Syria, the Arab Spring and the Western Left.

 

 

Perry Anderson on a ‘Concatenation ‘ of Uprisings.

“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.” Writes Perry Anderson (Arab World Concatenation – full text link*. NLR 68. March/April 2011). The links extend to the West. The region is of great strategic and economic importance, and the targets for the uprisings have been repressive authoritarian regimes that received overt or tactic support from Washington and the EU’s capitals.

The Tunisian revolution, driven by human rights demands, economic grievances, legal rights groups, the union federation the UGTT, urban and rural workers and poor, began the process. Economic protests at mass unemployment, an inability to provide for a demographic explosion, joined with long-standing resentment at an authoritarian one-party system.

The movement spilled across borders. Cairo was ignited, and the Mubarak system – or at least its leadership – fell. Ripples of revolt washed from the Maghreb to the Machrek. The past seemed forgotten as the West welcomed the overthrow of tyrannies and rushed to promote its model of democracy. Yet it showed decreasing enthusiasm the further into the Middle East one went, beginning with Yemen and Bahrain. Now, Syria is trying to repress mass opposition protests. President Assad has unleashed vicious repression, with hundreds of demonstrators shot. Civil war looms. It risks boiling the country’s politics down to sectarian religious and ethnic clashes. With this, and the likely even more profound chain-reactions in mind, Western appetite for further regime-change is weakening.

 

The West Changes Tack.

The West’s policy towards the Arab world remains in a flux. Nowhere has a strategic change in strategy been greater than in France. Earlier in 2011 exposure of the French political elite’s close financial ties to Tunisian dictator, Ben Ali, and its security forces, led to the resignation of the Foreign Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie. After hesitation and obstruction towards the Jasmine Revolution an effort to recast the Quai d’Orsay’s policy towards Arab societies is now in full play.

President Sarkozy has heralded the “Arab peoples who have taken charge of their own destiny” and, to dampen one potential source of Franco-Arab conflict called for a “dialogue” with Islamists in these lands. (Le Monde 19.4.11). Obama, Cameron and France’s President have pursued, through the UN, limited military intervention in Libya. To Anderson this is “more of a luxury than a necessity”, a model of “humanitarian intervention”, to display “valour” and restore – principally French – “honour”. This result is not immediately apparent. Gaddafi remains defiant. There is a drift towards direct involvement on Libyan soil gains the upper hand, without any immediate victory for his opponents in the National Transitional Council in sight.

 

The International Left Divided.

The World’s progressives are divided, writes Serge Halimi, “as to whether they put the emphasis on their solidarity with an oppressed people, or on their opposition to a Western war”(Le Monde Diplomatique. April. 2011). Some on the left, including Nordic leftist parties, France’s Parti de Gauche leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, intellectuals like Gilbert Achcar( a ‘population truly in danger’ and no alternative way to protect them’) and small far-left groups, like Britain’s Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, backed, on the grounds of solidarity with the Libyan revolution, the UN motion authorising the No-Fly Zone over Libya. In the UK opposition is dominant. Labour Briefing editorialises that the brutality of the Green Book regime was a pretext to remove a “rogue state”. That “calls for humanitarian interventions serve a Non-conservative agenda.” (May 2011).

 

The anti-intervention left has had great difficulty in finding a clear camp to back. It is hard to see Gaddafi’s phalanxes and administration – mired in decades of corrupt repression –  as just a ‘side’ . So, instead of backing him, some cast doubt on the politics and character of his opponents. The National Transitional Council, they suggest,  combines Islamists and pro-Western opportunists. A few, no doubt projecting their own inner feelings onto Tripoli, believe that perhaps Gaddafi was a Western asset whose loss is mourned by the White House. More accurately Eddie Ford talks of the US facing “imponderables” faced with its attempts to “deflect” and divert the revolution (Weekly Worker 21.4.11). If Eddie is against the intervention he stands with the revolution against Gaddafi, something far from being the case for many who oppose any form of Western or UN action against the Gaddafi regime.

 

Perhaps an intermediate position is to be critical of the intervention, while recognising that in extremis Gaddafi can only be removed and the population helped to protect themselves through some kind of UN aid. For the rest, conditions are too fluid to talk of a full-blown Western plan to force through a regime reduced to being its cat’s-paw. It is up to the Libyan people to develop their own policies in these circumstances. What is certain is that with Gaddafi in power this will be impossible.

It is clear that in Libya a civil war is underway. Saying this clarifies little; all revolutions to a varying extent are civil wars. The question of whether the left should support the Arab popular uprisings remains a live one; it is based on its democratic and social potential. Anderson cites Lenin to the effect that a democratic republic is the ideal political shell for capitalism. To trade famous quotations, no less a figure than Engels remarked, by contrast, that “the republic differs from the monarchy only that is the ready-for-use political form for the future rule of the proletariat.” (Letter to Lafargue March 6 1894). One can extend this insight by saying that a democratic republic is certainly a better vehicle for left politics than Arab nationalist one-party states, Gulf Monarchies, or theocracies. Freedom of expression, of organisation, and personal liberty, are not only desirable in themselves. They nourish the “social kernel” of the left, from trade unions, women’s rights to the whole gamut of social campaigns.

 

Imperialism, Arabism and Democracy.

