244 A Short History of the Middle East
In Turkey the Kemalist national revolution introduced a large
measure of state-control in industry1 and created a privileged class
of senior civil-servants with an interest in the maintenance of the
new regime. But since the death of Ataturk and particularly
during the Second World War the state machinery has not worked
too well. There has been a good deal of waste and inefficiency and
some of the old corruption, which Ataturk tried ruthlessly to sup-
press, has crept back again. This helps to account for the emer-
gence in 1946 of the so-called Democratic party in opposition to the
People's party founded by Ataturk which, unlike many totali-
tarian parties elsewhere, has always admitted in principle and has
recently permitted in fact the existence of legal opposition parties,
unwilling as it may be to see them attain power. The Democratic
party consists in the main of well-to-do merchants and traders who
desire greater economic freedom and the abolition of the state
monopolies which restrict their trading activities.
While Egypt and Turkey have advanced some distance towards
middle-class rule, in the countries of the Fertile Crescent the land-
owning and mercantile class is still predominant politically, and a
distinct middle-class is only in an early stage of emergence. The
governments of these countries are formed almost exclusively from
the upper-class. A striking feature of political life in Syria (and to
a lesser degree in Lebanon) is the manner in which the great land-
owners exert their influence and pursue their rivalries by means of
armed retainers, for all the world like medieval barons, except that
automatic weapons are now the vogue and that the ballot-box
plays a curious and unreal role on this Montagu-and-Capulet
scene. In 1943, for example, the Lebanese cabinet-minister Majid
Arlan raised his Druze henchmen in the mountains against the
French; early in 1946 Bedouin deputies drew revolvers and fired
several shots in the Syrian Chamber to intimidate a critic; in March
1947 the most recent of many clashes between two rival factions in
Tripoli was reported to have caused the deaths of fifteen to twenty
persons. During the Mandatory period the French were probably
1 This was not a matter of political ideology. 'Kemalist Turkey, intent on
liberating the country from foreign economic control, made one of its main con-
cerns the transfer to Turkish hands of the principal national sources of wealth
and industries. As private capital was scarce the State had to take a hand in the
process.. . . Thus the State found itself quite inadvertently committed to a
policy of a State-Socialism owning or controlling the principal industries,
communications, mines, and banks/ (Times Correspondent in Turkey, 13
May 1947.)