Globalization and Business Politics in Arab North Africa

Melani Cammett is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Middle East Studies Program at Brown University. She specializes in the political economy of development and the Middle East. She earned her Ph.D. in 2002 from the Department of Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley and served as an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies from 2005-6 and 2007-8. Cammett has published scholarly articles in Studies in Comparative International Development, Comparative Politics, World Development, Global Governance, and other journals. She is also completing a new book entitled Servicing Sectarianism: Welfare and Politics in Weak States, which explores how ethnic and religious parties allocate welfare goods focusing on sectarian organizations in Lebanon and other countries in the Middle East and South Asia. Her research has received support from the Smith Richardson Foundation, US Institute of Peace, Academy Scholars Program at Harvard, Social Science Research Council, American Institute for Maghrib Studies, Salomon Faculty Research Grant at Brown University, and Institute for International Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Cammett also holds an M.A.L.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (1994), received a Fulbright Fellowship in Jordan, and has consulted for development policy organizations.

Can production for global markets help business groups to mobilize collectively? Under what conditions does globalization enable the private sector to develop independent organizational bases and create effective relationships with the state? Focusing on varied Moroccan and Tunisian responses to trade liberalization in the 1990s, Melani Cammett argues that two constitutive dimensions of business-government relations shape business responses to global economic opening: the balance of power between business and the state before economic opening and the preexisting business class structure. These two dimensions combine to form different configurations of business-government relations, including "distant" and "close" linkages, leading to divergent interests and, hence, strategic behavior by industrialists. The book also extends the analysis to additional country cases, including India, Turkey, and Taiwan, and examines how different patterns of business-government relations affect processes of industrial upgrading.

The main focus of the book is whether globalization and trade liberalization enable business associations to become real representatives of business interests rather than state-controlled or otherwise ineffective organizations in developing countries. The book relies heavily on more than 200 interviews with Moroccan and Tunisian workers and employers to trace changes in business associational life after trade liberalization in the 1980s and 1990s. The core argument is that pre-economic liberalization relations between business and the state condition how business groups organize in the face of large-scale economic change.

Part I. The Framework: 1. Rethinking globalization and business politics; 2. Globalization and integration in international apparel manufacturing networks: the new politics of industrial development; Part II. The Institutional Context: 3. Business and the state in Tunisia: statist development, capital dispersion, and preemptive integration in world markets; 4. Business in the state in Morocco: business penetration of the state and the genesis of the 'fat cat'; Part III. Globalization and Institutional Change: 5. Business as usual: state-sponsored industrialization and business collective inaction in Tunisia; 6. Fat cats and self-made men: class conflict and business collective action in Morocco; 7. Globalization, business politics, and industrial policy in developing countries.