The war and the economy: the gradual destruction of Libya

ABSTRACT

This article questions dominant analyses about Libya’s present ‘war economy’ and ‘statelessness’, which are often deployed to explain the country’s ongoing destruction. By reinterpreting the history of the past as the failure of Libya to implement neoliberal reforms, these accounts trivialise its anti-imperialist history. The article reflects on the role that war and militarism play in the US-led imperialist structure, tracing the gradual unmaking of Libya from the progressive revolutionary era, towards its transformation into a comprador state and an outpost for global class war. In doing so, it moves the focus away from Libya’s ‘war economy’ to examine the war and the economy, linking Libya’s fate to the geo-economic and geopolitical forces at the core of US-led imperialism.

RÉSUMÉ

Cet article remet en question les analyses dominantes sur l’actuelle « économie de guerre » de la Libye et sur son identité de « non-État ou sans-État » (statelessness), termes déployés pour expliquer la destruction en cours du pays. En réinterprétant l’histoire du passé comme l’échec de la Libye à mettre en œuvre des réformes néo-libérales, ces récits banalisent son histoire anti-impérialiste. L’article se penche sur le rôle que la guerre et le militarisme jouent dans la structure impérialiste dirigée par les États-Unis, et retrace le démantèlement progressif de la Libye, de l’ère révolutionnaire progressiste vers sa transformation en État comprador et en avant-poste de guerre de classe mondiale. Ce faisant, il détourne l’attention de « l’économie de guerre » de la Libye pour examiner la guerre et l’économie, liant le sort de la Libye aux forces géo-économiques et politiques qui sont au cœur de l’impérialisme dirigé par les États-Unis.

KEYWORDS:

• Capitalism
• Libya
• US-led imperialism
• militarism
• political economy
• war

MOTS-CLÉS:

• Capitalisme
• Libye
• impérialisme mené par les États-Unis
• militarisme
• economie politique
• guerre

Acknowledgements

My particular thanks go to four anonymous peer reviewers for having guided me through further reflections on such politically challenging themes. I am highly indebted to Elisa Greco for her insightful, meticulous and supportive comments throughout the revision process. Finally, I am very grateful to comrade Ali Kadri for our numerous engagements on world affairs and the destructive power of capital.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

Matteo Capasso is a Max Weber Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute. His research examines the historical and contemporary interdependence between local and global sites of power and resistance, with a focus on the MENA region.

Notes

1 For a well-argued and comprehensive overview of the (mis)uses of the world ‘globalisation’, see Veltmeyer (2019).

2 Libya was accused of supporting numerous so-called ‘terrorist’ organisations worldwide (Jureńczyk 2018).

3 In 1982, the US intentionally relied on Saudi Arabian financing to bribe several African countries in order to deprive Qaddafi of the OAU chairmanship (Lahwej 1998).

4 Following this decision, France also reached the same conclusion over the explosion of another flight (UTA 772 DC) in the skies over Niger in September 1989, condemning another six Libyan subjects. Allegedly, Libya had targeted a French flight in response to France’s support of Chadian forces against the Libyan Army.

5 Many analysts (Peirce 2009; Ashton 2013), scholars (Bannon 2020) and UN mission observers (Kochler 2003; 2002) have questioned the trial procedures and the validity of the emerging evidence that allowed the conviction of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi in 2001 and thus Libya as the sole culprit. Bannon (2020) questions two fundamental points of the trial: the fragmentary and discordant statements coming from the main testimony, a Maltese shopkeeper named Tony Gauci; and the failure of British lawyers to counter them. This critique resonated with the report of Professor Hans Kochler, UN-appointed Human Rights Observer at the trial, who questioned the ‘consistency and legal credibility’ of the Court’s verdict (Kochler 2003; 2002). Recent press coverage (Mohdin 2020) has confirmed that the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission has approved the request, filed by the victims’ families, to review the trial’s verdict.

6 Libya had a law capping the amount of foreign investment to US$50 million, which the International Monetary Fund (IMF) pressured to remove in order to ‘modernise the country’ (IMF 2006, 3).

7 Throughout the 2000s, Libya partly kept investing in the pursuit of regional collaboration with African countries, but that topic is beyond the scope of this article (see Forte 2012).

8 For instance, Alessandrini (2011) discusses the failure of the Western Left to formulate a unified response to the Libyan events in 2011 and its tendency to consider the Libyan protests only when the international military intervention was being debated. This important criticism falls short of highlighting the role of this same academic scholarship (Halliday 2011; Dabashi 2012; Achcar 2013) by staying silent on the progressive role of war and militarism in the US-led imperialist structure and thus how it contributed in rewriting the history of Libya according to US interests.