Official Stories
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Official Stories

Politics and National Narratives in Egypt and Algeria

Laurie A. Brand

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Official Stories

Politics and National Narratives in Egypt and Algeria

Laurie A. Brand

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Until the recent uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, the resilience of authoritarian regimes seemed a fundamental feature of regional politics. While economic, political, and internal security policies are most often considered in discussions of regime maintenance, Laurie Brand introduces a new factor, that of national narratives. Portrayals of a country's founding, identity, and bases of unity can be a powerful strategy in sustaining a ruling elite. Brand argues that such official stories, which are used to reinforce the right to rule, justify policies, or combat opponents, deserve careful exploration if we are to understand the full range of tools available to respond to crises that threaten a leadership's hold on power.

Brand examines more than six decades of political, economic, and military challenges in two of North Africa's largest countries: Egypt and Algeria. Through a careful analysis of various texts—history and religion textbooks, constitutions, national charters, and presidential speeches— Official Stories demonstrates how leaderships have attempted to reconfigure narratives to confront challenges to their power. Brand's account also demonstrates how leaderships may miscalculate, thereby setting in motion opposition forces beyond their control.

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Information

Year
2014
ISBN
9780804792325
Topic
History
Edition
1
1
RESTOR(Y)ING THE STATE
National Narratives and Regime Resilience
PRIOR TO THE ARAB UPRISINGS IN SPRING 2011, much ink was spilt by academics, pundits, and journalists in an attempt to explain the resilience of the range of authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Although successive waves of democratization1 seemed to wash over other parts of the world, the MENA states appeared impervious to the same forces of history. Politicized, polemical, and often ill-informed writing offered a variety of ahistorical arguments focused largely on the purported resistance of a disembodied “Islam” or an essentialized Arab culture to any movements toward more meaningful participatory political systems.2
Eventually, over the din of the dim, scholars of the politics of the region made more sophisticated analyses heard. Careful single-case and comparative studies pointed to a host of factors having nothing to do with religion or the broader and even more problematic concept of culture. These analyses instead looked for answers in the political economy of the region, in the intervention of external actors, the role of the Palestine conflict, and the development and entrenchment of the security forces.3 In the economic sphere, the development of rentier economies or states was used to explain the ability of elites in some political systems to buy off potential opposition through distributive policies made possible by wealth accruing from oil or natural gas revenues, or strategic rents. Other analyses focused on the involvement of external or extraregional actors, most centrally the United States. Despite initiatives purported to promote democracy, U.S. aid, often to MENA military or security forces, privileged the stability seemingly guaranteed by dictatorships in order to protect the free flow of oil and thwart threats to Israel.4 Finally, the exceptional strength of coercive apparatuses—the military, the police, and other internal security forces—as well as the patrimonial character of state institutions and low levels of popular mobilization were also shown to be of central importance.5
All of these are critical variables in analyzing political stability and change, regardless of regime type or region. Depending upon country case, singly or in combination, they constitute compelling explanations for the resilience of authoritarian regimes in the MENA region. Nevertheless, they do not exhaust the range of strategies or tools upon which a leadership can draw to maintain or reinforce its power and legitimacy. While its influence on regime resilience may not be as immediately obvious or as easily explored as these other factors, the content of state discourse is another element worthy of study. Official narratives and pronouncements asserting the right to rule, seeking to justify policies, or combatting opponents also deserve careful exploration if we are to understand the full range of tools available to leaderships as they respond to crises—whether chronic or acute—that threaten their hold on power.
It is precisely these narrative tools that this study explores. Specifically, it attempts to discern the forms of scripting and rescripting of elements of the national story and identity, and the way they have been used in constructing or reinforcing legitimacy, “national unity,” and stability in postindependence Arab states. To do so, a range of official texts is analyzed to trace how key elements of the narratives have evolved or been reformulated in the context of major economic and political crises since the 1950s. In order to provide the basis for comparison and grounds for drawing broader inferences, the experiences of two countries—Egypt and Algeria—are explored in detail.
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE CASES
A brief examination of the histories of Egypt and Algeria reveals both similarities and differences that are critical in trying to understand the use of official discourse or narratives as a political instrument. First, both had colonial pasts, albeit of quite different natures. The invasion of Algeria by France in 1830 gradually developed into a brutal settler colonial regime, and the armed liberation struggle in 1954–62 that ended in national independence was subsequently adopted as the postrevolutionary state’s founding story. Egypt was occupied by Britain in 1882, and its finances and foreign affairs came under European control, yet it remained nominally a part of the Ottoman Empire until London made it a protectorate in 1915. It gained formal independence in 1922, following a national uprising called the 1919 revolution, although it continued to be ruled by a monarch from the line of Mehmet Ali,6 the Ottoman viceroy who had come to power in Egypt in 1805 following the defeat of the Napoleonic invasion. Not until after July 1952, when a group of military men known as the Free Officers overthrew the king, was the founding story for the Egyptian postcolonial state, that of the 23 July revolution, established.
