In the Arab Middle East the years between the mid-1940s and the late 1950s were very volatile. One reason was the instability of the emerging postcolonial Arab state system.Footnote 1 Despite the rivalry between the system's two strongest states, Iraq and Egypt, neither was able to attain regional dominance.Footnote 2 Fueled by the Cold War—in which London and Washington backed Baghdad, and Moscow, from 1955, backed Cairo—the rivalry was most destabilizing for the three Arab Levantine states sandwiched between Egypt and Iraq: Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon.Footnote 3 These three were further destabilized by the rising power in the 1950s of Arab nationalists and their champion, Egypt's President Jamal ʿAbd al-Nasir, and by the persistence of ties and boundary crossings across bilād al-shām, which fostered the meddling of these governments (especially Syria) in each other's affairs.Footnote 4
Another cause of tensions in these years was unfulfilled domestic societal and political aspirations, particularly in Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. All four states were allied with (or, in Syria's case, neutral toward) the West, a rather unpopular stance among their own populations. And in all four, with the partial exception of Lebanon, conservative elites who had been in power since at least 1918 continued to frustrate aspiring lower and middle classes, at a time when post-1952 republican Egypt proved that a new order was possible. In Iraq the Hashimite monarchy delayed socioeconomic reforms and repressed opposition. Syria underwent five military coups from 1949 to 1954 that, together with rising leftist movements, weakened its urban notable class without replacing it with a new order. In Jordan the impact of several hundred thousand Palestinian refugees was worsened by the Jordanian Hashimite monarchy's resource-poverty and reliance on Western aid. And in Lebanon the ultraliberal economic policies of the Beirut-based and predominantly Christian mercantile elite perpetuated imbalances between center and periphery and between Christians and Muslims.
In early 1958 all of those tensions came to a head in a series of crises. Each was domestic but, in its own way, catalyzed by peak instability in the Arab state system.Footnote 5 On 1 February, Syria's Baʿth Party and al-Nasir merged Syria and Egypt in the United Arab Republic (UAR). To most Arabs this heralded the dawn of the Pan-Arab dream; for pro-Western conservative Arab states it was a shock. On 14 February Iraq tried to restore the Arab state system's balance of power by confederating with Jordan in the Arab Union (AU), leaving most Arabs unimpressed but intensifying an ongoing Iraq–Egypt, now AU–UAR, propaganda war. In May, predominantly Muslim opposition in Lebanon to U.S.-aligned President Camille Chamoun (1952–58), who fancied an unconstitutional second term, spiraled into a minor civil war. This conflict was fueled by Beirut's neglect of Lebanon's peripheries, which gave their primarily Muslim residents all the more reason to admire the Nasir-led UAR and to reaffirm historical ties with neighboring (now UAR) Syria. In turn, Chamoun accused the UAR of meddling in Lebanon's affairs and asked for U.S. assistance on 14 July. The next day, 14,000 U.S. soldiers began coming ashore in Beirut. Their presence, Chamoun's eventual decision to stand down, and the election in September of popular Lebanese Army Commander Fouad Chéhab as the new president ended the minor civil war, and U.S. soldiers left on 25 October.
The U.S. intervention in Beirut had itself been precipitated by an officers’ coup in Baghdad on 14 July and Washington's desire to stem a Pan-Arab nationalist tide that it believed was sweeping the region and would benefit Moscow. In Amman, King Husayn—who since mid-1957 was the target of Egyptian/UAR subversion, including radio attacks that were well received by many Jordanians, and was now without Iraqi protection—feared a pro-UAR coup and called for support. It came on 17 July in the form of 2,000 British paratroopers whose presence, until October, restored his confidence. By August, Lebanon and Jordan had started to calm down. But in September Iraq's ruling officers were falling out over the question of joining the UAR; Arab nationalists led by ʿAbd al-Salam ʿArif lost to “Iraq-firsters” under the new prime minister ʿAbd al-Karim Qasim. This clash initiated the final crisis of 1958. Although al-Nasir, burdened with managing the UAR, did not publicly comment on whether Iraq should join it, Qasim's irreverence irked him. He acted when, in the fall, the powerful Iraqi Communist Party (ICP)—increasingly the de facto base of support for Qasim, who was not a communist but needed the ICP to balance the Arab nationalists—started to attack the nationalists, and the strong Syrian Communist Party, with ICP support, intensified complaints over the lack of socioeconomic reforms in Syria. By late December, the security agents of the UAR and Iraq were working overtime, and those states’ radio stations were waging a war over the airwaves. Communists in the UAR were repressed; the ICP helped defeat a March 1959 UAR-supported Arab nationalist officers’ uprising in Mosul; and al-Nasir picked a fight with his principle non-Arab supporter, the USSR. Only in mid-1959 did tensions subside, and the storm that had begun in early 1958 died down.
