i N g a N Bordering a New Middle East · Federalism, divergent conceptions of the state and the...

Bordering a New Middle EastFrontiers, weak states and the great imbalance of power

edited by

Roberto Menotti and Jessica Carter

Faisal J. Abbas, Francesca Borri, Doruk Ergun, John C. Hulsman, Lorenzo Kamel, Azzurra Meringolo,

Nicola Pedde, Bernard E. Selwan Khoury, Salim Tamani, Mattia Toaldo

Aspen Italia

VIEWS

Borders are a fundamental yet tricky issue in international poli-tics. Despite their seemingly static nature, shifting frontiers are at the heart of many historical changes, not just through war. The Middle East and North Africa are experiencing important transi-tions, some of which are traumatic. In the Middle East there is a “great imbalance”: power relationships are contested and far from clear and alliances, as well as the resilience of state institu-tions, are tested. Such a strategic outlook is especially conducive to violent conflict. One of the transitions currently underway has to do with state borders and their practical meaning.

The chapters of the book cover (individually or in conjunction with other countries) Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Libya, Palestine, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies, Syria, Turkey.

Roberto Menotti is Editor-in-Chief of Aspenia online. He is also Deputy Editor of Aspenia print edition and Senior Advisor - International Activities at Aspen Institute Italia. Among his recent publications, Mondo Caos (Laterza, 2010).

Jessica Carter is co-creator and former Managing Editor of Aspenia online.

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An Aspenia online special2015

Bordering a New Middle EastFrontiers, weak states and the great imbalance of power

edited byRoberto Menotti and Jessica Carter

Faisal J. Abbas, Francesca Borri, Doruk Ergun, John C. Hulsman, Lorenzo Kamel, Azzurra Meringolo,

Nicola Pedde, Bernard E. Selwan Khoury, Salim Tamani, Mattia Toaldo

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© December 2015, Aspen Institute Italia

I edition

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00186 Rome

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Aspen Italia Views Coordinator: Paola Fienga

All rights reserved. No part of this book shall be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means – electronic, mechani-cal, photocopying, recording, or otherwise – without written permis-sion from the publisher. No patent liability is assumed with respect to the use of the information contained herein. Although every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and au-thor assume no responsibility for errors or omissions. Neither is any liability assumed for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

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Aspen Institute Italia

Aspen Institute Italia is a private, independent, international, nonpartisan and nonprofit association that encourages a free ex-change of opinions about knowledge, information and values.

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“Aspen Italia Views” is a series of studies and analyses on some of the major challenges facing contemporary societies. Pub-lished materials deal with topics ranging from culture, eco-nomics and technology, to politics and security, on both Italy and the international system. The series aims to offer analyti-cal tools for the main social phenomena, with special atten-tion to the business community.

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Table of content

I. Frontiers, weak states and the great imbalance of power 8 Roberto Menotti

II. Libya: is a non-state worse than an authoritarian regime? 20 Mattia Toaldo

Libya’s de facto partition 21 Libya’s external borders 23 Two potential silver linings 25 Time to reassess Western policy 28

III. Egypt between internal insecurity and regional ambition 28 Azzurra Meringolo

Sinai: the sand box yet to be tamed 30 Libya: the brewing threat of war by proxy on the border 34 Conclusions 37

IV. Algeria, the deep roots of a nation state 40 Salim Tamani

The burden of history 41 A large welfare state, political crisis and violence 42 National reconciliation, the assault on Islamism,

and social cohesion as defense doctrine 44 Before the Arab Spring, Qaddafi the “separatist” 46 After the Arab Spring 47

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V. Straddling Syria and Iraq: the ISIS epicenter 50 Francesca Borri

The ideal enemy 52 Centrifugal forces and the people’s desperation 55

VI. Turkey: a changing national identity in the regional storm 60 Doruk Ergun

Modern Turkey and the legacy of the Empire 61 Today’s identity politics 65 The lethal Kurdish issue, Syria, Iraq and refugees 68

VII. The Iranian nation state between internal evolution and external change 74

Nicola Pedde

A political model under generational stress 75 Iran’s path between relative stability and social change 78 Tehran’s regional political and security outlook 81

VIII. Saudi Arabia as the custodian of stability 88 Faisal J. Abbas

The Yemen case as a possible model 89 Securing the northern border 92 The cost of the status quo 93

IX. Israel and Palestine: mental and territorial borders 96 Lorenzo Kamel

One state versus two: misleading alternatives 97 The role of international consensus 100 The conflict’s original dimension 104 References 105

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X. Lebanon: a weak state and its complex national identity at risk 108

Bernard Selwan Khoury Identity and institutions 109 Multiple external influences and proxy wars 111 Federalism, divergent conceptions of the state and the weight

of Hezbollah 114 The problem of Israel, and Lebanon as hostage to the

region 116

XI. The ties that bind: an American perspective on Middle Eastern borders 120

John C. Hulsman American schools of thought and the Middle East 121 Conclusion: whatever works 126

XII. Short Biographies 128

I. Frontiers, weak states and the great imbalance

of power

Roberto Menotti

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Borders are a fundamental yet tricky issue in international politics. State borders are depicted on political maps as neat static lines, in rare case as dotted lines if officially contested; normally they do not move and in fact enshrine stability if not permanence. Yet, shifting frontiers are at the heart of many historical changes, not just through war – think of the German reunification in 1991. In some cases, even if the lines on maps are not redrawn or drawn in different colors, the meaning of borders changes quite radically – think of the process of Euro-pean integration since the 1950s.

The region of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is experiencing important transitions in several respects, some of which are traumatic. We may describe the overall state of play in the Middle East as a “great imbalance”, in the sense that power relationships are contested and far from clear; as a consequence, the credibility of commitments and alliances, as well as the very resilience of state institutions, are repeat-edly tested. Such a strategic outlook is especially conducive to violent conflict, given that stability is neither guaranteed by a well-understood balance of power (via deterrence, diplomacy backed by credible military commitments, etc.), or pursued through institutional arrangements (formal cooperative secu-rity treaties, international mediation, etc.).

In this unsettled context, one of the transitions currently under-way has to do with state borders and their practical meaning.

Most states in the region belong to the theoretical category of “weak states” – by which we can generically indicate those po-litical entities which, despite being internationally recognized, have a limited capacity to supply basic “political goods” of comparatively adequate quality (especially the rule of law). A good proxy of the amount and quality of political goods supplied by the state is the “Human Development Index” of the United Nations Development Program – a widely used standard that combines socio-economic, institutional, human

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rights and other indicators. As this and other similar indica-tors suggest, the weakness of a “weak state” is not necessarily external, but first and foremost internal, and it often equates with a lack of accountability. The problem is that an internally hollow structure will eventually fail to manage external pres-sures, despite typical efforts at centralization relying on the armed forces and the security apparatus.

Precisely because these states exhibit significant gaps in their capability to enforce the rule of law, poor or very uneven eco-nomic performance, and sometimes openly contested institu-tions, they now also face direct threats or challenges to their borders that they are ill-equipped to manage peacefully. In-deed, the custodians of state borders risk being overwhelmed by regional forces that were not nearly as powerful or pervasive just a few years ago.

In the MENA region, several governments currently in power are seen by their citizens (or by sizeable minorities among the population) as not fully legitimate and accountable; and members of the political establishment can often be described as “rentier elites”, given the sharp limits imposed on truly competitive politics as well as on the market economy. This situation has given rise to an apparent paradox: civil society (as opposed to state institutions) is mostly fragmented and unable to exert genuine popular sovereignty, but sectors of civ-il society are also restless and more mobilized than in the past – especially following the Arab revolts. Well-educated youths, in particular, have demonstrated the ability to organize them-selves as active civic “movements” (at least in the short term) and are to some extent “globalized”, i.e. open to influences coming from all over the world in real time and with little government interference. The ability to cultivate links with counterparts in other countries creates informal networks that may facilitate forms of contagion – for good and bad. In other words, the meaning of borders is changing in many ways.

I. Frontiers, weak states and the great imbalance of power

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Against this background, our analytical assumption is that some trends of contested political legitimacy are regional and cross-border, but other key dynamics are local and sub-national. The interplay of these diverse forces makes a single analysis impossible – and a simplistic analysis pointless, in fact misleading. There are indeed general and recurring trends, but these are not unifying trends: most states in the Middle East are challenged, but each is challenged in its own way.

Thus it is worth adopting national perspectives on the basis of the same set of problematic issues. A focus on local circumstanc-es will obviously provide different angles but also, ultimately, a better understanding of the cross-border dynamics at play.

The flows of migrants from the southern shore of the Mediter-ranean (origin or transit countries) to Europe have recently attracted enormous public attention, and rightly so in light of their manifold repercussions: humanitarian, social and eco-nomic, political, and of course in security terms. It should be noted that the current migration flows involve both desper-ate people fleeing extreme violence and poverty (mostly fall-ing in the “refugee” category and driven by a forceful “push factor”), but also individuals and families driven by the lack of any prospect of economic improvement and better living standards in their home countries (mostly falling in the “eco-nomic migrant” category and driven by a strong “pull factor”). These flows are largely a consequence of the very phenomena of state collapse or chronic unaccountability that we put un-der the spotlight in the following pages. Terrorism is of course the most acute, violent and tragic manifestation of protracted instability beyond Europe’s borders, but possibly not the most macroscopic as the political map of a whole region seems to be changing before our very eyes.

In choosing which national cases to include in this collection of short essays, we have omitted (among others) Tunisia and

Roberto Menotti

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Morocco, two countries that are indeed of great interest – but for different reasons than the rest of the lot: both have not ex-perienced the combination of threats to their borders and ex-treme weakness of legitimate governance institutions that are the core issue under investigation. In part, this somewhat ar-bitrary choice is also a simple sign of hope that policymakers as well as ordinary citizens in Tunisia and Morocco will have the capacity to continue on their narrow path toward peaceful change.

A few ambiguous or controversial cases (in the perspective of the “weak state” definition) have been included: Israel because of the inherent territorial overlap between its political future and that of the Palestinian territories, which remains a desta-bilizing influence; Turkey and Saudi Arabia because of their direct role in the redefinition of territorial relations in neigh-boring states, but also in light of the serious challenges to their domestic equilibrium. The chapter on the US is justified by the unique role played by the distant superpower as a key counter-part/partner/adversary for each and every state in the region: without at least an analysis of the American perspective the evolution of the Middle East would be even harder to interpret.

The same cannot – yet – be said of Europe, as there is no such thing as a single European view of the MENA region. An assess-ment of European interests, goals, and potential contributions to its reshaping would therefore require an in-depth study of the interplay between the various members of the EU and the practical meaning of the “C” letter in the CFSP (Common For-eign and Security Policy) acronym. It should be underlined, however, that about half of the authors in this collection are themselves European – so they inevitably bring an Old Conti-nent flavor to the analysis.

While all the countries under consideration share major con-cerns for the prevailing regional dynamics, they often disagree


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on how they assess positive and negative changes underway. Even a cursory glance can help us see why this is the case.

Libya is a de facto partitioned country – and a bad precedent for Western (UN-backed) intervention, regardless of the spe-cific motivations for the use of military force by a NATO-based Euro-American coalition in 2011. The key feature is the absence of genuine state institutions in the wake of the Qaddafi regime, and the need to come to terms with the key role of informal local groups and social networks (and customs) in order to re-establish some form of governance. Post-Qaddafi Libya clearly shows that historical legacies and the peculiar social struc-tures they produce cannot be ignored or wished away, but can only be leveraged – hoping to channel dissent and bargaining through peaceful politics. In any case, the current situation of near-anarchy has rightly been recognized as a real and present danger by Libya’s immediate neighbors and by the European countries on the opposite shore of the Mediterranean.

Egypt is a pivotal country, to some extent due to its geogra-phy (in addition to its sheer demographic size) as it borders Libya to the West and Gaza to the East (through the troubled Sinai province). The Suez Canal and the recently discovered gas reserves off its coast also offer Cairo economic opportuni-ties that might, under certain political conditions, bring sig-nificant growth and social development to the country, and even to the wider region. But exactly because of its pivotal role and recent history of secular/military comeback, Egypt is seen by many hostile forces as a prime target. Meanwhile, the po-litical and economic system under the leadership of former General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi displays most of the weaknesses of the Mubarak era.

Roberto Menotti

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Algeria epitomizes the close connection between the attempt-ed consolidation of a modern, post-colonial, nation-state and secular authoritarian rule, as well as the risks of a religious-political backlash (which took the form of a bloody and pro-longed civil war in the 1990s). The country’s vast endowment of energy resources also allowed Algerian governments to sus-tain a large welfare apparatus, entrenching an economic sys-tem that has gradually become, in many ways, a problem for the further modernization of Algeria.

Syria (or more precisely the Syria-Iraq complex) is now viewed by nearly everyone as the epicenter of a macro-regional crisis that has produced and nurtured – along with a huge num-ber of refugees spilling over into many neighboring countries – the ISIS phenomenon. In a region of many contradictions, there is also a Syrian paradox: for all their tragic practical ef-fects on the country and beyond, the ISIS fighters, as well as Assad, have also become a sort of pretext used by external actors to wage a proxy war for influence. Syria is hostage to overlapping enmities and disputes – some recent and tactical, some historical and truly strategic for the future of the whole region. As Syria is ripped apart as a territorial entity, most of its people are exhausted by the deadly conflict and at some point will probably come to accept almost any peaceful settlement as a better alternative than the current disaster. In this, and in the belated recognition by several outside powers of the costs of the disaster even for themselves, may be a glimmer of hope.

Turkey is truly a unique case and in many respects an “outli-er”. Its gradual – and to many observers worrisome - domestic transformation in the past decade has coincided with a growth of its foreign policy ambitions, which eventually (by choice or by mistake) contributed to the bloody stalemate in Syria. Of course, Turkey cannot be held responsible for causing the re-gional conflicts on its southern borders: in fact, it has been hit hard by the fallout of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and then


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of the Syrian war (not just in terms of massive refugee flows), to the point that its own domestic arrangement may now be upset and become a victim of “identity politics”. The Kurdish issue, in its new unpredictable form following the emergence of semi-autonomous enclaves in both Syria and Iraq, may prove to be the most poisonous.

The other outlier in the regional “imbalance of power” is Iran – not just as a non-Arab country in a predominantly Arab re-gion, but even more importantly as a “post-revolutionary” po-litical system. As such, the “Islamic Republic” has managed to largely institutionalize (thus to some extent contain) the ideological zeal of the revolutionary forces, while consolidat-ing a rather sophisticated political system. This does not make Iran a democracy, of course, but it probably does make it a nation state in a modern sense, despite the very specific – and to many outsiders antiquated – features of what officially re-mains a theocracy. Such a hybrid domestic outlook has clearly affected the country’s external behavior, also when the time has come to exploit the unexpected opportunities offered by the collapse of the old Iraq in 2003 and of the old Syria in 2011. The reaction to the “Arab revolts” has equally been dic-tated by intertwined domestic and regional, pragmatic and ideological considerations.

Saudi Arabia is the undisputed custodian of the Muslim Holy Sites, and has built its reputation as a guarantor of stability largely on this basis in combination with its oil wealth. How-ever, its claim to a regional leading role in diplomatic terms and as a “security provider” is much more controversial, and in recent years has pitted the Saudi monarchy directly against the Iranian regime in a dangerous contest for influence. On one hand, the very nature of the Saudi state (named after the ruling dynasty and ruled on the basis of a very specific inter-pretation of political Islam) may contribute to a worrisome transformation of regional politics: from inevitable interest-

Roberto Menotti

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based competition to an ideological clash between factions and confessions. On the other hand, Riyadh is a necessary component of any regional order also involving Tehran and Ankara as constructive players in the effort to rethink the meaning of borders.

The Israeli-Palestinian dispute is still seen, after so many dec-ades of failed negotiated plans and “peace initiatives”, as a source of regional instability, but admittedly to a lesser degree than in the past. In practice, as other flash points have inten-sified and multiplied, the grievances of the Palestinians and even the feared military superiority of Israel have receded in the priority ranking of the neighbors – and of the outside pow-ers. Even the bid for a sort of “fuller statehood” at the United Nations General Assembly (with a flag raising ceremony in September 2015 that could not substantially change the status of “nonmember observer state”) does not seem to have funda-mentally altered the equation of Israeli-Palestinian relations.

The experience of Lebanon and its current precarious situation – squeezed between the internal anomaly of Hezbollah, the Syrian disaster, and a cohesive nation state such as Israel to its south – reminds us of the power of regional forces in upsetting a delicate internal balance. We can at least take some comfort in the very persistence of Lebanon as a state in the face of these pressures, given its distinctive institutional model of multicul-tural/sectarian coexistence: a far from perfect model, and yet much more peaceful than most of the alternatives developed in the neighborhood.

The United States remains – despite a redefined regional expo-sure and various policy oscillations – a very relevant actor in the Middle East, more an external balancer than a dominant power. In this, the Obama presidency may have just brought about the explicit recognition of a known fact: the US no long-er has the will to sustain long-term military commitments on


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the ground. But, even more importantly, the American foreign policy establishment (probably not just Obama’s team) also wants to set itself free from inflexible alliance relationships in which it has often ceded a sort of veto power to problematic partners – such as Saudi Arabia and Israel, or to a lesser ex-tent Egypt. The current approach is thus based on a more flex-ible and selective choice of alignments, including the option of simply abstaining from a direct commitment – be it mili-tary, diplomatic, financial. Inevitably, this has created political space for other actors (states as well as non-state entities) to exercise their influence on regional dynamics: it is a price to be paid for the American priority of not bringing unnecessary risks upon itself. As borders are redefined in the Middle East and the power balance shifts rapidly in unknown directions, Washington is considering its options on an ad hoc basis. But a pragmatic approach must also come to terms with another inconvenient reality: that current state borders may not be vi-able. This would imply a fundamental conceptual shift for the US as the external power that has been the guarantor of the status quo (however loosely defined) for several decades.

Against this very diverse backdrop and power relation in flux, Europe must be humble and pragmatic but certainly cannot remain indifferent or passive. Having put on hold over-ambi-tious projects of the “macro-regional” type, the EU has a ma-jor stake in the evolution of governments, societies, states and borders on the Mediterranean’s southern shore and beyond. A key question is where it will have the right mix of direct col-lective interests, strong political will, and adequate capabili-ties (diplomatic, economic, military, even cultural). This mix seems to be present in at least two cases, i.e. Libya and Tunisia, despite the profound differences between the two. The Europe-ans have the means to make a real difference – provided they get their act together. They can do so by supporting inclusive politics and economic recovery, although of course in Libya

Roberto Menotti

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this can only be attempted once a modicum of security and governance is reestablished. Clearly we cannot afford to sim-ply ignore the other countries in the region, but success stories (even relative and partial) are of great importance when one is trying to set up a virtuous cycle and gain credibility. Syria and Iraq will remain a huge problem for years to come, but there Europe – even assuming, as by now we cannot do, that it will act cohesively – can only be one among several contributors to a multi-pronged effort. Europeans however, have a rich his-tory of managing difficult borders, and in fact have invented borders in their modern connotation. Being well aware of that complicated – and unfinished – history will be useful as we move, for better or worse, toward a new Middle East.


