Michael C. Hudson*
Table of Contents
The Recent Historical Record
Egypt
Syria
Iraq
Jordan
Lebanon
Implications of Case Studies
Arab Democracy and the Conflict with Israel
Imagining Democratic Arab Regimes: Foreign Policy Consequences
Palestine/ Israel
Arab Unity
Relations with the United States
Assessing the Counterfactuals
Prospects for Democratization and Foreign Policy
References
At first glance, one would expect any essay on democracy and foreign policy in the Arab world to be a very short one. Democracy is almost non-existent today in thepolitics of the Arab states; and according to one well-Known study (Korany & Dessouki, et al, 1991, pp. 20, 30-31), Arab foreign policy decision-making is predominantly shaped by external factors. One searches in vain for references to “democracy” in the book’s index, and instead must settle for scattered references to “domestic environment” or “internal politics.” The authors write: “The primacy of the executive, particularly in the development of a presidential [or, we might add, monarchical] center... dominates the political process... due to the absence of a free press or a strong opposition”(20).
Empirical observations on internal and external factors in Arab foreign policy decision-making may be situated in the context of the theoretical debate in international relations which has pitted the “realist” school (and its recent variants) against the “sociological” school.
The realists have insisted on the causal priority of the international security environment in explaining the foreign policy of states, assuming that states are the primary unit of analysis and that they act according to rational calculation of interest. “Classical” realists (and neo-realists) have emphasized the importance of the balance of power, security threats, and the causal importance of the international system (Walts, 1959, 1979); while more recent dependency analysts have stressed the imperatives of political economy (Korany & Dessouki, Ch. 2). Both, however, have downplayed domestic politics; and some students of diplomacy have scarcely concealed their concern that democratic forces could impede the proper calculation and execution of the national interests by the foreignpolicy elite. Stephen Walt’s The origin of Alliances (1987) uses the Middle East to illustrate the neo-realist contention that actors are primarily driven by perceptions of a “balance of threat” to maneuver incessantly in a shifting pattern of coalitions that repeatedly contradicts the ideological agendas which regimes feel they require to manage their domestic environment.
The “sociological” school, on the other hand, derives its intellectual momentum from the behavioral movement in American political science, and focuses on the domestic environment as the principal causal locus for the external behavior of states. Foreign policy behavior, including going to war, is best explained by studying individual attitudes, social structure and relations, economic conditions, institutional patterns, political culture, leaders, and decision-making processes. Middle East applications include Brecher’s study of Israeli foreign policy (1972) and various case studies of Arab foreign policy-making (Korany & Dessouki et al, 1991, Chs. 4-12). It follows from this perspective that a major change in the domestic environment might be expected to produce changes in external behavior and international relations. To adherents of the “sociological” school, the realists’ construction of the state as a rational, monolithic, self-help actor in an “anarchic” environment is a simplistic abstraction. Rather, the roots of conflict lie within the state and society.
Any discussion of democracy as a factor in shaping Arab foreign policy, therefore, can go forth fruitfully only by assuming, first, that the domestic societal environment, in general, plays a significant role in policy formation. If the formidable realist objections to this assumption can be refuted, or at least set aside, there is still a second question: would a “democratic” domestic environment bring about foreign policy behavior among Arab regimes significantly different from their past foreign policy behavior? And in what way might it be different? Liberal American political science scholarship may be predisposed to imagine that democratically generated foreign policies in the Arab world might be pragmatic, accommodating, peace-loving, and generally benign -- but this could be completely wrong. It does not take much to imagine regimes being driven by emotional populist forces, generated by democratically elected majorities, into policies and behavior that would substantially raise tension levels and induce new conflicts in the region.
