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Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East, by Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, editors
12. The Other Arab Nationalism
Syrian/Arab Populism in Its Historical and International Contexts
James L. Gelvin
On 20 July 1920, six days after the initial French ultimatum to the Arab government of Amir Faysal and four days before French troops entered Damascus to begin their quarter-century occupation, insurrection erupted in the Syrian capital. Throughout the city, petit-bourgeois merchants, neighborhood toughs, unemployed youths, refugees from the Biqa' Valley, and recently demobilized soldiers from the regular Arab army took to the streets, while former members of the prorogued Syrian General Congress, 'ulama, and political agitators denounced the government which had acceded to French demands from minbars and street corners. Popular leaders raised sanjaqs, distributed leaflets that warned of the conspiracies threatening the nation, and broadcast reports of atrocities committed by French soldiers stationed to the west. In the quarters of Shaghur and the Maydan, where less than two weeks before residents had disarmed and beaten military policemen who had attempted to enforce the government's despised conscription policy, the same residents now attacked a contingent of troops loyal to the "traitorous" (kha'in) amir who was believed to be collaborating with the enemies of the nation.
When the Arab government tried to retake the streets, fighting broke out between regular army units loyal to the amir and the population. One group of insurrectionists, shouting anti-Faysal slogans, attacked the royal palace (on the roof of which the amir, anticipating rebellion, had placed machine guns) and the Damascus Citadel where arms and ammunition were stored and where, the rebels assumed, the government had interned political prisoners. According to British estimates, over one hundred Damascenes died in the clashes; Faysal himself later estimated one hundred and twenty killed and two hundred injured. During a similar revolt that broke out a day later in Aleppo, an explosion at an arms depot claimed between five and six hundred casualties.
On the afternoon of 21 July, popular leaders toured the quarters of Damascus encouraging residents to assemble at Baramki Station to await transportation west to Khan Maysalun, where General Yusuf al-'Azma was organizing a stand against the invading French. At Baramki, Shaykh Kamal al-Khatib led evening prayers and, in anticipation of the coming battle, prayers for the dead. Of the seventeen hundred volunteers from one Damascus neighborhood, only seven hundred carried weapons. Many of the volunteers who had earlier resisted conscription into the army of the Arab government now departed for the front, anticipating heroic death in "al-jihad al-watani."
Just five months after the events described above, Stephen P. Duggan of the Institute of International Education delivered an address to the American Historical Association in which he outlined the evolution of nationalism in Syria from the late nineteenth century through the first months of French occupation. 4 Duggan's lecture was structured in the form of what Hayden White and Northrop Frye have described as the "pre-generic plot-structure" of tragedy. 5 He thus began by tracing the auspicious origins and early promise of Arab nationalism (the nineteenth-century Arab literary renaissance, the appeal of "the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity under a national and representative government"), pursued his narrative through false hopes (the Syrian-Arab Congress of 1913, the Arab Revolt, the Anglo-French Declaration of November 1918, the King-Crane Commission) and trials (repression by the Committee of Union and Progress, the defensive politicization of the movement through secret societies, the seferberlik [the suffering endured by Syrians during the Balkan Wars] and World War I famine, the passion of the Syrian martyrs), and concluded by recounting betrayal and, ultimately, disaster (the wartime agreements, Zionism and the Balfour Declaration, British abandonment and French occupation). Duggan failed to mention the July insurrections in his remarks: since every plot-structure circumscribes and defines the array of options available to the historian--from the questions to be investigated to the selection and organization of data--Duggan could only regard the July events, if he regarded them at all, as irrelevant or anomalous. Insurrectionists who had claimed the title "thuwwar" (revolutionaries) subsequently became "extremists," or "the mob" to the infrequent historian who did include them in his account.
The significance of Duggan's address does not lie in its originality; indeed, it is noteworthy precisely because it is one of the earliest examples of the predominant strategy that has been used to emplot the story of Arab nationalism from the nahda through the mandate period. Not only did Duggan's colleagues--historians and advocates of "the Arab cause" such as T. E. Lawrence, John de Vere Loder, Hans Kohn, Richard Coke, Elizabeth P. MacCallum, and George Antonius--also situate their accounts within the selfsame narrative structure, but after more than seventy years many contemporary historians of Arab nationalism continue to do so as well. As a result the various assumptions and inferences derived from the application of this structure--including the tendency for historians to treat the history of Arab nationalism as "intellectual" history and to look to indigenous elites as the sole originators, carriers, and disseminators of nationalism--are shared by several generations of historians.
Although the findings of intellectual historians, when applied with circumspection, have contributed to the understanding of Arab nationalist ideologies, the attempt to place Arab nationalism solely within the domain of elite politics is essentially ill-conceived. While the role played by elites in the nationalist movement cannot be dismissed, it was, notwithstanding the formidable powers attributed to "charisma" and to the efficacy of vertical mobilization, far from comprehensive. Because the capacity of nationalist elites to define and dominate the political field was ultimately circumscribed by the ability of their ideas to articulate the aspirations of the nonelite majority, histories that place nationalist politics solely within the domain of elites fail because they present only one moment of the nationalist dialectic. They omit the other moment, the domain of popular politics, the manifold attributes of which cannot entirely be ascribed to elite designs. The political movements that took place within this domain, such as those represented by the July insurrectionists, their predecessors and successors, are the subject of this essay.
During the nineteenth century, two interconnected phenomena induced far-reaching economic, political, and social changes within the Ottoman Empire. First, the accelerating rate of integration of the region into the periphery of the capitalist world system hastened, albeit unevenly, the integration of local marketplace economies into a broader market-economy. 6 The salience of capitalist relations and concomitant institutions thus increased for many inhabitants of the empire who now produced crops destined for regional and international markets, competed with workers overseas, sold their labor, loaned or borrowed money at usurious rates, and participated as middlemen and factors in foreign trade. 7 The expansion of capitalist relations was facilitated by the second phenomenon, the attempts made by the Ottoman government throughout the century to strengthen and rationalize central control. While the regulations promulgated in Istanbul often had desultory and even antithetic results when applied in the provinces, over the course of the late nine teenth and early twentieth centuries they enabled government on all levels to expand substantially its role in society and its control over the citizenry. Furthermore, because government policies prompted the construction of institutions that were congruent with those of Europe, they abetted the further penetration of European capital and thus the diffusion of capitalist relations throughout the empire.