Historians have justly concluded that the events of 1958–59 were not the watershed that many people in the summer of 1958 thought they might become. They did not deeply change the ideological or political power balance of the Arab Middle East.Footnote 6
But there is another way of looking at that moment. In this article I argue, first, that during and immediately following the crisis, UAR–Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon experienced state-formation surges: the size, goals, and means of their state apparatuses expanded.Footnote 7 Of course this expansion had older roots, starting in the late Ottoman period and continuing through the Mandate era and early years of independence. But in 1958–59 these states saw significant and rapid change. This was not simply a copy of the first serious Arab postcolonial experiment in state expansion, that of post-1952 republican Egypt.Footnote 8 It was primarily a response to an explosive mixture of peak domestic pressures and interstate instability. In this sense, 1958–59 was a milestone moment.Footnote 9
Second, the state-formation surges of UAR–Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon were not simply separate events.Footnote 10 No doubt political structures remained distinct: UAR–Syria was an authoritarian republic, Jordan an autocratic monarchy, and Lebanon a sectarian democracy. But the three state-formation surges had much in common and together formed a single, regionwide process. They happened at the same time. They had the same twofold goal: to stabilize their societies and to better counteract neighbors’ meddling. And they involved similar means, which made their state apparatuses more alike. One such means was economic-development measures, including state-managed socioeconomic plans with sizable budgets and delineated goals to be attained over a number of years.Footnote 11 Serious thinking about planning started between late 1958 and early 1959; UAR–Syria's plan—the most far-reaching—was launched in 1960, Lebanon's and Jordan's in 1962.Footnote 12
The fact that the three state-formation surges formed a regionwide process highlights that the crises of 1958–59 were not only domestic but also crossed state borders. UAR–Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon were destabilized by the Iraq–Egypt rivalry and by persisting historical ties across bilād al-shām, including meddling by these states, especially UAR–Syria, in their neighbors’ affairs. Put conceptually, countries that are part of one regional interstate system cannot be fully understood individually; such systems affect domestic state structures.Footnote 13
Third and finally, there was a global context to these states’ responses to the 1958–59 crises. In the 1950s and 1960s “planning [was] the intellectual matrix of the entire modernization ideology” across the Third World, in countries neutral or affiliated with the communist bloc, where planning was pervasive, as well as in countries affiliated with the capitalist West.Footnote 14 (While First World leaders insisted on the importance of free markets, they and leading international economists simultaneously supported planning.Footnote 15) This global Third World trend intersected with the early Cold War. After decolonization, many Third World states grew rapidly as they attempted “to maintain security,” “establish control over the whole of the new national territory,” and “use the state to promote large programmes of economic development and social welfare.”Footnote 16 Those programs often involved planning.Footnote 17 Arab states were eager to join this trend, and like many of their Third World counterparts, they often worked with foreign development agencies.
Remarkably, although Beirut and especially Amman maintained strong ties to Washington, their planning agencies did not work with U.S. government development organizations. Jordan hired the U.S. Ford Foundation (FF) and Lebanon the Paris-based Institut de recherche et de formation en vue du développement (IRFED).Footnote 18 This choice was no coincidence. In the Arab Middle East the influence of Britain and France, which from 1918 to 1945 had ruled the entire region except for Saudi Arabia and Yemen, waned slowly; in Lebanon, France's decline from 1943 to 1958 was somewhat reversed in subsequent years. Two other factors, though, were crucial. In the Arab Middle East a situation that Washington believed might benefit Moscow in an unacceptable way only flared up briefly, in the summer of 1958, which is when Washington intervened. By late fall this threat had started to fade, decreasing the need for sustained heavy-handed U.S. action. However, this did not mean a return to business as usual: by this time Washington recognized that it could not maintain the hard line it had steered toward al-Nasir since 1955. Although the regionwide revolution that many foresaw in the summer of 1958 did not materialize, al-Nasir's power had increased enough during 1958 to force the U.S. to “initiat[e] a rapprochement with” him.Footnote 19 In November this U.S. move was enshrined in National Security Council report 5820/1. It included the declaration that:
the prevention of further Soviet penetration of the Near East and progress in solving Near Eastern problems depends on the degree to which the United States is able to work more closely with Arab nationalism and associate itself more closely with such aims and aspirations of the Arab people as are not contrary to the basic interests of the United States.
Consequently, the U.S. inter alia ruled out sustained military operations in the Arab Middle East and advised that economic development should happen through a mix of measures, with U.S. loans and “continue[d] technical assistance” coming fifth and last.Footnote 20 While Washington most certainly did not fold its tents in the Arab Middle East, it tried to lower its public profile following the stormy events of 1958.Footnote 21
A comparison underlines how strongly the Arab Middle East's sociopolitics and geopolitics in 1958–59 influenced U.S. Cold War behavior there: just as Jordan's and Lebanon's planners started employing nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and just as U.S. troops were withdrawing from Beirut (and British troops from Amman), the U.S. slowly, and from 1961 rapidly, expanded government development, counterinsurgency, and military programs in Latin America and southeast Asia, to combat rising communism. The most dramatic illustration of this difference was Washington's increasing presence in Vietnam from the late 1950s, the subsequent war there that became a rallying point for the global counterculture of the 1960s, and the mind-boggling number of at least one million people killed in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.Footnote 22
Did the governments of the UAR–Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon succeed in their goal of stabilizing their societies? Certainly in the short term, the answer is positive. The years following 1958–59 were calmer than those from 1945 to 1958. This was due partly to the abating Egyptian–Iraqi competition, but also to the new development policies, including planning, that addressed socioeconomic ills.Footnote 23 Jordan's short-term destabilization from 1967 to 1970 and Lebanon's long-term destabilization, especially from 1975 to 1991, happened only after and because of a new cataclysmic event: the 1967 Six Day War and its regionwide effects.Footnote 24 This war was an interstate political–military event in which, unlike in 1958–59, domestic socioeconomic problems played no direct role.
