the reignited Palestinian uprising beginning in September 2000. Of all the transitions, political liberalization remains the least developed. Since Chapters 2 and 5 have examined the various parliamentary elections (1989, 1993, 1997) and municipal elections (1999) in detail, this chapter places particular emphasis on political liberalization beyond procedural democracy and beyond simply the state itself. Thus I turn first to the questions of foreign policy change and economic adjustment under Abdullah, and then toward the question of political liberalization since 1999. I examine in particular three major challenges facing Jordan’s domestic political transition, all of which are essential to Jordan’s future liberalization prospects: civil society and press freedoms, gender equality, and the renewed debate over ethnic politics and the question of Jordanian identity itself.

JORDAN’S INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND FOREIGN POLICY Given its geography alone, the Hashimite Kingdom of Jordan has certainly been strongly affected—and indeed buffeted—by the tumultuous

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politics of the Middle East. It has been deeply affected by the ArabIsraeli wars of 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982, and the Persian Gulf wars of 1980–1988 and 1990–1991, in addition to the country’s own civil war in 1970–1971. Given Jordan’s long border with the State of Israel, its own treaty with Israel, and its large Palestinian population, the kingdom has also felt the impact of Palestinian uprisings in the West Bank and Gaza from 1987 to 1993 and again after September 2000. In part because of its own economic and domestic politics, and in part because of the foreign policy designs of others, the kingdom has been greatly influenced by regional politics through these many dramatic events, including its continually shifting inter-Arab alignments. Given this context, it is particularly striking that Jordan’s foreign relations in the early twenty-first century had become—if not troublefree—then at least more stable than at any previous time. The main exception to Jordan’s stable foreign relations remains the violence west of the Jordan River. With the succession in the monarchy, in 1999, Jordan had a new, top foreign policy decisionmaker for the first time in forty-six years.1 Hussein had seemed to many in the outside world to be the virtual embodiment of Jordan and its foreign relations. For the most part, King Abdullah’s policy views mirror those of his father. He too is moderate and cautious and is determined to maintain close alliances with Jordan’s traditional Western allies. Abdullah is even more committed to economic liberalization than his father was, although a major question remains his stance on domestic political liberalization. While Abdullah cannot have his father’s experience and clout on the world stage, neither does he have his animosities. Abdullah, unlike the long-serving Hussein, did not come of political age in the most intense days of the Cold War or even in the regional ideological conflicts of the 1950s and 1960s. He is not personally affected by the scars of the 1970–1971 Jordanian civil war, or by the long rivalry between King Hussein and various Arab leaders. Almost immediately after becoming king, Abdullah made clear his interest and indeed aptitude for foreign policy, by embarking on a series of trips to key capitals to shore up international support for his regime and for Jordan. Within the first six months of his reign, Abdullah had (not surprisingly) visited the leaders of each of the Group of Seven (G7) states—the world’s most industrialized and most wealthy countries.2 More locally, the young king also toured the Persian Gulf states, and even made a point of visiting Libya and Syria—states that had had tenuous relationships at best with Jordan under King Hussein. Since the accession of Abdullah to the throne, Jordan has managed to maintain and even strengthen each of its key external relationships—

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with the United States, the European Union, Israel, and Turkey. King Abdullah has himself also made extensive use of personal diplomacy to achieve warm relations with Egypt and even with Syria, ending what in effect amounted to a Jordanian-Syrian cold war. Abdullah was bequeathed a fairly stable set of international relationships, but he has managed to both broaden and deepen them. For many Jordanians, that very success presented another question: whether the king would utilize Jordan’s stable international situation as an opportunity to concentrate on lingering problems of domestic reform and political change. The kingdom has further linked itself and its fortunes to major international economic institutions such as the World Trade Organization. Closer to home, Jordan has maintained its peace treaty with Israel, despite the collapse of the Oslo peace process and the start of the second Palestinian intifada. In inter-Arab relations, Jordan under King Abdullah has managed to complete the long and difficult process (since the depths of the 1991 Gulf War) of reestablishing relations with each of the Persian Gulf monarchies. The kingdom has managed to secure its connections to these various Western and Gulf powers while also reestablishing many of its links to both Syria and Iraq. Even before returning to warmer diplomatic ties, Iraq and Jordan returned to functional and pragmatic economic cooperation despite their diplomatic rift. By the late 1990s, the lack of an economic windfall from Israel had pushed Jordan and Iraq back together at least at the economic level. Iraq remained the main source of Jordan’s oil supply, with part of that supply free and part at concessionary prices. Jordan’s port of Aqaba remained practically Iraq’s sole lifeline to the outside world while the UN sanctions regime continued.3 Thus the economic symbiosis between the two states, while problematic for several years, managed to survive the Israeli peace treaty. Following the succession in the Jordanian monarchy, King Abdullah, in his first speech before parliament, called for an end to the UN embargo on Iraq. In 2000, Jordan became the first Arab country officially to break the embargo by sending planes of medical supplies and later high-level government delegations to Baghdad. After Jordanian airliners began landing in Baghdad, numerous other countries followed suit. The improved Jordanian-Iraqi relationship did not amount to a full alliance, nor did it amount to the depth of alignment that had existed between the two countries from roughly 1978 through the 1991 Gulf War.4 But the foreign policy shift was nonetheless extremely significant, for it signaled an end to the period of hostility that had marked the late 1990s.

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While the Jordanian-Iraqi rift had been brief (if dramatic), Jordanian-Syrian relations had been strained for years, with little love lost between King Hussein and Syrian president Hafiz al-Asad. That relationship had deteriorated still further following the Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty. The fall of 1998, for example, saw a particularly virulent barrage of attacks against Jordan within the state media in Syria, especially in a series of statements by Syrian defense minister Mustafa Tlas, who accused Jordan of having been entirely co-opted by Israel. Tlas managed also to jab the Hashimite regime over what he saw as an emerging Jordanian-Israeli-Turkish alliance, and he even complained of Jordan’s limited commitment to the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.5 Following the death of King Hussein in 1999, however, the two countries’ bilateral relations began to improve. To the surprise of many in Jordan and elsewhere, President Asad made a rare journey to Amman to attend King Hussein’s funeral, while also making a point to speak at some length with Hussein’s son and heir, King Abdullah II. After President Asad himself passed away in June 2000, his son and apparent heir, President Bishar al-Asad, exchanged state visits with King Abdullah, thereby pushing the warming trend still further. Jordan’s various foreign policy links—especially those with Western countries, the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), and even Israel—are not only of political but also of paramount economic importance to the regime. It is dependent not only on financial aid, but even on external sources of water. That fact, for example, was an incentive in securing a peace treaty with Israel, but it is also an incentive in maintaining that treaty, and with it access to water transported from Israel to Jordan. Even then, with droughts and politics intervening to reduce the amount of water sent from Israel, the kingdom had to turn to Syria in the summers of 2000 and 2001 for additional water supplies. But beyond the specific question of water itself, these external ties are seen as so economically vital to the kingdom that the regime has tended to exhibit limited tolerance for domestic opposition to its foreign policy decisions. This is especially noticeable in the continuing rift between government and the political opposition over the peace treaty with Israel. Opposition forces have continued in their campaign to halt normalization of ties with Israel, a campaign led largely by the professional associations. These associations in turn overlap to some extent in membership and outlook with numerous political parties, from the Islamic Action Front (IAF) to the various leftist and pan-Arab nationalist parties. With the second intifada, beginning in September 2000, that campaign gathered steadily more domestic political support.

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Jordan under King Abdullah II has established stronger ties with its traditional Western allies and with the main global economic institutions. These key international alignments are based in very large part on the regime’s perceptions of Jordan’s economic interests. Jordan under King Abdullah solidified its alliances and its aid links to the United States and the United Kingdom, while also strengthening ties to the European Union as a whole and working closely with the IMF and World Bank. King Abdullah spent a great deal of time in key Western capitals lobbying not only for raising aid levels and restructuring debt repayments, but also for increased foreign investment. Jordan’s economic development plans and the king’s speeches continually emphasize the importance of foreign investment not just in Amman, but throughout the country. This includes the establishment of special free economic zones, such as one in southern Jordan at Aqaba. Jordan has repaired its formerly ruptured ties with Arab states from Iraq to Syria to each Persian Gulf monarchy—all while preserving its peace treaty with Israel and its military links to Turkey. Following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, the Jordanian-U.S. link grew stronger still, as the kingdom backed the U.S. military campaign against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. The regime also charged that it had uncovered and foiled a plot, linked to Osama Bin Laden and his Al-Qaida organization, to assassinate Jordan’s royal family itself. The immediate impact of these events led to even closer U.S.-Jordanian relations, including the congressional vote to approve the U.S.-Jordanian free trade agreement. With the tumultuous 1980s and 1990s finally behind them, the Jordanians had achieved greater stability in foreign relations than perhaps ever before. Specifically, the kingdom’s relations with all of its neighbors ranged from stable to warm, with its extraregional connections to Western powers and global economic institutions stronger than ever. Thus Jordan’s official and state-to-state relations were stable indeed, but the same could not be said of the regional political climate. Despite solid foreign relations, Jordan remained wedged between escalating IsraeliPalestinian violence to the west and heightened fears of renewed U.S.Iraqi violence to the east. In both contexts, King Abdullah attempted to play a strong personal role as a diplomatic intermediary. Still, Jordan’s construction of regional and global alliances, and its successful attempts at rapprochement with numerous Arab states, have left many Jordanians to expect that it is now time to return to pressing problems at home. Paramount among these, and indeed tying all the assorted challenges together, is the domestic context of political and economic reform.

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JORDAN’S ECONOMIC LIBERALIZATION A major continuing question for Jordan’s economic restructuring effort—for the regime and for its international creditors—remains that of the privatization of the many large public-sector companies. Jordan made its first moves toward privatization in the late 1980s following the downturn in the Jordanian economy, which in turn was closely linked to the recession in the Persian Gulf states. With more than a third of its labor force employed in the Gulf, Jordan was immediately affected by the troubles of the GCC economies.6 With remittances declining and Gulf aid also reduced, Jordan turned to the IMF. In addition to cutting government spending, Jordan’s IMF restructuring program has called for the privatization of many public-sector enterprises. In the Jordanian case, this has been part of the restructuring program since 1989, with considerable resistance from some public-sector elites. The enormous role of the public sector in the Jordanian economy dates back to the emergence of the state itself. In the 1920s, when the first King Abdullah (King Abdullah II’s great grandfather) began extending his power over the British Mandate of Transjordan, he ruled over a small state with a weak private sector. In that context, the state itself expanded to fill the void, establishing control of the various sectors that would comprise Jordan’s chief industries. In their modern form, these public-sector companies include the Jordan Cement Factories Company, the Jordan Electrical Authority, the Jordan Phosphate Mines Company, the Arab Potash Company, the Jordan Fertilizer Industries Company, the Public Transport Corporation, Royal Jordanian Airlines, and the Jordan Telecommunications Company. The kingdom’s privatization program for these large state-owned enterprises has thus far proceeded slowly. But large shares of the Jordan Cement Factories Company and of the Jordan Telecommunications Company have been sold to European companies, while some Royal Jordanian Airlines operations (duty-free shops, for example) have also been sold to private firms.7 When examining privatization in Jordan today, it is important to remember that there has been no time in modern Jordanian history when the public sector did not outweigh the private sector. The difficulty in reversing this trend is to some extent rooted in that early period of state formation, when the state ensured support among domestic coalitions of elites precisely through patronage ties in the public sector. In his analysis of the limits of market reform in Jordan, Timothy Piro has argued that elite resistance to changing these state-society ties and

