Lineages of Revolt. Adam Hanieh
support of the Eisenhower Doctrine, the United States responded with financial and political aid, replacing Britain as the major Western supporter of Jordan.13
As this crisis unfolded in Jordan, the United States also moved to support pro-Western forces in Syria by backing conservative politicians and encouraging Turkish and Iraqi plots against the country.14 Here the attempts failed, serving only to further generate support for Communist and Arab nationalist forces. In 1958, Egypt and Syria formed the United Arab Republic (UAR), a short-lived attempt by Nasser to form a union based on Arab nationalism, which was embraced by Syrian elites in reaction to the strength of the Communist movement in Syria.15 Responding to the formation of the UAR, Jordan and Iraq formed the Arab Union, a federation of the two monarchies that was set up as a pro-Western counterpoint to Arab nationalism. The unity lasted only six months, however, ending with the assassination of Iraq’s King Faisal II in a military coup largely inspired by the overthrow of Egypt’s monarchy in 1952. As these Western allies teetered, British troops were dispatched to Jordan to support King Hussein (with the support of Israel and the United States), while US Marines landed in Lebanon to bolster the pro-Western government of president Camille Chamoun.16
By the mid-1960s, popular and underground movements claiming fidelity to Arab nationalism and left-wing ideologies were shaking all the pro-Western regimes in the region. A most important and often overlooked part of this history was the range of deep-rooted struggles taking place in the Gulf region, where strikes and worker movements threatened the stability of corrupt and decrepit monarchies. In Bahrain, for example, where the first political party in the Gulf had formed in 1954, militant labor struggles occurred through the 1960s that culminated in a three-month uprising in March 1965 following the sacking of hundreds of workers at the Bahrain Petroleum Company (BAPCO).17 These struggles were led by Communist and nationalist leaders who fused agitation against the ongoing British presence in the Gulf with demands around worker and social issues. The strikes drew support from wide layers of society, including high school students who walked out in solidarity with the workers.18 Worker actions and nationalist-inspired movements were also widespread in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the smaller Gulf emirates. Elsewhere in the Arabian Peninsula, an armed struggle was launched in 1963 by the Front for the Liberation of Occupied South Yemen (FLOSY) and the National Liberation Front (NLF) against British control in Yemen.19 The mood of the time was encapsulated in the formation of the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG) in 1968, which viewed its base of operations as extending throughout all the Gulf states.20
The Character of Arab Nationalism
The landscape of Middle East politics from the vantage point of the mid-1960s was thus deeply marked by the chameleonic character of Arab nationalism, which assumed a variety of forms differing radically across time and place.21 While the Arab nationalist movement was represented most prominently by Nasserism in Egypt and the rival factions of Ba’athism in Syria and Iraq, its ideology and political practices resonated powerfully in every country in the region. At numerous points in its history, Arab nationalism, particularly in its Nasserist variant, would clash sharply with imperialist interests in the region. The overthrow of colonially backed monarchies, the nationalization of the Suez Canal, and the later confrontations around Israel (discussed below) are potent indications of this fact. All these points of resistance generated widespread sympathy and deep-seated feelings of pride among all layers of Arab society. Millions of people hold a genuine nostalgia for this era that remains indelibly inscribed in political and cultural practices to the present day.
Nevertheless, it is important not to fetishize the confrontations with imperialism and ignore the configurations of class power that marked the rise of Arab nationalist ideology. Too often the reasons behind the failures of the movement are attributed to the military and political defeats inflicted by external forces or the contingent actions of individual leaders during the 1960s and 1970s. While these are no doubt a critical part of the movement’s history, they can obfuscate the class dynamics that innervated the struggles of the time—most notably the fact that Arab nationalism rested on a contradictory ideology that, although focused on Arab unity, consciously downplayed the reality of class struggle.22 Indeed, many Arab nationalists, such as the Syrian intellectual Adib Nassur, condemned a focus on class as being divisive to the cause of Arab unity.23 Likewise, Michel Aflaq, one of the leading founders of Ba’athism, called on Arabs not to “lose their nationalism nor to confuse it with the felonious notion of class interests, so as not to endanger national unity.”24 In its dominant forms, this orientation actually ended up prioritizing the development of national capitalist classes, and was partly enabled by the presence of the Soviet Union. It was this (ultimately unsuccessful) negotiation of Cold War rivalries that generated the possibility for Arab nationalism to square the contradictions stemming from its pro-capital orientation and its apparent confrontations with imperialism.
The state-led fostering of national capital necessitated the elimination of institutional configurations—supported by earlier elites tied to colonialism—that blocked the development of new capitalist groups. Nasser captured this sentiment well in his Falsafat al-thawrah [Philisophy of the Revolution], in which he argued that the revolution was “a popular progressive struggle not class struggle” that brought together “peasants, workers, soldiers, intellectuals and national capital” as an alternative to “the alliance of exploitative capital and feudalism.”25 This struggle was an important, albeit partial, explanation of the character of the land reform that took place in the 1950s and 1960s (see chapter 4). In practice, it did not necessarily mean the destruction of those old social elites—in many cases they became an important component of the new capitalist classes—but was aimed rather at the institutional forms that represented those older social relations. The development of this local, state-supported bourgeoisie also helps to explain one driving force behind the confrontation with imperialism—an attempt to attain basic sovereignty over resources, state policies, financial systems, and so forth. All these measures explain the ubiquity of the “strong state” that typified Arab nationalist governments through the 1950s and 1960s, which provided the conditions for national accumulation through state-distributed contracts, financial linkages, and trading opportunities. Within this structure the military took a preeminent position as the only state institution with the internal cohesiveness and organizational discipline to direct this transformation.
It is this “pro-capital”/“pro-state” orientation of Arab nationalism that helps clarify a further feature of this history, which is often missed in the hagiography of Nasser and other nationalist leaders. The Arab states that emerged during the 1950s and 1960s were characterized by sharp confrontations with the Left, independent worker movements, and other struggles. These movements were tolerated at points, and their discourses were often absorbed into the language of ruling regimes (as can be seen in the frequent refrain of “Arab socialism”), but all Arab nationalist movements aimed at demobilizing and persecuting any left-wing forces that attempted to strengthen the autonomous mobilization of workers and other social forces.26 This strategy of demobilization could be seen in another innovation of Arab nationalism—the creation of state-led, corporatist unions and other federations that were billed as representatives of working classes but that, in reality, were frequently used to suppress struggles and prevent them from emerging outside of the state structures. These institutions were seamlessly taken over by the autocratic rulers that followed the first generation of Arab nationalist leaders (such as Mubarak and Ben Ali), and are important to understanding the contemporary form of struggles following the 2011 uprisings.
In short, despite their rhetoric, Arab nationalist regimes acted primarily to strengthen capitalism and an emerging, state-linked capitalist class—they had little to do with socialism, regardless of the nomenclature used to describe the various regimes of the time. This is not to deny the ways in which these regimes did carry out a range of measures that improved living standards and addressed many of the deprivations that populations had faced under colonialism—land reform, job security in the public sector, and, very importantly, provision of food and other subsidies to guarantee food access for the poorest layers of the population. These measures met real social needs, and were utilized by the Arab nationalist regimes—as with their anti-imperialist rhetoric—to bind mass support to governments in the context of sustained pressure from below. But their provision through the state, without any organs of real democratic participation or