Arab Spring

Uprisings, Powers, Interventions

Kjetil Fosshagen

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781782384663
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The events of the Arab Spring presented a dramatic reconstitution of politics and the public sphere through their aesthetic and performative uses of public space. Mass demonstrations have become a new global political form, grounded in the localization of globalizing processes, institutions, and relationships. This volume delves beneath the seemingly chaotic nature of events to explore the structural dynamics underpinning popular resistance and their support or suppression. It moves beyond what has usually been defined as Arab Spring nations to include critical views on Bahrain, the Palestinian territories, and Turkey. The research and analysis presented explores not just the immediate protests, but also the historical realization, appropriation, and even institutionalization of these critical voices, as well as the role of international criminal law and legal exceptionalism in authorizing humanitarian interventions. Above all, it questions whether the revolutions have since been hijacked and the broad popular uprisings already overrun, suppressed, or usurped by the upper classes.

INTRODUCTION

The Arab Spring—Revolution or 1848 Reaction?

Kjetil Fosshagen

The first crucial question about the so-called Arab Spring revolutions asks whether they can be considered social revolutions in the historical and political sense, in that they promised and introduced a radically new social order. This definitional problem is compounded by the fact that the word ‘revolution’ has become part of everyday popular discourse about change. The second question asks whether there is a structure of social forces underneath the apparent chaos of the Arab Spring uprisings and their aftermath. Liberal discourse in the West hailed the Arab Spring as revolutionary within the idealistic scenario of despotism versus democracy. The revolts have also been celebrated as significant democratic and social events by radical commentators such as Žižek (2012) and Badiou (2012). The latter sees the riots as ‘pre-political’ events marking the rebirth of history, since their occupation of central spaces grounded a vision of a new and lasting social order. For Badiou, rioting is the only possible shape of historical action at the present moment in capitalism’s history.

A positive view on the potentiality of the revolts is shared by two articles in this volume—one by Paola Abenante and one by Pnina Werbner, Martin Webb, and Kathryn Spellman-Poots. These two contributions analyze how the aesthetics, performance, and use of space in the revolutionary moments in Egypt (Abenante) and beyond the Middle East (Werbner et al.) opened up new practices and visions of the political.

Despite the clear strength and breadth of the Arab uprisings and their links to protest movements and earlier labor strikes, they did not produce coherent political organizations or socially radical policies. The emergent regimes at best expanded individual political rights, most importantly for the middle classes. However, the military and security apparatuses remained intact; in Egypt, they even joined the ‘liberal’, secular factions and struck back with great force against the elected government. In short, the broad social uprisings appear to end up like the 1848 revolutions—that is, as bourgeois revolutions and not as social revolutions. In order to grasp the dynamics of the uprisings, it is necessary to widen the analytical scope and locate the dynamics of national Arab revolts within transnational and global assemblages that have profoundly reconfigured the socio-economic and political spaces of many nation-states in the last decades. Analyses confined to national borders and internal politics tend to overlook crucial deterritorializing dynamics that cut across national borders and reconfigure internal processes. Such a perspective risks internalizing the process by attributing it to population growth, economic fluctuations, food prices (see Mitchell 1991), or overbearing local despotism.

Socio-political processes within Arab states must be located within two central, globalized dynamics of deterritorialization and reterritorializion (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). The first is the economic and political ‘opening up’ of Arab national spaces. The formerly closed spaces of state-directed socio-economic development have been deterritorialized by external forces since the 1980s. International regulations and conditions have reconstituted the terms of national policies, resulting in an expansion of capital flows. International agents of development, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, national development agencies, and local and international NGOs, have been central in the reconstitution of the socio-political space. These agencies are most often not directly state-controlled or coordinated, although they are often heavily state-funded. They constitute a decentralized transformative operation on social patterns and socio-economic processes, pushing for forms of civil society ‘empowerment’ and participation that are mostly individualizing, liberal, and anti-political.

Connected to these globalized power formations of capital and political pressure there is the second deterritorializing dynamic of vast Arab upper-middle-class diasporas that constitute decentralized social, economic, and political assemblages. They mediate between these groups and are themselves empowered in the process, emerging as new power blocs that have worked actively to deterritorialize and reterritorialize processes and groups within many Arab nations, as with El Baradai’s Association for Change leading up to the riots in Egypt.

