CRACKED CAULDRONS: THE FAILURE OF STATES AND THE RISE OF NEW NARRATIVES IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Tamim al-Barghouti

IN THE ARAB MIDDLE EAST, colonially created modern nation-states have failed in performing their most basic functions, the Hobbesian imperatives for which humans invented states in the first place, preventing civil war or foreign invasion, let alone fostering economic development, social welfare or human rights. In the past few decades, their resounding failure has led to the emergence of new forms of political organisation, based on sub-state and supra-state identities where narratives are replacing structures, networks are replacing hierarchical pyramids, conviction is replacing obedience, improvisation from the peripheries is replacing central planning, and ideas, for better or for worse, are replacing leaders.

This fading away of the colonially created modern Arab nation-state, and its replacement with ethnic, religious and ideological identities, is a process that can express itself in terms of peaceful democratic uprisings, as in Egypt and Tunisia, or in sectarian or tribal civil wars, as in Libya and Syria. The likelihood of civil war increases if the concerned Arab society is divided along ethnic or sectarian lines and if there are regional and international interests supporting both sides of such divides. Yet these are wars of attrition in which no one party can claim definite victory. Eventually, after civil wars exhaust their parties, the political drive to unite divided societies will enhance the calls to face the historical common enemy, hence recreating a unifying discourse/narrative/identity. Therefore, one can safely argue that, if no peaceful resolution is found to the Arab–Israeli conflict, within the coming two decades a major war between Israel and an array of Middle Eastern entities, state and non-state actors alike, is likely to take place.

Modern Arab states failed on their own terms; they did not reach the benchmarks they set for themselves. Regime after regime, leader after leader, ruling party after ruling party, claimed that they had to sacrifice democracy for economic progress, individual human rights for collective independence, and political change for peace and stability, yet they ended up without stability, peace or independence, instead wallowing in foreign domination, domestic despotism, civil war, poverty, underdevelopment and a painful loss of dignity at all levels of human existence. The image of the mighty military dictator waving to the cheering crowds has become nothing more than a real-life caricature seen by the whole world except by the dictator himself. The dictator’s confident sunglasses, his exuberant brass medals and the headgear that expresses his identity crisis as it varies from the traditional keffiyeh to the European hat to the military peaked cap adorned with gold no longer conjure up the intended awe. Instead, they remind the spectators of sixty years of military defeats against Israel, of the hundreds of thousands of infants who died during the American twelve-year-siege and subsequent occupation of Iraq, of the Lebanese, the Syrian, the Algerian, the Sudanese and the Yemeni civil wars, of ragged beggars in the streets of Egypt and the bloodstained walls in Egyptian torture chambers.

This failure of the modern Arab states is structural. It is my argument that the reasons for such failure lie in their colonial origin. It is much less costly for an invading power to control a colonised territory through the collaboration of a group of natives than to control it directly. To perform this duty, this native elite must have two qualities: legitimacy among their own people and the desire to collaborate with the foreign colonial power. So native leaders must be national heroes for their treason to be of any value. If they lacked legitimacy, they would have to rely on sheer force, just like the foreign colonial invaders, thus losing their comparative advantage; if they lacked the will to collaborate, there would be no point in employing them to secure colonial interests. The native elite running the colonially created state thus finds itself in a predicament: it has to acquire domestic legitimacy by opposing the colonial power and has to achieve international recognition by collaborating with that power. To solve this contradiction, the native elite commits itself to securing colonial interests with native hands; the international treaties documenting such commitments then constitute the legal basis for independence. Thus dependence becomes the precondition for independence and servitude the precondition for sovereignty.

This predicament causes the Arab ruling elites to adopt two contradictory discourses: one directed at the domestic audience promising real independence, the liberation of Palestine, Arab and/or Islamic unity, and breaking away from Western domination – in other words changing the status quo – and one directed at the international community, promising peace and stability in the region, with a steady flow of gas, oil and other raw materials – that is, preserving the status quo. It is obvious how any attempt to fulfil either one of the two promises renders impossible the fulfilment of the other.

Therefore, throughout most of the twentieth century, modern Arab states were seen as vassal states of the superpower of their day, whether this was Great Britain and France in the first half of the twentieth century or the United States in the second half. The Cold War provided an illusion of independence, as superpower rivalry provided Third World countries with some breathing space. Socialism also presented the intellectual Arab elites with a form of modernity that was seemingly anti-colonial. Hence Arab communist and socialist parties could oscillate between arguing that modern Arab nation-states were colonial cages to be destroyed and arguing that these same states could be temporarily considered as vehicles of modernisation and progress until they were dissolved in a larger pan-Arab entity.

