Daniela Pioppi

Playing with Fire. The Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian Leviathan

After the fall of Mubarak, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) decided to act as a stabilising force, to abandon the street and to lend democratic legitimacy to the political process designed by the army. The outcome of this strategy was that the MB was first ‘burned’ politically and then harshly repressed after having exhausted its stabilising role. The main mistakes the Brothers made were, first, to turn their back on several opportunities to spearhead the revolt by leading popular forces and, second, to keep their strategy for change gradualist and conservative, seeking compromises with parts of the former regime even though the turmoil and expectations in the country required a much bolder strategy.

Globalisation and the Restructuring of State Power in the Arab World

The dynamics of change in the Arab world today are part of a much larger global process–the neo-liberal phase of globalisation–that started in the 1980s and engendered a process of state power restructuring, both for peripheral “weak” states and core industrialised countries. Beyond national differences, the restructuring of the Arab states has implied the consolidation of neo-authoritarian political regimes characterised by fragmentation of the power structure and by an increase in informal modes of government (neo-patrimonialism, corruption), accompanied by the parallel political and economic marginalisation of large sectors of society. These less centralised and more elitist regimes are likely to be more dependent and vulnerable than their predecessors to external pressures and foreign influence.

The Öcalan affair revisited

On 12 November 1998, Abdullah Ocalan, political and military head of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), was arrested by Italian authorities upon entry into the country. The following day, the Kurdish leader filed a request for political asylum. This was the beginning of an unexpected – as well as risky and difficult – crisis, which is worth examining as an example of the workings of the Italian foreign policy decision-making process and for its implications on European-Turkish relations. The article is divided into three parts. The first deals with the arrest in Italy of Ocalan and the incident that ensued; the second assesses the Ocalan affair in the framework of European Union-Turkish relations; the third presents some conclusions.