Libya has a short but volatile history. The desert lands between Egypt and Tunisia have undergone major changes ever since Italian colonialism imposed on the local inhabitants the idea of belonging to a territory with defined boundaries and a centralized authority. After the Second World War, external powers established Libya as an independent state, a decision made in the framework of the United Nations (UN). The UN itself was, back then, an experimental way of trying to impose on international politics some form of global governance through interstate consultation mechanisms. In the newly invented United Kingdom of Libya, a reluctant, British-backed monarchy replaced ruthless colonial rule. After 18 years in power, in 1969, a group of young military officers overthrew the rule of King Idris al Sanussi and replaced it with a radical, overenthusiastically authoritarian and anti-Western republic.
Mu’ammer el-Qaddafi then brought 42 years of oppressive stability to Libya, based on a cult around his personality, around shared grievances against the West and the forceful suppression of dissent. His regime disposed of an effective manipulative mechanism to retain authority as it could control the top-down redistribution of wealth from the export of natural resources.1 By consequently absorbing the great majority of Libyans as employees of the state bureaucracy, the regime made a critical mass dependent on its goodwill. Political opposition could not only lead to prison or worse, but also to job loss or the withholding of social benefits affecting entire families. At the same time, Qaddafi knew to keep the Libyan bureaucracy and especially the security institutions in a state of continuous flux. The chaotic changing of institutions and a myriad of reporting lines was part of a strategy to mitigate the risks of coup attempts as it prevented the development of alternative power centers within state institutions.
Libya’s fate turned again when in 2011, in the wake of popular uprisings in neighboring Tunisia and Egypt, Britain and France initiated and led an intervention that empowered a plethora of Libyan opposition groups, both abroad and within the country. In the absence of any well-established or uncontested state structures, the opposition organized itself through local, informal networks of loyalty, establishing local militias and local governance structures. The short-term political objective of toppling Qaddafi initially united the rebels. However, beyond that shared goal lingered irreconcilable visions of what a future, post-Qaddafi Libya should look like. The international coalition that ultimately triggered the downfall of Qaddafi and his regime expected their military intervention and the following political transition to be short and successful, with a change of regime causing few negative regional and global consequences.
Ideas about developing a new Libya were simplistic: the West and its partners would back the National Transitional Council (NTC) and the loosely related militia. The West expected the Libyans – wealthy and highly educated on paper – to need little postwar assistance and imagined that they would work together towards a more liberal and more business-friendly future. Unfortunately, the assumptions underlying that best-case scenario turned out to be utterly flawed and post-Qaddafi Libya descended into civil war. Libya remained marred by centrifugal forces pulling the country apart. Once again, the United Nations had become the framework through which the international community tried to find common ground between the warring parties and the different regions, in order to prevent the break-up of its own creation – the independent, unified state of Libya.
The history of Libya shows that, throughout time, foreign powers have played a significant role in shaping its institutions and its policies. Intruders, interveners and enablers included Romans, Ottomans, Italians, British, French, Americans, Turks, Egyptians, sometimes Africans and more recently Gulf Arabs and those claiming to build an Islamic State. Sometimes, external threats and interventions helped unite the different tribes, families and classes of Libya. This was, for example, the case during the resistance and opposition to colonial control and decades later to Qaddafi’s rule. At other times, foreign backing of rival factions within Libya nurtured chaos, polarization and civil strife instead. Egyptian interference during the monarchical rule is a case in point, as is the international support during the years of troubled political transition after 2011.
One of the objectives of the 1969 coup of the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), masterminded by Mu’ammer el-Qaddafi, was to rid Libya of all detrimental foreign influences. A strong advocate of (Arab) nationalism, Qaddafi believed that his mission was to erase external influences in order to let a true Libyan spirit blossom. One complication to that vision was that Libya, as a unified place its inhabitants could identify with, had so far only existed in the imagination of external powers and a minority of Libyans. Upon its actual creation, first during Fascist Italian rule and then in the framework of the United Nations, the populations of the former Ottoman provinces Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and the Fezzan were hardly consulted on their future path and the establishment of new political, economic and social institutions. Centralized Libyan state authorities never exerted anything close to full control over the country’s territory or over those living within its (disputed) borders. Even Qaddafi soon figured out that in order to consolidate his power, rather than creating a strong nation, the more successful strategy was one of managing a weak nation, using local, tribal and religious identities and loyalties as chips in a complicated game of balancing power relationships within the country.
