After Tamerlane (69 page)

The Suez Crisis in 1956 grewdirectly out of this confrontation. When a loan to pay for Egypt's Aswan High Dam was stalled in Washington, there was no going back. Nasser expropriated the Suez Canal, then jointly owned by Britain and France. It seemed an act of bravado. But perhaps Nasser guessed that the British would find it hard to defeat him. They no longer had troops in the old Suez base. An open attack would enrage all Arab opinion. International pressure (through the United Nations) was unlikely to bring what they really wanted: his political downfall. Nasser may also have sensed that London's relentless hostility was not shared fully in Washington. Indeed, the riposte, when it came, revealed Britain's political weakness. Thinly disguised as an intervention between the forces of Egypt and Israel (in whose invasion they colluded), Anglo-French occupation of the Suez Canal was meant to humiliate Nasser and ensure his collapse. The key to Nasser's survival was the enormous appeal of his act of defiance to patriotic Arab opinion. It convinced President Eisenhower that allowing the British their victory would unite Arab feeling against the West as a whole, throw open the door to more Soviet influence, and wreck American interests into the bargain. By a painful irony, the economic fragility that had helped spur the British into their struggle with Nasser – fear that his influence would damage their vital sources of oil – nowproved decisive. Without Washington's nod, they faced financial collapse. The British withdrew, and ate humble pie. Nasser kept the canal.
⁵⁰
It was not he who fell through the political trapdoor, but the British prime minister, Sir Anthony Eden.
⁵¹

Suez signalled the end of British ambition to manage the politics of the whole Arab world. It created a vacuum of great-power influence. It was the moment to forge a new Middle East order. Nasser stood forth as an Arab Napoleon. His prestige was matchless: he was the
rais
(boss). With its large middle class, its great cities and seaports, its literature and cinema, its journalists and teachers, Egypt was the symbol of Arab modernity. Nasser's pan-Arab nationalism (formally inscribed in Egypt's newconstitution) chimed with a phase of sharp social change in most Middle Eastern states. To the new urban
workers, the growing number of students, the expanding bureaucracy, the young officer class, it offered a political creed and a cultural programme. It promised an end to the Palestinian grievance, through the collective effort of a revitalized nation. Within less than two years of his triumph at Suez, Nasser drewSyria into political union, to form the United Arab Republic. The same year (1958) sawthe end of Hashemite rule in Iraq. Nasser still had to reckon with American power (the United States and Britain intervened jointly to prevent the overthrowof Jordan and Lebanon by pro-Nasser factions). But American fears of rising Soviet influence and Nasser's opposition to Communism allowed a wary rapprochement. It looked indeed as if Nasser had achieved a stunning double victory. He had displaced the British as the regional power in favour of a looser, more tolerant American influence. He had made himself and Egypt the indispensable partners of any great power with Middle East interests. Pan-Arab solidarity under Egyptian leadership (the newIraqi regime with its Communist sympathies had been carefully isolated) opened vistas of hope. It could set better terms with the outside powers. It could use the oil weapon (oil production was expanding extremely rapidly in the 1950s). It might even be able to ‘solve' the question of Palestine.

But, as it turned out, the Middle East's decolonization fell far short of this pan-Arab ideal. Nasser might have hoped that the oil-rich sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf (especially Kuwait) would embrace his ‘Arab socialism' and throwoff their monarchs. But the British hung on in the Gulf and backed its local rulers against Nasser's political challenge. Secondly, the pan-Arab feeling on which Nasser relied faced a powerful foe. In the early post-war years the new Arab states seemed artificial creations. The educated Arab elite moved easily between them. So did their ideas. State structures were weak, and could be easily penetrated by external influence. By 1960 this had begun to change. New‘local' elites began to man the states' apparatus. Every regime acquired its
mukhabarat
– a secret police. The sense of national differences between the Arab states became clearer and harder: the charismatic politics of Nasser's pan-Arabism faced an uphill struggle. His union with Syria broke up after three years.
⁵²
Thirdly, the Israeli state proved much more resilient than might have been hoped, and its lien on American sympathy showed no sign of failing: if anything, it
was growing steadily stronger by the early 1960s.
⁵³
Fourthly (and largely in consequence), the pan-Arabist programme could not be achieved without help from outside. The search for arms, aid and more leverage against Israel (and their own local rivalries) drew the Arab states into the labyrinth of Cold War diplomacy. Lastly, a twist of geological fate placed the oil wealth of the region in the states least inclined to followCairo's ideological lead: Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Britain's Gulf protectorates. Nor did oil become (as coal had once been for Britain) the dynamo of social and industrial change. In fact Arab prosperity (or the prospect of it) seemed grossly dependent on an extractive industry over which real control lay in foreign hands – the ‘seven (multinational) sisters' who ruled the world of oil.
⁵⁴
The second catastrophe of the 1967 Six Day War, fought between Israel and Egypt, Jordan and Syria, was a savage reminder that mineral wealth was not the same as power, and that oil dollars did not mean industrial strength. By 1970, the year of Nasser's premature death, the promise of post-imperial freedom had become the ‘Arab predicament'.
⁵⁵

The three largest states in the Middle East were Egypt, Turkey and Iran (each of which was to reach a population of 66 million in 2001). With the failure of Nasser's struggle to make Egypt the centre of an Arab revolution, his successor, Anwar Sadat, turned back (like Mehemet Ali in the 1840s) towards an accommodation with the West. By the late 1970s Egypt had become the second largest recipient (after Israel) of American aid.

Turkey, under Atatü rk's shrewd former lieutenant Ismet Inonu, remained carefully neutral during the Second World War. But the huge forward movement of Soviet power at the end of the war, and Stalin's open avowal of his designs on the Straits – ‘It was impossible to accept a situation where Turkey has a hand on Russia's windpipe,' he declared at Yalta – pushed Ankara firmly towards the Western camp. Under the Truman Doctrine (1947), Turkey was included in the sphere of American help and protection, however vague at this stage. By 1955 it had become a full member of NATO. In a way that Kemal Atatü rk could hardly have dreamed of, the pattern of Cold War conflict had opened the door for Turkey's acceptance as a part of the West, with, by the end of the century, a widely recognized claim
to enter the European Union. Tensions with Greece and over the future of Cyprus (which Turkey invaded and partitioned in the 1970s) made relations fretful at times. Within Turkey itself, the key question for much of the half-century after 1945 was how far Atatü rk's grand project of a strong bureaucratic state, with a modern industrial base and a secular culture, was compatible with representative democracy (Atatü rk's Turkey had been a one-party state) and an open (not state-dominated) economy.

The case of Iran is the most intriguing of all. Iran had been jointly occupied by Soviet and British forces in 1941, partly to block Reza Shah's approaches to Germany, mainly to secure free passage for supplies from Britain to an embattled Russia. Reza Shah abdicated and was sent off into exile. The result was to unravel his authoritarian state. Resentful notables (the powerful landowning class), radical movements in the towns (like the Tudeh Party), tribal leaders (of the Qashgai and Bakhtiari) and ethnic minorities (Kurds, Arabs and Azerbaijanis) challenged the newyoung shah's authority and scrambled for favour from the occupying powers. At the end of the war, this instability grew. The Red Army stayed on in Iranian Azerbaijan until 1946. The effects of wartime inflation ravaged the economy. The supporters of the shah struggled with the radicals and notables for control of the Majlis, or parliament. The government faced increasing resistance from tribal, provincial and ethnic groups. By 1949, however, the shah was close to reasserting control, perhaps because the alternative seemed a further fragmentation of the Iranian state and a deepening cycle of social unrest.

Before this could happen, a huge crisis broke out. To restore his position, the shah had been anxious to swell Iran's revenue from its main source of wealth, the vast oilfields in the south-west of the country, controlled by the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (today's BP). In July 1949 a so-called ‘supplemental agreement' proposed to increase the royalty that the company paid from 15 to 20 per cent, with further increases envisaged. But this agreement ran foul of two massive obstructions. The first was the fear among the shah's opponents that this newfound wealth would seal the revival of his power along pre-war lines. The second was the much wider hostility across Iranian opinion against continued foreign control of Iran's key
resource and against the influence the company was believed to exert. To make matters worse, while the matter was debated in the Majlis, it became known that Aramco, the Arab-American Oil Company, had offered a 50 per cent share of profits to its host government in Saudi Arabia. As negotiations with Anglo-Iranian ground on, the political temperature rose and in March 1951 the Majlis passed a law to nationalize the company. A fewdays later Mohamed Mossadeq, a veteran antagonist of the shah and his father, took office as prime minister.
⁵⁶

The result was a stand-off. British talk of armed intervention was vetoed in Washington, where London's approach was regarded as reckless and retrograde.
⁵⁷
Instead, the large British staff was withdrawn from the fields and the Abadan refinery. The major oil companies, fearing that others might followthe Iranian example, imposed an international boycott on Iranian oil that was very effective. Mossadeq had seemed on the brink of achieving a constitutional revolution, but his support – never very cohesive – nowbegan to break up. In the West he was suspect as a dangerous demagogue, paving the way for Communist rule. In August 1953 he was overthrown by a military coup, aided and part-funded by American agents with some British support, and replaced by a premier who was loyal to the shah. Under a new oil agreement, Iran's oil was sold through a cartel of British and American companies. The shah's oil income rose spectacularly: tenfold between 1954–5 and 1960–61, to $ 358 million; and a further fifteenfold by 1973–4. So did his military and political power. By the early 1960s he was firmly established as a major ally of the West, whose value as a bulwark against a Soviet southward advance was offset periodically by the fear that his drive to be master of the Gulf would set off a conflict with the Arab states of the region.

In Cold War terms, the shah's triumph over Mossadeq seemed a victory for the West. In fact his success owed as much to the divisions and mistakes of his opponents and to the deep-dyed conservatism of a landlord-dominated society as it did to the machinations and manoeuvres of the CIA.
⁵⁸
From another point of view, the shah and Mossadeq between them had wrought a remarkable change in Iran's general position. The semi-colonial status which even Reza Shah had not entirely thrown off, the Company's privileges as almost a state
within the state, and the pervasive influence that the British exerted over Iranian officialdom and through their provincial allies had all been swept away in the humiliating retreat into which Anglo-Iranian was forced. To an extent that no other Middle East ruler could rival, the shah could assert not only Iran's independence but also its claim to be the one great power of the region. It was a signal irony that those who eventually inherited the state he had built were the bitterest enemies of the changes it imposed on Iranian society.

It was events in East Asia, South Asia and the Middle East that destroyed the Europeans' illusion that their colonial empires could be revived in the post-war world. For a while at least, Africa seemed different. Even well-informed observers doubted that Africa could follow in the wake of Asia, or would be allowed to do so without a bitter struggle. In the Maghrib countries (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia), the power of France remained deeply entrenched. The French idea of a Mediterranean ‘destiny' precluded real separation from lands thought so vital to France's place in the world. With 1 million settlers in Algeria (all with a voice in France's parliamentary system) and an Arméed'Afrique (mainly recruited in North Africa) that filled a crucial place in their military system, post-war French governments were doubly disinclined to see a North African lesson in their forced withdrawal from Indochina. In sub-Saharan Africa, the British, French, Portuguese and Belgians saweven less reason to prepare for an early withdrawal.

Sub-Saharan Africa had felt indirectly some of the fallout of war: inflation, shortages, the recruitment of soldiers, localized industrialization, the screech of propaganda. But (except briefly in Ethiopia) no real war was fought on its soil, and no invasion had disrupted the colonial regime. Linguistic, ethnic and religious diversity seemed to rule out the danger that African nationalism would ever become as potent as pan-Arab, mobilizing mass support within (let alone across) colonial boundaries. For similar reasons, the prospect that African leaders could create political movements on the model of Indian nationalism seemed very remote. The vast subcontinental coalition created by Gandhi was a world away from the localized nature of Africa's colonial politics. Indeed, far from evolving into African
nations, the colonial states of sub-Saharan Africa seemed to be moving in the opposite direction. ‘Tribal' Africa was still being invented, in part at least as the African response to the forms of ‘indirect rule' the Europeans had imposed. Creating ‘tribes' (some, like the Yoruba, on a very large scale) still seemed the optimum way for African elites to exert their influence and build their power. Lastly, in the ‘White South', it was white settler nationalism, not black African nationalism, that mobilized most aggressively after 1945. Enforcing apartheid (literally ‘separation') and fortifying white political supremacy was the political programme in 1950s South Africa. Building and defending a white-ruled Central African state was the settlers' aim in Northern and Southern Rhodesia (modern Zambia and Zimbabwe).
⁵⁹
The entrenchment of white power had a further dimension. With the rediscovery of its colonial mission after 1945, Salazarist Portugal embarked on the systematic colonization of its two great African territories in Angola and Mozambique.
⁶⁰