Two patterns of religiosity during the age of globalization in a quantitative approach: Italy versus...

The ROMANIAN JOURNAL

of SOCIETY and POLITICS

New Series

Vol. IX | No. 1 | Issue 17

June 2014

Faculty of Political ScienceNational School of Political Studies and Public Administration

BucharestAll rights reserved

2014

Summary

Editors’ Note.............................................................................5

Andra Roescu Preferences, voting rules, behaviour and outcomes.A field experiment on the local elections in Romania.........9

Todor Arpad Romania’s austerity policies in the European context.......25

Ionuţ Apahideanu Two patterns of religiosity during the age of globalization in a quantitative approach: Italy versus Romania...............43

Irina IliseiUpward Social Mobility of Individuals from Minority Groups: a Case Study of Roma Women inHigher Education....................................................................75

Richard Ingwe/Ogaboh Agba/Victor Etim Ndum

Natural Resource Abundance, Exploitation andAgitation for Resource Control in Nigeria’s Niger Delta:A Marxian Analysis..................................................................87

Marius Lazăr/Ecaterina Cepoi

Shi’ism and State in Contemporary Iraq:From Discrimination to Political Power............................111

Jozef Olmert Jabotinsky-Begin-Lieberman:The Changing Face of the Likud Party.............................137

Tereza-Brînduşa PaladeBook Review: Ronny Miron, Karl Jaspers: From Selfhood to Being, Value Inquiry Book Series, Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York, 2012....................................................................153

Mihai Stelian RusuBook Review: Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism, New York: Ecco, an imprint ofHarperCollins Publishers, 2011..........................................157

Melania-Gabriela CiotBook Review: Vasile Puşcaş, EU Accession Negotiations (A Handbook), Wien: Hulla&Co Human Dynamics KG, 2013...................................................................................................161

Radu CucutăBook Review: John Baylis, James Wirtz, Colin Gray (eds.), Strategy in the Contemporary World. An Introduction to Strategic Studies (Fourth Edition), Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013.........................................................................165

5

Editors’ NoteThe Romanian Journal of Society and Politics continues its publishing

tradition in with Volume 9, Number 1 (Issue 17). The current issue is amongst the largest ones published in the New Series of RJSP, in terms of articles/reviews, signalling an ever increasing interest and supply of high-quality contributions to the journal by national and international authors. The issue contains 7 regular articles and 4 book reviews, ranging accross various fields of study, from political science to public policies, sociology, political theory and political history. The issue places a significant emphasis on empirical studies (both quantitative and qualitative), especially targeting Romania (articles 1-4) but also other countries in Africa or Asia (articles 5-7).

The first article of the issue, Preferences, voting rules, behaviour and outcomes. A field experiment on the local elections in Romania, written by Andra Roescu, addresses the problem of electoral behavior in the Romanian context. In this article, the author draws on data collected from a field experiment conducted during the 2012 Romanian local elections in an attempt to analyze two research dimensions of voting behavior, namely that: (1) the results of the elections would turn out to be different under a different voting rule and (2) the extent to which strategic voting occured during the elections and the hypothesis that the propensity for strategic voting is encouraged by some electoral rules more than others.

In the second article, Romania’s austerity policies in the European context, Todor Arpad draws on data obtained during the recent economic recession to conduct a comparative analysis of the austerity policies designed and implemented by Romania in contrast with the ones designed and implemented by other EU members states. The author uses three theoretical frameworks in order to underpin policies adopted in the cases analyzed, namely power resources theories, functionalist theories and blame-avoidance theories.

The third article, titled Two patterns of religiosity during the age of globalization in a quantitative approach: Italy versus Romania, and written by Ionut Apahideanu, seeks to explain trends in religiosity in the past decades, with a specific focus on Italy and Romania. The author uses both a quantitative and a qualitative approach to study the underlying reasons and motivation for the initial revitalisation of religiosity in Italy and Romania during the ‘90s and the subsequent regress (in the case of Italy) and stagnation (in the case of Romania) in the past decade. His conclusions show that Italy’s religiosity decline is not attributable to a decline in the dominant religion, i.e. Catholicism, but is traceable to other denominations and that amidst new trends in globalization and immigration it is the Romanian dominant religion which has been more affected by un-canonical practices and beliefs than the Italian one.

The Romanian Journal of Society and Politics6

In the last article which is focused on Romania, titled Upward Social Mobility of Individuals from Minority Groups: a Case Study of Roma Women in Higher Education, Irina Ilisei tackles the issue of social mobility of minority groups. Her research is based on a qualitative methodology, and draws data from interviews conducted with Roma women, who attended or were in the course of attending higher education programs. The more specific aim of the research is thus to reveal the factors which influence and contribute to the socio-economic upward mobility of Roma women, via higher education studies, as well as the cultural and institutional obstacles and incentives which structure this process.

The fifth article, Natural Resource Abundance, Exploitation and Agitation for Resource Control in Nigeria’s Niger Delta: A Marxian Analysis, written by Richard Ingwe, Ogaboh Agba and Victor Etim Ndum, uses a series of marxist approaches, i.e. Gramscianism, Dialectical Materialism, Critical Theory in the tradition of the Frankfurt School and Neo-Marxism in order to analyze conflicts in resource ownership and control in Nigeria’s Niger Delta. Based on their theoretical investigations the authors formulate proposals in the form of constitutional amendments with the purpose of mitigatig the negative consequences of conflicts over resources, mirroring the type of federalism characteristic for Scandinavian countries.

In the sixth article, Shi’ism and State in Contemporary Iraq: From Discrimination to Political Power, co-authored by Marius Lazar and Ecaterina Cepoi, the authors analyze the role played by Shi’ism in the current political landscape of Iraq. The authors draw heavily on historical data concerning the evolutions of Iraqi Shi’ism in the 20th century, with a particular focus on exploring the political marginalization of the religious community during the Hashemite and Ba’thist periods and to their political revitalisation in the aftermath of the 2003 US-led military campaign in Iraq.

The final article of the issue, Jabotinsky-Begin-Lieberman: The Changing Face of the Likud Party, submitted by Jozef Olmert, is methodologically similar to the former article, in that it also primarily uses historical analysis as a tool of investigation, although the actual topic concerns Israeli politics and in particular the evolution of Likud as a political movement. The author focuses his analysis on explaining the ascension of Likud to power, as well as its consolidation and contemporary decline, through the means of both identifying turning points in the party’s history and emphasizing the role played by key personalities within the party, such as Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Menachem Begin, Benjamin Netanyahu or Avigdor Lieberman.

Aside from the above mentioned articles, the issue also contains 4 book reviews. The first book review is on Ronny Miron’s Karl Jaspers: From Selfhood to Being, and belongs to Tereza-Brandusa Palade, who claims that Miron’s book “provides a philosophical insight for revealing a continuity between Jaspers’s early medical-psychological work and his later philosophical writings, especially through the notion of the ‚perception of Selfhood’ (Selbstsein) and through a search for Being and transcendence”. The second book review is written by Mihai Stelian Rusu on Archie

7

Brown’s The Rise and Fall of Communism. The author argues that the core theme of Brown’s work is that communism is “an idea(l) gone bad, since between the values of social justice and equality that formed the central core of the primitive idea of communism and the political application espoused by its totalitarian practitioners the gulf couldn’t be any wider”. The third review, on Vasile Puscas’s EU Accession Negotiations (A Handbook), written by Melania Ciot, provides a brief overview of both the book as a whole and its chapters taken individually, claiming that they are “designed as a guide, which will give the technical dimension of what the accession negotiations meant”. Last but not least, the fourth review of the issue belongs to Radu Cucuta and targets the collective volume Strategy in the Contemporary World. An Introduction to Strategic Studies (Fourth Edition), edited by John Baylis, John, James Wirtz and Colin Gray. The author of the review states that the book is “probably one of the reference texts for the subfield of Strategic Studies, as far as textbooks are considered” and “an instructive and at the same time entertaining lecture, appealing to the scholar, the student and the casual reader alike”.

Liliana Popescu, Editor-in-ChiefViviana Anghel, Deputy EditorAlexandru Volacu, Deputy Editor

Andra Roescu 9

Introduction and theoretical argument

According to rational choice neo-institutionalism, the institutions, as a set of formal and informal rules and norms, constrain and influence the behaviour of rational actors and, in combination with preferences they determine the outcomes1. Applying the rational-choice institutional framework to elections, voting rules and preferences determine outcomes. When holding preferences constant, outcomes can vary as a function of the voting rule in place. Therefore, voting rules can be compared to each other or evaluated in terms of the outcomes they produce. The outcomes that voting rules produce can be divided at least into two types,

1 Ch R Plott, ‘Recent Results in the Theory of Voting’, in M. Intriligator (ed.), Frontiers of Quantitative Economics, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1971, pp. 109-27

Andra ROESCUNational School for Political and Administrative [email protected]

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to study the electoral behaviour of the Romanian voters under different voting rules, looking to answer the question regarding the extent to which voting rules matter in the local context. In order to achieve this purpose, I use the results of a pilot field experiment conducted in Bucharest during the local elections, which took place on the 10th of June 2012. Using the experimental results, I aim to answer two types of research questions. The first concerns the extent to which results obtained through different voting rules really differ in a real life setting, and if so, whether it is due only to the aggregation rule or also to a change in electoral behaviour caused by changing the rule. The second one concerns strategic behaviour in particular and aims to see to what extent strategic voting existed in these elections and whether some rules actually encourage strategic voting more than others, as theory predicts.

KEYWORDS

• voting rules• Romanian elections• field experiment• strategic behaviour

Andra ROESCU

PREFERENCES, VOTING RULES,

BEHAVIOUR AND OUTCOMES.

A FIELD EXPERIMENT ON THE

LOCAL ELECTIONS IN ROMANIA


according to Duverger2: outcomes produced by the mechanical effects of the rule – converting votes into seats, and those created by the psychological effects of the rule – the way people behave under the voting rule as a response to the mechanical effects3. For example, whether a voting rules leads to the election of the Condorcet4 winner, when such a winner exists5, or if it provides incentives for voters to behave strategically6 change their option when their preferred alternative is in danger of losing the elections. However, while some rules provide strong incentives for strategic behaviour, others do not. One reason is that strategic calculations might be difficult under some rules, especially when voters are not used to the rules.

Investigating the type of effects that different voting rules produce both in terms of outcomes and of voting behaviour is important, especially in a new context like a new democracy, where volatility might be high and where electoral reforms might be more frequent. Therefore, understanding what kind of effects different rules produce and to what extent the local context matters might become very relevant for this type of societies. Moreover, to my knowledge, little research of this kind has been carried out in such contexts, and in Romania in particular there has been none at all. Although the Romanian electoral systems for both the general and local elections have been changed in 2008 and both researchers and the policy makers had quite a few things to say about the consequences of these reforms, little information is actually available on what these would actually mean for the Romanian context7.

Furthermore, even if there is a vast literature on the effects of voting rules both upon behaviour and upon outcomes8, these are mostly based on research carried out on western democracies and thus theoretical predictions might not always match the empirical evidence from the Eastern Europe. Thus, either confirming that these predictions are accurate or infirming them and explaining why some do not apply becomes highly relevant.

2 M Duverger, Political Parties: the Organization and Activity in the Modern State, Wiley, New York, 1963[1951].3 We can also talk of a psychological effect on parties and candidates, which will not waste their resources in districts where they fear they will be the victims of strategic voting, the result of the psychological effects on the voters4 A Condorcet winner is an alternative that defeats all other alternatives in pairwise comparisons 5 M Peress, ‘Selecting the Condorcet Winner: single-stage versus multi-stage voting rules’, Public Choice, vol. 137, 2008, p. 207.6 Strategic voting refers to a the situation in which a voter casts her vote to her second-choice preference in order to prevent her least prefered alternative to win, when her first choice has no chance of winning (Alvarez et all, 2006)7 Gh Teodor (ed.), Alegeri 2008. Campanii, lideri şi sondaje [2008 Elections. Campaigns, leaders and polls], Polirom, Iaşi, 2009; CG Marian & RF King, ‘Plus ça change: Electoral law reform and 2008 Romanian parliamentary elections’, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, vol. 43, 2010, pp. 7-18; A Radu, Politica între proporţionalism şi majoritarism. Alegeri şi sistem electoral în România postcomunistă [Politics between proportionalism and majoritarism. Elections and electoral system in Post-communist Romania], Institutul European, Iaşi, 2012. 8 GW Cox, Making votes count: Strategic coordination in the world’s electoral systems, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997; JF Laslier, “The Leader Rule: A model of strategic approval voting in a large electorate” Journal of Theoretical Politics, vol. 21, 2009, pp. 113-136; M Duverger, op. cit., etc.

Andra Roescu 11

For these reasons, I use quasi-experimental methods in order to investigate these questions and the Romanian context of 2012 is an appropriate setting as

both local and general elections have taken place. Thus, a field experiment that allows for the real features of elections, like real candidates, real campaigns and real stakes to be introduced in the research, as opposed to only artificially reproducing these features in the lab through monetary incentives, might be very useful in understanding how well known voting rules interact with the local context and produce effects both on outcomes and on the behaviour of the electorate.

In order to account for these interactions a pilot field experiment has been carried out during the Romanian local elections in Bucharest on the 10th of June 2012. The present paper reports on the conclusions of the data collected through this quasi-experiment and their implications for the Romanian context.

The paper is structures as follows: section II presents the methodology and data used, including the quasi-experimental design for the field study and concludes with the main research questions and hypotheses for which this study has been intended; section III starts with a very short presentation of the local elections and the main candidates and then moves on to do some preliminary analysis of the data; finally, section IV concludes the study and proposes further research directions.

Methodology and data

The experimental design. I use the data from a pilot quasi-field experiment conducted during the local elections in Bucharest, Romania, on the 10th of June 2012. The purpose of the experiment was the study of voting behaviour under various voting rules in the context of the local elections. For this purpose, one location in each of the six districts of Bucharest was randomly selected, each of these locations including up to six polling stations grouped together in the same building. The experiment was conducted in two time intervals, the first from 8.00 until 14.00 and the second from 15.00 until 21.00, while the polls opened at 07.00 and closed at 21.00. During these two time periods, a total number of 278 questionnaires9 have been applied. Questions concerned vote choice for the general mayor under several voting rules (two-round majority, Borda count, approval, limited voting and the majority judgement system on a 10 point scale10. 9 Although the initial idea behind this field experiment was to set up an experimental polling station and get people to actually vote on experimental ballots under different voting rules, due to difficulties in getting ap-proval from Biroul Electoral Central – BEC (the Romanian Central Electoral Committee) to run the experi-ment, we have decided to switch to a survey solution, where we would ask people how they would vote under different voting rules scenarios. This compromise solution has allowed us to take advantage of the real life choice situation, with real candidates, real campaign and real stakes, that the local elections provided, while still complying with the requirements imposed by BEC. 10 Voters were asked to give each candidate a grade from 1 to 10, where 1 is the smallest grade and 10 the highest. Although in the original formulation the authors used a qualitative measure(M Balinski & R Laraki. Majority Judgement: measuring, ranking and electing, MIT Press, London, 2010), we relied on a numeric one, as the 1 to 10 grading system is used in Romanian schools and thus it is easy to understand by the voters


A series of questions regarding the degree of political information the voter held, political views and socio-demographic information were also included.

Although the design did not actually ask people to cast a vote under different voting rules, but just created different voting rules scenarios and then asked people how they would vote in each of these scenarios, I argue that the design can still be considered an experimental one, borderline between field and survey experiments. The design still has the main advantages of field experiments: it deals with real voters, real candidates and a real campaign, thus closely mimicking real elections in this respect11. All the while it also approaches a survey experiment with repeated measures where the baseline would be vote under the existing voting rule in the real elections, while the scenarios could be considered vignettes, after which change in behaviour is measured and compared to the baseline12.

The design was an intra-subject one, as the same subject was asked to advise how she would vote under all scenarios in the study. Although the intra-subject design has many advantages when comparing results, it might raise some issues concerning the effect of having chosen to answer in one way under a scenario on the way people chose to answer the latter ones. Thus, people might have tried to be consistent and therefore choose to answer in the same way under different scenarios13.

Because there was no way to properly sample the people that would come and vote, as there was no way to predict which people would show up to vote and which of those would agree to take part in the experiment, the operators have been instructed to approach people at random, but at the same time to try and get people from as many socio-demographic categories (age, gender, education and ethnicity) as possible. Even though the obtained sample is not representative for the population of Bucharest, or for the Romanian population for that matter, in order to get results as precise as possible and to get valid comparisons between different categories, after the experiment, we decided to control for any sample bias by performing weighting on the sample.

Research questions and hypotheses. There are several types of research questions and hypotheses I am interested in testing with this design, aiming to get a better understanding of how varying the voting rule would impact the outcome of the elections and the voting behaviour of the electorate.

11 J Carpenter, J List, & G Harrison (ed.), Field Experiments in Economics, Springer, 200512 C Atzmüller, & PM Steiner, ‘Methodology’ European Journal of Research Methods for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, vol. 6, no. 3, 2010, pp. 128-13813 The solution for this problem would have been to randomly vary the order of the scenarios or to randomly assign only some of the scenarios to each person. We chose not to do this, as the number of respondents assigned to each group would have been small enough not to be able to get an accurate measure of the magnitude of these effects. However, these issues will be taken into account and dealt with in the next field experiment during the general elections, when there will be more locations and more people involved in the study.

Andra Roescu 13

In regard to the outcome of elections, I am interested in both the absolute and relative results of the candidates. On the aggregate side of things, I analyse the

extent to which different voting rules produce different outcomes, when there can only be a single winner of the elections. Thus, the focus is on whether and to what extent the different voting rules under study produce a different winner.

H1: The winner depends on the voting rule in place.

In theory, different voting rules could lead to different outcomes, even if preferences remain constant, either because of the electoral formula itself or because strategic behaviour is involved. However, as strategic behaviour depends on the stakes of the elections and also on the complexity of the voting rule, I expect little evidence of strategic behaviour for the local elections. The reason for this is that the local elections for the general mayor in Bucharest have been quite non-competitive, with the first ranked candidate, Sorin Oprescu, winning approximately 64% of the vote share. The second reason is that some of the voting rules I study are somewhat complex (Borda count, limited voting etc.) and the voters are not used to them. Thus the possibility for strategic calculation might be severely reduced due to these aspects.

The second aspect of outcomes refers to the individual results each candidate would obtain in comparison to the rest. A measure of the relative individual outcomes could be given by the vote share that each candidate obtains in comparison to the rest and whether the differences in vote shares between candidates across rules are constant or vary. Regarding the relative individual outcomes, I aim at testing two hypotheses referring to the manner in which different voting rules will affect these outcomes:

H2.1: The more permissive the rule is in terms of the number of choices it allows the voter to express, the lesser the difference in vote share between the candidates.

H2.2.The more egalitarian towards the candidates a permissive rule is, in the sense that it does not ask the voter to order her the preferences she expresses, the lesser the difference in vote share between candidates.

The intuition behind these hypotheses is that the intensity or the strictness of the preferences might vary, especially when moving down past the first preference. Thus, if the rule is permissive, meaning the voter is allowed to express more than one preference, she might be more inclined to approve of more candidates or split the votes between several candidates, thus shifting up the scores of lower ranked candidates, even though the actual rank order will probably not be altered. Furthermore, I expect the observed difference to be even lower in the case of rules that are more egalitarian towards the candidates, that is, they allow voters to express more than one preference without requiring the voter to rank her preferences, like in the case of approval voting, as voters can only express the subset of alternatives


they prefer most, but not the order in which the alternatives in the subset are preferred.

The design of the study also allows approaching the outcome issue from a different perspective. Because I am analysing an intra-subject design, where the voting choices that the same person would make under the different voting rules are known, I can also examine the extent to which individual choices vary across rules. In doing so, several types of research questions arise both about the effect of the different rules in combination with the preference profile, and also regarding the effects of this particular research design. Using the intra-subject design I can research the extent to which strategic behaviour appears by comparing vote choice to the actual preference profile of each voter and also with the vote choice of the same person under different rules. Thus, I can also check the extent to which vote choice is consistent with the preference profile. Unfortunately, I will not be able to perform this analysis on the results of this pilot, because although the design allows me to, the small sample of participants does not. Therefore, I am forced to turn to aggregate measures of strategic voting, following Cox’s work14 and the tools developed by him and others that came after15consisting on comparisons of the vote share differences between the candidates.

However, the issues of consistency also raise methodological questions, as consistency might only be a consequence of the intra-subject choice of research design. Unfortunately, this methodological concern cannot be addressed here, as further data is necessary to determine the degree to which choices remain consistent when either employing a between subject design or when randomly changing the order in which the subject is provided with the scenarios.

With all these limitations, the advantage of this design is that, assuming that variation in choice is mainly determined by the rule in place and the preference profile, we can better trace the extent to which voters engage in strategic behaviour under different rules. Unfortunately, due to the non-competitive nature of these elections and the novelty of some of the rules, we expect little strategic behaviour:

H3.1: The less competitive the elections are, the lesser the strategic behaviour.

H3.2: The more complex or unfamiliar the voting rule is, the less likely it is for voters to engage in strategic behaviour, even when the rule might allow it.

Finally, the last type of research questions I aim to answer using the data collected is the extent to which this type of research is feasible for Romania. How open are Romanian voters to this type of research and how capable are they to use different strategies under different voting rules when it suits them. Thus, I am 14 GW Cox, op.cit.15 R Moser & E Scheiner, ‘Strategic voting in established and new democracies: Ticket splitting in mixed-member electoral systems’, Electoral Studies, vol. xxx, 2008, pp. 1-11; RM Alvarez, FJ Boehmke & J Nagler, ‘Strategic voting in British elections’, Electoral Studies, vol. 25, 2006, pp. 1-19

Andra Roescu 15

interested in the share of non-responses and infer that the non-response rates could be used as an indicator for the level of complexity of the rule. Thus, the higher the non-response rate the more complex the rule is perceived to be.

Results

The local elections in Romania, which have been the focus on this research, have taken place on the 10th of June 2010 under plurality, also known as the first past the post system. Eighteen candidates have entered the race for the seat of general mayor in Bucharest, including the incumbent Sorin Oprescu. The elections have been won by the incumbent with a majority of 64%. Oprescu has run for the second time as an independent candidate. He is a former member of the Social-Democratic Party (PSD), having resigned from the party just before the local elections back in 2008. Although he remained independent, he was supported by his former party in the 2012 elections. PSD did not nominate its own candidate for the mayoral office. Coming in second, with only 18% of the vote share, was the liberal-democrat candidate Silviu Prigoana. The Liberal-Democrat Party (PDL) has been the main incumbent party until the spring of 2012, losing in popularity due to the austerity measures implemented in the past couple of years. Finally, the third ranked candidate, with 5% of the vote, was Horia Mocanu, the candidate of the newly formed populist party of the People –Dan Diaconescu (PP-DD). The party is focused on its leader and initiator Dan Diaconescu and these were the first elections in which PP-DD entered candidates in the race. Finally, coming in fourth, with the same vote share of 4% are the independent candidate Nicuşor Dan (for which the expected vote share was about 8% according to the polls), and Gigi Becali, the leader and initiator of the quite radical and populist Party New Generation(PNG).

The experimental results match the aggregate official results for the first two ranked candidates, as 58.6% of the subjects declared that they have voted for Sorin Oprescu and 24.22% for Silviu Prigoana. However, coming in third in the experimental data is Dan Nicusor with 11.72% of the vote (ranked 4th on the real results), followed by Horia Mocanu with 1.95% of the vote and Gigi Becali with only 0.4% of the vote. Thus, the experimental results change the order of the third and fourth candidates, with Nicusor Dan getting a score almost 4 times higher than the real one. However, this is not surprising, given that the experimental sample is not large enough to be representative for the whole population of the city.

Comparing aggregate results under the voting rules used in this study (two-round majority, Borda count16, approval, limited voting and the majority judgement system -MGS on a 10 point scale) and the first preference of the voters, the results for the first 5 ranked candidates yield:

16 Borda count results have been compromised by some operators and will not be used in this analysis


First we can observe that all rules yield the same winner, Sorin Oprescu, although the percentage is a bit lower in the experimental results in comparison to the real vote. The interesting part is that the percentage is considerably lower under approval, even when compared to the rest of the experimental results. Also the second place is occupied by the real runner up, except for the grading system, where voters were asked to give a score from 1 to 10 to each candidate. The grading system, which usually takes into consideration the median grade that each of the candidates has received, ranked Nicusor Dan higher than Silviu Prigoana by a whole point. The rest of the results are consistent with the outcome of the question regarding vote choice in the real elections, although percentages are considerably higher for the both the second and third place and considerably lower for the fourth and fifth place. These could all be effects of the sampling bias, given that the sample is not representative. However, since what I am mostly interested is the variation in vote choice across the rules in the experiment and not necessary interested in comparisons to the real results, having oversampled some candidate’s voters and under-sampled others, should not invalidate the scope of the study.

I final observation I would like to make regarding the aggregate level results is that choices are to a large extent consistent with the voters’ first preference, as the study began by asking people to state their three most preferred candidates and the order in which they preferred them.

Given the observations above, at least at the aggregate level, the hypothesis regarding the change in outcomes under different voting rules can be rejected, at least for the first placed candidate. The winner stays the same regardless of the rule in place. There could be two explanations for this non finding. One is that since the incumbency won such a comfortable majority it might be difficult to notice the differences across rules than it would in a more competitive setting where hierarchies would be more easily overthrown. Secondly, it might be that participants wanted to be consistent which their answers and were less inclined to switch their vote from one rule to the next, thus giving similar answers to all of them.

In order to test the hypothesis regarding the declining difference in vote share between candidates under different rules, I calculate vote share ratios between the

Table 1. Candidates’ total vote share

CandidateOfficial

Results(%)

ExperimentalResults

Plurality (%)Limited (%)

Approval(%)

1st preference

(%)

MGS(means)

MGS(median)

1 Sorin Oprescu 64 58.6 56.61 31.04 58.08 7.52 92 Silviu Prigoana 18 24.22 22.82 18.12 23.53 5.65 63 Nicusor Dan 4 11.72 12.84 13.42 12.5 6.47 74 HoriaMocanu 5 1.95 2.24 2.68 1.83 - -5 Gigi Becali 4 0.39 0.87 13.42 0.73 4.07 3

Andra Roescu 17

first and second raked candidate and the second and the third. I will not go lower than that, for two reasons: first, starting with the fourth place the vote share is rapidly declining; and secondly because these are the main two measures used to explain and predict strategic voting17. Cox’s initial formulation18 only looked at the vote share difference between the first and second losers which in a single-member district setting would be the second and the third ranked candidates. He did so in order to operationalize Palfrey’s (1984) definition of Duvergerian and non-Duvergerian equlibria, hypothesising that Duvergerian equilibria are a consequence of strategic voting and thus an indication that this type of behaviour occurred. The idea bind this is that in a Duvergerian equilibria the second loser is trailing so far behind the first loser that voters are able to identify the second loser as non-viable (as not having any chance to win) and thus strategically coordinate on the first loser who could become a viable challenger to the front runner. In contrast, in non-Duvergerian equilibria, the second and third losers are so closely tied that it is difficult for voters to tell who the top challenger could be and thus the coordination strategy outlined above cannot take place. The ratio obtained by dividing the vote share of the second loser to that of the first loser could be an indicator of whether the voters were and were not in a Duvergerian equilibrium. Thus, a ratio close to 0 indicates that the second loser is trailing far behind while a ratio close to 1 indicates that the two are closely tied.

However, only looking at the ratio between the second and the first loser might not be enough to predict strategic voting. If the second loser is trailing so far behind that the voters can coordinate on the first loser, but the first loser is trailing so far behind the front runner that she stands no real chance of defeating the front runner even when getting the second loser’s votes, then the voters might have little incentive to abandon the second loser which was their true preference, because they have no chance of preventing the front runner from winning.

Therefore, I am opting to study both and label the Second-First Ratio the vote share ratio between the first loser and the front runner, which are the second and first ranked candidates and the Third-Second Ration the vote share ration between the second loser and the first loser, which are the third and second ranked candidates in the race. This way, I can test my hypotheses regarding the declining vote shares when rules become more permissible in terms of the number of choices they offer the voter and more egalitarian towards the candidates when they don’t ask voters to rank those preferences and I can also evaluate the presence of strategic voting under the different rules. In order for strategic voting to have occured, I would expect to find a second-first ratio close to 1 signalling that the there is a tight race between the front runner and the first loser and a third-second ratio close to 0 signalling that the second loser is trailing so far behind that voters should have coordinated on the first loser.

17 Alvarez et all, op. cit.; Moser and Scheiner, op. cit., 18 GW Cox, op. cit.


Let’s begin with the declining difference in vote shares. The results indicate that the vote share ratio is higher in the experimental results in comparison to the real results, because, like previously stated, it appears we have sampled a larger proportion of second and third ranked candidates’ supporters than we would expect to find in the population. Thus, there was a closer race between the front runner and the first loser in the experiment that it actually was in real life. However, similar to the real results, the second-first ratio is fairly close to the third-second ratio and the situation is similar for the results when taking into account only the first preference of the voters. Thus, the first loser was trailing behind the front runner at the same distance as was the second loser compared to the first loser. Therefore, even if all the votes of the second loser would have gone to the first loser, the first loser still would have not been able to defeat the front runner. As for the ratios under limited voting, we can notice that the third-second ratio has gone up while the second-first ratio slightly decreased, thus bringing the second loser closer to the first loser but distancing the first loser from the front runner. The gap between the two ratios has also increased, meaning that the first loser and front runner are further apart than are the second loser and the first loser. Under approval, both ratios as well as the gap between them go considerably higher in comparison to all other results, meaning that the front runner and the first and second losers come closer to one another, but the second and first losers approached more than the first loser and the front runner. Thus, even though these results might not be robust and require further research, it would seem that the ability to express more than one preference does shift the ratios up and the effect is larger when no ranking of the candidates is allowed or required.

As for strategic voting, the third-second ratio doesn’t approach 1 under neither of the rules, but comes closest under approval and limited voting. At the same time the second-first ratio is far from 0 under all rules, but out of the experimental results is lowest under limited voting. Thus, neither rule meets the requirements for strategic voting. The consequence of these conclusions is that we should observe a small proportion of strategic voting in general if any at all, but we would expect a larger share of strategic voting under these multi-choice rules (approval, limited voting) in comparison to the single-choice rules (plurality).

Table 2. Second –First and Third –Second Vote Share RatiosSecond - First

Vote Share RatioThird - Second

Vote Share Ratio1. Real results (First past the post) 0.28 0.22

Experimental results(First past the post) 0.41 0.48

2. Limited voting 0.40 0.563. Approval 0.58 0.744. First preference 0.41 0.53

Andra Roescu 19

There are two possible strategic voting situations for these elections. Voters preferred the second loser to both the front runner and the first loser and also preferred the first loser to the front runner, so given that the second loser stood no chance, they choose to vote for the first loser in the hope that she would manage to defeat the front runner. Secondly, there is the category that had the first loser as a first preference but considered she did not stand any chance of winning and thus decided to go with the front runner who was most likely to win.

There is little evidence of strategic voting under the real voting rule. Only 18 people vote for another alternative than their most preferred one. Out of them, 11 have a different first preference than Oprescu and 9 out of these 11 chose Oprescu, who was their second choice. Thus, only in these cases we could talk about not wanting to waste the vote on a candidate that has no chance of winning. However, the sample is too small to try and characterize these people. Therefore, strategic voting in Romania should be analysed further by a similar design in the context of the general elections. Investigating the same rules on the general elections, when there will be single member districts with different degrees of competitiveness will also allow me to test the hypothesis regarding the effect of the closeness of the elections on the observed amount of strategic vote.

Under approval voting, in order to talk about strategic voting, we should talk about sincere and insincere voting, as per Laslier’s et. all19 (2009, 2010) Leader Rule. According to the Leader Rule, a voter is sincere if she approves of all candidates that she prefers to the most likely to win candidate (the Leader) and doesn’t approve any of the of candidates she prefers the Leader to. Then, in order to decide if she approves of the Leader, she will compare her to her main challenger. The results indicate that out of the 269 people who indicated their vote choice under approval and did not abstain or refused to answer, 58 have deviated from this rule. Thus, the Romanian example seems to question the expected prediction regarding vote under approval. However, most subjects only chose to approve exactly one candidate and, with little exception, this was their first preference, indicating that people were somewhat reluctant to use the properties of this rule. The same stands for limited voting, where most people chose not to split the votes between several candidates, and gave their preferred option all three votes. The tables below describe the two situations:

Table 3. Results of vote under approval rule

No of Approvals 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 10 16 Mean Median

No of respondents 8 119 67 41 8 12 5 2 2 1 1 2.08 2

19 JF Laslier & K Van der Straeten, ‘A Live experiment on approval voting’, Experimental Economics, vol. 11, 2008, pp. 97-105


Table 4. Number of voters that cast 1,2 and 3 votes by candidate

No Name Cod party

3 votes

2 votes

1 vote

Total vote no.

Percentage received of

the total vote

No. of approvals

Percentage received of the total approvals

1 BECALI GEORGE PNG-CD 1 0 4 7 0.87 80 13.42

2 COJOCARU CONSTANTIN PP-LC 0 0 0 0 0.00 8 1.34

3 COLUMBEANU ADRIAN IRINEL P.P.P.S. 1 1 2 7 0.87 25 4.19

4 DAN NICUŞOR DANIEL CI 25 7 14 103 12.84 80 13.42

5 DIMA PETRICĂ PSR 0 0 0 0 0.00 4 0.67

6 DOBRESCU FLORIN PTT 0 0 2 2 0.25 4 0.67

7 GEORGESCU IONUŢ PER 0 0 0 0 0.00 11 1.85

8 GRIGORIU ADRIAN PNDC 0 0 0 0 0.00 3 0.50

9 IONESCU CONSTANTIN PSDM 4 0 0 12 1.50 5 0.84

10 IORDĂNESCU ANGHEL UNPR 0 0 4 4 0.50 35 5.87

11 LINCU VASILE PUER 0 0 1 1 0.12 6 1.01

12 MOCANU VASILE-HORIA PP-DD 3 3 3 18 2.24 16 2.68

13 OPRESCU SORIN MIRCEA CI 136 15 16 454 56.61 185 31.04

14 POPEANGĂ PETRE PRM 3 0 2 11 1.37 12 2.01

15 PRIGOANĂ VASILE-SILVIU PDL 50 13 7 183 22.82 108 18.12

16 ROMAN NICOLAE P.PRO. 0 0 0 0 0.00 6 1.01

17 TEODOSIU-IONIŢĂ IOAN PAS 0 0 0 0 0.00 1 0.17

18 VLADU ALEXANDRU PPE-DE 0 0 0 0 0.00 7 1.17

Total 223 39 55 100% 596 100%

Andra Roescu 21

Even though the number of people with insincere voting behaviour under approval is rather small, we could try and model the behaviour and investigate which category of people is more likely to behave in this manner. In order to do so, I employ a logit model, where the dependent variable is a dummy variable that is 1 when people behave insincerely and 0 for all other cases. As independent variables I use dummies to indicate whether the respondents’ first choice was Oprescu or Prigoana, a measure of how informed people think they are about the campaign, on a 5 point scale, and socio-demographic variables, like age measured in years, education measured on a 5 point scale, gender.

Coefficients:Estimate Std. Error z value Pr(>|z|)

(Intercept) 5.07642 1.29179 3.930 0.00***op -2.05685 0.84013 -2.698 0.22pr -1.02759 0.84013 -1.223 0.22age -0.07088 0.18791 -0.377 0.00**edu -0.07088 0.18791 -0.377 0.70male 0.32508 0.36192 0.898 0.36info -0.16137 0.18535 -0.871 0.38

Signif.codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1 Null deviance: 227.47 on 223 degrees of freedomResidual deviance: 202.87 on 217 degrees of freedomAIC: 216.87

The results indicate that the only two factors with a significant impact on the odds of behaving insincerely are: 1) having Oprescu as first preference and 2) age. Both have a negative impact, meaning that people whose first preference is Oprescu or people who are older are more likely to vote sincerely under approval and vice versa. A possible explanation for these results would be that older people might have more stable preferences, could be more risk adverse and more reluctant to behave insincerely. On the other hand, because Oprescu was a member of the Social-Democratic Party, and is still supported by them, he might be more appealing to older people, as he might be perceived as representing the left. Thus, it is very likely that most of the older people vote sincerely.

Finally, the last thing I would like to do in this analysis is to compare the non-response rate for different voting rules. The table below summarises these rates:


The rates in the table above seems to indicate that people did not find either approval or limited voting hard to understand as the non-response rates are rather low. However, if we look at the 2 round majority rule scenario where people were asked which pair of candidates they would like to see in the second round and also if we look at the response rate for the full preference profile, we can observe that the non-response rates increase significantly, especially for the second and third preference. A possible explanation is that people might not have a full preference profile, as none of the existing rules in Romania asks them to express more than one preference. Thus, it is very possible that people only decide which candidate they like best and do not evaluate each pair of two possible candidates to have clear preferences about the full ordering of all possible alternatives. This is another issue that requires further investigation.

Concluding remarks

The purpose of this study was to evaluate and compare the different outcomes and voting behaviour that can result as a consequence of changing the voting rule. For this purpose, I have analysed the results of an experimental study carried out during the local elections in Bucharest. The results of this preliminary analysis on the data seem to indicate that the rules which have been studied do not change the outcome too much, at least in the context of the local elections in Bucharest. Thus, the front runner and the runner up remain the same under all voting rules. Only the third and fourth place candidates change under some of the rules. The second conclusion is that although the rules seem to make little or no alterations to the order of the candidates, the vote share ratios between the second and the first ranked candidates (first loser and front runner) and between the third and second ranked candidates ( second and first loser) seem to increase (meaning the differences in vote shares become smaller) under limited and approval voting,

Table 5. Non-response rates

Number of valid responses Number of refusals Refusal rate

(%)

1 Experimental results(First past the post) 278 0 0

2. Limited voting 268 10 3.733. Approval 267 11 4.124. First preference 276 6 2.175. Second preference 192 86 44.796. Third preference 155 123 79.35

7. 2 round majority(majority runoff) 258 20 7.75

8. Grades (for Oprescu) 262 16 6.11

Andra Roescu 23

especially under approval voting, as these rules allow for more than one choice and also since approval does not allow for different rankings of approved candidates. This is extremely interesting especially since non-response rates seem to indicate that a good proportion of the people have trouble indicating a second and third preference. Thus, a rule that allows for more choices might allow people to better express their diffuse preferences between candidates.

Finally, the second purpose of this study was to check to what extent this type of research is feasible for the Romanian context, to what extent people are able to understand new rules and try to cast votes using them and also to what extent our research instrument works or needs to be altered. The results have raised some interesting questions which I can only partially answer using the data collected up to this point. Therefore, further research, on a wider population, with a wider variety of degrees of competition between candidates in the race and with the random alternation of the orders the scenarios appear in, is necessary to account for some of the results obtained up to this point.

References

Alvarez, RM & J Nagler, ‘A new approach for modelling strategic voting in multiparty elections’, British Journal of Political Science, vol. 30, 2000, pp. 57-75

Alvarez, RM, Boehmke, FJ, & J Nagler, ‘Strategic voting in British elections’ Electoral Studies, vol. 25, 2006, pp. 1-19.

Atzmüller, C, & PM Steiner, ‘Methodology’, European Journal of Research Methods for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, vol. 6, no. 3, 2010, pp. 128-138.

Balinski, M, & R Laraki, Majority Judgement: measuring, ranking and electing, MIT Press, London, 2010.

Blais, A, Laslier, JF, Sauger, N, & K Van der Straeten, ‘One round versus two round elections: an experimental study’, French Politics, vol. 5, 2007, pp. 278-286.

Carpenter, J, List, J, & G Harrison (ed.), Field Experiments in Economics, Springer (JAI/Elsevier series - Research in Experimental Economics Volume 10), 2005.

Cox, GW, Making votes count: Strategic coordination in the world’s electoral systems, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997.

Duverger, M, Political Parties: the organization and activity in the modern state, Wiley, New York, 1963 [1951];

Gerber, AS, & DP, Green, ‘The Effects of Canvassing, Telephone Calls, and Direct Mail on Voter Turnout: A Field Experiment’, The American Political Science Review, vol. 94, no. 3 (Sep.), 2000, pp. 653-663.


Fiorina, M, & Ch Plott, ‘Committee decisions under majority rule: an experimental study’, American Political Science Review, vol 72, 1978, pp. 575–598.

Forsythe, R, Rietz, TA, Myerson, R, & RJ Weber, ‘An Experimental Study of Voting Rules and Polls in Three-Way Elections’, International Journal of Game Theory, vol. 25, 1996, pp. 355-383.

Laslier, JF, & K Van der Straeten, ‘A Live experiment on approval voting’ Experimental Economics, vol. 11, 2008, pp. 97-105

Laslier, JF, ‘The Leader Rule: A model of strategic approval voting in a large electorate’, Journal of Theoretical Politics, vol. 21, 2009, pp. 113-136.

Laslier, JF, & MR, Sanver (eds.), Handbook on Approval Voting, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2010.

Marian, CG, & RF, King, ‘Plus ça change: Electoral law reform and the 2008 Romanian parliamentary elections’, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, vol. 43, 2010, pp. 7-18;

Radu, A, Politica intre proportionalism si majoritarism. Alegeri si sistem electoral in Romania postcomunista [Politics between proportionalism and majoritarism. Elections and electoral system in Post-communist Romania], Institutul European, Iaşi, 2012.

Riker, WH, ‘The Two-party system and Duverger’s law: An essay on the history of political science’, American Political Science Review, vol. 76, 1982, pp. 753-766.

Moser, R, & E Scheiner, ‘Strategic voting in established and new democracies: Ticket splitting in mixed-member electoral systems’, Electoral Studies, vol. xxx, 2008, pp. 1-11.

Peress, M, ‘Selecting the Condorcet Winner: single-stage versus multi-stage voting rules’, Public Choice, vol. 137, 2008, pp. 207–220.

Teodor, Gh (ed.), Alegeri 2008. Campanii, lideri şi sondaje. [2008 Elections. Campaigns, leaders and polls], Polirom, Iaşi, 2009.

