Political Narratives in the Middle East and North Africa: Conceptions of Order and Perceptions of Instability (Perspectives on Development in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region) 3030352161, 9783030352165

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Perspectives on Development in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region

Wolfgang Mühlberger Toni Alaranta  Editors

Political Narratives in the Middle East and North Africa Conceptions of Order and Perceptions of Instability

Perspectives on Development in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region Series Editor Almas Heshmati, Jönköping University, Jönköping, Sweden

This book series publishes monographs and edited volumes devoted to studies on the political, economic and social developments of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Volumes cover in-depth analyses of individual countries, regions, cases and comparative studies, and they include both a specific and a general focus on the latest advances of the various aspects of development. It provides a platform for researchers globally to carry out rigorous economic, social and political analyses, to promote, share, and discuss current quantitative and analytical work on issues, findings and perspectives in various areas of economics and development of the MENA region. Perspectives on Development in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region allows for a deeper appreciation of the various past, present, and future issues around MENA’s development with high quality, peer reviewed contributions. The topics may include, but not limited to: economics and business, natural resources, governance, politics, security and international relations, gender, culture, religion and society, economics and social development, reconstruction, and Jewish, Islamic, Arab, Iranian, Israeli, Kurdish and Turkish studies. Volumes published in the series will be important reading offering an original approach along theoretical lines supported empirically for researchers and students, as well as consultants and policy makers, interested in the development of the MENA region. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13870

Wolfgang Mühlberger • Toni Alaranta Editors

Political Narratives in the Middle East and North Africa Conceptions of Order and Perceptions of Instability

Editors Wolfgang Mühlberger Finnish Institute of International Affairs Helsinki, Finland

Toni Alaranta Finnish Institute of International Affairs Helsinki, Finland

ISSN 2520-1239 ISSN 2520-1247 (electronic) Perspectives on Development in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region ISBN 978-3-030-35216-5 ISBN 978-3-030-35217-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35217-2 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Foreword

Without narratives—stories with purposeful actors and consequential chains of events, beginnings and endings, meaning and direction—the chaotic world (of international relations) would remain chaotic to us, its inhabitants. Although facts seldom speak for themselves in any area of life, the realm of international relations is often viewed as exceptionally distant and difficult to grasp: it operates with abstract entities such as states and nations, brings into play complex ideas such as sovereignty and prestige and regularly takes place in highly symbolic or violent contexts such as summit meetings or foreign battlefields. Contending interpretations among both actors and analysts abound. The stories of adversaries are often mirror images in conflict situations, and as part of normal scientific practice different researchers single out different incidents and trends as essential evidence for their studies. International relations cannot be experienced directly and comprehensively. The need for coherent plots that delimit, mediate and organize action—both in the past and in the future—for various audiences is acute. The authors of this volume regard narratives as strategic tools used by political entrepreneurs interested in developments in the Middle East and North Africa. They refer to subjective interpretations, manipulative rhetoric and power-seeking behaviour. This is well-justified given the material under scrutiny—in other words the competing narratives of the different local, regional and global actors in the context of crisis and change. There are solid grounds for believing that narrative victory or hegemony is indeed the goal here and that the conflicting stories are carefully designed to persuade specific groups. I would go further and claim that narratives also assume importance in many situations in which storytellers seek objectivity, have little personal interest in the events and lack political power. As the editors of the volume suggest, we are indeed fundamentally storytelling animals (Mühlberger in the Introduction), and even our scholarly perspectives (Alaranta in the Conclusion) come in narrative form. As I see it, it is not only in situations in which we intentionally work towards a specific goal that we refer to, evoke and produce narratives: we do this all the time. All our observations (concerning international

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relations) fit into and lend support to larger interpretative frameworks—in other words narratives. What is fundamentally important, in my opinion, is that we learn to compare the competing narratives, the competing bids for the best explanation in any context, with a critical eye. The choice of narrative has profound effects: it determines which actors we see and who are left in the shadows, the events we deem significant and the ones we consider marginal, the interpretations we find natural or strange and the solutions we are inclined to reject or recommend. The articles in this volume demonstrate the vast variety of alternative narratives available for framing a specific issue or arena of action. In that individual readers will find different stories analysed here the most convincing—and many might find all versions of the events described self-serving—it is impossible to determine what “the true story about MENA” would look like. Unfortunately, we are forever stuck with imperfect narratives. Nevertheless, this volume makes a major contribution in terms of understanding the varying logic and making our own choices in our attempts to form as balanced a picture as possible. Helsinki, Finland 14 September 2019

Riikka Kuusisto

Contents

Introduction: The Power of Narratives in Political Contexts . . . . . . . . . . Wolfgang Mühlberger Part I

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Non-State Actors and Regional Powers Narrating and Reshaping Order

Wartime Narratives of Hezbollah Militants in the Syrian Conflict . . . . . Erminia Chiara Calabrese

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Chasing the Wind: Clashes Between Israeli and Palestinian Narratives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Olli Ruohomäki

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Turkey as the Order-Producing Country: Narrating the New Turkey in the Middle East . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Toni Alaranta

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Evolving Narratives of Political Contestation and Geopolitical Rivalry in the Persian Gulf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kristian Coates Ulrichsen

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Part II

Global Players’ Narratives Towards MENA Instability

Russia in the Middle East: In Search of Its Place . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Leonid Issaev and Alisa R. Shishkina

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The Chinese MENA Narrative: Peace with Development via the Belt and Road Initiative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 Christina Lin American Narratives of Order-Building in the Middle East: Dashed Visions on the Nile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 Ville Sinkkonen vii

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The European Union’s Epic Conceptualisations of the Southern Neighbourhood: A Narratological Take on the Mediterranean Story . . . 163 Wolfgang Mühlberger Conclusion: Narrative (Dis) Order in Today’s MENA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 Toni Alaranta

Introduction: The Power of Narratives in Political Contexts Wolfgang Mühlberger

Die Bedeutung eines Wortes ist sein Gebrauch in der Sprache Ludwig Wittgenstein (2003) Philosophische Untersuchungen “The meaning of a word is its use in language.” (Engl.)

Stories are powerful tools of interpretation that have extraordinary attraction. They combine the facility to convince with the constitution of knowledge, all the while functioning as a mode of comprehension. There is even a peculiar allure linked to them in their tendency to blur lines between realms, potentially fusing utopian dreamscapes with non-fictional real life. In the political world, therefore, the narrative mode of discourse offers attractive opportunities to power-seeking individuals and organisations, supporting their goals of convincing constituencies ranging from straightforward attempts at explanation to more coercive forms of persuasion. This book comprises stories told by political players with in interest or stake in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), a region considered for a variety of reasons one of virtually structural instability. It pursues an enquiry into the discursive practice of power in its narrative form, focusing on the dialectic relationship between language and power, as well as the functional interlinkages between narratives and political leadership or activism more generally. The empirical contributions scrutinise how a wide range of political entrepreneurs skilfully deploy accounts to make sense of their positions and actions. This is all the more relevant in times of societal turmoil and political change on a regional scale, as every narrative finds its origin in the disruption of a status quo—and addresses disorder by proposing a path to a solution that is a new state of stability, or a re-enactment of the altered situation. The critical point of departure for this investigation was the outbreak and aftermath of the Arab uprisings of 2011. This was conceived of as a crisis, a major political rupture, to which a number of interested actors proposed approaches, including employing the ordering potential of narrative discourse. Prior to this W. Mühlberger (*) The Finnish Institute of International Affairs, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: wolfgang.muehlberger@fiia.fi © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 W. Mühlberger, T. Alaranta (eds.), Political Narratives in the Middle East and North Africa, Perspectives on Development in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35217-2_1

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massive outbreak of discontent, however, the countries of the MENA region were already enduring varying levels of instability and intensity of contestation, including weak statehood and governance, demographic pressure on labour markets and resources, lacking economic opportunities, ideological cleavages and external military interference. In addition, most political actors in the region, both domestic and international, operate in authoritarian settings, devoid of comprehensive political competition. The main aim of the local political leadership, therefore, was to maintain discursive hegemony and thereby to justify their exclusive exercise of power, whereby narratives can play a central role to produce compliance or acquiescence. Political rivals in such a non-democratic setting often revert to proposing fully-fledged counternarratives, whereas the tendency of decision makers to opt for securitising narratives has become even stronger since 2011. The rationale for choosing narratives as a lens through which to view policy issues rests on two figures of speech: The first pertains that ‘politics is 80% communication and 20% action’ while the second underscores that ‘perceptions define politics’. If only a fifth of political routine does indeed correspond to action, and if subjective interpretations are more compelling than raw, objective and hard facts, the art of communication would assume fundamental importance for any politician seeking to captivate and convince an audience that was eager to listen. Hence, language1 and rhetoric are the primary realms in which political narratives are located and ought to be analysed. Given these underlying assumptions and in view of the public display of verbal communication on the political stage, the analysis of narrative discourse as a vehicle for selling policy proposals, inducing action and eventually achieving political legitimacy lends itself to closer scrutiny. What further supports the use of narratives for conviction purposes, related in particular to political aims, is the human inclination to use the narrative mode in the sense that the brain is somehow ‘hardwired’ to recognise and appreciate the narrative structure of stories. Indeed, as narrative analysis found its way from linguistics to the cognitive sciences in the 1960s, several researchers (such as Jerome Bruner and H. Porter Abbott) concluded that the human brain was particularly receptive to the narrative mode of discourse. Historically, it stands to reason that given the millenniaold custom of oral tradition before the advent of writing systems, narratives have had a special suggestive force that eludes other forms of discourse. Why should these scientific findings and theoretical assumptions motivate politicians to opt for the conscious use of narratives to transport their message? Would it not suit their purposes better to present a solid and less demanding argument in a non-narrative type of discourse? Several basic observations further inform this approach, tentatively providing answers to these questions. First, the use of narrative is an interpretive and explanatory semantic technique for making sense, achieved by means of a specific plot, an

1 In general, semiotics applies as a field of study, but the focus in this volume lies more on the semantic-discursive level and less on the visual aspects of communication.

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intentionally chosen sequence and combination, in other words a concatenation of events. For politicians it is a useful tool, as their urge to convince an audience requires references to a specific matrix, constituted by the cultural framework of their constituencies as well as an ideal socio-political order.2 Second, and consequently, political stories are conveniently inserted into this structural and functional logic of constructed accounts in that their intended goal, specifically a certain conception of order, can be semantically reflected in the emplotment of events. This is also relevant in the sense that political narratives are inherently subjective, intentional and goaloriented—a fact mirrored in the deliberate choice of events, their rhetoric interlinkages and the ending of each story. This purposeful characteristic of narrative discourse certainly requires consideration from a critical perspective, given that such forms of persuasion potentially facilitate manipulation.3 Third, as Jerome Bruner posits on the question of crisis and instability, and thus with potential relevance in situations of political strife, narratives eventually facilitate the restoration of an equilibrium of sorts via an underlying choice of event sequencing (Patterson and Monroe 1998: 324). Finally, in the particular context of acute crises such as conflict and marked polarisation, the use of narrative for political ends allows crafting a more convincing story than traditional lines of argument could develop under such exceptional circumstances (Biegoń and Nullmeier 2014: 43). Hence, the full range of cognitive, heuristic and epistemic dimensions of narratives corresponding to their sense-making, problem-solving and knowledgeproducing capacity, in other words coherence and order-producing qualities, are at the disposal of political entrepreneurs. However, a number of preconditions constrain the effective use of political narratives and limit their applicability. On the one hand, it only makes sense for decision makers to deploy narratives under certain conditions, in particular if they are faced with a complex problem such as might be caused by a sudden, critical event that triggered considerable change (see Gadinger et al. 2014a). It would not make sense to construct a complex, intentional, purpose-oriented narrative to propose minor, day-to-day policy choices. On the other hand, narrative is equally limited by its contingency, which as a rule of thumb corresponds to cultural plausibility. However credible, convincing and authentic a narrative might appear to certain recipients, it only makes sense within a certain epistemic field, determined by social and cultural characteristics (Patterson and Monroe 1998: 320). Furthermore, narratives may be challenged by alternative chronological emplotments of events, leading to varying levels of mutual ‘incommensurability’ (Ringmar 2006: 404) or to their contestation (Miskimmon et al. 2013: 110–119). President Obama’s Cairo Speech in 2009 is among the better-known cases of problematic reception in a MENA context. The allocution was intended as a

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Order is conceived of here as both a process (ordering) and an objective (end state). Coming analytically to terms with the potential influence of narratives also implies that the audience or the reader has the capacity to elude its suggestive power once the intentionality of the plot structure has become discernible.

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re-launch of relations between a regionally heavily involved superpower (the US) and a vaguely defined ‘region at large’ (in that case conceptualised as the ‘Muslim world’, used here in a territorialised sense). Accordingly, the speech expressed a specific narrative based on a conception of the role of the US in regional MENA politics. The limitations of such an approach became obvious (see Lukacs 2019). Not only was the plausibility of the proposed narrative measured against the political reality of contested regional US involvement, widely perceived as antagonistic, it was also reflected upon as a wide range of pre-existing regional narratives. The result was narrative contestation in varying degrees ranging from differentiation or rejection to complete disregard (for details see Miskimmon et al. 2013: 157–164). Some years earlier, in 2001, the US-led decision to engage in a “war on terror” and to opt for war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003 produced a welldocumented and widely analysed clash of narratives (on the former topic see Hodges 2011; on Iraq see Ringmar 2006). However, the audiences at that time were different from those listening to Obama’s account that purported to address some of the negative repercussions of his predecessors’ decisions in MENA. Here, the reception and narrative contest took place on the level of players who could exert a modicum of influence on the US decision to opt for warfare, or to reject such an endeavour, such as domestic constituencies, the UN as well as major Western and regional allies. More recently, the fraught situation created by the Arab uprisings of 2011 triggered responses from a wide range of interested domestic and external political actors who, justifying their positions, attempted to legitimise their own grab for power or claimed they were countering turmoil and restoring order with the help of narratives.

Staging Politics: The Political Dimensions of Narratives It is essential for politicians to convince their audience and to achieve dominance in the field of discursive competition. Rhetorical capability is a fundamental requirement in terms of attracting followers and capturing attention. Yet persuasion via narrative may be more effective combining a linguistically competent speaker with a plausible narrative that will influence the listener. In their intrinsic drive to propose solutions to policy issues, decision makers will therefore opt for narrative discourses, powerful and purpose-oriented rhetorical “constructions of political reality” (Gadinger et al. 2014a: 4). Narrative, in its discursive, non-visual form and as verbal expression, is closely linked to the art of rhetoric, even though it is based on a distinct chronological structure, the plot. Whereas language operates on the linguistic, semantic level, narrative, as a type of discourse, is a specific form of representation based on a set of principles. The Greek philosopher Aristoteles (384–322 BC) came up with the first known, hitherto classical conceptual framework for the structure of stories: “[. . .] a simple version of Aristotelian narrative featuring a complete narrative with a

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strong sequence between a beginning, middle and end” (Hyvärinen 2007: 37). To use a graphic analogy, this model conveys the idea of a triptych, in which the reading of a story is visualised—or rather emblematised—on three planes, viewed from left to right and encapsulating a fully-fledged story. Even though the Aristotelian model represents a sketch-like simplification, the reduction of cognitive complexity (see Gadinger et al. 2014b: 72) is part and parcel of the narrative process, allowing the recipient to make sense of events. In the political context, stories display two distinct characteristics. Narrative discourse, as a type of motivated, intentional language, suits political communication given its capacity to persuade and hence to establish rapport or a power base. Political actors seek to acquire, maintain or enlarge political power, an endeavour that requires them to engage in political communication by means of various discursive forms of persuasion. In that sense, political narratives are also fundamentally legitimising tools, with a clear purpose. From a more actor-centred perspective, the author applies narratives intentionally, in other words in a strategic, goal-oriented manner, for two reasons: to affect the cognitive level of comprehension for the purpose of persuasion and, crucially, to induce a specific and measurable action (see Biegoń and Nullmeier 2014: 41). These two types of political potentiality in narratives, persuasion and action, play out in two specific contexts. According to Gadinger et al. (2014b: 71), narrative plays a heightened role when socially significant issues are at stake and are “being negotiated”, as well as in tense, polarised contexts. In line with the basic assumption of a distinct narrative-order nexus, language itself represents a primordial ordering mechanism.4 Narratives, as highly effective semantic tools, also have the capacity to control perceptions through the use of an intentionally chosen chronological combination of events. Therefore, narrative discourse is a particularly useful instrument in terms of portraying conceptions of political order, which similarly follow certain logics of role ascription, sequence and ending. From a classical constructivist perspective and in a strictly Glasersfeldian tradition, it should be added here that narrative discourse is neutral, or indifferent, concerning questions of ‘truth’ or ‘reality’, or in view of a fiction/non-fiction binary.5 As Hodges (2011: 5) puts it, the interest of this investigation lies in understanding how political narratives can develop performativity, create truth conceptions for instance, rather than departing from the—rather transcendental—idea that narrative has the ability to unveil and represent an ‘existing truth’. Even if political players distinguish themselves by making truth claims, in practice, each story unfolds its plausibility against a cultural, social and individual background, and will be received “Only through language are [such] events turned into a full account of [that] experience. Through language, we name protagonists, ascribe motivations, and provide explanations. Through language, we construct a narrative.” Hodges (2011: 3/4). 5 A constructivist understanding of narrative would highlight its functional, autonomous character based on the concept of auto-poiesis, i.e. a self-referential and self-organising system capable of maintaining itself. 4

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and rated in this context, rather than based on some inherent link to ‘truth’. In the field of international relations, Suganami (2008: 355) argues for the explanatory potential of narrative, qualifying its truth dimension as follows: “[. . .] narrative accounts are not an unproblematic, transparent means through which the realities of world politics can truthfully be represented; it is perhaps more to the point to say that they are a means by which truth claims about world politics are realistically presented.” Shenhav (2006: 247), on the other hand, rather argues in terms of ‘fidelity of representation of reality’ as opposed to the idea of a plausible interpretation used in political narratives. Furthermore, from the contingency perspective of narrative inception, projection and reception,6 both the ideational and the material underpinnings of narrative construction and reception operate as conditions for them to realise their full potential. In other words, aside from the question of plausibility assessment, the material capabilities of political actors shape their perceptions and guide the credibility assessment of any narrative. A further essential feature of political narratives is their fundamental normativity, their rule-setting propensity that supports the objective of leaders to build or enhance political capital based on, or with reference to specific conceptions of order. As Patterson and Monroe (1998: 321; emphasis added) mention in their seminal contribution, “[. . .] all narrative suggests an interpretation of what the state of the world ought to be.” From the story perspective, for instance, a national myth represents a “state autobiographical narrative” (Subotic 2016: 611), which at the same time is a “broadly shared normative frame” (idem: 612). However, and vice versa, it can only emerge as a shared account based on common perceptions. In this context, Gadinger et al. (2014a: 8) mentions the community-endowing function of language, and of political narratives in particular, which connects more generally to reflections around the rhetorical organisation of collective memory (see Wertsch 2008) and identity.

Politicians as Storytellers: Regional Dimensions of Political Narratives Stories are human artefacts, combining creativity via a good and imaginative plot with linguistic skills. The story proper is based on a wilfully chosen concatenation of events, to capture the attention of the audience and to serve as an explanation. Political stories in particular work as enablers: not only do they explain (a situation) and help to foster understanding (of positions), they also fulfil the purpose of justifying policies and thereby legitimising political actors. In the end, however, how the recipients interpret the account will determine the ascribed levels of truth or fictionality (see Eco 1998), allowing decision makers to manage their political capital. 6

On all three aspects from the perspective of strategic communication, see Miskimmon et al. (2013).

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In the regional context of narratives employed by political actors in the Middle East and North Africa, the main purpose of this volume is to highlight the functional interrelationships among political narratives, perceptions of instability and conceptions of order. Stories are used as a lens through which to understand the function, relevance and impact of narrative discourse in politics, and to show how political players take positions, in other words how and why they craft, disseminate and adapt stories. The aim in deconstructing and reconstructing the narrative process is to illustrate, first, how political entrepreneurs operate on the rhetorical level; second, how they attempt to justify their policy choices, including ordering or reordering proposals; and third, how they react to change in their constituency by exploiting the flexibility of narratives. With regard to the MENA region, two aspects require special consideration. The first relates to the predominant type of political system, taking into account the fact that political narratives operate mainly in authoritarian contexts. This plays out on all three levels: the conception, diffusion and reception of narrative discourses constructed under conditions of censorship with a lack of leadership alternatives. In addition, this specific setting concerns both domestic and external actors, even though the audiences they address with their narratives may be diverse. The second aspect is linked to the scale of regional instability (see Tibi 2015), to real or perceived threats to regime continuity, and to how decision makers are motivated to use narratives in situations of political crisis, instability and uncertainty. The question of insecurity is also connected to levels of conflict-proneness, ranging from political unrest to armed intra-state hostility and bilateral warfare. Despite seemingly obvious assumptions to the contrary, authoritarian ruling systems make ample use of the rhetorical level for legitimisation (see FrankeSchwenk 2014). In such settings, acceptance of or consensus with the leadership is usually achieved via varying levels of coercion. Even though outright, physical repression represents a policy tool of choice, narratives play an important role in the legitimisation of political leadership and the justification of specific policies, ranging from birth-control issues to conflict-related decisions such as acts of war. Qadhafi’s Green Book, for instance, could be considered a discursive attempt to justify political domination via an elaborate narrative.7 Narrative discourse also supports attempts to stabilise the situation during periods of open contestation and conflict, such as the Arab uprisings or the Gulf crisis (see Tanner 2014; Cherkaoui 2018). What is observable throughout the MENA, even more distinctively in the aftermath of the Arab upheavals, is a tendency to securitise a wide range of socially and hence politically relevant topics. For instance, the current military leadership in Egypt recently declared demographic development a

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Here it is worth recalling that Qadhafi did not come to power with a political programme based on his Green Book—he rather constructed this ideological master-narrative retrospectively, publishing it around ten years after his coup had abolished the monarchy. This sequence further nurtures the presumption that it was an attempt at narrative justification in hindsight, rather than a forwardlooking political project.

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question of national security8; the Syrian regime, in coordination with its allies Iran and Russia, relentlessly framed its counter-insurgency operations as counterterrorism; Saudi Arabia and the UAE justify indiscriminate warfare in Yemen mainly in the context of an anti-Iranian stance, woven into a larger regional security narrative. Since each and every narrative plot represents an invented yet meaningful story structure, the very usefulness of this intentional choice implies the possibility of manipulation. This is especially relevant in authoritarian contexts when alternatives to the political decision makers in power are not really an option on the level of polity, and passive support in terms of subordination is sought by the leadership. Therefore, without any freedom of choice, on the reception level of narratives the expectations of the audience are different in authoritarian contexts. In addition, under non-coercive, democratic circumstances, which is the hallmark of political narratives, a shift from the virtual realm of storytelling to the material level of action is essential for the mobilisation of support. However, non-action and de-mobilisation are intentional in autocratic contexts, in other words the goal corresponds to quiet acquiescence with policy “proposals”. Yet polarisation also manifests itself in the discursive field of such environments. The ideologically motivated, mainly Islamist opposition usually develops alternative counter-narratives (as in the writings of Yusuf al-Qardawi and Rashid al-Ghannouchi, for instance), whereas Islamicinspired violent actors (jihadis) have developed their own story repertoire (see Halverson et al. 2011). The inherent ordering mechanism of narratives is of particular usefulness for decision makers in situations of political instability such as massive contestation, and during conflict on various levels of intensity. The projection of their accounts reduces the complexity to the level of an exit strategy from the chaotic picture. Moreover, in tense and unsettled post-conflict situations they enable politicians to shape the present and the future, in either a utopian or a ‘retrotopian’ (a term borrowed from Zygmunt Baumann) fashion. However, one could also argue that authoritarian political systems are constantly in an extraordinary situation, permanent instability of a kind, tied to efforts to ensure regime survival and to stabilise the polity via both repressive means and narrative discourse. In this sense, the “discursive construction effort in moments of crisis” (Gadinger et al. 2014a: 87) also requires consideration from the angle of ‘authoritarian insecurity’, and extension along the time axis. Finally, an additional dimension of instability is linked to the scope and intensity of conflicts in the MENA region. Narratives are often relayed to the realm of ‘softness’ (as in ‘soft power’), in other words questioning their impact and effectiveness. However, in the context of conflict they could even be decisive. For

“President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has described population growth along with terrorism as the biggest threats facing the country.” Heba Saleh, Egypt attempts to rein in population boom, 7 February 2019, Financial Times https://www.ft.com/content/363ff658-292c-11e9-a5abff8ef2b976c7

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instance, ex-post depictions of war can turn defeats into victories: “Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser may have been beaten on the battlefield during the 1956 Suez Crisis [. . .] but that conflict was cast so strongly in the anti-colonial metanarrative that he emerged victorious” (Tanner 2014: 91). Of course, such narrative interpretations require not only skilful shaping but also a receptive audience, willing and able to receive the story’s proper logic in a positive manner. On the other hand, conflict-resolution efforts could be supported through the crafting of non-exclusive conflict accounts. In sum, on the regional MENA level, political narratives serve as a crucial element in the political survival and legitimisation strategies of authoritarian regimes. However, in such a context, narratives are received in the wider framework of potential repression of dissent (Franke-Schwenk 2014: 364), favouring passive compliance with the proposed stories, pre-empting the emergence of alternatives, labelled as dissent, while nurturing fully-fledged counter-narratives. It goes without saying that such political systems are inherently insecure, requiring constant stabilisation, including through the construction of political order on the rhetorical level of political discourse. The next section traces the development of narratology across several disciplines to give a fuller picture of the shared features of all types of narratives, including political accounts.

Homo Narrans: The Storytelling Animal “We are trying to impose the order of story structure on the chaos of existence.”9 What sounds more like a statement about individual cognitive striving at making sense in a complex world also refers to the very core of the method employed in political narratives. Let us first return to the study of narrative, however, and trace the trajectory of narratology across several disciplines. Studies of folkloristic Russian tales by Vladimir Jacovlevich Propp (first published in 1928) heralded the utilisation of a limited number of narrative units (he counted 31), called ‘functions’, to assemble the plots of traditional Russian fairy tales. The variable assembling of plot structures pertains to the course of action, in which a number of quasiarchetypical events are combined by rhetorical means in a causal manner into a ‘dramatic’ structure, basically fulfilling the classic Aristotelian trias. As Tsvetan Todorov points out, the sequence establishing the plot is chosen not merely for its ‘dramatic’ effect, the narrator opting for a distinct chronological concatenation, its main function is transformative: “[. . .] narrative which requires the development of

9 Quotation from Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Storytelling Animal (2013), in his TEDx talk on narratives, broadcast on 5 May 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼Vhd0XdedLpY

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an action, i.e., change, difference” (Todorov 1971: 38). In this way, the unfolding of the sequence allows either the original state to be re-established, or an acceptable alternative situation to be put in place.10 Such elementary narrative units are also deployed as constitutive plot elements in contemporary political stories of international conflicts, including role ascriptions (villain and hero), mission statements (fighting evil or humanitarian intervention) and declared outcomes (improving governance aka bringing democracy). Interestingly, the moral conclusion of many a fairy tale is also being instrumentalised for political purposes, with ‘saviours operating for the good of mankind’ and similar heroic narrative constructions at play. Kuusisto (2018, 2019) and Ringmar (2006) both draw parallels between narrative forms and political narratives in international affairs, proposing a novel approach to IR narratology. The Russian school of formalism is considered a pre-cursor of the French school of structuralist thinking. Claude Lévi-Strauss, especially in his work on myths, developed a structuralist anthropology, not surprisingly inspired by Propp who had been working at the intersection of literary studies and anthropology. Later on, this analytical approach to ‘storied knowledge’ (Kreiswirth 2000) was taken up by Roland Barthes and Paul Ricoeur, who oriented their enquiry towards narrative in general—in contrast to the earlier focus on tales: “French structuralism [. . .] drew on linguistics as a model for theorizing a basic underlying set of principles connecting all narratives (Patterson and Monroe 1998: 317; emphasis added)”. Philosopher Ricoeur famously underscored the virtual ubiquity of tales, whereas linguist Barthes (Introduction 1966), in a similar fashion, stressed the human condition of homo narrans (Gadinger et al. 2014b: 69) while critically pointing at the potential abuse of institutionalised language.11 Complementing these mostly semiotic considerations and initial efforts at the integration of linguistic narratology into other disciplines, systematic and critical reflection on narratology as a research method was introduced by post-structuralist thinkers. Even though the ideological underpinnings of their reflection, basically informed by historical materialism, would deserve additional consideration,12 their work on narratives allows a number of substantial conclusions. Michel Foucault, espousing a seemingly contrarian take, fundamentally questioned ‘pre-existing discursive significations’ (Merrill 2007: 15), referring to the potentially hegemonic character of narration (Gadinger et al. 2014b: 6). JeanFrançois Lyotard, on the other hand, questions the coherence of grand récits, or

10

Notably, the only indispensable function mentioned by Propp is the situation of deficiency or harm (i.e. the change of an initial state), which will be remedied in the course of the story’s plot unfolding (a recovery/reconstitution achieved via transformation, in tales often by means of some magic element). 11 Linguists Gérard Genette (Discours du récit) and Algirdas Julien Greimas both follow in structuralist footsteps, respectively theorising narratology and further synthesising Propp’s system. 12 “Its representatives view themselves avant-garde of what they consider an inevitable cultural revolution” (author‘s translation). See Günther Schiwy (1986) Poststrukturalismus und „Neue Philosophen“, 17.

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meta-narratives, in particular what he portrays as ‘progressive modernity’ (Kreiswirth 1992: 640/641). However, his scepticism is based on the construction of a relatively disjointed argument, resembling an intentional deconstructive effort directed against coherence, with a wide discursive arch bending from references to topics as variable as Auschwitz via societal informatisation to entry into a postindustrial age.13 Put more simply, both oppose the idea of an anthropological narrative constant and consider verbal communication in its narrative discursive form exclusively from the angle of power relations. With regard to political narratives, the most relevant contribution of the post-structuralist school to conceptual reflection therefore relates to two aspects: contingency (embeddedness) and flexibility (adaptability). First, narratives are contingent in the sense that their development, projection and reception can only function in a distinct ‘cultural sphere’, a shared epistemic realm (see Halverson et al. 2011: 14). Their capacity to constitute knowledge about ‘reality’ and to be perceived as plausible will always be measured against a referential framework, including other narratives and allowing a distinct interpretation. Second, in a constructivist understanding of autonomy (auto-poesis), narratives are closed but not impermeable systems, open to external influences in the sense of their capacity to adapt to change. Effectively, stories are not set in stone, and certain elements can be introduced without necessarily altering the main message or the functioning logic of the basic plot. Events can be added or subtracted, or given a new interpretative twist, for instance, as Subotic (2016) convincingly shows in her analysis of the relationship between policy change and narrative continuity. Other major contributions to narrative studies originated in the cognitive sciences (Bruner 1991). The relevance of the cognitive dimension relates mainly to identity formation, in other words self-perception and self-conception. However, in that identity perceptions are strong triggers of behaviour, or action, they have potential implications in political and social contexts. The second cognitive aspect of narratives relates more generally to epistemic implications, i.e. their capacity to convey meaning and hence to establish knowledge. This, in turn, requires human capacity to be receptive to the narrative mode, as Abbott (2000) argues in his study of the ‘storied mind’. The latest stages in the reception of the narrative turn relate to the social sciences and humanities, including history and political science.14 Inspired by Margaret R. Somers’ concept of narratives constituting ‘social ontologies’ (The Narrative Constitution of Identity 1994), Patterson and Monroe (1998) continued to theorise about narratives in political science, suggesting basic elements of a definition of political narrative such as goal-oriented, specific, constructed and perspectival. Other authors have focused on sub-disciplinary aspects such as narratives in international relations (IR). Two trends are in evidence here: Suganami’s comparative

13

See Jean-François Lyotard (1986) Das Postmoderne Wissen. For detailed discussions, see Kreiswirth’s ‘Trusting the Tale’ (1992), and Viehöver’s ‘Erzählungen im Feld der Politik’ (2014).

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reflections and theoretical discussion on the interpretative character of both history and IR on the one hand, and more specific applications in the field of IR based on narrative plots (see Kuusisto 2018; Ringmar 2006) on the other. Starting from a literary categorisation into four basic narrative types, these scholars have identified occurrences in political contexts, such as tragedy and romance, the latter portraying Saddam Hussein as the villain (tyrant) to be punished (chased from power by means of regime change) to guarantee a better future (democratic utopia). As Biegoń and Nullmeier (2014: 44) claim, political narratives could be considered strategic given their intentional, purposeful and goal-oriented character. Nevertheless, the strategic dimension could also be understood from the perspective of an actor with the capability to project hard and soft power in the international arena. If political narratives are deployed as a soft-power instrument for strategic communication purposes to persuade international audiences, or domestic audiences on a topic related to international affairs, these particular manifestations of narrative discourse could equally be considered from a strategic angle. However, from a narratological perspective, two different concepts emerge that require disambiguation. The first one relates to the functioning of narrative discourse, whereas the second, developed by Miskimmon et al. in ‘Strategic Narratives’ (2013), focuses on the communicative aspect, in other words the deployment of narratives in a specific context. A common trait in all these approaches to the narrative question is the realisation, and thus the methodological implication, that the configuration of narratives implies an intrinsic affinity with order: they are coherence-producing tools and thereby capable of constituting meaning and mediating knowledge to the stories’ recipients. Explaining why audiences are particularly responsive to and receptive of stories, Gadinger argues that an innate “narrative causality” (2014b: 73) allows ‘making sense’. Considered from a more political perspective, the narrative type of discourse represents a linguistic technique for producing legitimacy (Gadinger et al. 2014b: 87), influencing action via ‘perception modelling’.

Storifying Politics: Narratives of Power Every good story has an end, customarily one that re-balances an out-of-control, chaotic situation. To conclude our own account of narratives, their manifestations in the world of politics and the MENA region in particular, we realise our initial intent and propose a working definition. Departing from the hypothesis that crisis is a trigger and an ideal environment for political narratives to reveal their explanatory power and their persuasive potential, we adopt the guiding assumption that politicians intentionally instrumentalise the ordering mechanism that is proper to narratives in order to project their own visions of order, albeit in a narrative discursive fashion. The use of narrative as a lens through which to comprehend and categorise political communication in and about the tense, conflict-ridden MENA region starts

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from its consideration as a heuristic device for studying what occurs at the intersection of political instability and communication, or to be more precise in rhetorical depictions of order and disorder. We analysed the functioning and the effect of accounts in an attempt to understand how narratives operate, and what they can achieve. What makes stories attractive in the first place, and why do people pay attention and listen to them? How, eventually, do the recipients of a story relate to it, possibly identify with it and even act upon their perceptions? What does this imply in the political field? Before writing became a means of transposing knowledge and ideas, including about power, verbal communication, including story-telling, was the only way to convey information and meaning. Therefore, from an anthropological perspective, our human brains seem to have been profoundly conditioned to the narrative mode, as Bruner (1991) and Abbott (2000) argue. Building on this unique position of influence, any storyteller derives a healthy level of authority, rivalled only by his or her own rhetorical skills or the plausibility of competing plots. Furthermore, good stories are attractive because they make the listener anticipate the end and derive meaning about the issues involved. The intentional use of narratives in politics, an environment that purports to influence opinions, shape attitudes and confirm convictions, is therefore potentially rewarding for decision makers in that identification with the story will ideally lead to action in the form of support for their positions. As Ringmar (1996: 454) argues, once a story ‘makes sense’ for a recipient, there will be a tendency to validate it in terms of truth: in other words it becomes right or true in the eyes (and brains) of the beholder. This, in turn, enables political entrepreneurs to back their claims of power distribution and to manage their political capital on a more general level.

Political Narratives: Characteristic Features and Defining Elements Political narratives constitute a distinct subcategory of narratives, or narrative discourse, used by political entrepreneurs and activists. Despite allegedly representing the truth and claims to veracity, they could be considered fictional accounts of a kind. However, as pointed out, the binary distinction of fictional vs. non-fictional is of no analytical importance from a constructivist/socialconstructivist perspective. As Hodges (2011: 6) put it: “[. . .] truth is not simply an object external to social interaction. But rather, a form of knowledge emergent from that interaction”. As narrative discourse, every story combines elements of language and rhetoric (the skill of telling) with the structure of what is told (the narrative emplotment). This pattern results in a coherent story. Furthermore, narratives operate on two levels that are relevant to their use by political entrepreneurs. First, on the cognitive level, stories function as sense-making tools in proposing an intentional plot, which is

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basically an ordering mechanism for both explaining and understanding. Second, on the epistemic level the specific sought-after order conceptions (solutions, goals) of political entrepreneurs are reflected in their choice of events and the intentional ‘dramatic’ interlinkages within the narrative. This not only creates an appealing story line, it also effectively provides the basis on which knowledge is constructed. Thus, the verbalised order conceptions of political decision makers—on socioeconomic, social, or security-related issues—are mirrored in the construction of a narrative. In other words, the cognitive ordering mechanism related to narratives can be utilised in political accounts to reflect order conceptions on which the assumptions of political entrepreneurs rest. There is another analogy to consider. Whereas the (fairy) tale uses the narrative structure of discourse to send a moral message, as reflected in the plot and the ending, politicians’ stories may serve to project another goal, that of an ideal sociopolitical order.15 In the end, this connects to the question of action prompted by a positively received story: the political intention is reflected in the finality. What is of most relevance to the political usefulness of narrative, beyond some cognitive appreciation, is that built-up tension can be released by the action of those the story addresses, the listeners (see Ringmar 1996: 455). For the purposes of this enquiry we use narrative, story, account and narrative discourse as synonyms. Our definition of the political narrative builds on general characteristics of narratives such as coherence building, sense making and knowledge constitution. Despite these shared features and generally applicable defining elements, one should nonetheless make a distinction between the functioning and the potential effects of political narratives. A good working definition would alleviate any blurring of the term attributable to cross-disciplinary transfer and the relatively recent adoption of narrative in the social sciences. Narration, the act of telling a story, corresponds to discursive practice. The story itself is thus a human artefact, created with a purpose and an intention. In that sense, narratives are intrinsically motivated, ‘strategic’ tools of which the narrator makes use with a specific goal in mind. As Lamarque (2004: 398) points out in his discussion of the ‘distortion thesis’, the main features of narratives include being selective and perspectival, interpreting events in a distinct manner and serving their own ends. In the case of political actors, the acquisition of political power, or more abstractly the management of their political capital, is their goal, and it lies at the heart of their motivation to engage in story-telling. The minimal definitional requirement for a narrative consists in the existence of a narrator and of two interlinked events, the “depiction of an ordered sequence of events” (Lamarque 2004: 402). However, beyond the question of the narrator’s motivation and the story’s structure, narratives only ‘exist’ (become functional) once they are being told and received (see Eco’s ‘Lector in fabula’).

15

For a discussion of this utopian aspect, see Berenskoetter, Felix (2011) Reclaiming the vision thing: Constructivists as students of the future, International Studies Quarterly 55(3), 647–668.

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Second, given the ordering logic of narratives, political actors can use the structure to argue for the implementation of their order conceptions, proposing plausible models and solutions. Third, the functioning of narratives, which is geared towards a particular end, can be transferred to reflect the objectives of political actors, who thereby take advantage of the intentional character of the narrative for their own purposes. Finally, if the proposed narrative is considered plausible and is thus perceived as convincing, the implicit instructions for action will be heeded and will eventually support the political goal of justifying the narrator. This central legitimising effect of a successful political narrative could turn a functioning narrative into political capital for the actor. From this perspective, it makes sense to examine how certain characteristics of narratives play a role in the proposition for and production of order via their instrumental use by political entrepreneurs. As Patterson and Monroe (1998: 323) state, “[P]olitical stability [is] emanating from shared narrative”. Moreover, since the starting point of each narrative is change, the application of political narratives is particularly beneficial in crises perceived as destabilising and potentially threatening for political decision makers. In addition, and especially in a serious crisis, the complexity-reducing pattern of narratives offers a helpful way of conveying meaning. This story-based approach could shed new light on geopolitical volatility, postconflict convulsions, political contestation and further risks of destabilisation in the MENA region.

The Structure of the Book and an Overview of the Chapters Following this overview of the narrative turns in several disciplines, including the social and political sciences, the empirical section of the book analyses specific manifestations of narratives in politics as they relate to the Middle East and North Africa. For analytical purposes, the observations are divided into two aggregate levels, ranging from local players with a distinct, geographically limited field of interest, through regional players with varying ambitions to shape the regional order (Part I: Local and Regional Players) to great powers with wider interests and a complex set of stakes in the MENA region (Part II: Global Actors). On the methodological level we endorse a cross-disciplinary perspective at the intersection of linguistics, political science, IR and regional, Middle Eastern studies. In this spirit, the empirical main section draws from a variety of professional and disciplinary backgrounds.

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References Abbott HP (2000) The evolutionary origins of the storied mind: modelling the prehistory of narrative consciousness and its discontents. Narrative 8(3):247–256 Barthes R (1966) Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits. Communications 8:1–27 Baumann Z (2017) Retrotopia. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt Biegoń D, Nullmeier F (2014) Narrationen über Narrationen. Stellenwert und Methodologie der Narrationsanalyse. In: Gadinger F et al (eds) Politische Narrative: Konzepte – Analysen – Forschungspraxis. Springer, Wiesbaden Bruner J (1991) The narrative construction of reality. Crit Inq 18(1):1–21 Cherkaoui M (2018) Beyond escalation: transformative narratives in the Gulf crisis. Al-Jazeera Centre for Studies, Doha Eco U (1998) Lector in fabula: Le rôle du lecteur, ou, La coopération interprétative dans les textes narratifs. Le Livre de Poche, Paris Franke-Schwenk A (2014) Politische Narrative in autoritären Herrschaftskontexten. In: Gadinger F et al (eds) Politische Narrative: Konzepte – Analysen – Forschungspraxis. Springer, Wiesbaden Gadinger F et al (2014a) Politische Narrative. Konturen einer politikwissenschaftlichen Erzähltheorie. In: Gadinger F et al (eds) Politische Narrative: Konzepte – Analysen – Forschungspraxis. Springer, Wiesbaden Gadinger F, Jarzebski S, Yildiz T (2014b) Vom Diskurs zur Erzählung. Möglichkeiten einer politikwissenschaftlichen Narrativanalyse. PVS 55(1):67–93 Halverson JR et al (2011) Master narratives of islamist extremism. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke Hodges A (2011) The “war on terror” narrative: discourse and intertextuality in the construction and contestation of sociopolitical reality. Oxford University Press, Oxford Hyvärinen M (2007) Analyzing narratives and story-telling. In: The SAGE handbook of social research methods. Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, pp 447–460 Kreiswirth M (1992) Trusting the tale: the narrativist turn in the human sciences. New Lit Hist 23 (3):629–657 Kreiswirth M (2000) Merely telling stories? Poetics Today 21(2):293–318 Kuusisto R (2018) Comparing IR plots: dismal tragedies, exuberant romances, hopeful comedies and cynical satires. Int Politics 55(2):160–176 Kuusisto R (2019) International relations narratives: plotting world politics. Routledge, New York/ Oxon Lamarque P (2004) On not expecting too much from narrative. Mind Lang 19(4):393–408 Lukacs NE (2019, April) Obama’s road to Cairo: the president’s rhetorical journey, 2008–2009. GIGA working papers 319. German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Hamburg Lyotard J-F (1986) Das Postmoderne Wissen. Ein Bericht. Passagen Verlag, Vienna Merrill JB (2007) Stories of narrative: on social scientific uses of narrative in multiple disciplines. Colorado Res Linguistics 20:1–25 Miskimmon A et al (2013) Strategic narratives: communication power and the new world order. Routledge, New York/Oxon Patterson M, Monroe KR (1998) Narrative in political science. Annu Rev Polit Sci 1:315–331 Propp V (2015) Morphologie du conte. (Éditions) Points, Paris Ringmar E (1996) On the ontological status of the state. Eur J Int Relat 2(4):439–466 Ringmar E (2006) Inter-textual relations: the quarrel over the Iraq war as a conflict between narrative types. Coop Confl 41(4):403–421 Schiwy G (1986) Poststrukturalismus und “Neue Philosophen”. Rowohlt Taschenbuch-Verlag, Hamburg Shenhav SR (2006) Political narratives and political reality. Int Polit Sci Rev 27(3):245–262 Somers MR (1994) The narrative constitution of identity: a relational and network approach. Theory Soc 23(5):605–649

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Subotic J (2016) Narrative, ontological security, and foreign policy change. Foreign Policy Anal 12:610–627 Suganami H (2008) Narrative explanation and international relations: back to basics. Millennium: J Int Stud 37(2):327–356 Tanner R (2014) Narrative and conflict in the Middle East. Survival 56(2):89–108 Tibi B (2015) The Middle East torn between rival choices: Islamism, international security and democratic peace. In: Monier E (ed) Regional insecurity after the Arab uprisings: narratives of security and threat. Palgrave, Basingstoke Todorov T (1971) The 2 principles of narrative. Diacritics 1(1):37–44 Viehöver W (2014) Erzählungen im Feld der Politik. Politik durch Erzählen. In: Gadinger F et al (eds) Politische Narrative: Konzepte – Analysen – Forschungspraxis. Springer, Wiesbaden Wertsch JV (2008) The narrative organisation of collective memory. Ethos 36(1):120–135 Wittgenstein L (2003) Philosophische Untersuchungen. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main

Part I

Non-State Actors and Regional Powers Narrating and Reshaping Order

Wartime Narratives of Hezbollah Militants in the Syrian Conflict Erminia Chiara Calabrese

Introduction On 25 May 2013, during a festival celebrating the end of Israel’s occupation of South Lebanon (1978–2000), Hassan Nasrallah, Secretary-General of Hezbollah since 1992, officially acknowledged that the party’s fighters were present in Syria, fighting alongside the forces of Bashar Al-Assad’s regime, in the wake of the popular uprising there that began in March 2011. In his speech, given to a crowd that had come from all over Lebanon, he characterized the regime in Damascus as a “pillar of the resistance”. Hezbollah, he claimed, “cannot stand by with its hands clasped while this pillar is being destroyed”.1 He added: We will continue on this path, taking on the responsibilities and the sacrifices that come with it. (. . .) This battle is our battle, and I promise you victory (. . .) What future can you imagine for Lebanon, Syria and Palestine with these takfiriyyin [“those who declare that we are unbelievers”—Author’s note]? (. . .) If today Syria falls into the hands of the takfiriyyin, Israel and the United States (. . .) the Resistance will be trapped, and Israel will enter Lebanon. (. . .) If Syria falls, the Palestinian cause will be lost.2

Hezbollah was founded at the beginning of the 1980s, as a military organization (Saad-Ghorayeb 2002) fighting against the Israeli occupation of Lebanese territory.

1

Field observation, Nabi Chit, Bekaa valley, 25 May 2013. Hassan Nasrallah speech, 25 May 2013, https://www.moqawama.org/essaydetails.php?eid¼27814& cid¼141 2

E. C. Calabrese (*) EHESS/CESOR, Paris, France CAMES, American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 W. Mühlberger, T. Alaranta (eds.), Political Narratives in the Middle East and North Africa, Perspectives on Development in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35217-2_2

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Its armed intervention in Syria represents a turnaround in its trajectory—in particular because, for the first time in its history, it is fighting outside Lebanon.3 Hezbollah’s intervention in Syria has fostered much scholarship. Some studies focus on the strategic stakes tied to this intervention (Samaan 2015; Smyth 2016), others on the role of religious belief in incentivizing and justifying it (Smyth 2015), and some on the party’s military operations in Syria (Cimino 2016; Alipour 2015). I aim to interpret this trans-border armed involvement from a new perspective by shifting the focus to the party’s activists.4 My focus here is on their narratives concerning their experience of war, be that experience direct—as a fighter—or indirect, as is the case for the majority of Hezbollah activists who do not take part in the fighting. Paying attention to what these people say, and to how they construct their narratives of their experiences, gives voice to ‘ordinary people’,5 who are often ignored in studies on war that tend to focus more strongly on political and military elites (Buton and Gayer 2012). This is all the more evident in the Middle East. This approach will also facilitate understanding of how the experience is channeled through “variable modes of individual subjectification” (Naepels 2015), as well as of the multiples meaning these activists attach to the conflict. My hypothesis is that these narratives are tied both to the social characteristics of the activists, as well as their positioning, interest, and level of integration within the party and to their timing—in contexts that change rapidly in wartime. Since 2012 Hezbollah has been able to justify its military engagement in Syria based on a conceptualization of order: the protection of Lebanese borders and, more generally, of Lebanese citizens against the risk presented by the entry of parts of the Syrian opposition, in particular the Islamic State, into Lebanon, and the need to pre-empt chaos in Lebanon following what happened in Iraq. Hezbollah portrays itself as a guardian of this order in Lebanon and Syria as well, participating in the combat alongside troops of Bashar al-Asad’s regime to avoid Syria’s descent into chaos, following to the narrative of Syrian regime. Hezbollah’s linked narrative is in accordance with the traditional party narrative: the religious element linked to the Kerbala battle and its sacred figures, a “central event in Shiite doctrines” (Mervin 2017: 123) as well as political movements that adhere to Shia Islam, and the military dimension as it relates to the protection of its own weapons. As I will show, however, Hezbollah has used these master-narrative elements in a different way.

3

See Mühlberger (2019) Hezbollah’s military campaign in Syria: from hubris to nemesis?’. I understand ‘activists’ in this chapter as those who define themselves as being engaged in the party, even though their engagement varies in intensity and the level at which it operates. Some of them are officially party members, others are not, either by choice or party decision, even if they support it and participate in its activities. On the various ways of being active in Hezbollah, see Erminia Chiara Calabrese (2016), Militer au Hezbollah. Ethnographie d’un engagement dans la banlieue sud de Beyrouth. Paris/Beirut: Karthala/Ifpo. 5 I use this expression reflecting Erik Neveu’s definition, of “protagonists who do not have established status in collective consciousness or the media” (Neveu 2008). 4

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This chapter is based on ethnographic fieldwork (interviews, conversations, and direct and participant observation) conducted between 2011 and 2017 with Hezbollah activists in the Southern suburbs of Beirut, where the party’s territorial and militant base is prominent. I was given regular access to these informants through the friendship and mutual-acquaintance networks I was able to develop during my doctoral research on the sociology of Hezbollah activists in Beirut’s Southern suburbs (Calabrese 2016a, b) starting in 2005. Consequently, I am able to analyze these trajectories from a diachronic perspective.6 My focus here is on the trajectories of three activists within the party: those of Manal, Ahmad, and Husayn.7 All three have the following characteristics in common: they live in Beirut’s southern suburbs; they are from a working-class background; they come from South Lebanon; and they became active in the party during the 1990s, albeit in varying roles and with varying degrees of commitment. As for their positions within the party, Manal8 and Husayn are party activists whereas Ahmad is a fighter (mujâhid), a militant category that involves considerable devotion to the party and embodies the hard-core within the various concentric circles according to which its militant base is structured.9

Reckoning on “Going to War”: Between Institutional Adjustments and Organizational Redefinition Founded in the 1980s as a military organization (Saad-Ghorayeb 2002), Hezbollah has become one of the main political movements in Lebanon. It has gone from being the party of the underprivileged of the Bekaa and South Lebanon to that of a neglected urban class that came to settle in Beirut’s Southern suburbs. Nowadays, Hezbollah plays a central role in mobilizing the various social classes within the Lebanese Shia community. It has skillfully managed to position itself as the best defender of that community’s rights—a key resource within the so-called “consensual” Lebanese political system, based on power-sharing between religious communities (Hudson 1968). It also portrays itself as the sole guarantor of the community’s security, setting itself up as defender of Lebanon’s Southern border—and since 2011 as “protector of 6 The relevance of such networks has been highlighted in several investigations into partisan institutions that are not inclined to disclose their internal structures. 7 The names have been changed to protect the informants’ anonymity. 8 Unlike male adherents, women are not recognized by the party as members because they participate neither in combat nor in military training, both requirements for party membership. Therefore, even though well represented and numerous inside the partisan structure (with varying levels of engagement and sometimes important responsibilities), on the legal level females remain outside the organization. For a detailed discussion see Erminia Chiara Calabrese (2018) Genre et militantisme au sein du Hezbollah libanais: apprentissage militant et réenchantement du monde, Revue Socio, 77–96. 9 On the various circles of party militancy, see Calabrese (2016a), 135–136.

