The Modern Middle East - A Political History Since World War I (Third Edition)

by Mehran Kamrava

  Crucial to any democracy is the role of the middle classes, without whose sustained participation in the political process a democracy becomes hollow and meaningless. This is especially the case in younger democracies, where initially the electorate comes to play a deliberate, guardian role in ensuring the system’s integrity. In many of the more recent democratic transitions in the developing world, the middle classes have played a most vital role, at least in the initial phases of the struggle to bring about a democratic political system. Before long, however, economic pressures and circumstances force much of their attention away from political activities and toward economics, thus giving state elites a freer hand in pursuing their own agendas. The confidence of the middle classes in the stability of their economic position (not having to work multiple jobs to keep their middle-class standing) and their economic independence from the state (not having to rely on direct state salaries or indirect state largesse) determines the extent and nature of their role as watchdogs over political elites. In other words, what “the people” let their elected officials get away with has a lot to do with how confident they feel about their economic standing. As we shall see, in Lebanon and Turkey, and to a lesser extent in Israel among the country’s Arab citizens, there are large segments of society for whom sustained, routine attention to politics is a luxury they cannot afford.

  In all three of the democratic systems in the Middle East, built-in features make the systems more quasi-democratic than viably democratic. In one way or another, and to one extent or another, especially when compared to the liberal democracies of the West, they restrict the scope of political participation or civil liberties by certain groups (e.g., the Kurds in Turkey and the Palestinians in Israel) or ensure the continued hold on power by specific oligarchies (e.g., in Lebanon). Also, in both Turkey and Israel, concern with national security, broadly defined, has led to far more influence by the armed forces in civilian policy making than is the case in almost all other democracies. In fact, one ironic label that has been used to refer to both systems is military democracy.84

  Let us begin by examining the Turkish political system. As we saw in chapter 2, the modern state that Atatürk founded involved two primary projects: the forcible secularization and modernization of Turkish culture and society, and the institutionalization and propagation of a distinctly Turkish as opposed to Ottoman national identity. Both tasks, coupled with the other projects of Atatürk’s “revolution from above,” involved significant state coercion. Having all come from military backgrounds, Atatürk and his associates liberally used the armed forces to achieve their political ends. In practical terms, this meant the significant presence of the army in civilian life, at least behind the scenes, and the military’s heavy-handed suppression of non-Turkish minorities, such as the Kurds. Kurds who did not accept the state’s efforts at forced ethnocultural assimilation into the “higher” Turkish identity were brutally repressed.85

  Once Atatürk was gone from the scene, the Turkish military assumed for itself the mission of safeguarding his legacy and ensuring that civilian politicians did not deviate from the path on which he had started. From 1950 on, an imperfect but functioning multiparty democracy governed Turkey. But the system was beset by political infighting and tension and by chronic economic crises. The first direct military intervention occurred in 1960, after some ten years of rule by the Democratic Party had brought the country to the verge of chaos and civil war. Viewing its mission as temporary and its goal as the restoration of the Kemalist republic, the ruling military junta drafted a new constitution and, after new elections in 1961, retreated to the barracks. Before doing so, however, it ensured its own institutional oversight of the civilian power structure through the establishment of the National Security Council (NSC). According to the 1961 constitution, the NSC was set up to assist the cabinet “in making decisions related to national security and coordination.”86

