Libyan foreign policy today is strongly influenced by forces originating in the past. The early history of Libya is one of colonialism and neocolonialism under the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, and Turks. Several centuries of Ottoman rule were followed by three decades of Italian occupation and nearly a decade of French and British occupation. The Italian domination of Libya was especially traumatic, as it was marked by two bloody wars followed by a decade of exploitation that only ended with the defeat of Italy in World War II. Italian policy included the seizure of choice lands together with the dislocation of nomads and peasants. Independence finally came in 1951, not because of internal action although there was discontent, but because it suited the strategic purposes of the Western powers. Even then, the boundaries of the new state were defined by the partition lines of the remaining imperialist powers in North Africa, the United Kingdom in Egypt and France in Algeria and Tunisia.
Located on the north central coast of Africa, modern-day Libya comprises the former provinces of Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, and the Fezzan. It is bordered on the east by Egypt and the Sudan, on the west by Tunisia and Algeria, and on the south by the republics of Niger and Chad.1 Libya’s long frontier with Egypt has been especially influential. In fact, Libya is sometimes described as Egypt without the Nile. Its proximity to one of the Arab world’s traditional leaders has increased its visibility on the world stage and given its external relations an importance they would not otherwise have had. The Mediterranean Sea borders Libya on the north, providing it with over 1,100 miles (1,775 kilometers) of shoreline. Its closeness to the oil markets of Europe gives Libya a distinct marketing advantage over other Middle East oil-producing states.2
With an area of 680,000 square miles (1,760,000 square kilometers), Libya is both the fourth-largest country in Africa and the fourth-largest in the Arab world. One-quarter the size of continental United States, it is larger than the combined areas of France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. Libya contains three climatological-geographic zones. The Mediterranean littoral is the most heavily populated and the most suitable for agriculture, but it is also the smallest, only 3 percent of the total. Some 6 percent is semidesert chiefly suitable for grazing; the remaining 90 percent is a desert zone containing a few fertile oases. An impression of the arid nature of Libya is conveyed by the fact that no stream in the entire country has a permanent flow. To correct a popular misconception, less than 20 percent of the desert area of Libya is covered by sand dunes. A much greater part is occupied by rocky and gravel plain.3
Libya rests on the periphery of three worlds—Arab, African, and Mediterranean. This location has given it some flexibility as to where it will play a role as well as creating uncertainty as to exactly where it belongs. For most of its history, Libya has lacked the human and material resources to impact simultaneously on all three areas. Consequently, the focus of its diplomacy has oscillated from one world to the other depending on where opportunities—or obstacles—were greatest.
Relative to the Arab world, Libya straddles the Maghrib (western Islamic world) and the Mashriq (eastern Islamic world). This political division is reflected in the physical split of the nation’s two major provinces by the Gulf of Sirte and the great Sirte Desert. Before independence, Cyrenaica tended to look eastward toward Egypt, while the focus of Tripolitania was westward toward Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Southern Libya extends well into the Sahara and shares selected socioeconomic features with the bordering African countries of the Sahel. To a degree, the Fezzan region of Libya has a natural role in Saharan affairs which accounts in part for Libya’s involvement in recent decades in the politics of central and eastern Africa.4
Demography has compounded the limits that geography imposed on the Libyan state. For a large and ambitious country like Libya, a population of approximately five million citizens concentrated in a few detached urban centers was debilitating. Compared to Egypt, for example, Libya has 75 percent more territory but only some 7 percent as many people. Consequently, it has proved difficult for the Libyan government to meet its development targets and build the military force it feels necessary to promote the national interest. The nation’s limited demographic resources underlay a number of controversial security policies over the last few decades, including universal conscription and the recruitment of mercenaries into the so-called Islamic Legion.