II. Libya: is a non-state worse than an

authoritarian regime?

Mattia Toaldo

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There are few elements like borders that explain Libya’s cur-rent predicament and Western misunderstandings in the after-math of Muammar Qaddafi’s fall in 2011. Libya is a de facto partitioned country since the summer of 2014. While new in-ternal borders are increasingly part of Libya’s reality, external ones are very porous for smugglers and illegal traffickers and very closed for ordinary individuals.

Once a relatively important actor of Middle Eastern and Af-rican politics, Libya is now a playground for regional powers in their confrontation for supremacy within the Sunni world. Conflicting coalitions are supported and armed by Egypt and the United Arab Emirates on one hand, and by Turkey and Qatar on the other.

Looking at today’s Libya, many Western observers and certain-ly policymakers are left wondering whether the previous au-thoritarian regime was a better neighbor for Europe than the current chaos, with its serious potential to be a bridgehead for the Islamic State and with its effects on illegal migration flows. The answer, however, is not in the difficult choice between an undesirable past and an equally (if not worse) undesirable present. The West, rather, should think more creatively about what it can do about Libya, focusing on its central government as well as on the local dimension of conflict and peacemaking.

Libya’s de facto partition

The 2011 civil war was, in its own way, a very local conflict. The National Transitional Council was the umbrella organization for the opposition to Qaddafi but it acted more as an interface with the West and the Arab League than as the actual center of the rebellion. The anti-Qaddafi revolution was actually carried out mostly by local military and civilian councils with little degree of coordination.

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Consequently, post-Qaddafi governments were in part the re-sult of a particular spoil system between the two largest groups of “revolutionary” militias, those from the city of Misrata and those from Zintan. This is not to say that in 2011, and later, a national (and even an international) dimension did not ex-ist. However, first and foremost, both Zintan and Misrata had national ambitions.Then there were also national actors, albeit their clout was not as big as their names would suggest. The Muslim Brotherhood was the only nationally-structured party but it did not win more than a tenth of all seats available in either of the two parliamentary elections since the fall of Qaddafi. The Brother-hood’s main political rival was the National Forces Alliance which won a much larger number of seats in 2012 but proved to be a collection of local notables. Finally, the remnants of Qaddafi’s army are a national actor under Khalifa Haftar (cur-rently the commander of the armed forces of the internation-ally recognized government) but they are not strictly an army as their ranks were swollen with civilians and they often have an unclear chain of command, if any.

The Libyan army, or what little was left of it after 42 years of willing negligence by Qaddafi, is where the current fighting started. It was from within the army officer ranks that the re-volt against the multiple militias sprung, eventually leading to the outbreak of a full-fledged conflict since May-June of 2014. This revolt against abuses and political assassinations by mili-tias was named “Operation Dignity” and Haftar was its chief.

Weeks after the beginning of this operation in mid-May, an alternative coalition was formed. “Libya Dawn” grouped Is-lamist as well as “revolutionary” militias rallying against what they perceived as the return of the old regime. In September 2014, Libya Dawn conquered the capital Tripoli. Since then, frontlines have mostly crystalized to form the current division of the country.

II. Libya: is a non-state worse than an authoritarian regime?

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Today, Libya is divided between the western area controlled by the Libya Dawn coalition, the eastern side controlled by the internationally-recognized government whose forces are headed by Haftar, the independent city-state of Misrata, the Islamic State-controlled area in the middle of Libya’s Medi-terranean coast and a chaotic south where tribal and ethnic clashes have never really stopped since 2011. In none of these areas, except in some respect for Misrata, has a clear decision-making structure developed. More often, formal and informal bodies coexist, in a situation of poor and uneven governance.

Libya’s external borders

While new informal borders grow within Libya, the country’s outside borders have become very porous for informal actors and much more closed than in the past for formal actors – starting with ordinary Libyan citizens. With the exception of Tunisia (which is nonetheless building a wall on part of its border with Libya) and partially Algeria, all of the other fron-tiers are formally closed. Yet, because of the recent collapse and traditional weakness of the Libyan state, these borders are quite open for illicit traffickers.

These traffickers, alongside what is left of the oil economy, have an increasing role in shaping Libya’s conflicts and Libyan society and in turn are fed precisely by the closure of formal borders both with Libya’s neighbors and with Europe. The ter-ritorial waters have also been marginally affected by the fight-ing as the tiny airforce under the command of the Tobruk government attacked some vessels. Otherwise, Libya’s mari-time security is de facto guaranteed by a web of EU operations (search and rescue for migrants by Frontex and anti-smugglers by the EU) and a strong Italian naval presence. In fact, one can identify the frontlines of the current conflict based on the

Mattia Toaldo

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intersection between centers of power, the oil economy and the illegal economy. Tripoli with its ministries and govern-ment agencies has been (and probably will be) a major bat-tleground. Numerous battles have been fought to control oil fields in southwest Libya as well as oil ports on the Mediter-ranean coast while closing and opening the flow of oil in the pipelines is one of the main “policy tools” used by the differ-ent militias to apply pressure on other groups – since pipe-lines partly run across territories controlled by various groups.

Finally, the fighting has never really stopped since 2011 in dif-ferent parts of Libya where illicit traffic is ripe - such as in the southern city of Sebha, a major hub for trans-Saharan smug-gling and illegal migrations, or the so-called “migration trian-gle” west of Tripoli from which most of the boats directed to Italy leave.

Ultimately, the closure of Libya’s borders and the collapse of the country’s oil production (with its knock-down effect on government revenues and spending) have fed the illicit econ-omy which in turn feeds the conflict, justifying even more the sealing off of Libya from the outside world. Yet, the more there is a formal blockade of movements from the country, the higher the demand for lucrative smuggling of goods as well as people. This vicious circle between closures of borders, smuggling and conflict is hard to stop, not least because of the increasing security concerns stemming from Libya since the establishment of the Islamic State’s bridgehead in the eastern coastal town of Derna in 2014. These concerns make the op-tion of opening Libya’s formal borders much less attractive to outsiders.


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Two potential silver linings

Today Libya is a major reason for concern in at least some Western capitals. After the failures of the war in Iraq in 2003, the chaos in Libya following the 2011 Operation Unified Pro-tector has further damaged the reputation of Western interven-tion in the region. This perception of inevitable failure is used in Europe to justify a peculiar form of isolationism that argues against any use of force for any purpose in the whole region, regardless of context, goals and circumstances.

Indeed, Libya’s predicament is dire. Usually neglected by West-ern media, there is a humanitarian crisis that is particularly harsh in the east of the country. Half a million Libyans are internally displaced and while casualties are low if compared to Syria, the unofficial body counts are unable to keep track of the thousands who have simply disappeared over the years be-cause of kidnappings and political assassinations carried out by militias.

But in all this, there are two silver linings. One is that, unlike in Syria, the diplomatic process on Libya is in flux, has achieved some results and sees the West more or less unified on the same line. For instance, on Libya Europe has not suffered the same divisions about arming the Syrian rebels. The US and Eu-rope have pursued the same goal: establishing a government of national unity through UN-led negotiations. This almost impossible task has fallen until early November 2015 on the Spanish top diplomat Bernardino León who managed to get the different factions around the table and have most of them sign an agreement in July 2015. In October he announced the formation of a national unity government, which had not ma-terialized when he handed over to Martin Kobler. Yet, these negotiations have proven how effective concerted Western pressure can be while building on the desire for peace from the local population.

Mattia Toaldo

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On this same desire for a cessation of hostilities was built the second silver lining, namely the extensive web of local cease-fires that started to take shape in western Libya in the spring of 2015. These were not mediated by the UN. The local ceasefires were the result of informal contacts between local elders, city councils, military leaders and other stakeholders motivated by war fatigue and pressure from the local population. Based mostly on exchanges of prisoners and informal understand-ings, the local ceasefires have managed to pacify a large por-tion of Libya, keeping the death toll low in this part of the country.

Time to reassess Western policy

Since 2011, the West has focused its assistance to Libya on re-building the central government and supporting government control of Libya’s vast borders. This was an obvious strat-egy given that the state structure was extremely weak under Qaddafi and was further damaged during the 2011 war and after.

Western assistance, more generous than often portrayed in the public debate in Europe and the US, was lacking almost com-pletely from the kind of coordinated political pressure that proved so effective in 2014 and 2015 in supporting the UN mediation. The US and Europe had no formal high-level co-ordination mechanism until the fall of 2014 when the P3+5 was formed to include Italy, Germany, Spain, the UN and the EU alongside France, the UK and the US. After 2011, the idea was that technical assistance and support for local ownership of the transition would do the trick. The result was that Libyan factions and regional powers were let free to escalate their con-flicts until the summer of 2014 when Tripoli’s airport was de-stroyed, the internationally recognized government had to flee


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the capital and Western embassies were forced to close. With the interruption of a Western presence in Libya, assistance to the build-up of a central government suffered a similar fate.

The strategy focusing on technical assistance to Libya in order to build its central government has failed and it is worth tak-ing stock of these failures if Europe and the US are to make any meaningful contribution to the country’s stabilization.

In fact, the coming years could present the West with two al-ternative scenarios. One is the failure of the current UN nego-tiations or, more likely, their effective stalemate. The other is the creation of a national unity government. This, as a Western diplomat recently put it in a closed-door meeting, will like-ly be simultaneously weak, subject to blackmail from armed groups, very likely ineffective and possibly corrupt. And yet, a national unity government, as inclusive as possible, is the only game in town to make the country’s economy work: oil wealth can only be managed centrally, as Libyans have experienced with their failed attempt at federalism in the 1950s.

Meanwhile, the West should take stock of the success of lo-cal ceasefires and build a parallel focus on the local dimen-sion of government. A more decentralized governance could be the key to stabilizing the country, building some form of institutions and even dealing with illicit traffic. In Libya, as almost anywhere else, all politics is local. While supporting, or working for, a national unity government in Tripoli, the West could concretely support local authorities to deliver humani-tarian aid, to support mediation and to ensure the delivery of basic public services. Such a combination – independent economic institutions performing some of the central govern-ment’s tasks and guaranteeing funds for a growing network of peaceful sub-regional arrangements – is probably one of the best antidotes against the spread of the so-called Islamic State.

Mattia Toaldo

III. Egypt between internal insecurity and regional

ambition

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The nation that styles itself as a regional stabilizer harbors fears for its own internal security: this is the paradox facing the “new” Egypt under Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. After having freed itself from the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood, who were brutally suppressed and once again driven underground, the country has re-entrusted itself to the hands of the army, which in its own turn is now having to contend with those who, de-nying the legitimacy of the “new” regime, threaten its existence and the nation’s stability. Indeed, the repressive policies of the government – targeting its opponents, Islamists and others – are fueling a new generation of extremists.

The combination of these circumstances has led to a renewed outbreak of violence concentrated primarily along the porous borders with Libya and the Gaza Strip, but which to some ex-tent also has extended to the Egyptian mainland proper. Espe-cially since July 2013, when the overthrow of Mohamed Morsi resulted in an escalation of violence that also hit Cairo and its surrounding districts, the Suez Canal and the Nile Delta area, the threats to Egypt’s stability have become increasingly more hybrid in nature, being both internal and external.

In the first six months of 2015 alone, there were 721 terrorist attacks, compared with 155 for the same period in 2014 and 36 in 20131. While in the preceding years these were mainly concentrated in the province of North Sinai (where 67% of incidents occurred in 2013 and 42% in 2014), this year only a third of attacks were aimed at this province, confirming that the violence has increasingly spread to those provinces which in previous years were considered safer2.

The undisputed main player in this resurgence of violence has been Ansar Beit al-Maqdis (ABM), the first Egyptian cell to

1 http://timep.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/ESW-June15.pdf2 http://timep.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/ESW-June15.pdf

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swear allegiance to the self-declared “Islamic State”. Already active in Sinai for a number of years, the group brings together within its ranks militias belonging to the “old world” of Al-Qaeda and fanatical “secessionists” of the Islamic State, the latter faction having essentially gained the upper hand in in-ternal power struggles since the fall of 2014. ABM has come to play a pivotal role because it has succeeded in rallying the strategies of smaller groups under an umbrella organization that mainly targets military and institutional facilities denot-ing central authority, while seeking to avoid, at least for now, any civilian massacres. It also proffers itself as the pawn of the Islamic State in its expansion beyond the Sinai Peninsula towards the Maghreb. ABM is a cell that, having emerged from the porous border with Gaza and making its way through the desert that stretches out to the arms trafficking hub of the Siwa Oasis, has geared its expansion towards reaching the militants operating along the equally porous border with Libya. It is in these two areas that the principal threats are concentrated, which, along with those stemming from the southern border of the country, endanger the security of Egypt. It is for this rea-son that since declaring war on those it indiscriminately labels as terrorists, whether they be Islamic State militants or other opponents of the Al-Sisi regime, Cairo has focused its efforts primarily on those areas of the country.

Sinai: the sand box yet to be tamed

Sinai – a region of strategic importance not just because of its position at the border between Israel and Egypt, but also for controlling the Straits of Suez – has for years been an ideal hub for the operations of traffickers, jihadist cells and Bedouin separatists. Apart from the tourist areas, the provinces of Sinai have always been considered remote outposts by Cairo, which has not invested in the development of a region that has thus

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become a thorn in the country’s side. Already kept on the mar-gins of Egyptian society during the Hosni Mubarak years, the Bedouins were also left out of the economic development that resulted from tourism in the region, which exponentially in-tensified their discontent and fostered the emergence of a low-level conflict with the central government, drawing Bedouins towards illegal trafficking activities.

With the outbreak of the uprising of 2011 and security forces shifting their attention towards the large urban centers, there was wider scope for action by Salafist groups, who were now also linked to groups in the Gaza Strip, with Sinai once again becoming a base from which to strike fresh blows against the central authorities.

Following the eruption of the revolution in Tahrir Square, ter-rorist groups – taking advantage of the resultant chaos on the Peninsula – set their sights chiefly on the pipeline through which Cairo exported gas (in fact, at well below market price) to Israel. The violence broke out particularly after Morsi was deposed. In the summer of 2013, there were 167 attacks, al-most two a day, compared to 14 over the previous four months. On October 24, ABM launched a series of attacks against the Karam al-Qawadis and Al-Arish checkpoints, killing 31 Egyp-tian soldiers and leading Al-Sisi to declare a state of emergen-cy. Originally set for three months, it has been extended at each expiry. On January 30, 2015, a day after the attack on the headquarters of the Egyptian army in North Sinai, again the handiwork of ABM, Al-Sisi also placed the entire province of Sinai under a joint military command headed by General Osama Roshdy Askar.

Stepping up antiterrorism operations and campaigns in the first five months of 2015, the military announced that it had killed 725 people classified as “terrorists”. After making North Sinai off-limits to reporters and analysts, the government

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ramped up its antiterrorist crackdown in the Peninsula, focus-ing especially on the Rafah area and the underground tunnels leading to the Gaza Strip. With a view to putting a stop to the Gaza-Sinai smuggling market, whose vast catalog of wares also features arms, Mubarak had already started constructing an underground wall, and even Morsi had proved no more lenient towards the supposed Palestinian “brothers”. In an at-tempt to resolve the matter once and for all, and employing a move with a number of potential consequences for the popu-lation of Gaza, in September Al-Sisi ordered salt water from the Mediterranean pumped into the tunnels. This clampdown on the tunnels was also accompanied by the creation of a buff-er zone in the Gaza Strip. By last August, this process – begun in the summer of 2013 and accelerated in October 2014 – had led to the demolition of 3,255 buildings, the evacuation and isolation of 79 square kilometers of land, and the destruction of 685 hectares of cultivated land. According to Human Rights Watch3, these operations are having devastating effects on the local population.

The campaign against the insurgency in Sinai also has inter-national implications, since it is linked to that against Hamas, the organization that rules over Gaza and which the Egyptian regime considers an enemy to be rooted out and discredited. On this front, there is all-out collaboration with Israel, which supports, probably much more than it says it does, the war against those Cairo indiscriminately describes as “terrorists”. In a relaxation of the Camp David peace accords, which pre-vent any significant Egyptian military presence in Sinai, Israel has given Cairo a free hand to operate in North Sinai. Help has also arrived from the United States, which, in October 2014, lifted the freeze on sending ten Apache combat helicop-

3 https://www.hrw.org/report/2015/09/22/look-another-homeland/forced-evictions-egypts-rafah


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ters that Egypt had been awaiting for over a year (Washington having blocked the delivery in condemnation of the manner in which Egyptian security forces had dispersed the sit-in of Islamist Raba al-Adawiya in August 2013 – an episode which saw at least 900 protesters killed). When Al-Sisi promised to use the Apaches in the antiterrorism campaign underway in Sinai, US Secretary of State John Kerry did not feel he could insist on maintaining the freeze, bearing in mind also the role played by Cairo in negotiations between the Israelis and Pales-tinians. All this has confirmed the importance of Egypt’s role as mediator and of Sinai as an influential factor in a broader regional security scenario.

For the moment, it is difficult to judge the results of the an-ti-terrorism campaign in Sinai. Since the summer, there has been a decrease in attacks, which has also been reflected in the number of terrorism victims nationally. Between May and June 2015, attacks dropped by 10%, but the overall trend for the year has still been one of growth. So while on the one hand it is clear that the security forces have managed to contain the advance of ABM, preventing it from taking control of all the areas it has sought to win, the efficacy of these operations as a whole is still in question above all in the aftermath of the October 31 Russian plane crash. The plane that exploded over Sinai as a result of a terrorist attack, had departed from the South of Egypt, an area where ABM cells are not particularly active. Thus it is not clear how much the Egyptian authorities know about these jihadist networks, their cross-border off-shoots, and their capacity for expansion.

Ultimately, by not focusing on the development of the region and not paying heed to the inclusion of the local population, the Egyptian authorities are continuing to address the issue of Sinai solely from a security standpoint, while ignoring the political variables that are among the triggering factors of the violence.

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Libya: the brewing threat of war by proxy on the border

The border between Egypt and Libya is a strip of land that is more than 1,000km long and which has forever been the bane of Cairene authorities. Even during the Qaddafi era, po-licing activities along this border were ineffective and were not particularly clear in their objectives, with the situation having become even more catastrophic since the fall of the dictator. The lack of controls has created a fertile ground for a myriad of militia groups to establish operations in illegal trafficking, whether of people, goods or weapons. All this has turned the area into the embodiment of the worst fears of the govern-ment in Cairo, which has refocused much of its energies on this front. Proof of this was also given by an incident in Sep-tember 2015, in which a group of Mexican tourists were killed in error during an attack in the Western Desert by security forc-es that had mistaken them for terrorists.

But while such operations have been carried out in recent times in particular, Egyptian officials had already repeatedly warned the Libyan authorities in previous years of the potential risks of this situation dragging on, exacerbated, in reality, not just by the ongoing civil war and the risk of contagion, but also by the longstanding state of neglect into which Cairo had al-lowed the Western Desert to fall, thereby transforming it into a hub of smuggling activity. It thus represents an internal threat, but also a source of income for those security personnel in collusion with the illegal trafficking conducted in the area. As with Sinai, Cairo, which has also coopted certain tribal leaders in this region, is confronting the threats by adopting an exclu-sively security-focused approach, disregarding the question of development and, by so doing, ensuring that this area likewise sinks into the abyss of violence, the reverberations of which have reached the heart of the country.