  The 1960 coup was carried out by junior officers of the Turkish military. Throughout the 1960s, however, the military’s sense of corporate identity, its internal discipline and cohesion, and the political and economic privileges of its high command grew significantly. With vested economic and political interests in maintaining social peace and stability, in 1971 the military stepped in again, this time to stop the increasingly rampant terrorism of left- and right-wing extremists. Unlike the 1960 coup, the 1971 intervention was at the behest of senior army officers, who, once again, used the 1971–73 interlude to enhance their own institutional autonomy within the ostensibly civilian body politic. A new constitution was drawn up and the NSC’s powers were expanded. However, once the military withdrew again, a succession of weak governments followed, none of which were able to deal with the mounting, often violent tensions and disturbances that ensued. By September 1980, the military once again felt the need to intervene. In a radio-television broadcast to the nation, the coup makers announced that they were only after “ensuring the prevalence of law and order . . . [and] restoring the state authority in an impartial manner.”87 This time, the coup was spearheaded by the NSC itself, which remained the principal ruling body for the coup’s three-year duration. Martial law was imposed, most of the political parties were banned, many politicians were banished or imprisoned, and scores of ordinary Turks were rounded up and arrested. As before, a new constitution was drafted, again guaranteeing the NSC’s dominance within the system.

  Even after new elections in October 1983, the military’s hold on public life did not change significantly. The NSC remained one of the most pivotal institutions of the state, and, despite civilian rule, the military’s presence in the public sphere remained extensive. Nevertheless, the 1980s witnessed a gradual demilitarization of the Turkish political system, promoted by several different factors, such as Turkey’s need to secure loans from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, its desire to be seen more as part of Europe, and the general global trend of the 1980s toward the depoliticization of many Third World militaries. By early 1984, martial law was lifted province by province. By the middle of the decade, state elites were floating civilian notions such as “civil society” and even showing signs of real autonomy vis-à-vis the military.88 The military, it seemed, had left Turkish politics for good.

  The appearance that the Turkish democracy was being consolidated was shattered in June 1997, when the military once again flexed its muscle and forced the sitting prime minister, Necmettin Erbakan, out of office. This episode is often referred to as the “silent coup,” since the military, through the NSC, summoned the prime minister to a meeting and demanded his resignation. Erbakan, a perennial political activist with Islamist tendencies, had become prime minister at the head of the vaguely religious Refah Party in June 1996. This in itself had sent shock waves through the system. In his short few months in office, the prime minister also embarked on a series of highly controversial measures, many of which were deemed threatening to Atatürk’s secularist legacy. He improved Turkey’s relations with Iran and Libya, adopted a populist rhetoric with vague references to Islam, and advocated the establishment of a Just Order, the underpinnings for which appeared nonsecular.89 It took only a year before the military removed him from office.

  The Turkish military might have become “depoliticized” in the conventional sense of not directly launching a coup. But as its move against Erbakan and the Refah Party showed, it continued to view itself as the vanguard of a reinvigorated Kemalist legacy. Although there was a democratic system of sorts in Ankara, the continued dominance of the military and its ability to force its preferences on civilian state actors seriously eroded the system’s democratic legitimacy. But then a political earthquake of sorts occurred in Turkey in 2002, when the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, or the AKP), one of the successors to the Refah, won a majority in the Turkish parliament and its leader, Recep Tayyip Erdog˘an, became the prime minister. The AKP went on to win subsequent elections in 2007 and 2011, and Erdog˘an, a onetime
mayor of Istanbul who had been banned from politics by the military, went on to become one of the most consequential leaders in the political history of contemporary Turkey. One of the most significant changes initiated during Erdog˘an’s premiership was a steady move to curb the political powers of the Turkish military. This was done through breaking up an alleged secret military ring seeking to launch a takeover of the state, legally prosecuting as many as 330 officers implicated in the affair, and forcing many others who were suspected of knowledge of the plot into retirement. For the first time in the history of the Turkish Republic, beginning in 2010–11 the country’s armed forces were on the defensive.

