![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
Abstract
The policy process in Libya is complex and intensely personalised around the figure of the Libyan leader, even if it also relies on a structured consultation process. Libya's foreign policy fits within this paradigm as well, as our research amongst Libyan policy-makers has demonstrated. Yet, despite its apparent unpredictability, it abides by three basic principles that interact with each other: opportunistic constancy, national self-interest and ideological commitment. Whilst the correlation between the first two elements is linear and progressive, their correlation with the third is inverted and retrogressive although they can condition and shape it as well. Actual relations form four inter-connected conceptual circles covering the Arab world, Africa, the West (Europe and America) and the BRICs (Russia, China, Latin America and Asia). Thus relations with the Arab world and Africa are suffused with ideological import alongside Libya's pragmatic objectives in Africa, whilst with Europe and America they are conditioned by pragmatic constancy based on oil and international acceptance. With the world of the BRICs, some of Libya's old visions of anti-imperialism have resurfaced but commercial concerns still dominate interrelationships. The personalised nature of foreign policy decisions has been powerfully reflected in recent years in Libya's bilateral relationships, as Bulgaria, Britain, Canada and Switzerland have recently discovered. They reflect a deep insistence that Libya and its leader should be taken at their own evaluation. Where this has not happened, Libyan displeasure has been manifest, the degree of displeasure being tempered only by a pragmatic and opportunistic consideration of possible adverse consequences. Overall, however, the constant and underlying theme since the 1990s has been regaining international acceptance, one which, even if its content is diametrically opposed to the patterns of that past, reflects the objectives of the 1970s and 1980s as well.
Notes
An earlier version of this article was published by the German Marshall Fund of the United States: Joffe, G. and Paoletti, E., 2010. Libya's foreign policy: drivers and objectives. Mediterranean Papers Series 2010. Washington DC: German Marshal Fund.
‘The term “charisma” will be applied to a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader’ (Weber Citation1947, p. 358).
Rentier state: a state where income is based on returns on an asset not itself the result of investment; neo-patrimonial state: one in which elite power is the consequence of access to a dominant charismatic ruler in a system which is replicated at all levels within the polity (see Eisenstadt Citation1973).
The jamahiri political system is the system of direct popular democracy that requires all Libyans to participate in the political decision-making process in Libya at all levels – regional, national and global – and that denies the role of political parties within the political process because they are perceived to be divisive (see Vandewalle Citation2008, pp. 16–29).
It should, perhaps, be read in conjunction with Joffé (2008a).
The Revolutionary Command Council members who participated comprised Colonel Qadhafi, Lieutenant-Colonel Abu Bakr-Yunis, Major Abdesslam Jallud, Major Bashir Huwaydi, Captain Umar Muhayshi and Captain M'Hamid al-Muqaryaf. Captain Muhayshi was executed in the wake of a failed coup d'etat in 1975, after having been returned from Morocco in 1984 and Captain Muqarayaf eventually became the founder of the National Salvation Front for Libya in 1980.
See, for example, works by Amal Obeidi, Zahi Mogherbi and Ahmed Ahima or by opposition figures such as Mansour Kikhiya.
These have been collected in annual volumes as al-Sijill al-Qawmi, and specifically religious discourses are available as Khutab wa-Ahadith al-Qa‘id al-Dinyah.
The colonel's concept of a new universal theory emerged in June 1973, just two months after the ‘people's authority’, the guiding principle behind the direct popular democracy that characterised the Jamahiriyah, was proclaimed. As St. John (2008) points out, it marked ‘the end of the ideological beginning’ of post-revolutionary Libya. Such ideas still form the basis of the Libyan political experience and the practice of the Libyan stateless state.
An excellent source for Colonel Qadhafi's essential ideological attitudes is Burgat (Citation1995, pp. 49–51).
Qadhafi speech. ‘Libyan leader says enemy recruiting agents abroad, coveting country's oil’, 1 March 2007. Available from: http://site.securities.com.
Qadhafi speech. ‘The brother leader addresses the Faculty and students of Cambridge University’, 22 October 2007. Available from: http://www.algathafi.org/html-english/cat_1_2.htm
Text from the Leader's speech at the student festival held by the Arab General Union of Students and Pan-African Student Union in Syria, 31 March 2008. Available from: http://www.jananews.ly/Page.aspx?Pageld=10090&Pl=25
Thus, when the Palestine National Authority was instituted in 1995, the Libyan leader argued that Palestinians now had a state and should return there. For example, in May 1995, just after the Authority had started to operate within the West Bank, 30,000 Palestinians in Libya found that their work permits had been terminated.