Moreover, after 1958–59 the state-formation surge itself proved to be lasting. Syria's exit from the UAR in 1961 did not end planning, which from 1963 was embraced with even greater vigor.Footnote 25 Planning promoted socioeconomic redistribution, central to the post-1963 leftist Baʿthist governments and their policy of sidelining the old elites.Footnote 26 The general expansion of the state apparatus continued, too.Footnote 27 In Jordan, this was similarly the case.Footnote 28 And while the consequences of the Six Day War put the execution of Jordan's plan on hold, a new plan was formulated in 1973, and planning was pursued into the 1980s.Footnote 29 Indeed, different ideologies notwithstanding, the Jordanian and Syrian states’ economic roles were similar.Footnote 30 In Lebanon, the expanded post-1958 state apparatus, and its new socioeconomic institutions and policies, persisted for some time after 1967.Footnote 31 In the civil war, it withered.Footnote 32 But it did not die. In fact, although the post-1991 state apparatus has not revived planning, is less centralist, and pays much less attention to socioeconomic inequality than it did from 1958 to 1975,Footnote 33 it is unquestionably larger than the pre-1958 state and has resumed or continued certain post-1958 socioeconomic policies.Footnote 34
A fuller examination of these questions of success/failure and continuity/change are beyond the scope of this article, the argument of which is centered on 1958–59. The following three sections focus on that origins moment. Each showcases my threefold argument by examining the intersecting domestic–sociopolitical, regional–interstate, and Cold War–Third Worldist aspects of the 1958–59 state-formation surge through the lens of planning, first in UAR–Syria, then in Jordan, and finally in Lebanon.
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Port Said, 23 December 1958. Night is falling as, an hour into UAR President al-Nasir's second Suez War Victory Day speech, his mood darkens. “[W]hen the people of Egypt and the people of Syria united, enemies began to appear before us, enemies who felt that . . . Arab nationalism would destroy their interests. . . . Reaction rose against unity and the Communist Party in Syria rose to work against unity.” Al-Nasir continues in this vein of attacking the communists along with “Zionism” and “imperialism,” before moving on: to confession time. It has not been easy, he announces, “to plan for the Syrian region as we had planned for Egypt in six years. . . . [W]e had no information on anything. Today, brethren, we have laid out the five-year plan for the Syrian region, and other development projects. I feel, brethren, that there is slackness in implementation.” But, he concludes, “there shall be no feudalism or exploitation. . . . For this purpose, a committee of the central government has been formed to double the speed there.”Footnote 35
Al-Nasir's speech crystallized UAR policy toward Syria's socioeconomic problems, which, although partly novel and now politically very explosive, were not new. In the decade before 1958, workers, peasants, and students, some of them members of progressive, antiestablishment parties, demanded land and labor reforms. Of the parties, the strongest were the Syrian–Lebanese Communist Party (SLCP), which following the UAR's establishment split into a Syrian and a Lebanese party, the Arab Baʿth Party, and the Arab Socialist Party (ASP), founded in 1924, 1946, and 1950, respectively. In 1950, the ASP had attracted up to 40,000 people.Footnote 36 In 1953, its leader, Akram Hawrani, merged it with the Baʿth, whose leftist socioeconomic positions suited it well, forming the Arab Socialist Baʿth Party.Footnote 37 Meanwhile, in 1951, the SLCP's leader, Khalid Bikdash, reaffirmed a “resolute turn toward the workers and the peasants,” its “principal allies.”Footnote 38 By mid-1957, the communists had systematically penetrated the Syrian labor movement and become the strongest party in the country, unnerving the Baʿth.Footnote 39
In January 1958, al-Nasir acceded to the Baʿthists’ request for unification.Footnote 40 Al-Nasir became president and Egyptian bureaucrats arrived in Syria to help run the administration. Still, key functions were retained by Syrians; most important was ʿAbd al-Hamid Sarraj, head of security services, who became for all intents and purposes the strongest man in UAR–Syria by late 1958. From the start, al-Nasir was worried about Syria's socioeconomic problems, which were aggravated by Syrians’ great expectations of the union.Footnote 41 These perceptions soon started turning into complaints. Merchants and industrialists fretted about trade restrictions, while lower-class and many middle-class Syrians impatiently awaited land and labor reforms, which were announced by the UAR only in the fall of 1958. Despite the establishment of a Planning Ministry and much talk about social justice, state-led economic plans failed to take off.Footnote 42
Those socioeconomic problems in Syria were the UAR's Achilles’ heel. In a February 1958 referendum almost all Syrian voters had embraced unification; the Syrian Communist Party (SCP), the UAR's main challenger, thus did not explicitly attack unity. Instead, it called for more welfare and other economic reforms. Around two-thirds of the SCP's platform, published in November, dealt with socioeconomic issues, challenging the UAR to, for example, “safeguard the Syrian economy,” “resist penetration of imperialist capital,” “carry through a comprehensive agrarian reform,” and “defend the level of wages and abolish unemployment.”Footnote 43 Similarly, the SCP newspaper al-Nur urged the UAR to improve Syria's economy.Footnote 44
The SCP pushed political buttons, too. It advocated institutional changes that would have undermined the UAR. Al-Nur lionized Iraq as a vanguard of anti-imperialism and warned of imperialist plots in the UAR.Footnote 45 When the pro-UAR Iraqi officer ʿArif was arrested in November, it asserted that “whether conscious or not . . . the behavior of these [pro-ʿArif] groups can only serve imperialism.”Footnote 46 While unmentioned, al-Nasir's name was easily read between the lines. Moreover, SCP cadres spread rumors that dramatized the underlying truth that Egyptians were assuming key administrative positions in Syria. Hence, some Syrians believed that Egypt intended to transfer Egyptian peasants to Syria or that the currency was near collapse.Footnote 47
