[This article is a part of Jadaliyya's Summer of Coups Series.]
In 1963, British Ambassador to Syria Thomas E. Bromley relayed through a “collection of gossip” the normalization of coups in Damascus,
I might mention a story current here…of a soldier who appeared with his sub-machine gun at the Foreign Ministry. On being asked his business he said that he had come to carry out a coup. The Foreign Ministry official said ‘My dear fellow, go down to the end of the queue; there are lots of people in front of you.’ [1]
While Syria might have experienced the highest rate of military intervention, as is well known, in the postwar period the entire region was plagued by coups. Less understood are the many stories of civilian politicians and party leaders who so often orchestrated these takeovers. Indeed, also in 1963, The Times wrote of Iraq,
The armed forces are the sole dispensers of revolution nowadays, simply because they have the arms. Only a man with a gun can overthrow one who came to power with a gun…. [P]olitical thought comes alive only in the fighting services. Even the policeman, because he cannot match the soldier in arms, is kept in the background, and the civilian, although they are his affairs that are at stake, has practically no voice at all. [2]
A recurrent but overlooked theme in Middle East politics is that civilians—far from passive or lacking in agency—have played prominent roles in most of the region’s coups. Their stories resist the tendency to reduce the source of power in coup-prone states to tanks, bombs, and guns.
A recurrent but overlooked theme in Middle East politics is that civilians—far from passive or lacking in agency—have played prominent roles in most of the region’s coups. Their stories resist the tendency to reduce the source of power in coup-prone states to tanks, bombs, and guns.
Examples span both time and space. In 1908, soldiers loyal to the ideas of the Young Turks—a collection of bureaucrats, students, officers, and exiles—marched on Istanbul to inaugurate the Second Constitutional Era by restoring the constitution, which Abdulhamid II suspended in 1878. In 1936, “Voltairian Republican” Hikmat Suleiman, as British Ambassador to Iraq Archibald Clark Kerr viewed him for his anti-establishmentarianism [3], and General Bakr Sidqi ousted Iraqi Prime Minister Yasin al-Hashimi. Radical politician Rashid Ali Kaylani followed with a pro-axis putsch, which prompted Britain’s re-occupation of Iraq in 1941. Akram al-Hawrani, a rural socialist from Hama, orchestrated all three of Syria’s infamous 1949 coups (and in 1951, 1952, and 1954). In 1957, Hawrani personally led ‘Isyan Qatana—a mutiny at the Qatana Garrison. In 1950s Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood cooperated with the Free Officers before the military revolution that Gamal Abdel Nasser eventually stole. Syrian and Iraqi Ba‘thists were involved in coups throughout the 1960s. Lebanon’s Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP; Parti Populair Syrien [PPS]) attempted in 1961 to seize control in Beirut. The Turkish Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi [CHP]) actively encouraged the military to intervene in May 1960. Turkey’s leftists infiltrated the military throughout the 1970s.
Although the region’s wave of coups receded in the 1970s, civilians have featured prominently in the coup events of the last five years. In July 2013, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and the Interior Ministry along with various political parties, business interests, and TV personalities, co-opted the not-so-unwitting grassroots Tamarod (Rebel) movement. This coalition plotted the downfall of the democratically elected President Mohammad Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen’s Hizmet organization participated in the abortive July 2016 coup—even if there is only circumstantial evidence that Gülen himself was somehow involved. We know that Gülen’s “shadowy” network had infiltrated the army, police, and judiciary—originally with the blessing of Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi [AKP]). As recently as May 21, 2018, Saudi Prince Khaled bin Farhan called for his uncles Prince Ahmed bin Abdulaziz (former interior minister) and Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz to oust King Salman, stating that, “ninety-nine percent of the members of the royal family, the security services and the army would stand behind them.”
