‘Creative destruction’

In recent years, anti-authoritarian movements have appeared across the globe. Populist disaffection has gathered the young, unemployed, underemployed and disappointed into often leaderless mass movements that have challenged the established political and economic order – whatever it may be – virtually everywhere. In the Arab world, in part because of the particularly shallow roots of the local states and the sclerotic character of the old regimes, these movements have been spectacularly successful in opposing authority. They have been far less effective in successfully engineering new governments, however, and the transitions that followed the fall of regimes in the region have been protracted and contentious.

The upheavals in the Arab world share elements of widespread political processes: in some ways they have been straightforward uprisings against authoritarian governments and regimes, not dissimilar to comparable revolts and revolutions at other times and places. In some respects, they represent the local expression of growing global social upheaval, which is driven at least in part by a technological revolution, not unlike the industrial revolution of the 19th century; new access to information and communication are reshaping economic, social and political identities and expectations everywhere.

But what makes the Arab uprisings unique is the fact that this tumult also marks the beginning of the end of the state system introduced into the Middle East by the 20th-century imperial order. Without gainsaying the importance of other perspectives, this article therefore emphasizes the character of the states and of competing political identities and organizations in the Arab world in shaping the contending forces now locked in a long struggle to define and reflect authority and legitimacy in the region.

For most political scientists, policy analysts and public intellectuals, the default political unit is the modern state. In recent years, there has been concern about what was called the ‘eclipse’ ¹ of the state, as the rapid development of new technologies of communication seemed to undermine its autonomy and sovereignty; as a prominent US policy analyst put it:

Nation-states will not disappear, but they will share power with a larger number of powerful non-sovereign actors than ever before … The world thirty-five years from now will be semi-sovereign. It will reflect the need to adapt legal and political principles to a world in which the most serious challenges to order come from what global forces do to states and what governments do to their citizens rather than from what states do to each other. ²

Of course, the state, whether ‘in eclipse’ or not, is actually a relatively new feature of human society. The vast part of human history has been made by complex and orderly communities of tribes, chivalric orders, churches, empires, trade federations, aristocracies, religious brotherhoods and other expressions of human ingenuity. For most citizens of established states, particularly in Europe and North America, these alternatives are historical anachronisms, aspects only of their personal or private lives, but they served for millennia as vehicles for regulating societal interaction, fortifying human bonds, organizing economic production and exchange, and assuring security in the absence of what we know as the state – and in many places, they still do.

Indeed, in many parts of the Middle East today the institutions associated with the domestic operation of conventional states – civil and common law systems, public bureaucracies, police forces, fiscal administrations, legislatures, judiciaries and the like – exist as little more than artifacts of a fast- fading imperial era. The formal elements of statehood – territorial boundaries, standing armies, international sovereignty – have been eroded in favor of alternative definitions and structures of community and identity. Some of these alternatives, such as religious and ethnic networks, are competitors of the state. They convey far fewer rights and guarantee far less welfare than established states but they often protect those they do protect far more effectively.

For the loyalists of these kinds of communities, it is the state itself that corrupts the social order. From the perspective of many in the Arab world, the modern European-style state is a burden imposed with the demise of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of the First World War. The European – soon to be ‘international’ – principle that territorial states were to be the organizational structure for participation in what the League of Nations called ‘civilization’ was to mean that aspirations to be rid of European domination were couched in terms of independence for these political units. Only states, understood as the territorial units imposed by European imperialism, could hope to join the ‘advanced nations’ that represented ‘civilization’. Alternative vehicles for political community were ruled out; it was inconceivable that the Utaibah tribe of the Arabian Peninsula, for example, or the Ottoman Empire, the Islamic ummah, the Berbers of North Africa, ARAMCO, the Sanusi religious brotherhood, or the Saudi royal family could become independent as such. And so peoples and communities aspiring to rule themselves adopted the attributes of states. Tribes and ethnic groups banned together, repressed mutual hostilities and claimed sovereignty. The successor states saved the question of their identity until independence was secured and then spent decades debating the merits of those state loyalties, as opposed to others such as those represented in pan-Arab or pan-Islamic movements.

