Libya and the Global Enduring Disorder

Jason Pack

• Publisher: Hurst Publishers
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781787385689
• eBook ISBN: 9781787387638
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Geopolitics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

We no longer inhabit a world governed by international coordination, a unified NATO bloc, or an American hegemon. Traditionally, the decline of one empire leads to a restoration in the balance of power, via a struggle among rival systems of order. Yet this dynamic is surprisingly absent today; instead, the superpowers have all, at times, sought to promote what Jason Pack terms the ‘Enduring Disorder’.

He contends that Libya’s ongoing conflict–more so than the civil wars in Yemen, Syria, Venezuela or Ukraine–constitutes the ideal microcosm in which to identify the salient features of this new era of geopolitics. The country’s post-Qadhafi trajectory has been moulded by the stark absence of coherent international diplomacy; while Libya’s incremental implosion has precipitated cross-border contagion, further corroding global institutions and international partnership.

Pack draws on over two decades of research in and on Libya and Syria to highlight the Kafkaesque aspects of today’s global affairs. He shows how even the threats posed by the Arab Spring, and the Benghazi assassination of US Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, couldn’t occasion a unified Western response. Rather, they have further undercut global collaboration, demonstrating the self-reinforcing nature of the progressively collapsing world order.

1

THE APPEASEMENT TRAP

The lack of leadership and coordination that characterized international actions towards Libya during and after the anti-Qadhafi Uprisings was mirrored in domestic Libyan politics. Each social group, town, tribe, ideological tendency, and institution suspected the intentions of the others and refused to pool resources or compromise. Qadhafi had been a tyrant, but everyone knew where the dinar stopped. In post-2011 Libya, a series of feckless leaders engaged in erratic acts of populist-style appeasement borne out of their own perception that they lacked sufficient legitimacy to lead courageously.¹ This is the primary theme of this chapter’s excerpt.

Governance requires coalition-building in order to solve collective action problems. This can involve giving preferential benefits to certain groups in exchange for their participation or support. Appeasement results from giving away benefits to certain domestic groups or foreign interlocutors without receiving anything commensurate in exchange.² Appeasement can result from poor policy choices, miscalculations, or a lack of resolve. It is also a knee-jerk response of a weak government confronted by a restive population that is militarized and has significant popular legitimacy for its demands.

Although the decision to undertake specific acts of appeasement is meant to delay conflict or avert it altogether, it leaves the appeaser in a worse bargaining position after the action than before. Hence, it usually succeeds in postponing conflict but makes it more virulent when it does break out. Sometimes it is done to buy time or to curry favour. When it fails to do so, it can have disastrous consequences.

For a range of historical reasons, Libya has always been the only Middle Eastern oil country in which the ‘periphery’ (disparate social forces and communities) dominates the ‘centre’ (government and centralized institutions).³ After the 2011 Uprisings, the institutions of the nascent centre felt a need to pay homage to the periphery. The periphery (i.e. armed youth from disadvantaged communities) had overthrown the Qadhafi regime. The men in suits representing the newly internationally recognized government had not. They attempted to claim the youth’s victory as their own, but this claim was not widely accepted.⁴

Populist appeasement tends to arise in situations where governmental legitimacy is weak, while the demands or grievances of the people or specific interest groups are seen as inherently legitimate. The traditional social legitimacy of the periphery in Libya combined with its role during the revolution guaranteed that this would be the case after Qadhafi’s ouster.

The very nature of the multipolar anti-Qadhafi uprisings led to the emergence of a multiplicity of armed actors, each with their own chains of command and raison d’être.⁵ This multiplicity was inherent in Libya’s social structure, its vast geography, and thinly spread population. Its history of governance from the Ottoman period to the present had reinforced primordial divisions—between the coast and the interior; east (Cyrenaica) and west (Tripolitania); non-tribal urban dwellers and nomadic pastoralists; the Sa’ada (or noble) tribes and the Murabatin (subordinate or bound) tribes, especially within Cyrenaica; and Arabs and darker-skinned, non-Arabic-speaking groups, especially in the south.⁶ In addition to tribal, ethnic, linguistic, and regional divisions, Libya’s coast has traditionally housed rival city-states. Given this history, it should come as no surprise that after Qadhafi’s ouster each armed group claimed to be acting on behalf of its social segment and presented itself as possessing greater legitimacy than the new governmental authorities—many of whom had returned from the Diaspora.