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the border” with Syria, in particular against the threat of various jihadi groups opposed to the regime of Bashar al-Assad. In line with most Lebanese political parties, Hezbollah manages a network of charities that provide various services to its members (Fawaz 1998; Harb 2010). It is also associated with private entrepreneurs who share “its moral and political positions” (Harb and Deeb 2010: 424). Hezbollah officially joined the formal Lebanese national-level political system by participating in the 1992 parliamentary elections, the first since 1972. When all the militias were dissolved (at least officially) at the end of the Lebanese civil war (1975–1990), Hezbollah became the only Lebanese party to continue the armed struggle, in the name of its fight against Israeli occupation. It participated in municipal elections in 1998, and entered government in 2005 with the appointment of a Minister from the ranks of the party. It became part of the majority for the first time June 2011, and is no longer in the opposition. The reference points of Hezbollah’s action rest on two pillars. The first is inspired by Khomeyni’s project of political Shiism, based on the doctrine of wilâyat al-faqîh (guidance of the jurist-theologian10). The second is political, pragmatic and territorial, and relates to the struggle against Israel as an occupying power in Lebanon11 (from 1978 to 2000), and currently to the ‘defense’ of the southern Lebanese borders with Israel. The party’s most influential institution is the Consultative Council (majlis al-shûra, or just shûra), comprising seven members, all of them men. This Council’s task is to “define the party’s political aims and policy, to support the general programme of the party’s activities, and to take its political decisions” (Qassem 2008: 91). When the protest movement first arose in Syria the Lebanese government chose to distance itself from events over the border, fearing negative repercussions (Geisser 2013). As for Hezbollah, it immediately declared its solidarity with the regime of Bashar al-Assad and called on Syrians to “lay down your weapons and find a political solution”.12 Nasrallah justified support for the regime in terms of needing to preserve the “Rejection Front” against the “Western plot”. As he stated in an interview for Al-Manar television on 10 November 2011: I can assert that a regime that resists is being brought down (. . .) because the alternative for the West and the enemy is indeed to set up a pro-American regime (. . .) that would meet Israel’s requirements, and that would drag Syria towards civil war and division.13

10

The doctrine was developed by Khomeyni at the end of the 1960s. In the absence of the hidden Imam, in occultation since the year 941, it gives the jurist-theologian the right “to rule in his name, both on religious and spiritual questions and on political ones.” Mervin, Sabrina (2008), “La guidance du théologien-juriste (wilâyat al-faqîh): de la théorie à la pratique”, in Mervin, S. (ed.), Le Hezbollah, état des lieux. Paris: Sindbad, 208. 11 Nowadays the ‘occupation’ element of the narrative is “kept alive” by the party through the Ghajar and Shebaa Farms questions. 12 See Hassan Nasrallah’s televised speech on 25 February 2012. www.almanar.com.lb 13 Broadcast on Al-Manar channel, 10 November 2011.

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Hezbollah was accused of sending its fighters to Syria as early as the Spring of 2011. Hassan Nasrallah repeatedly denied such allegations.14 In October 2012, the party’s Secretary-General stated in a Nasrallah speech broadcast on the party’s Al-Manar channel that Hezbollah members were fighting in Syria “as individuals and without a mandate from the party”.15 For the most part, these were fighters from the Hermel region on the border with Syria, and Lebanese Shia living in Syria16 and working in market-garden agriculture on the Qusair plain. The same year, the movement admitted that it had sent a few fighters to protect the mausoleum of Sayyida Zainab17 in the suburbs of Damascus,18 an important pilgrimage site for “Shia worlds” (Mervin 2017). Nasrallah restated in a televised speech in April 2013: Honest fighters for Islam must rise up to prevent the fall of the village and mausoleum of Sayyida Zainab. As such, some are present there defending this area, and falling as martyrs in the defence of this holy site.19

Thus, on 29 May 2013 in the midst of the battle of Qusair, the party issued an official communiqué stating: The information at our disposal shows that the groups of takfirîyîn in Syria planned to set up a strip on the border under their total control, around Arsal and Wadi al-Khaled. At that point, Hezbollah realised that there was no longer any point in hesitation, and that it had to stop reacting and to start acting. It therefore intervened militarily in the Qusair region, in a preventive battle. (. . .) For Hezbollah, this involvement is not tied to Bashar al-Assad himself, but to strategic choices (. . .).20

In the field, Hezbollah set up a multi-pronged “awareness campaign”21 that ran between 2011 and 2013 to legitimate its military participation in the conflict in Syria

14

See e.g. Hassan Nasrallah’s speeches of 11 November 2011 and 11 October 2012. www.almanar. com.lb 15 L’Orient-Le Jour, 12 October 2012. This acknowledgement followed the death in Syria of Ali Nassif, a military leader in the party, killed near Qusair in October 2012. See: www.moqawama.org, 3 October 2012. 16 This remains possible because the border between the two countries has never been fully delineated. See Karine Bennafla (2005) La région de la Bekaa: les mutations d’un espace frontière entre Syrie et Liban, Revue de l’économie méridionale, 53 (1/2), 211–218. 17 Sayyida Zainab is a female figure of Shia theology, the sister of Imam Husayn, whom the Shia consider to be the third Imam. 18 On the mausoleum, see Sabrina Mervin (1996) “Sayyida Zaynab, Banlieue de Damas ou nouvelle ville sainte chiite?”, Cahiers d’Études sur la Méditerranée Orientale et le monde Turco-Iranien, 22, 149–162; Paulo G. Pinto (2007) “Pilgrimage, Commodities, and Religious Objectification: The Making of Transnational Shiism between Iran and Syria”, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 27, 109–112. 19 France 24, 30 April 2013. 20 Al-Manar, 29 May 2013. 21 As defined by Christophe Traïni and Johanna Siméant: “media of every kind, the staging of material objects and symbolism deployed by the political players studied here, in order to arouse affect-based reactions that predispose those subject to such reactions to support the cause being

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and justify it to its militant base—and to mobilize its fighters to join the battle on the Syrian front. Included in the campaign were Hassan Nasrallah’s speeches, posters along the streets of Beirut’s Southern suburbs—in particular, giant posters of the Sayyida Zainab mausoleum carrying the slogan “Zainab will not be captured again”,22 speeches by Hezbollah leaders at the funerals of the first of the party’s fighters killed in Syria and, internally, additional ideological training for party members on the situation in Syria, and on Hezbollah’s narrative of it. Each of these measures produced “collective meaning and shared reference-points” (Lefebvre 2010b: 226). Further, they contributed to the construction of a common “enemy”—in this case, a singular “enemy”—that legitimated the war. The party and its militants labeled this enemy “takfirî” (celui qui excommunie). In other words the enemy, whether civilian or military, was not Syrian per se. Support for Bashar al-Assad’s regime by Hezbollah’s leadership was very widely accepted by most activists—albeit for reasons that varied widely. The party’s decision to send its fighters to Syria did not meet with the same quasi-unanimous acceptance, however. Many activists experienced genuine ideological distress between the end of 2011 and 2013 in particular. This was translated in their narrative self-constructions through expressions such as: “Syria is not our country” (suriyya mish baladna); “Let the Syrians fight for their country” (al-suriyyin lezem yhrabo kermel baladon); or “What business is it of ours what happens in Syria?” (shu khasna nahna ma’a shu am bsir bi suriyya?). The battle of Qusair,23 an agricultural plain a few kilometers from the border between the town of Hermel in Lebanon and Syria’s Homs, which was fought in May–June 2013, marked a turning-point for many of these activists. The party’s militant base considered the battle a spectacular victory for the party—but described it as a defensive act, a “preventive attack” (hujûm istibâqî). It was proof that the larger battle had now become “inevitable” (la yumkin tafadih) and “necessary” (darûri), faced with the threat of groups battling the Syrian regime.

defended”. Christophe Traïni and Johanna Siméant (2009) “Comment et pourquoi intéresser à sa cause?”, in: Christophe Traïni (ed.), Émotions... mobilisation!. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 13. 22 This slogan refers to the battle of Karbala, a founding moment of political Shiisms. Zainab, the daughter of Imam Ali and sister of Imam Husayn, whom the Shia consider to be the Third Imam, was taken into captivity by the Caliph in Damascus. She had lost many members of her family in the battle between Husayn and his companions on the one hand, and the powers lined up with the Umayyad Caliph on the other. See M.J. Fischer (1980) Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 23 Some Islamist brigades and the Free Syrian Army (FSA), fighting the regime of Bashar al-Assad, withdrew towards Qusair after being chased out of the city of Homs in April 2012. Pro-regime forces regained control of the area in June 2013, assisted by Hezbollah fighters who primarily came from the town of Hermel.

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Between Distress and Continuity Manal is a journalist. In 2005, when I met her for the first time, she was 40 years old. She became involved in Hezbollah in 1990, even though she had grown up in a Communist family in South Lebanon. It was the move away from her home and her Southern village to study Sociology at the Lebanese University in Beirut that brought her into contact with Hezbollah. At the end of 2011, as rumors began to circulate that Hezbollah fighters were deployed in Syria, Manal explained to me in our conversations that she would not approve “if Hezbollah decid[ed] to send the party’s fighters to Syria”. It was “for Syrians to solve the problems of their own country”. “We’ve lived through enough wars in Lebanon, let’s not also get involved in the wars of others”. Like several other activists I interviewed at the time, Manal experienced a certain “distress”, even if she did not call into question the party, its ideology or its cause in our conversations. Between 2011 and 2012, in the face of growing rumors that the party was militarily involved in Syria, she repeatedly voiced her disagreement.24 Husayn, a party member with a job in government administration who was 33 years old in 2011, took the same stance. When I met him in 2012, at the funeral of one of his friends who had been killed in Syria, he told me that he did not approve of the military intervention because Hezbollah “has to concentrate on Lebanon”. He thereby expressed his disappointment with the party’s decision. This type of disappointment could be termed “deadjustment,” in the words of Jacques Lagroye and Johanna Siméant, because it “leaves open the possibility of adjustments and of negotiations with the institution [here, the party]” (Lagroye and Siméant 2003: 67). Unlike Manal and Husayn, Ahmad, who was aged 45 in 2011, exhibited no particular distress or disappointment about Hezbollah’s decision to become militarily involved in Syria. Ahmad was from South Lebanon, and had been a fighter in the party since he was 20 years old. He lived with his wife and three children in the Southern suburbs of Beirut. As a Hezbollah fighter, he earned a full-time salary from the party. I had a conversation with him in 2015, during which he said: When Hezbollah decided to send its fighters to Syria it did not weaken my commitment or my belief in the cause I was defending. It was part of a coherent continuum. Granted, at the outset and like some other militants, I had a few doubts about this intervention. And do you know why? Because the project in Syria—and here I’m talking to you about the real project, what you see being put into practice today—wasn’t clear from the outset. At the outset, in 2011, personally, I believed in a popular insurrection in Syria, and I also believed that this uprising would be peaceful (silmiyye). Bashar al-Assad would carry out his reforms, and it would all be over. But then, from the end of 2011 when weapons started to appear, step-bystep, the project was clarified. We understood full well that it was larger than overthrowing a regime—not because Bashar al-Assad was a dictator, but because he was an enemy of the West. It was a full-scale project against the Resistance (mashrû‘ kâmil didda al-muqāwama).

Other militants chose not to raise the subject during these first two years. The party’s MPs adopted the same stance, avoiding any discussion of Syria in their interviews.

24

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E. C. Calabrese So, we had to commit ourselves to preserving our own cause, which is to say, ourselves (qadyatuna, ya’ni nahna). (Author interview, 14 July 2015).

Ahmad was explaining that he did not experience Hezbollah’s decision to intervene in Syria in 2013 as a “breach” or a “reversal” in his career as an activist. This was despite the fact that during our interviews before the end of 2011 he had repeatedly emphasized that he hadn’t initially felt concerned about what was happening in Syria—to the extent that his mission was “to guard the border with Palestine.” He explained that in 2013, “with events in Syria having become militarized and threats against Hezbollah”, becoming involved in the battle in Syria was consistent with his previous commitment. He saw it as a natural choice, a decision that was meaningful in the context of his career within the party. I could advance the hypothesis here—especially if I compare Ahmad’s narrative with the ones I gathered from other fighters within the party—that Ahmad’s position could primarily explain his obedience with respect to the party’s decision. The figure of the fighter represents the hard core within the circles of Hezbollah militancy. His levels of socialization and party discipline are very strong, and so are the material and symbolic rewards linked to the struggle. It is through armed struggle that these fighters acquire the status of a hero within the party’s society, which it labels the “society of the Resistance”.25 The status also involves sacrifice: the decision to give oneself over entirely to the party and to the cause, while also asserting oneself individually.

The War as “Existential Struggle” The battle of Qusair in 2013, the first battle in which Hezbollah admitted to having taken part, marked a turning-point for Manal. Once she saw “on television what the takfîrîyyin groups had done to the Christians who lived in the area”, she began to fear the prospect of these groups entering Lebanon. “They’ve been threatening us for months, and they threaten to come all the way here”. The party’s decision to intervene then became “necessary” and “inevitable” to her: as she told me one day, “we’re not in a position to choose when our very existence is on the line (ma fina nekhtar ‘andama wujudna bil da’)”. As she explained when I met her in December 2013 at the funeral of a Hezbollah fighter killed in Syria, as the coffin passed by, draped in the party’s yellow flag, and she, like the other women present, had thrown rice and rose petals on it: What a shame for all our fighters who are now dying in Syria! Most of them are very young. But in the end, what do you want us to do? It’s like Sayyid Nasrallah says, it’s the same struggle. If we don’t stop them in Syria, one day the takfîrîyyin will come here and cut our heads off. What greater regression could there be? [. . .] Now, you know, our fighters

On how the party defines this society, see N. Qassem (2008) Mujtama‘ al-muqâwama, ’irâdat al-’istishhâd wa sinâ‘at al-’intisâr [The society of resistance, the will for martyrdom, and the making of victory]. Beirut: Dâr al-ma‘ârif al-hikmiyya. 25

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(shabâbna) are defending the mausoleum of Sayyida Zainab in Damascus. How could we imagine leaving Zainab on her own, she who is Prophet Muhammad’s little daughter? Do you know what’s been written on the walls of the mausoleum? You’ll leave with the regime (sawfa tarhalî ma‘â-l-nizâm). No, I want to tell them that Sayyida Zainab’s mausoleum will stay! Because our fighters will not leave her on her own! How could they even think such a thing? [. . .] Yes, it’s true that because of this, many in the party have died—but do you think we have any choice? No.

Manal understood Hezbollah’s intervention in Syria as an “act of self-defence” on the part of the Lebanese Shia community, which saw itself as being in danger.26 The party’s activists refer to the struggle as an “existential battle” (harb al-wujûd). Inherent in this is a collective dimension, regarding the Shia community’s presence in the region—as well as individual and partisan dimensions. As Ahmad told me, it is only through battle that these militants can protect their countries, by “preventing these groups from reaching Lebanon”. Starting in 2014, both Islamist brigades, including the Nusra Front and, later, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and members of the Free Syrian Army retreated to the Sunni villages of the Eastern Beqaa valley, and conducted several military operations in Lebanese territory.27 For these militants, the threat has been embodied in the attacks that have shaken various neighbourhoods of Beirut’s Southern suburbs since 2013, claimed by various Syrian opposition groups.28 Concerning these attacks, several of them mentioned that the first President of the opposition’s Syrian National Council 26

Since the end of 2011, groups opposed to the Syrian regime have issued various warnings to Hezbollah and its members. 27 After several days of clashes with the Lebanese army, these fighters were evacuated in August 2017. There had already been clashes between Hezbollah fighters and these groups. 28 Two rockets fired from the village of ‘Aitat fell in the Southern Beirut suburbs, next to Mar Mikhael church on 26 May 2013, wounding four Syrians. A rocket was fired at Aley on 21 June 2013, and a bomb placed under a vehicle exploded at 11 a.m. in a parking lot in Bir Al-Abed on 9 June 2013, injuring 53. “The 313 Brigade—Special Forces” claimed responsibility for the attack in a communiqué on their Facebook page. They described themselves as “a military group fighting in Syria”, and explained that the reason for the attack was Hezbollah’s military intervention in Syria. Two rockets fired from an area next to the town of Aramoun in Aley on 1 August 2013 struck the area next to the Presidential Palace in Baabda, without causing any injuries. On 15 August 2013, a car bomb exploded in Ruweiss, in the heart of the Southern suburbs, killing 30 and injuring 300: a group calling itself the “Aisha, Mother of the Believers Brigade” posted a video on YouTube claiming responsibility for the attack. Two car bombs exploded outside the Taqwa and Salam mosques in Tripoli on 23 August 2013, killing 45 and injuring 500. On 19 November 2013, a man committed suicide on his motorbike, and another in a car parked in Bir Hasan, next to the Iranian embassy. The latter explosion killed 25, including the Iranian Cultural Attaché in Lebanon, Cheikh Ibrahim Ansari, and wounded 150. A car bomb exploded in Downtown Beirut at 9:40 a.m. on 27 December 2013, killing Minister Muhammad Chatah and his bodyguard, Mohammed Tareq Badr, along with others. On 2 January 2014, a car bomb killed at least four and wounded 66 in Dahiyeh, according to the Lebanese Ministry of Health. A suicide attack admitted by the Nusra Front killed four in the neighbourhood of Harat Hreik on 21 January 2014, and on 3 February a man blew himself up in a minibus that was supposed to pass through Beirut’s Southern suburbs. The Islamic State group (ISIS) claimed responsibility for the double suicide-bombing that shook the neighbourhood of Bourj el-Barajneh in Beirut’s Southern suburbs on 12 November 2015, killing over 40 and injuring nearly 200.

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(SNC), Burhan Ghalioun, had threatened as early as in December 2011 that if the regime of Bashar al-Assad fell, Syria’s relations with Iran and Hezbollah would be cut off. They referred in particular to Ghalioun’s statements in an interview with the Wall Street Journal: There will be no special relationship with Iran. [. . .] Breaking the exceptional relationship means breaking the strategic military alliance. [. . .] Hezbollah after the fall of the Syrian regime will not be the same.29

Hassan Nasrallah replied to these statements on 6 December 2011 as follows: The so-called Syrian National Council, formed in Istanbul, and its leader Burhan Ghalioun (. . .) are competing with each other to present their credentials to the United States and Israel.

This security and defence register seemed to dominate the narratives of many of these activists. In a conversation I had with Ahmad when he returned from the Syrian front, he pointed out that “The cause is us, not Syria.” He continued: What do I mean by that? Several things. In Syria, we fight above all for our own security, to defend ourselves and to defend our political project. Naturally, that means opposing the Israeli and American project in the region—since we are a party that was born as a party of resistance against Israel, and we are going to remain that. If they massacre us, we can’t just sit and watch. They are a danger to us, like Israel is a danger to us. That’s why we must defend ourselves. (Interview on 14 July 2015).

In 2015, Husayn’s register was in the same vein: The party’s fighters in Syria constitute a type of self-defence (difa’ nafso) and they defend the project of the Resistance, which is to say, ourselves [. . .] You know, I was only little when Israel occupied Lebanon, but I listened to my parents telling me all the time about the injustice (zulm) that the Israelis imposed on us, and that we all lived through during the occupation. Without the Resistance, we couldn’t have stayed in this country. Today, with my friends, I sometimes go to the South, to Kfarkila. We bring out some chairs and smoke narguileh, and the Israelis are right there, facing us. And do you know what? They’re the ones who are scared—not us. We don’t move. It’s thanks to the Resistance that all of this is possible. That’s why we have to keep defending it, to defend ourselves. (Author interview on 24 February 2015).

In 2012, Husayn had shared with me his disappointment at the party’s sending fighters to Syria. This was no longer the case in 2015. It was then that a kind of “reenchantment” of the party’s cause took hold. What emerges from Husayn’s words and his vision of the party’s military battle in Syria is that the party’s Resistance has multiple meanings. Outstripping the limited meaning of the struggle against Israel, it is also tied to the struggle against injustice, or to a security register, as individual and community protection and security against an outside aggressor. Alternatively, within the Lebanese political system it is tied to how that community sustains itself on the Lebanese political stage facing the risk of losing all the political and social capital gained by the community. 29

The Wall Street Journal, Syria Opposition Leader Interview Transcript, 2 December 2011. https:// www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970203833104577071960384240668

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As much of the scholarship on the sociology of collective action indicates, war can indeed constitute an important stage in reactivating a “party spirit” and partisan loyalty. Confronting one’s opponents, the return of fighters’ bodies to the party’s neighbourhoods, and the return of the wounded to this partisan society reinforce the borders between “us” and “the others”. Through various facets of its awareness campaigns, Hezbollah has succeeded in “providing substance to the gratifying feeling of contributing to a just fight” (Lefebvre 2010a)—and in channelling the emotions aroused by the loss of a son, a father or a brother on the battlefields of Syria towards participation in the armed struggle.

Conclusion The accounts of these activists foster appreciation of how actors are constantly producing adjustments related to enchantment and disenchantment with this military intervention. Such enchantment is, of course, a product of the militant community that constructs an ‘air du temps’ (Nicourd 2009: 17) by different means that approves this type of engagement. To quote Sandrine Nicourd, “these ‘airs du temps’ impact heavily on the construction of militant loyalty (fidelite militante) [. . .], and enable them to be ‘on the right side of history’.” (Nicourd 2009: 17). The reshaping of the Hezbollah narrative since its military engagement in Syria indicates, among other things, that such narratives are not as rigid as sometimes assumed—but can and do adapt to changing circumstances. This is even the case with the religious narrative, in particular with the sacred figures, notable in the shift from Hussein to Zaynab. These sacred figures who, to quote Robert Hertz, on the one hand “are impregnated with a particular essence, in virtue of their nature or accomplished rites, that consecrate them, put them apart, and endow them with extraordinary powers” (Hertz 1970: 88–89), and on the other hand are subject to multiple negotiations, rules and re-enchantments that ensure their permanent and ubiquitous significance. The use the party makes of Sayyida Zaynab shows how the idea of a ‘preemptive offensive’ (hujûm istabâqî) in which the Syrian war is framed transcends the narrative of military resistance against an occupier while embodying the idea of defense, in a similar manner as the struggle against Israeli occupation.

References Alipour F (2015) Syrian Shiites take up arms in support of Assad’s army, Al-Monitor Bennafla K (2005) La région de la Békaa: les mutations d’un espace-frontière entre Syrie et Liban. Revue de l’Économie Méridionale 53(1/2):211–218 Buton F, Gayer L (2012) Sociologie des combattants. Pôle Sud 36:5–8

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Calabrese EC (2016a) Militer au Hezbollah. Ethnographie d’un engagement dans la banlieue sud de Beirut. Ifpo/Karthala, Beirut/Paris Calabrese EC (2016b) ‘La cause c’est nous’: militants du Hezbollah au Liban face à la guerre en Syrie. Confluences Méditerranée 98:103–114 Calabrese EC (2018) Genre et militantisme au sein du Hezbollah libanais: apprentissage militant et réenchantement du monde. Revue Socio 11:77–96 Cimino M (2016) Le Hezbollah et la guerre en Syrie. Politique étrangère Été(2):115–127 Fawaz M (1998) Islam, resistance and community development, the case of the Southern Suburb of Beirut City, Masters in City Planning thesis, Boston, MIT, unpublished Geisser V (2013) Le Liban, au coeur de la crise syrienne, en marge des révolutions arabes? In: Burgat F, Paoli B (eds) Pas de printemps pour la Syrie. Les clés pour comprendre les acteurs et les défis de la crise (2011–2013). La Découverte, Paris, pp 221–237 Harb M (2010) Le Hezbollah à Beyrouth. Karthala/Ifpo, Paris/Beirut Harb M, Deeb L (2010) Piety and pleasure: youth negotiations of moral authority and new leisure sites in al-Dahiya. Bahithât: Cultural Practices of Arab Youth 14:414–427 Hertz R (1970) Sociologie religieuse et folklore. Les Presses universitaires de France, Paris Hudson MC (1968) The precarious republic: political modernization in Lebanon. Random House, New York Lagroye J, Siméant J (2003) Gouvernement des humains et légitimation des institutions. In: Favre P (ed) Être gouverné. Mélanges en l’honneur de Jean Leca. Presses de Sciences Po, Paris, pp 53–71 Lefebvre R (2010a) Petits arrangements avec son militantisme. Le désarroi identitaire des militants du parti socialiste. In: Surdez M, Voegtli M, Voutat B (eds) Identifier-s’identifier. Antipodes, Lausanne Lefebvre R (2010b) Se conformer à son rôle. Les ressorts de l’intériorisation institutionnelle. In: Lagroye J, Offerlé M (eds) Sociologie de l’institution. Belin, Paris, pp 219–247 Mervin S (1996) Sayyida Zaynab, Banlieue de Damas ou nouvelle ville sainte chiite? Cahiers d’Études sur la Méditerranée Orientale et le monde turco-iranien 22:149–162 Mervin S (2017) En attendant l’Imam: autorité religieuse et pouvoir politique dans le chiisme duodécimain. In: Mervin S, Mouline N (eds) Islams politiques: courants, doctrines et idéologies. Cnrs Éditions, Paris, pp 131–159 Mühlberger, Wolfgang (2019) Hezbollah’s military engagement in Syria: from hubris to nemesis”, in: Ajai Sahni (ed.) The fragility of order: essays in Honour of K.P.S. Gill. New Delhi: Kautilya Books, 267–280 Naepels M (2015, June) Une anthropologie du conflit. Entretien avec Michel Naepels, interview with Vincent Casanova and Valentin Chemery. Vacarme 72(25):42–57 Neveu E (2008) Trajectoires de soixante-huitards ordinaires. In: Damamme D et al (eds) Mai-Juin 68. Éditions de l’Atelier, Paris, pp 144–157 Nicourd S (ed) (2009) Le Travail Militant. Presses Universitaires de Rennes, Rennes Qassem N (2008) Hezbollah: la voie, l’expérience, l’avenir. Al-Bouraq, Beyrouth Saad-Ghorayeb A (2002) Hizbu’llah: politics and religion. Pluto Press, London Samaan J-L (2015, Summer) Israël-Hezbollah: la nouvelle équation stratégique. Politique étrangère 2:113–123 Smyth P (2015) The Shiite Jihad in Syria and its regional effects, Policy Focus 138, The Washington Institute Smyth P (2016) How iran is building its Syrian Hezbollah, Policy Watch 2580, The Washington Institute

Chasing the Wind: Clashes Between Israeli and Palestinian Narratives Olli Ruohomäki

Whoever controls the past controls the future; whoever controls the present, controls the past George Orwell 1984

Introduction The 1948 Arab-Israeli war was one of the most decisive events in the history of the contemporary Middle East. The consequences of the war and its impact continue to resonate in modern times. Both the Palestinians and the Israelis are stuck in an ongoing all-consuming conflict over territory, sovereignty and identity, with no end in sight. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been somewhat off-stage since the 2011 Arab spring and its aftermath, as the rise of the terror organisation ISIS took centre stage in Middle Eastern affairs. With the defeat of ISIS, attention shifted to the Syrian war. Nevertheless, even if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has received less media coverage in recent years it has not really petered out. On the other hand, the parties have not teetered off the cliff either and the conflict is again gaining currency, particularly since 15 May 2018 and the violence surrounding that date, which marked the 70th anniversary of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. There are two clashing and seemingly irreconcilable metanarratives present in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that revolve around what happened in 1948 with the formation of the state of Israel.1 The roots of the conflict lie in the partition of the Ottoman territories in the Middle East during the First World War. Britain and France aimed to implement a new order that replaced the Ottoman order and the

1

Metanarratives are essentially storswies about stories. They locate national stories within a larger historical and political scheme, and often constitute sources of identity and national legitimacy. O. Ruohomäki (*) The Finnish Institute of International Affairs, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: olli.ruohomaki@formin.fi © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 W. Mühlberger, T. Alaranta (eds.), Political Narratives in the Middle East and North Africa, Perspectives on Development in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35217-2_3

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‘Jewish national home’ (The Balfour Declaration), which was one of the various contradicting promises given at the time (Shlaim 2015: 21). The Palestinian metanarrative describes a people unjustly deprived of its land by invaders. The Israeli metanarrative, on the other hand, depicts the justified return of a historically dispossessed diaspora to the land of its ancestors. There is little understanding, respect or acknowledgement of what the other side perceives to be its narrative. The strength of the narratives is aptly revealed in the ongoing conflict. Both metanarratives are powerful mobilising instruments that galvanise people to support the causes they believe to be just and right. In the case of the Palestinian metanarrative, for instance, dispossession and displacement are notions from which the Palestinians draw inspiration to organise rallies and demonstrate against Israeli occupation. The violent clashes on the Israeli-Gaza border in May 2018 underscore this point. In the case of the Israeli metanarrative, return to the land has not lost traction, and even the goal of establishing the state has been fulfilled. The West Bank settler movement keeps the tale alive, and the narrative dovetails with the securitising meme of the Israeli state, which sees the return narrative as a way of countering an existential threat posed by the hostile world in which it finds itself. Hence, the two metanarratives are not only polarising, they also appear to be mutually exclusive and thereby translate into irreconcilable positions. Despite the complexity the clashes between the Israeli and Palestinian narratives entails, it is possible to outline the main contours of what is behind the two metanarratives that inform the ongoing conflict. There are a number of detectible layers and angles within them. In both are ideological, religious and strategic layers and angles that are at times intertwined. This chapter examines how the Israelis and the Palestinians have constructed their metanarratives and how they inform the policies and practices of their respective governments from this starting point,2 and concludes with reflections on the prospects for a resolution of the conflict in the face of the clashing narratives.

The Palestinian Metanarrative Al-Nakba and Its Repercussions The Palestinians refer to the formation of the modern state of Israel in 1948 as al-Nakba, the catastrophe. Al-Nakba basically corresponds to the narrative of dispossession and displacement, according to which the Palestinians were forced by regular and irregular Zionist armed groups to leave their homes, and thereby became refugees in neighbouring countries.

2 I would like to thank Timo Stewart, Pasi Patokallio, Toni Alaranta, Wolfgang Mühlberger and Jamal Abdullah for their constructive comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this chapter.

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The history of the Palestinian people is deeply marked by the dividing line between the pre-1948 and the post-Nakba periods. What happened in 1948 resembled an earthquake as far as the Palestinians are concerned: the geography, the demography and the identity of Palestine were changed forever.3 The Palestinian homeland was shattered and lost as a consequence of al-Nakba. According to Palestinian historian Saleh Abdel Jawad, between 80 and 85% of the Palestinian villages that fell under Israeli control were destroyed, and 60% of the people were expelled (Jawad 2006: 90; cf. Pappe 2006). In addition to the massive population transfers and the expropriation of their property, the cultural heritage of the Palestinians, including their library collections, was destroyed. Some 400 Palestinian villages were levelled to the ground, and some 700,000 of the 940,000 Arabs living in Palestine became refugees. Inside Israel an estimated 156,000 Palestinians survived the war and became an Arab minority in the Jewish state. Given the scale of the events, Jawad uses the term ‘sociocide’ to describe what happened in 1948 (Jawad 2006: 102). Currently the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) caters for some five million Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and neighbouring Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Israel offered citizenship to Palestinians who remained within the pre-1967 borders of the Israeli state. Jordan offered citizenship to the Palestinians within its new enlarged borders. The Palestinians who fled to Lebanon, Syria and other Arab countries remained stateless. Apart from Jordan, the Arab regimes exonerated themselves from any obligation to integrate Palestinians into their societies. They placed the responsibility for the refugees, in particular the financial burden, squarely on the shoulders of the international community. Israel replaced the name Palestine on the atlas of the globe. Arab states and a number of Muslim countries did not accept the state of affairs and most have continued to publish official maps of the Middle East without mention of the name Israel. Following the Islamic revolution of 1979, Iran joined the Arab states and a number of Muslim countries in not acknowledging the existence of Israel.4 Be that it as it may, Israel became established on 78% of the British Mandate for Palestine, and the international community recognised the borders of the 1967 ceasefire agreements de facto. Contemporary West Bank and Gaza constitute only 22% of the historic British Mandate for Palestine, enjoying neither full territorial statehood, nor sovereignty. Seventy years later, the narrative of dispossession and displacement is still strong in the collective consciousness of the Palestinian people. As Manna’ points out, the experience of statelessness and the injustice that befell the refugees have only intensified (Manna’ 2013: 87).

3

See Black (2017: 113–130) for a detailed description of the events; cf. Morris (1987). Curiously enough, there is no international dialling code for Israel in many Arab and Muslim countries. 4

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Al-Nakba is commemorated annually on 15 May, a day that Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza mark with speeches, rallies and protest marches. Many Palestinians in the diaspora also commemorate the day. In Israel, the security services are on high alert for any incidents that may occur. On commemoration day, Palestinian demonstrators typically throw stones at Israeli soldiers guarding checkpoints in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, who respond by firing bullets and tear gas. The demonstrations turned particularly violent in 2011. When thousands of Syrian protestors tried forcibly to enter the Israelioccupied Golan Heights, Israeli soldiers opened fire. The 15th of May 2018 marked 70 years since al-Nakba, and the significance of the date was underscored by violent events on the Gaza-Israeli border. Many Palestinian refugees took their keys with them in the belief that their return was imminent. Since then the keys have been passed on from generation to generation as a keepsake—in memory of their lost homes and as lasting symbols of their desired “right of return” as per the Palestinian interpretation of the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194. Some still possess the title deeds to their former homes. There is collective mourning of the past among many Palestinians. Palestinian historian Ari al-Arif adopted the term ‘Paradise Lost’ to depict the loss of Palestine in his book about al-Nakba (Arif 1958-1960). The depiction of the magical aura of the pre-1948 Palestinian village is prominent in Palestinian art, music and literature (Ben Ze’ev 2011: 91). The Arab defeats in the June 1967 war and the 1973 war between Israel and its neighbouring Arab states reawakened memories of al-Nakba. There were also other political upheavals in the region that contributed to the plight of the Palestinians. In particular, the 1970 Fatah-led uprising (Black September) in Jordan and the Lebanese civil war (1975–1982/90) caused death and destruction among Palestinian refugees present in those two countries.5 With the passage of time, and the diminished likelihood of a return to their ancestral lands, Palestinian refugees in what became a diaspora continued to nurture an identity as victims who had been subjected to brutal injustice and trauma.

5

In a nutshell, the series of events known as Black September was a violent conflict fought in Jordan between the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Jordanian army (see Shlaim 2008 for details). The PLO had grown in strength and the rulers in Amman viewed the organisation with apprehension, a situation that eventually led to a short but bloody conflict between the armed Palestinian factions and the Jordanian state. Thousands of Palestinians lost their lives, and for a period of time the Palestinian cause was put on hold in the Jordanian polity. The indecisive outcome of the Lebanese civil war resulted in the involvement of Syria, which in turn led to the invasion of Israel. Israel’s goal was to destroy the PLO and its bases in Lebanon. Again, Palestinian civilians suffered from massacres and the destruction of refugee camps in Lebanon. The Sabra and Shatila massacre is perhaps the best known of the events: under the eyes of the Israeli Defense Forces, thousands of civilians in the Sabra neighbourhood and the adjacent Shatila refugee camp were killed by a Christian Lebanese militia known at the time as the Phalange (Al-Hout 2004).

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Preserving the memory of loss and discrimination is a central constituent of the Palestinian metanarrative.6

The PLO as the Torchbearer of the Palestinian Metanarrative The ‘Palestinian National Liberation Movement’, better known under its acronym Fatah, was established in 1957. Fatah presented itself as a Palestinian national movement that focused on the Palestinian issue and its solution, demanding that the Arab world invest more to liberate the occupied land and provide financial and military assistance to the Palestinian people. According to Ghanem, the apex of the institutionalisation of the Palestinian national movement and the culmination of the process of its consolidation was the founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization (Munadhamat al-Tahrir al-Falasteniya), better known as the PLO, in 1964 (Ghanem 2013: 18). The outcome of the June 1967 war catalysed the crystallisation of the Palestinian national movement as the torchbearer of the Palestinian metanarrative. It also triggered the emergence of a strategic narrative that was nationalist in nature, but which at the same time sought to internationalise the Palestinian cause by framing it within a global anti-colonial narrative of resistance and liberation. The PLO Charter of 1964 and the amended version of 1968 refer to dispossession and displacement and call for the return of the Palestinian people to their lost homeland. The Charter contains passages emphasising that Palestine is “the homeland of the Palestinian people and an integral part of the greater Arab homeland”; that the Palestinian people have “the legal right to their homeland”; and that “armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine”. Mohamad notes that military means constituted the most important part of the PLO’s early “all-or-nothing” policy in the years following the Arab defeat during the 1967 war (Mohamad 1997: 1). The early strategy was somewhat militant, based on a type of guerrilla warfare. In addition to keeping the narrative of dispossession and displacement alive the PLO actively resisted the Palestinian narrative. However, after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war it realised it needed to achieve its goals by political means. The military option was still included in the overall strategy, however. The creation of a democratic state in Palestine became official policy in the Palestine National Council (PNC) meeting of 1971 (Hassassian 1993). It is worth pointing out that the PLO realised it had to recognise the Jewish demographic reality in Palestine. Consequently, the proposal called for the creation of a non-confessional secular state in which all Jewish residents who had come to Palestine prior to 1947

6 Both the Israelis and the Palestinians have suffered historical traumas (Daoudi and Barakat 2013). Pearce suggests that acknowledgement of these traumas by both sides could act as currency for fostering an understanding between them (Pearce 2014). This currency has been devalued, however, by what some on both sides see as over-exploitation.

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would become citizens. This did not mean accepting a separate Jewish territorial entity, however.7 The PLO introduced the concept of a national authority (sulta wataniyeh) in 1974 as an interim solution on the way to full statehood. As Mohamad notes, this approach implied the relinquishment of the goal to create a state covering the whole of Palestine (Mohamad 1997: 2). The 13th Palestinian National Council in 1974 called for the creation of a national state (dawla wataniyeh) on the Palestinian homeland. The understanding was that the homeland was to be located on the West Bank and Gaza, with the capital in East Jerusalem. From then onwards the PLO focused its efforts on securing the creation of an independent Palestinian state. It was at this juncture that the seeds of the two-statesolution narrative were planted, albeit such a term had not yet gained currency in the PLO’s political thinking. This two-state narrative would later put to an end the previous maximalist, irredentist demands and positions that the PLO had advocated. Not all Palestinians accepted the PLO’s stance. The radicals, led by the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), continued with their policy of armed struggle. The PLFP wanted to keep the narrative of active resistance sharp, whereas the PLO portrayed itself as a moderate force, and consciously improved its international image. Yasser Arafat’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly in November 1974 was a dramatic event in that as far as the Palestinians and the PLO were concerned it represented international recognition of the Palestinian struggle. In addition to framing the Palestinian cause in terms of an anti-colonial struggle against oppression the speech highlighted the injustice Palestinians had endured since the creation of what he called the ‘Zionist entity’. The 1980s saw a number of peace plans8 put forward, but because none of them saw the light of day and as the frustration of the Palestinians with Israeli policies and practices in the occupied territories grew the ground was ripe for upheaval. The Palestinian narratives of dispossession, displacement and injustice were revitalised with the narrative of active popular resistance. As it turned out, December 1987 marked the start of the first Intifada. What began as local demonstrations snowballed into a sweeping popular uprising against Israeli military occupation and settlement policies, which did not die down until the convening of the Madrid peace conference at the end of 1991 and the subsequent 1993 and 1995 Oslo accords.9

7 The views of the political elite who lived in the occupied territories differed from those of the PLO leadership in exile. The former called for a political settlement that accepted a Palestinian entity coexisting with Israel (Mohamad 1997: 2). As the years passed the views of the PLO leadership in exile and the political leaders on the ground started to converge. In the background was recognition that a political settlement had to be found and that coexistence had to feature in the solution. 8 Among these were the 1980 Brezhnev peace plan, the 1981 Fahad plan, the 1982 Fez plan and the 1982 Ronald Reagan peace plan. None came to fruition, but they did prepare the ground for the 1991 Madrid Middle East peace conference that would lead to the 1993 and 1995 Oslo accords. 9 Cobban notes how PLO leaders were able to harness the tremendous power of the intifada to pursue a political strategy they had favoured for a number of years: to seek entry into negotiation

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It is worth pointing out that throughout the years leading to the 1993 and 1995 Oslo accords the PLO kept alive the Palestinian narrative of displacement, dispossession and injustice endured, and sought to achieve recognition of the Palestinian peoples’ right to their homeland. The PLO was successful in internationalising the Palestinian cause on global fora, especially the United Nations. It was specifically the feat of keeping the Palestinian cause on the international agenda that led to the breakthrough that culminated in the Oslo accords. Israel officially accepted the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and the PLO recognised the right of Israel to exist. The Oslo accords brought to fruition the narrative of the two-state solution against the backdrop of the Palestinian narratives that the PLO kept alive for decades.10 Since the death of Yasser Arafat in November 2004, the Palestinian national movement and its leadership have faced major challenges in renewing its political power base and finding new directions (Mohamad 1997: 23). The post-Arafat era has witnessed a profound crisis that is manifested in a deep internal schism and an inability to function as a collective group with a consensual vision of the future. Arafat embodied the Palestinian cause and struggle for decades. With his passing the prevalent focus of the Palestinian metanarrative was lost and other contenders, namely Hamas, introduced new and opposing ideas into the official narrative.

Hamas and Demands to Replace the Official Palestinian Metanarrative Whereas secular PLO represented Palestinian nationalism, Hamas has represented a dogmatic religious alternative. Anchored in the philosophy of the Muslim Brotherhood, its 1988 founding charter was written with strong Islamist undertones. In essence, the difference between Hamas and the PLO is that whereas both defend the Palestinian cause, Hamas also purports to radically transform Palestinian society into the ideal society conceptualised by the Muslim Brotherhood. In other words, a return to Islam is seen as the answer to political problems and what Hamas terms the ‘Zionist threat’. Hamas has attracted youth with its radical stance vis-à-vis Israeli occupation. It has also portrayed itself as the embodiment of active resistance couched in Islamist thinking. As far as Hamas is concerned the occupied land is inherently Palestinian and Islamic. This line of thinking is expressed in its charter, which contains several antithrough which the occupation would end, and to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza (Cobban 1990: 232). 10 Nevertheless, critical views were voiced at the time about how the self-government established under the leadership of Yasser Arafat created Palestinian-administered Israeli occupation, rather than paving the way for an independent Palestinian state with substantial economic funding from the international community (see Bauck and Omer (2013) for a collection of essays on the meaning of the Oslo accords).

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Semitic elements and is deemed a call for the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic state in Palestine. Hamas took the narrative of dispossession, displacement and injustice to another level and called for the total liberation of the land through active and violent resistance, in other words Jihad against the ‘Zionist entity’. Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the founder of Hamas, is said to have proclaimed: “A Palestinian state should be established on every inch of Palestinian soil that we liberate, without any concessions regarding our right” (Hroub 2000: 78). The ‘recognition’ of Israel would thus represent a negation of the rightness of its own cause and would be indefensible under Islam. Hamas has been responsible for numerous violent attacks against Israelis in the past two decades. It also opposed the stance of Fatah, which for a period of time cooperated with Israeli security services through joint security patrols in Gaza.11 Throughout the years during and since the second Intifada (September 2000– February 2005) most of the suicide attacks in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities have been the handiwork of Hamas. In addition, a number of violent encounters between the Israeli army and Hamas have erupted into bloody clashes (“Operation Cast Lead” December 2008–January 2009, “Operation Pillar of Defense” November 2012, and “Operation Protective Edge” July-August 2014). It has become apparent in the past two decades that Israel cannot be defeated militarily, hence Hamas has attempted to find a formula that does not negate its Islamic foundational principles but accepts the fact that some kind of arrangement needs to be found that deals with Israel as a fait accompli. To relinquish the narrative of active resistance would go against its very foundational principles. However, some observers argue that Hamas could tone down its narrative of active resistance without giving it up altogether. As Mishal and Sela argue, for instance, Hamas is essentially a political and social movement, which provides extensive community services and responds to political realities through bargaining and power brokering (Mishal and Sela 2000). It has therefore taken a pragmatic stance vis-à-vis the “recognition” of Israel, and has applied Islamic concepts such as tahadiya and hudna in dealing with the dilemma of choosing between absolute Jihad against Israel and coming to terms with the existence of its enemy.12

11

As early as in 1994 Hamas called for security officers to end their collaboration with Israel and join the Jihad (Black 2017: 334). 12 See Scham and Abu-Irshaid (2009: 7–8) for an overview of the development of Hamas’ thought. According to Scham and Abu-Irshaid, tahadiya refers to a short-term calming period between conflict parties. In terms of modern crisis management, it echoes the concept of a cease-fire. Hamas applied the concept in practice between June and December 2008, for example, which helped to stop much of the violence between Israel and Hamas. Hudna is a truce for a specific period of time and is derived from the practice of Prophet Mohammad in the early days of Islam. Hamas has indicated that it is willing to apply the concept of hudna with regard to Israel if Israel agrees to Palestinian rights as set out in the Arab Peace Initiative. In doing so, Hamas could retain its Islamic frame of reference and yet come to a practical arrangement with its enemy.

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Scham and Abu-Irshaid are of the opinion that although Hamas would never negotiate with Israel it could be persuaded to be part of a coalition government led by Fatah, which would handle negotiations on its behalf (Scham and Abu-Irshaid 2009: 17). Hamas would allow Fatah to carry out the practical work of handling relations with the enemy. If this ever came to pass Hamas would assume the role of torchbearer of the Palestinian metanarrative in this process, with the layer of resistance included. There would be no implication that Hamas would abandon the narrative of jihad: it would rather amalgamate it into a unique Palestinian metanarrative incorporating the PLO’s original narrative of dispossession, displacement and injustice, with its religious overtones. Nevertheless, for this to happen Hamas and Fatah would first need to put aside their differences. There has been some movement in this direction: after a decade of intra-Palestinian strife, rival factions Fatah and Hamas have realised the need for a political compromise (Ruohomäki and Mühlberger 2017). The signing of the reconciliation agreement in 2017 indicated the adaptability of Hamas’s survival strategy and Fatah’s quest for renewed legitimacy. Nevertheless, its implementation remains uncertain.

Adding Despair and Despondency to the Palestinian Metanarrative As noted above, the Oslo accords of 1993 and 1995 signalled a new era of hope for the Palestinians. These accords established the Palestinian Authority (PA) as a provisional government and laid out a 5-year timetable for resolving all areas of conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis. The creation of the PA heralded a shift towards a more institutionalised process of building a future Palestinian state. Concomitantly, de facto political power has been shifting from the PLO to the PA’s bodies ever since 1993 (Abdul Hadi 2014a, b). Meanwhile, the PA has received significant help from the international community in developing its institutions to deliver security and services more effectively to Palestinians residing in the occupied territories. Unfortunately, the state-building process has been slow and there have been many obstacles along the way. One major problem is that the repercussions of the accords in terms of Palestinian land control have been extremely negative. Under the accords the West Bank was divided into three sections: Area A containing the major cities over which the Palestinians were to have full control; Area B, where Israel would be in charge of security while Palestinians handled civilian matters; and Area C, under full Israeli control. From the perspective of building an economically viable and sovereign state the division of the West Bank into A, B and C areas proved to be highly problematic. These delineations currently remain in place. Area C, which is annexed territory in practice but not in law, covers more than two-thirds of the West Bank—it is where the Israeli settlements are—and Palestinians complain of Israeli incursions into Area

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A. Areas A and B resemble an archipelago in the sense that the land area does not form a connected whole. In addition, most of the roads are in Area C, which means that all movement between the cities and towns situated in Area A are controlled by the Israeli army. The delineations that were part of the Oslo Accords have become symbols of dispossession, displacement and injustice, reinforcing instead of proving wrong these central elements of the Palestinian metanarrative. According to the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, Israel’s planning and building policy in the West Bank is aimed at preventing Palestinian development and cementing if not increasing the dispossession of Palestinian land.13 This is reinforced by the use of the same professional and legal terms applied to development in the settlements and in Israel proper, such as “planning and building laws”, “urban building plans (UBPs)”, “planning proceedings” and “illegal construction”. However, although the planning and building laws benefit Jewish communities in terms of regulating development and balancing different needs, they serve the exact opposite purpose when applied to Palestinian communities in the West Bank. The metanarrative of dispossession is further aggravated by what Israeli anthropologist Jeff Halper terms the ‘matrix of control’. This matrix, which Israel uses to control the lives of Palestinians, could be described as a vast net covering the occupied territories. It consists of five interlocking elements: physical “facts on the ground”; discriminatory laws and bureaucratic policies; economic de-development; military controls and military strikes; and imprisonment and torture (Halper 2015: 143–165). What has transpired is what Israeli historian Ilan Pappe calls the ‘Biggest Prison on Earth’ (Pappe 2017; cf. Weizman 2007).14 Of the above-mentioned interlocking elements described by Halper the physical “facts on the ground” are the most concrete and easily discernible to the occasional visitor to the West Bank. They are essentially Israeli outposts and settlements in area C. It seems that some elements driving Israel’s policy of creating “facts on the ground” were based on the assumption that should Israel one day be forced into some kind of negotiated compromise, the more land it had taken over in its settlement enterprise the more bargaining chips it would have to play with. Nonetheless, there is a significant element within the Israeli settlement enterprise that bases its activity on the assumption that there will never be any withdrawal from the settled lands (see below for a discussion on the Israeli settlement movement). Another form of dispossession, displacement and injustice for many Palestinian communities is the Israeli army’s uprooting of olive trees in the Occupied Territories. Among Palestinians the olive tree represents economic survival in providing sustenance in an agricultural environment, as well as attachment to the land. The Israelis have uprooted hundreds of thousands of olive trees since 2000. Furthermore, Palestinians have to obtain “permission” from the occupation authorities to access their olive groves that happen to be behind the dividing wall or the checkpoints

13 14

B’Tselem, https://www.btselem.org/planning_and_building (Accessed 22 Aug 2018). Pappe (2017); cf. Weizman (2007).