Van der Straeten, K, Laslier, JF, Sauger, N, & A, Blais, ‘Strategic, sincere and heuristic voting under four election rules: and experimental study’, Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 35, 2010, pp. 435-472

Wantcheckon, L, ‘Clientelism and voting behavior: Evidence from a field experiment in Benin’, World Politics, vol. 55, 2003, pp. 399–422.

Todor Arpad 25

1. Introduction

In 2007 Romania became member of the EU after a long and strenuous process of accession negotiations. Once with the start of the negotiation for accession in December 1999 Romanian experienced a period of continuous economic growth and improving living standards. Given the guarantees presented by the future statute as an EU member, speculative and non-speculative FDI flows increased and accelerated the economic growth significantly. Apparently, the start of the economic crisis found Romania in a strong position to withstand economic hardship. In 2008 the forecasted GDP growth reached a peak of 7.8%. While the deficit increased to 6% of GDP, Romania’s external debt decreased to 14% by 20081, one of the lowest levels in the region2. Yet, in the following years, Romania implemented some of 1 The total government debt in RON and foreign currency decreased to 19.54% of GDP2 The country rating as at BB+

Todor ARPADAsociaţia Pro DemocraţiaBucharest, [email protected]

ABSTRACT

The economic recession starting in 2007 with the collapse of the US Bank Lehman Brothers triggered waves of economic shock across the world. Various states were hit more or less hard through different mechanisms and reacted with different intensities to adjust to the crisis situation. In this article, I employ a comparative methodology to assess the austerity policies undertook by Romania during the Great recession period as regards the policies adopted at the level of other EU member states. Thus, I aim to offer an initial evaluation of the degree of similarity of Romania’s recession policy responses to that of some other EU member states, and the degree to which Romania can be labeled as an outlier. The comparative analysis tests the explanatory power of three different theoretical approaches on the causal factors explaining variation in policy responses: power resources theories, functionalist approaches and blame-avoidance.

KEYWORDS

• economic crisis• Romania• austerity

Todor ARPAD

ROMANIA’S AUSTERITY POLICIES

IN THE EUROPEAN CONTEXT


the most aggressive austerity measures, which significantly affected the wealth of its population and finally led to political turbulence that toppled the Cabinet that implemented these measures. By comparing the characteristics of the Romanian policy response to the economic crisis to those in the other EU member states, this article aims to untangle the causal factors that influenced the evolutions in Romania. The analysis evaluates the explanatory power of various theories that attempt to dissect that causal streams that led to variation in policies of fiscal adjustment.

The article is organized as it follows: in the second section, I present the theoretical models employed by various authors to explain the comparative evolutions in the context of the post 2008 recession. I discuss the Power Resource Theories, the Varieties of Capitalism and the functionalist approaches to the structural factors confining the government’s room for maneuver and their application within the post 2008 crisis situation by Lierse3. Fourth, I also analyze the blame–avoidance theory advanced by Jensen and Mortensen in 20134. In the third section, I comparatively assess the characteristics of the austerity packages implemented in the EU member states on three dimensions: welfare cuts, investment policies, and fiscal reforms. In the forth section I analyze into more detail the characteristics of the austerity measures in Romania. In the last section, I evaluate the explanatory power of each of these theories, and the degree to which they can help one understand the features of the Romanian austerity measures compared to other EU member states.

2. Theoretical approaches

In this section I define the theoretical framework that will be employed for the comparative analysis of the three dimensions of the austerity packages enacted in Romania and the rest of the EU member states. Each approach has some strength regarding their core independent variables, while they overlook some other important explanatory factors. The Power Resource Theory (PRT) starts with the assumption that the power, intensity and form of the organization reflecting class alignment organizations. Authors like Esping-Anderson and Korpi5, Huber and Stephens6, Castels and Obinger7 focus on various policy and macroeconomic outcomes resulting from left-wing v. right-wing governments. These authors found systematic evidence that left-wing governments actively promote policies favoring consumption and redistribution toward the lower end of income scale. Instead, right-wing governments favor investment and promote measures that decrease the 3 H Lierse, ‘Partisanship and Taxation: An exploratory study of crisis responses’, TransState Working Papers, no. 159, 2012, Accessed at: http://econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/54988/1/684352990.pdf4 C Jensen, & PB Mortensen, ‘Blame avoidance, Partisanship, and Government Responses to Fiscal austerity’, Comparative Political Studies, print June 11, 2013, doi:10.1177/00104140134885365 G Esping-Andersen, & W Korpi, ‘Social Policy as Class Politics in Post-War Capitalism: Scandinavia, Austria, and Germany’, in Goldthorpe, J. (ed). Order and Conflict in Contemporary Capitalism: Studies in the Political Economy of Western European Nations, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.6 E Huber, & JD Stephens, Development and Crisis of the Welfare State: Parties and Policies in Global Markets, University of Chicago Press, 2001. 7 FG Castels, & H Obinger, ‘Social expenditure and the politics of redistribution’, Journal of European Social Policy, vol. 17, no. 3, 2007, pp. 206–222.

Todor Arpad 27

redistributive role of the states in economy. According to Steinmo and Tolbert8, the evolution of tax policies in democratic states is strongly influenced by changes in voters’ attitudes toward taxation. The most straightforward way to operationalize these attitudes is to proxy leftist party control of governments for pro-taxation attitudes. The most important implicit argument that can be extracted is that right-wing governments are much more apt to enact policies falling under the category of tax competition. Based on the power resource theory, one can expect that the perceptions on the priorities regarding reforms under conditions of economic crisis will be different along the left-right continuum (Allan and Scruggs9; Amable et al10). While right-wing politicians would favor more abrupt welfare state retrenchment, left wing politicians will militate for milder reforms, whose impact will be distributed over a longer time span. Also, those authors focusing on the strategies generated by the aim to limit the negative consequences of welfare state retrenchment have identified various strategies used in different countries (see Pierson11).

The functionalist approach on policy reforms emphasizes the structural factors that confine government’s choice at any given moment. Authors like Garrett and Mitchell12, Swank and Steinmo13, Swank14, stress that the increased global integration through capital liberalization or trade openness increase the interdependencies among states and generate capital competition and a shift of the tax burden toward consumption taxes. Garrett and Lange15 and Rodrik16 postulate that the increased exit options for capital decrease state’s capacity to impose redistributive policies, situation that leads to a shift toward consumption taxes. Thus, during recession times, irrespective of their policy aspiration, the capacity of governments to enact tax measures aimed at taxing capital is limited.

One approach that tried to explain the conditions under which despite the structural pressures created by recession some states may choose not to enact widespread adjustment measures was developed by Katzenstein17. He argues that while capital mobility may exert downward pressure on tax rates, another major

8 Sven, S, & CJ Tolbert, ‘Do institutions really matter? Taxation in Industrialized Democracies’, Comparative Political Studies, vol 31, no. 2 1998, (April), p. 167.9 JP Allan, & L Scruggs, Political partisanship and welfare state reform in advanced industrial societies, American Journal of Political Science, vol. 48, no. 3, 2004, pp. 496-512. 10 B Amable, D Gatti, & J Schumacher, ‘Welfare-state retrenchment: The partisan effect revisited’, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, vol. 22, 2006, pp. 426-444. 11 P Pierson, ‘The New Politics of the Welfare State’, World Politics, vol. 48, no. 1, 1996, pp. 143-79. 12 G Garrett, & D Mitchell, ‘Globalization, government spending and taxation in the OECD’, European Journal of Political Research, vol. 39, 2001, pp. 145-177.13 D Swank, & S Steinmo, ‘The New Political Economy of Taxation in Advanced Capitalist Democracies’, American Journal of Political Science, vol. 46, no. 3, July 2002, pp. 642-655.14 D Swank, ‘Tax Policy in an Era of Internationalization: Explaining the Spread of Neoliberalism’, International Organization, vol. 60, 2006, pp. 847-882.15 G Garrett, & P Lange, ‘Political Responses to Interdependence: What’s “Left” for the Left?’, International Organization, vol. 45, no. 4, 1991, pp. 539-564.16 D Rodrik, Has Globalisation gone too far?, Washington DC, Institute for International Economics, 1997.17 P Katzenstein, Small States in World Markets. Industrial Policy in Europe, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.


component of globalization, namely trade openness, has a positive result on tax/GDP ratio. Moreover, the author stresses that the compensatory policies are typical in small, open European economies, countries that developed complex policy instruments to reduce the risk caused by international exposure. In his influential Small States in World Markets, Peter Katzenstein examines the economic and social development success of small European capitalist states and gives an explanation for the relationship between their size and the economic strategies they pursued. Katzenstein groups the type of responses to economic crisis in three categories: the liberal approach – of those countries relying on market solutions, and, in the extreme, to protectionist measures; the statist approach – of large capitalist countries like Japan that impose wide-ranging systemic protectionist measures; the small democratic corporatist countries that depend on the world market and cannot purse systemic protectionist measures. This group tends to combine their trade openness with an array of economic and social policies designed to temper the negative effects of cause by economic adjustments. According to Katzenstein, these countries’ strategy can be described as a preference “for a reactive and flexible policy of industrial adjustment”18. Nevertheless, pursuing such strategies while maintaining democratic institutions can be done only as viable mixtures of sustainable bargains among politicians, the stakeholders and bureaucrats on some core issues could be developed. Overall, within Katzenstein interpretation, although small states depend on the external influence, they cannot be labeled as passive recipients of this influence, but as actors that developed proactive adaptive responses to external challenges. All in all, according to Lierse19 the empirical evidence regarding the exact direction of tax shifts is still inconclusive as “often the effects are small and dependent on the specification of the mode.” Also, its worth stressing that some of the most important factors that deter the overall tax decrease regard budget rigidities and the long-term fixed costs of servicing the public debt.

The third theoretical approach is Jensen and Mortensen’s20 argument based in Pierson’s21 theory of double motivation: policy and re-elections motives - leading politicians pursuing various policies. According to this view, whenever economic hardship prompts politicians to enact measures leading to welfare state retrenchment they will be motivated both by ideological motives and by their desire to minimize the negative electoral impact these measures would have on them. To understand adequately the interaction of these potentially conflicting policy aims, one has to look at their dynamic interaction along two key dimensions: the ideological predominance of the government and the number of veto points22. These authors advance the hypothesis that the more veto points are present, the wider the distribution of blame for retrenchment reforms is. Instead, when the

18 Katzenstein, op. cit., p. 24.19 Lierse, op. cit., p. 5.20 Jensen and Mortensen’s, op. cit.21 P Pierson, Dismantling the Welfare State. Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p 17.22 Jensen and Mortensen’s, op. cit. A veto player is a person or institution that can prevent a change from tak-ing place

Todor Arpad 29

number of veto player is decreased, most blame for unpopular measures will go to these few veto players. Thus, actors that will have strong incentives to avoid being blamed for the economic hardship caused by retrenchment measures. The combination of the causal direction on these two dimensions leads to the predictions systematized in table 1. First, in countries with few veto players and left-wing government in power, one can expect to encounter higher prevalence of policies designed to protect the core constituencies of the left-wing government, and thus one can expect that social protection measures would be expanded. In addition, for the combination of right-wing governments in countries with few veto players, one can predict modest welfare state retrenchment measures given that voters of right-wing parties are less likely to be affected by these measures.

Instead, when several veto players are present, and thus, the blame for unpopular measures can be diffused, Jensen and Mortensen’s23 model predicts that power sharing will increase the likelihood of adopting retrenchment measures, irrespective of the type of government. Thus, the pressure caused by decreasing revenues given the economic downturn would prompt left-wing movements to enact modest retrenchment measures.

Table 1. The direction of reform given the number of veto points and the predominant ideology of the parties in government (from Jensen and Mortensen’s 2013)

Overall, the three different theoretical perspectives offer clear hypotheses that can be tested through the analysis of the policy efforts undertook after the start of the economic crisis. As the first part of this comparative assessment, in the following section I will present some of the most relevant features of the policy reforms undertook as a response to the economic crisis. These policy responses will be analyzed through their implications on the explanatory power of each of the three theories discussed in this section.

3. Analyzing the EU member states governments’responses to the economic crisis

Given that different countries had different structural weaknesses, the economic crisis affected the EU member states differently on different dimensions and prompted more or less immediate adaptation measures. While in 2009 many EU countries introduced tax relief measures to stimulate economic recovery, by

23 Ibid.

Government party Left-wing Right-wing

Veto points Many Modest retrenchment Radical retrenchment Few Expansion Stability


the end of 2010 this trend has been reversed. Starting with the spring of 2010, as news from Greece confirmed the discrepancy between its official statistics and the real situation, interest rates abruptly increases for all EU countries whose state of public finances was questionable. The potential Europe-wide banking sector collapse prompted the intervention of governments and subsequently led to the creation of the European Financial Stability Facility24.

The aggressive measures undertook by many EU member states to mitigate the effects of the economic crisis – especially to help the banking sector – led to an increase of the average debt from 59% in 2007 to 80% in 201025. As capital markets reacted to the increasing risk of long-term unsustainability of public debt, interest rates on government bonds soared for many countries. Forced to regain their credibility on the financial markets, governments across the EU introduced various tax increases aimed to help the process of fiscal consolidation, measures that nevertheless were quite diverse.

Theodoropoulou and Watt26 evaluate the characteristics of the austerity packages adopted in the EU countries for 2011 and 2012. The packages forecasted a 0.9% of GDP/year discretionary retrenchment, with a total value of 501 billion Euros for the five years after 2010. As expected, those countries that requested external funds from the IMF and the EU - Hungary, Latvia, Greece, Ireland, or those that were close to have to – Spain and Portugal – implemented the most abrupt adjustment measures27. Greece increased the top PIT rate by 5%, the VAT by 4% and imposed a one-time extra levy on business. Hungary also increased the VAT rate and the CIT tax. Instead, countries with better position managed to enact measures that would help economic recovery, like modifying the depreciation and exemption rules28. Further, countries that appealed to the IMF implemented austerity packages that placed most of the adjustments in the first year (frontloading). While indirect taxes represented the predilection area for tax increases, expenditures reductions were operated mainly in the area of social protection and public administration, reforms that overall had a consistent regressive effect on income distribution29.

All in all, with a few exceptions (Greece and Cyprus in 2011), most austerity measures enacted expenditures reductions rather on tax raises. The countries where this distribution was the most skewed in towards spending cuts (above 70%) are Denmark, France, Hungary, Ireland, Luxembourg, and UK30. The UK went so far 24 In October 2010, Ireland was the first country to benefit from this mechanism. Among the states most affected by the crisis, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, and UK announced harsh austerity packages in their effort to reestablish investors’ confidence in their capacity to repay their debt.25 Lierse, op. cit., p. 1.26 S Theodoropoulou, & A Watt, Withdrawal symptoms: an assessment of the austerity packages in Europe, European Trade Union Institute WP 2011.02, p. 1327 ibidem, p. 528 ibidem, p. 5.29 The only exceptions to this trend are Luxembourg and France, countries where measures aimed at top PIT earners have had a progressive effect.30 S Theodoropoulou, & A Watt, op. cit., p. 18.

Todor Arpad 31

as to plan tax cuts for 2012. For example Latvia enacted one of the most aggressive austerity packages. Nevertheless, fiscal retrenchment started in 2008 after it took over the liabilities of one of the largest banks and had to apply for IMF assistance in order to avoid default. Interestingly, during the negotiations, the IMF suggested an increase of the PIT Flat tax form 15% to 19%, measure that was considered unacceptable. Overall, the 18% output reduction in 2008 and 2009 made the Latvian recession one of the most dramatic in the EU31.

Further, some of the most significant spending cuts were implemented in the areas of education, research and development or public investments32. The analysis of the distribution of losses among social categories reveals that some of the persons most affected by these reforms were the pensioners and people approaching the age of retirement. In addition, public sector workers were disproportionately affected in comparison with workers from the private sectors. In some countries, plans to decrease the total number of state employees (Ireland, France, Austria, Spain, and Greece) led to a freeze in employment and in some countries significant layoffs were implemented (Hungary, Ireland, Cyprus, Germany, UK, Latvia, and Spain)33.

Some authors34 also argue that given that countries with current account surpluses designed reform packages aimed to further improve their competitiveness, an overall decrease of inequality among the EU countries is highly unlikely. Overall, given the high unemployment rates during the crisis, the regressive nature of the tax, and expenditure reforms, the overall effect of the economic crisis would increase income inequalities at the EU level. Last but not least, based on questionnaires completed by national level experts35 the authors appraise that while some forms of social dialogue took take place prior to announcement of the austerity packages, in the final outcome, the views of trade unions were largely ignored in most countries.

Another point of view is offered by Lierse36 who investigates the strategies adopted between 2008 and 2010 by the governments of the EU member states in order to mitigate the effects of the economic crisis in the area of fiscal rev-enues. Given that analyzing just the changes in the tax rates or the evolution of tax revenues does not offer a direct evaluation of the substantive characteristics of government’s policies, this author explores both the direction and amount of tax adjustment.37 Her aim was to explain to what extent did the left-right distribution of government composition and various structural pressures affected the type of measures undertook in the EU countries? Thus, her main depended variables are 31 S Theodoropoulou, & A Watt, op. cit., p. 14.32 ibidem, p. 19.33 ibidem, p. 2334 ibidem, p. 635 Ibid. According to these authors, most experts were members of the TURI Network of national trade-union research institutes. 36 Lierse, op. cit.37 The tax rate produces effects only in combination with the tax base the policy is applied too and the capacity of the government to collect that revenue.


the number, the direction (tax cuts v. tax increases) and the type of tax reforms. One of the most important predictions derived by Lierse based on the Power Resource Theory is that left-wing governments should promote more interventionist mea-sures, translated into more tax changes focusing on mitigating the negative effects of the crisis. Instead, right-wing governments are expected to enact less tax changes and less abruptly38. Her independent variables are operationalized as the govern-ment dominance of right v. left39, the bound rates, and the predicted growth rate.40

Her analysis reveals that for the 2008-2010 period both right-wing and left-wing governments opted for more tax cuts, although left-wing governments cut taxes less, and in some areas (SSC, VAT and other consumption taxes), they even chose to apply small increases41. Instead, a structural factor clearly associated with tax reforms is the fiscal stress reveled by the interest rates on ten-year government bonds42. Instead, countries with the interest rate under the EU average were those that afforded to cut taxes consistently across all types43. This author concludes that “high fiscal stress severely restrict governments’ capacities to shape political intervention. In fact, there is little proof that social-democratic governments adopt a more redistributive and interventionist approach to taxation than conservatives.”44 Instead, “State activity and adjustment processes increase with bond rates. Moreover, the results also support that tax competition is highest in the fields of corporate and personal income taxes as high rates may lead to a capital flight into low-tax regions or to comparatively costly employment”45. It’s worth mentioning that the tax shift from business and personal income taxation toward the consumption taxes was also advocated by OECD in the 2010 report46 on arguments that direct taxation is detrimental to growth.

Instead, Jensen and Mortensen’s47 testing of the blame-avoidance theory using OLS PCSE finds statistical evidence that strongly dominated left-wing cabinets would pursue expansionary welfare measures under the presence of few veto points. As soon as right-wing parties would join the government, this effect would disappear given that they would have a veto power over expansionary measures48. Instead, right-wing cabinet dominance with more veto points and economic globalization leads to aggressive welfare retrenchment measures. Also, even if the

38 Lierse, op. cit., p. 4.39 Operationalized through the party positioning in the Party Manifesto Group (Volkens et al. 2011)40 This author chose not to control capital account openness given that all countries are members of the EU41 Lierse, op. cit., p. 10.42 Those countries with interest rate well above the EU average (>7% at an EU average of 5.1%) enacted most of tax increases (although not Corporate Income Taxes), especially in the area of VAT and other consumption taxes.43 Lierse, op. cit., p. 12.44 ibidem, p. 2.45 ibidem, p. 13.46 OECD Tax Policy Reform and Economic Growth, OECD Publishing, 2010, Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264091085-en (accessed: January 2011).47 Jensen and Mortensen’s, op. cit. 48 Jensen, & Mortensen, op. cit., p. 19

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government debt is high, in countries where the number of veto points is reduced retrenchment measures are delayed.49

Overall, while the conclusions of these authors agree to some extent, they differ in some important points. Even if all authors agree that functional pressures are important50, their decisiveness differs. Lierse’s51 analysis implies that functional pressures trump the importance of the left v. right dimension, while Jensen and Mortensen stress that this is not the case if another dimension is taken into account – the number of veto players. The detailed empirical mapping of government’s response undertaken by Theodoropoulou and Watt52 reveals that the presence of external conditionality – especially the IMF – forced governments to enact measures that were not in accordance with their ideological stand. Instead, these authors indicate that the focus on expenditure cuts across the EU’ expose the extent of neoliberal economic philosophy dominance. Further, given that the condition stipulated by Jensen and Mortensen53 – the presence of pure left-wing cabinet under conditions of few veto players – did not characterize most EU countries after 2007,this causal situation did not have an important effect on the overall direction of EU reforms.

In the continuation of this comparative assessment, in the following section I will present into more detail the characteristics of the austerity package in Romania, the policy events that led to these outcomes. Further, I will comparatively analyze the features of these reforms in comparison with those from the rest of the EU member states. Throughout this analysis, I will attempt to test the degree to which various theoretical approaches could help one explain the chain of events.

4. Policies of austerity in Romania

To adequately understand the features of Romania’s policy responses to the economic crisis, we first need no analyze the peculiarities of its economic and political conditions. In this section I first present the most important factors that affected the structure of incentives of various policy actors, and then investigate into detail the timing and characteristics of the retrenchment policies adopted in Romania. Despite the signals that a worldwide economic crisis is highly probable, the autumn 2008 caught Romanian politicians in the fever of the parliamentary elections, and thus all political parties opted for highly optimistic electoral promises. The 2008 electoral year offered important incentives for politicians to increase significantly the salaries in the public sector, with a vote on doubling payments in the educational sector that occurred in the autumn. Thus, while the full effects of the crisis started to be felt in the last three months of the year, the first acknowledgments of these situations came only in the beginning of 2009. The initial

49 Jensen, & Mortensen, op cit., p. 2050 Especially the government bond rates and government debt.51 Lierse, op. cit.52 S Theodoropoulou, & A Watt, op. cit.53 Jensen, & Mortensen, op. cit.


adjustment started in the private sector, with a 315,000 reduction of employees in 2009, mainly in the construction and commerce sectors. As compensation measure, through Law No. 329/2009 Romania aimed to offer incentives for firms to employ persons in exchange of tax exceptions for reinvested profit. Subsequently, through Government Ordinance No. 13/2010 the government offered 6 months social security contribution exemptions for companies employing unemployed persons. Unfortunately, the budget passed in January 2009 was based on outdated data regarding the forecasted economic growth. As the discrepancy between the forecasted revenues and expenditures increased dramatically, between January and August 2009 Romania experienced an abrupt increase for the government bonds long-term interest rate that surged from 7% to a top value of 11.4%.

According to Aligica and Tarko54, the peculiar characteristic of the economic crisis in Romania was that it came after a three year period (2006-2008) when the government spending increased at a very abrupt pace. Despite the economic growth around 6-7%/year, the budget deficit also soared from 3% to 5.7%, the current account deficit peaked 13.6% of GDP in 2005, and annual inflation grew from 5% to 8%. Thus, given that the budget for 2009 was calculated on a presumed economic growth of at least 3%, the sharp economic contraction of 6.6% led to a budget deficit of 9%. In 2009, the expenditures continued to rise up to 41% of GDP while the total government revenues decreased to just 32%. While the consolidated gross debt as percentage of GDP remained stable over the 2006-2008 period, the widening gap between expenditures and revenues led to an increasing gross debt from 14% in 2008 to 25% in 2009 and 32% in 2010. In addition, from 2004 to 2008 the number of civil servants increased by around 400,000.

To counteract the negative effects of this increase, the Romanian government was forced to begin negotiations with the IMF in the winter of 2009 and a deal was reached in March 2009. The two-year stand-by agreement offered a joint IMF-EU-World Bank 12.95 billion Euros loan for Romania. The most important characteristics of this agreement were the commitment to maintain inflation low, and frontloading significant cuts in government spending. Aligica and Tarko55 argue that some of the negative features of this agreement were: the recentralization of the public sector as a mean to allow the fast implementation of expenditure cuts, and the imposition of across the board cuts. Thus, the absence of any performance related principles for government’s cuts blocked any structural reforms in the following years. Some of the most important measures imposed by this agreement were:

- Decreasing wages in the public sector by 25% and the elimination of many extra-benefits;

- Public pensions cuts by 5% - this measure was declared unconstitutional 54 D Aligică, & V Tarko, ‘The Uses of Austerity: Romania. Impressive improvisation on the short run, dark structural clouds on the long run horizon’, Presentation, 2012. Accessed at: http://www.slideshare.net/upsid-own/the-uses-of-austerity-romania-2007201155 Ibid.

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by the Constitutional Court and was compensated by a VAT increase from 19% to 24% and the imposition of a tax for the health insurances;

- Decreasing the total number of positions for employees paid by the state by 200,000 during the 2009-2011 period;

- 15% cut in unemployment and child benefits;- Structural reforms of 141 government agencies;- Tax increases for owners of more than one house or car;- Institutional reform to decrease tax evasion;- Privatization of various state companies like Oltchim, Cupru-Min,

Transelectrica, Transgaz, TAROM, and Posta Română;

All in all, these reforms should have led to a total of 700 million Euros savings in 2010 (3% of the total government spending). Given that the Presidential elections were scheduled in December 2009, none of the most unpopular measures were implemented in 2009. After several delays in starting the implementation of these reforms, in May 2010 President Traian Basescu became the main factor pushing for austerity reforms by publicly announcing the need to immediately implement some of the most painful measures of these reforms. In June 2010, the Boc Cabinet ordered a 25% wage cut for employees paid by the state, 15% cut in social security benefits and a VAT increase from 19% to 24%. Through the Strategy on reforming the social benefit sector56, the government committed to the goal of decreasing the costs of social security from 2.9% to 2% (the EU average is 5%). This aim was to be achieved by increasing the strictness of tests for resources, changing the manner of calculating the level of welfare benefits, and transferring the financial costs to the local authorities (30% central government and 70% the local budgets)57. In addition, in 2010 - 60,610 government employees were laid off. The implementation of the cuts led to a decrease of the average salary in the state sector from above 2,200 RON in 2009 to less than 2,000 in 2010 and 1,900 in 2011. Instead, wages in the private sector continued to rise during the entire period, from 1,650 in 2008 to almost 2,200 in 2012. Thus, despite the crisis, the overall wages in the Romanian economy have steadily increased during this period, from almost 1,800 in 2008 to over 2,010 in 2012.

After intense debates, in March 2011 the Parliament approved a new Labor Code that was vocally opposed by unions and the Romanian employers’ associations. Among the most relevant changes were the increased flexibility of employing and dismissing employees, the implementation of fixed-term work contracts, and decreasing the immunity of trade union leaders58. Further, in the summer of 2010 the Social Dialogue Code changed the criteria imposed on unions for gaining representativeness, imposed new and more difficult conditions for

56 Strategia privind reforma în domeniul asistenţei sociale 2011–2013 (National Strategy for reform in the area of social services). Accessed at: http://www.mmuncii.ro/pub/img/site/files/58bd6ffc9844fbc4a8a639672450872b.pdf57 V Stoiciu, ‘Austerity and Structural Reforms in Romania’, FES Working Paper, 2012. Accessed at: library.fes.de/pdf-files/id-moe/09310.pdf, p. 358 Ibid.


registering new unions, eliminated the professional trade unions and the national collective agreements59. Thus, despite the economic crisis and the high rates of unemployment, the share of social welfare costs remained constantly under 15%, one of the lowest levels in the EU. According to Stoiciu60, by 2010 the percentage of people at risk of poverty increased to 29.8% for if inactive and 45.4% for the unemployed persons. Also, while in 2009 the level of absolute poverty reached 4.4%, in the absence of social transfers the level would have raised to 36.8% of the population.

In addition to these measures the health system was another sector where significant cuts were aimed. While in 2011, 67 hospitals were closed, in January 2012 a draft bill aiming to reform the health care system caused an increased public outrage. Among the radical measures advanced by this law were the privatization of the emergency system, the transfer of health insurance to private companies, the privatization of hospitals or transformation them into foundations. Within this context, the political debate focused on the fact that the president had no Constitutional attributions regarding economic policies. Also, the coalition that supported the PDL Cabinet achieved 51% of votes through a process of massive migration following the 2009 Presidential elections. These aspects have been the most important points in the political oppositions’ effort to voice against the legitimacy of these austerity measures. While the public discontent continued to increase after the start of the austerity measures, protest movements were triggered only by the political conflict around the privatization of the emergency rescue services. The street protests in the winter of 2012 led to the resignation of Prime-Minister Emil Boc.

The detailed presentation of the policy measures undertaken in Romania underlines some peculiar features of the events in Romania: first, they were significantly influenced by the elections calendar, a situation that prevented any agreement among various political forces for almost one and a half years. Second, this one and a half year delay widened the scale of adjustment the external institutions asked from the Romanian authorities in order to offer a loan. Third, the second Boc Cabinet was consistent in its option for austerity measures that would have a regressive character. Thus, while no comprehensive quantitative evaluation of these measures exists at this moment, the Romanian austerity package appears to be one of the most steep and regressive among the EU member states.

5. Implications

Based on the detailed analysis in the previous presented, in this section I comparatively assess the features of the Romanian austerity policies in comparison with those from other EU member states. To start with, as in the case of most other EU members, the economic crisis came after a period of accelerated growth, period 59 Ibid. It is worth mentioning that the initial draft of this law was proposed by the American Chamber of Commerce and the Council of Foreign Investors and later embraced by the Boc Cabinet.60 Stoiciu, op. cit., p. 6.

Todor Arpad 37

that nevertheless did not lead to an abrupt increase of its debt as % of GDP. Unlike many West-European states, Romania did not face a significant threat of banking sector collapse, especially given the fact that most banks were subsidiaries of foreign banks and given that their exposure to risky credits was limited. Despite this, the widening gap between revenues and incomes that appeared in the beginning of 2009, combined with the lack of interest from the political parties and the President to publicly acknowledge the scale of the problem, led to a deterioration of investors’ confidence in Romania’s capacity to service its debt.

Also, the beginning of discussions about austerity measures was faster than in other West-European countries. Even if the measures were delayed after the 2009 presidential elections, they were still implemented before most other EU states. After Romania dropped out of the Stand-by agreement with the IMF in 2005, the beginning of the negotiations for a new agreement offered to the Romanian authorities a source of external credibility and increased their legitimacy for imposing austerity measures. The scale of the problem can be understood considering that even under the conditions of harsh austerity expenditure reductions, the government debt increased from 19.54% in 2009 to 34.93% in 2010.61 Thus, while Romania did not have to bail out it banking sector, the deficit issue became highly problematic since it could have led to a rapid deterioration of the state of public finance.

While countries that also took loans from the IMF like Greece, Latvia and Hungary opted for a combined package of tax hikes and expenditure cuts, the initial austerity package in Romania contained no increase of any major tax. Instead, the austerity measures forecasted abrupt cuts of state employees’ wages (25%) and public pensions (15%). Only after the Constitutional Court declared the pension cuts unconstitutional the government opted for a VAT raise from 19% to 24%. An effective pension reduction was nevertheless obtained by imposing a 5% contribution to social health insurances for the pension income above 740 RON. In addition, considering that most of these measures were implemented in 2010, the Romanian austerity measures were among the most frontloaded. As with most other EU countries, the areas of education, research and public investments were significantly affected by expenditure cuts. The divergent evolution of wages in the public and the private sectors in Romania led to a skewed effect of adjustment on the workers from the public sector. Nevertheless, throughout the austerity period, the total expenditures of the public institutions did not actually decrease but increased given the implementation of some reorganization measures and the obligation of the state to pay for some wage increases obtained through court of law decisions.62

While at this moment no comprehensive evaluation of the social effect of the austerity package exists, most of these measures had a regressive nature, 61 Data from the Ministry of Public Finance.62 http://www.gov.ro/informare-a-ministerului-finantelor-publice-referitoare-la-cheltuielile-de-personal-cu-prinse-in-proiectul-bugetului-general-consolidat-pentru-anul__l1a107557.html


including the only significant tax increase, the VAT. Also, as in most other EU member states, the social dialog produced no relevant effect on the nature of the austerity measures63. Additionally, the Cabinet chose to dismantle the Council for Social Dialogue in 2010 and to change the Labor Code as to create one of the most flexible labor markets for employees of the private sector.

Further, unlike other countries where the political coalitions in power justified the austerity measures as a means to restore the country’s financial viability, the Romanian President and some members of the Boc Cabinet actively advocated the austerity as a tool to enact a much-needed reform of the state apparatus and to dismantle inefficient welfare policies. According to Stoiciu64, the government employed two types of arguments as a means to legitimate its actions. The technical justification referred to the requirements imposed by the EU and the IMF and the need to modernize some sectors affected by the crisis. For example, while the Romanian labor market was not evaluated as too rigid, the Boc Cabinet insisted on deregulation of this area. The ideological arguments appealed to the widespread frustration and lack of trust in the state institutions and proposed to reform the system as to limit benefits for people on welfare, to dismiss as many lazy and corrupt officials as possible and to reform the obese state. 65

The neoliberal ideology was significantly present in the justification employed by the Boc Cabinet and especially the President. Given the dominance of the right-wing Liberal-Democratic Party, the Power Resource Theory appears to explain the direction of reforms in Romania. Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning that the coalition in power managed to obtain a slim majority in the Parliament after an intensive political migration of parliamentarians to the social democrats. The smaller left-wing party, the National Union for Romania’s Progress66 could have easily veto the highly controversial austerity reforms or to condition that the impact of the reforms be felt less on the lower end of the income scale. Instead, the enactment of radical retrenchment under the conditions of right-wing party with several veto points can explain the intensity of these reforms. On one hand, the presence of a three-party coalition with a left-wing party, the implication of the President and the capacity of the Constitutional Court and ordinary courts to censor some measures increased significantly the number of relevant veto points. Further, the implication of the IMF, the European Commission and the World Bank in drafting the agreement for the external loan Romania obtained further allowed a wider distribution of blame for the retrenchment reforms. On the other hand, the trigger of the harshest wave of reforms in May 2010 depended on the direct involvement and support of the most visible figure of the coalition in power: President Traian Basescu. As expected, in the months following these reforms the level of public trust in him decreased significantly (from above 50% to fewer than

63 S Theodoropoulou, & A Watt, op. cit.64 Stoiciu, op. cit., p. 4.65 Expressions used by the President Traian Basescu66 Uniunea Nationala pentru Progresul României (UNPR) is a center left party according to its political pro-gram acced at http://www.unpr.eu/description.php/Ideologie/16/

Todor Arpad 39

20%) for the next years. All in all, the political and economic situation of Romania and the characteristics of the policy sequence that led to the policy outcomes make the Romanian case a peculiar one. Using the theoretical instruments presented in the second section and the comparative data from the third section, in the next section I draw some preliminary conclusions regarding the explanatory power of each of the different theories under discussion.

6. Conclusions

Within this final section I investigate the strength and limitations of each of the three theories when they are applied to the case of Romania. Overall, the post-2007 economic recession affected Romania’s economy significantly and accentuated the public deficit problem to a point that could have led to a significant deterioration in a short period. While Romania had the advantage of a low level of public debt, the foreign loan it took from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the European Commission could only delay the necessity of a painful adjustment. The presence of two consecutive election years – in 2008, the parliamentary elections and in 2009, the presidential elections – delayed any significant adjustment measure by at least one and a half years. Since the looming painful austerity measures have not been discussed in either the parliamentary or the presidential elections, no clear popular mandate regarding these reforms resulted from these elections. After May 2010, Romania enacted one of the most aggressive and regressive fiscal retrenchment programs. While the scale of this retrenchment can be partially explained through the conditionality from foreign lenders, the regressive nature of all measures is a function of the ideological choice of the core artisans of this austerity package. Nevertheless, since the majority that enacted these reforms was crafted by President Traian Basescu through political migration and did not result from elections, the chain of events in Romania does not offer the strengths to the Power Resource Theory (PRT).

Instead, these events could offer more weight to the functionalist approach. Despite the inconclusive result of the parliamentary elections, and the delay caused by the presidential elections, the Romanian government had to implement the package of austerity policies given the structural constrains faced by Romania. While the coalition of the two biggest parties in the Parliament after the 2008 parliamentary elections could have led to a wide-ranging pact as those described by Katzenstein, the pressure created by the looming presidential elections, as well as the lack of trust among the two parties blocked any potential agreement on implementing a set of balanced austerity policies. Nevertheless, while the scale of retrenchment increased given the delay of these measures, the distribution of austerity measures across various categories and the timing of the implementation were placed within the choice of the Cabinet. The fact that the choices were consistently regressive and focused on state employees and beneficiaries of various welfare policies cannot be explained without weighting in the ideological factor. Thus, the functionalist approach on the structural threats faced by Romania could explain the sense of urgency for enacting and frontloading some of the harshest


austerity measures. While most of these reforms were delayed for one year given the presidential elections, in 2010 the reshuffled Cabinet67 enacted the harshest austerity measures, reforms that in combination with a continued economic recession led to significant social suffering. Instead, the highly regressive nature of most of the austerity measures was significantly influenced not by structural factors but by ideological reasons. For example, the need to keep Romania attractive for FDI was used as an argument to maintain the low Corporate Income Tax and the Personal Income Tax.

The presence of a heterogeneous coalition in power, the implication of the President and the power of the Constitutional Court increased the number of potential veto players who could affect the possibility of implementing the austerity measures. While this situation gives weight to Jensen and Mortensen’s argument regarding the conditions under which radical retrenchment is more probable, two limitations apply. First, the coalition in power comprised one left-wing party (UNPR) that could have easily derailed the reforms at any moment. Second, given the specific conditions of Romania, the decision to implement these reforms was attributed to a limited number of players – President Traian Basescu, the Prime-Minister supported by him and the main political party in the coalition – the Liberal Democratic Party. Further, the communication strategy used during the period of austerity placed the source of this decision on the President. Thus, no significant blame-avoidance strategy could be identified in the case of Romania.

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Ionuţ Apahideanu 43

Ionuţ APAHIDEANUBabeş-Bolyai UniversityCluj-Napoca, [email protected]

ABSTRACT

This research builds on previous findings which have placed Italy, alongside Portugal, as an exception within Western Europe in terms of religiosity trends over the last two-three decades, both countries having seemingly been marked, mainly over the ‘90s, by a generalized religious revival, relatively similar to the one manifested in the former Communist Eastern Europe.Starting from these findings, largely confirmed by various Italian researchers, this article deepens and extends the research in three major directions: it specifically contextualizes the Italian religiosity trends of the past two decades by comparing them, along more than twenty variables, with the ones manifested over the same timeframe in Romania, the latter country having also registered, albeit for obvious different reasons, a religiosity revitalization; it investigates the source and nature of the apparent aggregate religiosity decline in Italy, respectively stagnation in Romania, over the last decade by isolating as comparative analysis the two countries’ main religious groups; it transgresses the numerical approach and explores, in terms of “diffused spirituality” vs. “doctrinal orthodoxy”, the un-canonical, outside-of-church, component of each country’s and religious groups’ religiosity.The conclusions may seem surprising: quantitatively, following the undisputable religious revival of the ‘90s, the last decade has witnessed a plateau phase in Romania, while Italy’s aggregate religiosity decline has been realized rather on behalf of other denominations than the Catholic one, whose religiosity trend can hardly be qualified as a regress; qualitatively, and more surprising, when considering non-Christian immigration shares and globalization degrees of the two countries, the religiosity of Romanians in general and Romanian Orthodox Christians in particular has been affected by un-canonical practices and beliefs to a considerably larger extent than their Italian and Italian Catholics counterparts.

KEYWORDS

• religiosity• globalization• secularization• Christianity• Europe

Ionuţ APAHIDEANU

TWO PATTERNS OF RELIGIOSITY

DURING THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION

IN A QUANTATIVE APPROACH:

ITALY VERSUS ROMANIA


1. Introduction

The underlying research starts from the findings of a previous study (Apahideanu 2012), which, employing a 12-component aggregated religiosity index (ARI)1 constructed on the basis of the European Values Study (EVS) waves of 1981, 1990, 1999 and 2008, has placed Italy and Portugal as exceptions within a predominantly secularizing Western Europe, and as such quantitatively fitting rather the religious revitalization pattern registered in most of the former Communist Eastern Europe.

Illustrating for the 1990-2008 timeframe an inverted “V”-shaped trend of religiosity in Italy, the ARI instrument confirmed: (a) for the 1990s, the conclusions reached by Italian researchers who, although using different measurements methods, agreed in their overwhelming majority on the religious revival of Italy during the ‘90s (Introvigne and Stark, 2005: 10ff.; Driessen, 2009: 10, 12; Diotallevi 2002; Abbruzzese, 2000)2; and (b) for the 2000s, a few comparisons of local polls of 1994 and 2007, such as the one operated by Garreli (2013, 2011), suggesting a religious decline at the national Italian level3.

Starting from this, my underlying research essentially compares Italy and Romania in terms of religiosity trends along three dimensions: the aggregate religiosity displayed by the two societies over the last two decades in a quantitative (numerical) approach, both holistically and detailed by decade-by-decade, along twenty religiosity variables derivable from the EVS waves; a comparison of the two countries’ dominant religious groups – Roman Catholics in Italy and Orthodox Christians in Romania, in order to establish their religiosity patterns’ overlapping with the ones registered at the societal level; a qualitative (by nature of the research object, albeit quantitative by methods employed) investigation of the two countries’, respectively two major religious groups’ religiosity share which would be classifiable as what scholars have coined “diffused religiosity” (or rather spirituality) increasingly placed outside of the Church-set frontiers of “orthodox”, canonical, religious practice and beliefs (Apahideanu 2013).

