How regimes shore up power through national narratives.
Of all the factors that have been considered and evaluated as primers for the pervasive nature of authoritarianism in the Middle East, perhaps none are quite so crucial, nor quite so overlooked, as that of the national narrative. In her new book, Official Stories, International Relations professor, Laurie Brand, explores this particular discursive tool used by autocrats to legitimate their governments and quell public unrest. Citing political theorists the likes of Gramsci and Foucault, and zeroing in on the case studies of Egypt and Algeria, Brand explores how stories are deployed by ruling powers and internalized by those they rule to stabilize their otherwise unpopular regimes.
The following is an excerpt from Offical Stories: Politics and National Narratives in Egypt and Algeria, by Laurie A. Brand:
Prior to the Arab uprisings in spring 2011, much ink was spilt by academics, pundits, and journalists in an attempt to explain the resilience of the range of authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Although successive waves of democratization seemed to wash over other parts of the world, the MENA states appeared impervious to the same forces of history. Politicized, polemical, and often ill-informed writing offered a variety of ahistorical arguments focused largely on the purported resistance of a disembodied “Islam” or an essentialized Arab culture to any movements toward more meaningful participatory political systems.
Eventually, over the din of the dim, scholars of the politics of the region made more sophisticated analyses heard. Careful single-case and comparative studies pointed to a host of factors having nothing to do with religion or the broader and even more problematic concept of culture. These analyses instead looked for answers in the political economy of the region, in the intervention of external actors, the role of the Palestine conflict, and the development and entrenchment of the security forces. In the economic sphere, the development of rentier economies or states was used to explain the ability of elites in some political systems to buy off potential opposition through distributive policies made possible by wealth accruing from oil or natural gas revenues, or strategic rents. Other analyses focused on the involvement of external or extraregional actors, most centrally the United States. Despite initiatives purported to promote democracy, U.S. aid, often to MENA military or security forces, privileged the stability seemingly guaranteed by dictatorships in order to protect the free flow of oil and thwart threats to Israel. Finally, the exceptional strength of coercive apparatuses—the military, the police, and other internal security forces—as well as the patrimonial character of state institutions and low levels of popular mobilization were also shown to be of central importance.
All of these are critical variables in analyzing political stability and change, regardless of regime type or region. Depending upon country case, singly or in combination, they constitute compelling explanations for the resilience of authoritarian regimes in the MENA region. Nevertheless, they do not exhaust the range of strategies or tools upon which a leadership can draw to maintain or reinforce its power and legitimacy. While its influence on regime resilience may not be as immediately obvious or as easily explored as these other factors, the content of state discourse is another element worthy of study. Official narratives and pronouncements asserting the right to rule, seeking to justify policies, or combatting opponents also deserve careful exploration if we are to understand the full range of tools available to leaderships as they respond to crises—whether chronic or acute—that threaten their hold on power.
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That the control of discourse has been a central concern of authoritarian leaderships is obvious from the experiences of many countries around the world, and certainly those in the MENA region. Algeria’s second postindependence president, Houari Boumedienne, made clear that historians were to follow his directives in narrating Algeria’s past, and both he and the Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat established institutions aimed at controlling research and studies on historical periods deemed critical to their image or claim to rule. In addition, in authoritarian political systems like those of Egypt and Algeria, ministries of information, public guidance, press and publications, and the like have been established with the central task of constructing, controlling, and propagating messages, stories, and symbols aimed at generating support, or in some cases, silence, among the citizenry. Although their impact has waned with the rise of alternative information sources, before the globalization of electronic media, authoritarian leaderships exercised significant, and in some cases monopoly, control over such messages through state information outlets, various forms of cultural production (cinema, theater, and literature), educational curricula, and associated pedagogical materials.
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The primary goal of the narrative’s historical presentation is not accuracy but creating what has been called “a usable past.”
Edmund Burke III’s observations regarding former colonies’ nationalist histories highlight an additional element particular to the Algerian and Egyptian postindependence national narratives: story lines intended to counter the basic contentions of the colonial narrative, often those related to lack of or fractured identities or to purported backward essences of the population. In reaction, postindependence elites generally embraced the language and practices associated with an unexamined “modernization.” Just as potentially problematic, the need to counter the colonial narrative has often led to an internalization or unreflexive adoption of its epistemology. For example, colonial historians generally attribute a progressive character (mission civilisatrice) to colonization, which is then contested by nationalist movements and histories. However, rather than constructing new categories, the colonial dichotomies were generally retained, the most important change being that the heroes and villains simply change places: “If, for the French writers, France was the bearer of progress and resisters were coded as obscurantist reactionaries, nationalists told the opposite story, in which the French appeared as oppressors and Algerians as noble defenders of their way of life and cultural patrimony.”
Whatever its structure and features, the primary goal of the narrative’s historical presentation is not accuracy but creating what has been called “a usable past”: a set of heroes, events, and/or story lines that can be marshaled to serve the needs of the leadership, whether the goal is securing or reconsolidating power or facing down internal or external challenges. The official scriptings of both the past and the present are intended to shape popular understandings and responses to the socioeconomic, political, and religio-cultural environment in ways that will serve regime ends. Thus, they must be understood as closely intertwined with the leadership’s claim to legitimacy and the polity’s (and their) presumed collective future.
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