panorámica general de 1999

The Libyan revolution of 1 September 1969 was the turning point of the Libyan state and society in the MOWS. The Sanusi monarchy (1951-1969) started a mixture of programs mainly regarding health, housing and education that led to the creation of a new social class in the country; this was mainly in the eastern region. Only Tripoli in the west developed in similar fashion and the majority of rural Libyans stayed firmly „poor‟. During this period the biggest universities in Libya were established in 1955 under the name of the University of Al Fateh in Tripoli and University of Gar-Yunis in Benghazi.

Prior to the revolution Ahmida (2005) notes that Libyan society had been largely unchanged in terms of its social structure since the middle of the nineteenth century. Libya remained geographically divided into three regions under Ottoman rule and it was only with the occupation of Libya by Italy and then France and Britain that it became a nation-state under centralised rule. These three regions (Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and Fezzan) were dominated by different social groups and were in political competition with each other, a problem and legacy that were to affect Libya right through the post-colonial period (Vandewalle, 1998; Otman and Karlberg, 2007). Therefore in terms of social and cultural changes/structures Libya possessed three main classes of workers,

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“peasants (tribesmen) who had settled on small plots of land as sharecroppers; wage

labourers from British and Italian companies; and a bourgeois class that was composed of urban notables who were either salaried bureaucrats or comprador merchants who traded with Europe” (Ahmida, 2005:09).

In addition Libya had its ruling elites that were connected to the Monarchy. In this period Libya as a modern nation-state barely existed and it was only after the Sanusi regime came to power in 1951 that Libya became a state. By the time of the Sanusi monarchy Libya could be viewed socially as follows: The country was divided into the following social classes - elites who were connected to the monarchy; the dominant loyal tribes leaders; a middle class (mainly from students and intellectuals); small working class; lower-middle classes containing educated people who came from poor and minor tribes; and a large poor class, mainly rural, who were the largest social strata of the country (Vandewalle, 1998; Harris, 1986; Ahmida, 2005). The state itself began to evolve in this period and according to Vandewalle (1998: 53-54)

“The five most important ministries which allocated roughly 80% of the budget were:

housing and state property, public works, planning and development, communications, and industry were headed initially by tribal supporters of the king and by two Tripolitania technocrats. These ministries as well as the development funds, became the most important formal mechanisms for distributing the growing wealth.”

Thus, Libya remained a highly underdeveloped country which was dominated by poverty, particularly rural. The Sanusi regime attempted to modernise aspects of Libyan society but this was a process dominated by corruption and the continued links between Libyan elites and the former colonial powers. The power of the core over post-colonial Libya was firmly entrenched in this period of the MOWS as the regime established close relations with both the USA and the UK which included establishing military bases on the country. The political system was a limited kind of democracy but power overwhelmingly resided with King Idris who appointed ministers and dominated decision-making (Harris, 1986). Even after the discovery of oil in 1959 and the establishment of Libya‟s first 5-year plan for development

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(1963-1968) progress towards general social development was poor, as reflected in the high rates of illiteracy at the time of the revolution (St John, 2008; Vandewalle, 2006).

The revolution itself was driven by a number of factors but socially gained greatest support from the majority of poor tribes in the country (Ahmida, 2005). The Free Officers Movement, led by a twelve member directorate which called itself the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), claimed to have organised the coup and proclaimed the country to be the Libyan Arab Republic. In the initial period up until 1973 there were many threats of counter-coups against the revolution which saw the military-led state begin to adopt more overtly authoritarian measures such as taking control of the media and Trade Unions. The idea of civil society, so powerful in Western democracies, never really took hold in post-colonial Libya, but then, this was also the case throughout most of the region and the periphery and semi-periphery of the MWOS (Nonneman, 2001; Abootalebi, 1998). In that sense Libya‟s path was unexceptional and reflected the pattern whereby, as Fanon feared and Said and Wallerstein documented, newly installed national elites replaced colonial elites and established networks of power and support with the former colonial powers. This corruption of post-colonial regimes was to be a familiar pattern in the MOWS.

1973 represents a turning point for the revolutionary regime, now firmly dominated by Gaddafi and his loyal supporters. The consensus in the academic literature is to portray post- colonial Libya as a rentier state and an example of authoritarian populism and there is little reason to doubt this (Nonneman, 2001; Chaudry, 1994; Schwarz, 2008). Libya has always remained dependent upon its vast oil reserves which have enabled the post-revolutionary governments to fund its ambitious foreign and domestic policies. One of the consequences of Libya‟s rentier outlook has, of course, been the emergence of a monopolistic economy and a state that has lacked the complex bureaucratic structure associated with modern nation-states. Rather, the ruling regime has been able to use its vast wealth as a form of clientelism to buy support rather than trying to govern through what Weber famously described as the modern bureaucratic rational state and not by imposing taxes upon the population to fund public services (Anderson, 1987; Otman and Karlberg, 2007; Martinez, 2007). In this sense and like other rentier states it leaves the governing regime potentially vulnerable to domestic dissent as it does not possess the state infrastructure needed to unify and coordinate national policies

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and crucially to embed the population in a mutual relationship with the state. Hence the division of Libya into three regions remains a political issue for the populations of those territories to this day. The populism of the revolutionary government was reflected in a number of policies including removal of foreign military bases and a move to guarantee welfare for ordinary Libyans. It was this kind of appeal that marked the direction of the Libyan state rather than the move to construct a fully functioning state system.

