by Fatema Mernissi

I no longer share the predictions of upheaval and chaos in the Arab world for the simple reason that they do not take into account a great asset: its untapped "social capital" or reserves of traditional solidarity. In fact, I have come to realize that these resources are one of the main factors behind the extraordinary dynamism of civil society and the remarkable achievements of small NGOs (non-governmental organizations) that we are witnessing in many parts of the Arab world. This is particularly clear in Egypt, Jordan and Morocco where the effects of structural adjustment have limited the state’s role — thus creating an opportunity for citizens’ initiative — in vital sectors such as water, sanitation, health and education.

As I argue in my book, Les Ait DŽbrouille du Haut Atlas, social capital is a form of traditional community solidarity in which groups of people can pursue their individual self-interest by devoting themselves to community projects. This is the secret of the successful planning and implementation of electrification and water projects in 45 Berber villages in the High Atlas Mountains, a remote and mostly inaccessible section of southern Morocco. Through the establishment of village NGOs, these projects were initiated and carried out by the villagers themselves, and resulted in a substantial improvement in their living conditions and income potential. In fact, where the government had difficulty providing services, these village NGOs managed to build needed infrastructure in a short period at a competitive cost.

The story of the Berber villages is neither unique nor new. For centuries, one could be fined in such villages for dumping garbage beside a palm tree or for wasting water. Why would villagers show social responsibility by paying their fines while tax evasion is widespread in cities such as Casablanca? The answer may lie in the story of these Berber Village Associations, founded by the people of a poor Berber village in the High Atlas Mountains. By creating their own electricity, water and other projects, these villagers demonstrated the enormous potential of self-empowerment by the poor. How did the villagers organize themselves? What social networks were they able to draw from? What new ones did they create?

In the Berber High Atlas, there is a tradition of strong individual involvement in community projects. This commitment is what Robert Putnam, Director of the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, defines as social capital. According to Putnam, social capital refers to "features of social organization, such as networks, norms and social trust, that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit." Cooperation and coordination is much easier in a community where people trust each other. "Trust," concludes Putnam, "is an essential component of social capital."

A group that can mobilize readily for a common objective and sustain the effort has an asset in the economic sense of the term. In the words of James Coleman, a pioneer in social capital identification, social capital is simply defined as "people’s ability to cooperate, either as a group or part of an organization, in order to carry out projects that are in the common interests." He explains that "like other forms of capital, social capital is productive, making possible the achievement of certain ends that would not be attainable in its absence." For instance, a group whose members manifest trustworthiness and place extensive trust in one another will be able to accomplish much more than a comparable group lacking trustworthiness and trust. An illustration is provided by a farming community in which people assist and lend implements to each other and, as a result, are more successful than another community where people are suspicious of each other and pursue their individual objectives.

Francis Fukuyama, Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University, believes that this social capital, this group tradition of subordinating individual interest to the collective interest, is the secret behind the original American experience and the post-war German and Japanese miracles. Fukuyama points out that "the United States, like Japan and Germany have been, historically speaking, group-oriented societies with very strong trust potential, even though the Americans see themselves as rugged individualists." He explains that "the decline of trust and sociability in the United States is also evident in any number of changes in American society: the rise of violent crime and civil litigation, the breakdown of family structure, the decline of a wide range of intermediate structures such as neighborhoods, churches, unions, clubs, and charities, and the general sense among Americans of a lack of shared values and community with those around them." He also makes clear that "one of the most important lessons we can learn from an examination of economic life is that a nation’s well-being, as well as its ability to compete, is conditioned by a single, pervasive cultural characteristic: the level of trust inherent in the society." In other words, social capital plays a key role in international competitiveness; only those nations that have traditions of cooperation and solidarity will prevail in the next century.

