Power and Stability in the Middle East
Berch Berberoglu
Zed Books
Who rules the Middle East? How do the different regimes of the region maintain themselves in power? How likely are they to fall, and what forces threaten them?
This thought provoking collection provides a useful survey of the issues that are shaping events in the Middle East. The essays examine the balance of power in Egypt, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia. They explain the composition of governments and parties. Case, the authors reveal the factors that will determine the survival and future course of the various regimes.
The essays also focus on key events and problems: the causes and destabilizing impact of riots in North Africa, the problems of the Armenian community, the economic position of the Palestinians throughout the Middle East and the role of women in national politics in the region.
The book serves as an insightful guide to Middle East affairs and provides the reader with an understanding of its complex political processes.
Dr. Berch Berberoglu is an internationally recognized scholar specializing in the Middle East. He is curently associate professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Nevada, Reno, USA. He has published several books on the region, including Turkey in Crisis, also published by Zed.
Contents
Acknowledgements / vi
About the Contributors / vii
About the Editor / viii
Introduction / ix
1. Egypt the Origins and Development of a Neo-colonial State, Ahmad N. Azim / 1
Nasser and national capitalism / 1
Sadat’s Egypt infitah and the transition to a neo-colonial state / 11
Conclusion / 12
2. Class Politics and State Power in Ba’thi Syria, Fred H. Lawson / 15
Consolidating Ba’thi rule. 1963-65 / 16
Restructuring the regime. 1966-68 / 20
Reorienting the Ba’th. 1970-83 / 24
Conclusion / 28
3. Class, State and Politics in Iraq Joe Stork / 31
Oil and revolution / 32
The revolution shakes down / 36
The Ba’thi movement / 37
Politics under the Ba'th / 38
Oil and the state / 41
The state as boss / 47
The war with Iran / 49
4. Development of Capitalism and Class Struggles in Turkey, Fikret Ceyhun / 55
Laissez-faire capitalism / 55
Import-substitution industrialization / 56
Export-oriented industrialization / 59
The unfolding class struggles / 64
5. Political Power and the Saudi State, Ghassan Salami / 70
From Saudi power to Saudi state / 71
The royal family and its allies / 74
Clan and state the officer-princes / 75
Property and wealth / 76
The people of Saudi Arabia / 78
The political opposition / 85
6. Class Struggles, the State, and Revolution in Iran, Farideh Farhi / 90
Historical background / 90
National interlude and class struggles / 92
Return of the Shah and the politics of uneven development / 96
The state and revolution / 100
Post-revolutionary struggles and the rise of the theocratic state / 105
Conclusion / 107
7. Riot and Rebellion in North Africa Political Responses to Economic Crisis in Tunisia, Morocco and Sudan, David Seddon / 114
‘Enemies of the people’ official explanations for the riots / 115
Organized opposition or spontaneous protest (Tunisia and Morocco) / 117
Organized opposition or spontaneous protest (Sudan) / 120
The economic roots of social unrest / 124
Economic policy and economic crisis / 129
8. Women and National Politics in the Middle East, Julie Peteet / 136
Women and politics in the Middle East / 136
Palestinian women / 141
Conclusion / 152
9. Palestine and the Palestinians Pamela, Ann Smith / 157
The impoverishment of the peasantry / 157
The growth of the bourgeoisie / 160
The decline of the ruling families / 161
Nationalism and class, 1967 to 1982 / 163
The creation of a new working class / 163
The bourgeoisie challenge and retreat / 165
The ruling families under Israeli occupation / 167
The Palestinian diaspora. 1982 to 1985 / 168
10. The Armenian National Question, Paul Saba / 173
The Ottoman Empire / 174
Armenia before the Ottoman conquest / 179
Armenians under Ottoman rule / 181
The Armenian national awakening / 182
After the genocide / 191
Armenia. Kurdistan. Palestine / 192
National liberation two roads / 193
A new unity in Kurdistan / 195
Split in the Palestinian movement / 196
Split in the Armenian revolutionary movement / 197
Index / 202
Tables
1.1 Distribution of land and average income of owner / 2
1.2 Gross Domestic Product and per capita income in Egypt, 1952-61 / 7
1.3 The relative contribution of the public sector and national capitalism in Egypt, 1970-71 / 8
1.4 Performance of the Egyptian economy, 1961-71 / 9
1.5 The share of national capitalism in Egypt’s manufacturing industries. 1963-68 / 10
2.1 Structure of employment in Syria, 1965-79 / 27
3.1 Iraqi oil revenues, selected years / 33
3.2 Iraqi population in urban and rural sectors / 34
3.3 Iraq economic statistics / 35
3.4 Structure of Iraq’s Gross Domestic Product. 1976 / 42
3.5 Structure of the Iraqi labour force. 1977 / 43
3.6 Large manufacturing in Iraq / 44
3.7 Public sector share of large manufacturing / 44
3.8 Employment structure of large manufacturing, 1976 / 45
3.9 Growth of the state sector / 47
3.10 Main sources of Iraqi imports 1975-79 / 48
4.1 Turkey's merchandise trade by selected years. 1950-85 / 58
4.2 Turkey's merchandise trade by decades. 1950-1985 / 58
4.3 Minimum wage and price index / 61
4.4 Turkey labour force statistics, selected years / 63
5.1 Land holdings and cultivated land / 77
5.2 Saudi Arabia employment by economic sector and nationality, 1975 / 82
9.1 The Palestinian population, 1981 / 158
9.2 Palestinians registered for relief as a percentage of the total Palestinian population, 1949 to 1979 / 164
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A book of this sort requires the cooperative effort of a large number of people over an extended period. I began working on this project in the early to mid-1980s. when it became apparent to me and other colleagues in the field that comprehensive, comparative historical treatments of states and issues in the Middle East were few and far between. This, at a time of increasing conflict and crisis in a strategically important region of the world. It was the recognition of this fact by Robert Molteno at Zed Books that made the launching of this project possible in the mid-eighties.
