On the Failure of Nasser's Land Reforms

"I did more for the Russian serf in giving him land as well as personal liberty, than America did for the negro slave set free by the proclamation of President Lincoln," declared tsar Alexander II in 1879. "The vote, in the hands of an ignorant man ... without either property or self-respect, will be used to the damage of the people at large; for the rich man, without honor or any kind of patriotism, will purchase it, and with it swamp the rights of a free people." Alexander knew well that land, and its accompanying socioeconomic and political power, is essential to maintaining a free society. Similarly, Egypt's General Gamal Nasser knew the importance of the feudal peasantry's owning land. Unfortunately for Nasser, the methods he used and the goals he pursued ended up only slightly improving the peasants' situation, while their rights were swamped by strongmen who were antagonized by Nasser's policies.

What is most ironic about Nasser's policies is that he succeeded best in turning former allies (local strongmen) into diametric enemies. His ideology may have been supported by the average ignorant peasant, but the locus of power he created was centered on the local foremen. As a result of his lack of understanding of the benefits of the organizational and leadership structure at the local level, Nasser failed to acknowledge the important leadership role played by these middle-class landlords.

Indeed, bureaucratic problems plagued Nasser's reforms from cradle to grave. Nasser inherited the unwieldy British colonial bureaucracy and immediately set about hacking it away, either by replacing key leaders with his military allies, or by forming new institutions with similar functions as the old institutions had. In addition to all the typical problems associated with bureaucracies, such as entrenched attitudes, shiftlessness, lack of vision, and over-rigid hierarchies, Nasser found himself unable to effectively change the bureaucracies for two key reasons. First, his military allies were unqualified to oversee his changes; they had neither the education nor the experience to oversee major government ministries. Second, he hadn't enough allies to change the organizational and leadership structures of the bureaucracies he attempted to form or remold. As a result, Nasser increasingly found himself dependent on a bureaucracy whose leaders used their posts as fiefdoms to entrench their own power and fight other governmental organizations--or they even outright disagreed with Nasser.

Indeed, one thrust of the reform was to establish even more bureaucracy! Councils, coöperatives, and other local bodies found their ranks filled with the very people whose power they were supposed to reduce: the upper and middle classes! Though political participation among peasants did increase, the evidence Migdal presents suggests that the peasants were not upset over the arrangements in the early stages of reform. Their relation with village officials was not hostile, and village officials provided for many of the peasants' needs. Truly, Nasser's attempt to uproot the power system his redistribution created contributed to his reforms' ultimate demise. Simply, Nasser was unable to institute a bureaucracy that did a better job controlling the peasants than the local strongmen. The national bureaucracy, as mentioned earlier, was unsupportive (at best), and local officials were correctly able to recognize the lack of a central organizational authority.

Exacerbating the problem was the presence of what little central control Nasser successfully established: pricing policies. Artificially low prices allowed a flow of wealth from rural areas to wealthy urban middlemen, who cashed in on a cheap supply of farm goods. Nasser's reforms thus established a flow of wealth from rich capitalists (landowners), to poor peasants, and back to rich capitalists (either landowners or middlemen). Wealth that had been held by the rural élite was given to rural poor, and the wealth they generated flowed to urban élite. On balance then, the rich got much richer, the poor got a little better off, and urban middlemen made fortunes because of centrally controlled prices. In other words, development did not go from core to periphery, but vice versa.

Of course, this assumes the rich landowners even relinquished control of their properties, when, in fact, many simply transferred their holdings to relatives, straw owners, or their foremen, explaining why so little land was redistributed. Also, middle class people under the landowning limit received a windfall when they used their spare capital to buy-up land. The new organization of the national bureaucracy merely gave upper and middle classmen another chance to exercise political power, the opposite of Nasser's intentions.

While the organization and leadership surrounding Nasser contributed to his plan's failure, Nasser enjoys some of the mea culpa himself. Certainly, his leadership was undeniably strong, and, for some time, he was looked up to by many of his Arab neighbors. However, Nasser was unable to hold power effectively. As examples, his attempt to nationalize the Suez Canal was soundly defeated; he lost a series of embarrassing wars with arch-enemy Israel, where he lost the whole Sinai Peninsula; and as a result, he lost the military's confidence. A litmus test on the emergence of Nasser's dictatorial side turns up positive when he begins feeling that "his own political leadership is at stake" (204). Fearing for his political life, Nasser began to act like a paranoid Mao Tse-Tung, eliminating bureaucrats and attempting to centralize his own control. An organizational and leadership division resulted as the military and Nasser's party began carrying out witchhunts and harassing other bureaucracies. An immobilizing culture of fear was borne, capped by urban riots in June 1967, following lenient punishment of criminally-minded military élites. During the last two years of his term, Nasser is unable to keep hold of the helm of his reforms as he struggles just to retain his grasp on power.

As I have shown above, Nasser was unable to satisfy any of the three prerequisites to development that state capacity theory presents. His ideology is not supported by key decision-makers and decision-implementers; the organization of his government is not supportive--and sometimes openly hostile, and his leadership is not committed, united, or flexible. As a result, Nasser is unable to mobilize his government in support of his policies, and when he does, his measures are counterproductive. State capacity theory is thus useful to explain the failure of Nasser's land reforms since it explains the interactions within the government that lead to an attempt at development that achieves modest results but eventually ends up stifling itself.

An alternative theory, dependency, is unable to explain Egypt's failure because it focuses mostly on external factors of the world capitalist system, when, in fact, Egypt brought down its own house of cards. However, when applied only within Egypt, dependency could be used to view Egypt as a microcosm of the global economy. Marginal citizens are dependent on rich mercantilistic middlemen who need cheap labor, raw farm goods, and markets for their manufactured goods. Again, most of the benefits flow to the rich citizens, just as the benefits of mercantilism flow to rich countries. Dependency thus requires modification, though it can be applied within a country.

Modernization, the other alternative, also requires modification to be applied within one country. Egypt's economy was still traditional and agrarian, but it was at a stage of potential take-off, in that it had a burgeoning economy and sustained economic growth. Therefore, it confounds modernization theory by fitting into two separate, very distinct categories.