The transformation of Ottoman society, particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century, affected both the role and composition of local economic and political elites. In coastal cities such as Beirut, for example, the size and economic power of the so-called Christian bourgeoisie swelled as European governments extorted favorable terms for trade and special privileges for their clients from the Ottoman government. In Damascus, Aleppo, and other cities of Syria, the status and prerogatives of those families that both derived their wealth from landed investment and fostered good relations with the central Ottoman administration in Istanbul--the so-called land-owning, bureaucratic elite--also expanded, eclipsing in status and prerogatives those families that lacked one asset or the other. Concurrently, a new social category, a "middle strata," emerged, comprised of the skilled professionals, belletrists, civil servants, and trained military officers whose skills were both made possible by and were necessary for the continued expansion of market relations and administrative apparatus.
According to most historical accounts, one or more of the above categories of elites, inspired by the appeal of "the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity," by elective ties of affinity derived from common religious affiliation, education, or experience that bonded them to their European counterparts, or by an instinctive aversion to alien (Turkish, European) control, acted as the progenitor(s) of Arab nationalism, the literary/cultural revival that preceded it, or both. However, while it is unarguable that many from these social categories did align themselves with varieties of nationalism, explanations based solely on willful choice or instinctive anti-imperialism do not provide sufficient grounds for understanding why this should be so. These accounts fail to appreciate that nationalism is not fare to be selected or rejected from an ideological menu; rather, nationalism represents, in the words of Benedict Anderson, a comprehensive "cultural system," a specific framework for the organization of social relations and social reproduction, and for the diffusion and allocation of power.
Because each of the above-cited elite groupings originated as the result of the expansion of peripheral capitalism and the attempt to introduce uniform institutions of governance throughout the Ottoman Empire, the specific categories and constellation of categories used by individuals within these groupings to organize their world and order their society naturally cohered with or duplicated those enjoined by the dominant culture within the métropole. These categories "sanctioned" a multiplicity of analogous ideologies--Ottomanism, Arabism, Phoenicianism, etc.--the survival and propagation of which depended on factors external to the ideologies themselves (the degree to which the ideology was institutionalized, the resources available to those who promoted the ideology, and the political environment in which competing ideologies were situated). As a result, the fundamental ideological divide within Middle Eastern society during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not separate Ottomanists from Arabists; rather, the fundamental ideological divide separated Ottomanists, Arabists, and their ilk from the remainder of society, whose transformation and integration had been less thoroughly accomplished or whose encounter with the transformation was less agreeable.
Many of the nationalist elites that were affiliated with the Arab government of Amir Faysal during the immediate post-Ottoman period themselves recognized the centrality of this cleavage. Not only did they, through discourse and ritual activity, 10 divide the Syrian population between those fit to rule (a select group of notables and a self-identified grouping drawn from the middle strata, the so-called "men of culture" [mutanawwirun]) and the vast majority of the population that was fit only to be ruled, but the descriptions of the Syrian future that they proffered reflected their Comteanism and technocratic pragmatism:
| [Looking into the future,] I saw . . . the people now turning their attention to the founding of schools and colleges until no village remained without an excellent primary school. I saw prosperity spreading throughout the country and railroads connecting populous villages and farms. I saw farmers using the most modern agricultural techniques, extensive trade, and flourishing industry. Damascus appeared to me to be the most advanced of cities in terms of its construction. Its streets and lanes were paved with asphalt and the Barada River was like the Seine, traversing the city from east to west. On its banks was a corniche on which towering buildings stood. I saw Aleppo: its water, brought by canals from the Euphrates, sustained its gardens and parks and anointed its waterless desert. . . . Factories were founded throughout the kingdom so that the country had no need for manufactured goods from the West, but instead exported its products to China, India, and Africa. Its people grew rich, its power increased, and it moved to the forefront of advanced nations. 11 |
In a similar vein, during the same period al-'Asima, the official journal of the Faysali government, and al-Kawkab, a publication initially financed by the British government to support the Arab Revolt by identifying it with Islamic reformist ideals, ran articles urging Syrian women to study and emulate their more liberated counterparts in the West. "Today, women of the East must immerse themselves in the physical and moral sciences so that they might traverse the field of life through which the pageant of enlightened nations, guided by the light of knowledge, have paraded." 12 But beneath the calls for Syrian women to devote themselves to culture and the arts, to undertake acts of charity, and to renounce frivolity and frippery in order to devote themselves to the nation ("Damascene women possess gold jewelry whose value exceeds a million lira. . . . If all this money were collected and placed in a savings account, it could be used to establish an academy" 13 was the attempt to create a perfect facsimile of the two spheres--a public sphere dominated by men and the sphere of cultured domestic femininity--that defined idealized gender roles among the nonfeminist European bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century:
| If woman is not held back, she would be a treasure-house of knowledge and a depository of the humanities and art. Only she does not want the divine aptitude that would prepare her to be an engineer or lawyer or khatiba or journalist, but she wishes that it make her a mother and mistress of the house and nursemaid to her infants and children. Those who attempt to fill her head with various sciences and arts on the contrary fill the void in her thoughts with matters which separate her from what was created for her sake and drive her away from the execution of her natural functions. 14 |
The attitudes cited above cohere with a host of others, including an advocacy of free market economics, the celebration of "self-made men" ('isamiyyun), denunciations of worker indolence and amusements ("if a city had no coffeehouses, then the idle would focus their attention on finding work" 15 pronounced daily in speeches and disseminated through print by those nationalist elites allied with the Arab government of Amir Faysal. Because they infused their discourse with appeals to such recondite concepts as "progress" and "secularism" ("Religion belongs to God, the nation to all"), and because of the narrow range of interests their discourse represented, their ideology appeared not only to be "alien" and imitative, it also lacked resonance for nonelites more attuned to the discourse emanating from their more "authentic" adversaries within the nationalist tendency. Thus, for example, while for the mutanawwirun Europeanized women represented an image of a "civilized" Syria, for much of the remainder of the population they represented imported ideas, hauteur, and sycophancy to the very European powers that planned to subject Syria to division and foreign rule. As a result, women in Western dress were so frequently attacked on the streets of Damascus that authorities had to issue public statements expressly condemning the assaults. Likewise, when the Syrian General Congress attempted to extend the franchise to women and schooling to girls, the protests of popular leaders effectively immobilized the congress up until a week before the French occupation of inland Syria. Thus for much of the population of Syria, the adoption and reification of European categories of gender by nationalist intellectuals symbolically placed these intellectuals on a par with those French soldiers who were the tangible representatives of imperialism's violation of the unity and integrity of the umma. 16
