a new third political order?

A postcolonial “second order” was de facto established in west Asia and the middle east in the aftermath of WWII, which replaced the post-Ottoman “first order” that protected the nascent nation-states and their bourgeois middle classes and professional élite groups in the aftermath of the empire’s dismantlement and sudden demise. As it turned out, such groups were doing well and prosperous as long as the French and British colonial order was there to safeguard the middle east from further fragmentation. The 1952 free officers revolution in Egypt and the 1958 Qasim coup against the Hashimites in Iraq were the first indicators of the end of the post-Ottoman colonial bourgeois rule, with all its liberal underpinnings (free press, multi-parties, banking and finance, and family owned industries). By 1963 and the coming of the Baath in Syria and Iraq, the tone was clearly set that we're into "socialism," one-party state rule, secret services, and a preponderant role to the military and their affiliates, which ended up controlling education and major industries. Qaddafi's coup in 1969 against the Idrissi dynasty, the rejuvenation of the Baath in the 1970s under Saddam and Asad, reinforced the trend, while the Iranian revolution in 1978–79 completed the circle of the monolithic state and its military and intelligence apparatuses. So it took three decades after WWII for the political and social “second order” to take shape in west Asia and the middle east. Are the present revolts destined to dismantle that order or consolidate it? The elements that consolidated the old order, and which are still there, came from the rural peripheries and small cities, and were rooted in the military. In the four decades since they've come to power, they've lost touch with their original peripheries, hence what we're witnessing now is the class struggle emerging from large sections of the populations that have been disfavored and marginalized. However, there isn't much of a political program for all those lower classes, which have been joined by fragments of the middle classes that lost their purchasing powers over the years, and young techies that do not fit well into the current societal stalemate. High unemployment and birth rates, inflation of college degrees, the low status of women, and the failure to industrialize, are certainly the main culprits behind the gross failures of the nascent nation-states to modernize and compete with their Asian counterparts. Hence it's a curious combination of elements that are coming together in those street protests, more class- than ethnically-oriented, whose final resolution would take several decades to settle. To be sure, there will be more openings towards more representative political systems (multi-parties etc.), but that won't be enough, hence the possibility of a rigid consolidation if the social forces fail to mature in the right direction. I'm as usual fairly pessimistic, as I don't feel that the region as a whole is yet ready for a mature "liberal" solution.

Why the Arab revolts are not political, at least not for now

The Arab revolts have thus far taken different routes, even though their root cause may be similar. In Tunisia and Egypt, the army stood off the conflict, posing as arbitrator rather than protagonist. Such position led to a relatively bloodless resolution to the uprisings, at least for now. In neighboring Libya the army, composed of 50,000 or so poorly trained and equipped elements, dissolved rather rapidly, while the ruling clan managed to survive thanks to its private militias (the seven Qaddafi sons have, we are told, each their own militia, 5,000 each on average). In Yemen the state lost control over most of the national territory, but the president Ali Saleh survives in his presidential compound thanks to tribal links and his well-trained presidential guards, in spite of daily manifestations that have metamorphosed into a thriving business. In Syria, the bloody demonstrations have been spreading at a slow pace, with thousands (mostly male) demonstrators in various cities managing to break the security vanguards of the ruling clan. The Syrian revolt will thus to be fought city by city, neighborhood by neighborhood, and clan by clan, so much this urban society is fractured along kinship loyalties.

Observers of the Arab revolts have often pointed to their presumed “political” character in the narrow sense of the term: namely, that what is common to all of them is that urgent demand to overthrow an existing corrupt ruling group, which took control of the state apparatuses decades ago. What is therefore “political” in this instance is the overthrow of a corrupt régime as an apparatus that dominates “civil society.” But what such a view often overlooks, however, is how much is at stake beyond the usual opposition of state and civil society. In effect, analysts typically miss the fact that the link between state and civil society is so abstract as to become analytically useless. A more fruitful approach would be to point to intermediary institutions, such as political parties, municipalities, daily practices, the social uses of space, charismatic leadership, as necessary components of society, whose political expressions have been cruelly lacking in the Arab societies that have been witnessing uprisings and revolts. Such a crucial shortcoming, which has been present for over half a century, in the so-called postcolonial period, will only postpone the move towards more democratically representative (and industrialized) societies.