  Turkey has also had to contend with a serious nationalities problem, with the country’s Kurds remaining by and large a repressed minority. The general refusal of state elites to acknowledge the existence of alternative, non-Turkish national identities within their borders resulted in the eruption of an armed insurrection in the Kurdish-dominated southeast regions of the country in 1984. Headed by the Kurdish Workers’ Party, the PKK, the Kurdish national movement has elicited sharp and violent reactions from the Turkish army, which has often been heavy-handed in its dealings with Kurdish insurgency. There have been numerous accusations of mass arrests, torture, destruction of property, and forced assimilation by Turkish forces against the Kurds and PKK fighters. Even Kurdish members of the Turkish parliament have been arrested and expelled from it. In the mid-1990s, the Turkish government was said to have amassed some 220,000 troops in the southeast to defeat the PKK and to have launched operations involving as many as 35,000 to 50,000 soldiers.90 In May 1999, Turkish commandos captured the PKK’s leader, Abdullah Öcalan, and the movement appears to have seriously weakened or even collapsed after that. Nevertheless, even if Turkey’s Kurdish movement has faltered for now, the essentially restricted nature of the Turkish democracy remains the same. A viable, liberal democratic polity is still some way off.

  Compared to the Lebanese and Turkish political systems, Israel more closely approximates a liberal democracy. It has one of the most vibrant parliamentary systems in the world, it has had regular elections since November 1949, within a few months of independence the previous May, and since 1977 it has seen regular rotations in the party in power and in the parliamentary majority in the Knesset. In fact, a generally valid perception that the electoral system was too diffuse resulted in its overhaul in 1992, whereby Israeli voters now cast separate ballots for the prime minister and for the party list to be elected to the Knesset.91 Moreover, despite occasional wavering, the judiciary has largely maintained its independence from the country’s dominant political currents. As one observer has noted, “On the whole . . . the Israeli judicial system is professional and unpolitical, and, in that sense, very un-Israeli. This is what makes it such an important bastion of Israeli democracy in a sea of forces that would hasten the erosion of its foundations.”92

  Nevertheless, two features of Israeli democracy point to its illiberal nature: the treatment of the Arab citizens of Israel and the prevailing pattern of civil-military relations. In different ways, each of these factors undermines the integrity of the Israeli democracy or, at the very least, relegates it to a category separate from the liberal democracies of the West. Israeli civil-military relations are heavily tilted in favor of the military, so much so that civilian oversight of the military is at times more fiction than fact. And although Arab Israelis are technically Israeli citizens with rights equal to those of Jewish Israelis, they frequently face official discrimination and bias.

  In 1948, when the state of Israel was founded, according to official Israeli sources, 160,000 Arabs—mostly Muslims with some Christians and Druze—were living within the boundaries of the newly independent state. As of 2011, they numbered more than 1,624,000, or 20 percent of the total population of 7,840,000.93 From the start, the Arabs in Israel were given Israeli citizenship and many of the rights that accompanied it: they vote, have representation in the Knesset (7 out of the 120 seats after the 2009 elections, or approximately 6 percent), and have their own political parties (the largest being the United Arab List, with four MKs). These statistics, while demonstrating impressive quantitative achievements by Arab Israelis within the Knesset, mask more important qualitative facts. For nearly twenty years, from 1948 to 1966, official mistrust of Arab Israelis led the government to place them under military administration. “Most Arab towns, villages, farms, and property in Israel were destroyed or taken over by the new Jewish government.”94 The existing farming economy was destroyed. Many Arabs also found themselves victims of arbitrary arrests, expulsions from the country, and forced exile to other villages within Israel.

  While the treatment and living standards of the Arab Israelis have improved in recent years, most avenues of upward economic and political mobility remain closed to them. For average Israelis, service in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) is often key for obtaining access to social prestige, political influence, and a secure pension. But out of mistrust and for security reasons, Arab Muslim citizens of Israel are barred from military service, although Christians and the Druze can serve. In a country where religion—Judaism—defines the official essence of nationality, non-Jews face formal restrictions of various kinds. The state treats them with suspicion. Only 2 percent of the budget of the Ministry of Religious Affairs is devoted to the needs of their community. Yet with only 20 percent of the population, they form 50 percent of those living below the poverty line.95 As two longtime observers of Israeli politics have noted, “The Arabs . . . are excluded from many basic institutions of the state, from the state’s collective memory, and from most national symbols. No Arab citizen of Israel has ever held a leading position in any state political institution. The highest ranks obtained by an Arab have been deputy minister, mayor, or district court judge.”96