The elites were not, of course, the only strata to be affected by the transformation of Ottoman society. Over the course of the nineteenth century, particularly after the onset of the Great Depression of 1873, nonelites within the empire who increasingly found themselves at the mercy of market and state vented their rage by undertaking acts of resistance that ranged from draft evasion and emigration to open rebellion. Strikes for higher wages were common among Damascene journeymen weavers who were threatened not only by a decline in real wages but also by the weakening of guilds and guild-sponsored welfare programs, proletarianization, and unemployment or employment in sweatshops. In the Hawran, the grain-producing region of Syria south of Damascus, the decade of the 1890s brought increased taxation and more efficient tax collection, a severely depressed international market for wheat, and the restructuring of land tenure and the renegotiation of cultivation rights. As a result peasants abandoned their harvests, withheld taxes, and even fought pitched battles with Ottoman troops that had been deployed into the region to quell the disturbances--in one case inflicting more than six hundred casualties. 17
Strikes, tax revolts, and the wholesale abandonment of villages are examples of what Charles Tilly calls "reactive collective actions." Undertaken to defend a traditional social order or moral economy, these acts of resistance lack both the political program and organizational structure that would enable participants to maintain large-scale, long-term mobilization. 18 But the very factors that provoked the reactive collective actions in Syria also presaged the appearance of conditions necessary for programmatic and complex mobilization. The expanding influence of the "merchants and statemakers" and the incipient diffusion of the policies with which they were associated contributed to the breakdown of the parochialism and verticality that, according to most historians, had previously characterized the predominant pattern of political and social relations in the Middle East. Simultaneously, the weakening and/or dissolution of customary bonds of patronage and consanguinity, brought about by, for example, increased physical mobility and the aforementioned status revolution, facilitated the emergence among Syrians of horizontal and associational ties that, particu larly during periods of crisis, came to rival, subsume, and even replace the narrower vertical ties that were incompatible with the transformed social and economic landscape. 19
Urban areas in which vertical ties of patronage were particularly weak or absent as a result of immigration and/or rapid growth often served as epicenters for sustained political mobilization. For example, because the Maydan quarter of Damascus increasingly assumed the role of entrepôt for grain and immigrants from the Hawran during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the quarter contained a large population of newcomers and transients whose connections with the rural hinterland from which they came frequently superseded those within their new urban environment. As a result, during the months preceding the French invasion of inland Syria, Maydanis provided reliable, and often enthusiastic, support for organizations that pioneered unmediated and horizontal forms of political mobilization. In addition, Maydani volunteers, trained and equipped in Damascus, joined guerrilla bands, such as the Druze-led units operating in the areas of Rashaya and Hasbaya and a squadron of cavalry led by Mahmud Fa'ur in the Golan, raised to harass the French army occupying the Syrian littoral. 20 The Maydan, designated a "faubourg révolutionnaire" by French diplomats, continued its anti-French resistance after most other quarters of Damascus had been "pacified," and residents of the quarter also played a prominent role in the 1925 Great Revolt. 21
The Maydan was not unique: the demographic expansion and economic development of Palestinian cities during the interwar period generated similar political effects. The increased demand for wage labor fostered by, for example, British-directed infrastructural projects such as the enlargement of the port of Haifa, acting in conjunction with an international agricultural depression and local factors (peasant indebtedness, Zionist land purchases, policies of regressive taxation), encouraged both the seasonal and permanent migration of peasants into cities and broadened the interdependence between rural and urban economies. As the needs and concerns of migrants transcended and/or overtaxed the capabilities of the local notable-dominated economy, the newcomers forged new bonds through labor and political associations, the structure and function of which corresponded more closely to the contemporary urban milieu than could the politics of notables. The combination of these associations with the porous boundaries linking city and countryside ensured the existence of conditions requisite to promote and support the 1936-1939 Palestine Great Revolt. 22
Thus by the first decades of the twentieth century a social and economic framework that would permit sustained and proactive political mobilization was in place throughout much of Syria. During the nine months that preceded the July insurrection described above, for example--a period of eco nomic chaos and political uncertainty--the Arab government increasingly lost control of the streets of urban Syria and much of the countryside to popularly elected councils, such as the Higher National Committee and its quarter-based branches and on local committees of national defense dispersed throughout Syria. 23 These committees, comprised of a variety of social classes ranging from wealthy but disempowered grain factors to lower- and middle-class merchants, 'ulama, and artisans, organized their constituents to challenge both imperialist designs and the policies and institutions of the Arab government. Furthermore, by linking local, regional, and national councils together within a comprehensive structure, these organizations were able to assume primary responsibility for a variety of tasks that had previously been entrusted to the state or state-connected notables: they mustered volunteer militias to provide internal security and national defense, ran guns, collected taxes, licensed monopolies, dispensed poor relief and refugee assistance, guaranteed a "fair price" for grain, and so on. An analogous mobilization took place in Palestine almost two decades later when, during the aforementioned Palestine Great Revolt, locally based "national committees," "nourishment and supply committees," and peasant bands wrested control of similar functions from the hands of the state and the traditional notability. 24
The new structural realities that Syrians encountered, mediated through the affective horizontal bonds that united them into a political community, not only catalyzed the entrance of previously passive or excluded nonelites into public life but also informed the content of popular ideology. In the immediate post-Ottoman period, for example, the attempt made by the Arab government and its extragovernmental allies to disseminate slogans that included the call for "complete Arab independence"--a phrase derived from the 1915 Damascus Protocol drawn up by members of secret nationalist societies--fell flat; it was soon supplanted in leaflets, graffiti, and chants in planned and spontaneous demonstrations by slogans advocating the more popular "complete independence for Syria within its natural boundaries." While the Syrian/Hijazi/
Iraqi confederation promoted by pro-Arab government nationalist elites appeared artificial and abstract to most Syrians, "Syria within its natural boundaries" connoted the community whose borders coincided with and lent meaning to the furthest extent of regional market relations and informal migratory circuits. 25
Popular ideology was not just a byproduct of social transformation, however. By affirming and articulating the horizontal bonds that linked otherwise uprooted or anomic individuals with a wider community--what anthropologist Victor Turner calls the "undifferentiated, equalitarian, direct, nonrational" bond of "communitas" 26 --the ideology disseminated through popu lar committees in 1919-1920 was integral to the process of communal reconstruction.
Within popular nationalist discourse Syria was not merely the sum total of semiautonomous communities and vertically organized fiefdoms situated within internationally agreed-upon borders; Syria was an historically determined and integrated entity rooted in the soil that "has soaked up the blood of our grandfathers and fathers." Syrians were family, and just as a family is composed of interdependent members united by ties of kinship, Syria was composed of interdependent individuals and associations united by ties of mutual obligation. "Thus," wrote one activist, "I encourage people of good will of every quarter to form associations whose purpose is the collection of tithes from the rich to transfer to the poor, and for all endeavors aimed at creating harmony among the individuals of the nation." 27
The organic notion of Syria held by popular leaders and their constituents governed their attitude toward the nature of state and its proper relation with civil society. While in the eyes of many the Arab government lacked legitimacy for a number of reasons--the prominent role played by "foreigners," particularly "barbaric" Hijazis; 28 the incompetence of its economic policies that failed to curtail a devastating inflation; its seemingly sycophantic and overly conciliatory foreign policy--the "language of dissociation" 29 used by many affiliated with the government to divide the ruling elite from their charges, a language that reflected the dominance of an imperious state over civil society, affirmed a cleavage that appeared particularly unnatural and provocative.
Because for these Syrians the state was but "a shadow of the nation," 30 the state could not be the engine of national reconstruction but would, instead, be the product of national reconstruction. As described in the charter of the Higher National Committee,
| Public action for the nation cannot succeed if the individuals of the nation are not prepared for it. The requirement [for public action] is mutual assistance, which is necessary to foster it. These were the circumstances underlying the creation of patriotic formations in the capital of Syria. The need for them was felt in homes of every neighborhood and in the heart of every individual. Thus, the people rushed to realize this undertaking on every front, and the people of [each] district did their part independently, compelled by patriotic duty. This glorious creation, which was given the name the Higher National Committee and its branches, arose from the totality of their labors. |
In return, the committees would effect "the transformation of the entire nation into a single powerful bloc which feels one feeling and strives for one powerful interest." 31
Thus, it is apparent that, although fueled in part by sentiments of anti- imperialism and anti-Zionism, the mobilization of Syrians in 19191920 and of Palestinians during the 1936-1939 Great Revolt were not merely reactive or oppositional. Rather, both movements served as moments in a process through which a significant portion of the population of the Fertile Crescent, facing a crisis the seriousness of which rendered conventional structures of authority ill-suited or ill-prepared, both reconceptualized their community and undertook its reconstitution.
Interestingly, these movements were, to borrow a phrase from Angus Stewart, strangely "Janus-faced." 32 On the one hand, participants selectively repudiated Eurogenic and modernist conceits that often underlay the nationalism of their social betters: they reaffirmed their commitment to "traditional" values, rejected market-based relations in favor of a return to economic paternalism, and drew their inspiration for their egalitarian future from a mythologized past. On the other hand, the traditionalizing discourse used in both movements masked, as it commonly does in modern social movements, their truly innovative character. Although the discourse that accompanied both movements extracted symbols from popular religion and folklore ("Muhammad the Arab calls you to sacrifice your lives and money to save your country. . . . Follow the examples of Ibn al-Walid, Tariq, 'Uqba, Ibn al-'As and Ibn al-Khattab" 33 radically different circumstances imbued them with new meaning and, in the process, transformed them into nationalist symbols. At the same time unprecedented consensual political and social institutions temporarily dominated and redefined public life, impressed into service those who had previously been disenfranchised, and reconstituted these political neophytes as the subjects of political action and the architects of "popular will." While the combination of traditional and nontraditional elements within a social/political movement is hardly exceptional, their presence provides the clue for rethinking popular nationalism in the Middle East and for resituating popular movements in their historical and international contexts.
