Arabia Without Sultans

Fred Halliday

• Editore: Saqi Books
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780863567148
• Argomento: Politics & International Relations
• Categoria: Geopolitics

Fred Halliday writes: 'The Arab Middle East is probably the most misunderstood of all regions; the one with the longest history of contact with the west; yet it is probably the one least understood. Part of the misunderstanding is due to the romantic mythology that has long appeared to shroud the deserts of the peninsula. Where old myths have broken down, new ones have absorbed them or taken their place. Now the Sheikh of Arabia has stepped down from his camel. Instead, through the delusive lens of the 'energy crisis' he is seen to be riding a Cadillac and squeezing the powerless Western consumer of oil.' First published in the 1970s, Arabia Without Sultans retains its validity for the present as it analyses the Arabian peninsula and Iran within the global context of western post-colonial strategy and the political economy of oil. Halliday offers a thorough study of the history, the politi and the economi of this region in an ambitious, encompassing and entertaining manner. This classic work remains indispensable for students, academi, and all those who wish to have a greater understanding of the Arabian peninsula. 'A well-documented work, written by an author who knows the language of the area.' Maxime Rodinson 'Halliday provides an unusual view-point and a well-documented description of the history of these states.' Middle East International 'Anyone interested in this area will want to read this.' International Affairs 'A most valuable account of the developments which have taken place in the Arab Gulf over the last hundred years.' Tariq Ali

Part One

Peninsular Politics

Introduction

The Revolutionary Movement
in Arabia

Uneven and Combined Development

Arabia underwent a striking transformation in the two decades after 1950. From being an area of extreme economic backwardness and of marginal importance to the world economy, it became the scene of intense development and acquired enormous strategic importance for world capitalism. While local ruling classes developed their own autonomy, the anti-imperialist movement in the peninsula, which had been till then a relatively minor and retarded sub-section of the movement in the Arab Middle East as a whole, was transformed into a powerful section of that movement and was able to develop the anti-imperialist struggle to a level never before achieved in the region.¹ The rulers of the oil-producing states, in limited conflict with imperialism over Israel and oil profits, were intent on gaining a more influential position within world capitalism; the anti-imperialist movement wanted to destroy this system altogether.

This complex set of changes was a sharp instance of the Marxist law of combined and uneven development: capitalism unifies the world into a single market and into a system of political dominations; yet the different sub-sections of this world system remain distinct. In many cases the differences between them are accentuated by incorporation into a single system. It is because of this unevenness that the weakest links in the capitalist system as a whole may be found not in the most developed countries but in those countries where the retarded impact of capitalism creates contradictions that are all the sharper because the developments carried through elsewhere have not yet been completed. This was the basis of Lenin’s analysis of why the revolution was possible in backward Russia, and it underlies any subsequent analysis of the spread of socialist revolution to other colonial countries where capitalist development has been delayed: to China, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Albania, Cuba. It is no longer an anomaly that advanced forms of political and ideological combat arise and triumph in poor and backward countries; it is not because these countries are in themselves retarded but because they are both backward and part of the unevenly developed world market that they can embark on the path of socialist revolution.

Until the twentieth century the Arabian peninsula was marginal to world history, which had in turn relatively little impact on it. No external power intervened to impose an exogenous transformation; peninsular society was arrested by its own structures and therefore incapable of internally generating change. The explosion of the Arabian tribes under the banner of Islam in the seventh century A.D. gave the peninsula a brief world-historical importance, but it was only in the twentieth century that Arabia’s isolation was broken and that the socio-economic structure of the area underwent irreversible change. Imperialism dominated the area politically from the early nineteenth century; at first its aim too was to fossilize and insulate the peninsula. In the mid twentieth century changes in the political and economic configuration of world capitalism altered this policy. Just as previously inaccessible and marginal areas such as Alaska and the Brazilian interior were brought into the capitalist market, so the long untouched Arabian peninsula was similarly integrated into an imperialist system that continued to expand its need for raw materials. This integration into the world market and the growth of the local ruling classes was paralleled by the development of a revolutionary movement that attacked the power both of imperialism and of those sections of peninsular society whose interests were tied to the capitalist world. This movement has a triple significance: (a) it for the first time created the possibility of a revolutionary break with the past structures of peninsula society; (b) it posed a direct threat to capitalist control of two thirds of all known oil resources, the largest single deposit of strategic raw materials in the world; (c) it broke out of the ideological and class patterns hitherto dominant in the anti-imperialist movement in the Middle East and was therefore a guide to a possible radicalization of the anti-imperialist movement in the whole region.