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forms of patronage is the single largest obstacle to privatization. What has emerged is a privatization program alongside a continued large role for the state in economic planning.8 In daily operations, the state companies essentially operate much like a private-sector firm would. But the chairs of the corporate boards are appointees of the prime minister, and there tends to be a great deal of circulation of elites between government posts and positions in the public-sector companies. This patronage, together with its associated nepotism, has historically been a key to Hashimite regime survival. Public-sector dominance has also been ensured through centralized decisionmaking on production. Thus beyond the individual companies themselves, the government has played an enormous economic role through the Ministry of Industry and Trade, the Ministry of Supply, and the Ministry of Planning. The ministries themselves, much like the public-sector companies, tend to have overlapping jurisdictions and bloated bureaucracies.9 Economist Osama Abu Shair, in an another analysis of privatization and its limitations in Jordan, has argued strongly for privatization in the kingdom—but not on the basis of the usual efficiency or growth arguments associated with neoliberal institutions such as the IMF. Beyond these incentives, he argues, Jordan needs to privatize not as an end itself, but as the means to achieve government decentralization and hence a reduced state role in political as well as economic life.10 The issue, then, is not just one of the assumed benefits of a privatized economy so much as the potential abuse—through corruption and nepotism—of public-sector dominance. But Abu Shair also notes that privatization must be approached cautiously, mindful of its social impact, because the state-owned enterprises also play positive roles as sources of employment.11 The danger, of course, is when precisely this type of privatization project benefits entrepreneurial elites while inflicting the costs of adjustment and restructuring on the already least empowered sectors of Jordanian society. This perception is certainly what prompted the riots of 1989 and 1996. In pressing forward with privatization, King Abdullah appears to be very personally committed to the task. He has certainly made clear his conviction that Jordan’s future lies in economic development—including privatization of the state’s companies as well as increased foreign investment. In doing so, he is challenging a resistant and to some extent entrenched elite of state managers. But he is also creating an alternative constituency of like-minded elites who share his enthusiasm for neoliberal solutions to Jordan’s development. As one of King Abdullah’s for-

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mer cabinet ministers noted, “development is what defines him.”12 This has been reflected increasingly in the king’s political appointments. His initial choice for prime minister was the conservative Abd al-Rauf alRawabdah. But Rawabdah seems to have been more the choice of King Hussein, with Abdullah acceding to this wish too after his father’s death. Abdullah countered Rawabdah’s conservatism and traditionalism, however, by appointing Abd al-Karim Kabariti—a reformer and advocate of increasing democratization—to be chief of the Royal Hashimite Court. With these seemingly contradictory appointments, the new king may have been trying to satisfy both the reformist and conservative wings of Jordan’s political spectrum, by allowing for a creative tension between Rawabdah and Kabariti, the two most powerful figures in government aside from the king himself. The strategy did not work, ultimately, but it did illustrate the king’s intention to build rather than burn bridges between elite factions. What emerged instead was a clash and power struggle that the prime minister ultimately won, to the dismay of many democracy activists in the kingdom. But the king later dismissed Rawabdah too, and replaced him with the liberal-centrist and technocratic Ali Abu al-Raghib. Both Prime Minister Abu al-Raghib and the personnel in his various cabinets seemed to reflect what the king really had in mind: a team of economically oriented technocrats. Many of these officials had served on the king’s own economic advisory team or had experience in the trade and industry zones, sectors that were central to the king’s development plans. Before becoming prime minister, for example, Abu al-Raghib had served as chair of the king’s personal economic advisory committee. The makeup of the government itself thus underscores the absolutely central emphasis of Abdullah’s regime on economic development, continuing privatization, expanding trade, and luring international investment. With these goals in mind, the regime also aggressively pursued trade agreements with its key Western allies. In 2000, Jordan entered the World Trade Organization and later that same year Jordan also signed a free trade agreement with the United States. In 2001, Jordan joined the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), strengthening still further its ties to the economies of the European Union. In addition to his emphasis on free trade, King Abdullah pushed for Jordan to become a regional center for information technology (IT) and communications. And indeed, unlike some of its neighbors, the kingdom does allow full Internet access (Jordan is actually in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the street, located in the city of Irbid, with the most Internet cafes). The king’s hope that Jordan would

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become the IT and communications center for the entire region suffered a setback, however, when an entire “Internet city” was created in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. While the government’s overall economic development aims are clear, restructuring remains a colossal task, and one with profound social and political ramifications. As Western stores, fast-food chains, and other businesses continue to multiply in Jordan, and as the capital itself continues to expand rapidly, the larger questions still remain not just those of trade and investment, but of poverty alleviation, uneven development, and continuing high levels of unemployment. These questions are the focus of many opposition parties and activists, who hope to push the political liberalization process forward in part to alleviate some of the hardships of economic liberalization.

CHALLENGES TO POLITICAL LIBERALIZATION IN JORDAN Certainly foreign relations and economic adjustment are major challenges facing Jordanian politics today. But the emphasis on stabilizing both the kingdom’s foreign relations and its economy, which are themselves linked, has consistently stalled or even reversed the political liberalization process. The more stable Jordan’s economy and foreign relations become, so too will internal pressures continue to build to rejuvenate the domestic political liberalization process. While Jordan’s external relations with its Arab neighbors and with Israel will doubtless provide new risks and problems, I argue that the most pressing challenges facing the kingdom can be found at home. The main transition remains the domestic political liberalization process itself, even as this is linked to the associated economic adjustment program. For most Jordanians in their daily lives, the pressing questions concern basic economic opportunities and political rights. Will Jordan’s state and society move toward increasing pluralism, individual rights, civil society, and more meaningful democracy—or not? My purpose here is not to provide a prediction, but rather an analysis of specific challenges within the body politic that will be absolutely essential to the outcome. These include most importantly questions of civil society and press freedoms and also questions of social justice, which in turn touch on the ethnic balance in the kingdom and questions of gender equality.

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Civil Society and Press Freedoms While King Abdullah has received positive reviews globally for his foreign policy knowledge and abilities, the most difficult arena remains domestic politics. Almost immediately upon ascending the throne, the king signaled his intentions to proceed further with the reform process both politically and economically. One of his first actions as king was to meet with the heads of opposition parties and professional associations, emphasizing the need for a new national dialogue. Jordan held nationwide municipal elections in 1999, the first year of the new king’s reign. Abdullah’s stated commitment to deepening political reform may have influenced the various opposition parties to abandon the boycott of 1997 and rejoin the liberalization and electoral process in 1999. But the king also underscored his desire for reform in a more dramatic way. In 1999, King Abdullah donned disguises and made a series of unannounced appearances at various hospitals, ministries, and departments to check personally on public services. The incognito maneuvers led one newspaper to describe Abdullah as the “stealth king” and indeed the episodes made media headlines around the world.13 Playing off this series of events, Jordan’s newspaper Al-Ra’y carried a cartoon showing a government bureaucrat leaping to help a bearded man he believes to be the king in disguise. In a room filled with men in identical fake beards, the bureaucrat even goes so far as to break into song, singing a few bars of the royalist and nationalist song “Hashimi, Hashimi.” The visits were clearly designed to demonstrate the king’s personal interest in public services and in implementing reform. But as many reform activists noted, the visits also led to public expectations of significant and even immediate changes in Jordan’s vast and inefficient bureaucracy—changes that are slow in coming.14 The surprise royal visits also led some to link reform of the public bureaucracy to the broader political liberalization process. In response to the king’s surprise inspection of the free trade zone in the city of Zarqa, the Jordan Times printed as its main editorial a call for freeing the press in order to allow it—rather than the monarch himself—to act as the fourth estate or watchdog on public services: Free press and media are capable of exposing all our ailments and shortcomings. The press is willing to investigate what is wrong at the Zarqa free trade zone if it were guaranteed the right to do so. Jordan Television, we are sure, will be at the forefront if its mandate allowed

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it to do so and not be just a protocol tool. We are all capable of sparing our King the ordeal of investigating issues on his own. We in the media could be his eye and arm and provide him with all the information on achievements and mischiefs. We only need to be free.15

The editorial serves as an important point of departure in the discussion of pluralist democratization, the emergence of civil society, and in particular the role of a free press. The loosening of restrictions on the media beginning in 1989 was a central pillar of the initial liberalization program. The immediate proliferation of weekly publications and the emphasis of some on exposing scandals apparently tried the patience of regime officials—many of whom were skeptical about the very idea of democratization. A new press and publications law in 1993 was heralded by some as a step toward democracy, since it replaced legislation in effect since 1973 and hence during the martial law period.16 But the law also required that journalists be members of the Jordan Press Association (JPA)—a government body. Individual journalists have continually criticized this feature of the many different versions of press laws that have been handed down since 1989, because they see it as compromising their independence and hence running counter to civil society.17 Dismissal from the JPA in effect prevents a journalist from writing and working in the field. Following the 1994 peace treaty with Israel, the level of tolerance for the critical press declined still further. Regime conservatives viewed the media as too freewheeling and reckless. In the summer of 1997, the conservative government of Prime Minister Abd al-Salam al-Majali issued a temporary and highly restrictive preelection press law. The new law only exacerbated the tensions between the activist opposition and the regime, leading to the electoral boycott, which in turn paved the way for a more pliant parliament for 1997–2001. The 1997 press and publications law was later ruled unconstitutional by the Jordanian supreme court, but by then the elections had already occurred. Supreme court justice Faruq Kilani was shortly thereafter relieved of his post, but the ruling remained in place. Having secured the 1997–2001 parliament, the Majali government in 1998 introduced still another press and publications law.18 After passing the lower house of parliament, the bill was approved without amendments in the senate, but only after strong opposition from a few reform-minded senators such as Layla Sharaf and Abd al-Karim Kabariti. The 1998 law was seen as so restric-

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tive that Human Rights Watch sent a letter to the senate speaker, Zayd al-Rifa‘i, protesting the bill.19 The law set strict capital holding requirements for publications to continue operating in Jordan. Daily papers would have to secure 500,000 dinars, while weeklies had to secure 100,000 dinars in capital. The move was essentially aimed at closing down many of the weekly tabloids, since they, unlike the well-established dailies, were relatively new. The government has also frequently moved against publications and individual journalists, taking them to court for alleged offenses against the various press laws. In the 1998 law, which is representative of the various versions, Article 37 included a series of restrictions on journalists for writing anything that “disparages” the king or the royal family, the armed forces, or the security services. Journalists are not permitted to write anything that harms “national unity,” “leads to moral corruption,” shakes “confidence in the national currency,” or insults leaders of Arab and Islamic governments or other “friendly states.”20 The highest-profile case was that of the private and independent Arabic daily Al-‘Arab al-Yawm. Its main owner and founder, Riyad Hroub, was also the founder of the popular and controversial weekly Shihan. These papers were the first to break a number of key stories that other papers would not touch: corruption cases against government officials, nepotism charges, the pollution of the Amman water supply in the summer of 1998, and the Israeli Mossad’s failed assassination attempt against Hamas leader Khalid al-Mash‘al in Amman, among many other stories. Jordanian journalists argued that the government’s leveling of corruption charges against Hroub was a thinly veiled method of silencing him and reining in his papers. Hroub was forced to sell his majority shares in these and other papers, which many journalists argue have been essentially tamed and infiltrated by the Mukhabarat. This last charge—that regardless of the current press law much of the media is under the shadow of the intelligence service— was made unprompted by numerous interviewees, from journalists to party officials to former government ministers.21 Many of these same interviewees, while condemning the role of the Mukhabarat and the government move against Hroub, also praised the appointment of George Hawatmeh as editor of the largest-circulation Arabic daily, AlRa’y, in the summer of 2001. Hawatmeh had served for many years as chief editor of the Jordan Times and is certainly seen as an advocate of democracy and a free press. The move triggered hope of a more liberal approach from the state.

