The Early Presidency of Bashar al-Asad

“The New Lion of Damascus” is a very sympathetic biography of Bashar al-Asad by US academic  David Lesch from 2005. The book is based primarily on extensive interviews with Asad, as well as with family members and other insiders. A few prominent civil society critics from the 2000 “Damascus Spring” get a brief look in, but none of the well established regime figures and long time officials of the military and security apparatus do – an interesting gap. As will be seen Lesch identifies this group as the internal opposition to Asad, and given their absence I wonder how much of his analysis of their role was based on ignorance of their views, or if they were consciously excluded. Lesch admits to being charmed by Asad and having a strong personal liking for him. This comes across in the careful and painstaking way Asad is depicted to make him acceptable to Americans (remember 2005 was the height of the “Syria the next target” rhetoric from the US neo cons); a family man, modest, keen on modern music (apparently Phil Collins was his favourite – might explain a lot!), on sports and keeping fit, tech savvy, a hobbyist photographer, married to a beautiful and intelligent former Wall Street investment banker. My suspicion is that Lesch was played to some extent in his interviews and access and did not even notice it.

But what can the book tell us about Asad five years into his Presidency? Well quite a lot. Firstly it is clear that Asad wanted to modernise Syria economically and technologically. He was committed to opening up a free market economy and also fee based education. His model was China, Singapore and he admired Putin. In short Asad wanted a modern economy, Syria integrated into global exchange, wide spread familiarity and access to IT, but not democracy or civil freedom. Asad’s mantra was ‘stability’. In his narrative – and Lesch largely endorses this – Syria is a sectarian and fragmented society – like Lebanon and Iraq – and could fly apart into instability, civil war and chaos very easily if change happened too fast. (Certainly from the perspective of 2016 this looks prescient.) Democracy ‘too soon’ meant instability. Citizens in Asad’s terms , were not mature enough to handle freedom yet.

Asad’s program faced a number of challenges. For one his power base, Lesch argues, was narrow. The old guard, the old Ba’ath party officials and operatives from the 1970s and 1980s who predominated especially in the military and security organs, and had control of networks of corruption and nepotism and had used the state as a vehicle for the accumulation of wealth and power, were none too pleased. They had been struck a blow by the withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon, where many of them had entrenched themselves, and were being gradually phased out through mandatory retirements and in some cases corruption charges, but they remained powerful and  a threat to Asad. The second point Lesch argues is that Asad was in many ways the front man for the Alawite minority, which he admits had used the Ba’ath party to basically take over the military and security apparatus. That of course means that the very ‘old guard’ Lesch criticises are also Asad's co-religionists, the minority he fronts. Lesch interestingly does not connect these dots, but it suggests that it is more than a personal stake of members of a corrupt, entrenched old guard that slows Asad down, but also that they are the very people he represents. I think this is an important point, which Lesch overlooks and I will return to it below.

Then  there is the challenge of the geopolitical environment. Syria at the time of writing (and still) remains formally at war with Israel and committed to recovering the occupied Golan heights. Lesch is of the view (as am I) that Asad senior and junior were both serious about desiring a peace with Israel, and that while part of the failure to achieve that (as of 2005) was due to their own cautious and careful style of non public diplomacy, much of the failure was also due to Israeli intransigence, arrogance and the ‘on again, off again’ approach to negotiations. In such a strategic climate, Syria as a poor country had to spend an inordinate amount on the armed forces which acted not only as a further block to development financially, but also empowered and provided a power base for the very people that Asad has to be wary of politically. This strategic climate was of course exacerbated by the American occupation of Iraq, which added a further unstable border to the east.

Syria’s main supporter was the USSR in the Cold War and remains Russia. However this support has not come gratis. A large burden on Syria economically is a debt of US$12 billion to Russia, for military equipment supplied during the Soviet period. Apparently Russia insists on repayment, not accepting the Syrian argument that with the demise of the USSR as political entity, the debt should die too. The size of this liability (which of course from Moscow’s perspective remains an asset) also provides a very real material context for the support for Asad displayed by Russia in the recent civil war.

Lesch is totally condemning of the neo conservative anti Syrian lobby and arguments that prevailed in the US at the time of writing. He acknowledges that some cross border incursions and supplies were coming to the Iraqi insurgents from Syria and that some of the Hussein regime's officials had taken sanctuary there, and that this provided a basis for American anger. But he emphasises that American politicians misread the amount of power Asad had; and like the assassination of the Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Harari, these actions in all likelihood occurred without Asad’s approval. These were he suggests, the actions of the ‘old guard’ and Asad could not do anything about them. He was compelled by the limitations of his internal power base, to turn a blind eye. Indeed the limitations of Asad’s power are tellingly illustrated by the account of the extradition of Hussein’s half brother Sabawi al-Hassan. Told by the US that he was in hiding in Syria it took six months to trace him. He had taken sanctuary with an Arab tribe and had to bought by the central government from that tribe to be extradited.

Lesch emphasises the demographic powder keg which constituted Syria as of 2005. Population was growing faster than GDP; the 14 – 25 year old cohort was the biggest single population segment in the country. For them jobs were critical. Lesch, being  a good American liberal, puts his faith in the free market and is critical of the slowness of opening the Syrian economy. Asad wanted to grow a free market sector alongside the state sector however moribund,  to provide stability and avoid social dislocation and mass unemployment. If either strategy failed to produce the employment opportunities required then the future for Syria looked grim. Again from the standpoint of 2016 this looks prescient.

But here we hit the major shortfall in Lesch’s account. He acknowledges that the secular constitution has been used by the minorities to entrench themselves in the state apparatus. He asserts that Syria is fragmented and sectarian. What he never openly admits is that unlike Lebanon and Iraq, the population split is much less extreme in Syria – 75% of the population are Sunni Arabs and 25% are comprised of all the other minorities. The people who are excluded from the state apparatus – who are effectively colonised in their own country – are the majority. And given the birth rate trends cited above, that means it is this majority population which is facing the biggest problem in terms of a viable future being available for their growing young population. When we add this to the fact that the old guard and their clients largely come from the same minority group as Asad, that their power base lies in a bloated military and brutal and all pervasive security apparatus, and that is in their interest to maintain their numbers and power base by perpetuating a state of formal war with Israel, then the possibility of Asad in 2005 having any hope of realising his modernisation plans and plans for peace appeared limited. The current tragic civil war starts to appear as more likely than not, as a structural breakdown of the particular post colonial state that is Syria.