The SCP's actions were doubly explosive because the party had assistance beyond the UAR's reach, notably from the ICP in Baghdad, Cairo's regional rival. By July 1958, the ICP was Iraq's best-organized party and soon attracted hundreds of thousands of new members; from the fall of 1958 to the summer of 1959 it was the backbone of Qasim's support.Footnote 48 The ICP used its weight to initiate an “impressive [socio-economic] legislative crop” and to urge more reforms, including a plan that would “stress industrialization and raise living standards.”Footnote 49 The ICP lionized these successes and plans in the press and on Baghdad Radio which, broadcasting far beyond Iraq, showed “unmistakable signs of communist influence by September 1958.”Footnote 50 In sum, the UAR was threatened by ICP support for the SCP (and its criticism of the UAR) and by the fact that Iraq seemed primed to overtake it as the leading Arab progressive state. Indeed, the UAR–Iraq confrontation mentioned in this article's introduction initially took “the form of a competition over progressive laws in both Syria and Iraq.” For instance, al-Nasir had been “slow to issue Syria's Land Reform Law,” but then “suddenly had it broadcast by Radio Cairo,” because, in his words, “Qasim was to issue [Iraq's] Land Reform Law and it is inconceivable that he will do so before us.”Footnote 51 As U.S. Assistant Secretary of State William Roundtree concluded after touring the region in December 1958, “for the first time Arab leaders [were] really concerned about communism, particularly in Iraq and Syria, as a threat to Arab nationalism.”Footnote 52
It was for that reason and at that juncture that state expansion in UAR–Syria, especially in the field of economic intervention, started gaining real momentum. Initially, al-Nasir simply began talking with greater force. In a November 1958 address to the UAR's Cooperative Congress, for example, he promised that a “five-year plan for [Syria's] industrialization” would soon be implemented, increasing national income by 12 percent and creating “a prosperous society.”Footnote 53 At the same time, the Syrian Baʿthist newspaper al-Sihafa started to excoriate the communists.Footnote 54 Al-Nasir's 23 December speech upped the ante. He attacked the communists, calling them allies of reaction, Zionism, and imperialism, and announced that he would send a three-man committee to Damascus, to implement far-reaching state-led reforms.Footnote 55
The communists reacted with glee. In their eyes, al-Nasir had admitted that Syria was ailingFootnote 56 and thus that the SCP's advice in February—federation, not union, with Egypt—had been correct. For the next several months, from his pulpit in Baghdad's famous People's Court, Iraqi judge Colonel Fadil al-Mahdawi, a pro-communist cousin of Qasim, deplored Syria's “injustice, economic suffering, social deterioration,” and “famine”; called al-Nasir a “cocain-addicted” “fascist”; and warned Egypt's “monkeys” and their imperialist friends not to plot against Iraq's “lions.”Footnote 57 From communist-bloc exile, Bikdash insisted that the UAR was led by a greedy, bourgeois “monopolistic clique” in cahoots with reactionary Arabs and the United States. Feudalism and capital were still exploiting the masses.Footnote 58 In turn, Sarraj accused the communists of exploiting Syria's economic problems.Footnote 59 And throughout the next several months the UAR insisted that the Arab communists’ attacks proved that they were not any better than capitalist imperialists and their Zionist allies. The communists’ democracy was violence, their ideology alien to Arabs. UAR socialism and cooperativism was closing class divisions and achieving social and democratic justice. Subversion was futile.Footnote 60 Following al-Nasir's 23 December speech, the UAR repressed the SCP so brutally that Syrians started calling ʿAbd al-Hamid Sarraj “Sultan ʿAbd al-Hamid,” after the despotic late Ottoman sultan ʿAbd al-Hamid II.Footnote 61
Simultaneously, the three-man committee al-Nasir had referred to in that speech sprang into action. Led by Vice President and Plan Minister ʿAbd al-Latif al-Baghdadi, and including Akram Hawrani and Zakariya Muhyi al-Din, it arrived in Damascus on 4 January 1959. It apologetically pledged “to speed up reforms . . . promised” since last winter, as the press praised how it labored “day and night.”Footnote 62 Its mission was framed by politics. “Demonstrators were shouting anti-communist slogans outside its headquarters,” as Hawrani told the crowds that “Arab nationalism shall emerge victorious,”Footnote 63 and newspapers urged Syrians to join the committee's “economic battle” against the UAR's “enemies.”Footnote 64
The committee began enacting reforms immediately.Footnote 65 Planning was central. It was only now, as part of the UAR–Iraq showdown, that talk gave way to action. On 11 January, the committee started to restructure economic affairs and planning administrations. It abolished the Organization for Economic Development and the Economic Council, both founded in 1955, replacing them with an interministerial economic development committee under the Planning Ministry.Footnote 66 The need to show decisive change was patent in the speed of these reforms. Now, planning quickly took shape. In February, the final draft of a five-year industrial plan was ready; in May, the Planning Ministry was revamped; by summer, it had devised a general Syrian five-year plan that went into effect at the start of the following year.Footnote 67 Reflecting the UAR's message that development serves social justice, the purpose of the plan was “economic and social development.” Its introduction stated that “the main aim of the development plan in the Syrian Arab Republic is to start with the development process, which aims at raising the standard of living and widening the horizons for greater opportunities and a better life.”Footnote 68 Subsequent texts, too, emphasized the plan's social rationale.Footnote 69
Syrian planning was in no shape or form simply an extension of Egyptian planning.Footnote 70 The latter had had a rocky start in 1957 and was completely revised in 1960. Too, there was not a single UAR-wide plan but rather one for Syria and another for Egypt; Syria's plan was drawn up by Syrians, and while it certainly had similarities to Egypt's plan, it gave the private sector a greater role.Footnote 71 Similarly, Syria's overall state expansion was not simply “the export of the Egyptian system of economic and political management.”Footnote 72 More precisely, it was a response to the combined domestic and interstate pressures of 1958–59.Footnote 73 As for the 1960–65 plan, it called for investments of 2,720 million Syrian pounds (U.S. $712 million), and would become the first plan in Syria's history to be implemented, with qualified success.Footnote 74 It was not the only factor behind economic growth and income redistribution during these years, but it was an important one. It “became the official document in which the government stated the methods for achieving the ultimate objective, a ‘socialist society,’” including under the Baʿth from 1963.Footnote 75 Once planning was put in place it persisted, like the general expansion of the state apparatus.Footnote 76 As we will see in the next section, this departure from the pre-1958 state apparatus happened in Jordan and Lebanon, too.
