Trajectories of Anticolonialism in Egypt - 0 views
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The international was a colonial international, as Jabri phrased it, precisely because not all nation states were considered to be sovereign; in fact, the majority were not. Categories such as mandates and protectorates betrayed this linear logic of colonialism, whereby some nations were potential nation states[2] embodying sovereignty, but to reach this stage meant achieving a certain civilizational status. As Antony Anghie notes, “Sovereignty existed in something like a linear continuum, based on its approximation to the ideal of the European nation-state.”[3]
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Moments such as the 1955 Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference at Bandung were attempts at carving out a new international—attempts that ultimately failed as we see the return of the colonial international in the late 1960s. Across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, resistance to colonial rule materialised in varied and intersecting ways, whether through calls for independent industrialisation, cultural renewal, political self-determination, or the nationalisation of assets. In contexts such as Egypt, Nasser’s project was not merely a project of national independence, but an attempt at decolonizing both the national and the international. Resistance meant not only removing Egyptian production from this international sphere that was in and of itself colonial, but also the creation and articulation of new social and political projects that moved beyond binaries of East and West.[5]
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the failures of the Nasserist project from an economic perspective were already diagnosed early on by leftist writers and intellectuals,[8] including scholars such as Samir Amin, who had laid out the “traps” inherent in adopting capitalist development—even if led by an anticolonial state.[9] Given that the expansion of capitalism in Egypt was tied to the expansion of imperialism from the very beginning, it becomes difficult to disentangle one from the other.[10] It is this that makes Nasser’s decision to adopt state-led capitalist development contentious. Industrialisation was based on notions of scientific progress, modern planning, and centring the state within capitalist production; it is difficult to ignore the modern telos underwriting industrialisation-as-development
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from the 1940s onwards, feminists began to put forward a distinctive articulation of nationalism where anti-capitalism became increasingly prominent. In terms of gender, this lent itself to more structural understandings of inequality that called for more radical transformations. This was undoubtedly connected to the increased prominence of socialist and Marxist theorising globally, including the proliferation of organizations and conferences that connected feminists across the postcolonial world, conferences at which capitalist inequality was a central theme. This gave feminists the analytical tools, including a means of analysing class conflict, to analyse Egypt’s position vis-a-vis a rapidly changing world, and also provided a way of analysing what many of them saw as the main problem facing Egypt: social inequality
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these feminist articulations of anti-colonialism, nationalism and anti-capitalism were much more radical than the ones put forward by the state and its elites
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Sovereignty could only be imagined by breaking away from global capitalism; imperialism and capitalism were not two separate entities but rather two co-constitutive realities