Syria – a postcolonial state

Reading the history of modern Syria, from the French occupation until now, I am struck by the number of continuities in how the state machine operates.

While the population of Syria is about 95% Arab speaking, the population is divided by religious differences. Religious differences are far more critical in the Islamic world than they are in the modern west; the closest parallel is Ulster, and even there distinctions of religion where actually distinction between coloniser and colonised. The situation in the Islamic world is a legacy of the long centuries of Ottoman rule. The Ottomans divided their subjects according to religion, allowing each recognised group the rights to administer themselves according to their own rules and practices. (such a self administering community was known as a millet).As conversion was prohibited, religious groups remained closed and effectively became ethnicities, even though almost always Arabic speaking. In Syria, this has meant that a number of religious minorities exist with very powerful identities. The four main minorities are the Christians, the Alawites ( an offshoot of the Shi’a tradition in Islam), the Druzes (an eclectic and syncretic religion derived from Islam and also neo Platonism) and the Kurds (the one minority with their own distinct language, related to Persian rather than Arabic). Due to the way borders were drawn after WWI when the Allied powers carved up the Ottoman Empire ( a process referred to in British archival documents from the time as ‘The Great Loot”), a Turkish speaking minority, known as Turkmens, also ended up within the Syrian borders. The minorities altogether possibly account for around 30% of the Syrian population – the vast majority being Arabs of the Sunni tradition. (Note that in religion the Kurds are also Sunni Muslims – this is one case where actual linguistic identity overrides religion).

The minorities are mainly located in the west of the country, the Sunni predominantly in the east.  At the time of the French occupation – and until the 1960s – the dominant class in the region were the ‘notables’ – not necessarily aristocrats in the sense of being ennobled or titled - but large landowners living mainly off rents and services from their tenants and exercising political control over the mass of dependent tenants, as is the usual case in pre-capitalist landlord regimes. The notables were overwhelmingly Sunni, and dominated the political life of the region. Once the French granted a constitution in 1930, this class also dominated the parliament and government. Syrian self government was very limited though, as France maintained and overriding power over all decisions. Crucially the army remained under French control.

This is the point at which the similarities become apparent. The French (like all colonial powers) favoured divide and rule policies. They distrusted the majority and relied on the minorities to staff the army and the gendarmerie. Using polices of indirect rule and building on the Ottoman tradition of millet, the minorities developed systems of patronage to penetrate more widely into Syrian society, and in particular into the administration and into commerce.

The other very consistent feature was the French technique of dealing with civil unrest and uprisings, which was to surround the towns concerned and bombard them with artillery and air power into submission. (The last such French bombardment of cities was Damascus in 1945).

The point is that these features have remained as key features of the Syrian state. Syria was granted independence in 1946. Government cabinets initially remained dominated by notables, but the minorities continued to staff the armed forces and the security services. After defeat in the 1948 war with Israel, Syria experienced three military coups in 1949 alone, and parliamentary government only returned in 1954. In 1958, after a attempts by Britain and America to destabilise Syria following its diplomatic recognition of the USSR and purchase of modern weapons, Syria joined with Egypt in the United Arab Republic. This was terminated by another military coup in 1961, followed by parliamentary elections and a coup in 1963, at which point the French era Emergency Law was imposed and has been in force ever since.

The 1963 coup was carried out by an alliance of two strands of nationalist army officers – Nasser supporters and Ba’athists. At this point some understanding of the Ba-ath party is in order. Originally a nationalist body when founded by Michel Aflaq (a Christian) in 1952 the core ideology of the Ba-ath party was a pan Arab nationalism, wanting to fold the states created in the post WWI carve up into a larger Arab nation. The emphasis was on nationality and language as a unifying factor. The full title was Ba’ath Arab Socialist Party, the socialism being more in the line of using government administration and state ownership to modernise Syria. The Ba’athists entered the cabinet for the first time after the 1961 coup. The Ba’athist position was that the unification with Egypt had produced subordination to a much larger and more powerful state, rather than a true unity and Syrian development and interests had been sidelined. Again the Ba’athists participated in the coup two years later, as a way of removing what they saw as the roadblocks to their program in the still notable dominated parliament. Land reform legislation in the early 1960s broke up the large landholdings finally depriving the notables of power and reducing them to class of Sunni farmers and merchants in regional towns in the east.

The Ba’athist party proved attractive to the minorities (except the Kurds of course who were by definition excluded from the Arab nation unless they fully abandoned Kurdish identity)and as various minority politicians and officers moved up through both the party and the state machine, they were able to exercise patronage to bring in more of their communities. In the end the Ba’ath party became – like the French mandate administration – a means to keep the Sunni majority out of power.

For about 12 months after the coup the Ba’ath party experienced internal turmoil and struggle. By 1964 the old guard – including founder Aflaq – were purged. The Ba’athists consolidated their hold on the government, finally taking full power in the coup of 1970 by defence minister Hafez al Assad. Following this coup, the Alawite minority (to which Assad belonged) had consolidated its hold over the administration and especially the armed forces and the security service (the mukhabarat).

At a fundamental level the core French policy of excluding the Sunni majority from power has continued. The other key continuity has been the record of coups. The French had the habit f riding roughshod over the mandate era parliament, thus entrenching an attitude of rather than seeing the executive arm of government being in conflict with the legislative, with the latter seen as a source of problems rather than authority and sovereignty. Rather power, authority and sovereignty derive from control of the state machine, in particular the repressive apparatus.

