The most basic problem in the Middle East isn’t the conflict in Palestine or authoritarian Arab governments. The most basic problem is that the nation-states that were created there were artificially drawn and don’t represent coherent communities where consensus is possible among the governed. Tribal, sectarian, and ethnic differences within countries like Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon make it very difficult to organize representative governments where minority rights and majority-rule are respected. Attempts to get the people there to think of themselves as Iraqis or Syrians or Libyans have been only partially successful. If you aren’t a Turk, it’s hard to think of yourself as a Turk, and if you aren’t a member of the House of Saud, it’s hard to think of yourself as a Saudi.
Dictatorial regimes have been the historical solution to this problem, allowing for at least the semblance of civil order. The secular Baathist regimes in Syria and Iraq allowed somewhat ecumenical societies to emerge where religious or ethnic differences were somewhat submerged. But both regimes have now failed in that effort thanks to the United States’ decision to invade Iraq.
The neoconservatives’ simple-minded solution to anti-American Arab radicalism was to encourage democratic reforms in countries where dictatorship existed precisely because there could be no consensus among the governed.
Self-determination and human rights are wonderful ideas, but they don’t work unless there are coherent and cohesive communities in which to implement those ideas. America worked, imperfectly, precisely because Congregationalists and Quakers and Anglicans and Catholics and Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterians agreed to live and let live rather than to fight it out for domination. Ultimately, it didn’t matter if you were English or German or Norwegian. We learned to absorb even the Irish and Italians without letting ethnicity become a political determinant.
This was a process that we tend to gloss over. It wasn’t painless and it didn’t occur without creating a political backlash. But it wasn’t what caused our civil war, and we managed to get through it without much violence or too much political turmoil. But we also had a mostly unsettled continent to help us be generous about the available spoils. And we were settled by people from Europe who were sick and tired of religious wars and shared a basic consensus that fighting over religion wasn’t productive.
These conditions simply are not met in the Middle East. They may have to fight until they get tired of fighting. The only advice I really have is that the borders in the Arab world have little inherent value. The people there should not be bound by those borders if they are an impediment to peace. If communities can emerge that discount ethnic and sectarian differences in favor of national identity, that will be great, but it may be more important for communities to exist where the consent of the governed is possible in the here and now.
Kind of like how we gloss over the several million Africans in America whose consent was not consulted and the millions of natives whose denied consent was ignored.
Yeah. I think Boo is right on, except that the Civil War was very much about this.
I got to listen to Senator Graham say this morning that “al-Maliki has got to go.” Somehow, Bob Schieffer failed to respond by pointing out “Well, if the U.S. dictated al-Maliki’s ouster to the Iraqi government, wouldn’t that be profoundly undemocratic and become likely to create blowback on us?” The old man just moved on, zombielike, to his next talking-points-enabling question.
The rot which has permeated our elected leaders and elite media is really something to behold. These people have zero self-awareness and 100% self-regard.
Stonekettle:
Don’t think “9/11, 9/11, 9/11 …” is gonna do it for him.
One of his best rants ever — and the man can RANT.
This. This. A thousand times this.
I’ve been saying this in my class since 2004. There are no rational reasons for the borders of the Middle East. If we accept that imperialism exported the “state” as a political structure, and when imperialism receded it left the State behind as a the preferred political structure, then we have the final perversion of imperialism.
States often evolved around a national group (the French) or at least a people with common institutions and history (the Americans). In the post-imperial world, states were arbitrary creations.
Until we disenthrall ourselves from the idea that secession movements are de facto “bad” and allow people to live with the people they want, we will continue to see violence plague the world from Zimbabwe to Thailand, from Mauritania to Chechnya.
And while we are at it, let’s see if we can’t entice Texas, Mississippi and South Carolina to secede again.
Except for all the rulers, and the design of the United Nations protecting them, with the sacred principles of national sovereignty and territorial integrity applying to these imaginary communities. I’m afraid it’s been too late since this system was erected as a reaction to the bloodshed of the World Wars and the anti-colonial movements in all those old empires, and all we can do is hope that the decay of the system will keep being a little less bloody than those wars were.
What does your analysis say about the current state of domestic politics in the United States of America, whose internal federative states were also organized somewhat arbitrarily?
The argument you are making is that the choice of government in multicultural polities is limited to absolute monarchy (with the support of a military, cultural, or economic aristocracy, or all three) OR what classical societies called tyrranos (popular dictatorship) in which popular masses support, at least initially, dictatorial rule.
My analysis is that the issue in every society is whether a local majority seizes complete control over all aspects of civic life or whether minorities are allow civic space and some degree of autonomy. It is the insistence of a global or local majoritarian tyranny that pushes politics toward a decision between politics through deliberation or politics through force.
Morsi blew it in Egypt. Sisi is blowing it in Egypt. Saddam Hussein essentially blew it. And so has Maliki.
One of the problems of imperial or dictatorial rule in which a lid is put on ethnic conflicts and economic conflicts through force is that long periods of stability result in spatial integration of various cultural and economic interest groups. Reassertion of ethnic autonomy always comes as some sort of movement for ethnic cleansing.
In short, I don’t buy the argument that multi-cultural states never achieve democracy and always end in grief. Democracy seems very difficult to actually achieve and protect (even at very micro-local levels). And all forms of states have eventually come to grief, popular dictatorships being among the most short-lived.
Force rules when the mythology of force as the ultimate guarantor of peace becomes exaggerated. Long-term civil and international wars and peaceful inter-war eras have proved otherwise.
Ethnic nationalism (even of the USA-USA-USA kind) is only one basis of organizing a state. It is ethnic discrimination in civic life that is more damaging to stability in nation states. And ethnic discrimination, as we see all too well in the US, is an instrument of political strategy for gaining domestic power by providing an artificial way of united and goosing a base political movement. Religious sectarianism serves as well, as does regional multi-ethnic geographic identity unrelated to long-term kinship.
The British made a mess in 1920, but the US oil interests whacking the hornet’s nest regularly since World War II is more the cause of the current “crisis”.
Let the oil barons pay for it. US military subsidy of the oil industry is deforming the pricing structure of energy and subverting the US government.
Ethnicity and religion are always the beard for personal and economic power interests, anyway. Sunni and Shi’a lived in easy relationships for centuries in Mesopotamia (often with lots of intermarriage as in most of the 20th century), and still do in Pakistan of all places; they only fight when whipped into it by wouldbe dictators or imperial adventurers (divide et impera!). The Thirty Years’ War wasn’t about religion but economics, which is why Catholic France fought on the Protestant side.
That’s true. It actually was a factor in our Civil War, too. How do you convince non-slave owning white people to go to war to defend slavery? You resort to tribalism. Portray the Yankees as foreign aggressors who are threatening your Southern way of life.
White Southerners are a distinct ethnic group! I swear I never thought of that before, but it’s true, isn’t it?
What I think it happening, in some ways, with all the talk of ‘polarization,’ is that ‘Democrat’ and ‘Republican’ are being increasingly ethnicized. If that was a word.
They are certainly a tribe, and their golden rule is: My tribe, right or wrong.
Only as much as Brooklyn Italians or Southie Irish are a distinct ethnic group.
Actually, they conscript them.
Or bamboozle them into enlisting. Must remember that most of those who died in Vietnam had enlisted.
??? the draft
Not until 1862. The first year of the war, it was all volunteers.
Before 1862, most of the enlistees either owned slaves or owed money to people who did. Units were formed out of personally-led militia units led by prominent planters. After 1862, units were recruited geographically and conscription sought to enlist as much of the fighting-age population as possible. The geographically-based units meant that some towns and rural areas lost almost all their young men as are result of one devastating battle and others did not–with most locations between the two extremes. Rich guys tried to get their sons out of conscription (remember the war had turned badly and into a long war) by paying poorer men to go in their place under an offer they could not refuse. One of the stories in my family is that a great-great uncle refused such a generous off and had to hide out in the swamps of the PeeDee region of SC until the anger subsided. Another story claims he killed a sheriff’s deputy who came to bring him in. I have not yet found documentary evidence of this story. For a lot of white people in South Carolina, secession was done without their consent by a self-appointed convention and rigged legislature.
What is your point? Mine is that Confederate propaganda included a lot of appeals to tribalism, where the Sunny South was suffering under Yankee tyranny. I’m not really interested in quibbling about how voluntary their service was.
Although if you’re suggesting that no poor whites fought eagerly in the Confederate army, that’s absurd.
A lot of the tribalism came after the compulsory service and the defeat. And resentment from the scorched earth campaign of Sherman’s march. The tribalism was enforced by organized violence directed by the former planters and by the secessionist branch of the the Democratic Party (there was even after the Civil War a Unionist branch that resurfaced in Reconstruction governments).
To counter the resentment of Sherman’s campaign, most Freedman’s Bureau agents engaged the socially prominent people of the communities they were in even as they administered relief to freed slaves.
The major forces of propaganda were unorganized until Bedford-Forrest organized the Ku Klux Klan and Wade Hampton organized his Red Shirt campaign.
My point is that the propaganda was post-war and in the end captured non-Southern people in the mythology of the Knights of the South, gentility, and the whole sentimental romantic claptrap that Margaret Mitchell trotted out in the 1930s in Gone with the Wind.
Poor whites fought in the Confederate army for all sorts of confused reasons, some of them including the fact that they had served in militias with the same people for years–militias the mostly had to do with catching fugitive slaves.
The fact that there was pervasive propaganda by the likes of Edmund Ruffin and others did not mean that that was the proximate reason for volunteering or accepting conscription.
But my main point is the current attitudes in Southern politics are not as much grounded in neo-Confederate attitudes as in more contemporary conservatism that exists across the country. Which is why transplants from New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, and California who live in suburban rings around Southern cities also show up voting for the likes of Pat McCrory or Nathan Deal or the Cooch, join megachurches that have religious academies, and vote to defund local government.
In short, I don’t buy the argument that multi-cultural states never achieve democracy and always end in grief.
Where are you seeing that argument? I’m seeing an argument that the conditions that allowed a multi-cultural democracy to develop in the US don’t obtain in the Middle East.
Is a better argument something like ‘multi-cultural states in which the various cultures don’t identify at least as strongly with the state itself as with their ethnicity come to a great deal of grief before potentially achieving democracy?’
I started a reply to this. It grew. Now a stand-alone post.
No, Booman. Democracy…and the cohesion necessary to maintain it… begins at home.
Read it and weep.
Read it and…hopefully…begin to cohere.
Later…
AG
If you maintain your position as a supporter of the DemRat wing of the Permanent Government UniParty, you are as guilty as the original architects of the Iraq War. Not to the same degree, but still guilty.
I see, yes. What it’s really about is keeping your hands clean. Basically everything sucks and there’s nothing anybody can do about it, but if you denounce both parties then at least it isn’t your fault.
And this in a country so richly endowed with mountain ranges that we could have a guerrilla movement in each one, with none of them getting in the way of the others’ fighting the power.
what a perspicacious remark, you’ve outdone yourself Sir Davis
Uprated for “perspicacious”!
Wolverines!
Arthur Gilroy just doesn’t want to leave his parents’ basement – his posts are his rationale for remaining there
I don’t think that multicultural states always come to grief. Look at Spain.
But, what I do think is that the Middle East isn’t sorted in any kind of logical way. In theory, these communities can live together, intermarry, hire each other, not discriminate against each other, not kill each other. I think if you were a casual traveler to Iraq and especially Syria prior to the outbreak of war, you would have seen societies that kind of functioned as if sectarian, tribal, and ethnic differences weren’t all that vital. In places like Damascus and Baghdad, Sunnis and Shi’a and Christians and Arabs and Kurds and Turkmen all lived together in a way that you’d like to see in a democratic society.
But all the stuff we’re seeing now was still there, just beneath the surface. It didn’t get out of control because Assad and Hussein would pound the shit out of any religious leader who fostered religious strife. In both countries, it was a sectarian minority that ruled, so minority rights were respected as a matter of course.
I’m not saying that dictatorship is preferable to democracy, but it’s generally preferable to what we’re seeing in Iraq and Syria right now. I don’t blame any particular religion or sect or ethnicity for these problems. But I do think the region needs to come to the conclusion that their communities aren’t governable on a sectarian basis. That was the genius of our Founders, and it wasn’t something they concluded without a couple of centuries of hard experience trying to dominate each other religiously.
I do worry that you are also describing the USA after 35 years of GOP wedge politics that have intentionally divided the country into armed camps, and after 15 years of relentless right wing media that re-enforces those barriers and creates a universe of false frames for “understanding” the world on the right.
Amazing how you could say all that you poured here about us “cohesion” with a straight face.
Sure, Americans of European stock could “assimilate” and subdue their ethnic differences and cohere around democratic principles precisely because their “whiteness” as a category of racial privilege could be fabricated literally on the branded backs of African slaves, and geographical space freed up by murdering Native Americans.
Tut tut, Booman someone ALWAYS pays a price. Someone ALWAYS pays a price for America’s experiment with democracy.
By the way movement Conservatism 30 year effort to capture total power by whipping up neo-fascist forms of white tribalism in service of the plutocrats and corporatists, has all but cut the rudder off our democratic experiment — voter suppression, severe gerrymandering, wholesale sale of legislatures to billionaires and their minions. I mean we have a democracy left?
I’d like to teach Iraq about Democracy because we’re so experienced with it. First they should know that after 100 years they should free their slaves. Then after 150 years they should give their women the right to vote. Oh, and of course when they start it all they should begin with some genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Kurt Vonnegut- The Daily Show (September 2005)
So it goes.
you ignore the religious differences of the time around which NAmerican colonists did not cohere – their differences were substantial and the cause of much bloodshed in Europe and European colonies
I don’t really understand the point of your post.
You seem to be responding to an argument I didn’t make.
I started a comment on this. It grew. Now a stand-alone post.
No, Booman. Democracy…and the cohesion necessary to maintain it… begins at home.
Read it and weep.
Read it and…hopefully…begin to cohere.
Later…
AG
Maybe if the Shia militias hadn’t been doing that “power-drill-to-the-head” thing back in 2005 things wouldn’t be so heated.
Fascism flourishes with hatred. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.
Quite fitting, Obama sends aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush to the Persian Gulf …
○ For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States of America bij Peter Maslowski and Allan R. Millett
○ IHS Janes’360: Militant group ISIL’s advances threatening Baghdad will accelerate re-emergence of Shia militias
○ The Second Iran-Iraq War and the American Switch
Cross-posted from my diary – Syria War and Iran Backed Shiite Government of Maliki to Blame.
Notably, the United States of America, in its expansionary phase, also committed campaigns of ethnic cleansing and genocide. That’s setting aside slavery, which took several generations to abolish (and whose lingering effects continue even a century and a half later).
There shouldn’t be borders at all. Because les ouvrieres n’ont pas de patrie.
Those people over there are all victims of false consciousness, all of them. They can only see the things that pull them apart, not what pulls them together.
Fortunately we now have blog comment sections to do just that.
Progress: it’s awesome.
Democracy requires more than consent of the governed. It requires people to see themselves as a semi-coherent group with similar interests, morals and values, with a government acting as the collective voice.
Uh oh, collective? Collectivism? Soviet-era communist rule and gulags?!?
In direct opposition to democracy is capitalism. A belief that your own greed is moral and valuable to society…because something or other in some Ayn Rand book.
There is still way too much money to be made for democracy to develop in places where there are still undervalued natural resources and labor.