Patterns of cleavage development in the late Ottoman Empire and Khedival and British Egypt: intrasocietal and extrasocietal determinants of opposition

Abstract

The article analyzes the domestic dynamics of the political systems of the late Ottoman Empire and Khedival and British Egypt, in order to determine the causes of radicalization of the Egyptian Society of the Muslim Brothers (MB) and of the Turkish Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) as political parties in a comparative perspective. The study demonstrates that the nature of the two groups was determined by the constraints imposed by the political system upon party development. Constructed on the basis of the first predominant ideological cleavage, the political system and its actors were in turn shaped by the degree of penetration of foreign pressures into domestic politics. The first section of the article focuses on the impact of foreign pressures on the institutionalization of political cleavages, by examining modernizing reforms' trajectories and elite development. The second section analyzes the CUP and the MB as emergent externally created parties originating from the synthesis of intrasocietal and extrasocietal dimensions of the political systems in which they emerged.