The stability of the succeeding decades in the Middle East suggested acquiescence in, if not satisfaction with, the territorial states bequeathed to the region by European imperialism. The early post-independence Arab nationalist efforts to challenge the legitimacy of local states came to naught and by the 1970s, the region settled into a sort of sullen political stability that obscured widespread stagnation and resentment. That the communities and identities of the past had not been abandoned, even decades later, was suggested by none other than Usama Bin Laden, who reminded listeners in the broadcast in which he acknowledged al-Qa’ida’s responsibility for the attacks of 11 September 2001 that

… what the United States tasted today is a very small thing compared to what we have tasted for tens of years. Our nation has been tasting this humiliation and contempt for more than eighty years. ³

Should his audience have missed the significance of the illusion to eighty years of humiliation, he clarified it several weeks later: ‘Following World War I, which ended more than eighty-three years ago, the whole Islamic world fell under the crusader banner – under the British, French and Italian governments.’ In this broadcast, moreover, he identified the successor to the League of Nations as part of the problem: ‘Those who refer things to the international legitimacy have disavowed the legitimacy of the holy book and the tradition of the prophet Muhammad, God’s peace and blessings be upon him.’ ⁴

The alienation from the modern states of the Middle East exemplified by Bin Laden’s rhetoric, not to say his activity, was not universal in the region. But neither was it entirely exceptional. The disillusionment with the states of the region was deep and widespread. It was relatively rarely expressed in outright support of al-Qa’ida or other violent movements but it was frequently exhibited in what was, from the state’s perspective, corruption – that is, reliance on friends, family, ethnic and religious ties, moneychangers, even criminal networks, to obtain the necessities of modern daily life: education, health care, food, employment, authorizations to sell, trade, travel, in short, to live a reasonable life in the 21st century.

And, as of 2011, it was expressed in outright opposition to the policies, then the governments, then the regimes, and in some places ultimately the states of the region. What began as the self-immolation of a frustrated vegetable vendor in south-western Tunisia sparked region-wide challenges not just to unresponsive governments but to tyrannical regimes and alien states. Demands for the rights and responsibilities of citizenship challenged authorities – local, regional and international – that had demeaned generations of supposed citizens by treating them as little more than contemptible subjects. The technological revolution that gave birth to new sources of information and new media of communication was making imperious and autocratic rule increasingly unsustainable.

The history of the installation of the ‘independent nations’ of the Middle East reveals a great deal about the origins and contours of modern-day political conflicts. Although the Middle East has been home to elaborate and ambitious state-like institutions since the time of the Pharaohs in Egypt, the introduction of the modern European-style state was a 20th-century phenomenon. These states were minimally characterized by a specifically demarcated territory, a continuous administrative staff, a military establishment that maintains law and order, and a financial and tax collection apparatus that provides the revenue to support the administration and military; ⁵ in the 20th century, as liberal definitions of politics grew increasingly influential, the modern state was also said to fulfill a social contract in delivering basic public services. ⁶

After the First World War, the League of Nations recognized two kinds of political unit: independent states, which presumably reflected these characteristics, and territories, ‘which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world’. Among these territories were ‘certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish empire [that] have reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone’. ⁷ The League Covenant declared that for these territories, ‘there should be applied the principle that the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilization’. ‘Well-being and development’ were now formally acknowledged as the responsibility of states, and independence – ‘standing alone’ – was predicated on fulfilling this responsibility.

For the Middle East, the question of whether the peoples of the region could manage the strenuous conditions of the modern world was a touchy one, since the Ottoman Empire had effectively sustained independent sovereignty, even on European terms, for centuries. Moreover, the Kurdish, Arab and Maronite communities of the Ottoman Empire, among others, considered themselves ready for recognition as independent nations as well. In the event, however, none of them was accorded recognition as a provisional state. Instead, novel territorial units – Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, for example – were carved from the empire with little regard for the political identities or aspirations of local communities. States were to create citizens for whom the territorial identity – Syrian, Lebanese, Iraqi – would trump other ‘obsolete’ loyalties.

Three decades later, on the verge of the independence of these new states after the Second World War, an economist observed that ‘the existence of such thinly populated countries as unrestrictedly sovereign states is impossible without the support of larger States … It is not so long ago that independent State existence was contingent upon military strength and healthy finance.’ ⁸ Perhaps unwittingly, he summarized the unique challenges of the post-Ottoman Middle East. The juridical sovereignty that would be bestowed upon post-imperial states in the Middle East after the Second World War did not reflect the financial or military requisites, or the capacity to provide for the welfare, associated with European-style states. They were to ‘stand alone’ not because they could survive in ‘the strenuous conditions of the modern world’ but because their European protectors were exhausted by the war and wanted to shed some of the responsibilities they had taken on in the region.

