Gian Paolo Calchi Novati - 09/ 2011

Whether small or medium in terms of its size, the Libyan conflict has in its own way been a ground-shifting event; a seal more than a turning point. In the world system – from the end of the war and above all from 2001 – a rather well-defined process has been ongoing, and Sarkozy has exploited the trend to score a match point in favour of Europe, both in the match on the world level between North and South and in regard to the competition, undeclared but evident at least in the Mediterranean, between Europe and the United States. Even before the final outcome of the war, it is the act itself that makes the difference. Fifty years after Suez, the governments of Paris and London have regained the initiative, making the great ally from across the Atlantic default in order to recuperate rank and status. In 1956 President Eisenhower said no and the operation against Egypt ended up being a flop. In 2011 Obama was reluctant because Libya did not figure among the priorities of the White House but then it gave the go-ahead and, while leaving to Paris the honours of taking on the leadership, it has made a decisive contribution. The sophistication of the US armed forced is an essential atout in the technological wars with zero victims among the attackers (in this case NATO). The crisis of Muammar Gheddafi’s regime exploded after the change of regime in Tunisia and in Egypt. A correlation obviously exists between the different types, even if each one of them has its own historical and geopolitical specificities. In Libya there was neither a solid national State nor a compact army. The shock in Libya started from Derna, Tobruk and Bengasi and not from the political and metaphorical centre where the power lies and this was enough to make of the revolt mainly an affair of the Cyrenaica (reaching the capital only later on and by other paths). Traditionally, the Cyrenaica is placed in a marginal position and virtually a separatist from Tripoli and Tripolitania. Again unlike Tunisia and Egypt, where the protest was chiefly peaceful even if massive and always on the point of turning into rioting, the rebels took up arms: officially for having attacked an army barracks, probably because the agitators outside were ready to hand them out. Violence triggered off more violence. There was talk of mediations or interpositions, but in Libya the lack of an authority capable of convincing Gheddafi to come to terms with the reality as had happened in Tunis or Cairo was greatly felt. Here we have the proof of Italy’s relative weakness, being incapable of bringing to fruition the “special relations” confirmed by the controversial agreement of 2008. What are such treaties for if not to stop an emergency in a country considered to be strategically vital for the interests and the security of the “power” of reference from degenerating into an irreparable rupture? Between Italy and Libya the colonial syndrome has had far too much weight. Even the meek King Idris dared in his day to ask for Italy’s official apologies and economic compensation for the damage from the colonial wars and the occupation. If we abstract from the recognition of the acquired rights of the Italians in Libya, distinguishing between public property and private property (but those were other times), the 2008 agreement is not very different from the agreement signed with King Senusso in 1956. Gheddafi made of Italy’s specific admission of blame for the acts committed during colonialism a prerequisite for not breaking off relations with Rome, or discrediting it, but on the contrary, to be able to establish an equal-standing relationship without alienating the consensus of a people who preserve a deadly memory of Italian colonialism. The expulsion in 1970 of the last 20,000 Italian ex-colonial settlers living in Libya was supposed to be a necessary sacrifice for Italy to become an acceptable partner in the new sovereign and post-colonial Libya. The financial aspect of the gesture was relevant, but that was not the fundamental thing. It is paradoxical that a non-State and a non-nation like Libya had experienced colonialism as a shame to avenged. Libya certainly does not have behind it the history and the historicity of a country like Ethiopia. It did not have the Obelisk of Axum to claim back. For Gheddafi that reparation was indeed necessary to pave the way to the creation of the Libya that he was dreaming of in his moments of solitude in the desert: a protagonist of Arab and African politics after so many humiliations, a small State determined to valorise its resources (oil) and its geostrategic position in the Mediterranean. The smallness of its population, together with the immensity of its territory, was an advantage because it made the regime freer and more ruthless from the height of a petroleum yield to be transformed into welfare and, if necessary, into a political weapon and because it made available to the others (Egypt, first and foremost) that great space. What Gheddafi has never been pardoned is his demand not to leave the great powers with the power to decide, by themselves, the degree of violence acceptable in the management of international relations. For this reason, Gheddafi’s Libya has never been completely absorbed within the parameters of the Cold War. A factor of disturbance even greater than Cuba, which at least had sided with one of the blocs as compared with the “third-partiness” always reiterated by Gheddafi, notwithstanding the periodic weapons purchases more or less useful to Moscow. Reagan dispatched the American air force off to bomb Bengasi and Tripoli in 1986 to put an end to the “mad dog,” Libya found itself wholly unprotected. And that’s what happened also in 2011, when NATO chose Libya as an easy target – because it was very isolated, not comparable in that respect to Syria or Iran – to remind everyone, even those who had recently celebrated the autumn of the patriarchs and the spring of the peoples of North Africa itself, that the West watches over the transition when the crisis of the authoritarian regimes till then tolerated and assisted entered the terminal phase. Bipolarism no longer exists; the system is articulated today in systems of regional security. None of them, however, has reacted effectively; neither an Arab League impatient to settle the account with the heterodox pushiness of the Guide of the Libyan revolution and not even an African Union grateful to Gheddafi but without means and in the final analysis powerless in regard to a West that has brandished the ‘big stick’ having Africa well in mind. Gheddafi was inconvenient and undefended, but the war has a meaning that goes beyond Libya. The prophesy of Samuel Huntington on the “clash of civilizations” alluded to the resurgence of the people and the national projects of ‘others’ to challenge the West emerging triumphal from the East-West confrontation. The identities in the place of class or ideology. The scheme imaged was summarised in the formula “Rest vs. West”. Something of the kind could have occurred with the attacks of al-Qaeda on September 11th, 2001. Now, however, the prospect has been overturned. It is the West that is expanding its civilisation, fearless of re-evoking the shadows of colonialism, resorting often to war. From the Great Middle East and from Asia, the war has also gained the Mediterranean. It is as if Europe had become aware of the failure of neo-colonial cooperation with the Maghreb and Africa’s Mediterranean shores and has concentrated on the language of force. On the verge of undergoing, if not a fatal defeat, certainly a major setback, the global South has made its voice heard from the Chinese island of Hainan through the meeting of the BRICS (becoming on this occasion BRICS with South Africa’s membership of the club), condemning the western war against Libya and more in general the use of force to resolve the crises, real and destined to be repeated, that are shaking the “periphery.” Words such as “freedom” and “liberation” in these conditions sound rather out of key, yet, as we know, Eurocentric universalism has also infected the Arab and African elites, without forgetting the need to first of all come to terms sooner or later with the true rights and expectations of their people.

Gian Paolo Calchi Novati (University of Pavia)