1 Corresponding to three fundamental dimensions of religiosity, i.e. beliefs (a), practice (b), and affiliation (c), the 12 components of the ARI, selected primarily for their coverage of at least three EVS waves, were: a.1) belief in God (with a weight of 33.3/6% within ARI); a.2) respondent’s self-defining as a religious person (33.3/6%); a.3) attributed importance of God in respondent’s life (33.3/6%); a.4) belief in life after death (33.3/6%); a.5) belief in Heaven (33.3/6%); a.5) belief in Hell (33.3/6%); b.1.) taking moments of prayer/meditation (33.3/3%); b.2) ordinary religious service attendance (33.3/3%); b.3.i) church guidance in moral problems (33.3/3/3%); b.3.ii) church guidance in family life problems (33.3/3/3%); b.3.iii) church guidance in spiritual needs (33.3/3/3%); c.) declared affiliation to a religious denomination (33.3%). For more details see Apahideanu (2012). 2 Thus also retrospectively contradicting a few marginal and somewhat hasty opinions on the “collapse of regular [religious] practice” (Acquaviva 1993: 55) or an “end of religion [which was] near” (Dobbelaere 1993: 127).3 Specifically, Italy’s ARI value increased from 70.61 in 1981 to 70.97 in 1990 and to 73.19 in 1999, to eventual-ly decrease to 71.25 by 2009 (with a corresponding overall R2 value of +.2147). The trend was confirmed by a relatively similar built ARI based on the International Social Survey Programme waves of 1991, 1998 and 2008, whose values reached: 65.72 for 1991; 66.25 for 1999; 65.01 for 2008 (ibid.).


Plausibly, the fundamentally subjective nature of poll respondents’ answers, used here as primary analysis data, may somewhat cast doubts on the validity of any conclusions reached, in a reigniting of an otherwise substantial and ongoing debate over the reliability of such data. Italy’s more documented case has for instance witnessed considerable opinions explicitly stating a significant discrepancy between what people declare and what they actually do in regard to religiosity, or, interrelated, that many of them fit the pattern of “belonging without believing”4, that they assume a religious denomination belonging, but do not respect Church’s behavior prescriptions (Castegnaro and Dalla Zuana 2006; Introvigne and Stark 2005; Cipriani 2003; Pisati 1998). I argue that the underlying comparison is affected only to a safely marginal extent by this problem, since on the one hand there is no reason to assume a considerably higher subjective-objective discrepancy in one of the two countries, and on the other hand I focus on a longitudinal, trend-isolating, comparison and not on a transversal one in terms of which of the two societies would be more religious.

As a final preliminary remark, I acknowledge the selection of Italy and Romania as comparison objects may prima facie seem risky, or of limited heuristic value, given the countries’ obvious differences, ranging from historical background and geographical identity to the difference in major religious denominations, or from the asymmetry between one, at least mentally perceived, institutional center of worldwide Catholicism and an autocephalous national church, to objective contemporary national parameters, all important factors of secularization/religiosity, such as country size, legislation, degree of social and economic modernization, non-Christian immigration rate and its share of the national religious market, etc. I argue that, aside from such differences, a closer exploration of the two countries highlights interesting and substantial similarities, both numerically satisfactory and substantially relevant. For instance, the two religious markets structures are surprisingly similar, not only by the quasi-identical share held by the dominant religious denomination, but also by the measurable degrees of religious fragmentation and polarization. Furthermore, aside from the very similar, and all the more intriguing, important aggregate religiosity dynamics overlapping over the last two decades, the very static values of religiosity are very high among European countries5; the comparison is thus operated between a country whose religiosity values are too high to be explained by either the secularization paradigm, or the post-secular religious markets model (Diotallevi 2001, 2002; Smith and Sawkins 2003; Iannaccone 1992; Chaves and Cann 1992) and one whose “people is one of the most religious in Europe, regardless of the religious phenomenon’s approach” (Voicu 2007: 149). Finally, without by any means exhausting the list, even the current religion-related public debate topics within the two countries are, as I will show below, surprisingly similar.

4 As opposed to Grace Davie’s previous, already classic, label “believing without belonging” (Davie 1994).5 In a purely orientating-value 2008 extended European ranking of 35 countries by the value of national ARIs as derived from the 2008 EVS wave, Romania would rank 3rd (after Malta and Turkey) and Italy 8th (respectively 4th in Western Europe, after Malta, Northern Ireland and Ireland).


2. Setting the comparison framework: from history to current religious markets

Contextualizing recent religiosity trends within the two countries by approaching the historical background of church-state-nation relations, the dominant ecclesiastical institutions and the current religious markets frames a comparison binomial which I consider extremely interesting in terms of the uniqueness-similarity dichotomy.

2.1. Historical framework of church-state-nation relations. Deep historically-rooted factors have exerted profound effects on the analyzed countries’ triadic church-state-nation interactional patterns, with the first pair of terms evolving relationally significantly different, but church and nation evolving in both cases surprisingly similar. Thus, on a broader historical scale, the differences are impressive: whereas Italy has provided the cradle of Renaissance (Rinascimento) and constituted an integral part of a Western Europe foundationally reshaped by Reformation and Enlightenment, Romania lies by contrast in the midst of Orthodoxy as “a pre-modern culture”, only marginally exposed to the historical transformations which have built the foundations of modernity (Nikos Kokosalakis, apud Dungaciu 2006: 247). Nevertheless, from the same historical perspective, the Italian case pronouncedly distinguishes itself among Western European countries by at least two specific features: its “unique peculiarity closely connected with its destiny to host the center of the Catholic Church” (A. Ferrari 2010: 840-1), respectively the Italian Catholicism’s seeming ability “to withstand the test of time and the challenges of advanced modernity” (Garelli 2010, 2013: 3).

Correlated to the political, cultural and religion area identity, the two countries have been marked by the expression of two entirely different, and to a certain extent opposing, traditions of state-church interactions: a Vatican-centered and -promoted universalism and the Concordat practice in the European Catholic realm versus autocephaly and “symphonia” in the Orthodox realm. In this dichotomy, the Concordat practice characterized equal partners relations with the Holy See and formalized a “contractual separation” (Ferrari and Ferrari 2010: 431) between parties mutually acknowledging their legitimacy (Jemolo 1961), in a partnership guided by the principle “simul stabunt, simul cadent” (A. Ferrari 2010: 845), as opposed to the Orthodox area-specific symphonia between Church and state (Stan and Turcescu 2007, 2000; Voicu 2007: 21; Bruce 2001; Froese 2004), which “never entailed a partnership of equals” (Stan and Turcescu 2007: 5), but has rather been a euphemism for the Church’s adaptative and unconditioned surrender to the political power.6

6 Which, during the postwar era, translated into a sound contrast to the active and substantial involvement of most of the Catholic Churches in the former Communist states of Central and Eastern Europe in civic resistance movements (Pollack 2003, 2001; Need and Evans 2001; Froese 2004; Stark 2001; Bruce 2001). In return, as a reputed historian of Romania noted, the local “Orthodox Church was the only major national institution whose inner life [was] not destroyed by the party in order to conform fully with communist norms” (Gallagher 2005: 65).


In terms of state-building, both states have emerged as independent and unified states relatively recent on a broader historical scale and roughly simultaneous: the Italian modern state emerged following the Risorgimento in two stepts (the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861 and the capture of Rome in 1870 (Duggan 2007: xv-xvi)), while Romania was the result of the two-step unification of 18597, respectively 1918-1920. From this perspective not coincidentally, Churches played in both cases a significant role in the nation-building process. In Italy, where this role has been extensively acknowledged by historians (Pertici 2009; Impagliazzo 2004, Ruffini 1992; Margiotta Broglio 1990; S. Ferrari 1988; Jemolo 1961), Catholicism has been identified by some authors as the only significant cement binding the new country together (A. Ferrari 2010: 842), which, consequently, may explain why even today the majority of Italians do not seem to question the bond between the prevailing religious confession and national identity (Garelli 2013: 11). This could be equally reliable be said about Romania, part of an Orthodox area where national churches have been closely and profoundly linked to national identity and nation-building (Franklin Lytle 1998; Gheorghe 2004; Gillet 2001; Pollack 2001; Bruce 2001; Froese 2004; Stan and Turcescu 2000, 2005; Ramet 2006), the specific case of Romania having been addressed within this framework by a spectacularly numerous and still growing body of academic and research literature (Stan and Turcescu 2007, 2006, 2005, 2000; Voicu 2007: 21-2; Leuştean 2005; Gallagher 2005; Gheorghe 2004; Rogobete 2004; G. Andreescu 2003; Oldson 2002; Gillet 2001; Mungiu-Pippidi 1998)8.

2.2. Dominant institutional actors and religious markets. Remarkably enough given the different historical backgrounds, both countries have a quasi-monopolistic religious market, with the dominant churches (the Catholic in Italy, respectively the Orthodox in Romania) collecting each a share of over 4/5 of religious allegiances, around 86% in Romania, compared to 88% in Italy, when calculated as average of various polls and surveys.

7 With Alexandru Ioan Cuza, the first ruler of the united principalities forging the first measures qualifiable as “secularization”, i.e. nationalization of a large part of the Church’s land, and in return a state contribution to the clergy’s salaries, a clear regulation of institutional roles and responsibilities, establishing Romanian as the liturgical language, etc. (Stan and Turcescu 2000: 1467).8 Many of the authors emphasize the contribution of the Romanian Orthodox Church to the spread of ethno-nationalistic movements and ideas, both historical and post-Communist. Some of them go so far as for instance to accuse ROC’s “deeply ingrained homophobia, its inward-looking sacralization of the nation, its hostility towards liberalism and cosmopolitanism, and its consequent hostility towards both ecumenism and European unity” (Ramet 2006: 150), or to interpret the Church’s stance against abortion and contraception as rooted in part in “ethno-national considerations” (Stan and Turcescu, 2000: 1481). In the same spirit, others consider that over the last decade, Orthodox nationalism has replaced ethnic nationalism as the main source of pressure on the Romanian state (Andreescu and Andreescu 2009: 24).


Table 1. Italy and Romania’s religious structure; estimations and official data (%)

(Sources: 2006b: CIA World Factbook 2006 ; 2006a: Corriere della Serra ; 1994, 2007: national polls in Italy, quoted in Garelli 2013, 2011, Cesareo et al. 1995)

For Italy, where censuses do not include questions regarding religious affiliation, the figures above can be indirectly confirmed by various other indicators, such as the 90% of the pupils enrolled in state schools who attend Catholic religion education classes (Ferrari and Ferrari 2010: 431). In Romania, various national polls undertaken over the last two decades generally conform official data; for instance, in the November 2005 Public Opinion Barometer (which served as the national survey of the same year’s World Values Survey), respondents declared the following religious affiliation: 86.5% Orthodox; 6.1% Roman Catholic; 2.7% Protestant; 1.4% Greek-Catholic; 2.6% other religious denominations; 0.4 with no religious affiliation (Şandor and Popescu 2008: 173).

However, four complementary observations seem mandatory at this point, all of them referring to Italy and in part relatable comparatively to Romania. Firstly, regarding religious structure trends in Italy, multiple local authors have been recently drawing attention on the significant impact exerted by the high immigration rates registered over the last two-three decades, with three religious groups slowly, but steadily, challenging the monopolistic position of the Catholic Church: Eastern Orthodox Christians, originating from the former Communist states in Eastern Europe; Muslims, immigrating mainly from the Middle East – North Africa area; Asian and other Oriental religions adherents. For instance, the number of Muslims located in Italy has skyrocketed in thirty years from around 5,000 to somewhere

ItalyDenomination 994 006a 006b 007Catholics 88.6 87.8 0 86.1Other religion .6 .8No religion .8 .1

Romania

Denomination 2002 census

2011 census

Orthodox 86.67 85.94Roman Catholic 7.74 4.56Greek-Catholic 0.90 0.84Reformed (Calvin) 3.22 3.16

Baptist 0.59 0.62Adventists 0.45 0.45Other religion 1.73 1.78No religion 0.06 0.12Atheist 0.04 0.12Not declared 0.08 0.44


around 800,0009, whereas the number of Buddhists and Hindus (Sikhs included) had reached already in 2004 around 47,400, respectively 60,000, while Eastern Orthodox Christians reportedly numbered 350,000 (according to the Caritas and Fondazione Migrantes annual report10). In an organizational perspective, out of 120 organizations and groups delivering religious services in Italy at the turn of the millennia, almost a half of them (57) had arrived or had been founded since 1984 (Introvigne et al. 2001)11.

Subsequently, the current religious market of Italy may be interpreted as post-monopolistic (Garelli 2013: 3-2; Trombetta 2004), but the Catholic Church’s dominant position seems unthreatened on the medium term; as noted by other authors, non-Catholic immigration still covers only about 5% of Italy’s whole population (Garelli 2013: 3-4), posing a marginal competition (Driessen 2009: 18), while the spread new religious movements also seems less significant than in other Western countries (Ferrari and Ferrari 2010: 431-2).

Secondly, one of the main reasons Italian religiosity in particular has recently attracted a considerable scholarly attention (Cesareo et al. 1995; Garelli 2013, 2011, 2007; Introvigne and Stark 2005, Castegnaro and Zuanna 2006, Trombetta 2004, Iannacone 2002, Chaves and Cann 1992, Acquaviva 1993, etc.) lies in the country’s exceptionalism, not only among Western countries12, where, “in terms dynamics, intensity and quantity, Italy may be […] the second religious market” (Diotallevi 2002: 138)13, but also within the Catholic-majorities European cluster (Pérez-Agote 2012, Driessen 2009; Voyé 1994). Moreover, when measured by church attendance, participation, or commitment, Italy’s religiosity remains unexplainable by either the classic secularization paradigm or the post-secular religious market model (Diotallevi 2001, 2002; Smith and Sawkins 2003; Iannaccone 1992: 170-1; Chaves and Cann 1992: 85).

In search of an explanatory specific difference, some recent works have focused on the high internal diversity of Italian Catholicism, one ignited by the de-regulatory measures of the Second Vatican Council and acting as a mitigating 9 Their current number is controversially estimated, from one source to another, from 700,000 to 1.5 million. 10 The 2007 report (p. 194) estimated, based on statistics of the Internal Ministry, a total 3,690,000 immigrants in Italy, out of which 1/2 belonged to various Christian branches, 1/3 were Muslim, 5% followers of Asian religions, the remaining over 10% comprising adherents to other religious denominations and non-believers.11 In the same sense, Introvigne and Stark (2005: 9) inventoried for 2005 a total of 353 new religious mo-vements, plus another 120 Protestant, Evangelical and Pentecostal movements independent of the mainline churches.12 Confirmed as such by global poll such as Ipsos Mori (2011), in which Italy constantly scores highest among all Western European countries surveyed (see presentation of main findings http://www.fgi-tbff.org/sites/default/files/elfinder/FGIImages/Research/fromresearchtopolicy/ipsos_mori_briefing_pack.pdf)13 An opinion nowadays shared, for the ‘80s and ‘90s by the overwhelming majority of scholars, the only matter of debate remaining, possibly, the (main) geographical source of the religious revival; most authors identify it in the less socio-economically developed Southern Italy (Garelli 2013: 7; Trigiglia 1994; Cartocci 1994), while Diotallevi instruments objective data (i.e. non-poll derived) to expose the “myth of a religious South” (2002: 139).


factor of the Catholic Church’s religious (quasi-)monopoly (Pisati 1998; Introvigne and Stark 2005; Iannacone 1992: 170). Alternatively, other authors have operated a dissociation between religious pluralism and regulation, focusing on cross-national institutional variations in religion-state arrangements (Driessen 2009; Chaves and Cann 1992), while, finally, Luca Diotallevi elaborates a threefold explanation of Italy’s high religiosity: ecclesiastic strategies of religious modernization unforeseen by the old secularization paradigm; differentiation between church and religious organizations able to sustain a regime of internal competition unaccounted for by the post-secular paradigm adherents; a degree in complexity in the religious structure unforeseen by neo-secularists (Diotallevi 2002: 152).

Thirdly, involuntarily reigniting the long-enduring debate on how to (properly) measure religiosity14, various authors, as for instance Francesco Zaccaria (2010) have emphasized the need to investigate beyond the subjective dimension of beliefs declared by Italian Catholics, into the depth of religious practice as religiosity’s objective dimension, since the disparities may theoretically be, and usually are, significant. For instance, although constantly over 85% of the Italian poll respondents declare themselves Catholics, less than 40% of the taxpayers specify the Catholic Church as desired destination of their otto per mille tax contribution, while only 60% of marriages are held in accordance to Catholic rites (Ferrari and Ferrari 2010: 431). Consequently, many scholars and commentators prefer the term “active Catholic” to name a subcategory of, over the last two decades, 30-40% of the declared Catholics which are religiously active and genuinely and consciously practice their faith.

In relation to my research, this problem also affects Romania, where, although correspondent data are not available to my knowledge, other indicators confirm, as probably in the case of any country, a disparity between the subjective and objective dimensions of religiosity; for instance, the last EVS (2008) wave recorded 97.7% declared believers in God and 88.8% respondents affiliated to the Orthodox denomination, but a rate of at least monthly church attendance of only 49.9%15. Moreover, in order to overcome this shortcoming, further below we shall not only discuss religiosity in the two countries on the longitudinal, i.e. diachronically, and as such marginally affected by the religiosity specific structures16, but also isolate as comparative analysis units Italian Catholics and Romanian Orthodox Christians.

Fourthly, interrelated to the previous observation17, and equally relevant to the issue of religious market structure, innumerous authors have in time extensively and intensively discussed the Italy not exclusive, but nevertheless significant, phenomenon of “popular religion”. First conceptualized under the term “invisible religion” by Thomas Luckmann (1967), and gradually replaced by the alternative 14 For a brief summary of various models proposed by scholars, see Apahideanu 2012: 60.15 Or 46% according to the November 2005 Public Opinion Barometer (apud Şandor and Popescu 2008: 173).16 Unless, if the joke is allowed, someone develops and depicts in its reality a concept such as “cohort lying effect”.17 In relation to the frontiers of “doctrinal orthodoxy”, or “canonical conformity”.


label “diffused religion” by the 1980s (Cipriani 1984: 32), but currently admitting a few dozen synonyms18, popular religion (religiosità popolare) essentially refers to the phenomenon of a gradual functional replacement of church-defined religion by a more or less articulated set of hybrid, more or less trans-religious or trans-spiritual beliefs, norms and values, a phenomenon accelerated and disseminated by globalization19.

Reviewing an impressive number of scholarly works in the field, Zaccaria (2010: 7ff) has summarized the main expressions of popular religion among Italian Catholics as follows: in terms of practice, a specific organizations in groups and associations, transgressing parish frontiers, and a great cohesive and unifying power, aggregated especially around devotion to a saint or feast, venerating sacred images and relics; pilgimages, processions, vows and rosary; in terms of beliefs, specific mental representations of God, with a special emphasis on the religious interpretation of suffering and on certain aspects of Christ’s images, and particular images of the church on terms of its internal organization and of its relation to society20.

In its trans-religious extension, popular religion combines pre-Christian myths, legends, magic, superstitions, witchcraft (R.K. Smith 1999; Ferrari 2010: 842, n. 10) with newer, modern and post-modern elements of other religions, spirituality forms, ideas and currents, and diverse cognitive systems (astrology, yoga, New Age, occultism, anthropocentric ideas, etc.) and as such constitutes a phenomenological subset of a global trend towards what scholars have alternatively coined as “individualization” of beliefs, “bricolage”, “syncretism”, “diffused religion”, “patchwork” or “self-made” religion, etc.21

18 E.g. “folk religion”, “religion of the masses”, “religion of the people”, “religion of the oppressed”, “religion of the poor”, “common religion”, “civil religion”, “popular piety”, “popular faith”, “popular Catholicism”, etc. (see, inter alia, R.K. Smith 1999; Zaccaria 2010: 5; Berlinerblau 2000: 3; Cesareo et al. 1995: 261; Lanternari 1982; Caroll 1992: 6; Abbruzese, 1995: 167; Baumgartner 1979: 187-8; Pace 1979: 72).19 The significant problems in operationalizing the term seem notorious. Noticing that “popular religion” remains an extremely ambiguous term, having been applied to a spectacularly heterogeneous range of religious/spiritual expressions, e.g. from the snake-handling cults in Appalachia to Greek pilgrims crawling on their hands and knees to catch a glimpse of an icon on the Greek island of Tinos, Berlinerblau (2000: 3) concludes that the only consensus reached over the past thirty years of interdisciplinary research is that there is no consensus on the very meaning of the term “popular religion”. Similarly, Badone considers the term extremely problematic as a scholarly category” (1990: 4), while Carroll notices its “meaning has become less clear over the past two decades” (1992: 6).20 Although popular religion is estimated to influence, to various degrees, about 15-20% of Italians (Cesareo et al. 1995: 87-90), I consider nothing more but exaggerations statements such as the one that “the main religion [in Italy] is not Catholicism, as one could argue […, since] everybody lives a subjective religion which in many cases is far away from the Church doctrine (Garelli et al. 2003: 299; Trombetta 2004). 21 For a dozen such more or less synonymous terms that have been advanced by scholars and for a more detailed theoretical and empirical approach of heterodox religiosity as a manifestation of secularization at the individual level in contemporary Europe, see Apahideanu (2013).


Comparatively, new religions represent in today’s Romania a still marginal phenomenon. Nonetheless, pre-Christian customs and practices, geographically ubiquitous and tolerated by the Orthodox Church, have been extensively documented by sociologists, ethnologists, anthropologists, and historians22. Additionally, various national polls exploring contemporary Romanians’ beliefs, some of whose findings are detailed below, highlight a spectacular presence of diverse superstitions, and, completely “unorthodox” in both meanings of the term, a series of beliefs mixing elements of witchcraft, astrology, Gnosticism, Asian cognitive elements such as yoga, reincarnation, etc., which fully fit the religious “individualization” model aforementioned.

Essentially, Italy’s specific new immigration-bound religions aside, the two religious markets share essential similarities, with the dominant churches occupying quasi-monopolistic positions and the vast majorities of citizens not questioning their inextricable linkage to nation building and national identity. Thus, what for instance Alessandro Ferrari (2010: 844) distinguishes as three main features of today’s state-Church relation in Italy, namely (i) the privileged position of the dominant Catholic Church, laced at the top of the “pyramid of cults”, (ii) the way of considering the relation as an “apical matter” of exclusive competence of the State and Church leadership, and respectively (iii) a rather top-down directed general attitude favoring pluralism, seems equally applicable to the Romanian case: the corresponding Orthodox Church represents “the most important agent of Romanian religious life” (Andreescu and Andreescu 2009: 25); it has traditionally “been the closest to the state” (Stan and Turcescu 2006: 1119); finally, the Romanian model is a “managed quasi-pluralist” one (Stan and Turcescu 2007: 26), with the political elite occasionally initiating projects or punctual measures and decisions contradicting traditional, mainly religiously motivated / instrumented beliefs and convictions, and as such confronting more or less opposition, as for instance the introduction of biometric passports, or the current discussions, within the margin of a Constitutional revision project, on the possibility of legalizing gay marriages.

These resemblances translate even into similar patterns of public trust in Churches:

22 See, inter alia: I Bădescu, & O Cucu-Oancea, (eds.), Dicţionar de sociologie rurală, Mica Valahie, Bucuresti, 2005; M Brătulescu, Colinda românească [The Romanian Colinda], Minerva, Bucureşti, 1981; P Caraman, & V Săvulescu, Studii de folclor (Vol. 3), Minerva, Bucureşti, 1995; A Fochi, Cântecul epic tradiţional al românilor, Ed. Ştiinţifică şi Enciclopedică, Bucureşti, 1985; SF Marian, Înmormântarea la români, Grai şi suflet, Bucureşti, 1995.


Table 2. Public trust in institutions in Italy and Romania over the last two decades (% of “great deal” and “quite a lot” of confidence; within valid answers, EVS)

For the last EVS wave for instance, the (generically defined) Church in Italy ranks 3rd out of 15 monitored national and international institutions, surpassed only by the equally traditional institutions of the police and the Armed Forces; comparatively, in Romania, the Church has been ranking extremely high in the public opinion’s institutional trust ranking, actually competing for supremacy only with the Armed Forces. Both cases have been confirmed by multiple national polls operated over the last two decades, with the noteworthy observation that, in Romania, a March 2013 INSCOP national poll (see below) has identified a 69.1% of much and very much confidence in the Church, which, according to local sociologists, would mark, if confirmed by other researches, a first significant drop in the last fifteen years. However, the fact that such researches do not correlate religious affiliation and corresponding Church, but only holistically highlight all respondents confidence in a generically defined Church represents one more reason for later on in this article isolating and comparatively analyzing Romanian Orthodox Christians and respectively Italian Catholics.

In light of the above, it is not surprisingly that even the current debate issues regarding the state-Church relation in Italy and Romania are largely similar, ranging from the display of religious symbols (crucifixes, icons, etc.) in public institutions, state schools included, to state financing of the Churches, or to religious education classes in the public schools system (Ferrari 2010: 852; Garelli 2013: 11; SLC 2003;

InstitutionItaly Romania

1990 1999 2009 1993 1999 2008Church 60.2 67.1 65.6 72.3 82.7 86.2Armed Forces 45.6 51.6 73.7 82.2 82.6 76.2Police 64.9 67.2 75.7 45.1 45.4 54.8Education system 46.8 53.2 53.7 79.2 79.4 74.0Press 39.4 35.3 28.5 27.8 38.5 43.5Parliament 30.6 34.1 32.6 20.8 19.2 24.0Civil service 25.1 33.2 36.5 30.8 27.3 30.7Social sec. system 37.3 34.1 50.2 35.9 30.5 46.0Health care system 36.7 53.8 58.9 53.9Justice system 31.8 31.5 36.0 47.7 40.1 41.5EU 75.5 68.7 65.1 47.6 39.1 61.1NATO 52.5 55.7 57.2 56.8 34.9 57.0UN 67.9 64.6 44.3 58.4Government 27.5 24.7Political parties 13.5 17.8


Şandor and Popescu 2008: 172)23. However, although the identity of debate subjects is striking, the situations addressed differ significantly. In Romania for instance, the problem of (optional) religious education (and not a historical or comparative approach of religions) has become over the last years a controversial issue on the public debate agenda, not because of the majority of people24, but especially in protests formulated by secular NGOs and some branches of the cultural and intellectual elite, who consider it “a serious threat to freedom of religion and conscience” (e.g. Liga Pro Europa, SLC 2003, Enache 2007; A şi A 2009: 23, 42).

The most significant difference may reside in the way state contributes financially to the Churches’ activities. Italy’s current system was introduced by the Socialist Bettino Craxi government in the ‘80s, with Catholic priests no longer having their salaries paid from the state budget; instead, taxpayers are required to pay a 0.8% tax income (popularly known as the otto per mille) to be channeled by the state to “humanitarian or religious” activities; taxpayers can either indicate a Church to whom the tax will be redirected or abstain, in which case the government divides each collected 0.8% between the state and religious institutions proportionally to the preferences of those who expressed an option (Introvigne and Stark 2005: 5). Comparatively, Romanian taxpayers aren’t given any option, and “government funding for the recognized religious groups constitutes a central component of the Romanian state’s religious policy”; concretely, state financing is not only direct (disbursements for: clergy salaries, impoverished parishes, religious and theological higher education, for church construction, maintenance and renovation), but also indirect, and rather obscure in terms of accountability, by various taxes forgone by the state, the religious denominations’ legal monopolies on the manufacturing and sale of religious products, etc. (Andreescu and Andreescu 2009: 31)

2.3. A comparison of “orthodox” religious trends in Italy and Romania by two decades and 20 items. An approach, as below, of 20 variables, all, with one exception, measured over at least three EVS waves for both countries, highlights a generalized quantitative increase of religiosity in Romania (for which all variables registered in terms of linear regression a positive trend) and a mixed situation in Italy, where the overall increase of beliefs has been balanced by a decline in religious practice (including Church guidance) and religious affiliation.

A decade-by-decade comparative analysis however sheds light on more complex patterns. Thus, the ‘90s were marked by a spectacular religious revitalization in Romania, who registered positive trends by all three dimensions (beliefs,

23 Specifically (only) to Romania, the recenty years have been marked by a public debate on the project of a National Salvation Cathedral to be built in the center of Bucharest and financed in part from the state budget. 24 In a March 2013 INSCOP poll, 86.7% of the respondents agreed with religious education in schools and only 10.1% disapprove it. Out of them, 85.4% believed religion should be taught in primary school (first 4 classes), 58.4% in secondary school (5th-8th class) and 28.4% believed it should be taught in high school. In the same sense, 55.7% of the respondents were in favor of Orthodox religion being taught in school; 42.9% thought all religions should be taught; 1.3% indicated something else (http://m.agerpres.ro/n/Sondaj-Majoritatea-romanilor-are-incredere-in-biserica-si-doreste-predarea-religiei-in-scoli-190978).


practice, and affiliation) and by all 19 variables measured. By comparison, Italy also witnessed a generalized religiosity increase, albeit to a smaller degree (in terms of graph slopes and R squared), with apparently a single exception – the declared religious affiliation, which dropped from 84.6 to 82.2% of the valid EVS answers.

On the same overall national levels, the 2000s witnessed a clear religiosity trend reversal in Italy25, where only 3 out of 20 items registered value increases: the beliefs in Heaven and Hell (which may be prima facie attributable in part to non-canonical beliefs subsumed to “diffused spirituality”), and the perceived Church guidance in spiritual problems.

Table 3. A comparison of religiosity trends in Italy and Romania by 20 items (all figures reported as % within valid answers; EVS waves)

25 Confirming, inter alia, Garelli (2013: 5-6) and Cesareo et al (1995), who compared 1994 and 2007 local polls..

EVS wavecountry 1981 1990 1999 2008

Trend 1990-2008

(R2)Belief in God (% “yes” answers)

ITA 87.9 89.9 93.5 90.2 ▲ (.0056)ROM 93.7 96.3 97.7 ▲ (.9709)

Belief in Heaven (% “yes” answers)ITA 44.3 52.3 58.7 61.9 ▲ (.9643)ROM 57.5 75.1 85.3 ▲ (.9769)

Belief in sin (% “yes” answers)ITA 66.0 72.2 73.2 57.2 ▼ (.7002) ROM 76.7 90.6 94.7 ▲ (.9101) Importance of God in respondents’ lives (∑ 6-10

answers on a scale from 1 = “not at all” to 10 = “very”)

ITA 67.2 73.7 77.9 75.1 ▲ (.1071) ROM 76.2 89.6 88.3 ▲ (.6703)

Outside of Church prayer frequency (∑ ≥ monthly: “every day” + “several times a week” + “1/

week” + “≥ monthly”)ITA 67.9 66.1 ▼

ROM 81.0 85.7 ▲

Religious service’s importance at marriage(% “yes” answers)

ITA 81.1 84.9 81.0 ▼ (.0005) ROM 91.1 98.3 97.1 ▲ (.5870)

Church guidance – moral problems (% “yes”, does offer adequate answers)

ITA 48.2 51.5 61.8 55.6 ▲ (.1563)ROM 61.8 80.7 70.1 ▲ (.1919)

Church guidance – spiritual problems (% “yes”, does offer adequate answers)

ITA 56.1 68.6 72.4 76.7 ▲ (.9987)ROM 77.6 88.9 88.2 ▲ (.7007)

EVS wave country 1981 1990 1999 2008

Trend 1990-2008

(R2)Belief in life after death (% “yes” answers)

ITA 57.0 67.6 72.8 71.2 ▲ (.4568)ROM 57.7 67.8 74.0 ▲ (.9813)

Belief in Hell (% “yes” answers)ITA 33.3 40.2 49.0 51.5 ▲ (.9061)ROM 42.6 71.4 81.8 ▲ (.9316)

Self-defining as religious (% “yes” answers)ITA 83.6 84.5 85.8 85.1 ▲ (.2126)ROM 74.5 84.8 82.9 ▲ (.5872)

Practice of prayer/meditation (% “yes” answers)

ITA 71.3 74.7 78.9 74.3 ▼ (.0062)ROM 86.4 93.5 90.6 ▲ (.3461)

Religious service’s importance at birth (% “yes” answers)

ITA 84.3 89.0 85.1 ▲ (.0253)ROM 86.0 97.6 98.2 ▲ (.7868)

Religious service’s importance at death (% “yes” answers)

ITA 85.7 89.4 88.0 ▲ (.3789)ROM 88.7 97.9 97.3 ▲ (.6979)

Church guidance – family life problems (% “yes”, does offer adequate answers)

ITA 47.6 44.7 47.7 45.6 ▲ (.0854)ROM 52.9 78.5 62.1 ▲ (.1258)

Church guidance – social problems (% “yes”, does offer adequate answers)

ITA 40.5 43.5 39.2 ▼ (.0869)ROM 32.4 52.2 37.0 ▲ (.0493)


By comparison, Romania witnessed a rather confusing religiosity pattern, with 11 variables suggesting religious revival versus 9 hinting at secularization at the individual level, although percentage variations remain mostly confined within the margin of error. Interestingly, the latter category comprises especially items describing the perceived legitimacy and guidance of the Church – the importance of religious services at marriage and birth, or the Church’s interpretation as offering adequate answers to moral, spiritual, family life and social problems26, although, contradictory, the overall level of trust in the Church has increased over the same timeframe. Additionally, self-definitions as religious persons and God’s attributed importance in the respondents’ lives also witnessed slight decreases, as did the binary constructed (“yes” vs. “no”) dimension of prayer-meditation (from 93.5 to 90.6%), as opposed to the outside of Church declared prayer practice, which increased (from 81.0 to 85.7%). Subsequently, I consider as still valid previous research conclusions (Apahideanu 2012; Voicu 2007) which suggest that, following the spectacular religiosity revival of the ‘90s (explainable as a resultant of various contextual factors), Romania has entered in the last decade a “plateau-phase” in terms of aggregated religiosity, in a pattern actually characteristic to the former Communist Eastern Europe area in its entirety27

Italian Catholics versus Romanian Orthodox Christians: a religiosity trend comparison

An above justified isolation of Italian Catholics and Romanian Orthodox Christians as primary analysis units sheds an entirely new and surprising light on the afore discussed religiosity trends recorded at the overall national level: if expressed by linear regression over the 1990-2008 timeframe, the religiosity of Italian Catholics has not declined, but actually continued to increase numerically, by 16 out of the 17 variables measurable over two decades, the only exception being the number of believers in sin.

Comparatively, the same could be said about Romanian Orthodox Christians, whose religiosity has registered an overall 1990-2008 generalized increase by all the 26 The 2005 BOP measured values are mostly located within the variation interval of those measured by the 1999-2008 EVS waves. For exact figures, see Şandor and Popescu (2008: 173-4). 27 With the exception of a narrowly defined Mitteleuropa (grouping the former East Germany, Poland, Croatia, Hungary and, arguably, Slovenia and Slovakia as cases with variations within the margin of error), where, as a general trend, religiosity seems to have continued to decrease (Apahideanu 2012).

Confidence in Church (∑ % “a great deal” + “quite a lot”)

ITA 57.1 60.2 67.1 65.6 ▲ (.5535)ROM 72.3 82.7 86.2 ▲ (.9241)

Affiliation to a religious denomination (% “yes” answers)

ITA 92.9 84.6 82.2 80.6 ▼ (.9868)ROM 94.1 97.6 98.0 ▲ (.9868)

Church ordinary attendance (∑ at least once a month, i.e. “once a month” + “once a week” + “more

than once a week”)ITA 48.2 51.2 53.7 48.4 ▼ (.2788)ROM 30.7 46.5 49.9 ▲ (.8779)

Religion as providing comfort/strength (% “yes”)

ITA 68.7 71.5 70.8 ▲ (.5192)ROM 75.7 86.6 89.6 ▲ (.9028)


17 items, although, noteworthy, in 12 of the 17 trend pairs, the Italian Catholics’ R2 surpasses the one of Romanian Orthodox, indicating an overall clearer ascending trend28.

The 2000s national trends discrepancy’s reduction, when approached between the two dominant religious denominations, has been realized not on behalf of Romanian Orthodox Christians, whose religiosity pattern closely respects the general one of Romania’s other denominations, but on behalf of Italian Catholics, who displayed an easily distinguishable specific trend over the last decade: while over the ‘90s, both Catholics and non-Catholics in Italy registered a positive trend by 17 out of 18 items followed29, the 2000s highlighted a pronounced divergence of Catholics’ religiosity trend in comparison not only to their fellow Italians, but also, albeit to a lesser degree, to Romanian Orthodox Christians; Italian Catholics’ religiosity increased by 9 out of 18 items (especially in the beliefs dimension), remained the same by 1 (the attributed importance of religious services at marriage) and decreased by the remaining 8, out of which, however, the variation is smaller than 0.6% in 4 cases, thus suggesting rather constancy than decline. Comparatively, at the aggregate level of Italy, 15 of the 18 religiosity variables’ values decreased (with the exception of the beliefs in Heaven and Hell, and the perceived Church guidance in spiritual problems), while in the case of Romanian members of the Orthodox denomination, half of the variables increased numerically and half decreased.

28 Thus confirming, at least for the 1990s, the assertion that “most of [Italy’s religious] revival is among Ca-tholics” (Introvigne and Stark 2005: 13)29 The exception being Catholic believers in sin, dropping by a mere 0.4%, from 80.7 in 1990 to 80.3% in 1999.


The main exception to this pattern lies in church attendance, where the aggregated percentage of religious services monthly participants has diminished from 63.1 to 59.8% among Italian Catholics, and respectively increased from 44.0 to 47.5% among Romanian Orthodox Christians:


Figure 1. Italian Catholics and Romanian Orthodox Christians by church attendance categories, 1990-2008 (%; valid answers counted; EVS waves)

At a closer look, one can however notice not only the superior absolute frequencies of the highest attendances categories among Italian Catholics, but also, in terms of structural dynamic, a transfer of relatively 5% from the first two to the third (i.e. once a month), while within the Romanian Orthodox denomination, an approximately 6% migrated in the opposite sense.

To preliminarily summarize, I can state, depending on the construction method of an aggregated religiosity measure (i.e. each item’s weight within the index), that Italian Catholics’ religiosity has (a) [in a maximalist formulation] continued to increase over the last decade, unlike the one of other Italian denominations, or (b) [in a minimalist formulation] decreased less drastically and in fewer of its components than the religiosity of Italian non-Catholics and Romanian Orthodox Christians.

3. Outside of Church and heterodox religiosity

All the more interesting in the context of the globalization-accelerated phenomenon of religious, outside of Church, individualization of beliefs, the non-doctrinal component of religiosity can unfortunately be studied comparatively and diachronically in the EVS series of polls by only three items - belief in


reincarnation; belief in lucky charm protection; view on God – personal or spirit or life force, to which, in part overlapping, for the 2008 wave, the Church’s mediation of the relationship between the individual and Divinity may be added. Although not exhaustively covering it, these four items offer in my opinion a relevant insight into what scholars have named “an individualization” of faiths and beliefs, rather “uncertain and dubious” (Garelli 2013: 9), meaning people tend to believe more and more in what they choose to, and not what the Church and religious canons would have them to believe.

Belief in lucky charm protection

What strikes most in the EVS subsamples’ comparative analysis is the still very high proportion of believers in lucky charm protection among Romanians in general and Orthodox Christians in particular, one albeit declining over the last decade:

Table 4. % of believers in lucky charm protection, Italy and Romania (sum of 6 to 10 scores on an answer scale from 1 = definitely not to 10 = definitely yes)

Even more surprising, whereas in Italy church attendance and belief in lucky charm are negatively correlated (as expressed by the regression line), meaning the more frequent somebody attends religious services, the less he will believe in lucky cham protection (and the relationship intensified as such over the last decade), in Romania, aside fro the spectacular high frequencies, the correlation actually turned positive over the 2000s, with the percentage of believers in lucky charm among weekly curch attenders almost double the one among those participating in religious services atmost once a year:

EVS wavesubsample

1999 2008% N % N

Italy 10.0 196 12.2 181

Romania 67.7 630 41.8 545

Italian Catholics 9.9 158 12.5 145

Romanian Orthodox 65.4 515 45.0 503


Table 5. Church attendance and belief in lucky charm protection (%, within each church attendance category, of the sum of 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 answers on a scale from 1 = “definitely not” to 10 = “definitely yes” to “Do you believe that a lucky charm such as a mascot or a talisman can protect or help you?”30)

a Sum of 6-10 answers (as % of total valid) within country sample, regardless of church attendance frequency

Belief in reincarnation

At national and major denominations level, belief in reincarnation has registered differnt decade patterns, decreasing over the ‘90s (meaning in the context a canonical religiosity revival) and slightly increased over the 2000s, while in Romania it evolved in opposite directions; as a result of these trends, the differences registered for 2008/2009 between the four clusters are minor:

30 Admittedly, the questions’ translation difference may bear some implications; Romanian: “Credeţi că un ta-lisman vă poate proteja sau ajuta?”; Italian: “Crede che un oggetto portafortuna, come una mascotte o un talismano, La possa proteggere o aiutare?” Specifically, the absence of the word “mascot” in the Romanian questionnaire doesn’t rule out the possibility of some respondents interpreting “talisman” as a religious object (crucifix, blessed prayer book, etc.).

Church attd.

Country sample

≥ 1/week 1/monthonly on specific holidays

≤ 1/year totala R2

Italy ‘99

% 7.3 14.1 12.4 9.8 10.0 ▲.0631N 58 36 61 40 196

‘09% 10.9 11.3 12.3 13.2 12.2 ▲.9729N 51 27 49 47 181

Romania ‘99

% 65.5 65.6 67.9 72.9 67.7 ▲.8330N 146 126 231 121 630

‘08% 46.7 42.6 43.7 24.8 41.8 ▼.7069N 173 106 209 45 545


Figure 2. % of believers in reincarnation among national andmajor denominations clusters (%”yes” answers of total valid)

Table 6. Church attendance and belief in reincarnation (%, within each church attendance category, of “yes” answers within total valid)

a total % of “yes” answers (as % of total valid) within country sample, regardless of church attendance frequency.

26.8 27.2

17.8

19.2

24.1

28.027.2

29.4

20.2

25.0

29.5

21.8

16

18

20

22

24

26

28

30

1981 1990 1999 2008

ITA

ROM

ITA Catholics

ROM Orthodox

Church attd.