Imperialism in the Arab Middle East

It is this third aspect which must be examined both to explain the distance which the revolutionary movement in the peninsula has travelled and to focus on a possible consequence of the advance of revolution in the Arabian area of the world. The Middle East is a region which has undergone a long and diverse subjection to European colonialism. The Arab Middle East fell under intense imperialist control during the nineteenth century; peripheral areas, North Africa and Arabia, were annexed outright while the rival imperialist powers fought for influence in the central Arab regions, which at that time were oppressed by the Ottoman empire. The simultaneous durability and fragility of this empire constituted as ‘the eastern question’ a major diplomatic preoccupation of the late nineteenth century, and was only resolved by the First World War, which clarified inter-imperialist relations. This destroyed the Ottoman empire, led to the Russian Revolution and stripped a defeated Germany of its imperial influence. Italy, though a victor, was too weak to win any additional influence; and Britain and France were left alone to divide the conquered lands between them. The newly arrived imperialist United States made no territorial gains, but did use post-1918 changes in the inter-imperialist system to win its first foothold in Middle Eastern oil.

By the end of the Second World War many colonial Arab states had been granted a partial independence; Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Libya were launched on the world under the rule of classes which cooperated with imperialism. Further decolonization followed; at times it was forced on the imperialists (Algeria), and at other times it was placid (Kuwait). A variety of distinct Arab states emerged from this period. The number of forms that imperialism took, and the divisions between British and French rulers, compounded economic and political divisions rooted in the history of the region. As a result, separate state structures emerged, each with its own ruling class and each with a separate state apparatus, whose interests lay in preserving their separate identity. It is ahistorical to argue that imperialism simply created the divisions between Middle Eastern countries, or that these societies remained divided because imperialism kept them apart. Imperialism certainly intensified and used these divisions; but the differences themselves pre-existed imperialism. They are now partially independent of imperialism; and their autonomy is embodied in the class interests of the regimes in different countries. With both internal and external reinforcement, the forces of division in the Arab world are far stronger than the forces of unity; and no unity, except of a superficial and temporary kind, can be achieved without the destruction of these ruling classes. This means that unity between sections of the Middle East can only come after the socialist revolution in each part. It cannot predate it.²

While the Arab world is divided into distinct states there exists among all classes consciousness of a common Arab identity and a desire for unity. Much of this finds expression in the mystified and classless invocation of a common ‘Arabism’, a concept used to their own advantage by the ruling classes within each state. On the one hand, these states do benefit from limited political and economic cooperation; the different Arab states form a political community within which aid can be deployed to stabilize whichever regime requires it. They are also able to benefit from economic complementarities; oil-producing states can bank reserves and develop services in Egypt and Lebanon; Egyptian and Lebanese capitalists can provide goods and services in the Gulf. On the other hand the ruling classes are able to manipulate the popular sense of unity in order to reinforce their own position, and thereby that of imperialism. By posing as the champions of a classless Arabism they are able to deflect criticism from the oppressed within their own country. This has gone with a restricted ability to meet the threats from outside against whom national unity is involved. Arab regimes for decades manipulated the Palestinian question to ensure class collaboration within their own states and at the same time proved incapable of assisting the Palestinian people to assert their self-determination.³ In this way the predominance of a national rather than a class conception contributed to the continued strength of imperialism throughout the area, and to the disunity of the Arab world.

Nasserism and Its Limits

The dominant anti-imperialist trend after 1945 was Arab nationalism, embodied most notably in Nasserism but also finding an expression in Ba’athism. In both cases it represented opposition both to control of the economy by imperialism, large landowners and the Arab bourgeoisie, and to a profound transformation of the Arab countries prepared to empower the masses and organize them in democratic control of the economy. This force found expression in the expansion of the state sector which provided employment (large armies, nationalized industries, expansive bureaucracies), in private landowning and carried out certain anti-imperialist measures. It was anti-bourgeois in so far as capital accumulation and the provision of employment could be better advanced under state control. But within this overall domination by the state, a new ruling class was able to consolidate and exercise a new form of class dictatorship.⁴

The clearest instance of this was Nasserism. Both in Egypt and in the Arab world as a whole it was the representative of anti-imperialism and won a number of victories. In Egypt it lessened the power of the landowning class, expelled foreign capital and nationalized the Suez Canal. It also contributed to the growth of nationalism in other Arab countries. Yet ultimately its interests were not contradictory to those of the landowners and larger bourgeois; it did not destroy their power, but integrated them into the new system, in which power was shared by landowners, officers and bureaucrats. Similarly, its foreign initiatives foundered when the class interests of the regime so dictated. It was unable to fulfil its promise of Arab unity or to resolve the Palestinian question; and, as will be shown, its anti-imperialist initiatives in the Arabian peninsula collapsed. The Egyptian masses suffered immensely in these blundering foreign initiatives, which demanded large sacrifices of money and life. Yet throughout the 1950s and 1960s they followed Nasserite leadership, both because it did represent a more progressive regime internally than what had gone before and because they were presented with no viable alternative.

In the 1960s the anti-imperialist trend represented by Nasserism entered a crisis. The movement’s ideological confusions and veiled class character became more apparent. Nasserism consequently split: a pro-western faction moved to the right, while a minority of genuine anti-imperialists broke with Nasserism on the left. This decline included the breakdown of unity between Egypt and Syria (1961), the emergence of a workers’ and peasants’ opposition in Egypt (1965), and defeat by Israel (1967). The latter crisis, in particular made it seem that the anti-imperialist rhetoric of the Egyptian state represented a concealed justification for the class dictatorship of the army and the state, who proved incapable of carrying out their anti-imperialist undertakings. The defeat of 1967 unleashed a series of demonstrations and protests inside Egypt which the regime could smother but not prevent. The discrediting of the regular armies of the Arab world lent new authority to those who propounded guerrilla war, a process intensified by the then prominent example of the Vietnamese struggle.

In the years following the June 1967 defeat the Arab governments formerly able to pose as anti-imperialist moved to the right. The June defeat caused a general leftward radicalization and a break with Nasserism which was overshadowed by a decisive rightist shift in the core Arab states – in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan. Nasser’s death in October 1970, just after Hussein’s massacre of the Palestinians, accelerated this process by removing the individual whose personal role had been integral to anti-imperialist unity. His Egyptian epigone – Anwar es-Sadat – has taken further processes always inherent in Nasserism: its class oppression, its opportunism, its anti-communism and its mystificatory use of religion. The trend he represents shows that ‘petty-bourgeois nationalism’ in the Arab world is not defeated; it has assumed a more virulent and repressive form. In the aftermath of the October 1973 war, the Egyptian state brought its policies of the past six years to a culmination: the nationalizations of the Nasserite period itself were undone, foreign capital was invited to re-enter the country, and Henry Kissinger was greeted as the saviour of the Cairo regime. Sadat, who had been able to use the financial support of the oil-producing states to offset the defeat of 1967, was bent on reshaping Egyptian society along the lines which the Saudis and Kuwaitis most wanted to see.

A successful revolutionary movement in the Arab states would have had to break with the legacy of Nasserism. Since the Arab Communist parties have so far been weak, a future vanguard party would probably include the left-wing remnants of Nasserism. Any such break with nationalism would have to be dialectical; it would assert Nasserism’s achievements and the promises it was unable to fulfil, while pointing out its inadequacies and the need to found a movement on a new basis.⁵ The components of such an initiative would comprise both a class break and an ideological break. No successful anti-imperialist or democratic movement in the Arab world can be led by the Arab bourgeoisies or by petty-bourgeois states, which create new class dictatorships. The record of these regimes is clear for all to see. Although there are always differences between imperialism and the ruling classes in post-colonial capitalist countries, and between the old and ne...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Introduction to the Second Edition
• Acknowledgements
• Part One: Peninsular Politics
• Part Two: North Yemen
• Part Three: South Yemen
• Part Four: Oman
• Part Five: The Gulf
• Part Six: Conclusion
• Appendix One: Abbreviations
• Appendix Two: Basic Data on Peninsular and Gulf States
• Appendix Three: Exchange of Letters Between the British Government and the Sultan of Muscat and Oman, 1958
• Appendix Four: PFLOAG Documents:
• Index
• Copyright