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The western borders have come to be considered a priority by the authorities in Cairo, especially following the attacks in Farafra and Marsa Matrouh in the summer of 2014, when the danger of border attacks, and of local jihadist groups band-ing together with ABM to conduct armed initiatives in Sinai and the rest of the country, became evident. Additionally, what Egypt fears is the possibility of Libyan violence spilling over onto its own territory, as well as the influx across its borders of outlawed and increasingly radicalized members of the Muslim Brotherhood, who have found a safe haven in Cyrenaica from which to relaunch their efforts against the central government in Cairo.

Notwithstanding this, anyone venturing to cross the Libyan border will be taken aback by the scant presence of security forces patrolling the border. The ambiguity of Egypt on this front is also reflected in the stance that Cairo has taken at an international level regarding the wider crisis in Libya.

Even though Egyptian diplomats at the United Nations have always expressed support for the negotiations conducted by UN envoy Bernardino León, the military ranks have in fact chosen to offer their backing to the Libyan government sitting in Tobruk in the east of the country, which for that matter has already been officially recognized by the international com-munity. In particular, Cairo has supported General Khalifa Haftar and his campaign against Islamist militias that natu-rally extends to the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been lumped together with the jihadists.

In aligning itself with Haftar, the Al-Sisi regime has never genuinely supported the efforts of León, nor the partial agree-ment devised by him which is predicated on the involvement of those Islamists that Cairo considers bitter enemies.

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By the beginning of 2014, there was already talk of Egyptian secret service elements in Cyrenaica, an indication that Al-Si-si might view eastern Libya as a scenario where he could flex his muscles. Without spurning the option of annexing east-ern Libya, for months Egypt continued to send Haftar regular supplies of weapons, although not in great quantities. In Au-gust 2014, nameless US officials accused both Egypt and the United Arab Emirates of having conducted airstrikes in and around Tripoli. Similar bombings by “unidentified aircraft” were reported in the following weeks, while Libyan Prime Minister Abdullah al-Thani made frequent visits to Cairo and Abu Dhabi. In November, the Prime Minister announced that the Libyan air force had received five new Sukhoi aircraft as a gift from an unidentified country, from which also came the ammunition and small arms to fight the battle in Benghazi against Ansar al-Sharia. This is all despite the UN embargo against supplying arms to any side in Libya, and even as Egypt sent a special anti-terrorism unit comprising military trainers and advisers.

Although presented as a new development, the repeated air-strikes conducted by Egypt in collaboration with the air force of the government in Tobruk – following the news, in Febru-ary, of the beheading of 21 Copts at the hands of the Libyan Caliph’s militia – have only served to make public Egypt’s pol-icy of interference, which had actually already been in opera-tion for at least a year.

After these events, while Cairo sought international support for its interference in Libya, a debate was sparked within the country over the possibility of a ground intervention in the neighboring country. Supporting their Libyan colleagues, Egyptian diplomats asked the United Nations to lift the arms embargo on Libya, while also requesting UN authorization for a mission against Libyan Islamists. When this was not forth-coming, Egypt also sounded out Italian diplomatic willingness


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to cooperate in Libya. When Rome also expressed its readiness to support internal dialogue in Libya and the efforts of León to establish a national unity government, Cairo abandoned the idea of a ground intervention, confining itself to what the Libyan Foreign Minister, Mohammed al-Dairi, described as border incursions to counter smuggling operations.

Although the situation is still evolving, and despite the diffi-culty of evaluating the results achieved by Egypt on this front, what is clear is that Cairo will increasingly focus its efforts along the border with Libya. And it cannot be ruled out that Al-Sisi will gear his priorities towards this area. But while he can count on cooperation with Israel in Sinai, where some initial results are already discernible, the situation along the Libyan border remains totally out of control.

Conclusions

The fight against the militia presence concentrated in Sinai and along the border with Libya forms part of a foreign pol-icy and security strategy geared towards and instrumental to achieving the national policy objectives of the military regime. First among these is waging a war on political Islam, the Mus-lim Brotherhood and all its offshoots, and, secondly, contain-ing the jihadist threat from remote areas of the country, which risks spreading to the heart of the state. In addition to ground operations conducted in more critical flashpoint areas, in July Al-Sisi – who has not as yet had to contend with a parliament – enacted a new counterterrorism law which, based on a very vague definition of terrorism, expands the powers of the ap-plicable authorities.

But if there is one point on which there is no great degree of clarity it is precisely regarding who these authorities might be,

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or whom the Egyptian state has tasked with overseeing its se-curity. In Sinai, it is clear that it is not just the Interior Ministry and the Defense Ministry that will deal with these issues, but also the tourist police. It is hence within this triad of authority that the lucrative business which has for years dominated the region also lurks, with corruption as a potential explanation for the involvement of security personnel on the ground. Since Egypt has risen in the world rankings of countries engaged in human trafficking, the government has shown itself willing to take steps to break this chain of corruption. It is therefore likely that there will be confrontations within the combined front of those involved in overseeing Egyptian security in Si-nai, along the Libyan border and throughout mainland Egypt.

While during the Morsi era, it was the Interior Ministry in par-ticular that had a say on such matters, since his fall the role of the Defense Ministry has increased. The impression is that the military ranks have expanded their sphere of operations, mov-ing into an area that had previously been within their remit during the Mubarak era, and thereby militarizing the manage-ment of security along the country’s borders. However, in or-der to respond to the hybrid threats previously described, the government has – especially in mainland Egypt – availed itself of the services of the police, who answer to the Interior Min-istry. All this has probably created frictions within the front responsible for maintaining public security, as has emerged from several protests organized by security forces. These have also revealed the cracks in the structure of a state, namely Egypt, which – despite having risen to the role of regional sta-bilizer – must pay heed to its own internal stability, imperiled as it is not only by the said hybrid threats, but also by the man-ner in which the state has sought to address them.


IV. Algeria, the deep roots of a nation state

Salim Tamani

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When oil was discovered right in the middle of the war of lib-eration in 1956, colonial France offered to grant independ-ence to northern Algeria while maintaining control over the southern part of the country. The extraordinary wealth on which France had just laid its hands had completely altered its way of looking at the country that it had been occupying since 1830. But the Algerians’ response was irrevocable: Algeria is one and indivisible, and the struggle to recover national sov-ereignty and territorial integrity would be pursued until full independence is achieved.

The burden of history

It was in this difficult context, two years after the revolution began on November 1, 1954, that the cohesion of the national movement, with thirty years of fighting already under its belt, consolidated even further despite attempts to drive a wedge into it as orchestrated by the colonial army. If we are to grasp the foundations of the Algerian nation state, we have no op-tion but to hark back to that turning point in history and the stages which irreversibly molded what Algeria has become to-day, since independence in 1962. “The only hero is the peo-ple,” the revolution triumphed, restoring freedom to the peo-ple after a colonial domination lasting over 132 years. Indeed, the victory was not the work of a handful of individuals or of particular groups. However, through this process involving the glorification of the people, the Algerian government, after in-dependence, sought to paper over the differences that existed both before and during the war of liberation and to rally all citizens around a single goal, namely the construction of the country as a nation state. Yet the wish to establish such a state

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was parasitized by the Baath movement4 and by pan-Arabism, as well as by the Cold War. Algeria’s participation in the two Arab-Israeli wars of 1966 and 1973 had a crucial impact on the country’s foreign policy. At the same time, the violence suffered by the people during the colonial era had an impact on their political choices. For example, unlike the Algerians, both the Moroccans and the Tunisians (whose countries were only protectorates, without suffering full “settlement” coloni-zation) proved capable of building peaceful relations with the outside world after their independence.

Despite the political differences which emerged in 1963 fol-lowing revolutionary leader Hocine Ait Ahmed’s creation of the Front des Forces Socialistes (the FFS or Socialist Forces Front, Algeria’s first ever opposition party), the Algerians have al-ways placed the nation’s supreme interests above all else. This explains the fact that, after taking up arms against the new regime installed by President Ahmed Ben Bella, Ait Ahmed’s group had to emerge from clandestinity to aid the National People’s Army (ANP) following the Moroccan aggression in the same year, when Morocco attempted to assert its sover-eignty over Tindouf and Bechar, two border towns in the west of the country.

A large welfare state, political crisis and violence

Aside from the difficulties involved in building a modern state, particularly in the wake of the “revolutionary change”

4 The Baathist movement was founded by Orthodox Christian Michel Aflak in Damascus, Syria in 1947 with the aim of uniting the various Arab states into one all-embracing nation. The doctrine mixes Arab so-cialism with pan-Arab nationalism. Non-confessionalism is one of the pillars of Baathism.


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implemented by Houari Boumedienne (1965–79), the Revo-lutionary Council which led the country until 1975 proved capable of forging a domestic policy grounded in two basic criteria: welfare and state solidarity. Hydrocarbon production played a dominant role in the economy of the newly inde-pendent Algeria, and indeed the export of hydrocarbons is still the country’s principal source of revenue to this day. After na-tionalizing the hydrocarbon industry, the state established a system for sharing the profits from agricultural harvests. The problem, however, did not lie in the measure itself but rather in its implementation, as the results frequently showed very little profit. Be that as it may, President Boumedienne was ea-ger to reward all of the country’s farmers. One day the Agricul-ture Minister, Kaid Ahmed, asked him: “Mr. President, why do you share profits when the results are so discouraging?” The head of state replied, “We have to give something to the Alge-rian people who have been suffering for over 132 years.” That shows the tremendous scope of the welfare policy developed by the authorities following independence – a policy which acted as a social adhesive, a federator over several generations, and which is based on three fundamental tenets: never com-promise over national sovereignty or independence; recognize no power but that of the people; and never abandon the weak or the needy to their fate.

This strategy has been doggedly pursued since then, peaking out at almost $60 billion in social transfers in 2014 and 2015. Even better, during the crisis years – the oil crisis in 1986 and the structural adjustment agreement with the IMF in 1994 – the state logically cut back on hiring in the public sector, but it did not opt for free-market solutions despite the fact that the country’s tough economic and financial situation was cry-ing out for the abandonment of the extensive welfare policy. In the 1990s, when Algerians thought that they were living in a democracy, the interruption of the election process and

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the Islamist slide into terrorism kicked off a decade of dark-ness which plunged the country into chaos. In the face of this extremely entangled situation, the authorities mobilized all of their resources, relying as much on security measures as on civil society itself playing a crucial role in the struggle against terrorism and against the Islamist uprising. This was to be one of the bloodiest such uprisings ever seen in the Arab world, with over 200,000 dead and thousands either being wounded or falling victim to collateral damage. After peace was restored in the early 2000s, the authorities consolidated their social foundations by shouldering grassroots concerns.

National reconciliation, the assault on Islamism, and social cohesion as defense doctrine

Learning to live life to the fullest again began to take concrete shape in the solutions offered to the Algerian people to resolve their problems in the sphere of housing, employment and im-proving their standard of living. Rising oil prices in 2002, a year after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, were to give President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who was elected head of state in 1999, the tools that he needed to successfully imple-ment his policies. Algeria needed to overcome two major chal-lenges: the establishment of a civilian government after the years of terrorism experienced by the Algerian people who, having been disenchanted by their first pluralist experience, now finally hoped that they could live in a democracy; and the imparting of a fresh thrust to development by building basic infrastructures, emerging from total dependence on hydrocar-bons by investing in agriculture to ensure ongoing food sup-plies, and rekindling industry in order to carry weight among the emerging nations. In President Bouteflika’s view, the coun-try’s security lay first and foremost in the Algerian people’s support for his political project based on a return to stability. A


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grassroots referendum on the charter for peace and reconcili-ation held in September 2005 had been preceded a few years earlier by a pardon, which had allowed the terrorists in the for-mer Islamic Salvation Army – the armed wing of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), a party dissolved in 1992 on account of its involvement in the violence – to lay down their arms. On the diplomatic level, the repercussions of the September 11 attack allowed the embargo on Algeria to be lifted. But Presi-dent Bouteflika did not wish to spend what little revenue the country was taking in at the time on the purchase of arms. He insisted on resources being spent first and foremost on devel-oping the country’s economy and on building a prosperous society. Other “friendly” countries footed Algeria’s arms bills. In this configuration of the Algerian state, the social aspect is a genuine political equation: social transfers are going to rise by 7.5% in 2016, thus the overall amount earmarked is going to top the $60 billion mark. Over and above the plan to profes-sionalize and to modernize the National Popular Army (ANP), the effort to consolidate the army’s image in a rapidly chang-ing regional and international context is pretty much part and parcel of the new national defense strategy. In the view of Chief of ANP Staff and Deputy National Defense Minister Ahmed Gaid Salah, “National defense is a group of political, military, social, economic, legal and other measures which the state adopts with a view to gearing up to face aggression target-ing its sovereignty, its territorial integrity, its citizens’ security, its resources, its economic capabilities, and to eliminating the consequences of natural catastrophes or major risks.” In this same context, “national defense is expressed through a policy which enshrines a corpus of principles and of decisions adopt-ed by the state and generated primarily by its national secu-rity strategy.” Thus national defense is implemented through “the state’s overall capabilities resting chiefly on the spiritual (moral) values of the nation and which impart structure to the body of its actions for accomplishing its sacred duty which is

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the defense of the homeland.” That points out the importance of social confidence and stability, above and beyond a coun-try’s military capabilities. In other words, national unity under the umbrella of a powerful (and highly hierarchical) security apparatus is seen as a crucial asset for the viability of the coun-try, both domestically and on the international scene, in the face of a variety of threats.

Before the Arab Spring, Qaddafi the “separatist”

When we look at the regional context in which Algeria is set, it becomes quite clear that the destabilization maneuvers did not start with the Arab Spring. Well before that, in 1990, the Touareg uprising in northern Mali had already begun to trou-ble the region. Peace was restored thanks to the intervention of Algeria’s diplomats, and pledges were made in connection with the development of northern Mali after the region had been neglected by the authorities in Bamako. Algeria estab-lished a $10 million aid program, but the aid pledged by the international community never arrived. This certainly did not help to stabilize the region, which had been coming under major pressure since 2002 from Al-Qaeda groups fleeing the US war against Afghanistan and establishing a new home base in the Sahel only a few years later.

In addition to this, we should add the swashbuckling designs of former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, who launched a plan which he named “the Greater Sahara” in 2006 in an ef-fort to establish a federation grouping together the Touaregs of Libya, Niger, Algeria, Mali and Mauritania. His initiative was roundly condemned by Algiers because it was perceived as a move on the Libyan leader’s part to foster fresh instability in the Sahel, which was already coming under major social and economic pressure. Qaddafi was, in effect, seeking to establish


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a new regional order by grouping together the Touaregs, the Arabs, the Toubou, the Sonrais, the Bombaras, the population on the banks of the Nile, the inhabitants of Sudan and the people of the Arabian Peninsula. While the plan had all the makings of a utopian whim, nevertheless it posed an addition-al threat in the Sahel which was already laboring under the emergency of the Salafist factions and of the risk of Al-Qaeda putting down roots. If we then add to that the famine and the poverty besetting the local tribes, Libya’s proposition was only likely to further destabilize a picture already in the grip of an upheaval.

This, however, was by no means Qaddafi’s first piece of swashbuckling. He had set up the “Islamic Legion” compris-ing Touaregs from Niger, from Mali and from Algeria back in the 1980s, and incidents had occurred in 1991 involving the Azawid groups funded by Tripoli. Then, with the US interest in the Sahel region, the situation suddenly became more com-plex. Tripoli, which was eager to clean up its diplomatic image after the Lockerbie affair, decided to adopt a posture as Wash-ington’s crucial interlocutor in the sub-Saharan region.

After the Arab Spring

With the Arab spring, Algeria’s concerns were aggravated by the collapse of the Libyan regime. This, not because Algeria backed Qaddafi in any way, but because the government knew full well that he had not built a true state and so his disappear-ance would plunge Libya into a chaos fraught with militiamen and with armed groups whom Qaddafi himself had helped to prosper. Thus Algeria has wasted no time in beefing up the security on its borders, because quite apart from Libya, things in Mali had been heating up since 2012 with the armed Is-lamist occupation of the northern part of the country. And to

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this broadly precarious situation we should add the weakness of the Mauritanian regime, the threats from Boko Haram in Nigeria and in Chad, and the impact of the war in Libya and in Mali on the barter system, in other words the trading of goods among the people living on either side of the border. The strengthening of the security apparatus has placed signifi-cant restrictions on the circulation of goods and people across the borders in the Sahel. But at the same time, it has made it possible to secure trade links between Algeria and Tunisia to a large extent.

Deeply aware of the fact that its security is closely linked to that of its neighbors, Algeria has decided to offer its support to the young Tunisian democracy in the spheres of politics, security and finance, it has helped to train the first Libyan po-lice units in addition to offering diplomatic support for intra-Libyan dialogue, and it has bolstered its military presence on its borders with Mali and with Niger in an effort to check all attempts to enter Algeria whether by terrorists or by smugglers, whose ties with the Islamist movement in the Sahel have been abundantly demonstrated in any case.

Despite the confusion reigning on the other side of the coun-try’s borders, it is worth pointing out that no separatist claims have ever been made by the Touareg tribes who populate such a large part of the Algerian Sahara. In the difficult years of ter-rorism, the Touaregs made a broad contribution to the strug-gle against the terrorist phenomenon. And at the height of the Arab Spring, they voted for the nationalist parties in the legis-lative elections in May 2012, at a time when the entire world was expecting to see the emergence of Islamist formations in Algeria just as it had done in Egypt and in Tunisia. That did not happen in Algeria, a country which, at this juncture, may be considered in many respects an exception in the Middle East and North Africa region.


V. Straddling Syria and Iraq: the ISIS epicenter

Francesca Borri

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The Islamic State (formerly the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria - ISIS) is undoubtedly the most powerful – and most visible – challenge to the current geopolitical map of the Middle East. Shortly after the capture of the city of Mosul (in Northern Iraq) and the declaration of a Caliphate in June 2014, a group of jihadists materially and symbolically demolished the border between Syria and Iraq, thus commencing the dismantlement of the Sykes-Picot Agreement by which Britain and France, in-stead of recognizing the independence of the Arab countries as promised, divided up the Middle East at the end of World War I. But is ISIS really destined to last?

While it may have taken Palmyra, it lost Kobani along the Turkish border. It conquered Yarmouk and Ramadi, but lost Tikrit and Tell Abyad. It won Baiji, but then went and lost it. The military might of ISIS, thus, is yet to be proven. Strictly speaking, ISIS has really never conquered its two strongholds of Raqqa (in central Syria) and Mosul. While Mosul was – more accurately speaking – occupied following the disintegra-tion of the Iraqi army, Raqqa simply passed from the regime to the rebels and then from the rebels to the jihadists at the will of local worthies, without any real battle. ISIS has always installed itself through lightning-fast strikes, but afterwards it has always only defended its lines – without ever advanc-ing them. Indeed, when it has encountered resistance, it has never won but rather been forced to withdraw, as happened in Kobani. Similarly, when attacked by rebels in Aleppo in early 2014, it fell away. As for its political might, its actual capacity to govern and to function as a state, the situation is compli-cated: it is true that any assessment is difficult without journal-ists on the ground, and it is likewise true that the information filtering out is contradictory, and that, overall, the conditions in the cities it controls, in terms of public order, infrastruc-ture and social services, would appear to be those normally encountered in countries at war – no better, no worse. But it

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is also true, for example, that a ledger sheet stumbled upon by Aymenn al-Tamimi, an analyst at the Middle East Forum, re-veals that ISIS’s revenues are primarily derived from smuggling and extortion. There is no system of tax collection, nor an ad-ministration. ISIS has a currency (the gold dinar), but does not have an economic system. It has a territory and commanders, but no government.

And at the first signs of agitation or of instability, its response is unequivocal. It is no longer just infidels who end up execut-ed now, but also dissidents. On the outskirts of Raqqa, in Feb-ruary 2015, 30 foreign corpses were discovered: the remains of jihadists trying to return home.

The ideal enemy

Essentially, ISIS endures because, to many, it is the perfect en-emy – against whom, and in respect of which, there are no holds barred. Anything is better than ISIS, starting with Bashar al-Assad, who continues to be a de facto partner of the inter-national community, despite 330,000 people dead and 16 million displaced persons and refugees, representing nearly two-thirds of the Syrian population. In 2014, only 13% of ISIS attacks targeted his regime, and only 6% of the 982 counterter-rorism operations conducted by his regime targeted ISIS.

Right now, the fighter planes of 17 countries are darting through the skies of Iraq, and those of 16 above Syria – each with its own targets. Iran, for example, bombs Iraq, but not Syria; Israel bombs Syria, but not Iraq; while Syria (that is, Assad’s regime) bombs civilians more so than fighters. Saudi Arabia also bombs Yemen; meanwhile, Egypt bombs Libya; and Turkey bombs the Kurds. The war against ISIS is nothing but a pretext: everyone, in fact, is pursuing their own interests. And Russia, in this sense, is no more than the latest arrival.


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The most emblematic case, the one which most conveys the full extent of the ambiguity of the international response to ISIS, is that of Turkey. The country joined the coalition against ISIS after the attack in Suruç on July 20, 2015, which resulted in the deaths of 33 activists who were members of a support network for Kobani. Yet for now, it bombs the Kurds more than jihadists: as of September 1, it had made 300 strikes against the Kurds, and three against ISIS and later airstrikes haven’t seemed to change the pattern. Above all, Turkey has never closed its border with Syria, and, as is well known, its territory has served as a rear base for all Syrian rebels – jihad-ists included – since the war began. Policy initiatives, humani-tarian activities and rebel military operations are all directed and coordinated from the provinces of Hatay and Gaziantep, through which the smuggled oil that forms the main source of ISIS funding also enters. Yet Turkey is at present, officially speaking, at war with ISIS.

Even the ideological might of ISIS is in fact yet to be dem-onstrated, because although ISIS is without question adept at marketing and communications, despite the rhetoric of a uni-versal Caliphate, it is profoundly shaped by national contexts. And in Syria, it manifests itself very differently than in Iraq. In a certain sense, Syria is held together by the figure of As-sad. Even now, in Syria one is first and foremost either for or against Assad. All other distinctions, all other preferences, are subsidiary: Syria is polarized, but not divided.

Such a point of reference is, however, lacking in Iraq now that Saddam Hussein is gone, a little like in Libya after the elimina-tion of Qaddafi. In Iraq, it is not just the state that basically does not exist: ask around in Baghdad about who runs things and no one mentions the mayor. They will point to the two main Shia militias, but society itself has broken down – not along Sunni and Shia lines, however, but along tribal divides. Due to their different colonial heritage, French in the case of

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Syria (and British in the case of Iraq), but also because of their different geographies, and the different balances between ru-ral and urban areas, and between cities and desert, the role of tribes is very different in the two countries. In Iraq, the custom when introducing oneself is not to say one’s name, but the name of one’s family. Not so in Syria, where ISIS is clearly an exogenous phenomenon – a group which is dominated by foreigners, and against whom virtually all other rebels are now fighting, with the exception of certain tactical ambiguities on the part of the Al-Qaeda front Jabhat al-Nusra. In Iraq, on the other hand, ISIS is a phenomenon that is entirely endogenous to the society – and entrenched. ISIS in Iraq is a clear expres-sion of the frustration of Sunnis, who have ended up on the political and social margins since the fall of Saddam. Indeed, despite the fact that the dictator even ordered the murder of his own son-in-law and a grandson, and that, like all dictators, he struck out against all his opponents, regardless of ethnic-ity, religion or party affiliation, for the Americans his regime boiled down to a Sunni minority ruling over a Shiite major-ity. Therefore, democracy entailed removing the Sunnis from power. From this analysis sprang two of the most notorious decisions made by the Bush administration: the dissolution of the Baath party and of the army, as a result of which tens of thousands of Sunnis suddenly found themselves on the streets with nothing in their pockets save a weapon, and, above all, humiliated, accused of all of Saddam’s crimes, and blamed for all of Iraq’s problems – regardless of their individual culpabil-ity. From this sprang ISIS.

Turning up among the displaced in Iraq, in recent months, have been families on the run from ISIS, but also, often, from the war against ISIS: hence, from Shia militias, who tyrannize unchecked. In April 2015, for instance, Reuters reporters filmed the liberation of Tikrit, revealing, amid the festive crowd, a po-liceman cutting the throat of a jihadist.


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Centrifugal forces and the people’s desperation

Although the Islamic State currently occupies around half of Syria and a third of Iraq, what Syria and Iraq have in com-mon is not so much ISIS as divisive and centrifugal forces orchestrated from outside, from other countries. In Syria, for example, one need only look at who is funding the various armed groups. The Turks, whose particular interest lies in the north, with a view to preventing any potential territorial in-tegrity emerging between Kurdish areas, have placed reliance on the Turkmen cause. The Jordanians, whose priority is in-stead that of preventing the spread of the contagion, and thus maintaining a stable border, have relied on Bedouin tribes, to whom they are linked by kinship ties, just as the Israelis, for the same reason, have relied on the Druze, who already serve in their army. It goes without saying that Iran has allied itself with Shiites (in this case, the Alawites), just as Saudi Arabia and Qatar have relied on Sunnis. Everyone in Syria supports armed groups with whom they have ethnic or denominational affiliations. And the Syrians have understood from the outset just how game-changing the sectarian card would be.

The more moderate Islamists, who have repeatedly sought dia-logue with the United States, and with the UN, have always been accused of double talk: the reality, it has been said, is that groups like Jaish al-Fatah, the main coalition fighting ISIS, have no intention of subsequently handing power back to ci-vilians, but rather of establishing an emirate and introducing sharia law. However, there has always been double talk, even from the other direction, as many secular rebels have branded themselves Islamists because it was the only way to get weap-ons and dollars from the Gulf countries.

And indeed, the Southern Front group to the south has re-mained secular: while it is as Syrian as all the other groups, it has always received arms through Jordan and the United States – not via Saudi Arabia.

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As for Iraq, of the many criticisms leveled at the Americans and the years of occupation, the most widespread one is that of having introduced a political system like that in Bosnia, or Lebanon – a system, that is, in which every office and every ap-pointment is awarded on an ethnic or denominational basis, according more or less to official quotas. In Iraq, the head of state must be Kurdish, the prime minister Shia, and the speaker of the parliament Sunni, regardless of capabilities and, above all, of election results. The Americans started with a presump-tion of incompatibility between Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, and thereby ended up – if not engendering it – exacerbating it. In contrast, although it is true that, in Iraq, the south is Shia, the center is Sunni and the north is Kurdish, the reality is that every city, every area, has a mixture of various denominations and various ethnic groups. Yes, 60% of the population is Shia, but more than being a case of a majority and a minority, there are assemblages of minorities everywhere. And wherever one group prevails, it is by reason of wars and expulsions, forced displacements, and prevented repatriations – homogeneity, in other words, is not natural in Iraq, but artificial. What is – or perhaps was – natural is coexistence.

Syrians and Iraqis are simply tired of all this. Many of the refu-gees who are landing in Europe right now do not come di-rectly from conflict zones. They are Syrians and Iraqis who had already taken refuge in neighboring countries, mostly Turkey. Many of them had homes and jobs, and they are not on the run from war or famine, but from society: from a religion that has become an obsession, and, more generally, from pervasive control over individual lives. Especially for twenty-somethings connected via the internet to their peers around the world, the strict subjection to social dictates, together with pressure from the state, imams, fathers and families, has become intolerable. The most noteworthy example is Kurdistan, from which in re-cent months people have been leaving in the thousands. Yet


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the Kurdish areas are among the most stable and developed in the Middle East. A young engineer from Erbil would certainly be better off in Erbil than in Frankfurt, where he will probably end up as a laborer, but he will have left in search of neither security nor work, but rather freedom.

With its forays into participatory and decentralized democracy, Kurdistan continues to captivate many outside observers, and it is regularly held up as a model for a peaceful transformation of the Middle East. Yet it is the example that refugees most often cite when explaining the reasons behind the widespread mistrust and the general exodus. It stems from the fact that initially the Kurds, as is well known, were de facto the West’s proxy ground force in the war against ISIS. But if they had re-ally eradicated ISIS, it would then have become unavoidable, in return, to grant them independence and the state they have demanded for years, with a domino effect on other borders in the Middle East. During the fights for Kobani, the Kurds were heroes in the Western countries; now, they are bombed by a NATO member, i.e. Turkey. The problem is that, both in Syria and in Iraq, the war has not only enabled the Kurds to strengthen their autonomy and their institutions, but to eth-nically homogenize their territory. Kirkuk – the city that for Kurds is the equivalent of Jerusalem because it was the epi-center of Saddam’s massacres, and which, above all, sits above 40% of Iraq’s oil reserves – has seen a de-Arabization that mir-rors the de-Kurdification of the past. Ethnicity is nothing but a pretext for power struggles. The elimination of non-Kurds quickly becomes the elimination of internal enemies: decen-tralization, for now, simply means carving up power, and con-tracts, between clans. In Kurdistan, you live well and live as in Europe if you are Kurdish and are not politically engaged. Otherwise, you vanish into thin air.

The exodus to Europe that we have seen grow in recent months will shape the future of Syria and Iraq, and beyond, more so

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than any armed intervention. This is because it is not the poor who are leaving: in war, the poor, as always, do not even have a hundred dollars to pay for gas to get to the border, and strand themselves in a refugee camp. The people leaving are from the middle class – those who have the resources, the skills, and the get-up-and-go to rebuild their country and change it.

Even now, every Friday, despite all manner of bombings, Syr-ians assemble in the streets en masse. The only difference is that before they protested only against Assad, then against As-sad and the rebels, and then against Assad, the rebels and ISIS. Now, it is against Assad, the rebels, ISIS and Russia (as more limited French and British airstrikes are not truly supporting the regime). Meanwhile, not so far away, Iraqis have been pro-testing against the quota system for months, and against the country being reduced to a game between Sunnis and Shiites. But they are totally ignored by the media, and completely ig-nored by the international community, which all the while is on the lookout for troops on the ground, and for trustwor-thy allies. The reality is that there are worthy troops on the ground, but they are not those on whom we have pinned our hopes to date.


VI. Turkey: a changing national identity

in the regional storm

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Turkey stands out as a peculiarity when grouped under any one of the regions it borders – it is neither fully European, Middle Eastern, Mediterranean nor Caspian. Moreover, the Turkish state follows a continuity of establishments that go back to the Ottoman Empire and antecedent principalities that have ruled over Anatolia for nearly one millennium. It is through the country’s many forms of regional influence, and the legacy of these former identities (none of which it has wholeheart-edly embraced or fully rejected), that Turkey has many unique characteristics that have presented it both opportunities and challenges.

Aside from a brief period after World War I that paved the way for the modern Republic’s War of Independence (1919-1923), none of the Turkish establishments have been subjugated to colonial rule. On the contrary, the country’s history has seen major conquests in all directions from the Anatolian heart-land, but has also witnessed the loss of these territories as its power waned. Due to its Ottoman past, Turks have both held the title of caliph for centuries, and have abolished the seat entirely after the foundation of the Republic. Turkish states have been the only ones in the Middle East that have had a continuous and mutual interaction with Europe for centuries, through conquest, diplomacy or commerce; and since 2005, Turkey has been an official candidate for membership to the European Union. Turkey is also the only country in the region with NATO membership (since 1952), which Ankara origi-nally sought in order to protect itself against its traditional re-gional rival in Moscow. It is also one of the major economies of the G20 countries. And, compared to many states in the Middle East still suffering the effects of European colonialism, modern-day Turkey has many historical and current anchors that solidify its statehood.

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Modern Turkey and the legacy of the Empire

Turkish borders have evolved over time rather than having been carved out by external actors. While this saves the coun-try from many potential risks rising from the tottering borders across the region, Turkey has nonetheless had border disputes in the past. The most persistent has been with Syria over the Province of Hatay (before being resolved through the rap-prochement between the two countries prior to the Syrian civil war). The most threatening, though short-lived (until 1953), was with the Soviet Union over the Provinces of Kars, Ardahan and Artvin. Greek and Armenian nationalists have also had continual territorial claims. Except for the latter, which con-tinues to be a source of worry for Ankara when tied to the his-torical Armenian issue, these claims on Turkish territory have either been overcome or do not pose any military threat to the country. Although Ankara continues to have disputes with Athens over the delineation of territorial waters in the Aegean and the Cyprus issue, the risk of military confrontation has de-creased substantially over time. With regards to Turkish expan-sionism, Turkish ultranationalists have had dreams of uniting the country with Central Asian Turkic-speaking states, whereas some conservative nationalists (who have been at times re-ferred to as neo-Ottomanists) have fantasized about returning to the Empire’s days of glory, yet none of these ideas have ever translated into official state policy at any time throughout the existence of the Republic.

Nonetheless, the multiplicity of legacies has also left marks in the psyche of both the Turkish state and the people. For one, many Turks feel the pride of being the successors of a great empire, yet the memory of its downfall, replicated and carried on by the education system, is still fresh among the populace. Named the Sevres Syndrome, after the 1920 Treaty of Sevres that was drawn up by the great European powers de-fine how the Ottoman Empire would be territorially divided,

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this memory shows itself in mistrust towards other states, es-pecially Western ones, and a tendency to believe in conspiracy theories, and a siege mentality of always assuming that exter-nal actors are plotting to hamper the progress of Turkey.

Although the country managed to drive away its occupiers from the Turkish heartland in its War of Independence of 1919-1923, the transformation from a crippled empire to a re-public (and a nation- state) has been another source of trauma that continues to this day. The founder of modern-day Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, believed that the way forward for the country could only be achieved through a clean amputation of its past, by both reforming its symbols and substance. Indeed it was assumed that the way for creating a Turkish “nation”, would only come through breaking away from the country’s Ottoman legacy. After the painful labor that gave birth to the Turkish Republic, in the country’s official history the Ottoman Empire was no longer hailed as a once “glorious” empire, but rather as a weak nation that bowed down to the demands of Western powers and agreed to its own dismemberment.

Through this revolutionary period, the country managed to heal its wounds and, though it stumbled time and again, took hasty steps to catch up with the developments in the West (in the security and economic fields, and to some extent in terms of the political system). It was one of the few countries in the region to undertake democratic reforms, sometimes even sur-passing its Western counterparts, such as through granting full universal suffrage to women in 1934. It devoted significant ef-fort to developing its human capital, rapidly increasing its rate of literacy.

Yet one of the major features that the nascent Republic re-tained from the ancien régime was the lenience to “securitiza-tion” and even autocratic rule, putting the survival of the state as the highest priority over any other concern – including de-

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mocracy itself. While this conceptualization of the state and its role was not unique to Turkey at the time, the failure of the country has been the inability to transform this understand-ing in favor of a system that would prioritize the wellbeing of its citizens. Of course, creating a common identity represents one of the key facets of nation building. Over time, the Repub-lic formulated a rigid identity for its citizens – following the French model and partly repeating some of its mistakes. The state took on the role of implementing a strict form of laïcité, which favored an implicit and mainly cultural Sunni identity but strongly frowned upon conservative Sunni Islam or other sects of the religion. Being a “Turk” now meant more than an ethnic classification and came to stretch over all of the coun-try’s citizens as a national identity. In an attempt to catch up with the “Occident”, the country’s Oriental identity had been brushed aside. What followed were assimilation policies that were carried out with varying degrees of intensity by the state, its bureaucratic elite, and the vanguards of the Republic, its armed forces. Since 1923, the military has conducted two coup d’états, in 1960 and 1980, as well as three instances of correc-tive intervention to “normal” politics in 1971, 1997 and 2007.

Although the Republic managed to institutionalize its new identity for the most part through its constitution, judiciary and armed forces, this identity was not embraced by a multi-plicity of groups, most prominently by religious conservatives and ethnic minorities. On the societal level Turkish citizens have been divided on many fronts as competing identities instead of maintaining a healthy heterogeneous coexistence. These have been sectarian, mainly between religious Sunnis and Alevis and non-practicing Muslims; ethnic, primarily be-tween Turks, Kurds, Arabs and Armenians; ideological, between left-wing and right-wing, between Kemalists and political Is-lamists, ultranationalists and Kurdish nationalists, democrats and conservatives, to name just a few. Yet these have not been


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ever present frictions that cause widespread bedlam, instead, the country could be likened to a smoldering cauldron that only boils over when fueled by political, economic and so-cietal tensions. These tensions have reflected themselves as ideological confrontation and violence between youth move-ments, pogroms against religious and ethnic minorities (most notoriously the Alevis and Greeks), and ideological, radical religious and Kurdish separatist terrorism. The state also has a notorious past of using violence against its populace with multiple instances of extrajudicial killings, torture and count-less human rights abuses as evidenced by the scores of rulings against Turkey at the European Court of Human Rights.

Furthermore, Turkey continues to have endemic issues with its governance system and society. In the absence of credible social safety nets, an effective legal system – especially one that would guard the interests of the people against the state – and a political culture that feeds on pluralism instead of shunning it, many people try to find alternative means of ensuring their wellbeing outside the alternatives that the establishment of-fers. These means include, but are not limited to, tax evasion, seeking alternative social safety nets such as those offered by religious sects or movements, and establishing personal or fi-nancial connections with local authority figures. In most cases, when a political party managed to gain majority rule, it would attempt to turn the tables in its favor by manipulating the po-litical system or by undermining opposition political parties - either religious or Kurdish nationalist - on the grounds that they violated the core values of the establishment. The result has been further instability in the country’s politics.

Today’s identity politics

Following a decade of political and economic instability in the 1990s, Turkish voters decided to punish the ineffective coali-

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tion parties that governed through this period by voting into office a newly established, conservative political party with a progressive pro-European Union agenda – the Justice and Development Party (AKP). When the AKP came to power in 2002, its initial policies showed signs of promise in tackling some of Turkey’s endemic problems, and encouraged those hoping to see the country become a full member of the Euro-pean Union and fully democratize accordingly.

Yet after 13 years of uninterrupted rule, the AKP has ended up exacerbating these issues instead. Although the military’s influence in Turkish politics has been subdued, owing to ex-trajudicial uses of the legal system to prosecute hundreds of military staff, the political institutions are far from being non-partisan. Instead, under the AKP’s rule, institutions have been undermined to allow the AKP to entrench itself and establish its firm hand in ruling all aspects of the Turkish government, in a process that has resembled the creation of a distinctive “regime”. For example, laïcité has been replaced to a noticea-ble extent by the introduction of conservative Sunni religiosity in daily life, with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan arguing on multiple occasions that it was his party’s agenda to “raise a re-ligious youth” under his term as prime minister. The number of religious vocation schools has skyrocketed, while religious education has been made more “accessible” through “elective” courses (sometimes offered as the only elective choice, thus making them de facto mandatory) in primary education. Of-ficial media organs have become government mouthpieces, while freedom of the press continues to be curtailed with the detainment of journalists, threats of financial sanctions on news agencies and the banning of online access to news out-lets. The judiciary’s independence has been compromised as noted in the World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Report 2014-2015 which ranked Turkey 101 out of 144 coun-tries, down from the 85th place in the previous year’s rankings.


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The gender gap is expanding, as the role of women is reduced to motherhood frequently in official lingo; women are facing increasing hardships on issues such as abortion, and violence against women continues to skyrocket, as exemplified by its 1400% increase in the first decade of AKP’s rule. Intolerance to any form of political opposition continues, with the em-ployment of harsh measures against peaceful protesters, and the demonization of opposition parties through official state-ments and pro-government media.

Furthermore, the AKP’s key promise of economic stabil-ity seems to be eroding after years of economic underper-formance. The socioeconomic gap between the wealthy and the poor continues to persist, and Turkey has been ranked the third worst country among OECD nations in this regard. Moreover, by abandoning the country’s traditional pro-status quo, prudent and diplomacy-first stance in foreign policy in favor of a more revisionist one, the country has found itself with few supporters left on the international stage. Ankara’s adventurism has also made the country more vulnerable to the ongoing civil war in its neighboring country and the gov-ernment’s Syria policy continues to be one of its most unpop-ular, including among AKP voters.

In addition to the existing cleavages listed above, the new phenomenon in Turkish politics is a polarization between those who are pro- and anti-AKP, which is formulated mostly around the role that Erdoğan himself has been playing. In this regard, though many ideological, ethnic and sectarian divides remain among the populace, Erdoğan and the AKP’s heavy-handed rule has allowed groups to transcend their traditional identities and stand side by side in their opposition to the gov-ernment, as exemplified by the Gezi protests of 2013 and their aftermath. This has been quite unprecedented in the history of the Republic, and becomes an even more curious case when it is kept in mind that the Gezi protests were neither originally

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anti-Erdoğan, nor were they the only trigger for this unusual abridgment of gaps between significant portions of the popu-lation. For many AKP supporters, Erdoğan is a leader who will usher in a “new Turkey”, returning the country to the glory days of the Ottoman Empire, whereas others see that he is leading the country astray from its progressive and multicultural iden-tity and European agenda. The separation has surpassed mere ideological lines; each side’s position is reflected in different media outlets, decisions are based on predetermined percep-tions of rights and wrongs, and developments in the country are viewed from completely different lenses. Such a gap will be very hard to bridge.

The lethal Kurdish issue, Syria, Iraq and refugees

It is in this context that the Kurdish issue becomes more prominent and lethal for the integrity of the country. In a way, it could be argued that for a long time, the biggest threat to Turkish borders has not come from external enemies, but rather from within. The Kurdish issue has roots that go back to the early ages of the Republic when Kurdish revolts were suppressed forcefully by Turkish governments, and the con-voluted issue has multiple political, military, economic and sociological layers. After the 1980 coup, the situation became so dire that the existence of the Kurds as an ethnicity was com-pletely rejected by the state. The rise of the Kurdistan Work-ers’ Party (PKK), originally a Marxist-Leninist group that had roots in left-wing movements in the 1960s and 70s, after the coup and the bloody armed conflict that ensued throughout the 1980s and 90s has since resulted in thousands of innocent civilians (so-called collateral damage) perishing at the hands of both sides (current estimates put the number of total casu-alties at 40,000 and the number of displaced persons at over 1.5 million). The conflict had come to a halt after the Turkish


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military’s successful operations and the capture of the organi-zation’s leader, Abdullah Ocalan, in 1999. After several years of pause, the PKK resumed its operations in the second half of the 2000s. The Turkish government initiated two democ-ratization processes aimed at resolving the issue in 2005 and 2009, which had some merits but fell short. The most ambi-tious initiative was launched in 2012. At the time, the peace process initiated by the AKP, that consisted of closed-door ne-gotiations between the government and Ocalan through the mediation of the Kurdish political movement (as distinct from its military wing), resulted in a ceasefire. On the societal level, the peace process allowed majority Turks and Turkish citizens of Kurdish ethnicity to talk about peace and also discuss the past openly. Initial signs showed great promise for reconcilia-tion on a societal level.

Yet the resumption of scattered but recurrent violence after the June 2015 elections has showed that the demons were not banished but were merely hiding under the mattress. The violence, as well as the provocative rhetoric employed mostly by the members of the AKP against the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), which hosts members of the Kurdish political movement, has translated again into a racist attitude against the Kurds. This attitude had been diminishing, but has now resurfaced with violent protests against media outlets, Kurdish civilians, business owners and HDP offices. In the meantime, in addition to PKK militants, eastern and southeastern Turk-ish provinces saw disgruntled and young PKK sympathizers take to the streets and conduct violent protests, highlighting a more acute and societal dimension of the Kurdish issue.

The Syrian civil war and the resulting rise of the Kurds as part-ners of both the United States and potentially Russia acts as another complicating factor for Turkey’s Kurdish issue. Tradi-tionally the Turkish establishment has viewed the potential

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for Kurdish autonomy or independence beyond its borders as a development that could incite its domestic Kurdish nation-alism issue. Now that the Democratic Union Party (PYD) in Syria (with its ideological ties to the PKK) has gained more recognition as a coalition partner for the US, Europe and po-tentially the Damascus-Moscow alliance, this traditional wor-ry may have more solid grounds. Furthermore, the PKK has been fighting alongside the Syrian and Iraqi Kurds against the Islamic State, and Turkey’s operations against the PKK have drawn criticism from states in the region, in addition to raising concern among its Western partners.

In sum, as multiple analysts inside Turkey have argued, signs of societal fragmentation are visible on both the Turkish and the Kurdish side. Furthermore, Kurds may exploit their rising international status as a potential leverage to push for the au-tonomy agenda in Turkey or they may see that the Turkish state is no longer proving to be the tolerant haven that it could be for its minorities. A peaceful resolution to the issue must be backed by ambitious democratic reforms that would not only embrace some of the requests made by the Kurdish po-litical movement, but also increase democratic standards for all Turkish citizens. Without this, it may become difficult to prevent further bloodshed.

Another ingredient that has been added to the Turkish smold-ering cauldron has been that of Syrian and Iraqi refugees. Tur-key now hosts more than two million refugees (and count-ing) and has become the country with the largest population of refugees residing in its territory according to the UNHCR’s 2014 figures. As history has shown time and again, it would be overly optimistic to expect the majority of the refugees to return to their country even if and when the Syrian civil war ends – and the war is unlikely to end anytime soon. Unless Ankara manages to formulate exemplary economic and soci-


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etal policies on managing the refugee issue, the burdens that this imposes on Turkey in the long term will not be limited to the economic sphere.

The internal and regional context that Turkey finds itself in is indeed stark: an identity crisis and competition among the populace, an increasingly autocratic government, the rise of terror and separatism, early signs of intercommunal tensions, a malfunctioning political and governance system, a major refugee crisis, and bordering a raging civil war. And these are only some of the issues it faces.

Still the factors that keep Turkey together play a significant role in ensuring that the whole cauldron does not topple over. For one, the Turkish state as an administrative institution has a strong historical legacy that grants it legitimacy in the eyes of the international community and most of its citizens – except for a minority that consists mostly of Kurdish nationalists. Yet it is worth noting that the legitimacy of respective governments and their policies are now being questioned by a larger portion of the people. Turkey has had autocratic governments and has faced numerous issues including undemocratic practices, cor-ruption, lack of accountability and transparency, and increas-ingly partisan policy-making. Still, though not healthy, Turkey remains a genuine democracy for the most part, and these is-sues have the possibility of being resolved through reforms that would strengthen the political institutions, rather than an altogether alteration of the political system itself. Although there have been major societal frictions, all parties have shown a willingness to live together (though this has fallen short of widespread tolerance for alternative beliefs, ethnicities and lifestyles) except for in times of extreme polarity and crisis. Therefore the country has a strong chance of recovering from its current calamity through political normalization, coming to terms with its past, enacting democratic reforms and reform-ing the establishment. Its membership to NATO has provided

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Turkey with more than security guarantees and has allowed the country to have a lasting political relationship with the West that it has aspired to be a part of. Furthermore, the path of the European Union has always proven to be a compass for the country’s democratization. Even if Turkey never achieves full membership due to political circumstances in both Eu-rope and on its own end, its interaction with the Union, and the reforms that it undertakes to be a part of it, may once again prove to be the surest way for Turkey to achieve the democrat-ic, institutional and societal standards that most of its citizens aspire to have. Indeed, the support for EU membership and NATO approval ratings have increased considerably over the last few years, due to the country’s deteriorating democratic standards and the security environment beyond its borders.

Nevertheless, the domestic and international developments listed above show that the window of opportunity for taking action is rapidly closing, and the room for maneuver is nar-rowing. Pessimistic readings suggest that Turkey is gradually losing its ability to continue to exist as a nation. The continu-ation of polarizing politics, economic stagnation and societal cleavages may prove to be the country’s undoing and make it “ungovernable”. What the country direly needs is prudent and pluralistic policy-making and a new social contract between the state and the people, which would quell societal tensions instead of fueling them. Be that as it may, in the short term, it appears that the country may have to go through yet another painful labor before it returns to the path of democratization and stability.

The views expressed herein belong solely to the author and do not represent the views of the Centre for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies.


VII. The Iranian nation state between internal evolution

and external change

Nicola Pedde

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Only in name can the Iran of today be compared with what emerged 36 years ago from the revolution and overthrow of a centuries-old monarchy. The Western stereotype of a fierce and retrograde authoritarian, monolithic and fanatically re-ligious regime is now increasingly at glaring odds with the semblance of a moderately developed country that possesses a clear understanding of its role and ambitions, and which is, above all, ruled by a somewhat heterogeneous and often in-ternally conflicted expanded leadership. It is precisely because of these facets of its political structure that, after having been (often spuriously) perceived as an “ideal antagonist” for over 30 years, Iran has truly been able to engage in a slow process of reintegration into international – and especially regional – dynamics.

A political model under generational stress

Iran today is characterized by a slow and at times problematic generational transition, where what remains of the clerical el-ement that rode to power on the back of revolutionary zeal (channeling it shortly thereafter into the mold of an Islamic Republic) has not known how nor been able to forge a line of internal political succession for the clergy. As a result, the only alternative that has presented itself is the generation of those who fought in the ranks of Sepah-e Pasdaran (the Ira-nian Revolutionary Guard Corps), from among which hails former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The ruling group has traced its circles of allegiance within this military arm, with its peculiar institutionalization in the aftermath of the war with Iraq.

Despite Western perceptions, the Supreme Leader (as head of state and of the regime) has never been a repository of ab-solute authoritarian power, but has, on the contrary, increas-

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ingly emerged over the years as a moderator of a heteroge-neous landscape. Those making up the “first generation” of power, namely clerics, while divided between often glaringly different ideological positions, were nevertheless drawn from a small, homogeneous circle of sophisticated political adepts. In practice they always managed to contain the excesses of the more impetuous fringes, thereby resulting in stances converg-ing towards a common interest. The current Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the Imam Ruhollah Khomeini before him have had to oversee a somewhat structure-heavy and boister-ous political system, the fruit of a recent revolution and hence marked by excesses and by recurring problems with newly-established institutions stemming from rapid and traumatic overhauls. They thus have not authoritatively and solitarily governed the Islamic Republic but rather moderated it, con-taining the radical and divisive pressures while also being un-willing to eradicate them.

However, the Iranian clergy has never demonstrated shared and coherent sentiments towards the revolutionary experience and the constitutional setup it gave rise to, i.e. a system based on the principle of velayat-e faqih (or governance of the juris-consult) and hence of theocratic leadership. In reality, they have shown little inclination to cultivate a clerical political class capable of renewing itself over time.

Thus, for reasons of age alone, it is not possible today – after more than three decades of clerical political rule – to discern a proper line of succession which would, in furtherance of that experience, be capable of perpetuating the Khomeini model; this leaves the way open for a second and entirely different generation of political rulers.

The “second generation” traces its roots in the shared mili-tancy of the combatants in the Iran-Iraq war, especially among those of Sepah-e Pasdaran, where the legitimacy to represent

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and govern Iran was won with blood, and wherein were forged the spheres of affiliation and allegiance that today make up a rather disparate grouping. The upshot is a system which is only seemingly cohesive and homogeneous, but is character-ized, just as with the first generation, by rather diverse ideolog-ical positions that are often in open conflict with each other.

Just as diverse is the outlook of the two generations with regards to the region’s socio-political dynamics. The disintegration of Iraq and the destruction of the Taliban government in Afghani-stan represented a historic turning point for Iran in terms of how it saw its strategic role, with the two main longstanding components of the regional threat having been eliminated – and that at the hands of what was (and possibly still is) Iran’s chief global strategic threat, namely: the United States.

While the first generation has adopted a cautious approach to managing relations with the new emerging (and contested) au-thorities in the two neighboring countries, seeking to strength-en political ties and common religious interests, the second generation has instead opted for a stronger involvement by se-curity agencies and the business community – a more assertive, more politically controversial and even risky approach .

Even the dynamics of the so-called “Arab Spring” were the subject of quite divergent approaches within the Iranian po-litical landscape. The first generation sought to give them a religious interpretation, ushering in a short-lived and ineffec-tive attempt at framing them as falling within some implau-sible “Islamic Awakening”, while the second generation tried to reduce a common political narrative with a revolutionary slant. Both interpretations proved rather inadequate, incapa-ble as they were of giving shape to any real interaction with the social dynamics that gradually led to changes in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. Both were quickly abandoned.

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Lastly, just as divergent have been their takes on the Syrian problem and the battle against the Islamic State, where the first generation’s historically pragmatic approach has been matched by the interventionist and revolutionary line of the second, with a mix of political and military handling of the two issues that has given rise to some tensions. Also weighing heavily is the ambiguous stance adopted towards the Kurds, who were openly supported in the clashes in Syria and Iraq, but in respect of whose autonomy in Iran an absolute red line has been drawn.

It hence follows that the political and strategic thinking of the Islamic Republic of Iran is the product of a process that is not only constantly evolving, but also and most importantly is based on differences in ideology and perception that are often at glaring odds with each other.

Iran’s path between relative stability and social change

Another abiding Western stereotype of Iranian society sees the ever-looming prospect of a new revolution erupting, sparked by the younger generations with a view to ousting the political and religious authorities in charge of the country. This percep-tion, which suits those who have always – however much in vain – sought to play the card of regime change as the only possible solution to the confrontational relationship with Iran, has from time to time met with confirmation in periodic moments of tension between society and the political authori-ties. This was the case during the student protests that erupted in the second term of Mohammad Khatami’s presidency, or again in 2009, with the controversial elections that led to the reelection of Ahmadinejad.


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While, on the one hand, there is indeed in Iran a “third gen-eration” of ample proportions – with around 70% of the population being under 40 years of age – which is entirely distinct from the former two generations, it is equally true that this third generation has several features and idiosyncrasies in common with those of the two that preceded it.

Hence, to consider this huge mass of youth as antagonistic to the national system and to the institutional order established by the Constitution of the Islamic Republic is erroneous and misleading, and more often than not only serves the purposes of the proponents of regime change and of the inevitability of the social and political collapse of the Iranian system.

Those numbering in the ranks of Iran’s third generation, which can without doubt be taken as representative of Iranian society at large, are somewhat ideologically complex and het-erogeneous, on par with the generations of their forefathers. Almost none of those belonging to the third generation share the ideological motivations of those who staged the revolu-tion or participated in the war, their points of unity or conflict lying in an entirely different realm. The primary drivers of the third generation are dictated by the demands of daily life, and especially by employment and housing needs, which are mak-ing the lives of young Iranians increasingly more difficult.

The institutional and political model of the Islamic Republic is an interpretative paradox that often confuses the third genera-tion itself, to the point of producing contradictory sentiments. Indeed, while on one hand the political system is considered stifling and obsessive in its displays of control and repression of certain fundamental individual freedoms, (though in truth these are becoming somewhat more accommodating and less invasive), on the other it is believed to vouchsafe the political stability and territorial integrity of the country, situated as it is right in the middle of one of the most turbulent and problem-atic regions of the planet.

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Nor can one ignore the nationalism factor in Iran, which cuts across all three generations and definitely runs deeper than the denominational affiliation to Shiism. As a result, Iran – both before and after the revolution – has always felt invested with a historical role and responsibility that, from an Iranian per-spective, places it well above its regional neighbors, who – to put it bluntly – are seen as being retrograde conservatives, only recently civilized, and of scant political aptitude.

Yet this role that Iranians perceive for their country is sui gen-eris in character. It is not built on a hegemonic vision of the region, but rather on the necessity of defending the territory of Iran and Iranians, as well as the country’s approaches to the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. Iranians, in short, consider themselves an outsider within a mainly Arab environment, thus believing themselves to be surrounded by historically hostile neighbors in no way inclined to concede to Iran the development of its social, political and economic prerogatives.

The sectarian factor of affiliation to different denominational groups of the Islamic religion therefore has much less of a role and bearing than the ethnic and national dimension in Iran, as the many years of tension and war with Iraq have abun-dantly demonstrated. Hence, what Iran demands today, given the disappearance of historical threats posed by the presence of strong regimes hostile to Iran’s role, is recognition of its regional standing and influence, and to have a say in deter-mining security arrangements that more closely impact on its interests on land (as in the case of Syria and Iraq) and at sea (as with security in the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf).

Accordingly, in gauging young people’s perception of Iran’s role, it is important to consider both nationalism and the ideological underpinnings of the state. The political impulse of the masses of young Iranians is not geared towards a new revolution or subversion of the institutional order, but to re-forming and modernizing the existing set-up.


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Owing to nationalist sentiment, which is extremely wide-spread among the younger generations, this reformism is therefore focused on asserting the third generation’s social and economic demands within the existing system, and not neces-sarily restructuring the state’s institutional model. This is by no means a point of small difference, yet it has often given rise to significant misinterpretations in the West, especially where there has historically been a deliberate willingness to interpret every Iranian political phenomenon as a warning sign that a new revolutionary phase is looming.

