DEEP STATE AND THE FAILURE OF THE ARAB
SPRING
by
RIAZ HASSAN
__________________________________________________
Riaz
Hassan Is Director of the International Centre for Muslim
and non-Muslim Understanding at the University of South Australia
and Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Flinders University and
author of Inside Muslim Minds (Melbourne University
Press) and Faithlines: Muslim Conceptions of Islam and Society
(Oxford University Press).
In
protest for being persistently harassed and humiliated by municipal
officials, Tunisian street vendor Mohammad Bouazizi committed
suicide by immolating himself in public in December 2010. His
dramatic public act of protest led to a series of mass demonstrations
in Tunisia and became a catalyst for the Tunisian revolution
which toppled the country’s long serving president Zine
El Abidine Ben Ali. Within months of the Tunisian revolution,
mass demonstrations and riots engulfed other countries of the
Middle East and North Africa in an outburst of popular protests
against their autocratic rulers leading to the overthrowing
of regimes in Egypt, Libya, Yemen and civil wars and unrest
in Bahrain, Syria and other Arab counties. These events, unprecedented
in recent Arab history, have come to be known as the ‘Arab
Spring.’ Many hoped that this Arab Spring would bring
in new governments that would deliver political reform and social
justice. But that promise never materialized. Six years later
the reality is more war and violence, and a crackdown on people
who dare to speak out for a fairer, more open society.
Why
did the popular revolution of the Arab Spring fail to deliver
the promise of freedom and democracy? French historian Jean-Pierre
Filiu in his new book From Deep State to Islamic State
offers a provocative and compelling account of this failure.
Filiu argues that what is happening now in the Middle East is
a brutal counter revolution and a systematic war of the Arab
regimes against their people. The Arab regimes are the new ‘Mamluks.’
The Mamluk form of government refers to slave soldiers who were
the backbone of rulers’ coercive power in Egypt and Syria
for several centuries. Their sole purpose was to serve and protect
the interests of the ruling class. The military in the modern
Arab world is now performing the Mamlukian role and in doing
so claims political legitimacy as the sole defenders of the
state and the people. The military has become part of the Deep
State. The term Deep State originated in Turkish political history.
It refers to an opaque alliance of politicians, army, police,
intelligence, business leaders and leaders of criminal groups.
The
military cliques in Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Syria and Yemen,
in the name of serving national interests, control national
economic resources. They see themselves as the custodians of
the interests of the state. They regard themselves as above
the law and engage in activities which would otherwise be regarded
as criminal. Motivated by self-interest they feel they have
the unqualified right to do whatever they choose. This belief
is premised on a patrimonial view of the state and a paternalistic
view of the people. The state and Deep State are one and the
same thing. The Deep State, by its very nature, is counter revolutionary
and this is so because it is ruled by Mamluks. The military
cliques have usurped and high-jacked the original national revolutions
in Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria. The dissidents who
challenge them are subjected to brutal oppression and labelled
as terrorists. This has allowed members of the Deep State to
dominate the post-independence Arab states.
Filiu
is not the first to offer this explanation. In 2012 Harvard
economist Eric Chaney in a seminal study explored the question
of the prevalence of autocracies and freedom deficits in the
Arab world. His conclusions were broadly similar. He showed
that the prevalence of autocracies in the Muslim Arab world
was a product of the long-run influence of control structures
developed in the centuries following the Arab conquests. He
traced the development of this phenomenon to the ninth century,
when rulers across the Arab region began to use slaves (Mamluks)
instead of the native population to staff their armies. These
slave armies allowed rulers to achieve independence from local
military and civilian groups and helped remove constraints on
the sovereign in pre-modern Islamic societies.
In
this autocratic environment, religious leaders emerged as the
only check on the power of the rulers. This historical institutional
configuration, which divided the power between the sovereign
backed by the ruler’s slave army and religious elites,
was not conducive to producing democratic institutions. Instead,
religious and military elites worked together to develop and
perpetuate what Chaney calls ‘classical’ institutional
equilibrium designed to promote and protect their interests.
Rulers came to rely on slave armies, freeing themselves from
dependence on civil institutions. Religious leaders cooperated
with the army to design a system that proved hostile to alternative
centers of power. This concentration of power and weak civil
societies are the enduring legacy of this historical institutional
framework in regions conquered by Arab armies and which remained
under Islamic rule from 1100 AD onwards.
In
regions/countries incorporated into the Islamic world after
non-Arab Muslim armies, such as India and the Balkans, conquered
them, and where Islam spread by conversion (such as Indonesia,
Malaysia and sub- Saharan Africa) did not adopt this classical
framework. Their institutions continued to be shaped by local
elites, preserving their political and cultural continuity.
Consequently, democratic deficits have remained an enduring
legacy in the Arab world and in lands conquered by the Arab
armies and remaining under Islamic rule since 1100 AD. But in
Islamic countries incorporated into the Islamic world by non-Arab
Muslim armies or by conversions, democratic developments have
followed a more progressive trajectory.
The
events that have unfolded in Egypt following the downfall of
Hosni Mubarak illustrate the Deep State hypothesis. The election
of the first democratically elected President in the Egyptian
history, only to be toppled by the Deep State, followed by an
even more repressive military regime elected by sham elections.
Filiu is optimistic of the success of democracy in the Arab
world in the long run, because ‘Arabs are not different.’
But his book offers a bleak outlook for the near future. As
he puts it, the Arab struggle for ‘collective emancipation’
has been suppressed by regimes posing as guardians of regional
stability and reaping the associated benefits of their self-appointed
fictional roles. The Arab despots will never be part of the
solution, since they stand at the very core of the problem.
The
ubiquitous Deep State eventually nurtured the Islamic State
and the Arab Mamluks succeeded in transferring to the rest of
the world the responsibility for the monster they had helped
to create. These consequences bear out what a US intelligence
veteran told Filiu: that a defeat of the democratic movement
would give a boost to jihadi subversion that will see the counter-terrorism
budget tripled just to cope with the magnitude of such a threat.
This is exactly what has happened across the Arab world which
ironically is benefiting the Deep State clique. On 13 November
2014, the day ISIS released a video recording declaring its
‘Caliph’ on the Internet, a 22year old female Cairo
activist Zeinab al-Mhadi hanged herself. In her suicide note
she wrote: ‘There is no justice. Victory will not happen.
We lie to ourselves in order to survive.’
What
are the implications of Filiu’s and Chaney’s analyses
for the popular uprisings now known as the Arab Spring? Is history
the destiny? There are some optimistic developments that suggest
that it may be possible for the Arab world to escape from its
autocratic past. The region has undergone structural changes,
such as increasing levels of education, urbanization and industrialization
over the past 60 years, which have made it more receptive and
conducive to democratic change than any time in the past. This
does not preclude the emergence of political equilibrium in
countries like Egypt, Syria, Algeria and Yemen, similar to the
historical equilibrium, but there is one clear sign that Muslim
countries will follow different trajectories. Countries like
Turkey, Albania, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia
are more likely to defy history than the Arab countries, but
poverty and weak civil institutions will remain obstacles to
democratic.
