Domestic Conquest: Land Reform and Bounded Rationality in the Middle East Matthew E. Goldman A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2015 Reading Committee: Reşat Kasaba, Chair Elizabeth Kier Clark Lombardi Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Near & Middle Eastern Studies ©Copyright 2015 Matthew E. Goldman University of Washington Abstract Domestic Conquest: Land Reform and Bounded Rationality in the Middle East Matthew E. Goldman Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Reşat Kasaba Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies This dissertation examines the rise and fall of projects for land reform - the redistribution of agricultural land from large landowners to those owning little or none - in the Middle East in the mid 20th century, focusing on Egypt, Iraq, Palestine/Israel, Syria, and Turkey. Following the end of World War II, local political elites and foreign advisors alike began to argue that land reform constituted a necessary first rung on the ladder of modernization, a step that would lead to political consolidation, development, industrialization, and even democratization. Unfortunately, many land reform projects resulted in grave disappointments, leading to reduced agricultural output, increased rural poverty, political conflict, and more authoritarian rather than more democratic forms of government. As many policymakers and development experts themselves came to understand, an underlying cause of these problems was their failure to adjust land reform models to account for crucial variations in local political, economic, and ecological conditions. Using a method of similarity approach, this project asks why land reform projects so often sought to apply imported models in vastly different local contexts and then failed to adequately adjust these policy models to suit local realities. Through the examination of texts produced by international land reform advisors and local political elites, including books, parliamentary debates, letters from archival collections, diplomatic correspondence, academic works, and published articles, I trace the decision-making processes that led to the land reform programs and their failures. Drawing on research in cognitive psychology and bounded rationality, I argue that mistakes occurred under the influence of certain cognitive heuristics, i.e., inherent human biases in information processing. Policymakers and policy shapers often chose inappropriate land reform models because their attention was focused on high profile countries’ land reform programs, leading them to downplay differences such as low administrative capacity, relative lack of irrigation water, and threat of soil salinization. Describing an understudied episode in the political, social, and economic development of the postcolonial world, this dissertation offers a new empirical look at the roots of conflict in the Middle East while testing a political psychology argument for recurrent problems in the spread of development projects. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………......ii Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter 1: Bounded Rationality and Land Reform: Explaining the Rise and Fall of a Policy Model…………………………………………………………………………………………….15 Chapter 2: We Must Conquer the Country from Within: The Quest for Land Reform in Turkey …………………………………………………………………………………………...56 Chapter 3: Diminishing Returns: Land Reform in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq……………………....95 Chapter 4: Land Reform and Agrarianism in the Zionist Imagination…………………………126 Chapter 5: The Ideational Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy……………………………168 Conclusions……………………………………………………………………………………..201 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………210 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS By now it is certainly a tired cliché for an author to introduce a work with the claim that this is not the project he or she originally intended to write, but in my case I feel that I have earned the right. I came to the Interdisciplinary PhD in Near and Middle Eastern Studies at UW- Seattle some years back as a student of literature, planning to compare novels critiquing the failures of nationalist and development projects in the Middle East in the 1970s and 1980s. Looking back now as I submit this dissertation, an interdisciplinary social science work engaging primarily with the political science subfield of comparative politics, I feel boundless gratitude to both the people and the program that allowed my miraculous transformation from literary scholar to political scientist. I can see now that though my disciplinary focus and methodology changed radically, my main theme - disappointing projects for social transformation - remained the same. Perhaps these wise souls saw that too, and that’s why they let me find my own way. So I will begin by thanking Reşat Kasaba and Joel Migdal for leading the interdisciplinary program through thick and thin, and Jean Rogers for being the best program coordinator a person could ask for. However, this is hardly the extent of my debt to Reşat Kasaba, who over the course of my doctoral studies has served triple duty as chair of my committee, director of my program, and organizer of the invaluable Turkish Circle, a study group brings together the amazing community of students of Turkey that Seattle has managed to attract. (To other schools: you should be so lucky.) Throughout the twists and turns in my dissertation writing process and despite his considerably taxing duties as head of the Jackson School for International Studies, Reşat has iii always remained been wise, supportive, and there for me. For this I am both extremely lucky, and extremely grateful. To Elizabeth Kier, my gratitude knows no bounds. Her class on International Security opened my eyes to political science, and I have been hooked ever since. A fantastic scholar and an inspiring mentor, Beth has always pushed me to work harder and to aim higher. Her patience, her encouragement, her willingness to share her vast knowledge, and her genuine enthusiasm for understanding the political have been models for me. If I am a political scientist today, I can say it is all her fault. Clark Lombardi has long been a beacon of light to me, since my first fortuitous encounter with him serving as a research assistant on a project on Egyptian constitutions. He never ceases to impress me with his energy, his intellect, his passion, his range, his engagement, and his ability to keep it real. Trips to his office always brought me that much-needed ray of Manhattan sunshine, piercing even the grayest of Seattle afternoons. Jamie Mayerfeld is an amazing scholar of human rights and an amazing person, and the best Graduate School Representative (GSR) in the long and august history of that institution. I am grateful that he generously shares his thoughts and brings attention to critical human rights issues on social media, allowing me to continue to learn from him no matter how far from Seattle my travels take me. Follow him on Facebook: it will make you a better person. Special thanks also to a host of other great minds at the University of Washington- Seattle: Selim Kuru and Naomi Sokoloff for generous help early in my project, Gad Barzilai and Joel Migdal for help along the way, and Jonathan Mercer and Ellis Goldberg for being both brilliant and inspirational. Keep that knowledge coming. iv A huge thank you to all those at the institutions that funded this project: the US Department of Education’s Foreign Language and Area Studies grants, the Institute of Turkish Studies, the Graduate School Fund for Excellence and Innovation, the Chester Fritz Endowment, the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations department, and the Dorot Travel grant. Thanks also to all those helpful people at the archives and institutions where this research was conducted: the Başbakanlık archives in Ankara and Istanbul, the American Research Institute in Turkey, the Swedish Research Institute-Istanbul, the US National Archives in College Park, Maryland, the Beinecke collection at Yale University, and the New York Public Library. Thanks to the wonderful people at the Swedish Research Institute-Istanbul, where I finished writing this project, shocking the Swedes in the last weeks by working what were well beyond six-hour work days. Hats off to Johan Mårtelius, Önver Çetrez, Helin Topal, and Birgitta Kurultay. Another round of thank you’s to everyone at Lund University’s Center for Middle East Studies, where I was fortunate to spend many happy hours as a guest researcher: Leif Stenberg, Mark LeVine, Spyros Sofos, and Umut Özkırımlı. And of course, thank you also to my partner’s parents Ingmar and Margareta Karlsson, who not only made Lund feel like home, but actually made it home. Tack så mycket to you all. Finally, the long (and tactfully alphabetized) list of wonderful friends, brilliant minds, and fellow travellers whose help and conversation helped me to see the light at the end of the tunnel and to convince me it was not just an oncoming train: Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano, Hind Ahmed Zaki, Cihan Artunç, Assaf Ashraf, Waiel Ashry, Senem Aslan, Esra Bakkalbaşıoğlu, Idan Barir, Ceren Belge, Amund Bjørsnøs, John Buchanan, Marina Cacioppo, Eduardo Chemin, Karam Dana, Nick Danforth, Mike DeGerald, Rıza Dervişoğlu, James DiGiovanna, Olav Elgvin, Evrim Görmüş, Chris Gratien, Fouad Halbouni, Didem Havlioğlu, Charles Häberl, Helena v Hermansson, Chris Heurlin, Mike Iveson, Jens and Sahra Jacobsen, Turan Kayaoğlu, Filiz