After the Cold War, however, this breathing space vanished. During the Gulf War of 1990–91, when the United States and its allies came to the aid of Kuwait against Iraq, the ‘new world order’ meant that hundreds of thousands of American and allied troops were in the Arabian desert protecting the ‘old world order’: the colonial borders drawn by the British in the sands of Iraq and the Gulf after the First World War. The classic colonial mechanisms from the early twentieth century were back in place, with most Arab states now unquestionably vassals of the United States. Like feudal lords, their vassalage was the reason and precondition for their lordly titles. They were crying sovereignty to their own populations and pledging allegiance to the United States, trying to keep both legitimacy and recognition; the more they got of one the more they lost of the other.

Examples of such vassalage from the first half of the twentieth century include the Hussein–McMahon correspondence during the First World War, discussed by Avi Shlaim in this volume, the February declaration of 1922 by which Britain granted Egypt nominal independence, the 1936 ‘friendship and alliance’ treaty between Egypt and Britain, and the Anglo-Iraqi treaty of 1931. Examples from the second half include the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel in 1978, and the many treaties signed during the seemingly endless peace process between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation since 1993.

With the invasion of Iraq in 2003, all faith was lost in the ability of the modern, colonially created Arab nation-state. The compromise by which Arabs were to preserve colonial interests in return for nominal independence was shaken, as the United States resorted to classical conquest and direct rule. The modern state, with the modern army at its core, was shown to be utterly impotent in the face of its colonial creators. The Iraqi army could not protect the Iraqis against the Americans, and, by example, it was clear that the Egyptian army, if faced with the same challenge, would fail to protect the Egyptian people, and so on. Therefore, instead of these states, new forms of political organisation have emerged. Web-like entities, networks whose central node is a cloud of ideas and narratives, float across the region through word of mouth, poetry, music, religious sermons and news bulletins. People exposed to these narratives respond and act, without any central command. The networks thus can form and dissolve as needed. Here, narrative replaces structure, conviction replaces command, and improvisation from the margins replaces central planning. This has been a fundamental characteristic of the recent uprisings in the Middle East. Such non-state, non-hierarchical forms of organisation seem to provide society with an alternative to the formal, hierarchic, pyramid-like state structures and the system of centralised political parties, whether in power or in opposition.

If we look at Egypt, in early January 2011 a narrative was floating through social media, satellite channels, mosques, churches, universities, schools, factories and street cafés stating that people in Egypt could emulate the Tunisian uprising. A sentence mimicking the way schoolboys answer oral exams was widely circulated in social media: ‘In the name of God, most gracious, most merciful: the answer is Tunisia.’ People exposed to this overwhelming narrative were not organised in any party. Instead they improvised their actions in cells of two and three and ten and twenty, and took to the streets. Without a leader or a central committee, their movements on the ground were nonetheless highly coordinated, harmonious and effective.

During the eighteen days of demonstrations, between 25 January and 11 February, the Egyptian army command estimated the number of demonstrators throughout the country to have been around 20 million. This is almost equal to the population of Syria, twice the population of Tunisia, three times the population of Jordan or Palestine, five times the population of Lebanon and almost twenty times the population of Bahrain. Even if the numbers were at times exaggerated, these demonstrations would still be the largest in recorded Egyptian history. Yet these large numbers of people were able to manage communication, supply, information, security, defence and negotiation, without any ministries, committees, parties, or any other hierarchical centralised governing body, for eighteen days. They were able to improvise a social contract, an unwritten constitution, where relations between Muslims and Christians, Islamists and secularists, rich and poor, men and women, were more disciplined and amiable than they usually were under the rule of formal law. They were behaving as if they had a government, but without one. Leaders of political parties negotiating with the authorities found they could not lead the masses in the streets. In fact, it was the other way around; when public opinion in Tahrir Square was to continue the sit-in until Mubarak resigned, no conservative party could convince the masses to leave, and when the people decided to leave after Mubarak’s resignation, no radical party could convince them to stay. The idea, the narrative and the public will had replaced both the state and the classic opposition. And that narrative was as clearly pro-democracy as it was anti-colonial. The latter is evidenced by a range of occurrences from anti-American and anti-Israeli slogans to the fact that the only embassy that came under attack in Egypt by angry demonstrators in 2011 was the Israeli embassy.

