The Road to the Suez Crisis, part three
How the Rulers of the World Operate When They Think We Aren't Watching
This is the third part of my analysis of the Suez Crisis of 1956. What I’m trying to show, fundamentally, is how the expansion of global capitalism worked to make all populations dependent on what Jean Ziegler called “the new masters of the world.” This is just the extension of capitalism into the twentieth century under American hegemony. The American leadership is quickly losing credibility and control. But we still don’t know what is taking its place. (At least, I don’t. And I don’t think anyone does.) My immediate concern is for Palestinians. I lend them, and all who fight for them, my support.
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This document was written by the conspirators behind the invasion of Egypt and clearly explains the plot that they had concocted over the three preceding days. We can read the conspiracy in their own words:
PROTOCOL
The results of the conversations which took place at Sèvres from 22 to 24 October 1956 between the representatives of the Governments of the United Kingdom, the State of Israel and of France are the following:
1. The Israeli forces launch in the evening of 29 October 1956 a large scale attack on the Egyptian forces with the aim of reaching the Canal Zone the following day.
2. On being apprised of these events, the British and French Governments during the day of 30 October 1956 respectively and simultaneously make two appeals to the Egyptian Government and the Israeli Government on the following lines:
A. To the Egyptian government
a) halt all acts of war.
b) withdraw all its troops ten miles from the Canal.
c) accept temporary occupation of key positions on the Canal by the Anglo-French forces to guarantee freedom of passage through the Canal by vessels of all nations until a final settlement.
B. To the Israeli government
a) halt all acts of war.
b) withdraw all its troops ten miles to the east of the Canal. In addition, the Israeli Government will be notified that the French and British Governments have demanded of the Egyptian Government to accept temporary occupation of key positions along the Canal by Anglo-French forces.
It is agreed that if one of the Governments refused, or did not give its consent, within twelve hours the Anglo-French forces would intervene with the means necessary to ensure that their demands are accepted.
C. The representatives of the three Governments agree that the Israeli Government will not be required to meet the conditions in the appeal addressed to it, in the event that the Egyptian Government does not accept those in the appeal addressed to it for their part.
3. In the event that the Egyptian Government should fail to agree within the stipulated time to the conditions of the appeal addressed to it, the Anglo-French forces will launch military operations against the Egyptian forces in the early hours of the morning of 31 October.
4. The Israeli Government will send forces to occupy the western shore of the Gulf of Aqaba and the group of islands Tiran and Sanafir to ensure freedom of navigation in the Gulf of Aqaba.
5. Israel undertakes not to attack Jordan during the period of operations against Egypt. But in the event that during the same period Jordan should attack Israel, the British Government undertakes not to come to the aid of Jordan.
6. The arrangements of the present protocol must remain strictly secret.
7. They will enter into force after the agreement of the three Governments.
(signed)
DAVID BEN-GURION PATRICK DEAN CHRISTIAN PINEAU
The three conspirators met from October 22 to 24 at Sèvres, outside of Paris, to negotiate their respective roles in the plot against Egypt. As we have seen, for different but related reasons, the leaders of France, Israel, and Britain all wanted President Nasser removed from power. At Sèvres, they went to great lengths to conceal their machinations from public scrutiny and from posterity. They failed spectacularly. By carefully reconstructing the meeting, historian Avi Shlaim has also shed light on the worldviews of the conspirators. How did the leaders of France, England, and Israel understand their place in the world order?
The English and French had been making plans to attack Egypt since Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, but lacked a reason to declare war. On 14 October 1956, the deputy chief of staff of the French armed forces, General Maurice Challe, visited British Prime Minister Anthony Eden to propose a scenario in which the Israelis would be asked to attack the Egyptians in the Sinai Desert and appear to threaten the security of the Suez Canal. Apparently acting to protect the canal, the British and French would issue ultimatums to the warring parties to disengage. The ultimatum to Nasser would be framed in such a way that he would be forced to reject it. The British and French would then activate their plan to retake control of the canal.
