The shockwaves of popular rebellion reverberating across the Arab world since the start of 2011 have put to the test the West’s dominion over the region; a rule that has long aimed at securing access to the Middle East’s oil and gas, while supporting Israel’s ongoing colonization of Palestine. The means by which imperial control is exercised were vividly exposed to public view, as Western officials scrambled to ‘stabilize’ the states that had long served as their clients in the region…Stabilization, then, entails keeping the pro-Western dictatorship’s state apparatus in place while removing the figurehead-turned-liability…
The post-colonial state itself thus provides a key ‘remote control’ mechanism by means of which the West can determine the direction of countries nominally emancipated from its tutelage. In general, American strategy has been to entrust a client governing class with the keys of the state, on condition that it leave the door open. Within this framework, the West will permit various gradations of popular political expression. The range runs from zero, under a dictatorship, through a middling set of pro-capital authoritarian regimes, to parliamentary representation, in which elections can replace one fraction of the governing class with another, but otherwise leave the social order unchanged. There the gradations stop. This is not to say that popular contestation plays no role: it is pressure from below that usually necessitates the transition from one category to another. In a revolutionary situation, however, this controlled, step-by-step relaxation of repression becomes unstable; at that point, other forms of imperial intervention may be necessary to ensure that democratic aspirations do not exceed the bounds set by the ‘lock and key’ arrangement with the client governing class—by ‘military action when necessary’.
Schematically, we can represent the process by which the West has exercised its dominion over client nation-states as a ‘gearbox’ for managing popular demands. In conjunction with the appropriate fractions of the local governing classes, the gearbox is capable of shifting between different gradations of coercion and consent. The ‘gearbox of imperial control’ allows the West to adjust the compromise with the client governing class in response to actual popular pressure, in the way the Obama Administration ‘switched gear’ from Mubarak’s autocracy to (the call for) ‘open and transparent elections’…
The Arab world, in revolt and once again under attack, finds itself in the midst of a triple crisis: the crisis of Western hegemony, the crisis of capital and the crisis of the nation-state. The Arab peoples have had to fend for themselves, in a Middle East dishevelled by creeping privatization, rampant corruption and mass unemployment, with hunger threatening if food prices increase at all. The very conditions of survival in the region are in jeopardy: the fresh water supply is being exhausted, harvest yields are falling, demographic pressures are on the rise. States are failing even in their role as containers to hold a labour reserve or surplus population…
This is not… a revolution in which the social forces associated with a new way of life press forward to take the place of defunct governing classes, no longer able to hold the line. Instead, it may well be that the current storms raging across the Middle East are part of a planetary depression, signalling a structural weakening of the post-colonial state form through which the West has long exercised its control.
Kees van der Pijl,
“Arab Revolts and Nation-State Crisis”
The Arab Spring and the Crisis of Western Hegemony
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