With the end of the Second World War and colonialism, it took over three decades for the middle east, as an inherently incoherent region, to establish a political order that would become its trademark. In fact, both the 1952 free officers revolution in Egypt, and the 1958 bloody end of the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq, have set a dubious pattern of a sudden military takeover of civilian rule at the hands of low middle class officers from rural landowning families. The Baathist coups in Iraq and Syria in the early 1960s had consolidated that already familiar pattern of the breakdown of civilian bourgeois rule, and its concomitant replacement by a one-party state with faked mass-mobilization strategies. Such an arrangement meant the end of politics in civil society at large, and the current uprisings and revolts would not be enough to get politics back on track. At best, such uprisings could be termed “cultural,” in that they seem to emanate from groups (not to be limited to the youth) which by and large have learned their modus vivendi from the globalized media landscape in terms of mass communication, body language, and the social uses of space.

What therefore needs attention are the implications of the dismantlement of civil society in the Arab world at large for over half a century, and why the revolts sweeping the region at present won’t be enough as a remedy. What is at stake are practices that delve much deeper into the socio-political and cultural substrata.

Arab and Islamic empires of the past centuries give the false impression of states tightly controlling their societies, which some historians have wrongly attributed to long-term “absolutisms.” In reality, those states were more prebendal and patrimonial than “absolutist,” as the core of state formations was the clan and tribe of the ruling dynasty which distributed prebends to loyal urban groups. In modern times, with military power and technology, the grip of the state over society has only marginally solidified, giving that illusion of mighty control, while in reality the state only contributed at crushing and postponing movements in civil society that could have created possible alternative political formations and representations.

Having already overestimated the power of the authoritarian state, we should refrain from either overestimating its downfall or for a rapid emergence of political movements in civil society in the near future. Indeed, what we have been witnessing since December 2010 throughout the Arab world are the “cultural” expressions of large segments of frustrated groups in society. Besides the fact that 65 percent of the populations of the Middle East is under the age of 35, high unemployment, the failure to industrialize and modernize at a large scale, the marginalization of women in public life and the dismantlement of family values, have all contributed at pushing protesters into a “public sphere” that exists only marginally, that is, as a space whose social use has been severely truncated for decades. As globalization has created a mediatized world of images that centers on the body and its social power, it is that kind of culture, which is primarily non-political in its essence, that protesters have espoused, while the bringing down of the likes of Ben Ali and Mubarak are only symbolic acts which help to foster that needed energy of belonging together among protesters. It remains to be seen, however, whether such cultural representations would find a much deeper political expression, in terms of deeply rooted institutions, in particular that there is much at stake in the cultural values of society. Think, for instance, of family values and the role of women in public in Arab societies: Would it be possible to industrialize and modernize at a large scale without dismantling many of the traditional family values, and without giving women more public prominence and freedom? We should know by now that technology and science are not neutral entities, which could be exported and implemented at will, without their ideological underpinnings. It remains uncertain, however, how much awareness there is at the implications behind cultural change, and whether there is, indeed, any willingness to find political expression for popular discontent.

mysteries of minorities

The harassments that Christians are facing today in countries like Iraq and Egypt tend to be seen in isolation to similar problems across the middle east, on one hand, and from historical precedents on the other; and while routinely associated with a surge in Islamic values across the Arab and Islamic worlds, their economic underpinnings are overlooked.

 