At the same time, Libyan elites had always relied heavily on foreign donors, advisers and consultants, both with regard to domestic and foreign policies. Up until 1969, as a result of the dominant British and American influence during the first decades of independence, Libya was often depicted as a plaything or a puppet of the West. And indeed, without the external financial, material and political support received, the monarchy would most likely not have been able to remain in power for as long as it did. Nonetheless, the same seemed to hold true for Qaddafi’s regime. Qaddafi was well aware of the fact that, despite his dreams and ambitions, Libya could not do without its foreigners. His regime could put on a show of hostile rhetoric and symbolic acts, but to keep Libya’s oil-based economy running, it also had to hold on to strong and structural ties with the outside world. Hoping to at least reduce the influence of the West, Qaddafi focused on building up relations in the Arab world and other post-colonial places. Where he failed to create serious synergies with fellow Arab leaders, he was able to build some excellent relations in postcolonial Africa. While useful to gather support for votes in the United Nations, unfortunately, these African supporters barely provided Qaddafi with the global standing and admiration his megalomaniac personality longed for. Ultimately, Qaddafi found himself dependent on those powers he claimed to resent most – the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Italy. He needed them for economic as well as political security. The more that support for his rule eroded at home, the more he had to rely on the goodwill of foreign governments and the provision of external guarantees. The 2011 revolution was indubitably impelled by domestic concerns and grievances, but the withdrawal of external support and the subsequent international intervention were decisive for the outcome of these local rebellions.
This book traces the history of the bilateral relations between Libya and those Western governments most vital to its political and economic development – the United Kingdom, Italy, France and the United States. Over the past century, these foreign powers most clearly shaped the path of Libya as a state. In 1911, Italy was the first European power to establish itself in the Ottoman province of Tripolitania and, less effectively, in Cyrenaica and parts of the desert hinterlands of the Fezzan. Britain was second in establishing a strong presence. From the time London set up the British Military Administration (BMA) in the eastern part of Libya during the Second World War, it knew to expand its reach gradually, leaving lasting traces on Libya’s governance system. Also during the Second World War, France was granted control over the southern desert, using it predominantly as a springboard for its francophone possessions in the Maghreb and Sub-Saharan Africa. The United States, in particular under the Administration of President Ronald Reagan, contributed to the radicalization of Qaddafi’s regime, including through the imposition of economic and military operations. The story told here is that of a longer-term history that holds the respective Western foreign policies towards Libya against the light of changing global power settings. At the surface, the picture of Libya and its relations to the outside world seems one of extreme volatility and transformation, a rollercoaster going back and forth between consensus and conflict. Scratching that surface, a more complex, opaque web of direct and indirect interests and interdependencies emerges, actually exposing a substantial level of continuity and predictability.
The argument of this book is that, throughout history, the globe’s most powerful international contenders have regarded Libya as a peripheral state, even after the discovery of vast quantities of oil. More than a century ago, the Great Powers of Europe considered the Ottoman provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica as the scraps of the imperialist scramble for Africa.2 Britain predominantly focused on the east and southeast of the continent (Egypt, Sudan). The French concentrated on the west and southwest instead (Tunisia, Algeria, Niger and Chad). The desert territories in the middle constituted a natural, scarcely inhabited buffer between the historical spheres of influence of these two key European Imperial Powers.3 Italy, as the least of the Great European Powers and treated as inferior to Britain, France, and Germany, was arguably the only country that really cared for control over the Libyan territories.4 Libya belonged neither here nor there and never fell under the full protection of any significant global or regional powerhouse. A weak national identity, weak institutions and its peripheral position have made the country vulnerable to external influences. As a result, it repeatedly falls prey to foreign powers wanting to flex their muscles without causing any serious global reverberations. As this book narrates, this was the case in 1911, in 2011 and several times in between.
Footnotes
1
See for example Hazem Beblawi, “The rentier state in the Arab world”, in Giacomo Luciani (ed), The Arab state, University of California Press, 1990, pp. 85–98; and Michael L. Ross, “Does oil hinder democracy?” World Politics 53 (3) 2001, pp. 325–61. Applied to Libya, see Dirk Vandewalle, Libya since independence: oil and state-building, I.B. Tauris, 1998.
2
A vast body of literature exists on colonialism in Africa, to which this text, unfortunately, cannot do justice. See for example Thomas Pakenham, The scramble for Africa: White man’s conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912, Avon Books 1991; William H. Worger et al. (eds.), Africa and the West, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010; and Richard Reid, A history of modern Africa: 1800 to the present, John Wiley and Sons, 2012.
3
See Joseph S. Roucek, “The geopolitics of the Mediterranean”, The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 12 (4), 1953, pp. 347–354.
4
Richard Bosworth, Italy, the Least of the Great Powers: Italian foreign policy Before the First World War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.