[Peace-discuss] The Arab revolt in historical perspective

[C. G. Estabrook]

["...key requirements are: unrestricted civic and trade-union liberties of 
expression and organization; undistorted—that is, proportional, not 
first-past-the-post—electoral systems; avoidance of plenipotentiary 
presidencies; blocking of monopolies—state or private—in the means of 
communication; and statutory rights of the least advantaged to public welfare. 
It is only in an open framework of this kind that the demands for social justice 
with which the revolt began can unfold in the collective freedom they need to 
find any realization." And wouldn't those things be nice to have here, in our 
sham democracy in the USA?]


New Left Review 68, March-April 2011
PERRY ANDERSON
ON THE CONCATENATION IN THE ARAB WORLD
Editorial

The Arab revolt of 2011 belongs to a rare class of historical events: a 
concatenation of political upheavals, one detonating the other, across an entire 
region of the world. There have been only three prior instances—the Hispanic 
American Wars of Liberation that began in 1810 and ended in 1825; the European 
revolutions of 1848–49; and the fall of the regimes in the Soviet bloc, 1989–91. 
Each of these was historically specific to its time and place, as the chain of 
explosions in the Arab world will be. None lasted less than two years. Since the 
match was first lit in Tunisia this December, with the flames spreading to 
Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, Oman, Jordan, Syria, no more than three months 
have passed; any prediction of its outcomes would be premature. The most radical 
of the trio of earlier upheavals ended in complete defeat by 1852. The other two 
triumphed, though the fruits of victory were often bitter: certainly, far from 
the hopes of a Bolívar or a Bohley. The ultimate fate of the Arab revolt could 
resemble either pattern. But it is just as likely to be sui generis.

1

Two features have long set the Middle East and North Africa apart within the 
contemporary political universe. The first is the unique longevity and intensity 
of the Western imperial grip on the region, over the past century. From Morocco 
to Egypt, colonial control of North Africa was divided between France, Italy and 
Britain before the First World War, while the Gulf became a series of British 
protectorates and Aden an outpost of British India. After the War the spoils of 
the Ottoman Empire fell to Britain and France, adding what became under their 
calipers Iraq, Syria, the Lebanon, Palestine and Transjordan, in the final great 
haul of European territorial booty. Formal colonization arrived late in much of 
the Arab world. Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, the Subcontinent, not to 
speak of Latin America, were all seized long before Mesopotamia or the Levant. 
Unlike any of these zones, however, formal decolonization has been accompanied 
by a virtually uninterrupted sequence of imperial wars and interventions in the 
post-colonial period.

2

These began as early as the British expedition to reinstall a puppet regent in 
Iraq in 1941, and multiplied with the arrival of a Zionist state on the 
graveyard of the Palestinian Revolt, crushed by Britain in 1938–39. Henceforward 
an expanding colonial power, acting sometimes as partner, sometimes as proxy, 
but with increasing frequency as initiator of regional aggressions, was linked 
to the emergence of the United States in place of France and Britain as the 
overlord of the Arab world. Since the Second World War, each decade has seen its 
harvest of suzerain or settler violence. In the forties came the nakba unleashed 
by Israel in Palestine. In the fifties, the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt 
and the American landings in the Lebanon. In the sixties, Israel’s Six-Day War 
against Egypt, Syria and Jordan. In the seventies, the Yom Kippur War, its 
upshot controlled by the US. In the eighties, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon 
and crushing of the Palestinian intifada. In the nineties, the Gulf War. In the 
last decade, the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. In this, the NATO 
bombardment of Libya in 2011. Not every act of belligerence was born in 
Washington, London, Paris or Tel Aviv. Military conflicts of local origin were 
also common enough: the Yemeni civil war in the sixties, the Moroccan seizure of 
Western Sahara in the seventies, the Iraqi attack on Iran in the eighties and 
invasion of Kuwait in the nineties. But Western involvement or connivance in 
these was also rarely absent. Little in the region moved without close imperial 
attention, and—where necessary—application of force or finance, to it.