Coalitions of politicians and soldiers have shown greater attachment to their ideological group than public institutions such as the parliament or national army. This has created what this essay calls an invisible line between the Middle East’s soldiers and civilians. These coteries have collapsed the civil-military distinction by developing a “culture of coups” in which they seize power to advance their private interests in the public arena. They have, however, at the same time demonstrated sensitivity to allegations of flouting a “taboo”—a “normative prohibition” that protects “individuals and societies” from dangerous behavior and “refers to something that is not done, said, or touched”—against military intervention into civilian affairs. Forced to publicly qualify violations of the “taboo,” these civil-military cliques reproduce the very normative “line” between civilian and military authority that they routinely cross. This invisible line in Middle East political systems thus produces tension between competing normative frameworks: politicians and their military partisans can, quite naturally, seize power using the language of revolution, so long as they firmly denounce military coups d’état.
The Invisible Line
The line between civilians and soldiers in the Middle East’s domestic politics has been invisible. With little shared attachment to the idea of public institutions, firm distinctions between “civilian” and “military” interests did not develop. In Egypt, for instance, anti-Islamist politicians have more in common with secular officers than with the Muslim Brotherhood. Civilian elites shared with officers a desire to safeguard their interests from Islamists rather than a desire to align with all civilian stripes, including Islamists, to safeguard parliamentary independence from the military. Politicians’ consistent alignment with the state’s army blurs the boundary between state and society—between public and private—and challenges the Western foundations of “civil-military relations.”
The idea of state sovereignty is inseparable from the development of the modern army. Max Weber highlighted the transfer of society’s weapons from landed nobility to public soldiers as a defining feature of the state. With the transfer of weapons from private individuals to the idea of the “public,” political representatives have pondered how best to keep the “public army” in its barracks. The Weberian state is thus the point of departure for dealing with a problem that is uniquely its own: who will monopolize society’s weapons? Societies need armies to safeguard their sovereignty, but they have to prevent soldiers from introverting their lances. Our understanding of “civil-military relations” is built on this conceptual framework, which Peter Feaver’s civil-military problematique succinctly captures with a basic question: who will guard the guardians?
In answering that question, researchers, diplomats, and policymakers overwhelmingly view civil-military relations “through the lens of the liberal-democratic principle that elected civilian officials must be supreme over the military.” [4] This is partly because of its Western intellectual heritage. Samuel Huntington’s (1957) seminal The Soldier and the State modeled civil-military relations on Western democratic cases by drawing a line between civilians and “professional” soldiers. Proponents and critics of “military professionalism” have since reinforced a general view that only soldiers make coups. For instance, while Donald Horowitz—and even Huntington’s (1968) application of his theory in the developing world—urged researchers to search within society for the origins of coups, he meant the societal sources of officer motives. Military grievances originate in society, but coup plots germinate among officers. This view leaves little room for societal actors to use the coup as a political tactic.
The general framework of civil-military relations, then, reflects the “false primacy of institutions,” which mistakes culture as institutions. If the state is the product of widely shared ideas, then one cannot assume that individuals’ public identities as soldiers will always subsume their private identities when they join the public (state) army. Shared attachment to the state physically divorces civilians from control over society’s weapons. Warriors comprise the army—a large part of what makes a state, a state—and monopolize violence. “Civilians” are relegated to either succeeding in keeping “soldiers” out of politics, or else they are passive actors that cannot control an ambitious army. In either case the monopoly of violence rests in the hands of public soldiers.
There is a range of possible relationships, however, between the armed and unarmed. Private individuals are not always so far removed from society’s means of violence. People who enlist in the armed forces for ideological reasons, for instance, will have no such attachments to public identities. This is how radical politician Akram al-Hawrani infiltrated the Homs Military Academy with loyal socialists. In postwar Damascus, the problem was not an external one in “weak institutions”; the problem was an internal one in that neither civilian nor military agents shared strong attachments to their respective public institutions. By the late 1950s, civilian-officer coteries structured political life rather than institutionalized civilian and military spheres. While some thought “Syrian Army” factions acted to further their party’s goals [5]—there was no “Syrian Army,” per se, to have been factionalized. One was a Ba‘thist or Communist first and a soldier second. Some party members wore fatigues while others wore suits and sat in parliament.
Civil-military coteries in the Middle East blur the line between public and private; politicians and soldiers occupy nominally public space but act as private agents. Rather than both proponents and critics of statist approaches reifying the contested concept of the state, Timothy Mitchell has argued they should instead continuously (re)-interpret the evolving social relationships that define the public and private—a mutually co-constitutive boundary. There is no state and society; there is a society that discursively constructs and is constructed by the concept of distinct public and private spheres. Social relationships between civilians and officers are, at once, both public and private. Depending on historical and social circumstances, politicians and officers can retain a greater or lesser degree of attachment to private ideologies when they enter public life. Variations across time and space, like partisanship and family values, can alter the strength of these attachments.
Two Sides of an Invisible Line: The Middle East’s Taboo Coup Culture
Soldiers and civilians in the Middle East have developed relationships that encourage military intervention. It is normatively acceptable for coalitions of civilians and officers to seize political power—even as their public identities force them to call coups by another name. Politicians keep the “taboo” against military intervention in the back of their minds and at the tip of their tongues because despite repeated violations it is a forceful normative prohibition. Coteries of soldiers and politicians have thus created dueling normative environments that exist side-by-side—separated by a fluid invisible line.
Figure 1 represents the liberal-democratic view of civil-military relations and Figure 2 represents the two normative arenas on either side of the invisible line: the “taboo,” on the left, and the “culture of coups,” on the right. Authority is always negotiated between those with ideational sources of power and those with guns. As shown in Figure 1, civilian and military spheres are not entirely separate; officials argue over things like the budget and the jurisdiction of civilian courts. Figure 2 shows that soldiers and politicians negotiate who is in charge within each coterie (there can be more than one at a time).
After Syria’s secession from the United Arab Republic in 1961, for instance, politicians and officers in the Syrian Ba‘th Party struggled internally for power as much as externally. Civilian Ba‘thists like Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar knew of and internalized the norm of civilian supremacy (the “taboo”) but eschewed it temporarily in order to break conservative elite power. They “did not like military regimes but could not but applaud the eclipse of the traditional conservative parties.” [6] Once the Ba‘th’s Military Committee seized control in March 1963—with Aflaq and Bitar’s blessing—the civil-military struggle within the party defined Syrian politics until Hafez al-Assad consolidated power.
Iraqi politician Tawfiq Suweidi expressed discomfort with politician Hikmat Suleiman and General Bakr Sidqi’s military intervention in 1936. Brigadier Khairallah Talfah—Saddam Hussein’s uncle—was worried the coup would politicize the Iraqi army. [7] Chief of Staff Taha al-Hashimi called the army’s participation in the coup “shameful.” “I have never been comfortable,” wrote Hashimi, “with the army’s involvement in politics….” [8] Accounting for his violation of the “taboo,” Suleiman stressed that elites had violated democratic norms, so there was “nothing left…except the Army…so we resorted to the Army.” [9]
In the 1940s and 1950s, Turkish conspirators were constrained by the CHP’s strong distaste for military intervention. They tried to secure the CHP leadership’s support before seizing power, but İsmet İnönü rebuffed them. İnönü began flirting with the idea only in 1959-60 when the CHP viewed military intervention as more desirable than the continued rule of the Democratic Party (Demokrat Parti [DP]). Publicly endorsing military rule would have crossed the invisible line, so İnönü instead legitimated a “revolution,” not a “coup,” against the increasingly autocratic DP. In İnönü’s private residence, however, he told a group of retired officers on 17 April 1960, “that it was up to them, and to the military, to protect the soundness of Turkish society and the ideals of Turkish progress and development.” [10]
Fethullah Gülen condemned the abortive July 2016 coup in Istanbul and Ankara. So did every Turkish political party—including the opposition. Gülen said he disapproved because he had “suffered under multiple military coups.” After Chief of the General Staff Kenan Evren’s 12 September 1980 coup, however, the cleric expressed approval that the army saved the nation. When the BBC in 2016 asked about his support for the 1980 coup, Gülen differentiated support for the army and support for coups.
Despite an outpouring of public support for his coup in July 2013, General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi used the Egyptian security services’ “people in the media” to “create the impression” that he had seized power “only very reluctantly, at the request of the Egyptian people.” His supporters claimed persistently “that he [Sisi] overthrew Morsi at the request of the people, and that Morsi’s removal constituted a revolution, not a coup.” The contradictions were too overwhelming to ignore for liberal politician and academic Amr Hamzawi, who criticized Egyptian liberals after the coup for their “immediate and unconditional alliance with the military establishment during moments of conflict with the Brotherhood without deep reflection about the essence of democracy.”
The recurring theme of civilian involvement in military intervention connects the Middle East’s seemingly episodic waves of coups. Across time and space, the region’s politicians and soldiers are willing to lock arms and dirty their hands. Seeking to define the relationship between civilians and officers reveals an invisible line whereby a “culture of coups” enables coalitions of politicians and soldiers to advance their private interests but forces them to account for their actions by publicly demonstrating adherence to a “taboo” against military coups. While individuals and societies across the globe wonder how to keep their soldiers quartered, Middle Eastern politicians and their military partisans worry that surrounding the capital with tanks and storming the presidential palace will be viewed as a coup.
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[1] Thomas E. Bromley. (1963, April 2). [Letter to George F. Hiller of London’s Foreign Office]. FO 371 Foreign Office: Confidential Print Eastern Affairs, The National Archives of the United Kingdom (FO 371/170597, E 1015/57, para. 4), London, UK.
[2] My emphasis, The Times, “Lessons of Baghdad Upheaval,” 21 February 1963, para. 3. Retrieved from The National Archives of the UK, FO 371/170433, EQ1015/117, 21 February 1963.
[3] Archibald Clark Kerr. (1936, November 20). [Telegram no. 565 to Mr. Eden]. FO 406 Foreign Office: Confidential Print Eastern Affairs, The National Archives of the United Kingdom (FO 406/74, E 7351/1419/93, pp. 204-205), London, UK.
[4] Berk Esen and Sebnem Gumuscu, “Turkey: How the coup failed,” Journal of Democracy, 28:1(2017): p. 60.
[5] Mason, R. W. (1963, June 5). [The Syrian political parties since 1946 and the role of the army in Syrian politics]. FO 370 Foreign Office: Library and Research Department: General Correspondence from 1906, The National Archives of the United Kingdom, (FO 370/2719, LR 6/11, pp. 1-23), Kew Gardens, London, United Kingdom.
[6] Patrick Seale, The struggle for Syria: A study of post-war Arab politics, 1945-1958 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965[1986]), p. 116.
[7] Tawfiq Suweidi, Mudhakarati: Nusf qurn min tarikh al-‘Iraq wa al-qadiyya al-‘arabiyya (My memoirs: Half a century of the history of Iraq and the Arab question [in Arabic]; [2nd ed.] Beirut: Al-Mu’asasat Al-Arabiyya li-Darasat wa Nashr, 2010): p. 238 and Khairullah Talfah, Al-‘Iraq fi sitt sanawat: baḥth tafṣili li-wad’a al-ʻIraq al-siyasi wa-al-iqtiṣadi wa al-ʻaskari khilal al-muddah min 1936 li-ghayat 1941 (Iraq in six years: A detailed study of Iraq's political, economic and military situation from 1936 until 1941 [in Arabic]; Baghdad, Iraq: Matba’at al-‘Abaji, 1976).
[8] Taha Hashimi, Mudhakarat Taha al-Hashimi 1919-1943 (Memoirs of Taha al-Hashimi 1919-1943 [in Arabic]; Beirut: Dar al-Tili’a, 1967): p. 138.
[9] Emphasis added, as cited in M. Tarbush, The role of the military in politics: A case study of Iraq to 1941 (London, UK: Kegan Paul International, 1982), p. 121.
[10] My emphasis, Daniel Lerner & Richard D. Robinson, “Swords and ploughshares: The Turkish Army as a modernizing force,” World Politics, 13:1(1960): p. 43.