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Preface

RAMI G. KHOURI

IN THE FIRST HALF of the twentieth century, the Arab region completed impressive state-building processes that steadily improved citizens’ quality of life and forged national identities where none had existed before. Jordanians, Kuwaitis, Lebanese, Saudi Arabians, Libyans, and other citizens of new states emerged onto the regional and international scenes. The newly made states and their new citizens worked together and established an unspoken pact whereby both state capacity and citizens’ quality of life improved.

In the second half of the century and the first decades of the twenty-first century, most non-energy-rich states have seen their state-building momentum slow, stall, or even reverse as state financial resources could not keep up with the needs of growing populations. Erratic economic and social development after 1990 saw most non-oil-financed governments unable to improve or even maintain the quality of life of large swaths of their populations. The states’ retreat from some quarters of society allowed non-state organizations or the private sector to pick up the responsibilities of providing citizens the basic services, protection, opportunities, and political voice they needed to remain loyal citizens. Many citizens lost confidence in their states and their national identities. Some turned to other identities, including religious and tribal ones that long predated modern states. A few Arab regions even broke away from the central state (Yemen, Sudan, Iraq, Islamic State), and some populations or regions remained inside the state borders but mostly relied on other forces to serve and represent them (Hamas, Hezbollah, Ansarullah-Houthis, and others).

This trend of state fragmentation may be accelerating now due to current pressures from recent oil price drops, geopolitical tensions, and COVID-19 pandemic-related economic slowdowns. The UN today says that 70 percent of all Arabs are poor or vulnerable, and that figure is rising daily due to severe economic slowdowns. The relationship between state and society is emotional and psychological at some levels, but mostly it is manifested in how governments and citizens interact on a daily basis to access essential resources like water, health care, reasonably priced food, education, job opportunities, and security.

For this reason, the civil service’s interactions with citizens on a daily basis is probably the best indicator of the status of state-society relations. It is the flash point where citizens and state meet in person every day. This is also an important setting where citizens can experience either respect or injustice at the hands of the state. Dignity is measured in the material provision of services but also in the manner in which all-powerful officials treat individuals at that all-important window where one submits applications and forms. This is where individuals see whether the state respects them or disdains them.

When things go well, citizens feel they are treated with dignity. When they do not go well, citizens feel humiliated. Humiliation is the first step to losing faith in the system, and in the most extreme cases, that can lead to losing faith in the legitimacy of the state and its institutions. If the existing political system offers no credible avenues for redressing grievances, citizens become desperate and often turn to other identities and actors for support. Some citizens depart permanently for other lands, better identities, and more secure futures for their children. Some break away from the state to form new states, though the experiments of secessionist states tend not to go so well (South Sudan, Kurdistan, South Yemen).

This is why reforming the public sector in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is such an important challenge. This book is essential because it is necessary to pause and assess where and why some public sector reforms in MENA have succeeded and others have not.

Few people in our region have had as much sustained direct experience with these issues as Tarik Yousef and Robert Beschel Jr., and they have done us all a service in compiling these case studies of public sector reforms. As these case studies demonstrate, public sector reform requires the convergence of strong leadership, sustained political will, and resources for strategic planning and implementation. These variables are always vulnerable to erratic regional and global economic trends, volatile local politics, and, ultimately, the collective sentiments of the public. The smallest and biggest forces in our world—microscopic viruses and cosmic deities—also play a role, but people interested in exploring public sector reforms in the MENA region should focus on a force we can easily gauge every day: the sentiments of citizens and the equitable organizational capacities of state institutions. This book is an excellent starting place to understand the complexities involved in analyzing this issue, which will only become more important in the years ahead as much of the MENA region becomes an arena where increasingly marginalized citizens battle police states on the street.

Or, if you like on-the-spot research, you could go to any government passport or driving license renewal office in any MENA country and watch how states interact with their citizens. For example, when attempting to renew my passport in Jordan decades ago, I observed an old man who had been waiting in a slow-moving crowd for nearly an hour on a hot summer morning be told to come back another day with more signatures from other government agencies. He exploded in anger at the clerk’s haughtiness and his own helplessness. A few years after that experience, the Jordanian government unleashed a whole battalion of super-efficient public servants, many of them from the police and military branches, who radically reformed the passport and national ID card offices, the car and driver licensing departments, the tax department, and many other government departments. I assumed, from my discussions with many colleagues and senior officials in Jordan at that time, that the reforms happened because some people in the political leadership recognized that citizens were routinely humiliated in their daily encounters with the state, causing cumulative anger and stress in society.

When I renewed my passport ten years later, I walked into the same office and thought I was in a Swiss bank. The spacious room was air conditioned, with neat rows of comfortable benches and seats. I pushed a button on a machine at the door to get my number. A few minutes later, my number was called, I approached my designated counter, handed in my papers, then was asked after two minutes to pay the fees in the cashier window next door and wait to be called again. I did that, and after just twenty-five minutes they called my name, I picked up my renewed passport and walked out of the office with a pleasant and unusual sense that we have the proven ability to transform a citizen’s pain into pride. Policymakers in the MENA region would do well to recognize that how state institutions deal with citizens actually matters very much. This book is a most useful and timely place to start pondering this.