Country sample

≥ 1/week 1/monthonly on specific holidays

≤ 1/year totala R2

Italy

‘90% 31.8 30.7 25.9 19.9 27.2 ▼.9285N 203 61 95 79 442

‘99% 14.2 26.6 21.0 15.4 17.8 ▼.0021N 100 57 89 56 306

‘09% 20.7 16.8 20.6 17.3 19.2 ▼.1565N 85 36 70 51 244

Romania

‘93% 21.7 26.1 25.0 22.6 24.1 ▲.0102N 36 29 103 41 210

‘99% 27.7 34.9 24.9 28.6 28.0 ▼.0498N 44 45 64 36 189

‘08% 27.5 21.2 20.1 16.8 21.8 ▼.9170N 103 48 87 27 266


A correlation of church attendance and belief in reincarnation, as in the table above, suggests divergents trends, but in a rather confusing general picture: on the one hand, in Italy the correlation remained negative, but closed in on the 0 threshold, meaning a less canonical religiosity pattern while, on the other hand, the gradual increase of the R2 values, suggesting an orthodox religious revival, should be corroborated with the fact that belief in reincarnation somehow paradoxically increased within the highest church attendance category and respectively decreased among those rarely or never participating in religious services. A possible explanation lies in the respondents’ association of reincarnation with the otherwise canonical ideas of Heaven and Hell, which overlap on the last EVS averages in proportions of 1/5 to 1/4, not significantly different between the two countries:

Table 7. % of believers in reincarnation among believers in Heaven,respectively Hell

Personal God vs. spirit or life force

The first obvious observation refers to the higher and also increasing percentage among Romanians of those who view God in a heterodox conceptualization31 as a spirit/life force than of those believing in a canonical, anthropomorphic, God:

31 For a theological explanation of the two views, see AE McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction, Blackwell Publishing, 2006 or JC Meyer, Christian Beliefs and Teachings, Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997.

Heaven: Hell:1990 1999 2008 1990 1999 2008

Italy 41.4(325)

19.7 (176)

23.0 (152)

42.9 (263)

20.1 (149)

22.3 (121)

Romania 30.8(138)

33.5 (139)

25.9 (230)

34.4 (113)

33.7 (130)

26.4 (223)


Figure 3. Conceptualizations of God among Italians and Romanians, 1990-2009 (%, valid answers, EVS waves)

Furthermore, while in both countries, correlations between church attendance and belief in a personal God are positive and significantly high, in Romania’s case, the increasing belief in a spirit or life force has become in time more and more independent of the respondents’ church attendance rate (R2 for 2008 reaches 0.08), which means the aggregate numerical religiosity increase registered over the last two decades has been realized to a considerable degree on behalf of people with rather “unorthodox” beliefs, regardless of how often they (declaratively) attend religious services:


Table 8. Ordinary church attendance frequency and image of God: personal God vs. spirit / life force (EVS waves)

“PG” = personal God; “S/LF” = spirit or life force; a Ordinary attendance = except for Christenings, funeral services and other extraordinary events; b For each country and year, the remaining difference to 100% represents the sum of “don’t know what to think” and “no spirit, God, or life force” answers; c Total valid answers within country sample referring to the type of God conceptualization, regardless of church attendance frequency.

The discrepancy is even deeper between the main religious denominations, with the percentage of Italian Catholics believing in a personal God increasing from 73.5 to 79.1 in 1999, and dropping to 71.6% by 2009. Comparatively, the correspondent percentages of Romanian Orthodox remain, although on an ascending trend, smaller than the national averages, reaching 36.0% in 1993, 35.6% in 1999 and 37.0% in 2008. Oppositely, the percentages of Orthodox respondents thinking of God as a spirit or life force has increased from 43.9% in 1990 to 47.3% in 1999, only to lose an insignificant 0.3% over the last measured decade. In between, the percentage of people oscillating between the two models remains high, at 15.3% of Romanian Orthodox in 2008 compared to 6.9% of the Italian Catholics of the same EVS wave. Furthermore, as indicated by the two belief categories’ R2 values, in Italy’s case the PG vs. SLF ratio only marginally changed in favor of the latter term, whereas in Romania, belief in an impersonal God seems extremely pervasive and on a definite increase over the last two decades, thus suggesting that the new believers are rather carachterized by un-orthodoxy and un-orthopraxis.

≥ 1/week Ordinarya religious service attendance categories

Totalc R2

(regression line):1/monthonly on specif.

holidays≤ 1/year

country year PG S/LF PG S/LF PG S/LF PG S/LF PG S/LF PG S/LF

ITA

‘90%b 91.2 7.7 74.6 21.6 53.8 34.7 29.2 38.7 65.1 23.4 ▼.9926 ▲.9527N 685 58 197 57 253 163 139 184 1291 464

‘99% 90.9 7.6 78.6 16.0 62.1 28.3 36.6 34.4 70.7 19.5 ▼.9730 ▲.9853N 728 61 202 41 312 142 148 139 1398 385

‘09% 85.6 11.3 71.6 22.5 57.0 29.6 24.8 36.7 60.6 24.4 ▼.9523 ▲.9857N 400 53 169 53 221 115 85 126 879 354

ROM

‘93% 59.1 36.4 47.7 40.9 32.6 44.9 16.8 43.9 36.4 42.6 ▼.9948 ▲.8037N 120 74 63 54 175 241 36 94 395 463

‘99% 53.5 38.3 41.8 40.5 26.3 55.3 30.8 42.8 37.3 45.6 ▼.7881 ▲.2306N 144 103 97 94 104 219 56 78 406 496

‘08% 47.2 43.6 34.7 50.2 33.2 49.1 32.4 40.5 37.7 45.9 ▼.7272 ▼.0856N 196 181 90 130 165 244 60 75 524 638


Church mediation of individual-Divinity relation

Indicating the religiosity’s degree of Church-orientation, the variable discussed here adds substance to the above findings, suggesting that religiosity among Romanians in general and Romanian Orthodox Christians is located to a significant degree more outside of the Church institution and its teachings than the one of their Italian and Italian Catholics counterparts:

Figure 4. Respondents’ degree of agreement with the statement “I have my own way of connecting with the Divine without churches or religious services” (%, valid answers, EVS 2008 wave)

As shown above, the percentage of “disciplined”, Church-oriented, Italian Catholics placed within the extreme left cluster doubles the one of corresponding Romanians, while at the opposite end, the ratio is inverted.

Contextualization of the Romanian case

While Italy’s figures do not present spectacular deviations from the European EVS-recorded averages (indicating on the overall a more canonic national religiosity, all the more so among Italian Catholics), Romania’s above discussed values highlight an exceptional case. Hence, corroboration with data provided by other national polls seems necessary in order to confirm the EVS-derived findings. Specifically, I shall employ two polls operated in Romania in 2009, thus satisfactorily close in time to the EVS wave of 2008; as detailed below, both confirm a considerable share of the aggregated national religiosity placed outside the borders of doctrinal orthodoxy and Church teachings and prescriptions.

The first poll, operated at national level by the Bureau for Social Research (April 6-14, 2009, N = 1095 adult persons, margin of error of 3%) found that:

25.5

23.1

12.2

11.5

13.4

14.1

8.2

8.2

25.8

28.3

20.6

20.4

18.5

19.1

20

21.1

16.8

15.5

39.0

38.8

ITA agg.

ITA Cath.

ROM agg.

ROM Orth.

%not at all 2 3 4 very much


47.4% of the respondents believed in astrology, and no less than 45.3% verified their horoscope at least once a week32; 29.3% believed in witchcraft, and 7.7% thought they had been subjected in their lifetime to some sort of spell (while 1.3% admitted they had done themselves a spell); 68.2% believed in miracles and 42% were convinced that at least one miracle happened to them in their lifetime; 27.6% believed in reincarnation; 30% held the belief the biometric passport was an instrument of the forces of Evil; in terms of religiosity expression, the relative majority of the respondents (39.2%) considered the most important religious act would be to behave like a good Christian, the following answers indicating to believe in Jesus Christ (20.1%), respectively to pray (12.6%) (Ştefan et al. 2009: 72-3, 74-5, 77-8, 56, 65, 84, 80).

The second poll, publicized one year later by the Bucharest University’s Department of Sociology and Social Work, explored the Romanian society in terms of scientific education and rationalism, to conclude that 80% of the population didn’t possess elementary scientific knowledge, Romania ranking in this regard 24th out of 29 European countries surveyed (Vlăsceanu et al. 2010: 7, 21). Inter alia, the research concluded that: 40% of the respondents believed the zodiac signs influence personality to a large or very large degree33; 4/5 of the respondents believed in miracles as phenomena unexplainable by science; 37% rejected Evolutionism and no less than 2/3 reckoned the Church is never wrong in what it says, in a larger context in which 60% considered “we rely too much on science and not enough on faith”; roughly 50% agreed the “deochi” (a supposed form of eye-directed spell) could be neutralized by wearing something red (55% in the rural and 47% in the urban area); 42% were believing the Sun revolves around the Earth (Vlăsceanu et al. 2010: 8, 9, 20, 40, 49).

Thus, I think it is safe to conclude that the 2008 EVS wave covering Romania (and the previous one as well) wasn’t flawed methodologically in any way and that its findings were satisfactorily representative for the society surveyed.

4. Conclusions

Despite their extremely different church-state traditions and their entirely separate and almost incomparable historical backgrounds, Italy and Romania meet in at least three religiosity-subsumable issues: firstly, their historically relatively recent and chronologically quasi-simultaneous emergence as unified and independent states over the second half of the 19th century, which may in turn explain why in both cases the dominant Church has been inextricably linked to nation-building and national identity, in a similarity that compensates the a priori asymmetry between on the one hand the center of the Catholic world and on the other hand an autocephalous national orthodox Church; secondly, their extremely similar religious markets’ structure, with the dominant churches, the Catholic one 32 Comparatively, the correspondant percentage of Italians as measured by the 1999 EVS wave was 21.9%.33 Whereas in 2005, 22% of the respondents considered the horoscope to be „very scientific” (Vlăsceanu et al. 2010: 9).


in Italy, respectively the Orthodox one in Romania, capturing each around 86% of the religious allegiances at the national level; thirdly, and paradoxically in light of the significant differences between the two countries’ social, cultural, economic and political parameters, even the current major public debate topics related to religion and state coincide to a considerable degree, ranging from the display of religious symbols in public institutions to religious education in public schools.

In terms of quantifiable trends of religiosity, the here completed research confirms a multitude of previous academic works that indicated a religious revival in Italy over the 1990s, but, specifically, sheds a new and more nuanced light on the aggregated religiosity decline of the last decade. Concretely, the overall negative trend of the 2000s, one anyhow relatively minor in terms, has been realized rather on behalf of Italian non-Catholics, and not Catholics, whose religiosity trend is hardly classifiable as a regress; specifically, Catholic religious practice seems to have indeed registered a slight decline (still remaining higher than in Romania), but beliefs overwhelmingly continued to increase numerically, in a pattern discrepant to both the overall national one and the general Western European one. Equally true, religious affiliation has continued to steadily drop, at least since 1981, currently encompassing around 4/5 of the population, and most of the loss is attributable, logically in light of the absolute community’s size, to Catholics.

Comparatively, after the spectacular religious revival of the ‘90s, characteristic to all of Romania’s religious denominations, the last decade was marked by a clear religiosity plateau phase for both Orthodox Christians and members of other denominations, as a resultant of an equal number of variables increasing and respectively decreasing. Among the decreasing items, a distinct and coherent group comprises items regarding, more or less directly, the perceptions of and attitudes towards the Church – attributed importance of religious services at special life events and, especially, the perceived legitimacy of the Church in offering moral, spiritual, family and social guidance.

However, to conclude, the most striking difference is of qualitative nature and refers to the transgressions of doctrinal orthodoxy’s frontiers. Surprisingly enough, if considering Romanians do not share to the same degree Italians’ direct contact and interaction, especially via immigration, with non-Christian beliefs, Romania and the Romanian Orthodox Church followers seem affected to a considerably larger extent by the globalization-specific phenomenon of outside of Church religious individualization than Italy and Italian Catholics. This phenomenon’s magnitude is reflected especially in questions related to belief in lucky charm protection, astrology, a view of God as a spirit or life force, and the Church’s mediation of the relationship between individual and Divinity and is confirmed, for Romania, by other nationally-conducted polls of the recent years. If indeed, popular religion influences, to various degrees, between 15 and 20% of the Italians, there are reasons to believe that the current percentage of Romanians sharing heterodox religious hybridization features is probably two-three times larger.


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Irina Ilisei 75

1. Introduction

Roma women represent, according to Surdu and Surdu, ‘the most deprived category of the Romanian population’1. They experience multiple discrimination living at the crossroads of gender and racial discrimination. According to an UN report describing the various forms of discrimination faced by Roma women, ‘as a member of the Romani population, she [the Roma woman] has few advocates and is the target of constant hostility. She is marginalized within her community because of her minority status and within her family because of her gender’. 2 1 L Surdu, & M Surdu, Broadening the Agenda: The Status of Romani Women in Romania, Open Society Institute, Budapest, 2006, p. 5.2 UNDPI (United Nations Department of Public Information), At the Crossroads of Gender and Racial Discri-mination. World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. Durban, South

Irina ILISEINational School for Political and Administrative StudiesBucharest, [email protected]

ABSTRACT

In this paper I investigate the phenomena of social mobility of women from patriarchal communities and the low rates of social upward mobility of women having an ethnic minority background. The aim is to identify the factors that influence access to higher education for Roma women living in Romania. I examine the interaction between social, economic, cultural and institutional factors. This paper offers a clearer understanding of the interconnections between different factors in the decision making of women from minority communities who seek a higher socio-economic status. The results of this research are based on empirical evidence through qualitative research. The paper has an interdisciplinary perspective, though the main approach derives from sociology and political science (policy analysis). An important input in this research comes from a gender studies perspective, especially related to the analysis of the intersection between gender, class and ethnicity.

KEYWORDS

• Roma women• intersectionality• gender• ethnicity• social mobility• higher education

Irina ILISEI

UPWARD SOCIAL MOBILITY OF

INDIVIDUALS FROM MINORITY

GROUPS: A CASE STUDY OF ROMA

WOMENIN HIGHER EDUCATION


The multiple discriminations expose them to a higher risk of social exclusion. Moreover, previous research has shown that Roma women represent one of the most vulnerable groups in Romania with respect to poverty.3 Scholars on social exclusion identify a chain relation between social exclusion, income, access to the labour market and educational attainment. Education represents, in this perspective, a key instrument to fight against and counteract risk of poverty and social exclusion.

‘Socially excluded are first of all those who do not have an income that would buy them and their families a standard of living in line with their national benchmark. The principal reason for insufficient income is that they do not find a sufficiently well-paying job on the labour market. This leads straightforward to the first policy conclusion: all young people must receive an education that qualifies them for decently paying jobs’.4

For the case of Roma women, an increase of the educational attainment would decrease the risk of extreme poverty that Roma women are facing: the cycle of poverty may be interrupted by providing an adequate level of education, and the process of transmitting the poverty from one generation to another could be stopped.5 In this context, education can contribute for establishing social equality: ‘good education, including university level degrees’, is considered one of the most important points that define the central tasks of any policy of social inclusion – ‘This is a very demanding task, and yet it is a feasible one’.6 Education, including higher education, is approached, from this perspective, as an instrument for upward social mobility that would give Roma women the chance to enter labour market, have better health, be political involved and become financially independent.

In what concerns education, the Roma encounter major problems, being one of the social groups that are most exposed to the risk of dropping out of school. The situation is much more severe in the case of Roma women because of the harsh living conditions and because of patriarchal attitudes within the communities. In Romania, 80% of the school-age children who are not enrolled in the educational system, at any level, are of Roma ethnicity, and 23% of the Roma women over the age of 16 have not benefited from any kind of formal education, while only 3.7% of these women go to high school or college.7 Low educational enrolment therefore has a profoundly negative impact on a wide variety of aspects of an individual’s life, including family relations, access to the labour market8 and health care, and the

Africa, August 31–September 7, 2001 http://www.un.org/WCAR/e-kit/gender.htm3 A Iancu, ‘Dimensiunea de gen a excluziunii sociale’ [Gender Dimension of Social Exclusion] in O. Băluţă (ed), Partneri egali. Comptetitori egali [Equal Partners. Equal Competitors], Maiko, Bucharest, 2007, pp. 134-183.4 D Arpinte, A Pfaller, & MS Stănculescu, ‘Policy Priorities for Social Inclusion in Romania’ in A. Pfaller & M. Meinardus (eds.), Social Incluision in South East Europe, Friedrich Ebert Foundation, Sofia, 2010, p. 49.5 Iancu, op.cit., p. 143.6 Arpinte et al., op.cit., p. 49.7 A Dragolea, ‘Dimensiunea de gen a pieţii muncii’ [The Gender Dimension of Labour Market], in O. Băluţă (ed), Partneri egali. Comptetitori egali [Equal Partners. Equal Competitors], Maiko, Bucharest, 2007, p. 56.8 Arpinte et al., op.cit., p. 49.

Irina Ilisei 77

exercise of citizenship rights.9 Therefore, levels of educational attainment have to be proportionally distributed within communities. Implicitly also the rate of students who enter higher education has to be equally distribute between social groups.

Participation to higher education is approached, from this perspective, as an instrument for upward social mobility that would give Roma the chance to enter labour market, have better health, be political involved and become financially independent. Given the importance of education for social upward mobility, the provision of non-discriminatory quality education for the Roma minority is expected to have a substantial impact, in terms of living conditions.10

Therefore, it is important to analyse how access of Roma women to higher education is affected by the interplay between gender, ethnicity and class. In order to increase the understanding of Roma women’s status, there is the need to understand how their identity is constructed from both gender and ethnic perspectives: how ethnic identity manifests itself through gender identity and vice versa.11

2. Research aims and hypotheses

The main purpose of this research is to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms of social mobility of women from ethnic minority communities. The analysis focuses on access of Roma women to higher education in Romania. But the ultimate goal is to identify similar patterns of social mobility in cases of women from ethnical minorities.

Furthermore, in this study my aim is to explore of the factors that influ-ence the structural social upward mobility of women from minority groups. More specific for the present research case, the aim is to identify the factors that impact Roma women’s access to higher education and to determine how these factors interact. Is the low access of Roma women to education a question of class (ac-cess to resources), a question of ethnicity (different values ethnical values or the relation between majority and minority), or a question of gender (social roles of Roma women inside and outside their community)? The present paper contributes to understanding the underlying mechanism of participation of Roma women in HE. The factors that interact and influence the decision-making about entering HE are derived from the intersection between gender and ethnicity.

9 N Fraser, ‘After the Family Wage: Gender Equity and the Welfare State’, Political Theory, vol. 22, 1994, p. 603. 10 C Bruggemann, ‘Roma Education in Comparative Perspective. Analysis of the UNDP/World Bank/EC Regional Roma Survey 2011’, Roma Inclusion Working Papers, United Nations Development Programme, Bratislava, 2012, p. 10.11 E Vincze, ‘Forward to the Volume’ in N. Biţu & C. Morteanu (Autors of the Volume), Are the Rights of the Child Negotiable? The Case of Early Marriages within Roma Communities in Romania, Report, UNICEF & Romani CRISS, Bucharest, 2010, p. 7.


Central for a good understanding of how these factors interact is the concept of intersectionality, a framework essential in the analysis of multiple and complex inequalities. Intersectionality offers an explanatory model for grasping the back-ground of the ‘inequalities and discrimination that members of certain commu-nities face’.12 For the scope of the present paper, the concept of intersectional-ity broadens the possibilities of considering the specificities of and the diversity among Roma women: on the intersection between gender and ethnicity, Roma women are shown as ‘a category with a major risk of discrimination in the majority of the spheres of life’.13

To summarise, the paper examines the participation of Roma in higher education in Romania, focusing on the factors that affect Roma women’s entrance in higher education. The main research question is: What are the factors that impact the entrance to higher education of Roma young women and how do these factors interact?

The research started from the following hypothesis:

1. The lower the economic resources of Roma women and their families the lower the chances to enter higher education.

2. The higher the number of experiences of perceived discrimination, the lower the probability to aspire to enter higher education.

3. The wider the cultural distance between a certain Roma community and the majority population, the lower the chances of a Roma woman (from that certain community) to access higher education.

4. Family and community support for education have a positive impact on high-er educational attainment.

5. The lower the compatibility between following a higher educational program with the gender roles of Roma women specific to a community, the lower the chances for these Roma women to enter higher education.

3. Methodological considerations

For this research I undertook twenty interviews with Roma women living in Romania, aged 18 to 30, who attend or have attended higher education programs. For recruiting respondents I used the snowball technique.

The respondents were at different moments in their career paths. Either they were just starting their undergraduate education or they were already pursuing graduate studies or they were already on the labour market. Their backgrounds were also very diverse. Most of them (seventeen out of twenty), at the time of the 12 A Kocze, & RM Popa, Missing Intersectionality. Race/Ethnicity, Gender, and Class in Current Research and Policies on Romani Women in Europe, Center for Policy Studies Central European University, Budapest, 2009, p. 13.13 M Ungureanu, ‘Principalele rezultate ale cercetării’ [Main Results of the Research] in C. Mocanu (ed), Discriminarea multiplă în România [Multiple Discrimination in Romania]. Societatea de Analize Feministe ANA & Institutul Naţional de statistică, Bucharest, 2008, p. 20.

Irina Ilisei 79

interview, were involved in their daily lives in activities related to Roma communities and acting as mediators between these communities and the larger society. Twelve of them speak the Romani language and during their childhood or adolescence they spent some time in traditional Roma communities. None of the respondents is from a closed or segregated community or from a family that rejects having contact with the majority population. Eight of the respondents were from mixed families, with a non-Roma parent. The names of the respondents were changed, in order to protect their identity and to ensure confidentiality.

In order to understand how different factors interact to influence educational access and how these factors are perceived at a personal level, the use of qualitative research methods was more appropriate than quantitative research. I chose to use as research instrument a combination between narrative interview and semi-structured deep interview. The reason for selecting this method was to offer the respondent the opportunity to provide the story of her life and education, through her own lenses.

4. Results of the empirical research

The lives and the educational paths of the interviewees were to a large extent different from one another. I identified common patterns even though the women faced different problems, came from different socio-economic backgrounds, and had different educational experiences. During the interviews I could discern several intertwined factors. The most apparent factors included economic situations, fam-ily support, and attitudes of the out-groups. There was not one single factor that decisively influenced the access of women to university-level education. Having an appropriate economic status was generally the determinative factor, but this was rarely enough. Coming from a family where at least one of the parents had some level of education could have made the educational path easier. Nevertheless, this was not a necessary and sufficient factor, since in other cases access to education was enabled by the support of teachers and academic faculty or by being in a net-work where education was encouraged. However, the moral support or, at least, the acceptance of the family was in all cases necessary in order to be able to go further with the studies. Another important factor was the attitudes of the out-groups. None of the respondents considered that they were subjects of severe cases of discrimination, though sometimes they felt prejudice and stigmatization and argued that this discouraged them in going further with their studies. However, several interviewees mentioned that the family and/or the community were sceptical with regard to pursuing further education. The factor that motivated them to achieve university-level education was the belief that through education they can have a better life, earn qualifications and get good jobs.

A higher level of income was in most cases the defining factor that made access to education easier. Conversely, lack of money determined the withdrawal from studies and increased the chances of school dropout: ‘I had to work because of financial problems that I had, the death of my father’ (Tania). Lack of financial


resources created the impossibility of achieving good results: ‘I had problems at home. We barely had any bread. […] I liked to study, but I didn’t have the power to concentrate because I was always hungry. […] At the Baccalaureate [high-school graduation exam], at the physical education exam, I could not resist because I hadn’t eaten’ (Aura).

The respondents who did not have financial troubles declared that this helped them to achieve good results and to get admitted to university: ‘I’ve had a lot of support from my parents. I haven’t had financial difficulties because my parents tried as much as they could to give me everything I needed. I also had tutoring [a private and paid practice, common in Romania in order to ensure successful admission at BA studies]. I took extra lessons in chemistry’ (Valentina), said one of the respondents, who was happy to be one of the very few Roma and the only Roma girl who entered the best high school in her community at that time. In her case the educational path was smoother. Furthermore, her studies were not hindered by any interruption.

The financial and moral support of the family was also vital for increasing the access to education. In some of the cases even the scarce resources of the family were invested in education: ‘Let’s just say that there were some days when we had to eat just potatoes, but father still sent us to school’ (Ana), whereas, in certain cases, the other family members did not consider education as a priority: ‘I did not have money for the tax of an exam. I would have had it if my father hadn’t decided to gamble the money’ (Aura). Comparatively, the two types of attitudes of the family made a considerable difference in the possibilities of respondents’ educational achievement. In the instances where the family does not offer support, educational attainment is more difficult. In these instances, moreover, there are many gaps between the periods when the respondent went to school and periods when education had to be interrupted.

Education is negotiated mainly in terms of social reproduction. If the group of belonging, namely the family, had little access to education, than there are small chances for the individual, namely the Roma girl, to pursue higher education. Related to the idea of belonging to a social class, social networks played an important role in the educational achievements of the respondents who were from a lower class. The respondents from the middle class declared that the process of deciding to go to university was a joint one that including the parents. For the respondents who were from families with lower income and lower or no educational achievements, the help provided by a person who was either from the larger family group or a person involved in the educational system was particularly important.

This support can be in different ways, either on an administrative level or at the emotional and psychological levels. Some of the interviewees confessed that a barrier in the process of application to higher education was the fact that they were not familiar with the application procedures, and that their families were not able to guide them. Hence, receiving information about the possibilities to

Irina Ilisei 81

continue the studies and about the application procedure is very important: ‘My godfather told me to go to a certain school’ (Tania), ‘someone from an NGO helped me to prepare the file with the papers’. Therefore, receiving administrative and informational support is a deciding factor. On the other hand, emotional and moral support and encouragement proved to be equally important in facilitating access to education: ‘without the advice of that professor I could not have made it. He made me trust myself and [convinced me] that I am intelligent and can study further’ (Mirela). The most important aspect of this type of support is to make the individuals perceive that admission to and successful performance in higher education is something achievable, that they can make it, and that there are already positive examples in this respect: ‘when I moved to the new school I met a school counsellor that had a past similar to mine and gave me good advice’ (Aura).

Receiving administrative, informational and moral support is highly correlated with the variable of educational expectation. All but two respondents declared that their decision to study and subsequently their admission to an institution of higher education surprised their family. Therefore, the role of counselling was much more important for them, for they could not receive this type of counselling from their family, friends or social network. In addition, higher education studies were perceived as something unachievable in their social network and reference group: ‘I was the first girl in my community that went to university’ (Mirela). ‘My mother was a cleaning lady in a [prestigious school in Bucharest], and ever since I was little she took me with her and I made friends with children there. Going to university was for them something natural, something that was expected to happen. For me it was not like that, it was something that no one would have thought it possible’ (Maria). Receiving counselling and encouragement has a high impact, especially in the conditions faced by lower-class families, to a higher degree, risk avoidance and they fear that higher education studies cannot be pursued by someone like them: ‘Before going to university all where laughing at me because I was trying it’ (Maria), or ‘All my family was so surprised when I graduated from the university. They did not take me seriously and they did not expect it’ (Carmen).

Another central factor that influences access to education is the attitude of the family and of the community towards education. The results of the research show that the respondents who stated that they had the full support of the family (financial, moral and informational) had much greater chances to enter higher education than others. For none of the respondents was education against the social norms of the community. But the interpretation of this fact should not necessarily generate enthusiasm, and the idea that education is compatible with the social norms of all Roma communities should not be extrapolated or taken for granted. This last consideration is due to the fact that the sample of the present research is limited and not representative of all Roma communities. The segregated communities or the very traditional ones are not represented in the sample of this research. Moreover, there are few examples of members of such communities attending higher education, and such examples are rather exceptional. Therefore it can be concluded that the type of community they belong to is highly relevant in


enabling/disabling the access of Roma women to university. When they were asked if it matters the type of community in which they were raised, all of the respondents said that this was definitely important for them: ‘If I would had been born in a family of Căldărari [in English And Romani language Kalderash, one type of Roma ethnic sub-group believed to be more traditional compared to others] I wouldn’t have been to school’ (Aura). ‘For example, in the Gabori [another Roma ethnic sub-group, living mostly in west part of Romania in closed communities] families, the girls are not allowed to go to school. It is something about tradition. They get married and have children. There the tradition is kept very strictly’ (Carmen). One of the respondents explained why traditional families are not willing to let the girls to continue the studies, arguing that staying a virgin or else remaining faithful to the husband is a strict demand in the communities, and that going to school means being in contact with the ones who do not have the same social norms: ‘[The family members] are afraid that other girls will teach her that they can love someone other than her husband, how it is to love another man’ (Aura). ‘In my family, too, there were questions about why I needed so much school’.

The social norms of a community should not be interpreted as something unmovable or entirely fixed: ‘The Căldărari started to send their children to school’ (Valentina). This shows that some types of communities are more resistant than others, but all these communities are in permanent change. For instance, even if the Căldărari are rather isolated communities, they are still in a system of cultural exchange with other Roma or with Romanians.

Not living in a segregated traditional community is also seen as an advantage that facilitated access to education: ‘As my parents were living in town and not in the community, I had the occasion to go to a good primary school and afterwards to a good high school. This helped me very much’. Living in a closed community means in most cases not learning the Romanian language, which would hinder an individual from further education or otherwise create difficulties in achieving similar results as native Romanian speakers.

Through the research I also aimed to identify the type of relationship between respondents and their non-Roma colleagues and teachers. The respondents affirmed that they did not often go through episodes of discrimination or marginalization. Having a welcoming environment is one factor that has a positive impact on educational attainment. This shows that there is a common pattern according to which all those who succeed in higher education are those who had integrated in the broader society and had developed good relations with the members of the majority ethnic group. Moreover, as none of the respondents stated they felt discrimination or stigma for a sustained period of time during their primary or secondary education, it can be argued that one necessary factor of entering higher education is the absence of perceived discrimination or stigma.

When asked to identify what motivated them to enter higher education, the answers were in large proportion connected with the idea of acquiring a good

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professional qualification that could enable them to have a better life. For the respondents who came from families in the lower class, the main reason for going to school was to live a better life, which can be understood as the aspiration for social upward mobility. In the case of the respondents whose parents were well educated and belonged to the middle class, higher education is viewed as a natural way of maintaining their social status.

The special educational programs for Roma and the public policies in this field had also a positive impact on both educational attainment and access to higher education for Roma women. Twelve out of ten respondents were beneficiaries of special educational programs or policies. In some cases these policies gave them the chance to study in better schools, while in other cases it increased their trust in their own powers. In this way, such programs and policies gave them the possibility to be in contact with professors who later guided them in their career. Affirmative action measures – in particular the allotted places in university for Roma students, which functions as a kind of quota system implemented in Romania – represents the most common program used by the respondents for entry into higher education.

5. Conclusion of the research. Exploitation of the results in terms of public policies

The main purpose of this research was to gain a better understanding of the social mobility of women from minority patriarchal communities. While the analy-sis focused on the case of Roma women in Romania, the ultimate aim is to identify similar patterns for other minority women who belong to patriarchal communities. A better understanding of the way factors interconnect in the upward mobility of women from ethnic minority groups can provide a wealth of support in the pro-cess of policy making. The outcomes of this research will enrich the documenta-tion used for public policies and measures that can facilitate Roma women’s access to higher education in particular, and access to education for all ethnic minorities in general.

The results of this empirical research show that access to higher education is dependent on a series of factors that are clearly highly interconnected. The common pattern in all the interviews was that the respondents came from families and communities in which education did not violate social norms. For an individual who belongs to a minority community, this shows that access to education is facilitated when education is positively valued inside his or her community. The incompatibility between the educational system and the norms of the social group might be the main reason preventing women from attaining education. We should bear in mind, however, that values are transformable; there are no fixed, unmovable entities. For this reason, educational institutions should create a space for dialogue between educators and communities. In this way, the perception of education inside Roma communities can be improved. Additionally, educators and educational institutions learn to be more sensitive to the needs of Roma communities. Finally,


the educational system can adapt so as to include Roma values, too, for example by introducing into its curricula Roma language classes and Roma history.

This paper further shows that access to education for Roma women is in a large part dependent on the type of community they belong to. Social networks, affirmative public policies and good relations with teachers and other fellows can positively influence the access of Roma women to (higher) education. Moreover, the level of trust in the relation between educators and Roma communities remains low, and thus needs to be improved significantly. If this relation is to be improved, then educators will be better trained in terms of intercultural skills and discrimination in schools will diminish.

Further, belonging to the lower class – which typically correlates to having few economic possibilities, to having parents who cannot offer a proper educational counseling, and to having few if any role models to emulate – decreases one’s chances for educational attainment. For this reason, the role of educational institutions has to be raised in order to create equal opportunities for those who for those who do not have inbuilt socio-economic advantages within their families. Tutoring inside schools, combined with career counselling and emotional support, would help pupils from minority communities catch up with their middle- or upper-class peers. This measure would be highly beneficial, since it would mitigate many social disparities. The economic disparities can be overcome by offering educational stipends and creating spaces inside schools for after-school classes, in order to give pupils the chance to prepare for their studies.

According to the results of the study, educational expectation plays an important role in educational attainment. Therefore, teachers, communities and pupils themselves should perceive Roma women’s access to higher education as a reachable goal, rather than an exception. Role models and school counselling should undertake this task in order to overcome internalized discrimination and to convince and encourage Roma pupils that they can benefit from higher education in the same way as the majority population.

To conclude, Roma women’s access to higher education in particular, and the social mobility of individuals in general, can be facilitated by creating a positive attitude within state institutions towards members of this group, by taking affirmative action measures and by minimizing economic disparities.

Irina Ilisei was the beneficiary of the project “Constructing and implementing an interdisciplinary innovative doctoral program concerning Roma issues”, co-funded by the European Union through the European Social Fund, Sectorial Operational Program Human Resources Development 2007-2013, National School of Political and Administrative Sciences, Bucharest, Romania.

Irina Ilisei 85

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Richard Ingwe • Ogaboh Agba • Victor Etim Ndum 87

Richard INGWEUniversity of [email protected] AGBAUniversity of CalabarNigeriaVictor Etim NDUMUniversity of CalabarNigeria

ABSTRACT

Prolonged agitation for resource control in Nigeria’s Niger Delta has attracted increasing attention of academia and policy makers. Key issues are involved-fiscal federalism principles, resource control agitation strategies/intensities and politico-philosophical bases within constitutional and theoretical frameworks, past and present governments’ efforts aimed at resolving agitations by Niger Delta peoples for resource control have been examined from various traditional disciplinary perspectives in social sciences and humanities. This study explains conflicting postures of resources control, and dynamics of the struggle by applying fragments of the revolutionary Marxist ideology/ frameworks comprising Gramscian, Dialectical Materialism and the Frankfort School’s Critical Social and Neo-Marxist (conflict) theoretical perspectives espoused by Lewis Coser and C. Wright Mills. We argue that sections of Nigeria’s laws (the Constitution, and 1978 Land Use Act) that vested absolute land ownership/control authority on Nigeria’s Federal Government, among other obnoxious laws that promote marginalization of particular oppressed sections/strata of Nigeria’s population thereby provoking persistent conflicts, such laws are overdue for amendment. We recommend, among others, that: non-exploitative variety of federalism applied in Scandinavia (Norway), Switzerland, etc. should be implemented in Nigeria.

KEYWORDS

• resource control• Marxian analysis• federalism• revenue• exploitation

Richard INGWE • Ogaboh AGBA

Victor Etim NDUM

NATURAL RESOURCE ABUNDANCE,

EXPLOITATION AND AGITATION

FOR RESOURCE CONTROL IN

NIGERIA’S NIGER DELTA: A

MARXIAN ANALYSIS


1. Introduction

Nigeria’s “national question” describes some of the most difficult challenges in the nexus of efforts aiming at creating a nation out of the State forged by force of British colonial amalgamation of the Southern Protectorate of Nigeria with its Northern counterpart (Protectorate) in 1914. Scholars argue that the problematic aspiration towards nationhood in Nigeria results from the sheer multiplicity of conflicts presented by complications in interaction among numerous (about 300 cultural groups also described as ethnic nationalities and their civil societies) of the former protectorates constituting the present Nigerian federation. Some have examined the crises from the lenses of ethnicity, ethno-class relations (Eteng, 2008). Others have viewed the challenges from the perspectives of frictions in the bonding or mutual acceptance of the multiplicity of civil society groups representing the cultural or ethnic groups. Recently, between the late 1990s to the present, the violent kinds of civil societies have emerged to undertake insurgencies in their bid to demand for larger shares of political and economic resources from the federation (Oyovbaire, 2000). While natural resources exploitation generally and petroleum oil exploitation in Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger Delta accounts for as much as over 90 per cent of the country’s total revenue, the way this factor has contributed to nation-building (or otherwise) remains poorly understood. Resources refer to organic or inorganic substances that an individual, organization, community or a country identifies within the physical or cultural environment, and afterwards harnesses same for use in increasing available wealth. The resources of a given geographical area, determines her socio-economic and political status (Robinson, 1976). Nigeria presents an ideal country for studying and understanding the contribution of resources (both natural and human) to national socio-economic development. Among the many justifications of this assertion, is Nigeria’s reputation for being rich in manifold human and natural resources and the potential of becoming one of the most developed nations in sub-Saharan Africa. Moreover, the same country simultaneously exhibits scandalous poverty. Some of Nigeria’s resources include huge oil reserve of over 32 billion barrels, vast deposits of solid minerals, large domestic market, a population of over 150 million and a land of 923, 768 square kilometers. Paradoxically, some areas in the country with wealth of natural resources are still very poor, especially that of the Niger Delta region. Areas in Nigeria that are endowed with natural resources especially those of the Niger Delta, but poor, often attribute their predicament to lack of control of their resources. This is true when we reflect on Walter Rodney’s (1972) demonstration of “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”. He advanced that, Africa’s recent and current impoverishment is traceable to successive adversities (Trans-Atlantic Slavery, Colonialism, and Neo-colonialism). This implies that the poverty in Africa today, has colonial origin. The exploitation of Africa by Europe gave no room for Africans to control their own resources. Ideas like these, might have informed nationalist movement all over the world to fight not only for freedom but also for economic emancipation.


The quest for resource control as evidence in Nigeria is not a new phenomenon in social history. It is a perennial malady plaguing nations of the world, a problem of the type which Karl Marx (1818 – 1883), traced its origin back to the feudal system in Europe (Callinicos, 1989). The struggle over resource control in Nigeria, as in other parts of the world, often ended in a gradual or revolutionary reconstruction of society; it produces changes, development and wonders that far surpass the Egyptian Pyramids, Roman Aqueducts, and Gothic Cathedrals. The affliction of the Niger Delta region and its people by extreme poverty, environmental degradation arising from oil production, state-sponsored violence and terrorism and associated adversities in the region is a problem that has been profusely documented (Omojola, 2007; Mittee, 2010). However, this has not been done in a comparative manner (by either, sub-national region or by preferably by socio-economic and political class) to make the analysis amenable to Marxian analysis.

2. Objectives and organization

The objective of this paper therefore is to show the extent to which agitation for resource control in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria poses obstacles to nation building. Considering the crises characterizing Nigeria’s socio-political spheres namely ethnicity, ethno-class relations and the management of natural and human resources, generally, especially regarding the Niger Delta, we construct a theoretical framework that includes the Marxist research agenda as well as the Marxist political approaches to enhance understanding of the situation of that study area. The framing of the foregoing theoretical perspective, involves a nearly profuse review of the relationship between Marxism and exploitation in Nigeria’s Niger Delta, from various perspectives of Marxism – from Dialectical Materialism to the Frankfurt School of Critical/Social theory to Gramscian Marxism. In the rest of the papers, we present our discussion in sections as follows; the introduce is followed by discussion on the concept of federalism, its original meaning and showing how the application of the federal system in Nigeria deviates from the fiscal federalism used in other nation-states. Although federalism was adopted in Nigeria in 1963 and has been practiced nominally thereafter up to the present, we show how resource sharing schemes (within federalism) to various components of Nigeria have differed in terms of the practices of federalism in the early post-independence era, on the one hand; and post-civil war era (1970 to the present), on the other. We show how dissatisfaction of groups of the Nigerian population with the adulteration of the federal system used in the country has prompted agitations for resource control under the context of unacceptable revenue allocation principles and formulae, then we describe various dimensions of resource control that expresses differently in selected sectors of Nigeria’ economy.

Various strategies and policies devised by successive governments to resolve conflicts arising from resource control are described, and then we present conflict theory as exposed by various scholars such as Marx, Coser and Mills. The way agitation for resource control has been undertaken by various nationalities in


Nigeria is discussed. Finally, we suggest strategies that could be applied by Nigeria’s federal government and stakeholders to promote good governance that is capable of resolving or ending violent agitations for resource control and then conclude the paper.

3. Problematic context of natural resource abundance, exploitation and poverty in the Niger Delta contrasted to the bases of Nigeria’s elite

Originally, the Niger Delta region was delineated based on geographic homogeneity to comprise six states in the middle to south west and eastern Nigeria. Political factors were incorporated into the demarcation of the Niger Delta thereby extending its boundaries by including three additional states located in the neighbourhood during the first eight years of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party or the Obasanjo administration (1999-2007).

Therefore, the region currently covers about 110,624 square kilometers representing 12.2 percent of Nigeria’s territory (National Bureau of Statistics, 2006). It is located around Nigeria’s coastal area and stretches from south western Nigeria (demarcated from Benin River) to south eastern Nigeria (Cross River). The Delta is reputed to constitute the world’s third largest wetlands comprising mangrove forests, containing precious biologically diverse resources associated with the wetlands ecological category. Among the resources of the region include: about 150 species of fish, West African primates, hippopotamuses, and rare pigmy hippos (AMCEN/UNEP, 2007). Nigeria’s reputation as one of the world’s leading producers and exporters of hydrocarbons (crude petroleum oil, which occurs in association with natural gas, which has mindlessly been flared during the production of the former since the 1950s) and also, more recently regarded as a major exporter of natural gas, derives from huge deposits of these fossil fuel resources in the Delta.

A disproportionately large portion of the proven deposits of various natural energy resources credited to Nigeria are actually in the Niger Delta. These include the nation’s 4635 million metric tons of oil equivalent (mtoe) of petroleum oil; 4497 million (mtoe) of natural gas; (WRI, UNDP, UNEP, and World Bank, 2005: 201). Other natural resources of which substantial portions are located in the Delta include: about 30 billion barrels of oil equivalent of Bitumen, 14,750 MW of small and large hydropower, 13,071, 464 hectares of biomass energy (TELL, 2008: 21-3).