However, in 1973 after the failure of the Arab Socialist Union with Egypt and Syria, Gaddafi announced the establishment of the Jamahiriya state (meaning, of the masses), a populist cultural and political transformation of Libya‟s governing system (Otman and Karlberg, 2007; Vandewalle, 2006; Harris, 1986; Ahmida, 2005). According to Ahmida (2005:72) “Gaddafi destroyed institutions of the old monarchy and, at the same time created the

Jamahiriya institutions legitimizing a strong state acceptable to most Libyans in the hinterland”. Under the Jamahiriya state a network of „people‟s committee‟ were established

which for Gaddafi represented a Libyan version of direct democracy as they were the mechanisms through which policy would be implemented and also, in theory, through which the mass or the people could make decisions about policy (Vandewalle, 1998; Ahmida, 2005; Otman and Karlberg, 2007). In reality the latter did not take place. Committee members were elected and with the rise of a powerful authoritarian state over Libyan society it was decreed that there was no need for political parties as Libyan society was unified in its support of Gaddafi‟s „Third International Theory‟, a programme for development that he saw as applicable to the whole of the Third World (St. John, 2008). At the same time as this apparent move to decentralise power was taking place in reality the ruling regime under Gaddafi‟s leadership very quickly moved in the opposite direction to take power more firmly into the hands of the state with Gaddafi himself becoming officially leader of the revolution in 1979 (Harris, 1986; Metz, 2004).

Libya became a testing ground for political experiments in the 1970s with a series of councils and committees established in support of the idea that Libya was governed by a form of direct democracy (Fathaly and Abusedra, 1980). The most important of these were the Revolutionary Committees which, in theory, existed to help raise people‟s political consciousness but in reality acted as a mechanism by which the government could monitor

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and survey the population for signs of dissent (Martinez, 2007). Again, when one considers the authoritarian nature of Libyan state and society it is important to situate this in the context of political trends throughout the periphery and semi-periphery which were generally, in this period, prone towards authoritarian and military governments. Libya became distinct in the eyes of the West because its ruling governments authoritarian populism embraced an anti- imperialist rhetoric and material support for those Third World movements resisting Western imperialism. This is not to excuse the nature of the regime but to recognise that again, in the MOWS, the way in which governments in the periphery and semi-periphery are described in a media and academic discourse dominated by the core is also part of the structure of power/knowledge at the heart of the MOWS. This desire for political independence by the governing regime and its populist support and policies for the Libyan population have been significant factors in differentiating it from other rentier states in the region which were firmly in the Western camp and highly dependent on Western political and military support (such as Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco) (Delacrois, 1980; Schwarz, 2008). If the Libyan government sought to control its domestic population and opposition in ways which were an affront to human rights then they were in keeping with and often lagging behind other states in the region such as Algeria. The main difference between Algeria and Libya in this respect is the vast scale of human rights abuses carried out by the military junta in Algeria when compared with the Libyan governments own abuses (Whitley, 1994). The fact that Algeria was a part of the pro-Western bloc of Arab countries explains a great deal about its comparative sympathetic coverage in Western media and political circles. That said it must be acknowledged that the Libyan government carried out its own share of wide-spread abuses, particularly of opponents in exile, many of whom were assassinated in the 1970s (Sturman, 2003; Otman and Karlberg, 2007; Human Rights Watch, 2011). Further, its support for war against states in the core went back to the early years of the revolution when Gaddafi warned the French in 1971 not to oppose Libya‟s military intervention in Chad or suffer the consequences (Vandewalle, 1998). These overt warnings to states in the core helped to fuel the picture that was built up by the Reagan administration that Libya was one of the world‟s foremost sponsors of terrorists, not freedom fighters. Given that President Reagan viewed the ANC as a terrorist organisation the denunciation of Libya needs to be viewed in the context of the geo-political environment of the time which was framed in a familiar East-West Cold War narrative. This narrative decreed that all states were either friends or enemies of the USA or the USSR with no room for non-alignment. Nonetheless Gaddafi‟s support for independence movements throughout the Third World, including the

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Palestinians, saw him easily portrayed as a „mad-dog‟ and all the other features of Western propaganda (Hitchens and Said, 2001), an image which he embraced and presented as proof of his successful defiance of the West.

At the same time these early state-society models has some resonance with the ideas of a developmental state as mentioned in chapter one. The Gaddafi led governments sought to use the state to cement their power over Libyan society but unlike their East Asian developmental state counterparts and in keeping with rentier states more generally, the easy flow of money was too tempting of the state apparatchiks and political leadership. Without having to produce anything Libya like other rentier states became cash rich and this flow of money was sufficient o fuel the grandiose political projects of the Libyan governments. It meant that the emphasis on state-building witnessed in East Asian states was generally lacking, replaced instead by a form of patron-client relationship which did little to diversify the economy. Thus there are some links with the developmental state model but fundamentally Libya‟s rentier state status was the key factor in undermining its overall development. Ironically as the country became cash rich it at the same time became developmentally only moderate. Certainly the social quality if life indicators for Libya were stronger than most of their immediate neighbours, as we will see in chapter four.