If, as Fukuyama states, social capital is found where community tradition is deeply rooted in history, then the region of the High Atlas matches this profile. There, the tradition of the jema’a, or assembly, has enabled communities to mobilize and modernize through new cooperative approaches such as those embodied in NGOs. The jema’a is a treasure of traditional solidarity which previous generations have passed on to present day Moroccans. It meets and elects a representative, the moqadden, who is responsible for activities essential for the community’s survival. The moqadden invites villagers to perform all necessary tasks to meet the challenges posed to the village by a geographically hostile environment, including periodic repairs and cleaning of irrigation basins and channels, locust control, and the provision of hospitality for travelers. This approach enabled the High Atlas inhabitants to survive in a harsh environment, beginning with the basic need to store water. To that effect, they developed one of the most ingenious water storage systems, which includes carving terraces in the rock and constructing connecting irrigation basins and channels. In addition, the system provided for maintenance and fair water distribution arrangements.

All this called for an enormous investment on the part of the community, and fostered the development of the famous Berber democracy, whose elected leaders apply a complicated—and sometimes extremely delicate — system of supervision. The community produces its own legislation — in the form of unwritten laws — elects its leaders through an elected assembly, and requires them to justify their activities. Performing the leaders’ roles call for initiative and honesty. Trust, thus, emerges as a major strategic development factor in this region, where the problematic management of water has imprinted on people’s minds — for thousands of years — the need to harmonize the interests of the individual with those of the community. It is this dimension of social capital to which I would like to draw your attention: the capacity of group members to provide mutual support and cooperate to successfully complete a project. It is certainly one of the most widespread traditions in Morocco, found in both rural and urban areas. Could social capital be a reason for the success of rural NGOs in the south and High Atlas region?

In 1985, a small group of southern Moroccan immigrants in France were laid off and encouraged to return to their home country. The French authorities quickly realized that the immigrants were in no hurry to leave. From the immigrants’ perspective, it was difficult to leave a modern French town to return to their home villages, which lacked electricity and potable water. Supported by their French friends, the Moroccans established a number of NGOs, under the umbrella of the Association Migrations et Developpement (AMD), to ensure their successful re-integration into their villages by using their own skills and personal finances to initiate community projects in them.

The creation of these village NGOs re-energized the traditional solidarity of rural communities. One notable example is the village of Ait Iktel, which is one of the main villages of the Abadou rural community, situated in the High Atlas, approximately 100 km from the city of Marrakech. The village population consists of 800 living in 121 households. For the last thirty years, their economic mainstay has been the flow of remittances from its numerous emigrant workers. Each household can claim at least one member working either abroad or in other (urban) regions of Morocco. Agriculture, their traditional source of income, remains dependent on weather conditions. The methods employed and implements used are antiquated: Harvesting is a manual task, and the hand plow is universal.

The Ait Iktel Village Association came into being in the late eighties. All the inhabitants of the village — old and young, men and women — are members. Its executive committee, which consists mainly of young people, works in conjunction with the jema’a. The Association has initiated various project in health, water supply, electrification, road building and literacy training. Without exception, these projects have been carried out with the participation of the population, which becomes the owner of the assets created, and manages them through the Association. For instance, in the case of the electric power network, consumers covered 40 percent of the operation’s total cost of DH 750,000, with the remaining 60 percent contributed by the AMD. Each household pays an average of DH 25 per month for service. In addition to setting power tariffs, association members decide on management rules and contribute labor for the maintenance of facilities. During my visit to the village, an Association member pulled out an electric bill from his choukara (traditional purse). It showed the price for water and electric consumption, the cost of equipment depreciation and network maintenance. He explained that if each villager did not contribute to the maintenance of the facilities, the repairs would potentially cost them more.

For the Ait Iktel Village Association, the involvement of the jema’a represents a guarantee of successful management of the projects launched. But it is also much more. The jema’a’s involvement ensures that the introduction of modern technology inevitably brought about by each project does not affect in any significant way the traditional patterns of life. Overall, for a researcher on a brief visit, the experience of the Ait Iktel Village Association was a modern fable. There, trust prevails among people who come from very different places and have varied interests. And everyone works together and learns to respect each other — that is, farmers who never left the village, emigrants who have returned, government officials, university graduates and international aid representatives.

