The People Want
The People Want
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Joan Palevsky Literature in Translation Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.
The People Want
A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising
Gilbert Achcar
Translated from the French by G. M. Goshgarian
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley•Los Angeles•London
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University of California Press
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University of California Press, Ltd.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Achcar, Gilbert.
The people want : a radical exploration of the Arab uprising / Gilbert Achcar.
pagescm
ISBN 978-0-520-27497-6 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-520-28051-9 (pbk)
eISBN 9780520956544
1. Arab Spring, 2010– 2. Protest movements—Arab countries—History—21st century. 3. Revolutions—Arab countries—History—21st century. 4. Arab countries—Politics and government—21st century. 5. Arab countries—Economic conditions—21st century. 6. Youth—Political activity—Arab countries. 7. Unemployment—Arab countries. 8. Information technology—Political aspects—Arab countries. I. Title.
JQ1850.A91A3362013
909’.097492708312—dc232013014452
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Contents
Figures and Tables
Acknowledgments
Preliminary Notes
On the Arab Countries and “the Middle East and North Africa” (MENA)
On Transliteration of Arabic
Introduction: Uprisings and Revolutions
1.Fettered Development
The Facts
Poverty, Inequality, Precarity
Informal Sector and Unemployment: The Bouazizi Syndrome
Youth Underemployment
Female Underemployment
Graduate Unemployment
Fetters on Development
2.The Peculiar Modalities of Capitalism in the Arab Region
The Problem of Investment
Public and Private Investment
A Specific Variant of the Capitalist Mode of Production
1.Rentier and Patrimonial States
2.A Politically Determined Capitalism: Nepotism and Risk
The Genesis of the Specific Regional Variant of Capitalism: An Overview
3.Regional Political Factors
The Oil Curse
From “Arab Despotic Exception” to “Democracy Promotion”
The Muslim Brothers, Washington, and the Saudis
The Muslim Brothers, Washington, and Qatar
Al Jazeera and the Upheaval in the Arab Mediascape
4.Actors and Parameters of the Revolution
Overdetermination and Subjective Conditions
The Workers’ Movement and Social Struggles
New Actors and New Information and Communications Technologies
States and Revolutions
5.A Provisional Balance Sheet of the Arab Uprising
Coups d’État and Revolutions
Provisional Balance Sheet No. 1: Tunisia
Provisional Balance Sheet No. 2: Egypt
Provisional Balance Sheet No. 3: Yemen
Provisional Balance Sheet No. 4: Bahrain
Provisional Balance Sheet No. 5: Libya
Provisional Balance Sheet No. 6: Syria
6.Co-opting the Uprising
Washington and the Muslim Brothers, Take Two
Nato, Libya, and Syria
The “Islamic Tsunami” and the Difference between Khomeini and Morsi
Conclusion: The Future of the Arab Uprising
The Difference between Erdogan and Ghannouchi . . .
. . . And the Difference between Erdogan and Morsi
Conditions for a Genuine Solution
Notes
References and Sources
Index
Figures and Tables
FIGURES
1.1GDP per capita average annual growth rate
1.2Egypt—GDP per capita annual growth rate
1.3Average annual population growth rate
1.4GDP average annual growth rate
1.5Human Development Index (HDI), 1980–2010
1.6Informality in labor force and employment
1.7Unemployment rate
1.8Unemployment rate youth and adults
1.9Youth in total population, 2010
1.10Unemployment rate by sex, 2010
1.11Employment-to-population rate by sex, 2010
1.12Population with advanced education
2.1GDP per capita annual growth; MENA—1969–2010
2.2Gross fixed capital formation
2.3Gross capital formation annual growth; MENA without GCC—1969–2007
2.4Gross capital formation annual growth; MENA without GCC—1969–2007
2.5Gross fixed capital formation, public sector, 1995–2007
2.6Net official financial flows
2.7Gross fixed capital formation, private sector; 1995–2007
2.8Gross fixed capital formation, total and public; Egypt—1982–2010
2.9Public sector revenue, 2006
TABLES
1.1Distribution of Consumption
1.2GDP per Capita 2008
1.3Gross Enrollment Ratio in Tertiary Education (2009)
1.4Graduate Unemployment Rates 1984–2010
4.1Percentage of Individuals Using the Internet (2010)
Acknowledgments
This book is the outcome of intensive work that started shortly after the beginning of the revolutionary wave engulfing the Arabic-speaking region. It is based, however, on the course on Problems of Development of the Middle East and North Africa that I have taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS, University of London) since the academic year 2007–8. This means that I owe much to my institution, which offers an ideal environment and one of the richest libraries for the research on the region that is the object of this study. The students who attended my lectures and who will remember them when they read the following pages have contributed with their questions to forming the answers this book provides.
Yet scholarly teaching and research are but one of the sources of this work. My major debt is toward the great number of those whom I met and with whom I had a chance to discuss during my travels in different countries of the region over decades, and most particularly since the beginning of the uprising. I clearly cannot name them all. Four key stages in this experience occurred in 2011, when I was honored to be invited to take part in the “Spring University” of ATTAC Morocco in Casablanca, in April; the “Socialist Days” organized in Cairo after the uprising by the Egyptian Center for Socialist Studies, in May; the meeting of prominent members of
the Syrian Opposition, many of whom came directly from Syria to the place near Stockholm where it was held, in October; and the festivities celebrating the first anniversary of the beginning of the uprising in Sidi Bouzid, the Tunisian town where it all started, in December. I thank here one more time the organizers of these meetings, as well as the team of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, which gave me the opportunity to take part in a gathering of persons involved in cultural activities in the Arab region in January 2012.
I am also grateful to all those who invited me to submit some of this book’s theses to the critical attention of audiences including people knowledgeable about the region in various academic institutions—in particular Henry Laurens at the Collège de France; Robert Wade at the London School of Economics; Rashid Khalidi and Bashir Abu-Manneh at Columbia University in New York; Joel Beinin at Stanford University; Ronit Lentin at Trinity College in Dublin; Haideh Moghissi and Saeed Rahnema at York University in Toronto; Farid al-Alibi at the University of Kairouan, Tunisia; Tullo Vigevani at the Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP) in São Paulo; and the Brazilian National Social Science Postgraduate and Research Association (ANPOCS) at its annual convention in Caxambu.
The friends whose names follow have read the manuscript of this book in part or in whole and given me the benefit of their comments in finalizing it: Henry Bernstein, Ray Bush, Franck Mermier, Saleh Mosbah, Alfredo Saad-Filho, Fawwaz Traboulsi, and Lisa Wedeen. Very acute remarks by Omar El Shafei, who translated this book into Arabic, were most useful. My collaboration for the second time with Geoff Michael Goshgarian, who translated this book into English most elegantly after my previous one, The Arabs and the Holocaust, was equally an opportunity for useful exchanges between us. I beg those whom I failed to mention in these acknowledgments to excuse me. None of the abovementioned persons can in any way be held responsible for the theses of this book and the errors that it may include.
Preliminary Notes
ON THE ARAB COUNTRIES AND “THE MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA” (MENA)
In the following pages, “Arab” refers to the member states of the Arab League (with the exception of the Union of the Comoros, Djibouti, and Somalia). These countries are called “Arab” because Arabic is their main language of administration, communication, and instruction. Thus “Arab” and “Arabic” are, here, geopolitical and linguistic terms (whence also the occasional reference to the “Arabic-speaking region”); neither is in any sense an “ethnic” description. Non-Arab groups comprise a significant segment of the populations of these countries, notably the Amazigh in North Africa (Maghreb) and the Kurds in the Middle East (Mashriq). They have taken an active part in the uprisings in the region.
Several international institutions whose studies and statistics are copiously cited in the present book focus on a group of countries they call “Middle East and North Africa” (MENA or the MENA region). In addition to the countries identified above, MENA includes Iran. When data limited to the Arab states are lacking, data for the MENA region have been used.
All the figures published in this book are original; the sources of the data used in making them are indicated.
ON TRANSLITERATION OF ARABIC
The method adopted for the transcription of Arabic words and names in the Latin alphabet is a simplified version of the transliteration system in use in specialized literature; the aim is to make it easier for nonspecialists to read the text, while allowing the knowledgeable to recognize the original Arabic. Special characters and diacritical marks have been avoided, except for the inverted apostrophe representing the Arabic letter ‘ayn. The common spellings of the names of the best-known individuals have been retained. Finally, when Arabs have published in European languages, their own transliteration of their names in Latin letters has been respected, as has, in the citations, the transliteration of Arabic names in the form in which it occurs in the original.
Introduction: Uprisings and Revolutions
“The people want!” This proclamation has been and still is omnipresent in the protracted uprising that has been rocking the Arabic-speaking region since the Tunisian episode began in Sidi Bouzid on 17 December 2010. In every imaginable variant and every imaginable tone, it has served as the prelude to all sorts of demands, from the now famous revolutionary slogan “The people want to overthrow the regime!” to highly diverse calls of a comic nature—exemplified by the demonstrator in Cairo’s Tahrir Square who held high a sign reading: “The people want a president who doesn’t dye his hair!”