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The main focus of the regime, however, appears to be centered more on economic development—and the international alliances essential to that development—and considerably less on the pursuit of democratization. By 2002 the political reform process was merely thirteen years old, but it had amounted far more to liberalization than to democratization.22 For the former implies loosening government restrictions on rights and liberties, while the latter implies something still deeper: the explicit and effective participation of the people in government.23 Jordan has certainly seen some limited democratization in the lower house of the legislature, but even there the power of parliament is severely limited. And despite their efforts, Jordan’s many political parties and professional associations have proven largely unable to affect and change government policy. In addition to these parties and associations, other key facets of Jordan’s still emerging civil society include the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) within the kingdom. While many of these are among the most democratic organizations in the country, they too have been the focus of maneuvers to curb their potential influence. Since 2000 especially, the government increasingly focused on the “foreign connections” of these groups. Many have global connections and draw on sources of funding outside the kingdom. But some government officials, followed dutifully by many of the more pliant organs of the Jordanian media, continued to focus on these groups virtually as foreign infiltrators. This type of maneuver is quite old in Jordanian politics. Internationalist left-wing parties from the communists to the Ba‘thists found themselves subjected to similar charges for decades. But in the newer era of liberalization, and under a regime that openly embraces globalization, it seems particularly odd to criticize organizations for having global links. It is odder still that some of the more conservative parties fall in step with this critique themselves (particularly the Islamists). Just as they tend to be suspicious of the communist and Ba‘thist parties, the Islamists are also suspicious of what they see as the too-Western links of many NGOs, especially the human rights organizations.24 Perhaps just as compelling is the determination of many independent organizations or institutes to press on in their attempts to build civil society and more meaningful democratization. The efforts of these individuals and groups nonetheless run headlong into a core of the ruling elite that does indeed see democratization and all its trappings as a completed mission. For many regime conservatives the liberalization process has already occurred, and it includes strict parameters intended

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to give a showy and pluralist façade to an established pattern of power and privilege. But even the cynicism of this part of the power structure, coupled with the trends toward backsliding and deliberalization since 1994, should not be allowed to obscure the fact that there are real reformers within the state itself, as well as energetic democracy activists independent of the state who are working to create an effective civil society and a pluralist democracy. Quintan Wiktorowicz is correct when he argues that civil society itself is no panacea, that it can be more of a façade, and that it can be a means to exercise social control as an alternative to outright coercion.25 I argue, however, that the question is not only about the government’s motives, but also about what the opposition can do with civil society to deepen rather than stifle democratization.26 Thus the political opening that civil society creates, even if intended to be limited (as is the case in Jordan), nonetheless provides space and opportunities for those with more progressive visions than the government itself. Having created the beginning of a civil society in the kingdom, even the acts of deliberalization come to be discussed in the public sphere, albeit at times cautiously or even with self-censorship. But while the process has slipped since 1994, it has not regressed to the pre-1989 period. Today, unlike the era before 1989, extensive polling data are produced by such impressive institutions as the University of Jordan’s Center for Strategic Studies. Detailed analyses of the press, parties, associations, and other aspects of the liberalization process are produced and disseminated from the independent Al-Urdun al-Jadid (New Jordan) Research Center. And NGOs such as the Arab Archives Institute now link to global human rights organizations such as Transparency International and the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network. These can indeed be counted as among the most positive and hopeful features on the Jordanian political landscape. Many Jordanians are looking to a young and reformist king to tip the scales back toward liberalization and away from the conservative retrenchment that has undone much of the process. Many fear that the king is surrounded by too many reactionary officials. And certainly many point to the disturbing fact that the Mukhabarat’s role has actually increased rather than decreased, despite a secure peace treaty, stable international relations, and a smooth royal succession. Indeed, the consensus seems to be that the Mukhabarat returned to prominence in part to ensure the stability of the succession. But in the years afterward, the Mukhabarat seems continually focused on what it sees as pressing and multiple challenges to domestic security. That type of focus, and

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indeed that type of atmosphere, cannot be considered conducive to greater democratization. But many reformers still count the king as very much in their camp. According to one Jordanian scholar, the problem is not the king, but the array of officials and notables he inherited from his father. “The main problem now,” he argued, “is that we have an antiquated elite. The pickings are weak for top officials. The main problems are the same—wasta [the use of personal connections for personal gain], nepotism, favoritism—all under the guise of constituency services. It’s a problem of corporate culture.”27 As the transitions continue, the changes will thus have to be made both from the top down and from the grassroots up. Among the most pressing of these changes, and certainly the one most anticipated in Jordanian politics, is the revision of the electoral law. The 1997 version of that law in large part triggered the boycott of the last elections. Opposition leaders argue, correctly, that the districts are uneven, providing disproportionate levels of representation for rural over urban constituencies. For many districts, that also translates into increased Transjordanian rather than Palestinian representation. Christians, Circassians, and Chechens are of course guaranteed at least minimal representation through reserved seats. That latter feature is likely to be part of any future electoral law as well. Essentially, opposition leaders have tended to argue for changing the one-person, onevote format and returning to the earlier model in which each voter had votes equaling the number of representatives for a district. Opposition leaders also want to balance the representation so that districts are equal in population. Feminist activists have also argued for a quota of reserved seats for women (since reserved seats already exist for key religious and ethnic minorities) in order to break the gendered glass ceiling of representation in parliament. Opposition parties and organizations have actually suggested myriad alternatives for the Jordanian electoral system. The regime, for its part, issued repeated calls for a national dialogue and assumed a posture of listening to many such proposals. But few in the opposition think that these meetings are meaningful.28 Nonetheless, as the 1999 municipal elections made clear, the opposition had returned to participation in Jordan’s electoral processes. The question was simply when the next national elections would take place and under what new electoral law. The regime answered part of that question in July 2001, when it issued the long-awaited legislation, but only to the disappointment of many Jordanians, who had hoped for a more extensive revision.29 Most importantly, the new law retained the one-person, one-vote format that

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had in large part led to the 1997 opposition electoral boycott. The law added a number of measures to ensure more accurate vote-counting and electoral transparency, including new magnetic voter cards. Responsibility for supervising and monitoring the elections shifted from the Ministry of the Interior to the judiciary. The minimum voting age was lowered from nineteen to eighteen. Finally, the new law increased the number of parliamentary representatives from eighty to one hundred four, and increased the number of electoral districts from twenty-one to forty-five. The government argued that the increase in seats would enhance representation and alleviate the uneven levels of representation associated with previous parliaments. The largely Palestinian industrial city of Zarqa, for example, would now have ten deputies rather than six. But actually the number of representatives increased for all districts, except for Aqaba, and so the questions of uneven representation continue. Further, the increase in the number of deputies was not linked to any change in the actual voting procedure. Even Prime Minister Abu alRaghib himself had suggested several times that a two-vote system might be best: one in which voters cast one vote for a candidate in their district, and a second vote for a smaller number of additional seats reserved for political parties. The parties themselves had lobbied strongly for this split model of voting, with proportional representation to decide at least twelve party-affiliated seats. Since the liberalization process began, the opposition parties have charged that restricting voters to a single vote undermines political parties while encouraging “tribalism” and voting patterns based more on family and clan ties than on issues. While the earlier system of reserved seats for Christians (nine seats) and Circassians or Chechens (three seats) remained in place, no such additional quotas were added for parties or for women representatives.30 Having introduced the new law, the regime also announced that new elections would have to be postponed from their original date in November 2001 to at least September 2002 or later.31 The Ministry of the Interior argued that this was necessary in order to create the new magnetic voter cards (complete with a holographic image of a sevenpointed Hashimite star). Opposition leaders were quick to suggest that the delay was really linked to the ongoing intifada in the West Bank and Gaza, and fears of radicalized politics within Jordan itself. Given the immediate and palpable disappointment on the part of the political parties and professional associations, and on the part of activists ranging from Islamists to feminists, the new law was destined at minimum to

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perpetuate the ongoing debate over electoral reform. And since the new law satisfied so few of the demands of these disparate groups, it also carried with it the threat of another national boycott. But even as debates continue within Jordan regarding the press, parties, associations, and the pros and cons of various electoral laws, another debate has reemerged as a challenge to the liberalization process. That debate, among the most sensitive of topics in Jordanian politics, is the question of Jordanian identity itself, and the place in that identity for Jordan’s Palestinian community, on the one hand, and for the East Bank or Transjordanian community, on the other. Transjordanians, Palestinians, and Jordanian Identity One of the major features of contemporary Jordanian politics is the ethnic divide between Palestinians and Transjordanians, or between those originally of West or East Bank origin within modern Jordan. This division has sometimes been given far too much importance in writings on Jordan, especially when used as the sole social explanation for domestic politics, or when reduced to a “Palestinians versus bedouins” type of image. The nomadic bedouins account for perhaps 5 percent of the kingdom’s population, but they are an important part of the social construction of national identity for many Jordanians, underscoring “traditional” roots.32 Family, clan, and tribal links and lineages remain real and important for many Jordanians. But the division between the Transjordanian and Palestinian communities also remains real, and it is deeply controversial within national politics. Even admitting it exists can be controversial. And the tolerance for alternative opinions in this continuing debate is declining. Even Palestinians who were most closely associated with the Hashimite establishment are not immune in this political climate. In 1999, Adnan Abu Awdah, one of the most powerful Palestinians in the kingdom, a consummate insider and former adviser to King Hussein, found himself under attack from many social and political quarters for his views on Palestinian-Jordanian relations within the kingdom. Abu Awdah had published a book on the topic and then delivered a series of lectures in various venues in Jordan. His theme in these writings and speeches was the ethnic imbalance of opportunities within Jordanian society and politics.33 Abu Awdah was thereafter asked to resign from the senate. Similarly, in 2001, Jawad al-Anani, who just two years earlier had served as chief of the Royal Hashimite Court, published an editorial in an Arabic daily in the United Arab Emirates, arguing that the

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ethnic divide represented Jordan’s main political hurdle to achieve real inclusion or democracy. Shortly afterward, Anani too was forced out of the senate.34 Former prime minister Tahir al-Masri—the only Jordanian prime minister of Palestinian origin—has also been similarly critical of the ethnic divisions and of the limits of the political liberalization process itself and was one of the most prominent politicians in the 1997 electoral boycott. While the outspoken criticism of these prominent Palestinian figures has angered some Transjordanian nationalists, it has also drawn critical responses even from some Palestinians, who argue that such highly placed people should have been making these same criticisms years ago. None of these prominent Jordanians of Palestinian origin are separatists; all, in fact, are integrationists, but are critical of specific disparities in representation especially in government for Palestinian-Jordanians as opposed to East Bank Jordanians. Clearly the debate is surging at present.35 But it is just as clear that there are many who object to the very idea of bringing the topic up at all. Nonetheless, I explain here what the general positions in the debate are, and what public attitudes actually seem to be, even though people who strongly identify with one side of this divide will be likely to reject the alternative representation. The level of simmering tension, however, is real and must be taken seriously, for the sake of Jordanian society and certainly for any hope of an increasingly open and even partially democratic state. A major reason for the heightened level of ethnic tension lies with the Middle East peace process and its later collapse. With the signing of the 1993 Israel-PLO accord and the 1994 Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty, the question of Palestinian citizenship, rights, and loyalties resurfaced within Jordanian politics. With the collapse of the peace process, and the onset of the second intifada beginning in September 2000, these questions became still more intense. We have already seen that Palestinian participation in the kingdom’s electoral process generally tends to be lower than that of Transjordanians. Many Palestinians clearly feel that they are second-class citizens. But this cannot be taken in a strictly material or economic sense, for the communities do not neatly fall into an economic hierarchy that parallels the political hierarchy. Rather, in addition to impoverished Palestinians in refugee camps (which today are usually urban neighborhoods and often slums), the bulk of Jordan’s poorest population can be found especially in the rural Transjordanian communities across southern Jordan. Much of the private-sector economic elite, in contrast, is Palestinian. Much of the public-sector elite, and most top government officials, are Transjordanian. Since the abolition of the national military draft in

