Emirates Diplomatic Academy

"How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs: The Syrian Congress of 1920 and the Destruction of its Liberal-Islamic Alliance." Democratization, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2

This chapter assesses the support provided by the UAE to post-Daesh stabilisation and reconstruction efforts in Iraq from 2014 to 2018. It first reviews the role of the Working Group on Stabilisation (WGS) of the Global Coalition Against Daesh (GCAD) in helping the government of Iraq promote and coordinate stabilisation activities. With the scope of transitional stabilisation projects being progressively broadened to include wider reconstruction and development efforts, it then examines the UAE’s approach to stability in Iraq. In doing so, this chapter analyses the main challenges facing the UAE in helping Baghdad implement a transformative agenda through economic engagement, cross-confessional outreach and support to security sector reform.

In the first seventeen years after independence, Libya functioned as a loyal Anglo-American vassal state, administrated by a King relying heavily on London and a set of British advisers. During the eight years London administered the key cities in the Libyan provinces after the defeat of the Italians (1943–1951), it decided on all issues of foreign, economic and financial policy. Britain had strategically invested in personal relations with the emerging Libyan elites and many of them took up leading positions in the Sanussi monarchy. King Idris and his followers proved to be loyal allies in the West’s struggle against Communism and Arab Nationalism, while also providing the West with control over its economic development. The discovery of oil in commercial quantities at the end of the 1950s, drastically changed Libya’s outlook and its negotiating power with respect to the West. At the same time, Libya could not be isolated from general developments in the Arab world, which nurtured a generation dissatisfied with the close relationship with the West. Together with rampant corruption, a reluctance to treat Tripolitania and Cyrenaica on an equal basis and the inability to produce an acceptable and capable heir to its throne, King Idris saw his rule weaken and Western powers started reviewing their policies towards the monarchy.

The Italian colonialists had great difficulty establishing effective governance over their new territories. In addition, the transformation of arid land into an Agricultural Empire as was envisioned by the colonial lobby, also floundered. Soon after the Italian conquest, two devastating World Wars changed the political dynamics in North Africa and Europe. Libya, as part of the Italian sphere of influence, but bordering British and French controlled territories, found itself on a fault line of fighting. Especially the Eastern province, Cyrenaica, suffered substantial damage, with large numbers of the population affected by the war efforts of both the Allied and the Axis forces. The wars also weakened Italy. Britain had established an alliance with the Sanussi leadership aimed at battling the Italians together. During that process, the seeds for Libyan independence were planted as the British promised the Sanussi that their land would never fall back under Italian rule.

The 1969 coup by a group of junior officers took the world by genuine surprise. The Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), with Mu’ammer al Qaddafi in their midst, had Libya embark on a new political adventure, one which would last more than four decades. At home, he put great effort into weakening the legitimate sources of power: the monarchy and the religious establishment. At the same time, Qaddafi and the RCC consolidated power through a search for common ground in anti-Western feelings. The revolution proclaimed by the RCC was built on the utopian idea of freeing Libya from foreign influences, in order to uncover a true Libyan national spirit. Dismantling the Anglo-American military bases and expelling a large part of the Italian community were part of this vision. Militant speeches, combined with highly publicized acts of hostility against Western interests served the triple purpose of bolstering domestic legitimacy, attracting attention at the international level, and settling accounts with former occupiers and present imperialists. Nonetheless, the RCC and Qaddafi remained aware that their survival, economically and as such also politically, was linked to keeping substantial relations with Libya’s key trading partners in the West.

Interpreting both the ‘end of traditional Burma’ and the significance of Buddhism was done against the backdrop of rapid and decisive social transformations. Nothing embodied these changes as much as the development of Rangoon as a major imperial port city. Raymond Williams’s The City and the Country is admittedly an unlikely organizing inspiration for a study in imperial cultural history, but the division on which his classic work is predicated is indicative of key aspects of the Burmascape.1 Already in The Burman, which was written prior to the unification of the country, Scott deployed Rangoon as a signifier for modernization, commercial development and colonial rule. Yet, this chapter will point to a different trend: namely, that despite the fact that the Burmaphiles, and those who looked askance at much that they found there, all assumed that this backwater province of the Indian empire benefitted from these realities, they were much more interested in the rural and natural aspects of Burma. That is, many sought to represent the country itself as the ‘true Burma’ even though their writings illustrated that the land was as difficult to traverse as it was diverse. At the same time, their narrative accounts often had the unintended effect of proclaiming the power of British rule over such a challenging and exotic land. In order to pursue these themes in greater depth, this chapter will focus upon some of the ways in which British authors regarded Rangoon and other cities.

The previous chapters exhibit British self-confidence in governing Burma. This attitude, perhaps best personified by Viceroy Curzon's grandiose ambitions and assumptions ('It has now passed for ever into our hands'), ran through the heart of British writing about Burma. Curzon was actually referring to preserving Burma's historical artifacts, but he assumed that Britain would rule the country for a long time.1 The British, after all, were confident that Burma was an important place with its own history and cultures which, though distinct from India, would remain within the ambit and protection of the Indian empire, and which they could govern while recovering its past and reshaping its future. They assumed as well that while it was exotic, its religious life could be either used or translated into something respectable, and many believed that the immigration into Burma would probably reshape and reorient the country towards the broader streams of Indian Ocean commerce. Many of those in business and government continued to believe that Burma would provide almost magic access to the enormous southwestern China market. It might be recalled that actual episodes of rebellion or insurrection in new century Burma were comparatively rare and shortlived. The minor uprisings (largely isolated incidents) in 1906 and 1914 generated neither obvious popular support nor anxiety in the governing authorities.

British observers were nearly united in finding Buddhism to be one of the most conspicuous features of Burma.1 Buddhism might well be regarded as one of the country's picturesque signifiers as the title of Gwendolen Trench Gascoigne's Among Pagodas and Fair Ladies (1896) suggests. Nonetheless, British assessments of Buddhism (which included its relationship with nat worship) diverged beyond these most basic considerations. This chapter will exhibit some of the range of this divergence: Nisbet and Talbot Kelly wondered about Buddhism's durability in the face of modernity and Christian missions. Taw Sein Ko, himself a committed Buddhist, understood the religion to be one of the cornerstones (the British empire was another) for the successful modernization of Burma. In contrast, Harold Fielding-Hall followed Sir George Scott and wrote from a Burmaphilic position to enable their readers (both colonial and metropolitan) to understand the appealing and humanistic side of the religion. The chapter will call attention to British converts to Buddhism and end with considerations that while many of these figures were publishing, the YMBA was born. At the same time, despite the fact that Buddhism was part of the Burmascape in that for all Britons it helped to signify Burma, the British were not alert to ways in which the religion itself was being transformed by developments in the 19th century.