Militias like Hezbollah Spell Downfall of Arab States

By Hassan Khader

Modern Discussion Website (translated by ATFP)

May 28, 2013

Hezollah’s flagrant intervention in Syria calls into question the crucial concepts of the nation-state, its sovereignty and decision making-powers over national security and social relations within the established borders of an independent country. In principle, the state has the exclusive right to maintain and deploy armed forces, a monopoly on the use of  violence, and the authority to manage decisions regarding war and peace, and law and order.This is the raison d’etre of the modern state, and what distinguishes it from the state of nature in which the law of jungle and survival of the fittest defines existence.

But theory is one thing and reality is another, especially in the now independent postcolonial states whose political borders were demarcated by the colonial powers. In other cases, vast swathes of land in the Arabian Penninsula did not experience direct  colonial rule, but were characterized by tribal structures and regional parochialism. They were consolidated into countries by force, by the strongest tribal and regional chieftains, and thereby converted into modern independent states. But all this was all done with the implied consent of the overseeing colonial powers. 

In both cases, ethnicities, tribes, clans, sects, and different and differing communities were crammed together in the confines of the political borders of these newly independent states. And it was incumbent on the urban elites that sought freedom from colonial powers, and who led the struggle for independence, and negotiated the outcome, to achieve two things: convert the bureaucracy of colonial rule (or, in some cases, tribal formations) into coherent national states, and forge from their various components a united national identity, derived from and based on the political borders of these new states.

For a while, these nation-states seemed as if they had succeeded in imposing a monopoly on the use of violence and decision-making over national security and law and order. They managed to establish the basic structures of administration such as ministries, armed forces, national holidays, centrally-administered educational curricula, and diplomatic corps, etc. And, for a while, it seemed as if the process of social integration and melding, through culture, education, military and civil service, was successful in generating a collective national identity.

However, today in Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Yemen, Syria and Lebanon, we find ample evidence to demonstrate that this process has not only faltered, but actually reached a dead-end.  All these states have probably sunk to the level of failed statehood because of two primary elements. First, they lost the monopoly on the use of violence and the ability to ensure law and order as a result of state weakness, political and moral bankruptcy, or other forms of erosion of state legitimacy. Second, they permitted the fragmentation of broader collective national identity into dominant, subnational regional, sectarian, religious and ethnic identities..

The first factor is manifested by the appearance of armed militias, with paramount subnational sectarian, regional and ethnical loyalties. Some of them even possess tens of thousands of fighters (as in the case of Lebanon), and maintain arsenals of advanced and heavy weaponry that exceed, in some cases, that of the state itself. Some have a sophisticated bureaucracy equaling, or in some cases probably more efficient and effective, than that of the central government.

The second factor is manifested in the domination of sectarian, tribal, regional, religious and ethnical interests at the expense of the broader national public interest of the putative nation-state.. This has been effected either by reducing the state to primarily serving the interest of one subnational identity group or another, or by seeing state interests entirely defined in such parochial terms.

This conundrum is explained in a variety of ways by various Arab and western commentators. Some attribute the failure of many Arab states to flaws in the early stages of their formation. Others focus on fundamental transformations that took place during the later history of these states. But we must reject explanations that try to explain what went wrong by privileging an essential character or innate features to those groups, whether sectarian or ethnic, as the generator of identities that perforce transcend history, borders, ethnicities and states. On its own, this is no explanation, as such transcendent identities do not exist in the abstract but gain their power only in specific contexts.

Certainly it’s impossible to explain the overdetermined histories of either successful or failed states by trying to identify a single causal factor. And where there may be, in some cases, reasonable grounds to look to a specific cause, even then we must remember that each case is particular to its own context and history. Consequently, we should not extrapolate from the Lebanese experience to try to understand or predict anything about Yemen or Sudan.

Nevertheless, one common feature that all these failed states share is the fact that the urban elites who led their establishment as states, and fought the struggle for, and negotiated the outcome of, independence did not last long at the helm of power. They were soon deposed by the army, which was the only power that actually enjoyed the full control of arms. The army officers instituted their own monopoly on the use of violence in the name of the state. This is what happened in weak and poor countries which lacked modern political traditions and strong educated social classes. And when the army officers came to power, they took upon themselves the responsibility of continuing the project of state building, and creating and consolidating a collective national identity. This was done in the context of regional influences, as well as the hegemonic ideas, rhetoric and political models of the time. They typically found Stalinism the most attractive model.

In Syria, for example, the army interfered in politics only three years after the departure of the French troops. In Iraq, it was after just 10 years of after independence. In Sudan, it was a mere two years after independence. In Libya, this came less than two decades after the unification of the country and the establishment of the kingdom. In Lebanon, the first civil war erupted 11 years after the departure of the French forces. All these dramatic changes occurred under the shadow, and as a result, of the cold war that started at the beginning of the second half of the 20^th century, which was mirrored by a parallel Arab cold war. But those dramatic changes were also affected by the outcome and the consequences of the Arab-Israeli wars. 

What is crucial if not decisive is that the urban elites did not last long enough in power after independence. This happened in the weak and poor states whose social strata and political traditions were not fully formed at the time of independence, which led to the capitulation of the political classes and the rise of militaries that took upon themselves the task of statehood building and forming a unifying national identity. These armies were influenced by regional dynamics and the prevailing international postcolonial rhetoric, ideas and examples of the time, of which Stalinism was the most prominent and attractive model.

One of the primary outcomes of the rapid overthrow of the urban elites was an erosion of the urban features of the state. Add to this the tremendous increase in population, the combination of which led to disastrous effects. This sociopolitical phenomenon has been identified by Arab and western scholars alike as a triumph of rural traditions over those of urban society.

In this context, we can pinpoint the first moment of national fissure: the succession of the military coups that were associated with the accelerated erosion of the urban traditions. A simultaneous population explosion led to social and political destabilization, which in turn provided the new rulers (typically the military) with the pretext to change state priorities and dedicate themselves to the sustaining and protecting the regimes they now dominated. And, in this effort, they erased all lines separating the state itself from the government or regime of the moment. Consequently, state identity shattered and dissolved, and in some cases was eventually entirely lost in the process. National identity was fixed in a stage of arrested early development, where the states suffered from fragility and uncertainty, and in the process the very concept of the state was profoundly undermined.

Arising precisely from such a condition of national and political instability and confusion, and in one of its most blatant manifestations, Hezbollah -- standing firm alongside the Assad family -- stakes its rhetorical claims on an assertion of “natural right,” or what amounts to the law of jungle, providing analysts of cynically manufactured and artificial sectarian wars with all the vocabulary and rhetoric they could ever ask for.

Hezbollah openly puts itself above the Lebanese state and refuses to subject itself to its authority. On the other hand, the Assad family has lost the fig leaf that their regime, which claims to represent and protect the state, has depended on as it unleashes all the arms it can muster against people demanding their freedom. Once the Assad regime turned their artillery and missiles, fighter jets and heavy weaponry, on their own people, they lost all moral and political legitimacy to claim any right on the monopoly of violence or other prerogatives of the state. Meanwhile, fighters from various countries are converging on Syria to take up arms for one side or the other in a country that became an open killing field.

The ramifications of this situation will not be limited to Syria and Lebanon, but will reverberate throughout the whole Arab World. It illustrates the dire consequences of the rise of armed militias, hyper-empowered nonstate actors and their local allies, in all the places where the state has dissolved, and its unifying identify has shattered. We have seen those players operating in Iraq, Libya, Syria (fighting both for and against the Assad family), Lebanon, Yemen, and Sudan. Their potential emergence in other places in the Arab world can hardly be discounted.