This has been displayed in the continuity of repression by military violence, especially artillery and air bombardment as under the French. The first instance occurred in 1964 in Hama, although this was mild compared to the brutal and indiscriminate repression that followed the 1982 uprising. What has been seen since 2011 in the current Syrian Civil War has been a continuation of this policy.

The argument I am parsing here, derived from a reading of a number of texts on modern Syrian history) is that like so many other former colonial possessions, Syria is a post colonial state. My understanding of the post colonial thesis is that such states maintain continuity in practice, legislation, recruitment and state ideology with the previous colonial administrations. In their propaganda such states have either suggested they represent a rebirth of pre-colonial traditions (adapted to the modern world of course) or newly created national identities. In reality they continue the colonial project of ruling over and against the majority population, of perpetuating the interests of an elite (not necessarily based on a social class, more commonly an elite of state functionaries, who may become a class through using the state as a means to accumulate). In the post colonial state the interests of a colonising power are replaced with the interests of an elite often more at home culturally and socially in the western world of the former colonisers, than with the majority of the citizens (or more correctly subjects) of the state. Contempt and disdain frequently characterises the attitude of the elites to the majority. Where this elite – as in Syria – is recruited from actual minorities the state comes to represent the old colonial form even more so. In this case the rulers are not only socially distinct by wealth, power and lifestyle, but are also alien to the majority. Syria under the Assad dynasty is a post colonial state machine by means of which a minority exercises power analogous to that exercised in a formal colony by foreign administrators.

The return!

After a long hiatus, and inspired by my other blog I am reviving this project. Currently working on reviews of some history books, and will be posting soon. First one will be a review of Michael Denning's "Noise Uprising".

Using world - systems to narrate world history

 

 

What is clear is that Wallerstein's world -systems narrative is not a world history narrative. Wallerstein provides an historico - logical explanation of how the modern world came to be all inside the modern world - system, by recounting the internal history of that system. His focus is thus on the emergence, development and growth of that system from small beginnings in Europe to encompass the entire globe by the mid nineteenth century. But for the first three centuries of this narrative, Wallerstein's world - systems narrative does not tell us anything at all about the major part of the world. It is only from the around 1840 on that Wallerstein's world - systems narrative becomes a world history.

 

So the question that arises from this is: can a world history be constructed that uses the world -systems paradigm, but is more than an account of the immanent and historical logic of the modern world - system? How can the narrative of the modern world - system be incorporated into a narrative of world history?

 

The starting point I think is with an early observation of Wallerstein's, that more than one world-system can coexist, and that indeed that has been the norm for most of human history. The dominance of the modern world - system over the entire globe is unique and unprecedented in history. So I want to approach the history of the world since around 1500 in terms of multiple world systems initially.

 

World - systems are characterised by a unitary division of labour across the system, devoted to the production of necessities, with all production processes linked by commodity chains. (This is discussed in another post here). Theoretically it should be easy to determine the numbers and boundaries of the world -systems existing at any one time. The problem is that data has never been collected for such an exercise. (Now that would be a worthy project for a research institute, if funding could be found). So for the moment we are driven back on intuitive reasoning from anecdotal evidence.

 

I am taking as a starting point the map of the "eight commercial circuits of the thirteenth century world system" from Janet Abu Lughod's book Before European Hegemony. Now I will state upfront that I have a number of methodological criticisms of the book, but those can be discussed in another place. Abu Lughod did undertake a substantial project of research and reading, and did attempt to model the flow of commodities in the old world, albeit based on impressionistic rather than quantitative analysis. There are two further provisos to be made:

 

1.       Abu Lughod wrote about the period 1250 - 1350, and I am concerned here with around 100 - 150 years later; and

2.       In her narrative the thirteenth century world -system collapsed after 1350 due to the impact of the bubonic plague in Central Asia.

 

That said, here is the map:

 

 

 

 

 

Pasted from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Abu-Lughod>

 

 

My suggested development of this for the late fifteenth / early sixteenth century would be:

 

1.       A North sea / Baltic sea circuit, at this stage possibly peripheral to 2) below but from which the modern world - system will develop;

2.       A Mediterranean world - system, running from Portugal to Cyprus, extending northwards into the Germanies below the Main River, eastwards to Bohemia and Hungary and including the Maghreb, extending to West Africa (Songhay and Mali), with the core located in the Maghreb;

3.       Egypt, possibly extending into modern day Sudan;

4.       Ethiopia;

5.       The Indian Ocean littoral, including Arabia, the Persian Gulf, South Asia, across to Malacca and Sumatra and the east coast of Africa to Mozambique island;

6.       Iran and central Asia;

7.       China, East Asia including Japan, and South East Asia to Java;

8.       Muscovy / Russia

9.       The Ottoman empire including the Levant and the Balkans.

 

My evidence for this is at this stage inchoate - it is an anecdotal and impressionistic intuition gained from decades of reading history. But I would suggest it as  a starting point for research anyway. One area that is open to significant revision is the areas 2 and 3 and 3 and 4. If Egypt (the granary of the classical world) was still supplying grain to 2 and / or 4, then those areas all need to be merged. In either case, the core would then be Egypt, with the Maghreb possibly fulfilling a semi peripheral role to the European Mediterranean littoral.

 

So far so good. Assuming my breakdown holds, it should then be possible to construct a world historical narrative that focuses on the interactions among these world - systems, and how those interactions contingently intersect with the internal cycles and trajectories of each world - system. The narrative of the modern (European world - system) would thus for example develop the peripheralisation of the European Mediterranean lands, the attempt to break out of this peripheralisation by an alliance of Genoese capital and the Portuguese state seeking direct access to, and control of, the critically important source of gold in West Africa; the other Genoese enterprise to establish direct contact with the source of luxury goods for elite conspicuous consumption in east Asia, which leads to both the Portuguese protection racket in the Indian Ocean world - system and the fortuitous stumbling over the New World. The contingency of this underpins the attempt by the Habsburgs to build a world -empire, which comes to grief in the bankruptcy of 1567, laying the stage for the absorption of the old Mediterranean world - system into world - systems 1 and 9.