The French were the lynchpins of the conspiracy. They had taken the lead in arming Israel in the expectation of securing an ally in the region that would help to weaken Arab countries. This tells us something about the nature of colonialism. France wanted to maintain its colonial possessions in North Africa and to continue to exercise its mandatory authority over Syria and Lebanon. Far from nurturing its colonies, France wanted them to be weak. The Algerians had begun to revolt and the French, who had just lost control of Indochina, were determined to quash resistance to colonial rule. The colonial relationship requires a colonizer and a colonized. The Algerians were refusing their role as colonized, which in turn challenged the French national identity as the purveyors of civilization. The French were insulted and determined to strike hard against Arab pretensions to self-rule. The ruling French socialists were especially offended by Nasser who was proving that Arabs in Egypt were not inferior to Europeans. His unforgiveable crime was taking over the Suez Canal and proving that Egyptians could operate it independently of Europeans. Moreover, Nasser was arming his fellow Arabs in Algeria. The French, who believed that Algeria belonged to them, saw Nasser as their mortal enemy. Algerians saw Nasser as a friend.
The British were motivated by the same sense of superiority and privilege as the French. They too were trying to maintain their colonial influence over Arab nations. Like the French, they were watching their empire disintegrate. Also like the French, their goal was not to empower or help their colonies, but to keep them dependent. England and France, once rivals for empire, were now united in the goal of maintaining the structures of dependency. Prime Minister Eden, under pressure from the Suez Group inside the Conservative Party to eliminate Nasser, was elated by the proposition. However, he did not want Britain to appear to be associating with Israel against the Arab world. This would have undermined British foreign policy that was trying to promote the notion that Britain was the friend of oil-rich Arab countries. As with the French, it was a friendship based on the subservience of the Arab partners to British managers. The minister of state for foreign affairs, Anthony Nutting, opposed the French plan. However, Prime Minister Anthony Eden was able to convince a reluctant foreign secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, to support it. Thereafter, Eden not only shut Anthony Nutting out of the loop, but attempted to discredit him publicly.
Eden and Lloyd went to Paris to meet with French Prime Minister Guy Mollet and Foreign Secretary Christian Pineau. Both France and Britain were obliged under the Tripartite Agreement to intervene in the case of aggression in the Middle East. Eden explained that Britain would not intervene on Egypt's behalf, since Egypt had renounced the British alliance, but would be forced to come to the aid of Jordan should Israel attack that country. Prime Minister Mollet then conveyed the news to the Israelis, encouraging them to attack Egypt in the vicinity of the canal as the Challe scenario had envisaged.
David Ben-Gurion was delighted at the prospect of entering into an alliance with two of the world's colonial powers. For the Israeli prime minister, this was a great development. Israel was being recognized as a member of the club of colonizing powers. But while relationships would remain close with the French, Ben-Gurion distrusted and resented the British. According to the terms of the Anglo-Jordanian treaty of 1946, England was required to come to the aid of Jordan in the case of Israeli aggression. The fact that the state of Israel was involved in a continuous border war with Jordan increased Israeli tensions with the British. Only a week earlier, the IDF had attacked Kalkilya in Jordan and been reprimanded by Britain. Moreover, Ben-Gurion had been warned that Britain was preparing military action against Israel. If not for the fact that the Suez plot had originated with a French general and was being directed by Mollet and Pineau, it is unlikely that Ben-Gurion and Eden could ever have coordinated the ruse.
In Paris, the French and Israeli conspirators met first on 22 October 1956. Israel was represented by David Ben-Gurion, who was both prime minister and defence minister, IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan, and Shimon Peres, the director-general of the ministry of defence. They met with French Prime Minister Guy Mollet, Foreign Minister Christian Pineau, and Minister of Defence Maurice Bourgès-Manoury, all three of whom had been active in the Resistance during the war. In fact, the villa at Sèvres had been used by Bourgès-Manoury as a base for Resistance operations against the Germans. The main priority for these French leaders in 1956 was the uprising in Algeria. They did not identify with the Algerians who were opposing the French occupation. Instead, they saw Egyptian President Nasser as a dictator who was fuelling the insurgents and they believed that if he were to fall, Algerian resistance to France would dissolve.
