The Problem with the New Social Contract

Abstract

Chapter seven studies the diluted economic and political reforms that emanated from the resilience of the effendi social contract—between the mid-1980s and the January 2011 Uprising—regardless of official state attempts to launch a new social contract. The chapter first examines the growing academic and public discourse of despair over the future of the middle class, beginning in the late 1980s. It then studies how the contours of an existing effendi social contract have shaped the partial implementation of the Economic Reform and Structural Adjustment program since the 1990s. The chapter further examines an implied exchange (or pendulum swing) in reforms between efforts at the neoliberalization of the economy and official attempts at democratization. Meanwhile, an informal economy and informal political practices tacitly filled the gap between the dissolving effendi social contract and the unfulfilled new social contract. The chapter concludes that the effendi social contract, despite its many deficiencies and the constant calls for its change, turned out to be highly stable. Economic and political reforms could not move forward as envisioned, because all sides to the existing social contract had too much to lose.