Opening Old Bottles in Search of New Wine: On Nondemocratic Legitimacy in the Middle East

A new literature on authoritarianism that has emerged in the 2000s inquires into fields which had been ignored for a long time: the inner logic and dynamics of authoritarian rule. While the repression of political rights and civil liberties routinely is depicted as the distinctive feature of authoritarianism, this view neglects the fact that any political regime also needs to create and maintain legitimacy in order to survive over time. Gilley finds that among a range of factors that may influence legitimacy, ‘democracy and rights . . . are equal, but nonsuperordinate sources of state legitimacy.’ What, then, are nondemocratic sources of regime legitimacy? Despite its centrality to political life, legitimacy in the nondemocratic Arab world has not been studied in any encompassing manner for more than 30 years. This long neglect is in part due to a ‘lost decade’ during which a transitologist literature of ‘demo-crazy’ scholars dominated the field (see also Valbjørn and Bank, this issue). Michael Hudson’s Arab Politics until today remains the largest and most comprehensive contribution to the study of legitimacy in the Middle East. It is thus rather ‘old bottles’ which have long remained untouched in the cellars of Comparative Politics and which I take out here in search of new wine. This contribution first conceptualizes the category of ‘legitimacy’ in a way that explicitly captures nondemocratic forms of legitimacy and legitimation, and then suggests a framework for structuring the study of legitimacy along four different dimensions: the question of who