In the old Islamic empires, Christian and Jewish minorities were simultaneously referred to as “the people of the book” and ahl al-dhimma, the former referring to the identification of minorities with their holy scriptures, while the latter limited them to their status as minorities, in particular in matters of political representation and taxation (the special jizya tax). In Ottoman times, such minorities were integrated within the millet system, which grosso modo implied, as with the previous empires, poor political representation and special taxes, together with the legalization of economic practices that were forbidden to the majority of Muslims under sharia law. Thus, when Jews fleeing the Spanish inquisition in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries opted for the Ottoman empire, they were greeted within the millet system, on one hand, and as potential moneylenders on the other. Such historical millet-specific economic functions tend to be overlooked these days, in particular in relation to the hardships that Christians have been going through in the middle east. That 2010 implied the end of Christianity in Iraq, and that the hardships of the Copts in Egypt have been under the hood during the Mubarak autocratic rule, and have only accelerated since his departure, beg the following questions: How come autocratic régimes, like Baathism under Saddam Hussein, Nasserism up to Sadat and Mubarak, or Syrian Baathism, manage the status of minorities far better than the more “democratic” ones? It is, for instance, no secret that under Saddam Hussein the Christians of Iraq were much safer than now, and that an explanation of the kind that they have been targeted because of a sudden rise of Islamic jihadic groups, which the nascent federal state is unable to control, would certainly not suffice, and is inadequate as an explicans. What needs to be explained here—the explanandum—is the relative “security” that Armenians, Christians and Jews, in their lives and properties, have benefited from in Ottoman, colonial, and postcolonial times, but only when the postcolonial independent state acted like a mini-Ottoman state, with millet rights and privileges. There seems therefore, prima facie, at face value, a contradiction, which is precisely what needs to be explained: Why under autocratic conditions, in countries like Iraq, Syria and Egypt, minorities feel much safer than in less autocratic and more open conditions? The reason is that postcolonial autocratic states have stabilized around post-Ottoman notions of power, where millets were kept with similar economic rights and privileges. Whenever such autocratic states have shifted in another direction, as is the case in Iraq and Egypt, the “protection” accorded by the state is not there anymore, and the minorities find themselves competing with other groups, in particular the Muslim majority.

 

The real secret here may well be the so-called “pluralism” in sharia law, which permitted a special legal status to minorities and foreigners. Up to the early 19th century, such special legal status did not create large economic discrepancies between communities. By the 19th century, however, competition across the Mediterranean pushed for greater legal autonomy to minorities. In areas where sharia law was particularly weak, such as partnerships, moneylending, and corporations, minorities benefited from their special legal status, namely, the fact that laws outside the sharia system were applicable to them—and to them only—either within their own confessional millets, or else through capitulations and special mixed courts.

 

It is, indeed, that relative economic “success” of minorities that is often overlooked today. Is there any connection between the economic and cultural edge that minorities were able to secure, and the harassments and massacres that they had to endure? Let us note here that the first calls for autonomy, in the form of regional and territorial nationalisms, in the Ottoman empire, were to erupt in Greece and the Balkans, in regions where the Greek Orthodox faith was predominant.

 

In a recent book, the economist Timur Kuran notes that until the late 18th century Muslim role in trade and commerce was significant, as there is no historical evidence that Muslim merchants left trade to Christians and Jews, even though both Islamic economic and legal practices lagged behind their counterparts in medieval and early modern Europe in practices like partnership, the corporation, the legal person, primogeniture (as opposed to equal inheritance), money lending, the letter of credit, trust funds (as opposed to the closed waqfs), stocks, bonds, treasuries and public debt. But with the expansion of capitalism, the industrial revolution, trade and colonialism, the trend has begun to shift towards non-Muslim minorities, as more aggressive trade practices were needed. As sharia law leaves the door open for “legal pluralism,” the denominational communal courts served the purpose of granting legal protection for practices that the sharia courts would otherwise not have permitted. Better still, non-Muslim minorities had that unique option to opt for the legal authority of their own choice, pending on what was at stake. “By the end of the 19th century,” however, “the Ottoman Empire’s Muslim merchants were decidedly secondary players in its external trade with Europe, and at home, too, they had lost enormous ground to local minorities” (Kuran 191). Soon, the dhimmi communities who were commercially active became, like the foreigners of the empire, protégés of European powers or of their inside cohorts. Some, seeking better protection, or to be exempted from specific taxes, either became consuls or dragomans (tercümans) in consulates.