Ben-Gurion presented the French with his plan. He wanted Jordan to be divided into two. The East Bank would go to Iraq and would be used to settle the Palestinian refugees. The West Bank would be attached to Israel. Israel would expand in Lebanon to the Litani River. Lebanon would then become essentially a Christian country, which would strengthen its ties to France. The Suez Canal area would become an international zone and the Straits of Tiran would come under Israeli control. To achieve these goals, Nasser would have to be eliminated and a pro-Western government put in his place. Ben-Gurion's plan was premised on the notion that both the West and Israel benefited from the weakness of the Arab countries. The founding of Israel as a Jewish settler state depended on the displacement of indigenous Arabs that had resulted in crises in all surrounding countries. London and Paris wanted to maintain their colonial relationships with the Arab countries, which required that Arab nationalism be suppressed. Ben-Gurion identified with the imperialist West. As negotiations led to a concrete agreement with France and Britain, Ben-Gurion was ecstatic. Israel had joined the big leagues of the world order. Israel's contempt for the Bedouin nomads and Arab peasants that were being displaced was the other side of the coin of his identification with the European imperialists. While the French were sympathetic to Ben-Gurion's arguments, they cautioned him against too grand a vision. The moment was ripe to strike at Nasser. But the British prime minister faced opposition both in Cabinet and in the country. It would be necessary to present him with a realizable plan.
British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd arrived quietly with his private secretary to represent Eden, who did not want to leave any traces of his collaboration with the conspirators. Lloyd had been a reluctant convert to the plan and continued to hope for a diplomatic settlement to the Suez Crisis. His relations with Dayan and Ben-Gurion were strained. He affirmed Prime Minister Eden's position that, to assure Britain's cooperation in the plot, Israel would have to definitively attack Egypt and remain in the field for seventy-two hours before Britain would intervene. This would place Israel clearly as the aggressor, a role that Ben-Gurion wanted to avoid.
In response to British intransigence, Ben-Gurion made a counter-offer based on Moshe Dayan's existing plans for a preventive war against Egypt. This plan can be understood as the culmination of Israel's intensifying reprisal raids and fear of Egyptian power in light of Nasser's 1955 Czech arms deal. Israel would execute another retaliatory raid towards the canal. Britain and France would demand that Egypt evacuate its military forces from the canal and insist that the Israelis halt their progression. Then Britain and France would bomb Egypt's airfields. It was understood that Nasser would not be able to accept the demand of the Europeans to evacuate the canal zone, and thus they would be “forced” to occupy the area. Lloyd compromised by reducing the time that the British and French ultimatum would allow Egypt and Israel before they intervened to “protect” the canal. He refused to allow the British base in Cyprus to station aircraft for the bombardment of Egyptian airfields, because he wanted there to be no evidence of prior collusion. Lloyd returned to London to discuss the changes with Prime Minister Eden. However, fearing Lloyd's lack of resolve, French Foreign Minister Pineau crossed the Channel beforehand in order to meet with Eden himself and convince him of the value of the French-Israeli plot. Pineau took with him the bottom-line Israeli goal: the permanent annexation of the area east of the El Arish-Abu Ageila, Nakhl-Sharm el-Sheikh, which would ensure Israeli access to navigation in the Straits of Eilat. That was Israel's price for the collusion. Eden liked the direction the plot was taking.
Eden sent Patrick Dean to represent his interests in the final meeting at Sèvres the following day. He was told that British participation was dependent on the existence of a clear threat to the canal. Israel would have to advance far enough towards the canal to make British intervention credible. He was also impressed with the need for strict secrecy. Ben-Gurion had already decided to commit Israel to the plot. In his diary, he wrote, “This is a unique opportunity that two not so small powers will try to topple Nasser, and we shall not stand alone against him while he becomes stronger and conquers all the Arab countries.... and maybe the whole situation in the Middle East will change according to my plan.” The French, the lynchpins of the plot, had succeeded in bringing together the British and Israelis, all three unified in their hatred of Nasser and committed to his downfall.
As the talks concluded, Ben-Gurion asked that a protocol be drawn up to document the agreement. Ben-Gurion signed it for Israel, Pineau for France, and Patrick Dean for Britain, noting that its acceptance was conditional on the approval of his government. Eden was horrified to find that a document had been drawn up. He wanted there to be no trace of his part in the collusion, which he would deny until his death. He sent Patrick Dean back to Paris to convince the Israelis and French to destroy their copies. Dean, of course, failed.