* * *
Amman, late May 1959. “Everyone [is] anticipating . . . the arrival” of Benjamin Lewis, a U.S. planning specialist hired by the Ford Foundation (FF) to help the Jordan Development Board (JDB) draft an economic plan.Footnote 77 King Husayn, Prime Minister Hazzaʿ al-Majali, Minister of National Economy Khulusi Khairi, JDB Director Hazim Nuseibeh, JDB Deputy Director Anastas Hanania, and JDB planning head Najm al-Din Dajari, who all meet Lewis, are “enthused” and “prepared to make economic planning a reality.”Footnote 78
Since its foundation in 1952 the JDB's mission was to tackle Jordan's deep-rooted socioeconomic problems. Since Jordan's creation in 1922, the resource-poor country had depended substantially on outside financial support, until 1957 from London, thereafter mainly from Washington. The situation took a sharp turn for the worse when several hundred thousand Palestinian refugees arrived in the late 1940s. Moreover, in the 1950s farmed land grew only 30 percent and capital and jobs remained scarce.Footnote 79 Both Palestinians and East Bankers suffered, leading to economic protests in 1955.Footnote 80
Many outside observers predicted that Jordan's monarchy would not survive,Footnote 81 pointing also to al-Nasir's popularity, especially in Jordan's Palestinian West Bank, and to a small but energetic group of communists. The communists since 1956 and Egypt, consistently since mid-1957 through the Sawt al-ʿArab radio station, accused Jordan's government of failing to develop the country and criticized its dependence on the West.Footnote 82 Al-Nasir drew on Jordan's shaky legitimacy among Palestinians, many of whom were attracted to him and the idea of a Pan-Arab state as a condition for reconquering Palestine.Footnote 83 King Husayn certainly had pluck and was supported by many Jordanians, especially in the East Bank. But even there support had its limits: when the king flirted with the idea of joining the Baghdad Pact in December 1955, severe unrest erupted on both sides of the river.
In 1957, the JDB was charged with establishing Jordan's overall development policy.Footnote 84 As in earlier years, it barely functioned. That was partly due to the rivalry between the U.S. International Cooperation Administration (ICA, popularly known as Point Four) and the British Middle East Office, both close to the JDB. But the main reason was Jordan's meager resources. While Husayn, London, and Washington were all concerned with Jordan's instability and the influence of al-Nasir (and, among some Jordanians, communism), the challenges were not yet serious enough to necessitate a real reform of the civilian state apparatus.Footnote 85
That changed following the summer of 1958, as Jordan's domestic problems reached a boiling point, UAR media and sabotage attacks peaked,Footnote 86 and the overthrow of the Hashimite monarchy in Iraq left Jordan “totally vulnerable.”Footnote 87 Having lost its Iraqi protector to the east, it was pressured by an inimical UAR in the north, faced a ready-to-pounce Israel in the west, and found no help from Saudi Arabia in the south. Husayn survived due to sheer luck, his “mood of dour resolution,” and the security and moral support provided by British paratroopers.Footnote 88
By fall, crisis management gave way to state (re-)formation. In October 1958, before the last British soldiers had departed, Hanania met with the FF to talk about planning. Soon thereafter, the government started restructuring the JDB. In December, Jordanian prime minister and JDB president Samir al-Rifaʿi “assumed a major role” in the JDB. Other socioeconomic ministries followed his lead. The JDB was “greatly strengthened” and policy matters were “cleared up.”Footnote 89 Finally, in May, al-Majali appointed thirty-seven-year-old Nuseibeh, an energetic recent graduate of Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School, as JDB secretary general with unprecedented powers.Footnote 90 The JDB's deepening relations with the FF followed on the heels of these reforms. The ICA had asked the FF to assist the JDB several times since 1957.Footnote 91 The FF had always declined, citing the JDB's weak staff. But when the ICA contacted the FF again on 15 October 1958, on Jordan's behalf, it took less than a week for a FF officer to meet with Hanania. The FF understood very well the crisis-driven rationale and “political overtones” of Jordan's new planning interests.Footnote 92 In April 1959, following the JDB's restructuring, the FF hired Benjamin Lewis, and in October it awarded the JDB a U.S. $480,000, three-year consultancy grant that included five consultants.Footnote 93
The JDB planners and their FF advisors immediately started devising a five-year plan. It was concluded in 1961, foreseeing 1962–67 expenditures of 127.32 million Jordanian dinars (U.S. $357.54 million); implementation began in early 1962.Footnote 94 Thus, while it was Jordan's first technocratic government under Wasfi al-Tall that got to implement the plan, Jordan's state apparatus started changing earlier; indeed, by 1959–60 the JDB had already become a hub for Jordan's rising technocrats.Footnote 95
Husayn too took an interest in planning, which he hoped would improve “social welfare.”Footnote 96 No doubt the army remained the backbone of his support and, along with foreign policy, his passion. But his June 1959 audience with Lewis demonstrated that he considered planning “one of [Jordan's] most important problems” and grasped its sociopolitical implications.Footnote 97 These themes also were at the heart of a radio-broadcasted speech he gave to parliament in October 1959.Footnote 98 In 1960, he fleshed them out in broadcasts that he likened to Franklin Roosevelt's Depression-era fireside chats. Understanding the “human race's . . . insatiable aspiration for a better life,” he promised that planning would develop Jordan and create jobs aplenty.Footnote 99 But he also insisted that the state was not omnipotent and exhorted Jordanians to “cooperate.”Footnote 100
For their part, the JDB technocrats saw the plan through a macroeconomic lens but also stressed that it would raise living standards and “attain important economic and social benefits.” Alleviating unemployment was an important “goal,” and the plan would address “inadequate living conditions.” While these issues were subsumed under the aim of “expanding gross domestic output,” that goal in turn was framed as serving society.Footnote 101 On the technical level, Jordan's plan was less a fixed program than a catalyzing framework for new projects. Already before 1962, the JDB boosted the tourism sector and expedited existing economic projects. For example, construction of the East Ghor Canal commenced in August 1958 (and was concluded in 1963, with the first section opened in 1961).Footnote 102 Planning was not the most important factor behind Jordan's sustained economic growth rate of around 7 percent. But planning did “result in better living standard[s]” and contributed to the growth of the tourism, industrial, and agricultural sectors (the last of these not least through the East Ghor Canal).Footnote 103 Just as important as planning, the enlarged state apparatus launched numerous other economic policies and institutions. These included tariff protection, shares in industrial and tourism companies, and the establishment of a Central Cooperative Union in 1959, an Agricultural Credit Corporation (ACC) in 1960, and an Industrial Development Bank in 1965, the last two granting below-market loan rates.Footnote 104 In sum, a “fundamentally free-enterprise philosophy” was fused with a “benevolent paternalism” that involved “a high degree of administrative discretion.”Footnote 105 Planning continued into the 1980s, and the expanded post-1958 state structures persisted.