Hence, the relationship between society and institutions in Iran resembles in some respects that in countries of the re-gion, and in other respects that in the West itself. Indeed, the reputation of Iranian government officials has also received an extraordinary boost from the recent negotiating success of Tehran’s diplomats, who have achieved an outcome judged as extremely positive in talks with the so-called P5+1 group to re-solve the long and fraught debate over Iran’s nuclear program.

Tehran’s regional political and security outlook

Today more than ever Iran is engaged in defining and consoli-dating its sphere of regional interests – and for the first time, after many years of political isolation, it is doing so across a geographical reach that goes well beyond the mere limits of its borders.

This renewed push towards making increasingly more incisive efforts to establish firm and lasting foundations in defense of its regional role and interests is not, however, the result of new or improved political and military capabilities on the part of the Islamic Republic, but rather stems from the void left by over 15 years of repeated Western policy failures in the Middle

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East. The disastrous outcome of the war that brought down the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the Taliban in Af-ghanistan, the collapse of Syria and the growing instability of the Gulf monarchies, together with the war in Yemen and the ongoing political crisis in Lebanon, have enabled Iran, for the first time in its post-revolutionary history, to greatly boost its influence on local political and social dynamics abroad.

This unprecedented and entirely unexpected success for Iran – accompanied by gradual recognition from the West of the difficulty of promoting reforms and democracy in much of the Arab world – has resulted in a perception of the Shia world and its role in the Middle East that is almost turned on its head.

From the viewpoint of Iranian strategic thinking, however, this extension of interests over such a wider geographical scale than the strict confines of national boundaries stems from a vision of containment and defense geared towards establishing en-hanced borders for the protection of the Islamic Republic’s ter-ritorial and economic integrity. While the majority of the Arab countries view Iran as an expansionist and hegemonic power, in Tehran it is on the contrary considered extremely dangerous to pursue destabilizing policies within a broader and increas-ingly hostile Sunni Arab environment.

The most significant distinguishing factor between Iran and its Sunni Arab antagonists relates to perception. Whereas Tehran considers Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and certain other states in the region as political, economic and military competitors, the same countries view Iran as a threat to their existence which must be wiped out in order to ensure the con-tinuity of their systems and the dynasties that govern them.

Tehran’s political and strategic objective is that of maintaining the status quo, not the annihilation of existing regional politi-


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cal players, whose animosity and fears it is nevertheless aware of, and with whom it has sought in vain to establish a line of contact to avoid the possible outbreak of hostilities.

With regards to Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, Iran considers its net-work of regional proxies the only real guarantee against the possibility of a future attack by the United States (now at any rate considered highly unlikely), Israel or other Arab states, thus placing greater reliance on asymmetric rather than con-ventional warfare capabilities.

For this reason, Tehran has pragmatically developed an aware-ness of the need for a post-Assad transition, in respect of which it does not in any case intend to relinquish the choice of suc-cessor to third parties. Russia’s entry into the Syrian conflict has been viewed positively by the Iranian leadership, which does not however repose unconditional trust in Moscow – sus-pected of not seeking to restore the territorial integrity of Syria so much as “clean up” only a part of it and abandon the rest to the jihadists.

This scenario directly concerns Iraq, where Tehran is well aware of the impossibility of retaking the mainly Sunni Anbar prov-ince by military means, and where it fears a build-up of jihad-ist forces around a stronghold that straddles the two countries. While on one hand Iran considers it strategically necessary to aim for the restoration of Iraq’s historic borders, on the other it has also actively contributed to the disintegration of the gov-ernment of national unity, ignoring repeated calls from the Sunni community in Iraq and continuing to focus on support-ing majority Shia rule. Thus, it initially actively backed the Al-Maliki government without understanding how devastating the impact on social cohesion was, only abandoning it when a third of the country had already fallen into the hands of the forces of the Islamic State – practically without them firing a single shot and with them being acclaimed as liberators by the

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Sunni population of the Al-Anbar province. The belated in-tervention of General Qassem Soleimani and the Quds Force avoided the worst in some villages on the outskirts of Baghdad and in Iraqi Kurdistan, but has not in any way been able to un-dermine the build-up of forces of the Islamic State in much of the country. Hence, for Tehran, the Iraqi dilemma is linked to the issue of sectarianism, fueled for too long (including with the help of Iran) and now decisively out of hand, with little prospect of being susceptible to reconciliation through a pro-cess of national dialogue.

Equally fruitless were attempts at dialogue with Saudi Ara-bia, actively sought by the Iranian establishment – especially through the mediation of former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani – and systematically rejected by Riyadh for fear of a further consolidation of Iranian influence. Relations between Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates then conclu-sively deteriorated as a result of the intensification of the crisis in Yemen, where Houthi Shia rebels launched a massive offen-sive against the forces of the pro-Saudi government in Sana’a, forcing President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi to make a hurried and daring escape to Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi King Salman openly accuses Iran of having foment-ed and bankrolled the Houthi rebels to revolt in order to open up a new front and thereby create a new hotbed of violence in the Arabian Peninsula, while Tehran firmly rejects these allega-tions and throws them back at the Emirates and Saudi Arabia, which it considers – not without justification – the main archi-tects of regional instability.

European and Western media in general have built up a case based on the role of the Houthis and Iran of proportions that go well beyond any real capacity of the two actors. Indeed, while on one hand Tehran looks with interest and satisfac-tion at the continuing crisis in Yemen, insofar as it bespeaks a


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weakening in Saudi and UAE capabilities, on the other it also fears the repercussions that this crisis could have on the entire region.

The Houthis are a minority of Shia extraction, although quite distinct from Iranian “Twelver Shiites”, with whom they share almost nothing in sectarian, historical and political terms. Iran has maintained a rather ambiguous stance in managing its relationship with them, undoubtedly cultivating certain channels intended to financially and militarily support their struggle, without possessing any real capacity or prospect of transforming them into a new regional proxy, but with the re-sult of even further straining relations with Saudi Arabia.

Although the evolution of dynamics in the region overall could produce a scenario that is seemingly favorable to Iran and its enhanced political and military stability, what Tehran contin-ues to fear most today is a general collapse of local political and social balances in the near future. The possibility of the Is-lamic State coalescing around territorial holdings that include eastern Syria and western Iraq is accompanied by mounting uncertainty regarding the ability of the Saudi crown to protect and ensure its own continued existence, under threat as it is from manifest and growing internal conflict within the vast Al-Saud royal house, but also due to the increasingly active role being played by jihadism within Saudi territory itself.

Lebanon is a key pillar of Tehran’s security strategy, but despite the fact that the relationship with Hezbollah continues to be robust and effective, the range of political and social dynamics at play in Lebanon and the Mediterranean Levant presents cri-sis scenarios that are fairly substantial – and potentially devas-tating for the survival of Lebanon as we know it, given its quite fragile and complex institutional features.

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Viewed from Iran’s perspective, a somewhat already compro-mised local security scenario is also compounded by the dis-tinct deterioration of the situation in Afghanistan, with the risk of once again drawing sizeable Taliban formations to the borders of the country: this would bring an end to what for Tehran was a welcome interlude of over a decade of stability on the eastern front vouchsafed by the United States.

The sum total of these crisis variables thus instills more fears than expectations in Tehran vis-à-vis the prospect of achieving an increased role in the region, as its points to the emergence of changing scenarios in which the Islamic Republic would – against its will – find itself yet again isolated. This is within a region that has grown even more hostile and which is progres-sively being dominated by non-state forces, with whom it may become difficult – if not impossible – to forge rational and constructive relations.


VIII. Saudi Arabia as the custodian of stability

Faisal J. Abbas

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As the ancient proclamation goes, “The king is dead, long live the king!” In today’s modern world, Saudi Arabia is prov-ing that the saying still applies by holding on to a number of constants, regardless of who the “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques” sitting on the throne is.

One constant is definitely the Saudi role as a chief guarantor of the status quo and protector of both its own and the Gulf’s borders. Indeed, king after king, Saudi Arabia has proven that when pushed and when needed, it will never hesitate to “go all in” by using force and intervening militarily – though prefer-ably in a joint effort with allies.

Three examples resonate from recent history. The first dates to 1991 when the late King Fahd’s was determined to push Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. This was successfully ac-complished via a US-led international military coalition that waged its operation from bases inside Saudi Arabia.

One memorable quote by the late King Fahd came during a televised statement in early 1991, “Life and death are the same to us after the invasion of Kuwait and after what I saw him (Saddam) do to the Kuwaiti people with my own eyes. There is no such thing as a Kuwait and a Saudi Arabia, we are one country, we either live together or we die together.”

The second episode occurred twenty years later when an inter-vention by the “Peninsula Force” (the unified military force of the GCC countries) led by the late King Abdullah successfully managed to safeguard the rule of the Bahraini royal family against an uprising perceived to have been infiltrated by Ira-nian agents - clearly pursuing goals that were seen as a threat to Saudi interests.

In a quote commonly attributed to Abdullah during that peri-od (March 2011), he described Bahrain as “a young daughter” who he would “never let go of”.

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And of course, there is the ongoing war waged in Yemen by a coalition of Arab and Muslim countries under the leadership of current Saudi King Salman. During an Arab League meet-ing in March 2015, King Salman reiterated that the operation was launched to reverse the Iranian-backed Houthi militia’s takeover of the country, to restore the legitimate government of President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi and to give stability to the people of Yemen.

The Yemen case as a possible model

When Saudi Arabia launched its “Decisive Storm” military of-fensive in March 2015 in Yemen in response to an appeal by President Hadi, the world was taken by surprise. In fact, one could argue that the operation came as an absolute shocker to most observers as it portrayed – to those who have forgot-ten - the Saudi ability and willingness to implement a rapid military “shock and awe” strategy when required.

Of course what was novel to most was the swift and speedy decision-making process - which for a long time was not one of Saudi Arabia’s strong points.

As columnist and (Harvard-based) Saudi affairs expert Nawaf Obeid worded it in a Washington Post article at the time, this operation “should serve notice to the world that a major gen-erational shift underway in the kingdom is sure to have far-reaching geopolitical ramifications.”

According to Obeid, the new Saudi leadership — centered on a cadre of youthful, dynamic royals and technocrats — is de-veloping a foreign policy doctrine to address long-standing re-gional tensions. This doctrine is based on the persistent legiti-macy of the Saudi monarchy and the centrality of the kingdom to the Muslim world, especially as bulwark against instability.


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Of course, one must point out that prior to launching the op-eration, Riyadh had claimed it exhausted all diplomatic routes before finding itself on an unavoidable collision course with Iran’s agents seeking to control the Kingdom’s southern bor-ders. Secretly aided by toppled Ali Abdullah Saleh (who turned his back on Saudi Arabia and the GCC which negotiated and guaranteed his safe exit following the uprising that overthrew him in 2011), the Houthi militia had taken Yemen by force.

Aside from official request by Hadi’s government, there were too many major factors that influenced the Saudi decision to go after the Houthis. At the time of Hadi’s appeal, the Houthis had already managed to capture the capital city of Sanaa and were moving closer to taking Aden, which was declared a tem-porary capital by the Yemeni government.

Saudi Arabia issued numerous warnings to the Houthi leader-ship and to Saleh. However, the Houthi-Saleh combination itself was extremely problematic and proved to be hardly vi-able. Even though this unlikely alliance itself was unforeseen and would have been incomprehensible even just a few years earlier (given that Saleh waged several wars against the Hou-this), the reality on the ground at the time of Operation De-cisive Storm was crystal clear: Saudi Arabia had a neighboring country that was about to be overtaken by a highly ideological clan supported by its arch nemesis, Iran.

Not only that, but the Houthi clan had access to a wealth of arms, trained men and resources due to the alliance with long-time dictator Saleh, who for many years was the recipient of generous US military aid as he claimed to be fighting Al-Qae-da in Yemen.

As such, by degrading and undermining the Houthis’ mili-tary capabilities, the Saudi-led military efforts also serve as a preemptive campaign against the possible use of ballistic mis-siles, such as SKUD, which could target GCC countries.

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Most importantly, given its custodianship of the two holy mosques, Saudi Arabia must protect the sacred shrines in Mec-ca and Medina from the likes of the Houthi movement. Such claims were not far-fetched, as the Houthis didn’t spare any ef-fort in intimidating Saudi Arabia when it performed a military drill on the Kingdom’s southern border just a few days before Operation Decisive Storm was launched.

Securing the northern border

Apart from the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, until the early 2000s there were no real threats to the northern border of Sau-di Arabia.

However, the situation changed with the collapse of the Saddam regime following the 2003 US-led war and subsequent invasion (on which Saudi Arabia officially remained neutral, refusing to send Saudi troops into Iraq or allowing the coali-tion to use its lands or bases to launch the attack). The King-dom’s initial concerns about the “day after” proved to be true. The US demonstrated utter mismanagement of Iraq following the war, as it insisted on dissolving the Iraqi army and Baath party. Unfortunately, numerous Saudi warnings that the US strategy in Iraq would hand the country to Iran and extremist groups fell on deaf ears. What made the situation worse was the pro-Iran Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who the White House backed despite advice it received against his candidacy from Riyadh and London.

Maliki quickly became another Saddam and throughout his tenure, between 2006 and 2014, he managed to severely desta-bilize Iraq even further by alienating and enraging the coun-try’s Sunni component, while also allowing Tehran-backed paramilitary groups (such as the infamous Asaaib Ahl al-Haq) to operate freely.


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Furthermore, Maliki also managed to waste $1 trillion in pub-lic funds, according to a recent interview with the pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat with Iraqi official Bahaa al-Aaraji.

As such, it is no wonder Iraq became a fertile ground for Al-Qaeda and, later, for ISIS. However, following the removal of Maliki, Saudi Arabia took the first step towards normalizing its relations with Baghdad by reinstalling an ambassador follow-ing the appointment of Iraq’s new Premier, Haider al-Abadi.

Together with the Unites States, Turkey and other allies, the Kingdom is also an active member in the anti-ISIS coalition which since 2014 has been engaged in a mission to degrade and destroy the terrorist group’s military capabilities both in Iraq and Syria.

The cost of the status quo

No price tag can accurately estimate the cost of war, for there is no amount that can reflect the cost of lives taken, nor of the possible fruits of money that could have been invested else-where. However, no wise person (or country) chooses to go to war for no reason or for superficial motivations, and Saudi Arabia is no different – albeit, whatever the reason is behind opting to resort to military action, the price is always hefty.

For example, according to a recent report by CNN, the libera-tion of Kuwait in 1990-1991 is said to have cost around $61 billion, of which Saudi Arabia and some other Gulf countries covered more than half - the amount excludes other econom-ic, environmental costs and doesn’t take into consideration wasted opportunities.

With a potential ISIS threat up north and a rapidly developing situation on the ground in the south where the Saudi-coalition

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forces continue to pound Houthi targets, the Kingdom is natu-rally going to carry on investing in maintaining, enhancing and upgrading its military capabilities. Recent military drills and purchases, such as the acquisition of two dozen H145 Air-bus helicopters, which are typically used for border patrol, in-dicate that Saudi Arabia intends to boost and intensify defense of its borders. Of course, this comes at a time when oil prices continue to plunge and the Kingdom is having to resort to its massive reserves, which are estimated at $700 billion.

Furthermore, the Kingdom is also fostering new alliances and partnerships, such as with France (which has supplied the H145 Airbus helicopters) while also working towards better engagement with regional allies with whom it might have had issues in the past, such as Qatar and Sudan.

By enhancing its own military capabilities and fostering new alliances, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia seems set to continue on its solid path of seeking regional stability and maintaining the status quo, particularly after the devastating effects of the Arab Spring in the likes of Libya and Syria.


IX. Israel and Palestine: mental and territorial

borders

Lorenzo Kamel

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In a new Arab world, which increasingly seems to be mov-ing away from nationalism, challenging existing state borders and questioning the states entrapped in them, the Palestinian struggle for separate statehood appears to many observers as rather odd, if not obsolete. This is even more so when consid-ering the practical effects of the Israel’s continuous state-fund-ed enlargement of settlements and outposts5 in the “Palestin-ian territories”:6 the “one-state solution” is being increasingly perceived as the only alternative to the current impasse – and to the “two-state solution” that is still widely endorsed by the international community.

One state versus two: misleading alternatives

The endless debate over “the only real alternative” - a single, binational state and the related reshaping of the local borders or lines - is largely a misleading, empty and counterproduc-tive exercise. It is misleading because supporting the principle of self-determination for both peoples does not mean reject-ing other possibilities. The two-state solution, in Uri Avnery’s words, “is the first floor, and federation is the second, one may imagine that the third floor will be a regional union, on the

5 While “outposts” are considered illegal also by the Israeli authorities and built in contravention of Israeli statutes regulating planning and construction, they receive copious subsidies and military protection. Ten of them were legalized by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2012 and many others will likely follow suit. 6 The International Court of Justice (ICJ), the UN, the EU and virtually all international organizations consider the West Bank as part of the “occupied Palestinian territories”, or “occupied territories”. See Kamel, L. (2015), “On the Legitimacy of the Settlements: a Legal and Historical Perspective”, Opinio Juris, December 4, 2015, available at http://opinio-juris.org/2015/12/04/on-the-legitimacy-of-the-settlements-a-legal-and-historical-perspective/.

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lines of the present European Union... Federation presumes partners of equal status, if not of equal strength”.7

The debate is also empty because it is based on a wrong as-sumption. By annexing East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, but not the whole West Bank, the Israeli authorities fulfilled several policy goals as well as ideological purposes. The chanc-es that the Israeli authorities may express an interest, albeit weak, in the creation of a single state, or just in the annexation of all the Palestinian territories, are near to null. The ongoing status quo, underpinned by a tendency to manage (rather than to solve) the conflict, ensures the exploitation of the Pales-tinian territories - as well as control of an area considered of strategic importance for defense purposes - without requiring additional “inconvenient responsibilities.” In this sense, the Palestinian territories represent in many ways a unique case. In other somewhat similar contexts, such as Tibet, Abkhazia, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, Western Sahara and East Turkestan, the “occupying powers” of these areas have incorporated the local inhabitants as their citizens – with all the guarantees, rights and problems that this entails (Kamel 2014a).8

On top of this, the debate on the politics of “de-bordering” (i.e. policies and practices aiming at undermining the rel-evance of state borders as lines markedly circumscribing po-

7 Avnery, U. (2013), “Federatzia? Bo Natkhil minMedinat Falastinit [A Federation? Let’s start with a Palestinian State]”, Haaretz, August 9, 2013, available at http://www.haaretz.co.il/opinions/.premium-1.2092573, last accessed December 15, 2015. 8 On this issue see Kamel, L. (2014), “Is the EU Adopting a Double-Standards Approach toward Israel and the Palestinian Territories? (Part 2)”, Opinio Juris, January 9, 2014, available at: http://opiniojuris.org/2014/01/09/eu-adopting-double-standards-approach-toward-isra-el-palestinian-territories-part-2/, last accessed January 31, 2015.