These two dynamics—economic and regulative forces and diasporas—can be seen as interlinked and as forming part of a decentralized global nexus involved in an ongoing reconfiguration of state power on a global scale (Kapferer 2010). An important dimension of this nexus is the expansion of international criminal law that legitimizes military interventions in order to introduce democracy and human rights (see Michael Humphrey’s contribution to this volume). The two interlinked dynamics have the potential for violence and for producing a dominance of wealthy groups, but their deterritorializing operations also involve or feed into governmental processes that increasingly embed the social within the economic.

This volume presents three articles on states that were not—or were not considered to be—part of the Arab Spring, revealing the dynamics involved in the rebelling societies. Thomas Fibiger’s article discusses how the discursive register of terrorism and security was invoked to support the crushing of the democracy protests in Bahrain, a crucial US ally. Sobhi Samour’s article critically analyzes how the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank has embraced a neoliberal strategy (within the Oslo Accords) of development that is based on successful securitization as the condition for national development and future independence. This approach has turned its population into an Israeli labor pool and produced a thriving upper middle class. Kjetil Fosshagen’s article discusses why the West has promoted Turkey as a structural model for the ‘post-revolution’ Arab states.

The 1848 Spring of Nations and the Arab Spring

A comparison with the European revolutions of 1848—known as the Spring of Nations, the Springtime of the Peoples, or the Year of Revolution—can be instructive. This series of upheavals, which spread rapidly to 50 countries, was the first and only Europe-wide (temporary) collapse of traditional authority. The uprisings can generally be said to have emerged out of increasing poverty, disillusion, and despair and growing anger against the privileges of the established elites. They were led by short-lived ad hoc coalitions comprised of reformers, workers, and the middle class. Despite massive popular participation and unrest, the revolutions did little to change established economic and political structures and lost out to reactionary forces within a year.

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx ([1852] 2006) outlines why the French revolutionary forces, after a long battle following the July Revolution of 1830 (and even the Revolution of 1789), were finally defeated by the haute bourgeoisie. The structure of landownership and property holding had not changed much after 1789, despite the adoption in 1830 of minor liberalizing reforms. During the 1848 Spring of Nations, masses of people from different classes took to the streets across Europe, demanding bread, improved social conditions, and political reform. In France, this brought the July Monarchy to an end and led to the establishment of the Second Republic, with universal suffrage and a ‘right to work’ realized through National Workshops. These reforms, however, were short-lived. The alliance between workers and the liberal, republican bourgeoisie soon ended as the former found themselves dominated politically by conservative bourgeois and peasant interests. The workers’ insurrection of June 1848 was crushed, and the socialists were pushed out of the political scene. They were soon to be followed by their worst enemy, the petite bourgeoisie, who had been used by the wealthier classes to obstruct the socialists before largely falling into poverty themselves. The Second Republic became dominated by the industrial and financial aristocracy and ended with Napoleon III’s emperorship in 1852. The revolution never restructured the economy; it merely introduced formal political rights that turned it into a republican political form of bourgeois society. The call for participatory rights had masked a divergence of interests, and in the end the Year of Revolution was hijacked by the industrial and finance bourgeoisie.

The Arab Spring uprisings appear to share crucial features with the 1848 revolutions. Again, a variety of social groups have entered into ad hoc coalitions with different or vague agendas of democracy and ‘freedom’. In Egypt and Tunisia, the uprisings undoubtedly mobilized many important sectors of society,¹ including labor unions, and protests articulated egalitarian political and social demands, expressed in slogans such as “Bread, freedom, social justice!” There was nevertheless an upper-middleclass dominance in organization and discourse. While the Egyptian mass revolts started as a middle-class movement (albeit after years of labor strikes), the Tunisian middle class stepped in and more or less appropriated the ongoing socio-economic protest, shaping it into a liberal rights-oriented protest (El-Meehy 2011). My intention is not to diminish the broad social basis or the democratic potential of these uprisings, but to point out a structural dynamic concealed by the undifferentiated picture of protests. Already in demonstrations shortly after the fall of Mubarak, conflicts appeared between middle-class and working-class demonstrators (Haddad 2011). The Arab upper middle classes pushed for the removal of small oligarchic state elites in order to gain access to the market and to state institutions and agencies, and the recent authoritarian hijacking by the liberal upper middle classes of the Egyptian revolt in the name of democracy and revolution demonstrates this dynamic.

