Blackwell Reference Online

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Do parties and unions matter in the Middle East? Earlier modernization theory inspired literature took parties seriously: thus, according to Halpern, once traditional legitimacy erodes, leaders find that only parties can bind them to the masses in an organized way for a common political aim. For Huntington, the political party was the single most important key to political modernization, that is, to the institutionalization of political participation. Party case studies proliferated. Deeb traced the history of one of the most successful independence parties, the Wafd. Several writers analysed ruling single parties, ‘the modern form of authoritarianism’. Khoury traced the development of such parties as the outcome of revolutionary generations while several seminal studies, notably of the Neo-Destour in Tunisia and the ASU in Egypt, identified the functions that they performed. At the same time, Marxist-inspired literature traced the rise of class conflict between capital and worker that provided the conditions of unionization and class-based parties. Yet, thereafter, the role of parties, unions and class politics was seemingly marginalized in both the actual Middle East and the scholarly literature on it (except for writings on Turkey and Israel). It is a fact that the region, with a disproportionate number of no-party, one-party or dominant-party states, seems to suffer from ... log in or subscribe to read full text