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1992, Transjordanian dominance of the armed forces and the security services has only increased. Many Transjordanians, in turn, point to the enormous wealth of many Palestinian business families, and to their lavish villas in neighborhoods like Abdun. They point out that of all the Arab countries, only Jordan extended citizenship to Palestinians. And they note that many of the kingdom’s prominent ministers and politicians are of Palestinian origin. Accordingly, this line of argument tends invariably to arrive at the issue of gratitude, or perhaps more often, ingratitude. Palestinians, including even many who have reached the pinnacle of the kingdom’s economic and political elite, say that they are still daily treated as second-class citizens. They argue that in interactions with bureaucrats, police officers, soldiers, and other officials, they are treated differently and negatively. Family names give much away for anyone in Jordanian society, since the family name usually signals the owner’s ethnicity and religion. Many Palestinians argue that no matter how long they have lived in Jordan, they still feel that they are treated as foreigners—that despite their full citizenship status, they nonetheless do not enjoy full political rights. They feel that they are still seen as temporary residents by many Transjordanians. And indeed, rightwing Transjordanian nationalists agree with them, at least in the sense that these nationalists see Palestinians as essentially foreign, and not as “real” Jordanians. For these nationalists, Jordanian identity is rooted in East Bank heritage, and often in real or imagined bedouin traditional values. For them, Palestinians are indeed temporarily in the kingdom, and are of highly suspect loyalty. The nightmare scenario for such ultranationalist Transjordanians would be a new wave of Palestinian refugees, forced across the Jordan River in the face of an Israeli military offensive. Both successes and failures in the peace process have actually exacerbated some of these domestic tensions. After the 1993 accords, the creation of the Palestinian National Authority and the possibility for a sovereign Palestinian state raised questions in Jordan about which state Palestinians would be loyal to, which state they would live in, and what any of these decisions and scenarios would mean not just for Jordan’s survival as a state, but also for its very identity as a nation and as a people. These views are certainly not shared by all Transjordanians. As one Transjordanian scholar noted regarding stereotypes of both communities, “This is not a country just of Palestinian refugees or Transjordanian bigots. . . . It’s still the freest Arab country. The problem is not the

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people, it’s the elite.”36 Still, these questions of national identity are of broader concern to many Jordanians, and are by no means rooted just in the ultranationalist or chauvinist minority within the Transjordanian community. Other voices of Transjordanian nationalism, for example, can be heard in the form of the very active former prime minister Ahmad Ubaydat or in the writing of one of Jordan’s most well-known newspaper columnists, Fahed al-Fanek. Ubaydat, for example, is a prominent critic of the peace treaty with Israel, and of backsliding in the democratization process, while also being sharply critical of Adnan Abu Awdah’s critique of Jordanian-Palestinian relations within the kingdom.37 Fanek, perhaps Jordan’s most read columnist, has written against the idea of confederation between Jordan and any Palestinian state in future (“not now, not later” in his words) in part because of feared effects on Jordan’s own demographic balance.38 This exact construction of arguments, charges, and countercharges can also be found in other social relations in the kingdom. In particular, these types of arguments for many Jordanians characterize relations between the kingdom’s majority Muslims and its minority Christians, and further between Transjordanians and other ethnic minorities such as Circassians and Chechens. But this is not true for all Jordanians. For many, these debates are old and tired, and simply are not an important part of their lives, or of present-day Jordan. Unfortunately, these debates also form a very real present for other Jordanians. And of course there are many very open-minded Jordanians of all backgrounds who do indeed welcome a more open debate and discussion of these touchy topics, with the goal of moving toward a broader and more pluralist redefinition of Jordanian national identity itself. While discussing this very topic with a Transjordanian from a bedouin family in southern Jordan, I was corrected in my use of the term “second class” in referring to how many Palestinians feel they are treated. “No,” the man said. “Not second class. Fourth class.” Then regarding Jawad Anani’s critique of the lack of ethnic balance at the levers of power in Jordanian politics, this same man, defying many a stereotype, said, “Tell Mr. Anani when you see him that I agree with everything he said.”39 Some prominent Palestinians in the kingdom, especially those who see themselves as thoroughly loyal to the Hashimite state, fear that if nothing is done to address these ethnic grievances, the kingdom can expect capital flight from many wealthy secular Palestinians. Some Palestinian businesspeople support economic adjustment and privatization in part because they see them as eroding the public-sector dominance of Transjordanians, and what they

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view as biases in hiring practices within the public sector. But other Palestinians in Jordan, especially those less well-off, tend to feel the bite of IMF adjustment measures. In opposing these, and in opposing normalization of relations with Israel, they are turning in ever greater numbers to the Islamist movement within the kingdom. As Glenn Robinson notes in his study of Jordan’s liberalization, the Muslim Brotherhood is one of few organizations within Jordan wherein Palestinians can work “without the baggage of Palestinian ethnicity.” He continues: The Muslim Brotherhood has been the only organization in Jordan that Palestinian activists can join and work for a political agenda while at the same time avoiding the label “Palestinian.” Unlike any other Jordanian organization, the Muslim Brotherhood and the IAF have had numerous Palestinians in the upper echelons of leadership, yet these individuals generally have not been known politically in Jordan as Palestinians. They are known primarily as members of the Brotherhood. Non-Islamist Palestinian politicians always carry the “Palestinian” ethnic tag no matter how many governments they serve in, as the case of Tahir al-Masri suggests.40

Masri himself also argued that unless these perceived ethnic imbalances were addressed, more Palestinians would indeed turn to the Islamists and away from more secular politics—an outcome he sees as negative for Jordanians in general.41 These questions are essential not just for the future of Palestinians in the kingdom, but also for Transjordanians themselves. The official line, however, tilts heavily against the debate at all. Throughout his reign, for example, King Hussein emphasized the need for national unity. He underscored the idea that all Jordanian citizens were Jordanians, regardless of origins, and warned against emphasis on two nationalities. For Hussein, as for the Hashimite monarchy today, there remained only one Jordanian “family” and one nationality in the kingdom.42 In terms of legal nationality and citizenship, that is clearly accurate. But it is also clear that many Jordanians are acutely aware of the ethnic divisions, although they differ considerably on what, if anything, should be done about them. On this issue, as on many others, Jordanians are looking to their new leadership. Many Jordanians have emphasized the very positive symbolism embodied in the royal couple: Abdullah as a Hashimite Jordanian king and his wife, Queen Rania, who is of Palestinian origin. Certainly some Palestinian Jordanians are hopeful that this translates to more than symbolism, with a king and queen literally representing a marriage of Transjordanian- and Palestinian-Jordanians. King Abdullah has

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made clear his belief that the major factor to integrate Jordanian society will be the same factor intended to dampen hostility toward normalization of relations with Israel: that is, expanded economic development.43 The broader question for Jordanian politics and society will remain, however, not only one of equality of economic opportunity, but also one of equality of political rights and representation. And the additional question is of course whether increased international investment, privatization, and trade will prove sufficient as economic solutions to social problems. As one former cabinet minister concluded: The question is do we acknowledge that half the population is Palestinian, or do we just shut up especially now when politics are so hot, especially with the second intifadah. But this is an internal Jordanian matter. It’s not foreign policy. It permeates everything in society and every sector. There are lots of packages of reforms—political, economic. But none will work if half the population feels itself marginalized.44

Questions of Gender Equality While the last sentence in the above quote referred to ethnic issues within the kingdom, it might just as easily have referred to gender relations in Jordan or indeed anywhere. And here, as with the other topics covered in this book, I look (for brevity’s sake only) at the public rather than the private sphere. As noted in previous chapters, women of all backgrounds remain underrepresented in government and in public life in general. Despite the vast differences between Jordanian women in terms of social and economic circumstances, the lack of parliamentary representation (one member of parliament out of eighty in the 1993 election; no women members following either the 1989 or 1997 elections) clearly affects all women. While no women were elected to the chamber of deputies in 1997, the 1997–2001 parliament did eventually have one woman member after it elected Nuha Ma‘aytah to fill the seat vacated by the death of Representative Lutfi Barghuti. In terms of cabinet posts, women are not entirely absent, but they remain underrepresented. This is certainly not due to a lack of qualified candidates, since Jordan to its credit has an extensive public education system, with a small gender gap in literacy between men and women, and one of the best educated populations in the entire Arab world. It is precisely because of the education level of Jordan’s workforce that so many Jordanians have been employed as skilled professionals in Gulf

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economies. Most of these migrants, however, are men. But in Jordan, despite their education levels and qualifications, women are more often found as clerical staff and clerks in ministries, offices, banks, and so on—rather than as ministers or directors.45 In terms of government positions, any student of Jordanian politics would be likely to come up with the same list of prominent women in Jordanian politics—in the lower house, the senate, or the cabinet—precisely because the list is so short. For most people, these areas of public service would inevitably bring to mind individuals such as longtime senator Layla Sharaf, or Tujan Faysal based on her single (1993–1997) parliamentary term, or former minister of planning Rima Khalaf. Indeed, among the most prominent women in public life are princesses of the Hashimite royal family. Princess Basma, for example, has played a very prominent role as an advocate of women’s rights in Jordan, as has Queen Noor and now also Queen Rania. Queen Rania, in fact, appears poised to play a more prominent role even than Queen Noor did in Jordanian politics. As King Abdullah has made clear, he considers the ruling “team” to consist of himself, his wife, Queen Rania, and his crown prince and half brother, Hamza. Still, while glass ceilings have been broken in terms of educational opportunities, and despite the efforts of the prominent women noted above (in addition to the efforts of thousands of other less well-known women), women continue to be underrepresented in both houses of parliament, in the cabinet ministries, and in the royal court. While it is clear that women lack empowerment at the key positions in Jordanian public life, it would be misleading to attempt to draw a general picture of the status of all Jordanian women, given the vastly different circumstances of women’s lives in the kingdom. Here the crosscutting variables of social class, ethnicity, religion, urban or rural circumstances, and so on each deeply affect a woman’s status and opportunities (in both the public and private spheres). It is fair to say, however, that the transitions examined here—in terms of political liberalization, economic adjustment, and the peace treaty—each have gendered impacts that can be disproportionately negative for women. As Laurie Brand has suggested in her study of women and liberalization, women are more likely than men to find themselves unemployed through IMF restructuring programs. Also, she suggests, given the unenthusiastic response to the peace treaty on the part of many Jordanians, “the Jordanian leadership is unlikely to propose legislative changes that might create further dissatisfaction among its support base by challenging traditional notions of gender roles and patriarchal control.”46

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This is not to assume that simply the presence of women members of parliament will automatically translate into feminist legislation. Many Jordanian women, for example, are activists in Jordan’s main Islamist party, the Islamic Action Front.47 But with no women represented at all in parliament—whether left or right, secular or religious— there can be little expectation of progressive legislation on gender issues. Greater women’s representation would, therefore, still dramatically change the current political circumstances, and prevent episodes such as a parliament of eighty men debating laws governing the killing of women for “crimes of honor.” The reference here is to family members killing women relatives suspected of adultery or of otherwise offending “family honor.” This often amounts to little more than a woman being the subject of rumors, wherein male family members have then acted to “cleanse” the family’s honor by killing the woman in question. Approximately twenty-five women are reported killed on the basis of honor crimes per year in a country of almost five million. This contentious issue has received media attention globally, with specific exposure within Jordan by such journalists as Rana Husseini of the Jordan Times. The issue has turned not only on the act of violence itself, and its dubious “traditional” roots, but also on its legal status. Article 340 of the Jordanian penal code specifically allows leniency in sentencing for men convicted of murder in cases of honor crimes. While conservative nationalists have claimed that this practice is rooted in bedouin traditions, their erstwhile Islamist opponents are actually on the same side on this issue, arguing that the practice is rooted in Islamic law, or sharia. Despite these more reactionary positions, human rights activists such as attorney Asma Khader have waged a campaign to highlight this violence, and to repeal Article 340. The Hashimite royal family has directly joined this debate, with Queen Noor and later King Hussein condemning the practice. Since then, King Abdullah and Queen Rania have lent their voices to this campaign. Even more directly, Prince Ghazi (King Abdullah’s adviser on bedouin and tribal affairs) and Prince Ali have helped lead protests against Article 340. Most dramatically, in February 2000 they, along with 5,000 other Jordanians, assembled in front of parliament to condemn the practice, and to call for the repeal of Article 340.48 The article has thus been condemned by a large grassroots movement as well as by the palace itself. Article 340 was twice canceled by the Jordanian senate, with the support of the government; but on both occasions the senate move was overturned by the lower house of parliament.49 In the