With the document in his pocket, Ben-Gurion spoke to the French prime minister: “I told him about the discovery of oil in southern and western Sinai, and that it would be good to tear this peninsula from Egypt because it did not belong to her; rather it was the English who stole it from the Turks when they believed that Egypt was in their pocket. I suggested laying down a pipeline from Sinai to Haifa to refine the oil and Mollet showed interest in this suggestion.” Another conversation took place between Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Mollet shortly before. In his memoirs, Peres writes, “Before the final signing, I asked Ben-Gurion for a brief adjournment, during which I met Mollet and Bourges-Maunoury alone. It was here that I finalized with these two leaders an agreement for the building of a nuclear reactor at Dimona, in southern Israel... and the supply of natural uranium to fuel it. I put forward a series of detailed proposals and, after discussion, they accepted them.” Ben-Gurion's aim was to develop nuclear weapons. Moreover, a nuclear plant would put Israel squarely in the camp of the advanced, modern states and further distinguish it from the colonized world. A year later, under Prime Minister Bourgès-Manoury, the French delivered a reactor to Israel with twice the capacity promised at Sèvres. Historian Avi Shlaim argues that the side agreements with the French “drive a coach and horses through the official version which claims that Israel went to war only because it feared an imminent danger of attack from Egypt.” To bring down Nasser, France offered Israel all the support it needed in becoming a regional power.
Throughout the summer of 1956, the Canadian secretary of external affairs, Lester Pearson, feared that Britain and France were planning to retake control of the Suez Canal by force. When the Israelis invaded and Britain and France issued their ultimatum, he immediately assumed, as did many observers, that the three countries were playing out their parts in a poorly written drama. The Canadian diplomatic corps was shaken. As we have seen, it was in the process of arming Israel. But the collusion also exposed the imperialist mindset of Canada's closest allies. How could Canada promote the Commonwealth as an ideal of cooperation among races, cultures, and peoples while Britain was asserting its inherent privilege to govern the colonies? The colonies of the Commonwealth rejoiced with the Egyptians. They understood the nature of imperialism differently than settler-colonial states like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The previous year, twenty-nine countries from Asia and Africa sent delegations to a conference in Bandung, Indonesia, that addressed their opposition to colonialism and the growing tensions between the People's Republic of China and the United States. They proclaimed their rejection of all forms of colonialism, whether originating in the capitalist West or the Soviet Union. The Suez Crisis was a shot in the arm to the non-aligned movement. The United Nations would be the place where the imperialist world order was either disassembled or reinforced. Which would it be?
The Security Council could not deal with the aggressive actions of two of its permanent members. However, there were alternatives that gave the General Assembly precedence over the Security Council. When France and Britain blocked a resolution intended to deal with the crisis, the USA tabled a procedural motion under resolution 377, Uniting for Peace. Ironically, the Uniting for Peace resolution had been tabled by the United States in October of 1950 to ensure that the Soviet veto on the Security Council not interfere with American aggression in Korea. Washington had taken advantage of the absence of the Soviet Union in the Security Council in the early summer of 1950 to launch the war in Korea. At the time, the Soviet Union was boycotting the United Nations to protest the refusal of the capitalist countries to recognize the People's Republic of China as the successor to the Republic of China, a founding member of the UN. Instead, the Chinese seat went to Taiwan. The People's Republic of China would remain outside of the United Nations until 1971. Realizing that it would not always be so blessed with the absence of the Soviet Union on the Security Council, Washington sponsored the Uniting for Peace resolution by which, whenever the Security Council was unable to fulfill its responsibility to guarantee the peace, the issue could be referred to the General Assembly. Given the composition of the General Assembly in 1950, the United States believed that its will would prevail. However, as colonies asserted their independence and were admitted to the United Nations, the General Assembly changed its complexion. When Britain and France attempted to control the Security Council through their vetoes in relation to their aggression in Egypt, the United States tabled resolution 119, which referred the Suez Crisis to an “emergency special session” of the General Assembly. It was in that context that Lester Pearson, the Canadian secretary of state for external affairs, with his experience at the United Nations (having served as president of the General Assembly) was able to assume a leading role.