Ruefully, after earning an average annual revenue of about US$20 Billion from exporting these Niger Delta-derived minerals for over half century, the huge earnings has reportedly been appropriated by Nigeria’s elite for massive building of federal capital (and allied) cities. The major petro-dollars-financed urban centres include: Nigeria’s former federal capital (Lagos) and her incumbent federal capital (Abuja). This public policy inspired urbanization was contrived by the nation’s power gladiators in the military, business, politics, academic and traditional ruling institutions, which have been globally acknowledged for their conspicuous since Nigeria’s Second Republic in the early 1980s. In contrast, majority of the Delta’s


non-elitist native population have been systematically pauperized and weakened through policies of marginalization that exclude and alienate them from the federal government-tier controlled hydrocarbon industry/economy which inflicts on them untold environmental problem that have destroyed the livelihoods of the people (AMCEN/UNEP, 2008: 272).

4. Exploiting/neglecting the “Goose laying the Golden Eggs” while intensively financing elite’s urban infrastructural development

Recent studies are elucidating on such sub-national variations in federal government controlled investment of national financial resources. For example, Richard Ingwe and colleagues report on disparities in the degree of urbanization phenomenon that has been determined by federal government policy of deliberate urbanization through successive creation of capital cities/towns to provide operational bases for sub-national regional administrations of states/local government, which have increasingly been created since the 1950s-when three regions were created up to 1997, when their numbers rose to 36 states and 774 local government areas. This policy has not been in favour of the Niger Delta region. Following their analysis of Nigeria’s 2004 population (projection for the 36 states and FCT from those of 1991), Ingwe and colleagues (2011) show that the Delta region presents a higher level of rural residence of its population –as much as 77.8% (i.e. lower urbanization associated with inadequacy of the “public goods” of modern life) compared to Nigeria’s national average: 63.7%.

The degree of rural residence in some of the member states of the Niger Delta were much higher with 94.3% and 87.9% recorded in Abia and Akwa Ibom states respectively. It was only in two of the nine Niger Delta states (Edo and Ondo) that presented rural residence that was below national average of 63.7% with 54.56% and 59.62% respectively. The only two of the nine Delta states that featured urban residence levels above the national average (36.28 %) in 2004 were Edo (45.44%) and Ondo (40.38%). The higher level of urbanization in the latter (two states) is attributable to other factors (innovative development championship) contrasted to the earlier mentioned federal government policy of deliberate urbanization, which in itself, was not capable of stimulating development in the Niger Delta in ways that would be commensurate to the enormous oil and gas resources extracted from the region. Massive industrial development of Edo State happened between 1960s-1970s- during visionary governorship (military dictatorship) of Colonel Samuel Ogbemudia (now retired) of Bendel State. The urban residence levels in the remainder (i.e. seven states) of the region were below the national average.

5. Demographic dynamics and regional agitation

Of the current geopolitical configuration of Nigeria’s federal government comprising 36 states and a federal capital territory, the Niger Delta’s total population of over 31.2 million (22% of Nigeria’s total population (140,003,542) in 2006. it was projected that 51.6% of the nation’s population was under the age of 25 years.


That excluded other youth of up to age 40 years (National Bureau of Statistics 2006). This demographic scenario indicates that the Delta presents the problem of “youth bulge”, which is associated with unemployment, despondency and social disorder. The region’s population stratum under age 25 years constituted about 16.1 million youth (over half of the total population in 2006 based on the national growth rate of 3.2% per year (National Population Commission, 2006). Therefore, the region’s population is projected to have risen to about 34.4 million in 2010. The serious insurgency or youth restiveness in the region has been attributed to high unemployment, as in other parts of Nigeria. However, lopsided and polarized sharing of political power and other economic/financial and social opportunities arising thereby has never favoured the Delta, as in other deprived cultural groups described as minorities in Nigeria (The Sunday Magazine, TSM, 1994). This policy has been viewed as systematic marginalization of the Delta, like other minorities in the country. It is aggravated by the youth bulge in the region.

Figure 1. Nigeria showing the Niger Delta region (as shaded portions)


Table 1. Selected geographic and socio-economic features of the Niger Delta

Sources: National Bureau of Statistics, 2006-07; National Population Commission, 2006.

Table 2. Selected poverty indicators in the Niger Delta region

Sources: National Bureau of Statistics 2007.

The paradoxical serious poverty scenario amid natural resource abundance presented above and the prolonged history of the agitation for resource control by the Niger Delta peoples/representatives and vanguard beckons for new

State Population (2006) Area (km 2 )

Rural residence

(%)

Urban residence

(%)

Abia 2833999 4900 94.26 5.74Akwa Ibom 3920208 6900 87.89 12.11

Bayelsa 1703358 9059 See Rivers below

See Rivers below

Cross River 2888966 21787 74.92 25.08Delta 4098391 17108 66.85 33.15Edo 3218332 19187 54.56 45.44Imo 3934899 5288 67.33 32.67Ondo 3441024 15,820 59.62 40.38Rivers 5185400 10,575 68.65 31.35Total: Niger Delta 31224577 110,624Nigeria 63.72 36.28

StateHouseholds

people accessing water

Households using untreated

water from rivers, streams, dams,

surfaces, etc (%)

Households cooking with

solid fuels (%)

Total Child Labour (%)

Girls getting married

underage (before 18th birthday (%)

Akwa Ibom 11.1 46.0 88.5 49.8 23.1

Bayelsa 3.0 57.0 53.6 32.3 45.0

Cross River 25.5 59.6 74.9 47.3 27.8

Delta 3.1 15.9 53.6 27.7 25.1

Edo 2.4 28.0 79.6 36.6 25.3

Rivers 6.2 10.2 56.2 28.1 21.9

Abia NA 26.8 77.1 27.2 10.3

Imo NA 33.3 85.5 35.5 11.2

Ondo NA 38.2 73.5 22.5 14.2


approaches and analytical approaches. Considering the failure of neoliberalism to resolve persisting poverty in Africa while Latin America achieves successes through socialist policies (Ingwe, Ikeji and Ojong, 2010, Bond, 2009, Igwe, 2005), we apply revolutionary Marxism to provide philosophies capable of enlightening dynamics between conflicting parties (Nigeria’s federal government versus Niger Delta) of the resource control issues.

6. Methods and data

We used the method of aetiology in this study. This method is similar to causation because it involves creating the nature of the logical and empirical principles and laws that govern outcomes of phenomena. In this study, exploitation of the natural resources of the Niger Delta region for development of Nigeria’s elitist cities while ignoring the needs of the former under the context of Nigeria’s pseudo-federal government system are the issues at stake for analysis. We preferred to apply aetiology because this method facilitated our systematic and scientific study in the following several ways: description of the objects of this study; relating the study’s objects to other pertinent issues; to study and explain causation of outcomes of these various phenomenon; and related issues.

We followed the usual procedure of aetiology by providing a foundation for subsequent analyses of the issues at the outset. This involved undertaking a preliminary description of the study’s object; determining the fundamental constituents of the phenomena of interest in this study as well as the nature and principles governing inter-relationships among aspects of the key issues (exploitation of the natural resources of the Niger Delta region for financing infrastructural development in Nigeria’s elitist cities while ignoring the needs of the former under the context of Nigeria’s pseudo-federal government system). We established the interconnections among the origin, history and evolution of resource exploitation versus agitation for resource control based on consideration that the consequences of the foregoing interconnection are not discrete but developmental; not final but dialectical.

The dialectical characteristics of most issues refer to the way two aspects of a single situation make them to affect each other thereby facilitate aetiological analyses. We use this politico-development study to demonstrate the possibility achieving robust results similar to those earlier produced from the application of this aetiological analytical method to studies in various disciplines from medical sciences, where it was originally applied, thereby commending it to increasingly use for analyzing various issues criminology -example mafia and other gangsterism, cultism, delinquency, etc (Igwe, 2005: 6, 56-7).


7. Marxism, Exploitation and impact of Nigeria’s federalpolicies on the Niger Delta

Marxian analysis employs the tenets, principles and arguments in the nexus of Marxism. The latter refers to an accumulation of theory originally contributed by two scholars (in order of seniority); Karl Marx (1818-83) and Friedrich Engels (1820-95). Afterwards, other scholars who were fascinated by this original duo emerged to create and gain the label: Marxists. Marxism, and by extension Marxian analysis, revolve around critical theoretical conceptualization of issues which challenge, alter traditional thinking about economics (example Laissez Faire espoused by Adam Smith, political theory, etc) thereby revolutionized paradigmatic orthodoxies in multiple social science disciplines (Politics, Sociology, Religion, Philosophy, Economics, History, Psychology, Culture, Law etc) as well as professional and pedestrian practice arising from the theoretical strands. Marxism became the most influential theoretical strands adopted for organizing societies and economics affecting over one third of the global population for a considerable part of the 20th century up to the end of the millennium.

Marxism is considered one of the most articulate critics of modern society whereby the application of free market capitalist mode of production leads to Man’s (used in plural form to represent both female and male, gender and society) alienation from: (i) His product of labour, (ii) Man’s productive activity; and (iii) his fellow men (social relations among other men and women or society. Marxism argues that capitalism highlights commodity production for exchange purposes thereby engendering an alienated system whereby the alienated form of Man’s productive activity takes centre stage in an all-consuming form; the quintessence of capitalism. Ultimately, the social characteristics of Man’s productive process is downplayed (obscured) and suppressed by the individual capitalist who is preoccupied with appropriating commodities/products of work or workers for the market. Although, production and exchange processes possess inherent social relationships among men, it is only in the latter that the social relationship is more noticeable. Consequently, man’s relationship with fellow men is contrived by the capitalist system to take the form of interaction among inanimate objects (or things) (Etokudoh, 2011: 96-7).

The enormous influence of Marxism/Marxists on society has been reviewed by David McClellan (1983) and C. Wright Mills (1962). It has been praised for its potential to facilitate creativity in society is reorganization and critical enterprise (Marcuse, 1958). Ruefully, these potentials of Marxism were dented when the ideology was adapted in form of the Marxism –Leninism (a.k.a. Leninism) by Joseph Stalin (1879-1953), a soviet “repressionist”, and implemented in ways that led to dissatisfaction with it, rejection and failure in the defunct USSR. The ascendance of Marxism to its heydays in 1960s and 1970s presented opportunities for identification of some of its several versions including: the formulation in the 1920s of one of its ideological varieties by fusing the early works of Marx with those of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), a German idealist philosopher


credited with creating the concept of historical dialectical materialism, whereby history of thought and its political correlates are viewed as paths for approaching rational truth (Scott & Marshall, 2005). The most notable of this new form of Marxism were: Gyorgy Lukacs and Karl Korsch, whose propositions/formulations were discredited by orthodox Marxists and most of the Soviet Union, at the time (Scott & Marshall, 2005; 389).

There is a Gramscian Marxism whose origin is credited to Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) whose discourse of intellectuals, education, Italian history, political parties, fascism, hegemony and fordism in his post-humunouly published book: The Prison Notebooks (1971) rose to great influence in the Marxist community in the 1970s. Gramsci’s works/ideas were extended by Nicos Poulantzas to fabricate political sociology and other intellectual strands amenable to application in handling issues involving Marxism and “discourse analysis”: (Joll, 1977). Gramscian Marxism was decimated by the imprisonment of Gramsci apart from other adversities (poverty and illness) that plagued his life. However, it is credited recently for its contributing towards the development of the theory of ideology through its notion of hegemony, which was achieved via incorporation of other instruments: (Linguistic and conceptual, example discourse analysis) (Scott and Marshall, 2005).

8. The Gramscian Marxist Theoretical Perspective of Hegemony

Drawing from volume four of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, N. Sekler (2009) suggested reconceptualizations of hegemony in various senses. It is founded on class domination, repressive forces and institutions, which could be employed by one nation at an international level. Hegemony can be constituted and consolidated within traditional political institutions in a nation. Another perspective is to conceptualize it as characterized by procedural and consensus-based phenomena which could be established and interrogated at multiple scales and expressed in daily attitudes or practices. Sekler laments that the Gramscian notion of that hegemony has been presented mechanically or descriptively to determine the solidity of a given hegemony, or analogically to question the effectiveness of hegemony”. In other to strengthen it in the ongoing era of neo-liberalistic asphyxiation that strangulates national and supranational economies, societies and ecologies, she emphasizes the procedural aspects of creating and negating hegemony.

Sekler proposes the understanding of hegemony as a phenomenon that is deeply entrenched in civil society. The latter could be viewed as organizational platforms that society contrives for disputing and dissenting against hegemony and for developing/managing social struggles in the nexus of mental constructs and counter constructs (interpretations) and (variously) contrived “truths”, multidimensional phenomena including institutions within political, economic, socio-cultural components of society encompassing various structures, processes. It also presents the platforms for both facilitating and stabilizing) or traumatizing, disabling (questioning) hegemonic phenomena. The Gramscian conception is praised for the value it adds through its presentation of civil society as “socially


constituted and embedded” and the distinctive contribution made by it through its practices and strategizing towards either facilitating or traumatizing (pressuring) hegemony in spatial and temporal dimensions (Sekler, 2009:60-1).

Marxism contributed immensely towards the development of the critical understanding of relationships between/among humankind, political, economic and social (re) construction of ideas that previously existed. However, assessments and perceptions of the influence and consequences of the ideology that it created have varied depending on the biases of those people who receive its postulations. It did empower people to exercise optimism pertaining to its use for creating laws and principles promising to reconstruct the human society, transform human political, economic and social circumstances into a purer form devoid of the fallibilities and injustices generated from defective capitalist theoretical perspectives contrived by earlier paradigms in the social sciences.

9. The impact of Marxism on society

Another major variant of Marxism is the Frankfurt School of Social/Critical Theory which emerged and flourished prior to the ascendance of the Nazi to power in Germany. Founded in 1923, by Jürgen Habermas (who was exiled between 1935 and 1953 to USA), this School was resuscitated in Frankfurt University by its founder who professed its ideals from the 1960s to the 1980s. It combined Marxism and psychoanalysis in analyzing subjects (authoritarian rulers), as an emancipatory tool for extricating the oppressed from their oppressors.

It developed the theory of “communicative action” aimed at promoting understanding among participants in dialogues characterized by systematic distortion of communication wherein ideal speech situations are created for facilitating cooperative participation. Habermas suggested that in the period of late capitalism, the consent and commitment sought by rulers from the ruled is jeopardized by the “legitimation crisis” (McLean and McMillan, 2003:205; Scott and Marshall, 2005).

Marxism enabled its proponents and followers to aspire towards uplifting oppressed people, freeing them from the strangle hold of repressive ideas used by the ruling class to practice hegemony through exploitation of the poor (proletariat) by the ruling class (bourgeoisie) and the oppressor controlling the state apparatus of power. It promoted the undertaking or implementation of bloody revolution as a means of extricating the oppressed from the bondage of which they are held by their oppressor, if this becomes necessary or inevitable (Marx and Engels, 1947). Although the former USSR (Soviet Union) represented one of the most advanced realizations of some of the theoretical tenets of Marxism as espoused by Marx and Engels, the way its revolution (which started in 1917 through the instrumentalities of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin (1870-1924) and the Bolsheviks in 1917 and expired by perestroika and the efforts of the British and USA in the 1980s, confirms the view that neither Marxism nor its earlier cousin (capitalism) have had their


theoretical bases implemented by its self- acclaimed promoters in unadulterated forms (Igwe 2005:253, Bidwai, 2009).

Some of the eloquent articulations of exploitation in theoretical formats have been identified in Marx’s works such as Das Kapital (1867). The Poverty of philosophy (1847). Engels’ contributions to this subject include: A contribution to the critique of Political Economy (1844). Despite the waning of Marxism in the 1980s (referring to the collapse of the Soviet Union), the strength of its fundamental principles and ideas continue to linger in various forms in such countries as Cuba and elsewhere in Latin American example Venezuela, etc, (Ingwe, Ikeji and Ojong, 2010, Igwe 2005:253).

10. Application of Marxism in a Spatial System

This denounces the use of capitalist concept of scarcity as a tool of exploitation by its restriction to the use of land while it is allowed to lie fallow or lie empty. This is seen as an ecological fallacy and a means of appropriating the resources of one of territory by another. The capitalist system dominated by the state and transnational corporations (TNCs) concentrates and consumes surplus product in socially undesirable ways. This manifests in conspicuous consumption, mass build-up of cities, militarism or mercenary capitalism, waste, etc). Contrastingly, the promotion of growth based on principles of social justice in Marxist-communist systems (example Cuba & China) are advocated for due to their superiority (Harvey, 1973:114-5).

Some Marxists scholars who have applied its analytical tools at a supranational regional scale include Andre Gunder Frank and Samir Amin whose works have contributed to the centre-periphery model/theory. The latter contains two major theory-laden debates. First, a theory of modes of production conceptualizes various economic systems based on relationships established by nations in terms of production and distribution of goods and services required by their citizenry. Second, explores linkages among specific sectors (areas) located within the spectrum described as centre and periphery (re)-constructed the capitalist system (globalizing) but mediated (obstructed) by socialist-communist interventions as it were, arising from influences, actions of promoters of the two major politico-economic perspectives.

Frank argues that the capitalist system exploits non-capitalist preindustrial colonies of European invaders at different levels (regional and local); all along appropriating resources of the foregoing victimized regions. Some of the victims include: landowners, merchants, peasants and even vulnerable landless people (laborer). This “chain” of exploitation leads to the emergence of the elite (capitalists) dominating the poor majority: the latter lose their economic surpluses to the former. While this exploitation afflicts from ordinate to subordinate positions, the latter could only shield (or resist) the predatory process as far as those occupying higher positions on the ladder can allow. Thus is created the multiple-level of


intensity of capitalism from global to national, and local (subnational) levels, each presenting various characteristics (structures, institutions, processes and attitudes) of predation. Conclusively, while capitalist regions experience growth and development, their non-capitalist counterparts experience retrogression, (loss of growth and stagnation as their resources and products are perpetually appropriated by the former (Frank, 1969: 31-2, 1978, Harvey, 1973: 262-3, Scott & Marshall, 2005: 61-2, Amin, 1976). It deserves mention that while the use of the concept of elite could be seen in the works of some Marxists, this departs from Marx’s theory of classes as constituents of society contrasted to the elite and dominated strata of the population.

11. Relevance of Marxian Analysis to the Niger Delta Situation

Several aspects of Marxism described above are amenable to the analysis of exploitation of the Niger Delta region and people. A few deserve mention briefly. The Delta’s huge deposit of hydrocarbons (petroleum oil and natural gas) which are appropriated by Nigeria’s ruling class for earning foreign exchange for financing the elites conspicuous consumption and massive construction of cities (Lagos, Abuja, Kaduna), to name but a few of urban Nigeria construction from petrodollars, are among the confirmation or manifestation of exploitation of the region. The multiple levels of capitalist development are visible in Nigeria. Evidence of this include: the majority national capitals (Lagos and Abuja,) zonal centres of various hierarchy and intensities example Kaduna, Port Harcourt, Ibadan, among others. These conform to Frank’s theoretical and/or modeling efforts.

Moreover, Nicola Sekler’s suggestions that domination under the Gramsician Marxism could be reconceptualized as employable by one nation in an international sense and also within existing national institutions are relevant to Nigeria’s federal government exploitation of the Niger Delta. In the latter sense, the delta has been dominated through Nigeria’s distorted fiscal federalism which reversed previous revenue allocation formulae that were more beneficial to the three (later four) regions when agriculture earned revenues that sustained federal and regional economies in the 1950’s early post-independent era before the 1967-1970 Civil War . The former form of domination (involving one nation at an international level) could be seen in the way that the imperialistic forces of prominent capitalist nations (example USA, Britain, France and more recently China) and their oil multinational companies (example ExxonMobil, Chevron, Britain Petroleum, Agip, Shell P.D.C. Nigeria, etc) have worked as representative and in connivance with their home governments to manipulate Nigeria’s successive governments to “underdeveloped’ the Niger Delta.

12. Conflict theory and the Niger Delta’s resource control agitation

The quest for resource control has not only been a recurrent phenomenon in human history, but has come to stay with human civilization and growth. To understand the propelling force behind its persistence in society, particularly


in Nigeria, the intrinsic causes of the problem of the resource control can be understood from the Marxian Paradigm.

Coser (1954), in his work “The functions of social conflict” observed that, social conflicts, including the resource control problem are caused by the struggle over scarce values, status, power and resources. He observed that, conflict may break out over the distribution of a variety of scarce values, goods, such as: income, status, and power, domination over territory or ecological position. In line with this assertion, revenue allocation formula in Nigeria had been a driving force in causing and escalating the problem of resource control in the country. States and local governments, both in military and democratic dispensations often expressed dissatisfaction with the magnitude of revenue shared to them by the federal government. The quest for resource control in the Niger Delta is tied to this fact, and it corroborates Coser’s posture on social conflict.

Coser (1954) also argued that, legitimacy is an essential variable, before any antagonistic sentiment can be transformed into social action or conflict; the underprivileged group must become fully aware that, it is actually negatively privileged. From this assertion, awareness in the Niger Delta was low and slow in the 1960s and early 70s, but gathered momentum in the 1980s and 1990s till date. This awareness awakes the underprivileged people of the Niger Delta to agitate for resource control.

Similarly, considering the arguments and the ideology propounded by Karl Marx (1818-1883) the quest for resource control could be attributed to inequality in proceed sharing; that people who control means of production are positively privileged to the disadvantage of the “have nots”. Consequently, the less privileged engage in an open fight to over throw the oppressive tendency of the ruling class (Marx and Engels, 1952; Marx, 1971; Reitzer, 1996, 2008; Haralambos, Holborn and Heald, 2004; Giddens, 2006). According to Marx, the state/government is a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie. Thus, all its output is oppressive; laws are made to perpetuate the dominance and status of the ruling class; putting resources in hands of the minority dominated class. In the same vein, C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) in his work The Power Elite (1956) provides evidence to show that power has become highly centralized in all sectors of the American Society. He observed that, American economy is dominated by few people. While Mill’s use of the concept of elite differs from Marx’s concept of ruling class, they both explained the domination of the majority by a minority. Some therefore argue that both the ruling class and the elite dominate the majority in various combinations of forms (Igwe, 2005). This argument justified our proposal that Nigeria’s federalism be made/fashioned after Scandinavian system because of its less exploitative compared to that applied in the USA (Harvey, 1932).

Hiding under the banner of the federal constitution of Nigeria, fashioned after the US constitution, the economy/resources of Nigeria are controlled by the parasitic (non-generative elite) (Harvey, 1973). The claims of Nigeria’s constitution,


that it is meant to redress the injustice are contradicted by numerous injustices perpetrated by the Nigerian state as represented by its parasitic elite on the people of the Niger Delta provides evidence therefore, that the claims stated in the document were seem to be dubious expression by the elite to deceive the poor masses of Nigeria. This flaw has been identified by scholars with regards to other forms of uncivil actions and offences perpetrated by Nigeria’s elite (Ingwe, Agi, Adams, Ukwayi and Otu, 2009).

13. Federalism and history of resource control problem in Nigeria

Before we can meaningfully understand the controversy surrounding the past and the present quest for resource control in Nigeria, attempt must be made to discuss briefly, federal system of government and constitutional development in Nigeria. Federalism refers to the existence, in one country, of more than one level of government, each with different expenditure, responsibilities and tax collection powers (Nyong 1999: 286). It represents in one sense a compromise between unitary government and extreme decentralization (Oates, 1972). It is a method of dividing powers so that the federal and regional governments are each, within a share coordinate and independent (Wheare, 1964).

Federal system of government has been described as the best form of government because it offers a good resolution of the problems that constitute the economic raison d’être of the public sector. It is in this sense, that federalism may, in economic terms, be described as the optimal form of government. However, the greatest problem in a federal system of government is the problem of legislation, which tends towards uniformity.

Nigerian legislators tend to forget that the birth of a federal system is as a result of diversity in the country; thus government actions must as a matter of fact reflect these diversities (Okoh, 1982). One of the most difficult functions in a federal system of government is the problem of allocation of functions. This responsibility is difficult and controversial. Anyone who has followed closely the problem of resource control in Nigeria will no doubt agree with Musgrave’s assertion.

14. Relating the historical development of resource abundanceand exploitation under federalism to resource control in Nigeria

Federalism in Nigeria dates back to 1914 when the British government amalgamated the Southern and Northern Protectorates into a country called Nigeria. This also marked in earnest, the problem of resource control in Nigeria; as colonial over Lords (that is the central government) has and control resources of the country, through traditional rulers (Okoth-Ogendo, 2007). This situation continued till 1946 when the Richard’s granted autonomy to the existing regional governments in the country (Nyong, 1999); with that constitutional reform, it became apparent that resources have to be galvanized to enable regional government


perform their assigned responsibilities (Obo, 1999). The Richard Constitution therefore, encouraged a tripartite political division in the country (The North, South West and South East); also economic autonomy was granted to these regions (Eteng, 1999). Although, regional economic autonomy was granted by Richard’s Constitution, the Federal Government has the first claim on whatever revenue was collected and surplus is only shared to regions on the principle of derivation only after it needs have been satisfied (Nyong, 1999).

In 1951, the Hicks-Philipson Commission was set up by McPherson, who was at that time Governor-General of Nigeria. This Commission’s recommendations granted greater autonomy to the regions; increased special grant out of revenue generated from the regions was more given to the regions for the development of education, capital projects and the police. Similarly, the Chick Commission of 1953 granted greater fiscal autonomy to the regions. Revenue derived from exports and imports was shared to regions on the basis of derivation. With the creation of the Mid-West region in 1963, the Binn Commission (1964) still recommended fiscal autonomy for the regions, but modified revenue formula to: Mid-West – eight percent, West – 20 percent, East – 30 percent and North – 42 percent. Between 1960 and1966, revenue from regions was still shared on the basis of derivation of a proportion to the federal government and others to all the regions (Obo, 1999).

With incoming of the Military in Nigerian politics in 1966, twelve states were created in 1967 from the four existing regions; this further aggravated the problem of resource control and how revenue should be shared among states. This agitation continued until after the civil war in 1970. During Military regime, the relative regional autonomy that existed was further eroded, as government became more unitary; though retaining the federal system. National unity became the cardinal objective of successive military administrations. Consequently, the federal government controlled major resources in the country; while the federal tier has earned an average of US$20 billion annually from export of oil. The areas endowed with these resources were abandoned in abject poverty, this situation forced most regions especially those of the Niger Delta to agitate for resource control (Omojola, 2007).

According to Onduku (2001:9), the origin of resource control problem is traced back to the 1950s following the discovery of petroleum in the country and the marginalization of the Niger Delta. He stated that:

…the marginalization and balkanization of the people of Niger Delta, the despoliation of their environment and the resultant conflicts have their roots in the discovery of oil, exploitation, exploration and production activities by the oil multinationals in the late 1950s… despite being the richest geopolitical region in terms of natural resources endowment, the Delta’s potential for sustainable development however remains unfulfilled and is now increasingly threatened by environmental devastation and worsening economic conditions… incidental to and indeed compounding this ecological


devastation is the political marginalization and total oppression of the people and especially the denial of their rights, including land rights…

It is worth noting that during the cocoa boom, the Western region clamored most for resource control; while during the groundnut pyramids in the 1960’s, the Northern part of the country led the vanguard in the quest for resource control and agitation for more revenue allocation based on derivation in the 1960s. Afterwards, governors, youth and people of the Niger Delta started the struggle for resource control in the 2000s. This struggle led many Niger Deltans to death; the dead including Ken Saro-Wiwa along with eight Ogoni’s who were hanged on Friday, November 10, 1995. With the inception of the Fourth Republic, former Governor of Akwa Ibom state Victor Attah, among other indigenes of the Niger Delta, still clamoured for resource control.

15. Revenue allocation and the problem of resources control

There is a close link between revenue allocation and the problem of resource control in Nigeria. According to Akpan (1999), the upheavals in the Niger Delta, the marginalization cry, and the desire of some ethnic nationalities to opt out of Nigeria’s pseudo federal system is connected to revenue allocation system which exploits the Niger Delta minorities. It should be that, in Nigeria’s federal system, where federally collected revenue of over 90 per cent is derived from a particular region (the Niger Delta), the federal tiers has found it difficult to share revenue between the central government and the federating units in such a way that would compensate the region where the bulk of the resources are derived. This is because derived issues in the areas of ecological, political and socio-economic problems occasioned by oil exploitation are not neutral to all the federating regions.

The unfavourable revenue allocation to the Niger Delta, occasioned by unequal laws and force of arms wielded and applied by the federal government and transnational corporations engaged in oil production has denied the area of the right to manage their affairs and develop economically, socially and environmentally. This singular reason above all, has propelled ethnic revolt in the Niger Delta. Ethnic Nationalities of the Niger Delta agitate for fairness and justice. They argued that for government to achieve peace, stability, and neutralized ethnic revolt in the region, the resources of the Niger Delta should be controlled by the Niger Delta people, or alternatively, adequate revenue should be given to the area. In response to this demand, the federal government created more states and local governments in the area, as a means of enhancing the access of these oil gas-rich communities to the federal revenue. In line with the Africa Charter of Human and People’s Right Article 20 (1), which states that: all peoples shall have an (imprescriptibly) and inalienable right to self-determination and freedom to ensure their economic and social development, the Ogoni people, while still reaffirming their wish to remain part of Nigeria, consistently demand that, the Ogoni people should be politically governed by the Ogonis, and their resources should be used for Ogoni development (MOSOP, 1992:2, Mittee 2007).


Nigeria’s petroleum and mining laws as enshrined in the independent and republican constitution of 1960 and 1963 respectively, mandated the Federal government to pay 50 percent loyalties to constituent regions were these monies are generated. This sharing formula was reduced to 20 percent in 1975 and completely removed in 1979 constitution. With this development, most regions, especially of the Niger Delta, were left with little or no resources for their socio-economic development, thus the quest for resource control.

16. Efforts of successive Nigeria governments to manage andresolve agitation for resource control

The perennial upheavals emanating from the problem of resource control, especially in the Niger Delta, without doubt, compelled past and present administrations to make concerted efforts to quell this crisis. For instance in 1970, the military government promulgated Distributive Pool Account Decree. Under this arrangement, 45 per cent of mining rents and royalties from on-shore production were allocated to states based on the principles of derivation. Again in 1986, Babangida’s administration set aside 1.5 percent special fund to cater for ecological problems of oil producing states. This fund was increased to three percent. More so, the Oil Mineral Producing Areas Development Commission (OMPADEC) was established to tackle the problems of the oil producing areas. However, few years after its operation, OMPADEC was seen as a failure as oil producing areas saw the Commission as a half-hearted measure taken by Babangida’s dictatorship to address the problem of the oil bearing communities in the Niger Delta.

At the inception of the Fourth Republic, the Obasanjo administration, set-up the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC). The commission was saddled with the responsibility of promoting socio-economic development of the Niger Delta region. The Commission is involved in classrooms building, construction of roads, waste management, transportation, training programmes, building of jetties, enlightenment and poverty alleviation programmes. Like OMPADEC, the NDDC is already facing disapproval from the Niger Delta people, because of what they perceive as non-performance, and inability of the Commission to address the problem of the Niger Delta region. Consequently, in late 2004, the NDDC was almost scrapped by President Obasanjo. To alleviate the plight of the Niger Delta people, the Obasanjo administration, claimed that it was also committed to ensuring that revenue base on derivation was given to the states concerned, including those of the Niger Delta. Again, to address the problem of resource control, President Obasanjo eased his grip on offshore onshore oil dichotomy law; which barred oil-producing states from benefiting from revenue accruing to the Federal Government from its offshore oil exploration. The littoral states achieved this feat only after a prolonged legal tussle leading to Nigeria’s Supreme Court ruling in their favour.

In 2009, the Yar’Adua/Jonathan’s administration allocated more capital projects in the Niger Delta to quell the agitation for resource control and develop


the region. These projects included roads, electricity, hospitals, schools among others. The Amnesty programme was also introduced by late President Yar’Adua to ensure peace and justice in the Niger Delta and, it was also geared towards establishing lasting peace and development in the region.

17. Development from the problem of resource control in Nigeria

Development is the struggle of the opposite. The quest/struggle for resource control in Nigeria produced a mixed bag of development (positive and negative development). On the negative side, problem of resource control has produced all forms of human right abuses and chains of vices, lives and property are lost. Also, disunity among Nigerians has escalated, the emergence of all forms of tribal militant groups: Movement for the survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), Movement for the Survival of Oloibiri; in the South Western region and AREWA pressure group in the North. The operations of these tribal groups are sometimes detrimental to national unity.

On the positive side, unity among southern governors in early 2000s was enhanced during their struggle for 13 percent derivation formula. They spoke with one voice and stood united in their cause. Again, it spurred the Federal Government to establish the Niger Delta Development Commission, whose function is to cater for the socio-economic development of the Niger Delta region. Furthermore, it pressured the federal government and oil multinational corporations (OMNs) to build more schools, roads, hospitals/clinics etc to the boost socio-economic development of the oil producing communities. Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) is also improving efforts towards fighting all forms of pollutions during oil exploration, today, agriculture, is also encouraged in the Niger Delta region by SPDC and Chevron Nigeria Limited.

18. Suggestions

Following the causes and problem of resource control in Nigeria, we suggest that, the model of federalism based on social justice, good governance and mutual acceptability by stakeholders of the federating regions, as practiced in Switzerland Scandinavia should be adopted in Nigeria. This model should replace the federal system practiced in the USA, because of its deep-seated concentration on appropriation of the surplus value and exploitation of the resources of well-endowed constituent regions (Harvey, 1973: 314). States should be given more autonomy as obtainable in Federal States. The constitution should the amended to foster true federalism. Some ambiguous sections of the constitution should also be amended; for instance, Second Schedule, Section 4, item 17, 24, 39 and 64 of the 1999 constitution, as well as the Land Use Act, should be amended to avoid over centralization of power and resources at the federal level.

Oil multinational companies operating in the Niger Delta, should be adequately supervised to ensure their compliance with their business social responsibilities


to host communities. These companies should also adopt environment friendly equipment that will protect or prevent environmental pollution in their operational areas. Strict environmental laws should be made and enforced by the Federal Government in cooperation with subnational regions; states and local governments.

19. Conclusion

Evidence in Nigeria and elsewhere in the world; reveal that the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of struggle for scarce resources. And this struggle takes different forms: simple to complex as society metamorphoses. In Nigeria, evidence of steady build-up of various forms of conflict between and among ethnic cultural groups and ethnic nationalities and regions started since the amalgamation of North and Southern Nigeria in 1914; intensified in 1946, following the creation of regional government. Concerted efforts made by past and present administration to quell the agitation for resource control have proved abortive. Resource control has produced positive and negative changes. On the negative side, precious and incalculable lives were lost and property destroyed while on the positive side, improved infrastructure and revenue allocation was given to agitating oil bearing communities. We recommended among others, that the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria should be amended; and that true federalism patterned under the Scandinavia type should be practiced in Nigeria.

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Marius Lazăr • Ecaterina Cepoi 111

1. Introduction

In the contemporary Middle East, especially in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon, Shi’ism does not designate only an attachment to a religious identity reference, but it reifies as an active structures in the political, social, economic, security, even military field, it becomes an agent that interferes in processes of construction, management or, on the contrary, of challenging of the statist order1. The twelver Shi’as represents about 12% (140 million adherents) of the Muslim population inhabiting an area stretching from Lebanon to India and Central Asia. They are the majority in Iran (90-95%), Azerbaijan (85%), and Iraq (65%) and are the main community within the Muslim population in Lebanon (27% of the total Lebanese population). Over 70% of the population next to the Gulf is Shi’a although it is prevalent in countries - except Iran and recently Iraq, with Sunni political leadership where it often has a secondary status, being often subject to repression and discrimination. Thus, in Saudi Arabia, the Shi’a make up about 10-15% of the population but they are right in the al-Hasa oil province; in Kuwait they are in a percentage of 25-30%, in Qatar of 20%. However, Bahrain is the one with a particular situation, with 75% of the

1 G Fuller, & F Rend Rahim, The Arab Shi’a: The Forgotten Muslims, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1999.

Marius LAZĂRBabes-Bolyai University,Cluj-Napoca, [email protected] CEPOICarol I National Defence University,Bucharest, Romania

ABSTRACT

The paper is a reflection and an analysis of the evolution of Iraqi Shi’a in relation to the national construction processes of the state and its interactions with its regional geopolitical environment where religious identities represent a decisive element in shaping the behaviors of states or of different under- or over-state actors. The core of the research is represented by the political phenomenology of Iraqi Shi’as, but it is always contextualized within the broader context of domestic politics in Iraq and the multiple dynamics of the Persian Gulf and of the Middle East in general.

KEYWORDS

• Iraq• Shi’a• Islam• Middle East• Nuri al-Maliki

Marius LAZĂR • Ecaterina CEPOI

SH’ISM AND STATE IN

CONTEMPORARY IRAQ: FROM

DISCRIMINATION TO

POLITICAL POWER


population being Shi’a, predominantly rural, under Sunni, town power. Significant Shi’a minorities are also encountered in Pakistan (20%), Afghanistan (19%), and India2.

What essentially defines Iraqi territories, for centuries, is the complexity of their community structure and the multiple identities built at the level of the population where sectarian, tribal, ethnic, regional, and even neighborhood affiliations mix - in urban environments. In general, the situation in contemporary Iraq, in terms of ethnicity, is as follows: most of the population is Arabic (75% - 80%) then follows the Kurdish community (15% - 20%) and the remaining approximately 5% consists from other minorities: Turkmens, Iranians, Circassians, Armenians, etc. Regarding the religious configuration, it is characterized by a predominance of the Shi’a community (60% - 65%) although the Sunnis (32% -37%) were, from the Ottoman era until 2003, those who controlled the political and administrative Iraqi territory. Finally, there is a small percentage of Christian population (3%), represented by a multitude of pre-and post-Chalcedonian churches3.

Iraqi Shi’a is thus a category, sociological, religious, cultural and ideological, which interferes, through its multiple instances and representatives (the population as such, clerical leaders, politicians, communities, political parties, movements) as an active agent in the field of Iraqi political and public life or at the level of international interactions. The case of Iraqi Shi’a illustrates, in a very visible way and with a national and regional impact, the dynamics of the processes of identity social, political, ideological transformation of a community in the Middle East, defined religiously, but which tries to appropriate and to accommodate to the new mutations produced by the emergence of national states and of the need to rethink its own status in relation to new standards of modernity.

2. Building of modern Iraq and the impossiblenational supra-community project

There is a complex process of nation-building of Iraq, between 1914 and 1958, under British influence, unwanted but persistent, which failed to build a state consistent with European models and endowed with political representativeness and power management which is not dependent on the particular interests of different Iraqi communities4. The formation of contemporary Iraq results from the overlapping of European colonial interests with the emergence of Arab nationalism which both, in the early 20th century, project their own representations on the fate of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire5. But the new state will encounter a number of difficulties in building a statist coherence and functionality on an extremely heterogeneous and anarchic social background. The community structure of Iraqi society was shared in many ways, based on religious (Sunni, 2 S Mervin (coord.), Les mondes chiites et l’Iran, Karthala, 2007, pp. 457-464.3 CIA – The World Factbook 2011 – Iraq, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/iz.html4 P Sluglett, Britain in Iraq. Contriving King and Country, I.B.Tauris, 2007.5 E Kedourie, England and the Middle East. The Destruction of the Ottoman Empire 1914-1921, Westview Press, 1987.


Shi’a, Christian, Hebrew), ethnic (Arabs, Kurds, Persians, Turkmens) criteria and especially characterized by the existence of many rural populations attached to tribal identities and behavior.

Occupying Mesopotamia in 1914, against the background of the war with the Ottoman Empire, British authorities had to reflect on the most pragmatic and beneficial formula to integrate all this ensemble with large entropy, made up of social-identity groups not only self-referential, but especially with a long history of rivalry and tensions, in a functional statist structure6. The option chosen took into account not the possible interests of the Iraqi population but rather the British desire to build here a state to represent the interests of London and whose elite be dependent on the British authority. In implementing this model, the solutions were relatively limited: British strategists who now set out the political and institutional destiny of the new state had to select from the groups and persons with authority and experience not challenging, at least in fact, the legitimacy of the British mandate and London’s claims of being the tutelary agent that manages the construction of the new Iraqi state.

British preference, which will be finally determined at the conference in Cairo, in 1921, went, on the one hand, toward the person of al-Faysal, son of Sheriff Hussein of Mecca; from the need to ensure the fastest resuming of state functionality and the implementation of new institutions, the British authorities in Iraq shall use much of the old frameworks and elites from the Ottoman period. As these were in the majority of Sunni origin, as al-Faysal himself, and his entourage recruited from members of former Arab nationalist movements, were also Sunni, it results that the first Iraqi political structures that are implemented by the British gain a strong religious character7. Installed in power, they will be tempted to become permanent, including in an Iraqi political system in principle based on parliament elections and on governments representing the expression of national scale political forces. Thus, Iraqi national and state building shall perpetuate a sectarian dimension (and, to some extent, also Arabic, as the official identity reference will always be that of being Arabic, excluding Kurdish claims as to the recognition of a dual nationality character in the state), resulting not so much in a deliberate strategy but is an objective result of the perpetuation of solidarity networks already present in the field of statist institutions, since the beginning of the state, which recruits especially from among those who share the same religious, tribal, regional etc. identity. This way, the Iraqi Shi’a community, which represents over 60% of the population, saw, since the beginning of the British mandate, its capacities and options to participate in political life and in state institutions much reduced.

The British mandate installed in Iraq a modern type political and social system, but the background against which it was called to act remained largely tributary to its own tradition and especially to some mentalities still insufficiently prepared to work quickly in such a new structure. The failure of a coherent and stable statist 6 RS Simon, & EH Tejirian (eds.), The Creation of Iraq, 1914-1921, Columbia University Press, 2004.7 TJ Paris, Britain, the Hashemites and Arab Rule, 1920-1925: The Sherifian Solution, Franck Cass, 2003.


construction in Iraq is due, to a large extent, to the persistence of a local vision about what it means to have power and to use it. The exclusion from important decision-making positions of Shi’a actors starts from the very formation of the state; even if during the monarchy period there will be a certain Shi’a political participation, it is well below the share represented by Shi’a population in Iraqi society8. To a large extent, this elite present in power is made up of large landowners or of different tribal leaders, whose loyalty is captured by the assigning of political or economic functions or the granting of different privileges, by the Hashemite monarchs or the governments in power. In fact, these regimes are now trying to cover up the obvious sectarian character of the state, based on the promotion of Sunni elements, disseminating a series of Arabic ideologies, in order to create an abstract generic identity to mitigate the religious slip within the society. But the concept of an egalitarian society, specific to Western political culture, based on the category of citizenship and of universal rights, has little applicability in a tradition where asabiyya (fidelity to the proximal circle of solidarity the individual is participating in and in relation to which he constructs his specific identity) prevails and the relationships within the community are placed especially in terms of dominance / submission and of exclusive possession of power. The persistence with which the Iraqi political elites have promoted a system that privileged the Sunni produced a religious fracture within Iraqi society and forced the two communities to think of their relationships in terms of competition and rivalry for power. The position of the Shi’a at the beginning of the Iraqi state was weakened also by the fact that they did not have a tradition of political participation or elite in this sense. The traditional elite of the community, the clergy of the holy cities (Najaf, Karbala, Samarra), assumed religious, but not political leadership and even the Shi’a anti-British jihad in 1920 was being led in the name of religious principles of interpretation of the Iraqi territory. Shi’a political leaders emerged during the monarchy had little popular representation and their community identity was much subdued in favor of their personal interests or of those of their own clients9.

The Iraqi Shi’a community is not a homogeneous block but it experiences, in resonance with the specificity of the area, a series of doctrinal, family, tribal, economic, political attitude fragmentations. Until the mid-twentieth century, Iraqi Shi’ism was represented by three main structures: the clergy class, who inhabited mostly the theological academies in the sacred centers; a community and economic elite, consisting of groups of sheikhs (tribal leaders) and the class of traders and large land-owners, part of which revolved quite closely around the sacred centers whose interests they promoted and whose financial support they provided, through religious taxes and donations, and the bulk of the Shi’a population, established mainly in rural areas, and dealing with agriculture10. Obviously, forced most of the times to exist within Sunni political entities, Shi’ism was obliged, in order to survive, to moderate their political ambitions and focus more on the cultural and doctrinal 8 E Kedourie, ‘Anti-Shi’ism in Iraq under the Monarchy’, Middle Eastern Studies, no. 24, 1988, pp. 249-253.9 P-J Luizard, La formation de l’Irak contemporain: le rôle politique des ulémas chiites à la fin de la domination ottomane et au moment de la construction de l’Etat irakien, Ed. de la CNRS, 2002.10 Y Nakash, The Shi’is of Iraq, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1994


preserving of their themes. It is also the case of Iraqi Shi’ism in the long history within the Ottoman Empire. Although the southern Shi’a regions, particularly the holy cities, have enjoyed relative freedom during the Ottoman rule, this resulted from the fact that the theological elite from here were not involved in various political ambitions. Najaf and Karbala were defined primarily as the main theologi-cal centers and sacred territories toward which the entire Shi’a space converged. The theological academies there were characterized as centers par excellence of an „Shi’a international”, maintaining an intense cultural, educational, economic, human exchange, with the other Shi’a regions (Iran first of all, Lebanon, the Gulf area, Azerbaijan, Pakistan, India, Central Asia etc), establish a genuine rule of the great ayatollahs of Iraqi Atabat (Najaf, Karbala, Kadhimiyya, Samarra) and Hawza (theological academies) representing a decisive influence on the whole Shi’a space11.

This conferred a distinct identity to these cities, unproblematic within an Ottoman Empire itself cosmopolitan, but which will face, from the moment of formation of independent, the pressures of a political environment had become the assuming of a national identity with Arabic referential. The suspicions permanently surrounding the „Iraqi” loyalty of the Shi’a originates precisely in the new Arab nationalist ideology underpinning the new state, circulated mainly by Sunni elements seizing the power, and for which the „foreign” character of Shi’a religious elites now becomes an argument to exclude their possible participation in power. However, the nationalist dimension of some ayatollahs becomes apparent when the new Iraqi state is established in 1920, when a part of the mujtahids (the Shi’a clerics) from the holy cities shall initiate the anti-British revolt and shall spread modernist political concepts, in Islamic grid, but which validate the classical notions of national independence, democracy, etc.12 Ever since 1924, together with the proclamation of the Law on Citizenship, continuing with the ba’thist discriminatory policies, the reality that much of the high clergy consisted mainly of Iranians motivated restricting projects of Shi’a traditional institutions that are considered as having an „anti-national” or even subversive character. This sliding occurs even within the clergy itself, where, the classical „internationalist” trend is accompanied by the emergence of a growing sense of Iraqi or Arab identity13.

The power relations within the clerical class depend essentially on theological prestige, the main factor influencing the Shi’a community. The Shi’a system is based on the idea of a full fidelity of the believer to the teachings (religious, behavioral, legal and even political) promoted by one of the great ayatollahs, which it takes as a „source” (marja’- pl. maraji’). Marja’, by virtue of its outstanding qualities and of its theological prestige, is conceived as the only one able to make correct decisions, in accordance with the teachings of the Islam and of the Imams, towards the various

11 M Litvak, The Shi’i Ulama of Najaf and Karbala, 1791-1904, Harvard University Press, Cambridge - Massachusetts, 1991.12 A Vinogradov, ‘The 1920 Revolt in Iraq Reconsidered: The Role of Tribes in National Politics’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol.3, no.2, 1972, pp. 123-139.13 P-J Luizard, ‘Le mandat britannique et la nouvelle citoyenneté irakienne dans les années 1920’, in P-J. Luizard (coord.), Le choc colonial et l’Islam, La Découverte, 2006, pp. 406-407.


issues concerning the life of the believer. It makes the great clerics get hold of an immense power, either symbolic or explicit, over the community, and therefore the marja’iya institution was seen by most modern Iraqi leaders as a permanent threat to their desire to fully seize the entire field of Iraqi community events14.

As a result, one of the recurring crises crossing the contemporary history of Iraq is that of the relationships between the political powers and the Shi’a aspirations in relation to ratio of their representation in decision-making. The Ottoman Empire was a political structure based on the ancient oriental governance model of some communities identified primarily from a religious and not a national point of view. The concepts of nation and nationalism are emerging in the East only from the second half of the nineteenth century, together with the increase of the European political and cultural influence and of that of their own national emancipation movements in Europe. But the formation of Iraq, as well as of the other new Arab states in the Middle East, was more like a colonial act and less the actual expression of a local Iraqi nationalism. Besides the Sunni nationalist elites, recruited partially from among Iraqi officers from the former Ottoman army (and grouped in several secret movements, that will then direct their loyalty to the new Hashemite sovereign of Iraq, al-Faysal), the other coherent manifestation of Iraqi national consciousness was represented precisely by the opposition of the Shi’a clerical circles, whose anti-British revolt had been led on behalf of the independence of a yet unstructured Iraqi space as a new state identity but inferred as such. The formation of the Iraqi state thus forced the Shi’a community to enter the logic of a national identity and to rethink its status in terms of the relations that it is now required maintaining with the other communities. What is called “the Iraqi problem” is owed precisely to the failure to create a sense of cohesion between the three major ethno-religious communities that are now included in the skeleton of the Iraqi state (the Shi’a, the Sunni, the Kurds) and to actually transcend the segregations within the society15.

3. The republican Iraq and the Shi’a militancy

The 1958 military coup d’Etat in Iraq, which leads to the fall of the Hashemite monarchy and to the proclamation of the republic is part of the regional wave of challenges to the old colonial political order, to the persistency of some regimes that were considers as excessively dependant on the Western powers and especially lacking in popular authority. The new mobilizing myth of the fifth and sixth decades is that of the Arab nationalism, predominantly resuscitated in a political and militant dimension, ideologically enveloping the doctrine themes that were developed by the classic theorists in the Inter-Wars period, with a regenerating calling both over the State and the individual consciences.

As a consequence, Iraq’s inclusion in the same revolutionary process was inevitable. The lack of legitimacy and popular support of the monarchy facilitates 14 LS Walbridge (ed.), The Most Learned of the Shi’a. The Institution of the Marja’ Taqlid, Oxford University Press, 200115 P-J Luizard, La question irakienne, Fayard, Paris, 2004.


the 1958 revolution, made by a group of nationalist military men lead by general Abd al-Karim Qasim and supported by the Nasserian, Communist, and Ba’th forces. The proclamation of the republic draws Iraq out of the block of the western allied states and leaves the impression that it will join the Pan-Arab union project started between Syria and Egypt. In reality, the personal rivalry between Nasser and Qasim, doubled by Iraq’s own ambition of regional leadership and the apprehension of letting itself being drawn in an ambiguous structure, in Egypt’s wake, lead to the failure of the union projects, even though they are regularly resuscitated at the official discourse level16.

The toppling of the old monarchy order at the moment of the 1958 revolution, the support which the, at that time, Shi’a dominated Iraqi Communist Party offers to the new republic within its first two years, adopting some reforms and social programs that brought benefits firstly to the underprivileged Shi’a environments, offered the illusion that finally, the members of the Shi’a community can accede to govern and that the interests of the Shi’a will be taken into account17. The Iraqi revolution process lead, however, like in other Arab countries, to the emergence of a new political actor, the Army, from within which new leaders will now be recruited. As the Officer Corps was almost entirely made out of Sunni officers, the rapports of force within Iraqi society remain unbalanced in favour of the Sunni minority from within the ranks of which management and administration leaders are promoted, often on account of solidarity networks of a regional, tribal, family etc. nature18. The failure of president Qasim’s socialism of constructing an Iraqi society on the principles of equality is also based on the opposition which the Sunni structures manifest towards the idea of a Shi’a political emancipation, which would have led to the forfeit of an important part of the owned privileges. This is the moment in which the Shi’a Islamist movement appears (al-Da’wa, Munazzamat al-’Amal al-Islami), which aims at both preserving the Shi’a values in the face of modernity and the new secular ideologies and an effective political action program, pursuing the installation of a government in conformity with the principles of Islam19. As with all the Islamic movements of the Muslim world, the Iraqi Shi’a Islam sets off with a spatial projection at a trans-national scale and realises a lecture of the reality within and using the theological conceptual apparatus. Ideologues like ayatollah Muhammad Baqir Al-Sadr are interested by the rebirth of the Islamic principles and of the construction of a utopian Muslim society governed by the Shari’a20. Only once with the installation of the authoritarianism of the two Arif presidents (Abd as-Salam Arif: 1963-1966, Abdul Rahman Arif: 1966-1968), the al-Da’wa Party starts to „nationalize”

16 M Farouk-Sluglett, & P Sluglett, Iraq since 1958. From Revolution to Dictatorship, I. B. Tauris, 2001, pp. 99-106.17 P-J Luizard, ‘Les chiites d’Irak: une majorité dominée à la recherche de son destin’, Peuples méditerranéens, no. 40, 1987.18 S Zubaida, ‘Community, Class and Minorities in Iraqi Politics’, in Robert A. Fernea, & William Roger Louis, The Iraqi Revolution of 1958. The Old Social Classes Revisited, I.B. Tauris, 1991, pp. 197-210.19 JN Wiley, The Islamic Movement of Iraqi Shi’as, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1992.20 Ch Mallat, ‘Religious Militancy in Contemporary Iraq: Muhammad Baqer al-Sadr and the Sunni-Shia Paradigm’, Third World Quarterly, no. 10, 1988, pp. 699-729.


its discourse and strategies of action, gradually linking the general problem of Shi’a resurrection to the one of the emancipation of the Iraqi Shi’a community.

The sixth decade is structurally marked by multiple rivalries within the ensemble of the Arabic countries, which made Malcolm Kerr utilize the term „Arab Cold War” to define the regional political context21. The tensions are both ideological (the nationalist reference vs. the traditional, Islamic one), political (republican systems vs. conservatory monarchies) or options regarding the blocks of the Cold War. The republican regimes are close to, within different gradations, to the USSR and the communist countries, with which they entertain rising collaborations at both an economical and military level. The fragmentation is however transferred, including within the republican group, where the traditional rivalries within states and the hegemonic ambitions of each of them (Egypt, Syria, Iraq) is doubled with the breakage of the Arab nationalist movement in the two great poles, Nasserism and Ba’thism, the last one fracturing in its turn in the two „regional” commandments, the Syrian and Iraqi ones, between which a tenacious rivalry will take place. Finally, these multiple schisms are as well projected at the level of the internal stability of the states, polarizing the different groups that ideologically originate in the different factions that are confronted within the Arab nationalist movement but in fact, being often mobilized by the temptation of obtaining an exclusive power control.

Iraq is thusly traversed by a ferocious rivalry between the nationalist group centred around Qasim, to which the support of the important communist movement is added and the Ba’th group, that manages to attract a part of the former military partners of the Zaim (President), led by Arif brothers. The new 1963 revolution puts a new regime in place in which the elites are military men as well as civilians but which retain the same selection preferences from the ranks of the solidarity networks originated in different Sunni regions. Once more, the political life is marked by authoritarianism and a rising security control, especially on the basis of the rapid rupture between the Arif group, which draws near Egypt, and the Ba’th, drawn out from power and obligated once more to minimise its expectancies22. This is the period in which, like in the case of its Syrian branch, in the Ba’th Party there are a series of cleansings and changes of the old elites that that take place, in their great part Shi’a ones. The rivalries between different factions of the party, oftentimes ferocious, end through the definitive ascension of the „Tikriti” clan, led by Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr and his nephew, Saddam Hussein.

From the moment in which the Ba’th party reaches leadership, in 1968, any Shi’a political ambition of participating in power in the name of the community’s interests is excluded. Although it claims to be founded on a Pan-Arabian doctrine, the Ba’th represents an avatar of applying tribalism in policy and of the persistency of a patrimonial vision over the State institution23. After 1968, the Ba’th is centred 21 M Kerr, The Arab Cold War: Gamal Abd al-Nasir and His Rivals, 1958-1970, Oxford University Press, 1971.22 T Alaa, Irak. Aux origines du régime militaire, L’Harmattan, 1989, pp. 257-270.

23 M Farouk-Sluglett, & P Sluglett, ‘Iraqi Ba’thism: Nationalism, Socialism and National Socialism’, in CARDI (Committee Against Repression and for Democratic Rights in Iraq), Saddam’s Iraq:


around a nuclei formed by members united by the solidarity conferred by the common past within the party, family links and the affiliation to the same tribal area and Sunni identity24. Learning from the past lessons of the Iraqi history and especially of the recent republic, they are convinced that the only efficient modality of keeping the power is on one side, the winning over the membership of as many of the population as it is possible and on the other on the elimination of any possible competitor. This is what will describe the Ba’th politics, especially in the seventh decade. Lecturing the social Iraqi landscape in this exclusivist perspective of power, the Ba’th leaders see the religious and Shi’a community institutions as an opponent to their absolute hegemony.

There are five major themes of conflict: 1) the first one is political, based on blocking any political project of the Shi’a community; a partial participation is permitted at the most, within the limits imposed by the Ba’th power and one that has a formal, non-decisional nature; 2) the economical conflict, between the secular tendency of Bagdad and the Shi’a commercial classes. After the agrarian reform of 1959, which disintegrated the class of agricultural owners, the nationalizations of 1964, 1970, 1977 affected the Shi’a commercial and industrial elites, leading to the disappearance of the middle class, which, in part, will be deported to Iran and will convert itself towards intellectual activities or will take up the exile path; 3) the cultural rupture between the Ba’th discourse, which puts accent on national identity or on the Arab character and the values of the Shi’a leaders, which are religious by excellence; more so, the clerical institutions are largely restricted, seen as a rival in winning the total fidelity of the population; 4) the problem of the public rights of the Shi’a population, which is often discriminated and even subjected to reprisals on account of their confession (the massive deportation of Shi’as, under the accusation that they are „Iranian” subjects, not Iraqi); 5) the policy of secularization, that not only affects the social influence of the Shi’a religious discourse but has destroyed the control system that the clergy benefited from in administering its rapports with the faithful (justice, education, collecting of religious taxes, the disappearance of the medium Shi’a class that assured the financial sustenance of the Hawza programmes etc.)

The restrictive Ba’th policies towards the traditional instances of the Shi’a community leaves only a single organized actor inclined to a contesting reaction, the Islamist movement. Since the `60s, al-Da’wa party spread its influence especially among the urban population, workers and intellectuals. In the seventh decade, the Islamist opposition will stand behind several protest movements, on the occasion of the great popular mobilisations of the Shi’a pilgrimage rituals. Their violent repression and that of the Islamic groups announces the installation of a totalitarian system that does not hesitate to turn to mass repressions in order to defend its privileges. The rapports between the clerical institutions, devotes and militants and the Ba’th power now become radically antagonistic. For Hawza, the

Revolution or Reaction?, Zed Books, 1990, pp. 96-105.24 A Baram, ‘The Ruling Political Elite in Bathi Iraq, 1968-1986: The Changing Features of a Collective Profile’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 21, no. 4, 1989, pp. 447-493.


problem is posed in terms of survival and of at least retaining the institution as such and in no way assuming political ambitions: it is the traditional line of the great maraji`, like ayatollah Muhsin al-Hakim or al-Kho`i25.

The success of the Iranian Revolution offers yet again the illusion of the possibility to seize power through the mobilization of the masses but such a scenario fails26. Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, the leader of the Iraqi Shi’a resistance is executed, the Islamist movement is yet again subjected to reprisals and, in front of the appeals to destabilization of the country addressed by Khomeyni to the Iraqi Shi’a population, Iraq decides starting a war with Iran27. The Iran-Iraq conflict differentially affected the destiny of the Iraqi Shi’as. Those that remained in the country will choose to rather assume the Iraqi identity than the confessional one and will show great patriotism, even if the aversion toward the Ba’th Party remained unchanged. This also represented a success of the intense Iraqi propagandistic efforts that pools all the possible resources in favour of enticing the fidelity of the population towards the country’s territory, means through which the Ba’th power maintains its position. On the other hand, the war allowed a accumulated mobilization of the exiled Shi’a opposition groups, that largely move their headquarters and resources in Iran, participating alongside in the war effort, in hope of a possible regime change in Iraq and seizure of power. The Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), al-Da’wa, The Organization of Islamic Action (Munazzamat al-’Amal al-Islami) and other militant movements develop an entire political, cultural, military and doctrinaire infrastructure, a prelude to the hoped of, future exercise of governance after the Ba’th regime would fall28.

For Iran, however, the Shi’a opposition is more of an instrument of its Iraqi policies, and the declarations of independence and nationalism displayed by some Iraqi militants are not always to the Teheran leaders’ liking. Furthermore, the end of the war, Khomeyni’s death, adopting a strategy that discards the principle of exporting the revolution in the favour of national interests makes the Iranian support of the Shi’a opposition fall29. Except SCIRI, a great part of the groups will move their headquarters in other capitals, mostly in Europe, where the freedom of speech and the rising number of Iraqi refugees permits a much more efficient propagandistic and recruiting activity30.

25 B Ofra, ‘Shi’ism and Politics in Ba’thi Iraq’, Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 21, no. 1, January, 1985, pp. 1-14.26 B Amatzia, ‘The Impact of Khomeyni’s Revolution on the Radical Shi’i Movement of Iraq, in David Menashri (ed.), The Iranian Revolution and the Muslim World, Westview Press, 1990, pp. 130-151.27 C Tripp, ‘The Iran-Iraq War and the Iraqi State’, in Derek Hopwood, Habib Ishow, & Thomas Koszinowski (eds.), Iraq: Power and Society, St. Anthony’s College, Oxford, Ithaca Press, 1993, pp. 91-116.28 J Faleh, The Shi’ite Movement in Iraq, Saqi Books, London, 2003.29 B Amatzia, ‘From Radicalism to Radical Pragmatism: the Shi’ite Fundamentalist Opposition Movements of Iraq’, in James Piscatori, Islamic Fundamentalisms and the Gulf Crisis, The University of Chicago Press, 1991, pp. 28-51.30 B Amatzia, ‘The Radical Shi’ite Opposition Movements in Iraq”, în Emmanuel Sivan, Menachem Friedman (eds.), Religious Radicalism and Politics in the Middle East, State Univesity of New-York Press, 1990, pp. 95-126.


The invasion of Kuwait and the Gulf war reopens a new stage in Iraq’s history and that of the Shi’a mobilisation. Firstly, the Kuwaiti crisis permitted the United States’ to become the main external influence over the Middle Eastern, especially in the zone of the Persian Gulf, and in assuming the management of the Palestinian problem. Iraq and Iran are subjected to a policy of containment which aims at limiting their autonomous regional actions against the interests of the United States. Iraq is the most affected one, in the measure in which the international embargo is added to the destruction caused by the war. For the power in Bagdad, the problem is not regional supremacy anymore, like in the previous years but it’s very survival31.

The international restrictions, in fact, only strengthened Saddam’s authoritarian policy and he is now open to any strategy in order to conserve his power. He demonstrated this through the violent repression of the Shi’a and Kurdish revolts in March 1991, which probably represented the most powerful internal threat to the Ba’th regime since its instalment32. In order to compensate for the lack of institutional authority and that of the Party in the Shi’a southern zones, Saddam reverts to a new strategy of winning the fidelity of some clients, that would serve as agents within the Shi’a communities and the Iraqi population in general. This is the case of the tribal leaders, who are bestowed upon a series of privileges, having been awarded the duty of maintaining local order in the name of the state33. This „re-tribalisation” of Iraq is accompanied by promoting an Islamic discourse and policies in a Sunni manner, Wahhabi even, the regime’s last ideological resource towards the winning of the attachment of an exhausted Iraqi population. This does not mean that all of this was accompanied by a liberalisation of the attitudes towards the Shi’a elite, and the Shi’a community’s cultural guidelines: Hawza continues to be restricted and a last great visible opponent from within the clergy, ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr is executed in 1999.

4. The Shi’a political revival in post-Saddam Iraq

The fall of Saddam’s regime, following the military campaign proposed and coordinated by the United States, together with some symbolic allies leaves room, for the second time in Iraq’s history, to a nation-building process, imagined by the American neo-conservatory ideologues but who’s application is extremely difficult in an Iraq destroyed by conflicts, embargo, the emergence of a generalized violence that blocks for several years any coherent attempt of implementing a functional order at the institutional and service levels34. It is one of history’s ironies that, if in 1920 the British chose to rely on the Sunni elites, thusly setting the

31 B Amatzia, Building Toward Crisis: Saddam Husayn’s Strategy for Survival, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1998.32 J Faleh, ‘La répresion du soulèvement chiite de 1991’, in Kutschera Chris, Le livre noir de Saddam Hussein, Oh! Editions, 2005.33 B Amatzia, ‘Neo-tribalism in Iraq: Saddam Hussein tribal’s policies 1991-1996’, International Journal of Middle-East Etudies, no. 29, 1997, pp. 1-31.34 T Dodge, ‘The ideological roots of failure: the application of kinetic neo-liberalism to Iraq”, International Affairs, vol. 86, no. 6, 2010, pp. 1269–1286.


foundation of a communalisation of power, in 2003, the American troops brought with them the old exiled Shi’a and Kurd opponents, installed in the new public positions, also in accordance with a logic that takes in account the premises of demographic partitions of the ethnic and confessional communities (muhasasa).

Once again, the destiny of the new Iraq will succumb in front of an incapacity to imagine a political formulae that would make subsidiary the particular identities of the groups that make up the Iraqi society. On the contrary, post-Saddam Iraq has known the most violent instrumentation of the sectarian differences that paroxysmal reflected a current which already traverses the Muslim world for some decades after the Iranian Revolution, that of the elevated geopolitical tensions between Sunni and Shi’a communities. The Islamization of the identity references at the scale of the whole Muslim space is thusly reflected through this elevated reification of the social corps defined through the affiliation to a particular confessional Islamic group. Thusly, the recent modernity did not bring a reinforcement of the attachment toward the state and the national identity; on the contrary, in the Muslim societies one can observe an ever more clear distancing towards the state officials (which the states provoke by their transformation in oppression systems and privileged distribution of resources) and a rising attachment of the masses towards sub-national or supra-national references.

The first months of post-Saddam Iraq are characterized, on the one hand, by the willingness of the Shi’a, Kurdish and Sunni parties (all returned from exile) to become involved in the political process although it unfolded under the control of a Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). On the other hand, a bitter and often violent competition emerges between groups and parties which want to secure various leadership positions for their members in the local administration. It is the moment when, transferring to Iraq the logistics and human resources they had in their former countries of residence, Shi’ites movements from exile begin to establish their own militias, whose role is often to win over new areas of influence and to control and administer the territories held under the authority of various parties. Except for the classical institution of marja’iyya, which has prudently kept a pious altitude and avoided direct political involvement, the main Shi’a players, who come to forefront in the very first days after Saddam’s fall, have at the same time a political and a religious target for their actions and discourses.

It is especially the case of Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution of Iraq (SCIRI) – later (after May 11, 2007) to be known as Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC). Established in Iran in 1982, the Council remains throughout the following period the main Shi’a resistance movement in exile, although a certain closeness towards Iranian leaders and especially the fact that the al-Hakim family comes to hold important leadership positions gradually leads to an estrangement of some allied Shi’a groups. During its Iranian period, SCIRI defines itself primarily as a mass movement, focused on the charismatic personality of ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim, who takes advantage of the vast resources and international influence of his family in order to promote his image as a possible future leader of an Islamic


regime in a freed Iraq. However, returning to Najaf and wishing to become a member of marja’iyya, Baqir al-Hakim makes efforts to change his previously pro-Iranian image and his discourse takes on increasingly nationalistic tones with a focus on the need for an independent Iraq. His assassination, in August 2003, deprived SCIRI of its key ideological figure. The new leader, Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, has neither the religious authority nor the charisma and prestige of his brother but during the following years the party still remains the main Shi’a political force, its influence being strengthened by the fact that al-Sistani is acknowledged as marja’ of the movement35. Also, the military wing of the party – the Badr brigades – unofficially offer security and military support to Hawza at the difficult times of Sadrist contestation.

The situation is similar for the Sadrist movement, which originates in the activism of ayatollah Mohammad Sadiq al-Sadr (Sadr II, murdered in 1999) who was himself a member of another important Shi’a clerical dynasty that gave several major political and religious Iraqi leaders. Three important elements define Sadiq al-Sadr’s program, which will last after 2003. First, Sadrism displays the characteristics of a classic Islamist movement, which is especially clear in the manner in which conservative patterns of behavior are encouraged while, at the same time, traditional tribal social norms and values are allowed, in addition to Shari’a. Second, Sadrism shares a nationalistic and Iraq-centered vision, which marks a breach with the pan-Shi’a tradition usually embraced by the historical Shi’a parties. Moreover, as he argues in favor of an all-Arab marja’iyya, Sadr II denies the legitimacy of the high clergy in Najaf and Karbala, most of whom are non-Iraqi and whose relative political passivity is explained as a result of their being foreigners with a weak sense of belonging to the Iraqi nation. Third, Sadiq al-Sadr is one of the main initiators of a phenomenon which becomes very important in post-Saddam Iraq, namely the emergence of a messianic feeling referring to the imminent arrival of the hidden Imam and the establishment of a Mahdist state. Although it claims a religious dimension, the Sadrist movement has mostly a social and political character.

As he did not have the religious authority necessary to emerge as a leader of the Shi’a community according to traditional canonical norms, Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the Sadrist movement after 2003, chooses the alternative of a militant and populist Shi’a movement, focused on mass actions and militia that target the Americans as well as Iraqi leaders, both religious (Hawza) and political (those returned from exile). During the first years of his leadership, Muqtada takes advantage of the human resources and territories under his control (Sadr-City, the poor neighborhoods on the outskirts of the large Shi’a cities, the tribal areas in Maysan province) in an attempt to impose, often by force, his hegemony on the Iraqi Shi’a community36. After a period when he takes a radical attitude against almost all Iraqi authorities (the new political elites, the international forces, the high clergy) – 35 ‘International Crisis Group, Shiite Politics in Iraq: The Role of the Supreme Council’, Crisis Group Middle East Report, no. 70, 15 November 2007.36 P Harling, & HY Nasser, ‘La mouvance sadriste: lutte de classes, millénarisme et fitna’, in Sabrina Mervin (coord.), Les mondes chiites et l’Iran, Karthala, 2007, pp. 267-286.


which reaches a peak during the Sadrist insurgence in 2004 – Muqtada chooses to become involved in the political process. Thus, the Sadrist movement ends up by acquiring a triple dimension (like the Lebanese Hezbollah): mass movement (mostly put into action by a large network of minor clergy and secular militants), militia (Mahdi Army, which becomes the most important paramilitary force of any Iraqi party), and political body involved in governing the state37.

The historical party al-Da’wa – the first Islamist Iraqi Shi’a movement emerged in the 1950s – has an infrastructure and a capacity for militant action that are both inferior to those of the two previous movements. Repeatedly fractured during the exile of its main leaders, the party has been represented since 2003 by two main branches: one which brings together the party members who spent their exile in London or some European countries, and the Iranian branch that is closer to the religious model promoted by Tehran leaders. The former branch, known as Da’wa islamiya, is led by secular members even if it largely remains faithful to the Islamist agenda upheld by its historical leaders38. Although it has fewer human resources than SCIRI or the Sadrist movement, al-Da’wa islamiya has succeeded in effectively controlling Iraqi politics and, after 2005, has given the country two prime-ministers: Ibrahim al-Jafari and Nuri al-Maliki.

The first free Iraqi’s elections, in January and then in December 2005, offer a clear image of the fragmentation of the Iraqi community along religious or ethnic lines. For each of the major political forces, the criterion for parties or movements to group together is not a similar ideology or common programs but, almost exclusively, the fact of belonging to one of the ethnic and/or confessional structures of Iraqi society. The elections clearly indicate that the most effective means of mobilizing the population is the reference to a shared religious or ethnic background. This ethnic and religious enclavisation of the major Iraqi communities has made almost impossible, for a while, the emergence of parties or program with nationwide support.

The elections in December 15, 2005 put an end to the process of establishing a legitimate Iraqi authority. The main novelty brought by these elections is the participation of the main Sunni parties, now persuaded that staying out of national politics was inefficient and would only allow the Shi’a and Kurdish communities to promote their program and interests39. Since the beginning of his mandate, the new prime-minister Nuri al-Maliki has to deal with the disastrous economic 37 International Crisis Group, ‘Iraq’s Muqtada al-Sadr: Spoiler or Stabiliser?’, Middle East Report, no. 55, 11 July 2006.38 A-H al-Ruhaimi, ‘The Da’wa Islamic Party: Origins, Actors and Ideology’ in Faleh Abdul-Jabar (ed.), Ayatollah, Sufis and Ideologues: State, Religion and Social Movements in Iraq, Saqi Books, 2003; R Shanahan, ‘The Islamic Da’wa Party: Past Development and Future Prospects’, Middle East Review of International Affairs, Vol. 8, no. 2, 2004; Y Dai, ‘Transformation of the Islamic Da‘wa Party in Iraq: From the Revolutionary Period to the Diaspora Era’, Asian and African Area Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, 2008, pp. 238-267.39 M Benraad, ‘Irak: avancées et écueils d’une transition (2005 – 2006)’, in Frédéric Charillon, & Bernard Rougier (coord.), Afrique du Nord – Moyen Orient. Le Moyen-Orient en crise, La Documentation française, Edition 2006-2007, pp. 95-119.


situation of the country as well as its lack of security. His main tasks are to restore state authority by dissolving all militias, to prevent the expansion of inter-sectarian violence and to attempt to offer a solution acceptable to all parties to the problem of federalization. The difficulties within the country are accompanied by immense pressure from the great international powers that have an interest in the Iraqi situation: the United States and Iran. After 2007 the arguments between various factions within the government tend to follow the logic of sectarian rivalry, as Sunni parties accuse Maliki of sacrificing the national interest to that of the Shi’a community. However, political fragmentation becomes increasingly obvious within the Shi’a movement itself, as group interests, conflicting strategic views on the future of Iraq, and personal rivalry among the leaders become more radical.

5. Nuri al-Maliki’s second mandate: toward a new dictatorship?

What most of specialists and observers of the Iraqi scene observed, during the past years, is the updating of a specific pattern in the history of modern Iraq as well as in other countries in the region: the leader temptation to exercise an exclusive monopoly of power, creating around him a network of clients who are used to control the institutions and decision-making positions, and seeking ways to most effectively block any opposition that might affect the authority. It is here about Nuri al-Maliki, who had a totally unpredictable political trajectory, radically contradicting initial skepticism about its ability to manage multiple Iraqi crisis; he succeeded, in his first mandate, then, to a greater extent in the second, reconfirmed in 2011, to become the most influential political figure in the Iraqi arena and he also succeed the performance, not easy in a Iraq fractured by the civil war, widespread insecurity, destroyed infrastructure, exiled or displaced populations, continuous interference of foreign powers, to be recognized as a leader with national opening and to politically survive to huge external pressures40.

But this relative pacification of the country was conditioned by his transformation into an authoritarian leader and a true doubling of official state institutions from the shadow, a structure of solidarity closely dependent on the person of al-Maliki, a new asabiyya so traditional in the political history of the Arab regimes – it is here shown, once again, the functional persistence of exercising the power mechanisms specific to the Arab world41. It is once again highlighted the effectiveness of conditionality exerted by specific political culture, even in an Iraq that, functionally applies a democratic syntax. On the other hand, it must be recognized that centralization of power by Nuri al-Maliki responded as well to a pragmatic necessity, as an effective solution to limit the authority’s institutions dissolution and the fracture of political field, ensuring a consistent control center that should transcend sectarian or ethnic solidarities and by which to control the process of security recovery of the territory and the offensive against insurgent groups. Al-Maliki took the position in the most difficult moments of Iraq, marked 40 JD Rayburn, ‘Rise of the Maliki Regime’, Journal of International Security Affairs, no. 22, 2012, pp. 55-61.41 T Dodge, ‘Iraq’s Road Back to Dictatorship’, Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 54, no. 3, June-July 2012, pp. 147-168.


by the explosion of sectarian violence and wide spreading climate of insecurity. He effectively assumes the lessons in modern Iraqi history, especially Saddam’s model, realizing that the stability and pacification of a country with such a centrifuge tendency like Iraq can be achieved only using within certain limits, an attitude of strength, and controlling to a great extent the decision-making field.

Thus, the rise of al-Maliki firstly begins with seizure of control within his own party: in April 2007, he dismisses Ibrahim al-Jafari and makes himself appointed as the new Secretary General of al-Da’wa Party. Then he establishes a loyal group of officials, nicknamed al-Malikiyoun, distributed in most ministries and institutions, which are exclusively dependent of him. In the background of a turbulent and violent political life marked by instability and permanent temptation of Sunni or Sadrist parties to produce a fall of his government, al-Maliki will gradually develop a network of influence and patronage, controlled only by himself and his cabinet, where are trapped responsible persons, political leaders, military safeguards, but whose relationship with al-Maliki does not pass through the intermediation institutions belonging to him but directly, personally42. Later, al-Maliki will recruit members of his tribe, Banu Malik (Shi’ite tribe in the south of the country, around Basra) and his family, whom he will install in various key positions of responsibility. His son, Ahmed al-Maliki is named responsible for controlling all Iraqi security services and providing the protection of his father43. Moreover, the role of security services is fundamental, not only because they are the instrument designated, together with Western Allied forces, to restore order, but mostly because their operation is parasite by sectarian, party, and tribal partisanships.

Since 2007, he dismisses most of the senior officers, appoints people close to him in the leadership of the army, police, paramilitary and intelligence units. In this way, he manages to partially limit the influence of his political rivals and unite an efficient structure used in offensives against Sunni and Sadrist insurgency and secure urban centers. He creates a unified command to coordinate military and security structures, which puts him in direct control of the office of Prime Minister44. The next step was passing under its direct control the most important and effective post-Saddam Iraqi military forces. Iraqi Special Operations Forces (ISOF) was a creation of U.S. military and security services, trained and equipped by them, whose role is to serve as a local interface in the fight against insurgency and jihadist movements45. In April 2007, they go from U.S. command under the authority ofthe Iraqi government; al-Maliki created a special department in order to

42 J Rayburn, ‘The Emergence of the Maliki State in Iraq: The Undoing of Power-Sharing and the Reemergence of Izzat Ibrahim ad-Duri’, on Syria Comment, the website of Josua Landis, Director of Center for Middle East Studies and Associate Professor, University of Oklahoma, http://www.joshualandis.com/blog/?p=14320.43 N Parker, ‘The Iraq We Left Behind: Welcome to the World’s Next Failed State’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 91, no. 2, 2012, p. 100.44 BA Salmoni, ‘Responsible Partnership: The Iraqi National Security Sector after 2011’, Washington Institute for Near East Policy: Policy Focus, no. 112, May 2011, p. 14.45 International Crisis Group, ‘Loose Ends: Iraq’s Security Forces between US Drawdown and Withdrawal’, Middle East Report, no. 99, 26 October 2010, p. 7.


coordinate ISOF, the Office of Counterterrorism. It is under his direct leadership, escaping from interference from Parliament and does not depend even from defense or even interior ministries. Consisting of over 4,000 people, Iraqi Special Operations Forces have become the most effective tool of personal control of al-Maliki, which some come to call, ironically, „Fedayeen al-Maliki”, compared to the praetorian guard that defended in the old regime Saddam’s person46.

Finally, Iraqi intelligence services will come too under the influence of the prime minister. Iraqi National Intelligence Service (INIS) was created, in 2004, by the CIA, to replace the plethora of services for the Ba’thist period; it had been put, since the beginning, under the command of General Mohammed Abdullah al-Shahwani, Turkmen Sunni in close relationships with American services47. INIS was meant to be a purely professional structure, trans-confessional and trans-ethnic, taken outside political rivalries and used as a tool serving the interests of both American and Iraqi official power48. Since 2006, however, al-Maliki appointed as Minister of State for National Security Mr. Sharwan al-Waeli; between the two individuals and the institutions will be established an acute rivalry and hatred. Loyal to the prime minister, al-Waeli is suspected, in the same time, for too close relations with Iran. Finally, in 2008, al-Shahwani is forced to resign and INIS enters, at its turn, under the direct authority of al-Maliki49.

After 2009, the prime minister’s ambitions to control the executive power more efficiently and his desire to escape the conditioning of his former Shi’ite allies lead to a fracture between al-Maliki and the other Shi’ite parties, in particular the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq50. Around his party, al-Da’wa, he builds a new political structure, the State of Law Coalition (al-Dawla al-Qanun), to which several Sunni groups rally, proposing a platform that claims to be trans-sectarian and a program focused on the concept of a unified, national Iraq. During this pre-election period, he takes advantage of his traditional rivals’ weakening. The death of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq’s leader, Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim, on 26 August 2009, led to a certain fragility of the party and the movement. Partly true to the traditional line that defines the parties with a substantial Shi’ite religious dimension, the succession will stay in the family, Ammar al-Hakim - son of Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim, being recognized as the new leader of the movement51. His appointment was contested by

46 JS Yaphe, ‘Maliki’s maneuvering in Iraq’, Foreign Policy, June 6, 2012, http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/06/06/has_the_iraq_experiment_failed47 Ch Wilcke, ‘A Hard Place: The United States and the Creation of a New Security Apparatus in Iraq’, Civil Wars, vol. 8, no. 2, 2006, pp. 124-142.48 G Bennett, Iraq’s Security and Intelligence Structures: More Problems, Defense Academy of the UK/Conflict Studies Research Centre, May 2006.49 G Munier, ‘Guerre des services secrets à Bagdad’, 8 novembre 2009, http://irakiennes.blogspot.com/2009/11/guerre-des-services-secrets-bagdad.html50 J Domergue, & M Cochrane, ‘Balancing Maliki. Shifting Coalitions in Iraqi Politics and the Rise of the Iraqi Parliament’, Iraq Report, no. 14, Institute for the Study of War, Washington, June 2009.51 J Lecuyer, ‘al-Hakim, nouvel arbitre de la scène politique irakienne?’, Moyen-Orient, no. 5, Avril-Mai 2010, pp. 57-61.


a group of the old guard, who would have preferred one of them to take the lead and so it was perceived as a setback for the party which, in the absence of a charismatic leader with theological prestige, feels an increasingly stronger need to seek support within the religious authority of the grand ayatollahs, such as al-Sistani, or those in Iran52. It is the same case for the sadriste movement, where Muqtada’s voluntary exile to Qom, with the purpose of perfecting his theological studies, left the movement without its charismatic leader and without a coherent political or militant action.

Weakened by al-Maliki’s withdrawal and numerous internal fractures, especially between sadrists and followers of the al-Hakim clan, the Shi’ite parties in the former United Iraqi Alliance announced, on 24 August 2009, the formation of a new electoral list, the Iraqi National Alliance (al-Ittilaf al-Watani al-Iraqi). This is the result of pressure coming from Iran, concerned to perpetuate an effective political structure which could identify itself as Shi’ite53, as well as of Ayatollah al-Sistani’s concern over the attitude of Iraqi political elites. After 2005, he keeps growing apart from the new political class, accused of incompetence and attachment to personal interests54.

At the parliamentary elections in March 2010, refusing to ally, in the electoral campaign, with the Iraqi National Alliance, State of Law loses important numbers of the Shi’ite votes. More importantly, however, al-Maliki has now to face a coalition which proposes, in its turn, a cross-sectarian platform, namely the al-Iraqiyya (Iraqi National Movement - al-Harakat al-Wataniya al-Iraqiyya), led by former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. The latter’s political resurgence after years of absence, was one of the major surprises of the new electoral process. He returns with a secularist, cross-sectarian message, based on the concept of a unified and democratic Iraq, showing opposition to the autocratic tendencies of Nuri al-Maliki55. The formation of al-Iraqiyya is announced on January 16, 2009, bringing together the old party led by Iyad Allawi, the Iraqi National List, with many of the Sunni political leaders: Saleh al-Mutlaq, a Sunni Arab secularist, leader of the Iraqi Front for National Dialog, vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, former leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party etc.56

During the elections in March 2010, the al-Iraqiyya bloc managed to convince and attract many more votes from the secular social groups, but especially from Sunnis, who had never perceived al-Maliki as a worthy politician. Relations between Sunni parties in the Iraqi Front for National Dialog and the Iraqi Prime Minister were tense and strained, with several coup attempts; one of the central themes of Sunni criticism was precisely al-Maliki’s authoritarian inclinations and the highly 52 More information about the daily activity of the party on his website: http://www.almejlis.org/eng/index.php53 R Visser, ‘After Sadr–Badr Compromise in Tehran, the Iraqi National Alliance (INA) Is Declared’, 24 August 2009, http://www.historiae.org/ina.asp54 International Crisis Group, ‘Iraq’s Uncertain Future: Elections and Beyond’, Middle East Report, no. 94, 25 February 2010.55 K Katzman, Iraq: Politics, Elections, and Benchmarks, Congressional Research Service, December 22, 2010; A Dawisha, ‘Iraq: A Vote Against Sectarianism’, Journal of Democracy, vol. 21, no. 3, 2010, pp. 26-40.56 International Crisis Group, ‘Iraq’s Secular Opposition: The Rise and Decline of Al-Iraqiya’, Middle East Report, no. 127, 31 July 2012.


personal character of his decisions in domestic and foreign policy, often ignoring the parliament’s or the government’s opinions.