Jordanian planning had a foreign policy dimension as well. By strengthening the economy, planning, it was hoped, would eventually “decrease outside financial assistance,” especially from Washington.Footnote 106 It was also related more directly to U.S. Cold War Middle East policy. By late 1958 Washington grudgingly recognized that it had to seek some rapprochement with al-Nasir, with whom it had often clashed since 1955. NSC report 5820/1, the new Middle East policy guideline formulated in November 1958, stated that
the virtual collapse during 1958 of conservative resistance, leaving the radical nationalist regimes almost without opposition in the area, has brought a grave challenge to Western interests in the Near East. Faced with this challenge, we must determine which of our interests may be reconcilable with the dominant forces in the area. . . . [and] endeavor to establish an effective working relationship with Arab nationalism.
Even more than in previous years, Washington focused on its two primary, related objectives in the postwar Middle East: Soviet containment and oil supply. Any other objective that might seriously harm a measured improvement of relations with al-Nasir was more clearly secondary than before.Footnote 107 “Political evolution and economic and social development in the area to promote stable governments” was one of five “secondary objectives” to be achieved “to the extent compatible with the two primary objectives.”Footnote 108
While the compatibility between the primary and secondary objectives was accepted in relation to Jordan, Washington acted neither independently nor directly. Rather, as mentioned previously, the ICA asked the FF for assistance, explicitly telling the latter that Washington was afraid it would hurt Jordan's government politically by directly advising the JDB.Footnote 109 This pattern, too, was reflected in NSC report 5820/1. It called for the U.S. government to “promote both national and regional economic development” as far as possible by encouraging actors other than the U.S. government itself.Footnote 110 In sum, the Cold War interests of Washington played a role in Jordanian planning, but an auxiliary one. While Washington continued supporting Jordan financially and politically, it tried to lower its public profile in Jordan because it was constrained by regional geopolitics, especially by the political and ideological prestige and power that the UAR had accumulated in the Arab state system.
Finally, the JDB's initiative was itself framed by a global trend, decolonization, and more specifically the expansion of early postcolonial states, including in the realm of planning. This was illustrated by an exclamation of Jordanian planners: “India has a plan, Pakistan has a plan; Iran has a plan—if we only had a plan!”Footnote 111 Lewis saw much sense in this wish, and suggested a trip with Dajani to Iran. Iran's Plan Organization (PO) and a recent FF mission that had advised it might provide useful lessons, he hoped.Footnote 112 He likely thought of Iran because the PO had made great strides, and because Tehran was a U.S. client like Amman, and a friend of Jordan. Iraq's antimonarchic revolution had rattled King Husayn as well as Iran's Muhammad Riza Shah, and the two shared enough concerns—both of their countries bordered Iraq, and both feared communism—to meet twice in 1959, in April in Tehran and in November in Amman.Footnote 113 Moreover, Lewis was in contact with economists working in Libya, and emphasized that examples such as India showed that planning and a free market economy could go hand in hand. And in yet another example of global networks of planning, in the 1960s Jordan became a model for Sudan's planners.Footnote 114
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Beirut, 7 March 1959. It is morning as the French Dominican Father Louis-Joseph Lebret, head of the Institut de recherche et de formation en vue du développement (IRFED), lands at the airport. He has come on the invitation of an acquaintance, Maronite Church official Monseigneur Jean Maroun, who asked him to talk with Lebanon's new president, Fouad Chéhab (1958–64). After that high-level meeting, Lebret meets with the Lebanese cabinet and the Planning Council, where he outlines his concept of putting the economy back in “the service of man.”Footnote 115 Lebret leaves the next day, but contacts between the IRFED and Lebanon continue, and in late 1959 the IRFED initiates a countrywide development study.Footnote 116
Such a program would have been unimaginable merely a year earlier. For Beirut, the years following independence in 1943 were golden. Haifa's disappearance as a rival port in 1948, with the establishment of Israel, strengthened Beirut's transit trade; several Western oil corporations and multinational companies opened regional headquarters; and Arabs from near and far filled Beirut's bank vaults with deposits and its newspaper stands and cafés with debates. The sights and sounds of high-rise construction sites and of planes flying low over Beirut to land at its airport left no room for doubt: Lebanon's capital was a regional center, intellectually and economically.