The country survived without a police force, which was destroyed on 28 January 2011, for almost five months. Only in May did the police start appearing again in Egypt, and that was only in Cairo, under the protection of the military. (Indicatively, their first appearance was to protect the Israeli embassy from demonstrators commemorating the Nakba, the loss of Palestine and the foundation of Israel, on 15 May.) In the rest of the country, the police appeared much later. In the absence of the hard-core of the state, the military and the police, the country still functioned; society could manage well enough without the state. In the current struggle, after the coup d’état of July 2013, the state is trying to regain its power over an increasingly rebellious and independent society.

Yet, not every narrative is benevolent or benign. In societies divided by ethnic and religious rivalries, the fading away of state power, as might be expected, results in civil war. In Tunisia and Egypt in 2011 a degree of social consensus thwarted attempts by Ben Ali and Mubarak to split the narrative of the opposition, or to create rival narratives depicting the uprising as conspiracies by local Islamists or foreign agents. In Libya the situation was different. There the dilution of state power gave rise to conflicting narratives and warring identities. Gaddafi and his sons stressed that civil war would break out if their authority was lost or even diminished. The violent crackdown on dissenters deepened old tribal/provincial rivalries and created new ones. Civil war became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Since society, along with its narratives and identities, was the alternative to the state, the state actively worked for the disruption of society and the widening of the gaps among various subgroups within it. The state would smear the hands of its supporters with the blood of its opponents; that blood feud would subject the supporters to the existential fear of the opposition’s revenge once it reached power; defending the state thus became a matter of self-preservation.

The Egyptian government that came to power after the July 2013 coup d’état also worked by this strategy of divide and rule. By committing massacres against opposition demonstrators in August 2014, in which hundreds (in some estimates, thousands) of men, women and children lost their lives, the government was creating a blood feud between various political factions and cultural groups within Egyptian society, thus making civil war more likely. Official government discourse then stressed the necessity of ‘protecting the state’ and ‘supporting the president’ because civil war was said to be the alternative. As the failure of the Arab colonially created nation-state drives society to escape its grip, the state actively attempts to sabotage such an escape, along with the potential for peaceful coexistence among society’s various components.

While, in theory this strategy could save the state as an alternative to civil war, in practice it failed, as is clear in the cases of Libya, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Instead of consolidating state power and showing society to be divided and weak, the state loses its authority ever more rapidly and more violently. Instead of losing its power to a unified social movement with a unifying narrative, it loses it to a number of armed militias, each with its own identity and narrative.

In Iraq the regular Iraqi army could not defend the country against the American invasion. The modern nation-state of Iraq, whose borders were drawn by the British Mandate authorities after the First World War, had failed to protect its own existence. In fact, it could be argued that its defeat was inevitable. An Iraqi victory against the neo-colonial campaigns of the United States would have required an advanced industrial base to produce a military more efficient than the combined forces of the US, the UK and their allies. But the modern Iraqi state was built by its British colonial designers as a relatively small oil-dependent rentier state with identity and legitimacy problems. One could argue, even, that precisely because Iraq was a state, precisely because its fighting force was organised in the form of a modern centralised army, it was bound to be defeated.

On the other hand, the myriad Iraqi decentralised militias inflicted enough losses on the occupying American forces to stop Washington reaping the political fruits of its invasion. Many of these militias were made of improvised cells formed by individuals exposed to the cloud of anti-American narratives emanating from personal experience, word of mouth, mosques, satellite channels or the internet, but they were organisationally isolated from any one hierarchy or leadership. There was usually no line of command to break, no command and control centre to bomb and no irreplaceable leader to arrest or assassinate. While the foreignness, lack of legitimacy, dependence, rentierism, paranoia and centralisation of the modern state and its hovering above society guaranteed its military defeat, the nativeness of the improvised network-like entities, their organic emergence from and merger with society guaranteed their resilience. Here again, an Arab society was doing the state’s job.

Yet when society replaces the fading state, it comes with its own problems: a society divided along ethnic or religious lines expresses such divisions and allows them to be exploited by any interested, local, regional or international power. While those militias managed to inflict more damage on the occupying forces than the Iraqi army did, they also tore down the very fabric of Iraqi coexistence and plunged the country into civil war.