The election results were a huge surprise: al-Iraqiyya managed to rank first, with 24.7% of the votes and the largest number of members of Parliament (MP), 91. The electoral bloc of Prime Minister al-Maliki, al-Dawla al-Qanun, came only second, with 24.2% of the votes and with 89 MP. The next positions went to the Iraqi National Alliance (18.15% and 70 MP) and the Kurdistan Alliance (14.6% and 43 MP)57. The fact that Iyad Allawi’s coalition won the election was a shock to al-Maliki, who cannot conceive a result that removes him from power and his subsequent decisions showed his determination to do everything possible to preserve his position. As a consequence, it follows an anomalously long interval for such an unstable country as Iraq (249 days, compared to 156 days to form the government after the elections in December 2005), of fierce and endless negotiations for the new government, leading to the separation of two main fronts. The first believes that leaving al-Maliki in power would mean a further increase of his authoritarianism which could lead to a personal dictatorship, threatening to entirely annihilate the legitimacy of democratic governance that Iraq still strives to implement. The other bloc, even if not entirely composed of sympathizers of al-Maliki, are mainly concerned with the rise of the Sunni in case that al-Iraqiyya is recognized as the winner, which could in fact jeopardize the political, administrative and economic positions acquired by the forces that have held power since 2003 and their clientele.

The ambiguity of the electoral outcome did nothing more than to bring about, once more, the complicated negotiation process between the Iraqi political forces, together with the whole complex of pressures, influences exerted by external actors (Iran, Saudi Arabia, and United States). The elections of 2010 offered a meaningful picture of the United States’ limited power in Iraq, when Washington representatives failed to provide a compromise political solution that could reconcile the parties disputing the legitimacy of building the new government58.

Eventually, on 11 November 2010, an agreement is reached which allows the forming of a coalition government that brings together the State of Law, the Iraqi National Alliance and the Kurdish parties. Senior members of al-Iraqiyya move away from Iyad Allawi and receive important functions: Saleh al-Mutlaq is appointed Deputy Prime Minister and Osama al-Nujaifi becomes the Parliament’s spokesman59. The United States’ inability to bring Allawi to power and especially the fact that the new al-Maliki government is the result of Iranian pressure and

57 ‘The 2010 Iraqi Parliamentary Elections – Interactive graphic’, The New York Times, March 26, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/03/11/world/middleeast/20100311-iraq-election.html58 M Eisenstadt, United States Policy Toward Iraq: Future Challenges, Testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, June 23, 2011, http://foreignaffairs.house.gov/112/eis062311.pdf59 M Ottaway, & D Kaysi, ‘Can Iraq’s Political Agreement be Implemented?’, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: Analysis of the 2010 Iraqi Parliamentary Elections, November 15, 2010, http://carnegieendowment.org/2010/11/15/can-iraq-s-political-agreement-be-implemented/261l.


negotiations were widely seen as a visible sign of decreasing American influence over Iraq60. Indeed, Tehran has persuaded the Shi’ite parties in the Iraqi National Alliance to provide support to al-Maliki, despite rupture between al-Da’wa and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. Also, Tehran convinced Muqtada al-Sadr to become al-Maliki’s ally again, putting to rest all memories of violent repression of the sadriste movement in Baghdad and Basra, as well as former political disputes between Parliament and the government61. Muqtada has conditioned his support on compliance with the withdrawal calendar of American troops from Iraq and al-Maliki’s promise that he will not accept a new agreement to delay withdrawal.

Once again confirmed as prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki continues the same tendency to personal control and exclusive political power. Even now, he continues, pragmatically and efficiently, to exert his power on the army, police, security and intelligence services. In fact, Iraq is again becoming a militarized state, but whose strength is developed in order to ensure internal security rather than reject external aggression. The number of employees working in institutions connected to the Ministry of Interior is double compared to those who work for the Ministry of Defense, which clearly indicates that the fundamental concern of the regime is internal control and the ability to have the resources to dominate endogenous threats by force62. This centralization of power in the hands of al-Maliki has both positive and negative sides. It provides a relative political and social stability, after the dissolution of state authority and multiple internal conflicts. On the other hand, al-Maliki’s authoritarian inclination and his tendency to seize full political control of all the important institutions give rise to frustration from other political or community forces. To continue to exclude them from sharing the power, resources, functions, benefits, may lead to deeper resentment from their part and even to resurgence of violence, still latent within the numerous social and community groups.

6. Conclusions

In the modern history of Iraq, the political elites used to be recruited mostly from among the Sunni minority although the official nationalist propaganda (during the Hashemite and especially the Ba’thist period) made efforts to disguise this aspect by referring to an ideology that highlighted national rather than religious identity. Previous decades, marked by violent repressions of traditional Shi’a institutions, and especially of their politicized or activist forms of manifestation,

60 M Knights, ‘The Effort to Unseat Maliki: Lessons for U. S. Policy’, Washington Institute for Near East Policy: Policywatch 1947, June 5, 2012.61 M Fayad, & S Jarous, ‘Iran Pressuring Al-Sadr to Support Al-Maliki for Second Term’, al-Sharq al-Awsat, August 23, 2010, http://www.asharq-e.com/news.asp?section=1&id=2206562 According to the quarterly report made in January 30th, 2012, by The Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), the agency that succeeded the dissolution, on 28 June 2004, of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the total number of employees in the Ministry of Defense is of 279,103, while the Interior Ministry has 649,800 employees: Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, Quarterly Report and Semiannual Report to the United States Congress, January 30, 2012, p. 68, http://www.sigir.mil/publications/quarterlyreports/January2012.html


had a deep impact on the Shi’as’ sense of identity and led to the failure of Ba’thist regime’s integrationist policies. At the same time, Iraqi Shi’a Islam was impacted by regional geopolitical changes, in particular the Iranian revolution, the revival of Lebanese Shi’ism, and the difficult handling of the dilemma during the Iraqi-Iranian war (i.e. whether loyalty should be shown towards the Iraqi state under threat or, on the contrary, towards the Shi’a identity shared with the Iranian enemy). A categorical breach followed the Shi’a Intifada (in the wake of the 1991 anti-Iraqi campaign), when violent reprisals and the rigid security control system of the Southern provinces deepened the gap between the Shi’a community (which became increasingly focused on its own cultural and social identity) and the power in Baghdad. During the 1990s, exiled Shi’a parties and organizations were actively involved in the project of enabling a unified front to determine a change of regime in Iraq.

The military offensive, which led to the fall of the Ba’ath power in 2003, was at first regarded as an opportunity to redress a historical injustice, i.e. the possibility for Shi’as to freely practice their religion, to preserve their values and especially to gain unrestricted access to political life according to their demographic representation. However, far from being homogeneous, the Iraqi Shi’a community has been traditionally fragmented along various lines with the consequence that group loyalties, conflicting ideological and political options, rivalry between leaders, and fights for influence and power constantly undermine the population’s unity.

The new Iraq, post-Saddam, is more complex and dynamic than in any of its previous historical periods. After the period of a rising sectarization in the political field, the leaders and the population have become, after 2008, more attached to the Iraqi identity, trying to once more reconstruct the national state, exiting the disastrous logic of the sectarian conflict that almost ended with dismantling the country. The fragility of the institutions, the profound political fracture, the unpredictability of the inter-communities relations as well as the defiance of the regional geopolitical environment, which itself suffers uncertain transformations and is characterized by a rising problem of the anti-Iranian attitudes and of exacerbating the Syrian crisis, all of these contribute to the coherent unpredictability of Iraq’s destiny.

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Jozef OLMERTUniversity of South CarolinaUnited States of [email protected]

ABSTRACT

The portraits of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founding father of the Revisionist Zionist Movement, the mother party of the current Likud, as well as that of Menachem Begin, the first ever Likud P.M are always in display when the party holds its general conferences and occasional central committee meetings. Clearly, the party takes pride in commemorating the historic leaders and their political legacy. It definitely wants its members and supporters, as well as the general public to believe that this is the case. Almost a year ago, the Likud Party held its internal primaries, in which close to 70,000 members elected their list of candidates ahead of the Knesset parliamentary elections of 22 January 2013. Benny Begin, Dan Meridor and Michael Eithan , three veteran members of the Knesset and ministers were overwhelmingly voted out. The three had a common denominator; they were considered ‘’soft’’ Likudniks, moderate, Liberal-oriented politicians. They belonged to the ‘’old guard’’, modeled on the traditional Revisionist Jabotinsky - Begin ideology. In their place, a group of younger leaders, known as more militant Likudniks, were elected to high places in the list of candidates. The Likud primaries were held shortly after the surprising announcement by P.M Netanyahu about the creation of an electoral bloc between Likud and the Israel Beitenu party, led by Avigdor Lieberman. Many political commentators related to both the results of the Likud primaries and the merger with Lieberman as the beginning of the ‘’new Likud’’, a development which practically was in the making for a long time, and finally got its formal seal ahead of the 2013 elections. This paper is not supposed to be a detailed history of the Likud party. It is not also a theoretical discussion of the processes which lead a political party, with a well-defined ideology to change this very ideology,, while professing to adhere to it. Consequently, the paper is not using a methodology which is designed to create a comparison with similar situations in other countries. Rather it is intended to describe and analyze an important chapter in the political history of the State of Israel. The narrative emphasizes the various stages through which the party evolved, by concentrating on some of the significant developments which may have irreversibly changed this historic movement. So, the main changes are analyzed as they have evolved through a

KEYWORDS

• Jabotinsky’s legacy• nationalism• liberalism• religion• social awareness• intelectual openness

Jozef OLMERT

JABOTINSKY-BEGIN-LIEBERMAN:

THE CHANGING FACE OF THE

LIKUD PARTY


1. Introduction

Ze’ev Jabotinsky was an’’ ardent nationalist’’, according to the anti-Zionist historian Avi Shlaim1, who emphasized Jabotinsky‘s unshakeable belief in the absolute, undisputed right of the Jewish people over Eretz Israel from both banks of the Jordan river (in a famous song, Jabotinsky referred to the river as the ‘’sacred Jordan’’). Jabotinsky believed that this territory assigned to the Jews in the original Mandate was to be the independent Jewish state, which should have been established as soon as possible. In fact, the demand for statehood became an official Zionist policy only during the Second World War2, but for Jabotinsky and his followers it was a must from day one of their movement. Moreover, beyond believing in the statehood over the entire historic homeland, Jabotinsky believed also that the national-ethnic identity was the most significant source of solidarity in human history.

While Jabotinsky was an uncompromising nationalist, he was also an uncompromising Liberal. Raphaela Bilski Ben-Hur is absolutely right in referring to Jabotinsky as follows: ’There is little doubt that Jabotinsky was a committed Nineteenth-Century Liberal who succeeded in adapting his liberal teachings to the complexity of the modern world. He did state that, had he been able, he would have composed a political Philosophy based entirely on the premise that every individual is a king, and whose only conclusion would have been practically anarchistic state’’3. Clearly being a near anarchistic and ardent nationalist at the same time, may indicate that Jabotinsky had a complicated, multi-dimensional political thinking, and he was driven by different intellectual motivations, though it is obvious, that for him, the desire to establish a Jewish state over the historic land of Israel was the paramount consideration. Yet, the man with his prolific, open-minded political thinking, gave an example, and was a source of inspiration to his followers, to the extent, that a gamut of political groups sprung from the original Revisionist movement. Some of them went a long distance away from his original teachings4.1 A Shlaim, The iron wall: Israel and the Arab world, W. W. Norton, New York, 2000, p. 112 600 Zionist leaders from 18 countries attended the conference at the Biltmore Hotel in NYC from 6 to 11 May 1942, and declared that ’’Palestine be established as a Jewish commonwealth’’.3 R, Bilski Ben-Hur, Every individual a king, Bnai Brith, Washington, DC, 19934 Among the offsprings of the Revisionist movement we can find the Kanaanites led by Yonathan Retosh,

long period of time, and by emphasizing the roles of particular personalities. That is being done while putting them in the context of the changes which occurred in the politics of Israel in general, due to socio-demographic-cultural developments. The sources mainly used are such, that enable us to look at the political history of the party mostly from the perspective of those who either are opponents of Likud’s ideology to start with, or those who regret the changes described in the paper. The gist of the narrative is the rise of Likud to power in Israel, and staying there for 3 decades, thus taking the movement from a position of near political marginality into one of dominance. Still, the political power of Likud, judging by the number of seats in the Knesset is in a state of gradual decline. Israel is known for its shifty politics, so it is premature to predict the demise of the Likud party, and the end of the era of its political dominance, but it is definitely not premature to show, as this paper tries to do, that the current party, with AvigdorLieberman as a key figure is fundamentally different from the movement molded after the legacy of Jabotinsky and Begin .

Jozef Olmert 139

The unison between Jewish nationalism and Liberal thinking is best illustrated by his ideas regarding the role of non-Jews in the independent Jewish state. Here are the key words of a famous song written by Jabotinsky;’‘’Sham yirwe lo meshefa vaosher, ben Arav, ben Nazereth ubni’’(“There they will live in affluence and joy, the Arab [referring to the Muslim-J.O], the Christian and my son”). As is so clear from his writings, Jabotinsky believed that there should be a clear Jewish majority, with an Arab minority, whose full rights are to be protected. For him, granting full rights meant absolute equality between all the people, regardless of their ethnic and religious differences. He specifically refered to linguistic equality, something of major importance for him, as he attached great significance to the centrality of the Hebrew language in the overall process of Jewish national revival. So, what was important to Jews was also important to Arabs. But the teacher went far beyond that. He specifically envisaged a situation whereby an Arab could fill every position in a Jewish state, even President or P.M .There was no need for any statement of loyalty on behalf of Arabs, and no other litmus test to prove it. The concept of fully –equal citizenship was dominant in his mind, and stood on its own feet. This is where his ideas about Liberal-Democracy and Jewish nationalism merged into one coherent concept, rather than collide with each other. What tends to emphasize this point, is the fact, that Jabotinsky, being an intellectually honest person as well as an unabashed Jewish nationalist was still ready to acknowledge the existence and force of Palestinian-Arab nationalism, much before many Zionist leaders, particularly from the Labor movement, came to that conclusion. Still, while recognizing the possibility of a perpetual national struggle between two competing national movements, as is so clearly exemplified in his ‘’Iron Wall‘’ concept, he clung adamantly to his belief in complete equality of Arabs in a Jewish state. In fact, the need for such equality was part of his concept of ‘’ Iron Wall’’, which was not only based on physical force, but also on moral justification5.

Ze’ev Jabotinsky was not a religious Jew, and his basic, fundamental reference to the important question of state and religion was primarily determined by his liberal approach. Initially, Jabotinsky’s views reflected the primacy of nationalism ,writing that ’’Judaism is a nation, not a religious community’’6, though never expressing rejection of the Jewish religion, he also spelled out the fear that ‘’a fierce clash of cultures is inevitable in this land (Eretz Israel-J.O)’’7. At a much later stage in his career, he changed the tenor of his thinking, though not the basic premise. According to the founding document of the New Zionist Organization, in 1935, he called for a Jewish state, ‘’established in the spirit of the Torah of Israel’’8. He then wrote a letter to his son Eri, in which he explained that there would not be

secular Hebrew nationalists as Hillel Kook, Left-Wing supporters of Palestinian state such as Nathan Yellin Mor, messianic nationalists such Dr. Yisrael Eldad and so many others who joined and established political and intellectual movements.5 Jabotinsky article about the ‘’iron wall’’, The iron wall; we and the Arabs, first published in Russian, Rassveyt, 4 November, 1923.6 M Kremnitzer & A Fuchs, Ze’ev Jabotinsky on democracy, equality, and individual rights, Jerusalem, 2013, p. 13.7 ibidem, p. 14.8 ibidem


tolerated any religious coercion, and that the ‘’freedom of conscience and debate is like an oxygen for religion’’9, and kept repeating his basic belief, that the values and spirit of the Torah are, and should always be compatible with basic universal principles of freedom. He made it clear, that Jews should respect the holy places of others, because a people loses its divine spirit when it desecrates what is holy for others10. Religious Jews stuffed the Revisionist movement in large numbers, during Jabotinsky’s life time as well as afterwards, but for many years, there was no political alliance of any kind between the main organ of religious Zionism, the Mizrahi movement and the Revisionists, not even over the question of Greater Israel, though the Mizrahi shared the Revisionist opposition to the Partition plan of 193711.

Jabotinsky dealt extensively also with the question of the social-economic character of the Jewish state, and he advocated a combination of liberal, free market approach with the concept of a welfare state. In fact, Jabotinsky rejected materialism, which was part of his overall rejection of and strong opposition to Marxism12. His spiritual-oriented approach to the need for a society based on values of justice and morality meant also strong objection to an uncontrolled market economy based on rampant Capitalism.

Altogether, Ze’ev Jabotinsky was an intellectual giant, a political innovator and a charismatic leader who left behind him a comprehensive legacy and a motivated political movement which continued to play a role in Zionist and Israeli politics. His unique contribution to Zionist thinking was the combination he created between ethnic nationalism and liberal democracy. Not an easy combination at best of times, not under the circumstances of a national struggle fought against an emerging Arab national movement, as well as the great British Empire, the super power of its time.

2. After Jabotinsky

2.1. Menachem Begin and the Herut Party. Menachem Begin and Ze’ev Jabotinsky had a very complicated personal relationship. The protocols of the Third World Beitar (the Revisionist youth movement-J.O) convention in Warsaw in 1938 portray very dramatically this state of affairs. The leader poked fun at the young rising star, saying to the delegates that Begin’s Speech sounded like the noise of a ‘’squeaking door’’…13. The debate though was not personal, as Begin did not dare challenge the authority of Jabotinsky. The root cause, was the feeling of many young Revisionists, that Jabotinsky was too soft towards the British policy in Eretz

9 M Kremnitzer & A Fuchs, op. cit., p. 14.10 ibidem.11 Rabbi Meir Berlin, the Mizrahi leader was a strong opponent of the plan.12 J Heller, ‘Zeev Jabotinsky and the Revisionist revolt against materialism-in search of a world view’, Jewish history, vol.12, no.2, fall 1998.13 Begin was the leading member of a group of more militant young Revisionists who wanted Jabotinsky to radicalize his position towards the British Mandatory government at the time of the Arab rebellion in Eretz Israel.

Jozef Olmert 141

Israel. They wanted much more action, including a violent full-fledged rebellion, but Jabotinsky objected. Menachem Begin though made it very clear, that his loyalty and admiration to Jabotinsky remained intact.

The circumstances of Begin’s accession to the position of leadership after Jabotinsky’s premature death in 1940, are beyond the scope of this paper, but it is of importance to note, that his claim to the leadership was based on his years as the Commander-in-Chief of the National Military Organization (IZL-Irgun-J.O), the main Revisionist fighting organization (Lehi, the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel-Stern group, were initially part of the Revisionist orbit, but much less so in the last years of the British Mandate). Begin’s command of the Irgun turned him into a revered figure in the minds of ordinary Revisionists. In fact, begin’s stature as the leader of the newly-established Herut party, resembled that of Jabotinsky as the leader of the Revisionist movement. Begin was the recipient of adulation which developed into a real personality-cult. His leadership came on occasions under attack from within the party, but it is arguably the case that Herut was the Begin movement, a party whose basic political doctrines reflected those of the undisputed leader, a party which stayed firmly loyal to him throughout his active political life.

Like Jabotinsky, Begin was the undisputed leader of the movement, but the circumstances of his tenure, particularly his early years at the helm as the commander –in-chief of a armed resistance movement, meant, that the ideological aspects of the struggle were seconded by the needs of making everyday decisions affecting the lives of people. A leadership under such circumstances usually leads to levels of personal and political loyalty which compromised the strong democratic tradition created by Jabotinsky. However, Menachem Begin proved that he was aware of the possible contradictions and his leadership was characterized by a sincere effort to follow in the footsteps of the first, charismatic leader.

2.2. Begin and Herut Core Principles – The Primacy of the Jabotinsky Legacy. The combination of ‘’ardent nationalism’’ and unabashed Liberalism, which was the trade-mark of Jabotinsky’s teachings, was also at the core of Begin’s ideology. As was clearly put by Kremnitzer and Fuchs, ‘’although some in Israel hold nationalism and liberalism to be mutually exclusive, former Israeli P.M Menachem Begin was both a proud nationalist and an unwavering guardian of liberal principles’’14. Begin was a dedicated believer in “Greater Israel”, or ‘’Shlemut Hamoledet’’, as was the logo of the party newspaper Herut. Yonathan Shapiro is absolutely right when emphasizing the importance of this principle in the Herut ideology15. In fact, the uncompromising doctrine of Shlemut Hamoledet was one of the main reasons, why Herut under Begin was considered an extreme party, a pariah organization, alongside the anti-Zionist Communists (Ben-Gurion coined the famous phrase ‘’without Herut and Maki- the Communists-J.O)/ This was a stigma stuck to the party, though Begin never called upon the state to initiate a war aimed at liberating 14 M Kremnitzer & A Fuchs, Menachem Begin on democracy and constitutional values, Jerusalem, 2011, p. 115 Y Shapiro, The road to power: Herut Party in Israel, Suny Press, Albany, 1991.


what was called after 1949, the West Bank. Begin also shared Jabotinsky’s belief that ethnic-national identity was the primary, most important source of collective solidarity. At the same time, Menachem Begin was a great believer in the unshakeable principle of total equality of the Arab citizens of the state. He consistently objected to the imposition of Military Administration on Israeli Arabs, which was abolished only in 1966, and that put him in an uncomfortable political alliance with parties of the Left, including the Communist party. Yet, Begin was unwavering in his opposition, and Tom Segev is clearly wrong when trying to explain’s Begin position on this subject, to the fact that the Military Administration was based on the British Mandatory legislation which was used against Begin’s Irgun. Segev, a Left-Wing distinguished historian was disingenuous by not even offering the classic Revisionist concept about Arab citizens as a possible explanation16.

Like Jabotinsky, Begin was a democrat through and through. Believing that individuals come before the state, hence the need to protect human rights of all, including the minorities. In fact, Begin’s concept on this issue was classic Liberal, yet his political rivals, chief among them David Ben-Gurion daubed him a ‘’Fascist’’….Nothing was further from the truth!, but Ben-Gurion definitely had his way for too many years…Herut was the champion also of the need for absolute academic freedoms. Begin’s no.2 in the party leadership, Yochanan Bader attacked the establishment of Higher Education Council in Israel, arguing that ‘’universities can only prosper through absolute freedom, without any intervention’’17, thus expressing a typical Revisionist attitude towards the possibility of government intervention in both the contents and personal composition of Israeli universities. Begin was also a supporter of the Jabotinsky theory about the desired socio-economic regime of the state, a combination of free market operating within the Welfare state. One of the main slogans of Herut was the call for ‘’social justice’’, alongside the idea of Shlemut Hamoledet and the ingathering of the exiled Jews in their historic homeland. Where Begin was distinctly different than Jabotinsky, it was in his observant life-style and the frequent use of religious-motivated symbols in his oratory. Begin kept saying ‘’with G-d ‘s help’’, but even with that in mind, it has to be emphasized, that contrary to the position of the religious parties, Begin supported the idea that there should be a constitution, and he did not speak and write about a constitution to be based only on the Jewish Halacha. He said in the Knesset, that ’’the day will come when a government elected by our people will fulfill the first promise made to the people …to provide…a constitution …for the nation will then be free…free of fear, free of hunger, free of the fear of starvation…”18.

16 T Segev, 1967: The war and the year that transformed the Middle East, Macmillan, New York, 2007, pp.67-69 .17 This is a very significant remark in view of the controversies aroused over attempts by Likud education ministers to bring about closure of the Department of Political Science at Ben-Gurion university for alleged anti-Zionist bias. It is noteworthy that the call for a constitution is also made in the context of Begin’s overall support for the notion of a welfare state.18

Jozef Olmert 143

Menachem Begin was not a thinker-philosopher as Jabotinsky was. He was an intellectual, but primarily a political leader, having in mind the goal of taking his party to power from its position of near obscurity in the early years of the state. He fulfilled this goal, but the long road to power was to prove crucial as far as the ideological purity of the movement was concerned.

3. Likud

3.1. The Road to Power: The Begin Electoral Coalition. It was a long journey for Menachem taking him from the old, small and ideologically-pure Herut to power. The stations along the road included the union with the Liberal party, which created Gahal (the Herut-Liberal bloc-J.O), and later Likud party, a coalition of various Right-Wing factions, including some who were formerly in the historic Mapai, including sworn adherents of the historic political nemesis of Begin, David-Ben-Gurion.

When Begin came finally to power in 1977, he was a sick man, the leader of a big party (45 seats, 14 only in first Knesset elections in 1949), and the road to victory was made possible by an electoral coalition created by Begin. The first target was the Sepharadic community, which was a very small demographic minority in the Jewish population of the pre-state days. Being defined by their traditional observant way of life, and not sharing the socialist values of the mostly Ashkenazi Labor movement, which was politically and demographically dominant, meant that they considered themselves and were considered by the majority as outsiders. The IZL, commanded by Begin, had a very significant Sepharadic membership. Sepharadic voters started to gradually support Herut in elections, and Menachem Begin knew how to play up the sense of alienation of a growing number of them towards the Labor-Ashkenazi establishment. This was the beginning of an alliance of the political haves-not. It would pay Begin, Herut and Likud great political dividends19. It should be emphasized that the attraction to Likud was also influenced by the Populist posture of the party, and the prevailing impression among many Sepharadic voters that it was a socially-minded movement, much in tune with their own desire to climb up the socio-political ladder. Also, the Hawkish posture of Herut had an impact on many Sepharadic voters who left Arab states where they were considered second-class and often subjected to violence, even pogroms.

Another demographic group which was cultivated by Begin in the long years of being in the political wilderness, were Religious Zionists. Their representative party, the National Religious Party (NRP, a merger of Hamizrahi and Hapoel Hamizrahi), was a loyal partner of David Ben-Gurion and the Labor movement, but their younger generation started to question the foundations of this alliance. Also the effects of the wars of 1967 and 1973, were greatly instrumental in accelerating political change in Israel. The first led to a dramatic transformation in the religious 19 Symbolically enough, the main street of the Hatikva neighborhood in Tel-Aviv, the main Sepharadic quarter of the city was name Haezel street, not the Haganah street, something which was unheard of in any other neighborhood in Israel in its early years.


Zionist community. The results of the war, the liberation of Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), were taken by the vast majority of religious Zionists to be a divine act, a step towards the final redemption of the Jewish people in its historic homeland, and thus they started a dramatic move away from the traditional moderate posture of the NRP and the coalition with the Labor movement.

Altogether, the war of 1967 enabled Begin and his movement to extricate themselves from the political ghetto which was forced upon them by Ben-Gurion and Mapai. Begin became a member of the National Unity Government, established on 1 June 1967, but even more significantly, the main platform of Herut, the Greater Israel-Shlemut Hamoledet principle, became a much more popular concept, taking Herut away from the position of ideological isolation, in fact that of complete marginality, into the very center of Israeli society20.

The war of 1973 and the sense of failure felt in Israel, shattered the historic position of Labor’s political dominance. In the dunes of Sinai and on the Golan Mountains, tens of thousands of young Israelis, and with them heir families back home, turned their backs to a government which was perceived as incapable and worn out after so many years in power. When the votes were counted on 17 May 1977, it was clear that the Sepharadic community was firmly in the Likud column, and soon afterwards, the NRP became the natural coalition partners of Likud. It was Eretz Israel which led to this alliance, between religious and secular nationalists. But in the process of creating this coalition, a momentous development occurred, the implications of which became clearer as years went by. Likud and the Religious Zionists consecrated the construction of Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria as the best way of expressing the claim to political sovereignty over these territories. However, Likud had no human reservoir of its own who could go and settle the territories, as opposed to the huge ideologically-motivated yeshiva students sent there by the lay leaders and Rabbis of the NRP. An interesting situation developed, whereby Likud sub-contracted the NRP youth to fulfill its ideology, but in the process roles changed and tables turned, as the settlers became a political force to reckon with, and they became influential not only on Likud from the outside as coalition partners, but also within the Likud party itself , because many settlers and their supporters joined Likud in order to ‘’influence from within’’, in fact they became a Trojan Horse in the Likud party.

3.2. New Recruits to the Likud Coalition – The Russian Aliyya. In a span of 5 years, from the late 1980’s, Israel absorbed almost one million new immigrants, Jews from the former Soviet union. A mammoth effort by all accounts, a development which also had a deep and on-going impact on every aspect of Israeli society, and surely on its political system. This wave of Aliyya came after the days of Menachem Begin as leader of Likud and PM (he resigned in 1983). But for the elections of 1992, in which the Russian vote helped bring the Labor Party and Yitzhak Rabin to power, the new immigrants always voted overwhelmingly to parties associated with 20 Soon after the war, the Movement for Eretz Israel Hashlema was established, which included prominent members of the Labor movement.

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Right-Wing politics, Likud, Israel Ba’aliyya of Nathan Sharansky, and later Yisrael Beitenu led by Avigdor Lieberman. Excluding 1992, the Russian parties participated in the Likud coalition governments, thus making it impossible to establish a center-Left government in Israel. The inclusion of the Russian immigrants in the Likud-religious-Sepharadic coalition was not a foregone conclusion. To start with, many of these immigrants came without any religious background, so a partnership with religious parties seemed unnatural, particularly when issues such as ‘’who is a Jew’’, the Law of Return and conversions to Judaism were on the political agenda. Also, the Russians came with their European cultural background, whereas a great deal of Likud voters are of Sepharadic origin, representing a different cultural tradition. That said, the Russian vote became firmly locked in the Right-Wing of Israeli politics. What tilted the balance towards Likud were three factors: First, the Russian immigrant’s anathema to anything Socialist, to the Left-Wing world of symbols, a sentiment based on the sense that they left ‘’ Socialist heaven ‘’, not in order to come to another version of Socialism, as presented by the Labor party and other Leftist parties. Second, the Russians came from a country not known for its democratic-Liberal tradition. For them, to join the Right-Wing parties in Israel seemed natural , as they perceived them to be less Liberal. Interestingly enough, surveys made among Russian – Jewish immigrants in the US, showed a strong measure of support for the Republican party21, something which places them at clear variance with the vast majority of the American – Jewish community, which votes for the Democratic party. But what has proved to be the decisive factor, is the radical nationalist approach of the overwhelming majority of the Russian immigrants. The sense, that ‘’ we are in our homeland, and do not need to hide our identity any more’’. Statements like this are common, and this kind of political discourse and orientation is contradictory to the Left-Wing political culture and discourse in Israel.

The rise of Likud to power is in a way the story of how Israel has changed from a variety of perspectives, demographic, ideological and cultural, from the tightly-knit Ashkenazi – oriented, secular society of the Yishuv and the dominant Labor movement, and became the Israel dominated by the new claimants to power, the new demographic communities which by virtue of their numerical superiority took over the country in 1977. It is definitely the case, that Likud knew better than Lanbor to adapt itself to the changes in Israeli society and take advantage of them.

4. The New Likud

The inclusion of the Russian immigrants in the Likud-led coalition further highlights the basic question dealt in this paper, which is what likud? Avigdor Lieberman , the most prominent political leader of the Russian Aliyyah relates to Ze’ev Jabotinsky as his ideological mentor, source of inspiration22, but this claim is open for strict scrutiny. Lieberman and his movement can be regarded as the 21 I Somin, ‘Tyler Cowen on the political attitudes of Russian Jewish immigrants’, The Volokh Conspiracy, 23 April, 2011.22 Lieberman’s official home page of his movement.


New Right of Israel, a political movement not dissimilar to Right-Wing parties in countries of Europe grappling with the question of internal race and ethnic conflicts. It is the Lieberman belief, so much in conformity with extreme Right-Wing opinions in many European countries, that Israel should get rid of most of its Arab citizens, even if it means giving up on lands being under Israel’s sovereignty since 1949. To be precise, unlike the late Rehavam Ze’evi, who specifically called for a ‘’transfer’’ of the Arab Population of Israel23, Lieberman talks about an exchange of land. In this respect it is relevant to note, that Lieberman,as well as most of his voters, got their political education in a country, the Soviet Union, known for its tough, uncompromising solutions to ethnic conflicts. Gershon Gorenberg goes against conventional wisdom when arguing that Lieberman has redefined the terms of Israeli politics, and cannot be considered Right-Wing, because of his readiness to give up parts of Israel pre-1967, as well as in Judea and Samaria24, but he is wrong, even though Lieberman is even ready to give up Arab-populated neighborhoods of greater Jerusalem.

Lieberman is an integral part of the Right-Wing coalition, as he states himself to be, and due to his electoral bloc with Likud. He presides over a mostly-secular movement, but he is ultra-nationalist, and as such gained an entry ticket to the Likud coalition. But this is the ‘’new Likud ’’ that he joined, as not much connects Lieberman with Jabotinsky and Begin’s traditions.

Not much connects also religious Zinonists to the legacy of the two leaders. Likud and the Religious Zionists share a great deal in terms of a general hawkish policy on security issues, and surely with regard to the fate of the territories of Judea and Samaria and the settlements, but there still are major differences. Likud gave up on settlements in the Sinai in 1982, and former Likudniks, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert did the same in the Gush-Katif Gaza region in 2005. Successive Likud governments expressed readiness to give up, even significantly so, in the Golan Heights25. Likud was and still considers itself a secular, pragmatic party, whereas the text book of the Religious Zionists is the word of God. Definitely a great difference, however not as big as may seem to be, as Likud has been penetrated by messianic elements such as the group of M.K Moshe Feiglin, and many settlers and their supporters who are assisted by the new wave of young militant Likudniks, those who were elected in 2013, people such as M.Ks Danon, Hotobali, Levin, Elkin and others, who refer to the fate of Judea and Samaria in much the same terms as the Religious Zionists. Even the search for peace as a goal is being challenged by these people, which together with the Lieberman component in the Likud bloc constitute a majority in the Knesset caucus.

23 There is a misunderstanding about Lieberman’s transfer plan as opposed to Ze’evis! It is essential to pinpoint to the basic difference.24 The Atlantic, 17 February, 2009.25 PM Shamir vehemently opposed any territorial compromise in the Golan, but not Netanyahu, and then PM Olmert, a veteran Likudnik, though he negotiated with Bashar Assad when was a Kadimah PM. See, J.Olmert, ‘Israel-Syria; The elusive peace’, Digest of Middle East Studies, vol. 20, no. 2, fall 2011, pp. 202-212.

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Menachem Begin was no less supporter of Shlemut Hamoledet than these people, but he gave up on the Sinai and offered self-rule to the Palestinian Arabs of Judea And Samaria. Sure, he initiated the Annexation of the Golan Heights and was An uncompromising opponent of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). He did not believe though in any solution which might compromise the built-in Jewish majority in Israel, and categorically rejected any idea about incorporating Arabs in Israel without giving them full rights. After the Sadat visit in 1977, when Begin’s readiness to give up territory to Egypt stunned some of the members of his party, he did not shy away from a forceful debate with them, in which he maintained the centrality of the search for peace. M.K Danon is today declaring in unmistakable terms that the goal is not peace26, and he and others in the party advocate annexation of Judea and Samaria, with the inevitable inclusion of a vast number of Arabs, and with it the tangible danger of losing the Jewish majority in the not so distant a future. When asked about the possibility of the existence of a formidable Arab minority in Israel, M.K Hotobali specifically admitted that such a state of affairs would lead to the creation of an Apartheid-like state27. While PM Netanyahu formally clings to the notion of two-states solution which inevitably would lead to the surrendering of large parts of Judea and Samaria, the majority in his parliamentary faction disagrees with him. Here is a ‘’new Likud’’ in action, a political party which is supposedly in the center of Israeli politics, being the largest party, the governing party, but in effect, a party which is in the midst of a process of being taken over by extremist elements. It is Likud which is closer to the ‘’Jewish Home’’ party led by Naftali Bennett and guided by some fanatical Rabbis.

It can be argued that the ‘’new Likud’’ attitude with regard to the possibility of peace with the Palestinians involving an historic departure from the ideology of Shlemut Hamoledet is more in tune with classic Revisionist doctrines than the more compromising position of Netanyahu, as well as people before him. Surely, the proponents of the’’new Likud’’ uphold this notion. It is clearly problematic to write in categorical terms what would Jabotinsky have done if he was alive today, as done, for example, by the late Ben-Zion Netanyahu, with the clear aim in mind of arguing that any territorial concession would have been resisted by him28, but a point needs to be mentioned in order to give us a realistic perspective; The ‘’iron wall’’ doctrine of Jabotinsky formulated as early as 1923, is the Linchpin of his thoughts about the Palestinian-Arab conflict with Zionism, and is often quoted as a justification to those who claim ideological purity as opposed to the ‘’moderate, soft’’ Likudniks. This is not a static concept, rather it was a reflection of what should be done by the Zionists in order to be able to reach a reasonable agreement with the other side. The ‘’iron wall’’ should convince the Arabs that the extermination of Israel was impossible, and then what? Jabotinsky refrained from categorically stating that once achieved, there should be no movement on the part of the Jews 26 Danon is very close to Republican politicians in the US, especially Evangelical Christians.27 Hotobali is an observant woman, who made her name as a T.V personality. She must be fully aware of the P.R damage, as well as diplomatic, that a statement like that may be causing.28 B-Z Netanyahu, ‘Jabotinsky as statesman and leader of his people’, in A. Bareli & P. Ginossar [eds.], In the eye of the storm, Jerusalem, 2004, pp. 25-39.


towards a settlement including an element of compromise. Menachem Begin came to the conclusion, that the ‘’iron wall’’ was instrumental in precipitating Sadat to come to Jerusalem and make peace with Israel. He reciprocated in kind, by giving up the entire Sinai, including the Jewish settlements there, and by offering the Self-Rule plan for Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Other Likud governments, that of Netanyahu after 1996, and Sharon’s before his split from Likud and the establishment of Kadimah party accepted the Oslo Accords, though grudgingly. They too did it on the basis of the conviction that the ‘’iron wall’’ was in place, and Israel could follow in its footsteps and offer. Concessions, and by so doing not putting in danger the existence of the state. Moreover, the attitude towards the Jewish settlements was one of viewing them both as an expression of the unassailable right of Jews to live everywhere in the historic homeland of the Jewish people, as well as to use them as a bargaining card. In fact, it can be argued that the settlements, established by Likud governments, though heavily populated and dominated by Religious Zionists have been significantly instrumental in bringing the Palestinians to the negotiating table, thus upholding the logic of the ‘’iron wall’’ concept.

Such an approach by Likud has placed it in the center of Israeli politics and was in line with the basic premises and inherent logic of classic Revisionist thinking. The approach of the new guard, being so much in line with the thinking of the Religious Zionists reflects an abandonment of the Likud legacy. Likud is not, nor has ever been , a religious-oriented party, which is governed by the rulings of Rabbis. Feiglin, Danon and co. push Likud in that direction, and the latest from the former was, that if P.M Netanyahu were to reach an agreement based on territorial concessions , he, the elected leader of the party would be ousted from Likud29. It is arguably the case, that right now, it seems almost inevitable , that P.M Netanyahu may be faced with this situation of a major internal rift, if indeed he means business with the Palestinians. That could not have happened under Begin whose authority always prevailed, but then this is another Likud.

Add up to that the growing influence of Avigdor Lieberman and his own party in the Likud coalition, and the stream of new legislation offered by them, aimed at creating loyalty tests to Arab citizens of Israel, the concerted assault on the Supreme Court and the judicial system in general, the attempts to respond to the unacceptable calls for and actual boycott of Israel by imposing severe restrictions on the freedom of action of Israeli organizations supported politically and financed by the EU, and other international organizations which are critical of Israeli policies, often maliciously critical, and we get a fuller picture of what the ‘’new Likud’’ is. A Likud which is not tolerant towards minorities, favoring restrictions on important institutions which are pillars of Israeli democracy, among them universities and other academic institutions, and at the same time being party in which in order to become a rising star you need to denigrate the very search for peace. Where are the days of Menachem Begin who proudly declared that ‘’there are judges in Jerusalem’’ and hailed the search for peace as a key element in his political strategy?29 Danon may be considered a hot-headed young politician, but he is the newly-elected chairman of the powerful Likud Central Committee.

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Last, but not least, Likud has abandoned the classic Jabotinsky-Begin welfare state approach, one that Begin referred to as ‘’doing good with the people’’, an approach based on the negation of materialism, both Marxist as well as capitalistic, in favor of the Milton Friedman classic free market approach. This change is the brain child of P.M Netanyahu, a self-styled adherent of American – Conservative concepts of free-market. The classic Likud party was a populist party, upholding the flag of free market alongside that of state-run assistance to the weak and poor. No more, and the political repercussions are dramatic. Likud is in the midst of a process whereby it is losing large segments of the poorer elements of Israel’s population, particularly in the Sepharadic community. It is arguably the case, that Israel’s economy, judging by the stats of vital elements is doing very well, and Netanyahu, as well as Olmert before him, should rightly take credit for that. However, in the process, Israel became so much divided socially, with huge and bearable economic gaps between haves and haves not. Totally in contradiction with the party initial policies when first coming to power, let alone the Jabotinsky-Begin legacy.