Speech at the Accra summit, Conakry, Guinea, 25 June 2007. Available from: http://www.jananews.com
By ‘process’ we understand both the intellectual, often ideological inputs, as well as the analytical processes that are structured into a coherent pattern of policy articulation, not the mechanisms through which it is articulated and applied.
In late December 1988, an American airliner flying from London to New York was blown up over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, a catastrophe in which 270 people died. Although initial suspicions focused on Iran where the previous July an Iran Air passenger aircraft had been destroyed by missile fire from an American warship, the USS Vincennes with the loss of all on board, by 1991 Libya had been identified by the Scottish police and American investigators as the culprit. In 1992 it was placed under United Nations sanctions until it handed over two named suspects for trial in a Scottish court set up especially for the purpose in Holland in 1997.
‘Text of the Leader's speech in his meeting with French economic activists in Paris’. Available from: http://www.jananews.com/Page.aspx?Pageld=91786. ‘African activists in France flocked yesterday to the headquarters of UNESCO in Paris to meet the Leader of the Revolution’. Available from: http://www.jananews.com?Index.aspx?Language=3.
These three terms have quite specific meanings here: ideology reflects policy responses derived from ideological preconceptions; pragmatism consists of rational responses to what are perceived to be real situations; and opportunism is the exploitation of opportunity to gain advantage. The latter two, of course can combine and can mobilise the first to provide principled reasons for action.
Ironically enough, Colonel Qadhafi himself is strongly opposed to terrorism and Libya was the first country in the world to issue an international arrest warrant against Usama bin Ladin (see ‘The Leader's analysis of the current crisis of terrorism in the world’. Available from: http://www.algathafi.org/html-english/cat_03_10.htm).
Libya has referred to the court on at least three occasions over maritime border disputes with Tunisia (judgements issued in 1981, 1982 and 1985) and Malta (judgements issued in 1984 and 1985), and over a territorial border dispute with Chad (judgement issued in 1994). It also referred two disputes with the United Kingdom and the United States over the Lockerbie affair and the Montréal Convention (judgements issued in 1998). See http://www.worldlii.org/int/cases/ICJ/toc-L.html and http://www.worldlii.org/int/cases/ICJ/toc-T.html.
This meant in effect that the revolutionary content of the jamahiriyah was dominant over the formal structure of the executive branch of government. See ‘Declaration on the establishment of the Authority of the People’ (1977).
This occurred on 1 September 1979, as part of the process of the militarisation of Libyan society (Vandewalle Citation1995, p. xxviii).
The term combines Weber's ‘patrimonial’ and ‘legal-rational’ concepts of bureaucracy and aptly describes the crucial feature of access to the authority of the leader as the path for decision-making and articulation of power.
At the end of 1979, 40% of Libya's oil exports went to the United States (Wadhams Citation1980, pp. 324–330).
Indeed, some commentators (for example, Arnold Citation1996, pp. 151–162) have suggested that the sudden and, at the time surprising, designation of Libya as being responsible for the Lockerbie incident had much to do with Libya's diplomatic successes in Europe. The UTA incident was far less ambiguous because there was evidence of a Libyan diplomat handing a passenger a booby-trapped briefcase before he boarded the flight. It was assumed to be linked to Libyan resentment at the role played by France in Libya's defeat in Chad.
The issue of Lockerbie has never been satisfactorily explained. Although one of those directly accused of the incident, Abdelbasset al-Maghrahi, was eventually found guilty by a Scottish court sitting in the Netherlands at Kamp Zeist, his co-accused was found not guilty and there were serious questions about the quality of the evidence produced. Al-Maghrahi was released in late 2009 on compassionate grounds to a hurricane of American protest, and has since returned to Libya. In Libya, his guilt has never been accepted, either officially or unofficially and, even in its formal acceptance of responsibility for the incident, Libya did not go beyond accepting formal responsibility for the actions of its representatives – an obligation it has under international law. It should also be remembered that, until 1990, the main weight of the enquiry into the incident, in Britain, was directed towards Iran, because of the 1988 Iran Airbus incident. Scottish police had begun to enquire into the Libyan dimension of the affair in that year, partly because of the evidence of timers, of the type used in the Lockerbie bomb, having been supplied to East Germany and Libya by a Swiss company.