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struggle for gender equality and social justice in Jordan, the honor crimes issue will clearly continue to be one of paramount concern. And a list of additional such concerns would have to include private- and public-sector employment opportunities, the gendered effects of structural adjustment programs, and continuing struggles for political representation. The 2001 electoral law, however, did not feature the minimum quota of seats for women representatives that many activists had hoped for. Even conservative critics noted that the new, smaller districts might make it still less likely for women to win seats. In a 2001 speech that was representative of the views of many conservative Jordanians regarding women’s rights, former prime minister Abd al-Rauf alRawabdah argued that the smaller districts would enhance tribal voting patterns, “and tribes do not like to be represented by women.” Rawabdah also noted, correctly, that an additional problem is the reluctance of many political parties to field women candidates. The former prime minister dismissed the call for a women’s quota, arguing that quotas were only for minorities and hence not for women. That very argument, however, only serves to underscore the disparity between women’s majority in society and their minimal political representation. Rawabdah suggested further that women needed to be less confrontational, to show more gratitude for what the government had done for them, and only then to push forward with demands for change.50 But regardless of such views, and of the social and political obstacles, women activists immediately began to organize for future parliamentary electoral campaigns. The newly formed Higher Committee to Support Women in Elections (HCSWE), affiliated with the already established Jordanian National Commission for Women (JNCW), organized to encourage women as voters and as candidates. Similarly, other groups, such as the Jordanian Women’s Federation (JWF), led by former deputy Nuha Ma‘aytah, planned also to help educate and train women in preparation for future polls under the new electoral law.51 While organizing in an effort to work within the new legal framework, however, many activists continued to support a future electoral law revision to include the quota for women’s representation.

CONCLUSION This book has examined the series of major transitions in Jordanian politics since roughly 1989, from economic adjustment, to peace with

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Israel, to the royal succession, to the political liberalization process itself. In many respects, political liberalization has the most direct impact on the daily lives of Jordanians. Despite its far-reaching implications for all Jordanians, political liberalization is also the transition that—while achieving much—still has the furthest to go. Yet as I have suggested, the political liberalization process has tended to take a back seat to other transitions, such as economic adjustment and foreign policy change, when and if it ever appears to challenge these key features of the Jordanian political landscape. In an overall assessment of political change in the kingdom, one might see the process as amounting to limited perestroika and even more limited glasnost.52 Economic restructuring has proceeded, but slowly and at times painfully, and this in turn initially led the regime to open the political system as well. But since the early and most extensive period of political liberalization, from 1989 to 1994, the period since has seen basically a stalled process, with regime tolerance for political openness declining when the public opposes the other, linked, government initiatives. The negative signs regarding the overall liberalization process are certainly numerous: public disaffection, low voter turnout, restrictions on the press, weak opposition parties (except for the Islamists), and periodic attempts to stifle civil society. The question is whether the Hashimite regime is pursuing only cosmetic liberalization in order to release the steam of opposition and to please international creditors by holding regular elections—but without allowing real dissent, greater levels of political participation, or the mobilization of a stronger democratic opposition. There are also positive signs, and the process still must be credited with having liberalized political life since 1989. Expectations for full democratization, however, have certainly not been met. In electoral politics, the opposition clearly has a long way to go (especially the secular left), but opposition candidates in Jordan do run for office and sometimes they actually win seats (especially the religious right). A key issue, then, is whether the reluctance of some of the regime’s ruling elite to allow any real depth to the liberalization process will outlast the demands of opposition organizations and the society at large for greater reform. For Jordanian women who are underrepresented, for Palestinians who feel politically excluded, for Christians who sense job discrimination, for poor Transjordanians who feel that they have not benefited from economic reform, and indeed for democracy activists of all backgrounds, much still needs to be done. The core complaints of each of these overlapping sectors of Jordanian society share a common

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theme: the broader question of inclusion in the political and economic life of twenty-first-century Jordan. Hackneyed though the phrase may be, Jordan in the early twentyfirst century does indeed stand at a crossroads. There appear to be at least two paths. The regime could return to its liberalization program and make it more than cosmetic reform, and indeed turn it into genuine democratization. Or it could allow the process to remain stalled or even to regress further from its promising beginnings in 1989. Unfortunately, many of the signs suggest the latter path. But opportunities remain for a different approach—one that takes the initial liberalization process seriously and seeks to deepen it in genuine ways. A start down that road—in effect returning to the spirit of democracy and pluralism (al-dimuqratiyya wa al-ta‘adudiyya), which the regime itself claims to support—would include a more evenhanded revision of the electoral law and a repeal of the various press and media restrictions initiated in the late 1990s. It would also welcome pluralist politics and support the continued emergence of a vibrant civil society and the strengthening of political parties and parliament. While Jordan’s liberalization process has shown signs of backsliding since 1994, it has not retreated to the pre-1989 stage. Despite these problems and the stalling of the liberalization process, Jordanians still have more freedom in everyday life, and more access to information, than was the case before 1989. The key buzzword that should perhaps be added to the lexicon in Jordanian political debates—in addition to the continuing discussions of liberalization, democratization, and transparency—is inclusion. That is, if Jordan is taking this journey, is it taking the entire society along for the ride? This cautionary question underscores the need to move beyond procedural democratization, to ensure that political liberalization increasingly entails social liberalization as well—with inclusion for all Jordanians, regardless of gender, ethnicity, religion, or social class (which is, of course, a challenge facing all political systems). That journey would no doubt prove to be tumultuous, as democratic systems always are. It would also open the regime to far more domestic criticism than it is at present permitting. But it would also be a more genuinely democratic path, and for that reason it is one that will clash with the many conservative and traditionalist elites who continue to dominate much of the regime. But it is also a path that would be more consistent with Jordan’s large reform-oriented constituency and indeed with the reformist agenda that King Abdullah has strongly espoused since his accession to the throne in 1999.

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NOTES 1. This section on Jordan’s foreign policy under Abdullah draws in part on Curtis R. Ryan, “Jordan’s Changing Relations,” Middle East Insight 15, no. 6 (November–December 2000): 83–87. 2. The G7 are Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. 3. Barbara Nimri Aziz, “Iraq and Jordan: A Partnership Restored,” Middle East International, May 2, 1997, pp. 18–19. 4. Curtis R. Ryan, “Between Iraq and a Hard Place: Jordanian-Iraqi Relations,” Middle East Report 215 (2000): 40–42. 5. Jordan Times, September 9, 1998, and October 13, 1998. 6. Jawad al-Anani and Rima Khalaf, “Privatization in Jordan,” in Said alNaggar, ed., Privatization and Structural Adjustment in the Arab Countries (Washington, D.C.: International Monetary Fund, 1989), pp. 210–225. 7. Middle East Economic Digest, August 18, 2000, p. 4. 8. In effect, Jordan is pursuing a state-capitalist model of development that continues some neomercantilist policies while also speaking increasingly in neoliberal terms. See Timothy J. Piro, The Political Economy of Market Reform in Jordan (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), p. 90. 9. Thus Jordan can be seen as having a market-based economy overseen by a “mercantile state.” See Osama J. A. R. Abu Shair, Privatization and Development (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), pp. 136–137. 10. Ibid., p. 203. 11. Ibid., p. 128. 12. Author interview, Amman, July 2001. 13. Jeffrey Goldberg, “Learning How to Be King,” New York Times Magazine, February 6, 2000. 14. Author interviews, Amman, July 2001. 15. “Reform or Deterioration?” Jordan Times, July 31, 1999. 16. See the discussion of the media and political liberalization in George Hawatmeh, ed., The Role of the Media in a Democracy: The Case of Jordan (Amman: Center for Strategic Studies, 1995). 17. Author interviews with Jordanian journalists, Amman, July 1999 and July 2001. 18. Al-Ra’y, August 21, 1998. 19. The Star (Amman), September 8, 1998. 20. Sa’eda Kilani, Black Year of Democracy in Jordan: The 1998 Press and Publications Law (Copenhagen: Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network, 1998). 21. Author interviews, Amman, July 2001. 22. Some regime elites argue that the process actually began much earlier, citing the 1984 recall of parliament (and elections for some of the vacant seats) or still earlier in 1977 with the creation of a consultative council. But the council was utterly powerless, as was parliament after 1984. This is not to say that the parliaments of 1989–2001 have been powerhouses themselves. But they do have the distinction of being based entirely on votes of the public, with opposition figures having the right to genuinely participate. The key departure point for modern political liberalization began in the late spring of 1989, in the immediate aftermath of the IMF riots.

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23. A similar distinction between liberalization and democratization is drawn in Rex Brynen, Bahgat Korany, and Paul Noble, eds., Political Liberalization and Democratization in the Arab World, vol. 1, Theoretical Perspectives (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1995). 24. In some respects this is a mirror image of developments in the United States, particularly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Just as organizations within Jordan came under scrutiny (especially from Islamist opponents) for having extensive Western or global links, organizations within the United States were coming under scrutiny for having Middle Eastern or Islamist links. 25. Quintan Wiktorowicz, “Civil Society as Social Control: State Power in Jordan,” Comparative Politics 33, no. 1 (2000): 43–61. 26. See, for example, Jillian Schwedler, ed., Toward Civil Society in the Middle East? A Primer (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1995). 27. Author interview, Amman, July 2001. 28. Author interviews with opposition party and association officials, Amman, July 1999 and July 2001. 29. Al-Ra’y, July 24, 2001; and Al-Dustur, July 24, 2001. 30. For discussions of the new law, see Alia Shukri Hamzeh and Francesca Sawalha, “Analysts: New Elections Law Simplifies Polling Procedures, but Fails to Rectify Inequalities,” Jordan Times, July 24, 2001; “Our Say . . . Election Blues,” The Star (Amman), July 21, 2001; and Lola Keilani, “New Law Unleashes Discontent,” Al-Ahram Weekly Online, July 26–August 1, 2001. 31. Al-Ra’y, July 25, 2001. 32. For a theoretically and empirically rich study of the creation of national identity in Jordan, see Joseph A. Massad, Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). 33. Adnan Abu Odeh, Jordanians, Palestinians, and the Hashemite Kingdom in the Middle East Peace Process (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace, 1999). 34. Jawad al-Anani, “Al-Urdun al-Muhasir” [Jordan Blocked], Al-Bayan, July 27, 2001. 35. A detailed and thorough discussion of the public sphere debates within Jordan over ethnicity, identity, and democracy can be found in Marc Lynch, State Interests and Public Spheres: The International Politics of Jordan’s Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 36. Author interview, Amman, July 2001. 37. Ubaydat, former prime minister and former director of the Mukhabarat, had in the 1990s become an active proponent of increasing democratization in the kingdom. But as an ardent nationalist, he has also criticized the renewed Palestinian-Transjordanian debates as “sectarianism parading under the banner of equal rights.” Jordan Times, February 17, 2000. 38. In a piece on this topic for the Jordan Times, Fanek concluded that “Jordanians strongly support the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. They are against mixing the cards, which will only serve Israeli ambitions to swallow the territories while getting rid of their population. Confederation may be sold as unity between two Arab peoples, but it is in fact an Israeli project to solve Israel’s demographic dilemma at the expense of Jordan.” Fahed al-Fanek, “Confederation: Not Now, Not Later,” Jordan Times, March 31, 1999. Fanek is even more widely read in his regular columns in the Arabic daily newspaper Al-Ra’y. 39. Author interview, Amman, July 2001.

