The Struggle for Syria

"I chose The Struggle for Syria partly because it’s a wonderful read and partly because it captures the sense that what’s happening right now is not necessarily historically unique. I suspect there will be a lot of resonances between what happened in the 1950s and what we’re going to see unfold as these authoritarian states open up. The Struggle for Syria is about the great Arab cold war of the 1950s and 60s between the pan-Arabist trend – led by Egypt – and the conservative forces. It played out in the domestic politics of states like Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. It was an intense war of ideas. You had extremely high levels of popular mobilisation and people in the streets. You also had the transnational media. For example, when Egypt’s Voice of the Arabs radio would beam out King Hussein of Jordan, thousands of Jordanians would take to the streets, burn things down and riot. It was a period of intense popular mobilisation within a regional framework. People who read this book and see how turbulent the region was back then will, I think, feel a shock of familiarity. And that’s a very cautionary tale. After the 1967 war, the oil crisis flooded money into the hands of the conservative regimes, and made Saudi Arabia in particular indecently rich. So the pan-Arabist side of the Arab cold war lost, and all of the rulers in the region – whoever was on the throne circa 1970 – used the money to build massive state security apparatuses and patronage networks, and create the stifling repression that we’ve come to associate with Arab politics. In a sense that’s new. If you go back to the period before 1970, it was the opposite. The states were extremely weak. Governments were overthrown at the drop of a hat. To a large degree, the authoritarianism we associate with the region was a response to the instability and turbulence of that Arab cold war. If you really wanted to be a pessimist, you could say that one of the possible pathways we could be walking down is an even deeper return to authoritarianism, at the hands of whoever surmounts this round of turbulence. I am on my good days. Malcolm Kerr wrote the other great book about that period, The Arab Cold War . In the preface to the final edition, which came out in 1971, he writes something along the lines of, “This is going to be the last edition of this book, because Arab politics isn’t fun anymore.” There was this sense of the passing of an era. I think they’ll try. But with the changes in information technology and in the expectations of the mobilised youth, I just don’t think it would be allowed. They’re far more vulnerable than people think they are. They have all the ingredients for instability, but – for now – they also have a huge amount of money to throw at the problem. That does help. I don’t think so."