Hannah Arendt points out that such charismatic authoritarian systems often generate large areas of political autonomy within the bureaucratic structures in which the leading elements anticipate leadership decisions and orientations in making autonomous decisions of their own. The conventional superficial pyramidal system of authority is, in effect, a cover for bureaucratic confusion and autonomy, which can lead to self-defeating policies in both the domestic and external spheres (Arendt Citation1965).
The trade statistics demonstrate clearly Libya's dependence on access to the industrialised world, particularly the European Union, where three countries – Germany, Italy and Spain – alone absorb 80% of Libya's exports, and the European Union absorbs 85% of all exports and generates 75% of Libya's imports (Joffé Citation2001).
There was the specific problem of oil companies forced to abandon their interests in Libya when the Reagan administration introduced its own presidential sanctions in 1986. The five American oil companies that were forced to leave – Marathon, Occidental, Oasis, Amerada Hess and Hunt – left behind assets worth $2 billion and generating an income flow of $2.3 billion a year, but these have been worked in trust for them by companies linked to and created by National Oil Company (NOC) for this specific purpose. The companies concerned have now returned to Libya, spearheading what is expected to be an enthusiastic commercial invasion.
The historical background to Libya's relationship with Europe is provided in Joffé Citation(2001).
Libya was the European Union's tenth most important supplier in 2007, with energy providing the vast majority of its imports – Libya provided 7.42% of Europe's energy imports – and is its 45th most important export market. The European Union, on the other hand, has been Libya's most important supplier in 2007, generating 47.9% of its imports, and its most important export market, absorbing 79.2% of its exports. Exports to Europe, of course, consist almost entirely of energy – 90.3% of the total, with chemicals adding a further 1.3% in 2008. Europe, in turn, exports refined products to Libya – 20.9% of its exports to the North African state in 2008 – and food (11.0%), together with machinery (23.8%), cars (5.6%) and chemicals (6.4%) (Eurostat (Comext, Statistical regime 4) Citation2008). In 2004, for instance, Europe provided 63.1% of Libya's imports, with 18.3% originating in Italy, 12.0% coming from Germany and 4.1% from the United Kingdom – a total of 34.3%, or just around half of Europe's total exports to Libya. Europe absorbed 90.5% of its exports – 39.3% going to Italy, 18.3% going to Germany and 13.3% going to Spain. In short, three countries absorbed 78.3% of Libya's exports to Europe and 70.9% of Libya's total exports (Encyclopaedia Britannica Citation2008, p. 627).
The term was first used by Romano Prodi in introducing the Union's new European Neighbourhood Policy in 2002 and 2003, itself in part a response to the United States' Middle East Partnership Initiative. See, for example, his speech in Washington in June 2003, at http://www.europa-eu-un.org/articles/en/article_2477_en.htm.
Italy has also tried to establish formal repatriation relations with Libya, according to the MIREM project at the Robert Schumann Centre for Advanced Studies in the European University Institute in Florence (http://www.mirem.eu/donnees/accords/libye). Libya signed a repatriation agreement on 13 December 2000, which came into operation in 2002, a further agreement on 3 July 2003, a memorandum of understanding on 18 January 2006 and a police cooperation agreement on 29 December 2007. At least one of these agreements concerned the abortive project to create Italian-financed and Libyan-controlled ‘repatriation camps’ in Libya, a project that was abandoned over human rights concerns (Paoletti 2009). Malta signed a police cooperation agreement with Libya in 1984, which came into operation in 2001, and Britain has signed a memorandum of understanding, connected with the British desire to deport persons suspected of terrorism as well as illegal migrants, on 18 October 2005 but it is not in operation because of domestic legal issues in Britain. Spain and Ukraine are negotiating about cooperation agreements as well.
Tanzanian reports of the decisive Battle of Lukaya in southern Uganda claimed that the force suffered 600 dead and only 57 prisoners were eventually repatriated via Algeria. Remaining Libyan forces only escaped destruction because Tanzanian forces, on instructions from Tanzania's president, Julius Nyrere, allowed them to flee (Folz Citation1988, pp. 62–63).
It had been able to gain favourable judgements in its maritime delimitations with Tunisia (1982) and Malta (1985).
‘pacta sunt servanda’ rather than ‘rebus sic standibus’.
There is an interesting first-hand account of the way in which the negotiations were carried out in Ben-Halim (Citation1994, pp. 165–171).
In an interesting comment on Libya's ties in Africa, whether political, social or diplomatic, Colonel Abdulhafidh was married to Goukouni Oueddei's sister.
Brazil, Russia, India and China and, by extension, Latin America, South-East Asia and Russia's own ‘near abroad’ – the Caucasus and Central Asia.