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40. Glenn E. Robinson, “Defensive Democratization in Jordan,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 30, no. 3 (1998): 400. 41. Author interview with Tahir al-Masri, Amman, July 14, 2001. 42. Ben Wedeman, “Jordan’s ‘Siamese Twins’ Agonize over National Identity: Prospects for a Palestinian Entity Renew Old Debate,” Middle East Insight 10, no. 3 (1994): 35–40. 43. See, for example, the discussions in The Economist, July 8, 2000, and in Middle East Economic Digest, August 18, 2000. 44. Author interview, Amman, July 2000. 45. On women in Jordanian politics, see Laurie A. Brand, Women, the State, and Political Liberalization: Middle Eastern and North African Experiences (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Laurie A. Brand, “Women and the State in Jordan: Inclusion or Exclusion?” in Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and John L. Esposito, eds., Islam, Gender, and Social Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 100–123; and Abla M. Amawi, “Gender and Citizenship in Jordan,” in Suad Joseph, ed., Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), pp. 158–184. 46. Brand, “Women and the State in Jordan,” p. 120. 47. Janine Astrid Clark and Jillian Schwedler, “Who Opened the Window? Women’s Activism Within Islamist Parties,” Comparative Politics (forthcoming 2003). 48. Rana Husseini, “Princes Ali, Ghazi Lead Protesters Calling for Abolition of Article 340 of the Penal Code,” Jordan Times, February 17, 2000. 49. In the first instance, in November 1999, the lower house voted 79–1 to defeat the measure calling for the cancellation of Article 340 of the penal code. Shortly thereafter, in January 2000, the measure was approved again by the senate, and again sent back to the lower house of parliament, which this time called for a mere show of hands without counting the actual votes, given the presumed majority in favor of retaining Article 340. Jordan Times, January 27, 2001. 50. Rana Husseini, “Women Not Likely to Win in Upcoming Parliamentary Elections, Says Premier,” Jordan Times, August 24, 2001. 51. Rana Husseini, “Women Form Alliance to Increase Political Representation,” Jordan Times, August 27, 2001. 52. These terms are of course most strongly associated with Mikhail Gorbachev and the political and economic transitions from the Soviet Union to the modern Russian republic. Perestroika refers to economic restructuring, while glasnost refers to the political opening of the system.

Bibliography

INTERVIEWS Most interviews were kept anonymous at the interviewees’ own request; these are documented in the endnotes with reference to the person’s general position (e.g., policymaker, journalist, democracy activist). Open interviews are listed below. Most were conducted in Amman, Jordan, during fieldwork in 1992–1993, 1997, 1999, and 2001. Abu Awdah, Adnan. Former senator, political adviser in the royal court, and Jordanian representative to the United Nations. February 29, 1993. Abu Jaber, Kamel. Former foreign minister and current president of Jordan’s Institute for Diplomacy. July 13, 2001. Anani, Jawad al-. Former senator, deputy prime minister, and minister for planning and for supply. April 10, 1993, and July 13, 2001. Arabiyyat, Abd al-Latif. Former speaker of the house of deputies and leader of the Islamic Action Front. February 25, 1993. Badran, Mudar. Current senator and former prime minister. March 31, 1993. Hamarneh, Mustafa. Director of the Center for Strategic Studies, University of Jordan. Numerous conversations in 1992–1993, 1997, 1999, and 2001. Hassanat, Abdullah. Former editor of the Jordan Times. Numerous conversations in 1992–1993, 1997, and 1999. Hindawi, Asim al-. Official at the Ministry of Industry and Trade. April 3, 1993, and April 12, 1993. Khatib, Abd-al Illah al-. Former foreign minister of Jordan, and former director of the special office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. April 7, 1993. Kilani, Sa’ida. Codirector of the Arab Archives Institute. July 12, 2001. Lawzi, Ahmad al-. Former prime minister and speaker of the senate. March 11, 1993. Masri, Tahir al-. Former prime minister, foreign minister, and speaker of the chamber of deputies. March 2, 1993, and July 14, 2001. Qasim, Marwan al-. Former chief of the royal court and foreign minister. April 6, 1993.

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Qudah, Iyad. Official at the Ministry of Planning. April 12, 1993. Rifa‘i, Zayd al-. Former prime minister and current speaker of the senate. March 29, 1993. Safadi, Ayman. Former journalist for the Jordan Times, press officer for Crown Prince Hasan, and current press officer for King Abdullah II. Numerous conversations in 1992–1993, 1997, and 1999. Ubaydat, Ahmad. Former prime minister and senator. April 15, 1993. Zu‘aby, Salih. Former secretary-general of parliament. March 4, 1993.

BOOKS AND ARTICLES Abdalat, Marwan Ahmad Sulayman al-. Kharita al-Ahzab al-Siyasiyya alUrduniyya [Map of Jordanian Political Parties]. Amman: Dar al-’Ubra, 1992. Abu Jaber, Kamel S. “Jordan and the Gulf War.” In Tareq Y. Ismael and Jacqueline S. Ismael, eds., The Gulf War and the New World Order. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1994, pp. 366–382. Abu Jaber, Kamel S., Matthes Buhbe, and Mohammad Smadi, eds. Income Distribution in Jordan. Boulder: Westview Press, 1990. Abu Jaber, Kamel S., and Schirin H. Fathi. “The 1989 Jordanian Parliamentary Elections.” Orient 31, no. 1 (1990): 67–86. Abu Jaber, Raouf S. Pioneers over Jordan: The Frontiers of Settlement in Transjordan, 1860–1914. London: I. B. Tauris, 1989. Abu Khusa, Ahmad. Al-Dimuqratiyya wa al-Ahzab al-Siyasiyya al-Urduniyya [Democracy and Jordanian Political Parties]. Amman: Middle East Publishing Company, 1991. Abu Odeh, Adnan. Jordanians, Palestinians, and the Hashemite Kingdom in the Middle East Peace Process. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace, 1999. Abu Ruman, Husayn, ed. Aqd Min al-Dimuqratiyya fi al-Urdun [A Decade of Democracy in Jordan (1989–1999)]. Amman: Markaz al-Urdun al-Jadid li alDirasat, 2001. Abu Shair, Osama J. A. R. Privatization and Development. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Amawi, Abla M. “Gender and Citizenship in Jordan.” In Suad Joseph, ed., Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000, pp. 158–184. ———. “The 1993 Elections in Jordan.” Arab Studies Quarterly 16, no. 3 (summer 1994): 15–27. Anani, Jawad al-. “Adjustment and Development: The Case of Jordan.” In Said alNaggar, ed., Adjustment Policies and Development Strategies in the Arab World. Washington, D.C.: International Monetary Fund, 1987, pp. 124–148. ———. “Falsafa al-Iqtisad al-Urduni bayn al-Fikr wa al-Tatbiq Khilal Nisf al-Qarn al-Maadi” [Jordanian Economic Philosophy Between Thought and Application During the Last Half Century]. In Mustafa Hamarneh, ed., Al-Iqtisad alUrduni: Al-Mushkilat wa al-Ifaq. Amman: Center for Strategic Studies, 1994, pp. 92–96. Anani, Jawad al-, and Rima Khalaf. “Privatization in Jordan.” In Said al-Naggar, ed., Privatization and Structural Adjustment in the Arab Countries. Washington, D.C.: International Monetary Fund, 1989, pp. 210–225.

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Anderson, Lisa. “Absolutism and the Resilience of Monarchy in the Middle East.” Political Science Quarterly 106, no. 1 (1991): 1–15. Andoni, Lamis, and Jillian Schwedler. “Bread Riots in Jordan.” Middle East Report 201 (October–December 1996): 40–42. Antoun, Richard T. Arab Village: A Social and Structural Study of a Transjordan Peasant Community. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972. Arabuti, Khalid Ibrahim al-. Fikr al-Husayn fi al-Mizan [Hussein’s Thought in the Balance]. Amman, 1992. Astorino-Courtois, Allison. “Transforming International Agreements into National Realities: Marketing Arab-Israeli Peace in Jordan.” Journal of Politics 58, no. 4 (1996): 1035–1054. Bailey, Clinton. Jordan’s Palestinian Challenge, 1948–1983: A Political History. Boulder: Westview Press, 1984. Baram, Amatzia. “Baathi Iraq and Hashemite Jordan: From Hostility to Alignment.” Middle East Journal 45, no. 1 (1991): 51–70. Barnett, Michael N. Dialogues in Arab Politics: Negotiations in Regional Order. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Barnett, Michael N., and Jack S. Levy. “Domestic Sources of Alliances and Alignments: The Case of Egypt, 1962–73.” International Organization 45, no. 3 (1991): 369–392. Beblawi, Hazem, and Giacomo Luciani, eds. The Rentier State. London: Croom Helm, 1987. Bennis, Phyllis, and Michel Moushabeck, eds. Beyond the Storm: A Gulf Crisis Reader. Edinburgh: Cannongate, 1992. Bienen, Henry S., and Mark Gersovitz. “Economic Stabilization, Conditionality, and Political Stability.” International Organization 39, no. 4 (1985): 729–754. Boulby, Marion. The Muslim Brotherhood and the Kings of Jordan, 1945–1993. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1999. Braizat, Musa. Jordan’s Diplomacy: Balancing National Survival with Nation’s Renewal. Amman: Center for Strategic Studies, 1995. Brand, Laurie A. “Economic and Political Liberalization in a Rentier Economy: The Case of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.” In Iliya Harik and Denis J. Sullivan, eds., Privatization and Liberalization in the Middle East. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992, pp. 167–188. ———. “The Effects of the Peace Process on Political Liberalization in Jordan.” Journal of Palestine Studies 28, no. 2 (1999): 52–67. ———. “‘In the Beginning was the State . . .’: The Quest for Civil Society in Jordan.” In Augustus Richard Norton, ed., Civil Society in the Middle East, vol. 1. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995, pp. 148–185. ———. Jordan’s Inter-Arab Relations: The Political Economy of Alliance Making. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. ———. “Liberalization and Changing Political Coalitions: The Bases of Jordan’s 1990–91 Gulf Crisis Policy.” Jerusalem Journal of International Relations 13, no. 4 (1991): 1–46. ———. “Palestinians and Jordanians: A Crisis of Identity.” Journal of Palestine Studies 24, no. 4 (1995): 46–62. ———. Palestinians in the Arab World: Institution Building and the Search for a State. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. ———. “Women and the State in Jordan: Inclusion or Exclusion?” In Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and John L. Esposito, eds., Islam, Gender, and Social Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 100–123.

