State-Building in the Middle East and North Africa

One Hundred Years of Nationalism, Religion and Politics

Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou, Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou

• Editorial: I.B. Tauris
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780755601424
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia de Oriente Medio

Why have state-building projects across the MENA region proven to be so difficult for so long? Following the end of the Ottoman Empire in the early 1920s, the countries of the region began a violent and divisive process of state formation. But a century later, state-building remains inconclusive. This book traces the emergence and evolution of state-building across the MENA region and identifies the main factors that impeded its success: the slow end of the Ottoman Empire; the experience of colonialism; and the rise of nationalistic and religious movements. The authors reveal the ways in which the post-colonial state proved itself authoritarian and formed on the model of the colonial state. They also identify the nationalist and Islamist movements that competed for political leadership across the nascent systems, enabling the military to establish a grip on the security apparatus and national economies. Finally, in the context of the Arab Spring and its conflict-filled aftermath, this book shows how external powers reasserted their interventionism. In outlining the reasons why regional states remained hollow and devoid of legitimacy, each of the contributors shows that recent conflicts and crises are deeply connected to the foundational period of one century ago. Edited by Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou, the volume features contributions by stellar scholars including Faleh Abdel Jabar, Lisa Anderson, Bertrand Badie, François Burgat, Benoit Challand, Ahmad Khalidi, Henry Laurens, Bruce Rutherford, Jordi Tejel and Ghassan Salamé.

PART ONE

FOUNDATIONS AND LEGACIES

1A CENTURY OF ELUSIVE STATE-BUILDING IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA

Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou

The period from the 1910s to the 2020s was a particularly important one in the long history of the Middle East and North Africa. From the Maghreb (the west) to the Mashreq (the east) reaches of the area, history seemed to accelerate during this century. History appeared to do so both in bringing long-festering, slow-building social and political tensions to a cusp and birthing new consequential ones, doing ever so indecisively and without a sense of closure. By the time the twentieth century closed and the twenty-first opened, the sequence had persisted. Analysis and study of the region remained as it had been, dominated by talk of unceasing armed conflicts, open-ended social crises, religious confrontation, ideological contestation and continuous political transformation. Though it had never really lost it all along, the region had in this new fin de siècle regained international policy and media attention, notably in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 (an event coming ten months after the fall of the Berlin Wall). That crisis, which continued throughout the 1990s with the United Nations-enforced economic embargo on Iraq and its costly humanitarian consequences, then gave way to the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States and the Global War on Terror, which in turn were followed by the 2011 Arab Spring and subsequent crises in the Levant, Egypt, Yemen and Libya. Following his election in November 2016, President Donald J. Trump added momentum to this sequence by adopting in January 2017 a so-called ‘Muslim Ban’, prohibiting citizens from seven Middle Eastern countries (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen)¹ from entry to the United States, and launching in January 2020 a ‘Deal of the Century’ peace plan meant to solve the sixty-year-old Israeli–Palestinian conflict. For all their high-profile and urgent nature, these momentous events spanning the 1990s and early 2020s line up, however, more significantly in a historical sequence of developments, which can be traced back revealingly a century ago to the 1910s, and at the heart of which stands centrally the challenge of state-building combined with the primacy of foreign influence.

Against such latter-day and earlier backdrops, this book examines the question of statehood and its underpinnings in the Middle East and North Africa. Its starting point is threefold as it argues that, amidst nationalistic and religious contests and foreign interference, over the past one hundred years or so, the region of the Middle East and North Africa – in its generic understanding also referred to as the Arab world or the Orient² – has been wrestling primarily with the challenge of establishing cogent, performative, independent, representative and resilient states. This layered statehood conundrum played out in relation to several dimensions at the forefront of which stand three main founding historical developments: regional imperial withdrawal, international colonial domination and domestic political struggles. As the Mashreqi and Maghrebi Arab states, as well as the three non-Arab countries of the region (Iran, Israel and Turkey) all experienced a sequence of (i) end of the Ottoman Empire,³ (ii) rise of Western colonial empires and (iii) emergence of local nationalist and religious movements, several questions that impact the search for statehood arose or were revealed problematically. The aim of this volume is to historicize this statehood trajectory by attempting an unpacking of the above three components against a dual interrogation: why so little statehood and why so much conflict?