The situation in Syria is more complicated. Due to Syria’s geostrategic position and its international alliances, almost all major political actors in the world became involved in the Syrian crisis. The Syrian civil war has been correctly described as a miniature world war, where regional and international rivalries are fought through exploiting domestic sectarian and ethnic divides. With almost half of Syria’s population displaced and hundreds of thousands killed, the Syrian civil war threatens to become the single most devastating human catastrophe in the region since the occupation of Iraq.

While advocates of centralised state power elsewhere in the region point to Syria as the catastrophe waiting to happen to them if they let society lead, the state’s failure is nowhere as acutely and as painfully felt as it is in Syria. Instead of becoming the prize over which factions fight, the state in Syria became itself just one faction among many.

Nonetheless, the Syrian civil war, along with its offshoots in Iraq and Lebanon, cannot be won. Wars among communities of tens of millions, such as the Shiites and the Sunnis, are unwinnable. Despite the brutality, in time all factions will come to realise that no one can eliminate the other. The form of the new coexistence will then be dictated by the regional and international balance of power.

The threatening of the colonial order in the Middle East, and the state system created by this order, affects almost all Arab countries. The painful dismantling of Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Sudan and Lebanon are cases at hand; Algeria and Saudi Arabia might also face serious challenges in the near future. But I argue as well that the dismantling of the colonial system will certainly affect Israel more than any other country in the region. Israel will have to worry because, if narrative is replacing structure, if ethnic and religious identities are replacing state-based affiliations and if public opinion becomes a determining factor in Middle East politics, it will not be long before an anti-Israeli consensus, or quasi-consensus, manifests itself, even after taking the current sectarian conflicts into account.

It is much easier to end the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, or even change the Israeli law of return, and de-Zionise the state of Israel, than it is to end Sunnism or Shiism. Unlike sectarian wars, struggles against legal systems and political regimes are winnable. In fact, such struggles have often been won: for example, the American civil rights movement or the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Other than being morally wrong, wars against ethnic or religious communities of millions are impossible to win. In a Middle East where narratives and ideas increasingly determine both peaceful and violent political behaviour, the narrative around which consensus could be easily built is the Palestinian narrative. After all, Zionism is an ideology/political system that discriminates among people based on their religion; it is equally unfriendly to Arab Muslims, Christians, Shiites, Sunnis, Islamists or nationalists. If the 4 million Palestinian refugees were to become Jewish tomorrow, they would be allowed back to their homes with all the rights and privileges of citizenship. If the 3 million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza were to become Jewish tomorrow, they would be given the chance to vote for or against the laws and military directives that have been governing their lives for the past forty-eight years. Even opportunistic politicians will realise that one way to end the civil war of narratives raging in the Middle East is by reintroducing a narrative around which there is consensus. A challenge to Israel may well turn the various civil wars into one major regional war.

To conclude, the colonially created Arab states are old cracked cauldrons filled with boiling narratives and passions that cannot be contained. The first searing streams of the boiling deluge are already spilling out of these cauldrons’ cracks, and they may turn the region into a lake of fire soon. The future therefore looks grim and violent civil war may well turn into an international conflict involving Israel, the region and perhaps the superpowers. It is dark, yet out of that darkness there might be hope that new forms of political existence, new identities, new ideas and narratives, more responsive to people’s rights and more effective in meeting people’s needs than the nation-state, more inclusive than the tribe and the religious sect, might emerge.

Postscript: A Poem

Given my themes, it is appropriate to sum up this essay with an excerpt from a poem I wrote in the summer of 2014.

It Was Not Wise

(translated into English verse by the author)

It was not wise of you, O Death, to come so close

It was not wise of you to place us under siege

For you to camp year after year so near our homes

So often have we met, we’ve memorised your face

We’ve come to know when you prefer to have your meals

Your sleeping times, your temper and your shifting moods

Your heart’s desires and your hidden weaknesses

We know you well, O long-time neighbour, so beware

And please do not feel safe that you have counted us

For we are more than you can count, and more than you

For more than sixty years of war we’ve held our ground

For two millennia many Christs have walked these hills

Like schoolboys bearing unseen crosses on their backs

And lamps still shine in what remains of homes destroyed

How many times will you repeat yourself to us?

It’s boring, as we must repeat ourselves to you

There is no death, but fear of death, and since that’s gone

…

Be sure, our old-time neighbour, we will have you killed

So, Death! know this: next time you’re minded to Crusade

Fear us, for out of boredom, we won’t be afraid.