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Why Decolonization?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 March 2020

Cyrus Schayegh  and
Yoav Di-Capua
Cyrus Schayegh
Affiliation:
International History Department, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland, e-mail: cyrus.schayegh@graduateinstitute.ch
Yoav Di-Capua
Affiliation:
History Department, University of Texas at Austin, e-mail: ydi@austin.utexas.edu
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Abstract

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Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , February 2020 , pp. 137 - 145
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

In December 1960, Sawt al-‘Arab star broadcaster Ahmad Sa‘id traveled to Havana as part of an Egyptian delegation, to celebrate the second anniversary, in early 1961, of the Cuban Revolution's final victory. Hundreds of other foreign delegates were heading there, too.

In the span of a few days we had discovered the secret for our quick mutual understanding with all the other delegations. In attendance were at least 850 delegates from across Latin America…officials, judges, lawyers, journalists, medical doctors, engineers, peasants, teachers, workers and students. We quickly connected to them… The secret? It was stronger than the Spanish language which we did not understand, and stronger than the Arabic language that they did not comprehend, and stronger, still, than the English language, which did afford us some measure of exchange of ideas and opinions. But the real secret for our connection to them was our similar circumstances of life, the fact that we both suffered from the same kind of colonialism and the burgeoning revolutionary spirit which aspires towards complete freedom, true democracy, just socialism and the recovery of our countries’ resources. It was such an auspicious moment…Footnote 1

Sa‘id's type of experience of decolonization: beyond the Middle East and North Africa and across it as much as within one country, and not just political in nature but also economic, cultural, and indeed ontological, is at the heart of this roundtable. We showcase contributions to a field that over the last two decades has evolved dramatically.

Decolonization, it is turning out, was not simply the negotiation and management of the transfer of state power (“changing the flag”), central to classic histories of ends of empire.Footnote 2 Rather, as David Stenner and Olivia Harrison illustrate in this forum, it was a complex multiphase process open backwards in time and forwards.Footnote 3 Also, it was not only political in nature and demand but also economic and, as Paraska Tolan Szkilnik shows here, cultural as well as, indeed, psychological and ontological.Footnote 4 Rather than simply concerning the Global South, it was one of a handful of macrohistorical processes shaping the modern world as a whole.Footnote 5 As a matter of fact, it molded also postimperial European polities and, as Michael Fischbach shows, the civil rights movement in the United States.Footnote 6

For sure, decolonization was political, but not simply in the sense of power and elite rule, though elites mattered a great deal.Footnote 7 It was driven both by a dialectic cycle of European calculations and colonized actions which, presumably, were conditioned by the spectre of the nation-state as the only normative solution.Footnote 8 In practice, however, and somewhat paradoxically, the model of the nation-state was not its only imagined or real political end.Footnote 9 Continental (con)federations, commonwealths, and leagues and plans for them proliferated, however abortive or circumscribed their writ.Footnote 10 Though the political horizon was always unclear, international and transnational solidarity networks—south-south,Footnote 11 west-south,Footnote 12 and east-southFootnote 13—helped strengthen national causes and/or were an end by themselves, to overcome the white color line and Northern imperialism.Footnote 14 As Jeffrey Byrne argues here, as the 1960s drew to a close and nation-states struggled to emerge as stable political entities, this intricate and delicate process by which the Global South came into being as a coordinated entity bound by solidarity, socialism and the history of common experiences gradually unraveled. Its slow ending is as important to the understanding of decolonization as its brave beginnings.

At least some elements in this unraveling process had to do with the artificiality of the nation-state as a model and a solution to post-colonial needs. Indeed, at their most aspirational, some decolonizing actors wished to remake the nation-state logic and racial foundation of the modern international order.Footnote 15 They helped shape the postwar debate about human rights, too.Footnote 16 In parallel, the newly independent nation-state was not the only decolonization space. Some states self-consciously functioned as linchpins between multiple regions, for instance Arab-African Egypt and Algeria.Footnote 17 Certain cities—Dar es Salaam, Cairo, and Paris, among others—became hubs for activists from various countries.Footnote 18 There were transnational networks like the Afro-Asian People's Solidarity Organization, founded in Cairo in 1957.Footnote 19 Institutional spaces mattered, too, like the United Nations and the League of Nations in New York and Geneva and UN regional headquarters.Footnote 20 Decolonization, in sum, helped reconfigure not only national but also regional and transnational and global spaces of politicocultural action and belonging, rendering more complex the question “who is ‘us’?”—as Ahmad Sa‘id's quote shows.