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installed by the occupation authorities. At times, they face the risk of attack by violent settlers. Seventy years after the events of al-Nakba the Palestinian metanarrative of dispossession continues. The PLO managed to carve out a strategic layer of Palestinian nationalist ideology infused by an internationalised anti-colonial liberation struggle in the narrative, and Hamas added a religious layer. Despite the attempts emanating from the Oslo accords and the idea of a two-state solution, Palestinians continue to be without a sovereign state.15 Although the central premises of the two-state solution remain valid, the prospects of Palestinians ever achieving an independent sovereign state are quickly diminishing. There is little the Palestinian Authority can do to counter the policies of the Israeli government or the actions of the Israeli military administration and settlers in the West Bank. The PA can protest, lodge complaints to the Israeli authorities, and bring the issues to the attention of the diplomatic community present in Ramallah and East Jerusalem, the media and international organisations in the hope that through these processes pressure will be put on the Israelis to stop their actions. At times, the Israelis do stop for a limited period, but rarely has there been a total reversal of Israeli policies vis-à-vis “creating facts on the ground”. Even admonishment from the US administration has led at best to a temporary freeze of Israeli government policies in the Occupied Territories, such as extending the settlements. Some Palestinian intellectuals are of the opinion that there is no future for a two-state solution in the current circumstances. Instead, Palestinians fear that they are facing a political ‘one-state’ reality, that they will be contained in separate cantons served by municipalities controlled by military occupiers (Abdul Hadi 2014a, b: 220). Outside observers are not too hopeful either. According to a recent International Crisis Group report, “The peace process, long discredited, has never seemed more of an outdated relic” (ICG 2016: i). The overall mood in the Palestinian polity is sombre. It is reported in a June 2017 survey conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) 2018 that support for the two-state solution in principle has fallen to 46% (PCPSR 2018). Scepticism about the two-state solution package appears to be closely related to serious doubts about the feasibility of its implementation in practice. It is therefore little wonder that attributes of despair and despondency have become parts of the Palestinian metanarrative of dispossession, displacement and injustice.

15

Under the two-state-solution package: a demilitarised Palestinian state was established close to the 1967 borders; Israel annexed the large blocks of settlements in return for the equal-sized territory given to Palestine, and evacuated outlying settlements; East Jerusalem was named the capital of Palestine and West Jerusalem remained the capital of Israel, and each side controlled its holy sites in the Old City; Palestinian refugees returned to a Palestinian state, and a limited number to Israel for family reunification.

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The Israeli Metanarrative The foundation of Israel corresponds to the legitimate return of a persecuted people, based on a religious-historical claim to the territory of Palestine as expounded by Zionist ideology. Whereas for the Palestinians the events of 1948 represented a major catastrophe that led to their dispossession and displacement, the Israelis refer to the ‘War of Independence/Liberation’, which represents redemption and a process of national revival. On 14 May 2018 it was 70 years since the creation of the modern state of Israel.

The Emergence of the Narrative of Return According to the Israeli metanarrative, the Jews gathered their exiles in the land of their ancestors to establish their state. As Scham, Pogrund and Ghanem note, “the Israeli narrative demonstrates a justified return of those dispossessed many generations before” Scham et al. 2013: 2). Many Jews in the diaspora since the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. and their subsequent dispersal to distant lands have entertained the idea of return, as epitomised in the age-old adage ‘next year in Jerusalem’. Oz-Salzberger and Stern, in turn, point out that the Zionists rested their claim to their ancient territory on a pile of written evidence: well over two millennia of testimony beginning with the Hebrew Bible. The numerous expressions of longing for their lost homeland among multitudes of Jews reinforced the return-tothe-land narrative (Oz-Salzberger and Stern 2014: 1). Let us fast-forward this narrative from 70 A.D. to the late nineteenth century, when the Zionist movement espoused the idea of creating a Jewish homeland (Laqueur 2003). The events during WWII and the policies of Nazi Germany towards European Jews gave a tremendous boost to the Zionist narrative. Heller argues that the Holocaust epitomised the supreme justification of the classic theory of Zionism, stating that the only safe haven for Jews was a Jewish state in the historic homeland (Heller 2006: 571). Israel’s declaration of independence (14 May 1948) hailed the rebirth of the Jewish people in an ancient homeland. As Black notes: “building this new nation meant primarily the ‘ingathering of the exiles’ (kibbutz galuyot)” (Black 2017: 136). According to Passig, the creation of the State of Israel was an illogical national phenomenon: there is no other example of a new national entity that, having penetrated a distant land defined its national identity on the “religious characteristics” of a disparate group of individuals, whose only commonalities were a bitter fate and a common Jewish narrative (Passig 2014: 350). Israelis commemorate the War of Independence each year, but the timing changes according to the Jewish calendar. Ofer posits that although the memory of the Holocaust and its meaning vis-à-vis the need for a homeland is still at the heart of

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the Israeli experience, the way it is remembered through rituals has become multifaceted (Ofer 2013: 82). The early Zionists—proponents of the late-nineteenth-century European political movement that infused nationalistic ideology with the religion of Judaism—also put forward the powerful idea that in fact the land that was earmarked for the return was devoid of people. They adopted the slogan, ‘A land without a people for a people without a land’, wilfully denying the very existence of the indigenous population of Palestine. This narrative was strongly adopted among the top echelons of the Israeli political leadership. In 1969 Israel’s Prime Minister Golda Meir issued her famous statement to the Sunday Times: “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people. . . It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn’t exist.” (Sunday Times 15 June 1969). Rose, in turn, argues that this line of thinking was a Zionist myth that did not have any basis in reality (Rose 2004). Of course, the claim by some parties that there is no Jewish connection to the land at all is equally ludicrous, given the irrefutable archaeological evidence to the contrary (Provan et al. 2015). Many new Jewish immigrants who fled Europe during and after the end of WWII settled on the land left empty by Palestinians who had fled or had been expelled during the events of 1948. The Law of Return passed in 1950 granted Jews the world over the automatic right to live in Israel. As a result, the Jewish population rapidly swelled to 1.5 million by 1951, most of the newcomers coming from Iraq and Yemen (Black 2017: 136). Many ended up in newly formed settlements in the countryside and the frontier region at the edges of nascent Israel. The establishment of new Jewish settlements in the new Israeli was intended to prevent Palestinian refugees from returning to their former homes and lands. These settlements also played a crucial role in sealing the borders of the newly established state and thereby bolstering political control. According to Rozin, some 350 new settlements were founded between the establishment of the state and the end of 1954, almost all of which were agricultural, known as moshavim and kibbutzim (Rozin 2016: 451). Rozin goes on to argue that the very act of settling the land was an act of strength in Zionist parlance (Ibid, 452). It was a process from which emerged the attribute of toughness: in other words, the narrative of return was injected with the attribute of a tough citizenry that could bear the burden of defending the land of their ancestors that had now been redeemed. The Israeli writer Amos Oz captures this ethos in some of his writings, such as Where the Jackals Howl.

1967 and the Settler Movement The events of the Six-Day War in 1967 provided a major impetus for the Zionist narrative of a return to the land. As Jordan withdrew from the West Bank Israel

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established a military presence there.16 Initially the Labour government had prohibited civilian settlement in the Occupied Territories, but it quickly backed away from its original stance because of pressure from the religious Zionists. However, Gershom Gorenberg, who examined the birth of the settler movement in the 10 years following the Six-Day War, found that it was as much the child of Labour Party socialism as of religious extremism (Gorenberg 2006). Key figures in Israeli political history such as Moshe Dayan, Golda Meir, Levi Eshkol and Yigal Allon all played major roles in supporting the process of settling the occupied territories; Ariel Sharon, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres were instrumental in the settlement project. The “Creation of the facts on the ground” became synonymous with the settlements. This essentially meant at the time, and still does, the taking over of Arab lands by Israel through a combination of strategies including seizing property and land by force, buying up property and land through various schemes and declaring land as a nature reserve or designated for the use of the army. Gush Emunim, or the Block of the Faithful, was a Jewish messianic right-wing activist movement that played a key role in the early days of the Israeli settlement project. It developed from a loose association of settlement activists and ultranationalist rabbis, writers and military figures into an umbrella movement that was committed to establishing Jewish settlements in the occupied territories (Lustick 1988). Its ideology was based on the belief that, according to the Torah, God gave the land to the Jewish people. The narrative of a return to the land was and continues to be anchored in a strong belief in the divine right to take over the land from the Palestinians. Gush Emunim could be considered a right-wing movement given its reactionary, fundamentalist, nationalist and religious ideology (Kedem et al. 1987: 38). According to international law the settlements are illegal, being in contravention of Article 49 of the Geneva Convention that forbids an occupying power from transferring its civilian population to occupied territories. The Geneva Convention counts for nothing among the settler movement however. Its members claim a divine mandate to settle the land (Zertal and Eldar 2007), which per se, would not count for much if it were not for the active support of the Israeli state. The settlement movement received an additional boost with the rise to power of the right-wing party Likud. Although previous governments had de facto recognised settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, and invested substantial resources in settling the Jordan Valley, the Golan Heights, the greater East Jerusalem area and the Gush Etzion area, successive right-wing governments gave official status to a number of settlements and began a systematic policy of settling the Occupied Territories. In essence, all Israeli governments since 1967 have, in one way or another, taken a strategic perspective on the Occupied Territories based on the premise that holding on to the West Bank is essential to Israel’s security.

16

Many Israelis refer to the West Bank as Judea and Samaria. This in itself is a speech act in that Judea corresponds to part of the ancient Jewish Kingdom of Judah, and Samaria to the ancient Jewish Kingdom of Israel.

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It is worth pointing out that precisely because the West Bank corresponds to Judea and Samaria the area is equally significant to the ‘security’ argument and to the religious-identity narrative. Most of the biblical sites are in Judea and Samaria, not in the fertile coastal plains. Interestingly enough, the interests of the settlement movement and the right-wing governments have largely coincided over the years. Whereas the former has a strong religiously inspired agenda intent on transforming Israeli society and bringing about the narrative of a return to the land, the latter seeks to win elections and to stay in power through catering to its conservative constituency. Hence, the narrative of clinging onto the settled land as promoted by the religious-nationalists has been added to the Israeli metanarrative of a return. In the interests of fairness, it should be pointed out that not everyone in Israel’s political landscape shares the official policies of the various governments. Certain outspoken individuals and human-rights organisations in the Israeli body politic do question the wisdom of the government’s policies vis-à-vis the Occupied Territories. Some of the most vocal critics include Breaking the Silence, which is an organisation of veteran combatants serving in the Israeli military since the start of the Second Intifada who have taken it upon themselves to expose the Israeli public to the reality of everyday life in the Occupied Territories. Another example is B'Tselem—The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. In its own words, the organisation “works to end Israel’s occupation in acknowledgment of the fact that ending the occupation regime is the only way to forge a future in which human rights, democracy, liberty and equality are ensured to all persons living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea”. (https://www.btselem.org/ about_btselem) Accessed 22 Aug 2018. It should also be noted, however, that aside from the supporters of right-wing political parties and religious Zionists there is a general feeling of apathy among the general populace vis-à-vis the question of the Occupied Territories. As Beck aptly notes, “no major political party or powerful social movement has been willing or capable of questioning basic aspects of governmental occupational policies in East Jerusalem and the West Bank in the twenty-first century” (Beck 2017: 174). What the building of the Israeli West Bank barrier has done to the collective Israeli psyche is to put the occupation “out of sight and out of mind”, particularly among Israelis who do not live near the barrier.17 In addition, unlike in earlier times, there is less and less people-to-people contact between ordinary Israelis and Palestinians. As one Israeli Arab interlocutor told me: “these days the average Palestinian will only learn Hebrew in an Israeli jail and the average Israeli will only learn Arabic if he serves in the Shin Bet or IDF special units”.

17

There are several names for the Israeli West Bank barrier: some call it a separation barrier or fence whereas others simply call it the wall. Many Palestinians call it an apartheid wall or fence.

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Jewish, Democratic and All of the Land The Israeli metanarrative of a return to the land of their ancestors is integrally linked to the question of Jewish identity and Israel as a national homeland for the Jewish people. Israel is also a vibrant democracy for its Jewish citizens. The challenge, however, is that ideas related to the return-to-the-land narrative such as Jewish national identity and democracy run into insurmountable problems when account is taken of the Palestinians living in the territory of Israel and the Occupied Territories. In other words, at any given time Israel can justifiably have two of the three above-mentioned attributes ascribed to it. It can certainly have a Jewish identity as a nation and it can possess all the land from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, but it cannot possibly claim to be a democracy for all the people living in the land given that there is no equality for the Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories. One could also question how equal the opportunities are, in reality, for Israeli Arabs in Israeli society, which according to the Israeli narrative presents itself as a democracy (Pappe 2017). Yiftachel refers to Israel as an ethnocracy, suggesting that in essence it could be characterised as a political regime that facilitates expansion and control by a dominant ethnicity in contested lands. It is neither democratic nor authoritarian, with rights and capabilities depending primarily on ethnic origin and geographical location (Yiftachel 2006). Israel could, in theory, also base its nation on a Jewish identity and be fully democratic. This would exclude non-Jewish people living on the land, hence the notion of possessing all of the land from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River would not be applicable. Ruth Gavinson, winner of the Israel Prize for Legal Research, is nevertheless of the opinion that because Israel is essentially an ethnonational nation-state it would be possible to preserve its special Jewish character without violating the basic rights of the non-Jewish residents in the land she terms Eretz Yisrael (Gavinson 2014: 158–160). Stern puts forward a more convincing proposal, suggesting that the European Charter for the Protection of National Minorities is a model that Israel could adopt: according to this vision the Arab minority would protect its unique culture, religions, language and heritage without endangering the Jewish identity of Israel, thereby maintaining democracy as the basis of the political system (Stern 2017: 32–33). The third option would be for Israel to become a neutral liberal democracy covering all of the people living on the land from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, in which case the notion of the Israeli state basing its identity solely on its Jewish identity could not apply. Such a state would essentially be a ‘civic state’ in which religion would be relegated to the private domain. If such an option were adopted the Jewish population would number around 6.5 million whereas the Arab population would be 4.6 million, or approximately 6.3 million if Gaza were included. Hence, contemporary Israeli society is essentially facing an impossible conundrum. It cannot simultaneously base its nationhood solely on its Jewish identity,

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claim to be democratic and cling to the metanarrative of a return to the land of its ancestors as long as there are Palestinians and Israeli Arabs living in Israel/Palestine. To use a simple metaphor, Israel cannot ‘square a circle’ without giving up one of the three attributes on which it purports to base its identity. There is significant debate within Israel on the orientation and identity of Jewishness, which in turn has an impact on the Israeli metanarrative of a return to the land. There is ongoing discussion on the role of religion in the state, for instance, exemplified by how the Sabbath, conversion, military conscription of the ultra-Orthodox and marriage and divorce should be viewed (Stern 2014: 10–20). In due course, this will have an impact on the Israeli body politic. However, more significantly with regard to the narrative of a return to the land is the far-reaching fault line between the Israeli right and the left regarding Israel’s borders. According to Stern, the dispute is not only political, it is also religious: many national-religious Jews believe that Jewish law forbids the relinquishing of any part of the biblical Land of Israel (Ibid, 20). Drawing on the work of Jewish religious writer Emunah Elon, Daniel Statman points out that the call to withdraw from Judea and Samaria ultimately undermines the right of Jews to reside in Tel Aviv or in Haifa, and ultimately undermines the entire Zionist project (Statman 2014: 248). Acknowledging that the make-up of Israeli society is changing, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin observed in a recent public address that four distinct identity groups were replacing the traditional secular majority: ultra-Orthodox Jews, nationalreligious Jews, secular Jews and Arabs. There is an emerging trend within the Jewish population indicating that the proportion of religious groups will increase whereas the secular group will continue to decline. Hence, the narrative of a return to the land will continue to play a significant role in the very foundational attributes of Israeli society. Concomitantly, the metanarrative of returning to the land and clinging onto it is unlikely to weaken. The dissonance between the three attributes will in all likelihood also continue.

Conclusions In sum, the main issue at stake in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that for Israelis and Palestinians to begin to resolve the impasse they need to become acquainted with, respect and acknowledge each other’s metanarratives. The Israelis need to acknowledge that Palestinians have roots in the territory that now constitutes the state of Israel and the Occupied Territories, and the Palestinians need to acknowledge the Jewish attachment to the Promised Land. Neither may not necessarily agree with the metanarrative of the other, but if there is to be any progress towards a peaceful resolution of the conflict each must respect and acknowledge the other’s narrative. Becoming acquainted with the other’s narrative would be the first step. Familiarity with narratives paves the way to respect, hence respecting each other’s narrative would be the second step. This would not yet entail any value judgement: at the very

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least it would be an acceptance to agree to disagree. Respect does entail listening to the other side’s narrative, however. It means that the other side’s narrative cannot be merely dismissed as fantasy, nor can it be treated with contempt. The third step would be to acknowledge the other side’s narrative. Acknowledgement does carry political and perhaps even juridical implications. It would require true statesmanship from both Israeli and Palestinian leaders, something that has been lacking in the region since the time of Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat. Currently, however, the political atmosphere in Israel is that of brinkmanship with no long-term vision of the future, while the Palestinians have lost faith in their leadership. One of the major challenges is that although the narratives on both sides have their merits and credence, there is a strong power asymmetry between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The Israelis have a successful developed state and have had time to reflect on their statehood, whereas the Palestinians only have the rudiments of a state and are not in control of their own destiny. The Palestinians are still firmly stuck in the events of 1948. The Israelis could, from their position of strength, help the Palestinians to free themselves from the quagmire of their narrative. This would entail ceasing to oppose the Palestinian metanarrative and accepting the fact that the state of Israel carries some responsibility for what happened during the events of 1948. In particular, accepting the ‘right of return’ to Palestinians born in British Mandate Palestine would be a symbolic start. The Palestinians would then need to soften their demands for a ‘right of return’ to these individuals. This could allow space for further contemplation of the two-state-solution package. However, apart from a few notable exceptions18 Israelis remain unable to come to terms with their past, and more specifically are unwilling to accept responsibility for al-Nakba, the catastrophe that took place in 1948, or to acknowledge that the Palestinians as a nation are entitled to self-determination. If this were the case, there would be a mass Israeli political movement demanding an end to the occupation and initiating a serious discussion on the right of return for at least the Palestinians who were born in British Mandate Palestine. Over the years and despite the rhetoric of a two-state solution, the West Bank policies and practices of respective Israeli governments have only entrenched the official Israeli metanarrative of a justified return of the dispossessed to the land of their ancestors. This is supplemented with a strategic argument within the metanarrative that the West Bank, or in Israeli parlance Judea and Samaria, must be held for strategic security reasons. The religious layer within the metanarrative further solidifies this. It is a position that essentially negates official acknowledgement of the Palestinian metanarrative of dispossession and displacement.

18

Former Speaker of the Knesset Avraham Burg is a good example of this genre. He argues that Israeli society must get over the preoccupation and stop using the Holocaust as an excuse to justify the policies vis-à-vis the Palestinians and move on. He also seems to suggest that clinging to the idea of a Jewish state is the key to its end (Burg 2009).

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The Palestinians, for their part, will not accept that there is historic truth in the Jewish narrative of returning to what they consider their ancient homeland, nor the idea of using the narrative as a basis on which to build an exclusive nation-state. Any attempts to acknowledge that perhaps the narrative of the other side has some truth in it have been consistently frustrated in the face of Palestinian internal disunity and disaccord, particularly between the secularists and the Islamists. Moreover, anyone contemplating the Israeli narrative is quickly labelled a traitor to the Palestinian cause. This, in turn, has further entrenched their metanarrative of dispossession and displacement, which is now turning into despair and despondency. From a theoretical perspective, the prisoner’s dilemma from game theory applies to these clashes of Israeli and Palestinian narratives. In essence, the prisoner’s dilemma is about resolving a tricky situation by means of mutual trust. If both parties trust that the other party will reciprocate they will be rewarded with a positive outcome for trusting each other. However, given that there is no means of verifying that the other party will reciprocate the chances are that the parties will opt for the easy way out and betray each other. In this event, both parties stand to lose. If the prisoner’s dilemma is applied to the case of Israeli-Palestinian clashes of narratives the main issue would seem to be that if they are to begin to resolve the impasse they need to become acquainted with, respect and acknowledge each other’s narratives. However, this entails trust that the respect and acknowledgement of the other’s narrative will be reciprocated. Even if it appears to be in their best interests, neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians are able to respect and acknowledge each other’s metanarratives, to move forward or to put the past behind them. Spoilers, with their stakes, lurk behind any attempt to focus attention on the notions of respect and the consequent acknowledgment of the of the other party’s metanarratives. Every time there is positive movement within the Middle East peace process, there are actors on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides who ‘pull the rug from underneath’ the feet of the proponents of peace. There is suspicion and hostility, and a lack of trust that the other side will honour its commitments. Given the entangled and highly confrontational politics of the past 70 years of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it appears unlikely that either side will place trust in the other’s respect and acknowledgement of their respective narratives. Both the Israelis and the Palestinians are therefore caught in the prisoner’s dilemma from which there is no way out. Nevertheless, despite the exclusive depictions of past events and their implications in terms of politics and practice there are overlaps, such as the negotiated agreement that was reached in the form of the Oslo accords of 1993 and 1995. Immense outside pressure, the first Intifada and Israel’s economic problems in the early 1990s made this possible, but it did not yield any sustainable results: after a few years the accords collapsed and gave way to violence. The Oslo accords marked a unique moment in history, shaped by unique political, social and economic conditions in Israel/Palestine, both regionally and globally. The question remains whether the right conditions will arise again to resolve the impasse in which the Israelis and Palestinians are now firmly stuck. It is more likely that both

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parties will embrace the clashing pre-Oslo narratives of mutual hatred, which will again lead to violence and bloodshed. Although the Palestinians have never consciously stated that the Sykes-Picot arrangement in the Middle East is at the root of their predicament, the Palestinian metanarrative could also be read as an attempt, albeit unsuccessful, to challenge it. After all, the formation of the State of Israel and the corresponding disaster that befell the Palestinians have their roots in the remaking of the Ottoman order. Put another way, the creation of Israel on Palestinian land would not have been possible without the Sykes-Picot agreement. Whereas the unravelling of the Post-Ottoman order continues in the rest of the Middle East, the Israeli-Palestinian situation is becoming ever more entrenched. The entrenchment is being further cemented by the enduring nature and power of the Israeli and Palestinian metanarratives.

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Jawad SA (2006) The Arab and Palestinian narratives of the 1948 War. In: Rotberg RI (ed) Israeli and Palestinian narratives of conflict: history’s double helix. Indiana University Press, Bloomington Kedem P, Bilu A, Cohen Z (1987) Dogmatism, ideology, and right-wing radical activity. Polit Psychol 8(1):35–47 Laqueur W (2003) The history of zionism. Tauris Parke Paperbacks, London Lustick IS (1988) For the land and the lord: Jewish fundamentalism in Israel. Council of Foreign Relations, New York Manna’ A (2013) The Palestinian Nakba and its continuous repercussions. Isr Stud 18(2):86–99 Mishal S, Sela A (2000) The Palestinian Hamas: vision, violence and coexistence. Columbia University Press, New York Mohamad H (1997) PLO strategy: from total liberation to coexistence. Palestine Isr J 4(2):1–5 Morris B (1987) The birth of the Palestinian refugee problem, 1947-1949. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Ofer D (2013) We Israelis remember, but how? The memory of the holocaust and the Israeli experience. Isr Stud 18(2):70–84 Oz-Salzberger F, Stern YZ (2014) Introductory remarks. In: Oz-Salzberger F, Stern YZ (eds) The Israeli nation-state: political, constitutional and cultural challenges. Academic Studies Press, Boston Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (2018) Poll summary Palestinian-Israeli pulse: a joint poll. 25 January Pappe I (2006) The ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Oneworld, London Pappe I (2017) The biggest prison on earth: a history of the occupied territories. Oneworld, London Passig D (2014) The future of nationhood in Israel. In: Oz-Salzberger F, Stern YZ (eds) The Israeli nation-state: political, constitutional and cultural challenges. Academic Studies Press, Boston Pearce N (2014) Israel and Palestine: a tale of two narratives. The Elders, October 23 Provan I, Long VP, Longman T III (2015) A biblical history of Israel. Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville Rose J (2004) The myths of zionism. Pluto, London Rozin O (2016) Infiltration and the making of Israel’s emotional regime in the state’s early years. Middle East Stud 52(3):448–472 Ruohomäki O, Mühlberger W (2017) Reconciliation in Gaza: burying the hatchet or changing stripes? FIIA Comment 24, The Finnish Institute of International Affairs Scham P, Abu-Irshaid O (2009) Hamas: ideological rigidity and political flexibility. Special report, United States Institute of Peace, Washington Scham P, Pogrund B, Ghanem A (2013) Introduction to shared narratives—a Palestinian dialogue. Isr Stud 18(2) Shlaim A (2008) Lion of Jordan: the life of King Hussein in war and peace. Vintage, New York Shlaim A (2015) The post-Ottoman syndrome. In: Shehadeh R, Johnson P (eds) Shifting sands: the unraveling of the old order in the Middle East. Profile, London Statman D (2014) The right to the land: from moral justifications to religious justifications and back again. In: Oz-Salzberger F, Stern YZ (eds) The Israeli nation-state: political, constitutional and cultural challenges. Academic Studies Press, Boston Stern YZ (2014) The state of Israel and national identity. In: Oz-Salzberger F, Stern YZ (eds) The Israeli nation-state: political, constitutional and cultural challenges. Academic Studies Press, Boston Stern YZ (2017) Religion, state, and the Jewish identity in crisis in Israel. Brookings Institution: Center for Middle East Policy Weizman E (2007) Hollow land: Israel’s architecture of occupation. Verso, London Yiftachel O (2006) Ethnocracy: land and identity politics in Israel/Palestine. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Zertal I, Eldar A (2007) Lords of the land: the war for Israel’s settlements in the occupied territories, 1967-2007. Nation, New York

Turkey as the Order-Producing Country: Narrating the New Turkey in the Middle East Toni Alaranta

The leaders of the incumbent Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) base their quest for regional order in the Middle East under Turkish leadership on a specific narration of Turkey’s own and the region’s history in the twentieth century. In many ways, this is a direct counter-narrative to the general historical account espoused in Kemalist state ideology, which was founded on the secular-nationalism that informed the establishment of the Republic of Turkey as a modern nation-state in 1923 following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Closely related to this new conceptualisation of history is the ‘Imperial counter paradigm’, which initially emerged within Turkish strategic culture in the 1950s (Mufti 2009) and has been adopted as the dominant approach by AKP governments since 2002. During the last decade, the AKP constituency has produced a large number of texts and statements, which in one form or another promote the idea that Turkey should aspire to achieve the status of a regional power in the post-Cold War world (Aslan 2018). This material is exemplified by—but is definitely not reduced to—the thinking of Ahmet Davutoğlu (Minister of Foreign Affairs, 2009–2014; Prime Minister 2014–2016). Many commentators draw a clear demarcation line under 2011, arguing that Turkish foreign policy underwent a significant transformation with the eruption of mass protests in the Middle East, often labelled the Arab Spring. According to these views, what was until 2011 a more-or-less stabilising activity driven by attempts at economic expansion and regional integration subsequently turned into a highly adventurous, ideological and aggressive foreign policy, especially in Syria (Schanzer and Tahiroglu 2016; Barkey 2016; Stein 2014). This chapter follows the same periodisation, not because it was necessarily an essential turning point, but because the aim is to shed light on how the AKP leadership has framed the situation created by the upheavals that started in 2011. As I will T. Alaranta (*) The Finnish Institute of International Affairs, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: toni.alaranta@fiia.fi © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 W. Mühlberger, T. Alaranta (eds.), Political Narratives in the Middle East and North Africa, Perspectives on Development in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35217-2_4

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demonstrate, the AKP leadership has framed the events unfolding since 2011 not just as a regional crisis, but also as potentially providing new opportunities. In line with the conceptual approach adhered to in this volume, this chapter concerns the political narrative used for rationalising, explaining and justifying Turkey’s foreign-policy behaviour in the post-2011 Middle East. The aim is, first, to detect the long-term traditions of strategic thinking in Turkey and thereby to demonstrate how these previous formulations have enabled, or possibly restricted, the ability of the AKP leadership to produce intellectually and emotionally convincing narratives of Turkey’s foreign-policy behaviour in the lead-up to the upheavals that started in 2011. Further, for the purpose of contextualisation these narratives of legitimacy, understood here as intentional attempts to justify Turkish foreign policy during the period in question, are analysed in tandem with the discussion on the aspirations of other important actors. This analysis also includes initial assessments regarding the applicability of Turkey’s foreign-policy narrative. The reading of Turkey’s post-2011 foreign-policy narrative at the same time as considering other actors’ aspirations is based on the idea of intertextuality, namely that ultimately all texts acquire their meaning only in relation to other texts (Allen 2000: 1). The value of this concept nevertheless extends much further than simply pointing out that foreign-policy narratives depend on, and are received in the context of, other similar texts. The war in Syria, for example, underlines the crucial importance of competing interpretative frames regarding a major international conflict—how different actors and their aspirations are defined in the media, and what terms and words are utilised to describe the various actors. In short, it makes a crucial difference whether an armed group is referred to as comprising ‘rebels’ (with a positive and even somewhat heroic connotation), or is defined as an Al-Qaeda-affiliated Sunni Islamist faction. The Syrian conflict in particular is steeped in this kind of problematique, demonstrating the importance of the ability to dominate the battle of narratives in international politics.

Turkey’s Imperial Strategic Culture as a Precursor of the AKP’s Post-2011 Foreign Policy Narrative If one is to understand the mechanisms that have both allowed and limited the new foreign policy of Turkey’s current power holders with regard to the Middle East, one must be aware of both the internal and the external factors that either strengthen or weaken the AKP’s ability to produce narratives of legitimacy. The internal factors include Turkey’s domestic power struggle between the incumbent AKP and its opponents, the AKP’s ideology and political agenda and, more widely, Turkish traditions in terms of foreign and security policy (Turkey’s competing strategicculture paradigms). External factors, in turn, include the events in the Middle East during the last 10 years that have provoked a specific reaction among the Turkish power bloc. The popular uprisings starting in Tunisia in 2011 and then spreading to other countries in

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the region (that were once defined as The Arab Spring), have of course been a major external driver influencing the AKP leadership. Putting it in this way, however, does not suffice: it effectively prevents one from seeing how the AKP’s foreign policy, especially regarding Syria, has contributed largely negatively to the Syrian conflict, and has also affected how it has been interpreted in the international arena. Thus, rather than merely reacting to what has been unfolding in its neighbouring country, Turkey’s foreign-policy decisions have played a major role in the conflict. Further, through its foreign-policy narrative of what is taking place in Syria, the Turkish government has been one influential actor among others shaping perceptions about it. Among the domestic factors, long-term foreign-policy traditions are highly influential. As Malik Mufti (2009) demonstrates quite convincingly, Turkey’s republican history could be interpreted as a competition between two major strategic culture traditions, the Republican and the Imperial. These rival traditions are clearly observable when reduced to their domestic origins. The Republican tradition is by its very nature a clear extension (or continuation) of the Kemalist modernisation project, explicitly grounded on the idea that Islam cannot and should not function as a constituent ingredient of Turkey’s national and state identity. The fact that Turkey as a society has never been as strictly committed to secularism (being a Sunni Muslim was always, in practice, seen as the precondition for being an ideal citizen), as was once declared in official state ideology, does not change this observation. Thus, the Republican paradigm is essentially founded on a secular theory of international relations in the contemporary world: religiously defined entities are considered remnants of a past era, which in the modern context merely obstruct the healthy organisation of a modernising nation-state (Eisenstadt 1984: 9). Above all, and closely related to this, it has reproduced a tradition of strategic thinking that emphasises the strict nation-state borders secured in the Lausanne Treaty of 1923. From the perspective of internal security and regime consolidation, the Republican paradigm purports to ensure that no external forces are able to manipulate Turkey’s internal cleavages—the Islam-secularism divide and the ethnic distinction between the Turkish majority and the Kurdish minority. The general transformation of this established Turkish national narrative has also brought about a transformation of the foreign-policy narratives framing Turkey’s role and position in world politics. It is thus useful to interpret the AKP government’s political narrative regarding the post-2011 Middle East as a sub-narrative of this more general new foreign-policy discourse (Telatar 2015: 494). In other words, the existing Imperial counter-paradigm enables, but does not determine, the actions taken by AKP cadres in the post-2011 situation. What the more general new national narrative does is to contribute the necessary principles and rhetorical maps (frames of interpretation) to the new post-2011 foreign-policy narrative. The idea of Turkey acting as a specifically Muslim nation in the international arena, on which the AKP leadership now vehemently insists, would have been considered insulting by several generations of Turkey’s Republican state elite. In contrast, the Imperial tradition—at least in its most vocal current version implemented by the AKP regime—is explicitly grounded on historical-civilizational assumptions that religious identification plays a major if not the leading role in the

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life of a political community. Today’s ruling elite in Turkey perceives itself as being at helm of the world’s leading Islamic country, with historical responsibilities. AKP leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan defines this as follows: Do not expect the struggle between God and injustice, which began 1,400 years ago, to end now. Do not think that those who set their sights on our lands 1,000 years ago have now abandoned their aspirations. Do not expect those who attacked us in Çanakkale 100 years ago, and who then attempted to conquer all our lands in Anatolia with their powerful armies, weapons and technologies, to be regretting their acts. They will never do that. . . This ancient struggle continues. Those who want to make Turkey another Andalusia, those who want to make Turkey another Africa, those who want to make Turkey another Eastern Europe or the Balkans, will never abandon their aspirations. The word “Turk” has an ethnic meaning only in our country, whereas westerners have always used it with reference to all Muslims. This is not to claim any superiority; it is just an historical state of affairs. This situation, at the same time, expresses the responsibility that history has bestowed on our nation (Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Cumhurbaşkanlığı 2015). (transl. T.A.)

These two, competing strategic-culture paradigms have an intellectual history reaching back to the first modernisation attempts in the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the eighteenth century (Karpat 2010: 106–110). It is thus a question of a struggle between two very distinct and recalcitrant civilization projects, namely that espoused by republican secular modernism and that of political Islam. Religion (in this case Islam) is defined in the former as an individual’s personal faith and vocation, distinct from the purely secular public realm, whereas in the latter it is understood as the guiding principle behind the very foundation of the political community (Ay 2004). Thus, the two projects represent two very different conceptualisations of modernisation—radical (holistic) and Islamic-Conservative (selective)—and it is thus unhelpful to lump them together under the common label of authoritarianism, as often happens nowadays. Both traditions have been inclined to encourage authoritarian practices, but both originate from very different understandings of modernity. It should therefore be understood that the AKP government’s aggressive post2011 Middle East policy, especially in Syria but also in Libya, Egypt and Iraq, was not a complete break with the Turkish strategic culture. It was definitely a radical break if compared with the Republican paradigm, but it has a clear intellectual and rhetorical connection with the Imperial counter-narrative that initially emerged in the 1950s and was seriously implemented by Turgut Özal in the 1980s (Mufti 2009).

From Domestic State Transformation to the New Assertive Foreign Policy in the Middle East The periodization of Turkey’s foreign policy under the AKP adopted by many analysts conceptualises 2011 (the beginning of the Arab revolutions) as the crucial watershed. The period from 2002 to 2011 is perceived as one of reformulation in the albeit continuing attempt to redefine Turkey’s relations with its Middle East

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neighbours that was launched in the 1980s. A slogan that is frequently used to sum up the process is “zero problems with neighbours”, indicating that Turkey should develop more productive and even fraternal socio-economic and political relations with the Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East in particular. This proposition has been described as indicating a transformation in mentality regarding national security, which for a long time was based on the premise that Turkey was surrounded by hostile states (Yeşiltaş and Balcı 2011: 17–18). According to influential accounts, Turkey under the AKP did not try to challenge the existing state structure or to implement a political Islamist regional vision, the aim was rather to strengthen regional integration through economic liberalisation. These policies strengthened Turkey’s position as an important partner for Western governments, compared to the previous, much less active foreign-policy vision that reflected the Republican strategic culture (Efegil 2016: 48). Accordingly, one could argue that, at least at the beginning (2002–2010), the new, proactive Turkish foreign policy in the Middle East had more to do with a changed perception of how best to produce security and stability in the region. Whereas the Middle East was conceptualised as a threat from which Western-oriented Turkey was trying to isolate itself in the Republican strategic-culture paradigm, the new approach was based on a different assumption. It was the belief that Turkey could best serve its national and security interests by encouraging regional trade and cooperation, and actively engaging with its neighbouring countries to this end (Kurubaş 2014: 468). Nevertheless, elements in the state-transformation project implemented by the AKP within Turkey from the beginning carried implications that would require challenging long-held convictions regarding Turkey’s foreign policy in the Middle East. The AKP’s domestic narrative, as it has emerged since it came to power in 2002, has many themes that point towards a more assertive foreign-policy agenda, not only in terms of increased trade and economic cooperation but also involving attempts at direct political interference in its neighbourhood. As Cenk Saraçoğlu (2013: 62–63) convincingly argues, Ahmet Davutoğlu’s basic unit of analysis seems to be an unproblematized “nation” (millet), whereas “civilisation” (medeniyet) is understood as a concept through which various nations are listed in a hierarchical order. According to Davutoğlu’s argumentation, countries that have acquired political independence only relatively recently—during the previous 50 years or so—and that do not have an imperial history reaching back many centuries, are inevitably conceived of as being on a lower level than Turkey. In this context, one can see how the concept merkez ülke (centre state), repeatedly used by the AKP leadership, is very much part and parcel of a classical geopolitical discourse that connotes greatness and hegemony. As Saraçoğlu (2013: 63) further observes, when defined in terms of merkez ülke, Turkey is no longer a more-or-less passive bridge between civilisations but is rather perceived as a country that promotes the power potential of Muslim nations, becoming a leading country of the Islamic civilisation. The most significant theme with foreign-policy implications repeatedly observable in the AKP’s political narrative is that the Middle East has been occupied by illegitimate regimes suppressing the popular will. According to this view, the same

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was true in Turkey until 2002, when the AKP came to power (see, for instance, Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi 2014d). Starting on that day—but especially during the last 7 years—the AKP leadership has implemented a wide-ranging state-transformation project in Turkey, which is interpreted within the Islamic-conservative constituency as a maturing process of Turkish political Islam. Halime Kökçe, one of the new Islamist intellectuals who publishes her columns in the pro-government daily Star Gazetesi, explains it as follows: The generation following Erbakan is often seen as having abandoned Islamism in its political struggle. However, in my opinion this is more properly interpreted as the localisation of political Islam. During the process in which Islamism left behind its oppositional posture, the relationship between religion and the state came to be understood through tradition-based codes. In this sense, I believe the AKP has localised Islamism (Kökçe 2013). (Transl. T.A.)

This process could be defined as an Islamic-Conservative state-transformation project, the ultimate goal of which is to thoroughly alter Turkey’s national and state identity. In a nutshell, one could argue that in recent years the AKP leadership has conceptualised the whole Middle East as the foreign-policy extension of this domestic state-transformation project, both allegedly consolidating each other. The value-based approach in Turkey’s foreign policy, called for by both Ahmet Davutoğlu and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, explicitly maintains that the alleged democratic consolidation secured by the AKP governments in Turkey by empowering its Islamic-Conservative constituency is directly linked to the AKP’s foreign-policy narrative, according to which Turkey under the AKP functions as the saviour of Muslim peoples all over the Middle East (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi 2014a). In fact, this mechanism produces as much as it reflects the aspirations of that constituency. In this sense, the narrative clearly implies that the international and regional order established in the Middle East after the First World War fragmented the historically structured Ottoman socio-cultural and political (regional) system, turning it into (domestically highly challenged) territorial nation-states. It also contributed to the situation that arose in which these new political entities were allegedly ruled by the alienated (that is, westernised) elites. The AKP’s domestic narrative thus puts great emphasis on the ideas of restoration and normalisation, arguing that the state-society relationship has been dysfunctional and lacks a solid basis (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi 2014b). The restoration is thus about creating a new healthy relationship, and this domestic development has also forced Turkey to re-evaluate its foreign policy. Furthermore, it allegedly enables Turkey to take the role of düzen kurucu aktör, a regional order-producing actor (Araş 2009). On reflection, it is safe to say that this approach produced its most controversial and destabilising results in Syria. The order Turkey was seeking—one in which the AKP’s ideological equivalent, the Muslim Brotherhood, would take on governmental responsibilities—required ousting not only the current Syrian government but also its existing state institutions built around the al-Asads (Landis 2015). To this end, Turkey started to arm various Sunni Islamist factions fighting against the Syrian government, specifically the Al-Qaeda cooperative and the salafi-jihad organisation Ahrar al-Sham. According to Guido Steinberg (2016: 5), “Turkey and Qatar have been supporting Ahrar since 2012/2013, and appear to have selected it as their most

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important recipient of arms and funding.” Further, Turkey allowed international jihadi organisations such as the so-called Islamic State (Daesh) to use Turkish territory as a logistics and supply centre, a policy that facilitated the emergence of the infamous jihadi highway on the Turkish-Syrian border (Uslu 2016). In order to understand the AKP’s vision of a Turkey-centred Middle East one should first look at the social and ideological background of its leading cadres. The party leadership emerged from the Turkish Islamist movement (Milli Görüş), led for decades by Necmettin Erbakan. Erbakan and his followers soon established contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood groups in the region (Gurpinar 2015: 25–26). Further, the AKP’s predecessors once espoused an Islamist grand vision for the Middle East, as Erbakan elaborated his formulation of a legitimate order in the region during the 1970s. This vision was intended to create a specifically Muslim regional system, with Muslim Countries United Nations (Müslüman Ülkeleri Birleşmiş Milletler Teşkilati), Muslim Nations’ Common Defense Organization (Müslüman Ülkeler Savunma İşbirliği Teşkilati), Muslim Nations’ Common Economic Union (Müslüman Ülkeler Ortak Pazar Teşkilati ve Birliği) and Muslim Nations’ Cultural Cooperation Organization (Müslüman Ülkeler Kültür İşbirliği Teşkilati) (Çakır 2006: 566). The claim that the Middle East regional order, put in place by Western powers after the partition of Ottoman domains during and after the First World War, is illegitimate and should thus be replaced with a specifically Muslim order under Turkey’s guidance, is thus a well-thought-out ideational statement uttered by a person the AKP leadership perceives as their great teacher (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi 2014c). According to a widely held view, revisionists within Erbakan’s party established the AKP at the end of the 1990s when they realised that it was impossible to rise to power within Turkey’s secular system using the traditional Islamist discourse of Erbakan’s Milli Görüş parties. However, after 15 years of uninterrupted one-party governance, the AKP is increasingly emphasising its heritage as the allegedly authentic political representative of Turkey’s Sunni conservatives. The party has also come to perceive itself as the only legitimate representative of the allegedly oppressed Turkish Muslim nation. Furthermore, it supports the view that Turkey, as the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, has a moral and historical responsibility to advance a similar kind of democratic consolidation in the Middle East. Even if many AKP actors reject various concepts used to describe the party’s agenda—such as neo-Ottomanisn, pan-Islamism and neo-imperialism—the leadership has explicitly confirmed the actual contents of the policies that others have described in these terms. Thus, the AKP leadership has repeatedly stated that Turkey’s value-oriented foreign policy is a direct extension of the AKP’s domestic project. One could argue if one looks at the characteristics of the discourse of Ottomanisn, which is implied in evaluations defining Turkey’s new foreign-policy approach as “Neo-Ottomanism”, that although there are elements of it in Turkey’s recent foreign policy, the policy cannot be reduced to it. According to Hakan Yavuz, Ottomanism was not only a history of military conquests and conflicts, but also a vast confluence of culture, education, art, trade, urbanism, and diplomacy. Recovering this tradition and understanding its achievements and failures can help us better appreciate the dynamics of Turkish history and to identify the roots of Turkey’s aspirations to become again a regional power (Yavuz 2016: 442).

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Accordingly, one should at least partly re-evaluate the claim that Turkey’s foreign policy in the Middle East prior to 2011 and the Arab Spring had nothing to do with neo-imperial imagination. One could, for example, acknowledge that since the end of the Cold War and the emergence of Neo-Ottoman cultural and socio-political imagination, actors within Turkey’s political class who grew up as members of centre-right conservative and Islamist parties (Anavatan Partisi and Refah Partisi in particular), increasingly started to conceptualise Turkey’s past and present from the perspective of Ottoman traditions. Thus, rather than directly determining Turkey’s assertive foreign policy during the Arab Spring demonstrations and subsequent armed conflicts, the Neo-Ottoman discourse and the traditional Imperial sub-culture of the Turkish strategic culture together provided the necessary, but in itself insufficient, justification for the AKP’s foreign-policy choices. From these premises, one could proceed explicitly along the lines of the theoretical approach advanced in this volume, according to which it is fruitful to conceptualise various political narratives as rhetorical (and implemented to varying degrees) responses to the crisis/opportunities brought about by popular mass movements since 2011. The AKP leadership’s rhetorical and ideational responses to the crisis situation were thus truly novel: they emerged as a reaction to the events it suddenly confronted, but derived from the traditional Imperial version of Turkey’s strategic culture, as well as the foreign-policy ideal of Turkish political Islam. The narrative rationalising the recent policy choices also combines these two aspects in its references to Ottoman and Islamic universalism. It should now be clear that it is not very useful, after all, to search for an all-encompassing definition of the new Turkish foreign policy under the incumbent AKP (such as Neo-Ottoman or Pan-Islamist). Indeed, some observers of Turkey’s recent and rapidly changing actions have even suggested that the country hardly has a foreign policy as such, merely offering disconnected ad hoc reactions in various fields. However, as the discussion thus far has demonstrated, there are indeed some long-term aspirations that are detectable if its foreign policy is analysed within the context provided by other actors in the region. One could start by asking how the AKP’s foreign policy relates to three different types of ordering logic that have a significant effect or presence in the region. Moreover, even though Turkey’s positions seem to change perplexingly quickly, relatively enduring rhetorical devices, concepts, and narratives are indeed utilised to describe the AKP’s policies to both domestic and external audiences. Thus, to get a clear picture of Turkey’s long-term approach in the Middle East it would be useful first to sketch a map of various alternative and competing models or manifestations of order building in the region. First, the USA and the EU aim to promote what is usually called a liberal international order. This in itself is both a long-term policy and a narrative with strong normative tones, implying a model in which the promotion of democracy goes hand in hand with market liberalisation, which among other things aims to secure the material and economic interests of Western countries. Its characteristics thus include free markets and trade, a security regime based on North-Atlantic unity and its regional alliance structure, safeguarding the West’s economic interests and promoting liberal democracy.

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Second, and frequently in direct confrontation with the above, the region’s regimes tend to aspire to a balance-of-power order in which state sovereignty reigns supreme and neither external nor regional powers are able to manipulate the chronic legitimacy deficit that is characteristic of almost all the states in the region. Third, the international Muslim Brotherhood movement aspires to achieve a pan-Islamic union in which, finally, all Sunni-majority countries would be ruled by a popularly based Islamic government, which at least in its traditional formulation espouses Islamic sharia law. All these attempts necessarily constrain or enable the AKP’s attempt to make Turkey a central state and order producing country in the region.

The Main Target of the AKP’s Foreign Policy Narrative: The Muslim Brotherhood Constituencies The AKP’s post-2011 political narrative could be described as a combination of all three approaches listed above. The claim that Turkey’s new, value-based foreign policy consolidates democratic development both at home and abroad clearly recycles the US/EU discourse on the promotion of democracy. In other words, reflecting US/EU attempts to use their hard and soft power to promote liberal democratic governance in target countries, the AKP’s foreign-policy narrative emphasises the similarity between other Middle Eastern countries and Turkey in the sense that the majority of citizens are conservative Muslims struggling against repressive, often secular-oriented governments. There is a direct link from this assertion to the Muslim Brotherhood’s political discourse, which at least traditionally has framed the political malaise in many Middle Eastern countries as attributable to the lack of religious adherence on the level of state and government institutions. The Brotherhood has also learned to play the game required by the democratic era in that it has become increasingly willing to participate in elections—there is good reason to think that, with its tight and widespread grassroots networks encompassing many religious institutions, it will acquire electoral majorities in fair and free elections. However, the AKP’s foreign-policy narrative also has clear elements of the status-quo approach espoused by many (other) authoritarian regimes in the region. Turkey’s Syria policy is the best example of this curious combination. On the one hand, the AKP leadership has framed the conflict in Syria as one in which an illegitimate minority-based (Alawite) dictatorship represses and murders members of the Sunni majority. This approach is a clear call to bring about a violent regime change in Syria that would bring the Islamist opposition to power, a policy the AKP government has been stubbornly trying to implement since 2012. On the other hand, when it comes to the question of Kurdish autonomy in northern Syria, the AKP leadership regards these PKK-oriented groups as an existential threat and asserts that they should not be allowed to jeopardise Syria’s territorial integrity by constructing new state institutions with foreign help. However, this stance requires the consolidation rather than the replacement of the existing central-state structure and the unitary, homogenising national identity in Syria.