 

In India this period sees the reverse of what happens in Europe. In India a multi polar world system is transformed into a classic world - empire by the Moguls, detaching northern India from the Indian Ocean world -system and absorbing the central Asian periphery from the Iranian system. The Indian Ocean world - system continues to operate with the core in the south Indian peninsula. The strength and wealth of this system is shown by its ability to absorb the piratical incursions of the Portuguese and the century long protection racket the latter impose on the system.

 

Of particular interest however is the linking of the entire globe into a unified circuit of with the opening of the port of Manilla in the 1580s and the institution of the Acapulco -Manilla galleon route. Once the VOC begins trading with both the Indian Ocean and East Asian world - systems the mass of silver that had flown into Europe in the previous century starts to move east to pay for imports of luxury goods. Silver also flows to the east Asian system via the Manilla route. Essentially over the next century, Spain hauls silver out of Peru and Mexico and the bulk of it ends up in China, either directly, or through an Indian circuit first. This phenomenal flow of silver east is well accounted for in the work of Gunder Frank in "ReOrient" and in various articles by Dennis Flynn. (It is also the reason why the shipwreck gallery in the city of Fremantle, in my state of Western Australia, has such large displays of sixteenth and seventeenth century Mexican silver coins recovered from Dutch shipwrecks along the West Australian coastline.)

 

At this point I am writing of this circuit as an exchange of precocities between world - systems. But this is the interesting point. China (and South Asia in second place) had highly monetised economies in this period, and the Chinese was the most liquid and monetised economy in the world until the late eighteenth / early nineteenth centuries. (The work of Bin Wong and Ken Pomeranz is brilliant on this - I need to write about them at another time). Chinese currency was based in silver, and large quantities of silver were needed to keep minting coinage. This if course is why China is the world's "silver sink" from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. So for China, silver is actually not a precious or luxury commodity, but an essential bulk good, a necessity. Does this therefore mean that China was the core of a global world - system from around 1600 onwards? Following the logic of commodity chains of production I think we have to say yes!

 

So what does this do to my narrative? It suggests that once direct commercial contact is established with China in the last twenty years of the sixteenth century (and direct was still at arms length - Chinese authorities would not permit foreign vessels to carry good to Chinese shores, and most exchange occurred at Manilla when the annual Chinese fleet called) the emerging European world - system (with its extension into the Americas and the west African littoral) was rapidly absorbed into a Chinese centred world - system. Europe in that system should be seen as a semi - periphery, sourcing materials (mainly silver, later also plantation crops from its American peripheries and providing basic manufactured goods in turn, while conveying silver the Chinese core and receiving high value manufactured items in return (e.g. silks, porcelains, tea, lacquer work). A lot more detailed empirical work on the flow of commodities and the reconstruction of commodity chains in the areas discussed here needs to be one to make the argument stick, but this outline is worth pursuing.

 

I want to explore some other aspects of this construction later - the English construction of an Atlantic economy in order to compete with the privileged position the Dutch hold as a link in this hypothesised China centred early modern world -  system; the actual "great divergence" between Europe and China circa 1780  - 1840; the position of South Asia in this world - system especially given it was the supplier of the highest quality cotton textiles to Europe in this period, again in exchange for silver; and the whole theoretical issue this historical reconstruction raises of sub systems within a system. Arguments to be developed.

 

Review of Mark Mazower, Salonica: City of Ghosts (Harper Perennial, pap. edition, London and New York: 2005).

Today is the anniversary of the first train from Salonika to Auschwitz, the start of a process which ended with the murder of 90% of the 45 000 Jewisn inhabitants of the northern Greek city Thessasalonica. The atrocity is well covered in Mark Mazower's history of the city. I reviewed this book eight years ago, and am posting it here today (16/3/13) in memory of the victims of that atrocity.

 

Visitors to Greece who venture to the second biggest city and northern ‘capital’, Thessalonica, will discover a architecturally extremely modern, if not modernist, and thoroughly Hellenic city. A city moreover which proclaims its Greek antiquity through monuments and myriad displays of ancient stonework. A prominent memorial to the supposed founder Alexander the Great (actually it was his sister and he never visited) can be seen in the central plaza.

 

A discerning visitor who looks carefully will find a holocaust museum which documents the in murder of the local Jewish community by German invaders. The visitor will also find, after much very careful searching, some traces of Muslim Turkish remains. These traces in turn contextualise the second big equestrian statue in the city – that of Prince Constantine who delivered this ancient Greek city of Christians from the infidel yoke in 1912.

 

Mention of Greek Christianity illuminates the other pole of the modernist ideology of Hellenism – the heritage of Byzantium. Medieval Byzantine churches are prominent in Thessalonica, as are other Byzantine ruins and fragments. The cursory visitor thus is left with a clear impression – this is a Greek city, and a Christian city, and it always has been, even when occupied by infidel Turks. And this Hellenism and Christianity, proudly touted as legacies, are wrapped in a modern and modernist package, showing that Greece is a European, not an Oriental, country; it belongs to the West, not the East. As most of modern Thessalonica was constructed in the 1950s and 1960s a clear Cold War text is also present. The east to which Greece did not belong included not only the ‘past east’ of ‘oriental’ Islam, but the ‘present east’ of Slavic anti-Christian communism. Reinforcement for these messages will be found in elaborate public monuments to the 1922 refugees from Turkey and the 1949 expellees from the Crimea, Bessarabia and southern Ukraine. For modern Thessalonica is the place where modern Greece gathered in the descendants of Greek communities more ancient than the polieis of the Peloponnesus – the remnants of the Archaean immigration to the Black Sea and Asia Minor of the seventh century BC - reversed by the ethnic cleansing nationalism of the twentieth century.

 

Mark Mazower, historian of Greece under Nazi occupation, the modern Balkans and of a very insightful history of twentieth century Europe, has turned his eye to one city; a city he first encountered as student backpacker in the 1980s when, turning away from the obvious tourist signposts he found the remains of a different Greece to that constructed by modern Hellenism. As he puts it, this was a Greece “less in thrall to an ancient past, more intimately linked to neighbouring peoples, languages and cultures”. What Mazower proceeds to do is to bring this forgotten city, this ‘city of ghosts’ to life.

 

At a recent conference, this reviewer heard a suggestion that history was generally written forwards, to account for and underwrite the emergence and existence of modern identities. What was needed it was suggested, was to write history backwards, to find the identities that have been submerged or lost, written out of history. Mazower has done this with regard to the city to which he refers by the old name, Salonica, for the period from the Turkish conquest in1430 to 1950.

 

As Mazower starts his story, Salonica was under siege. Indeed the city had been occupied previously by Turkish forces, and found the experience on the whole unexceptional. The population were in favour of surrender, the bishop not; and in the inevitable three day sack that followed the population paid the price. After 1430, the population was reduced to a third, living among ruins. The rebirth of Salonica occurred two generations later. Reconstruction had been one of the goals of Sultan Murad from the start, but protection of surviving Christains, their churches and community structure, as well as settlement with Muslims and the foundation of mosques and vakfs (religious, charitable and educational property trusts) had done little to reverse the drastic consequences of conquest. Repopulation, and with it the economic ability of the city to play its appointed role in the Ottoman imperial economy, came after 1492. In that momentous year, Jews were expelled from Spain and Spanish possessions in Italy. (The King of Portugal followed suit about ten years later). Iberian Jews found protection and welcome in Islamic lands (in contrast to the current assumption of eternal hostility between the Abrahamic faith communities). Many were resettled in Salonica, and from the sixteenth century until 1943, Salonica was the largest Jewish city in all of Europe. Indeed in early nineteenth century censuses, Jews accounted for half the population, with Christians in third place. The character of old Salonica was thus irrevocably diverse, with three faiths co-existing. Linguistically it was even more diverse – most Jews were actually Spanish speaking (or Ladino, a dialect of medieval Spanish), although some spoke Portuguese or Italian. About half of the Christians at any one time were Slav speaking, immigrants from the countryside of Thrace and Macedonia. They became Greek speaking after a generation or two of urbanisation. Among Muslims actual Turks were a minority; there were many Albanians, some Slav speakers, (proto Bulgarians mainly, Bosnians came after the Austrian occupation of Bosnia in 1908), Arabs, Circassians, Berbers from North Africa. Black and white slaves were found, as were Armenian and Georgian Christians. Salonica thus looked like a pre modern ‘oriental’ city – religiously, culturally and linguistically diverse – ‘multi-cultural’ in modern parlance.

 

It has become a popular commonplace in current political commentary that multiculturalism breeds hostility and conflict. It is Mazower’s main purpose to prove the opposite by concrete historical example. Occurrences of inter communal violence and hostility were rare. Communities were largely self administering under the Ottoman system and while suspicion and prejudice were present, they rarely boiled over. The administration protected each religion equally, ensuring their places of worship were inviolate, their holy days and festivals licensed, making conversion and intermarriage effectively illegal. Conversion to Islam was always protected, but active proselytisation was frowned upon. Rabbis, imams and priests attended the major festivals of each religion, and called on each other and the Turkish governors to show respect and tolerance. Christians and Jews had responsibility for the upkeep of portions of the walls, and for manning the fortifications in the event of war (which never happened – Salonica’s longest period of peace was 1430 to 1912). Where some churches were converted to mosques, Christians still retained visiting rights to saints’ graves and other holy places, which were generally guarded and maintained by Muslim caretakers, often Sufis.

 

Hidden in this narrative, and subtly communicated with great skill, is Mazower’s account of the downfall of the Ottoman tradition over the nineteenth century. Key aspects here are the invention of a Greek identity attached to the late eighteenth century emergence of a Greek commercial elite, pirates as much as traders. Western intervention in the Greek war of independence led to a privileged position for western powers in Ottoman Turkey, with consuls at Salonica becoming in many ways an alternative administration. The arrival of western capital with shipping lines once the pirates were cleared and the railway built from central Europe, led to commercial prosperity as Salonica became the outlet for the agricultural produce of the Thracian and Macedonian plains. Soon local industry emerged, and old divisions within the religious communities and among them, became transformed into class divisions. While Jews were prominent among the commercial and industrial elite, so were Christians, and the working class remained predominantly Jewish. Muslims were found among the officials and the landowning classes, with the peasantry divided between Muslim and Christian. Against this backdrop nations were invented and the residents of Salonica found themselves wooed by Greek or Bulgarian or Macedonian nationalists, while the Ottoman state sought painfully, in an era of nationalism, to modernise itself into a multinational modern state. Theoretically educated readers will see in this narrative a local study of the incorporation of an old style world-empire into the modern world-system with the consequent peripheralisation that process entailed.

 

Another theme deals with the response of west Europeans to Salonica, both in travel literature and in novels. Here we see a disdain for both medieval Byzantine survivals and anything Turkish. Travellers sought Greek and Christian antiquity (St Paul had founded the church in Salonica, according to Scripture). The actual reality of the city was disdained as dirty, unsanitary, corrupt and at best, picturesque. By the end of the nineteenth century, Salonica was a setting for exotic and erotic novels dealing with love affairs between harem women and western men. The Turk in this literature was transformed from the once feared martial conqueror into a passive, effete, depraved and corrupt figure; only capable of rule by brutal cruelty and too weak to even protect his harem against the charms of western seducers. Mazower does not use the term ‘orientalism’ but readers of Said while see here a confirmation of his analyses of the stereotype, and readers of Bernal will find some interesting examples of the essentially western and racially inspired creation of Hellenism.

 

Old Salonica died in the twentieth century. Readers familiar with east European history will know that the real past of eastern European is one of multiculturalism. That world was destroyed by the invention of nations. The process of nation state building in south east Europe in particular involved war, massacre, terror and ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. In the region of Salonica this tragic history began with the operations of the world’s first modern terrorist group, IMRO, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation, with its campaign of terror against Muslim peasants in the 1870s, which led directly to the infamous “Bulgarian massacres” of 1876 and the 1878 Russo-Turkish war. A partial reprieve for the Ottoman Empire came with the victory of the Young Turk movement in 1908, a modernising, parliamentary movement which sought to build a transnational identity from all groups.[i] Founded in Salonica and supported by people from all communities, the aftermath of the 1908 coup initially brought great enthusiasm for reform; but soon the junta itself fell to the forces of nationalism, this time Turkish. The Balkan war of 1912 saw the occupation of Salonica by Greece. The chaos of the First World War, whose dire impact on Greek politics is well documented by Mazower followed, leaving Salonic under allied occupation. The great fire of 1917 destroyed much of the old town, particularly the Jewish quarter, which allowed for the first spate of modernist rebuilding. The Greek war with Turkey in 1922 led to the first great round of ethnic cleansing with the Muslim population generally classified as Turks (even when they were not) and expelled and the Christian population of Turkey classified as Greeks and resettled in Salonica. Paradoxically the use of the Turkish language, and the survival of Turkish music (in the form of zembetiko) and of food ways, increased after the population exchange, as many so called Greek refugees were Turkish speaking Christians.

 

Greek politics between the wars resembled a state of nearly constant simmering civil war and Mazower is on sure ground in guiding the reader through this maze. He illustrates the rise of extreme right wing politics in Greece in this time, with fascist and anti –Semitic tendencies. These elements were keen to co-operate when the Nazis arrived, and local collaboration, particularly the desire to reappropriate the enormous Jewish cemetery for urban development (it is now the location of the university), played into the hands of Nazi racial policies. Over a matter of a few weeks in 1943 the entire Jewish population – more than 40,000 people - was dispossessed, classified and transported to Auschwitz and to death. Barely 5% of Salonica’s Jews survived the war, compared to 50% in Athens, where the Archbishop specifically spoke out against Nazi policies. Salonica elites by contrast remained silent. Mazower also documents the shameless grab for Jewish businesses, properties and possessions pursued by Greek businessmen and civil servants during and after the war.

 

Mazower achieves four worthwhile objectives in this fine book. He shows that multicultural societies have as much chance of producing civil peace as any other; that the root of many modern tragedies lies in the invention of nationalism; that the Hellenist façade of Thessalonica (and by extension, modern Greece) is built over buried identities for whose demise the current state has some responsibility; and that the old Ottoman empire on the scale of human values, was not such bad place after all.[ii] At a methodological level, the book is a fine of illustration of the ability of a micro scale study to illuminate macro themes. This is an excellent example of a complex story well written, a story worth reading and pondering for its lessons; a fine exemplar of history ‘written backwards’.

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[i] Indeed Salonica was rhe birthplace of Mustapha Kemal, later Kemal Atatürk, founder of the modern secular Turkish republic.

[ii] The reviewer is of course fully aware of the Turkish complicity in the 1876 Bulgarian massacres and the massacres of Armenians from 1908 on, culminating in the 1915 genocide. The reference here is to the older tradition.

Modelling the world-system I: Commodity Chains

Ever since his first exposition of the world -systems perspective in 1974, Wallerstein has insisted that the defining characteristic of a world - system is a unitary division of labour across the world - system. Furthermore he has emphasised that this division of labour is constituted to produce necessities; products essential to the continued existence of the world-system.  Exactly how this unitary division of labour functioned was not spelled out until Wallerstein and his colleague Hopkins began their work on commodity chains at Binghamton in the late 1970s. The following quote from Wallerstein summarises their ultimate conclusions very well: "A world-economy is constituted by a cross - cutting network of interlinked productive processes which we may call 'commodity chains,' such that for any production process in the chain there are a number of 'backward and forward linkages,' on which the particular process (and the persons involved in it) are dependant."

 

What Wallerstein is arguing here is that commodities are the outcome of complex process of manufacture, and that said manufacture is conducted in diverse geographical locations within the world-system. A final commodity - one that is marketed to end consumers - is itself composed of a number of other commodities and may well have been part processed, manufactured or assembled before taking its final form. To illustrate this let us take two examples from the early days of the world - system and the present.

 

Let us look at a nice, simple commodity, fundamental to life in the mid sixteenth century - bread. At this point in time the emerging economic core of the world -system was the Netherlands. Rye bread is the bread of choice for good Dutch burghers and was generally bought at neighbourhood bakeries. The rye flour from the bread was milled from rye grown in Poland; the salt used to flavour the bread came from the Basque country; the copper baking trays and iron stove would have been made in Germany, most likely in Franconian towns like Nuremburg and Augsburg and the metals were mined in the Alps, the Ore Mountains of Saxony or in Bohemia. The wood from which the oven was fired and out of which the bakery was constructed came from Norway. Specifically Dutch in this mix was the yeast and the water.

 

Turning to our own times, what product could be more universal than a pair of Levi jeans? It transpires that a pair of jeans is the outcome of around 43 different process (including growing cotton and mining copper and zinc) conducted across 4 continents).

 

What Wallerstein is therefore emphasising is that commodities, even in the early years of the world -system, were and are produced not in one locality but on a system-wide basis. Hence the emphasis on the unitary division of labour. We can thus (theoretically at least) trace the contours of the world -system by tracing out the lengths of the commodity chains. Commodity chains thus constitute the geographical bounds of a world -system.

 

More significantly, commodity chains actually structure the component parts of the world -system - the famous core - periphery dichotomy. Let us read Wallerstein's own words again:  "As the commodity chains have become longer and more complex, and involved more and more machinery, there has been a constant pressure of the strong against the weak. The pressure has concentrated more and more of the processes in the chains that are easiest to 'monopolise' in a few areas - 'core' processes in 'core' areas - and more and more of the processes that require less skilled  and more extensive manpower that is easiest to keep at a low income level in other areas - 'peripheral' processes in 'peripheral' areas."

 

Now this is a very revealing quotation. Most summaries of Wallerstein's world - systems model take the existence of core and periphery as axiomatic and start by stating that a world - system is divided into core and periphery. Well clearly that is correct, BUT the two poles are in themselves the product of way the commodity chains function. Cores and peripheries are produced because the core and peripheral processes are concentrated in those areas. It is the clustering of production processes and their relative complexity and automation that produce core and periphery. The commodity chains are thus not only geographically, but structurally constitutive of the world -system.

 

In my reading this has not been a point that Wallerstein has emphasised, and perhaps he himself has not fully drawn the implications of his argument. (Although given the first 1974 volume of The Modern World-System does dwell at length on the development of the grain supply to north western Europe from Poland - Lithuania he could argue that it is there the be teased out). But the commodity chain explication does strongly imply - to my reading - that we need to see the establishment of commodity chains ad both logically and historically prior to the formation of the modern world -system, and possibly all others too. (although Wallerstein is always admirably cautious in retrospectively extending categories of analysis developed for the capitalist world market).

 

We are not down with commodity chains quite yet either. Obviously for such a geographically diverse process of production to function, commodities and part commodities must ne transported between locations. Again Wallerstein has some interesting points to make: "These production processes usually require physical transportation of commodities between them, and frequently the transfer of 'rights' to commodities in a chain are made by autonomous organizations, in which case we talk of the existence of 'commerce.'  Commerce is frequent, but far from universal, as the mode of linkage, and in no way essential to the functioning of a commodity chain, except at the very end when the final consumable product is sold to the final consumer. Both the great merchant companies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the contemporary multinational corporation have been structures that eliminated much (though seldom all) of the commerce in the interstices of given commodity chains."

 

The above quote is extremely significant. One of the consistent criticisms of Wallerstein from orthodox Marxists is that his model of the world market is geared towards exchange and commerce and slights production; that it is to quote the first such critique by Robert Brenner in 1975, "neo Smithian". Sadly this critique persists to the point of being recycled by Heike Gerstenberger in 2005. But what is clear is that Wallerstein is actually talking about production and subordinated to exchange and / or commerce to production. In his model exchange is not about "trade" but about the changing title to commodities or part commodities during the process of production. In some case, the transfer of title is between discrete economic actors, located in divergent political entities and so can be (mis)represented as trade; in other cases, it occurs as internal transfer within horizontally integrated economic entities. "Trade" for Wallerstein remains merchant trade, and occurs between world -systems, and invariably involves precocities. This is the arbitrage business of merchants and is quite separate to the activities conducted within a world - system which remain oriented to production.

 

Wallerstein also asserts that early modern merchant companies were similar in operation to contemporary multinationals in that they often conducted a form of vertical integration of commodity production. This is an assertion that raises the ire of orthodox Marxist critics, who insist that chartered companies are pure representatives of merchant capital. But is this always the case? There is powerful empirical evidence to support Wallerstein's view. The VOC, for example, can be seen as a merchant capitalist enterprise engaged in the exchange of precocities between two world - systems - silver from the European world - system and spices from the China centred east Asian world -system. But the VOV very quickly transformed itself into a carrier within that East Asian system, shipping silver to India where it was exchanged for textiles, which were shipped to Japan for copper and gold, shipped in turn to Manilla to exchange fro Chinese manufactures which were in turn exchanged for spices at Batavia and Malacca. In this case the VOV functioned as an element in the transfer of necessities within the East Asian system, subordinated to production of commodities. Even more significantly, the VOC itself became the producer of the spices sought in Europe. Thus the inhabitants of Ambon were exterminated in a war in the 1630s and the island resettled with slaves required to grow and supply cloves to the VOC. Here we see the VOC practising vertical integration, producing, transporting and storing a commodity that was turning into a necessity in Europe. And what about the Dutch West India Company, pioneering the sugar plantation complex in Brazil? Here is another case of a merchant company operating as a vertically integrated producer and supplier of a commodity, which as Wallerstein points out, became a necessity for European population growth and manufacture, providing as it did a quick burst of energy to workers engaged in production in the core. And as a final example, the British Royal Africa Company, engaged in the supply of slaves from West Africa to the Caribbean. Slaves after all are also a commodity - labour power - and were a necessity to the production of that new nutritional necessity of the European world -system, sugar. The acquisition and transport of slaves across the Atlantic is thus more than merely merchant capital - it constitutes part of the production of the commodity labour power. The production component of the Africa Company lay precisely in delivering a quantity of slaves, healthy enough and rendered compliant by the brutality of the voyage, to the plantations of Jamaica.

 

my argument here is that the orthodox Marxist insistence on this distinction of merchant capital from productive capital is very hard to delineate in the actual historical record, and depends upon a great degree of abstraction to work. The insistence on maintaining this distinction seems to me more idealist and even moralistic, than anything else. The evidence I suggest, lies with Wallerstein.

 

The starting point then for modelling the world - system, lies in identifying and mapping (as far as possible) the commodity chains at the relevant point in time. Identifying the relative complexity of the production processes involved will allow us to determine the core and peripheral regions within the system. Political entities that contain a predominance of core regions within their borders can be considered as core countries or states, and the same applies with regard to peripheral countries. (As Wallerstein stresses, these are labels of convenience and not accurate; no country is entirely given over to core processes, and peripheral processes can also be found within political borders. Indeed the German world - systemist H -H Nolte, has developed this conception further in his work on "inner peripheries". Core and peripheral countries are shorthand; such concepts are actually not found in Wallersteinian world - systems analysis.)

Comments on Davidson "How revolutionary were the bourgeois revolutions?"

Comments on the Preface

 

Page xii "To ask how revolutionary these revolutions were is therefore to ask what type of revolutions they were". Yes; but I would honestly phrase the question as "how bourgeois were the bourgeois revolutions?"

 

Four reasons why Bourgeois Revolutions should claim our attention:

 

1.       Inability of the left to distinguish between proletarian and bourgeois revolutions. Never thought of it this way, and it is a good point. Interesting that he sees the Chinese Revolution as a bourgeois revolution; of course exactly the same point could be made about the Bolshevik revolution! I would be inclined to make the point, but I doubt Davidson will.

2.       Political conclusions drawn from a successful deployment of the bourgeois revolution thesis. The first amount to a propaganda point to undercut the evolutionary and peaceful claims of the current bourgeois order; the second to a justification of revolution as a socialist strategy because of a prior bourgeois revolution.  The power of the first point of course would depend on the proponents of the current bourgeois order being convinced that the bourgeois revolution thesis does "illuminate the process" as Davidson puts it. And if accepting that exposes them to such critique, why then would the accept it in the first place? I question therefore the value of this argument. The second reason is even more questionable. Why does socialist strategy need to be legitimated by a bourgeois past anyway? Our opponents are always going to attack any revolutionary strategy, so who cares about countering them anyway? Of course, what Davidson does not spell out is that these political points arising from the assumption that the bourgeois revolution thesis "illuminates" the origins of our world are directed at the middle ground, the uncommitted masses who can presumably be won for a socialist strategy of transformation if the elements of the bourgeois intellectual and cultural hegemony (what Wallerstein calls the 'geoculture') can be countered. And countering them requires a far lesser burden of proof and argument than against 'experts'. So in a nutshell, Davidson's argument here boils down to the political utility of the thesis, its value as to be crude, 'agitprop'.

3.       The meaning of the events subsumed under the concept of bourgeois revolution will remain contested until the world ushered in by those events is transformed "by another revolution, which is greater, more solemn, and final". In other words, the because the social structure of the world in which we live is a product of history, that history is still current and therefore contested. Hegel's owl of Minerva cannot fly and past judgement on the era and its origins, until it comes to a decisive end. It is difficult to know exactly what to make of this  point. I think what Davidson is trying to say here is that historical events pertinent to the birth of 'modernity' are not cut and dried, all over, but remain contested - and that contestation is essentially political - and that socialists thus have a duty to contest them. Davidson also makes the point that even the minimal program of democracy - universal suffrage and free contested elections - was not an initial component of bourgeois liberalism and is NOT necessarily compatible with capitalism. Indeed the contrary is the case - modern democracy is the outcome of class struggle and revolutionary pressure applied from the working class, contrary to the claims of neo liberal apologists. Indeed in reading this (and following up Davidson's footnotes) it is worthwhile also looking into Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism, where he demonstrates how many neo liberal "reforms" actually involve the circumvention of democratic accountability and the transfer of decision making to unelected and non accountable "experts". (Of course Wallerstein in his recent fourth volume of The Modern World - System which discusses what he calls the 'geoculture' of the capitalist world-market, argues that this phenomenon was present in centrist liberalism from the start). I like the way he deploys Benjamin (my all time favourite "Marxist" thinker) here to support this!

4.       His final point, that apologists and propagandists for 'neoliberalism' have grabbed hold of the concept of bourgeois revolution and applied to their counter revolutionary strategy against social democracy and the welfare state. This is really another version of the above argument, that the meaning of the phrase of bourgeois revolution is politically contested, that this contest is of immediate and current significance, and that there is a political responsibility on the socialist movement to actively participate in this contest. It is in other words, no mere academic exercise, but a political task.

 

What I find very interesting in Davidson's enumeration of reasons for (re)examining the bourgeois revolution thesis is the ghostly presence of post modernist relativism that lurks behind them. Note what is absent from the list. Davidson identifies two opponents in the debate: neo liberal apologists who wish to appropriate the thesis for their own ends and Marxist 'revisionists" (he means in particular George Comninel though the latter is at this stage not named). But he does not say that they are wrong, and that the argument is therefore about historical truth. Rather the argument is about political utility; and the logical extension of this is that the audience can choose to accept the argument or not. Now one of the strengths of Marxism in the past was the sense that the movement  was on the side of history and the future, that as a social science it was able to discover social truth, freed from the ideological blinkers of bourgeois ideology. And the most compelling reason for an audience to adhere to a viewpoint is that it is true. A Marxism convinced of its possession of truth has only to show how the dominant ideology is partial and inaccurate and it has won over half the argument. But of course post modernist relativism in the last thirty years has made it impossible to hold this view. (And of course, this was in my view, the entire purpose of the post modernist push. Despite its 'leftist' rhetoric post modernism, as James Holstun shows in the first three chapters of Ehud's Dagger, was always primarily aimed at countering and subverting Marxism.) So Davidson is reduced to a language of implied individual choices in accepting or rejecting an argument, and deprived of the strongest tool in the war of ideas.

 

I want to add some final observations on Davidson's  fourth point. He quotes from one of the cabal of Thatcherite court historians, Norman Stone, in which the latter argues that the bourgeois revolution was only happening under Thatcher, because the British state and society retained many institutional blockages to the proper and unfettered expansion of capital. Now Stone's target was of course the welfare state and other social democratic (and also straight democratic) means of limiting the exploitation of capital and delivering some modicum of the total extracted surplus value back to the working class. But Stone is also implying that there is a continuity between the residual feudal limitations on capital in the early modern period (when the original bourgeois revolution occurred) and the social democratic institutions of the post 1945 era. What Davidson does not mention is that there is a Marxist element in the underlying assumptions. In the mid 1960s Perry Anderson et al developed the argument in the pages of New Left Review that England had never experienced a "proper" bourgeois revolution as in France, which swept away all the elements of feudalism. Anderson et al's target was the British Labour movement, which they argued remained tied to the reformist and class collaborationist ideas of the left liberal side of the unfinished bourgeois revolution and this accounted for the British failure to develop a proper continental style Marxist culture. But the thesis of the incomplete bourgeois revolution was there, able to revived to different political purposes by the bourgeois ideologists. (It is worth noting that EP Thompson savaged and critiqued this argument extensively; and Ellen Wood refuted it thoroughly in her book The Pristine Culture of Capitalism).