While this situation was rooted in the 19th century, it was cemented when, after independence, a supremely laissez-faire state was established by about thirty oligarchic families at the helm of Lebanon's political–economic elite, twenty-four of which were Christian (including nine Maronite and seven Greek Catholic) and six Muslim (four Sunni and two Shiʿa). Flimsy business regulations and rock-bottom taxes worked well for an elite that “held a monopolistic control over the main [economic] axes.”Footnote 117
But if the 1950s were golden for the elites and middle classes of central Beirut and Christian Mt. Lebanon, they were leaden for the rest of the country. Lebanon's rural and predominantly Muslim peripheries were poor, “in crisis,”Footnote 118 and neglected by the state. Popular urban neighborhoods, including the bulging misery belt around Beirut, fared slightly better but far from well.Footnote 119 Worst off were more than 100,000 Palestinian refugees. Insistent trade union demands for improved labor legislation, for example, in 1945, and waves of strikes, for example, in 1946 and 1952, underscored high living costs and unemploymentFootnote 120; disasters such as the 16 March 1956 earthquake revealed narrow state capacities.Footnote 121
This situation had been deplored for years. Bikdash's SLCP, which was not strong in Lebanon, praised the USSR as a beacon of “social progress.”Footnote 122 Following the 1956 earthquake, the Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) under the Druze leader Kamal Junblat intensified calls for state-led development.Footnote 123 Centrists too demanded more social justice and state economic intervention. In 1948, Gabriel Menassa, head of the Société libanaise d’économie politique, published a Plan de reconstruction de l’économie libanaise et de réforme d’État.Footnote 124 And in 1955, Pierre Gemayel's Kataʾib Party—mainly Maronite and lower-middle class, and politically right-wing but socially reformist—agreed with the PSP to “fight reaction and feudalism and try to end standard-of-living discrepancies.”Footnote 125 Muslims and leftists also fervently demanded anticorruption, political, and administrative reforms. The former wanted administrative representation equal to Christians; most of the latter, Muslim or Christian, wanted to do away with sectarian politics.Footnote 126
Lebanon's political and socioeconomic inequalities were thrown into relief by the minor civil war of spring 1958; the fact that the fighting prominently involved Sunni central Beirut and that rebels seized the mainly Shiʿi North Bekaa and Druze Shuf dramatized the sectarian color of these inequalities. Most poor Lebanese were Muslim, and many Muslims poor; the (mostly Sunni) Muslim petty bourgeoisie felt marginalizedFootnote 127; Christians were overrepresented in the middle classes and dominated the elite.
This—along with al-Nasir's charisma and the appeal of a Pan-Arabism that might transcend a Christian-dominated Lebanon—explained why many Muslim Lebanese welcomed the birth of the UAR.Footnote 128 (However, Lebanon was not absolutely divided religiously. For example, Maronite Patriarch Butrus Meouchy opposed Chamoun's presidential aspirations.) Jubilation about the UAR was all the stronger because Lebanon bordered the UAR–Syria, itself a historic focus of Lebanese Muslim affinities that had not been fully neutralized, especially given Lebanon's enduring inequalities. In turn, the shared border facilitated Syrian support of Lebanese rebels during the 1958 minor civil war.Footnote 129 The fusion of deep-rooted discontent at home and an attractive polity with a charismatic leader across the border was a recipe for continued instability in Lebanon. Indeed, the civil war's end, in July, solved little. Al-Nasir's picture continued to adorn walls across Lebanon, his visits to Syria still attracted Lebanese delegations, and labor strikes and protests persisted.Footnote 130
It was this double—domestic and regional—shock of 1958 that triggered a “turn in . . . Lebanon's political economy,” becoming a milestone for the expansion of its state apparatus.Footnote 131 The new prime minister and minister of economy, Rashid Karami, announced that the economy would remain free but “subjected to such restrictions as required by public interests.”Footnote 132 The strongest force for change, however, was the new president Chéhab. He demanded a “social renaissance,”Footnote 133 an “economic and social response to Lebanon's first civil war and to the question of the badly integrated peripheries. . . . He [thought] first—without naming them—of [Lebanon's] Muslim inhabitants attracted in 1958 by Nasserism.”Footnote 134 In his eyes, stabilization now and national unity in a hopefully near future depended on country-wide socioeconomic equality.Footnote 135
While planning was only one demand made by Chéhab and by the centrists and leftists now in government, it was crucial because its core—infrastructure improvements in the predominantly Muslim peripheries—truly encapsulated Chéhab's goals. The president wanted to go far beyond the “powerless” Development Board (established in 1953) and Planning Ministry (1955) and the toothless February 1958 plan.Footnote 136 Hence, he met with Lebret, integrated him into the highest circles of power, and hired the IRFED.Footnote 137 And the IRFED did not disappoint. Its September 1960 report asserted that Beirut's “fortune” hides the fact that “an important part of the population lives in the countryside, in conditions of insecurity and destitution that require planning. . . . if this [gap] is not reduced, social problems will not fail to appear in the near future.”Footnote 138 This made sense to many LebaneseFootnote 139; in government, Chéhab was backed by Karami, leftist, and centrist cabinet members like Junblat and Gemayel and by reformist technocrats in new state bureaucracies. The shock of 1958 was so deep that until 1960, Beirut's political-economic elite barely even tried to undermine Chéhab and the IRFED enjoyed an “état de grace.”Footnote 140 As many as 1,500 people attended a presentation of its first final report, praised almost universally.Footnote 141
The IRFED's report formed the base of the LE450 million (U.S. $145 million) 1962–67 Five-Year Plan. Not by chance, three-quarters of the funds were earmarked for irrigation, drinking water, electricity, and road projects, especially in the peripheries. When the Beirut-based Planning Ministry was expanded in 1962, the “IRFED's mission was best felt” in the establishment of a Regional Development Organization.Footnote 142 Projects realized by 1965 included highway construction, improvements to Beirut's port, and electricity and water for “many villages.”Footnote 143 Still, the task was difficult. There was considerable corruption, and from 1961 liberal and conservative hostility toward what was seen as undue state interventionism resurfaced. Several times the IRFED had to overcome political obstacles,Footnote 144 and some projects remained incomplete. In sum, the socioeconomic situation after 1958 was more regionally balanced than before, but not as good as had been hoped.