In terms of their respective political systems, both Algeria and Egypt were long variations on “republican military” authoritarian regimes.7 Egypt was built on the basis of a state that had arguably been initiated by Mehmet Ali during the first half of the nineteenth century.8 Algeria was constructed on the ruins of what little infrastructure the French colonial regime had left behind. Following their respective revolutions, each country faced significant problems of socioeconomic development and political institutionalization, and each witnessed the emergence of a strong role of the military in politics. Confronted with a host of challenges to power consolidation and stability, their postrevolutionary leaderships subsequently drew heavily on their respective revolutionary credentials—Algeria’s born in a bloody liberation war and Egypt’s through a coup that promised equality and justice—as sources of domestic legitimacy and regional influence.
As for significant differences, the two present important variations in terms of “ethnic” composition and its potential challenges to national identity construction. The majority of the population in both is Muslim, but each has had a small Jewish community, and in Egypt there is also a Christian (largely Coptic) population, totaling perhaps 10 percent of the population. In Algeria, in addition to religious diversity, there are communities of Arabic speakers as well as a significant part of the population (referred to generically as Berbers) whose maternal language is not Arabic, and who have their own regional and tribal affiliations. Beyond that, there has been the issue of the role of French, the language of the colonizer, which had been so important to the limited educational opportunities offered Algerians prior to independence. In Egypt, homogeneity is generally proclaimed, yet some historic differences have existed between the south (upper Egypt) and the north (lower Egypt), along with the separate identities of Nubians and Arabs (in this context meaning desert or non–Nile Valley peoples).
Dramatic events or crises in each country serve to illuminate when and in what way(s) the leadership may have introduced changes into the content of state discourse. In Egypt, we have the initial challenge of consolidating the postmonarchy military regime, the Israeli-French-British invasion known as the Suez war in 1956; the termination in 1961 of the United Arab Republic, the Egyptian-Syrian union concluded in 1958; the disastrous June 1967 war, which destroyed the Egyptian military and led to Israeli occupation of the Sinai Peninsula; and the sudden death of President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1970. Then came the decade of Anwar al-Sadat’s presidency: the beginnings of charting a new political and economic course with the expulsion of Soviet advisors in 1972, the launching of the October 1973 war against Israel and the initiation of the Open Door economic policy in 1974. Bloody economic riots in January 1977 were followed by Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem the following November, and ultimately the conclusion of a peace treaty with Israel, the first between the Jewish state and an Arab county, in March 1979. Sadat’s assassination in 1981 brought another unexpected transition at the level of the presidency, beginning what would be Husni Mubarak’s thirty-year rule. Under his presidency, stability was challenged by the violence of Islamist groups, the continuing movement toward ending the remnants of the welfare state, and a fuller opening to international capital and investment.
Turning to Algeria, there is a similarly significant list: the brief post-independence war in the summer of 1962 between rival forces seeking to control the new state; the 1965 coup against President Ahmed Ben Bella by his vice president and minister of defense, Houari Boumedienne; and the 1979–80 transition from Boumedienne to President Chadhli Bendjedid. Algeria also witnessed an ethno-political uprising in 1980 known as the Berber Spring, a popular explosion in October 1988 triggering the end of one-party rule in 1989, the rise of militant political Islamism, the dark decade of internal insurgency of the 1990s; and the move to national reconciliation in the 2000s.
These crises unfolded quite differently across the two countries; however, there are also a number of similarities that provide grounds for potentially fruitful comparison. For example, both Egypt and Algeria have suffered major economic crises that provoked serious riots. Both have experienced the unexpected death of a defining leader (Boumedienne and Nasser); a coup (Boumedienne ousting Ben Bella) or coup attempt (‘Ali Sabri et al. against Sadat) as part of a leadership change; and have had to deal with domestic Islamic insurgencies (if of different orders), as arguably the most significant domestically generated challenges to the state.
In sum, there is significant and interesting variation in a number of variables that may be salient in challenging a founding story or in constructing national unity and identity, including ethnicity, language, religion, and region. The list above is intended neither to be exhaustive nor to establish that the two countries constitute “comparable cases” from a social science perspective. Moreover, in both cases, economic distributive policies, external assistance, and the coercion of the security forces were central elements in maintaining or restoring order, or enabling the leader or ruling group to survive in power, depending on the episode. Nevertheless, shifts in the portrayals of particular historical episodes or in the definitions of national mission and values found in speeches, official documents, government schoolbooks, and other texts provide strong evidence from the highest levels of leadership that discourse was viewed as an important tool in reinforcing or (re)legitimating political power.
STATE DISCOURSE AS A POLITICAL TOOL
No political leader or elite, even in authoritarian states, rules solely through the threat of coercive violence. All leaderships need some level of support, or at least acquiescence, from the people over whom they rule. Indeed, even the most brutal regimes manifest a strong desire to secure and maintain legitimacy, acceptance by the people of their right to rule.9
In considering the bases of acceptance of a given political system or leadership by the population, the political theorist Antonio Gramsci’s formulation of hegemony is particularly salient. He argued that in order to understand the power of the state, it was necessary to explore far more than direct forms of control, such as the police, laws, and the courts, which he referred to as “domination.” Less tangible elements that shape state authority are also central. Here he was referring to a complex configuration of values, customs, political principles, and social relations accepted throughout society and its institutions at a given historical moment. In his view, it was this set of elements that constituted what he called “hegemony,” an indirect form of authority that arose from their broad acceptance in a given polity.10 While Michel Foucault’s notion of hegemony departs significantly from Gramsci’s, he also argued that there had been an historical shift in the exercise of power, away from juridical forms that often involved corporal coercion and violence to more complex, and ultimately more effective, technologies of power.11
One element key to both Gramsci’s formula of hegemony and Foucault’s technologies of power is discourse. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe define discourse as the means used to organize a society into a structured reality, in order to give it stability and meaning. Some meanings tend to become dominant in the sociopolitical imaginary, and thereby contribute to strengthening a particular cause, political position, or power structure. Discourse, which shapes cultures, identities, and ideologies, is indicative of power relations.12 However, unlike more tangible material factors like distributive policies or the role of the security forces discussed above, the effect of discourse is generally indirect: “it operates though the ‘minds’ of people . . . typically exercised through persuasion or other forms of discursive communication, or resulting from fear of sanctions” for noncompliance.13
That the control of discourse has been a central concern of authoritarian leaderships is obvious from the experiences of many countries around the world, and certainly those in the MENA region. Algeria’s second postindependence president, Houari Boumedienne, made clear that historians were to follow his directives in narrating Algeria’s past, and both he and the Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat established institutions aimed at controlling research and studies on historical periods deemed critical to their image or claim to rule. In addition, in authoritarian political systems like those of Egypt and Algeria, ministries of information, public guidance, press and publications, and the like have been established with the central task of constructing, controlling, and propagating messages, stories, and symbols aimed at generating support, or in some cases, silence, among the citizenry. Although their impact has waned with the rise of alternative information sources, before the globalization of electronic media, authoritarian leaderships exercised significant, and in some cases monopoly, control over such messages through state information outlets, various forms of cultural production (cinema, theater, and literature), educational curricula, and associated pedagogical materials.
A number of concepts help to link the exigencies associated with maintaining political power and the production of official narratives, whether in speeches, policy statements, and national charters, or in perhaps less immediately obvious forms, such as government school textbooks, and museum displays. Studies of China use the term “thought management,” defined as activities geared toward making people’s thinking conform to the dominant ideology to describe government efforts.14 The term “linguistic engineering,” meaning attempts “to affect people’s attitudes and beliefs by manipulating the language that they hear, speak, read, and write,” has also been used.15 While it addresses only one kind of state discourse, the literature on propaganda also offers important lessons for understanding the intent behind and the mechanisms involved in producing official narratives.
Much of the literature on propaganda, defined by Karel Berkhoff as “a deliberate and systematic attempt to shape perceptions, mental states, and above all, behavior, so as to achieve a response that furthers the propagandist’s intent,”16 examines its use in addressing specific challenges. Wartime is one obvious example of a crisis in which a leadership will see a clear need to shape public attitudes and actions. For example, in his classic study The Birth of the Propaganda State, Peter Kenez argues that propaganda played a large role both in the 1917 victory of the Bolsheviks and in their retention of power during the subsequent civil war. Their successes, he contends, owed to the fact that they better understood the exigencies of the moment and the nature of the struggle than their enemies did, and adjusted their message and policies accordingly.17 In a very different case, Lillian Guerra argues that during the Cuban revolution official discourse, far from being simply a backdrop, shaped events and outcomes, in particular in early confrontations with Washington.18
As for the role of propaganda in legitimizing colonial ventures, Matthew Stanard notes that wide use of propaganda by imperial powers suggests “that this pro-empire device was an integral and necessary component of overseas rule in the twentieth century as governments and others attempted to manufacture consent in societies of mass politics.”19 Focusing on Belgian colonization of the Congo, he stresses the importance of education, especially at the elementary level, in off...

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