Ideologies and institutions: transformation in the Middle East from yesterday to today
by Gökhan Bacık*

The factor to consider here is Arab nationalism, which was the basic prescription placed by Arab elites before their societies at the start of the 20th century. The situation is in fact a bit reminiscent of a similar story concerning Turkey. In 1911, a group of Arab youths formed the group Al-Fatat in Paris. This youthful movement proposed that it was only via secular-nationalism that Arabs would achieve true enlightenment. Interestingly, the influence of Christian Arabs in the formation of ethnic Arab nationalism was great. Christian Arabs such as Michel Aflaq, Ameen Rihani, Anton Saada, Ibrahim Yaziji and Butrus al-Bustani made a profound contribution at this time in pushing Arab nationalism towards a secular pole. To wit, one of the most important names from the very basis of Arab political unity was Georgy Zeidan, a Christian.

The extreme secularism of Arab nationalism was later to lead this way of thought to be closely tied with socialism very efficiently. In the meantime, as far as anyone knows, the first written tract on Arab socialism was written by yet another Christian Arab, Salama Moussa, in 1913. Let us stop at this juncture to bring up this question though: How did it happen that Kemalism in Turkey and Arab socialism in the Arab world drifted so quickly to the left? The fact that so many Middle Eastern nationalisms became so close over time to socialism is a sort of cautionary historical tale. The reason for this is in essence the extreme secularism inherent in the ideological prescriptions across the Middle East, including Turkey.

In 1958, Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser formed the United Arab Republic along with Syria. But after only a short while, the Syrians grew weary of Egypt’s political ego and in 1961 they pulled out of this union. Two years later, in 1963, Syria, Iraq and Egypt formed a new united Arab state union, but it was dissolved almost a decade later, in 1971. Nasserism, which was a strange interpretation of Arab nationalism, provoked a longing for success amongst the crushed Arab masses. Millions of Arabs embraced Nasser as a sort of savior. And there can be no question that, in fact, Nasser was a great orator and rhetorician. Politicians such as Sulayman al-Nabulsi from Jordan and Saeb Salam from Lebanon were devoted supporters of Nasser, who had not brought about success. The enormous military victories by Israel, the bankrupted formulas for united Arab states… And worse yet was this: One of the primary actors in strengthening and making permanent the oppressive Arab state order that is so complained about today was Nasser. Under Nasser, thousands of people were imprisoned, and Egypt’s institutional political system was thrown into chaos. In essence, since the 19th century, Egypt had been one of the most important centers of reform from the perspective of institutionalization. So when Nasserism worked to de-fang these institutions, and instead placed single-person cult politics in the spotlight, it ultimately wounded the political culture in the region.

Looking at Baathism

As for Baathism, it is based on a different angle from the above summarized intellectual structures. Baathism puts socialist thinking at its center and was representative of a Jacobean stance. The creators of Baathism themselves were mostly inspired by French positivists, such as Auguste Comte, and figures such as Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar had anyway received their educations in France. Baathism, which defended the idea of a pan-Arab union, had a very strong effect on both Syria and Iraq. But when Bashar Assad came to power in Damascus, the traditional Baathist overtones were pushed almost entirely to the backburner.

The ideological vision put forward by the Arab elite proposed a mixture of extreme secularism and nationalism with socialism. This in turn had two significant political results. First of all, one inevitable outcome of this ideological legacy was that it wound up placing the political elite at a point well-distanced from the people of the nations themselves. This was due to the fact that radical secularism and nationalist socialism could not, from any historical perspective, ever gain widespread acceptance in the cultural basin of Islam. This ill fit between the regional social fabric and the “foreignized” ideological prescriptions proposed by Arab intellectuals had another important result: oppressive regimes. It was a meaningless political dream to expect the average Arab to be extremely secular, nationalist and socialist. For this reason, the cost of this ideological prescription put forward by Arab intellectuals was always an authoritarian state stance.