The great political beneficiary of this situation has been the Shas party, whose establishment in the first place, had to do with developments in Israeli society which are beyond the scope of this paper, but whose continuing political success is closely related to the sense of alienation felt by many Sepharadic voters towards the party which has departed so significantly from the welfare state approach of classic Revisionism and the Begin days30. The Shas electorate is composed mostly of former Likud voters, and while the leadership of that party is ultra-Orthodox, the rank and file voters are not. These are people who lost the sense of having a political home in Likud which is sympathetic to the feelings of bitterness still felt by many Sepharadim regarding their early days in Israel. Likud did a very good job of channeling these sentiments into a voting pattern, but did not know how to absorb many of the up coming young Sepharadic leaders in the ranks of its leadership. The latest example of this state of affairs is Moshe Kachlon, a rising star in the party who excelled himself as a minister in charge of reforming the cellular phone industry, and later as a welfare minister. He is out of the Knesset now, refusing to compete for a seat in the January 2013 elections, making it clear that the sharp turn of the party under P.M Netanyahu towards free market policies, based on wide-range privatization, was not his cup of tea. Likud always had a popular Sepharadic leader alongside Begin, and later P.M Shamir and Netanyahu, a leader who was both an influential political force , and also a symbol of the party openness towards the ‘’second Israel’’. David Levi, Meir Shitrit And Moshe Katzav (until his tragic downfall) come to mind. There is none now.

5. Conclusions: Quo Vadis Likud?

Israel is a dynamic, functioning democracy, still having to face with huge challenges to its national security, even existential threats, particularly if the Iranian nuclear program will not be stopped before it reaches the point of no return. 30 Shas voters come from the traditional Likud electoral strongholds. It is almost a family feud…


Under such circumstances, the fact that the state is a democracy is in itself a little miracle, not something to be taken for granted. Especially so that the majority of its population moved in from countries, either in Eastern Europe or the Middle East which lacked any democratic tradition, and a sizeable portion of the population is under the influence of a formidable non-democratic dominating influence, that of Rabbis and other religious leaders who are tuned firstly of the text of holy books, rather than to the laws of a secular state. It is therefore a very fragile democracy, so if the governing party doesn’t stand to protect and strengthen the democratic values, then there is a problem.

Traditionally, the extreme right in Israel was defined by its hawkish and nationalist – religious views on the fate of the territories of Judea-Samaria , but as shown in this paper, the definition should be expanded, and include also attitudes towards the Arab minority inside Israel, and some very vital aspects of Israeli democracy. The attitude towards Israeli Arabs is particularly troubling. It seems that the Lieberman approach has become dominant, even though his policies on this issue are not the official Likud policies. Surely, developments within the Arab Israeli community, which are beyond the scope of this paper, most notably, the self-styled Palestinization and the provocative behavior of many of their leaders have done a lot to bring about a sense of vitriol among many Likudniks, but then, a ruling party, especially one which prides itself of following in the footsteps of Jabotinsky and Begin simply cannot push for legislation which creates litmus tests of loyalty to the Arab citizens.

The new young militants of Likud, plus the Lieberman faction and the Jewish Home of Naftali Bennett constitute over a third of the current Knesset. This is an unprecedented situation in Israeli politics, and it is bound to have strong influence over the future course light of the Likud party, which is still the largest component of the secular nationalist-religious electoral coalition in Israel.

Moving from political marginality to power and control inevitably requires ideological compromises and political adjustments, primarily due to the need to create coalitions. By definition, political coalitions are predicated on finding a common denominator which cannot be a precise reflection of the original, small and ideologically-pure party. Menachem Begin understood this elementary political dictum when establishing the electoral coalition which led him to power. So, he took Herut from the Right-wing margins to the center of Israeli politics and society. He did it without giving up on his core beliefs about Shlemut Hamoledet, while strictly adhering to the fundamental, precious Liberal, democratic values of the historic Revisionist movement, and this combination created a winning and popular electoral coalition. The pendulum seems to have swinging back. While the emerging new forces within Likud still pay lip service to the original traditions of the party, they have a different agenda in mind. Core values are being abandoned. This is in the eye of the beholder to decide whether these changes are to welcome or to regretted.

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References

Bilski Ben-Hur, R, Every individual a king, Bnai Brith, Washington, DC, 1993.

Heller, J, ‘Zeev Jabotinsky and the Revisionist revolt against materialism-in search of a world view’, Jewish History, vol. 12, no. 2, fall 1998.

Jabotinsky, Z, ‘The iron wall; we and the Arabs’, Rassveyt, 4 November, 1923.

Kremnitzer, M, & A Fuchs, Ze’ev Jabotinsky on democracy, equality, and individual rights, Jerusalem, 2013.

Kremnitzer, M, & A Fuchs, Menachem Begin on democracy and constitutional values, Jerusalem, 2011.

Netanyahu, B-Z, ‘Jabotinsky as statesman and leader of his people’, in A. Bareli & P. Ginossar [eds.], In the eye of the storm, Jerusalem, 2004, pp. 25-39.

Olmert, J, ‘Israel-Syria; The elusive peace’, Digest of Middle East Studies, vol. 20, no. 2, fall 2011, pp. 202-212.

Segev, T, 1967: The war and the year that transformed the Middle East, Macmillan, New York, 2007.

Shlaim, A, The iron wall: Israel and the Arab world, W. W. Norton, New York, 2000.

Shapiro, Y, The road to power: Herut Party in Israel, Suny Press, Albany, 1991.

Somin, I, ‘Tyler Cowen on the political attitudes of Russian Jewish immigrants’, The Volokh Conspiracy, 23 April, 2011.

The Atlantic, 17 February, 2009.

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Could the modern emphasis on subjectivity be a point of departure for a theoretical thought which gradually leads, by an existentialist questioning, to a metaphysical concern for Being, based on people’s experiences which prompt them to clarify their disposition towards transcendence? This question triggers Ronny Miron’s endeavour to thoroughly explore the gradual formation of a metaphysical consciousness in the work of Karl Jaspers. The main exegetical novelty of Ronny Miron’s book is that it provides a philosophical insight for revealing a continuity between Jaspers’s early medical-psychological work and his later philosophical writings, especially through the notion of the ”perception of Selfhood” (Selbstsein) and through a search for Being and transcendence. Miron claims that there is also a further development of these themes even in the socio-political works of Jaspers written after WWII.

In the first part of the book, The Explication of Selfhood, Miron uncovers some early metaphysical intuitions present in Jaspers’s psychiatric and psychological writings, based on the ”wholeness” of Being which lies beneath the notion of the human person seen as a whole, and on the metaphysical elements which transcend the world views of a subject, and even the subject who constitutes them. These are, as the author shows, intuitions and ideas that are to be developped in Jaspers’s philosophy, especially in the part of his work in which he elaborates on the interplay between real world, Selfhood, the Existenz’s consciousness, and the capacity of the contingent Existenz to hint at the absolute. Yet, the author argues that Jaspers tended to move gradually from his earlier emphasis on subjectivity which exposed him to the risk of solipsism to a new framework for the reflection upon Being of Existenz which highlighted the unity between subjectivity and objectivity.

In the second part of the book, Transition Mechanisms, Miron follows the evolution of Jaspers’s thought from a concern to explicate Selfhood to an increasing interest for Being. She presents the notion of Existenz ”as being pushed to transcend its boundaries” in Jaspers’s transition-works, and as leading accordingly to an awareness of aspects outside the Being of Existenz. Thus, a new horizon was opened for Jaspers, who started focusing on more absolute aspects of reality that were reflected on with a growing awareness regarding the Being of Existenz. Jaspers took seriously the idea that the boundary of self-knowledge indicates something beyond Selfhood. To move beyond the sphere of Selfhood, and thus to avoid his early solipsism, he also considered the issue of communication, which

Tereza-Brînduşa PALADENational School for Political and Administrative StudiesBucharest, [email protected]

Tereza-Brînduşa PALADE

Book Review: Ronny Miron, Karl Jaspers: From Selfhood to Being, Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2012, 346 pp.


he conceptualized through the distinction between ”communication in existence” and ”existential communication”. It should be noted, as Miron reminds us, that the emphasis on the loneliness which separated Existenzes and leads to the process of individualization was a common approach in Jaspers’s time and that its critique, especially by Erich Fromm, was in the background of the elaboration of the socio-political critique of the Frankfurt School. Nevertheless, Jaspers tried to overcome this difficulty by assuming that the contact with the other creates a loneliness that is a precondition of communication. The dialectic relationship between loneliness and communication was itself a target of the Marxist critique of the time, which stated that such dialectic hides ”the objective social contradictions” and thus also ”the class struggle”. As Miron points out, this critique misses the point of existentialist philosophy in general, since the latter supposes that different levels of existence are not characteristic of different social groups, but are different modes of existence of the same person who oscilates between authentic and inauthentic modes of existence. In fact, despite some internal difficulties, his account of communication helped Jaspers to revise his solipsistic notion of Being of Existenz in which there is only separatedness between ”You and I”, and to reflect upon the transcendence of existence which goes beyond meeting the other or missing him/her, and yet is made possible by a ”struggling communication” and a confrontation with the reality of the other. Another thematic shift of Jaspers explored by Miron is from communication to the consciousness of historicity, which proved to be a means for an existentialist elucidation of Existenz. Again, Miron shows how Jaspers considered the implications related to transcendence by realizing that the boundaries of existential existence that are revealed by historicity require transcendence.

The third part of the book, The Explication of Being insists upon the period in which Jaspers moved from the intuition that the consciousness that Existenz does not exist by itself to the idea that it refers to another Being that is the transcendence of Existenz. From the awareness of ”the insufficiency of myself alone”, Jaspers passed to ”the insufficiency of any Being that is not transcendence”. Miron shows that the intuition that Existenz aims at transcendence raises also the question of the freedom of Existenz, which is related to the constitution of Selfhood and its propensity towards transcendence. Jaspers also assumed, as Miron extensively shows, the task of viewing transcendence through the experience of ”foundering”, which has proved however to be an insufficient approach of Being in transcendence. Jaspers moved afterwards to a reflection upon ”Being as encompassing” – a topic which is discussed by Miron in both its epistemological and its ontological dimension. Later, Miron presents the ”two facets of Being” enlightened by Jaspers: ”the immanent” and the ”the transcendent” and discusses Jaspers’s development of the perception of the encompassing by the term ”periechontology”, which means the theorizing aimed at encompassing. Jaspers went on to a reflection on the notion of ”ciphers” or symbols of transcendence, which is another topic which is treated at length by Miron. Jaspers’s idea is that immanence, the tangible reality of the world, and the conscious perception of immanence by human beings, are to be seen as ”ciphers of transcendence”. Miron shows how, by the concept of cipher, Jaspers advances towards the constitution of a metaphysical consciousness. Thus, the metaphyscial

Tereza-Brînduşa Palade 155

consciousness is not developped by Jaspers from an objectivist standpoint, which assumes the direct access of consciousness to transcendence, and thus ignores the mediation of language. Jaspers searches, according to Miron, for the existential roots of a metaphysical consciousness, and gains metaphysical depth through the concept of ciphers. So, according to Jaspers, the presence of transcendence is captured by unmediated experience in the absolute consciousness of Existence, but this already represents a language, though one which is anchored in the historicity of the individual person. The other language, in which the metaphysical consciousness is embodied, is based on Jaspers’s premise that transcendence stands out the real present seen as empirical reality – and this language is expressed in the form of myths.

Finally, Miron tries to elucidate the difficult relationship between Jaspers’s concepts ”Being” (Sein) and ”transcendence” (Transzendenz). In doing this, she reviews various interpretations of the meaning of Jaspers’s ”transcendence”, which are classified as emphasizing immanence, or a theological search for God, or an ethical emphasis that is due to Jaspers’s preference for immanent transcendence. In the end, Miron critically acknowledges an ”obvious vagueness” in Jaspers’s thought, which made possible this variety of interpretations. Even the concept of transcendence is twofold, being either related to the immanent perception discussed in the framework of the concept of Being, or treated as a perception which is entirely separated from immanence. This vagueness was however inevitable, as Miron finally explains, since Jaspers did not aim teleologically at the constitution of a metaphysical consciousness, but rather ”discovered” such consciousness after he had actually reached it, which is the mark of an authentic philosophy. And, as Miron points out, Jaspers’s philosophy does not establish ”the road to the constitution of a metaphysical consciousness”, but follows only one possible path for arriving at the constitution of this consciousness.

Ronny Miron’s extensive study of the formation of a metaphysical consciousness in Jaspers’s work is a large-scale attempt to explore with the help of an ”Ariadne’s thread” a huge amount of primary and secondary literature, which is as successful as it is deep, sophisticated, well-structured and erudite. This study is especially important as a sign of the revived interest in Jaspers’s philosophy, which was overshadowed in recent decades by the research on Heidegger’s thinking. The depth of Jaspers’s philosophy is still exceptionally thought-provoking, not only for philosophical, but also for religious, ethical and psychological studies.

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The long cycle of the growth, maturation, decay, and eventually collapse of communism had sprawled throughout the “age of extremes” of contemporary history (Hobsbawm, 1995). Compacting even more the already “short twentieth century,” placed by the British historian between 1914 and 1991, so that its symbolic debut coincide with 1917, it can legitimately be spoken of communism as the defining phenomenon of the past century. Both as intellectual subject matter and human social reality, communism has never ceased to fascinate, and equally terrify, scholars venturing into the socio-political universe sprang out of the doctrine of dialectical materialism. Hardly can anyone remain indifferent to the atrocities of communist regimes, whose death toll reaches 94 million (Curtois et al, 1999). Not even the “opium of the intellectuals” whose power of cognitive seduction was highlighted by Raymond Aron (1957) can alter the consciousness of this brute statistical reality. The same intellectual fascination towards both abstrusity and evilness (two constitutive elements of totalitarian communist states) underlies the analytical approach deployed by Archie Brown in The Rise and Fall of Communism. Except that, unlike of its forerunners trying to provide a synthetic image of communism, the work of Oxford University’s scholar takes full advantage of the new information become available with the partial opening of the former USSR’s secret archives.

Archie Brown presents the historical career of the communism idea, and ideal nonetheless, in parallel with its concrete empirical incarnations into the diverse political configurations that had scudded across significant areas of the globe in the aftermath of World War II. The resounding theme seems to be: an idea(l) gone bad, since between the values of social justice and equality that formed the central core of the primitive idea of communism and the political application espoused by its totalitarian practitioners the gulf couldn’t be any wider.

As expected, the historical narrative evolves predominantly along the Soviet axis, from which the author engages into short exploratory excursions, assessing the developments made in the other provinces of the Communist commonwealth. If possible, a topographical analysis of Brown’s historical discourse would reveal that Moscow is the central location to which the author is compelled to return. Its Soviet-centric account of communism, with its strong emphasis on the political decisions taken in the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), recommends this book as being a Kremlinological account of communism.

Mihai Stelian RUSUBabeş-Bolyai UniversityCluj-Napoca, [email protected]

Mihai Stelian RUSU

Book Review: Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism, New York: Ecco, 2011, 720 pp.


The historical story told by Brown progresses linearly through the conventional eventual-chronological coordinates: from the origins of the idea of communism, through the Russian Revolution of 1917, followed by the phase of socialism building within the Soviet Union until the World War II (Part One: Origins and Development); “Part Two: Communist Ascendant” covers the communist takeovers in Europe and China (through Soviet imposition or following “indigenous paths”); “Part Three: Surviving without Stalin” evaluates the shockwaves sent by Khrushchev’s “secret speech” denouncing the personality cult of the Stalin, whose immediate impact was seen in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, but whose delayed effects were being fully felt in Prague Spring of 1968, crushed by Warsaw Pact Army tanks. The “era of stagnation” under Brezhnev which followed, disturbed by civil society’s pressure of reform, creates the prelude to “Part Four: Pluralizing Pressures.” The Soviet story ends in “Part Five: Interpreting the Fall of Communism,” thanks to Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost policies.

Despite announcing that „the book […] sets out to be more than a narrative history of Communism” (p. 4), for most of the time Brown’s account remains restricted to the traditional narrative strategy of eventual chronicle, thus touching only the „surface disturbances, [the] crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong back” (Braudel, 1995, p. 21). Moreover, this histoire événementielle goes hand in hand with a Carlylesque brand of historiography, given Brown’s emphatic insistence upon the biographies, decisions, and political deeds of the Great Communist (Anti-)Heroes. The book’s iconothèque, placed in the middle-pages of the book, certify this conclusion: from the total of 40 images, 31 are portraits (29 of them portraying Communist leaders, while the remaining two depicting Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Pope John Paul II, respectively), and only 9 pictures presenting military event and ordinary (anonymous) people.

The eventual chronicle of communism is only once interrupted by a brief, but analytically important, theoretical exposition in which Brown (pp. 105-112) identifies the defining six features of a communist system (as distinguished from a “communist” social order, i.e. the utopic classless, stateless, conflict-free society dreamt by Marx): a) the monopoly of power of the Communist Party; b) democratic centralism, a misnomer for bureaucratic centralism characterized by a “rigid hierarchical, severely disciplined party” in which the decisions flow invariably from top to bottom without a drop of critical feed-back; c) non-capitalist ownership of the means of production; d) command economy; e) the declared aim of building communism as the ultimate goal; f) the existence of, and sense of belonging to, an international Communist movement. The first two characteristics define the specific political system of a communist society, the third and fourth singularize the economic system, and the remainder two features pertain to the ideological sphere of the archetypal communist society. Setting out these defining features, Brown pleads for a “precise and parsimonious” use of the term communist. So that, after espousing these pack of feature as forming the minimal criteria of accepting a society as communist, it becomes clear that “no African state has ever been Communist” (p. 105).

Mihai Stelian Rusu 159

By far the most attractive parts of the book are the closing “interpretative” chapters, into which, after bringing to a conclusion the long narrative history of the rise and fall of communism, Brown sets out to tackle what he calls to be the “big questions” of communism: a) Why did communism last so long? b) Why did it collapse? c) What’s left of communism?

Addressing the first question Brown points out a number of factors. For one thing, all the surviving communist regimes developed unusually efficient repressive state apparatuses, being able to procure mass, collective obedience to the regime’s authority. The propaganda machine, whose effects were supplemented by pervasive official and internalized self-censorship, further ensured that everybody stay in their party designated place. Another reason why the communist systems lasted so long is to be found in the population’s accommodation with the regime, made possible through the evolution of a parallel system of “informal rules of the game” (p. 580). In all the sectors of society, polity, and economy, the rigid formal bureaucratic procedures were systematically being bypassed and shortcut. For the ordinary person, procuring basic goods and services in the conditions of a shortage economy, with its chronic systemic failure, meant that possessing a repertoire of informal tricks was an everyday necessity. The economy itself needed to be declogged in order to be minimally functional: “The command economy would scarcely have worked at all if informal practices have not oiled its wheels” (p. 581). Nevertheless, Brown concludes that the public services offered by the state (free education and health care, full employment) were played a great part in creating collective loyalty towards the regime.

Why did communism collapse? The irony of Communist history lays in the fact that precisely the large-scale educational campaign, in the long run, turned against its master planners. From the Party’s perspective, the unintended consequences of educational policies consisted in fostering critical thinking into an intellectually repressive society, progressively fed by a growingly freer flow of information which was made possible after the Glasnost policy (meaning “openness” or “transparency”) has been adopted. As Brown puts it, “By nurturing a highly educated population, Communism contained the seeds of its own destruction” (pp. 588-9). The accruing of economic difficulties also had its role in weakening the communist systems, but Brown rejects an overtly economic deterministic explanation of the fall of communism. He considers that economic problems created only the stimuli for political reform, the latter being the deciding factor. What put an end to communism wasn’t the economic chronic failure. It was the radical reform of its political system (through Perestroika and Glasnost) which turned out to short-circuit the nervous center of the communist socio-political order. Political “reform produced crisis more than [economic] crisis forced reform” (p. 598). The democratization of the Party could not been contained to spread throughout the social system. But although the reformist wing of the Party elite, personified by Gorbachev, wanted to inflict only intra-systemic change, they soon lost their grip on the democratizing forces unleashed, which converted into full-fledged systemic transformative change.


What’s left on communism? Very little; indeed, only some crumbs, seems to be Brown’s reply. In the world of today, only five states declare themselves to be communist (China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam). But China, undoubtedly the most important of these last standing communist states, took decisive steps away from the theoretical model of a communist system. The radical economic reforms implemented by Deng Xiaoping transformed Chinese society into a hybrid system which was paradoxically dubbed “party-state capitalism.” Only the North Korean case remains a pure relic of the ideal-typical communist system. The almost complete crumbling of the communist systems (survived only in a few minor enclaves) leads Brown to write the “epitaph for [the communist] illusion,” which, despite comprising some universal idealistic aspirations, ended up as a “ghastly failure.”

References

Aron, R, The Opium of the Intellectuals, Secker & Warburg, London, 1957.

Braudel, F, ‘Preface to the First Edition’, in The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (Vol. I, pp. 17-22), 1995.

Curtois, S., Werth, N., Panné, J.-L., Paczkowski, A., Bartosek, K., Margolin, J.-L., Kramer, M., & Murphy, J., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999.

Hobsbawm, E. J., The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991, Michael Joseph, London, 1995.

Note: This work was possible with the financial support of the Sectoral Operational Programme for Human Resources Development 2007-2013, co-financed by the European Social Fund, under the project number POSDRU/107/1.5/S/76841 with the title „Modern Doctoral Studies: Internationalization and Interdisciplinarity”.

Melania-Gabriela Ciot 161

20 years of Copenhagen criteria - A Handbook on EU Accession Negotiations

Some of the scholars compare the European negotiations with a process, which requires abilities and skills to survive and a specific pedagogy designed especially to help perform better, and in turn compare Brussels with an “arena” or a “a small world of its own”. The EU decision makers have the opportunity to experience the game spirit, the businesslike or bargaining atmosphere, the interpersonal communication enhanced by cultural and background diversity, as well as the cobweb of home-made rules with which to muddle through diversified preferences and interests.

Nowadays, European negotiations mean learning tools, knowledge of negotiation and game theory, application of procedures, the use of position papers and background dossiers, interpersonal communication, politically correct behavior and a diplomatic language.

The handbook of the Chief Negotiator for Romania’s Accession to the EU (2000-2004), professor Vasile Puşcaş, Ph.D., offers all of the elements mentioned above and also the knowledge and technical support for the formation of the essential requirements of an European accession negotiator: strategy orientation, diplomatic mind and “language”, and a clear view on what it needs to be done.

The transfer of the know-how regarding the EU accession negotiations could be considered as the main motivation of this handbook. As the author himself mentioned, this book took shape during the session of training of the negotiating team of candidate countries from the Western Balkans, in which he is actively involved. The handbook contains the experience of a practitioner in the fields of European negotiations and diplomacy and the approach of a dedicated scholar to the field of international relations, reflected in his published books and articles.

The understanding of the process of accession negotiations, of decision making at the European level regarding its policies (especially the enlargement

Melania-Gabriela CIOTBabeş-Bolyai UniversityCluj-Napoca, [email protected]

Melania-Gabriela CIOT

Book Review: Vasile Puşcaş, EU Accession Negotiations (A Handbook), Wien: Hulla&Co Human Dynamics KG, 2013, 216 pp.


policy), the development of a critical thinking and of an interdisciplinary approach of a certain subject constituted the main aims for the appearance of this handbook.

The handbook is very well structured, following a model of constructive thinking, supporting the readers to build up their own knowledge and to develop their own negotiating abilities.

All of the chapters of the handbook were designed as a guide, which will give the technical dimension of what the accession negotiations meant. From the beginning, the handbook provides a clear picture of the approach of the European Union, seen as a continuous process of negotiations. Then, it continues with the presentation of the main EU institutions and policies. The decision-making at the EU level represents an important chapter, which supports the understanding of the mechanism of the accession negotiations.

The description of the European negotiations from chapter 5 is linking the theory and practice of negotiation with the enlargement policy, in order to provide the necessary information for understanding how complex was the process that shaped decisions at the European level, and how it is possible to effectively participate in them.

The institutional framework and actors which are involved in the European accession negotiations are mentioned in the following chapters. It is important to have an interactive view on the process, and to find out the mechanism which is functioning between the working groups, the line ministries, the representatives of civil society and of interests groups, as well as the importance of the negotiating team and the authority of Chief Negotiator.

But the core of the handbook is composed from the four chapters which describe the strategies and tactics used in the accession negotiations; the position papers/negotiating position; the derogations and transition periods and the final stage of accession negotiations. These chapters are very technical, and managed to offer a practical guide to be followed in the process.

The complex view on the accession negotiation is finalized by the chapter on effective implementation of the negotiated commitments and the EU rules, which comes naturally to complete the approach of the subject of the handbook and to demonstrate that the European integration is a process of Internal Commitment.

The study case and the annexes included in the volume were designed for a better enhancing of the knowledge offered throughout the handbook.

The handbook is written in a pedagogical, deductive style, which is direct, clear and complete, succeeding in bridging the theory with the practice and the general with the specific.

Melania-Gabriela Ciot 163

The EU Accession negotiations (A Handbook) is a very good initiative of the RENA program for the states of the Western Balkans, which are preparing their accession, and for that reason I strongly recommend this useful tool to the governments and to the negotiating teams from these countries. Also, the academic community is honored and proud to receive this “example of lived history”, because only this experience could certify the quality of the information and of the examples given in the content of this handbook. Nevertheless, the handbook is a good guide for the students from the field of international relations and European studies, as well as for the general public interested in this particular topic.

Radu Cucută 165

Teaching Strategy after Irak and Afghanistan

Strategy in the Contemporary World is probably one of the reference texts for the subfield of Strategic Studies, as far as textbooks are considered. The book brings together chapters written by important authors, such as Colin S. Gray, John Baylis or Lawrence Freedman. It attempts to offer a clear and convincing account of an academic subfield that has generated over time an impressive output of expertise, but has been only rarely the focus of systematic study, as even some of the authors of the volume argue1.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part of the book discusses the issues that represent, according to the authors, the enduring part of Strategic Studies. Aptly, the part starts with an analysis of the causes of war, which attempts to build a taxonomy of the different explanations for the phenomenon. The second chapter attempts to cover the evolution of modern warfare, starting from Napoleon’s historical role and form Clausewitz’s contribution and ending with total war, the final expression of the mass industrialization of the phenomenon. Thomas G. Mahnken manages to construct an accessible explanation of strategic theory, in the third chapter, centered also on Clausewitz’s contribution. The chapter dedicated to strategic culture is one of the attempts made by the book to move beyond the traditional discourse on strategy, incorporating constructivist perspectives and attempting to show how cultures influence the making or enacting of strategies. Justin Morris’ contribution on the influence of international law remains one of the highlights of Strategy in the Contemporary World. Morris’ explanation of why law matters in one of the fields that seemingly has little to do with norms is elegant and manages to give the textbook the overall balance required of a textbook. The first part of the book also explores the influence of geography and intelligence over strategy, as well as the relationship between the evolution of technology and warfare. The last three chapters avoid a determinist perspective, as well as a 20th century grounded interpretation, offering a convincing and detailed account of the background in which strategy is made and enacted.

1 See for example Colin S. Gray & Jeannie L. Johnson, “The Practice of Strategy”, in John Baylis, James J. Wirtz, & Gray Colin S. (eds.), Strategy in the Contemporary World. An Introduction to Strategic Studies, (4th ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 359-361.

Radu CUCUTĂNational School for Political and Administrative StudiesBucharest, [email protected]

Radu CUCUTĂ

Book Review: Baylis, John, Wirtz James J., & Gray Colin S. (eds.) Strategy in the Contemporary World. An Introduction to Strategic Studies (Fourth Edition), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 454 pp.


The second part of the book deals with contemporary issues in strategy: asymmetric warfare and its implications on strategy, nuclear proliferation, and the security challenges of the cyberspace. James Kiras discusses terrorism and insurgency, emphasizing that these forms of conflict remain well within the confines of Clausewitz. Dale Walton and John Baylis, respectively, discuss the problems posed by nuclear proliferation and the challenges WMD control has to face after the end of the Cold War. Their chapters show how Strategic Studies has moved beyond this powerful intellectual theoretical framework. John Ferris concludes in the 12th chapter that conventional power remains, at the beginning of the 21st century an important, but limited tool, while Stephen Biddle argues that the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts have proven largely inconclusive in terms of the speed vs. mass debate. Jacob Shapiro and Rudolph Darken argue that, in spite of the emphasis placed by US political leaders on homeland security, understanding the enemy remains a distant goal and the US is still facing a major strategic option, between containing Islamic terrorism and rolling back Islamic extremism. The recent conflicts are also analyzed from the perspective of the opportunity of humanitarian interventions, Sheena Greitens and Theo Farell emphasizing that the jury is still out on the capacity of the intervening parties to set-up functional governments or democratic regimes. The last chapter of the second part is the only new topic added to the fourth edition. John B. Sheldon covers the issue of cyber power, arguing its influence over strategy is pervasive, even though the erosion of the role of the state has been overemphasized.

The third part of the book covers the future of strategy. James Wirtz discusses the influence the expansion of the concept of security has had on Strategic Studies. Wirtz remains convinced that the new threats to national security need to be taken into account by strategists, and even though their influence on political and military conflicts are manifest, solving them remains outside a discipline mostly concerned with the threat or use of force. Columba Peoples argues in its debunking of the criticism brought to this field that there is more to Strategic Studies than nuclear war and nuclear strategies, while drawing an insightful division between the different contributions brought by different generations of Strategic Studies scholars. Colin Gray and Jeannie Johnson plead in favor of a more contextual and prudent reassessments of the discipline, capable of taking into account not only the existing context, but also the historical and theoretical experience of this field. Lawrence Freedman calls for a return to the realism tradition, while taking into account the insights of constructivism and the pitfalls of structural realism.

At first glance, several elements stand out in regards to Strategy in the Contemporary World. First, it manages to cover a large number of topics, ranging from views on the conventional use of force, to recent debates such as the influence of counter-insurgency operations on the military or the future of Strategic Studies as a field of study.

Secondly, the textbook manages to discuss traditional issues of strategy, while tackling, at the same time, contemporary debates. In fact, the textbook attempts to

Radu Cucută 167

explain these debates and to offer insight into their practical, as well as theoretical consequences. Regardless of whether we are talking about terrorism, counter-insurgency, humanitarian intervention, or cyber power, the volume sums up the debates in the field and offers an array of possible alternative explanations. In fact, the volume itself goes to great lengths to show the contemporary relevance of Strategic Studies (Baylis and Wirtz’s introduction, as well as the third part of the book, aptly labelled “The Future of Strategy” underline the authors’ emphasis on this point).

In fact, it is precisely this “contemporary appeal” that might make the book less appealing to the readers of the first edition: the second part of the 2002 edition, “The Evolution of Joint Warfare”, which discussed the evolution of land warfare, respectively of air and sea power has disappeared with the 2007, 2nd edition of the book. It is obvious that the reality of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars undoubtedly influenced the book, but the didactic purpose of the volume warranted maybe a more detailed glimpse over these topics.

Last, but not least, Strategy in the Contemporary World faces and manages to overcome an almost insurmountable task. On the one hand, the imperatives the authors try to take into account are those facing a regular textbook – accessibility of information, clear explanations, relevant details, structured narratives. On the other hand, the more personal contributions, such as Colin S. Gray’s, Lawrence Freedman’s or Jeffrey S. Lantis and Daryl Howlett’s, stand out as bolder and more original attempts, that escape the didactic confines of a textbook.

The authors of the book have won their gamble. The fourth edition of Strategy in the Comteporary World is first an instructive and at the same time entertaining lecture, appealing to the scholar, the student and the casual reader alike. Moreover, it is important to note that the book remains true to its original educational purpose – even though educating strategists remains a task for the future, as Gray would want us to believe, the numerous faces and conditions of strategy.

Monica Alexandru 169

ContributorsOgaboh A. M. AGBA, PhD, is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology,

University of Calabar (Nigeria). He has served or is currently serving as editor to a number of journals including Social Development Issues published by the Faculty of Social Sciences. He has published extensively in numerous peer-reviewed journals across the globe, contributed book chapters and serves in the University of Calabar’s Research Directorate. His research interests are multi-disciplinary and eclectic ranging from personal human responsibility for life (as in suicide), industrial sociology (including industrial disputes analysis/resolution, among other issues) to poverty, sociology of crime, and marginalization to political sociology.

Ionuţ APAHIDEANU is a Ph.D. candidate at the Doctoral School of Political Science, University of Bucharest. He is also a researcher within the Centre for Political Analysis, Babeş-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca. B.A. Political Science, Babeş Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca. M.A. International Relations, National School of Political Science and Public Administration, Bucharest. Research interests: global studies, religious studies, international relations. Selective publications: volume chapters in Manual de relaţii internaţionale; Crisis-management in Romania; Armonie şi conflict intercultural în Banat şi Transilvania. Perspective cultural-istorice, 1650-1950. Articles in Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies, South-East European Journal of Political Science, EuroPolis, Studia Politica. Romanian Political Science Review, Revista internaţională de psihologie politică şi societală, Strategic Impact, Monitor Strategic, Sfera Politicii, etc.

Todor ARPAD holds a PhD degree from European University Institute. Since 2006 Todor Arpad works as expert and program coordinator at Asociatia Pro Democratia. His main efforts have focused on the APD’s Electoral Code (the only law that is under debate at the moment in the Romanian Parliament), the introduction of the Score Card system for evaluating MPs activity. In 2013 he was Executive Coordinator of the Constitutional Forum, a public consultation project aimed to propose amendments of the Romanian Constitution. Besides his NGO activity, Todor Arpad is active in the academic community. He is editor of the CEU Political Science Journal, has been involved in more than forty research projects and wrote several papers concerning Romanian’s political evolution. He is currently finalizing a book manuscript with Prof Philippe Schmitter titled Varieties of Capitalism and Types of Democracy.

Ecaterina CEPOI is PhD candidate in Information and National Security at Carol I National Defense University of Bucharest and PhD candidate in Middle Eastern Studies at University of Basel, Switzerland. Her areas of interests are Middle Eastern Studies, International Relations, and Security Studies. She is author of several studies about the political and security issues of the Middle East; her most recent publication is a book about the relation between state and religion in Middle East and North


Africa: Sisteme de relaţii religie-lume-stat în Orientul Mijlociu şi Africa de Nord: între secularizare şi Islam, Ed. Universităţii de Apărare „Carol I”, Bucureşti, 2014.

Melania CIOT, PhD, is an Associate Professor in international relations and European studies at the Babes-Bolyai University, Faculty of European Studies, Department of European Studies and Governance. She received her PhD in educational sciences from the University of Ghent. Her research interests are: the psychology of decisional processes, especially in relation to foreign policy, international and European negotiations, mediation, crisis and cooperation management. She published 12 books (8 as a single author, one as coordinator and 3 as co-coordinator), 17 chapters in collective volumes and 54 articles (12 of which ISI indexed or ranked B+). Recent publications: Modelul Negociatorului (idiosincrazii în procesul decizional al politicii externe)”, Cluj-Napoca: Eikon, 2012; Managementul educaţiei (clasa de elevi), Cluj-Napoca: Eikon, 2012; Educaţie şi societate, Cluj-Napoca: Eikon, 2012; Fundamente ale pedagogiei – partea I, UTPres, Cluj-Napoca, 2012; Media portrayals of people with disability – an intercultural approach, Casa Cărţii de Ştiinţă, Colectia Ştiinţele Educaţiei, vol. 59, Cluj-Napoca, 2009;

Radu-Alexandru CUCUTĂ is a lecturer in International Relations within the Department of International Relations and European Integration of the National School for Political and Administrative Studies/ National University for Political and Administrative Studies. He holds a PhD in political science with the NSPAS and is a graduate of the Conflict Analysis MA Program of the same University. His main fields of interest are theories of international relations, theories of revolutions and the history of international relations.

Irina ILISEI recently graduated a PhD Programme in the field of Roma Studies at the National University of Political and Administrative Studies (NUPAS) in Bucharest, Romania. She holds a MA in Politics of Gender and Minorities from NUPAS and graduated at the same university in Political Sciences and in Communication Studies having a specialization in Sociology. She was involved in several academic exchange projects at Mannheim University, Mannheim Center for European Social Research, TU Ilmenau and ELTE University. Her last publications are: “Education of Roma Women between Feminism and Multiculturalism. Study case: Roma Women in Romania” (2013) in Journal of Social Science Education of Bielefeld University and “A feminist perspective on the Romanian Governmental Strategy for Roma Inclusion” (2012) Political Perspectives Journal of NUPAS. Her current research interests are: educational inequalities, social mobility, intersectionality between gender, ethnicity and class, theories of rational action and social capital.

Richard INGWE is a Researcher at the Institute of Public Policy/Administration, University of Calabar, and Senior Scholar, Centre for Research and Action on Developing Locales, Regions and the Environment (CRADLE), manages/leads multi-/interdisciplinary research programmes in both institutions. He is an author of over 100 research projects/papers, over sixty of which have been published by peer-


reviewed journals, books and technical reports, while many others are being reviewed for publication. Drawing from his multi/trans-disciplinary research interests and publications, his scholarship is organized around clusters of separate professorships and professional specializations: He is simultaneously a political, economic, social geographer, practices the geographies of neo-liberalism and neo-liberalisation, petroleum and energy geographies, among others, while also professing geographies of sustainable development and the geographies of various social sciences.

Marius LAZĂR is PhD in International Relations and PhD candidate in Geopolitics at Institut Français de Géopolitique, Paris. He is Lecturer at Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, Department of International Studies and Contemporary History, where he teaches International Relations in 20th and 21th Centuries; Geopolitics of Contemporary Middle East; Geopolitics of Caucasus and of Central & South Asia. He has conducted field researches in Egypt, Iran, Morocco, and published several studies on Islamology, Middle Eastern Studies, and International Relations; a book about the history of contemporary Iraq is forthcoming.

Victor E. NDUM has been working as a Researcher at the Institute of Public Policy and Administration (IPPA), University of Calabar (Nigeria) since 2010. He graduated with B.Sc. and Masters in public policy and administration from the same IPPA and institution. His research interests revolve around myriad aspects and bifurcations of public policy and administration of Nigeria, developing countries as well as how such issues connect, in diverse ways, with global issues. He is currently following a Ph.D. course at the University of Uyo, Nigeria. He is currently a coordinator of the pre-degree Diploma course in Business Administration in the University of Calabar, a course managed by IPPA in partnership with the Faculty of Management Sciences of the same institution/university.

Josef OLMERT, PhD, is an an adjunct professor of Political Science at the University of South Carolina. He teaches courses on the Middle East, International Relations and the Media & Foreign policy. Dr. Olmert is a noted Middle East expert, and got his PhD from the prestigious London School of Economics, writing his thesis under the supervision of Professor Elie Kedourie. Dr. Olmert specializes in issues relating to Syria, Lebanon, religious minorities in the Middle East and Israeli politics. He is about to publish a book on Syria under Bashar Assad: The end of stability without legitimacy, to be published by the Walker Institute, the University of South Carolina. Dr. Olmert is also working on a book about the evolution of Right Wing politics in Israel.[no name as yet]. Dr. Olmert’s articles on the Middle East and Israel appear regularly in many academic and online magazines.

Brînduşa PALADE is associate professor at the National School for Political and Administrative Studies (Bucharest, Romania), Faculty of Political Science. She teaches Political Ethics and Religion and Religious Fundamentalism. Her most recent scientific articles are “Reconstructing Society and Politics after a Worldwide Economic Crisis”, European Journal for Science and Theology, vol. 9/2013, and “Humour, an


Enlightening and Restorative Force of the Inner Cosmos”, Annalecta Husserliana, The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research, vol. CXVI, Springer International Publishing, 2014. She also published recently the volume of essays TheNameless Infinite: A Few Reflections on the Paradoxes of Faith (Infinitul fără nume. Cîteva reflecţii despre paradoxurile credinţei, Galaxia Gutenberg, 2013.

Andra-Maria ROESCU has a PhD in Political Science from the National School of Political and Administrative Studies. Her thesis has studied the impact of different voting rules on outcomes and behaviour, using an experimental approach. During her PhD, she has also carried out visiting stages at the Mannheim University in Germany and at Central European University in Hungary. Her main areas of interest are political competition, electoral studies, electoral systems, public choice, experiments and quantitative research methods. She has attended several international conferences on some of these areas of interest and has published some articles on political competition under the new Romanian mixed-member compensatory system and on experiments in political science.

Mihai Stelian RUSU is a PhD student at the Faculty of Sociology and Social Work, Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca. His research interests are: collective memory; sociological theory; social psychology. Recent publications related to the submission: Rusu, M.S. (2011). The Structure of Mnemonic Revolution. International Review of Social Research, 1(1), pp. 105-121; Rusu, M. S. (2011). The Colonization of the Past and the Construction of the Mnemonic Order. Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai – Sociologia, 56(2), pp. 39-57; Rusu, M. S. (2011). Sociopsihologia memoriei colective [The Sociopsychology of Collective Memory], pp. (67-89). In P. Iluţ (ed.). Studii de sociopsihologie [Sociopsychological Studies]. Cluj-Napoca: Presa Universitară Clujeană.


Call for Papers

Romanian Journal of Society and Politics

Special Issue

1989: After Twenty-five Years

Issue 18, Vol IX, due December 2014

The editors of the Romanian Journal of Society and Politics invite you to submit articles and book reviews for a special December 2014 issue: 1989: After Twenty-five Years. We encourage contributions that cover a wide range of topics related to the turning point that was the year 1989 in history of Central and Eastern Europe and the world and its aftermath. The articles should cover (but are not restricted to) the following topics:

• The fall of the Berlin Wall: a moment of political change in CEE. What sort of change?

• 1989 in Romania. Meanings, opportunities, change, continuity• Revolution and reform in CEE in the past 25 years• The transition years. Democratization: a consensus project?• Democratic success and challenges in Romania, CEE and the post-soviet

space. From free elections to institutionalization of rules• EU and NATO: their impact on regional cooperation• USSR and its post-imperial legacy• 25 years later. Evaluations

The topics can cover individual case studies or comparative perspectives.

The editors welcome contributions from a wide array of research perspectives, including, but not limited to, political science, international relations, European studies, history, political theory, sociology and anthropology. Interdisciplinary approaches are welcome. For submission guidelines please refer to: http://rjsp.eu/submission.html. All contributions should be sent by email to: [email protected]. Deadline for the submission of contributions is 15 July, 2014.

In addition, RJSP is accepting manuscripts at any time. However, if you would like to submit your article for the next Issue (to be published in June 2015), please send your article no later than 15th of September 2014.

All contributions should be sent by e-mail at the following address: [email protected].

Please also refer to www.rjsp.eu

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