On one level, the early take on decolonization by scholars of the MENA mirrored dominant Euro-American historiography. We treated decolonization as not less, but also not more, than a formal political story: the transition of power from sinking colonial empires to emerging nation-states during the early Cold War.Footnote 21 Area studies scholars also, however, looked beyond the moment of independence to examine the twists and turns of post-imperial politics, the experiences of newly liberated societies, and the shaping of nation-states. They spent most energy on nationalism, in particular Pan Arabism, taking its postwar bloom as proof that decolonization had succeeded and that this project was finite in nature.Footnote 22 Behind this approach stood the belief that the study of nationalism, especially of Pan Arabism, can fully account for what in fact is a rather illusive inner national domain. After more than two decades of intense engagement with nationalism and its postcolonial critique we have learned much about the reproduction of the nation in many spheres of life, from the intimate realm of family to gender relationships and the economy, politics, and culture.Footnote 23

Still, the story of decolonization as a constructive revolutionary endeavor that sought to radically and holistically transform all aspects of life within an ethical global context is yet to be fully explored. The study of nationalism and, in some iterations, of anti-colonialism, is too insulated to account for the complex transregional and global character of decolonization.

This, then, is the entry point for this forum. Engaging new source material, the contributors collectively help to look at modern MENA history from a new angle, seeing it not as an insulated collection of distinct state/country projects but as a field embedded in multiple, contrasting, even contradictory ways in the world. They show how decolonization was a global process characterized by the building of multilingual and transnational webs of practices and meanings. The study of decolonization, their texts imply, offers MENA historians ample possibilities to investigate the history of “their” region against African, Asian and Euro-American contexts—in line with the post-Cold War historiographical shift toward transnationalism.Footnote 24

In parallel to our contributors’ texts, we would like to make two sets of points. Firstly, we suggest that rather than treating decolonization exclusively as a historical era, or as a period, we should also begin to consider it as a broader human condition whose manifestations, while anchored in the postwar era, transcend it in significant ways. Taking our cues from Arab intellectuals of the late 1940s, at the heart of the matter lies their unique understanding of the meaning of freedom (al-huriyya). This kind of freedom was comprised of several key concepts. The first was authenticity (al-asala) and the concern that the Arab subject was culturally inauthentic. Seeking to come to terms with the schizophrenic cultural effects of colonial modernity, Arab intellectuals sought to reestablish their individual and collective existence on terms that were endemic and internal to their heritage. The second foundation was social justice (al-`adala al-ijtima` iyya). Shared by intellectuals of all stripes, Islamists as well as Europhiles, the quest for social justice aimed at addressing the wretchedness of the poor, sick, illiterate and disenfranchised postcolonial subject. Defined as a problem of basic human dignity (al-karama al-insaniyya), it conjoined the material aspects of underdevelopment and unequal distribution of resources with the subhuman subjectivity of many “liberated” citizens. Related to this, the other prevalent concept was that of sovereignty (al-siyada). This concept conjoined the quest for concrete political sovereignty (raw power as a necessary condition for addressing all postcolonial concerns) and the dire need for a new form of collective identification, or identity, which transcended the self. Indeed, there is a very tight link, yet to be explored, between decolonization and self-transcendence. Taken as a whole, this was the regional understanding of freedom in the wake of empire. As the opening quote illustrates, the task of decolonization was to develop a global peripheral view that would assist societies in retrieving this freedom and fulfilling its potential.

A derivative of the quest for freedom and one of the most dominant manifestations of decolonization, was the ambition to temper with “the self” and forge a new collective ontology. Envisioned mostly via revolutionary means and through the formation of a new revolutionary ethos, the ultimate destination of this journey was not simply to unite the Arab world (as scholars of Pan Arabism would have it) but to create a new Arab subject (al-insan al-`Arabi al-jadid). Both Nasserism and Ba`thism were committed to this project via a radical ontological reimagining of the meaning of freedom (the Iranians had their own Islamic version). The millions who followed them in the 1960s did not speak of decolonization (which does not have an Arabic equivalent).Footnote 25 Instead, they spoke of “al-thawra,” thus inviting us to rethink and re-engage the Arab revolutionary era and its long term consequences as part of the broader framework of the universal ethics of liberation.

Viewed from this angle, the quest for freedom (material, political and ontological) that the study of decolonization exposes and accounts for, was not only the business of the new nation-state and its secular ideological apparatus and elites. It was also shared by Islamists of all stripes. And while their solution differed considerably from those proposed by Nasserism, for instance, the intellectual oeuvre of someone like Sayyid Qutb should be understood as an engagement with this exact same problem of freedom. In that sense, the study of decolonization invites us to overcome the prevalent split in the field between the study of Islamic subjects and the study of, essentially, all the rest.