And the post-Ottoman states had been ambitious efforts, for despite considerable rhetoric to the contrary, the European rulers had endowed them with relatively elaborate administrations. New boundaries had been demarcated, police forces established, laws promulgated, taxes levied, tax collectors hired, nomads settled, peasants brought to markets, roads, railroads and ports built, schools opened, weights and measures standardized. Far from serving merely as caretakers, the colonial regimes reshaped many of the most fundamental aspects of life.

All this was done under the guise of the tutelage or protection of the natives: the colonial powers portrayed themselves as guardians, responsible, if not to, certainly for, their charges. Colonies, which had once been viewed principally as valuable sources of raw materials and markets for manufactured goods, had come to entail significant obligations. ‘In fact’, as political theorist Quincy Wright wrote in 1930,

… if we judge by the current terminology we may suppose that dependencies have ceased entirely to be a right of the imperial state but have become a responsibility, a trust of civilization, the white man’s burden … The trust undertaken by the imperial power was not only for the administration of property but for the development of a ward. It resembled guardianship or tutelage. ⁹

Because status and stability counted for more than profit in collecting colonies at this late stage of imperialism, the European powers did not design the new states to be economically self-sustaining. The administrations established by the French, British and Italians in the Middle East did little to encourage economic development, particularly industrialization, and weak initial industrial capacity would hobble the region for decades; by the mid-1970s, the Middle East’s industrial output was a mere 1.5 per cent of the world's total. ¹⁰

By contrast social welfare was an important arena of government activity. Although most observers criticized the European-backed administrations for not having done more to improve the lives of the people under their jurisdiction, both the rationale and the institutions for government spending on social services and public welfare were certainly introduced – and, in fact, widely accepted – in the interwar period. Education, for example, was an increasingly large item in the budgets of the protectorates and mandates and during the Depression and the Second World War, growing nationalist pressures and European concern to maintain control and stability in the region contributed to expansion of broadly based welfare programs. ¹¹

Who paid for all this? Although much was made of the European insistence on fiscal restraint and financial solvency, the local colonial administrations everywhere in the region relied on the metropole for financial subsidies; most of the states of the region never even approached self-sufficiency. ¹² The relatively light tax burden borne by the local population went hand in hand with equally rudimentary systems of political accountability – as wards of the European powers, these populations were sometimes permitted to practise parliamentary politics but only as long as it did not devolve into real political claims-making.

As a result, at independence the rulers of the Arab world did not inherit and were not constrained by institutions designed to guarantee the government’s domestic accountability but they did find themselves facing precedents for providing generous subsidies and services and, in many cases, equipped with the institutional infrastructure with which to do so. Independence changed the resources available to the players but not the rules of the game they played. Although the attainment of the political independence of most of the countries of the Middle East and North Africa between 1948 and 1962 was accompanied by much drama and even bloodshed, as was astutely observed of North Africa,

… independence put an end to the formal domination of the European powers, but everywhere … the programs of the ‘Westernized’ elites were consistent with the ones carried out by the vilified colonial authorities and were marked by the precipitation that characterizes the action of an elite convinced that it is the vanguard of progress. ¹³

The imperial conception of the role of the colonial state as an active and intrusive instrument of change was wholeheartedly adopted and vigorously extended by the nationalist rulers. They differed in their ends: the Europeans had expected that state intervention to guarantee their interests in the region; the nationalists anticipated using the state to foster sovereignty and prosperity – ends best served by their own rule, guaranteed by the apparatus of an interventionist state. Moreover, and again like their European predecessors, the nationalist leaders saw their role as tutelary, although they typically portrayed themselves as ‘fathers of their country’ or ‘vanguards of the people’ rather than ‘protectors’ of those ‘not yet able to stand by themselves’. Finally, like the colonial administrators, the nationalists used the interests of international actors in continued regional access and stability to maintain a steady flow of revenues to fund their ambitious plans. Although the nature and sources of the external resources changed over time, the outward orientation of the regimes remained remarkably constant throughout the postwar period. The resulting overdeveloped, tutelary and extroverted states shaped politics throughout the Middle East well beyond the end of the 20^th century.

The primacy of political imperatives was evident in the high proportions of post-independence government budgets devoted to welfare – and in the lack of outcomes measures. As a World Bank report dryly observed about regional investments in education, ‘these investments in human capital appear to have generated poor returns’. ¹⁴ In part this reflected the fact that, although spending on education, consumer subsidies and devices for other welfare provision required financing, except in oil-producing countries, savings failed to match the rate of investment; the resulting ‘resource gap’ was larger in the Middle East than in anywhere else in the Third World. ¹⁵ This gap was filled by foreign resources, particularly foreign aid, grants and loans from former metropoles, superpowers, oil producers and international financial institutions. The specific sources of external revenue varied from country to country; only Egypt enjoyed the rents of Suez Canal transit receipts, for example, and Tunisia was far more heavily reliant on aid than its neighboring hydrocarbon exporters. Nonetheless, the region-wide pattern of dependence on external rents was striking.

The relative insignificance of the domestic population in providing fiscal support for the states of the Middle East also explained the slovenly and cavalier approach to statistical data exhibited by many governments. By the mid-1990s, nearly half the region’s population was under 15 years old, and the growth rates in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, Jordan and Palestine were among the highest in the world. Yet few governments exhibited much concern – indeed, much knowledge – about the social or economic consequences of this growth. In the early 1990s, for example, neither the sending Egyptian government nor the hosting Saudi and Libyan governments compiled statistics on the number of Egyptians working in those oil-producing countries: according to Egyptian government economists, ‘there was “probably” an additional US $3–4 billion entering the country, in the form of either cash or goods that were not officially recorded … estimates of the number of Egyptians working abroad were … placed anywhere between 1.6 to 3.2 million’. ¹⁶

Many of the inefficiencies associated with large-scale government intervention elsewhere in the world plagued these economies: low wages, low productivity, high unemployment. That this did not produce wide-scale famine – or even significant malnutrition – reflected the impact of government-sponsored social welfare programs and this is partly why, of all the developing areas, the Middle East had the lowest income disparities. Equally important, however, was the growth of the region-wide informal economy that accompanied the oil price increases in the 1970s and subsequent liberalization of regional trade, travel and labor migration.

Yet in a number of countries, the hidden economy – transactions of which the government had no record – spawned by remittances probably amounted to well over one-third of GNP by the late 1980s. Most of the activity of the informal economy depended upon personal networks of family, friends and associates. As political scientist Ghassan Salame observed, ‘gangs, nepotistic privatizations, trafficking in influence, tolerance of drugs, militia corruption, the so-called black or informal economy, and para-statist rackets have all been obstacles to democratization. But … these gangs are also the instruments of survival of groups marginalized by the state as well as forces maintaining those states.’ ¹⁷

By the turn of the millennium, it was amply apparent that the pre-industrial welfare states established under European tutelage in the interwar period and sustained by the superpower rivalries of the cold war and the industrial world’s growing reliance on petroleum had overpromised and failed to deliver. They were beginning to lose control of the very populations they had been designed to serve. In 1999, Anthony Cordesman, a US policy analyst, wrote that: ‘[M]any Middle Eastern states have no enemy greater than their own governments.’ ¹⁸ Six years later, Usama Bin Laden agreed: ‘No-one can be unaware of the tremendous spread of corruption, which penetrated all aspects of life. It can no longer be a secret to anyone that various evils have spread.’ ¹⁹

The growing absence of the state administration in realms, both territorial and social, that it once commanded began to reveal the outlines of alternatives. The continuing frailty of the territorial states reflected and reinforced continuing reliance on other kinds of political identity.