I would like to thank, first and foremost, all the contributors to this volume, who in addition to producing excellent pieces of research and writing commissioned especially for this volume, have endured the long and arduous process of publication with great patience. I would especially like to thank David Seddon, Fred Lawson. Farideh Farhi and Julie Peteet for their prompt response at various stages of this project, as my thanks go to Fikret Ceyhun, Ghassan Salame. Paul Saba, and Ahmad Azim for their cooperation and help in making the completion of this volume possible. Additionally, my thanks go to the editors of the Journal of Palestine Studies and MERIP Middle East Report for permitting the publication of the articles by Pamela Ann Smith and Joe Stork, as well as allowing the publication of a revised version of articles by Seddon and Salame which have previously appeared in the Report.
I would also like to thank David Dickens. Cyrus Bina. Sohrab Behdad. Ertugrul Tonak. Hamid Hosseini and Behzad Yaghmaian for their input through discussion on various topics involving the Middle East.
My thanks also go to Peggy Hart, who typed and retyped numerous versions of most of the articles in this book, with countless hours spent in front of the computer; her work is much appreciated.
Finally, I would like to thank Robert Molteno and Michael Pa His of Zed Books for their commitment and dedication to the project in seeing to it that a solid piece of important scholarly work on the subject is produced and made available to a broad audience in Middle East studies in a timely fashion.
Needless to say. any errors in fact or interpretation remain those of the authors of individual articles, while I. as editor, assume responsibility for selection and inclusion of the essays that make up this book, as I do for my introductory comments and observations that constitute the opening pages.
B.B.
About the ContributorsAhmed N. Azim is an Egyptian economist, now an associate professor of organizational theory and policy analysis at the University of Calgary. Canada. He is currently engaged in research on the political economy of Egypt and the Middle East.
Fikrer Ceyhun is a graduate of the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Ankara. Turkey, and is currently a professor of economics at the University of North Dakota. USA. His articles have appeared in Economic Forum and the Review of Radical Political Economics. He is currently engaged in research on the political economy of Turkey.
Farideh Farhi is an Iranian social scientist, now an assistant professor of political science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She is presently engaged in research on a comparative analysis of the revolutions in Iran and Nicaragua.
Fred H. Lawson is assistant professor of government at Mills College in Oakland, California, where he teaches international relations and Middle East politics. He is the author of Bahrain The Modernization of Autocracy (Boulder. Co Westview Press. 1987).
Julie Peteet received her Ph. D. in Anthropology from Wayne State University in Detroit. She has taught at the American University of Beirut and Georgetown University in Washington, and conducted fieldwork on Palestinian women in Lebanon in 1980-82. She was more recently a senior research fellow at Yarmouk University in Jordan. Her publications include articles on Palestinian women in Lebanon in the Journal of Palestine Studies and MERIP Reports.
Paul Saha is a practising attorney in Tucson. Arizona. He is presently doing work on the Jewish National Question, the history of the Bund and leftwing Zionism and implications of Gramsci's work for socialist strategy in the developed capitalist countries.
Ghassan Saame is a Lebanese social scientist. He teaches political studies at the American University of Beirut, and Saint-Joseph University in Beirut. He is the author of Saudi Foreign Policy Since 1943 (Beirut. 1980).