“The people want . . .” first emerged as a slogan in Tunisia. It echoes two famous lines by Tunisian poet Abul-Qacem al-Shebbi (1909–34) inserted in the country’s national anthem:
If the people want life some day, fate will surely grant their wish Their shackles will surely be shattered and their night surely vanish.1
The coming of the day of reckoning expressed in this collective affirmation that the people want, in the present tense—that they want here and now—illustrates in the clearest possible way the irruption of the popular will onto the Arab political stage. Such an irruption is the primary characteristic of every democratic uprising. In contrast to the proclamations adopted by representative assemblies, such as the “We the People” in the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, here, the will of the people is expressed without intermediary, chanted at lung-splitting volumes by immense throngs such as those that the world has seen packing the streets of Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, Syria, and many other countries besides.
The use of the term “revolution” to qualify the upheavals under way in the Arab region has nevertheless been, and continues to be, hotly debated and stoutly contested, even in those victorious cases in which the people have succeeded in ridding themselves of an oppressive tyrant. The more neutral term “uprising” has been used in this book’s subtitle not only to avoid settling the debate on the cover, but also because the word “revolution” has more than one sense.
The Arab region has unquestionably witnessed uprisings. Indeed, it has witnessed the whole gamut of what that word designates, from outpourings of demonstrators to armed insurrections. The Arabic term intifada, which the Palestinian population of the territories occupied by Israel in 1967 has added to the international lexicon, covers the same semantic range. The Arabic term thawra also has a broad range of meanings: derived from the verb thara (to revolt), it originally corresponded more closely to the idea of revolt than to that of revolution. Thus thawra is accurately translated in the familiar English names of other events that have shaken the Arab region: the Great Arab Revolt of 1916–18, the 1920 Revolt in Iraq, the Great Syrian Revolt of 1925, and the Great Palestinian Revolt of 1936. For the same reason, insurgents, rebels, and revolutionaries alike are called thuwwar in Arabic.
Farsi, together with the languages it has most deeply influenced, has for good reason settled on the Arabic term inqilab (overturning) to translate the Western concept of revolution. In Arabic itself, however, inqilab has come to mean “coup d’état,” whereas thawra means not just revolt, but also revolution—in the sense of a radical upheaval including, at the very least, a change in the political regime accomplished in ways that violate existing legality. These diverse semantic developments can help us bring out the imprecision of the terms in our own ordinary lexicon.2
The concept of revolution generally evokes, in Western languages, a movement in which the people seek to overthrow the government from below, although a “revolution” need not lead to the use of arms. A coup d’état, in contrast, is the work of a faction, usually originating in the army, which seizes power at the pinnacle of society, always by force of arms. It so happens that the history of the Arab region is dotted with coups d’état that were unquestionably revolutionary, in that they culminated in profound transformations of political institutions and social structures. To cite just one example, the 23 July 1952 coup of the Free Officers led by Gamal Abdel-Nasser unquestionably led to a transformation of Egypt much
more radical than anything that has so far resulted from the Revolution of 25 January 2011.
The 1952 coup led to the overthrow of a dynasty, the abolition of the monarchy and parliamentary regime, the creation of a republican military dictatorship, the nationalization of foreign assets, the subversion of the old regime’s property-holding classes (big landed property, commercial and financial capital), a major drive to industrialize, and far-reaching progressive social reforms. These changes certainly better deserve to be called a “revolution” than do the results of the uprising set in motion in January 2011, which so far (at the time of writing) has led only to the overthrow of the small clan that dominated the state, and the democratization of the semipresidential regime, pending a change in the constitution by means that seek to maintain juridical continuity with the old institutions.
Indeed, we might go so far as to say that the passive counterrevolution led by Anwar al-Sadat after Nasser’s death on 28 September 1970 also brought about deeper socioeconomic changes than those seen in Egypt since the downfall of Hosni Mubarak on 11 February 2011. Yet the immense uprising that began on 25 January 2011 constitutes a bursting of the masses onto the political stage that had no precedent in the very long history of the land of the pyramids. Hence it has, beyond the shadow of a doubt, set a revolutionary dynamic in motion. It is too soon to pronounce on the consequences. The most radical results of the 1952 coup appeared only many years later. We would do well to bear that in mind.
In this sense, it takes no extraordinary acumen to identify, from the outset—from the very first hours of its existence—a revolutionary dynamic, like the Duke of La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, who, “during the night of July 14–15, 1789”—according to a story that became famous after Hyppolite Taine retold it—“caused Louis XVI to be aroused to inform him of the taking of the Bastille. ‘It is a revolt, then?’ exclaimed the King. ‘Sire!’ replied the Duke; ‘it is a revolution!’”3 If the duke really did make this remark, he could only have been referring to the rioters’ intentions; they had indeed set out, not to vent their disgruntlement in an ephemeral revolt, but to have done with Absolutism once and for all. They plainly had revolutionary aims, identifiable as such from the moment they took the Bastille.4