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Index

Abdullah II (King), 67, 73, 82, 93, 95, 97, 98, 104, 106n8; accession of, 2, 3, 4, 87–105; appointments to posts by, 117; commitment to liberalization, 111; international support for, 111; policy views of, 111; privatization efforts, 116; reestablishment of relations with Gulf States, 112 Abdullah I (King), 6, 80, 89, 115; assassination of, 7 Abu Awdah, Adnan, 126, 129 Abu Shair, Osama, 116 Afghanistan, 114 Agriculture, 48–49; imports and, 49 Akaylah, Abdullah, 24, 25 Algeria, 19 Ali (Prince), 95, 133 Alia (Queen), 95 Alliances, 83, 114; economic motivations for, 3; regional, 74; with Turkey, 73; with United Kingdom, 12; with United States, 12 Al-Anani, Jawad, 126, 127, 129 Al-Aqsa Mosque, 8 Al-‘Arab al-Yawm (newspaper), 103, 121 Arab Cooperation Council (ACC), 53, 74 Arab-Israeli conflict, 6 Arab-Israeli War (1967), 8, 111

Arabiyyat, Abd-al Latif, 24 Arab League, 71, 80; Baghdad Summit (1978), 51, 80 Arab Legion, 7 Arar, Sulayman, 43n20 Al-Armuti, Mazen, 33 Article 340, 133 Al-Asad, Bishar, 113 Al-Asad, Hafiz, 1, 93, 113 Al-Aziz, Fahd Ibn Abd (King of Saudi Arabia), 93 Badran, Mudar, 22, 23, 24, 25, 29 Baghdad Summit (1978), 51, 80 Balance of payments, 50, 57 Barghuti, Lutfi, 131 Barzani, Mas‘ud, 72 Basma (Princess), 132 Ba‘thism, 8, 59, 80 Bin Laden, Osama, 114 Black September, 9 Blair, Tony, 1 Brand, Laurie, 132 Camp David Accords (1978), 788 Center for Strategic Studies, 103, 123 Church of the Holy Sepulchre, 8 Civil society, 4; development of, 19; emergence of, 69; expansion of, 2; as form of social control, 19; institutions of, 19, 38; open debate and, 17–18; organizational pluralism

151

152

INDEX

and, 19; participation and, 17; press freedoms and, 119–126; voluntary organizations and, 17; weakness of, 6 Clinton, Bill, 1, 72 Cold War, 6, 80 Communism, 6, 8, 80 Corruption, 23, 29, 53 Cronyism, 23, 53 Currency devaluation, 52 Darwish, Adel, 94 Debt, national, 15, 51, 57; increases in, 51; renegotiation of, 52; rescheduling, 52, 83; restructuring, 114; service, 51, 52; writeoffs, 83 Deliberalization, 19 Democratic Bloc, 23 Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), 43n18 Democratic Popular Unity Party, 60 Democratization, 1, 15, 16, 17, 77; defensive nature of, 42n5; formal/informal aspects of, 17, 20; lifting of martial law and, 26; nongovernmental aspects, 17; parliamentary aspect, 21; prioritization of, 3; pursuit of, 122; status of, 41; third wave, 18–20 Diwan. See Royal Hashimite Court Dome of the Rock, 8 Al-Dustur (newspaper), 31, 103 Dynasticism, 88 East Jerusalem, 7, 8, 10, 21 Economic: adjustment, 1, 3, 12, 33, 47–63; austerity, 2, 12, 15, 53, 57, 61, 90, 91; changes, 56; constraints, 42n5, 52; crises, 2, 3, 52; interdependence, 78; mismanagement, 53; norms, 47; policy, 59; privation, 57; recession, 115; reform, 56, 91; restructuring, 1, 2, 45n47; stabilization, 3, 11 Economy: domestic, 6, 16; Jordanian, 48–51; political, 2, 9, 16, 50, 85n16; regional, 6, 16, 50; vulnerability of, 49 Education: levels of, 49

Egypt, 49; in Arab Cooperation Council, 53; deliberalization in, 19; in Gulf War, 70; Israeli relations with, 8; peace with Israel, 10; relations with, 53 Elections, municipal, 90, 98–102, 119 Elections, national, 2; boycotts of, 30–34, 37–40, 91; changing nature of electoral system and, 39; exploitation of electoral system, 27; irregularities in, 33; new electoral law and, 26–30; regularity of, 40; suspension of, 21; voter cards for, 33, 125; voter turnout, 26, 39, 40, 100, 101 Elections, national (1989), 16, 20–26, 90 Elections, national (1993), 16, 26–30, 90 Elections, national (1997), 16, 17, 30–34, 37–40, 99 Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network, 123 European Free Trade Association, 117 European Union, 83, 112, 114, 117 Al-Fanek, Fahed, 128 Farhan, Ishaq, 33 Al-Faysal, Tujan, 22, 34, 44n26, 45n38, 102, 132 Faysal II (King of Iraq), 8 Foreign aid, 6, 16, 48 Foreign policy, 1, 67–84; adjustments to, 52; conservative, 67, 80; decisionmaking in, 67–70; public opinion and, 68, 70; transformation of, 2; transitions in, 70–79 France: historical role in Jordan, 4 Futaymat, Imam, 101 Future Party, 32 Gardiner, Toni, 95 Gaza Strip, 52 Gender: equality, 131–136; feminization of poverty and, 104; honor killings and, 104, 133, 134; relations, 19; segregation, 25 General Intelligence Directorate (GID), 22, 29, 69, 103, 105, 121, 123 Ghazi (Prince), 133

INDEX

Globalization, 2, 84 Golan Heights, 8 Government: antagonism with opposition, 29; appointees to, 20; attempts to improve image, 33; budget tightening, 58; cabinet memberships, 24, 25; criticism of, 45n47; elections and, 20–42; executive branch, 20, 25; hostility toward, 57; legislative branch, 20–42, 69; Muslim Brotherhood in, 24–25; patronage in, 116; personal confidantes and, 68; power vested in king, 68; press oversight by, 23; reduction of oversights in politics, 26; response to political upheaval, 58–61; spending, 58, 115; targeting of Ba‘th Party, 59–60 Gramsci, Antonio, 19 Great Arab Revolt, 5 Gulf Cooperation Council, 11, 70, 71, 74, 113, 115 Gulf states, 70; aid from, 53; expulsion of Jordanians during Gulf War, 24, 71; in Gulf War, 75; Jordanian workers in, 50–51; renewal of relations with, 77, 114; as rentier regimes, 88 Gulf War (1990), 23, 24, 70, 71, 74–76, 80, 111 Haddadin, Khalil, 34, 60 Halaby, Liza. See Noor Hamarneh, Mustafa, 103, 104 Hamas, 121 Hamza (Prince), 95, 97, 132 Hasan (Prince), 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 106n8, 106n10 Hashd, 60 Hashemite monarchy; change in line of succession, 87, 93–98; establishment of, 5; modern roots of, 4; preservation of, 80; succession in, 1, 2, 87–105; survival of, 2, 3, 48, 89, 116; vulnerability of, 76 Hawatmeh, George, 121 Herb, Michael, 88, 89 Higher Committee to Support Women in Elections, 134

153

Hizb al-Dusturi al-Watani. See National Constitutional Party Honor killings, 104, 133, 134 House of Hashim, 5 House of Notables, 20 House of Representatives, 20; election of speaker, 20, 43n20; ethnic/religious representation on, 21; membership, 21; minority constituencies in, 21, 27 Hroub, Riyad, 121 Human Rights Watch, 32, 121 Husseini, Rana, 133 Hussein Ibn Talal (King), 67; accession of, 7; access to, 68; assassination attempts against, 96; death of, 1, 3; domestic popularity of, 71, 81; as embodiment of Jordan, 111; foreign policy and, 68; funeral, 113; as “great survivor,” 1, 7; Gulf War and, 24, 81; illness of, 81, 90–98; political legitimacy of, 59; power vested in, 68; public support for, 92; response to political upheaval, 58–61; role in foreign policymaking, 79–82; support for economic reform, 56 IAF. See Islamic Action Front Ibn Shakir, Sharif Zayd, 23, 29 Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun. See Muslim Brotherhood Income: external sources, 16, 50; remittance, 16, 49, 50, 51 Inflation, 15 Institutions: civil society, 19, 38; domestic, 67; economic, 114; electoral, 29; financial, 47; foreign policy, 68; military, 88 International Monetary Fund, 2, 12, 15, 29, 47, 52, 53, 54, 61, 76–77, 83, 90, 91, 115; austerity programs and, 48; pejorative image of, 47; structural adjustment and, 47 Intifada, 10, 12, 52, 57, 112 Investment: foreign, 58, 114, 116; increased, 58 Iran, 19; relations with, 11; revolutionary regime in, 11, 51, 80; war with Iraq, 11, 51, 80

154

INDEX

Iraq: in Arab Cooperation Council, 53; Arab opposition to, 70; British mandate for, 4; economic interdependence with, 788; embargo on, 112; establishment of, 5; invasion of Kuwait by, 12, 23, 70, 73–74; military coup in, 8; overthrow of monarchy in, 5, 8; relations with, 2, 11, 51, 75, 86n31, 112, 114; war with Iran, 11, 51, 80 Islamic: fundamentalism, 11; law, 23; movements, 23 Islamic Action Front (IAF), 27, 30, 33, 37, 37tab, 41, 55, 56, 60–61, 91, 99, 100, 113, 133; splintering of, 28 Israel: Egyptian relations with, 8; intifada against, 10; occupations by, 52; opposition to accommodation with, 3; Oslo Accords and, 28, 71; Palestine Liberation Organization relations with, 28; peace treaty with Jordan, 2, 3, 28, 31, 33, 62, 70, 72, 76; Syrian relations with, 8 Jabha al-‘Amal al-Islami. See Islamic Action Front Jordan: Arab states’ aid to, 51; artificial boundaries of, 4, 6; attempted coups in, 8; dealignment with Iraq, 54, 62, 70, 72; defense alliance with Turkey, 73; deliberalization in, 19, 30, 38; democratization in, 1, 15, 77; dependence on foreign aid, 6, 16, 48, 50, 80; disconnection between state and society in, 41, 63; domestic politics in, 76–79; economic adjustment in, 47–63; economic crises in, 2, 3, 15, 52; economic liberalization in, 1, 47–53, 115–118; economic vulnerability of, 50; economy in, 48–51; Egyptian relations with, 53; emergence as modern state, 4–11; establishment of, 5; ethnic tension in, 126–131; in European Free Trade Association, 117; European Union and, 83, 112, 114, 117; foreign investment in, 58, 116; foreign ministry in, 68; foreign policy in, 1, 2, 52, 67–84, 110–114; free economic zones in, 114, 119;

free trade agreements and, 83; geopolitical importance of, 1, 5–6, 7, 71; Gulf monarchies relations with, 12; during Gulf War, 23, 24, 70–71, 73–76, 80; independence from Britain, 5; International Monetary Fund and, 47, 48, 52, 53, 54, 61, 76–77, 83, 91, 115; international politics and, 73–76; international recriminations for, 24; international relations and, 110–114; Internet access in, 117; invasion by Syria, 9; Iranian relations with, 11; Iraqi relations with, 2, 11, 51, 70, 75, 86n31, 112, 114; isolated position of, 75; as Non-NATO ally, 73; oil imports, 50; Palestinian population in, 9, 28, 49, 126–131; peace treaty with Israel, 2, 3, 28, 31, 33, 62, 70, 72, 76; political liberalization in, 1, 15–42; political stability in, 47–63; political unrest in, 12; realignment of international position by, 62; refugees in, 9; renewal of relations with United States, 72–73, 77; renunciation of claims to West Bank, 10, 52, 72; riots in, 48, 53, 57, 58, 90; as semi-rentier state, 16, 50, 88, 89; structural adjustment programs, 83; survival of, 3; Syrian relations with, 73, 113; ties to Britain, 6; Transjordanian population in, 28, 49, 126–131; Turkish relations with, 67, 83, 112, 114; United Nations peacekeeping participation, 82, 83–84; U.S. relations with, 6, 31, 67, 112; vulnerability of, 7, 10, 76, 77, 82. See also Hashemite monarchy Jordanian Arab Socialist Ba‘th Party, 34, 59, 60 Jordanian National Commission for Women, 134 Jordanian Women’s Federation, 134 Jordan National Committee for Women, 102 Jordan Press Association, 120 Jordan Times (newspaper), 32, 103, 104, 119, 121, 133