Are these initiatives sustainable? The Association Migrations et Developpement is now ten years old. It has come a long way from its initial objective of helping with the repatriation of immigrants laid off in 1985, to initiating local development projects in home villages. To date, forty new electricity grids and numerous reservoirs for potable water and irrigation have been built. The socio-economic fabric of these communities has been further reinvigorated by the development of new enterprises — such as women’s artisan activities — as well as new initiatives in education and health. Not only did the parent association create a true network of forty NGOs that have joined together in a federation, but Moroccans living in Casablanca and Rabat have established a local network with linkages to numerous associations which exchange information. The idea is simple: Motivate urban Moroccans with rural roots to contribute membership dues to the AMD and use these funds to invest in village facilities.

In fact, the AMD is responsible for the phenomenal growth of rural NGOs in southern Morocco and the High Atlas, two regions that account for a substantial number of former emigrants. In addition, it has encouraged other Moroccans to create NGOs, even in areas that have few relocated emigrants. In 1994, these efforts led to the creation of the Association Migrations et Developpement Locale (AMD-L), a local federation which is essentially a network of rural NGOs launched by big-city Moroccans who had emigrated from rural areas. As one of the founders of the Association explained, the term emigrant no longer applies only to those who have left the High Atlas to live in France. It also encompasses those who have migrated within the country. This encourages wage earners in big cities to invest in their home villages.

Can Morocco’s experience be replicated elsewhere? What do the villagers identify as key elements of their success? First, local participation and the involvement of beneficiaries is a critical factor. It must begin at the planning stage by informing all those involved in the project and ensuring their participation in all aspects of the plan, and thus ultimately reducing costs. Therefore, village NGOs should be encouraged, not because they are automatically democratic — they have many problems as will be discussed below — but because unlike the large, centralized government, they have the virtue of shortening the distance between decisionmakers and beneficiaries. Today, this distance translates into tremendous costs for a variety of reasons: inconsistencies between projects and the needs of beneficiaries, indifference on the part of users, lack of transparency in decisionmaking, embezzlement of funds, a slow process of evaluation and readjustment, etc.

Second, the development of electric power and potable water is not an end in itself, but lays the foundation for the joint involvement of emigrants and villagers. By broadening the term emigrant from those who have left the High Atlas to live in France to include those who have migrated within the country, the local villages received additional technical expertise and financial support. Finally, investing in civil society — with strong NGO and local participation in the management of local affairs — will create social, economic and political stability, and entice energetic and knowledgeable people back to their home villages.

Not all grassroots associations are as democratic and tidy as the Ait Iktel Village Association. In many cases, factions of every stripe make use of associations for their own purposes. While some analysts see the associational movement in Arab countries as a major factor for a stronger civil society, others question the ability of today’s NGOs to break with authoritarian practices and produce the new, democratic culture needed to compete with other nations. According to Ghamen Bibi, the co-founder and coordinator of the Arab Resource Collective, to infer that the proliferation of NGOs in the Arab world is an indicator of democratization is to ignore the fact that in the Arab and Berber traditions group solidarity has always had a tribal and sectarian flavor with religious, ethnic or gender-based restrictions. He believes that the reasons behind the increasing number of Arab NGOs includes the frustration of the middle classes in the face of the rigors imposed by the dynamics of globalization and privatization, which they are barely surviving, and the inability of a public sector weakened by that same dynamics to meet their economic and social needs.

Bibi argues that "while village NGOs may provide various social services, it can hardly be said that they contribute to a democratization of attitudes." How many Arab NGOs transcend the boundaries of political parties and sects? Are they able to embrace and involve all community members and share information and resources? To measure progress towards democracy, Bidi proposes certain criteria: Modern NGOs should be open membership organizations that are based on fundamental principles of participation, rotation of responsibility, accountability, transparency, internal dialogue, etc. But should the line be drawn between new and traditional organizational forms of support within communities? The answer lies in the examination of the seemingly impassable barrier between "tribal democracy" — whether Arab or Berber — and Western democracy.