3

The reasons for the exceptional degree of Euro-American vigilance and 
interference in the Arab world are plain. On the one hand, it is the repository 
of the largest concentration of oil reserves on Earth, vital for the 
energy-intensive economies of the West; generating a vast arc of strategic 
emplacements, from naval, air and intelligence bases along the Gulf, with 
outposts in Iraq, to deep penetration of the Egyptian, Jordanian, Yemeni and 
Moroccan security establishments. On the other, it is the setting in which 
Israel is inserted and must be protected, as America is home to a Zionist lobby 
rooted in the country’s most powerful immigrant community, which no president or 
party dare affront, and Europe bears the guilt of the Shoah. Since Israel is in 
its turn an occupying power still dependent on Western patronage, its patrons 
have become the target for retaliation by Islamist groups, practising terror as 
the Irgun and Lehi did in their day, and screwing imperial fixation on the 
region to a still higher pitch. No other part of the world has enjoyed the same 
level of continuous hegemonic concern.

4

The second distinguishing feature of the Arab world has been the longevity and 
intensity of the assorted tyrannies that have preyed on it since formal 
decolonization. In the past thirty years democratic regimes, as understood by 
Freedom House, have spread from Latin America to Sub-Saharan Africa to Southeast 
Asia. In the Middle East and North Africa, nothing analogous occurred. Here, 
despots of every stripe continued to hold sway, unaltered by time or 
circumstance. The Saudi family—the aptest sense of the term is Sicilian—which 
has been the central saddle of American power in the region since Roosevelt’s 
compact with it, has ruled unchecked over its peninsula for nearly a century. 
The petty sheikhs of the Gulf and Oman, propped up or put there by the Raj in 
the time of the ‘Trucial Coast’, have had scarcely more need to go through the 
motions of listening to their subjects than the Wahhabite helpmeets of 
Washington next door. The Hashemite and Alaouite dynasties in Jordan and 
Morocco—the first a creature of British, the second a legatee of French, 
colonialism—have passed power down three generations of royal autocrats with 
little more than gestures at a parliamentary façade. Torture and murder are 
routine in these regimes, the best friends of the West in the region.

5

No less so in the nominal republics of the period, each as brutal a dictatorship 
as the next, and most no less dynastic than the monarchies themselves. Here too, 
the collective longevity of rulers had no parallel anywhere else in the world: 
Gaddafi in power for 41 years, Assad father and son 40, Saleh 32, Mubarak 29, 
Ben Ali 23. Only the Algerian military, rotating the Presidency in the manner of 
Brazilian generals, have departed from this norm, while respecting every other 
principle of oppression. In external posture, these regimes were less uniformly 
subservient to the hegemon. The Egyptian dictatorship, rescued from a terminal 
military debacle in 1973 only by the grace of the United States, was thereafter 
a faithful pawn of Washington, with less operational independence from it than 
the Saudi kingdom. The Yemeni ruler was bought at a bargain price for service in 
the War on Terror. The Tunisian cultivated patrons in Europe, principally but 
not exclusively France. The Algerian and Libyan regimes, enjoying large revenues 
from natural resources, had a greater margin of autonomy, if within a pattern of 
increasing overall compliance: required by the Algerian variant to ensure 
Western blessing for its decimation of Islamist opposition, by the Libyan to 
atone for its past and place lucrative investments in Italy. The one significant 
hold-out remained Syria, unable to submit without a recovery of the Golan 
Heights, blocked by Israel, and unwilling to let the fossil-mosaic of Lebanon 
fall completely into the hands of Saudi money and Western intelligence. Even 
this exception, however, was brigaded without difficulty into Operation Desert 
Storm.