The Libyan government’s dependence on imported labor, especially after the discovery in 1959 of significant deposits of petroleum, reversed regional labor practices long characterized by a substantial emigration of Libyan workers to Egypt and Tunisia. Whereas there were only 17,000 expatriate workers in Libya in 1964, the total had risen to 223,000 in 1975 and 562,000 by 1983, representing approximately half the total work force. And official figures probably underestimated the size of the foreign work force because they did not take into account illegal and undocumented migration. But even though foreigners accounted for around 20 percent of the Libyan population in 1983, it should be noted that the situation in Libya was still very different from that in the Gulf States, where foreigners outnumbered nationals. One of the major international issues related to the expatriate work force has been the problem Libya faced in maintaining politically acceptable host countries. For example, large-scale repatriations of both Tunisian and Egyptian workers occurred in the 1970s as the result of political crises between their governments and Libya. There was also the question of the political vulnerability of the groups who migrated to Libya, since the Libyan government has often tried to organize and indoctrinate its expatriate work force.5
On the other hand, the social significance of the presence of such a large alien work force has appeared to be minimal. Expatriate workers have generally adjusted relatively well to the austere living conditions of revolutionary Libya, while the Libyan population has mostly remained detached from these workers. The periodical crises that plagued the Libyan economy over the last two decades have been the cause of occasional adjustments in the size of the foreign work force. The dramatic fall in oil prices after 1981 sharply reduced government revenues, resulting in the expulsion in the summer of 1985 of tens of thousands of expatriate workers, including large numbers of Egyptians and Tunisians. In late 1995, the Libyan government requested permission from the United Nations to use aircraft to repatriate more than a million African workers. The government cited the poor state of the economy in support of its request, but some observers also viewed the policy as a form of protest against the UN sanctions in place at the time.6
The problem of underpopulation was aggravated by the generally low educational attainment of the Libyan labor force. Over 90 percent of the population was illiterate in 1952, and the illiteracy rate was still above 60 percent as recently as 1973. Consequently, it should come as no surprise that both the monarchy and the revolutionary government emphasized educational development. Broadening the educational policies of the monarchy, the revolutionary government achieved significant advances in the number of educational facilities and the size of the student body. The impact of the revolution on the quality of education was more difficult to assess. Education in revolutionary Libya was not a goal in itself but a means to create a new kind of citizen. The Libyan government announced a new round of educational reforms in mid-1992, for example, which constituted yet another redefinition of the role education should play in Libya. The new law defined the role of universities to be the development of citizens with specialized scientific training and the ideological convictions necessary to perform their obligations to the Arab nation and the jamahiriya. University students were described in the reforms as the vanguard in the awakening of Arab and Islamic civilization.7
At the outset of the independence era, Libya was judged by the World Bank to be one of the least developed nations in the world. Its capacity to generate foreign exchange earnings was so limited that a significant contribution came from the export of esparto grass, used in the manufacture of cordage, paper, and shoes, as well as the scrap metal collected from disabled World War II armored vehicles. Eighty percent of the population were engaged in agriculture and animal husbandry; however, insufficient rainfall, poor soil, and limited usable groundwater restricted most agriculture to dry farming. Libya was aptly referred to as the desert kingdom.8
The discovery of petroleum in commercially viable quantities at the end of the decade modified the Libyan economy quickly and drastically. A number of international oil companies arrived in Libya after 1955 and began investing substantial amounts of capital in oil exploration. In spring 1959, Esso Standard Libya Incorporated, an affiliate of Standard Oil of New Jersey, made the first major oil strike. Oil production at the Zelten oil field increased almost twenty-three-fold in 1961-64, and the production of associated natural gas increased nearly twenty-four-fold. By 1966 Libya was exporting 1.5 million barrels of oil a day. Since the mid-1960s, petroleum sales have accounted for upward of 99 percent of annual export earnings and have never dropped below 90 percent. In this sense, Libya can be considered a distributive state, as opposed to a production state, in that its income is derived from the sale of a commodity as opposed to extracting taxes from the population. At current levels of production, Libya’s estimated oil reserves are expected to last well into the twenty-first century.9
Exploding oil revenues affected Libya’s external relations in a number of significant ways. The new income freed the monarchy from its former dependence on foreign base revenues and thus made possible new policies that were inconceivable less than a decade earlier. Oil revenues also increased Libya’s political influence beyond its frontiers by permitting it to dispense aid to less fortunate neighbors and to rebuild and rearm its armed forces. Finally, Libya’s new status as an oil-producing state increased and diversified its political relations with other countries and made those relations more important. The early impact of oil on Libya’s external intercourse can be easily demonstrated by comparing the number of countries that purchased Libyan crude oil in 1961 (six) to the number in 1971 (twenty-two).10
