From Resilience to Revolution

How Foreign Interventions Destabilize the Middle East

Sean Yom

• Editorial: Columbia University Press
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780231540278
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Middle Eastern Politics

Based on comparative historical analyses of Iran, Jordan, and Kuwait, Sean L. Yom examines the foreign interventions, coalitional choices, and state outcomes that made the political regimes of the modern Middle East. A key text for foreign policy scholars, From Resilience to Revolution shows how outside interference can corrupt the most basic choices of governance: who to reward, who to punish, who to compensate, and who to manipulate.

As colonial rule dissolved in the 1930s and 1950s, Middle Eastern autocrats constructed new political states to solidify their reigns, with varying results. Why did equally ambitious authoritarians meet such unequal fates? Yom ties the durability of Middle Eastern regimes to their geopolitical origins. At the dawn of the postcolonial era, many autocratic states had little support from their people and struggled to overcome widespread opposition. When foreign powers intervened to bolster these regimes, they unwittingly sabotaged the prospects for long-term stability by discouraging leaders from reaching out to their people and bargaining for mass support—early coalitional decisions that created repressive institutions and planted the seeds for future unrest. Only when they were secluded from larger geopolitical machinations did Middle Eastern regimes come to grips with their weaknesses and build broader coalitions.

1

THE ARGUMENT AND THE CASES

THE ARAB SPRING raised hope that democracy would sweep over the largely authoritarian landscape of the Middle East and North Africa. As national transitions bogged down in violence and strife, however, optimistic forecasts of political freedom quickly gave way to more visceral concerns about stability and order. In many countries, the short-lived triumph of people power did not lead to the creation of resilient democracies that could bridge social divisions and rally popular support behind new leaders. Egypt, Libya, and Yemen have joined postwar Iraq and Afghanistan as examples in which authoritarian regimes were forced to surrender power in the twenty-first century—but whose heirs have not established stable governments of any sort due to unending social resistance and popular unrest. Syria may well join their ranks.

The lesson learned: political order should be democratic, but it should also be durable. The type of a regime matters little if that regime does not last very long in the first place or is constantly immersed in opposition and strife. Before liberty, as Samuel Huntington famously remarked, must come “the creation of a legitimate public order.”¹ Yet, what determines the durability of any political regime? Here, looking to the past furnishes vital clues to answering this present question. Consider the era when imperialism began to wane—the 1930s to 1950s, when most states in the Middle East began to acquire formal sovereignty from imperial powers. What distinguishes this early era was endemic social conflict in many countries. The kings and presidents representing the first generation of postcolonial leadership lacked mass support. Relying upon traditional elites such as large landowners, tribal sheikhs, and religious authorities, they faced opposition in the form of new urban forces fighting for social justice and democratic reforms, such as labor unions, merchant chambers, and student movements.

These domestic struggles did not unfold in a geopolitical vacuum. After the sunset of colonialism, great powers continued to intervene across the region as they sought resources like oil and gas, coveted strategic assets like the Suez Canal, and amplified proxy clashes like the Arab-Israeli wars. Such hegemons bolstered endangered local regimes deemed focal to their strategic interests through diplomatic, fiscal, and military support. The United States, for instance, rescued Pahlavi rule in Iran and Hashemite dictatorship in Jordan during the 1950s. British troops safeguarded monarchical friends in Iraq during World War II and Bahrain in 1956. By the 1960s, Soviet advisers and arms were flooding Egypt and Syria, backing these states against their pro-Western rivals in the struggle for regional influence. At the same time, other Middle East regimes confronted societal resistance alone, bereft of foreign patronage. The Sabah dynasty of Kuwait and the fledgling Bourguibist presidency of Tunisia garnered little assistance from imperial patrons when they defeated entrenched opposition movements by the late 1950s.

These two catalysts—domestic conflict and geopolitical mediation—combined to form a striking pattern across the Middle East. The more that outside hegemons intervened to help local rulers squash domestic opposition, the less durable their regimes turned out over time. External support was destructive in the long term, because it deterred national leaders from making inclusive bargains with opposing social forces and encouraged reliance upon repressive and exclusionary institutions. In contrast, autocrats who lacked external patrons were forced to negotiate with domestic rivals, favoring compromise over coercion. Facing the potentiality of defeat, they had to sacrifice much to win more support and through this costly process created more inclusive states that would experience less conflict and instability during future decades. In essence, political order in the postcolonial Middle East was more likely to be durable when founding conflicts between state and society were secluded from geopolitical interference.