This paper does not pretend to settle any of these issues definitively. Instead, it will take a speculative look at the relationship between democracy and foreign policy in the Arab world by raising a historical question and posing a counterfactual proposition. The historical question is whether we can ascertain any such relationship between democracy and foreign policy during those relatively infrequent “democratic” periods in recent Arab politics. The counterfactual proposition asks: what if Arab regimes had been “democratic”? Would they have pursued policies vis-a-vis Israel other than the ones they actually have pursued? Would some greater degree of Arab unity or cooperation have been achieved? Would they have positioned themselves differently vis-a-vis the United States? Finally, we can briefly address the prospects for democratization in the Arab world and ponder how governments more representative of societies torn by socio-economic dislocations and ideological ferment, yet increasingly intruded upon by “the new world order,” might behave in their external security, diplomatic, and economic relations.
I. The Recent Historical Record
Without insisting on a purist’s definition, let us suggest that the existence of several political parties, a parliamentary electoral system, and a relatively free press comprise the minimum requirements of democracy. Perhaps the term, “limited liberal parliamentary system” is more accurate, if also more cumbersome. Even by these modest criteria, it is clear that the Arab world has not experienced much democracy since world war II, but it has experienced some. The principal examples are Egypt until the 1952 revolution; Syria from independence in 1943 until the period of the military regimes (1949-54), 1954 until the 1958 merger with Egypt, and 1961 to 1963, between the end of the union and the Ba`thist takeover; Iraq (in a much more restricted sense) until the 1958 revolution; Jordan (with a limited parliamentary system) from independence in 1946 until the 1957 nationalist challenge; and Lebanon until 1975. Most of these cases require various qualifications, and other cases that one might think of (Morocco, Sudan, or Kuwait at various times) require stretching the definition even more. The main difficulty is the extent to which “the people,” or society as a whole were “represented,” the extent to which the executives were accountable -- and the extent to which politically significant sectors perceived that the system was “democratic.” Bourgeois parliamentary system, some of them chaperoned by Britain or “guided” by strong monarchies, may have been formally democratic, but they were generally not popular. By the middle to late 1950s, nearly all of the main parliamentary systems had given way to authoritarian single-party populist regimes dominated by nationalist military officers, or to successful assertions of royal authoritarianism.
If we confine ourselves to Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, can we draw any conclusions about the relation between their relatively liberal, pluralistic practices, and their foreign policy behavior? Four points need to be made first, however. First, we should recall that, in this decade, the issues of imperialism, full independence, and nationalism dominated the foreign policy agendas of these countries. Second, the over Palestine Israel had traumatized Arab opinion. Third, the issues of social justice, corruption, and reform were weighing heavily on new and fragile governmental structures and practices. Fourth, political movements outside the formal political structure were articulating these demands in a manner that challenged the legitimacy of the established order, leading these regimes to regard them as subversive. Thus challenged, these fledgling “democratic” regimes were compelled to pursue defensive and reactive foreign policies.
In Egypt since World War I there had been three centers of power: the monarchy, the British, and the Wafd party -- the main representative of the nationalist movement. But there were other parties as well represented in the elected Egyptian parliament. Between the two world wars, the Communist Party and the Muslim Brotherhood also developed grass roots strength. During and after World War II, a succession of prime ministers alternately challenged and accommodated the British presence, but failed to move forward on this paramount national issue quickly enough to forestall the 1952 coup (Vatikiotis, Ch. 15). As domestic tensions increased, a Wafdist government, under Mustafa Nahhas, came into power in 1950. Notwithstanding its belated steps forward on pressing social issues, it found itself in confrontation with a British government that firmly resisted growing nationalist demands for withdrawal. Egypt abrogated the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian treaty in October 1951, but this did not deter the Egyptian nationalists from engaging in growing guerrilla warfare against Britain. When the British retaliated with force, the Nahhas government dithered. “In these conditions,” writes Vatikiotis, “the opposition groups assumed correctly that the Wafd government was not prepared to risk armed combat with British troops”(371). A bloody clash in Isma`iliyya triggered the “burning of Cairo” on January 26, 1952. Over the next five months leading up to the July 23 revolution, there were three governments, none of which could arrest the slide toward populist authoritarianism.