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One should point out that there have been several instances during the last 10 years when Muslim Brotherhood actors in other Middle Eastern countries have responded very positively to the AKP’s pro-active foreign policy advocating a common purpose and even unity based on a common Muslim identity. To give one prominent example, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood explicitly argued in 2012 that they would use Turkey’s AKP government as a benchmark for their own performance (Sallam 2013). The last 10 years have thus demonstrated that there is some sort of trans-national popular support base for the AKP’s Islamic-Conservative agenda. However, it seems that its heyday is past, at least temporarily, and that Turkey’s increasingly conflict-ridden domestic environment is less attractive to the citizens of neighbouring countries. On the other hand, one might ask, at least hypothetically, to what extent the AKP’s increasingly authoritarian model and hegemonic position—or alternatively its illiberal democracy model—encourages various Muslim Brotherhood groups to see it as a potential remedy in their own situations. Hasan al-Banna established the Brotherhood in 1928, more or less at the same time as the secular-nationalist (Kemalist) regime in Turkey was able to consolidate its power. This happened after the turbulent years following the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the declaration of the Republic, the abolishment of the Caliphate, and the suppression of a considerable traditionalist opposition movement that culminated in the Sheik Said rebellion of 1925. One could argue that both secular nationalism and political Islam as espoused by the Muslim Brotherhood are products of modernisation processes that have been underway in the Middle East since the beginning of the nineteenth century. In other words, they are two competing frames of interpretation originally designed to provide an answer to profound questions such as political legitimacy, the nature of political community in the modern era and the basis of effective mass mobilisation against foreign intervention. Many Middle Eastern countries are once again engaged in a profound struggle regarding the very foundations of the political community, and there have been various conflicting attempts at identity-construction and loyalty-building among their citizens. Both of these traditional versions of mass mobilisation offer all actors the necessary political and intellectual resources. One could further argue that the polemics regarding the nature of the political community in the post-Caliphate era, which began with the radical cultural revolution and the abolishment of the Caliphate by the Kemalists at the beginning of the 1920s, have never been resolved. Together with the question of economic inequality, these debates continue to fuel much of the political struggle in many Middle Eastern states, including Turkey. The movement Hasan al-Banna founded in 1928 has gone through many phases, the most notable transformation being the acceptance of electoral democracy, at least among its mainstream membership. However, it has a long way to go in terms of accepting a pluralist and non-confessional political order. Ma’mun al-Hudaybi (1921–2004), the sixth General Guide of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers, continued to point out in the 1990s that the organisation was based on two fundamental principles. The first of these was that in affairs of state and society, Islam and Sharia functioned as foundational sources, and the second was that the organisation existed

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in order to secure the unity of the Muslim nations against imperialism. More recently, the Brotherhood has talked about supporting human rights while simultaneously maintaining a programme that explicitly stresses the need to implement sharia law (Guitta 2010: 7). However, the most recent developments within one variant of this tradition—Tunisia’s Ennahda party—imply that the jury is still out regarding the possible emergence of a truly pluralistic vision espoused by a MuslimBrotherhood-originated party (Marks 2017: 103–105). According to many Turkish liberals, that pluralistic vision was allegedly almost established in the AKP’s so-called democratisation reforms during 2002–2008. Since then, the liberals who joined the AKP early on have declared en masse that the party has completely betrayed its original democratic and liberal-leaning agenda. Irrespective of the increasingly critical evaluation in Western and Turkish liberal circles, the AKP cadres vehemently and consistently insist that their movement and the advanced political agenda create a true democracy in Turkey—and beyond. The crucial question, then, is not so much about how sceptically this is taken in the West, but rather concerns whether or not it is considered credible among its Middle Eastern target constituencies. From these premises one could argue that the AKP’s “New Turkey” (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi 2014b) foreign-policy narrative regarding the contemporary Middle East has several audiences, but it is mainly targeted on the constituencies in Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Egypt, Libya and Tunisia that are directly part of or at least feel sympathy towards the Muslim Brotherhood movement. This target constituency further comprises many different groups of people included in the broadly-shared common Islamic-Conservative approach, from the militant wing of Hamas and Syrian Sunni Islamist rebels to the moderates within the Tunisian Ennahda party. It is worth noting that the New Turkey narrative emphasising an IslamicConservative civilizational identity for Turkey remains rather unconvincing if not complemented with a foreign-policy extension. In fact, the AKP actors put this very explicitly, evidently aware that the linkage between domestic and foreign is crucial for a movement that aims to re-invigorate the Ottoman political project: The discussion about the New Turkey must include a discussion about the New Middle East. Turkey can no longer be thought of on its own, its actions and strategies can no longer be only about itself. Without Turkey, all calculations regarding the Middle East will be imbalanced. Therefore, giving content to the concept of New Turkey requires Turkey to be involved in the Middle East (Öztürk 2015). (Transl. T.A.)

This quotation from an op-ed columnist writing for a feverishly pro-AKP Yeni Şafak newspaper summarises the essentials of the AKP’s long-term policies regarding the Middle East. There appear to be two components, the traditional and the novel. The former concerns Turkey’s enduring assertion that it has an obligation to prevent all PKK-related activity not only inside Turkey but also inside its neighbouring countries, at least in Iraq and Syria. When those responsible for the formulation of Turkey’s security policy have deemed it necessary to hunt down PKK members, they have had little respect for Iraqi and Syrian territorial state sovereignty. As has become evident in recent years, even if many things have changed,

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this approach has continued unabated. On the other hand, an essential new element has emerged in Turkey’s strategic thinking during the AKP era: all governments are of necessity interested in what is going on in their neighbouring countries. However, the AKP’s new grand strategy includes the idea of Turkey functioning as an order producing actor (düzen kurucu aktör) in global politics in general, and in the Middle East in particular. This vision of an order-producing Turkey is narrated in a way that requires the conceptualisation of Islamic-Conservative constituencies, traditionally represented by the Muslim Brotherhood movement, as the main constituency. It is in the name of this constituency that the order is being structured, combining a Muslim identity and a majoritarian democracy. Further, this constituency’s values and identity, as interpreted by the AKP leadership, are taken as the normative basis for the emerging order.

The AKP’s Foreign Policy Narrative in the Evolving International System It is emphasised in this chapter that even though the upheavals starting in the Middle East in 2011 represent a significant new development requiring new policy initiatives from the Turkish government, the AKP’s foreign-policy narrative is incomprehensible unless it is seen as a logical extension of the domestic agenda implemented previously. Another reason for conducting the present analysis was the conviction that inherent in the AKP’s narrative of making Turkey an orderproducing country in the region are several contexts that shed light on its limits and possibilities. The first of these concerns the macro level, in other words the presentday characteristics of the international system: does it enable or disable the AKP’s vision? Second, account should be taken of the reactions of current Middle Eastern regimes to Turkey’s new project. Third, there is the question of ordinary citizens’ views in countries such as Syria, Iraq, Egypt and Tunisia regarding the SunniConservative AKP’s political agenda. Finally, one should consider whether the AKP has the ability to continue its hegemony within Turkey, so as to ensure that no major opposition force will distract the current proactive and interventionist foreign-policy agenda in the near future. These factors and forces thus determine the context within which the AKP’s post2011 political narrative regarding the Middle East purports to produce positive responses among different constituencies. One could argue, however, that several prominent scholars have already demonstrated that at least when it comes to a Turkish model—democratisation through market liberalisation by a religiously oriented mass party—the project has ended in failure. The clearest indication of this is the building by the AKP leadership of an illiberal regime that resembles other Middle Eastern authoritarian governments far too closely (Kirişci 2013). What is relatively clear, then, is that in the eyes of Western powers the AKP’s narrative has lost its credibility. As suggested above, one way of grasping what kind of order the

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AKP’s rhetoric regarding Turkey as an order-producing country might represent would be to compare it with various other visions of order that seem to have some resemblance to the AKP’s own. The presumed order implied in the Western liberal discourse is intended to promote stability and prosperity in the Middle East through market liberalisation: a regional order that ultimately functions as a regional sub-order of the overall liberal international order established by Western states, especially the US. This should include practices of good governance and accountability, induced by investments, technology transfers, military cooperation and access to markets. Such practices usually include professing regional economic integration, increased political dialogue and financial assistance to various pro-democracy civil-society organisations. On the other hand, this form of order—presumed as ideal by Western states—is said to be in crisis, although there is no consensus regarding the nature and depth of the crisis. John Ikenberry (2012: 6), for example, argues that in terms of the liberal international order it is not about foundational principles but merely about the need for a new bargain among various stakeholders. A major emergent question is whether Turkey’s post-2011 foreign-policy narrative supports such a view. There are, at least on a strict textual level, many indications of similar formulations in Ahmet Davutoğlu’s (2012) vision papers, in which Turkey is presented as the kind of liberal actor that pursues regional stability. However, after 15 years of continuous one-party rule, it has become very clear that AKP leaders envision a Middle East order based on the majoritarian understanding of democracy in the particular context of Sunni-Muslim majority populations. As early as in 2010, a prominent Turkish scholar observed rather critically that the AKP insisted on defining democracy by equating it with parliamentary majoritarianism, thereby taking a highly instrumentalised approach (Keyman 2010: 352). This inevitably added a crucial further dimension, requiring analysis that deals with the Muslim Brotherhood’s long-term vision. Although Western countries were initially highly enthusiastic about the AKP experience, which they saw as a way of overcoming the Islamist-secularist divide, the conclusion at this point must be that the Muslim Brotherhood order and the Western liberaldemocratic order are not reconcilable within the AKP’s narrative. Irrespective of the various contradictions between the articulated visions produced by pro-government academics and think-tank organisations, and the actual policies implemented in specific cases, there is little doubt that Turkish foreignpolicy elites and the larger AKP constituencies perceive the international order of the last 20 years as being in tremendous flux. The AKP’s rhetorical response to the crisis that emerged after 2011 has enabled the party to produce a political narrative framing the extremely conflict-ridden political situation in countries such as Egypt, Syria and Iraq as symptoms of a failing Middle Eastern order created after the First World War. From this interpretative perspective, and according to the AKP’s narrative, the crisis could be turned into an opportunity: these transformations have allegedly opened a space in which Turkey is more or less destined to play a much bigger role than previously.

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This way of framing the overall international structure and the Middle Eastern regional order in the AKP’s narrative also conflicts rather sharply with the Western perspective. The AKP’s narrative presupposes a mastering of the political and economic system in the region by local actors, which gives it credibility among the Sunni Conservative target audiences in the region. However, the proposition that Turkey—as the most highly developed and powerful regional actor—should lead this empowerment is destined to remain highly problematic. After all, a previous similar attempt to install a regional leadership that was heavily biased towards one particular country, in other words Nasser’s attempt to consolidate Egypt’s hegemony in the region by utilising the theme of Arab empowerment, ended in failure. Turkey, as a non-Arab Middle Eastern actor, has chosen Islam and democracy as core elements in its new foreign-policy narrative of emancipation. Although the universalism manifested in these two concepts has obvious potential, combining them in the AKP’s narrative has not been successful thus far due to the emergence of domestic authoritarianism. As noted above, as the AKP cadres understand it, during the last 15 years Turkey has experienced profound normalisation and restoration projects that have changed the country’s domestic and external character. Further, the AKP leaders’ rhetoric, as in President Erdoğan’s slogan, “the world is bigger than the five”—referring to the permanent members of the UN Security Council—has at least some relevance among target audiences not only in Turkey but also in the region more generally (Albayrak 2016). It is well known that there is fairly widespread resentment among different Middle Eastern constituencies of Western policies in the region, which in the opinion of many mainly serve their own material interests, disguised in democracy and human-rights rhetoric. The above-mentioned slogan is meant to be a rallying call to the region’s peoples invoking the idea of their own actorness and their ability to take their political destiny into their own hands. President Erdoğan is known for his rather feverish speeches in the summit meetings of the Organization of Islamic Countries, frequently calling on Muslim countries to cooperate, to lay to rest their internal conflicts, and to stand united against foreign powers. There is, of course, nothing new in such postures and calls for unity against outsiders. Indeed, it has been an enduring element from Nasser’s Pan-Arabism to Iranian revolutionary leadership and Osama bin Laden. What is new is that Turkey’s political elite is now willing to adopt a similar posture and thus completely to redefine the country’s position in world politics. There are several aspects to consider in this new development. One of them concerns the mechanisms of relative power-and-enforcement capabilities in the hands of the US as the hegemon in the liberal world order. As mentioned above with reference to Ikenberry, various prominent commentators argue that the liberal order as such is not in its death throes, but its survival will require profound renegotiation among various stakeholders. One could thus argue that the Turkish AKP government’s demand for actorness among Middle Eastern peoples’ reflects a wider new trend whereby maintenance of the Western-led liberal order will require the giving of much more decision-making power to regional states. However, the attractiveness of the AKP’s narrative of Turkey as the order-producing country remains highly limited given its

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domestic authoritarian system and interventionist foreign-policy behaviour: it will at best able to appeal to certain Muslim Brotherhood constituencies in various Middle Eastern countries.

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Evolving Narratives of Political Contestation and Geopolitical Rivalry in the Persian Gulf Kristian Coates Ulrichsen

This chapter examines the interplay of hegemonic competition in the Persian Gulf between Saudi Arabia and Iran alongside the intra-Arab Gulf crises that have erupted since 2011. Regional rivalries between Saudi Arabia and Iran acquired a potent geopolitical dimension following the fall of the Shah in 1979 and the initial zeal of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the 1980s. During this period, Iranian officials proclaimed their support for the spread of their revolutionary message to the Arab Gulf states while their counterparts in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States perceived Iran as both an internal and an external threat. Whereas Iranian foreign policies moderated after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, the narratives framed during the 1980s were hard to dislodge, even during the thaw in cross-waterway relations that occurred in the presidencies of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (1989–1997) and Mohamad Khatami (1997–2005). Although geopolitical tensions flared again after Mahmoud Ahmedinejad set Iran on a course of confrontation with the international community after 2005, the legacy of years of mutual mistrust became clear after the spread of the Arab uprisings across parts of the Middle East and North Africa in 2011. Although the bulk of the unrest was concentrated in North Africa and Syria, mass protests brought down Yemen’s decades-long president, Ali Abdullah Saleh and briefly shook Bahrain’s ruling family, the Al Khalifa, to its core. In response, Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states intervened in Bahrain in 2011, where they deployed a Peninsula Shield Force to assist in the restoration of order and security, and in Yemen in 2012, through a GCC-led political transition that transferred power to Saleh’s vice-president, Abd-Rabbu Mansur Hadi. Both the Arab Gulf States’ responses to the so-called Arab Spring in 2011 and the bitter disputes between the trio comprising Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United K. Coates Ulrichsen (*) Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, Houston, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 W. Mühlberger, T. Alaranta (eds.), Political Narratives in the Middle East and North Africa, Perspectives on Development in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35217-2_5

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Arab Emirates (UAE) and Qatar in 2014 and 2017 illustrate how political narratives continue to polarise the Persian Gulf, albeit in subtly different ways. In addition to what happened in Bahrain and Yemen, significant protests erupted in Kuwait in 2012 and (to a lesser extent) in parts of Oman. In each case, the instinctive reaction of the ruling elites in the GCC states was to attribute the demonstrations to external meddling in a bid to externalise the root causes of the unrest—to Iran in Bahrain’s case and to the Muslim Brotherhood in areas in which Sunnis, rather than Shias, took the streets. These approaches built upon the rise of sectarian identity politics in the region after the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, which in themselves acquired a powerful new dimension with the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011 and the eruption of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in 2014. There are three sections to this chapter. Section “I” opens with an examination of the legacies of 1979 and the clashing regional narratives that followed. It examines the impact not only of the Iranian Revolution but also of the protest movements that rocked Saudi Arabia in November and December 1979. The takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Sunni fundamentalists jeopardised the legitimacy of the Saudi royal family as Custodians of the Two Holy Mosques just as weeks of Shia-led protests occurred in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. Saudi policy became more Islamised in response as the Al Saud reasserted its religious credentials and projected itself more forcefully as the leader of Sunni Islam just as Iran’s revolutionary new leadership tried to do among Shia Muslims. Tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran then spiralled during the Iran-Iraq War and the emergence of violent non-state groups in the early-to-mid-1980s. Section “II”, in which the focus shifts forward a generation to the post-2003 re-emergence of sectarian identity politics in the Persian Gulf, examines how and why officials in Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Arab states reacted so virulently to the downfall of Saddam Hussein. It explores the securitisation of identity politics that took place in the Persian Gulf in the 2000s and ensured that tensions between Iran and its Arab neighbours remained high on the political agendas on both sides of the Persian Gulf. Examining security as discourse adds a vital perspective to regional geopolitical debates and brings in factors that inform the regimes’ perceptions of their internal and regional security landscapes. These factors, in turn, have shaped policy toward issues such as the post-occupation dynamics in Iraq and the material and ideational challenge that Saudi and Iranian officials each perceived the other as posing. Finally, section “III” analyses the impact and legacy of the Arab Spring in the Persian Gulf. While Iran and Saudi Arabia remain locked in a bitter war of words and blame over the quagmire in Yemen, the cases of Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar shed light on the impact of polarising narratives in reshaping developments on the ground in new and different ways. This section traces how political contestation and geopolitical rivalry in the Persian Gulf have evolved since the shock of the Arab Spring, and have created significant new fissures that add a layer of instability to an already volatile regional landscape, as the war of words and the struggle of competing narratives have set GCC states against one another.

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I The polarisation of narratives between Saudi Arabia and Iran—whether in religious (Sunni-Shia) or ethnic (Arab-Persian) terms or in regional hegemonic bids for leadership—was not preordained. Iran under the Shah and Saudi Arabia from the 1950s to the 1970s were broadly on the same side in the Cold War-era fault-line in the Middle East between conservative monarchies and populist political forces (Brew 2015). The Nixon Doctrine, proclaimed in 1969, called on key American partners to maintain a regional balance of power favourable to United States interests (Halliday 2005: 124–125), and evolved into the ‘Twin Pillars’ approach to supporting Saudi Arabia and Iran as conservative, status-quo bulwarks in the region. Both countries shared a common interest in combating socialist and radical nationalist influences in the Persian Gulf and maintaining the steady flow of oil-export revenues that underpinned the social contract between state and society (Furtig 2007: 628). They also provided a counterweight to the projection of growing Iraqi influence in the region as its brand of Ba’athist pan-Arabism was considered destabilising to regional security (Tripp 2002: 175–176). Saudi Arabia under King Saud (1953–1964) and King Faisal (1964–1975) supported the formation of international Islamic organisations such as the Muslim World League in 1962 and the Organization of the Islamic Conference and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth in 1972 (Hardy 2008: 101). The creation of these entities reflected, in part, the utilisation of the Kingdom’s surging oil wealth to spread its soft power as a trans-national Muslim and Islamic force, but was not directed (pre-1979) against Iran, which instead participated in all three organisations before the revolution. King Faisal and the Shah of Iran traded official visits: Faisal journeyed to Iran in 1966 and Muhammad Reza Shah reciprocated in Saudi Arabia in 1968. The contentious issue of Iran’s territorial claim to Bahrain was also resolved in the interests of all parties in 1970, albeit not before it had caused the (temporary) cancellation of the Shah’s inaugural visit to Saudi Arabia (Alvandi 2010: 165). Under the Shah, Iran also provided air support and ground troops between 1972 and 1975 to assist the Sultan of Oman in quelling the military rebellion in Dhofar. Although the Iranian presence ‘contributed substantially to major operations in the final phase of the conflict,’ it was nevertheless kept secret from Oman’s Arab Gulf neighbours lest it stoke concerns about Iranian expansionary designs on the Arabian Peninsula (Jones and Ridout 2015: 156). Developments in 1979 brusquely ruptured the relationship between Iran and Saudi Arabia, as well as between Iran and the United States. To ensure a proper understanding of the depth and legacy of the mutual animosity and mistrust that followed it is essential to consider in tandem the events that shook both countries in that seminal year, namely the Shia-led revolution that toppled the Shah in January in Iran and the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Sunni fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia in December. Although the Iranian Revolution ‘was launched in the name of the oppressed’ it gradually took on an Islamic character during the year-long struggle that preceded the Shah’s departure in January 1979 and the infighting among the

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revolutionaries that followed (Entessar 2017: 128). The perceived threat that revolutionary Iran posed to Saudi Arabia initially was missed by leading officials in the Kingdom, who welcomed the Islamic nature of the new regime in Teheran. Prince (later King) Abdullah went so far as to state: “The Holy Quran is the constitution of our two countries, and thus links between us are no longer determined by material interests or geopolitics” (Hiro 2018: 66). When Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Iran in February 1979 he fused political and religious ideology into a distinctive Shia Islamic model of governance that proclaimed the revolution in Iran as the first step in a series of uprisings against regional rulers who suppressed their own Shia communities. In support of this objective, members of the Shirazi network in Iran established the Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain (IFLB) and the Organization for the Islamic Revolution in the Arabian Peninsula (OIRAP). The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) also created an Office for Liberation Movements and set up a radio station at Abadan that broadcast programmes calling for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain (Louer 2012: 52–55). Khomeini himself asked, rhetorically, of Saudi Arabia, “How long must Satan rule the House of God?” (Miller 2016: 51). Such acts aroused the Saudi leadership from their above-noted complacency regarding the Iranian revolution, and prompted the Interior Minister (and future Crown Prince) Nayef to fulminate in December 1981 that “The Iranians, who after their revolution said they did not want to be the policeman of the Gulf, have become the terrorists of the Gulf” (Hiro 2018: 98). The Shirazi movement (also known as the Shiraziyyun) with its transnational clerical networks was construed as a direct threat by leaders on the Arabian coast of the Gulf, in part because of its many adherents among Shi’i communities in Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. As followers of Iranian cleric Mohammed Mahdi al-Shirazi, members of the Shiraziyyun were active in Kuwait before 1979, where al-Shirazi had settled with his family and entourage in 1971. From Kuwait, he built up a network of followers in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and parts of the UAE, utilising connections among transnational Shia merchants whose commercial interests spanned the Gulf (Louer 2008: 120–121). Another key figure in the Shiraziyyun, Hadi al-Mudarissi, settled in Bahrain in the 1970s after fleeing his hometown of Najaf following persecution by the Ba’athist regime in Iraq, and members of his network were involved in a failed coup attempt mounted by the Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain in 1981 (Al-Hasan 2011: 604–606). The thwarted coup in Bahrain was one of several incidents in the early 1980s that set the tone for years to come, and built upon Khomeini’s observation in 1981: “The Iranian revolution is not exclusively that of Iran, because Islam does not belong to any particular people. . .we will export our revolution throughout the world because it is an Islamic revolution” (Miller 2016: 51). Other incidents included a spate of terrorist attacks in Kuwait that included the bombing of the French and US Embassies in Kuwait City in 1983 and an attempt to assassinate Emir Jabir al-Ahmad Al Sabah in 1985 (Assiri 1990: 72). Public demonstrations of support among Shia communities—both Kuwaiti and expatriate—for the Iranian revolution and for Khomeini further rattled the Kuwaiti authorities, as they did officials in other Arab

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Gulf states where they also occurred (Boghardt 2006: 28). The terrorist operations in Kuwait were linked to Basra-born Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis (real name Jamal al-Ibrahimi). An Iraqi persecuted by Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime for being a member of the outlawed Da’wa Party, al-Muhandis fled to Iran in the early 1980s where he became a senior Badr Corps commander during the same decade and subsequently rose to become the most senior Iraqi active-duty member of the IRGC’s Qods Force. Despite (or perhaps because of) his long Iranian connections, al-Muhandis was elected an MP in Iraq in 2005. He caused great consternation and anger in Kuwait in 2011 when as a leading figure in the Kita’eb Hezbollah militia in southern Iraq he threatened retaliatory action if Kuwait continued the construction of its Mubarak al-Kabir port located (provocatively) near the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab and Iraq’s only access to the Gulf (Gulf States Newsletter 2011: 8). Even as Khomeini and his supporters out-manoeuvred their political rivals to take control of post-revolutionary Iran, a different yet momentous set of events was unfolding in Saudi Arabia as 1979 drew to a close. In November, the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia experienced 7 days of prolonged and bloody clashes between thousands of Shia protestors and Saudi security forces. The violence had multiple causes and was sparked by the harsh state-sanctioned repression of the Ashura festival commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Hussein (Jones 2006: 219). During the 1970s, Saudi students who had studied and spent time at Mohammed Mahdi al-Shirazi’s mosque and library in Kuwait City formed ‘the first generation of Saudi Shia Islamist activists’ in the Kingdom. They included Hasan al-Saffar, a preacher and teacher from Qatif who later founded the Organization for the Islamic Revolution in the Arabian Peninsula. Also present in the Eastern Province as the 1970s ended was Hadi al-Mudarrisi, the leader of the Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain (Matthiesen 2015: 94–95). Despite their activities, al-Saffar and al-Mudarrisi were representatives—in 1979—primarily of the Shirazi movement rather than agents of revolutionary Iran, however much the Saudi security services and royal family later saw them as part of the narrative that reframed the nature of Iran’s threat to Saudi regional interests. There is little evidence that Iran had any hand in the uprising in the Eastern Province in 1979, other than through the admittedly potent inspirational appeal and radicalising effect that the sight of Shia empowerment and the Islamic turn in postrevolutionary Iran had on al-Saffar and his followers (Jones 2006: 229–230). Nevertheless, the strength of this appeal to Shia citizens in Saudi Arabia (and Bahrain), who felt they suffered from political discrimination and economic marginalisation, was considerable. The suppression of the 1979 uprising also provided a contemporary update to historical Shia narratives of injustice at the hands of oppressive rulers, the memory of which—in turn—was revived in the Shia-led protests that rocked Bahrain and Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province in 2011. In 2006, prominent Saudi activist Fouad Ibrahim recalled the powerful symbolic effect of Khomeini’s ascendancy on the Shia communities in Saudi Arabia, and on their ideational affiliation to pan-Shiism in 1979: The most attractive feature was the leadership of Imam Khomeini. The Imam’s charismatic features were truly extraordinary and resonated deeply with all Muslims, particularly the Shia. Second, the new interpretation of Shia political thought inspired by the Iranian

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This appeal notwithstanding, it is notable that despite Iranian attempts to support them after the revolution, the majority of Shia organisations and parties in the GCC continued to regard the nation-state as their primary point of reference when articulating demands for reform. They thereby remained rooted in their domestic context and held a far more nuanced attachment to trans-national loyalties than supposed by suspicious ruling elites in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere (Louer 2008: 297–298). Indeed, organisations such as the OIRAP in Saudi Arabia split with the pan-Shia (and Iraqi-founded) umbrella Movement of Vanguards Missionaries (Harakat al-Risaliyin al-Tala’) during the 1980s, due in part to differences of opinion over Khomeini’s concept of velayat-e faqih (guardianship of the Islamic jurists) (Kwarten 2009: 7). Nevertheless, the beliefs and suspicions of the ruling elites in Saudi Arabia and other GCC states played a key role in framing perceptions of Iranian and Shia objectives, and provided tools for officials opportunistically to turn events into politically useful narratives that attributed destabilising efforts to regional meddling and external interference that diverted attention from the domestic roots of political and economic grievances—as became very clear in the response to the Arab Spring in the Gulf in 2011. Periodic statements on Iranian aspirations for regional hegemony built on Arab Gulf rulers’ unease at the potential disloyalty of their Shia communities. This tied the external, physical threat posed by Iran (as a much larger country) to core questions of internal security and ideational legitimacy in the far-smaller Arab Gulf states. So, too, did comments such as those made in 2008 by a former Iranian consul-general to Dubai in Gulf News, a Dubai-based English-language newspaper, claiming that Iran had maintained a network of sleeper cells in Arab Gulf states since 1979. As Adel al-Assadi (who defected from Iran to the UAE in 2001) put it, ‘Teheran has enough manpower to destabilize the GCC countries’, and ‘the practice of recruiting agents in the Gulf is deeply rooted in the way the intelligence institution is operating and is considered a strong point for Iran (Agence France-Presse 2008).’ Although his allegations were promptly repudiated by Iranian officials, who accused the media of spreading disinformation about Iranian intentions, they nevertheless tapped into a widely-held suspicion in Arab Gulf capitals that Iran does indeed maintain a network of undercover agents that could, and would, engage in underhand tactics if ordered to do so (Gulf Times 2008). From an Iranian perspective, the Iraqi invasion and the Arab Gulf states’ (varying levels of) support for Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War illustrated how these states were willing to work with regional neighbours and international partners (such as the United States) to isolate and confront Iran. Saddam Hussein visited Saudi Arabia on 5 August 1980, 6 weeks before the Iraqis invaded on 22 September. A joint communiqué emphasised the common interests between the two countries, and it appears very likely (although it is unproven) that Riyadh was informed of, and acquiesced in, the plan to invade Iran. All six Arab Gulf states reacted to the outbreak

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of war with varying degrees of support for Iraq in the apparent belief that there was no effective alternative approach to dealing with the revolutionary threat to their polities (Nonneman 2004: 173). Alarm at the outbreak of military conflict was consequently tempered by Arab Gulf states’ calculations that an Iranian victory would unleash revolutionary forces they were unable to contain, and that an Iraqi victory was the least worst option. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait led the way in providing generous loans, financial assistance, and oil- and non-oil support to Iraq throughout the war, amounting to an estimated $25 billion from Saudi Arabia alone. Kuwait provided a further $13.2 billion in non-collectible ‘war relief subsidies’ and provided Iraq with vital deepwater facilities at its ports of Shuwaikh and Shuaiba. Beginning in 1982, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia also supplied 330,000 barrels of oil per day from their shared neutral zone to compensate for Syria’s closure of the pipelines running through its territory to Iraq (Assiri 1990: 69–71). As the war intensified and Iran pushed back initial Iraqi gains the Saudi position hardened, as Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abdulaziz Al Saud labelled Iran ‘the terrorist of the Gulf’. Saudi pilots shot down an Iranian F4 over the Kingdom’s territorial waters in June 1984 in the first example of the use of Saudi military force against Iran (Nonneman 2004: 178) in terms that have reappeared heavily in the years since Mohammed bin Salman rose to prominence in Saudi Arabia as Minister of Defence in 2015, and as Crown Prince in 2017. Conditions in the southern Persian Gulf did not pose an immediate threat to security, as was the case in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, which bordered Iraq, or the delicate internal situation of Bahrain. Policymakers in Qatar, the UAE and Oman sought to balance their limited financial and declaratory (through GCC communiqués) support to Iraq with their continuing commercial relations with Iran. This delicate balancing act assumed extreme proportions in the UAE, where Dubai, Sharjah and Umm al-Qaiwain supported Iran and maintained extremely close trading ties with Teheran. Dubai additionally benefited greatly from damaged ships calling at the extensive dry-dock repair facilities at its massive new port in Jebel Ali. This had been decried as a white elephant when it opened in 1979, but the rising demand for ship-repair facilities was a significant economic boon for the emirate (Davidson 2008: 106–107). The other four emirates of Abu Dhabi, Ras al-Khaimah, Ajman and Fujairah all sided with Iraq, with Ras al-Khaimah offering Baghdad the opportunity to establish air bases on its territory (Davidson 2006: 206). A lack of consensus among Arab Gulf rulers on the urgency and specific nature of the threats posed by the Iran-Iraq war undermined collective approaches to addressing the conflict and contributed to the subsequent internationalisation of the Persian Gulf. Kuwaiti officials at the November 1986 GCC summit in Abu Dhabi requested the GCC to provide maritime protection of Kuwait’s oil and merchant fleet and to station a contingent of Peninsula Shield troops on Bubiyan Island to counteract Iran’s seizure of the Faw Peninsula the previous February. However, their request was declined due to an unwillingness to confront Iran politically or militarily, Oman and the UAE displaying the strongest opposition to the proposals. This left Kuwaiti officials with little option but reluctantly to turn to external powers to provide the maritime protection for its fleet, leading to the re-flagging and chartering

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of Kuwaiti vessels in 1987-88 as the GCC failed its first real stress test to act collectively in support of an individual member (Assiri 1990: 101–102). The internationalisation of the Gulf occurred as the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, France and Italy all sent warships to conduct convoy operations protecting re-flagged and chartered vessels. Iranian attacks on re-flagged ships now provoked external retaliation, such as when US ships destroyed Iranian offshore oil platforms in response to attacks on US-flagged ships in October 1987 and April 1988 (Assiri 1990: 107–108). Although the US only sought and acquired large-scale basing rights in the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, developments between 1986 and 1988 brought a sizeable external naval force into the Persian Gulf for the first time since Britain’s departure from the region in 1971.

II The sectarian lens became the prism through which many in the Arab Gulf states— policymakers and members of the public alike—came to interpret regional developments during the 2000s following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the mismanaged occupation that ensued (cf. Gaiser 2017). In addition to entrenching an ‘us and them’ mentality that intersected with notions of loyalty and disloyalty, playing the sectarian card was also a canny move that—both before but especially after the Arab Spring—allowed Arab Gulf leaders to emphasise the messages that would resonate most in key Western capitals. There was therefore a clear political rationale for emphasising identity politics consistent with Fanar Haddad’s observation (in the context of Iraq) that ‘sectarianism,’ ‘sectarian identity’ and ‘sectarian’ are mere labels the social and political relevance of which ‘advances and recedes according to wider socioeconomic and political conditions’ (Haddad 2011: 2). Furthermore, as Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel noted in 2017 in Sectarianization, after a thaw in Saudi-Iranian relations during the 1990s, the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq ‘dramatically affected the regional balance of power’ and marked a ‘turning point. . .in sectarian relations across the region’ (Hashemi and Postel 2017: 10). Concerns among Saudi and other Arab Gulf policymakers revolved around the perceived and actual expansion of Iranian influence following the removal of its main counterweight in the Gulf, and its consequences for the Shia communities in GCC states. As early as in February 2003, the Foreign Minister of Saudi Arabia, Prince Saud al-Faisal Al Saud, warned President George W. Bush that he would be ‘solving one problem and creating five more’ if Saddam Hussein was removed by force. Subsequently, in 2005, Saud al-Faisal opined that the United States was ‘handing the whole country over to Iran without reason’ (Washington Post 2006).1

Quoted in Nawaf Obaidi, ‘Stepping into Iraq: Saudi Arabia will Protect Sunnis if the US Leaves,’ Washington Post, November 29, 2006.

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Officials and analysts in Arab Gulf states increasingly came to view the empowerment of Iraq’s Shia majority and the strengthening Iranian influence in Iraq as major, if unintended, consequences of the overthrow of the Ba’athist regime. In March 2007, spiralling Saudi anger at perceived US missteps in Iraq prompted King Abdullah to blast the American presence as ‘an illegal foreign occupation’, which he held responsible for the ‘detestable sectarianism’ in Iraq as the civil war (s) intensified (New York Times 2007). The result was vocal suspicion of Iran’s cultivation of extensive ties with both state and non-state actors in Iraq, which provided Teheran with a degree of strategic depth and stoked deep unease in Arab Gulf capitals (Sager 2008). It was in this context that the somewhat vague and amorphous concept of a ‘Shia crescent’ running from Iran through Iraq and the oil-rich Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia to Lebanon gained considerable traction in much popular and political discourse in the Middle East (Yamani 2006: 8). This occurred as the orgy of political violence and sub-national communalistic challenges to Iraqi state authority sharpened sectarian tensions in the Persian Gulf and the broader region. The accident of geography that situated the region’s largest oil reserves in precisely these areas heightened the perceived stakes among policymakers in the GCC and the United States, especially as the sectarian nature of the conflict in Iraq intensified between 2005 and 2007 (Furtig 2007: 635). Interestingly, however, some of the earliest statements that ascribed an openly sectarian dimension to the violence in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East in the mid-2000s were made by leaders from outside the Persian Gulf. Thus, it was Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak who declared that Shia communities in Iraq and other parts of the Arab world were more loyal to Iran than to their own (Arab) states, and it was King Abdullah of Jordan who first coined the term ‘Shia crescent’ in 2004 (Mazur 2009: 21). The narrative of sectarian conflict and minority identities was overly simplistic, albeit appealing to regimes as it downplayed the domestic roots of socio-political and economic dissent, and attracted international support in ‘securitised’ environments in which Iran was deemed to pose a security threat to Western interests, just as Islamists were deemed to do after 9/11 (Louer 2008: 223). ‘Securitisation’ refers to the processes in which issues become constructed as threats to security, by whom and for what reason. If an issue is successfully securitised, and accepted as such by the relevant audience, the principal actor feels empowered to take extraordinary measures to combat it (Buzan et al. 1998: 23). On an international level, the ‘War on Terror’ represented an example of securitisation after 9/11 as the Bush administration argued that it was necessary to bypass certain international norms and structures to combat the perceived threat from Al-Qaeda-linked transnational terrorism (Buzan 2008: 1103). On the regional level, officials in Arab Gulf capitals—especially Riyadh, Manama and, over time, Abu Dhabi—portrayed themselves as holding the front line against Iranian expansionary designs and, less successfully, regional militancy. However, the usage of a ‘Shia crescent’ narrative among Arab rulers, and their suspicion that Shia actors and political groups represented a threat to GCC polities rested on a flawed ascription of pan-Shia trans-national loyalties and an assumption

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of monolithic unity within Shiism that did not exist in reality. Shia in Kuwait, for example, demonstrated their loyalty to the state and the ruling Al Sabah family during the Iraqi occupation in 1990–1991. Their comparatively more advanced associational infrastructure provided the backbone of an organised resistance movement against the Iraqi occupation forces, especially as most Kuwaiti Shia remained in Kuwait throughout the occupation whereas others, including many of the Al Sabah, went into exile in Saudi Arabia (Meyer et al. 2007: 300). The Shia community was divided in Iraq, and many had a more complex and positive attachment to Iraqi nationalism than admitted by proponents of a Shia crescent. The popularity of Moqtada al-Sadr and his Jaish al-Mahdi after 2003 testified to the ideational appeal of an Iraqi Shia nationalism that rejected both foreign occupation and a pro-Iranian alignment (Visser 2007: 23). Nevertheless, the sectarian lens constituted a powerful filter through which ruling elites throughout the GCC viewed developments in Iraq. In states such as Saudi Arabia and Bahrain with significant Shia communities and pronounced local differences in political and economic access, the potential overspill of sectarian violence and the perceived threat to internal security were instrumental in shaping their leaders’ initial engagement with post-2003 Shia-led governments in Baghdad. Saudi officials deeply distrusted the Iraqi government led by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki from 2006 to 2014, which they suspected was an Iranian proxy and a source of multiple physical and ideational threats to their own polity. This contributed to a cycle of self-fulfilling prophecies as the Gulf States’ reluctance to increase their political and economic engagement with Iraq enabled Iran to take the lead in reconstruction and development projects (Khaleej Times 2008). These projects included a new international airport at Najaf, which opened in August 2008, the creation of a free trade zone around Basra, and the signing of multiple cooperation agreements between Iraq and Iran covering issues as diverse as education, industry, environmental protection and insurance (Katzman 2008: 6). Although investment from Kuwait and the UAE increased, notably in Iraqi Kurdistan, Saudi Arabia did not appoint a resident Ambassador in Baghdad until 2017, and the Emir of Kuwait was the only GCC head of state to attend the Arab League Summit that took place in Baghdad in March 2012 (Coates Ulrichsen 2013: 45). The entanglement of Arab Gulf states’ and US security interests in the 1990s and 2000s provided fodder for Iranian politicians who sought to drive a wedge between Arab Gulf rulers and their people: there was growing public anger at the Iraq war as the occupation ground on, and indications of widespread support for Hasan Nasrallah and Hezbollah for taking the fight to Israel in the July-August 2006 war in Lebanon (New York Times 2006). Rulers and ruling circles in GCC states were uneasily aware that public opinion in their societies did not necessarily support the political decisions they made, and that this provided opportunities for anti-status-quo groups and states to make hay at their expense. Even in Kuwait in the mid-1990s, less than a decade after US-led forces drove out the Iraqi occupation, there was already talk of a ‘smothering embrace’, and expressed unease that the US did not maintain a hegemonic role in the Gulf ‘out of love for Kuwait. . .if America defends its interests, then we have every right also to defend our beliefs and our principles’ (Al-Shayeji 1997: 5).

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Other Arab Gulf states wrestled with similar gaps between the ruling circles and public opinion. Soon after the 9/11 attacks, a survey of opinion in Saudi Arabia indicated that 95% of young male respondents between the ages of 25 and 41 sympathised with their erstwhile compatriot Osama bin Laden (Schwarz 2007: 124). As Muhammad al-Musfir, a professor of political science at Qatar University, bluntly told Mary Ann Weaver of National Geographic In 2002: . . .Your military is a very provocative element, and it’s not just my students who are saying this. Go to the suq. Go downtown. Go to any café. The attitude is decidedly anti-American (National Geographic 2003).

Four years later, as speculation mounted that either the US or Israel was planning to strike Iranian nuclear targets, Qatar’s Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani journeyed to Teheran to seek reassurance from President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad that Qatar would not be targeted for retaliation in the event of an attack on Iran. In response, President Ahmedinejad told the Emir that as host to the forward headquarters of US Central Command (CENTCOM), Qatar would be included in the first wave of Iranian retaliatory moves (Kechichian 2007: 306). Iranian officials periodically made attempts to stir up disharmony in GCC states by trying to play on such perceived gaps in opinion and by making pointed references to Arab Gulf states’ security ties with the US, especially as the War on Terror grew more unpopular in the late-2000s. In 2008, for example, policymakers in Iran initiated a war of words directed against ruling elites and decision-makers in the GCC. This was designed to leave them in no doubt about Iran’s intention to destabilise their polities in the event of conflict. Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Manouchehr Mohammadi, questioned the legitimacy of the traditional monarchies in the Arabian Peninsula and their ability to quell rising domestic unrest over the American military presence (World Tribune 2008). One month later, in mid-September, the defence minister, Mostafa Mohamed Najjar, issued an explicit warning to GCC officials: “Our response to any attack would be decisive. . .We are certain the countries of the region would prevent America from attacking Iran” (Gulf Times 2008). With Iran geographically surrounded by US occupying forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Bush administration increasing the pressure on Teheran’s nuclear programme during its last years in office, speculation about a possible US or Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear facilities was routine: this was despite a US National Intelligence Estimate in 2007 indicating, with high confidence, that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons programme in 2003. Given the web of forward US military and naval facilities in Arab Gulf states—which included the headquarters of the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain and extensive bases in Kuwait and the UAE in addition to CENTCOM in Qatar, the making of veiled threats of Iranian retaliation on US security positions in GCC states was designed to sow doubt in Arab Gulf policymakers of the wisdom of supporting a US (or US-sanctioned Israeli) strike on Iran. Kuwaiti and Qatari officials made it clear—in 2007 and 2012 respectively—that they would not permit the US to use its bases on their soil in any attack on Iran (Dawn 2007; Times of Israel 2012).

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III The unexpected outbreak and rapid spread of regionwide protests in 2011 (which became known internationally as the ‘Arab Spring’) caught Arab Gulf governments by surprise. Qatar, which was among them, subsequently opted to support some of the uprisings in North Africa and Syria and arguably fanned the flames of revolt through Al Jazeera’s round-the-clock coverage. Although Iran had experienced massive street protests in 2009 (the ‘Green Revolution’), the enormous demonstrations in Arab capitals from Cairo to Damascus were a source of deep concern to policymakers in Arab Gulf states, who for decades had sought to rule over societies that were depoliticised as far as possible. Rather than having a degree of political opening and space that could absorb and survive such demonstrations of public anger, as in Iran’s hybrid political-religious regime, Arab Gulf rulers viewed any display of political or popular grievance with deep misgiving. As a result, their initial response was to blame any unrest on external ‘meddling’, partly to deflect attention away from domestic root causes of economic or political discontent. Given that this narrative of Iranian meddling took shape in and after 2011 it provided the glue that brought the leaderships of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the UAE closer together and overcame the inability of all six GCC states in the 1980s to agree on their perception of a common threat posed by Iran. It was therefore unsurprising that the initial reaction of the ruling elites in Arab Gulf states was to attribute the unrest to foreign interference in regional and domestic affairs—initially Iran but later the Muslim Brotherhood as well. Ascribing the protests in Bahrain and parts of the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia in February and March 2011 to Iranian ‘aggression’ was facilitated by the fact that many of the demonstrators were Shia, although in Bahrain the initial protests had been noted for their social inclusivity and the protestors’ explicit attempts to proclaim that they were ‘neither Sunni nor Shia but Bahraini’ (Coates Ulrichsen 2011a). In addition, there were tangible ideational (if not organisational) links between the Bahraini and Saudi protests: demonstrators in the Saudi Eastern Province of Qatif displayed Bahraini flags, carried replicas of Bahrain’s Pearl Roundabout and chanted ‘Free Bahrain’ and ‘one people, not two people’ during the early stages of the Saudi protests in 2011 (Matthiesen 2012: 637–638). The growing calls for political reform were deeply troubling to both the Bahraini and the Saudi authorities precisely because they threatened to bring together communities that the ruling elites had long sought to keep apart in a divide-and-rule strategy: this was despite the fact that the Saudi authorities had thrown their support behind (and later armed) opposition groups in Syria, calling for the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad at almost exactly the same time. The sight of Bahrainis from different social and religious backgrounds gathering at the Pearl Roundabout in Manama posed a significant risk to the ruling elite in Bahrain, just as the Qatif demonstrators’ adoption of Bahraini slogans did to Saudi officials. Shia communities in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia had been complaining about discrimination and marginalisation in a systemic, albeit informal, manner for decades. Bahraini and Saudi officials responded by selectively targeting protestors to play on existing

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social and sectarian fissures and thereby divide the opposition movement before it could develop any further. Ascribing the protests to Iranian interference was one way of making it less likely that members of the Sunni community would continue to participate, and well as stigmatizing the demonstrations as acts of treachery and disloyalty to national interests. Thus, as Bahrain’s Foreign Minister, Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed Al Khalifa, claimed in March 2011: ‘We have never seen such a sustained campaign from Iran on Bahrain and the Gulf as we’ve seen in the past two months,’ and his Emirati counterpart, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, warned Iran to ‘respect the unity and sovereignty of Gulf countries’ (Coates Ulrichsen 2011b). Emphasising the rolling back of Iranian influence was another way in which the Saudis justified their intervention in Syria (on behalf of the opposition) as well as in Bahrain (on the side of the regime). It was just the same in the 1980s, when the Saudi Ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, justified the large-scale Saudi assistance to Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War thus: “It was in our interest to stop Iran on the Iraqi borders, rather than fight them on our borders” (Miller 2016: 56). The Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI)—a five-member independent body set up by King Hamad to investigate the Bahraini protests of February–June 2011—concluded in November 2011 that they were unable to find any evidence of Iranian involvement in the demonstrations. As M. Cherif Bassiouni, the Algerian chairman of the BICI, stated in an interview: ‘The Iranians were propagandists, you can’t expect them not to want to take advantage of a situation like that . . . But to say they were funding, they were agitating? We found no evidence of that’ (Washington Times 2011). The BICI finding did not please the Bahraini officials, one of whom told a London audience in 2012 that the Bahraini government had information on Iranian meddling but was unable to release it publicly.2 In terms of framing and shaping narratives it is instructive that the tendency in 2011 to blame Iran for the protests in Arab Gulf states shifted in 2012 when largescale demonstrations in Kuwait made it more difficult for policymakers to credibly play the Iran card. The Kuwaiti demonstrations originated in public anger at mounting political corruption in 2011 and led to the resignation of Prime Minister Sheikh Nasser Mohammed Al Sabah that November. After members of the political opposition (primarily from tribal and conservative Sunni Islamist backgrounds) won 35 of the 50 seats in the National Assembly in February 2012, new demonstrations erupted in September when the Constitutional Court annulled the election and Emir Sabah al-Ahmad Al Sabah issued a decree (in parliament’s absence) changing the way votes were cast. The demonstrations were led by the charismatic former MP Musallam al-Barrak, who hailed from one of the largest Sunni Arab tribes that spanned the Kuwaiti-Saudi borderlands, and who was arrested after appearing to threaten the Emir at a mass public rally in Kuwait City in October 2012 (Diwan 2013).

2 The author’s participation in a Bahrain-focused event at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in March 2012.

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Whereas the regime narrative in the Gulf capitals in 2011 attributed the unrest in Bahrain and the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia to Iranian meddling in predominantly Shia communities, the mass protests led primarily by Sunni Arabs required governments to find a different scapegoat so as to attribute the unrest to external rather than domestic causes. Thus, the Muslim Brotherhood replaced Iran as the external manipulator supposedly behind the largest protests in Kuwait’s history, which rocked the country between October and December 2012. The building up of the Muslim Brotherhood as the new bogeyman of the Gulf was strongest in the UAE, where officials launched a widespread crackdown on the Brotherhood’s local affiliate in 2012. The outspoken and controversial Director-General of Dubai Police, Dhahi Khalfan Tamim, stated categorically in March 2012, albeit without any supporting evidence, that the Muslim Brotherhood was planning to ‘take over’ the Arab Gulf monarchies: ‘My sources say the next step is to make Gulf governments figurehead bodies only without actual ruling. The start will be in Kuwait in 2013 and in other Gulf states in 2016’ (Agence France-Presse 2012). Remarkably, Khalfan also suggested that ‘they [the Muslim Brotherhood] are also secret soldiers for America and they are executing plans to create tension’ (Kuwait Times 2012). In this deeply-polarised climate it was inevitable that Qatar and the UAE should clash over domestic- and regional-level approaches to the perceived Islamist threat in general, and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular. Tensions boiled over in the spring of 2012 after the UAE revoked the visas of several Syrians and began to return them to the war-torn country. This followed an unlicensed protest against the Assad regime outside the Syrian consulate in Dubai, which drew some 2000 people. The display of popular support for an Arab Spring-style protest deeply unnerved the Emirati authorities, who were in the process of stamping out any signs of domestic unrest within the UAE. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the spiritual figurehead of the Muslim Brotherhood who was based for decades in Doha, responded on his weekly Sharia and Life programme on Al Jazeera thus: “the Emiratis are humans like us, if they think they are superior, they are wrong . . . They do not have rule over people more powerful than the others” (Baskan 2012). These comments enraged Dhahi Khalfan Tamim and prompted a diplomatic rift between the UAE and his Qatari hosts. Khalfan responded by issuing an arrest warrant for Qaradawi, whereupon the spokesperson for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt warned the UAE that the whole Muslim world would rise in Qaradawi’s defence if the warrant was ever carried out (Gulf States Newsletter 2013). Regional rivalry between the UAE and Qatar thus took root as officials in Doha and Abu Dhabi competed for influence and supported very different groups in the post-transition political reordering in states that experienced a change of leader in 2011. This was most immediately apparent both in Libya, where both the UAE and Qatar provided critical Arab back-up to the NATO-led military intervention but supported different groups of anti-Gaddafi fighters on the ground, and in Egypt, where the turbulent period of post-Mubarak politics presented UAE policymakers with an initial challenge in the form of a Muslim Brotherhood government in Cairo backed heavily by Qatar. When President Mohammed Morsi was ousted by a military coup led by General Abdel-Fatah al-Sisi in July 2013, however, the

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UAE—and Saudi Arabia—responded quickly by mobilising large amounts of political and financial support that far exceeded Qatar’s support to the Morsi government. Significantly, Saudi Arabia joined with the UAE to slam shut the participatory windows that had opened in Egypt in 2011, and after Salman succeeded Abdullah as King in January 2015 a close relationship developed between Mohammed bin Zayed in Abu Dhabi and Prince (later Crown Prince) Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh (Bianco and Stansfield 2018: 634). The sharply differing responses to the Arab Spring therefore set the Arab Gulf States on a collision course between Qatar on the one side and Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the UAE on the other, with Kuwait and Oman hovering in-between. The root causes of Qatar’s isolation by its three neighbours are manifold and go back many years, but Qatar’s willingness to work with, rather than resist, political change in North Africa was a large part of it. So, too, was Qatar’s more open economic and political relationship with Iran. This reflected a pragmatic acknowledgment by Qatari officials that their shared gas reservoir meant that they needed to maintain a working relationship with Iran, at the very least, as well as a widespread perception among policy elites in Gulf capitals that Qatar supported the Muslim Brotherhood and its Islamist affiliates across the Middle East (Mühlberger 2017: 1–2). The cache of US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks in 2010 encapsulated the Qatari leadership’s view of its relationship with Iran: as the then-Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani told an American interlocutor, ‘they lie to us, and we lie to them’ (The Guardian 2010). Sheikh Hamad’s frankness was replicated, albeit in a sharply different tone, in another leaked US cable that chronicled how King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia reportedly appealed to US officials to ‘cut off the head of the snake’ by attacking Iran and ending its nuclear programme (Reuters 2010). Narratives in the Persian Gulf have therefore developed along new fracture-points since 2011 in terms of regional tensions both with Iran and among the GCC states. In the case of the Saudi-led campaign that began in Yemen in March 2015, the rivalry with Iran incorporated a direct military component for the first time, as Saudi officials led by the young and impulsive new Defence Minister, Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, became convinced that the Houthi rebels who had taken over large areas of Yemen, including the capital Sana’a, in September 2014 were being backed by Iran. The timing of the start of the war also came days before world powers were due to reach agreement with Iran over its nuclear programme (in the event, the deadline for what became the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was delayed until July 2015). In effect, the Saudi (and Emirati) leadership made it clear to their international partners that they did not share the Barack Obama administration’s view that the issue of Iran’s nuclear programme could be divorced from Iran’s manipulative (as they saw it) regional role. From the perspective of Riyadh, Iran’s supposed meddling in the Kingdom’s south, in Yemen, was consistent with its perceived behaviour in Bahrain to the east, and its actual involvement in Iraq (to the north) and Syria (to the west). Saudi officials therefore felt surrounded by Iranian proxies and were unwilling to give ground to President Obama’s desire for dialogue (Coates Ulrichsen 2015).

