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This
is the first of two posts in nisralnasr discussing US history as a source for
understanding events in the Middle East.
This one concerns the Revolutionary War; the next one will address
Reconstruction and After.
The history
and politics of the US have long been presumed, not least by Americans
themselves, to be sui generis. Until recently it was widely understood that
American law might have much to teach other legal traditions but little to
learn from them. American political
institutions do not, we have almost all been taught, prosper in other soils and
we ourselves have no reason to adopt the practices from abroad. There is not much point then to comparing
American experiences and those of other countries. That this is self-evidently so is made real
in the practice of my discipline where American politics and comparative
politics are seen as two distinct sub-disciplines.
American
history and politics remain what was once called Whig history: a narrative of perennial
improvement. No matter what sordid and
terrifying features of the past are unearthed, the narrative remains Whiggish. The more we learn about the horrors of the
past the more certain we become of how far and how irreversibly we have come. Another particular feature of how we prefer
to understand our own history, consonant with Whig assumptions, is that we are
the authors of our fate—collectively and individually. Americans have made American history, we want
to believe, without any external assistance.
Whether this is a common belief for a liberal republic or for an
imperial power deserves study, but as we seek to understand the rest of the
world through the lens of our own history we should take care not to believe
our own myths too strenuously.
In a
recent, widely read discussion of the Islamic State the American-born and
educated French scholar Scott
Atran argued that US history can help us appreciate its revolutionary
potential. Citing a study of
contemporary jihadis and the Viet
Cong, Atran asserts “what matters in revolutionary success is commitment to
cause and comrades.” Atran connects
this study of contemporary fighters to those who fought in the Continental Army
with George Washington. Atran recalls
the winter of 1777-8 when Washington withdrew with his army to Valley Forge,
not far from Philadelphia. “Haggard
remnants” of that army, Atran reminds us, were on the verge of leaving Valley
Forge when Washington gave a speech, an “inspired appeal” as Atran describes
it. After hearing Washington’s stirring
appeal the troops “fused together in the harsh winter…henceforth able to
withstand any adversity.”
Atran is
arguing that revolutionary action is the fusion of a deep sense of sacred
justice with personal solidarities. IS
cadre, in this argument, is the fusion of a belief in a sacred mission shared
by committed activists tested in conflict.
Whatever the objective status of their beliefs revolutionaries
understand their goals to be sacred and their links to be those of personal
devotion to each other as well as their ideal.
National liberation, the Islamic caliphate, or the dictatorship of the
proletariat can presumably all provide such goals and be championed by comrades
of such devotion.
This essentially voluntarist view
of revolution has deep roots in American social thought although it was
probably not shared by most of the men who founded the state. We can find it among others for whom
transforming a movement into a state was never an option or simply never
succeeded. “If you will it” as Theodor Herzl
told his followers in the Zionist movement, “it is no dream.” Saul Alinsky, the premier community organizer,
once said “We must believe that it is darkest before the dawn of a beautiful
new world. We will see it when we
believe it.” Or, in the words of
Jefferson Davis, first president of the Confederate States of America, “Obstacles may retard, but they cannot long prevent
the progress of a movement sanctified by its justice, and sustained by a
virtuous people."
Human beliefs matter, but believing
that the sheer power of belief is all that really matters beggars belief. In the US successful business executives, like
the movement leaders cited above, fervently believe that their fervent
commitment to their product and their own well-being propelled them beyond
their peers and competitors.
Businessmen, no less than civil rights leaders, have dreams but we
rarely take them as models when we talk politics. Not simply because they are businessmen but
because so many of them fail.
As the leaders of the American Revolution
well understood, neither Valley Forge nor George Washington’s speeches were the
key to victory. Contemporaries and most
modern historians recognized two very different undertakings in 1777 as crucial
to the success of the revolution.
Neither involved Valley Forge or George Washington and one was, at least
briefly, a direct threat to Washington’s leadership. As most of Washington’s contemporaries were
well aware, he was in Valley Forge because the British had successfully captured
Philadelphia, the seat of the Continental Congress. British troops had earlier taken control of
New York and not long thereafter they successfully besieged Charleston. In short, while Washington waited out the
winter in Valley Forge, the British had seized control of three of the most
important cities on the North American continent and in the entire British
colonial empire including the capitol of the revolt.
The revolution was rescued by
foreign support, not emotional discourse.
In September and October 1777, General Horatio Gates and the elements of
the Continental Army under his control won the battles of Saratoga, decisively
defeating General John Burgoyne near the upstate New York town. Gates’s defeat of Burgoyne effectively ended
any possibility of British control of the Hudson Valley or of regaining control
of Boston. It also very briefly provided a challenge to Washington's command. News did not travel fast in
the late 18th century but when accounts of Saratoga reached Paris
two months later, King Louis XVI promptly decided his government could enter negotiations
with the American envoy Benjamin Franklin to assist the revolutionary cause.
Louis was no revolutionary, but he was
willing to work with American insurgents out of fear that the British
consolidation of a transoceanic empire at French expense would leave France in
a permanently weakened situation. France
had lost its primary North American and South Asian possessions at the end of
the Seven Years’ War in 1763. To engage
the French, Britain was forced to draw down its land forces in North America
and re-direct its fleet away from the American coast. Once this occurred the
revolutionary colonists were able to fight British forces on a more nearly
equal footing. Yet even what most
Americans think of as the final defeat of Britain, the surrender of Lord
Cornwallis at Yorktown, was the result of a victory by the French fleet over
the British in the Chesapeake Bay and a joint Franco-American ground force.
It is thus not surprising that
Saratoga and the decision of the French monarch are the crucial events for understanding
the success of the American Revolution, not Valley Forge. The success of the American Revolution, like
that of others, depended far more significantly on international succor and
support than it did on the intense commitment of the revolutionaries.
The supposition that revolutions
succeed because revolutionary heroes refuse to accept defeat has a long
history. Still, indomitable will as the
basis of victory and its absence as the cause of defeat is far more common an
idea among reactionary radicals than among conventional leftists. Far more common among the latter is the
belief that social change including revolution is the result of institutional
and social structures than the untrammeled desire of the revolutionaries. It has also long been a staple of critics of
liberal societies whose members and leaders are generally thought to be
insufficiently dedicated to the rights and liberties whose importance they
proclaim. Arguing that the success of
the opponents of liberals is due to the strength of their commitment is
frequently used to buttress a claim that a more tough-minded approach to
protecting society from the depredations of its enemies is necessary.
The Islamic
State has not succeeded because of the devotion of its members although
commitment to the cause has probably brought people who otherwise might have
been engaged elsewhere to the border areas of Syria and Iraq that it
controls. It has succeeded, to the
extent that it has, because more powerful states regionally and internationally
have not been able to agree on whether or how to eliminate it. That seems to have begun changing recently—Russia,
the US, Turkey and Iran have increasingly come to practical arrangements that
will make it more and more difficult for the Islamic State to function. In the process they have also come to
arrangements to resolve their disagreements about other actors in the region as
well. These include Bashar al-Asad, the
Ba’thi regime in Syria, and a multitude of anti-regime political and military
forces including the Kurdish ones.
Here,
however, it is possible to see another way in which the American experience
usefully illuminates events in Syria and Iraq.
If it is true that insurgents and revolutionaries cannot succeed without
international help, it is equally true that external states cannot simply
generate whatever forces they would most prefer in a given conflict. There is every reason to believe that Louis
and his ministers would have preferred different American allies than the ones
they had. But in the end, intervening to
help the insurgents in North America as part of a global strategy aimed at
Great Britain required the French government to work with whatever leaders had
survived on the ground.