Old orders and fleeting statehood

The past one hundred years can be characterized as a century during which the societies of the Middle East and the North African region have been overwhelmingly preoccupied with the project of the establishment of viable and functioning states. At times explicit and at times less so, that project was continuously crucial for them while constituting a distinct preoccupation for their larger international environment. In significant ways, the statehood project remains today a difficult, frustrating, divisive and incomplete endeavour. This shortcoming has also determined the imagery and phraseology resorted to in order to analyse the area. Problematic talk of ‘fragile states’, ‘weak states’, ‘failed states’, ‘collapsed states’, ‘war-torn societies’ and ‘fractured lands’⁴ continues to dominate representation of the region’s political, economic and social scene. Where state apparatuses have been set up with a measure of stability, such apparent durability⁵ was nonetheless achieved through the artifice of authoritarianism, which invariably – notably in Iraq and Syria, the twin enemy Ba’athist mukhabarat (intelligence services) states, or in Algeria and Egypt where the military continues to hold sway over all things political – sowed the seeds of its own crises to come.⁶ For decades, these police state systems, divorced from their citizens aspirations for representation and better livelihood, seemed impervious to the internal and external pressures for socioeconomic and political change. In time, the deeply alienating dynamics the regimes had established only made the dead-end of these giants with clay feet more spectacular, as witnessed vividly with the fall of Tunisia’s Zein Al Abidin Ben Ali, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi 2011. Elsewhere, traditional so-called ‘tribal-clanic systems’, whether initially organized in the form of emirates, former Ottoman provinces or large regional confederations, evolved into state systems quite late during the second half of the twentieth century – doing so more in form than in substance, and often dragging a distinct ‘tribes with flags’ legacy into their uncertain statehood project, as the Egyptian diplomat Tahseen Bashir once termed it.⁷ Similarly, the regionally all-important Palestine question itself – for all its identity, religious and geopolitical aspects – was and remains a state-formation dispute as well as an instance of quest for statehood for both Palestinians and Israelis.⁸

If Middle Eastern and North African statehood has been evanescent, it has been so not merely as result of the underperformance – real and consequential – of the local actors but equally and principally because of a specific historical configuration. The latter came into formation a century ago at the confluence of the three related-but-inherently distinct developments noted, namely the slow end of the Ottoman Empire, the violent encounter with the European colonial powers and the gradual rise of the local nationalistic and religious emancipation movements. In time, these three constellations came to preside over what we can term a stateness deficit, one that continues today to be determined largely by these strands. Eminently interrelated in their eventual consequences on statehood or the lack thereof, each of these three aspects of Middle Eastern and North African history, however, initially played out distinctly.

The so-called ‘slow end’ of the Ottoman Empire is the first and arguably most important of these stories, as it relates to the political and strategic milieu of the nascent, soon-to-be-elusive order. In retrospect, we can see that from about the mid-1860s the diminishing control of the Sublime Porte, as Istanbul was known, over the territories it had been administering directly or holding suzerainty over since the 1500s in the Levant, Arabia, the Nile Valley and the Maghreb both paradoxically enabled the rise of local autonomous movements for emancipation and rendered their project more arduous. The Ottoman twilight played out amidst a series of three successive failed attempts at reforming the empire: the military affairs-focused nizam-i-cedid or nizam-e-jedid (new order) in 1790–1807, the tanzimat (reorganisation) administrative reforms between 1830 and 1876 and the strategic political use of pan-Islamism in the period 1876 to 1908. Though it was ultimately unsuccessful – and fuelled the secular opposition to Sultan Abdul Hamid II led by the Young Turks movement known as the Committee of Ottoman Union, later renamed Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) – the combined historical territorial reach of the Ottoman provinces in the area and the nature of the transcendent religiously couched project, as well indeed as its ‘reformist’ claims, introduced a pattern whereby what can be termed ‘backward-looking forward-moving’ Islamist change could be articulated as a political project. One, too, that could be and would be pursued both by state and non-state actors alike. In time, it would be, as it were, precisely in those areas where Istanbul laid down the sword of the Caliphate in 1924 – in and around the Levant – that the organization of the Islamic State (IS) sought, in 2014, to reclaim it and re-establish that religious-territorial (by now also cyber-virtual) dominion.⁹

The Ottoman Empire’s imprint – primarily present in the dynastic power matrix and heavy administrative structure that it left in the countries of the region (through the prisms of sultan, i.e. monarch, and dawla, i.e. state) – was accompanied by colonial experience at the hands of European powers. Often captured in reductionist ways in post-Arab Spring analyses heralding ‘the end of Sykes-Picot’ in the mid-2010s, the secret British-French-Russian agreement in 1916 and the League of Nations’ Mandate System combined to introduce from the 1920s to the 1940s a second factor of structural historical disruption of the state-building project, namely external control and interventionism. To be certain, social and political events played out differently across the vast region, but the colonial impediment logic was more often than not systemically the same. In the Levant, the division of newly carved territories between Britain and France led to unrest starting in 1920 and running well into the late 1940s. Western action stunned and paralysed the domestic political power struggles, particularly between nationalists and Islamists – both now resultingly focused on the external arbiter – and cemented the role and place of violence as the chosen method to settle those struggles. Nowhere more than in Iraq (a country amalgamated in 1921 by the British from the former Mosul, Baghdad and Basra provinces of the Ottoman Empire, and given a Hashemite monarch, Faisal bin Hussein bin Ali al Hashemi, brought from the Hejaz by way of Syria, of which he was briefly king) were those dystrophies more visible. The trouble in Iraq built up continuously, ever more violently, during the monarchy years until the bloody revolution of July 1958, into the ruthless Ba’athi regime from July 1968 onwards and in the aftermath of the US invasion in March 2003. In the Maghreb, the Italian control of Libya (1911–1947) and the French one of Algeria (a department from 1830 to 1962), Tunisia (a protectorate from 1881 to 1956), Mauritania (a colony from 1904 to 1960) and Morocco (also a protectorate, from 1912 to 1956) yielded the same type of violent colonial dispossession experience formally ending in the early 1960s only to take new postcolonial forms. The brutality enacted by the British in Iraq was matched by both the Italian and the French, respectively in Libya and Algeria.

The past century was also importantly the scene of a virulent competition between societal projects throughout the region as nationalists and Islamists pursued different and antagonistic visions of nation and state. This existential contest played out amidst active external interference. Even if they tried by the mid-twentieth century to maximize their positions (individually as new states or jointly in regional organizations, notably through the League of Arab States established in 1945), the countries of the region were essentially in majority political systems set up by others and to the benefit of others. Dominated by a sense of peripherality in its very labelling (middle east, medio oriente, moyen-orient) and malleability (from the ‘the Sick Man of Europe’ in 1853 to ‘the Greater Middle East’ in 2004), the region’s agency over its destiny and in particular its encounter with modernity was often hijacked by notions of alleged ‘strangeness’, ‘dangerosity’, ‘volatility’, ‘instability’ and ‘violence’, which became the familiar folkloric depictions of the area and simultaneously the geostrategic hallmarks of Orientalism. As Tarak Barkawi and Keith Stanski note:

Orientalism [was here] not mere bias against Easterners; it [was] a regime of truth. Views that in fact amount to grotesque misrepresentation come to be accepted by the authorised experts and by those they communicate with. One such misrepresentation that sits at the core of historical and contemporary Orientalisms concerns the East as a site of disorder and the West as that which brings order to disorder.¹⁰

That site of disorder has often been identified as ‘the Arab state’. These tenets also set the stage for the nationalist/military and the Islamist/insurgency dichotomous forces, which would come to compete indecisively in and for most of these theatres. As socio-historical entities in flux, these two camps – with many...

Índice

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Contributors
• Foreword Lisa Anderson
• Acknowledgements
• PART ONE FOUNDATIONS AND LEGACIES
• PART TWO IRRESOLUTIONS AND ABSENCES
• PART THREE REINVENTIONS AND RETURNS
• Chronology
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint