The Middle East in 1958

Reimagining a Revolutionary Year

Jeffrey G. Karam, Jeffrey G. Karam

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780755606818
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Imperialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The revolutionary year of 1958 epitomizes the height of the social uprisings, military coups, and civil wars that erupted across the Middle East and North Africa in the mid-twentieth century. Amidst waning Anglo-French influence, growing US-USSR rivalry, and competition and alignments between Arab and non-Arab regimes and domestic struggles, this year was a turning point in the modern history of the Middle East. This multi and interdisciplinary book explores this pivotal year in its global, regional and local contexts and from a wide range of linguistic, geographic, academic specialties. The contributors draw on declassified and multilingual archives, reports, memoirs, and newspapers in thirteen country-specific chapters, shedding new light on topics such as the extent of Anglo-American competition after the Suez War, Turkey's efforts to stand as a key pillar in the regional Cold War, the internationalization of the Algerian War of Independence, and Iran and Saudi Arabia's abilities to weather the revolutionary storm that swept across the region. The book includes a foreword from Salim Yaqub which highlights the importance of Jeffrey G. Karam's collection to the scholarship on this vital moment in the political history of the modern middle east.

Chapter 1

Reimagining 1958 through the Lenses of Multilingual Sources and Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Jeffrey G. Karam

The year 1958 was a time marked by a series of transformative sociopolitical developments that shook the foundations of the existing Middle Eastern order and in various ways, sparked the beginning of a new sociopolitical landscape in the region. The year 1958 remains a vital, if not one of the most important, moments in the Middle East from the Nahda (Renaissance) to the Arab uprisings in 2010–11 and the most recent wave of protests in the region that erupted in 2019.¹ Against the backdrop of Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal Company and the ensuing crisis of 1956, the creation of the United Arab Republic with the merger of Syria and Egypt into one state on February 1, 1958, seemed the initial step toward greater Arab unity. As the present work shows, the repercussions of the union between Egypt and Syria had an impact both on the states in the Middle East and on the ones outside the region. The most visible impact manifested in three Arab states: first, the aggravation of the political crisis later turned civil war in Lebanon between May and July 1958; second, the attempted and foiled coups against Hussein in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in June and July 1958; and third, the military coup turned revolution in Iraq on July 14, 1958, that ended the monarchy and created a republic.

The three seminal events constituted a turning point in the modern history of the Middle East and North Africa. However, this book considers that these sociopolitical developments were part of a larger series of events in a period marked by decolonization, revolutionary nationalism, internationalism, postcolonialism, imperialism, anti-imperialism, and state formation. Therefore, this book is a study that brings together these events, arguing for the importance of examining these moments in conjunction and in conversation with each other by using the time span of that seminal year of 1958. Existing scholarship, especially the edited volume A Revolutionary Year: The Middle East in 1958, by Roger Louis and Roger Owen, draws the connections between the events in Iraq and Lebanon. Other works examine the process of state formation in some states in the Arab Middle East and the importance of oil in the region.² However, these important contributions have mostly explored the experiences of a limited number of states and focused on collections of records and documents, while excluding a deeper appreciation of the role of non-Arab actors in the region and the multilayered connections between local, regional, and global developments in 1958.

This book remedies the fragmented nature of the scholarship on 1958 by bringing together, for the first time, scholars researching and writing about the wider context of critical events at the outset of the Cold War in the Middle East and particularly before and during the year 1958. Therefore, although the focus is on 1958 in the Middle East, the volume transcends, first, temporal limitations of one particular year to include pre- and post-1958 contexts, and second, the geographic scope of the Middle East to encompass global trends and processes. It, therefore, examines a series of momentous events in different Middle Eastern capitals and ones outside the region from a wide range of linguistic, geographic, historical, and academic specialties. Only by facilitating a dialogue between the many scholars and practitioners specializing in different aspects of the postcolonial moment in 1958 and its connections to broader revolutionary struggles, both failed and successful, can we appreciate the global, regional, and local experience of various Middle Eastern actors and states and the transnational nature of the twentieth-century world and the Cold War in the Middle East.