Indeed, Lebanon's state expansion did not quite create the rational body that some had envisioned,Footnote 145 and under the shadow of the 1975–91 civil war some observers even read state collapse back in time.Footnote 146 Still, 1958 was a turning point for Lebanese state formation.Footnote 147 Planning was only one example. New institutions such as the Social Development Office, another “central [executive] structure of Chéhab's socioeconomic development policy,” were created.Footnote 148 New policies like social insurance (1963) were initiated. And more and more middle-class Muslims were integrated into the administration, including at the highest level.Footnote 149
Like in Jordan, Lebanon's planning had foreign policy and global dimensions. A precondition for Chéhab's planning was the U.S. armed intervention of July 1958 that, together with U.S.-allied President Chamoun's relinquishment of power, helped Chéhab to balance Lebanon. Thereafter, Washington watched Lebanese planning and its state-formation surge as a whole with interest.Footnote 150 However, from late 1958 in Lebanon, as in Jordan, a direct communist or even Soviet challenge was not imminent and hence did not demand sustained U.S. government presence. As important, regional geopolitical realities, especially the UAR's peaking power, imposed clear limits on such a presence. Indeed, while Jordan's planners worked with the FF, their Lebanese counterparts did not even meet with a U.S. NGO.
The vacuum was filled by France and the IRFED. From 1958 to 1969 French President Charles de Gaulle strove to make France more independent of Washington by transforming it into the center of a “European Europe” and returning as a global player of import.Footnote 151 Part of this aspiration was to recoup a measure of the power France had enjoyed in Lebanon during the Mandate (and financially during Bechara al-Khoury's presidency from 1943 to 1952) but lost politically in the mid-1940s and economically in the 1950s to Washington and London. Although Lebanon was a small dot on France's radar, it was there, because of its economic role in the Middle East and its position on the Mediterranean, prominent in Gaullist visions of France's role in Europe and Africa.Footnote 152 French aspirations fit Lebanese needs: Paris had remained impartial in the 1958 civil war, and before the watchful eyes of Lebanese supporters of the U.S. and the UAR Chéhab had to cautiously balance foreign policy.Footnote 153 Hence, he strengthened Lebanon's ties to France, including through the hiring of numerous technical advisers.Footnote 154 Besides, two of his oldest and most trusted personal advisers, as well as his wife, were French. So was Lebret, whose IRFED was headquartered in Paris. Unsurprisingly, the Quai d'Orsay welcomed the IRFED's hire by the government of Lebanon.Footnote 155 Indeed, Lebret maintained good relations with the French ambassador in Beirut.Footnote 156 He was not Paris's minion, though, and the IRFED was not pushed by France onto Lebanon. Neither did the IRFED initiate Lebanese planning but, like the FF in Amman, was brought in after Beirut had made a basic policy decision.
Nonetheless, Lebret's social reformist Catholic approach to development, which he called devéloppement harmonisé and économie humaine Footnote 157 and which included attention to regionally equitable development, did help frame Lebanon's plan. This was true particularly in terms of its focus on neglected peripheries. Lebret drew on his previous experiences working on development, in the 1930s and 1940s in France and especially from the late 1940s in the Third World, first across Latin America and then in Asia and Africa (since 1957 through the newly established IRFED).Footnote 158 Moreover, he was a prominent participant in the reformist Pope Paul VI's Second Vatican Council (1963–65) and had coauthored the 1967 encyclical Populorum Progressio and worked for ecumenism, including Christian-Muslim dialogue. That made him doubly attractive for Chéhab, president of a religiously mixed country. It made “selling” Lebret to Lebanese Christians easier and was another reason, in addition to Lebret's socioeconomic vision, why Muslims as much as Christians affectionately called him abūnā, our father.Footnote 159
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Using as its case study the question of why Lebanon, Jordan, and UAR–Syria kickstarted serious state-led planning in 1958–59, this article has made a threefold argument. In these countries, the 1958–59 explosive fusion of longstanding domestic and interstate tensions triggered state-formation surges that were meant to stabilize these societies and minimize the effects of outside meddling. Hence, although the dominant traditional reading of 1958–59 as a series of events that did not deeply change the ideological or political power balance of the Arab Middle East is correct, 1958–59 was a milestone from the viewpoint of state formation. Second, because of the persisting ties among the neighboring states of UAR–Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon and because of their shared position within the unstable Arab state system, they did not simply develop distinctly. Even after independence, they sometimes were in sync. In 1958–59 their state-formation surges together formed one regionwide process, which made those state apparatuses (though not their political systems) more alike. Reformulated analytically, this shows how regional interstate systems can shape presumably country-specific state formation. Third and lastly, the fact that Amman's and Beirut's planners worked with non-governmental organizations illustrates that while both, and especially Amman, maintained close relations with Washington, the United States tried to keep a low profile in their state-formation surges. Washington had neither a real incentive nor enough maneuvering room to do otherwise: there was no sustained direct communist threat and the UAR's geopolitical regional influence and prestige was peaking. This observation contributes to ongoing scholarly debates over how local, regional, and global actors located in the First, Second, and Third worlds interacted in the Third World as processes of global decolonization met the early Cold War.