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Since 2014, two rounds of bitter dispute between Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the UAE on one side, and Qatar on the other, have created a new regional fault line that has triggered a new set of polarising narratives and has undone four decades of cautious integration of the six Arab Gulf States within the GCC. Both iterations of the Qatar dispute—the 9-month withdrawal of the Saudi, Bahraini and Emirati Ambassadors from Doha in 2014 and the blockade that began in 2017—have shredded any lingering illusions of a common-threat perception in Gulf security. In fact, the legacy of the 2014 and 2017 disputes are as profound as they are polarising both for the individual Gulf States as well as for the GCC as a unit. Ties of trust and confidence have been shattered on both sides of the divide as positions have hardened and a zero-sum mentality has taken root. Just as Qataris ask themselves why they should ever trust their immediate neighbours again, leaders of the ‘GCC-3’ of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the UAE remain convinced that Qatar violated the agreement that settled the 2014 dispute and would do the same again if given another chance. As for the GCC, twice in 3 years it has been unable to prevent three of its members from turning on a fourth and has been bypassed at every stage of the crisis—from the formulation and delivery of the initial grievances to attempts to mediate and resolve the dispute (Coates Ulrichsen 2018). Saudi Arabia and the UAE designated the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organisation in March 2014, and at the same time, with Bahrain, withdrew their Ambassadors from Qatar after claiming that they had “exerted massive efforts to contact Qatar on all levels to agree on a unified policy. . .to ensure non-interference, directly or indirectly, in the internal affairs of any member state” of the GCC. The trio also claimed—citing the Qatari leadership’s perceived support for Muslim Brotherhood affiliates in Syria and North Africa but without providing any real evidence to back up their rhetorical assertion—that they had appealed to Doha “not to support any party aiming to threaten security and stability” in the Gulf (The National 2014). Their action came 3 months after a showdown in Riyadh when King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia ordered Qatar’s young new Emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, to sign a document pledging “non-interference” in neighbouring countries’ affairs and to “change Qatar’s ways” in a regional power-play that was unprecedented—at that time—in the modern history of the Gulf States (Stephens 2017). The 2014 diplomatic spat lasted for 9 months until it was resolved in late November via an agreement in which Qatar made several concessions and the three GCC states agreed to return their Ambassadors to Doha in time for the annual GCC Summit set to take place there in December. The concessions included relocating Muslim Brotherhood figures hitherto resident in Doha to Turkey, ordering Emirati dissidents who had been given refuge in Doha after the UAE’s crackdown on domestic Islamists in 2012 to leave Qatar, closing the Egyptian branch station of Al Jazeera, enforcing the GCC Internal Security Pact, and cooperating closely with GCC partners on matters of intelligence and policing (Coates Ulrichsen 2017). These were meaningful acts by the new Qatari leadership, which exhibited a willingness to acknowledge and address the perceived grievances of its three regional adversaries, but they still proved insufficient for Qatar’s detractors.

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By the time the 2017 iteration of the argument began with the renewed withdrawal of the three countries’ ambassadors from Doha in June, accompanied this time by their Egyptian counterpart and an economic and trade blockade of Qatar, the so-called Anti-Terror Quartet accused the Qatari leadership of violating both the spirit and the letter of the Riyadh Agreement that ended the 2014 dispute. By 2017, however, the Saudi Arabia-Bahrain-UAE triumvirate came to perceive Qatar as a hostile entity and a direct threat to their concepts of national and regional security. A convergence of factors rather than any one trigger appeared to shift the geopolitical landscape in the Gulf, as the new Trump administration signalled its initial intent to follow a set of regional policies that were aligned more closely with Abu Dhabi and Riyadh than with Doha. The policy inexperience of many within President Trump’s inner circle presented a further opportunity for both the Saudis and the Emiratis to shape the administration’s thinking on critical regional issues such as Iran and Islamism, both of which they did both overtly and, more controversially, through surrogates (Associated Press 2018). The Gulf crisis that erupted with the rupture over Qatar in June 2017 remains unresolved as of September 2018. The breakdown of trust among the six GCC states and confidence in the GCC as an organisation is likely to be generational and probably fatal to the chances of its re-cohering. At no stage in the crisis was the GCC consulted or used as a mechanism for raising or addressing the grievances that animated the dispute as the GCC and its Riyadh-based secretariat were unable to prevent three of its members from turning on a fourth for the second time in a little more than 3 years. The primacy of personalised decision-making and the fact that both Qatar and Saudi Arabia are led by ruling figures in their thirties—along with the possibility that Mohammed bin Zayed may easily lead the UAE for several decades after he eventually becomes Ruler of Abu Dhabi—means that the discord is likely to cast a long and bitter shadow across the Gulf. Moreover, the anger and recrimination that the crisis has created on both sides of the divide—augmented by the criminalisation in Bahrain and the UAE of sympathy for Qatar—has torn at the social fabric of Gulf societies hitherto bound closely together by tribal and familial ties (Gulf Times 2017). Indeed, the polarising ways in which the Qatar crisis has played out has far-reaching implications for social and economic relations in the Gulf, which historically have been inextricably linked through tribal, marriage and commercial ties that crossed national boundaries and bound together the peoples of the region. From the start, the anti-Qatar group sought to meddle in and manipulate tribal and ruling family dynamics to undermine social and political cohesion and drive a wedge into state-society relations in Qatar. Media outlets in Saudi Arabia and the UAE promoted various Qatari ‘opposition’ figures, both imagined and real, and attempted to play the tribal card by offering incentives and inducements to powerful tribes whose brethren spanned the Qatar/anti-Qatar divide. Several days before the diplomatic rupture with Qatar on 5 June 2017, Saudi and Emirati newspapers ran excerpts from an ‘interview’ with Saud bin Nasser Al Thani, almost certainly a fictitious character whom they claimed was planning to set up an opposition political party based in London (The National 2017). Three months later, the UAE heavily

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promoted Khalid al-Hail, another ‘opposition leader’ who did in fact exist and put on a rambling 1-day conference in London that was followed soon after by another in Washington, DC. It was revealed later that funding for the DC event, at the Hudson Institute, was traced back to Elliott Broidy and George Nader, two figures with significant business connections in Abu Dhabi, as was funding for another anti-Qatar event held at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in DC in May 2017 (New York Times 2018). Whereas the sponsored opposition events were at best a distraction and at times mildly comical, the efforts to promote two pretenders to Qatari leadership were more serious. The claims to power of Abdulla bin Ali Al Thani and Sultan bin Suhaim Al Thani were tenuous at best, and relied upon a creative interpretation of counterfactual ‘what-ifs’ that stretched back to the 1970s. Advancing them as alternative Emirs implied rejection of the entire period of Qatari leadership after 1972, when Emir Tamim’s grandfather, Khalifa bin Hamad Al Thani, had taken power from Abdulla bin Ali’s older half-brother (Coates Ulrichsen 2018). Moreover, the fact that both Abdulla bin Ali and Sultan bin Suhaim had close links with Saudi Arabia and the UAE and had not lived in Qatar for years further delegitimised them in the eyes of many. The ham-fisted attempts to interfere in ruling-family matters had the paradoxical effect of strengthening and unifying the Al Thani—historically one of the more fractious in the Gulf with a record of internal schisms—against such external meddling. Far from creating and expanding cracks in Qatari society, the blockade strengthened a burgeoning national identity that appeared to encompass all residents of Qatar, expatriates as well as citizens within a narrative of a nation under siege. In August 2017, the Qatari government approved a plan to create a pathway toward permanent residency for selected groups of expatriates in a move that broke with the GCC consensus on matters of citizenship, which hitherto had made rigid distinctions between citizens and non-citizens. The blockade also created human hardship in a region where many had extended cross-border familial ties and faced restrictions on visitation that have been criticised by international human-rights groups such as Amnesty International (Amnesty 2017). The collective memories being formed on both sides will be hard to erase after the sheer intensity of the campaign of vilification against Qatar in Quartet media and online: hatred has been manufactured and reproduced in ways that will not easily be forgotten. Developments in the spring and summer of 2018 illustrate the extent to which regimes in the Gulf are seeking to shape narratives and—in the process—enforce compliance with, and punish dissent to, official versions of events. The apprehension of dozens of scholars, clerics and social activists in several rounds of arrests in Saudi Arabia between September 2017 and June 2018 sent a powerful signal that the Saudi government was unwilling to tolerate any form of criticism as Mohammed bin Salman acted to reshape domestic power structures and carve an assertive regional policy after taking over as Crown Prince in June 2017. Several of the arrests, such as of the well-known Sunni clerics Salman al-Awdah and Ali Alomari, were made because those concerned were perceived to have offered insufficient backing for Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the campaign to isolate Qatar: they faced secret trials

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and potentially the death penalty in national security courts on charges of conspiring against the state and supporting terrorism (Wall Street Journal 2018). Women’srights advocates were arrested in April and May 2018, shortly before women were finally given the right to drive in Saudi Arabia. State media outlets labelled the women ‘traitors’ and ‘agents of embassies,’ especially Qatar’s, to whip up public opinion against them and to counter the international outcry at their detention (Al Jazeera 2018). The power of social media to direct and reinforce narratives has greatly enhanced the capabilities of state-linked actors to try and dominate the online echo chamber and crowd out alternative points of view, using ‘virtual armies’ of bots where necessary (Washington Post 2018). The use of such tools has added a new dimension to the age-old attempt to drive the agenda, as the deployment of deep data-mining has enabled states to track, deter and punish transgressors in ways that were simply not possible in earlier periods. Narratives in the Gulf have always been generated by policy elites and imposed in a top-down manner on societies, but the use of coercion—or at least the implied threat of coercion against those who do not conform—risks transposing geopolitical rivalries and inter-state tensions into social and interpersonal relationships, and doing generational damage that cannot be resolved at the flick of a technocratic switch if it is decided to make up or to direct the regime’s anger at a different target.

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Coates Ulrichsen K (2011a) Bahrain: evolution or revolution? Open Democr, March 1 Coates Ulrichsen K (2011b) Gulf states: studious silence falls on Arab Spring. Open Democr, April 25 Coates Ulrichsen K (2013) GCC-Iraq relations. In: Spencer C, Kinninmont J, Sirri O (eds) Iraq ten years on. Chatham House, London Coates Ulrichsen K (2015) Why have the Gulf states intervened militarily in Yemen? Houston Chronicle, March 27 Coates Ulrichsen K (2017) Qatar: the Gulf’s problem child. Atlantic, June 5 Coates Ulrichsen K (2018) The Gulf Impasse’s one-year anniversary and the changing regional dynamics. Gulf Int Forum, May 30 Davidson C (2006) The United Arab Emirates: a study in survival. Lynne Rienner, London Davidson C (2008) Dubai: the vulnerability of success. Hurst, London Dawn (2007) Attack on Iran: Kuwait won’t allow US to use its territory, June 12 Diwan K (2013) The politics of transgression in Kuwait. Foreign Policy, April 19 Entessar N (2017) A regional great game? Iran-Saudi relations in flux. In: Coates Ulrichsen K (ed) The changing security dynamics of the Persian Gulf. Hurst, London Furtig H (2007) Conflict and cooperation in the Persian Gulf: the interregional order and US policy. Middle East J 61(4):627–640 Gaiser A (2017) A narrative identity approach to Islamic Sectarianism. In: Postel NHD (ed) Sectarianization: mapping the new identity politics of the Middle East. Hurst, London Gulf States Newsletter (2011) Militant threat adds to pressures on Kuwait and Iraq over Mubarak Port Project. Gulf States Newsl 35(907):8–9 Gulf States Newsletter (2013) Qaradawi’s comments spark spat between UAE and Egypt. Gulf States Newsl 36(920):4 Gulf Times (2008) Iran dismisses sleeper cell ‘lies’, September 17 Gulf Times (2017) Qatar sympathizers to face fine, jail, June 7 Haddad F (2011) Sectarianism in Iraq: antagonistic visions of unity. Hurst, London Halliday F (2005) The Middle East in international relations: power, politics and ideology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Hardy R (2008) Ambivalent ally: Saudi Arabia and the ‘war on terror’. In: Al-Rasheed M (ed) Kingdom without borders: Saudi Arabia’s political, religious and media frontiers. Hurst, London Hashemi N, Postel D (eds) (2017) Sectarianization: mapping the new politics of the Middle East. Hurst, London Hiro D (2018) Cold war in the Islamic world: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the struggle for supremacy. Hurst, London Jones TC (2006) Rebellion on the Saudi periphery: modernization, marginalization, and the Shi’a uprising of 1979. Int J Middle East Stud 38(2):213–233 Jones J, Ridout N (2015) A history of modern Oman. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Katzman K (2008) Iran’s activities and influence in Iraq. Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, Washington, DC Kechichian J (2007) Can conservative Arab monarchies endure a fourth war in the Persian Gulf? Middle East J 61(2):283–306 Khaleej Times (2008) US wants Gulf States to impose curbs on Iran, December 14 Kuwait Times (2012) Muslim brotherhood plans to take over Kuwait by 2013: Khalfan, April 18 Kwarten L (2009) Why the Saudi Shiites won’t rise up easily. A Conflicts Forum Monograph, Beirut Louer L (2008) Transnational Shia politics: religious and political networks in the Gulf. Hurst, London Louer L (2012) Shiism and politics in the Middle East. Columbia University Press, New York Matthiesen T (2012) A “Saudi Spring”? The Shi’a protest movement in the Eastern Province 2011–2012. Middle East J 66(4):628–659 Matthiesen T (2015) The other Saudis: Shiism, dissent and sectarianism. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

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Mazur K (2009) The “Shia Crescent” and Arab State Legitimacy. SAIS Rev Int Aff 29(2):21–22 Meyer K, Rizzo H, Ali Y (2007) Changed political attitudes: the case of Kuwait. Int Sociol 22 (3):289–324 Miller R (2016) Desert kingdoms to global powers: the rise of the Arab Gulf. Yale University Press, New Haven Mühlberger W (2017) Qatar Engulfed: tactical steps raise stakes in protracted crisis. Finnish Institute of International Affairs Comment Paper 18/2017, September National Geographic (2003) Qatar: revolution from the top down, March issue New York Times (2006) Tide of Arab opinion turns to support for Hezbollah, July 28 New York Times (2007) Saudi king condemns US occupation of Iraq, March 28 New York Times (2018) How 2 Gulf monarchies sought to influence the White House, March 21 Nonneman G (2004) The Gulf States and the Iran-Iraq War: pattern shifts and continuities. In: Potter L, Sick G (eds) Iran, Iraq, and the legacies of war. Palgrave Macmillan, New York Reuters (2010) “Cut off head of snake” Saudis told US on Iran, November 28 Sager A (2008) The GCC states and the situation in Iraq. Gulf Research Centre, Dubai Schwarz B (2007) America’s struggle against the Wahhabi/Neo-Salafi movement. Orbis 51(1):107–128 Stephens M (2017) The Arab cold war redux: the foreign policy of the Gulf cooperation council states since 2011. The Century Foundation, February 28 The Guardian (2010) US Embassy cables: Qatar Prime Minister: “Iranians Lie to Us”, November 28 The National (2014) UAE recalls envoy from Qatar over “interference”, March 5 The National (2017) Qatar should stop funding terrorism, says leading opposition figure, June 3 Times of Israel (2012) Qatar: we won’t allow attack on Iran from our soil, March 28 Tripp C (2002) The foreign policy of Iraq. In: Hinnebusch R, Ehteshami A (eds) The foreign policies of Middle East States. Lynne Rienner, London Visser R (2007) ‘Basra, the reluctant seat of ‘Shiastan’. Middle East Rep 242 37(1):23 Wall Street Journal (2018) Push to execute Saudi clerics rattles kingdom’s power structures, September 16 Washington Post (2006) Stepping into Iraq: Saudi Arabia will protect Sunnis if the US leaves, November 29 Washington Post (2018) A plague of Twitter bots is roiling the Middle East, June 5 Washington Times (2011) No Iranian role found in Bahrain unrest, November 23 World Tribune (2008) Senior Iran official predicts imminent demise of Gulf State royals, August 15 Yamani M (2006) Arcs and crescents. World Today 62(12):7–8

Part II

Global Players’ Narratives Towards MENA Instability

Russia in the Middle East: In Search of Its Place Leonid Issaev and Alisa R. Shishkina

There is nothing the Russians admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than weakness, especially military weakness. Winston Churchill

Introduction: From Ideology to the Pragmatic Defence of Interests The collapse of the Soviet Union brought about substantial change in Russian foreign policy and its priorities. In the early 1990s, for the first time in decades (if not centuries), Russian domestic politics took priority over external policy. It is impossible to consider the foreign policy of Moscow in general, and in the Middle East in particular, without taking the internal specifics into account. As Yevgeny Primakov, Russian Prime Minister in the 1990s, rightly observed: “at that time the Middle East in general was out of the zone of our interests. The most important were relations with the United States. It was clear that the Middle East could not attract Russia’s attention. On the one hand, there was no cold war there, and on the other hand, there was no stability in Russia and the authorities were those who did not believe that Russia could be a great power” (Vasiliev 2018: 364).1 During the post-Soviet period, when all efforts were focussed on the development of market-economy institutions following the end of the Cold War, the situation inside the country conditioned the corresponding tasks of Russian foreign policy.

The “great-power” discourse is addressed in the context of the Russian military campaign in Syria, but for now we focus on the first decade of the existence of the post-Soviet Russian state.

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L. Issaev (*) · A. R. Shishkina Department for Asian and African Studies, National Research University, Higher School of Economics, Saint Petersburg, Russia Laboratory for Sociopolitical Destabilization Risk Monitoring, National Research University, Higher School of Economics, Saint Petersburg, Russia © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 W. Mühlberger, T. Alaranta (eds.), Political Narratives in the Middle East and North Africa, Perspectives on Development in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35217-2_6

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The priority was to gain a foothold in Western political, economic and financial structures. This was confirmed in the “main provisions of the concepts of Russia’s foreign policy” adopted in 1993, according to which the goal was to maximise conditions that would facilitate the successful implementation of “democratic and economic reforms” (MFA of Russia 2018a). Thus, Moscow adopted a stable course of accelerated integration into Euro-Atlantic structures, and attention was given to the Middle East based on the residual principle. This orientation, in turn, predetermined the extremely pragmatic policy that Moscow began to pursue towards the Middle East. It did not mean that Moscow ceased to pay attention to what was happening in the region: far from it. Everything that was happening in the Middle East mattered to Russia, although it was not immediately relevant. However, one should keep in mind two important aspects that determined Russian foreign policy. First, as Igor Ivanov, the last foreign minister of the Boris Yeltsin era, noted “superpower psychology” was no longer acceptable to the Russian leadership (Vasiliev 2018: 364). Second, a Russian presence anywhere was conditional primarily on the availability of resources. Deputy Foreign Minister Viktor Posuvalyuk assessed the situation in the following way in an interview with “Le Monde diplomatique”: “Indeed, we are now weak, and our financial resources are limited. We can no longer give unlimited credit to our allies. We do not have a mandate from the Russian people to supply an infinite number of weapons” (Gresh 1998: 70). However strange it might seem at first glance, the new Russia of the 1990s had its advantages over the Soviet Union, among which the rejection of ideology in defining its foreign-policy line should be singled out. As a result, Russia has designated its presence in the Middle East in a fundamentally different way. Of course, there was no question of reviving Soviet influence, and in general there was no need to do so. However, the Russian leadership managed to build working relationships with all countries in the region, which the Soviet Union could not boast of. Russia restored diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia in the 1990s: they were broken off in the 1930s after the Soviet leadership assassinated its own ambassador in Riyadh, Karim Khakimov, who was considered a close friend of the royal family. Relations were also restored with another influential country in the region, Israel, having been disrupted since the Six-Day War of 1967. In other words, the absence of any ideological component allowed Moscow to take a balanced position in the Middle East, trying to maintain working relations with all countries in the region. At the same time, the Russian leadership was well aware that the country was not in a position to become the main partner for most Arab countries. It was obvious that the United States was the absolute hegemon in the Middle East and the guarantor of the regional order. Moreover, since the turn of the twenty-first century Washington has become a strategic partner for all key regional actors—Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Weakened by wars, sanctions and internal problems, Iran and Iraq were unlikely to present any serious threat to US dominance. It was in this context that Russia, in the run-up to the Arab Spring, tried to develop its trade and economic ties with various countries in the region, gradually expanding

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the sectors of possible cooperation in the interests of both sides. Moscow saw its role in the Middle East conflicts exclusively as that of an intermediary, having exerted maximum effort to resolve the situation in Iraq by diplomatic means since the 1990s up to the invasion of NATO forces in 2003. The Russian leadership also tried its very best to find a solution to the problem of the Iranian nuclear programme, not to mention the case of Syria in the second half of the 2000s: when George Bush Jr. officially accused Damascus of complicity in terrorism it seemed that Syria was destined to follow the fate of Iraq. Nevertheless, the main credo of Russian foreign policy in the 1990s and 2000s was to “do no harm”. This could be interpreted as follows: Moscow’s actions in the Middle East should not negatively affect Russia’s relationship with its main foreignpolicy partner, the West. Indicative of this is the settlement of the situation in Iraq in the mid-1990s. After Saddam Hussein had deployed troops to the border of Kuwait in 1994, Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev visited Baghdad and persuaded the Iraqi leadership to begin withdrawing them. The initiative of Moscow, supported by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, provoked discontent in Washington, as it “limited the choice of pretext and time for striking Iraq” (Vasiliev 2018: 397–398). However, the Russian minister was no less severely criticised inside his own country. In particular, as the chairman of the State Duma’s international affairs committee, Vladimir Lukin, said: “We once again dreamed of the laurels of world peacekeepers, and it is precisely our passion for show-off that destroys us. . . As a result, we managed to spoil what we should treat more carefully—working relations with the US administration” (Olimpiyev and Khazanov 2013: 104). A cautious Middle-East policy such as this was typical of the Russian leadership before the Arab Spring and, to be more precise, before the protests on Bolotnaya Square in Moscow in 2011–2012. After all, at the very beginning of the protests and demonstrations in the Arab world in 2011, Russia played the role of a “passive spectator”, trying to distance itself from what was happening in the Middle East. As Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov, who was Russia’s ambassador to Cairo in 2011, said: “our policy line has been very cautious. We did not want to offend anyone” (Vasiliev 2018: 491).

The Drivers and Principles of Foreign Policy In general, Russia puts an emphasis on bilateral relations in politics. The economic component became dominant and expanded along with an improvement in foreign economic relations. The construction of nuclear power plants, contracts in the energy and military-technical sphere and the launching of satellites show that Russia is a potential partner for the countries in the region. Nevertheless, the Middle East continues to play a secondary role in Russian foreign policy compared to other world regions. Paradoxically, even after sending Russian troops into Syria, Moscow cannot boast of having a long-term strategy for

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the entire area. The pursued policy is situational in many ways, the aim being to benefit from the current political setting. Moscow’s actions in the Middle East are, by and large, conditioned by the three principles that guide the Russian leadership: pragmatism, opportunism and inclusiveness among all regional actors. In other words, pragmatic interest is the determining factor in Russia’s cooperation with any country in the region, its policy is free of messianism, and Russia cannot be viewed as part of any kind of alliance. This is the reason for Moscow’s neutrality on the most pressing issues in its Middle East policy of recent years (with the exception of the Syrian and Libyan conflicts, in which Russia was already involved). The Kurdish problem, the Yemeni conflict and the Gulf crisis are just three of the most acute issues the region has faced, and on which Russia has taken an equidistant position from all the parties concerned. Even the constant bombing of Syria by the Israeli Air Force does not cause any reaction in the Kremlin (Aptekar 2018; Al Jazeera 2018). There are three basic reasons why the Russian leadership should adopt such a position. First, it has an awareness of the limitations of its resources and opportunities to occupy leading positions in the region in the long term. In fact, participation in the Syrian conflict could be considered the limit of Russian opportunism, which explains the decreased capacity of the Russian leadershipto to become involved in the rest of the region’s problems. In any case, the Russian presence in Syria is already becoming burdensome for Moscow, forcing it to look for ways out of the crisis. Second, the temporary nature of the Russian presence in the Middle East is recognised. In fact, the region was called on to fill the vacuum in Russian foreign policy in the face of cooling relations with the West. In other words, one might predict a sharp weakening of Russian interest in the Middle East immediately following the normalisation of relations with the European Union. Third, there is a distrust of all regional actors. During his visit to Israel in 2005 Vladimir Putin said to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon: “I am a new person in the Middle East, what is the first [piece of] advice you could give me?” The answer was: “Never believe anyone” (Vasiliev 2018: 388).

Views of the Arab Spring: From Sober Assessment to Useful Narrative Following the onset of protests in Arab countries at the end of 2010–2011, the narrative of expert commentaries and official statements on the course of the Arab Spring published in the Russian media changed from one of protest based on internal grievances to one of conspirancy. Depending on the adopted position, the Arab Spring was characterised by the following features. First, in terms of reasons, a set of premises was put forward. Among them was the dissatisfaction of educated young people with their social status and their lack of

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prospects for the future. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov described the reasons for the demonstrations several months after they began (MFA of Russia 2011a): “The driving force behind the events that were taking place in Libya, which we observed in Egypt and other countries, was mostly the educated youth”. Mikhail Bogdanov made the following statement in July 2011: “As for the root causes of the current turmoil in the Arab countries, in my opinion they lie both in the socioeconomic and political spheres. Of course, with all the specifics of the development of events in different countries, there is much in common—in many of them the crisis of the authoritarian political system was long overdue. The irremovability of leaders and political elites in general, the low degree of social mobility, the late nature or even absence of urgent reforms, high unemployment, corruption, and other social diseases—all these internal conflict factors accumulated for many years and detonated at the beginning of this year. In addition, we must not forget that in the Arab countries, the young population predominates. They are modern, educated people who have mastered the Internet, blogs, social networks, who did not see the future in the existing coordinate system. It is not by chance that they became an important mobilising element of the Arab revolutions.” (MFA of Russia 2011b). Second, emphasis was placed on the internal nature of the reasons that led to a wave of protests in the Arab world, and it was strongly denied that they could be characterised as colour revolutions.2 In this connection, Mikhail Bogdanov stated in his interview: “. . .the development of the countries of the region along the democratic path can only be welcomed. However, do not forget the mistakes of the past. After all, attempts to “instill” [in] the Arab countries a democracy of one or another sample from outside have already been made, but they have not led to anything good. The long overdue reforming of the Arab states must take place on the initiative of the peoples themselves” (MFA of Russia 2011b). Sergey Lavrov referred to the involvement of the United States in the political crisis in his March 2011 interview. He even pointed out some strangeness in the behaviour of the Americans, who did not immediately formulate their approach to the situation in Egypt as it developed rapidly and under the influence of internal processes (MFA of Russia 2011a). The reference messages were broadcast both in the media and in expert comments. Thus, the TASS news agency, referring to the Russian President’s special representative for Africa, Mikhail Margelov, called the Arab Spring a consequence of the predisposition of the masses, not of the intervention of the West (TASS 2011). Experts referred to internal, domestic causes, discussing the riots in other countries and comparing the situation in them with what was happening in the Arab world (Echo of Moscow 2011). Thus, the main cause of the Arab Spring was people’s anger (Tamme 2011). The situation changed dramatically in late 2011—early 2012, which in many respects was attributable to internal political processes in Russia. First of all, protests on Bolotnaya Square started in December 2011, which were provoked by the

From the public and political perspective dominant in Russia, so-called ‘colour revolutions’ are believed to be externally induced.

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complete falsification of the parliamentary elections in 2011 and preceded the nomination of Vladimir Putin for a third presidential term in early 2012. At that time the Russian authorities, as well as pro-government media, began actively to support the narrative of the Arab Spring events as colour revolutions inspired from without. The underlying rationale of this was to put events on Bolotnaya Square on a par with protests in the Arab world, emphasising the absence of internal prerequisites for the anti-regime demonstrations and their predominant external nature. Russia’s principled position on Syria in the UN Security Council following the arrival of Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin served only to strengthen such a thesis among the Russian authorities. Vladimir Putin, who was Prime Minister in 2011, stated during the traditional presidential-hotline broadcast that the opposition was always unhappy with the results of elections, this was an “absolutely normal thing” and the elections were “objective and honest” (BBC 2016a). President Putin stated at a meeting of the Security Council in 2014 that the authorities wojuld do everything possible to prevent such colour revolutions from occuring in Russia. According to the BBC, Putin also equated them with extremism, which, he said, was used in the modern world as an instrument of geopolitics and redistribution of spheres of influence (BBC 2016b). As the President’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov noted in an interview: “In the Middle East, a chain of colour revolutions took place, which was supposed to be limited to controlled chaos, but turned into an absolutely uncontrolled thermonuclear process” (RIA Novosti 2015a). Mikhail Bogdanov also pointed out in an interview the similarity of the Arab Spring with the colour revolutions that took place in the former Soviet Union: “It all started like a peaceful demonstration on Al-Tahrir Square in Cairo or on Maidan Square in Kiev, then the media stirred things up: the people demanded a regime change, a change of president. . . and a certain power and controllability vacuum was created. This vacuum is filled with chaos and extremism. And if we talk about Syria or Libya, it is terrorism. . . . This is a very dangerous phenomenon. We were told by people who participated in the demonstrations. They went to America and took special courses.” (Vasiliev 2018: 512). Commenting on the anti-corruption rallies in March 2017, Vladimir Putin also used the narrative of the colour revolutions (as examplified by the Arab Spring) to explain the events. Recalling the Arab Spring and Euromaidan he noted that these events “led to chaos . . . This is a tool of the Arab Spring: we know very well what it led to. It also became an occasion for a coup d’état in Ukraine and plunged the country into chaos . . . Anyone who goes beyond the law should be accountable under Russian law.” (RBC 2017). It is no coincidence that, justifying its pre-2015 position on Syria, Moscow focused on preventing external interference, drawing parallels with Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. At the same time, the rhetoric of the Russian authorities began to have a pronounced anti-Western tone, which in turn encouraged Moscow to pursue an increasingly deterministic policy in the Middle East. Thus, even if the dominant view in Russia in the initial stages of the Arab Spring was that objective preconditions for such protests existed in the countries touched by them, the narrative changed significantly following the events at Bolotnaya Square

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in Moscow and the events in Ukraine at the turn of 2013 and 2014. The most widespread narrative tool was “conspiracy theory,” which began to dominate in the Russian media and in the statements of political figures. The trigger in this case seemed to be a statement given by Dmitry Medvedev at a meeting of the National Anti-Terrorist Committee in Vladikavkaz in February 2011. As President Medvedev said: “Look at the situation that has developed in the Middle East and the Arab world. . . In a number of cases, we can talk about the disintegration of large, densely populated states, about their disintegration into small fragments . . . And it is likely that complex events will occur, including [the] coming of fanatics to power. This will mean fires for decades and the further spread of extremism. It is necessary to face the truth. Such a scenario they used to prepare for us. . .” (Kremlin 2011). This statement by the former president is interesting in that it sheds light on the logic designed by representatives of the Russian political elite with reference to the events of the Arab Spring. “The United States supported the colour revolutions of anti-Russian orientation, then the events of the Arab Spring unfolded according to this scenario, and then such a scenario was conceived to weaken and potentially disintegrate Russia” (Vasiliev 2018: 520). In other words, in the context of confrontation with the West and the need to strengthen authoritarian power in Russia, the Russian leadership chose a very effective tactic to weaken the country’s right-wing liberal opposition by crafting a narrative linked to the negative experience of the Arab countries. This situation is closely connected to the assumed dichotomy between democratisation and stability, which assumed an important role in Russian social and political discourse after the mass protests at Bolotnaya Square in Moscow in 2011–2012. At that moment the Russian political establishment started actively promoting the idea that stability should serve as a key criterion in asessing the effectiveness of any political regime. The events of the Arab Spring only confirmed this thesis, providing vivid evidence. The authoritarian but stable dictatorship regimes of Al-Asad in Syria and Al-Sisi in Egypt, for example, were believed to be opposed to various kinds of democratising projects that resulted in the coming to power of different fanatical groups, from the Muslim Brotherhood to the so-called Islamic State. This is why Russia’s solutions are top-down, working with entrenched regimes and brutal dictatorships rather than aligning with bottom-up revolutions aimed at changing the status quo. Moscow saved the ruthless Bashar al-Asad regime, and supported Abdelfattah al-Sisi’s regime and Khalifa Haftar in Libya. Russia is advocating conflict resolution among dictators it assumes will serve its own interests rather than supporting people’s calls for political participation and dignity. Its interventions are exacerbating the causes that led to these revolutions in the first place. The Russian understanding of international security is exemplified in various ways. Sergey Lavrov’s comments on the situation in Afghanistan are particularly indicative: “We have a common concern about the degradation of the security situation in this country, the growth of terrorist activity, the drug traffic threat that does not disappear anywhere, and the strengthening of the positions of ISIS in north and east Afghanistan. Unfortunately, we have to state that the military presence of

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the United States and NATO for many years has not brought peace and stability to the Afghans” (MFA of Russia 2018b). In this case there is a significant circumstance to be considered. The events of the Arab Spring occured during a highly controversial period in the relations between Russia and the West. On the one hand, the late 2000s witnessed a resetting of Russian-American relations, but on the other hand many of the problems afftecting relations between Russia and the West were not resolved. The Russian leadership was extremely irritated about plans to deploy ballistic-missile defence systems in the immediate vicinity of Russian borders. There was no optimism in Moscow about NATO’s eastward expansion, especially when it came to the possibility of postSoviet Georgia and Ukraine joining this military-political bloc. A serious surge of anti-Americanism also swept over Russia in the late 2000s due to the presence of American military vessels in the Black Sea. Indeed, such developments were perceived in Moscow as an invasion by the West into the zone of Russia’s exclusive interests. As a result, the anti-American narrative employed by the Russian leadership was highly appreciated in Russian society, which characteristically entertained “phobias concerning plans of the external forces” (the US, and the West in general). Thus, many started talking about the theory of “controlled chaos that the United States was implementing in the Middle East” (Zvyagelskaya 2014: 77). It is not surprising, therefore, that the negative experience of interaction with Western powers, markedly strengthened by the perception of events in Ukraine, “remained part of the Russian public consciousness, ready to respond to tectonic shifts in the Middle East within the conspiracy theory” (Zvyagelskaya 2014: 83). The anti-Americanism narrative was especially visible in the military campaigns, as discussed below.

The Libyan Conflict: Internal Controversies The Libyan case had a significant influence on the position of Russia regarding the events of the Arab Spring in general, and Syria in particular. A substantial part of Russian society, even in the post-Soviet period, continued to perceive Middle Eastern regimes through the “friends and foes” prism, and stable stereotypes couninue to exist among the Russian population regarding ruling regimes in the region. In fact, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Bashar al-Asad in Syria and Muammar Qaddafi in Libya were consistently perceived as long-standing allies of Moscow. Such sentiments led the majority of Russians to react very disapprovingly to the position of outside observer that Moscow occupied during the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, and also in 2003 in relation to the NATO military operation in Iraq. The graph (Fig. 1) clearly shows how the Russian perception of the United States has evolved negatively in the public consciousness since the early 1990s, in particular during US military operations against those who are, on the whole, considered to be Russian allies.

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Fig. 1 In General, how do you feel about the United States? (% in favour) (Smeltz et al. 2016)

As the graph shows, there were four major downturns in public opinion after the collapse of the USSR: in 1999, 2003, 2008 and 2014. The first two were attributable to a critical attitude to the role of Americans in NATO’s campaigns in Yugoslavia and Iraq. There was also a decline in 2011, related to NATO operations in Libya. Apparently, no significant decrease, as in the cases of Iraq and Yugoslavia, was observed in 2011 because the Libyan campaign was extensively lobbied by France and Britain, whereas the role of the United States was not so visible. The downturns of 2008 and 2014 are connected with the critical attitude of the United States towards the policy pursued by Russia in Georgia and Ukraine. Turning to the events in Libya in 2011, one could say that they fuelled rejection among Russians to Moscow’s official position regarding UN Security Council Resolution 1973, which provided for the introduction of a no-fly zone over Libya. It is worth pointing out that in 2011 the Russian delegation to the UN abstained from voting on the resolution proposal in the Security Council on behalf of President Dmitry Medvedev. As the results of the polls show (Table 1), 62% of rspondents believed that Resolution 1973, which authorised the bombings in Libya, was not valid. However, the President’s position on Libya could hardly be considered a consensus point of view among the Russian leadership in relation to this country. A diametrically opposite position was voiced in 2011 by then Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, calling NATO’s actions in Libya a “shameless crusade” (Lenta.Ru 2011). It is noteworthy that the position of the Prime Minister proved to be much more acceptable to the majority of the Russian population (Table 2): 53% supported the position

Table 1 Do you think the UN Security Council Resolution authorising the bombing of military objects and Muammar Qaddafi’s troops is right or wrong? (Levada Center 2011) Correct, because it protects the lives of people who do not agree with the policy of Qaddafi Wrong, because these bombings are interfering in the internal affairs of Libya/an aggression against a sovereign country I do not know anything about it/I find it difficult to answer

April 2011 9 62 30

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Table 2 Which Russian leader’s position on Libya do you support? (Levada Center 2011) Answers The position of Medvedev, who condemned the actions of Qaddafi and supported the adoption of the UN Security Council resolution on Libya The position of Putin, who condemned the adoption of the UN Security Council resolution on Libya and the bombing of Qaddafi’s troops Cannot say

Percentage 13 53 34

of Vladimir Putin, who rejected the adoption of Resolution 1973, whereas only 13% agreed with Dmitry Medvedev, who condemned Qaddafi’s actions. Such figures could be explained in terms of a distinct friends-and-foes narrative, which is reflected in Putin’s famous maxim, which mirrirs Russian sentiment, “We do not leave anyone behind”. Putin’s position was widely represented in the media, relying on traditional anti-Americanism, whereas that of Dmitry Medvedev, which was more complex in terms of argumentation, did not receive sufficient TV coverage or explanation: “The US arguments were never understood and not taken into account by Russian citizens, and Medvedev in this case was inscribed in the specific context of American policy” (Levada Center 2011). The Russian ambassador to Tripoli Vladimir Chamov, who was recalled for rejecting Moscow’s official—in other words the President’s—position with regard to Resolution 1973, also emphasised the special relationship between Libya and Russia. As he stated in his article, “The Libyan Drama: The Vision of a Russian Diplomat”: “I would remind you that the Libyan leader has always sharply opposed NATO, criticised its actions in Serbia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, the expansion of the alliance to the east, the inclusion of post-Soviet states into its orbit. His categorical rejection of plans of Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO, his interesting and sharp articles on this topic, and finally his open support of Russia, military actions in order to save the population of South Ossetia from the Georgian genocide in August 2008, did not add sympathy to Qaddafi’s relations with the ‘Atlanticists’” (Chamov 2012: 574). Mikhail Bogdanov, at that time representative of the Russian Federation at the League of Arab States, recalls the situation as follows: “We expected that the resolution would be implemented in a different way. And the Westernizers said: No, there are the words “all the necessary measures” for “protecting the civilian population”. They argued that these words gave them the right to send aircraft and [to] bomb everything. . . That is why, together with the Chinese, in the Security Council we have repeatedly used the veto power over Syria, because we perfectly understood that our Western partners and some regional partners were set to repeat the Libyan scenario, to get legitimisation for their military intervention, by referring to the Security Council” (Vasiliev 2018: 522–523).

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The Syrian Conflict: Towards a Superpower Posture Perceptions of what was happening in the Middle East through the friend-or-foe prism were also reflected in Russian involvement in the Syrian conflict. In particular, the fact that Bashar al-Asad was considered an ally in Russian society in many ways determined Russia’s position on Syria. Vladimir Putin, elected in 2012 for a third presidential term, was expected to realise his militaristic principle “We do not leave anyone behind”, and to prevent external anti-regime interference in Syria. This special attitude towards Bashar al-Asad is also discernable in Russian opinion about the purposes of Russia’s military operations in Syria. According to a poll conducted by the Levada Center, the majority of citizens (58%) were of the opinion that the government was, with the help of the army, seeking to neutralise and eliminate the threat that Islamic radicals and terrorists would extend military actions to Russian territory. However, at the same time, 27% of Russians believed that a group of Russian Aerospace Forces in Syria was defending the government of Bashar al-Asad to prevent a chain of colour revolutions “provoked by the United States around the world”. A further 9% saw the task of Moscow as supporting the Asad regime in the fight against the armed opposition (Levada Center 2016). The prevailing public opinion reflects the narratives most commonly used by the political elite in Russian society. President Vladimir Putin formulated the objectives of the operation in November 2015 as follows: “Clear Syria of militants, terrorists and protect Russia from possible terrorist attacks” (RIA Novosti 2015b). However, he explained that there was another task, “to stabilize the legitimate power and create conditions for the search for a political compromise” (RBC 2016). In time, however, the high percentage of citizens who were under the impression that the purpose of the Russian military presence in Syria was to protect a friendly regime became a problem/source of iritation for the Kremlin. There was no acceptance among the majority of representatives of Russian society of Vladimir Putin’s repeated statements on the withdrawal of Russian troops from Syria at a time when the Syrian regime continued to struggle with its armed opponents, and US President Donald Trump actively employed extremely hostile rhetoric targeted at Damascus. To a great extent this determined the change in narrative explaining the Russian presence in Syria as soon as the Kremlin faced the problem of withdrawing from the Syrian conflict. Over time, the Russian leadership increasingly began to focus society’s attention on the fact that it did not care about the fate of the Baath regime, and that its presence in Syria was not connected with the fate of Bashar al-Asad. Vladimir Putin insisted in the interview that the main purpose of the operation in Syria was not to support Asad, but to fight against international terrorism (TASS 2015). As Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov stated in early 2016, Russia’s operation in Syria was aimed at destroying the hotbed of terrorism that threatened the whole world: “We would like to recall that the main and only goal of the Russian operation in Syria is the destruction of the largest hotbed of international

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terrorism, which almost absorbed the entire territory of the UN member state last year” (Russia Today 2016). However, it should be pointed out that the roots of the Russian military presence in Syria lie largely in the domestic political sphere. In this regard, at least three major factors motivated Russia to take part in an armed conflict far from its own borders. First, there was a need for political mobilisation around the ruling regime in Russia. By mid-2015, the effect of the annexation of Crimea on popular opinion began to diminish. The post-Crimean period was also characterised by the very difficult legacy it left for Russia in the form of an unsettled conflict in eastern Ukraine. Of all the options available to Moscow in relation to Donetsk and Lugansk, the Russian leadership chose the most unprofitable scenario: it provoked a conflict, from which it subsequently decided to distance itself. The sanctions imposed by the United States and the European Union were, in the end, connected with the situation in the Donbas. Evsei Gurvich and Ilya Prilepsky from the Economic Expert Group published an article in the leading Russian journal on economic issues, Voprosy Ekonomiki: they estimated the accumulated loss to Russia’s GDP from sanctions during the period 2014–2017 at 6% in 2013, whereas economists estimated a net capital outflow, provoked by sanctions, of $160–170 billion over the same period (RBC 2011). As a result, Russia’s relations with its key external economic partner, the European Union, which accounted for almost half of the country’s total foreign-trade turnover until 2014 (Federal State Statistics Service 2013), did not exactly improve. Restoration of relations was directly dependent on the implementation of the Minsk Agreements, which according to the Russian leadership was not possible in the short or medium term. Thus, by mid-2015 the country needed a new wave of patriotic mobilisation, which was successfully achieved through successful military operations abroad. As the graph (Fig. 2) shows, the proportion of citizens approving the foreign policy pursued by the Russian leadership grew after the war in South Ossetia in 2008 and the accession of Crimea in 2014. A similar effect was achieved within the framework of the Syrian campaign, after which the numbers of people who positively assessed the course pursued by the authorities began to increase. The graph also shows the very limited effect of the waves of patriotic mobilisation, after which the tide turns and the number of citizens approving the government’s policy starts to decline. There was a similar fall in 2015, when the effect of Crimea’s accession began to weaken significantly, thereby determining the need for another surge of political mobilisation around the government. This applied in particular to the parliamentary elections scheduled for autumn 2016: the Russian authorities had to prevent a repetition of the events of late 2011/early 2012, when the elections to the State Duma ended with mass protests in Bolotnaya Square. The second factor was the need to overcome the economic frustration of Russian society in the post-Crimean period. As the graph indicates (Fig. 3), the financial and economic crisis that Russia faced after the sanctions policy of the West peaked in 2015–2016. The deficit of the Russian budget in 2015 reached 2.4% of GDP, increasing to 3.4% in 2016.

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90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 February-17

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Fig. 2 The attitude of Russian citizens to the government’s policy in general, 1996–2017 (Gudkov 2018). Note: The black-and-white line reflects the opinion “All is going in the right direction”; The black-solid line reflects the opinion “The country is on the wrong track” (percentages) RUSSIA GOVERNMENT BUDGET 6 4.1

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Fig. 3 Russian Government Budget (surplus/deficit), 2008–2017 (Trading Economics 2018)

There was a decline in the growth rate of the Russian GDP at the end of 2015. By autumn 2015 it had dropped to its lowest level since 2009, when the country was experiencing the consequences of the global financial crisis. Consequently, it was extremely important for the Russian leadership to re-direct the attention of people from the country’s internal economic problems to its foreignpolicy agenda. In this regard, the terrorist component of the Russian narrative justifying its campaign in Syria turned out to be very attractive. By the middle of 2015 the expansion of IS had reached its highest point, and the population of Russia had become aware of a threat from the Islamic state to the republics of the North Caucasus and Central Asia. In this case, the security issues of the southern borders

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RUSSIA MILITARY EXPENDITURE 70345.1

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Fig. 4 Russia Military Expenditure, 2013–2016 (Trading Economics 2018)

and the fight against the terrorist threat began to take precedence over socioeconomic issues among Russian citizens. Incidentally, it was the threat from the Islamic State that allowed the Russian leadership to justify to its own population an increase in spending to meet the needs of the military-industrial complex (Fig. 4). Moreover, there was now a tendency on the rhetorical level to connect the Russian budget deficit not with the failed foreignpolicy line towards the West and Ukraine, but with the need to resist international terrorism, while the world community preferred to remain silent at best. The third factor that motivated the Russian invasion of Syria was the perceived need to prevent Russia’s isolation and its coercion of the West—primarily the United States—to engage in a dialogue with Moscow. Vladimir Putin’s speech at the 70th UN General Assembly in September 2015 was paramount in this regard. In essence it boils down to a Russian foreign-policy narrative according to which Russia would regain the status of a superpower, which it lost after the collapse of the USSR, and that its opinion should therefore be taken into account. In his speech at the UN General Assembly, Vladimir Putin focused on the fact “that, after the end of the Cold War, a single center of domination arose in the world. And then those who found themselves at the top of this pyramid were tempted to think that if they are so strong and exceptional, they know best what to do. Consequently, there is no need to reckon with the UN, which often, instead of automatically sanctioning, legalising the necessary decision, only hinders, as we say, ‘gets in the way’ . . . Today, unilateral sanctions, bypassing the UN Charter, have almost become the norm. They not only pursue political goals, but also serve as a way to eliminate competitors in the market” (Kremlin 2015). In other words, the Russian President expressed dissatisfaction with the world order that had developed after the collapse of the USSR. He concluded his speech thus: “Russia believes in the enormous potential of the UN, which should help to avoid a new global confrontation and move on to the strategy of cooperation. Together with other countries, we will work consistently to strengthen the central coordinating role of the UN” (Kremlin 2015).

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Vladmir Putin’s statement covertly refers to his Address to the Federal Assembly in 2005, in which he described the collapse of the USSR as “the largest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century” (Regnum 2005). The Russian leader was drawing a parallel between the transition from a unipolar to a multipolar world on the one hand, and the revival of the former (primarily military and political) power that was associated with the Soviet Union and lost in the 1990s on the other: this mattered a great deal to the majority of the Russian population. It is surprising that such an assertion elicited such a response among the population, but it required the Russian leadership to take specific actions aimed at visualising this thesis. The surveys of the Levada Center (Gudkov 2018) clearly show the effect of Vladimir Putin’s speech at the UN General Assembly, and of the subsequent military campaign in Syria, on the increasing tendency among the Russian population (up to 75%, the highest index rate since the collapse of the Soviet Union) to think of the country as a superpower.

The Military Operation of 2015: Enter Russia According to M. Leichtova, institutionally the president plays the leading role in the Russian political ensemble, whereas the government appears to be a supporting actor: “In terms of representing the system, President Putin is also in practical terms the key figure of the contemporary system in front of both domestic and foreign audiences to the extent that the term “Putin’s Russia” is now being widely used. . . . The state media work is a precise transmitter of the. . . right pictures at the right moments.” (Leichtova 2016: 123). In the Syrian case President Putin presented himself as a warrior fighting against terrorism, which was a threat not only to the Syrian regime and the Middle East region, but also to Russia and the entire world: he was also a supporter of the Asad regime, again representing a legitimate force struggling against terrorism. Looking back to 2015, one sees that President Putin continued to construct a convenient foreign-policy reality and sought to impose, primarily on the West, his discourse in the framework of the international agenda. Unlike in previous periods, however, when rhetoric and propaganda were the main instruments, Putin took concrete actions to “create facts on the ground” and promote the decisions he made based on his ideas about reality. As Vladimir Frolov points out, Putin’s portrayal of the war in Syria was the result of deliberate actions by the US and the West in general to destabilise and overthrow stable authoritarian regimes in Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Tunisia and Egypt. Asad was the legitimate President of Syria and the guarantor of stability. His army was the only institution at war with IS terrorists, and not supporting would be a mistake. The West was equipping the so-called opposition, which was no different from the IS terrorists, and at the first opportunity would run over to their side with American weapons. All those who advocated the overthrow of Asad’s legitimate authority were terrorists, and statements about the atrocities of the regime, the bombing of residential areas, the use of Asad chemical

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weapons against civilians, the cooperation of Asad with IS and the evasion of the military operations of the Syrian army against the IS could be considered “antiSyrian propaganda” (Frolov 2015). The main mass of the Russian electorate is nostalgic for the Soviet period with its stability and sense of belonging to a great power, albeit often at the cost of a comfortable life. The colossal surge in patriotic sentiment after, say, the annexation of Crimea may well have been associated with the return of this feeling. The start of military operations in Syria in autumn 2015 was logically consistent with the formation of Russia’s image as an important actor in the international arena, which the United States and the West were now forced to acknowledge. It is noteworthy how often the population of Russia expresses its readiness to endure difficulties in exchange for identifying itself with a great power. Undoubtedly, this narrative reached its apogee in Vladimir Putin’s address to the Federal Assembly (which could be considered a pre-election statement) in March 2018: “Even surprising, but despite all the problems that we faced in the economy, finance, defense industry, in the army, Russia still remained and remains the largest nuclear power. No, no one really wanted to talk with us, no one listened to us. Listen now.” (Kremlin 2018). Implicit in this statement is not only an emphasis on Russia’s foreign-policy ambitions but also a justification of the problems faced by the population of Russia due to the actions of the country’s leadership: the preservation of the status of a nuclear power and the build-up of imperial ambitions. The extensive propaganda of religiosity as a way of life and a form of identity in contemporary Russian society follows along the same lines. It serves as a reference to imperial Russia with its intertwined religious and secular power on the one hand, and on the other it implies that the identification of oneself with the Church automatically confirms patriotism. In the Syrian context the Russian Orthodox Church also supports the government’s narrative according to which terrorism is the most dangerous threat to humanity, and the struggle against it could even be considered a holy fight. The Russian President openly declared that Russia would return to its Christian roots, with its inherent idea of the “salvation of suffering brothers in faith”. Russian authorities have justified their presence in Syria in the context of the spiritual and religious rebirth of Russia in opposition to the politically secular West. Meanwhile, there is no consensus among the Christian clergy of the Middle East about the role of Russia in Syria. On the one hand, the Archbishop of Aleppo, Jean-Clement Zhanbarta, openly supported Russia’s military intervention in 2015 (The Arab News 2016). On the other hand, the Beirut Metropolitan Elias Audi, an abbot of the Greek Orthodox Church, made his opposition clear as the Russian air strikes began: “Those who kill will not be blessed! The Russian Church publically condemned the US war in Iraq in 2003. Today, she uses ‘holy war’ to support Putin in Syria” (Freeman 2015). Patriarch Kirill of Moscow pointed out in his 2018 Christmas interview that behind Russia’s participation, in addition to resolving issues related to stabilising the situation and counteracting military threats to prevent being conquered by terrorists, was a very important goal—the protection of the Christian minority. According to

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him, the participation of Russia had prevented the genocide of Christians (Rossiyskaya Gazeta 2018). Preventing “Christian genocide” in Syria seemed much more convincing and understandable to the indignant West as the main aim of Russian foreign policy than straightforward support for the authoritarian government of Bashar al-Asad. Moreover, the protection of the Orthodox population in Syria was actively being used by the Kremlin to justify Russia’s military operation in the eyes of its own population. Hence, Orthodoxy in its role as a fundamental element of modern Russian identity was being used to legitimise the actions of the Russian leadership in Syria. From this perspective, the key aim of this rhetoric was to create a positive image of Russia within the country, which could possibly be broadcast outside (Issaev and Yuriev 2017a, b).