Libyan history empowered the periphery

Italy’s brutal occupation of Libya (1911–42) differed from most examples of British and French colonial rule in the Arab world as it involved the deliberate destruction of indigenous institutions and leaders rather than coherent efforts to coopt them.⁷ Afterwards, the British Military Administration (1942–51) governed Libya’s historic regions separately. In the favoured eastern region of Cyrenaica, it was keen to ‘re-invent’ supposedly native institutions, like tribal councils and Sanussi ‘ministries’, rather than to build a modern bureaucracy.⁸ For the first twelve years of the Sanussi monarchy (1951–63), Libya was governed as three federal provinces. Identity and multiple corrupt layers of bureaucracy were rooted in the provinces. The Sanussiyya, as well as their British and American patrons, preferred this arrangement, as it allowed for the administrative separation of the more populated and Arab nationalist part of the country, Tripolitania, from the sources of the king’s power, based in Benghazi, the Green Mountain, and the southern desert.

Oil was discovered in 1959 and exported in 1961. The extractive industries traditionally modify the structures of the regimes with which they come into contact—forging centralized (even if corrupt) institutions, which then engage in top-down decision-making about both rent extraction and wealth distribution. The need to manage a national oil industry and the wealth it produced led the Sanussi monarchy to abandon federalism in 1963 and embark on six years of genuine national institution-building. Nonetheless, favouritism and corruption were still rife while anti-colonial and anti-monarchical resentment festered.⁹

When Qadhafi came to power in a coup d’état in 1969, he changed the symbolic focus of the regime. His rhetoric stressed international issues, but its legitimacy came from local, regional, tribal, and communal identities. Qadhafi’s views on direct democracy and deep suspicion of centralized meritocratic institutions inhibited the movement towards technocratic centralization and further reinforced the already deeply rooted trend of peripheral dominance over the sources of social legitimacy. Although Qadhafi preached radical decentralization and the diffusion of real power to the populace in his speeches and Green Book, it was only the Uprisings against him that made this a reality.¹⁰

In the wake of his ouster, pre-existing institutions were destroyed and power was therefore extremely diffuse. It was the ideal moment for a great unifier to arise, put forth a shared national vision, and harness the populace’s collective energy. Tragically, what instead ensued was a crisis of leadership in which Libya’s leaders appeased the militias, dodged the real governance problem, and adopted populist attempts to spend their way out of the crisis of legitimacy.

Islamist factions who advocated for sharia to be the basis of all law lobbied for Islamic banking and a traditional Islamic personal status law (Ahwal Shakhsiyya). They drew support from the Qataris¹¹ and Turks.¹² Those who advocated a civil republic, in the Tunisian vein, drew support from the French and Emiratis.¹³ New Madkhali Salafist groups opposed both Sufis and political Islamists and followed the doctrine of waliya al-amr (a jurisprudential principle concerning the religious imperative to defer to the authority of temporal rulers as an obligation to God). They drew support from the Saudis.¹⁴

Contrary to how things might have played out in a bygone hegemonic era, the West did not swoop in to help Libya’s post-Qadhafi leaders consolidate power by offering coherent on-the-ground security assistance, bureaucratic capacity-building and military training programmes. Most NTC politicians actively rejected any Western offers of on-the-ground security support, fearing it would undermine their authority relative to the militias.¹⁵ Nonetheless, in the early days when the NTC was still popular, such an approach could have brought the disparate armed factions under central control by leveraging the popular goodwill that the new authorities had acquired by overseeing the ousting of Qadhafi.¹⁶ Instead, certain international advisors advocated for the holders of Libya’s purse strings to reject controversial Western security assistance programs and seek instead to ‘temporize’ by paying off militia members—to obtain their loyalty and incorporate the top militia commanders into the government apparatus. This went against every orthodox theory of how to create a security environment compatible with a transition to government control over the use of force through a demobilization, disarmament, and reintegration (DDR) process followed by security sector reform (SSR).

