Some will point out that this happened during the Cold War. Maybe so. But if that excuse is not admissible for Communist crimes in Budapest in 1956, neither is it admissible for anti-Communist crimes in Jakarta in 1966. A crime is a crime, a massacre is a massacre, and the extermination of elites promotes regression.
Moreover, Indonesia is not the only Muslim country in which the leaders who advocated political independence and state control of their principal natural resources were countered with ferocious efficiency by the West. Sometimes this was because they were the allies of the Soviet Union. But the process also happened in reverse. Some countries turned towards Moscow
In the case of Iran, which I have already mentioned, there is no doubt that Dr Mossadegh dreamt only of establishing a modernising pluralist democracy on the Western model. He had no intention of setting up a Marxist- Leninist dictatorship, nor an ultra-nationalist regime, nor any sort of despotism. He was an upright, self-effacing, depressive man, constantly on the point of quitting public life to go and shut himself away in his library, but he was profoundly motivated by injustice and poverty and only wanted the resources of his country to be used for the advancement of his people. It was for that reason alone that he was forced out of power in 1953 in a coup d’etat planned and executed by the US and British secret services, as numerous accounts attest (some of them in the form of subsequently published confessions).
It was no coincidence that this betrayal of its own principles by the West resulted a quarter of a century later in the Iranian revolution which founded contemporary political Islam.
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 facade, 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
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.
Chapter 12
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