Western democracy proclaims not only the principles of participatory decisionmaking — which is found in tribal traditions — but also the universal and inalienable rights of every person. In traditional society, not everyone has the right to participate: Strangers and women are excluded from the Berber jema’a, because participation is not an individual right but a tribal member right. A strongman can come along and seize all power in the name of the group. Describing these traits, Abdallah Laroui points out that "the celebrated ‘freedom’ of the Berbers can hardly be found anywhere but in books. The grand ca•ds, amghars, marabouts, agurrams and mugaddams wield the kind of power over individuals that is no less suffocating than that of the sultans." The only aspect of Berber democracy that is modern is its apparent secularism. Power resides in the person who represents the group, and therein lies the seemingly unbreachable gulf between the traditional solidarity systems and western democracy.

What Laroui calls "Berber democracy" could just as well be called "Arab democracy" — the tribal democracy which Ibn Khaldun brilliantly described in the 14th century with the concept of a�abiya or "esprit de corps." According to Khaldun, the success of Islam as a world power was due to a�abiya. When that was shattered as a result of internal divisions, the Arabs lost their grip on power. The only world power that subsequently arose was the West, precisely because it replaced allegiance to the clan with a model based on individual rights. The a�abiya, like the solidarity of the Berber jema’a, is a form of social capital that must be linked with modern social institutions if it is to be effective as a development strategy tool. This is precisely what the Japanese have done with the "Keiretsu," their traditional form of clan solidarity, even though its effectiveness is being increasingly questioned.

Why did the Japanese not become the driving force behind a formidable Asian power that would have included China, Korea, Indonesia, etc.? Why, despite their technological advantage, did the Japanese remain a nation apart, one that inspired distrust among its neighbors? One of the main reasons is the nature of the Keiretsu, which in many ways is similar to the Arab a�abiya. The solidarity attained by the Keiretsu only applied to the Japanese themselves: It excluded all others and inhibited any attempt to promote a democratic federation of nations. The success of the Japanese economy was based on the consensus that "what is good for Toyota is good for Japan." Each firm was committed to guaranteeing its workers "jobs for life," and companies pulled together in a network to promote and defend the interests of Japan first. In contrast, the Western economies readily close factories in their own countries and do not hesitate to open them in developing countries where labor is cheaper. In Japan, the Keirestu forbade this kind of behavior.

The dynamics of globalization are forcing the Japanese to re-examine the Keiretsu, which until recently stood in the way of any broader regional view. For example, Japanese companies are beginning to close more plants at home and transfer their activities to less developed countries. Japanese firms have some 500,000 jobs in other countries in Asia, while unemployment is steadily rising in Japan. All this was illustrated in a recent statement from the president of the Kaidanren, the most powerful business association in Japan, which included a quote to the effect that the Japanese social and economic systems have become inefficient and irrelevant.

The Japanese example shows that, above all, modernity is about motion and change. Modernity also means that there is a choice among many alternatives and possibilities. Arabs and Berbers are free to rethink their entire heritage. They must take a serious look at their existing social capital and make it relevant for the rapid changes shaping the countries in the region today. In other words, the solidarity of the jema’a will never have any modern value unless it is integrated into economic and social strategies at the national, maghrebian, Mediterranean, and international level. This is the challenge for the Mediterranean countries as the face the 21st century: to escape from tribal identities and build new ones based on respect for universal rights.

The Japanese Keiretsu and Berber jema’a also illustrate the positive and negative aspects of tribal solidarity, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of the social capital that it engenders. But to fully understand the limitations of tribalism, the concept of the jema’a must be explored more deeply. If democracy is defined as the right of all individuals to participate in the decisionmaking process, then the Berber jema’a does not fully meet this definition, as participation is limited to tribal members. Berber tribal life can be described as democratic only in a structural sense, not in an ideological sense. Rather than being based on a set of theoretical principles, it is a "dŽmocratie vŽcue" (a lived democracy), in the words of Pierre Bourdieu. It does not preach or practice the inalienable right of individuals to political participation. On the contrary, it explicitly and formally — not just de facto — excludes the poor and the weak from the political process. Tribal practice is also fully compatible with the exclusion from citizenship of people on grounds of profession, religion or skin color.