6

The two hallmarks of the region, its continuing domination by the American 
imperial system and its continuing lack of democratic institutions, have been 
connected. The connexion is not a simple derivation. Where democracy is reckoned 
any threat to capital, the United States and its allies have never hesitated to 
remove it, as the fates of Mossadegh, Arbenz, Allende or currently Aristide 
illustrate. Conversely, where autocracy is essential, it will be well guarded. 
The despotisms of Arabia, resting on tribal hand-outs and sweated immigrant 
labour, are strategic pinions of the Pax Americana which the Pentagon would 
intervene overnight to preserve. The dictatorships—royal or republican—presiding 
over larger urban populations elsewhere in the region have been somewhat 
different conveniences, of a more tactical order. But the gamut of these 
tyrannies has mostly been aided and supported, rather than created or imposed by 
the United States. Each has indigenous roots in its local society, however well 
watered these may have been by Washington.

7

In Lenin’s famous dictum, a democratic republic is the ideal political shell for 
capitalism. Since 1945, no Western strategist has ever disagreed. The 
Euro-American imperium would prefer in principle to deal with Arab democrats 
than dictators, provided they were equally respectful of its hegemony. This has 
rarely proved to be a difficulty in the regions newly democratized since the 
eighties. Why has the same process not applied in the Middle East and North 
Africa? Essentially, because the United States and its allies have had reason to 
fear that, just because of the long history of their imperial violence in the 
region, and the perpetual exactions of Israel, popular feeling might not deliver 
comparable electoral comfort to them. It is one thing to rig up a client regime 
at the point of a bayonet, and round up enough votes for it, as in Iraq. Freer 
elections are another matter, as Algerian generals and Fatah strongmen 
discovered. In each case, faced with a democratic victory by Islamist forces 
judged insufficiently amenable to Western pressures, Europe and America 
applauded cancellation and repression. Imperial and dictatorial logics remain 
intertwined.

8

This is the landscape in which the Arab revolt has finally erupted, in a 
concatenation facilitated by the two great cultural unities of the region, 
language and religion. Mass demonstrations by unarmed citizens, nearly 
everywhere facing repression by gas, water and lead with exemplary courage and 
discipline, have been the lance of the uprisings. In country after country, the 
over-riding demand has gone up in a great cry: Al-sha’b yurid isquat 
al-nizam—‘The people want the downfall of the regime!’ In place of the local 
despotism, what the huge crowds in squares and streets across the region are 
seeking is essentially political freedom. Democracy, no novelty as a 
term—virtually every regime made ample use of it—but unknown as a reality, has 
become a common denominator of the consciousness of the various national 
movements. Seldom articulated as a definite set of institutional forms, its 
attractive force has come more from its power as a negation of the status quo—as 
everything dictatorship is not—than from positive delineations of it. Punishment 
of corruption in the top ranks of the old regime figures more prominently than 
particulars of the constitution to come after it. The dynamic of the uprisings 
has been no less clear-cut for that. Their objective is, in the most classical 
of senses, purely political: liberty.

9

But why now? The odious cast of the regimes in place has persisted unaltered for 
decades, without triggering mass revolts against them. The timing of the 
uprisings is not to be explained by their aims. Nor can it plausibly be 
attributed just to novel channels of communication: the reach of Al-Jazeera, the 
arrival of Facebook or Twitter have facilitated but could not have founded a new 
spirit of insurgency. The single spark that started the prairie fire suggests 
the answer. Everything began with the death in despair of a pauperized vegetable 
vendor, in a small provincial town in the hinterland of Tunisia. Beneath the 
commotion now shaking the Arab world have been volcanic social pressures: 
polarization of incomes, rising food prices, lack of dwellings, massive 
unemployment of educated—and uneducated—youth, amid a demographic pyramid 
without parallel in the world. In few other regions is the underlying crisis of 
society so acute, nor the lack of any credible model of development, capable of 
integrating new generations, so plain.

