ABSTRACT
Warum, dachte ich, sinkt wohl das Gewölbe nicht ein, da es doch keine Stütze hat? Es steht, antwortete ich, weil alle Steine auf einmal einstürzen wollen. [Why, I asked myself, does this arch not collapse, since after all it has no support? It remains standing, I answered, because all the stones tend to collapse at the same time.]
(Kleist 1982)
This study deals with elite dynamics and elite change in Algeria and how these interact with political system transformation. Arab elites were a research topic much en vogue from the 1960s to the early 1980s in the context of the emergence of newly independent Arab states in the post-colonial era. Due to the lack of elite change in these states for decades – leaders, such as King Hussein of Jordan, stayed in power for up to forty years – and the accompanying continuity in the political systems, studies of Arab elites became rare in the 1980s. Elites in the Arab world did not come back into focus until the 1990s.1 This renewed attention had two main reasons. First, the numerous transitions to democracy in Latin America and in former Eastern European socialist countries caused observers to ask why Arab regimes and their elites, in contrast, remained so resistant to democratic change. Second, with several of the Arab incumbent prime decision-makers passing away in the late 1990s, researchers wondered what these changes implied for the prospects of political system transformation in Arab countries. This study can thus be situated in the larger context of more recent studies on elite change and system transformation in the Arab world.