There are two major problems with the stand of some of the left. The first is most obvious amongst those who are hostile to Western intervention. They consider that the main challenge facing the Arab revolt is imperialism. The second, only now working its way onto the agenda, is the shape of a democracy that could emerge in these lands.

Imperialism in the Arab context always leads back to Israel. Anderson considers it an “expanding colonial power”, a partner of the United States. He traces “Euro-American vigilance and interference in the Arab world” not only to the interests outlined above, but also to the “Zionist lobby” at work in the US. He recognises that demands for equality will best the immense process of democratic transformation that may be underway. Yet, like the most strident ‘anti-Zionist’, he concludes that the “priority” in the immediate future is a rejection of the Sadat peace-treaty with Israel. “The litmus test of the recovery of a democratic Arab dignity lies there.”

Syria and the Front of Steadfastness was, we might remark, already there. Hostility to Israel is responsible for the ‘secular’ state’s alliances with Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and other repellent regimes and political movements. The state’s official ideology is Pan-Arabism, its version of Ba’athism has long constructed this identity against the Other, Zionism. Their ‘socialism’ (which the Syrian Communists use to justify their alliance with Assad) is a social texture of Arabity, underpinned by the vicious suppression of all difference. Not to mention the grip that Assad family and  wider ‘clan’ holds on the state. Those in West who continue to admire the regime are few in number. But if George Galloway largely stands alone, in celebrating Arabist ideology, and by implication this type of clan,  Anderson illustrates that some of his assumptions are more widely shared.

The pan-Arabist focus on ‘dignity’ (usually contrasted with Arab ‘humiliation’) has a strange echo. The New Left Review rejectionist displays some of the less attractive features of the Ba’thists’ pan-Arabism. Talk that “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.” Others who inhabit the same space as the “Arab nation” have not always greeted the pride in Arabism of this culture-cluster. For Anderson then it would seem that the printemps berbère never happened, the Kurds are again homeless, the genocide of non-Arabs in Dafur has disappeared, Arabs not bound to Arabic ‘sacred texts’ (Greek Orthodox Copts, Jacobites), and those with non-Qu’ranic scriptures (Druze and others) are invisible. One has only to look at Dafur to see how Arabism and Islam are a lethal combination – descending rapidly into racism.

The political obstacles pan-Arabism faces are too well-known to be cited in detail. How Israel and its Jewish population negotiate a democratic solution to the Palestinian issue, and finds a place alongside any kind of new “fraternal” Arab landscape with such a powerful “higher idea” is anyone’s guess. Anderson looks as if he has thrown out exhausted Arab nationalist dictatorships by the window, only to welcome the heart of their original ideology in again by the front door.

 

Post-Islamism?

Anderson barely discusses Islamism. Apparently it is, like the old Arab nationalism and socialism, ‘washed out.” Yet, as we have seen with pan-Arabism, it has come back in new forms. In both Egypt and Tunisia “the largest civilian force to emerge in each country (is) a domesticated Islamism.” Tunis witnessed this week the leader of Ennahda, Raced Ghannounchi explicitly backing democratic institutions, equal rights for women, and the rule of laws inspired not just by the Sharia but by European legislation. (Le Monde. 27.4.11) In Egypt currents within the Moslem Brotherhood aim, by contrast, to bring public authority in line with Islamic law, and reform individual behaviour in accordance with scripture. The ‘Charia dans la rue’ (the Sharia in the street) may well prove to be a threat to democratic equality when allied to political authority. Pressure to adopt Islamic dress-codes to life-style (homosexuality, ‘vice’ and repression of non-Moslem belief) has not gone away. Familiar with the region, Serge Hami states that violent Islamism has “not said its last word”. Today’s bombing in Marrakech only confirms this.

An attenuated Islamism may as Ghannounchi intends, be integrated, like the previously anti-democratic Italian ‘post-Fascists’ into republican democracy. Or it may, by a lingering adherence to the Qu’ranic inequality between believers and non-believers, sap its social roots. That at least is the contention of secularists, who are strong in Tunisia and have begun to clash with the Islamists over the issue of women’s rights and religious law. Those on the left who concentrate on the position towards the West of the emerging political forces in the Arab world neglect this dimension. Giving “priority” to an anti-Israel foreign policy risk confusing matters still more, since they may well judge ‘anti-Zionist’ Islamists more progressive than they really are.

A Democratic Left.

The Arab left needs our support in building new democracies that can tackle inequality and promote the rights of workers, women, the unemployed and the marginalised. This would certainly not be a ‘pro-Western’ project. It is against the grain of globalised capitalism. We should not just be be opposed to the Gulf Monarchies, the Hashemite regime in Jordan and the Moroccan Rais. Syria’s regime should tumble – and aid given if possible to the Syrian democratic left as a counterweight to the renascent Moslem Brotherhood. Yemen, one of the hardest cases, still has the remnants of a socialist party. The best answer to the injustice that is the legacy of their dictatorships, and the religious tyranny that remains strong in regimes like that of Saudi Arabia is there is  social republics. As for Tel Aviv, the most effective way to end the occupation and the exclusion and misery of the Palestinians is for the Arab popular movements to be able to create democratic, secular and egalitarian societies. The human happiness that such states could help foster will strike powerful blows at all religious and ethnic oppression across the world.

* This title follows the admirable principle, “Never use a familiar Anglo-Norman word when an obscure Latinate one can be squeezed in.” Perry Anderson. Politics and the English language. 1964.