Сonclusion There have been three major shifts in Russian narratives on the Middle East and North Africa in recent years. The first of these concerns the perception and depiction of the Arab Spring. The dominant view initially was that these countries had objective preconditions for protesting, but after the events at Bolotnaya Square in Moscow and in Ukraine at the turn of 2013 and 2014, there was talk of a conspiracy theory related to Western machinations. Second, Russian action in Syria came to be represented by a superpower narrative. Third, the idea that stability could serve as a key criterion for the effectiveness of any political regime gathered momentum. However, these narratives are not set in stone and may evolve through being adapted to circumstances or made to correspond with specific policy goals. In many respects, this reflects the fact that Russia does not have a clear long-term action plan for the Middle East: its foreign policy is basically reactive to varying levels of US “hegemony” or patterns of interference. In theory, Russia’s mediation should help to resolve the conflicts in the Middle East. Its involvement could potentially end the monopoly of unilateral American mediation that has traditionally failed to settle regional disputes—such as the IsraeliPalestinian conflict—and has exacerbated them instead. However, Russia’s approach to conflict resolution is more effective in freezing conflicts than in ending them, as is evident in several areas in which it has attempted to mediate, namely Crimea, Ukraine, Georgia and Chechnya. Moscow was able to impose unilateral solutions to these conflicts through the use of force, but it failed to address the underlying causes. Unless the root causes are addressed, the most this approach will ever achieve is a fragile peace, or what Johan Galtung calls a “negative peace” (Galtung 1996). In fact, what Russian military intervention achieved was to transform these conflicts structurally by creating a severe imbalance of power between the parties, which in turn left no room for resolution (Fraihat and Issaev 2018). The key problem with Russian foreign policy since the collapse of the Soviet Union is that it does not offer an alternative to the world order that the West

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promotes. The ideological alternative in Soviet times was communism, but nowadays there is an ideological vacuum that has persisted for the past two decades. This, in turn, is indicative of an extremely reactive Russian foreign policy, especially in the post-Soviet space and the Middle East. Russia is not yet able to formulate an agenda on its own, and its actions are merely reaction to what the West does. It is no coincidence that almost all of the statements issued by Russian officials, as well as the news reports on federal media connected to Syria or Islamic State, for instance, do not fail to mention the destructive role of the United States. Russian policy in the region is presented exclusively as a response to Washington’s “shortsightedness”. As a result, the lack of an independent and creative agenda—and a related narrative—means that Russia is losing its influence year by year in the strategically important post-Soviet space. It may be that this has made Russia feel extremely uncomfortable in the Middle East since Donald Trump came to power in the US: thus far in the course of his presidency Trump has not been able to formulate a clear American strategy in the region, either.

References Al Jazeera (2018, April 9) Syria war: attacks hit Syrian airbase in Homs province. https://www. aljazeera.com/news/2018/04/syria-war-strikes-hit-syrian-airbase-homs-province180409052436335.html Aptekar P (2018, April 10) Kak eskalatsiya ugroz priblizhaet real’niy krizis [How the escalation of threats brings a real crisis closer]. https://www.vedomosti.ru/opinion/articles/2018/04/10/ 764381-eskalatsiya-priblizhaet-krizis BBC (2016a, December 10) Five years of the Bolotnaya: how the authorities reacted to the protests. https://www.bbc.com/russian/features-38266529 BBC (2016b, November 20) Putin promised to prevent a “color revolution” in Russia. https://www. bbc.com/russian/russia/2014/11/141120_russia_putin_extremism Chamov V (2012) Liviyskaya drama: videniye rossiyskogo diplomata//Blizhniy Vostok, «arabskoye probuzhdeniye» i Rossiya: chto dal’she? [Libyan drama: the vision of a Russian diplomat//Middle East, “Arab awakening” and Russia: what’s next?] (Sbornik statey/otv. red.: V.V. Naumkin, V.V. Popov, V.A.Kuznetsov) M., IV RAN Echo of Moscow (2011, August 14) Unrest in London. https://echo.msk.ru/programs/magazine/ 801635-ecfeeho/ Federal State Statistics Service (2013) Russia’s foreign trade turnover. http://www.gks.ru/bgd/regl/ b13_01/IssWWW.exe/Stg/d01/2-2-5-1.htm Fraihat I, Issaev L (2018, June 12) Russia doesn’t solve conflicts, it silences them. Foreign Policy. https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/06/12/russia-doesnt-solve-conflicts-it-silences-them/ Freeman C (2015, October 13) Syria archbishop calls on West to back President Bashar al-Assad in war against Islamist rebels. The Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/ middleeast/syria/11929694/Syria-archbishopcalls-on-West-to-back-President-Bashar-alAssadin-war-against-Islamist-rebels.html Frolov V (2015, September 29) Munich speech - 2015. Syria, Ukraine and the post-Soviet space by Vladimir Putin. Republic. https://republic.ru/posts/57193 Galtung G (1996) Peace by peaceful means. Peace and conflict, development and civilization. Sage, London

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Gresh A (1998) Russia’s return to the Middle East. J Palest Stud 28(1):67–77 Gudkov L (2018) After Crimea: opinion polls in 2017. Levada Center, Moscow Issaev L, Yuriev S (2017a) Russian policy towards Christians of the Middle East, Asia and Africa Today 12 Issaev L, Yuriev S (2017b) The Christian dimension of Russia’s Middle East policy. Al-Sharq Forum. https://www.hse.ru/mirror/pubs/share/217045866 Kremlin (2011, February 22) Dmitry Medvedev held a meeting of the National Anti-Terrorism Committee in Vladikavkaz. kremlin.ru/events/president/news/10408 Kremlin (2015, September 28) 70th session of the UN General Assembly. http://kremlin.ru/events/ president/news/50385 Kremlin (2018, March 1) The President’s address to the Federal Assembly. http://kremlin.ru/events/ president/news/56957 Leichtova M (2016) Sanctions in Russian political narrative. Politics Central Europe 12(1):145. https://doi.org/10.1515/pce-2016-0007 Lenta.Ru (2011, March 21) Putin called the operation in Libya unscrupulous crusade. https://lenta. ru/news/2011/03/21/criticize/ Levada Center (2011) Russians about the bombing of Libya and operations in Iraq – 2003, 17 May. https://www.levada.ru/2011/05/17/rossiyane-o-bombardirovkah-livii-i-operatsii-v-irake-2003/ Levada Center (2016) The Russians approved withdrawal of troops from Syria more than the start of the campaign, 4 April. https://www.levada.ru/2016/04/04/vyvod-vojsk-iz-sirii-rossiyaneodobrili-bolshe-nachala-kampanii/ MFA of Russia (2011a, March 13) Interview of the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov by Vladimir Soloviev, Head of the Author’s Program “Actual Conversation” of the “3 Channel” TV Company. http://www.mid.ru/foreign_policy/news/-/asset_publisher/cKNonkJE02Bw/content/id/ 215526 MFA of Russia (2011b, July 5) Interview with the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Russia M. Bogdanov at the Interfax agency. http://www.mid.ru/web/guest/foreign_policy/news/-/ asset_publisher/cKNonkJE02Bw/content/id/200982 MFA of Russia (2018a, November 30) The concept of Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation. http://www.mid.ru/foreign_policy/news/-/asset_publisher/cKNonkJE02Bw/content/id/2542248 MFA of Russia (2018b, February 20) Speech and answers to the media by Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov at a Joint Press Conference Following Talks with the Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan HM Asif. http://www.mid.ru/web/guest/ meropriyatiya_s_uchastiem_ministra/-/asset_publisher/xK1BhB2bUjd3/content/id/3086927 Olimpiyev A, Khazanov A (2013) Mezhdunarodnyye problemy Blizhnego Vostoka [International problems of the Middle East. 1960 - 2013]. 1960-ye – 2013. Yuniti-Dana, Moscow RBC (2011, May 11) Economists have estimated Russia’s losses from Western sanctions for the first time. https://www.rbc.ru/economics/11/05/2016/57322fb99a794753913fc68b RBC (2016, February 5) “Soushki” and “Raptors”: how different are the operations of the US and Russia against the IS. https://www.rbc.ru/politics/05/02/2016/56b472239a79477e2416bacc? from¼rbc_choice RBC (2017, March 30) Putin first commented on anti-corruption rallies. https://www.rbc.ru/poli tics/30/03/2017/58dcfb469a794724c89684df Regnum (2005, April 25) Vladimir Putin: “The collapse of the USSR is the largest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”. https://regnum.ru/news/444083.html RIA Novosti (2015a, December 20) Peskov: a chain of color revolutions hit the “Big” Middle East. https://ria.ru/world/20151220/1345644780.html RIA Novosti (2015b, November 20) Putin: Russian Aerospace Forces’ tasks in Syria are being fulfilled, but this is not enough. https://ria.ru/syria_mission/20151120/1325063905.html Rossiyskaya Gazeta (2018, January 7) Patriarch Kirill: Russia helped protect Christianity in Syria. https://rg.ru/2018/01/07/patriarh-kirill-rossiia-pomogla-zashchitit-hristianstvo-v-sirii.html Russia Today (2016, January 16) Defense Ministry: France’s statement on Russian actions in Syria is puzzling. https://russian.rt.com/article/142367

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The Chinese MENA Narrative: Peace with Development via the Belt and Road Initiative Christina Lin

Introduction Strategic thinker Lawrence Freedman (2006) refers to narratives as “compelling story lines which can explain events convincingly from which inferences can be drawn”. Strategic narratives, or stories with a political purpose used by actors to affect the behaviour of others, may thus have a major impact on the international order. As Miskimmon et al. point out in their 2013 book, Strategic Narratives: Communication Power and the New World Order, narratives frame how complex issues are understood and help to shape strategic decisions on cooperative action (Miskimmon et al. 2013, 2017). Stories that can be crystallised in a single word or phrase such as “containment”, “democratization”, “the global war on terror” or “human rights” provide an organising framework for collective action. As such, an actor’s narrative tells the story of what he or she believes is the reason for disorder, which subsequently legitimizes prescribed policies that will restore order. However, problems arise when there is misdiagnosis of the cause of the disease or disorder, followed by the prescribing of the wrong medication in the form of policies that could cause further damage. From the Chinese vantage point, such is the problem in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, in which various conflicting narratives and conflictual policies from various countries are impeding international cooperation and prolonging the post-Arab Revolt regional disorder. The predominant narrative is from the West and is rooted in the Democratic Peace Theory1 positing that a lack of 1

As leading proponent of Democratic Peace Theory (DPT) Rudolph Rummel stated in 1999: “Democracy is a general cure for political or collective violence of any kind.” According to DPT, C. Lin (*) Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 W. Mühlberger, T. Alaranta (eds.), Political Narratives in the Middle East and North Africa, Perspectives on Development in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35217-2_7

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democracy causes conflict and disorder. The alternative narrative from the autocratic Arab Gulf views conflicts through the sectarian lens of a majority Sunni Muslim population rebelling against Shia Muslims and non-Sunni rulers, as in the case of Syria.2 Both the Western and the Arab Gulf narratives tend to view violent regime change as the solution in terms of restoring regional order. Ironically, in China’s view the Western approach of exporting democracy and sponsoring “colour revolutions” results in regional disorder, not order,3 after a string of “regime change” target countries such as Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen descended into chaos and created ungoverned spaces for rising Islamic extremism and terrorism. The war in Syria, in particular, is engulfing the wider region and pulling in major powers such as the US, Russia, Iran and Turkey into a potential confrontation among the great powers. Given the prospect of an impending clash, China is stepping in and offering an alternative narrative to restore order in MENA. The Middle Kingdom is evolving as a new extra-regional power in MENA, offering a new narrative of “peace with development.” Both the West and China seek to restore regional stability, but they differ in terms of what path should be taken to reach the goal. Whereas the US considers democracy promotion the solution to MENA disorder, in the view of China the promotion of economic development is the means to restore order. Whereas the West seeks to export its governance model, China with its non-interference principle does not moralise or expect others to attest to the superiority of its ideology or culture. Moreover, unlike the West it has no historical or colonial baggage in the region, and its authoritarian development model fits better with the political systems and social contracts in place in most MENA countries’ (Raik et al. 2018: 34). As such, China could be seen as a wild card or a blank canvas on which regional countries could project their aspirations for a different type of great-power relationship. China is also playing an increasingly important role in MENA’s economic and security landscape through the Belt and Road initiative, or BRI. By creating economic value and boosting geopolitical relations in the region, Beijing’s economic involvement via the BRI has the potential to transform MENA trade, infrastructure, regional relationships, as well as to provide new security and stability. Coupled with China’s narrative of “peace with development”, the converging aspirations of the

democratic leaders are restrained by the resistance of their people to carrying the costs of war-related deaths, and democracies are therefore less likely than autocratic regimes to go to war against each other. 2 More generally, Khaleeji (Arab Gulf) regimes tend to use two other main narratives: the Ikhwani (Muslim Brotherhood) threat and “Iranian interference”, which relates to Shia Muslims on the peninsula opposing the status quo of Sunni dominance. 3 China does not disregard domestic components of discontent in social protests and uprisings, but it is against external interference that fuels, hijacks and militarises protests turning them into a violent proxy fight for dominance. It supports the principle of national sovereignty and believes reforms should be implemented domestically within a country’s existing governance structure—whether autocratic, democratic, or a hybrid system—and should not be forced by external powers to convert to a democratic structure as a panacea for all domestic grievances.

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Middle Kingdom and its MENA partners could thus serve as a powerful transformative force in this region and help to pave the way towards post-conflict peace and order. In the face of current divisive narratives that impede cooperative action, China’s narrative and strategies for collective action offer a fresh perspective on old problems. Such a perspective could perhaps facilitate the improvement of international cooperation in addressing pressing challenges such as the conflicts in MENA, and help to resolve other global issues such as climate change, nuclear proliferation and the protection of vulnerable civilians from violence and humanitarian disasters. This chapter is divided into four sections. The first of these provides a brief overview of the Western narrative towards MENA, and how it helped to precipitate the descent into regional instability and disorder. The second section examines China’s reaction to and criticism of the Western narrative, and its new narrative of peace and development via the BRI to restore order. Section 3 focuses on the challenges to China’s interests in MENA, and how it is implementing and institutionalising the BRI to protect those interests. The concluding section discusses the implications for the MENA region and the emergence of a new regional security architecture in an increasingly multi-order world.

Western Narratives and the Current MENA Disorder Charles Kupchan, professor at Georgetown University and former White House official in the Obama administration, had an article published in the February 2018 issue of Foreign Affairs in which he discusses the metamorphosis of American exceptionalism from spreading democracy by example, to spreading democracy by intrusion and invasion. He argues that prior to World War II it was all about insulating the American experiment from foreign threats and international entanglement, spreading democracy by example, embracing protectionism and fair trade, and preserving a relatively homogenous citizenry through racist and anti-immigrant policies. This “American Exceptionalism1.0” was essentially about “America First”.

Spreading Democracy by Intrusion However, the attack on Pearl Harbor ended US isolationism and began the Exceptionalism 2.0 era of active foreign intervention. If the US could no longer shield itself from the world and share the American experiment by example, it would run the world by means of intrusion to project its powers and values. The 1956 Suez Crisis cemented US hegemony in MENA, when it refused to back its allies France, Britain and Israel against Egypt and upended European colonial dominance. Given that Egypt was the most influential Arab state in the region, the US saw it as an influential partner in deterring Soviet incursion into MENA as Washington increasingly took a competitive

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stance against the Soviet Union. The approach towards MENA was within a clear Cold War framework, with a military component supplemented with economics. The US and its allied forces sought to advance Western interests by securing oil fields, ensuring the safe passage of shipping, and inoculating formerly feudal and colonial societies against the seduction of communism (Alterman 2018: 45). Democratisation and governance became a major part of US foreign assistance for many decades, and linking governance to security has played an important role in every presidential National Security Strategy since 1990 (USAID 2013: 9). Anchored in Democratic Peace Theory, which posits that democracies are less likely to go to war with each other, the 2010 National Security Strategy states: “The United States supports the expansion of democracy and human rights abroad because governments that respect these values are more just, peaceful, and legitimate” and more likely to support US interests (White House 2010: 37). As such, in delineating democracy as a legitimate form of governance that would be more likely to serve US interests, and autocratic countries as illegitimate, the US purported to shape MENA according to this narrative, which provided legitimate cover for a string of interventions. As former West Point instructor Danny Sjursen (2017) observed, since 1979 America has “bombed, invaded, raided, sent its drones to kill in, or attacked Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq again (and again), Somalia (again and again), Libya again, Iraq once more, and now Syria as well.” In practice, the US aim was not to promote democracy as such, but to manage allies and satraps to further US interests: this started with the 1953 CIA coup against a democratically elected prime minster in Iran, and led to a close alliance with the conservative and autocratic Gulf monarchies. In the US case, then, there is a distinct split between a narrative that becomes somewhat virtual and a realpolitik that follows a different, and somewhat contradictory path. Indeed, as Indian strategist C. Raja Mohan observed, superpowers are “exceptional” in that when they decide it suits their purpose, they make exceptions for themselves (Allison 2018).

Failed States and Increasing Disorder Thus, as a corollary of this wrong prescription of promoting “democracy by bombing”, the result has not been the spread of democracy, stability and prosperity. Instead, the greater Middle East has been plunged into further chaos and disorder after US interventions. In reality, the Taliban and ISIS are increasing their presence in Afghanistan after 17 years of US stabilisation efforts (Moore 2017; Shinkman 2015). Libya, a country that once boasted about having the highest living standard on the African continent, now boasts of an open slave trade and infestation by ISIS and other Salafi terrorists following US/NATO intervention (BBC 2017; Bennis 2017). In Yemen, the US/Saudi bombing campaign prompted Congress to pass the Lieu amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to try to prevent the US military from further abetting what some have described as war

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crimes against the Yemeni people (Lin 2016c; U.S. House of Representatives 2017). The end is nowhere in sight in Syria, after seven years of Western-sponsored proxy warfare to overthrow the Assad government that gave rise to ISIS and strengthened Al Qaeda. With MENA engulfed in conflict and negative externalities spilling into the EU and also affecting Chinese interests, the Middle Kingdom is stepping in. It is offering a new narrative in the hope of resolving the current stalemate and providing a catalyst to prompt cooperative behaviour among regional stakeholders.

The Chinese Narrative Aimed at Restoring Order In light of the MENA chaos and the refugee crisis that is having an impact on the EU, China criticised the Western narrative and its regime-change policy as the cause of the current disorder. According to an article published in Xinhua in February 2018, “US-led coalition forces invaded Iraq and Afghanistan in 2001 and 2003 respectively in order to impose a regime change and install a western-style democracy, but both countries have remained war-torn states until today” (Xinhua 2018a). “Democracy: A Western tool for domination” is the title of another article published in Global Times that refers to democracy as a Western hobby horse aimed at destabilising China and other non-Western governments (Polin 2018). As Tian Wenlin from the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR) wrote in People’s Daily, “the United States and Europe took the opportunity to carry out ‘regime change’”, which “has caused massive disasters in western Asia and northern Africa that are now boomeranging on Europe and the U.S.” He continues: “in truth, the U.S. and Europe’s tyrannical foreign policy is both frightening and stupid.” (Tatlow 2015; Huang 2015).

The US: A Democratic System at Home, but an Autocratic Power Abroad The Chinese military shares the view that the US behaves like a tyrant internationally, despite professing to be a democratic power. Retired People’s Liberation Army Colonel Liu Mingfu from China’s National Defense University challenged US foreign policy towards non-western countries in his 2010 book The China Dream.4 Noting that the US often bypasses international consensus, and uses military power to overthrow “non-democratic” and “illegitimate” dictators it dislikes (such as in Iraq, Libya and Syria) while supporting US-friendly “legitimate”

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The book was translated into English in 2015.

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dictators (such as in Qatar and Saudi Arabia), he claims that the US has failed the true “democratic” power test. Liu argues that the US is not a gold-standard “democracy” or a “legitimate” actor in the international system, and he condemns the American penchant for overthrowing foreign governments that defy Washington. He makes the stunning claim that the US is a half-democracy—a democratic system at home, but a hegemonic and autocratic power abroad. As he explains: “The substantive characteristic of a democratic country has two aspects: The first, democratic domestic policies without totalitarianism in domestic society, and the second, democratic international policies without hegemony in the international community.” He continues: “To judge whether a country is democratic, one needs to see whether it adopts democratic systems at home and in international diplomacy.” Thus, having failed the “democratic” litmus test in the international system, the US is only “half democratic” and therefore should not wag its finger at others for not being democratic, or try to topple them. This sentiment is echoed by a few in the US establishment. The co-authors of an article published in Foreign Policy on 18 December 2015 (Leslie Gelb, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, retired Lieutenant General Robert Gard, chairman emeritus of the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, and retired Brigadier General John H. Johns, professor emeritus at the US National Defense University) called for US-Russia cooperation in Syria and an end to US obsession with regime change. The article states: “In the past, Washington has tried to sideline dictators like Assad, Muammar al Qaddafi in Libya, and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. We have advocated democratic norms and human rights in those countries. The results: increased chaos and destruction, rather than a shift to the norms and aspirations for a democratic revolution.”

External Intervention Prolongs Civil Conflicts Moreover, according to political scientists, civil conflicts are prolonged when foreign powers intervene. A study conducted in 2008 by James Fearon and David Laitin from Stanford University affirms that civil wars tend to be significantly longer when foreign countries intervene decisively on one side (Fearon and Laitin 2008; Fearon 2004; Fisher 2013). This applies to Syria: the Syrian government is supported by Iran, Hezbollah and Russia, whereas the Syrian armed opposition is supported by the US, some NATO members, Israel, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Nicholas Sambanis (University of Pennsylvania), Stergios Skaperdas (University of California, Irvine) and William Wohlforth (Dartmouth College), the authors of a working paper published in 2017, further argue that if one side’s patrons increase material support for its proxy, there is a risk of escalation by the other side’s patrons. In other words, if actor A ¼ the Syrian government and A is its sponsor (Iran, Hezbollah, Russia) while actor B ¼ the rebel opposition and B is its sponsor (the

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US, the UK, France, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Qatar), then any escalation by B may risk escalation by A to prolong the conflict. For example, with the April 2017 US airstrikes and the April 2018 US/UK/ French tripartite airstrikes targeted directly on the Syrian government on behalf of the opposition, Washington may be signalling an escalation of resource commitments to topple the Assad regime (Kuperinsky 2017; Cooper et al. 2018). This is complemented with further Israeli airstrikes on Syrian military assets (Times of Israel 2017). US, British, French and Israeli military actions thus risk paving the way for other direct military attacks on the Syrian government by sponsors of the opposition (Arab states in the Gulf Cooperation Council [GCC] and additional NATO members) (Kuo 2017; Lin 2017a). In this case, the balance shifts in favour of the rebel opposition so that A + A < B + B. However, it would probably provoke A to escalate and rebalance so that A + A  B + B. A would now include Iran, Hezbollah and Russia plus China and other Eurasian states in CSTO/SCO,5 whereas B might now include the US/NATO, Israel and GCC states. As such, this scenario risks escalating the Syrian conflict into a regional and international war between the great nuclear powers (the US, Russia and China), with Al-Qaeda, ISIS and their patrons benefitting from the additional chaos. Indeed, a 2017 report by IHS Markit warned that “The Syrian government is essentially the anvil to the U.S.—led coalition’s hammer” against ISIS, and its downfall would empower ISIS to the detriment of the international community (O’Connor 2017; IHS Markit 2017). Such a conflict would inevitably spill over into Israel as Iran, Russia and China are provoked into increasing military support of the Syrian army, drawing in other states in the SCO with concerns about Salafi jihadists from their region setting up a safe haven in Syria. Thousands of Central Asian militants, based mainly in Idlib and East Aleppo (before being ejected by the Syrian army in 2017), have been training and fighting alongside US/Western-backed groups to try to overthrow the Syrian government (Tucker 2015; Lin 2016a). Given the prospect of a military escalation that would be bloodier and more violent, and that would involve even more great powers but would still probably end in stalemate, an alternative path is needed. It is in this context that China is stepping in and offering an alternative narrative and a path of peace with development to restore the MENA order.

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The Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) is a Russia-led military alliance consisting of Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, with Afghanistan and Serbia as observer states. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is a China-led Eurasian security bloc consisting of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, India and Pakistan, with Afghanistan, Belarus, Iran and Mongolia as observer states.

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“A Community of Common Destiny” for Peace and Development Since Xi Jinping became Chinese president in 2012, the “community of common destiny” (命运共同体) has become the official party line with its aspirations for a reshaped international order. It featured prominently in Xi’s 19th Party Congress speech in October 2017, and represents a break from the hitherto dominant Western model of collective security, which is exclusive, to one of cooperative security, which is inclusive (China.Org 2017). The new community would defy political, ideological and physical boundaries by putting aside ideological differences and finding the biggest common denominator (Dangdai Shijie 2016; Beijing International Studies University (BIDU) 2017). Economic development will be the common ground on which the community will coalesce: Beijing No. 2 Foreign Language Institute professor Zhang Yaojun defines this as “the key to solving all problems” (BIDU 2017), and State Councillor and Politburo member Yang Jiechi deems it “the most important task.” (Rolland 2018). In contrast to the current US narrative of a new Cold War and zero-sum great-power competition as outlined in the 2018 National Security Strategy, China’s “community of common destiny” is an attempt to forge a common narrative between the US and China for co-governance in a new world order. This, as Miskimmon et al. observe, “could act as an organizing principle that reduces strategic drift and encourages other more cooperative behaviors over time.” (Miskimmon et al. 2017: 3; Lo 2018; Beinart 2018). The authors also point out that strategic narratives come in three main forms: (1) narratives about the international system that articulate how a political actor develops an understanding of the international order; (2) narratives employed by political actors to influence the development of policies; and (3) narratives of identity that allows political actors project their identity in international affairs (Miskimmon et al. 2017: 2). An actor capable of aligning these three types of narrative thus has a greater chance of exerting influence. Armed with the strategic narrative of a “community of common destiny” for the international system, “peace with development” via the BRI as the policy for reaching the goal, and China’s identity as a great power emerging from a century of humiliation by colonial powers, the Middle Kingdom appears to be signalling to its citizens and the international community that it is finally poised to be a responsible stakeholder and to restore its proper role in history. The concept embedded in the title of Xi’s speech, “Adhering to the Path of Peaceful Development and Constructing a Community of Common Destiny with Mankind”, is intimately associated with the BRI (Mardell 2017). Former diplomat and scholar Wang Yiwei describes how the BRI promotes the formation of a “new global and economic order”, and Madame Fu Ying, chairperson of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National People’s Congress, points out that it will promote common development to narrow the gap between developed and developing countries (Fu 2017). She also connects economic development with improved security, and explains how “lessons from history show that unbalanced development provides a breeding ground for extremist ideologies.”

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China therefore sees the BRI as a path to peace through economic development and the restoration of order in MENA. As Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Ghuang stated in a daily briefing in 2017, “China supports efforts made by countries in the region to reinforce counter-terrorism and to restore order and stability. . .jointly build the Belt and Road initiative and promote peace and stability through development” (Global Times 2017). According to Gong Xiaosheng, China’s special envoy on Middle East affairs, “The Belt and Road Initiative is highly likely to become China’s most significant contribution to the Middle East peace process because it will provide the economic solution the region needs.” (Bosu 2017). Moreover, the peace process should address issues such as post-war reconstruction, humanitarian aid and local economic and social development, instead of focusing only on anti-terrorism campaigns and democratisation processes as Western countries do (Xinhua 2017). This theme was further underscored in May 2018 at a conference in Shanghai on the Syrian peace process, in which China emphasised that MENA should prioritise “development, rather than democracy”. As Pentagon official Thomas Parker observed, “In the Middle East, China’s first goal is stability; its second and third goals are stability as well (Parker 2018; Pollack 2018).” These developments stem from China’s own experiences: the Communist Party of China (CPC) produced a rising living standard for the people, which in turn ensured the regime’s legitimacy and survival. As Chinese Premier Li Keqiang stated in the 2017 World Economic Forum, “lack of development is the greatest risk” in China, and Beijing is responding to economic challenges with “stability.” Maintain stability, or weiwen (维稳), is a favourite term for the CPC, which tends to attribute its lagging economic performance over several centuries to a lack of social stability (Bradsher 2017). China also upholds what it considers sacred principles of sovereignty and non-interference, and is uncomfortable with post-Westphalian norms such as the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and humanitarian interventions. As they see it, the US weaponizes “human rights” issues for regime change, and China’s position is that R2P cannot trump the norm of sovereignty (Swaine 2012). Given China has a deeply held belief that “the ultimate goal of ‘Western powers’ is to overthrow [Chinese leaderships] rule,” it is thus committed to preventing initiatives via the UN Security Council that could challenge Chinese security and stability, and continues to view regime change as non-permissible (Fung 2017: 4). In sum, the ensuing chaos and turmoil after regime change exacerbate unpredictability with regard to the management of China’s overseas interests in the targeted states (Fung 2017: 11). As such, China has embarked on implementing the BRI to help restore the MENA order and protect its interests.

China’s MENA Interests and the Implementation of the BRI As former State Councillor Dai Bingguo stated in 2009, China’s core interests are sovereignty, territorial integrity, continued economic development and the survival of the Communist Party (Zhao 2014: 127; China News Service 2009). These

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interests are supported by MENA via the provision of energy and market access to foster China’s economic development. The region provides more than half of China’s crude imports, and is a hub for market access in Africa and the EU, which is the country’s largest export market with a trade volume of €514.8 billion in 2016. With the presence of ISIS, Al-Qaeda affiliates and thousands of Chinese Uyghur jihadists in Syria and the Eastern Mediterranean, MENA is also a forward front countering terrorism and separatism in Xinjiang.

Challenges to BRI: MENA Terrorism and Islamic Extremism The issue of returning Uygur jihadists poses a threat to the BRI because the Muslim province of Xinjiang serves as the centrepiece and bridgehead for the economic “Belt” across Eurasia. This also threatens China’s territorial integrity. Interestingly, China’s internal state-security budget has surpassed its defence budget every year since the Xinjiang uprising in 2009, which indicates that Beijing perceives domestic terrorism and instability as a greater security threat than military conflict in the South China Sea.6 In fact, the “Research Report on China’s National Security” published by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in May 2014 emphasised terrorism and social instability as key threats to domestic security. A commentary followed in 2017 in Qiushi, the ideological mouthpiece of the CPC, which gave priority to protecting its citizens and overseas assets in its security narrative (Raik et al. 2018: 28–29, 32). Thus, as widely reported, Chinese troops are already on the ground in Syria ready to fight thousands of Uyghur militants, whether in ISIS or the Chinese Al-Qaeda, the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) (Friedman 2017; Middle East Monitor 2017; Moussa 2017; Dzyubenko 2016). Syria-based Uyghur Jihadists launched an attack on the Chinese Embassy in Kyrgyzstan in 2016, and Beijing fears that they plan on further attacking China’s territory and its citizens and assets abroad. If the Syrian government is toppled by US military strikes, and the armed opposition consisting of various jihadist groups, including Uyghurs, are allowed a permanent safe haven in Syria, they will continue to be trained and equipped as a more professional fighting force to attack China and to partition Xinjiang. As such, China is adopting a more robust diplomatic and security stance, and proactively supporting the “peace with development” narrative to mitigate this risk

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China’s security budget was $87 billion in 2010, and the defence budget was $84.6 billion: the corresponding figures were $99 billion and $95.6 billion in 2011; $111.4 and $106.4 billion in 2012; and $123.6 billion and $119 billion in 2013. The Chinese government has withheld full disclosure of the security budget since 2014 given its sensitive nature: defence was $131.57 billion. Defence was budgeted at $141 billion in 2015, a 10% increase from 2014, whereas the security budget increased by 11%. However, the overall internal security budget was probably higher than the defence budget based on past trends. Defence was budgeted at $146 billion in 2016, and $151.43 billion in 2017, when the estimated security budget was $196 billion. The corresponding figures for 2018 are $175 billion (defence) and $210 billion (estimated security).

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and restore regional order (Lin 2016b). As China’s foreign-ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang stated in a meeting with a Syrian delegation on 29 November 2017: “Too many people in the Middle East are suffering at the brutal hands of terrorists. . . We support countries in the region in exploring a development path suited to their national conditions and are ready to share governance experience and jointly build the Belt and Road and promote peace and stability through common development” (Gao 2017). Dong Manyuan, Middle East analyst at the China Institute for International Studies (CIIS), emphasised the importance of providing development aid and preventing Syria from becoming a haven for Uyghur militants: “stability in Syria is important for the situation in Xinjiang because a stable [Syrian] administration means it has the ability to fight terrorism and prevent its territory from becoming fertile ground [for Uyghur fighters].” (Wong 2018). China is also against Western-sponsored regime change elsewhere in MENA. As Sinologist John Garver from the Georgia Institute of Technology observed, China’s proactive efforts in negotiating the Iran nuclear deal and promoting peace-making diplomacy in MENA are aimed at preventing Iran’s collapse (Garver 2018: 147). China learned a harsh lesson from Iraq, which was transformed from a major regional power in the 1980s to a failed and fragmented state due to two lost wars with the US (in 1991 and 2003). Chinese strategists realise that a war between the US and Iran would leave the latter in ruins and destabilise the entire Persian Gulf; it would threaten China’s access to energy sources to ensure continued economic growth, jeopardise its flagship BRI project in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor by the Strait of Hormuz, and expand a larger swath of ungoverned space in MENA in which terrorist actors could thrive. The sudden loss of $20 billion worth of investments overnight together with the forced evacuation of 36,000 Chinese nationals during the 2011 civil war in Libya was a bitter pill for China to swallow, and Beijing thus does not want a repeat of Libya in Iraq, Syria, or elsewhere in MENA (Hook and Dyer 2011; Collins and Erickson 2011; Huang 2011; Lin 2013). With the “peace with development” narrative in place, China has embarked on implementing it via the BRI as a multi-purpose umbrella for its foreign policy and domestic development. In so doing, it hopes to ensure energy and market access, reduce regional inequalities through infrastructure connectivity and economic integration, and help to protect MENA from violent regime change by promoting political stability and security through prosperity.

Institutionalizing the BRI In a nutshell, the BRI is a vision launched by President Xi in 2013 aimed at integrating China into the Eurasian landmass through a vast network of transport corridors, energy pipelines and telecom infrastructures. It consists of a land route known as the “Silk Road Economic Belt” that links China, Central Asia, the Middle East, Russia and Europe, and a sea route known as the “Maritime Silk Road” that stretches from China’s eastern ports to connect with Southeast Asia, South Asia and

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Fig. 1 Six economic corridors (Source: HKTDC Research, “The Belt and Road Initiative”, September 13, 2017)

East Africa, continuing on to the Middle East and the Mediterranean. In terms of geographic scope, it covers 65 countries, 4.4 billion people or 62% of the world’s population, and 30% of global GDP. The two main routes have a series of loops, branches and various economic corridors such as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and the ChinaCentral Asia-West Asia Economic Corridor (CCWAEC), which according to Xinhua starts from Xinjiang in China and traverses Central Asia, the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean Sea and the Arabian Peninsula.7 It crosses five Central Asian countries (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan) and 17 countries and regions in West Asia (including Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey) (Xinhua 2018b; Suokas 2017; Gulf Insider 2018; Lin 2017b; PricewaterhouseCoopers 2016: 2) (Fig. 1). A network of cooperation mechanisms would support BRI projects, including the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the Silk Road Fund and other existing bilateral and multilateral institutions such as the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, The Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA) and the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum. It is thus a very broad, flexible, and inclusive framework for economic cooperation. In fact, the 7 The map merely depicts the general connectivity of the Central Asia and West Asia regions, the BRI being open to additional participation from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).

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AIIB already had 57 founding members in 2015 from Asia, Middle East, Europe, Africa and the Americas, and as of July 2019 membership expanded to 100 with the admissions of Benin, Djibouti and Rwanda (Zhang 2015; AIIB 2019). According to Michael Kovrig from the International Crisis Group, if applied wisely, the BRI and supporting institutions could be vehicles enabling China to play an increasingly important, cooperative and beneficial role in the international system (Kovrig 2017). Nonetheless, Washington harbours suspicions that Beijing is forming parallel institutions to supplant Western institutions in the US-led liberal order. These different narratives leading to either cooperation or confrontation between China and the West raise certain questions. Is China’s intention to challenge and supplant the US-led order? Or is it to fill gaps and address inadequacies in the current institutions? Moreover, are parallel structures necessarily bad? Is there room for synergistic cooperation to supplement the current order? (Heilmann et al. 2014)

Supplementing Western Institutions Madame Fu Ying attempts to explain China’s stance on reforming the current order in her 2016 Foreign Affairs article. She argues that China and other rising powers are frustrated because of their under-representation in current institutions, and are thus circumventing them by setting up alternatives that are better suited to defending their interests (Fu 2016; Leonard 2013). In this sense, China is not necessarily a revisionist state intent on overthrowing the current liberal order in which it has greatly benefitted, but merely wishes to reform the existing order to better reflect its preferences. Andrew J. Nathan and Andrew Scobell (2012) also point out in their book, China’s Search for Security, the importance of distinguishing between security and hegemony in Sino-US relations. They argue that whereas the US seeks to maintain its hegemony, Beijing aims at security rather than global power. Thus, when China says it wants peace, it means stability enabling it to “concentrate on economic development.” (Nathan and Scobell 2012: 28). This may explain why the phrase “maintain stability” (weiwen, 维稳) occurs repeatedly in Chinese official statements, especially with reference to MENA from which China obtains the bulk of its energy. The fact that Washington seeks to maintain hegemony whereas Beijing desires stability and security presents an opportunity for synergistic cooperation in the MENA region, in which China is still dependent on US military power to underwrite regional security. As Henry Kissinger argues in On China (2011), it may be possible for the US and China to develop the same kind of “strategic trust” that evolved between the US and the UK, specifically by increasing economic and institutional interdependence that tends to dampen the desire for conflict. Although this does not make conflict impossible, and could make war even more destructive should it occur, nonetheless it provides incentives to keep conflicts with major partners manageable.

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As such, the current US approach to China’s ascendency in the international order also needs revision. When confronted with Chinese efforts that seemingly benefit the global community but weaken US influence and challenge the liberal world order, the US should develop a strategic response that defends its interests without categorically opposing Chinese contributions to the international system (Lou 2018; Farley 2018a). Given the growth in China and the “rising rest”, and the inevitable relative decline of the West, in the view of some observers US leaders can no longer “dictate terms at China’s 12-mile limit” in the South China Sea or maintain dominance over access to MENA resources, and thus needs to consider adopting a posture of strategic modesty (Farley 2018b; Glazebrook 2018). According to Charles Kupchan, this strategic modesty could result in the US adjusting its role from that of a global policeman to become a new “arbiter of greatpower peace”, emphasizing diplomatic rather than military engagement outside core areas (Kupchan 2012, 2014, 2018). Former US National Intelligence Council officials Mathew Burrows and Roger George likewise mention the need to revise the hitherto dominant US narrative of America’s “exceptionalism” and its “indispensable” role, and to be honest about the country’s more limited influence and need for strategic restraint and modesty (Burrows and George 2016). The authors issue a warning: instead of trying to export the US-style democratic-governance model and make others in America’s image, Washington should not treat others as pariahs, given that states “including even Russia and Iran—want to be on good terms even if they don’t share our values or interests.” Given that a non-Western initiative is not necessarily anti-Western, America should forgo the tendency to reject international initiatives that are not made in America. The authors further recommend, given that global commons are now much more diverse among the “rising rest” with their divergent values but shared convergent interests and concerns about terrorism, nuclear proliferation and failing states, that setting the global agenda in ways that are inclusive may mark Washington’s successful transition “from a status quo power to one that will lead the world to a new equilibrium.” The late Zbigniew Brzezinski likewise echoed the need for Washington to take a more inclusive stand in realigning the global-power architecture, and to adopt a new paradigm to stabilise MENA that could only be effective if “it forges a coalition that involves, in varying degrees, also Russia and China” (Brzezinski 2016).

A New Mideast Security Arc in a Multi-Order World Thus, instead of mandating US-style governance elsewhere and enlarging the liberal order, Washington should move towards co-governance with other states and leverage the BRI and its supporting institutions-in-the-making to complement Western efforts to address pressing needs in targeted regions. Given ongoing regional security problems related to terrorism, economic woes and the urgent need for infrastructure, investment and trade in MENA, China’s BRI proposes quick economic relief.

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Moreover, not only do these countries attract Chinese investments for BRI projects, they also receive full development packages to stimulate their economies. One example of this is the $300-million deal with the UAE that was concluded in 2017 to develop a manufacturing operation in the free-trade zone of Khalifa Port, on the heels of China’s COSCO Group winning a 35-year concession agreement with Abu Dhabi Ports to develop and operate a new container terminal (Shepard 2017; Wang 2017). Whereas most shipping companies own or operate terminals and ports on foreign terrain as shipping-centric operations, China also opens new ports and invests in adjoining special economic zones and other development initiatives so that host countries receive the entire development package. Thus, Abu Dhabi will continue to benefit as a future international hub of transport, production, commerce and international investments, extending far beyond the initial capital investment. As such this could apply to Syria’s war-torn economy and the Levant (Rasmussen and Osseiran 2018; Younes 2018; Berman 2016). The Chinese are currently considering the port of Tripoli in Lebanon as a main trans-shipment hub for the Eastern Mediterranean, with an eye on Syrian reconstruction. Before the war, Lebanon’s ports were used to trans-ship goods to Syria and Iraq, bypassing the longer sea route through the Suez Canal and around the Arabian Peninsula. There has also been talk of rehabilitating the Tripoli-Homs railway network: with a planned Special Economic Zone adjacent to the port, Tripoli could become a useful hub for Syria and enable China to play a constructive role in post-conflict reconstruction and stabilisation efforts via the BRI (Issa 2017; Lin 2017b). It would also align with the 2016 EU Strategy on China, recommending Brussels and Beijing to cooperate in the EU’s Eastern and Southern neighbourhoods to encourage rule-based governance, sustainable development and regional security (European Commission 2016; Van der Puttin et al. 2016: 27). Moreover, as Gal Luft recommends in Foreign Policy (2016), China could play a complementary role in filling diplomatic gaps in MENA. In the absence of official ties between Saudi Arabia and Iran, for example, China’s open communication with both capitals could become a vital asset, and the BRI could serve as a tensionreduction mechanism to promote projects that cater for shared Sunni-Shiite economic interests. Indeed, although the US is a dominant power in MENA, it faces barriers in promoting regional cooperation due to its pro-Israel stance (Carlson et al. 2018: 16). China, on the other hand, has good relations with various regional and extra-regional actors—Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia and the EU—and may be more successful in promoting economic-based regional cooperation. With the US foreign-policy establishment still allergic to considering an American role that is not built on hegemony, which prompts China to bypass US-dominated structures to partner with regional actors for cooperative action, a new post-Western regional security architecture appears to be emerging. MENA countries are increasingly looking East for help in resolving regional problems. Iraqi Kurdistan leader Masoud Barzani gave a nod to China’s rising regional status in March 2018 in calling on Beijing—not Washington—to “play a greater role” in restoring MENA stability (Ali 2018). Disparate Eastern Mediterranean countries such as Israel, Syria and Egypt

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have also followed in Turkey’s footsteps in applying to be partners with the China-led SCO, which includes Iran as an observer (Interfax 2016; Fulton 2018). US dominance also appears to be waning. When President Trump called for an Arab army to replace US soldiers occupying northeast Syria in April 2018, Egypt declined stating that “The Egyptian Armed Forces are not mercenaries”: in particular, it would undermine Cairo’s policy to support the Syrian government’s territorial integrity and fight against terrorism (Al-Araby 2018). In fact, Egypt does not support the US and GCC narrative for regime change to restore order in the Levant, and President Sisi sees the Syrian government as a bulwark against Islamic extremism. If Syria falls, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt would be next, thus Cairo has turned to Syria, Russia and Iran to form what former Oxford University scholar Sharmine Narwani describes as a new “Security Arc” comprised of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran in the midst of Mideast terror (Narwani 2013; Lin 2016d). With Egypt as a large Sunni Arab nation aligning with the Syrian government and Eurasian powers to counter Salafi terrorism, Riyadh’s narrative that this is a sectarian conflict is no longer valid (Fig. 2). As Syrian expert Joshua Landis states, Washington has failed in its efforts to enlarge the US-led liberal order to MENA, and to produce a democratic Northern Middle East in which Sunnis and Shiites share power and emulate US forms of governance (Landis 2018). Thus, instead of blocking reconstruction aid and escalating military efforts to contain Iran and Russia using Syria as a launchpad, the US should recognise the new security architecture in the northern Middle East and allow the region to stabilise and rebuild on its own. Landis criticises current US policy for keeping Syrians and Iranians poor in the hope that they will demand a regime change, which would only bring more wars, bitterness and extremism to the region, and exhorted that “only by promoting growth and unity can the United States advance stability, the rule of law, and liberal values.” This ties in with China’s narrative of “peace with development” to restore order to MENA and, given the emerging regional security architecture, overlaps with China’s Central Asia-West Asia Economic Corridor (CAWAEC) on the BRI. Here is a unique opportunity for cooperative action between China and the West. Finally, as Trine Flockhart (2016) argues, although the West is losing its material primacy and ideological dominance with the devolution of power from Western hegemony to increasing regionalism, identity (e.g., Muslim, Western, Asian, Latin American, African) is likely to be the major defining feature of the new orders. In a system in which no single order, power or pole dominates, the challenge is to manage relations between diverse modes of capitalist governance in a state of de-centred globalism: as the Chinese say, weave a community of common destiny for peace and development in a multi-order world.