10

Yet to date, between the deeper social springs and the political aims of the 
Arab revolt there has been an all but complete disjuncture. In part, this has 
reflected the composition of its main contingents so far. In the big 
cities—Manama is the exception—it has not, on the whole, been the poor who have 
poured into the streets in force. Workers have still to mount any sustained 
general strike. Peasants have scarcely figured. That has been an effect of 
decades of police repression, stamping out collective organization of any kind 
among the dispossessed. This will take time to re-emerge. But the disjuncture is 
also an effect of the ideological limbo in which society has been left by the 
same decades, with the discrediting of Arab nationalism and socialism, and the 
neutering of radical confessionalism, leaving only a washed-out Islam as a 
passe-partout. In these conditions, created by dictatorship, the vocabulary of 
revolt could not but concentrate on dictatorship—and its downfall—in a political 
discourse, and no more.

11

But liberty needs to be re-connected to equality. Without their coalescence, the 
uprisings could all too easily peter out into a parliamentarized version of the 
old order, no more able to respond to explosive social tensions and energies 
than the decadent oligarchies of the inter-war period. The strategic priority 
for a re-emergent left in the Arab world must be to close the rift in the 
revolts by fighting for the forms of political freedom that will allow these 
social pressures to find optimal collective expression. That means, on one side: 
calling for the complete abolition of all emergency laws; dissolution of the 
ruling party or dethronement of the ruling family; cleansing the state apparatus 
of ornaments of the old regime; and bringing to justice of its leaders. On the 
other side, it means careful, creative attention to the detail of the 
constitutions to be written once the remnants of the previous system are swept 
away. Here the key requirements are: unrestricted civic and trade-union 
liberties of expression and organization; undistorted—that is, proportional, not 
first-past-the-post—electoral systems; avoidance of plenipotentiary 
presidencies; blocking of monopolies—state or private—in the means of 
communication; and statutory rights of the least advantaged to public welfare. 
It is only in an open framework of this kind that the demands for social justice 
with which the revolt began can unfold in the collective freedom they need to 
find any realization.

12

Notable has been one further absence in the upheaval. In the most famous of all 
concatenations, the European 1848–49, not just two, but three fundamental kinds 
of demands intertwined: political, social, national. What of the last in the 
Arab 2011? To date, the mass movements of this year have not produced a single 
anti-American or even anti-Israeli demonstration. The historic discrediting of 
Arab nationalism with the failure of Nasserism in Egypt is no doubt one reason 
for this. That subsequent resistance to American imperialism came to be 
identified with regimes—Syria, Iran, Libya—just as repressive as those which 
collude with it, offering no alternative political model to them, is another. 
Still, it remains striking that anti-imperialism is the dog that has not—or not 
yet—barked in the part of the world where imperial power is most visible. Can 
this last?

13

The United States can afford to take a sanguine view of events to date. In the 
Gulf, the rising in Bahrain that might have put its naval headquarters at risk 
has been crushed by a counter-revolutionary intervention in the best traditions 
of 1849, with an impressive display of inter-dynastic solidarity. The Saudi and 
Hashemite kingdoms have held firm. The Yemeni bastion of the battle against 
Salafism looks shakier, but the incumbent dictator is dispensable. In Egypt and 
Tunisia, the rulers have gone, but the Cairene military hierarchy, with its 
excellent relations to the Pentagon, remains intact, and the largest civilian 
force to emerge is in each country a domesticated Islamism. Earlier, the 
prospect of the Muslim Brotherhood or its regional affiliates entering 
government would have caused acute alarm in Washington. But the West now 
possesses a reassuring blueprint in Turkey for replication in the Arab lands, 
offering the best of all political worlds. The AKP has shown how loyal to NATO 
and to neo-liberalism, and how capable of the right doses of intimidation and 
repression, a pious yet liberal democracy, swinging the truncheon and the Koran, 
can be. If an Erdog˘an can be found for Cairo or Tunis, Washington will have 
every reason to be satisfied at the exchange for Mubarak and Ben Ali.

14

In such a prospect, military intervention in Libya could be regarded as icing on 
the cake, at once burnishing the democratic credentials of the West and 
disposing of its most embarrassing recent recruit to the ranks of the 
‘international community’. More of a luxury than a necessity for American global 
power, however, the initiative for NATO attack came from France and Britain, 
re-running as if in a time-warp the spool of the Suez expedition. Once again, 
Paris took the lead, to cleanse Sarkozy of his government’s intimacies with Ben 
Ali and Mubarak, and stem his disastrous drop in the polls; London fell in, to 
allow Cameron his frequently expressed wish to emulate Blair; the Gulf 
Cooperation Council and Arab League supplied cover for the venture, in a meek 
imitation of Israel in 1956. But Gaddafi is not Nasser, and this time Obama, 
with little reason to fear the consequences, could go along with it, hegemonic 
protocol requiring that the US take nominal command and coordinate ultimate 
success, allowing combatants like Belgium and Sweden to exhibit their aerial 
valour. For holdovers from the Clinton era in the current American regime, an 
additional bonus will be the rehabilitation of humanitarian intervention, after 
setbacks in Iraq. The French media and intelligentsia, predictably, have been 
ecstatic at the restoration of their country’s honour in this line of endeavour. 
But even in America, cynicism is widespread: sauce for the Libyan goose is too 
patently not sauce for the Bahraini, or any other gander.

15

For the moment, none of this has ruffled the surface of the landscape since the 
revolt. Wariness of the power of the hegemon, preoccupation with national 
concerns, sympathy with the Libyan rebels, hope that the episode will be quickly 
over, have combined to mute reactions to the latest bombardment from the West. 
Yet it is unlikely the national can be sealed off indefinitely from the 
political and social in the ongoing turbulence. For in the Muslim world to the 
east of the zone of upheaval, the American wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and 
Pakistan have yet to be finally won, and the blockade of Iran is still some way 
from its logical conclusion; and at its centre, the occupation of the West Bank 
and blockade of Gaza continue as before. Even the most moderate of democratic 
regimes may find it difficult to insulate itself from these theatres of imperial 
prepotence and colonial savagery.

16

In the Arab world, nationalism has too often been a clipped currency. Most of 
the nations in the region—Egypt and Morocco are the exceptions—are factitious 
creations of Western imperialism. But as in Sub-Saharan Africa and beyond, 
colonial origins have been no bar to post-colonial identities crystallizing 
within the artificial frontiers drawn by the colonizers. In that sense, every 
Arab nation today possesses as real and refractory a collective identity as any 
other. But there is a difference. Language and religion, tied together in sacred 
texts, were—and are—historically too strong, and distinctive, as common cultural 
markers not to surcharge the image of each particular nation-state with the 
higher idea of an Arab nation, conceived as a single ecumene. That ideal gave 
rise to a common Arab—not Egyptian, Iraqi or Syrian—nationalism.

17

There followed the rise, corruption and failure of Nasserism and Ba’athism. They 
will not revive today. But the impulse behind them will have to be recovered in 
the Arab world, if revolt is to become revolution. Liberty and equality need to 
be rejoined. But without fraternity, in a region so pervasively mauled and 
inter-connected, they risk souring. From the fifties onwards, the price of 
assorted national egoisms for any kind of progress in the Middle East and North 
Africa has been high. Needed is not the caricature of solidarity offered by the 
Arab League, a body whose record of bankruptcy and betrayal rivals that of the 
Organization of American States in the days when Castro could call it, with 
perfect justice, the US Ministry of Colonies. Required is a generous Arab 
internationalism, capable of envisaging—in the distant future, when the last 
sheikh is overthrown—the equitable distribution of oil wealth in proportion to 
population across the Arab world, not the monstrous opulence of the arbitrary 
few and the indigence of the desperate many. In the more immediate future, the 
priority is plain: a joint declaration that the abject treaty Sadat signed with 
Israel—scuttling its allies for the pottage of an agreement that does not even 
give Egypt enough sovereignty for its soldiers to move freely within its own 
territory, and whose associated framework agreement on Palestine, contemptible 
in itself, Israel has not even made a pretence of observing—is legally defunct. 
The litmus test of the recovery of a democratic Arab dignity lies there.

<http://newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2883>