Foreign policy during Egypt’s parliamentary, multi-party constitutional monarchical system was hardly pacific. King Farouq and Prime Minister Nahhas both had sought to enhance their popularity by backing the Palestinian cause and Arab unity. There was strong public backing for military intervention to help save Palestine for the Arabs. But the unexpected and humiliating defeat of the Egyptian army in the 1948 war not only further de-legitimized the parliamentary system and the monarchy itself, but also deepened the salience of this issue in Egyptian politics for years to come. Elsewhere in the region, Egypt sought to project hegemony in the Sudan and influence in Arab Asia and North Africa. But highest on the agenda was the continuing British imperial presence. The delegitimizing effect of the British presence on the monarchy and on a seemingly ineffectual governmental system contributed to the nationalist revolution of 1952. Perceptions of domestic corruption and of socio-economic policy failures further discredited the liberal order. Whatever the moral virtues of a liberal political system may be, one sees no obvious indications of exceptional foreign policy restraint, tolerance, or competence that can be associated with Egypt’s form of government at this time.
In Syria, the republican era began unsteadily with independence from France in 1943. The National Bloc, which had led resistance to the Mandate, transformed itself into the National Party, and its head, Shukri al-Quwwatli, became president. The National Party and other parties that soon appeared, however, were narrowly based groupings dominated by wealthy businessmen and landowners; and the parliamentary system in the late 1940s had a reputation for corruption and incompetence (Seale, 1965, 1986, Chs. 4, 5). One policy that the Syrian political elite and public opinion both strongly endorsed was support for the Palestinians against Zionist encroachment. Quwwatli, in particular, had been an ardent advocate of assistance to the embattled Palestinians during the unsuccessful Palestinian uprising of the late 1930s. So there was powerful domestic Palestinian uprising of the late 1930s. So there was powerful domestic backing for Syria’s military involvement in the 1948 war, even though the French evacuation in 1946 had left behind only a small, inexperienced, and ill-equipped army.
Syria’s military debacle in 1948 had even more devastating political repercussions than had Egypt’s. Rocked by humiliation, scandal and intrigue, the military staged no fewer than three coups d’etat in 1949, initiating an era of instability that ended only when another officer, Hafiz al-Asad, seized control in 1970. Despite the early military interventions in political life, Syria continued fitfully to manifest some parliamentary and party activity until an elected government sought the country’s merger with Egypt in the short-lived United Arab Republic (1958-61). Competition between traditional bourgeois parties of notables and broader-based movements like the Parti Populaire Syrien, the Communists, the Muslim Brothers, and the Ba`th (all of which were struggling against each other, as well) continued during the brief restoration of parliamentary government between 1954 and 1958. But the country was unable to maintain an effective liberal-democratic system.
Syria’s foreign policy during its short pluralist era was affected by frustrated nationalist and irredentist goals -- specifically in Lebanon, enlarged by the French in 1920 at the expense of what most Syrians considered Syrian territory; Alexandretta Province, ceded by the French to Turkey in 1938; and, from an Arab nationalist perspective, Palestine (also known as “southern Syria”) in 1948. Loss of the Golan Heights in 1967 only exacerbated these frustrations.
Notwithstanding its intervention in Palestine, Syrian foreign policy in this “liberal” period was essentially defensive. Damascus was pressured by competing regional ideological currents and by powerful and intrusive neighbors: Iraq, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and on the international level France, Britain, the United States, and, later, the USSR. Within an intense domestic ideological environment featuring powerful Arab nationalist, greater Syrian, Islamic radical, socialist and communist movements, Syrian politicians fended off (and engaged in) intrigues and maneuvers to balance (and exploit) the ambitions of regional neighbors, notably the Hashemite rulers of Iraq and Jordan, the Saudis, and the Egyptians. Syria’s foreign policy at this time may have been generated within some kind of liberal democratic framework, but it is difficult to discern that this framework shaped policy in any consistent and coherent way. Indeed, inconsistency and improvisation seem to be the main hallmarks of that policy.