In this context – what political theorist Seyla Benhabib has called ‘the postmodern quasi-feudal state’, where the thin patina of ‘civil society’ is a pale but accurate reflection of the weakness of the modern state ²⁰ – alternatives flourish. Ghassan Salame asks: ‘Can we really speak of the coexistence, even the superimposition, of the rivalry or the conflict of two societies, one “authentic,” the other artificially created?’ ²¹

In fact, there is a third possibility, where we have neither ‘authentic’ nor ‘artificial’ societies but imaginative constructions built with the shards of both. That we have an impoverished vocabulary to describe these alternatives does not make them less powerful. ‘Taliban’ – ‘students’ – or al-Qa’ida – ‘the base’ or Ikhwan – Brotherhood – or Hizbullah – ‘the Party of God’ are various ways of conveying a political purpose and identity that is not circumscribed by the international system of states. They may – indeed, often do – flourish where those states are weak or absent but they do not necessarily see themselves as constructing new or stronger states.

This mobilization is neither traditional nor modern, but it is consistent with a world in which ‘the most serious challenges to order come from what global forces do to states and what governments do to their citizens rather than from what states do to each other’. The shrinkage of the public sphere enlarged the realm of religious commitments and economic networks everywhere, but in the United States and Europe, faith-based initiatives are an explicit policy alternative within the context of an established state and civil society. In countries with weak or non-existent states, such initiatives are often a rejection of the state altogether.

That Islamist movements in the erstwhile European possessions may be not simply a demand for better administration – although they certainly are that – but an effort to construct a true alternative to the state itself is suggested, again, by none other than Bin Laden:

People are struggling even with the basics of everyday life, and everyone talks frankly about economic recession, price inflation, mounting debts, and prison overcrowding. Low-income government employees talk to you about their debts … They feel that God is bringing this torture upon them because they have not spoken out against the regime’s injustice and illegitimate behavior, the most prominent aspects of which are its failure to rule in accordance with God’s law … ²²

God’s law transcends all others – including the international law of sovereign states – and failure to acknowledge that explains the misery of the Muslim world.

Just as kinship networks and religious affiliations violate political boundaries (or perhaps, equally, the political boundaries drawn in London and Paris 80-odd years ago contravene kinship and religious identities), so too economic networks are not bounded by national markets or even captured in national accounts. Hizbullah, for example, is frequently described as a ‘state within a state’ in Lebanon, but it is both more and less than a state. It has a wide infrastructure of social services, from orphanages and hospitals to reconstruction companies and garbage collection systems, and it has a militia. After Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, Hizbullah was expected to integrate its forces into the Lebanese army but it refused to do so, calling itself ‘a force of resistance not only for Lebanon, but for the region’. ²³ So, too, the revolts of the ‘Arab spring’ both have revealed and intensified the importance of informal and trans-regional networks.

For many people in the modern Middle East, the public institutions associated with the internationally recognized states of the region are neither trustworthy nor legitimate. Born in the demise of the Ottoman Empire little over 80 years ago, midwifed by European imperial powers, and nurtured in the cold war by superpowers largely indifferent to the well-being of the peoples of the region, the existing states came to be associated with structures of accountability that privileged external actors over local interests. In the absence of public institutions that respond to and represent local interests, people organized around those still vibrant alternative forms of community that exist – the exchange networks of informal economies or the kinship systems of extended families and the ethnic and religious communities of language, sect and confession – and sometimes they reorganized and reinterpreted these identities to supplement and ultimately supplant the failed states in which they found themselves.

Empowered by a wave of global populism, young, unemployed, over-educated and disaffected people in the Arab world gathered into often leaderless mass movements; in some places, these ‘flash mobs’ of protest solidified into guerrilla forces and militias, supported by trans-regional networks of money and sentiment. In working those networks, and challenging the legitimacy of the putative states, they have challenged notions of crime and corruption – the rulers are the criminals, the formal institutions have warped and dishonored vibrant social identities – and upended notions of authority and hierarchy in spasms of creative destruction. Perhaps not surprisingly, however, given that there is little consensus about the positive purposes to which these revolts are to be put, beyond the universal and elemental demands for bread, dignity and social justice, they have been far less effective in successfully engineering new governments and the transitions that follow the fall of regimes have already proven to be protracted and contentious.

Faith and kinship-based organizations, suitable as they may be for comforting the afflicted, do not provide robust institutions for conflict resolution, particularly with those who are deemed non-believers, nor – except in exceptional charismatic moments – do they tolerate, much less sustain, anti-authoritarian postures. Religious sentiments and particularistic affiliations may link the networks of arms and money, of anger and aspiration, that will bring down the state system in the Arab world but they will probably not survive the construction of the new order, whatever that may be.