  Equally problematic for Israeli democracy has been the prevailing nature of civil-military relations in the country. Given that the Israeli state was born into war, from the very beginning the armed forces were seen as indispensable to its survival and security. To ensure personal control over military matters, and by some accounts to prevent the possibility of a coup, Ben-Gurion decided to hold on to the Defense Ministry in addition to the Prime Ministry. He did this all three times that he became the prime minister, and his example was later followed by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol (1963–67). The unintended consequence of this dual control by the prime minister, especially in the formative years of the young republic’s life, was the lack of development of viable civilian institutions for effective oversight of the military. Repeated military conflicts in 1956, 1967, and 1973 drove home the importance of security matters, in turn giving military planners increasing freedom to do what was deemed necessary to defend the country. In the process, the Defense Ministry became “the civilian aide for the military,” often acting as a sort of Ministry of Military Procurements in peacetime.97

  Since Israel does not yet have a written constitution, the constitutional limits of the military’s influence and the nature of its oversight by civilian institutions remain unclear.98 Consequently, many high-ranking IDF officials have become very influential in policy-making circles. In fact, Israeli military officials were highly active in the 1993 Oslo Accords negotiations and others that followed with the Palestinians and later the Syrians. Since the mid-1970s, especially after the Likud Party came to power in 1977, many high-ranking IDF officials have engaged in what has come to be known as “parachuting”: they wait out the obligatory hundred days of retirement and then assume influential positions in one of the political parties, usually the one in power.99 None of this, of course, brings the IDF anywhere close to the levels of power enjoyed by the Turkish military, where the Turkish NSC and the military high command could until recently effectively dictate the policies that the prime minister had to follow. Nevertheless, the IDF’s influence throughout the Israeli polity remains enormous by almost all democratic standards. “The Middle East’s only democracy,” as
Israel is often called, still has some way to go to become fully democratic.

  Of the quasi democracies, Turkey and Israel are at the opposite extremes of most and least restrictive, respectively, and Lebanon falls somewhere in the middle. Lebanon’s 1926 constitution was meant to accommodate the country’s fragmented sectarian mosaic, divided into no less than seventeen official religious communities. According to the 1932 census, the largest religious community was Christian, with 51.2 percent of the population (nearly 30 percent of them Maronites and the rest Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic, and Armenians), while the Muslims were about 48.8 percent of the population, most of them Sunnis (22.4 percent) and Shiʿites (19.6 percent) and the rest Druze (6.8 percent).100 Within such a highly fragmented society, local notables (zuʿama) assumed crucial importance as the articulators and defenders of communal interests and power. In times of instability and crisis, the zuʿama and other primordial sources of loyalty, such as family and kinship, became particularly instrumental for those feeling threatened by others or by circumstances. The developments in postindependence Lebanon only served to strengthen primordial and sectarian loyalties, at the expense, as it turned out, of a cohesive sense of national identity.

  Shortly after independence in 1943, a notable Sunni delivered a talk in which he outlined a Muslim-Christian understanding regarding the overall nature and the character of the Lebanese state. The National Pact (Al-Mithaq al-Watani), as the talk came to be known, reaffirmed Lebanon’s independence from France, its separateness from Syria, and its Arab identity. It also outlined an institutional arrangement for power sharing among the various sects. According to this “informal” provision, the presidency was reserved for the Maronites, the office of the prime minister for the Sunnis, and the speakership of the parliament for the Shiʿites. These same distribution patterns came to be replicated among other echelons of power as well, from the command of the army (going to a Maronite), to the various ministries (Justice Ministry for the Greek Orthodox and Defense Ministry for the Druze), and on to the state bureaucracy.101 Although unwritten, the National Pact essentially became the constitutional foundation of the Lebanese state. For the few happy years that followed, Lebanon became something of a “consociational” or “consensus” democracy—that is, a “government by elite cartel designed to turn a democracy with a fragmented political culture into a stable democracy.”102