Created in 1921 by the British out of the Mesopotamian provinces of the defunct Ottoman Turkish Empire, the Kingdom of Iraq was a constitutional monarchy ostensibly in the image of its British sponsors. It first parliamentary elections were held in 1924, and the state remained, in form at least, a parliamentary system until the military-led Arab nationalist revolution of 1958, which ushered in the era of single-party bureaucratic-authoritarian politics that has continued through the rule of President Saddam Husayn.
Iraqi politics under the monarchy, however, can be called “liberal” only in the most qualified way. Riven by ethnic and sectarian conflicts, by Sunni-Shi`a schisms, and tribal rebellions, Iraqi political life was more conspiratorial than democratic. Rising nationalist, communist, an anti-imperialist sentiments could only erode the legitimacy of a regime so closely connected to Britain (Batatu, 1978). A small elite of merchants, former Ottoman officials, and landowners -- predominantly Sunni Muslims -- dominated parliamentary and governmental affairs. At the same time, Iraq began a remarkable process of economic and social development that would make it one of the most advanced couin the Arab world. A talented andskilled labor force gradually appeared, replete with the educational, scientific, manufacturing, and bureaucratic talent that might have underpinned a vibrant civil society and liberal political order. Instead, however, the ruling elite remained isolated and corrupt; and the growing ideological opposition movements found expression in mass organizations that occasionally erupted in massive demonstrations, and the military, which has the distinction of staging the first coups in contemporary Arab politics -- in 1936 and 1941. These nationalist, anti-British efforts were thwarted; and the British, who had installed the Hashemite family on the throne after World War I, now found in Nuri al-Said, a former nationalist and Ottoman officer, a capable and willing ally to run the country.
Under the autocratic management of Nuri al-Said, parliament was held firmly in check, and political parties were routinely harassed and suppressed. Nevertheless, there was more political freedom of activity in Iraq at this time than there would be under the much more authoritarian single-party nationalist regimes to come. Nuri and the Regent, Abdul-IIah, might have been dictatorial, but they could not totally ignore other political forces, for the politicization of Iraqi society -- and the growth of mass and cadre parties -- would lead to periodic violent upheavals, as in 1946, 1948, 1952, and finally, the revolution of 1958 (Cf. Batatu, 526ff, and Chs. 22, 32).
How did this nominally liberal political system affect Iraqi foreign policy? Despite -- perhaps because of -- its British “taint,” the regime did its best to display nationalist credentials. This may explain Iraq’s decision to intervene in the Palestine war of 1948, even though it was a non-contiguous actor. Iraq also sought to promote its own version of Arab unity --a “Fertile Crescent plan” which would have embraced Syria, Jordan and perhaps Lebanon, under Baghdad’s hegemony. But when it came to larger strategic relationships, Nuri and the royal family decided to cast their lot with Britain and the West. In spite of apparent public opposition, Nuri (with British encouragement) took Iraq into treaty commitments with Turkey and Iran, leading to the formation of the Baghdad Pact. Nuri had no trouble generating overwhelming parliamentary support for these ventures (Gallman, 43-56), despite their unpopularity outside parliament. If Iraq’s “democracy” could not prevent the regime form pursuing its own unpopular foreign policy interests, neither could it save that regime from the eventual consequences of such policies.
The Iraqi “liberal” period is too clouded with ambiguities to permit any clear conclusion of how the form of government affected foreign policy behavior, particularly its willingness to engage in war. If we classify this government as “democratic” we must count its war with “democratic” Israel in 1948 as an exception to the “democracies do not fight democracies” proposition of international relations scholars. It is arguable that had Iraq been more democratic, its involvement in Palestine might have been even more extensive. Similarly, if one regards Nuri’s pro-British stance as evidence of “peaceableness,” “pragmatism,” or “statesmanship,” then one has to observe that he pursued this course against what was probably Iraqi public opinion on this matter, even though he commanded formal parliamentary majorities.