STATE-BUILDING AND ITS OUTCOMES

State-building means the creation of new governing institutions to regulate economic markets and impose political rules within a defined territory.² This results in new regimes, or the legal structures that control access to power and resources. The durability of regimes, in turn, measures two things—longevity plus stability. Too frequently, analysts conflate these terms, resulting in conceptual confusion. For instance, as the Arab Spring showed, it seems all dictatorships are “durable” until the moment they collapse, at which point they are described as having been brittle all long. As a more rigorous conceptualization, I consider any given regime as durable if, over the same time period, it lasts longer than a comparable set of peers and faces little to no sustained opposition.³

Durability varies in several ways. First, consider an autocratic order that reigns for a quarter century and then collapses in social revolution, such as Iran under the uninterrupted rule of Shah Pahlavi (1953–1979). On the one hand, given that other regimes in the same region have lasted more than twice as long and some still persist today, this case would seem not durable given its short life span and fatal insurrection. On the other hand, long-lived regimes are not identical. Consider Jordan, whose Hashemites have retained power since gaining independence after World War II but only by quelling periodic rebellions from society, and the Sabah dynasty of Kuwait, which has ruled over the same period but far more peacefully, seldom needing to violently suppress a supportive citizenry. Despite their mutual longevity, these cases are qualitatively different: Jordan has persisted under a cloud of regime insecurity necessitating frequent coercion, while Kuwait’s rulers have seldom seen their citizens as credible threats. Jordan is a case of tenuous survival, whereas Kuwait comes the closest to embodying long-term stability—that is, durability.

These outcomes of revolutionary collapse, tenuous survival, and regime durability each result from a distinctive confluence of domestic conflict and geopolitical mediation punctuating the early stage of state-building, when rulers have yet to secure full power, social opposition is mobilizing, and few institutions of governance exist. These patterns of historical causation comprise the theoretical framework here, and each deserves careful attention.

GEOPOLITICAL SECLUSION AND DURABLE ORDER: KUWAIT

First, early conditions of geopolitical seclusion contribute to durable regimes. Seclusion, here, does not mean shielding from all external influences; that is nearly impossible. Rather, it means contexts where leaders lack access to great power support, because either their national territories hold little strategic value or they refuse offers of outside intervention due to their complicated colonial past. Without the diplomatic boost, economic aid, and military assistance that come from external support and that could help neutralize domestic opposition, such regimes have a compelling incentive to approach new social forces and make bargains for their loyalty through promises of enrichment via material means or protection from another threat. In essence, autocrats broadened their ruling coalitions.

Kuwait represents this trajectory. In the late 1930s, the stubborn regime of the Sabah family reeled against wealthy merchant opposition, which resisted its despotism and demanded greater political rights. Much to the regime’s disappointment, its imperial patron, Britain, refused to deliver the financial and coercive resources necessary to suppress these progressive rivals. Grudgingly recognizing its extreme vulnerability, the leadership was compelled to compromise with the rebels by making liberal concessions and leaving their assets untouched. It also sought to immunize itself from further unrest by deepening ties with its small existing base of pastoral tribes, as well as reaching out to woo new allies in society such as the Shiʿa minority. All of these coalitional overtures to broaden the dynasty’s social foundation occurred before the advent of oil wealth transformed the political economy during the 1950s.

Geopolitical seclusion, then, encourages regimes in conflict to broaden their coalitional alliances with society. Such Brumairean pacts are preferable to defeat in conflict but are still costly; they require the surrender of absolutism, alongside new commitments to furnish patronage and protection desired by each group in return for loyalty. Over time, those promises become embedded in the new economic and political institutions that leaders create to govern their territory, from industrialization programs to organs of representation. The goal is to turn citizens into constituents by giving them material and symbolic stakes in the new political order. This also necessitates staying the hand of repression, for repeated coercion against the citizenry breaks down these reciprocal understandings between state and society. Though constraining and expensive, these coalitional investments pay off during severe crises decades later, when events like economic implosion and military conflict again spur everyday people to dissent. Broad ruling coalitions not only reduce the audience for potential resistance but also moderate emergent opposition: critics tend to complain not if but how their regimes should reign. In turn, because of their proximity to and knowledge of society, leaders carry a repertoire of nonviolent strategies to demobilize confrontations before they spread and radicalize, such as credibly promising democratic reforms, shuffling their coalitions, and reaching out to opposition elites. In essence, broadly based regimes can prevent crises from spiraling out of control by working with, not through, society.

That arc of durability plays out in Kuwait from the 1960s. Regardless of its authoritarian aspirations in the early twentieth century, Sabah leaders recognized that long-term stability required being connected to different sectors of indigenous society from tribes and merchants to Shiʿa and their own sprawling family. Institutionalizing this broad coalition devoured the sheikhdom’s oil wealth as the regime initiated costly economic projects and political initiatives from land transfers and trade protections to parliamentary representation and citizenship grants. Yet they paid off starting in the 1980s, which saw a string of successive crises—financial collapse, sectarian tensions from the Iraq-Iran War, then the 1990 Iraqi invasion and subsequent occupation—that uprooted the Sabah dynasty altogether. Throughout this turbulence, the regime defused each crisis in turn: it placated financial losers with material compensation, replaced some Shiʿa supporters with newer Sunni Islamists, and negotiated with disgruntled merchants with little desire for revolution. Most of all, it drew upon its deep societal roots in pledging democratic reforms—a compromise accepted by almost all Kuwaitis, who continued advocating the restoration of their autocracy over any other ruling alternative. The result since then has been renewed benevolent authoritarianism, where political blocs fight over the spoils of oil but seldom the irreducible legitimacy of the regime itself.

GEOPOLITICAL SUBSTITUTION AND REVOLUTIONARY COLLAPSE: IRAN

By contrast, other rulers did reap the assistance of international powers when they stumbled against opposition. In these cases, foreign allies can underwrite the defeat of internal enemies by strengthening incumbent regimes. They may diplomatically boost their confidence to crack down, expand their fiscal resources, and bolster their coercive muscle. Diminishing the cost of repression reshapes the calculus of coalitional strategy: liberated from fear of downfall, previously embattled leaders now have little incentive to bargain with friends and enemies alike—to undertake the costly task of widening their coalitions. Why surrender power and resources to social forces if those demanding actors can be crushed outright? These regimes often restore order believing that coercion, not compromise, represents the winning strategy of governance.

Here, state-building patterns diverge, revealing the second and third causal pathways of the theory. In the second pathway of state-building, conditions of geopolitical substitution—that is, when leaders became so reliant upon great power backing that they failed to raise any real coalitional support—encouraged future revolutions. In such cases, rulers develop their states without having made any commitments to enrich or protect supporters, whether old or new. Economic modernization hoards capital for corrupt cronies; political organizations privilege only an elite few; and brutal repression regulates public life. However, short-term autonomy breeds long-term weakness, because narrowing coalitions distance states from societies. When sudden crises trigger public unrest, autocrats find that decades of detachment from society have produced opposition that spreads quickly due to the many previously marginalized and abused groups. They cannot counter protests by rallying any loyalist factions, lack the credibility to mollify angry crowds with reform promises, and have little knowledge of how to co-opt opposing elites. Left dependent upon repression and great power support, such substitutive dictatorships are highly likely to collapse.

Iran provides a vivid case of geopolitical substitution with revolutionary consequences. In Iran, an Anglo-American intelligence operation restored the Pahlavi Shah to power in 1953 by toppling an elected government backed by popular leftist and nationalist movements. Afterward, the United States provided steady diplomatic, fiscal, and coercive assistance, allowing a regime on the verge of breakdown to assume the offensive and liquidate those in opposition, as well as the sectors supporting them such as students, workers, and intellectuals. The potential victory of such opposition, one aligned against the West and potentially toward the Soviet Union, was unacceptable in Washington. Hence, Pahlavi autocracy reequilibrated without having compromised with opposition or bargained for loyalty. It believed that unconditional U.S. support, and its coercive apparatus, could guarantee future stability.

The governing institutions then in line to transform Iranian society reflected the absence of patronage and protection commitments, as the regime grew more insulated from society. Political parties were talk shops for royal factotums, not forums to rally grassroots support; industrialization and modernization programs alienated old allies like rural land owners, bazaar marketeers, and Shiʿa clergy. When protests erupted in 1978 amid economic crisis, the dictatorship had no tool apart from violence by which to respond. Yet, repression only facilitated the spread of dissent and its radicalization into a revolutionary movement. Against this, the shah had no credibility when promising reforms in return for peace; neither could he organize supporters to neutralize a hostile street or speak directly with resistance leaders. Despite U.S. encouragement and intensifying coercion, the Pahlavi monarchy could not defeat the revolution.

GEOPOLITICAL SUBSIDIZATION AND TENUOUS SURVIVAL: JORDAN

Not all regimes saturated with foreign support become substitutive. Middle-range outcomes of tenuous survival—longevity without stability, due to the periodic threats of uprisings and constant insecurity—can be traced to earlier conditions of geopolitical subsidization, the third causal trajectory of my theory of political regimes. Here, structural factors come into play. Some countries remain uniquely bifurcated by a single ethnic or sectarian division, producing a large communal majority and cohesive minority fearful of maj...