Lisa Watanabe

Egypt One Year after Morsi’s Ouster

With the election of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as Egypt’s new president, Egypt’s transition looks in danger of generating a political order ominously reminiscent of the Mubarak era. The military still holds considerable political sway and autonomy. Moreover, the interim authorities have been engaged in the violent suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters, generating counter-attacks by what appears to be the Islamist opposition. The authorities have responded with repressive measures that risk causing further violence and have already eroded many of the democratic gains of the 2011 revolution.

Implications for a Potential Seventh Critical Turning Point — 2011–15

This concluding chapter has two tasks. First, we survey the range of potential factors that are likely to create the conditions for a potential seventh critical turning point in the Middle East. These range from fragile and failing state implosion; violent extremism and the continued export of strategic dysfunctionality; and Palestinian-Israeli generated tensions. Second, we reflect on the nature of current approaches to managing change in the region — noting four different and competing approaches, each of which is supported by a narrative that purports to identify and address underlying structural and systemic causation in the region. The Sixth Crisis: Iran, Israel and the Rumours of War by Dana H. Allin and Steve Simons constitutes a recent attempt by imaginative scholars to outline the parameters of the next major crisis — identified as the juncture created by Iran’s nuclear programme, the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate and the state of US-Israeli relations.1 We argue that to be able to speculate on the catastrophic event or series of crises which might constitute such a future critical turning point has little utility for policymakers, if we draw the wrong conclusions as to its causes. Under such circumstances policy responses will be driven by existing narratives that misidentify a set of underlying tensions and cleavages that the responses then attempt to address. As a result the policy responses will have limited utility, and, worse, will likely sow the seeds for yet another critical turning point.

A New Strategic Context in the Middle East

The next turning point started in the late 1980s and matured at the turn of the 1990s. Contrary to previous experience, a cluster of systemic shocks — some quite tragic — occurring between 1987 and 1991 gave rise to the perception of the next turning point, a turning point which had the potential to bring about some measure of positive change in the region. These crucial events included the first Intifada in the Palestinian territories that began in 1987, the end of the Iraq-Iran war in 1988, the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, the First Gulf War subsequent to the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq in 1990 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The Arab Defeat

The first critical turning point brought into existence a number of states that altered traditional authority structures. The elites that came to power within these newly created territorial entities drew upon Arab nationalism as a means of legitimizing their power and constructing national identities within a state-centred system. During the interwar years, a new generation of elite emerged, who stressed the need for greater unity among Arabs and promoted Pan-Arabism as a means of achieving this. The second critical turning point is constituted by the events of 1948 and the first Arab-Israeli conflict. This juncture would have long-lasting effects both within the Middle East and beyond. The severe defeat of Arab militaries by Israeli troops in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War represented a real setback for the Arab states involved (Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq). At the end of the war, only 21 per cent of the Palestinian territories allotted by the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan remained outside Israeli control. Egypt and Jordan merely managed to capture the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, respectively. These territorial transfers were accompanied by a Palestinian exodus and the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. The defeat dealt a serious blow to Arab countries, measured in terms of their humiliation, credibility and prestige, which translated into popular dissatisfaction with elites of the vanquished states, especially those incumbent in Syria, Egypt and Jordan.

The Iranian Revolution and its Aftershock

The Iranian Revolution sent shock waves through the region. The establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran implied that an alternative to a secular, liberal-democratic Western model could be brought into existence. It led to an increase in the popularity of, and spurred on, radical religious groups, which opposed both conservative and secular regimes. It also made these very regimes acutely conscious that state-sponsored revolutionary ideologies could spill over from one state to the next, particularly since Iran was eager to export the revolution to other countries. The seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, a few months later, reinforced this apprehension. It was the first time the religious and political legitimacy of established authorities was so openly questioned. Confronted with such serious challenges to the maintenance of political order and the status quo, many governments had no choice but to change direction. The question was whether they should liberalize further or, on the contrary, adopt more conservative policies. States that were determined to preserve domestic and regional stability opted for the second strategy — reinforced conservatism.

