Amin Maalouf - Disordered World

In Nasser’s day, militant Islamist movements, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, were forced to remain in the shadows on account of the repression they suffered, and also because the Egyptian president’s popularity in the Arab world made all his opponents seem like supporters of colonialism and imperialism.

On the eve of the Egyptian revolution, the Brotherhood was well established in various echelons of society, especially the army. They were conducting a bitter struggle against King Faruk, British interference and the Western presence in general. Their influence spread so rapidly that when the Free Officers seized power in July 1952, many observers imagined that this organisation, which had been unknown up to that point, was just a manifestation of the Brotherhood, a façade, perhaps even simply their military wing. We know today that several participants in the coup were indeed linked to the Islamist movement, some intimately and others more informally.

But the principal architect of the coup, Nasser, very soon came to view the Brotherhood as rivals. They were too powerful to be used as a mere instrument in the hands of the Free Officers, and he had no desire to be their puppet. He came into conflict with them, sought ways to undermine their influence, and after they tried to assassinate him in 1954, he had some of their leaders executed and others imprisoned. Those who managed to escape the crack-down fled to Western Europe, the US or Arab countries which opposed Nasser, such as Jordan or Saudi Arabia.

When the Egyptian president nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956 and emerged victorious from his confrontation with the British, French and Israelis, thereby immediately becoming the hero of the Arab masses, the Brotherhood could no longer oppose him openly. Each time they tried to raise their heads, there was another crack-down, as for example in 1966, when their most brilliant intellectual Sayyid Qutb was condemned to death and hanged after a summary trial. Arab public opinion at the time was not much affected because it associated the Islamists with the ‘reactionary monarchies’ and the Western countries where they had sought refuge.

After the defeat of Nasserism and the painful self-examination which followed, the Islamists were once again able to get a hearing. ‘We told you that you shouldn’t trust that charmer!’ Though their voice was at first hesitant, whispering, half-hidden, it would grow more and more confident, until it became dominant, even deafening.

Everything that had happened in the world during the previous decades helped the Islamists’ arguments to prevail in Arab societies. The successive failures of regimes which called themselves Arab nationalist would end up totally discrediting this ideology and giving credibility to those who had always said that the very idea of an Arab nation was a Western import and that the only nation worthy of the name was the nation of Islam. The acceleration of globalisation would increase the need for and credibility of a global ideology which swept aside borders and went beyond local allegiances. For a small fraction of the population that was Marxism; for the vast majority it could only be religion. And in any case the collapse of the Soviet camp would conclude this debate once and for all in favour of the Islamist movements, but without them transforming themselves into parties of government, and without the dilemma of lost legitimacy being resolved.

For one of the major consequences of the successive defeats of Nasser, Saddam and others is that the very idea of an Arab head of state who can stand up to the West, as was the case in the 1950s and ’60s, has ceased to be credible. Anyone wishing to remain in power has to make himself acceptable to the superpower, even if, in order to do so, he has to go against the wishes of his people. Those who are radically opposed to the US, whether by arms or violent rhetoric, generally have an interest in staying in the shadows.

And so two parallel political universes developed, one visible but lacking popular support, and the other hidden and possessing a certain popularity, but unable to assume the responsibility of power long-term. Those who represent the former are perceived as native lackeys in the pay of the enemy; those who represent the latter are mere outlaws. Neither of them has true legitimacy; one because they govern without the people, and the other because they are manifestly incapable of governing, as much due to international hostility as to their own political culture, which predisposes them to radical opposition, doctrinal intransigence and the issuing of fatwas , rather than the inevitable compromises required to govern a state. This is a dead end which the Islamists in Egypt, Sudan, Algeria, Morocco and Jordan became aware of and which was made abundantly apparent when Hamas won the Palestinian elections.

For any human society, the absence of legitimacy is a form of weightlessness which disturbs all forms of behaviour. When no authority, institution or individual is able to boast true moral credibility, when people come to believe that the world is a jungle in which the survival of the fittest is the universal law, and where any action is permissible, then a drift towards deadly violence, tyranny and chaos becomes inevitable.

As a result, the erosion of legitimacy in the Arab world cannot be treated as a vague topic to be pondered by specialists. One of the lessons of 11 September 2001 is that in this era of globalisation, no type of disorder remains strictly local, and when it affects the emotions, self-image and daily life of hundreds of millions of people, its effects are felt all over the planet.

After this long development on the loss of legitimacy in Arab countries, I want to return for a moment to the other crisis of legitimacy which contributes to the disorder of the world: the global role of the United States. I want to underline that the pertinent question for me is not whether US democracy functions properly; I don’t know many which function better. But even if it were the most perfect system, even if all citizens of voting age exercised their right to vote in ideal conditions, the problem would remain the same: from the moment at which the votes of US citizens, who make up 5 per cent of the world’s population, become more significant for the future of the whole of humanity than those of the remaining 95 per cent, there is something dysfunctional in the way global politics works.

It is as though someone decreed that the inhabitants of Florida alone were going to choose the US president, and the electorate in all the other states of the union would only elect state governors and local authorities. I have again taken Florida as an example as its population happens to represent exactly 5 per cent of the US population.

It is true that there is not too much indignation when the preferences of those who have the privilege of voting elect someone we might have chosen ourselves. But that only masks the anomaly; it does not remove it.

At the beginning of this second part, I wrote that the ‘jurisdiction’ of the US administration now covered the whole planet. The word was in quotation marks, given that the authority exercised by Washington does not result from a mandate bestowed on it by the world’s people. Within the US, it is a de jure mandate. In the rest of the world it is a de facto government, with questionable legitimacy.

It is not easy to discuss this question and at the same time firmly reject the systematic anti-Americanism which reached its zenith in the first years of this century. However, that is the line I am sticking to; first out of conviction, given that I feel neither servility nor rancour towards our global ‘suzerain’; and also because it is the only way to understand the dramas of our times and seek solutions. I shall therefore set aside the question of whether the US has shown expansionist and hegemonic tendencies since its inception. It is not that this question does not interest me, but it seems superfluous to spend time on it, given all the other countries that have used and abused their power whenever history has granted them the opportunity to do so. Indeed, if the Russians, Japanese, Germans, British or French — to mention only those nations which have dreamed of global hegemony in the course of the past two centuries — had been able to attain a global status comparable to that of the United States, their behaviour would have been even more high-handed. I suspect that it will be the same in the future with China and India.