 

Herein lies the shift that occurred from the “protected” millet status to one that was life threatening to non-Muslim minorities. To understand the significance of such a shift by the late 19th early 20th centuries we need to go no further than the decline of the populations of non-Muslim minorities in Anatolia. Historians of the empire (Kemal Karpat and Justin McCarthy) give on average 10 to 25 percent for non-Muslim minorities in Ottoman Anatolia, when it was still within the empire’s jurisdiction. But with the killing and deportation of close to 1.5 million Armenians, and other minorities (primarily Greeks) by the end of WWI, Turkey’s population of today’s minorities stands at less than 1 percent of the total of the republic. Nor was such a movement of deportation and harassment to stop with the foundation of the republic or in the aftermath of WWII for that matter. The last episode, known as “the pogrom against Greek businesses,” on 6 and 7 September 1955, when Adnan Menderes was prime minister (1950–60), emptied the heart of Istanbul, the Beyoğlu (Pera) area, from its Greek businesses, amid large scale riots that pushed many Greek families to leave their homes and fortunes behind in their rush for more secure countries (Zürcher 231). Ironically, the Greeks were targeted at a time when Turkey’s economy was most successful, achieving a 9 percent growth rate over the ten-year period of the Menderes administration, with rapid urbanization and industrialization, thanks partly to foreign aid. Which begs the question, Why are minorities targeted even in times of relative economic success, when the country is not challenged by external enemies?

 

Yet, Turkey is the only country in the region to have successfully industrialized and modernized, well situated within the prestigious G–20 membership. Why was it the first Islamicate society to systematically eliminate its minorities? Was the elimination of minorities an operation necessitated by the growth of the nation-state, industrialization, modernization, laissez-faire capitalism? In other words, does the “imagined community,” which acts as a prerequisite for the nation-state, necessitate that “minorities” be targeted to create a “coherence” in the imagined ideology?

political or cultural theater?

The events in the Middle East are portrayed as people versus their despotic rulers, innocent masses against corrupt states, utopian crowds versus crony capitalists of the nouveaux riches, religious versus secular, and tribalism versus the cold raison d’état of the statism. That politics is perceived as a theater of expressivity against corrupt and oppressive rulers, good guys versus bad guys, is commonplace. In the wake of the financial collapse in the US and the rest of the world in 2008–09, the bad guys were the Wall Street bankers, who, behind our backs, and while benefiting from our trust (in the money that we’ve safely deposited in their banks), they went ahead and engineered all kinds of “immoral” (rather than illegal) transactions. The financial collapse was thus seen in terms of individuals defecting as a group from common sense behavior against the majority of innocent actioners. Similarly, the middle east uprisings are portrayed as an action of an innocent majority versus a corrupt minority in power. But how come such a minority managed to rule the uncorrupt majority? By sheer force? What political discourse and analysis hardly reveal is the amount of consensus behind political power, whatever the degree of coerciveness involved: indeed, it all comes to a matter of degree rather than deeply rooted principles. That oppressors and oppressed belong, therefore, to the same cultural landscape (ethos), that they may share similar cultural values, is what is often overlooked once the veil of consensual coercion has been broken—but to what kind of political order exactly? In other words, once the consensus that lies behind political power (from the most totalitarian to the most liberal) seems to have been broken, amid, for instance, street protests and violence, political power is de facto portrayed as “out of sync”—or out of touch—with the masses, hence hiding (repressing) the very idea of consensus even behind coercion and oppression, not far away from the consensus that we find in liberal democracies. That is to say, what is occulted here is what protesters are finally aiming at. Thus, when we ask the trivial question, What is it that they want, what is it that they are aiming at?, we get the trivial answer, They want political freedom, uncorrupt governments, and a radical régime change. Whether to some this implies western laissez-faire liberalism, or on the other end, a Muslim radical theocracy or a moderately Islamic liberal government (in the style of the Muslim Brothers), important as it may as an issue, is not what is at stake here, at least not for the centrality of the revolts. We want to unmask what has been left out in all this: the real motivations of the protesters, why they’ve been coming, with their bodies, alone or en masse, day after day. We want an analysis along the following lines: the body, the visible, the gaze, time and (public) space, all of which pertain to a particular political culture. We want to argue that the broad movement launched across the middle east, which is now shaped as a region whose coherence (or lack thereof) is being made and unmade through the protests, targets an entire cultural landscape, between oppressors and oppressed, wealthy and poor, the state apparatuses and those outside them.