When Transjordan declared its independence in 1923, neither its British inventors nor the mainly nomadic inhabitants of this arid territory had any intention of establishing a liberal democratic form of government. In reward for services rendered by the Hashemites, the British installed Amir Abdallahs as ruler, and were more concerned about developing a competent army (the Arab Legion) than a liberal democratic political order. Politically, Transjordan was less a state than the possession of a prince, whose family (even though not indigenous to the territory) enjoyed Islamic and tribal legitimacy. Nevertheless, the emirate held its first elections in 1929, and in the 1930s several political parties came into existence.
The turbulence between Zionists and indigenous Palestinian Arabs in Mandatory Palestine during the 1930s dominated Transjordan’s political agenda. As the conflict reached its climax toward the end of World War II, Britain’s decision to withdraw in 1948 galvanized the several claimants to power: the Zionists, the Palestinian Arabs, and the neighboring Arab states -- foremost among them Amir Abdallah’s Transjordan. In 1946 the amirate had achieved full independence from Britain, and thereafter had issued a constitution establishing a bicameral legislative with an elected lower house. The Chamber of Deputies was given legislative power but no authority over finance or government appointments (Patai, 1958, p.46). The 1947 elections were effectively dominated by the pro-government party, with the opposition preferring to protest from outside the country. The legislature fully supported Abdallah’s continuing cooperative relations with Britain, even though nationalists objected. And Abdallah was able to pursue secret talks with Zionist (and later Israeli) leaders through which he hoped to arrange a peaceful partition of Palestine between himself and the new Zionist state. Ultimately, of course, such a partition occurred, although not peacefully. What is noteworthy for our purposes, however, is that Abdallah’s actions clearly contradicted the collective position of the newly created Arab League to reject the Zionist project with force if necessary. Had Transjordan been democratic -- with effective contestation and participation -- one wonders whether Abdallah could have pursued his policy of what Avi Shlaim (1987) calls collusion with the Zionists. In 1951, a Palestinian Arab nationalist bent on punishing King Abdallah’s “treason” assassinated him at the Mosque of Omar in what had become Jordanian East Jerusalem.
Following the accession of Abdallah’s grandson Husayn in 1952, the young king (like his cousins ruling in Iraq) sought to pursue his family’s traditional alignment with the British, but more discretely. Discretion was necessary because as a result of the 1948 war, Jordan now had a very large population of dispossessed and angry Palestinians. Arab nationalism was galvanizing the masses throughout the Arab world. Most Arab regimes, and all the nationalist-progressive parties, reviled the Hashemites for “selling out” Palestine. At first, Husayn tried to build up his legitimacy by allowing parliament and parties to function fairly openly. For about five years he presided precariously over what, in hindsight, may be called Jordan’s brief liberal experiment. It was the freest and most free-wheeling period in Jordanian politics until the King’s new democratic opening in 1989. Husayn tried to placate the nationalist wave, and in one of his most symbolic moves, he sacked Glubb Pasha, the legendary commander of the Arab Legion and a symbol of Britain’s continuing presence. But in 1957 he drew the line when the pro-Nasser officer Ali Abu Nuwar and the Arab nationalist government of Sulayman Nabulsi appeared to be going too far after an attempted military-nationalist coup. Liberalism thus gave way to some three decades of “emergency” rule, in which political freedoms in Jordan were drastically curtailed.
Jordan’s brief liberal experiment in the 1950s was a good deal freer than the more cosmetic parliamentary life of Hashemite Iraq. But there were similarities in foreign policy: both regimes pursued a British (and later an American) connection, and looked upon the pan-Arabism emanating from Egypt as a serious threat, even though it was very popular among their own peoples. King Husayn proved far more astute than his Iraqi cousins in handling what, for the latter, proved to be a mortal danger. Husayn sought to ride the tide of popular outrage over the loss of most of Palestine rather than allow himself to be engulfed by it. This meant both engaging in strong pan-Arab rhetoric, and yet avoiding provoking Israel. It also meant suppodiplomatic compromise rather than forceful con. Husayn’s disastrous decision to attack Israeli Jerusalem in the early hours of the 1967 war is the exception (and an understandable one, on political grounds) to a stance that most Western policymakers have called “statesmanlike.” Many Palestinians and other Arabs have less flattering words for it. Evaluating the “quality” of foreign policy often depends on the situation of the evaluator.