This book joins a multitude of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary volumes that underscore the importance of studying critical junctures and sociopolitical developments in a particular year.³ The present volume’s focus is primarily on the revolutionary year of 1958. This is the result of three considerations. First, the authors control for and hold constant transformational events in 1958 and subsequently are able to focus their analysis on the connections between developments that preceded and proceeded vital and transformational moments in this particular year. This focused approach allows the authors to analyze similarities and differences within and across different states under the same temporal and conceptual considerations. Second, by focusing primarily on one year, the authors collectively demonstrate the methodological and conceptual merits of variation and in-depth analysis of turning points within and across different states in the region. This scholarly contribution is rarely found in works that either focus on the experiences of one particular state or adopt a larger temporal framework that must leave out many of the intricate details of important sociopolitical developments. Third, the authors’ focus on the revolutionary year of 1958 through varied methodologies and archival sources is an important scholarly conversation that highlights the failed and successful experiences of different states within the same time period and in the context of similar transformational moments.

The book is primarily the product of two scholarly conversations. The first began in 2013, as I was conducting research for my doctoral dissertation in different Middle Eastern capitals. During this time, I established contact with a group of political scientists and historians that shared a common appreciation for the complexities of the events in the year 1958 and the need to address a number of cases, as well as records and sources, that were not fully analyzed in existing scholarship. The second phase was in early 2018, especially when plans for an international conference and the current volume started to materialize.

After correspondence with scholars in Europe, the Middle East, and North America, the authors of different chapters were invited to partake in an international conference at the American University of Beirut (AUB) in March 2019. For three consecutive days, the scholars discussed earlier versions of the chapters in this volume, and then consequently participated in a closed book workshop.⁴

Scope and Purpose of the Book

This book recovers the debates, introduces the personalities, and reveals the ideas central to the global revolutionary and postcolonial moment in the Middle East at the outset of the Cold War in the 1950s. It does so through a political, social, economic, anthropological, and historical study of the year 1958 to answer one broad question: to what extent were events in the year 1958 revolutionary and transformative for states in the Middle East and ones outside the region? And if we consider that year to be “revolutionary,” in any given sense or definition of the term, how can an examination of 1958 enhance our understanding of revolutionary moments in the Middle East and the Third World more generally?

Besides the broader question that motivates this book, the chapters engage with many issues, including Egypt and Syria’s perceptions of the United Arab Republic and internal motivations for merger into a single state; the linkages between the Algerian War of Independence and the collapse of the Fourth Republic in France; the extent to which states in the Gulf, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, were affected by different crises and events in Iraq, Lebanon, and Jordan; the ability of Turkey and Jordan to weather the revolutionary wave at the time; the success of the military coup in Iraq and the failure of the different coup d’états in Jordan; Britain’s coping strategies and actions with the ascendancy of the United States in the region; the introduction of US forces in Lebanon and the involvement of a superpower in a domestic political crisis; and the contributions of existing and newly declassified primary and secondary sources from different continents to inform novel discussions of the rivalry between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in the region.

The authors examine these issues in a threefold manner. First, they collectively assert that important sociopolitical developments in the Middle East in 1958 were as transformative for Middle Eastern states as they were for outside powers, including Britain, France, the United States, and the USSR. By focusing on these states outside the region, the chapters explain how outside powers were equally impacted by the different military coups, uprisings, calls for reform, armed skirmishes, and crises in the region, the authors are both breaking the silence on the wider repercussions of the events in 1958 and drawing novel contributions on the interactions between local, regional, and global actors and movements at the time. While the chapters highlight the impact of the Cold War on events in the Middle East, they equally demonstrate that the sociopolitical developments in the Middle East had equal, if not stronger, repercussions on falling and rising powers at the time. They are specifically reversing the dominant and often assumed direction of impact between states in the twentieth century, by shifting the focus on the Third World global south and its agency in shaping Cold War history.