0

Mauritanie

500

Mali (2013)

1 000 km

Algérie

France

Nigeria

Niger

Tunisie

Allemagne

Libye (2011)

Centrafrique

Tchad

Syrie

Kurdistan

Soudan du Sud

Soudan

Egypte

K enya

Irak (2003)

Ethiopie Somalie

Iran

Bahreïn Qatar

Yémen

Arabie saoudite

Koweït

Daghestan

Somaliland

Djibou

Erythrée

Liban (2006) Israël Gaza Palesne (2008-2009 et 2012) Jordanie

Chypre

Turquie

Tchétchénie

Russie

Fig. 2 Crisis arc forges a new Mideast Security Arc (Source: Le Monde diplomatique, October 2013)

Sénégal

Sahara occidental

Maroc

Royaume-Uni

Oman

arabes unis

Emirats

Pakistan

Zones tribales

Tadjikistan

Etats faibles ou déstabilisés

Campagnes d’aaques de

Intervenons militaires occidentales depuis septembre

Principales voies de circulaon des combaants djihadistes

Inde

Kirghizstan Fergana

Etats détruits ou inexistants

Baloutchistan

Turkménistan Afghanistan (2001)

Ouzbékistan

Kazakhstan

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56, June, pp 27–36. https://www.fiia.fi/en/publication/the-security-strategies-of-the-us-chinarussia-and-the-eu Rasmussen SE, Osseiran N (2018) Lebanon seeks foreign aid to support its war-rattled economy. Wall Street J, March 14. https://www.wsj.com/articles/lebanon-seeks-foreign-aid-to-supportits-war-rattled-economy-1521058947 Rolland N (2018) Beijing’s vision for a reshaped international order. China Brief 18(3). February 26. https://jamestown.org/program/beijings-vision-reshaped-international-order/ Rummel RJ (2018) What is democratic peace? University of Hawaii. https://www.hawaii.edu/ powerkills/DP.IS_WHAT.HTM. Accessed 8 September 2018 Sambanis N, Skaperdas S, Wohlforth W (2017) External intervention, identity, and civil war. University of California, Irvine Working Paper, May. https://www.socsci.uci.edu/~sskaperd/ SSW_Intervention_013117.pdf. Accessed 7 September 2018 Shepard W (2017) Next up on China’s Maritime Silk Road: Abu Dhabi. Forbes, August 2. https:// www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2017/08/02/next-up-abu-dhabi-chinas-maritime-silk-roadbreaks-into-the-middle-east/ Shinkman PD (2015) New year may bring renewed war to Afghanistan. US News & World Report, December 30. https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015-12-30/isis-taliban-surge-in-afghani stan-could-provoke-us-escalation Sjursen D (2017) This US military officer explains why America’s Middle East Wars have been utter failures—hint: the foundational narrative is the problem. The Nation, February 21. https:// www.thenation.com/article/a-us-military-officer-explains-why-americas-wars-in-the-middleeast-have-been-utter-failures/ Suokas J (2017) China’s belt and road initiative explained. Global Times, May 9. https://gbtimes. com/chinas-belt-and-road-initiative-explained Swaine M (2012) Chinese views of the Syrian conflict. China Leadership Monitor Issue 39 (Fall). https://carnegieendowment.org/files/Swaine_CLM_39_091312_2.pdf Times of Israel (2017) Russia condemns alleged Israeli strikes in Syria, April 27. http://www. timesofisrael.com/russia-condemns-alleged-israeli-missile-strike-in-syria/ Tatlow DK (2015) For China, migrant crisis is someone else’s fault, and responsibility. The New York Times, September 9. https://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/09/09/for-chinamigrant-crisis-is-someone-elses-fault-and-responsibility/ Tucker N (2015) Central Asian involvement in the conflict in Syria and Iraq: Drivers and Responses. United States Agency for International Development, May 4. https://www.usaid. gov/sites/default/files/documents/1866/CVE_CentralAsiansSyriaIraq.pdf US Agency for International Development (2013) USAID strategy on democracy, human rights and governance. USAID, Washington, DC U.S. House of Representatives (2017) Rep. Lieu Statement on House Passage of NDAA with Lieu Provisions on Yemen. Press Release. November 14. https://lieu.house.gov/media-center/pressreleases/rep-lieu-statement-house-passage-ndaa-lieu-provisions-yemen Van der Puttin FP, Montesano FS, van de Van J, van Ham P (2016) The geopolitical relevance of Piraeus and China’s New Silk Road for Southeast Europe and Turkey. Clingendael Report, December. https://www.clingendael.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/Report_the%20geopolitical_rel evance_of_Piraeus_and_China%27s_New_Silk_Road.pdf Wang J (2017) One belt one road: a vision for the future of China-Middle East relations. Al Jazeera Centre for Studies Report, May 9. http://studies.aljazeera.net/en/reports/2017/05/belt-roadvision-future-china-middle-east-relations-170509102227548.html White House (2010) National Security of the United States, May. http://nssarchive.us/NSSR/2010.pdf Wong C (2018) China to step up aid to Syria as the war winds down. South China Morning Post, February 12. http://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2133064/chinastep-aid-syria-war-winds-down Xinhua (2017) Israel, Palestine ready to work with China to find solution to peace process. November 7, 2017. http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-11/07/c_136732623.htm

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Xinhua (2018a) French PM calls military interventions in Middle East ‘mistake’. February 11 2018. http://www.china.org.cn/world/Off_the_Wire/2018-02/11/content_50486795.htm Xinhua (2018b) China sees Saudi Arabia as important partner in Belt and Road construction: Chinese FM. May 22, 2018. http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-05/22/c_137197787.htm Younes A (2018) Jordan’s economic crisis threatens political stability. Al Jazeera, February 14. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/02/jordan-economic-crisis-threatens-political-stability180214112245542.html Zhang M (2015) Cooperation, not competition. China.Org, May 15. http://www.china.org.cn/ opinion/2015-05/15/content_35578422.htm Zhao S (2014) China’s geo-strategy and relations with the major powers during the global downturn in 2008-2010. In: Men J, Shen W (eds) The EU, the US and China-towards a new international order? Edward Elgar, Cheltenham

American Narratives of Order-Building in the Middle East: Dashed Visions on the Nile Ville Sinkkonen

Introduction The story of US foreign policy after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 has been written against the backdrop of (military) engagement in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. The forceful reaction of the George W. Bush administration to 9/11, epitomised by the battle against terrorism and the war in Iraq, has inescapably haunted the presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald J. Trump. The present chapter takes stock of one manifestation of US foreign-policy agency vis-à-vis the Middle East, namely the narratives of order-building that US administrations have employed in the post-9/11 era, although more emphasis is laid on developments that have taken place against the backdrop of the Arab Spring revolutions of 2011. The purpose is to shed light on how the narratives utilised by the successive presidential administrations have evolved: the exposition is thus concerned with both change and continuity. A further aim is to explore how these discursive constructs are predicated upon ways in which administrations fathom America’s global role and US leadership (or hegemony) in an evolving and increasingly complex twenty-first-century world. The analysis presented focuses specifically on the case of Egypt. This choice is justifiable on two counts. First, the country has been an important US ally in the region for four decades: the US addresses Egypt to a sufficient extent in its policy documents to allow reference to the construction of an order-building narrative in the

The author is grateful to Anu Ruokamo at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs for her expert research assistance. The editors, participants of the authors’ workshop and Professor Henri Vogt provided valuable comments on earlier drafts of the chapter. V. Sinkkonen (*) The Global Security Research Programme/ The Center on US Politics and Power, The Finnish Institute of International Affairs, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: ville.sinkkonen@fiia.fi © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 W. Mühlberger, T. Alaranta (eds.), Political Narratives in the Middle East and North Africa, Perspectives on Development in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35217-2_8

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first place. Second, recent developments in the country—and the evolution of the US-Egypt relationship as part of these developments—places the potential discrepancies of America’s order-building narrative in stark focus, especially when reflected against the backdrop of order-maintenance practices. US involvement in the Middle East has historically been premised largely upon attempts to foster order in a troubled region, although the robustness of visions of order and the means through which it would best be achieved have varied across administrations. It is argued in the present chapter that, upon closer inspection, there is remarkable continuity running through the George W. Bush and Obama administrations in terms of rhetorical commitment to liberal hegemony—to America’s continued engagement in the Middle East as a superpower guarantor of order, and to democratic principles as the foundational building blocks for achieving sustainable order. Of course, administrations have differed, substantially at times, over the means through which such an order should be pursued. Although it may still be early to render judgment on the Trump administration, it appears that a shift on the level of narrative in a direction that more closely reflects the nature of America’s policy practice is on the cards. The normative and strategic desirability of this sea change remains open to debate, however.

Narratives of Order-Building It is necessary to consider the definitional properties of order and narratives in the study of international politics before attempting to dwell on US order-building narratives vis-à-vis the Middle East. In the most general sense, order can be used both to describe the “absence of upheaval” and to denote an organisational form, although it is obvious that the latter can hardly exist without the former (Reus-Smit 2017: 854). In perhaps the most well-known exposition of order in the literature on International Relations (IR), Hedley Bull argues that it entails “a pattern that leads to a particular result, an arrangement of social life such that it promotes certain goals or values” (Bull 1977: 4). This preoccupation with purposeful patterns to achieve goals appears ubiquitous regardless of the level of analysis upon which order is scrutinised.1 International order thus refers to “a pattern of activity that sustains the elementary or primary goals of the society of states” (8). For Bull, these goals include the sustainability of international society, external sovereignty, peace and limits on violence, the honouring of promises and the stabilisation of possession (17–19). With regard to the present exposition, there are three key takeaways from these definitional properties of order. First, orders have a function, that is to say they are designed to serve certain purposes, the most fundamental of which is to escape from chaos or disorder. Second, they are social constructions with defined sets of rules,

1 For in-depth discussion on the level-of-analysis problem in the study of international politics see e.g. Waltz (2001) and Singer (1961).

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institutions and organising principles (Reus-Smit 2017: 854–855). Third, orders occur on various levels of social organisation. In the international arena they may encompass the whole system of states, or some meaningful subset such as a region. Narratives, in the most basic sense, are stories. More precisely, “a narrative is [. . .] a dialogue or a relation between the narrator and the reader or listener, or even the outside ‘world’” (Vogt 2005: 12). Actors employ narratives to serve a purpose, which is to say that narratives are “crafted” to (re)produce and constitute social reality. Through the practice of narrating, therefore, actors satisfy an innate human desire to impose a semblance of harmony upon a complex and chaotic (social) world. In this sense, a narrative is always at best an imperfect reflection of reality, it weaves together “different social elements—irrespective of whether these elements actually have a relation or not” (13). Because it is a reflection, a simplification, a narrative remains by definition fragmentary (Krebs 2015: 11). Policy protagonists create political narratives to achieve political purposes, but also come to constitute political reality by engaging in the articulation process. This logic of political narration has been succinctly summarised thus: [P]olitical actors do not seek merely to purchase or compel others’ assent to specific policies. They also aim to shape the linguistic axes that define the scope and substance of political debate. They seek not only to fit their programs into the prevailing language, but to fix the terms in which debate is conducted, policy legitimated and events interpreted. (Krebs 2015: 9)

Accordingly, political actors may use narratives to exercise what Barnett and Duvall (2005) term productive power through language. That is to say, narratives (especially those that become “dominant” within a certain social constellation) effectively set the limits of what is fathomable and, in a discursive process, “produce social identities and capacities” (55–56).2 Finally, order-building narratives, the focus of this chapter, are stories that political actors tell about how to move from disorder to order, or from one manifestation of order to another. They are effectively a subset of political narratives, concerned with the constitution and legitimation (or even universalisation) of a particular vision of order. As such, order-building narratives may contain ideas about, inter alia: the organising principles of an order; the legitimate units of authority in an order; the breadth and scope of an order; the norms, rules and institutions of an order; the means and logic through which an order is (to be) built, strengthened and sustained; and the goals and ends of an order.

2 For a thorough definitional exposition of the notion of dominant narratives, see Krebs (2015: 7, 31–65).

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Background: The Faces of (Liberal) Hegemony It is frequently posited that the US has, by and large, adhered to the grand-strategic orientation of liberal hegemony in the post-Cold War space (cf. Ikenberry 2012; Walt 2018). According to this understanding of America’s global role, the US has a strategic imperative to remain a hegemon, the preponderant power in the international system. By implication, it also assumes the responsibility that falls upon the most powerful state in the system as the ultimate guarantor of international order. However, the manner in which the US has gone about pursuing this grand-strategic approach has differed between regions and over time. For current purposes, one should distinguish between the thin and thick interpretations of order that have undergirded the idea of liberal hegemony.3 In its thin manifestation, American hegemony has been liberal in character in the sense that the US has been willing to tie itself into the rules, norms and institutions of the international order, effectively practising “strategic restraint” to gain acquiescence from other states (Ikenberry 1998; Brands 2016: 2). To achieve this, it has taken to providing certain public goods such as free(r) trade, freedom of navigation and security, which have benefited both itself and the broader international milieu (Nye 2017: 11). In its thick incarnation, which has become increasingly prominent since the end of the Cold War, liberal hegemony has entailed placing requirements on the types of states that could be considered rightful members of the international order. This has imposed a premium not merely on adherence to norms governing interstate conduct, but also on regime type, most notably the realisation of human rights and democratic governance within states (cf. Ikenberry 2015; Reus-Smit 2004; Simpson 2004). The US, as a hegemon, has been willing to sanction the violators of said values through differing degrees of enforcement action—albeit it has done so selectively. The thick approach thus leans on Kantian ideals, most prominently laid out in the democratic peace thesis.4 During the Cold War era the US approach to the Middle East appeared, on the surface, more hegemonic (i.e. preponderant) than liberal in either the thin or the thick sense (see Halabi 2009). The US relied on authoritarian allies to keep potential challengers for regional primacy at bay, an approach that ultimately catered to a relatively fixed set of interests premised on containment of the Soviet Union’s influence, the flow of energy supplies from the region to world markets and the maintenance of Israeli security (Gerges 2012: 35–36; Cook 2012: 250–252; Miller 2009: 202). Although the end of the Cold War and the bipolar power struggle brought the US unprecedented potential leverage in the Middle East, the lens

3 For similar distinctions between different incarnations of the liberal world/international order, see Leonard (2017) and Ikenberry (2015). 4 In its most robust formulation, the democratic peace thesis maintains that democracies are more peaceful than autocratic states both in their reference group (democracies virtually never fight wars with each other) and vis-à-vis all other states (see Russett and Oneal 2001).

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through which it viewed the region remained fixed on maintaining a stable order.5 US allies, most notably Egypt and Saudi Arabia, received substantial military and economic perks in return for complicity with America’s regional designs. The case of Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt is illustrative. Since World War II, Egypt has received an estimated $80 billion dollars in economic and military assistance from the United States (Sharp 2018: 18). Over the span of roughly 30 years prior to the Arab Spring, Egypt served as a linchpin of the US-sponsored security order by virtue of the 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty. The US acquired necessary support and complicity from Egypt’s authoritarian leadership in various domains, such as maintaining peace across the Sinai,6 sharing intelligence, engaging in joint military exercises and (tacitly) backing America’s forays in the Gulf (see Gardner 2011; Cook 2012).

Guiding Premises Egypt as the chosen country case presents a useful proxy for assessing the evolution US order-building narratives vis-à-vis the Middle East. Of course, it may at times be difficult to disaggregate levels of analysis in such narratives: the regional and global levels must be kept in mind throughout. More concretely, the case allows assessment of how the US constructs its order-building narrative vis-à-vis an ally that has imposed on it substantial policy dilemmas. A further methodological note is warranted before the analysis is embarked upon. Although the notion of order (or disorder) is not always mentioned explicitly in US policy discourse,7 it is possible to uncover order-building narratives by looking for references to the constituent elements of order. In fact, political actors can be seen to address questions of order when they discuss matters such as: the rationale for pursuing certain political arrangements; how these constellations should come about; what their envisaged organising principles, underlying norms and values are; who or what are the legitimate actors and stakeholders within the said assemblages; and what kinds of institutions should govern them.

To quote Fawaz Gerges’ (2012: 64) assessment: “[a]ccording to the official dominant narrative, US foreign policy [in the Middle East] has been successful, on the whole, by ensuring a half century of stability and access to petroleum in the Gulf”. 6 Peacekeeping duties in the Sinai are carried out by the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO), whose origins lie in Annex I of the 1979 Treaty of Peace between Egypt and Israel, and a subsequent Treaty Protocol negotiated in 1981 (Multinational Force & Observers 2018). 7 US foreign-policy discourse is taken in the present analysis to consist predominantly of key speeches by Presidents and Secretaries of State, as well as strategy documents produced by the White House and the State Department. 5

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George W. Bush: Constructing and Escaping the Incessant Spectre of Disorder The terrorist attacks of 9/11 were a shock to America’s national psyche. For the Bush administration, the events functioned as a catalyst to re-evaluate the broader US strategy for dealing with the Middle East. It appeared that maintaining stability by co-opting authoritarian allies would no longer guarantee security for America(ns) in an international environment in which threats no longer flowed mainly from the interstate level. This need to address transnational threats entailed not only a policy change vis-à-vis America’s regional foes, but also a rhetorical shift in its approach towards allies in the Middle East. The Bush team wanted to replace authoritarian stability with an approach that would construct, as per the 2002 National Security Strategy (NSS), “a balance of power that favors freedom” (Bush 2002b: preface). Achieving such a balance of power meant embracing a thick conception of liberal hegemony (cf. Hassan 2008; Reus-Smit 2004), coupled with a hubristic seizing of the “unipolar moment” (Krauthammer 2002/03). The US held “unprecedented—and unequaled—strength and influence in the world” (Bush 2002b: preface), which, as the administration argued, it could utilise to remake the ordering principles in the international system at large, and within the regional constellation of the Middle East in particular. This would be achieved under the auspices of what the administration came to call the Freedom Agenda. The Bush administration duly sectored off the world into “good” states that resided in the zone of freedom, and “evil” states that were beyond the pale and had to be transformed (Bush 2002a; cf. Müller 2014). Furthermore, such transformation could take place in contravention of the traditional Westphalian principles of international order. In essence, the achievement of a stable order in the Middle East would demand a more qualified reading of external sovereignty. Ultimately, only governments willing to pursue “democracy, development, free markets, and free trade” would ensure a sustainable and robust order and allow the region to escape the incessant danger of disintegration into sectarianism and chaos (Bush 2002b: preface). The State Department succinctly summed up the logic in its fact sheet “Institutionalising the Freedom Agenda”: Governments that respect the human rights of their own people are more likely to uphold responsible conduct toward other nations. The advancement of freedom is the most effective long-term measure for strengthening international stability, reducing regional conflicts, countering terrorism and terror-supporting extremism, and extending peace and prosperity. (US Department of State 2008)

The administration thus believed that the universal appeal and applicability of (neo)liberal ideals would ultimately ensure symbiosis between America’s national interests and security (and the sustenance of US hegemony) on the one hand, and cherished values on the other. The role of the US in the Middle East would thus be that of a hegemonic instigator and guarantor of a new regional order premised on the spread of democratic governance.

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In the case of America’s enemies, Iraq in particular, the template for averting the spectre of disorder and creating a new, more stable order appeared deceptively simple—although the Bush administration admitted that such a transformation would take years to achieve. “All free nations” would need to acknowledge that the appeasement of rogue regimes leads to disaster. Pre-emption and regime change could be justified on the grounds that “responding to such enemies only after they have struck first is not self-defense [. . .] [it] is suicide”. The US would not shirk from its “duty” and “responsibility” to “work to advance liberty and peace” in the Middle East (Bush 2003). However, this rhetorical commitment to regional liberation presented a conundrum in terms of dealing with America’s traditional Arab allies, who had thitherto been instrumental in sustaining the old order. Ultimately, the Freedom Agenda would not entail shock-and-awe regime change in such states: instead, it became an incremental approach aimed at nudging America’s authoritarian partners towards democratisation in a piecemeal fashion (Hassan 2013: 5). Nevertheless, the narrative employed by the Bush administration was transformative. In her speech at Cairo University in 2005, for instance, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice commended President Mubarak for “unlocking the door” to democratic reforms (the Egyptian strongman had committed to holding “free(r) elections” in 2005), but also criticised his repressive policies. She went on to voice support for norms such as free and fair elections, freedom of assembly, the rule of law and the free market as foundations for a new social compact, the positive implications of which would ultimately be regional in nature: Freedom and democracy are the only ideas powerful enough to overcome hatred, and division, and violence. For people of diverse races and religions, the inclusive nature of democracy can lift the fear of difference that some believe is a license to kill. [. . .] For neighboring countries with turbulent histories, democracy can help to build trust and settle old disputes with dignity. [. . .] And for all citizens with grievances, democracy can be a path to lasting justice. (Rice 2005)

Despite such eloquent words, American eagerness to push for democratisation gradually waned in the later Bush years. This was attributable, in part, to the quagmire in post-regime-change Iraq—the administration had initially envisioned the country as a poster child for swift democratisation, one that would engender the diffusion of representative government across the region (Halabi 2009: 120–121). Moreover, the electoral success of Muslim Brotherhood candidates in the 2005 People’s Assembly elections in Egypt, and Hamas’ victory in the January 2006 elections in Palestine, showed that democratic reforms might lead to electoral outcomes that the US had trouble stomaching (Bâli and Rana 2010; Cook 2012: 189–190). The difficulty of combining the push for democratic reforms with fighting the War on Terror meant that emphasis on the latter ultimately triumphed. The case of Egypt was again indicative: Hosni Mubarak’s regime remained a valuable asset to the United States and the Egyptian premier had apparently succeeded in convincing the Bush administration that chaos would ensue if democratic reforms were implemented in the country (Gardner 2011: 178–180).

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Barack Obama: Whither Does the “Arc of History” Bend? As is habitually the case with changes in presidential administrations, Barack Obama initially took great pains to distance himself from the policies of his predecessor, especially when it came to the Iraq War and the War on Terror. As part of his early engagement with the globe, the President embarked on a world tour—critics dubbed it an “apology tour” (Rove 2009)—in an attempt to reset US relations with America’s allies and partners, and their populaces. In his speech at Cairo University in June 2009, perhaps the most important foreign policy address of his first term, Obama sought to articulate8: [A] new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles—principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings. (Obama 2009a)

The new White House incumbent would forge this vision of a novel Middle East by addressing violent extremism (a key rhetorical departure from Bush’s use of terms such as “War on Terror”, “terrorism” and “jihadism”) (Gerges 2012: 101), striving towards a two-state solution in the context of the Middle East Peace Process, strengthening nuclear non-proliferation (even signalling a willingness to talk with Iran), and working towards democratisation, religious tolerance, women’s rights and economic development. The US would strive to achieve these “mutual interests”—“the world we seek”—together with the peoples of the Middle East (Obama 2009a). These words fit with Obama’s broader worldview. The President harboured a belief that, in the grander scheme of things, human agency could “through bold yet pragmatic action [. . .] bend the arc of history towards justice and towards progress” (Obama 2010a; cf. Goldberg 2016; Graham 2015). However, the basis of America’s role in steering the course of history should be altered. Instead of embracing its preponderant power position in the international system as an invitation to remake the world in its own image in the vein of the Bush administration, under Obama’s tutelage the US would strive to lead by example. This meant exhibiting a modicum of humility for past mistakes, refraining from imposing a form of government upon other states, and co-opting allies and partners to achieve a more sustainable order (Obama 2009b). In short, these tenets initially suggested a move towards a thinner understanding of liberal hegemony. Such reflexivity led Obama’s critics to argue that the administration was downgrading America’s commitment to democracy promotion (Muravchik 2009). However, upon closer inspection, the President’s preferred logic for achieving order in the Middle East through democratic reforms did not fundamentally differ from 8 Obama’s speechwriter Ben Rhodes (2018: 51–61) provides an insider account of drafting the Cairo Speech. He describes the process of constructing the narrative to suit President Obama’s wishes against the backdrop of bureaucratic inertia as well as pressure from interest groups and even US allies.

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that preached by the younger Bush, especially in the later years of his presidency. The US would continue its commitment to “relentlessly confront violent extremists who pose a grave threat to our security”, although it would now pursue this course more in keeping with its principles. This meant forsaking the use of enhanced interrogation techniques and a (premature) promise to close down the prison facility at Guantanamo Bay (Obama 2009a).9 The US would also retain “an unyielding belief” in the universality of a set of values, including “the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose”. With regard to maintaining confidence in the ability of these liberal ideals to enhance order, and reminiscent of his predecessor, Obama stated: “governments that protect these rights are ultimately more stable, successful and secure” (Obama 2009a). Similarly, beyond stressing the intrinsic value of democratic and human-rights norms, the administration’s first NSS, published in early 2010, made the instrumental logic behind fostering such principles unambiguously clear: the US had “a strategic interest in ensuring that the social and economic needs and political rights of people in this region [. . .] are met” (Obama 2010b). Thus, in emphasising the inherent universality of American (or Western) values, the Obama administration’s order-building narrative also espoused a thicker conception of liberal hegemony. However, it also signalled that the spectre of disorder was lurking just around the corner.10 In fact, only weeks before the full-scale eruption of the Arab Spring revolutions, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton articulated the Obama administration’s vision to a crowd of regional leaders at the G8-BMENA Forum for the Future in Doha.11 The imperative was to “build stronger partnerships with societies that are on the path to long-term stability and progress”, because “the region’s foundations are sinking into the sand”. She urged economic, social and political reforms to keep “extremist elements” at bay and, linking the regional order to the global level, forewarned that events in the region “will have implications far beyond” (Clinton 2011a, see also 2014: 337–338).

9

The detention facility in Guantanamo Bay remains in operation, with few prospects of closure during Donald J. Trump’s tenure in the White House. 10 The President even issued a Presidential Study Directive (the eleventh of his term) in August 2010 to identify potential “flashpoints” in the region. The classified study reportedly outlined the means by which the United States could nudge its authoritarian allies to undertake reforms before it was too late (Landler 2011; Ignatius 2011). 11 The G8-BMENA (Broader Middle East and North Africa) Forum for the Future was launched in the heyday of the Bush administration’s Freedom Agenda in 2004 to bring together leaders of the G8 (Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States) and countries in the Greater Middle East, as well as civil society actors, to facilitate discussions on reform in the region (see Hassan 2013: 132–133; G8-BMENA Initiative 2013).

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The Heady Days of Revolution The Arab Spring revolutions of 2011 swiftly shattered any illusions of a managed transition in the Middle East through American prodding of authoritarian allies towards much-needed reforms. The case of Egypt is particularly instructive in illustrating the dilemmas that the Arab Spring presented for the Obama administration. The protests against Hosni Mubarak’s rule began on 25 January 2011, dubbed the “day of rage”, and swiftly ballooned into massive unrest replete with violent clashes between protesters and the regime’s security forces. From the outset the Obama administration was torn between two courses of action, which also diverged in terms of the means the US should adopt to help in restoring, building and sustaining order in Egypt and the region at large. There were differences between the “old guard” in the administration, advocating a more incremental approach, and voices in Obama’s National Security Staff who wanted him to take a clear stand on the side of the demonstrators. The former—most notably Vice President Joe Biden, Clinton, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and National Security Advisor Tom Donilon—remained convinced that an “orderly transition” with a gradual and graceful exit for Mubarak would ensure the requisite level of stability both in the country and in the region at large. As Clinton (2014: 345) recounts in her memoirs: “Those of us who favored the stodgy-sounding ‘orderly transition’ position were concerned that the only organized forces after Mubarak were the Muslim Brotherhood and the military”. The latter—including Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough and Assistant to the President for Homeland Security John Brennan—pressed Obama to opt for the “right side of history” by throwing in America’s lot with the demonstrators (Clinton 2014: 343–344; Gates 2014: 504–507). President Obama (2011a) ultimately insisted, on February 1, that a “meaningful” and “orderly” transition encompassing “a broad spectrum of Egyptian voices and opposition parties” should begin right away with the goal of holding free elections and establishing a government representative of the “aspirations of the Egyptian people”. Although he did not explicitly call on Mubarak to step down immediately—Obama (2011a) even stressed that “it is not the role of any other country to determine Egypt’s leaders”—the declaration has been widely interpreted as a cut-off point (Lizza 2011; Clinton 2014: 343–344; Gates 2014: 506–507). As far as the US President was concerned, Hosni Mubarak could no longer be the legitimate interlocutor for forging a future for Egypt or, as had previously been the case, a trustworthy partner in maintaining order in the MENA. Greeting Mubarak’s eventual departure on February 11, Obama rehearsed a notion utilised on numerous occasions during his presidency. He maintained that the peaceful demonstrators had bent the “arc of history” towards justice through “the moral force of nonviolence” (Obama 2011c). In his rhetoric the President thus placed the US on what, at the time at least, seemed to be the right side of events in embracing the calls of protesters for change (Obama 2011d). In the same breath, however, he implied that the US had put its faith in the Egyptian military (Obama 2011c). The army became the revolution’s de facto

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caretaker in the shape of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), tasked with seeing through a transition, so the Americans hoped, to “genuine democracy” (Obama 2011b). This idea proliferated in US documents vis-à-vis Egypt and the region at large in the aftermath of the 2011 revolutions. The narrative in Obama’s keynote speech on US reaction to the Arab Spring and measures for going forward in May 2011 thus remained similar to that of the 2009 address in Cairo. We look forward to working with all who embrace genuine and inclusive democracy. What we will oppose is an attempt by any group to restrict the rights of others, and to hold power through coercion and not consent. Because democracy depends not only on elections, but also strong and accountable institutions, and the respect for the rights of minorities. (Obama 2011e, emphasis added)

Although Obama (2011e) warned that “hardship always accompanies a season of hope”, he retained his strong belief in the progress of history towards a higher moral plane: “after decades of accepting the world as it is in the region, we have a chance to pursue the world as it should be”. The US would not shirk from its responsibility to “stand squarely on the side of those who are reaching for their rights, knowing that their success will bring about a world that is more peaceful, more stable, and more just” (Obama 2011e). Accordingly, order in the new Middle East would be forged by its new stock of legitimate democratically elected leaders, and the process would remain in the “hands of the people”, respectful of the indigenous nature of the revolutionary processes that were unfolding. The role of the US would thus be to act as a benevolent friend in need.12 In fact, the administration clung to this narrative even as the transition to democracy in Egypt under the guidance of the SCAF stalled, and dark clouds appeared in the region more broadly. The US continued to urge “a fundamental solution, devised by Egyptians, which is consistent with universal principles” (Office of the Press Secretary 2011). The Obama team even resisted calls from within Congress and civil society to halt the flow of military aid to Egypt and thus impose conditionality on the interim authorities (Nuland 2012). This was the case despite frequent violent crackdowns on protesters (Mühlberger 2015: 12–13), as well as a clampdown on civil-society organisations that saw American NGO workers stand trial in Egypt in early 2012 for “manipulating the Egyptian political process” (Kirkpatrick 2012). The US also maintained that it would judge Islamist political parties not “by the names they call themselves” but “by how they behave” (Nuland 2011). As the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party triumphed, first in the elections for the two chambers of the Egyptian Parliament—the People’s Assembly and the Shura Council in late 2011 and early 2012, respectively—the US commended the authorities for “important steps toward fulfilling the promise of Egypt’s revolution, which has inspired the world” (Office of the Press Secretary 2012a). In their public forays the Obama administration floated the idea that democracies—even those that disagreed with the US on key policy issues—would make reliable allies over the

In Obama’s (2011e) words: “If you take the risks that reform entails, you will have the full support of the United States”. 12

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long haul. In Secretary Clinton’s (2011b) view: “it is no coincidence that our closest allies—from Britain to South Korea—are democracies [. . .] as the fall of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt made clear, the enduring cooperation we seek will be difficult to sustain without democratic legitimacy and public consent”.

The Morsi Interregnum and the Al-Sisi Backlash When Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, won the presidency in June 2012, the US continued to maintain that he would need to be given the benefit of the doubt as the first freely-elected president of the country (Office of the Press Secretary 2012b). However, the Obama administration was clearly wary of the direction the Egyptian transition had taken, and incessantly reminded the new Egyptian leadership of the need to retain the building blocks of the “old” order in the Middle East. These included Egypt’s commitment to regional stability through adherence to the 1979 Peace Treaty with Israel, and to the Mubarak-era policy of preventing Hamas from acquiring weapons via Egypt’s territory (Obama 2013a). Such fears were heightened when Morsi issued a declaration in August 2012 that granted him broad legislative and executive powers, and purged the top brass of the military in an attempt to side-line the army—the SCAF had sought to maintain its grip on power and to curb the President’s authority a month earlier. With a constitutional crisis and unrest brewing in the country, Morsi assumed further powers in November 2012. In an attempt to placate mounting criticism and unrest he agreed to curb some of these powers, but forced a referendum on a contested constitutional draft in December 2012. It thus appeared to his critics that the President was nudging the country towards an Islamist dictatorship rather than a genuine democracy (Balanga 2016: 232–233). US reactions included calls for a “broader consensus”, “genuine consultation and compromise” and restraint from violence to ensure that the promise of the 25 January Revolution be met, but at the same time the Obama administration tried its best not to take sides in Egypt’s domestic political contest (Ventrell 2012). Meanwhile, the Americans continued to stress the need for implementing economic reforms to secure IMF support for Egypt’s economic woes—restructuring on terms promoted by Western-backed IFIs would create the prerequisites for a sustainable order (Kerry 2013). Amidst widespread protests against Morsi’s rule, the military took power under the leadership of Abdelfattah al-Sisi in June 2013. Supporters hailed the army’s intervention as a revolution, whereas detractors referred to it as a full-fledged military coup. The heady summer of 2013, together with a violent crackdown on Muslim Brotherhood supporters and the arrest of the group’s leadership (Morsi included), put any remaining visions of democratic transition in Egypt in the freezer. The US initially responded to the turn of events with criticism, but refrained from using the term military coup: that would have had adverse repercussions for America’s long-running relationship with the Egyptian military and the maintenance of regional security and stability (David 2016: 51–52; Balanga 2016: 233–238).

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However, in light of the violent crackdown, the Obama administration made the decision to freeze military cooperation with Egypt (Obama 2013b; Psaki 2013). Speaking at the UN later that year, Obama (2013c) continued to stress that it was not America’s place to “choose sides” or to pass judgment on who was leading Egypt, and that it should rather “encourage a government that legitimately reflects the will of the Egyptian people” for “true democracy”. The subtext of the UN remarks was clear, however. As had been the case during the George W. Bush administration towards the end of the second term, it became apparent that US involvement with Egypt in the future would yet again be built on a tenuous marriage between short-term strategic expediency and the long-term (rhetorical) goal of achieving democratic governance. [G]oing forward, the United States will maintain a constructive relationship with the Interim Government that promotes core interests like the Camp David Accords and counterterrorism. [. . .] [O]ur approach to Egypt reflects a larger point: The United States will at times work with Governments that do not meet, at least in our view, the highest international expectations, but who work with us on our core interests. Nevertheless, we will not stop asserting principles that are consistent with our ideals [. . .] [W]hile we recognize that our influence will at times be limited, although we will be wary of efforts to impose democracy through military force, and although we will at times be accused of hypocrisy and inconsistency, we will be engaged in the region for the long haul. For the hard work of forging freedom and democracy is the task of a generation. (Obama 2013c)

In fact, despite its distaste for the hard-line tactics espoused by Egypt’s President al-Sisi—who consolidated his rule by cracking down on both the Islamist and liberal opposition, and legitimised his presidency by holding a pro forma election in 2014—by 2015 the Obama administration had released its hold on key components of Egypt’s military aid. The US justified this move in light of “the shared challenges to U.S. and Egyptian interests in an unstable region, consistent with the longstanding strategic partnership between our two countries” (Obama 2015b). However, in an apparent attempt to maintain a modicum of conditionality, the US announced that it would restructure Egypt’s military aid, which had traditionally been used to provide largescale conventional military equipment for territorial defence. From 2018 onwards, Foreign Military Financing (FMF) would be steered towards “counterterrorism, border security, Sinai security, and maritime security” (Sharp 2016: 12). In the 2015 Security Strategy, the Obama administration termed the post-Arab Spring situation in the MENA region a “generational struggle” (Obama 2015a: 5). The term is indicative of the timeframe in which the region’s prospects for achieving a sustainable order were viewed: a “process [which] will continue to be combustible, especially in societies where religious extremists take root, or rulers reject democratic reforms, exploit their economies, and crush civil society” (5). Furthermore, “[s]tability and peace in the Middle East and North Africa also requires reducing the underlying causes of conflict” (26), which included Iran’s nuclear programme, the Israel-Palestine conflict and Sunni-Shi’a sectarian tensions. In terms of long-term order-building, the strategy envisioned a role for the US not as a driver, but as a facilitator of stabilisation and change on a country-by-country basis. In the case of Egypt, it merely pledged to “maintain strategic cooperation [. . .] to respond to shared security threats, while broadening our partnership and encouraging progress toward

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restoration of democratic institutions” (26). The short-term need for stability had again triumphed over noble visions.

Donald J. Trump: A Return to Acknowledging Authoritarian Stability On the night of his improbable election victory, Donald J. Trump received a laudatory phone call from Egyptian President al-Sisi, who duly claimed to have been the first world leader to congratulate the new President-elect (Arraf 2016). The underlying message of the call was not lost on foreign-policy pundits: the expectation was that America’s traditional authoritarian allies in the Middle East would have a much easier ride fostering their relationship with the US when Trump assumed the reins in the White House. By most accounts, Donald Trump has delivered, especially on the rhetorical level. In keeping with the America First trope, the Trump administration, unlike its predecessors, views the world in zero-sum terms, claiming to embrace: “a clear-eyed outlook that the world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage” (McMaster and Cohn 2017; see also Trump 2017c; US Department of Defense 2018). The President’s concomitant disdain for the institutions of the liberal international order is well documented—Trump is no believer in a liberal brand of US hegemony in either the thin or the thick sense (cf. Ikenberry 2017; Nye 2017; Patrick 2017; Posen 2018), as epitomised by his walking away from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Paris climate agreement and the Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA; Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action). A corollary of this worldview is that the administration—and especially Trump himself—appear to give short shrift to valuebased concerns, human rights and democracy promotion in particular (Margon 2018). Now-ousted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (2017) admitted as much in remarks he gave at the State Department, arguing that the promotion of values could constitute “obstacles to our ability to advance our national security interests, our economic interests”. In terms of America’s order-building narrative vis-à-vis the Middle East, this worldview has tangible implications. Trump (2017b) articulated a gloomy picture of a dangerous world in his address to a group of Arab leaders in Riyadh in May 2017, a world in which America and its allies “must be united in pursuing the one goal that transcends every other consideration [. . .] to conquer extremism and vanquish the forces of terrorism”. Speaking of the Middle East, Trump told a tragic tale of “a humanitarian and security disaster [. . .] spreading across the planet” (Trump 2017b). He attributed this malaise to extremist ideology: [The people of the Middle East] seek great futures to build, great national projects to join, and a place for their families to call home. But this untapped potential, this tremendous cause for optimism, is held at bay by bloodshed and terror. There can be no coexistence with this violence. (Trump 2017b)

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The speech contained a deceptively simple formula for achieving a peaceful Middle East and stopping migration flows out of the region: “stamping out” extremism and dealing with Iran, which in Trump’s assessment was “responsible for so much instability in the region” (Trump 2017b).13 Trump also reminded his audience of regional dignitaries that “we [the US] are not here to tell other people how to live, what to do, who to be, or how to worship [. . .] we are here to offer partnership—based on shared interests and values—to pursue a better future for us all” (Trump 2017b). However, unlike Obama’s Cairo Speech, Trump’s address in Riyadh contained no direct mention of either democracy or human rights (although he did touch on economic development, equality and religious tolerance). In line with such omissions, the National Security Strategy published in December 2017 framed the core interests of the administration in the MENA in terms familiar from a bygone era: [A] Middle East that is not a safe haven or breeding ground for jihadist terrorists, not dominated by any power hostile to the United States, and that contributes to a stable global energy market. (Trump 2017c: 48)

Thus presented, the Trump administration is harking back to pre-9/11 days when America’s engagement with the region was underpinned by containment, maintaining Israeli security and ensuring a steady flow of energy, with less regard for how states in the region, especially America’s Arab allies, decided to govern themselves. [N]either aspirations for democratic transformation nor disengagement can insulate us from the region’s problems. We must be realistic about our expectations for the region without allowing pessimism to obscure our interests or vision for a modern Middle East. [. . .] Encouraging political stability and sustainable prosperity would contribute to dampening the conditions that fuel sectarian grievances. [. . .] By revitalizing partnerships with reformminded nations and encouraging cooperation among partners in the region, the United States can promote stability and a balance of power that favors U.S. interests. (Trump 2017c: 48)

This commitment to political stability and sustainable prosperity has been reflected in the administration’s narrative vis-à-vis Egypt. When al-Sisi visited the White House in April 2017—a moment of political validation for the Egyptian strongman, who had been persona non grata in Washington during the last years of Obama’s tenure—Trump lauded lavish praise on the Egyptian premier for having “done a fantastic job in a very difficult situation” (Trump 2017a). During his first visit to the Middle East as Vice President in late January 2018, Mike Pence laid out the role US envisions for Egypt in the region in the years ahead, based on mutual economic and security interests. After a time where our countries seemed to be drifting apart in the last year, thanks to your leadership and the relationship that you and President Trump has [sic] forged, we believe the ties between Egypt and the United States have never been stronger. We are united not just in commerce and in prosperity, but most importantly, in a commitment to security. We stand shoulder-to-shoulder with you in Egypt in the fight against terrorism. (Pence 2018a)

The administration regards Iran as “the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism”, see Trump (2017c: 49).

13

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Once again, the Vice President made no mention of either the dire human-rights situation in Egypt or the need to retain the promise of the 2011 revolution and move towards democratic governance, although he did claim to have addressed Egypt’s NGO legislation and religious freedom in conversations with the Egyptian premier (Pence 2018b). However, the Egyptian case also serves as a microcosm of Trump’s chaotic approach to foreign policy: beyond the laudatory narrative, it has assumed almost schizophrenic undertones. To illustrate, when Trump (2018) controversially congratulated al-Sisi on his victory in a rigged presidential election in April 2018,14 the State Department struck a different tone. Its statement noted “constraints on freedoms of expression and association in the run-up to the elections”, and stressed the need for Egypt’s rulers “to encourage a broadening of opportunities for political participation for Egyptians, and emphasize the importance of the protection of human rights and the vital role of civil society in Egypt” (Nauert 2018). The State Department had actually announced already in August 2017 that the US would withhold $260.7 million of Egypt’s $1.3 billion FMF total for the Fiscal Year (FY) 2017, citing concerns over human rights, democracy, restrictions on NGOs and Egypt’s dealings with North Korea.15 Despite this, the FY 2018 Appropriations Act signed by President Trump retains the traditional $1.3 billion tally for Egypt’s military aid, although $300 million of this has been made conditional upon progress in human rights and democracy, at the behest of Congress (Sharp 2018: 15–17; Kotb 2018). Far from being indicative of a preference by the Trump administration to press for democratic reforms or human rights, such dissonance could be read as yet another manifestation of its well-documented internal dysfunction—and of competing narratives clashing within (and between) government bureaucracies and the legislature. At present, it seems that the building blocks of democracy are simply a non-factor in the Trump administration’s vision of a stable order in the Middle East. The first year and a half of the Trump Presidency, therefore, attest to the fact that the new administration has accepted, in word and deed, that pursuing US interests in the region necessitates leaving values on the back burner.

14

Al-Sisi won 97% of the vote. The stated rationale for withholding $195 million was that the administration could not certify – as required by law – that Egypt was making progress in human rights and democracy. An additional $65.7 million was reduced from the tally due to concerns regarding the country’s restrictive NGO laws and relationship with North Korea. It also appears that the Trump administration will retain Obama’s restructuring of the military aid, at least for the time being (Sharp 2018: 15–17). 15

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Concluding Thoughts: Narratives of Order, Hegemony and Hypocrisy From the standpoint of the United States, hopes for building a more sustainable order in the Middle East have been dashed time and again. Behind this dynamic lurks a mix of misinformed American foreign-policy agency bred in part by domestic political and cultural constraints,16 as well as developments that on the surface might appear to be indigenous to the region, but are inescapably intertwined with the long history of involvement by external powers (Hamid 2015). The above analysis, spanning three presidential administrations, attests to the difficulty that the US has had in matching practices of order-maintenance with order-building narratives. The order-building narratives of the George W. Bush and Obama administrations should be understood within a broader framework as attempts to justify the pursuit of liberal hegemony in the Middle East. However, commitment to this approach has materialised predominantly on the level of narrative. As a guiding premise of policy practice, its application has been sporadic at best. In fact, the situation was inherently paradoxical during the Bush and Obama presidencies: insofar as the purpose of the order-building narratives they espoused was to legitimise their respective visions of order, which would then be enacted by the administrations in policy, these visions were haphazardly pursued—so much so that few bought the story either domestically or internationally.17 The reception of order-building narratives is thus closely tied to the different means the administrations use to enact policies, as well as to the political necessity of reacting to events, some of which remain—at least partly—beyond the control of the US. The Bush administration, for instance, was lambasted by the international community for the Iraq War, and for its misinformed approach in rebuilding that country. The reception of the Freedom Agenda was, likewise, one of bafflement and dismay among US allies in the region. In the case of Egypt, the Bush administration received the cold shoulder from Mubarak’s regime when it pressed the strongman for reform, but at the same time American attempts to stimulate Egyptian civil society were viewed with suspicion by the very reform-minded groups that the US was meant to be supporting (Cook 2012: 254–271). As for Barack Obama’s reaction to the 25 January Revolution in 2011, his team managed to anger Mubarak holdovers (many of whom remained in positions of power in the interim government and SCAF) as well as protesters calling for change. The former were offended that the US would forsake a faithful ally of nearly three decades, the latter were adamant that the administration had vacillated and not taken a clear enough stand in favour of the demonstrators (Lizza 2011; Clinton 2014: 16

On the manner in which American foreign-policy ambition and implementation remain irredeemably mismatched, see Dueck (2006). 17 For an in-depth discussion on paradoxes of US foreign policy in the Middle East, see Sinkkonen (2015, chap. 8).

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344–347). When American-funded NGOs were in the throes of an arbitrary criminal investigation in the aftermath of the 2011 revolution, US attempts to resolve the situation were perceived as meddling in the Egyptian political process, not only on the part of the interim rulers, but reportedly also by some of the democracy activists the US pledged to defend (El-Din 2011). Similarly, both sides in the struggle between Morsi and the military in Egypt blamed the US for picking sides when the administration, by its own admission at least, tried to avoid doing so in the first place (Balanga 2016: 236–238). Moreover, it appears that many people in the American foreign-policy-making community regard the US approach towards the Middle East in the post-9/11 era as an abject failure. While the debate over Bush’s misinformed policies in Iraq rages on (Deudney and Ikenberry 2017),18 dismissals of Obama’s record also abound. Two prominent critics from the Republican mainstream, Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, maintained that “the failure of the Obama administration to use our influence to shape events [. . .] has only diminished our credibility, limited our influence and constrained our policy options” (Lengell 2013). Even administration insiders ultimately became dismayed. As Obama advisor Ben Rhodes described the situation in Egypt in 2016, “[w]e’re in that sweet spot where everyone is pissed off at us” (Crowley 2016). The perceived inability of the administration to prod the Egyptian army towards meaningful reforms, both before and after Mohamed Morsi’s ouster, also led one scholar to highlight that “[t]he notion of neutrality, for a country as powerful as the United States, is illusory” (Hamid 2015). Therefore, by espousing and narrating a liberal-hegemonic approach to the region with faith in democratic idea(l)s as the common denominator, both the Bush and Obama administrations’ order-building narratives have been relatively easy to dismiss as hypocritical and out of touch with the regional reality (cf. Finnemore 2009). The perceived discrepancy between how America professes its values and the way it conducts itself towards Egypt and the region at large has remained stark, even in the post-Arab Spring frame. Studies on public opinion report that populaces in the region view America as not “practising what it preaches”, which engenders a further sense of “frustrated expectations” (Lynch 2007: 203; Telhami 2013: 113). The Trump administration has recently offered its own “solution” to this Catch22 puzzle by focusing unabashedly on US security interests as the guiding light in US global engagement, reflecting an America First foreign policy. The Trump team contends that it has raised human-rights and democracy issues in private (Sevastopulo and Saleh 2017), but be that as it may, these concerns are hardly present in its order-building narrative vis-à-vis the Middle East and Egypt. It has recently been argued that Trump’s foreign policy is moving the US from a consensus on the pursuit of liberal hegemony towards illiberal hegemony (Posen 2018). This

18

See also the recent panel at the 59th Annual Convention of the International Studies Association (ISA) in San Francisco, 4 April 2018, entitled “Realism, Liberalism and the Ideological Origins of the Iraq War” at https://www.isanet.org/Conferences/San-Francisco-2018/Program

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claim warrants serious consideration. Perhaps Trump’s order-building narrative signals a return to a pre-9/11 policy, according to which US attainment in the region is simply hegemonic without liberal overtones in the thin or thick sense (cf. Cook 2018). In this manner, the Trump administration appears to be doing away with a paramount hypocrisy in US foreign policy vis-à-vis the Middle East: it neither preaches a narrative nor practices an approach that ties American forays in the region to the realisation of a democratic future. Yet, it is worth questioning whether such an approach is, in the end, either normatively desirable or strategically sustainable. Reverting to an age-old approach according to which America’s hegemonic designs trump the calls of the region’s populaces for a better tomorrow does not exorcise the spectre of disorder: at most it might muffle it in the short term. Therefore, as a best-case scenario, the Trump administration could opt for a role that maintains a tenuous equilibrium between different power centres in the region, and ties America into these bargains as a guarantor in the thin sense of liberal hegemony. However, as Trump’s recent forays into the Iran nuclear deal, the Middle East Peace Process and the spat between Qatar and the other Gulf monarchies attest (Simpson 2018; Walt 2017; Wright 2018), the US looks unlikely to play the role of a minimalist provider of regional public goods, order included, in the immediate future.

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The European Union’s Epic Conceptualisations of the Southern Neighbourhood: A Narratological Take on the Mediterranean Story Wolfgang Mühlberger

Je les voyais comme je n’ai jamais vu personne et pas un détail de leurs visages ou de leurs habits m’échappait. Pourtant je ne les entendais pas et j’avais peine à croire à leur réalité. Albert Camus, L’étranger “I saw them as I had never seen anyone before and no detail of their faces or clothes escaped my attention. Yet I didn’t hear them and I could hardly believe in their existence.” (Engl.) Nicht die Völker Europas sind senil - sondern nur ihr politisches System. Dessen radikale Änderung kann und muss zur vollen Heilung des kranken Erdteiles führen. Richard N. Coudenhove-Kalergi, Pan-Europa “It is not the European people who are senile—only their political system. Its radical change can and must lead to a full recovery of the sick continent.” (Engl.)