The Reconfiguration of Arab National Spaces

During the period of Arab nationalism, most Arab states built up large middle classes as a crucial modernizing element of projects that were intended to break a long history of Western domination and to build communities oriented to a common state-based identity. These modernist projects created national social spaces characterized by equal social rights, public education and welfare systems, social mobility, and egalitarian individualism. This stood in sharp contrast to the earlier social structures of semi-feudal and capitalist agriculture and limited social mobility.² The Arab states sought to create autonomous national spaces through import substitution, nationalizing foreign companies, redistributing land, and building up shared national identities centered on the state. The militaries had a central role in achieving and protecting national sovereignty. Acting as vehicles of modernism, they produced social mobility and independence from entrenched social powers, which gave them a measure of legitimate autonomy within the nation-state spaces.

This modernist nationalist project of creating a unified identity grounded in social, cultural, and economic forms of autonomy protected and promoted by the state began to erode with Sadat’s introduction of infitah (opening) in Egypt in the 1970s, and with the launch of neo-liberal policies in Tunisia and elsewhere in the 1980s and 1990s. In line with IMF and World Bank programs, land reforms were reversed, and banks, industry, education, and health services were privatized. Poverty increased, and the gap between the poor and the rich grew. Land tenants and rural laborers in Tunisia (see King 2000) and Egypt protested in the early 1990s against conditions that effectively evicted them from the land through liberalized land rents (which increased by 2000 percent in Egypt), water pricing, and the cessation of easy credit access (Kishk n.d.: 6). These structural changes removed the social protections and flexibility offered by the former system, which gave a greater role to the state in the economy and in the management of class differences.

The restructuring process gained a further boost from massive US debt relief and loans remediated through the IMF and the World Bank that were partly remuneration for Egypt’s support in the First Gulf War. The policies of opening up in effect pushed millions of rural dwellers off the land and into the cities, where unemployment soared further. As Mitchell (2002) has shown, the structural adjustment programs concealed and rephrased their transformative work of encompassing the social within the economic behind a sense of simply being efficient technical operations. Free trade agreements with the US and industrial free zones³ are examples of the deep restructuring of internal socio-economic relations that also reach deeply into the political, for they involve the partial suspension of national laws. The US’s bilateral free trade agreements with some of the Middle Eastern states have been described as strikingly comprehensive and deep in character (Lawrence 2006: 22).

The main effect of neo-liberal policies was that large sections of the Arab peasantry and lower middle classes were progressively impoverished. The relative share of total household expenses spent on health care and education in Mubarak’s Egypt ranked second and third in the world (Mitchell 2002: 229). Social mobility declined dramatically for many lower-middle-class graduates, due partly to the steep decline in public service positions. This led many university graduates to depend increasingly on personal connections for private sector jobs (Binzel 2011), creating compartmentalized networks of patronage. Both Egypt and Tunisia, star examples of successful neo-liberal structuration programs, have vast populations of poor workers and people employed in the enormous ‘informal sector’. Just above the sector of the ‘officially poor’ we find the vast lower ‘middle classes’. They are being statistically concealed and rebadged as ‘middle class’ so as to downplay the forms of class polarization that are taking place. Statistically, the middle class is defined in absolute terms as those with a per capita spending above...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: The Arab Spring—Revolution or 1848 Reaction?
• Tahrir as Heterotopia: Spaces and Aesthetics of the Egyptian Revolution
• Beyond the Arab Spring: The Aesthetics and Poetics of Popular Revolt and Protest, 2010–2012
• Emergency Law and Hypergovernance: Human Rights and Regime Change in the Arab Spring
• The Promises and Limitations of Economic Protests in the West Bank
• Stability or Democracy? The Failed Uprising in Bahrain and the Battle for the International Agenda
• The Turkish Model for the Arab Spring: The Corporate Moralist State
• Notes on Contributors