The Six-Day War and its Consequences

The 1948 defeat in the Arab-Israeli war, the ambiguous armistice agreements that followed and the growing belief in the need for collective Arab actions that characterized the second critical turning point created the conditions for the third critical turning point, which was highlighted by the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. The Six-Day War, as it is also known, which involved Israel, Egypt, Syria and Jordan, brought many significant changes to the region and helped to sow the seeds for the next and fourth critical turning point. The war resulted from a combination of factors, including increased tensions between Israel, Egypt and Syria, and internal problems within the Jewish state, evidenced by the anxiety of elites, demographic conditions and economic strains. The key motives behind it are, however, still debated among historians. The war constituted another humiliating moment for Arab countries. In one day, the Israelis had destroyed the whole Egyptian air force. Five days later, they occupied the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.1 Again, these military actions were accompanied by huge movements of refugees, which would be a source of enormous political difficulties in the future.

September 11 and After

On 11 September 2001, extremists seized control of passenger jets leaving Boston, Newark, New Jersey and Washington. Two of these planes were crashed into the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center. Another was flown into the Pentagon in Washington and the fourth, thought to have been intended to target the US Capitol or the White House, crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.1 The reactions to these events and the corresponding policy changes that they prompted created a sixth critical turning point. The first important consequence was the reversal of US foreign policy. The new approach resulted in, among other things, the attack on Afghanistan in 2001 (as part of the Global War on Terror), which was carried out with key allies, and the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (supposedly, as part of the fight against the ‘axis of evil’). This strategy placed an enormous strain on US relations with many Middle Eastern countries, including close strategic partners, and gave the impression of a greater divide between the West and the Muslim world. In addition, it unsettled the regional order, raising anxiety among rulers who feared the destabilization of the region. Most governments within the Middle East were uncomfortable with the US military intervention in their region. This apprehension explains the reluctance of many countries in the region to support the build up to the Iraq war (which is not to say that they supported Saddam Hussein’s regime).

The Historical Legacy — The Rise and Fall of the Golden Era

In this chapter, we identify and survey the factors that contributed to the rise of the Arab-Islamic Empire and its decline. The chapter begins by discussing the leading explanations for this rise and decline, in particular those that highlight dynamics internal to the region as well as those that underline external factors. Key internal and external factors contributing to the rise of the Arab-Islamic Empire are outlined by drawing on a range of Arabic philosophical and scientific texts, as well as Arab-Islamic historical analyses, such as those of Ibn Khaldun, Chapra, Al-Rodhan and others.1 The chapter then considers the nature of the retrenchment itself. It also examines the range of explanations that historians have offered to account for the decline. A brief overview of the major critical turning points in the pre-twentieth-century history of the Middle East is then discussed. These critical turning points, often brought to the surface by an event or a series of events, reflect broad political, economic, social and cultural processes. Their outcomes include a blow to the collective psyche, weakening and fragmentation of the region, and they prompt reactionary responses and ideologies. We pay particular attention to both internal and external factors contributing to these junctures and their consequences. We aim to demonstrate that together these critical turning points contributed to an acute sense of vulnerability, humiliation, frustration and defeat and successive weakening of the region, culminating in the colonization of a significant part of the Arab-Islamic Empire by European powers eager to fuel their industrialization and expand their influence.

Double Diplomacy and Betrayal

In the previous chapter, we examined pre-twentieth-century critical turning points in the Middle East, the last occurring as a result of European colonialism in the western lands of the Arab-Islamic Empire and internal rivalry within the Ottoman Empire. The outbreak of the First World War ultimately sealed the fate of the last Arab-Islamic Empire. Having been rebuffed by Britain, France and Russia, the Ottomans allied with Germany.1 While this proved initially to advance their interests through territorial gains, attacks orchestrated by the British and the Arab Revolt of 1916–18 eventually led to their defeat and the loss of all European territories. The ultimate outcome was the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire in 1922. The defeat of the Ottomans represented the first critical turning point of the twentieth century. During the First World War, two events occurred that would have important repercussions for the future. The first was the false promises made by the British at the time of the Arab Revolt. Prior to the uprising, the British and Arab nationalists, particularly Sharif (meaning descendant of the Prophet Muhammad) Hussein Ibn Ali, appointed Amir of Mecca by Sultan Abdul Hamid II in 1908, had come to an agreement in the McMahon-Hussein correspondence that took place between 1915–16 by which the British would support the creation of an Arab kingdom (including Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and the Hijaz) in return for the Arab participation in the war.2