Projecting European Order: The Rhetorical Playing Field When the French pied-noir Camus wrote the above mentioned lines in the late 1920s, the three northern departments of Algeria were an integral administrative part of metropolitan France, as they still were in 1951 at the foundation of the EU’s precursor organisation, the European Community for Steel and Coal (ECSC). In this sense, the earliest stages of European integration included a truly transMediterranean component, which eventually came to an end with the Algerian war of independence (1954–62) and the successful dissociation of the North-African state from the former colonial power. W. Mühlberger (*) The Finnish Institute of International Affairs, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: wolfgang.muehlberger@fiia.fi © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 W. Mühlberger, T. Alaranta (eds.), Political Narratives in the Middle East and North Africa, Perspectives on Development in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35217-2_9

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This chapter is about the European Union’s ability to project its policies and principles abroad, and in particular how this endeavour is reflected on the semantic level in the interplay between idealised order conceptions and practical policy considerations. More specifically, the aim is to shed light on the question of whether the EU has developed a full-fledged, cross-institutional foreign-policy narrative or if, as the narratological approach1 implies, it basically makes use of its internal metanarrative of peaceful integration for the purposes of external projection. A further issue that is addressed is how the European Union attempts to justify its foreignpolicy activities by discursive means—with a story that not only provides for its internal legitimisation as an actor but equally rests on external plausibility. In that Europe incorporates the twin dimensions of idea and territory, the problem of the European order is manifest in its dealings with the Non-Member States along its periphery.2 Conceived of as a project based on values and an integrative mechanism, it shows a strong propensity to project a universal message. In the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean (SEM), the European Union grapples with the instability and unpredictability of its vicinity on the practical policy level as well as on the prescriptive discursive level. Political dialogues, material incentives and negotiations of trade agreements represent central features of the former, whereas the ideal of external ‘Europeanisation’ is equally reflected in the rhetorical dimension of the EU’s ‘external action’, notably in the construction of a so-called ‘Mediterranean’ as part of the framing of the Southern vicinity. Imbued by its own success over several decades, the EU considers itself a template in terms not only of values, norms and principles, but also of more down-to-earth policy practice. By projecting its tested model of regional integration, democratisation and peaceful co-existence, it effectively seeks to stabilise the countries on its South-eastern flank, portraying the Middle East and North Africa as a deficient ‘neighbourhood’ and virtually reconstructing it in a self-referential manner. However, this proposed European ordering has been met with mixed levels of enthusiasm and contestation in its geographic proximity. In fact, the ruling Arab elites, who tend to interpret such a socio-political ideal as a threat to their regimesurvival strategies (Schlumberger 2011), tend to engage in stonewalling tactics against the diffusion of the European foundational narrative to their countries. The arguments they use to counter the European proposals range from post-colonial discourse (hegemony, interference) to more technical questions of ownership and the

For a detailed discussion on political narratives refer to Chap. 1 in this volume, ‘Introduction: The Power of Narratives in Political Contexts’. 2 From the early pan-European thinkers onwards, the European question has basically been formulated as one concerning the relationship among European nations: “Die Europäische Frage lautet:, Kann Europa in seiner politischen und wirtschaftlichen Zersplitterung seinen Frieden und seine Selbständigkeit den wachsenden außereuropäischen Weltmächten gegenüber wahren - oder ist es gezwungen, sich zur Rettung seiner Existenz zu einem Staatenbunde zu organisieren?” Coudenhove-Kalergi 1923, Pan-Europa. 1

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rejection of conditionality. The relative vagueness of concepts used by the EU such as ‘Mediterranean’, ‘neighbourhood’ and ‘partnership’ is not helpful either in terms of securing a positive reception of the Union’s foreign-policy discourses or delineating a coherent narrative. In practice, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is neither a homogenous nor a contiguous region. Nor are the EU’s intentions clearly formulated, even though its practical preference for and prioritisation of stability, in other words of an authoritarian status quo enabling a modicum of predictability versus political reform and hence uncertain outcomes, has become more pronounced since the Arab upheavals starting in late 2010 (Börzel and van Hüllen 2014; Schumacher 2015; Miskimmon 2017). Two phenomena are linked to the EU’s motivation for getting structurally involved in foreign policy. On the one hand, polls indicate that European citizens would like the EU to have a stronger role in international affairs (Nitoiu 2013: 245). According to surveys conducted by the Bertelsmann Foundation3 and Pew Research, three quarters of the respondents wish to see the EU play a more active role in global affairs, a figure that, paradoxically, is in contrast with the negative assessment of its actual role.4 In relation to the Middle East and North Africa, these figures seem to reflect a desire that is motivated by perceptions of increased threat (linked to jihadism and uncontrolled migration), as well as the assumed capacity of the EU to be more effective than its individual member states and a potentially more capable player in countering the negative externalities of increased instability in the SEM. On the other hand, foreign-policy involvement and related narratives may serve to enhance internal legitimisation (Biegon 2012; Nitoiu 2013: 241). Ideally conceived of as a unitary policy field, foreign-policy formulation in the EU remains a cumbersome and time-consuming process involving multiple internal agents and institutional layers. This hybridity is attributable to the organic growth of multiple EU institutions that assumed their own foreign-policy-related responsibilities over time (Henökl and Stemberger 2016: 229). The Lisbon treaty, which entered into force in 2009, purported to introduce an element of co-ordination at the top of this structure, without reducing the numerous agents involved in the process. The multinational and bureaucratic organisation of the EU complicates foreign-policy decision-making, including in the field of strategic communication. The high degree of compartmentalisation within the Union’s bureaucracy created several nodes with foreign-policy agendas, such as the Commission and various Directorate Generals. At the same time, numerous policy mechanisms and instruments were introduced to enhance coordination, set priorities, and to finance and

3 See: A Source of Stability? German and European public opinion in times of political polarisation, https://eupinions.eu/de/graphics/data-infographic/eupidata/Rsmbsteupidata/should-the-eu-play-amore-active-role-in-global-affairs-160/ 4 Pew Research Center, Key findings on how Europeans see their place in the world, 13 June, https:// www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/06/13/key-findings-europe/

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implement policies. With the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) having been conceived to tackle relations beyond the enlargement process, the CFSP/CSDP has a distinct security angle based on missions and operations. Most recently, the European Union Externa Action Service (EEAS) has emerged as a diplomatic body to facilitate action in line with the core interests of the Union and its member states. The development and formulation of foreign policy also constitute a strange paradox in the EU context. Deeper integration and successful enlargement have been the major internal drivers of foreign policy development, in other words the necessity to act on the external relations level. “[I]t is the very success of the EU enlargement that led to many of the problems the Union faces today” (Harris 2019: 39). Reaching the geographical limits of the European project effectively compelled the Union to formulate clearer positions (Harris 2019: 39). In the absence of the necessary foreign-policy structures, though, fluid concepts such as ‘Mediterranean’ have emerged as the favourite framing devices, allowing multiple, often diverging member-state positions to be subsumed. Furthermore, the EU is increasingly competing with other external actors active in the SEM, including with their (counter-) narratives. In particular, Russia (Mühlberger and Siddi 2019) and China have (re-) emerged as influential political players in MENA, both operating strongly on the discursive and narrative levels, challenging the proposed European order.5 In other words, the internal administrative complexity compounded by the multiple diverging interests of the member states and their established bilateral ties, not to mention the competing external actors, have not been helpful in galvanising a unitary foreign-policy line. Rather, several specific thematic discourses have emerged (Nitoiu 2013; Schumacher 2015; Miskimmon 2017) that, even in combination, cannot exert the significant pull of a plausible narrative and lack the interlinkages necessary to build a cohesive plot.6 For this reason, recourse is taken to the European foundational meta-narrative of an exemplary, peaceful and economically striving society of states to legitimise the necessity for foreign-policy action, internally and externally. Della Sala conceptualises this phenomenon from a hierarchical perspective: whereas he describes the EU’s foundational master-narrative as primary, its normative implications establish a derivative myth (sic), which in turn justifies EU action on its own behalf in the external realm (Della Sala 2010: 6). Foreign policy in strategic communication is not limited to its discursive inception, challenging as it may be in the EU context. It is not only the construction but also both the methods of dissemination and the reception of accounts of external action that play essential roles in the projection of foreign-policy themes (see Miskimmon et al. 2013). In the context of the EU it is therefore imperative to

5

See also the chapters by Leonid Issaev/Alissa Shishkina and Christina Lin in this volume. Nitoiu (2013) identifies five distinct discourses, which he refers to as ‘narratives’: the EU as a peace promoter, democratisation, good neighbourliness, security and well-being.

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understand the processes, actors and objectives involved on these three levels of narrative communication. The incremental increase in relevance of the EU on the foreign-policy level has also produced a broad institutional mix involved in the conception and formulation of foreign policy, including associated stories. In a similar fashion, their dissemination via EU documents (e.g. ESS 2003; ENP review 2015; Global Strategy, 2016; EP 2019) and speeches (cf. Ferroro-Waldner 2005 & 2007; Ashton 2010; Barroso 2013; Hahn 2015) is shaped by the considerable numbers of contributing actors. Furthermore, beyond the intricacies involved at the first two stages of this intentional, goal-driven communication process, the most complexity is probably on the reception level. Here, there is a basic cleavage in terms of audiences: whereas EU citizens represent the primary targets within the EU context, recipients of the EU’s foreign-policy discourses in the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean (SEM) include both political elites and populations. Whereas authoritarian leaders are most apprehensive of the EU’s insistence on democratisation and human-rights standards, and its conditionality, going as far as portraying these as ‘new colonialism’ to justify their outright rejection, populations in the SEM have been less dismissive, considering the European Union a credible role model for freedom (Dandashly 2018: 110). From this angle, the assertion of the EU’s ‘loss of credibility’ amongst SEM polities requires far more empirical underpinning, as polls tend to indicate otherwise (European Institute of the Mediterranean 2018; Open Neighbourhood 2017). In terms of the narratological approach of the present enquiry, the use by the EU of its grand foundational narrative for foreign-policy purposes also carries romantic undertones (see Kuusisto 2018). A theme of epic dimension, with a hero proposing to save his vicinity if the neighbours become more like him and thereby contribute to strengthening the ideal European order, runs through the European story. What is often referred to as ‘normative’ (Diez 2005) in the EU’s foreign policy corresponds, in effect, to the characteristics of a romance when considered from the angle of narrative discourse. Shaped by a particular genesis, the EU has established itself as the torchbearer of its own ‘EUtopian’ (Nicolaidis and Howse 2002) account. Yet the assessment of narrative plausibility is not only contingent on cultural and geographic conditions but is equally influenced by the material underpinnings of political narratives. Hence, the credibility of a European order model for external audiences depends on a range of elements, the coordination of which can hardly be realised, particularly in the context of the EU’s complex administrative setting (see Koschorke 2016).

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The Post-Modern Vision of Charlemagne: A European Master Narrative7 The account of the European Community’s founding accentuates the self-image of a peaceful unification of the continent’s many nations, repeatedly locked in strife8 over continental and external hegemony.9 This newfound constructive coexistence among previous foes, dubbed ‘integration’ in the technocratic jargon of the Union, has been portrayed as an ideal type of transnational governance—and, somehow, the victim of its own success, an order worthy of all those ready to play by its script. As a consequence of continuous expansion and the eventual reaching of geographical borders, the necessity emerged for the Union to define a foreign-policy line that transcended the bureaucratic management of enlargement.10 Whereas the upholding of multilateralism as a diplomatic principle reflects its own approved and preferred problem-solving mechanism, ‘external action’ and ‘neighbourhood policy’ also encompass a rhetorical communication level. Within this semantic field, the idealised internal story of unification and unity is not neatly distinguished from associated discourses projected to the exterior, such as peacefulness and non-violent conflict resolution (see Schumacher 2015). This lack of distinction reflects the genesis of the union as well as its outbound dimension. Internally, insisting on the European peace project and rhetorically pushing it to the fore could be justified in terms of its broadly positive connotation: it is an attractive and more palatable alternative to the potentially negative story of antinationalism. Furthermore, despite its technocratic-bureaucratic dimension, the pan-European process of transnational, quasi post-Westphalian unification, economic integration and peaceful expansion also has a cosmopolitan flavour, corresponding somewhat to the personal backgrounds of the Union’s founding fathers (in particular Schumann, de Gaspieri, Adenauer and Monnet). However, it remains unclear to what extent these intertwined dimensions of the EU’s metanarrative, transnational peace and cosmopolitanism will capture external audiences,

7 One of the downsides of the linguistic and narrative turn in the social sciences and humanities is the tendency to use the terminology in a loose manner, supposedly identifying an omnipresence of ‘narratives’, whereas most of the texts in question are merely more or less structured discourses, narrations of sorts, and do not meet the basic criteria of narrative proper. For a critical assessment, see Ryan 2007. This chapter follows a classical narratological approach with a focus on the political dimension of narratives, as discussed in the introduction (Chap. 1) of this volume. 8 “A major feature of the history of Europe is the extraordinary weight of suffering [. . .]. Europe is barely emerging from this nightmare.” (Ricoeur 1995: 9). See also Churchill 1946. 9 The historian Timothy Snyder, for instance, advances the hypothesis that the ‘end of empire’ motivated European unification. See: 'Judenplatz 1010: A speech to Europe 2019', http://www. erstestiftung.org/en/timothy-snyder-judenplatz-1010/ 10 The alternative would be to leave foreign policy entirely to the remit of member states; it continues to happen in tandem, despite a tendency to pool sovereignty.

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be they political elites or citizens.11 Similar reservations could be voiced regarding the customary emphasis on shared European values (democracy, human rights and various freedoms) that function as a transnational bond within the Union. The countries of the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean have neither an established history nor a remarkable contemporary presence in this field. Hence, the topos of ‘shared values’ and its recurring mention in official documents and allocutions related to the Southern neighbourhood appears to be a rather abstract invocation, more of a utopian appeal than an ascertainment. Notwithstanding these loosely connected elements of the European story (peace, transnationalism, and value-driven), incremental enlargement via economic integration and political membership has created the need to define a proper foreign policy in order to qualify the thrust of the EU’s external action beyond the question of enlargement proper. Accordingly, all-encompassing umbrella-type polices based on an underlying regional logic (such as the ENP) were developed, and were considered a coherence-promoting instrument for the individual foreign policies of the EU’s member states. Yet, despite the achievements in terms of practical policy, no accompanying trans-national foreign-policy narrative has developed, leaving the semantic field linked to the external dimension mainly to the European Union’s foundational account. With regard to the visibility of political narratives, it is worth pointing out that they tend only to appear at the forefront during episodes of crisis. Whenever the plausibility of a narrative is questioned, awareness of its existence increases, even more so that accepted narratives are also inducing action (Gadinger et al. 2014; Miskimmon et al. 2013). This explains, for instance, the comments made by former EU Commission president Barroso on the need for a ‘new narrative’ (Barroso 2013). Against the backdrop of increased and divisive nationalism, and mindful of younger generations, he pointed to the need for the adaptation and rejuvenation of the EU’s master narrative.12 Although primarily an internal issue touching on EU cohesion, the external reception of a narrative might also be adversely affected under such circumstances, particularly if important elements of the EU grand narrative are used for the purposes of external projection. Effectively, in its foreign policy activities the Union makes ample use of what it supposes to be the vibrancy of its own foundational narrative. Even though this field of activity does not correspond to the basic logic of the European integration process, the rationale behind its use is twofold. Internally the Union needs to justify its external action and foreign-policy activities, and their associated costs, to EU citizens and member states alike. Externally it wishes to offer an attractive story to its partners and neighbours, inviting them to mimic its

11

Open Neighbourhood, a comprehensive, cross-regional poll, published views of MENA citizens about the EU in 2017. See: https://eeas.europa.eu/sites/eeas/files/report_opinion_poll_2017_0.pdf 12 This is very much in line with narrative theory, confirming that plots can be rearranged or partially re-written without altering the overall rationale or meaning, while improving the plausibility of a story. This process is crucial in political narratives such as the EU’s grand narrative.

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conception of the idealised European order. In terms of external communication, the political narrative of the EU’s successful internal association could be considered a foreign-policy soft power instrument for conviction purposes (Diez 2005: 630–632; Pace 2009; Cebeci 2012). This grand narrative of unification on a continental scale, of orderly co-existence and peace side by side, also represents a new type of political and social order, an ordering mechanism sui generis. At the same time, with its implied rapprochement between neighbouring countries, the account carries an inherent foreign-policy component. Here, the most important question concerns the extent to which this is still an open-ended integration process, with potential candidates for membership and geopolitical limitations in place that delineate hard borders. With regard to the MENA, the Turkish exception has not been successful to date, and the entire SEM rim of the EU has been firmly classified as ‘neighbours of Europe’ rather than ‘European neighbours’ (Hadfield 2017: 214). From a narrative perspective, in particular from the viewpoint of plausibility, the still relatively fuzzy geographic borders of the European project (Christiansen, Petito and Tonra 2000) also raise the question of the need to differentiate on the level of the story between potential members on the one hand and those deemed to remaining permanent outliers on the other. The plausibility of a story such as the EU’s foundational myth will be judged differently by different types of neighbours, depending, too, on the elements mobilised for external policy purposes, particularly if the EU compartmentalises the neighbourhood into categories of potential accessibility or exclusion from the wider project. Likewise, if a foreign policy in the Southern neighbourhood were able to deploy a certain transformative potential its narrative framing would require going beyond the logic of accession and expansion (Börzel and van Hüllen 2011). More generally, the contingent nature of the European unification process equally raises the question of its replicability elsewhere, and of whether the global projection of the EU’s grand narrative does justice to these idiosyncrasies. Hence, what is equally at stake in addition to the question of geographical borders when it comes to the semantic level of Europe’s neighbourhood dealings, in particular with the SEM area, are the frontiers of the European model. The European Union developed an umbrella-type story for its integration process, using metaphors to express its transnational character (‘under one roof’, ‘concert of nations’). Yet, compared to traditional national mythologies, the vague and loose story of a contiguous albeit complex European super-structure requires deeper embedding—in other words, its plausibility is at risk. Still in the process of building a distinct transnational identity, post-Westphalian thinking remains on shaky ground, largely driven by material aspects such as a seemingly perennial peace dividend. From a narratological perspective, however, it is not only the performative aspect that is under scrutiny. The fundamental debate revolves around the question of whether (political) narratives constitute or represent reality.13 German narratologist

In line with our explanation in the introductory Chap. 1, we have chosen a ‘radical’ constructivist position, claiming that narratives essentially do construct reality, i.e. fundamentally shape our

13

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Albert Koschorke (2016) contends that the European Union’s unique set-up impedes the emergence of a distinct, “strong” and convincing EU narrative. According to him, its heterogeneous composition, its seemingly borderless nature and its weaker position in the international system explain why the EU is hard to define in terms of actorness within the plot of a story. Nevertheless, it remains unclear why these elements should counter the conception of an over-arching, transnational narrative. His argument makes sense, departing from the assumption that a narrative only works if it reflects something that exists in practice. However, even the many national mythologies of EU member states, as political narratives par excellence, deploy a distinct performative function in building national identities, albeit without necessarily reflecting historical facts in an accurate or objective fashion. Furthermore, following a narratological plot characterisation (cf. Kuusisto 2018), the account of the EU’s foundation corresponds to the romance genre, with a hero coming to the rescue of a needy state and fending off evil. Hence, the EU’s rationale for the explicit and verbalised external projection of its narrative reflects its valuedriven promotion of peaceful integration to safeguard stability. Remarkably though, the hero of the account is not a concrete person but rather an abstract idea, the ideal of peace, realised through a readiness to pool sovereignty and to establish transnational institutions. This idiosyncratic epic dimension of the EU’s convergence narrative is simultaneously a prerequisite, a central feature and the motivation behind the external projection of the utopian ideal.

For Those About to Rock: The European Union and the Non-European Other The extent to which the foundational narrative is still considered plausible, convincing and hence internally activating, and how the sirens’ song of nationalism will further test compatibility with the European project, are not the only concerns: the external potency of the European narrative is also in jeopardy. The outward projection of the EU as a utopian model and as “a gift to the world” (Nicolaidis and Howse 2002: 771), exemplifying how difference can be managed within a normative framework and institutional bodies, requires a positive and welcoming reception amongst the addressees to enable the process of active emulation (idem, 774). However, an Arab world riven by precarious governance and numerous intra- and inter-state conflicts represents an unlikely candidate for emulating the logic of peaceful and negotiated EU integration.

perception thereof. However, this does not exclude the possibility that such an account may also accurately represent hard facts, in line with their semantic representation. The effect of the perceived correspondence (between reality and representation) in a story is on the level of its reception, when it will be judged according to its plausibility, depending on the cultural and epistemic context of the audience.

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The emergence of a distinct European foreign policy has been a multidimensional yet open-ended process. The elements that paved its way can traced back to bureaucratic mechanisms, the ideational shaping of the Union proper as well as the negative perception of a deficient vicinity. In fact, the burgeoning administrative apparatus of the evolving Union was marked by increasing institutional competence and individual capacity related to foreign-policy issues, aspects that were reflected in both the formulation of overarching policies (European Neighbourhood Policy; CFSP; EUGS) and the institutional set-up. Furthermore, inspired by its internal functioning logic and its underlying principles, the Union’s marked turn towards shared values was equally reflected in the formulation of a pronounced, value-based foreign policy, driven in part by its exceptionalist pretensions (Tonra 2011; Diez 2005). In terms of an external push factor, the generic perception of the Southern neighbourhood as ‘problematic’ has been the driving force behind the ordering of the SEM (Nicolaidis and Howse 2002: 772) to mitigate potentially negative externalities. The increase in institutional capacity was facilitated by the incremental devolution of foreign-policy competences from the national level to the EU’s supranational bodies (the Commission and, more recently, the EEAS) and intergovernmental decision-making processes (the European Council). Equally, the relevance of the rhetorical dimension of its foreign-policy formulation is linked to the growing role of the Union in external affairs. However, two major issues continue to shape this evolution, negatively affecting the conception and formulation of an overarching EU foreign-policy narrative. First, despite internal coordination efforts reflected in the formulation of regional policies (initially EMP, then ENP), and on the institutional level primarily in the setting up of the position of High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, there is no streamlined, shared foreign-policy narrative. As Miskimmon (2017: 155) points out, “[t]he EU has never managed to forge a narrative of the EU that expands its influence and binds third countries to it”. Second, and functionally linked to the first point, national foreign-policy practices and associated national discourses (or sometimes narratives) continue at different levels of intensity. However, certain national conceptions, for instance from southern European member states, have also entered EU rhetoric. A terminological example is ‘Mediterranean’, an expression historically grounded in conceptions such as the Roman ‘mare nostrum’ that is employed metaphorically when referring to the ‘Southern neighbourhood’, i.e. the MENA region. On the ideational level, virtually corresponding to a natural reflex, the EU has been advocating the regional integration of parts of the MENA region, promoting in particular the UMA (Union du Maghreb Arabe) during the 1990s. Yet, during the same time period it consolidated its self-perception as a ‘value-community’ (Loth 2002: 22–23), a trend it could not separate from its toolkit of foreign-policy discourses. As the UMA accord remained lettre morte in practice, the failure to promote external regionalisation based on economic logic akin to the EC founding became secondary due to the discursive emphasis on democratisation and human rights discourses (Nitoiu 2013), in correspondence with the EU’s own core values. According to some authors, this tendency to reflect the internal functional logic in external affairs corresponds to an ideational current of “hidden utopianism”

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(Nicolaidis and Howse 2002: 781), based on the rejection of destructive war-time nihilism combined with political humanism, and sets the stage for a “mission civilisatrice” (idem, 782). However, even if elements of the political narrative of the EU’s foundation are for instance specified in the Copenhagen accession criteria, the post-Arab Spring situation in the SEM provided a strong rationale for further ‘principled pragmatism’, reducing the significance of some idealistic value-related discourses.14 A further reason for conceiving of an EU foreign-policy line for the Southern neighbourhood was the potential for negative externalities, viz. the adverse effect on European interests of developments in the region. From this perspective, the ‘Southern question’ was current long before the Union achieved its current geographic expansion. However, the levels of instability have reached threatening levels, particularly since the outbreak of the regional upheavals in early 2011. The European perception of a maximum cleavage separating European standards from governance practice in the SEM has been reinforced by hypothetical risks turning into practical threats. Most of these threats relate to the management of uncontrolled migration flows and the denial of illegal entry into the Schengen area, as well as to terrorist threats from Salafi-jihadi groups throughout MENA.15 From a narratological perspective, too, there is an increasing need to come up with a coherent, distinct foreign-policy narrative. The purpose of such a narrative would not merely be to justify external action or to respond to the public’s increasing demand for the EU to adopt an international role, it would also serve as a tool to negotiate order with the SEM countries. However, even if foreign-policy coordination mechanisms and institutions are in place, the Union’s bodies tend to negotiate to achieve ad hoc consensus on specific issues. It therefore remains a practical challenge to find such consensus on any overarching foreign-policy narrative, supposedly representing a conception of interaction with and the shaping of the Southern neighbourhood shared by all 28 member states. As Miskimmon notes, “[the EU] has found it difficult to have a coherent narrative on the events that have destabilized the region” (Miskimmon 2017). It further raises the question of who inside the EU should be entrusted with the formulation of such a consensual account. In this context it is worth recalling that even though instability in the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean has reached threatening proportions since 2011, the actions of certain member states substantially contributed to the deterioration in regional stability. The situation challenged the EU to define conflict-solution or management tools, mostly

14

Some formulations in the ENP review of 2015 and the 2016 EUGS suggest more realistic, pragmatic stances. However, this does not adversely affect the overarching idealistic nature of the EU’s foundational narrative, and the external dimension thereof, projecting a European ideal to the exterior. 15 Interestingly, despite the shortfall of most of Libya’s hydrocarbon exports, this has not adversely affected EU energy supplies (i.e. security), but has rerouted imports from other replacement suppliers. More worryingly however, several hundreds of thousands of migrants (see the International Organisation of Migration, https://www.iom.int/countries/libya) are waiting in Libya for a job opportunity there or a passage to Europe.

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in the framework of the CSDP, but the results have been poor (Mühlberger and Müller 2016). Lacking a comprehensive and coherent foreign-policy narrative, the EU nevertheless makes ample use of specific thematic discourses in its foreign policy. Discernible beyond the foundational narrative are distinct discourses in which specific elements of European self-perception and awareness of the vicinity are perceived as problematic. Such discourses are typically referred to in official documents or allocutions of EU representatives. Examples occur in speeches given by Benita Ferrero-Waldner and in Javier Solana’s remarks, both early embodiments of the EU’s intention to formally represent foreign policy, and consequently in Ashton’s and Mogherini’s allocutions. Ferrero-Waldner took up the theme in speeches given in 2005 and 2007, respectively entitled ‘Europa als globaler Akteur—Aktuelle Schwerpunkte Europäischer Außen- und Nachbarschaftspolitik‘16 and ‘EU Foreign Policy: Myth or Reality?’, introducing her audiences to the EU’s philosophy of co-operation, the integration process, the bundling of sovereignty and the valuebased origins of the European order. With regard to the MENA region she stressed the need “to export stability, to avoid importing instability” (Ferroro-Waldner 2005), considering the implementation of the ENP a project of geostrategic relevance, while equally underlining the hypothesis of added value through foreign-policy co-ordination, enabling cohesive European action. From a less procedural and more scholarly perspective, Cristian Nitoiu, examining the ‘narrative construction of the EU in external action’ (2013),17 identifies five distinct discourses related to the Union’s foreign policy. Tobias Schumacher, following similar lines, adopts four of these discourses and establishes their connection to the EU’s foundational meta-narrative (Schumacher 2015).18 In both cases, though, the approach corresponds to a thematic deconstruction of the grand narrative rather than constituting discrete foreign-policy narratives. Alister Miskimmon, on the other hand, through his conceptual lens of ‘strategic narratives’, i.e. narrative used for strategic communication purposes in international affairs, remains equally vague as to the definitional criteria or characteristics of a foreign-policy narrative—the reason why ‘narrative’ and ‘discourse’ tend to be used interchangeably (Miskimmon et al. 2013; Miskimmon 2017). However, despite this lacking definitional accuracy and in view of the structural challenges in EU foreign-policy-related activities, one might conclude that the EU lacks a distinct foreign-policy narrative stricto sensu. The

16 (Engl.) ‘Europe as a global player—current emphases of European foreign and neighbourhood policy’. 17 Notwithstanding a section on ‘discourses and narratives’ the author neither provides a working definition of (political) narratives, nor does he follow a narratological approach to the theme, as suggested in Gadinger et al. (2014). Even though scrutinising the semantic and rhetorical dimension of the so-called narratives, in fact the author deconstructs the EU’s meta-narrative into thematic discourses. In that sense, ‘narratives’ are in fact loosely structured discourses at best, if not policies or paradigms. 18 While equally identifying narratives of peace promotion, democratisation, good neighbourliness and well-being, he also sees a ‘threat/risk narrative and a ‘duty and opportunity narrative’ at play.

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European Union, first and foremost, makes use of its epic foundational narrative for the external projection of its conception of the ideal order, while, secondly, employing a range of thematic discourses in its foreign policy that are closely woven into the overarching grand récit of the Union. This finding raises the question of the validity of spatial concepts (Jones 2006) such as the ‘Mediterranean’ area and ‘neighbourhood’ in the European Union’s interaction with its geographical environment. These suggest a certain regional uniformity, on which the Union’s own ideal can be projected, even though the mere rhetorical construction of a region is not a sufficient criterion for creating resemblance. The third section of this chapter therefore analyses the regional dimension of EU foreign-policy formulation with the Arab world, and considers the projection and reception levels of the narrative and related discourses in more detail.

The EU’s Southern Neighbourhood: Framing a Mediterranean Story Lacking a distinct foreign-policy narrative and despite reference to the external dimension of the European grand récit, EU interaction with the MENA region also faces constant challenge on the rhetorical plane. In attempts to hedge the issue on the semantic level, various approaches have crystallised to circumscribe the Arab world and Israel as a region (Schumacher 2017), establishing a rudimental discourse based on a metaphorical understanding. The generic recourse to the order-producing European narrative causes the introduction of an epic element in the relationship. However, this neither accommodates the EU’s short-term goals of (regime) stabilisation, nor does it resonate with the Arab elites. The three coastal Algerian départements of metropolitan France were originally part and parcel of the precursor organisation of the EU, the European Community of Steel and Coal (ECSC), which paved the way via economic co-operation and logistical co-ordination to further peaceful integration. Nowadays, only a couple of dispersed territorial possessions adjacent to Moroccan territory (Ceuta, Melilla and a few islets and promontories along the coastline) remain under Spanish suzerainty, leaving the EU with the remnants of a historical, trans-Mediterranean territorial dimension. On the other hand, the perennial proximity of the MENA region requires the constant nurturing of ties, the building of relationships and the management of various exchanges with the Southern and South-eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. As Edgar Pisani, then heading the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, commented in 1993: « Alors que l’Europe s’unifie la Méditerranée se fragmente; alors que l’Est nous attire, le Sud est parfois perçu comme une menace. Un déséquilibre croissant, annonciateur de perturbations graves est en train de se nouer. »19 10 years later,

(Engl.) “While Europe unifies, the Mediterranean [sic] fragments; while the East attracts us, the South is sometimes perceived as a threat. A growing mismatch, announcing serious disquiet, is 19

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reflecting on Eastern integration, the EU realised that its successful expansion implied potential risks. Indeed, it was acknowledged in the 2003 European Security Strategy (ESS) that “[t]he integration of acceding states increases our security but also brings the EU closer to troubled areas” (Harris 2019: 46). During this 10-year intervening period, and following the launch of the ESS, the Union grew by accepting numerous additional members, extending its territory while also bringing it closer to its limits, both geographically and in terms of feasibility. This is particularly relevant with regard to the Southern neighbourhood, a region envisaged as beyond membership potential (Börzel and van Hüllen 2011; Henökl and Stemberger 2016; Hadfield 2017). It is also a region in which hard interests have always been at the fore, embracing hydrocarbon flows and migratory control, as well as security on two fronts - countering jihadi terrorism on the one hand and supporting Israel’s safety on the other. Even though these interests, as well as specific threat assessments (see the 2003 ESS or the EUGS since 2016), have guided policy formulation, the EU has simultaneously been operating on the rhetorical level, framing its relationship with the Middle East and North Africa along three basic paradigms: neighbourhood, partnership and the Mediterranean. The geopolitical concept of ‘neighbourhood’, with slight undertones of a rough vicinity in need of improvement, has become enshrined in the ENP, which creates the Union’s boundaries and builds a supposedly cohesive external zone. In view of the territorial proximity and the precarious political environment of this vicinity, as well as conveying the image of a periphery that requires shaping, the neighbourhood concept features strongly in the rhetorical depictions of the SEM. In a similar fashion, the ‘partnership’ paradigm serves as a figure of speech to embellish the operational aspects of negotiation—implying action on a level playing field despite a clearly asymmetric balance of power.20 The ‘Mediterranean’, also a geopolitical concept, implies a shared albeit intercalated area, carrying the potential of a junction while in practice also with a long history of separation. The ‘Mediterranean’ tout court, neither explicitly an area nor a sea, represents a trope, an implicit way of speaking, tentatively expressing the idea of a connecting bridge or even of a shared region, suggesting similarities and cultural affinities. Yet, as Anne Ruel astutely points out in her unique analysis of the ‘invention of the Mediterranean’: « Toutefois, si on la pense avant tout comme une mer de civilisation, c’est peut-être pour justifier un nouvel intérêt économique et géopolitique. »21 (Ruel 1991: 10). In line with the highly charged use of the term, probably the most pronounced action in terms of claim was the setting up of the ‘Union for the Mediterranean’ (UfM) in 2008, suggesting a unifying principle derived from the concept of a Mediterranean space. On the level of the imaginary, it certainly looming.” Quote taken from: Ilbert, Robert, Anne Ruel (1991) Comment la Méditerranée vient aux politiques, in: La Méditerranée espace de coopération? En l’honneur de Maurice Flory. Paris: Economica. 20 In this context it is worth recalling that Russia had reservations about co-operating with the EU under a ‘Privileged Partnership’ scheme. 21 (Engl.) “However, if it is thought of primarily as a sea of civilisation, it is probably to justify a new economic and geopolitical interest.”

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remains unclear whether the regional logic is a presumed point of departure or a goal to be achieved. With performance hard to pin down, the setting up of this EU institution revealed something about the intricacies of foreign-policy formation within the EU (Hadfield 2017: 213). As Scholar of Arab authoritarianism Oliver Schlumberger concludes, the depoliticised nature of the UfM has been a boon for authoritarian regimes operating in breach of European values across the board, in that cooperation has not been made conditional on criteria fulfilment (Schlumberger 2011). Beyond the adumbrative power of these three paradigms, a variety of scholarly approaches purport to come to terms with the EU’s external role in the ‘southern neighbourhood’. These approaches range from ‘external governance or Europeanisation‘(Lavenex and Schimmelfennig 2009) via ‘Normative Power Europe‘(Diez 2005) and ‘transformative power’ (Börzel and van Hüllen 2011) to ‘external region building’ (Jones and Clark 2008; Schumacher 2017) and ‘fuzzy borders‘(Christiansen, Petito and Tonra 2000). Interestingly, most scholars either conclude or depart from the assumption that the region in question is way beyond cohesion, strongly at odds with the rhetorical depictions of a virtual regional order on a ‘Mediterranean’ scale. Alun Jones, for instance, contends that the challenges and threats emanating from the southern shores of the Mediterranean originate in a “contested and fractured geopolitical space” (Jones 2006: 420). There is also a long list of expressions such as ‘global hot spot’, ‘ring of fire’ and ‘arc of instability’ conveying the comparative and objective levels of disorder in MENA that informed the rhetoric of the EU’s conceptual papers, most recently adding the resilience paradigm to the 2016 EUGS. Given the dual realisation that democratisation could not be promoted via soft power and incentives are ineffective on the one hand, and that the region’s political systems have not become more stable on the other, it would seem that European interests are not merely at risk but practically under threat from uncontrolled mass migration and jihadi terrorism. In other words, not only has the MENA region become less homogeneous, it is more fragile than ever as perceptions change and tangible threats are transformed into issues of policy formulation, especially in the field of foreign policy. Even though critics contend that ‘the West’ effectively supported military or repressive regimes, and never really sought democratisation, EU Commissioner Johannes Hahn pointed at home-made issues in his 2015 allocution at the Collège d’Europe in Brugge: “Because instability is as much the result of internal factors such as inexistent rule of law; deeply rooted corruption; persistent economic underperformance; poor trading links between our partners; [and] feeble administrations incapable of implementing reforms even when they have been adopted on paper[.]”.22 Effectively, incumbent regimes have little incentive to bring about political reform. The potential costs, in other words detrimental effects on regime stability, or even survival, are deemed too high, whereas non-compliance with European standards does not have substantial adverse effects on the material base of the regimes. Thus the EU resembles a caller in the desert, as the regimes

22

Hahn (2015) Theorizing the European Neighbourhood Policy.

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systematically challenge the plausibility of any narrative aimed at promoting the European role model. Narratives are purposefully constructed to establish how the world works and how it is supposed to work. Yet, if they are to perform their activating logic they require some kind of reception. The interpretive, conceptual, normative and utopian dimensions of narratives are all reflected in the EU’s own success story about cohesive region-building, which is used in its external messaging, including with its Southern neighbours. In addition to projecting the EU’s own master-narrative, the three terms used for framing the relationship purport to transform a geographical region into a geopolitical entity, and hence to provide it with a specific meaning, justifying action and legitimising the players. Alun Jones predicts some kind of ‘external Europeanisation’ based on the ‘geopolitical narrative’ [sic] of regionbuilding, the ‘Mediterranean’ being a good example of the rhetorical construction of a geo-political space (Jones 2006: 417). It reflects the stronger interest among southern European member states (France, Italy, Spain) in imagining and managing the relationship with the Southern shores of the Mediterranean (Ruel 1991: 11–12). This rhetorical construction of the neighbourhood has also been considered on the level of policies, instruments and initiatives. Hence, in line with the rhetorical depiction, the SEM countries have been subsumed under comprehensive programmatic umbrellas, ranging from the EMP to the ENP. It is in this context that the mantra ‘shared values’ also enters into the discourse, as it serves to underpin the encompassing geographical and geopolitical concept of the Mediterranean with an ideational, supposedly connective framework. However, neither the three paradigms nor the ‘shared value’ theme are sufficient as elements for building a proper foreignpolicy narrative for the SEM. The EU’s operating mode as a regulatory power is similarly reflected in its drive to project stability onto the geographic vicinity. One of the more recent motivations for influencing the region on its own terms is the return of geopolitics, in particular the increase in geopolitical competition that has manifested itself since the Arab insurrections began in late 2010. The EU Global Strategy purports to address the related concerns, the proximity of the SEM amplifying the potential of negative externalities due to instability or uncontrolled external interference. Felix Ciuta, in his conceptual reflections on the intersection of narrative (theory) and European security, considers (external) Europeanisation in terms of a security strategy, based on the assumption of underlying stabilisation and hence the ordering logic of the EU’s modus operandi (Ciuta 2007: 190). As far as the SEM rim is concerned, in practice one can only admit to utter failure in this respect. However, this does not impinge on the construction of a European security discourse based on the orderaffinity inherent in the EU’s integration process. The story of EU integration is a normative, foreign-policy narrative of a regional order, but its plausibility understandably seems questionable among states with no prospects of accession, such as countries in the SEM region. Even a conceptual detour via the three above-mentioned geopolitical concepts cannot offer an attractive and credible regional-order narrative. Moreover, there is no inherent willingness among Arab elites to engage in the EU’s reform approach, because it would be

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detrimental to regime stability. This has recently been taken into account even on the rhetorical level by switching from the ‘shared values’ topos to a discourse built on the notion of resilience.

The European Union, the Mediterranean and Foreign Policy: An Epic Dilemma The European Union’s foreign policy is determined by a broad range of interests and goals, contingent on multiple players and member states, and implemented by numerous institutions and instruments in line with several policy documents. Cutting across these various bureaucratic and administrative dimensions is the semantic plane, in which discourses about the envisaged role of the EU in the world are embedded. These rhetorical depictions of the Union’s external actions are of particular interest in the MENA, given the maximum cleavage of the region’s governance from the European ideal and practice—and the peculiar way the EU has come to conceive of its relationship with countries in the southern and eastern Mediterranean. This chapter has assessed the extent to which the European story exhibits narrative plausibility across time and space. In particular, it analyses the perceived attractiveness of the foundational narrative of the European Union in its southern and south-eastern geographic neighbourhood, and the extent to which a distinct foreignpolicy narrative has been crafted to address the multiple challenges posed by sustained instability in this region. Following a narratological approach based on a distinct definition of political narratives, we depart from the assumption that narratives, particularly political ones, serve a theme-driven justification and actor-linked legitimisation purpose. Hence, political entrepreneurs such as the European Union feel compelled to make use of them, for instance to explain to a variety of audiences the motivation to engage with its geographical neighbours on the Southern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. The self-referential story of the Union’s foundational myth represents a sort of grand récit, a meta-narrative, applied to describe Europe’s foreign policy. In that sense, the relationship with the SEM follows the plot of a romantic novel, in which the Union’s own destiny plays the role of the exemplary heroic saviour of a region stuck in poor governance, weak statehood, underdevelopment, rentierism, corruption and separation, as well as internal and external strife. To those interested and able, the EU offers to replicate its own success story, inviting them to the mimetism proper to all narratives. On the other hand, the European Union does not engage in a full-fledged foreignpolicy narrative, in other words a story with dramatis personae, a chronological plot, a disruptive beginning and an anticipated end. Rather, to justify its foreign-policy engagement on the rhetorical level it tends loosely to combine several discursive elements or separately to put forward specific thematic discourses. The EU operates to legitimise its own actorness in the foreign-policy field in three ways: first, it

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projects the foundational narrative on a global scale (“for humanity”); second, its thematic discourses address relevant policy fields in more detail; and third, through its conception and depiction of a delimited, adjacent and homogenous region—broadly the ‘neighbourhood’, and specifically the so-called ‘Mediterranean’. Its professed, utopian goal would be to create some sort of political convergence around democratic governance, and cultural convergence around shared values. Even though the economic clout of the EU is by far its most distinctive characteristic in the international arena, the Union has also become involved in foreign policy proper, adding a significant element to its broader external action. This is a domain that encompasses diplomacy, conflict management and security policy, and the EU seeks to secure classical political interests such as the stability of its immediate environment, the maintenance of security and of low levels of conflict, and a secure flow of goods including energy resources. Specific discourses linked to peace, democracy and human rights address these topics in a highly idealised fashion, but most of them represent particular aspects of the larger European metanarrative, in an inferential or a direct manner –basically corresponding to elements of the post-Westphalian order. In other words, in negotiating order with foreign states, in particular its neighbours in the MENA, the EU proposes its own success story for imitation, while also introducing the specific concept of a regional order by making ample reference to the ‘Mediterranean’. In view of the various risk and threat assessments emerging from EU documents in relation to this very region, however, it seems likely that the ‘Mediterranean’ cypher is used in a metaphorical sense to refer to the adjacent Arab world, conjuring up the ideal of a region shaped by principles similar to those of the European Union. However, the external reception of these discourses and of the grand narrative has been mixed, at best. The predominantly autocratic regimes consider it an intrusive form of post-modern European expansionism, threating the brittle stability of their regimes. Therefore, to pre-empt a positive reception and consequent action, they deny it any kind of plausibility by mobilising anti-European sentiment to justify their rejection: nurturing resentment linked to past wrong-doings is a preferred tool for reform-adverse regimes. The grand European narrative is therefore confronted with a double failure. First, its reception remains partial or conditional, putting its plausibility at odds and hence impeding the unfolding of its ordering potential in terms of proposing an acceptable temporal and logical sequence of events. Second, on the practical policy level, the qualified rejection of the plot also impedes the realisation of the proposed European order via mimetism. Furthermore, beyond the question of authoritarian resilience providing the rationale to deny the plausibility of the EU’s account lies the question concerning the extent to which the story of Pax Europa can be brought into correspondence with the historical experience and narrative dimension of Pax Islamica in the Arab world. The resulting perception is of the greatest possible divergence between the utopian claims of the EU narrative and its effective policies: given the various methods used to stabilise the region these policies have strayed far from the idealistic order proposal of the narrative, thereby further undermining its

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plausibility. Facing precarious and contested legitimacy as a foreign-policy actor in the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean, the European Union remains caught in an epic quest for external stability.

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Conclusion: Narrative (Dis) Order in Today’s MENA Toni Alaranta

This book explores the narratives of various political entrepreneurs in terms of the current post-2011 ‘Arab Spring’ Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The chapters included analyse both regional and external forces. Each of the eight carefully chosen case studies concerns influential actors and their political narratives, ultimately the way in which they actively participate in the construction of reality by rhetorical means. In most cases this has required taking a long view, detecting how narratives in political communication evolve over time. The perceived lack of a legitimate order has been one of the most prevalent issues characterising the MENA region during its 100 years of post-Ottoman existence. Following the break-up of this specific kind of imperial order in 1919, the Middle East has witnessed various attempts at order building that have significantly influenced the histories of individual states and constituencies in the region. The post-Ottoman disorder—and the troubled experiences of what some argue are completely artificial nation states—is in itself a highly influential narrative. However, even though the collapse of the Ottoman Empire was a major watershed, its importance is relativized if one considers how the British and the French became influential actors in the MENA region’s politics following the invasion of Egypt by Napoleon’s army in 1798. As the individual chapters of the present book demonstrate, many of the responses and accompanying political narratives of different actors emerging since 2011 are combinations of enduring and more recent traditions of policy formulation. In particular, novel accounts rationalising and legitimising actions are built on previous layers of narrative production that are then reformulated according to new requirements and circumstances. These existing narratives may well constrain

T. Alaranta (*) The Finnish Institute of International Affairs, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: toni.alaranta@fiia.fi © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 W. Mühlberger, T. Alaranta (eds.), Political Narratives in the Middle East and North Africa, Perspectives on Development in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35217-2_10

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as much as they enable new kinds of strategic accounts produced by foreign-policy entrepreneurs in specific contexts. Furthermore, narrative form characterises not only the specific rhetorical constructions of regional and external actors, but also the various scholarly perspectives applied in explaining political developments in the Middle East. International Relations as an academic discipline has come to represent some kind of contestation between different, and sometimes even mutually exclusive, narratives of international politics. On a basic level this is to be observed in different conceptualisations of the main actors: the system as a whole; the nation states; and ultimately the individuals working together. There are also varying conceptions of the kind of cause-and-effect mechanisms that produce international political outcomes: tightly knit, autonomous and homogenous units with fixed interests striving for power; economically-driven global processes creating interdependency and asymmetric relations of domination; or historically changing collective identities, constituencies, nations and even civilisations constructing, and being constructed by, intersubjective discursive practices. Beneath this meta-level or ontological discussion on the nature of actors and processes is the level of academic models of explanation that tend to reduce the observed enduring political malaise in the MENA to some overall conglomeration of key factors. As an illustrative example, note how the lack of democratisation in the Middle East and North Africa has often been taken as the crucial anomaly in need of an explanation, and how during previous decades this has induced scholars to search for its root causes in various factors. According to one school of thought—labelled ‘Orientalist’ in reference to Edward Said—the deep-seated cultural-religious context largely dominated by Islam has been seen as a hindrance or an outright obstacle to the development of freedoms and democratisation. Others have dismissed such evaluations as ‘essentialist’ and ‘ahistorical’, emphasising instead the global structural asymmetries of power and authoritarian political systems that have been perpetuated both by domestic patrimonial networks as well as the unfavourable status of Middle East states in the international system (see, for instance, Lob 2015). In many ways, narrative and order have long been closely combined in international relations in general, and in the Middle East in particular. As Wolfgang Mühlberger emphasises in the introductory chapter, authoritarian rule, intensified social cleavages and external pressure in the region tend to produce highly antagonistic political narratives in which the opposition challenge the ruling cadres’ securitising narrative by threatening to wipe out the whole system and build it anew from altogether different premises, such as some interpretation of religious authority. The ability to produce an intellectually and emotionally comforting and convincing narrative of order indeed occupies a more central role in international politics than is often acknowledged. A fruitful way of analysing order and narrative is through the traditional (and still highly relevant) three-part distinction regarding the level of analysis, in other words the setting within which order is sought, established, maintained and lost: the domestic, regional and global levels, each of which can be separated from the others, at least in the course of scholarly analysis if not in practice. In its most typical manifestations, order in world politics is based on specific ‘ordering moments’

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during which great powers of any given era are forced to grapple with and come to some agreement on the general principles and arrangements of an international order. In the words of John Ikenberry, ‘war and upheaval between states—that is, disorder—is turned into order when stable rules and arrangements are established by agreement, imposition, or otherwise’ (Ikenberry 2012: 12–13). On this basis, Ikenberry proposes a basic categorisation in which international order is established and maintained through one of three mechanisms: balance, command or consent. However, even a seemingly negotiated and widespread set of rules, institutions and practices is also ultimately a narrative construction, the universality of which may in fact be much more questionable than its advocates are inclined to believe. The so-called ‘liberal international order’ of the current era is no exception in this regard. One must also duly acknowledge that even hegemonic external powers have not been able to build a lasting order in the Middle East. Although there have been distinct phases during which external actors have played essential roles—France and Britain before the Second World War; the US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War; and the US most recently—these attempts at ordering have been vehemently countered by strong domestic and regional forces (Fawcett 2005: 175–176). Another aspect observable repeatedly in the existing literature emphasises the lack of security regarding both states and individual citizens. In many cases, the insecurity related to the hostile environment of a given territorial state, as well as in terms of citizens’ loyalties, has tended to push Middle Eastern states to engage in authoritarian practices and to build up powerful armies. The implication in this observation is that, especially as far as local actors are concerned, all attempts at regional/international order-building stem from the problems associated with establishing a durable domestic order within an individual state (Hinnebusch 2005: 157). The contributions in the first section (Calabrese; Ruohomäki; Alaranta; Ulrichsen) of this volume demonstrate that both highly challenged as well as dominant narratives of domestic order tend to function as a matrix for a distinct foreign-policy narrative, which might be hard to get rid of later on, even when circumstances change. With regard to external powers, Issaev and Shishkina’s contribution provides a powerful argument attesting to the importance of domestic determinants of changing foreign-policy narratives in the case of Russia. Further, as Wolfgang Mühlberger points out in the chapter on the EU’s rhetorical construction of the MENA region as its unruly Neighbourhood, one can see how the Union’s own rather idealised ‘postsovereign’ meta-narrative clashes with the MENA region’s realities. This has produced an inclination to develop a contradictory EU foreign-policy narrative in which the overall story espouses a universalist vocation for emancipation (an emphasis on political reform, democracy and human rights), whereas the more mundane everyday decision-making tends to prioritise and make use of another influential European narrative of stabilisation. This is likely to reproduce the narrative trope of relative predictability produced by the region’s existing status quo and authoritarian regimes. Further, in the case of the EU, the construction of a political-ordering narrative—such as the Union itself—is hybrid in form, being produced on several institutional levels and as an effort involving both individual member states and supranational bodies.

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Order, especially during the twentieth century, has been strongly linked to the idea of sovereign (nation) states as the only legitimate grounds for the orderly arrangement of international politics. For much of history until the twentieth century, however, it was often perceived as a consequence of the actions of major imperial powers extending their rule and practices within a vast geographical area. In a rather strange way, the idea of order has recently been expressed within two conflicting traditions. The first is the old tradition of imperial or otherwise hegemonic power that is perceived as a guarantor of order in a structure that is otherwise anarchical. The second, more recent doctrine of an international system comprising sovereign nation states coming together under the United Nations emphasises the idea that order can only be achieved when independent states, allegedly representing distinct peoples (as the sources of sovereignty) are all given the opportunity to have a say in international affairs. It is worth mentioning that the Western-led, so-called ‘liberal international order’ is still firmly grounded on the Westphalian system of sovereign states representing distinct nations (Kudnani 2017: 2). Nevertheless, even this sovereignty-based doctrine has been extensively challenged since the 1990s and the end of the Cold War. As Andrew Hurrel (2007: 165–166) points out, this has concerned the United States and the United Kingdom in particular. In addition to serving the traditional objective of hard security, coercive force has come to play an important role in dealing with non-traditional security threats such as terrorism, and even more controversially as a means of promoting liberal goals, as in cases of humanitarian intervention. As Ville Sinkkonen shows in the present book, the undermining of the cherished principle of state sovereignty was taken to extremes by the US in the most explicit liberal emancipation narrative recently implemented with the use of force—the so-called Freedom Agenda of George W. Bush. As the case studies observed in this book show, some of the grounding principles of modern international relations have become questioned, and there is a severe lack of trust and increasing contestation regarding what are perceived as binding rules. This is amply demonstrated in the present book in Christina Lin’s analysis of China’s Middle East narrative, within which the paradigmatic Western democracy-promotion narrative is seen to undermine state sovereignty, create chaos, encourage violence, and promote deep-seated conceptions of double standards. Narrative order in the study of narratology refers to the way in which the narrator chooses to organise and present events that comprise the story or are relevant to it. Thus, in its original meaning it could be conceptualised as a method of arranging the accounting of events in a specific manner and in a particular chronological order, creating what is referred to as a plot (Genette 1980: 35). Even in this stricter sense, there is still something odd about political narratives and the question of justification in international politics. Narrative order could be understood in this context to refer to the way political actors purposefully describe major events such as conflicts as starting from one particular event, rather than another—such as 9/11 in the US narrative on the ‘War on Terror’ (see, for instance, Hodges 2011). In a more general sense, narrative order in the present context could be understood totally differently as meaning ‘order’, in other words it is not so much about determined temporal arrangements but more of an arrangement between various

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political communities. This renders narrative order as the story level manifestation of any global or regional order, meaning the rhetorical justification of power arrangements conceived as more or less legitimate. To the extent that such a legitimation narrative is challenged by a number of actors, one could speak about narrative disorder. It could be concluded from the findings of this book, Political Narratives in the Middle East and North Africa: Perceptions of Instability and Conceptions of Order, that such a narrative disorder in today’s MENA region is serious but perhaps not fundamental. Thus, concerning the foundations of shared rules and principles, at least in the cases of China and Russia, the objection is not so much to the Westphalian, nation-state foundations of the liberal order, but rather to its subsequent reformulation within the interventionist democracy-promotion narrative. On the other hand, the power of the strategic narratives presented by external actors such as Russia and China is constrained by a lack of emancipatory and utopian elements. In other words, they contain intellectually comforting elements in terms of avoiding increased violence and chaotic developments resulting from Western-led forced regime change. However, as long as the Middle Eastern states are deeply authoritarian and reluctant to allow even the most basic democratic rights, the conservative narratives advocated by Russia and China fail to provide an emotionally comforting vision of a more democratic future for the peoples of the Middle East. In this sense, one could argue that concerning the reception of competing ordering narratives by Middle Eastern citizenry, as opposed to the governing elites, there is more likely to be a positive response, in particular to the EU’s insistence on democratisation, human-rights standards and conditionality. On the other hand, this inclination towards emancipatory narratives is also highly contested. Complementing Western models is a wide range of regional, either secular or religious, utopian narratives of a more legitimate order that are constantly envisioned. The paradox here, of course, is that all these competing narratives could just as easily end up creating serious regional disorder.

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