The second set of points concerns questions that the MENA case poses for the study of political dimensions of decolonization beyond “our” region. Let us highlight three issues. First, historians often talk of a sequence of space-specific waves of decolonization: in Latin America, around 1800; in the Balkans, from the 19th to the early 20th centuries; in Africa and Asia, in the 1940s-60s; and in Eastern Europe and the USSR, in the 1990s. Not fitting neatly, the case of MENA suggests that this scheme, centered on the moment of independence of specific polities within a presumably distinct region, obfuscates as much as it illuminates. After all, different MENA areas were part of different waves and times: think of Algeria, independent in 1962, and Iraq in 1932—and if we speak of ex-Ottoman provinces, what to do with Albania and Greece, independent in 1913 and 1830, respectively? Also, some countries reoriented their demand for independence. While around 1920 Arabs in bilad al-sham (Greater Syria) insisted that they deserved independence not less than European ex-Ottomans like Romanians, by the 1940s their reference point was Asia.Footnote 26 Zionism/the Yishuv/Israel is part of this picture, too, by the way, and exemplifies how much the context and very meaning of “national liberation” shifted over time.Footnote 27

Second, although with the exception of Algeria, most overall accounts of decolonization marginalize our region, one could argue that MENA was oftentimes a forerunner. In the 1920s, the A Mandates, Syria-Lebanon, Palestine-Transjordan, and Iraq were meant to become independent in the (undefined) future, at least in principle. In practice, Iraq did so, if “lightly,” in 1930; Syria and Lebanon obtained constitutions and elections around 1930, too; and in the Yishuv—a special case, to be sure—there was the para-state Jewish Agency. In the 1930s, the only two non-Western polities that joined the League of Nations after its official foundation, in 1920, as freshly independent countries were Iraq, in 1932, and Egypt, in 1937, following the 1936 Anglo–Egyptian Treaty.Footnote 28 In 1945, the Arab League was the postcolonial world's first regional multistate league.Footnote 29 The independence, in 1943, of Lebanon and Syria— completed in 1946—can be seen as Asia's first decolonization. The dispute about Iran's oil nationalization, in 1951–53, was an early milestone in postcolonial countries’ political and international legal assertion of sovereign rights over their resources.Footnote 30 (Related, the 1953 coup d'etat in Iran, led by the CIA, as well as CIA support for the 1949 coup in Syria, were that agency's first such operations worldwide.Footnote 31) Egypt's successful Suez Canal nationalization and its political defeat of the tripartite Aggression in 1956 were a decolonization milestone and clarion call far beyond the Middle East.Footnote 32 So was the Algerian War for Independence from 1954 to 1962.Footnote 33 This was the case also for its eventual galvanizing effects on European public opinion, certainly of the left.Footnote 34 Last but not least, by the late 1960s, Palestine became a—perhaps the—focal point and symbol for self-liberation and the continuation of anticolonial struggles worldwide as well as a vital counterinsurgency laboratory.Footnote 35

Finally, building on the view that decolonization has had a “globalizing” effect, “trigger[ing] all sorts of changes ranging from global geopolitics and new transregional alignments to major migratory movements and bitter culture wars over the legacies of empire,” one can argue that it had a “regionalizing” effect, too.Footnote 36 In MENA, the common experience of a rising struggle against a foreign imperial presence—whatever the different and, over time, shifting political goals—helped reshape and deepen regional senses of identity. This included not only Arabic-speaking countries but others, too.Footnote 37 And early on, these regionalizing effects mattered doubly because colonies coexisted for a long time with three if not five (however “light”) sovereign states: Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia; and, from 1930 and 1936, respectively, Iraq and Egypt. The very existence and experience of those states served as models and interlocutors across and beyond the region, and/or they used their independence in the region and beyond vis-à-vis still colonized countries. Examples abound. Consider the effect of the Anglo–Iraqi Treaty of 1930 on Syrian and Lebanese politics; the role of interwar Iraq and Saudi Arabia as training and testing grounds for Arab nationalist state builders; Turkey's rekindled interest in the Arab world in the 1930s; Egypt's role in North African decolonization up to the 1950s; and Arab interest in the course and fate of Iran's oil nationalization.Footnote 38 Such interactions between coexisting postcolonial and (still) colonial polities helped shape the region—a pattern observable elsewhere, too.

In conclusion, the history of decolonization in our region is not only fascinating per se. It also allows us to revisit a range of issues: from everyday life experiences to the interplay between politics, culture, and truly ontological questions of life, dignity and identity; from the question of how “the region” was formed on the ground and in people's minds in the modern period to the question of how it related to, and was embedded in, networks beyond the region, around the world.