Could Jordan have pursued such a “statesmanlike” course had its political system been more liberal and democratic than it was? Again, it is hard to say, but it is noteworthy that during the “liberal” period of the 1950s, Jordanian policy briefly became more nationalist. The King also declared solidarity with the Palestinian fida`iyyin guerrillas in 1968, during another brief period when his royal authority was being challenged by the Palestinians. In general, however, it is hard to imagine that the King could have been as “statesmanlike” as he was if there had been a more open and competitive political process in Jordan.
The case of Lebanon is especially interesting because it was the most democratic of all the Arab countries. With all its flaws, the Lebanese political system was distinctly more liberal and pluralistic, and less authoritarian than that of the other states we have just mentioned. Although the Lebanese president had much more power than the prime minister, the cabinet, or the Chamber of Deputies, he was far more limited than his neighboring counterparts, owing to Lebanon’s consociational structure. The blueprint of that structure was the National Pact of 1943. It embodied two compromises designed to manage Christian-Muslim tensions, one of which involved Lebanon’s future foreign policy. The newly independent state would forswear any entangling alliances either with the West or the Arab East. We have here a unique case of an Arab country’s foreign policy orientation fixed in a quasi-constitutional pact. If Lebanon’s democracy thus shaped its foreign policy it is also true that an unbalanced foreign policy could destroy Lebanon’s democracy -- and, indeed, its very stability.
This is indeed what almost happened. In 1948 Lebanon participated (albeit rather passively) with its Arab League partners in the Palestine war. It dispatched four battalions to the border and supported Lebanese and Palestinian irregular forces in holding for a time portions of central Galilee. Not to have done so would have almost certainly alienated the Muslim communities and created a disastrous rift in the new and delicate Lebanese polity; but some Maronite Christian leaders opposed, or at least were lukewarm, towards Lebanon’s involvement even in token form. In the mid-1950s, the regime of President Camille Chamoun and Foreign Minister Charles Malik maneuvered to align Lebanon overtly with Western security projects, at a time when Arab nationalist currents were running strong among Lebanon’s non-Christian communities (and among Greek Orthodox Christians as well). It was not the Chamber of Deputies but rather fear of popular protest that kept Chamoun from bringing Lebanon into the Baghdad Pact in 1955. The parliament elected in 1957, in what opposition politicians claimed was a rigged election, supported Lebanon’s adherence to the Eisenhower Doctrine. Following the brief civil war of 1958, the new President, General Fuad Shihab, steered the country’s foreign policy back toward a centrist stance -- friendly towards Nasser’s United Arab Republic, and France and the United States, but tied to none of them. Shihab understood that Lebanon’s domestic environment of pluralistic power-sharing required such a position.
A decade and a half later, however, another Lebanese president, Sulayman franjiyyeh, faced a foreign policy crisis far more difficult than the 1958 episode. His regime split apart as Sunni prime ministers (with a large popular following) supported the activities of the Palestinian resistance movements against Israel, while Maronite Christian politicians, military men, and militia organizations turned to violence in order to oppose what they saw as an unacceptable violation of the National Pact’s stipulation of balance and non-involvement in regional disputes. The formal structures of Lebanese democracy were inadequate to sustain a foreign policy of non-involvement and the concurrent restrictions that would have been required on Palestinian activities, and the country split into opposing, warring camps. Equally explosive domestic issues deepened the split. Would a less democratic Lebanese political system possibly have been able to steer the country clear of the 15-year civil war that ensued? Or was the problem that Lebanon was not democratic enough? With all its imperfections, Lebanon’s quasi-democratic system did reflect a deep popular polarization over foreign policy -- for better or for worse.