The French and British conspirators had not informed their closest allies of their plot. The Americans were outraged by the fact that they had been kept out of the loop. The American ruling class had taken upon itself the management of the world, meaning the global expansion of the capitalist empire. It expected deference from its closest allies. Pearson was motivated to reconcile Canada's closest allies. At first, he considered proposing that the British and French troops en route to Egypt be sanctioned as a United Nations police force. Canadian diplomat Geoffery Murray suggested that it would simply appear that Canada had been part of the collusion. The United Nations would also be shown to be a tool of the imperialists. Pearson sounded out the American ambassador, John Foster Dulles, with the idea of a United Nations police force. With American support, Pearson was able to sell his idea in the General Assembly to countries from all continents. Resolution 1001 created the United Nations Emergency Force, by which Nasser agreed to permit international troops on Egyptian soil. Israel, on the other hand, refused. Nevertheless, the Israeli troops were forced to leave Egyptian territory, including Gaza and Sham-el-Sheik.
In 1957, Pearson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. However, in Canada, there was much opposition to the actions of the Canadian delegation to the United Nations. Many traditionalists were outraged that Canada had not supported Britain in its hour of need. The Conservative Party, led by John Diefenbaker, rallied much of the country in opposition to the Liberal government. In the House of Commons, Prime Minister Louis St Laurent defended his government: “I have been scandalised more than once by the attitude of the larger powers, the big powers as we call them, who have all too frequently treated the Charter of the United Nations as an instrument which did not have to be considered when their so-called vital interests were at stake. ... the era when the supermen of Europe could govern the whole world has and is coming pretty much to an end.” In 1957, Diefenbaker would lead the Conservatives to the greatest majority government in Canadian history. The Suez Crisis was one of a number of election issues, but Diefenbaker's accusation that the government had betrayed Britain resonated with much of the electorate.
In Cairo, Canadian diplomat Herbert Norman persuaded President Nasser to allow Canadian troops to be a part of the United Nations Emergency Force. Nasser was initially suspicious of Canadian participation, especially in light of the decision of the Department of National Defence to send the Queen's Own Regiment to represent the country. Egypt was trying to extract itself from the colonial mindset, and the government insisted that no British or French troops be allowed to participate in the police force. The relationship of Canada, and its armed forces, to the European powers was at odds with Egyptian sensibilities. Norman developed a rapport with Nasser and assuaged his suspicions about Canadian intentions towards Egypt. Norman was an historian who had written an important history of Japan, published just before the outbreak of World War Two. His analysis was influenced by Marx and he was sensitive in his work to the experiences of the common people. In Egypt, his natural affinities led him to identify with the Egyptians struggling against empires. It is likely that this tendency was significant in his success with Nasser. However, the American secret services, and several officers within the RCMP, maintained an extensive file on Norman whom they considered not only a communist, but a spy for the Soviet Union. While there is no evidence that he was a spy, he had been a communist in his years at Cambridge. But his communism led him to identify with the victims of imperialist, capitalist processes, rather than to sympathize with the Soviet Union. When they realized that Herbert Norman was at the centre of the Suez Crisis, the House Committee on Un-American Activities reopened his file and began the process of hounding him, as they had seven years earlier. In April 1957, Norman took his own life in Cairo.
Norman was sensitive to how power is exercised. That interest made him, in the eyes of the ruling class, a communist. In fact, whether Norman was a member of the Communist Party was less important to the ruling class than the fact that he cared about the victims of the expanding Empire. After Norman was dead and the crisis was over, what happened to the common Egyptians? Remember that many Egyptians wanted to prove their equality with the imperialist, modern world. What was the legacy of the dam? Who wanted it? How did it transform Egyptian society? We can consider both human and non-human elements of Egypt. According to economist Khalid Ikram, “Although the country contains about 386,000 square miles ... only a narrow strip in the Nile Valley and its Delta is usable. This area of 15,000 square miles – less than 4 per cent of the land – is but an elongated oasis in the midst of desert. Without the Nile, which flows through Egypt for about a thousand miles without being joined by a single tributary, the country would be part of the Sahara. Crammed into the habitable area is 98 per cent of the population ... The population has been growing rapidly and is estimated to have doubled since 1947.”
Political scientist Timothy Mitchell says that the international development industry frames the economic problem of Egypt as the inability of the land to support a growing population. And so, the solution to the problem lies in better management and modern: Western technology. But if we analyze the issue from a different perspective, we are not led to the same conclusion. When people are hungry and destitute, the answer is not necessarily that there are too many people or that they are mismanaging their resources. Poverty may be rooted in class relations. However, when we blame people for their poverty, we also judge them as incapable of solving their problem. Since we were successful where they failed (we are eating while they starve), it is up to us to lead them out of the darkness. Alternatively, if we resist the conceit that we are the progeny of a superior civilization and instead seek to understand the roots of poverty, we may find that we are trying to solve the problem by reinforcing its cause.