Although in the past historians of the Middle East have commonly presented Arab nationalism as a phenomenon sui generis that reflects, for example, presumptive cultural or historical processes unique to the region, it is difficult not to be struck by the similarity between the popular movements described above and the "populism" generated in other regions of the world that experienced comparable rapid and unsettling transformation as a result of the spread of capitalist relations and the consolidation of modern state institutions. For example, Paul W. Drake describes the circumstances that preceded the emergence of populism in Chile and Argentina in the following familiar manner:
| It appears that the failure and dislocations of tardy and dependent capitalist development, rather than its absence, tended to produce populism. Stimulated by the growth of the export economy in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, urban modernization began gathering the necessary mobilizable mass and socioeconomic issues for populism to take hold in the opening decades of the twentieth century. Urbanization outstripped industrialization. Fluctuations in the international economy caused disruptions in local production and state finances which helped spawn populist movements. When raw material-producing economies were jolted by market forces beyond local control, openings appeared for mass mobilization against traditional upper-class, laissez-faire policies. . . . In this sense, populism constituted a reaction against expanding and unstable capitalism. 34 |
Similarly, Ernesto Laclau's explanation for the ideological content and discursive form of populist ideology in Latin America parallels the arguments made above. According to Laclau, the popular movement in Argentina rejected the alien ideology of liberalism common among the local landowning oligarchy and instead adopted a discourse that was distinctively "populist" in both form and content for four reasons. First, because liberalism advanced the interests of the dominant classes at the expense of the majority of the population, and because implementation of liberal policies was thus impossible without repression, liberalism was incompatible with popular democratic aspirations. Second, liberalism presented "economic development" as a positive value even though this clashed with the experience of most Argentineans. Third, liberalism was associated with "Europeanism" and a correlated distinction between the "civilization" of Europe with the "backwardness, obscurantism and stagnation" of indigenous culture. Finally, those who advocated political liberalism--which, in this context, connoted political contestation among elites who backed their claims by mobilizing their dependents--treated the new stratum of national leadership whose expanding base of power resided in nonclientalist forms of political organization as pariahs. Laclau sums up his findings in the following manner:
| These four ideological elements, of which liberalism was the articulating principle, constituted the system of coordinates defining the ideological domain of oligarchic hegemony. Positivism was the philosophical influence which systematised these distinct elements into a homogeneous whole. Popular ideologies . . . exhibited the opposite features. It was therefore natural for popular resistance to be expressed in anti-liberal ideologies; for it to be nationalist and anti-European; for it to defend popular traditions against the corrosive effects of capitalist expansion; for it to be, therefore, personalist and to lend support to popular leaders who represented a politics hostile to the status quo. 35 |
While the term "populism" has begun to appear with increasing frequency in the works of Middle Eastern specialists to describe movements that range from nineteenth-century peasant revolts in Syria to the 1979 Iranian Revolution, authors who have used it have tended to regard its meaning as self-evident. This lack of rigor reflects the ambiguity and contentiousness attached to the term as it has been applied in the broader literature. Although "populism" has been part of the standard social science vocabulary since the mid-1950s (historians had previously used the term to denote two specific phenomenological referents--the Populist movement of the 1890s in the United States and the Narodniki in Russia) 36 --social scientists have yet to reach a consensus on a number of fundamental issues, such as whether populism refers to a movement or an ideology; whether it is imposed from the top down as the result of elite manipulation or emerges naturally as the logical consequence of social disruption; whether it is multiclass or fundamentally anti-class; whether its place of origin is urban or rural; and even whether the term is a useful construct or whether, in the words of one critic, "It is, to adapt Thurber, a naive little concept, but we ought not to be too amused by its presumption." 37
That which renders the formulation of an ideal-typical populism difficult is the extraordinary diversity of phenomena--ranging from the previously cited Narodniki to H. Ross Perot's presidential campaign--commonly labeled "populist" by participants and outside observers. Nevertheless the literature is replete with attempts to construct a comprehensive definition. For example, both Ernesto Laclau and Margaret Canovan, among others, suggest that the only thread uniting populist phenomena is a commonality of rhetorical themes. 38 Thus, borrowing the notion of "interpellation"--the means by which an individual or group becomes both subject and object of an ideology--from Louis Althusser, Laclau maintains that populism "consists in the presentation of popular-democratic interpellations as a synthetic-antagonistic complex with respect to the dominant ideology." To put it more simply, for Laclau populist discourse differs from, for example, Marxist discourse in that it not only declaims from the standpoint and in the name of "the people," but that, instead of class conflict it presents (or as Laclau would describe it, it "mystifies") the struggle between "the people" and the "ruling bloc" as the fundamental objective contradiction that divides society.
Using the work of Laclau and others as a starting point, it is possible to obtain an even more practicable and precise definition by regarding populism not merely as a type of discourse but rather as a type of community of dis course. Participants in this community not only share a common discursive field--the "space" that encompasses, arranges, integrates, and thereby shapes the meanings to be derived from the community's preeminent and collectively held symbols (such as the "people"/"ruling bloc" antinomy, correctly described by Laclau as the distinguishing polarity within populist discourse)--they also share institutions that, because they are imbued with socially constitutive meaning by the discursive field, both validate and make substantial the proper ordering of society as apprehended by community members. The institutionalization of the discursive field also assures the autonomy of the community of discourse. 39 Thus populism combines attributes associated with both an ideology and a politico-social movement. The fact that the institutions that support populist mobilizations--labor unions, agricultural cooperatives, political parties, popular committees, etc., acting singly or in combination--vary widely, depending on the specific political and social environment in which each movement arises, is, undoubtedly, the reason why observers such as Laclau and Canovan have dismissed their importance and have, as a result, formulated an idealized version of populism.
It is therefore not merely a coincidence of rhetorical flourishes that unites the Peronist "descamisados" (shirtless ones) of Argentina with the "mankubun" (wretched ones) and "mushaghibun" (agitators) of Faysali Syria in their common struggle against the "vendepatria"/"al-dassasun alladhina ba'u watanahum kal-bida'a" ("traitors who sell their nation like merchandise"). The populist insurgency in Argentina and Syria, along with American populism of the late-nineteenth century and the Palestine Great Revolt, all might be seen as a process by which a population or a segment of a population that has undergone or perceives itself as having undergone economic, social, and/or political peripheralization not only reconceptualizes itself but also reconstitutes itself as "the nation" in opposition to the politically dominant "anti-nation."
In other words, populism arises as a political response to a societal disjuncture, such as that prompted by the rapid and uneven spread of capitalist relations described by Drake. Not only does the variable scope and timing of social transformation cleave society into dissimilar and competing segments, it generates a new political bloc from among the disaffected and excluded. Typically, this bloc includes so-called "declining elites" (such as those 'ulama who, increasingly excluded from power in late Ottoman and post-Ottoman society, played a particularly important role in Syrian populism) who experience what T. S. di Tella calls "status incongruence" as the result of the divergence between their expectations for and the reality of their position in society, 40 as well as nonelites who are commonly mobilized for, but not integrated into national political life. Although these groups have not been at the vanguard or the chief beneficiaries of social change--they have, in the words of one observer, been "exposed to but not necessarily part of social change" 41 --they are able to take advantage of modern forms of mobilization in their attempt to recover an (imagined) gemeinschaftlich political community in which class differences are temporarily subsumed to a single unifying principle--the demand for a "just" (i.e., inclusive) and harmonious social order.
Almost ninety years ago Rosa Luxemburg polemicized against the leadership of the German trade union movement that, having watched the Russian Revolution of 1905 from the sidelines, concluded that mass strikes were like a pocketknife "which can be kept in the pocket clasped 'ready for any emergency,' and according to decision, can be unclasped and used." 42 For Luxemburg the mass strike was not a tactic that could be employed or deferred at will; instead, the mass strike was an "historical phenomenon" that both resulted from and catalyzed further the specific form of social relations realized under capitalism. Thus, Luxemburg predicted, regardless of the activity of union leaders, mass strikes would not only continue to erupt in Russia, but would erupt at an accelerating rate.