Temporizers versus de-centralizers

I was an early opponent of such populist appeasement, and experienced first-hand the fierce real world and scholarly debate over the issue.¹⁷ In a peer-reviewed journal article submitted in late 2012 and written immediately after the July 2012 election for the GNC, my co-author and I traced the myriad errors of appeasement made by top NTC policymakers that impacted the subsequent meaning of the electoral results.¹⁸ They had knowingly ‘caved-in’ to militia pressure—specifically over the role of the GNC in appointing the constitutional committee. After one journal rejected the article as ‘not political science, but more like contemporary history’, we revised it and resubmitted it elsewhere to include the then current instance of appeasement—a uniquely Libyan form of lustration (i.e. purging public life of former regime officials), known as the April 2013 Political Isolation Law. The reviewer asked us to focus less on the literature about appeasement and to present more political science literature about democratization theory and instances that could elucidate the theoretical case that the NTC could successfully ‘temporize’ itself out of the militia problem (i.e. with populist payoffs) rather than having to confront them head on.

In order to have our article published, we begrudgingly did so. True, the reviewer had put forth a persuasive case that the central government would become stronger over time while the militias could be bought off in the interim. Yet its eloquence did not make it truer. He was a man of conviction and consistent principles. He was a cheerleader for the ‘success’ of the 17 February Revolution and wrote articles in prominent journals and newspapers about how Libya was on a democratic trajectory.

The ensuing rounds of revisions delayed publication further. They were only brought to a close when a former American ambassador mentor of mine happened to be brought in as a third peer reviewer—presumably to adjudicate between the doyen’s negative review and the positive review of another scholar. The ambassador wrote in support of the article’s intellectual bona fides. By the time the paper was finally ready to come out—nearly twenty-six months after our initial submission and more than eighteen months from our first submission to the eventual journal of publication—the central government’s security structures had been completely infiltrated by the militias, the First Libyan Civil War had just broken out, and chaos reigned throughout most of the country.¹⁹ At the copyediting stage, the journal suggested that we retract the very same paragraphs that months earlier, the reviewer had advocated we put in. We had won the scholarly argument, but Libya had lost the war.

Ironically, while top advisors to the UN and respected chairs of academic political science departments had advocated for the ‘temporizing’ policy, grad students, newly minted PhDs, and diaspora Libyan twenty-year olds were cogently briefing about the dangers of this course of action. For example, the idea that ‘temporizing’ might ever work was the exact opposite of what my esteemed German colleague Florence Gaub had been advocating for. She and I were roughly the same age and on the identical briefing circuit—rubbing elbows at the NATO Intelligence Fusion Centre at RAF Molesworth and at various chancelleries across Europe. I recall one meeting in the British Old War Office—a glorious marble building a stone’s throw away from Whitehall. She told the assembled audience that the militias were like the little furry Mogwai in the Gremlins movie. They start off nice and cuddly, and serve a useful purpose during the daytime. (And in Libya, this was true of the militias as they had ousted Qadhafi and then were essentially protecting their communities from looting and lawlessness in the ensuing power vacuum.) But like the Mogwai, if you fed them fried chicken after dark, their inner demons came out.²⁰ This was Florence’s clever way of expressing what I had previously termed the appeasement trap. It was the post-Qadhafi authorities’ decisions to subsidize the militias with free cash and preferential access to subsidized goods (such as petrol and letters of credit) that brought out their inner demons. By failing to follow the plot, Libyan policy-makers and their international advisors had fallen into the appeasement trap despite multiple warnings and clever metaphors from astute observers.

Appeasement begets a classical positive feedback loop—like so many of the destructive dynamics that characterize the era of the Enduring Disorder. The more money the political class shovelled at the militias, the greater their appetites became, the more power they acquired relative to the political class, and the more enshrined they became in the institutions of state.

As soon as the political class met one round of militia demands, new requests surfaced, and the militias...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Preface: Welcome to the Enduring Disorder
• Introduction: The Great Unravelling
• 1. The Appeasement Trap
• 2. Jihadis Are Just a Symptom
• 3. Unregulated Cyberspace Leads to Neo-Populism
• 4. Libya Versus the Global Economy
• 5. The US–Libya (Anti-)Business Association
• Conclusion
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover