Posted on May 29, 2011 in
Articles The Article: On The Concatenation In The Arab World by Perry Anderson in the New Left Review.
The Text: The Arab revolt of 2011 belongs to a rare class of historical events: a concatenation of political upheavals, one detonating the other, across an entire region of the world. There have been only three prior instances—the Hispanic American Wars of Liberation that began in 1810 and ended in 1825; the European revolutions of 1848–49; and the fall of the regimes in the Soviet bloc, 1989–91. Each of these was historically specific to its time and place, as the chain of explosions in the Arab world will be. None lasted less than two years. Since the match was first lit in Tunisia this December, with the flames spreading to Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, Oman, Jordan, Syria, no more than three months have passed; any prediction of its outcomes would be premature. The most radical of the trio of earlier upheavals ended in complete defeat by 1852. The other two triumphed, though the fruits of victory were often bitter: certainly, far from the hopes of a Bolívar or a Bohley. The ultimate fate of the Arab revolt could resemble either pattern. But it is just as likely to be sui generis.
Two features have long set the Middle East and North Africa apart within the contemporary political universe. The first is the unique longevity and intensity of the Western imperial grip on the region, over the past century. From Morocco to Egypt, colonial control of North Africa was divided between France, Italy and Britain before the First World War, while the Gulf became a series of British protectorates and Aden an outpost of British India. After the War the spoils of the Ottoman Empire fell to Britain and France, adding what became under their calipers Iraq, Syria, the Lebanon, Palestine and Transjordan, in the final great haul of European territorial booty. Formal colonization arrived late in much of the Arab world. Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, the Subcontinent, not to speak of Latin America, were all seized long before Mesopotamia or the Levant. Unlike any of these zones, however, formal decolonization has been accompanied by a virtually uninterrupted sequence of imperial wars and interventions in the post-colonial period.
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