References

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14 However, see also Maurice M. Labelle, “Tensions of Decolonization: Lebanon, West Africans, and a Color Line within the Global Color Line, May 1945,” Radical History Review 131 (2018): 36–57; colonized attempts to draw a white/non-white color line, reach back deep into the colonial period: Rey, Carina, “Decrying White Peril: Interracial Sex and the Rise of Anticolonial Nationalism in the Gold Coast,” American Historical Review 119, no. 1 (2014): 78–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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19 Reem Abou-El-Fadl, “Building Egypt's Afro-Asian Hub: Infrastructures of Solidarity and the 1957 Cairo Conference,” Journal of World History30:1-2 (2019): 157–92.

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21 The most prolific proponents of this understanding of decolonization are historians of the British Empire such as William Roger Louis who edits The Oxford History of the British Empire. See also Louis, William Roger, Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez and Decolonization: Collected Essays (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006)Google Scholar; Smith, Simon, Ending Empire in the Middle East (London: Routledge, 2012)Google Scholar. A fresh look, turning around the concept of (divergent US and British) mental maps, is Husain, Aiyaz, Mapping the End of Empire: American and British Strategic Visions in the Postwar World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014)Google Scholar. For recent critiques of the political literature on decolonization, see Takriti, Abdel Razzaq, “Colonial Coups and the War on Popular Sovereignty,” The American Historical Review 124, no. 3 (2019): 878–909CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Abou-El-Fadl, “Building Egypt's Afro-Asian Hub.” The now classic treatment of the role of decolonizing and postcolonial countries in the Cold War is Westad, Odd Arne, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. More recent interventions include Duara, Prasenjit, “The Cold War as a Historical Period: An Interpretive Essay,” Journal of Global History 6, no. 3 (2011): 457–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McMahon, Robert, ed., The Cold War in the Third World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)Google Scholar; Leslie, James and Leake, Elisabeth, eds., Decolonization and the Cold War: Negotiating Independence (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015)Google Scholar.

22 The standard on the topic is: Dawisha, Adeed, Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003)Google Scholar. For a recent rethinking of this field see: Wien, Peter, Arab Nationalism: The Politics of History and Culture in the Modern Middle East (London: Routledge, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 The bibliography on nationalism is enormous and cannot be cited in full here. See for instance, “Relocating Arab Nationalism: Special Issue,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 43, no. 2, May 2011: 203–312.

24 For instance, Immerman, Richard H. and Goedde, Petra, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For transnational history more generally, see Saunier, Pierre-Yves, Transnational History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Iriye, Akira and Saunier, Pierre-Yves, eds., The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 The common usage is ma ba‘d al-kulunyaliyya, which is, essentially, post-colonialism or, in its earlier iteration, the period right after colonialism.

26 A point expanded on in Schayegh, Cyrus, “The Mandates and/as Decolonization,” in The Routledge Handbook of the History of the Middle East Mandates, ed. idem and Arsan, Andrew (London: Routledge, 2015), 412–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Shumsky, Dmitry, Beyond the Nation-State: The Zionist Political Imagination from Pinsker to Ben-Gurion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018)Google Scholar.

28 As both had been British ruled, their trajectories may be compared to the five British colonies that were formally separate members of the League of Nations from its start: South Africa, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and India.

29 The Pan American Union dates back to 1890, sure, but the imperial United States was central to it. (Then again, as already noted, Britain had a hand in founding the Arab League.)

30 Dietrich, Oil Revolution.

31 For a conceptualization, using British cases, see Takriti, “Colonial Coups.”

32 Brennan, “Radio Cairo.” Related, see Fink, Carole et al. , eds., 1956: European and Global Perspectives (Leipzig: Leipziger Uni-Verlag, 2006)Google Scholar; Laron, Guy, Origins of the Suez Crisis: Postwar Development Diplomacy and the Struggle over Third World Industrialization, 1945–1956 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

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34 James Le Sueur, Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics during the Decolonization of Algeria (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); Kalter, Christoph, The Discovery of the Third World: Decolonization and the Rise of the New Left in France c. 1950–1976 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Imlay, Talbot, “International Socialism and Decolonization during the 1950s: Competing Rights and the Postcolonial Order,” American Historical Review 118, no. 4 (2013): 1105–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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36 Thomas and Thompson, “Introduction,” 4–5. There were feedbacks between regionalizing and globalizing effects, too. See e.g. Abou-El-Fadl, Reem, “Neutralism Made Positive: Egyptian Anticolonialism on the Road to Bandung,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 42, no. 2 (2015): 1–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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38 Schayegh, Cyrus, The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 201CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cleveland, William, The Making of an Arab Nationalist: Ottomanism and Arabism in the Life and Thought of Sati' al-Husri (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971)Google Scholar; Amit Bein, Kemalist Turkey and the Middle East: International Relations in the Interwar Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Stenner, Globalizing Morocco; Sternfeld, Lior, “Iran Days in Egypt: Mosaddeq's Visit to Cairo in 1951,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 43, no. 1 (2016): 1–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.