While, in the light of subsequent history, many of the assumptions contained in Luxemburg's pamphlet can easily be dismissed, she does provide a paradigm and raise questions that might be usefully adapted and employed in the study of populism. In particular, her understanding that mass strikes serve as a catalyst for social transformation, and her underlying assumption that, during periods in which "traditional" patterns of social relations devolve, a wide and seemingly contradictory variety of such relations coexist, may explain not only the continued importance of elites within the nationalist movement even in the aftermath of populist insurrection, but their ultimate displacement as well.
One of the reasons it has been easy for historians to overlook populism in Syria in 1919-1920 and in Palestine during the 1936-1939 Great Revolt was the continued existence of vertical ties side-by-side with the newly emergent horizontal political and associational ties. For example, although in the former mobilization populist committees pioneered new forms of political organization, they simultaneously took advantage of preestablished family and patron/client ties where those bonds were still effectual and when the use of such ties proved practical, such as for the induction of tribal and village-based contingents into service of the Higher National Committee and the committees of national defense.
Even in the aftermath of populist uprisings, nationalist elites were able to reassert their authority within the nationalist tendency for a variety of reasons. First, French and British authorities violently suppressed any movement that displayed the characteristics of populist nationalism in their respective mandated territories. Immediately after the French army entered Damascus in July 1920, for example, French authorities forcibly disbanded the populist organizations and sentenced the most important populist leaders to death. Similarly, the British deployed twenty thousand troops to Palestine during the Great Revolt, imposed collective punishments on villages suspected of harboring "terrorists," and organized commando-style Special Night Squads and "peace bands" from among their Zionist and Arab allies. 43 Second, nationalist elites not only continued to enjoy sufficient social prestige to attract the spontaneous consent of nonelites but, because of their control of the machinery of local governance and networks of communication, for example, they often possessed formidable powers for the inculcation of values, mobilization, and/or coercion. Finally, nationalist elites possessed unique capabilities that made them indispensable for the success of any nationalist undertaking. While populist leaders assumed uncompromising, nonnegotiable positions that, while congruent with their fundamentally apocalyptic view of politics, were invariably doomed to failure when pitted against the superior resources of the imperialist powers, the position of the nationalist elites atop society, combined with their Westernized Weltanschauung, afforded them the opportunity to mediate between the strictures imposed by the international community and the indigenous population. In other words, only nationalist elites, not populist leaders, were capable of translating the established principles of a world divided into nation-states into local vernaculars.
Nevertheless the position of the nationalist elites within the nationalist tendency was not without its ironies. Although the local notables who provided a significant segment of the nonpopulist nationalist leadership in Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine frequently participated in and/or guided the nationalist movement for a variety of reasons, including a desire to retain their status among the increasingly politicized nonelites and to ensure the dominance of a nationalist program that promoted anti-imperialism while frustrating radical forms of interest representation, the horizontal nature of the national bonds they were obliged to promote ultimately served to undermine their privileged social and political positions. This contradiction inexorably led to the shackling or eradication of this stratum by a new generation of nationalist leaders in the decades following World War II.
While the domain of nonelites was thus not the only, or even, at times, the predominant moment in the nationalist dialectic, situating the 19191920 popular mobilization in Syria, the 1936-1939 Great Revolt in Palestine, and, perhaps, other post-World War I Middle Eastern politicosocial movements that, at least cursorily, display similar characteristics within the populist framework remains significant for a number of reasons: To begin with, the existence of populist movements in the initial decades of the twentieth centu ry not only demonstrates the early emergence and resiliency of the expansive horizontal bonds upon which popular Arab nationalism was built, it also calls into question the assumption, common in elite historiography, that maintains that nationalism, the product of a small clique of military officers, professional agitators, and salon habitués, was thrust on a recumbent population with "revolutionary abruptness" 44 sometime during the Mandate period. Furthermore, both the factors responsible for the populist movements cited above--uneven development, rapid urbanization, mobilization without integration--and the attributes that defined these movements--the focus on economic justice and political inclusion, the problem of communal reconstruction--were responsible for and defined other seemingly disparate political phenomena that have occurred since the early twentieth century, such as the nationalism-cum-etatism of midcentury military regimes and contemporary Islamicist movements. Although commonly dissociated from each other on the basis of their distinct symbolic languages--a practice that has rendered the population of the Middle East capricious, to say the least--their coherence becomes apparent when they are incorporated within the common framework of populism. Finally, the reemplotment of Arab nationalism serves both to contextualize and recenter the study of nationalism in the region by providing a paradigm for comparative studies and by endowing nonelites with the capability of acting as subjects of their own history.
Notes:
Note 1: Ministère de la Défense, Vincennes (hereafter MD) 4H114/695. Renseignements, n.d.; MD 4H114/4/662. Cousse to Gouraud, 8 July 1920; MD 4H114/4/691. Cousse to Gouraud, 13 July 1920; MD 4H114/5/282-283. Cousse to Gouraud, 15 July 1920; Foreign Office, London (hereafter FO) 371/5037/E8509/74. Mackereth to FO, 16 July 1920; MD 4H114/5. Cousse to Gouraud, 20 July 1920; FO 371/5037/E8880/80. Mackereth to FO, 23 July 1920; MD 4H60/1. Bulletin Quotidien 1270, 23 July 1920. Ghalib al-'Iyashi, al-Idahat al-siyasiyya wa asrar al-intidab al-Faransi 'ala Suriyya (Beirut, 1955), 105-106; Hasan al-Amin, Dhikrayat (Beirut, 1973), 27; Ihsan al-Hindi, Ma'rakat Maysalun (Damascus, 1967), 59-60. Back.