The description of Egypt as overpopulated and archaic conjured images in the minds of those in the core capitalist countries that were transferable to much of the peripheral world. The development industry thereby established a dichotomy by which the world was divided into civilized and primitive societies. The core capitalist countries had arrived at the endpoint of evolution and were trying to help the laggards to join their ranks. This schema contained a prior definition of technology and science as Western, capitalist, and modern: interchangeable concepts that positioned the observer as the standard against which the Third World/Global South subject was judged. For sympathetic observers, Third World subjects were children who needed to be educated. However, as Timothy Mitchell shows, a careful analysis of Egyptian agriculture reveals that the peasants on small landholdings were efficient and perfectly capable of feeding themselves and the country. The growing poverty in Egypt during the postwar decades can be understood in terms of power relations. Moreover, to define technology as Western, capitalist, and modern serves the powerful who were profiting from the reorganization of the land that was causing millions to fall into poverty. What are the facts?
Since 1974, Egypt has been a net importer of food. The development industry frames this as the inevitable consequence of overpopulation and technological backwardness. However, the World Bank's own tables undermine that conclusion. From 1965 to the end of the Cold War, increases in food production outstripped population growth. So, why did Egyptians need to import food? Moreover, studies found that, despite the fact that the protein supply is sufficient to feed the country, the level of malnutrition is high. A 1979 study found eighty-three percent of children under five years of age to be malnourished. Twenty-three percent were severely malnourished. Mitchell found that the per capita consumption of protein had increased. However, there was a shift in the consumption habits of the wealthiest Egyptians towards meat products, which provoked malnutrition among the poor. While crop production increased, it was diverted to feed cattle rather than the general human population. Eating protein in the form of meat is ten times more expensive than as beans and lentils.
The switch to meat consumption among the wealthiest quarter of the Egyptian population meant that the country needed to import grains. After 1974, Egypt became the world's third largest importer of grains. The Egyptian government taxed cultivators who grew grains for human consumption while it subsidized their importation. As a result, poor Egyptians became dependent on foreign grains for their own food. They were encouraged to produce feed for livestock that became the staple of the upper classes. By the 1990s, Egyptian land was devoted to meat, poultry, and dairy products. The vast majority of Egypt's arable land was used for animal fodder and two industrial crops – cotton and sugar.
To pay for the importation of wheat that became the staple of the poor majority, the Egyptian government borrowed money. By 1988, the national debt had reached fifty billion dollars US. To earn the money to service the debt, the International Monetary Fund required that Egypt produce more commercial crops for export. Consequently, the dependence on foreign grains for survival became structural. Meanwhile, the simplistic notion that overpopulation was responsible for malnutrition and poverty in Egypt continued to frame the issue for the core capitalist countries. In the words of Timothy Mitchell, “That Egypt does not grow enough food to feed everyone in the country is thus not the result of too many people occupying too little land, but of the exercise of power by a certain section of the population, supported by the prevailing domestic and international regime, which has shifted the country's resources from staple foods to more expensive items of consumption.”
A USAID study in 1976 reported that the average Egyptian farmer had approximately two acres of land, leaving the impression of an overpopulated fertile valley. Again, Mitchell examined the data more carefully. The Nile valley is exceptionally fertile, well-irrigated, and has year-round sunshine. Farmers can harvest three crops each year. A family of five could feed itself and pay taxes with the crops from less than one acre of land. In fact, such a family would need to hire workers to cultivate more than five acres of land. The USAID report did not mention that the distribution of land was increasingly uneven, with certain families expanding their holdings. By 1982, ten percent of the holdings controlled almost half of Egypt's cultivated land. Moreover, those figures did not include agribusiness. A group of Egyptian and international bankers, together with the state, owned the Delta Sugar Company of over 40,000 acres. Bechtel International, an American multinational, managed another estate of over 10,000 acres. Redistribution would have easily ended the problem of poverty resulting from landlessness.