A number of different forces, including the imposition of economic sanctions by the United States and the United Nations, falling demand, OPEC quotas, and aging fields, affected Libyan oil production in the 1990s. Only a few new oilfields were put into production after the mid-1970s, and the Libyan government did not issue detailed field reserve or production figures for them. Despite these difficulties, oil production in 1990 was estimated at 1.372 million barrels a day, the highest output since 1980. Annual production remained between 1.361 million and 1.483 million barrels daily for the remainder of the decade. In fact, the Libyan oil industry became in some ways more robust because of the economic sanctions imposed. The National Oil Company took considerable, and justifiable, pride in being a survivor, in keeping the oilfields abandoned by the Americans in 1986 under production, and in finding secure markets for its exports. The sanctions also helped cement stronger links, both upstream and downstream, with European companies. From this perspective, the ability of the Qaddafi regime to maintain production at a relatively high level throughout the decade represented something of an achievement, albeit one the government chose not to publicize. Instead, it emphasized the damage to the economy done by the sanctions.11
Islam penetrated North Africa as a result of the Arab conquest in about A.D. 642-643. Thereafter, the North African shore, especially Libya, assumed a distinct Arab-Islamic character. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Muhammad Bin Ali al-Sanusi founded the influential Sanusi order in Cyrenaica. Born in Algeria in 1787, al-Sanusi spent his early life in the Maghrib studying in and around his home town of Mustaghanim. He then moved in 1809 to Fez in Morocco, the intellectual capital of the Maghrib and one of the great centers of learning in the Islamic world. Accounts of his subsequent movements are imprecise; however, he first traveled to the Hijaz after 1815 and later returned for an extended period, following an interlude in Egypt around 1826. Returning to the Maghrib around 1840, al-Sanusi founded his first lodge at al-Bayda in Cyrenaica in 1841.12
Al-Sanusi was a Sufi, seeing this as the basis for his religious experience, as well as a prolific and renowned scholar and author of some fifty books, eight of which have survived together with a collection of prayers, a poem, and other fragments. His interests and activities centered on the religious, scholarly world as opposed to the temporal, political realm. He became one of the most influential Islamic leaders of nineteenth-century North Africa. Creating an organization that spread over most of the central Sahara and desert edge, he had a profound and lasting impact on the nomadic society of what is today called Libya.13
Centered in Cyrenaica, the Sanusiya became well established in the Fezzan but never achieved the widespread following in Tripolitania that they had in eastern and southern Libya. More a religious than a political movement, the Sanusiya aimed at purifying Islam and educating the Libyan people in Islamic principles. By the late 1920s, there were 146 Sanusi lodges scattered throughout North Africa and the Middle East, with one-third of them located in Cyrenaica. Administered by the Sanusi brothers or ikhwan, the Sanusi lodges constituted the socioeconomic and administrative structure of the order and formed the core of a de facto state.14
When the Italians invaded Libya in 1911-12, the Libyans considered it an attack against Islam; consequently, it was religious zeal rather than nationalism in the European sense that provided the motivation to resist Italian occupation. Sidi Umar al-Mukhtar, born of the Minifa tribe and educated in Sanusi schools at Janzur and Giarabub, was an active and highly effective guerrilla leader after 1923 and a major hero of the Cyrenaican resistance movement. With his capture and execution in 1931, effective Libyan resistance to Italian colonization ended. In the wake of the Italian occupation of Cyrenaica, the Sanusi order largely ceased to exist as a religious, political, or social organization in the territories occupied by French and Italian colonial forces. Nevertheless, Islam, as epitomized by the Sanusi brotherhood, gave continuity and legitimacy to the hereditary monarchy established in 1951. Muhammad Idris al-Mahdi al-Sanusi, the grandson of Muhammad Bin Ali al-Sanusi, was the first head of state of the independent United Kingdom of Libya, formed under the auspices of the United Nations. The role of religion as a legitimizing force steadily declined in the following two decades for a number of reasons including increased education and urbanization.15
The strong role of religion in Libya’s traditional Islamic society remains an important influence on government policies. Conservative attitudes dominate, and people’s values and behavior are very much a function of their religious background and attachment. The resistance wars were motivated by the demands of the true faith as part of national expression and emancipation, and religion was also central to the Arab League’s efforts to motivate the Libyan populace to demand independence from the Commission of Investigation that visited the country in 1948. In short, Islam continues to play a most influential role in determining the direction and content of public policy as well as being a political symbol of great importance in controlling and mobilizing the masses.16