David Seddon is reader at the School of Development Studies. University of East Anglia, where he teaches North African and Middle Eastern development. He is the author of Moroccan Peasants and is currently editing a collection on The Political Economy of Agrarian Change in Turkey (with Çaglar Keyder).
Pamela Ann Smith is a journalist specializing in Middle East studies, and is the author of Palestine and the Palestinians. 1873-1983 (New' York St. Martin’s Press. 1984).
Joe Stork is editor of Middle East Report in Washington. DC and co-founder of the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP). He writes and lectures on contemporary development in the Middle East and United States policy there.
About the EditorDr Berch Berberoglu is associate professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Nevada. Reno. USA. He is an internationally recognized scholar specializing in the Middle East and in political economy, class analysis, and comparative historical studies on a world scale. His writings have appeared in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, Development and Change. International Studies and Research in Political Economy, among others. His recent book Turkey in Crisis from State Capitalism to Neo-Colonialism (London Zed Press. 1982) is the first comprehensive radical history of the 20th Century Turkish political economy to appear in English. His most recent book. The Internationalization of Capital (New York Praeger Publishers. 1987) examines the nature and contradictions of imperialism and capitalist development on a world scale. He is also the editor of a two-volume collection of classical and contemporary Marxist writings on India Vol. I India National Liberation and Class Struggles Vol. II Mode of Production, Class Struggles and Revolution in India (both published by Sarup & Sons, Publishers, Meerut. India in 1986 and 1987. respectively).
IntroductionThe most recent crises in the Middle East centering around the civil war in Lebanon, the Iran-Iraq war and the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza, are part and parcel of the larger crisis engulfing the region for the past 40 years. Clearly, the period from the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 to the present is replete with critical events unfolding in a continuous drama of social and political struggles, war and revolution. The origins of these crises in the Middle East, however, go much further back in history - to the disintegration and collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the invasion of its territories by the European powers at the beginning of this century. By the end of World War I. Ottoman Turkey had lost most of its territories to Britain. France. Italy. Greece, and other Western powers who divided these lands amongst themselves, turning them into colonial possessions. Thus. Britain came to possess the Persian Gulf region and today’s Iraq. Kuwait. Jordan. Israel. Egypt, and parts of North Africa; France established a mandate over Syria and Lebanon, while continuing its colonization of Tunisia. Algeria, and Morocco; while the United States. Germany. Italy. Greece, and other lesser powers divided Turkey and its adjacent territories between themselves. Western penetration of the Ottoman Empire, which had begun a century earlier, was now complete with its final partition through brute military force.
Thus began a prolonged period of colonial rule in the Middle East, which lasted several decades and led to the development of nationalist sentiment and struggles that resulted in wars of national liberation and revolution by the 1940s and. especially, in the 1950s. It is during this period that an increasing number of countries in the Middle East - including Syria. Lebanon. Iraq. Jordan. Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria - gained their independence and emerged as ‘autonomous’ nation states. In Lebanon, nationhood was achieved through a ‘peaceful’ transition of power to neo-colonial elements who remained within the Western imperial orbit; in Egypt. Syria, and Iraq, nationalist regimes came to power through military coups led by junior officers in the army; and in Algeria a protracted war of national liberation finally forced the French out. These struggles took place in response to Western intervention in and control of the Middle East. The partition of the region into colonial possessions also deprived long-established nationalethnic groups of their homelands and dispersed them across several nationalpolitical boundaries, as in the case of …
Berch Berberoglu
Power and Stability in the Middle East
Zed
Zed Books Ltd
Power and Stability in the Middle East
Edited by
Berch Berberoglu
Zed Books Ltd
London and New Jersey
Power and Stability in the Middle East was first published by
Zed Books Ltd. 57 Caledonian Road. London N1 9BU.UK.and
171 First Avenue. Atlantic Highlands. New Jersey 07716. USA.
in 1989.
Copyright © Berch Berberoglu. 1989.
Cover design by Andrew Corbett
Typeset by EMS Photosetters. Rochford.
Essex Printed and bound in the UK by Biddles Ltd.
Guildford and King’s Lynn
All rights reserved
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Class, power and stability in the Middle East
1. Middle East. Politics.
I. Berberoglu, Berch.
320.956.
ISBN 0-86232-808-X
ISBN 0-86232-809-8 pbk
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Power and stability in the Middle Eastedited by
Berch Berberoglu
p. cm.
Bibliography p.
Includes index
ISBN 0-86232-808-X. - ISBN 0-86232-809-8 (pbk.)
I. Middle East - Politics and government - I979-.
I. Berberoglu, Berch.
DS63.1.P69 1989
320.956-dc 20