Note 2: FO 371/5039/E10316/38. J. B. Jackson (Aleppo), 30 July 1920; India Office, London (hereafter IO) L/PS/10/802/P5841. GHQ (Egypt) to War Office, 24 July 1920; Sulayman Musa, al-Murasalat al-ta'rikhiyya, 1920-1923 (Amman, 1978), 144; Jules Kersante, "Syrie: l'occupation d'Alep," Petite relations d'Orient 6 (November 1920): 173; Mahmud Charkas, al-Dalil al-musawwar lil-bilad al-'arabiyya, vol. 1 (Damascus, 1930), 119-121; As'ad Daghir, Mudhakkirati 'ala hamish al-qadiyya al-'arabiyya (Cairo, 1956), 122, 139-142; Muhammad 'Ali al-'Ajluni, Dhikrayat 'an al-thawra al-'arabiyya al-kubra (Amman, 1956), 98. Back.
Note 3: Interview with Muhammad Rida al-Khatib, Damascus, 6 January 1990; Interviews with Kamil Daghmush (Damascus, 2 November 1989) and Abu Ribah al-Jaza'iri (Damascus, 15 November 1989), veterans of the Battle of Maysalun; al-Hindi, Ma'rakat Maysalun, 113. Back.
Note 4: Duggan's speech was later published under the title "Syria and its Tangled Problems" in Current History 13:2 (February 1920): 238-248. Note: unless otherwise indicated, "Syria" refers to the area that comprises present-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and the Occupied Territories, and western Iraq. Back.
Note 5: White, "Interpretation in History," in Tropics of Discourse, 51-80. Back.
Note 6: I have borrowed this phrase from Winifred Barr Rothenberg, From Market-Places to a Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750-1850 (Chicago, 1992). Back.
Note 7: See, inter alia, Roger Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy, 1800-1914 (London, 1981), 153-179, 244-272; James Anthony Reilly, "Origins of Peripheral Capitalism in the Damascus Region, 1830-1914" (Ph.D. dissertation, Georgetown University, 1987); Linda Schatkowski Schilcher, Families in Politics: Damascene Factions and Estates of the 18th and 19th Century (Stuttgart, 1985), 60-86. Back.
Note 8: See Leila Tarazi Fawaz, Merchants and Migrants in Nineteenth-Century Beirut (Cambridge, MA, 1983); Philip S. Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism: The Politics of Damascus, 1860-1920 (Cambridge, 1983); Rashid Khalidi, "Society and Ideology in Late-Ottoman Syria: Class, Education, Profession and Confession," in John Spagnolo (ed.), Problems of the Modern Middle East in Historical Perspective: Essays in Honour of Albert Hourani, (Reading, 1992), 119-131. Back.
Note 9: Anderson, Imagined Communities, 12. Back.
Note 10: For an analysis of the meaning of rituals in Faysali Syria see James L. Gelvin, "Demonstrating Communities in Post-Ottoman Syria," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 25:1 (Summer 1994): 23-44. Back.
Note 11: al-'Asima, 7 May 1919, 1-2. For the division of Syrian society into two sorts, see, for example, al-Kawkab, 27 May 1919, 9; al-Kawkab, 3 June 1919, 8-9; al-'Asima 17 June 1919, 1-2; al-'Asima, 11 September 1919, 6; al-'Asima, 16 October 1919, 1-2. Back.
Note 12: al-'Asima, 28 August 1919, 6. For the origins and financing of al-Kawkab see Durham University, Wingate Files 143/2/167(AB202). Arbur to Sirdar (Khartoum), 13 November 1916. Back.
Note 13: al-'Asima, 28 August 1919, 6. See also al-'Asima, 5 February 1920, 5; al-Kawkab, 11 November 1919, 11; al-Kawkab, 13 January 1919, 11. Back.
Note 14: al-Kawkab, 28 October 1919, 7-8. See also al-'Asima, 11 September 1919, 1-2; and the account of Gertrude Bell's visit to the "School for the Daughters of Martyrs"(madrasat banat al-shuhada) in Damascus: IO L/PS/10/802. Gertrude Bell, "Syria in October 1919," 15 November 1919, 11. Back.
Note 15: See al-Kawkab: 30 September 1919, 7-8; 21 October 1919, 7-8; 28 October 1919, 7-8; al-'Asima: 7 May 1919, 1-2; 16 June 1919, 1-2; 25 August 1919, 1-2; 28 August 1919, 5-6; #24 (n.d.). The quote is from a front page editorial entitled, "A Danger Threatens our Domestic Life," in al-'Asima, 11 September 1919. Back.
Note 16: Wajih al-Haffar, "al-Hukumat allati ta'aqabat 'ala al-hukm fi Suriyya," al-Shurta wa al-amn al-'amm 11:10; Archives Diplomatiques, Nantes (hereafter AD) 2374/938/CP/Dossier TEO Zone Ouest: Adm., Cabinet Politique. 29 April 1920; al-'Asima: 29 April 1920, 4; 3 May 1920, 5; 31 May 1920, 1; 12 July 1920, 1. Similar attitudes toward Westernized women were expressed during the Palestine Great Revolt of 1936-1939. See Ted Swedenburg, "The Role of the Palestinian Peasantry in the Great Revolt," in Edmund Burke III and Ira Lapidus (eds.), Islam, Politics, and Social Movements, (Berkeley, 1988), 192. Back.
Note 17: See Reilly, "Origins of Peripheral Capitalism," 120, 155-158; Sherry Vatter, "Militant Journeymen in Nineteenth-Century Damascus: Implications for the Middle Eastern Labor History Agenda," in Zachary Lockman (ed.), Workers and Working Classes in the Middle East: Struggles, Histories, Historiographies (Albany, 1994), 1-19; Linda Schatkowski Schilcher, "Violence in Rural Syria in the 1880s and 1890s: State Centralization, Rural Integration, and the World Market," in Farhad Kazemi and John Waterbury (eds.), Peasants and Politics in the Modern Middle East, (Miami, 1991), 50-84. Back.
Note 18: Charles Tilly, Louise Tilly, and Richard Tilly, The Rebellious Century, 1830-1910 (Cambridge, 1975), 50, 253-254. Back.
Note 19: Schilcher, "Violence in Rural Syria," 76; Eric R. Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York, 1969), 282, 292-294; James L. Gelvin, "The Social Origins of Popular Nationalism in Syria: Evidence for a New Framework," in International Journal of Middle East Studies 26 (1994): 645-662. Back.