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litical systems) and the related one- or two-state solution is counterproductive in as much as the most likely alternative to the two states would not be a binational entity. In a reality in which one of the two contending parties is exponentially more powerful than the other - from a political, economic and military standpoint - a single state would, in fact, soon turn into a legalized tool for “choking” the weaker party.

In books such as Ali Abunimah’s One Country: A Bold Propos-al to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse the one-state scenario appears as a sort of Lebanon-style confessional government divided along religious/ethnic lines (Abunimah 2006), while in volumes such as Caroline Glick’s The Israeli Solution (Glick 2014), it looks more like an ideological plan that deliberately leaves out the Gaza Strip. Even assuming that these and oth-er highly heterogeneous one-state visions would have some chance of being implemented, it should be stressed that the idea of creating a binational state already failed at the time of Brit Shalom (in the late 1920s), when the attitude of most of the local inhabitants, free from the scars of this last century, would have been in theory far more malleable. Today even more than at that time, any serious plan for implementing a one-state scenario would require first and foremost the ab-sence of a marked imbalance between the two parties.

Thus it is noteworthy to mention that according to a report (“Acting the Landlord,” June 5, 2013) released by the Israeli NGO B’Tselem, Israel’s policy in Area C of the West Bank is anchored in a perception it is meant above all to serve Israeli needs. The exploitation of natural resources and the psycho-logical humiliation that are taking place beyond the “separa-tion barrier” should not be justified by the legitimate Israeli need to rely on safe borders. An internal document compiled in April 2013 under the auspices of the Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Zeev Elkin - distributed to all of Israel’s embassies in Europe - claimed that the settlement-product labeling under

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discussion among EU foreign ministers would have hurt the Palestinian economy the most. The latter is an attitude that brings to mind the times in which well-known historical fig-ures praised the economic opportunities afforded by the be-nevolent Western powers to the occupied peoples. This further confirms that one of the most pressing priorities is to disman-tle the selective annexation process that has used the “peace process” as a façade - especially in recent years. Such an ap-proach requires fewer idealistic slogans and effortless “short-cuts” and more practical forms of pressure on both sides.

The role of international consensus

Since his first address to the Knesset plenum, Naftali Bennett, Israel’s current Minister of Education and leader of The Jewish Home party, did not hide his opinions: “There is no room in our small but wonderful God-given tract for another state.”9 The same day (February 12, 2013) Bennett, echoing a com-mon sentiment among Israeli politicians, expressed his oppo-sition to relinquishing any parts of the “Land of Israel” in a peace deal with the Palestinians. It is noteworthy that Israel was never asked by the international community to formally recognize the Palestinians’ right to their land and never voted in favor of the two-state solution.

On the other hand, several representatives of Hamas, while in some cases accepting the idea of a Palestinian state within the 1967 armistice lines, have clarified over the years that they would not recognize the State of Israel. Other members explic-

9 Winer, S. (2013), “Bennett: No Palestine in «God-given» Land of Is-rael” The Times of Israel, February 12, 2013, available at: http://www.timesofisrael.com/bennett-no-palestine-in-god-given-land-of-israel/, last accessed January 31, 2015.


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itly continue to call for Israel’s destruction. On May 5, 2014, Mousa Abu Marzouk, Deputy Chairman of Hamas’ political bureau, pointed out that “we would have spared ourselves sev-en years of misery under siege and two wars in 2008 and 2012 had we wanted to recognize Israel.”10

In this looming scenario, a new attitude is gaining ground. Israel, as pointed out by Khalil Shikaki (among others), Di-rector of Ramallah’s Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, will be soon forced to choose between two options, both falling into a one-state framework: “The consolidation of a one-state reality, which would then force it to become an apartheid state; or granting Palestinians full citizenship.”11 This dichotomy, echoed in the United States by several authors, in-cluding Max Blumenthal and Ali Abunimah, ignores or down-plays a third scenario that, in the absence of a more credible outside multilateral intervention, appears far more realistic: Israel will annex Area C of the West Bank (that is, about 60% of the West Bank) and will offer to the Palestinians what Ben-nett defined as “autonomy on steroids.”12 This plan does not require any war of annexation, military operation or the fast removal of most of the population residing in the area: to the

10 Abu Amer, A. (2014), “Hamas’ Abu Marzouk says recognizing Israel a «red line»” Al-Monitor, May 5, 2014, available at: http://www.al-moni-tor.com/pulse/originals/2014/05/interview-abu-marzouk-hamas-israel-fatah-reconciliation.html, last accessed January 31, 2015.11 Shikaki, K. (2014), “If Kerry fails, dissolution or collapse of the Pal-estinian Authority becomes inevitable”, Open Democracy, May 4, 2014, available at: https://www.opendemocracy.net/arab-awakening/khalil-shikaki/if-kerry-fails-dissolution-or-collapse-of-palestinian-authority-become, last accessed January 31, 2015.12 Lazaroff, T. (2014), “Bennett: «We’ll annex Area C and offer the Pal-estinians autonomy on steroids»”, The Jerusalem Post, April 29, 2014, available at: http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/Bennett-Well-annex-Area-C-and-offer-the-Palestinians-autonomy-on-ste-roids-350790, last accessed January 31, 2015.

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relatively few Palestinians who will still reside in Area C in the coming decade,13 the State of Israel will grant full citizenship.

Some authors claim that continuing to support the two-state solution is, from the perspective of the Israeli government, a way to buy time. Others believe that it is necessary to put a price on the status quo. To a certain extent, one can agree with both points of view. However, to put aside the wide consensus on the principle of self-determination of both peoples (one of the few important results achieved by the Palestinians in recent decades), without first obtaining a practical and realis-tic alternative, would be political suicide, which would further affect the lives of millions of human beings. The claim that a binational state or the two-state solution are the only, or even the main, alternatives currently on the table is a dangerous illusion that risks deflecting attention from the real priority: to find (or strengthen) practical forms of pressure – such as for instance the settlement product labeling guidelines, often misrepresented as a form of boycott, issued by the European Union on November 11, 2015 – in support of the wide inter-national consensus on the principle of self-determination of both peoples.

Why is the reference to international consensus relevant? One among the many possible good reasons relates to the fact that both Israel and the “non-member State of Palestine”, recognized as such by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on November 29, 2012, have never agreed to define their territories and borders. This means that, besides not fully qualifying as states under the criteria of the 1933’s Montevideo Convention, both Israelis and Palestinians could theoretically

13 The Israeli NGO B’Tselem is monitoring the process of “quite trans-fer” that is taking place in Area C. B’Tselem. 2015. Facing Expulsion, May 10, 2015, available at: http://www.btselem.org/facing_expulsion_blog, last accessed May 31, 2015.


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start building settlements on the internationally recognized soil of the counterpart.

A second and more historical reason is provided by the exam-ple of the Palestinian village of Umm Rashrash, present-day Eilat. It was taken, without encountering any opposition,14 by the Israeli Negev and Golani Brigades on March 10, 1949, eight months after the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 54 that called for a ceasefire, forbidding any acqui-sition of territory after that date. Resolution 54 clarified that a threat to peace existed within the meaning of Article 39 of the UN Charter, reiterated the need for a truce, and ordered a ceasefire pursuant to Article 40 of the Charter. It was a bind-ing Resolution (until 1968, UNSC Resolutions never expressly invoked Chapter VII of the UN Charter). It is only thanks to an established international consensus - expressed by 160 coun-tries - that today Eilat is legitimately part of the State of Israel. The same international consensus established the illegality of both the settlements and the occupation of the Palestinian ter-ritories. This is even more so when considering that Israel’s admission to the United Nations (May 11, 1949) was not un-conditional but bound to compliance with its explanations and assurances on the acceptance of the UN Charter and reso-lutions (Israel’s original application for admission was, not by chance, rejected by the UNSC): “Negotiations,” assured Abba Eban (1915–2002) in front of the UNGA on May 5, 1949, “would not, however, affect the juridical status of Jerusalem, to be defined by international consent.”15

14 The State of Israel signed an armistice agreement with Egypt on Feb-ruary 24, 1949 (it permitted Israel to hold on to territories acquired until October 14, 1948). On the other hand, Transjordanian-Israeli ar-mistice negotiations started in Rhodes on March 5, 1949.15 Eban, A. 1949, Speaking in front of the UNGA, May 5, 1949, New York, available at: http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/1DB943E43C280A26052565FA004D8174, last accessed January 31, 2015.

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The conflict’s original dimension

“History doesn’t repeat itself,” as Mark Twain allegedly put it, “but it does rhyme.” The political voids that characterized the Middle East and North Africa at the beginning of the 19th cen-tury can be witnessed today as well. At that time, the Ottoman authorities increasingly lost their grasp on power as their citi-zens confronted “European modernity”: this favored the end of an old order and the rising of new powers and long-lasting dynasties. Most of the countries in the region are now experi-encing a similar process that might trigger a new groundbreak-ing moment, this time related to a new potential state system in the Levant and a partial deconstruction of the “nationalist myopia.”

The contours of this new order are still far from being clear and the region is experiencing one of the darkest periods of its history. As Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) argued in his Prison Notebooks, “the crisis consists in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” (Gramsci 1971: 276). However, and whatever the final outcome will look like, the dynamics currently at work in the region will probably have a very limited impact on what some observers imagine as the imminent “reshaping” of the Israeli-Palestinian context and its borders/lines. Due to their unique past and peculiar pre-sent, Israel and the Palestinian territories will likely experience concrete changes only in the context of an agreement between two equal parties and, most of all, in the frame of a full in-ternationalization and “multilateralization” of the conflict in support of international consensus: that is, a return to its origi-nal dimension.


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References

Abu Amer, A. (2014), “Hamas’ Abu Marzouk says recognizing Israel a «red line»”, Al-Monitor, May 5, 2014, available at: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/05/inter-view-abu-marzouk-hamas-israel-fatah-reconciliation.html, last accessed January 31, 2015.

Abu Ghazaleh, A. (1973), Arab cultural nationalism in Palestine, 1919–1948 (Beirut: Institute of Palestine Studies).

Abunimah, A. (2006), One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (New York: Metropolitan Books).

Almeghari, R. (2012), “Chomsky in Gaza: academic boycott «will strengthen support for Israel»” The Electronic Intifada, October 20, 2012, available at: http://electronicintifada.net/content/chomsky-gaza-academic-boycott-will-strength-en-support-israel/11795, last accessed January 31, 2015.

B’Tselem (2015), Facing Expulsion, May 10, 2015, available at: http://www.btselem.org/facing_expulsion_blog, last ac-cessed May 31, 2015.

Bartlett, W. H. (1844), Walks about the City and Environs of Jeru-salem (London: Georges Virtue).

Bar Yosef, E. (2005), The Holy Land in English Culture, 1799–1917 (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Bayoumi, M. and Rubin, A. eds. (2000), The Edward Said Read-er (New York: Vintage Books).

Cabral, A. (1969), Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories. In Cabral, A. (ed.) Revolution in Guinea: Selected Texts (New York: Monthly Review Press).

Eban, A. (1949), Speaking in front of the UNGA, May 5, 1949, New York, available at: http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/1DB943E43C280A26052565FA004D8174, last accessed January 31, 2015.

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Glick, C. (2014), The Israeli solution: A One State Plan for Peace in the Middle East (New York: Crown Forum).

Gramsci, A. (1971), Lettere dal carcere (Turin: Einaudi).

Jassal, S. and Ben-Ari, E. (eds., 2007), The Partition Motif in Contemporary Conflicts (New Delhi: Sage).

Kamel, L. (2015), Imperial Perceptions of Palestine: British In-fluence and Power in Late Ottoman Times (London and New York: I.B. Tauris).

Kamel, L. (2014a), Dalle profezie all’Impero: L’espansione dell’Occidente nel Mediterraneo orientale, 1798–1850 (Rome: Carocci Editore).

Kamel, L. (2014b), “Is the EU Adopting a Double-Standards Approach toward Israel and the Palestinian Territories? (Part 2)”, Opinio Juris, January 9, 2014, available at: http://opiniojuris.org/2014/01/09/eu-adopting-double-standards-approach-toward-israel-palestinian-territories-part-2/, last accessed January 31, 2015.

Lazaroff, T. (2014) “Bennett: «We’ll annex Area C and offer the Palestinians autonomy on steroids»”, The Jerusalem Post, April 29, 2014, available at: http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/Bennett-Well-annex-Area-C-and-offer-the-Palestinians-autonomy-on-steroids-350790, last accessed January 31, 2015.

Morris, B. (2009), One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Pal-estine Conflict (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).

Shikaki, K. (2014), “If Kerry fails, dissolution or collapse of the Palestinian Authority becomes inevitable”, Open Democracy, May 4, 2014, available at: https://www.opendemocracy.net/arab-awakening/khalil-shikaki/if-kerry-fails-dissolution-or-collapse-of-palestinian-authority-become, last accessed January 31, 2015.


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Winer, S. (2013), “Bennett: No Palestine in «God-given»”, Land of Israel. The Times of Israel, February 12, 2013, availa-ble at: http://www.timesofisrael.com/bennett-no-palestine-in-god-given-land-of-israel/, last accessed January 31, 2015.

Lorenzo Kamel

X. Lebanon: a weak state and its

complex national identity at risk

Bernard Selwan Khoury

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“You have your Lebanon and I have my Lebanon”, wrote the Lebanese poet and philosopher Khalil Gibran, because when it comes to Lebanon, there is no single vision of the coun-try recognized by Lebanese, Arabs, and Westerners. There are several Lebanons, with different cultures, different religions, different geopolitical visions, and even different borders. Gi-bran’s words provide a starting point for understanding the various conceptions of the state, borders and national identity in Lebanon. In order to clearly and realistically examine how the state is envisioned by Lebanese citizens, it is necessary to identify the country’s trademark elements and symbols recog-nized across the board by all the various ethnic and religious components of the Land of Cedars. Chief among these – and perhaps alone today – are the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), which, even more so than the cedar tree, are the real national emblem.

Identity and institutions

The majority of Lebanese people today recognize their country as a nation that traces its roots – and its natural borders – back to at least the third millennium BC, and whose civilization be-gan two thousand years earlier in 5000 BC in the present-day city of Byblos. The country’s name, Lubnan in Arabic, comes from the Semitic root meaning “white”, a reference to the snowy peaks of its mountain ranges, and appears frequently in the Bible’s Old Testament. This might seem a fairytale vi-sion of the country, but it is on the negation of this historical mainstay that Syria has, from the 1960s under Hafez al-Assad till today under his son Bashar, advanced its right to “reclaim” a land – that is, the Lebanese territory – which purportedly forms part of the historical reaches of the so-called “Greater Syria”. But as history teaches us, it is a population – with its culture, language, identity and character – that transforms a territory into a nation, and never the other way round. Nev-

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ertheless, the powerful spread of the ideology of pan-Arabism and Baathism between the 1950s and 1960s favored the emer-gence of a culture and an ideology that rejected the boundaries of other Arab nations as drawn on the map by Western coun-tries. Thus came to the fore the idea of a single Arab nation, a concept that has its doctrinal roots in the Islamic religious no-tion of Ummah – a united nation of Muslim faithfuls without ethnic and cultural differences, but most importantly, without borders. Conflict over this ideology was indeed at the heart of the Leb-anese Civil War (1975-1990), which rocked the very notion of the Lebanese state with its current borders. It is this same ideological confrontation which today threatens to wipe out certain borders between the Arab states of the Near East, such as those between Syria and Iraq – a coveted goal of the Cali-phate proclaimed by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who in fact has on several occasions announced his intention of “breaking down the barriers” imposed by the West.

It was in 1916 that the then League of Nations awarded France the mandate over Lebanon and Syria. Four years later, partly at the instigation of the by-then long-established Lebanese Christian community, the Maronites in particular, France in-stituted the so-called “Greater Lebanon” as an independent state in 1920, thereby enabling the country to reclaim its natu-ral geographic border territories and its likewise natural gate-ways to the sea, namely: Tripoli to the north, Sidon and Tyre to the south, and Beirut in the middle. It was thanks especially to the Maronite Patriarch, Elias Boutros Hoayek, that Lebanon was pieced back together in this way. He went to Paris to the Peace Conference of 1919, as head of a Lebanese delegation, to support the cause of Lebanon being equipped with borders that would enable it to provide for its own self-sufficiency16.

16 Georges Corm, Le Liban contemporain. Histoire et société (La décou-verte, 2003 and 2005).

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After expelling the British-installed Hashemite ruler of Damas-cus in 1920, France adopted the five “old” provinces (vilayat) of the Ottoman Empire, namely: “Greater Lebanon”, the Ala-wite mountain state, the Druze mountain state, the State of Aleppo and the State of Damascus.

There was already a Representative Council in 1922, no dif-ferent in form to the current Lebanese Parliament, composed of 30 deputies elected on a sectarian-community basis. The French experiment of unifying the Syrian territories had failed by 1936, with only Lebanon surviving as a separate state en-tity. Thanks to Maronite Christian lobbying in Paris and Bei-rut, in 1941 France announced that Lebanon would be granted independence. This took place two years later, in 1943, but it was only in 1946 that French troops left the country.The year 1943 is important in the history of Lebanon, as it was not only the year of formal independence from France, but also the year of the National Pact that remains unwritten and yet is still in force today, pursuant to which the various key offices of state are distributed among the country’s ethno-religious communities.

Multiple external influences and proxy wars

Describing Beirut as the “Paris of the Middle East” of course gives an incomplete picture. The inherently mixed character that the city presents today already existed before the years of the French mandate. Beirut is Canaanite, Phoenician, Greek, Roman, Arab, Ottoman and French. In a few decades, poster-ity will also add “Saudi, Gulf-state, Iranian and Anglo-Saxon” to the reckoning. Even so, the impact that French colonial-ism had on the culture, society, politics and even the urbaniza-tion of Beirut and Lebanon is substantial and evident. Once in Beirut, the French found themselves having to contend with public disfavor, which they dealt with as follows: in order to


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rally consensus, they held meetings away from the corridors of power with strong local figures, leaders (zuama) who, as good Phoenicians, struck a deal to receive money in exchange for their support. As would be seen, after a century little has changed.Another card the French relied on, the repercussions of which would continue to make themselves felt to the present day, was the middle class, especially among the Christian com-munity, which was active in the business, trade, banking and professional sectors. It was these powerful Christian families, together with the Maronite Patriarchate, who would play a key political and diplomatic role in the birth – with the blessing of the French – of modern-day Lebanon, then known as “Greater Lebanon”.