INDEX

Al-Kabariti, Abd al-Karim, 29, 55, 56, 59, 61, 65n21, 117, 120 Kamrava, Mehran, 18 Khader, Asma, 133 Khalaf, Rima, 132 Khazraji, Nazar, 72 Khomeini (Ayatollah), 11, 80, 86n32 Khouri, Rami, 92 Kilani, Faruq, 120 Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), 72 Kuwait: invasion by Iraq, 12, 23, 70, 73–74 Labor: foreign, 49; import/export, 49, 58; markets, 49; remittances, 16, 49, 50, 51; skilled, 49 Law: electoral, 26–30, 33, 40, 91, 100, 124; financial, 121; Islamic, 23; martial, 10, 16, 26; political party, 60; temporary, 30 Al-Lawzi, Ahmad, 17 League of Nations, 4 Lebanon, 10, 19 Le Jour (newspaper), 104 Liberalization, economic, 1, 47–63, 115–118; as defensive strategy, 47–63; privatization and, 49; public sector and, 49 Liberalization, political, 1, 15–42; from above, 18; backsliding in, 40, 41; challenges to, 3, 118–134; changes in political space from, 19; civil society and, 2; constraints to, 3; as cosmetic, 98; as defensive strategy, 2, 15–16; economic constraints on, 42n5; electoral process and, 17; illness of Hussein and, 90–98; legalization of political parties and, 16, 29; lifting of martial law and, 10, 16, 26; limitations of, 26; motivations for, 18; pace of, 91; results of, 23; as safety valve, 18; shifts toward, 18; success of, 98 Libya, 111 Ma‘aytah, Nuha, 131, 134 Madrid Peace Conference (1991), 25, 71, 75 Al-Majali, Abd al-Hadi, 34, 102 Al-Majali, Abd al-Salam, 29, 61, 120

155

Majlis al‘Ayyan, 20 Majlis al-Nu’ab, 20 Majlis al-Ta‘awun al-‘Arabi. See Arab Cooperation Council Manufacturing, 49 Marx, Karl, 19 Al-Mash‘al, Khalid, 121 Al-Masri, Tahir, 25, 28, 32, 41, 127, 130 Media: conservative, 31; criticism from, 38, 62; financial rules for, 32, 121; freedoms for, 119–126; government oversight, 23; Internet access, 105, 117; intimidation of, 103; investigative journalism by, 32; loosening of restrictions on, 2, 16, 26; national security and, 62; newspaper closings, 32; proliferation of, 69; restrictions on, 30, 31, 38, 91, 103, 104, 120; satellite television, 104–105; selfcensorship in, 31 Middle East: democratization in, 18–20; European imperial policy in, 4, 5; modern roots of monarchies in, 4; peace process in, 6 Military: alliance with Turkey, 73; development, 10; royal patronage of, 89; special forces, 97; Yarmuk Brigade, 86n31 Al-Mithaq al-Watani. See National Charter Morocco, 19, 89 Muhammad, 6 Mukhabarat. See General Intelligence Directorate Muslim Brotherhood, 16, 21, 37, 37tab, 130; cabinet positions for, 23; in elections, 22, 43n17; electoral organization, 27; exploitation of electoral system by, 27; Islamic Action Front and, 27, 33, 41, 55, 56, 60–61, 91, 99, 100, 113, 133; as loyal opposition, 21; parliamentary positions for, 24 Al-Najdawi, Ahmad, 60 Nasserism, 8, 80 National Charter, 24, 69 National Constitutional Party, 34, 102

156

INDEX

Nationalism: Islamic, 57, 80; Palestinian, 9, 57; pan-Arab, 8, 22, 23, 28, 29, 60, 80; Transjordanian, 9, 25, 32 Neorealism, 85n16 Nepotism, 124 Netanyahu, Benjamin, 82 New Jordan Research Center, 123 New world order, 2 Nongovernmental organizations, 19, 122 Noor (Queen), 95, 96, 97, 132, 133 October War (1973), 10, 111 Oil: Gulf state imports, 50; from Iraq, 75; shock of 1973, 50; shock of 1979, 51 Oman, 89 Opposition: boycotts, 30–34, 37–40, 91; democratic, 30; discomfort with relations with United States, 31; domestic, 3, 8; government accession to, 32–33; government terms for, 24; loyal, 16, 21, 24; of Muslim Brotherhood, 21; organizations, 72; parliamentary, 30; political, 22, 113; return of, 104; toleration for, 24 Oslo Accords (1993), 28, 71, 72, 76, 78, 112 Ottoman Empire, 5 Palestine: British mandate for, 4; conflicts with Israel, 6; partition of, 6 Palestine Liberation Organization, 9, 72; expulsion from Jordan, 9, 10; Israeli relations with, 28; Oslo Accords and, 28, 71; Syrian support for, 9 Palestinian National Authority, 128 Palestinians: anger over peace treaty with Israel, 28, 29; citizenship for, 9–10, 128; intifada and, 10 Pan-Arabism, 6, 8, 22, 23, 25, 28, 29, 60, 80 Paris Club, 83 Parliament: bicameral, 20; boycotts of, 56; dissolution of, 61; in foreign policy, 69; ideological diversity in,

37; Islamic power in, 24, 25; Islamist-led opposition in, 65n21; political trends in, 37tab; suspension of, 69; women in, 22, 34, 44n26. See also House of Representatives; Senate Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), 72 People’s Democratic Party, 60 Peres, Shimon, 82 Phosphates, 49 Piro, Timothy, 115 Pluralism, 6, 17, 24, 29, 69; organizational, 19 Policy: advisers, 68; economic, 15, 59; formulation, 70; neoliberal, 47; state, 91 Political: change, 25, 50; constraints, 18; crises, 15; decisionmaking, 88; development, 5; economy, 2, 9, 16, 50, 85n16; legitimacy, 59; mismanagement, 53; movements, 27; opposition, 22, 113; participation, 17, 24, 99; pluralism, 69; prisoners, 23; reform, 90; rights, 30, 118; stability, 47–63, 78; unrest, 52–53; violence, 48 Political parties/candidates, 2, 17, 19; banning of, 21, 22; centrist, 22; clan-affiliated, 34, 38–39, 99, 100; conservative, 22, 25, 34, 37tab, 38; Democratic Popular Unity Party, 60; in elections of 1997, 36–36tab; Future Party, 32; Hashd, 60; independent, 28; Islamist, 22, 24, 25, 27, 28, 32, 34, 37tab, 90, 91; Jordanian Arab Socialist Ba‘th Party, 34; legalization of, 26, 29, 40, 69; limited organization of, 99; National Constitutional Party, 34, 102; pan-Arab, 22, 25, 37tab; People’s Democratic Party, 60; Progressive Arab Ba‘th Party, 60; religious right, 22, 28, 34, 99; removal of ban on, 26; secular leftist, 22, 28, 30, 32, 34, 37tab, 99; unclear platforms of, 99; underground activity, 26; weakness of, 41

INDEX

Politics: Arab, 8; domestic, 1, 3, 11, 76–79, 119; elite bargaining and, 16, 19; international, 73–76; pluralist, 8; radical, 8; regional, 111 Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), 43n18 Potash, 49 Poverty, 45n47; feminization of, 104 Prices: dairy, 56; increases in, 57–58; rises in, 53, 54; wheat, 54 Private sector, 115; domination by Transjordanian population, 9 Privatization, 49, 115; patronage and, 116 Progressive Arab Ba‘th Party, 60 Public sector, 115; bias in hiring, 130; decrease in employment in, 58; domination by Palestinian population, 9; employment in, 116; establishment of, 6; inefficiency in, 49; salaries in, 58; state-owned enterprises in, 49 Al-Qaida organization, 114 Rabin, Yitzhak, 82 Al-Raghib, Ali Abu, 104, 117 Ramadan War (1973), 10, 111 Rania (Queen), 130, 132, 133 Rashid (Prince), 95 Ration cards, 55 Al-Rawabdah, Abd al-Rauf, 99, 104, 117 Al-Ra’y (newspaper), 31, 103, 119 Refugees, 9, 56, 127 Resources: human, 49; limited, 49; mineral, 49 Al-Rifa‘i, Zayd, 29, 52, 53, 59, 86n32, 121 Rights: human, 32, 121, 133; political, 30, 118 Robinson, Glenn, 130 Royal Hashimite Court, 23, 68, 117, 126 Royal Jordanian Airlines, 49, 115 Sadat, Anwar, 51 Saddam Hussein, 59, 62, 67, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 77, 85n26 Saudi Arabia, 5, 65n21, 71, 74

157

Schwedler, Jillian, 19 Sedition, 57, 61 Senate, 20; appointment of speaker, 20; approval of bills from House of Representatives, 21; membership of, 20; political liberalization and, 21 Service sector, 49 Shahin, Mariam, 94 Sharaf, Abd al-Hamid, 22, 34, 44n26 Sharaf, Layla, 120, 132 Sharia, 23 Al-Sharif, Osama, 38 Sharon, Ariel, 82 Shihan (newspaper), 31, 103, 121 Shryock, Andrew, 89 Sinai Peninsula, 8 Six Day War (1967), 8, 21, 111 Social: control, 19; legislation, 27; movements, 18; pressures, 18 Star (newspaper), 38, 103, 104 Structural adjustment programs, 29, 47, 83; public response to, 57–58 Subsidies: bread, 54, 55, 56; domestic, 54; fodder, 56; reductions in, 15; removal of, 54, 55, 56 Sudan, 49 Sykes-Picot agreement, 4 Syria, 111; desire to retrieve Golan, 10–11; in Gulf War, 70; invasion of Jordan by, 9; Israeli relations with, 8; relations with, 73, 113 Talabani, Jalal, 72 Taliban regime, 114 Telecommunications Corporation, 49, 115 Tlas, Mustafa, 113 Tourism, 71 Trade: deficits, 49, 50; foreign, 49; imbalances, 49 Transjordan, 5; British mandate for, 4, 115 Tribalism, 38–39, 100 Tunisia, 19 Turkey: defense alliance with, 73, 83; relations with, 67, 70, 83, 112, 114 Ubaydat, Ahmad, 32, 41, 129 Unemployment, 15, 45n47

158

INDEX

United Kingdom: foreign aid to Jordan, 50, 114; in Gulf War, 75; historical role in Jordan, 4; imperial policy of, 4, 5; relations with, 80, 114; ties to Jordan, 6 United Nations: peacekeeping operations, 82, 83–84 United States: foreign aid to Jordan, 50; free trade agreements and, 83; in Gulf War, 24, 74, 75; halts aid to Jordan, 24, 71, 75; relations with, 6, 31, 67, 72–73, 77, 80, 112, 114; terrorist attacks on, 114 Washington Consensus, 47 Water supply, 48, 113, 121 West Bank, 7, 8, 10, 21, 52, 72 Western Wall, 8 White September, 9 Wiktorowicz, Quintan, 19, 123 Women, 131–136; absence of voices in parliamentary debate, 41, 101; in

activist organizations, 133; electoral candidates, 22, 34, 44n26, 101; employment opportunities, 132; Higher Committee to Support Women in Elections, 134; Jordanian National Commission for Women, 134; Jordanian Women’s Federation, 134; Jordan National Committee for Women, 102; lack of empowerment and, 132; literacy and, 131; refusal to allow to campaign, 101; request for quota of seats in parliament, 102, 124 World Trade Organization, 83, 112, 117 Yarmuk Brigade, 86n31 Yemen, 53; in Arab Cooperation Council, 53 Yom Kippur War (1973), 10, 111 Zionism, 6

About the Book

Jordan has long been regarded as a pivotal country in the Middle East, one whose policy choices carry strong implications for regional stability. Jordan in Transition offers a cogent and compelling analysis of the country’s domestic and international politics. Ryan argues that there have been four dramatic transitions in Jordan’s recent past: ambitious economic restructuring, efforts toward political liberalization, realignments in foreign relations (culminating in the 1994 peace agreement with Israel), and the succession of King Abdullah II. Exploring these transitions, and how each in turn affects the others, he provides a major contribution to our understanding of Jordan. Curtis R. Ryan is assistant professor of political science at Appalachian State University, North Carolina.

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