Note 20: Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Paris (hereafter MAE) L:SL/12/32-38. Cousse to Haut Commissionaire, 6 April 1919; AD 2344/Cl/305-306. Cousse to Picot, 31 October 1919; AD 2344/Cl/311. Cousse to Picot, 3 November 1919; AD 2430/Dossier Confidential-Départ/325-326. Cousse (?) to Haut Commissionaire, 10 November 1919; AD 2375/Chemise Division de Syrie 1919-1920/ 442/2. Arlabosse to Gen. Cmdt. Div. Syrie, 25 January 1920; AD 2375/Chemise Division de Syrie 1919-1920/445/2. Haak to Cmdt. en Chef l'AFL, 26 January 1920. Back.
Note 21: See MD 4H58/2. Rapport hebdomadaire 503 (29 July-4 August 1920); Khoury, Syria, 180, 191; Jean-Paul Pascual, "La Syrie a 1'epoque ottomane (Le XIXe siècle)" in Andre Raymond (ed.), La Syrie d'aujourd'hui, (Paris, 1980), 39. Back.
Note 22: See Sarah Graham-Brown, "Agriculture and Labour Transformation in Palestine," in Kathy and Pandeli Glavanis (eds.), The Rural Middle East: Peasant Lives and Modes of Production, (London, 1989), 53-55; Swedenburg, "Palestinian Peasantry," 184, 189-193. Back.
Note 23: Unless otherwise cited, information about the composition and activities of the Higher National Committee, the branch committees, and the committees of national defense was obtained in the "Lajna al-wataniyya" and "Lajnat al-difa'" files preserved in the Salafiyya Library, Cairo (SL: LW, SL: LD). Back.
Note 24: See Swedenburg, "Palestinian Peasantry." Back.
Note 25: See James L. Gelvin, "Popular Mobilization and the Foundations of Mass Politics in Syria, 1918-1920" (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1992), 232-237, 459; IO L/PS/10/802/16-17. Gertrude Bell, "Syria in October 1919," 15 November 1919. Back.
Note 26: Victor Turner, "Social Dramas and Ritual Metaphors," in Victor Turner (ed.), Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, 1974), 46-47. Back.
Note 27: al-'Asima, 17 November 1919, 1-2; SL: LW. "Nizam al-lijan al-wataniyya al-far'iyya fi bilad Suriyya," 17 November 1919; al-Kinana, 15 July 1920, 2, 3. See also leaflets and transcriptions of leaflets contained in AD 2345. 5 March 1920; AD 2372/Dossier Propagande Anti-FranŤaise. 8-9 March 1920. Back.
Note 28: FO 371/3054/227658. Clayton to Sykes, 28 November 1917; IO L/PS/11/140/P497/1918/P1171. "Appreciation of the Situation in Syria, Palestine, and lesser Armenia by Colonel Sir Mark Sykes," 15 November 1918; FO 371/3385/191237/277. Wingate to Balfour, 18 November 1918; FO 371/3385/191229/190. Clayton to FO, 18 November 1918; FO 371/4178/7094. Hogarth to CPO, EEF, 18 December 1918; AD 2368/10/2/66. Cousse to Haut Commissionaire, 9 January 1919; AD 2326/Dossier du Hedjaz. "Extraits de la lettre 94m de M. Bensaci, Envoye du gouvernement de la Republique a la Mecque," 16 May 1919; MAE L:SL/15/324/22-23. Picot to Pichon, 18 July 1919; AD 2358/Dossier Emir FayŤal. "Mystification Cherifienne," 13 September 1919; MAE L:AH/7/1429-30. Picot to MAE, 29 October 1919; MD 4H114/2/132. Cousse to Gouraud, 19 February 1920. Back.
Note 29: Keith Wrightson, "Estates, Degrees, and Sorts: Changing Perceptions of Society in Tudor and Stuart England," in Penelope J. Corfield (ed.), Language, History, and Class (Oxford, 1991), 44-47. Back.
Note 30: al-Difa', 13 January 1920, 1. Back.
Note 31: SL: LW: "Nizam al-lajna al-wataniyya al-'ulya fi al-'asima al-suriyya," and "Nizam al-lijan al-wataniyya al-far'iyya fi bilad Suriyya," 17 November 1919. Back.
Note 32: Angus Stewart, "The Social Roots," in Ghita Ionescu and Ernest Gellner (eds.), Populism: Its Meaning and National Characteristics (London, 1969), 187. Back.
Note 33: al-Kinana, 15 July 1920, 2. Back.
Note 34: Paul W. Drake, "Requiem for Populism?" in Michael L. Conniff (ed.), Latin American Populism in Comparative Perspective, (Albuquerque, 1982), 236. Back.
Note 35: Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism-Fascism-Communism (London, 1977), 177-179. Back.
Note 36: See J. B. Allcock, " 'Populism': A Brief Biography," Sociology 5 (1971): 372. Back.
Note 37: Kenneth Minogue, "Populism as a Political Movement," in Ionescu and Gellner, Populism, 200. Back.
Note 38: Laclau, Politics and Ideology, 101-102, 164-165; Margaret Canovan, "Two Strategies for the Study of Populism," Political Studies 30 (1982): 552; Donald MacRae, "Populism as an Ideology," and Peter Worsley, "The Concept of Populism," in Ionescu and Gellner, Populism, 153-165, 212-250. Back.
Note 39: See Robert Wuthnow, Communities of Discourse: Ideology and Social Structure in the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and European Socialism (Cambridge, 1989), 13-15, 553, 555. Back.
Note 40: T. S. di Tella, "Populism and Reform in Latin America," in C. Veliz (ed.), Obstacles to Change in Latin America (Oxford, 1962), 182. Back.
Note 41: Stewart, "Social Roots," 187; Laclau, Politics and Ideology, 148-149. Back.
Note 42: Rosa Luxemburg, "The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions," in Mary-Alice Waters (ed.), Rosa Luxemburg Speaks (New York, 1970), 153-218. Back.
Note 43: See Gelvin, "Popular Mobilization," 431-432; Swedenburg, "Palestinian Peasantry," 193-194. Back.
Note 44: Kedourie, "Pan-Arabism and British Policy," 213-235. Back.
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