Second, the chapters move beyond the binaries and prevalent frames of reference, such as West versus East, capitalism versus communism, and the United States versus the USSR, that predominantly characterize the trajectory of many sociopolitical developments in the Middle East during that period.⁵ The contributors to this volume contend that analyses along binary frames fail to properly account for the fluidity of different events and the complexity of alliances between and within Middle Eastern states and the two superpowers at the time. This again re-centers the conversation toward the agency and decision-making of local actors, notwithstanding the influence of ideology but rather without assuming actors’ behavior as necessarily following these inhibiting binaries.

Third, almost all of the authors draw on multilingual sources, employ innovative methodologies that cut across disciplinary boundaries, and combine primary and secondary records to analyze the wider connections within and between revolutionary and transformative developments in the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond. Without such a holistic account, we are left with a biased and incomplete account of some of the most important critical junctures in the political history of the Middle East.

The Merits of Multilingual Sources

It is important to highlight two points regarding multilingual sources. First, almost all of the authors have surveyed documents and records in at least two languages in geographically diverse locations to produce novel, accurate, and inclusive scholarly accounts. In fact, most of the contributors to this volume have consulted documents in different languages that are available in archives based in France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and other Western countries. Many of the authors’ proficiency in more than one language certainly allow them to thoroughly analyze Arab or French documents from archives and records in the West. This language proficiency has allowed many authors in the present volume to examine the original document, before it was translated, and in many ways to account for discrepancies or meanings that could be lost in translation across languages. Almost all of the contributors to this volume have analyzed both the original document and subsequent translations.

Second, almost all of the authors who have analyzed the experiences of non-Western states in 1958 have consulted a number of eyewitness accounts, primary records, newspaper and media reports, and secondary accounts authored and published by citizens of these countries. The availability of and access to archival documents in most non-Western states in the Middle East and North Africa is unlike what scholars experience in most Western archival locations and depositories. Many of the contributions to this present volume have scoured published and unpublished materials, drawn on previously conducted interviews with actors in various Middle Eastern capitals, and consulted local accounts to provide a holistic and culturally more sensitive account of important sociopolitical developments before, during, and after the revolutionary year of 1958.

Many of the contributors to this present volume have examined newly declassified and understudied archival records and documents to sustain arguments in their chapters. Other authors offer fresh perspectives and conclusions on previously available documents by employing interdisciplinary lenses and drawing connections between primary and secondary resources. Given that almost all contributors are proficient in more than two languages, they were able to extract records, interpret them, and translate parts of their findings to sustain assertions in their respective chapters. In some instances, the authors have not broken new ground by consulting existing archival sources. However, all the chapters are in effect providing revised interpretations from existing sources that center on drawing connections between several levels of analysis, ranging from domestic considerations to global ones. By inviting the contributors to “reimagine” the impact of the “revolutionary year of 1958” on different states during the wave of decolonization, nationalization, state formation, armed struggles, military coups, and rise of authoritarianism, the present volume does break new ground on the centrality of the Middle East and vital sociopolitical developments in 1958 that were a significant part of global trends and processes that unraveled in other regions.

Importance of the Volume and Contributions to Existing Scholarship

This book builds on existing scholarship, draws on a collection of primary and secondary sources, and makes novel contributions to different disciplines and subfields. In many ways, the present work continues the scholarly debates that began in A Revolutionary Year and so, deepens the analysis through the use of interdisciplinary methodologies and multilingual sources. The book’s significance and contributions are manifold. I will briefly discuss four major ones.

First, the present work considers the significance of the year 1958 both in retrospect and in hindsight. While most scholarly works analyze important junctures that have occurred in the past and could often seem much more important in hindsight than when they transpired at the time, the authors analyzing events in the Middle East examine the commonality between different calls for reform and better economic opportunities in various societies at the time. The major uprisings in different states that began in the early 1950s shared a common purpose: the rejection of Western imperialism and the regimes they bolstered. Another common trend across most of the chapters is the profound distaste for Western-supported authoritarian leaders and regimes, and the slow economic development in different states. The mobilization of different actors and movements in various societies were sparked by the same triggers, a sense of alienation from the established status quo and the popular need to rebel. The volume explains how these struggles were an integral part of the wave of decolonization and state formation that transpired in the Middle East and other regions around the world.

Second, the book brings to the fore the voices of local political actors,...