This above situation guides us to look at the institutional side of Middle Eastern states. This institutional structure signifies what we call the “typical Middle Eastern state.” First of all, there is a problem with the very legitimacy of this structure. Here is what this legitimacy problem means: Neither the leaders nor the institutions have ever been fully embraced by the people of the nations. Today, we see that millions of people are celebrating the departure of the head of the Egyptian state. And again, when we look and see that the head of the Tunisian state escaped from Tunisia, it is even clearer just how pervasive this legitimacy problem really is. At this point another question emerges: How exactly is it that regimes which have legitimacy problems survive for decades? How was it that people and institutions whose rules were not based on the wishes of the people were able to carry on? The answer to this is quite simple: militaries, which were formed with their first and foremost duty being to protect the regime. It is for that reason that the Middle East became the land of coups and military regimes. Most heads of state in the Middle East were at one time soldiers. Even in Turkey, which we praise these days for its democracy, nearly half of all the heads of state up until now have been from the military! But even more critical is this: How could such a small devoted group of people form bureaucracies, intelligence agencies, universities and justice systems against the desires of the majority? This very fact pushed Middle Eastern regimes towards a sort of minority neuropathy. In nearly every nation of the Middle East, there were unofficial agreements made between the nation’s political elite and certain groups, such as religious sects and ethnic groups and the like. Under Saddam in Iraq, even the municipality police were from the native tribes in and around the Tikrit area. In Iraq, larger family groups had basically taken over the state.

The ‘chosen few’

Elite employment in Middle Eastern is provided through these chosen “small groups.” When you examine the makeup of intelligence agencies and high courts, you notice that there is a different sort of structure that has taken root in these, one based on ethnicity or religious sectarianism. The most important 2,000 people ruling a typical Middle Eastern state are always somehow friends, relatives or from the same sect! In the meantime, the elites at the center of the structure absolutely do not want to see “modernization” extend to the peripheries. 

And so the number of universities has never increased. Potentially important political actors are prevented from coming into the center from the peripheries. (For example, in Turkey, it has always been conservative figures that have come up with formulas such as the Anatolian high schools, or opening up new universities in the provinces, etc.) Another reality is that, because a typical Middle Eastern state is established by civil servants, the state is the enemy of the markets.

As a result of all these factors, naturally, a typical Middle Eastern regime only very rarely fears outside enemies, and instead its primary worries are about “enemies” that might come from the interior. Generally, these worries are related to the influence of Islam.

Today, however, in the region we call the Middle East, there are three basic currents we see: democratization, marketization and globalization. For political actors coming to the center from the periphery (in Turkey the Justice and Development Party [AK Party], in Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood [Ikhwan]) these three currents lead to situations in their favor. To summarize this idea, all three of these currents will ultimately strengthen the religiously devout. And thus, central regimes are all rather allergic to these three currents.

Another interesting angle to all of this is that in the Middle East, support for the status quo has come to mean defending a certain opposition to democracy, statism and globalization. (And what is meant here by “globalization” is not the American ideology therein, but rather the reality of a merchant from Yozgat selling his wares in Africa.) So that it appears that the continuation of support for the status quo comes only at a very high price (juntas, economic collapse, oppressiveness), and this is clearly not sustainable. In a sense, you could say the entire idea of supporting the status quo is itself in crisis.

The final factor to be highlighted here is Islam. After 1945, one of the primary attributes of systems in the Middle East was the complete elimination of Islam. This was a mistaken and non-realistic intellectual blunder. This pushing away of Islam from the center of regimes wound up creating a crisis of legitimacy between the peoples of the nations and the states themselves. I suppose that from this point onwards, there needs to be a serious questioning of whether in fact there is such an existential relationship between democracy and secularism, as many allege. Secularists have now been shown to be bankrupt on the question of bringing about democracy. The basic matter that lies before us is ultimately the acceptance that Islam has existed as a basic theme here for more than a thousand years and the consequences of this have manifested themselves as a natural part of both politics and society.