After gaining independence in 1943, Lebanon was a country given over to total openness towards the West. Despite con-stant and strong pressures towards the Arabization – especially after 1948 – of a country that in part still today identifies as more Phoenician than strictly Arab, the Land of Cedars had become a tourist, cultural and business destination, not only for Arabs but also particularly for Westerners. It was its geo-graphic and cultural position between the East and the West which earned Lebanon various epithets, such as “the Pearl of the Orient” and “the Switzerland of the East” – as well as “the Paris of the Middle East”.The Lebanon we know today, from a geographic and institu-tional standpoint, but especially in terms of its current bor-ders, was strongly championed by the Christian community, which has always inhabited this strip of land and has managed to survive various conquests over the course of 1,600 years. From the outset, it sought to have a multicultural and multi-religious country, serving as a potential message and a symbol to other nations in the region – a country where freedom was guaranteed for all: Christians, Muslims, Druze, Jews, atheists


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and Buddhists. Today, this message is at serious risk of being stamped out. A wake-up call came already in the 1970s, and more precisely in 1975, the year in which the Lebanese civil war began. It started because a section of Lebanese society, namely the Maronite Christian community, perceived the mil-itary presence of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organi-zation – which sought to transform Lebanon into a second (or primary) base for the Palestinians from which to plan and launch offensives against the neighboring state of Israel – as a threat to Lebanon’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. It was then that the ideology of pan-Arabism played a major role, and another section of Lebanese society – more particularly the Sunni community – expressed solidarity for their Pales-tinian “brothers” under the banner of the common cause of “Arab Ummah”. Thus it was an external threat that turned into a civil war.After the Iranian revolution of 1979, the strengthening of the Shiite community and the emergence of Hezbollah on the one hand, and the ideological counteroffensive of the Sunni mon-archies (first and foremost that of Saudi Arabia) on the other, Lebanon underwent a radical cultural and ideological trans-formation from the early 1990s, and the face of a Middle East-ern country with a Western soul gradually changed to a face that was at times Arab, at times Persian, in aspect. To date, this has not been a threat to the territorial integrity and borders of the country, but it has certainly brought Lebanon much closer to the idea of Ummah – mostly through its negative implica-tions – than ever before.As an elderly Lebanese woman named Georgette would always say to me, “If you want to understand what is happening in the Middle East and try to figure out what will happen in the future, study the situation in Lebanon.”Of all the civilizations and cultures that have invaded but never dominated Lebanon, the Syrian under the Al-Assad banner has most influenced the socio-political reality of the country. In


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1976, a year after the start of the civil war, an Al-Assad-led Syria took advantage of the crisis to set foot on sovereign territory that Syria had never recognized as such but rather had always considered a natural extension of itself. This heavy presence, though withdrawn in 2005, in reality continues to influence the internal dynamics of Lebanon, as evidenced by the direct involvement of Hezbollah in the Syrian war, and, vice versa, by the hundreds of Lebanese who have joined the anti-Al-Assad front, particularly Sunnis of a Salafi-jihadist bent.In 1985, Lebanese philosopher and politician Ghassan Tuéni wrote of Une guerre pour les autres (“a war for others”), describ-ing the civil war that tore the Land of Cedars apart. Proud of embodying the intelligence of its natural ancestors the Phoe-nicians, the farsightedness of the Persians, the culture of the Hellenes, the astuteness of the Romans, the spirituality of the Christians, the pride of the Arabs, the dignity of the Ottomans, and the fervor of the Lebanese, Lebanon today – as a token of these civilizations – risks disappearing, and turning into a failed state surrounded by other failed states and by a regional instability that currently shows no signs of easing.

Federalism, divergent conceptions of the state and the weight of Hezbollah

One possible state model that has gained purchase in recent years in Lebanon, particularly since the start of the civil war, is that of a federal system similar to the Swiss cantons. In Leba-non, it is a taboo subject, but in reality the Lebanese know that it is a card that no politician has ever taken off the table. In fact, the Lebanese political system, in its own way, reflects that of the Swiss cantons, with the Tripoli area (in the north) being predominantly Sunni, the south being prevalently Shiite, Mount Lebanon having a Christian majority, and so on. It is a system that is also reflected at an institutional level, with the


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president required to be a Maronite Christian, the prime min-ister a Sunni Muslim, and the Speaker of the Parliament a Shia Muslim, and so on for the other institutional positions. What would differentiate Lebanon from Switzerland would be the religious element, which is no small matter in this part of the world, resulting in a federal system based not only on ethno-geographical considerations, but, above all, on religious ones. Currently, bearing in mind that the largest religious community in Lebanon is Shia, Hezbollah would have the largest canton, notwithstanding the fact that Lebanon’s “Party of God” has the capacity to subdue the entire Lebanese territory by force.In Lebanon, there is no shared conception of the state: Chris-tians have their own, Sunnis a different one, Shiites another and Druze yet one more. The Christians’ vision of the state is influenced by the historical relations they entertain with West-ern countries, while the Shiites look to Iran as a model, and the Sunnis to the monarchies of the Gulf and Saudi Arabia. This attitude – divisions within a single state – crystallized in 1990 with the signing of the Taif Agreement in Saudi Arabia, which, on paper, officially sanctioned the end of the Lebanese civil war. The Agreement would go on to be described by local and international observers as enshrining the “will to coexist”.With four million inhabitants in an area of 10,452 km2, Leba-non has 18 officially-recognized religious communities. Twen-ty-five years on from the Taif Agreement, which should have laid the foundations for peaceful coexistence, the country is still divided and unstable, with a weak and partially sovereign state. In keeping with the National Pact of 1943, the Taif Agree-ment, sponsored by Saudi Arabia with the blessing of the US, maintained the religious-based allocation of the three highest offices of state, but actually also transferred powers from the president to the prime minister: a symbolic shift, which con-firmed Lebanon’s move away from a Western sphere of influ-ence to one that was Sunni-Arab on one hand, and Iranian on the other. The parliament also underwent changes, with the


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number of deputies increased to 128: 64 Christians and 64 Muslims. However, one fundamental aspect of the Agreement rejected by the Christian community was the Arab image and identity that it accorded Lebanon, given that Lebanese Chris-tians have always refused to be identified as Arabs. The Taif Agreement also provided for the disarmament of all militias involved in the Lebanese civil war, with the exception of Hez-bollah, seen as a “resistance force to the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon”. The need for this resistance should, in the-ory, have disappeared in 2000, when Israel withdrew its troops from southern Lebanon. Yet Hezbollah maintains, even to this day, that the Jewish state continues to occupy the Shebaa Farms, a strip of land that ostensibly belongs to Lebanon, but which serves to legitimize Hezbollah’s armaments and bolster the ideology of “resistance against the Jewish enemy”.The clout carried by Hezbollah in Lebanon places it not so much in a position to have a different conception of the state but to act as if it were itself the Lebanese State, deciding when the country is at peace or at war, and in which countries to intervene militarily. And indeed, for all practical purposes Hezbollah is acting as an international force capable of con-ducting regional missions, Syria being a paramount example in this regard. Its position has been strengthened by the presi-dential vacuum that has endured since May 2014. A state with-out a president, and with more than 500,000 Palestinians and a million Syrian refugees to manage, is now threatened by its worst crisis since 1975.

The problem of Israel, and Lebanon as hostage to the region

Theoretically, Lebanon, as well as the other so-called “Arab” states, has been at war with the Jewish state since the latter’s proclamation of independence in 1948. Israelis cannot enter


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Lebanon, nor can foreigners who have an Israeli stamp on their passport. Furthermore, Lebanese citizens cannot entertain any form of relationship with Israelis anywhere in the world. If they were to do so, even with a simple greeting, they would risk being imprisoned on charges of “spying for the enemy”. This stance has toughened in recent decades with the strength-ening of Hezbollah’s position in Lebanon. However, Lebanon can be considered the least anti-Israeli Arab country, although it would be among the last of the Arab countries to sign a peace deal with Israel, since that would signal the death of the strongest militia-party in Lebanon today: Hezbollah. This paradox accurately reflects the reality of Lebanon as a coun-try that is both Eastern and Western, Christian and Muslim, modern and feudal, democratic and illiberal, as well as toler-ant and aggressive – not one Lebanon, but many Lebanons. A Lebanon that one could assume would want peace with Israel, and another that judging by appearances and words, does not.Lebanese society is a fascinating mix of religions, civilizations and cultures, but rarely have the Lebanese come together as a united front and a single state, coexisting harmoniously. The in-adequacy of the state has led the various ethno-religious groups in the country to be loyal to their own religion or leaders rather than to the state and its laws. Behind these groups, there often – or perhaps always – lies support from abroad. Une guerre pour les autres, a war for others, as Tuéni reminded us.The Lebanon of those Lebanese who believe in the existence and historical values of the country, and who firmly believe in a democratic system and its territorial area of 10,452 km2, has no further need of “martyrs”. Much of its talent has emigrated and has upheld the country’s reputation abroad. But today, Lebanon needs that talent back in the country, to strength-en the foundations of a state that, throughout the years, and despite the various ups and downs, has never collapsed. The alternative is that, in the coming decades, and with the dan-gerous social changes underway due in part to fresh waves of


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displaced people, the Land of Cedars may be engulfed by the sea of utopias that surround it and by the geopolitical upheav-als that threaten its identity and natural borders.

Khalil Gibran17 grasped this a century ago, when he wrote:You have your Lebanon and I have my Lebanon. You have your Lebanon and its dilemma. I have my Lebanon and its beauty. Your Lebanon is an arena for men from the West and men from the East.My Lebanon is a flock of birds fluttering in the early morning as shepherds lead their sheep into the meadow and rising in the even-ing as farmers return from their fields and vineyards.You have your Lebanon and its people. I have my Lebanon and its people. […]Yours […] are brave, the liberators and the reformers, but only in their own area. But they are cowards, always led backwards by the Europeans. They are those who croak like frogs boasting that they have rid themselves of their ancient, tyrannical enemy, but the truth of the matter is that this tyrannical enemy still hides within their own souls. […]Let me tell you who are the children of my Lebanon.They are farmers who would turn the fallow field into garden and grove.They are the shepherds who lead their flocks through the valleys […]They are the builders, the potters, the weavers and the bell-casters. […][T]hey are the lamps that cannot be snuffed [out] by the wind and the salt which remains unspoiled through the ages. […]

17 M. L. Wolf, A. R. Ferris, and A. D. Sherfan, The Treasured Writings of Kahlil Gibran (Castle Books, 2013)


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What will remain of your Lebanon after a century? Tell me! Except bragging, lying and stupidity? […]Do you believe life will accept a patched garment for a dress?[…]


XI. The ties that bind: an American perspective

on Middle Eastern borders

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Winston Churchill, by dint of his American mother Jennie, always had America’s number. As he grandly (supposedly) in-toned, “America will do the right thing… but only after ex-hausting every other possibility.” Even if apocryphal, Church-ill’s undoubted understanding of his long-time American ally nicely captures the country’s maddening inability to analyti-cally avoid major crises, as well as its admirable pragmatism once within them. Regarding the future of the Middle East, and the critical borders question increasingly at the heart of its prospects, one can only hope that Churchill’s wisdom contin-ues to hold true.

For while the United States had little to do with the pernicious and arbitrary borders drawn in the region by the British and French Empires (embodied in the noxious Sykes-Picot Agree-ment of 1916), it has unwittingly and religiously upheld them ever since, even though they themselves are a major reason the region has been convulsed by almost constant tumult. How-ever, the dire results emanating from the ashes of the Arab Spring are now all around: the rise of ISIS, the carnage in Syria and its attendant (almost biblical) refugee crisis, the chaos in Libya. The Middle East is in such dire straits that American pragmatism seems to be kicking in; to anyone’s eyes, what Washington sees when contemplating the region is simply not working.

American schools of thought and the Middle East

In terms of the three primary ideologies vying for control of American foreign policy, the Obama years have been a very odd time. While utopian thinking - Wilsonian for the Demo-crats and neoconservative for the Republicans - has remained dominant in both major political parties, the White House has been run by a man who espouses a form of realism, the minor-

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ity point of view for both Democrats and the GOP. As such, for all that Barack Obama is a historically consequential president - both due to his healthcare reforms in domestic affairs and his “pivot to Asia” in foreign policy - it is an open question as to whether the politicians who follow him to the White House will continue to pursue his broad global policies.

Like most American realists, the President has a great fear of instability, a factor that naturally leads to a very conservative and cautious approach to border changes. After failure upon failure in the Middle East - in Iraq the Americans went all-in, in Libya they led from behind, and in Syria they did precious little - the general realist inclination is to do as little as pos-sible in the quagmire that is the region, pivot to Asia, and al-low for an organic and sustainable balance of power to emerge over time. This sort of arrangement will limit America’s role to being that of an off-shore balancer, only called upon to inter-vene in the region if the five major local powers (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, Turkey and Israel) are unable to generally keep order there.

Such realist thinking lies behind one of the administration’s signature foreign policy achievements: the just-concluded nu-clear arms deal with Iran. Beyond the specifics of the accord, the Obama White House sees the agreement as a way to bring the Islamic Republic in from the cold, to deal with it as a status quo power rather than a revolutionary one. If, over time, this can be achieved, it allows the US to realize its desired pivot to Asia, which is (rightly) seen as the future source of both most of the world’s global growth, and a good deal of its future po-litical risk.

The problem with this elegant theory is that (given the most optimistic scenario) it will take quite some time for Iran to be reintegrated into the global order, and that it is more than an open question - especially given the Syrian debacle where, far

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from working together to preserve stability, regional rivals Sau-di Arabia and Iran are engaged in a proxy war - as to whether the five local powers are able and willing to uphold such an or-der. At present, they certainly are not. If this remains the case, the whole lovely strategic theory goes straight out the window.

And we come back to the Churchill quote that began my argu-ment. For realists, more than the other schools of thought, are focused on what practically works on the ground. In the case of the Middle East, that means separating genuine functional countries of which there are precious few (Israel, Iran, Tur-key), capable of acting decisively, and the hapless rest, whose borders doom them to incoherence and chaos as they are not politically representative of the basic unit of politics, often ethno-religious, on the ground.

But if states like Iraq certainly do not control their claimed ter-ritory, sub-units like the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) do, can act decisively, and are broadly politically representa-tive of the territory they control. We are not too far from a place - and I for one am already there - where it is openly admitted that the Middle East will never see stability until its borders are changed to correspond to organic political reali-ties long on the ground, and that capable (and pro-American) sub-state actors like the Kurds ought to be rewarded with state-hood, being brought into the community of nations in order for them to play a stabilizing role in the region.

American Wilsonians, by contrast, are not burdened by any residual loyalty to state boundaries, as are the majority of more traditional realists. They believe in a world where such constructs matter less and less, as international forces such as globalization wear away at the sinews of states everywhere. Further, with their belief in international law and the glob-al community’s responsibility to protect local citizens from the depredations of cruel overlords, Wilsonians start from an

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intellectual position of being open to the impermanence of boundaries.

Syria is a case in point. Democratic frontrunner (and garden variety Wilsonian) Hillary Clinton has forthrightly said that while serving as Secretary of State she pushed Obama to enact no-fly zones on the Syrian-Turkish border, as a way to deal with the monumental refugee crisis occurring in country. Obviously, this is de facto a direct challenge to the Assad regime’s de jure control over the whole of Syrian territory. Given the murderous nature of his government, and in order to stop the humanitar-ian crisis there, American Wilsonians could de facto care less for the niceties of Syria’s theoretical control of its borders.

But here the Wilsonian theory of the region runs out of gas. Chastened by the failure of the much-favored Arab Spring (and still not beginning to understand why it all went so wrong), and buffeted by crises in the region from Libya to Yemen, Wil-sonians are much more focused on dealing with the symptoms of the disease of instability in the Middle East (humanitarian crises, trying to remove the human rights violator Assad from power, endeavoring to halt the advance of the even more bar-baric ISIS) rather than get at the root cause: borders which do not represent the organic ethno-religious units of politics on the ground, thus dooming states there to perpetual repression, chronic instability, or both. As time passes, Wilsonians may well be open to offer regarding boundary changes in the Mid-dle East, but given their focus on the immediate crises at hand and stanching the humanitarian calamities in the region, they cannot be looked upon to actively take the lead in supporting such a radical overhaul.

Nor do the neoconservatives worry much about root causes of the problems of the Middle East. They find themselves in a very awkward intellectual position at present. Still smarting from the obvious, terrible debacle that was American inter-


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vention in Iraq (which with the evisceration of Saddam led directly to Iran becoming the dominant power in the Persian Gulf and indirectly led to the rise of ISIS), American neocons are loath to go down that road again. On the other hand, the Obama White House’s global retrenchment has enraged them, as it is antithetical to their creed’s basic understanding of the imperative of America taking the lead in almost all global situ-ations. This conundrum places them squarely in an intellec-tual no-man’s land, ever calling for more action and greater involvement around the world, without ever quite specifying how to do so.

Further, given their democracy-above-all philosophy, there are precious few “good guys” to work with in the region, beyond Israel.

Yet it is here that one can see an intellectual opening for border changes in the region. For the Kurds are an exception. They are a dream come true for the neocons: broadly democratic and capitalistic, relatively less corrupt and more functional than their neighborhood, pro-American and about the only boots on the ground in both Iraq and Syria truly taking the fight to ISIS. The plight of the Kurds becomes the thin end of the boundary wedge for the neocons. Over time, should a think-ing neocon like Senator Marco Rubio become president, look for closer operational ties between the US and the Kurds over fighting ISIS leading to the question of Kurdish independence bubbling to the fore. If this comes to pass, the broader US ac-ceptance of boundary changes in the Middle East will dramati-cally come onto the foreign policy agenda.

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Conclusion: whatever works

In each case, and largely without noticing it, all three ma-jor schools of thought in American foreign policy are drift-ing towards a sea-change from their traditional, nonsensical view that boundaries in the Middle East should never shift. For their own very different reasons - the realists see that the current boundaries are the root cause of regional instability, the Wilsonians don’t mind dismembering Syria to lessen the humanitarian crisis there, and the neocons are drawing ever closer to the worthy and democratic Iraqi Kurds - all three are beginning to question the received and long-held wisdom that the region’s boundaries are sacrosanct.

We must end as we began, with Churchill’s uncanny under-standing of his American cousins. Above all else, boundary changes in the Middle East will soon be on the American foreign policy agenda for the fact that - as all three schools of thought implicitly acknowledge - championing artificial boundaries simply hasn’t worked. And deep in the American psyche, doing whatever works remains an essential part of the country’s thinking, no matter how many times we have been wrong.


XII. Short Biographies

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Faisal J. Abbas is a renowned columnist and speaker on inter-national Arab affairs. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Al Arabiya News Channel’s English service and a blogger with the Huff-ington Post since 2008.

Francesca Borri is a freelance journalist specialized in Middle Eastern affairs who is currently covering the war in Syria.

Doruk Ergun is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies in Istanbul.

John C. Hulsman is President and Co-Founder of John C. Hulsman Enterprises and a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Lorenzo Kamel is a historian of the Middle East at Bologna University and a Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Cent-er for Middle Eastern Studies.

Azzurra Meringolo is Editor-in-Chief of AffarInternazionali (Istituto Affari Internazionali) and Scientific Coordinator of the Arab Media Report.

Nicola Pedde is Director of the Institute for Global Studies and Director of Research on the Middle East at the Military Center for Strategic Studies.

Bernard E. Selwan Khoury is Director of the Center for Ori-ental Strategic Monitoring (COSMO) in Rome and lecturer of Arab-Islamic studies.

Salim Tamani is Head of Public Relations and Media at Djezzy and former Editor-in-Chief of Liberté in Algeria.

Mattia Toaldo is a Policy Fellow for the Middle East and North Africa Program at the European Council on Foreign Relations in London.

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