Mitchell argues that the image of an overpopulated country implied that the landholdings were already as small as practical. That led to the conclusion that the answer would be found in technology. USAID presented Egyptian farming methods as having remained unchanged for thousands of years. Audiences in the core capitalist countries were to understand poverty as the “natural” state of the peasantry before Western, capitalist, technological advancements. The traditional world, as against the modern world, is imagined to be static and inefficient. In contrast, we should analyze such changes as Egypt was experiencing throughout the Cold War era in terms of a struggle for power whereby certain technologies replaced others. In this case, USAID funded the Agricultural Mechanization Project between 1979 and 1986. An American company was awarded the thirty-eight million dollar contract to modernize Egyptian agriculture through the purchase of American equipment. Other funding came from the World Bank and the Egyptian government. Farmers were advanced loans to buy new seeds, fertilizers, and fuel that “scientific” agriculture required. By 1986, a study found that the new methods had not produced higher yields as promised. But the new mechanized methods were taken up by the large landowners who claimed that there was a shortage of labour. The shortage of labour, however, was the result of the redistribution of land to large farms. Farmers who had been self-sufficient joined the waged labour market where, as a result of mechanization, wages were inadequate. Meanwhile, the development industry hid the dynamics of this capitalist class formation behind the myth of the inefficient peasant farmer.
Similarly, USAID promoted decentralization of the Egyptian state by supporting private interests at the local levels. It argued that the tradition of a strong Egyptian state was an anachronism that dated back five thousand years. Under the restructuring, the more powerful farmers at the local level were able to establish industries that then employed those who had lost their lands. Funds under this decentralization process went to projects that generated incomes. Thus, a capitalist class took shape in rural Egypt aligned with benefactors from the United States, on the backs of the dispossessed cultivators who were now waged workers.
Mitchell says that USAID removed itself from the equation. Presenting Egypt as a self-contained entity ignores the international dimension of the class struggle. International development agencies imagine themselves as rational players external to the country that they are affecting. But they are, in fact, key players, altering the class relations both within the country and internationally. International organizations guided by neoclassical economics argue that a free market will organize world trade and finance for the benefit of everyone as long as states do not interfere. USAID, the World Bank, and the IMF imposed a program of structural adjustment on Egypt, reorganizing the state in favour of private interests. However, it was states such as the United States and Canada that coordinated this imposition in conjunction with international financial institutions and Egyptian capitalists. The most powerful corporate and financial institutions worked together with the core capitalist countries, led by the United States, to manipulate markets, prices, and subsidies. The prices of commodities such as oil, sugar, coffee, as well as currencies, interest rates, stocks, and bonds are manipulated by monopolies facilitated by the most powerful countries. Meanwhile, the most vulnerable elements in the peripheral countries pay the biggest price for the neoclassical illusion of a free market.
By the 1980s, as a result of massive subsidies to American farmers, Washington was selling grain on the international market at forty percent less than its production cost. Export subsidies allowed American feed grain to underwrite the shift to a meat-based diet among wealthier Egyptians. Between 1974 and 1989, US$8.7 million, or fifty-eight percent of American economic assistance to Egypt was spent on American corporations peddling grains, agricultural equipment, and to service its debt to the United States. The other forty-two percent was spent on projects in Egypt, but paid to American contractors such as General Electric, Bechtel, John Deere, and International Harvester. The assistance had the effect of tying the Egyptian and American economies together, making Egypt dependent on the United States. Not only was Egypt structurally dependent on the importation of necessities like food, but more ominously, it was bound by debts to American financial institutions. At the same time, as we have seen, a small ruling class inside of Egypt benefited from the restructuring.
Mitchell's analysis allows us to see how fundamental social and cultural changes in Egypt resulted from Washington's goal of supporting American interests. American grain surpluses transformed Egyptian agriculture and eating habits. American industries found a new market for machinery and expertise. All of this depended on the roles played by the two states. Washington was able to displace problems of overproduction inside of the United States onto Egypt. This was sold inside of America on the grounds of helping a pre-modern people into the twentieth century. A number of analysts would come to describe a global development industry that relied on assumptions about the meaning of modernity, science, capitalism, and free markets. Those who profited from the discourse underwriting development would not be motivated to unravel its premises. The general population in the core capitalist countries were already convinced of their superiority and would be receptive to the notion that the world was progressing under their tutelage. The worse conditions became in the peripheral countries, the more it was claimed they needed assistance from the core.