In the case of women, they were automatically excluded from the political process on the grounds that they did not bear arms, and therefore were prevented from participating in the Jihad (holy war). Their exclusion was also justified by the fact that, according to the Islamic Shari’a (laws), "a woman can neither be a prophet nor a sultan nor a Qadi, nor can she bear witness." The pervasiveness of this tradition and its extreme manifestations in modern society is clearly illustrated by the findings of a recent survey conducted by the Legal and Psychological Aid Center for Battered Women in Casablanca. They showed that most Moroccan men will not help a battered woman in the street because they believe that husbands have the right to disfigure their wives. A community that operates under the belief that it is acceptable to perpetrate violence on a group of people and exclude from it from legal and social protection is undeniably a community that does not believe in the universality of rights.

These exclusions were, to be sure, somewhat offset by legal mechanisms that ensured protection of women and religious minorities. For instance, women were represented by their husbands, and other minorities had the status of dhimmi (protected persons). However, while protective systems in traditional societies may indeed have provided — and still provide — a certain measure of redress for the exclusionary rule, they do not come close to meeting the principle that characterizes western democracy: the universality of rights. This again illustrates the fundamental difference, the insurmountable chasm that exists between the principle of universality of rights in western democracy — where in theory nothing justifies stripping an individual of his/her political rights — and "traditional" democracy, whether it is the Moslem Shari’a (Islamic law) or the Beber Urf (customary law) — where, as mentioned above, the exclusion of certain individuals from the political process is acceptable.

Fukuyama points out that the strength of the West lies in the idea of universal human rights, because it gives value to the thinking individual, the responsible citizen. He argues that the "chief psychological imperative underlying democracy is the individual’s desire for universal and equal recognition. By contrast, authoritarian regimes, whether from the right or from the left, are nothing but versions of the traditional master-slave relationship in which the dignity of the masters (the "ruling elite", the "vanguard party", etc.) is recognized, whereas that of the ordinary citizens is not. The desire for recognition is an entirely non-economic source of motivation that can take a wide variety of forms, including its use as a rationale for non-democratic alternatives such as theocracy or aggressive nationalism. But only liberal (western) democracy can rationally satisfy the human yearn for recognition — through the granting of elementary rights of citizenship on a universal and equal basis."

The intolerance and political violence that are tearing the Arab world apart are exercised by men — whether in government or in the opposition — who think that they alone posses the truth. Their roots are to be found in the absence of recognition of conflict as the very basis of society. Ralf Dahrrendorf points out that in western democracy, only one thing is certain: no one has a monopoly on the truth. He asserts that the "starting point of our reflection in the realm of politics is not uncertainty about truth but uncertainty about goodness or justice. The underlying assumption is that since no one knows or can know what form of social order is ultimately satisfactory and just, it follows that such social order can only be reached so long as the conflict between its different conceptions is kept alive — uncertainty requires competition, social and political conflict." The significance of the institutions of representative democracy is thus rooted in the principle of uncertainty.

These principles — namely the universality of rights, and conflict as the basis of the political process — have never been taught seriously and systematically in the Arab countries’ educational institutions, or practiced as fundamental tenets in their political institutions. But despite the absence in the Arab world of a teaching tradition centered around the principles of freedom of expression, the right to a divergent opinion, and dialogue as the main means of political intercourse, millions of citizens, tired of oppression and violence, are ready to change their mindset and way of life. This is why they are turning in increasing numbers to NGOs, in an effort to overcome sectarianism and intolerance. The example of the Ait Iktel village illustrates the strong desire for democracy and responsible citizenship that has become an aspiration of the poorest and most marginalized groups in Morocco.

The fundamental issues that will continue to confront the Arab countries relate to the ability of their citizens to learn to have confidence in each other and develop their social capital while modernizing it, strengthen group solidarity while cultivating respect for individual differences, and build a strong civil society as the only barrier against violence and turmoil.