Rich And Poor States In The Middle East

Egypt And The New Arab Order

Malcolm H. Kerr, El Sayed Yassin, Jeswald Salacuse, Ismail Serageldin

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367286064
• eBook ISBN: 9781000310122
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

While oil wealth has enriched some Middle East Arab nations, others that lack oil resources have remained poor and are looking now to their oil-rich neighbors for development assistance. This collection of studies on the economic, social, and political relationships between the haves and the have-nots in the Middle East focuses on Egypt-the largest state in the region-and on its prospects for change based on financial assistance from other Arab countries.The authors have many disagreements about the future of both rich and poor nations in the Middle East and considerable skepticism about the possibility of transforming Egypt, but they do agree that the future must be projected in the framework of a new regional order in which oil wealth, labor migration, and liberalized national economies are fundamental realities.

Part One
The New Arab Social Order

II
Oil, Migration and the New Arab Social Order

Saad Eddin Ibrahim

I. Introduction

Social orders reproduce themselves with every new generation. But with each reproduction, varying degrees of alteration or even mutation take place. The Arab social order is no exception. Since the traumatic rediscovery of the West by the Arabs at the end of the 18th century and the subsequent penetration by the West into the Arab homeland, four big waves of social change have left their profound impacts on the Arab social structure. The colonial experience, modern science and technology, the national struggle for emancipation, and oil are the hallmarks of the four tidal waves and their chain reactions in the transformation of Arab society.¹ Every Arab generation since the 1800s has experienced the collapse of one or more aspects of the pre-modern social order, and the gestation, difficult labor and occasional caesarian birth of a new one. There have been many false pregnancies and several miscarriages. But through it all the old structures never disappeared—they continued to coexist, albeit in a crumpled or twisted form, with new or caricaturized modern structures. The continuous interplay between elements of the old and the new has given the Arab world a permanent state of "transition" for the last two centuries. Every generation believed it was the bearer of the burdens of transition, and occasionally felt trapped or victimized by it.

The Arab social order in the 1980s is a product of previous orders intersecting with regional and global events of the previous two decades. The symbolic point of its emergence may date back to the Arab defeat of 1967, to the death of Nasir in 1970, or to the Arab sense of triumph in their fourth war with Israel in 1973.² But whatever the hypothetical conception point of the new order, oil has been its underlying factor. As a salient substructural force, oil has not only altered the global relation between the Arabs and the rest of the world, but has also triggered manifest as well as latent forces of change in the inter-Arab equation, within each Arab society, and inside most men and women of the Arab world. To be sure, oil has been affecting the social landscape in a score of producing countries for the previous three decades. But it is in the last ten years that the oil-related social changes have been phenomenally accelerated within those countries and have spilled over dramatically into neighboring countries. In this sense, it is justifiable to speak of one Arab social order—the chain of causation begins in some countries and ends up in others, and vice versa.

It would be an oversimplification to attribute all features of the new Arab social order to oil. But it is not an exaggeration to contend that oil is one of the most important factors in giving this order its unique characteristics. In this sense, we submit that oil in its own right has triggered as many qualitative and quantitative changes as did each of the three previous waves—colonialism, the introduction of science and technology, and the national struggle for liberation.

The new Arab social order, of which we propose to analyze one aspect in this chapter, is still emerging; that is, it is in a continuous state of flux. Thus the word "order" should not imply "orderliness", "congruency" or "harmony". If anything, early indications point to marked tension, conflict, and inconsistencies in the new Arab social order. It is an "order", nevertheless, insofar as its elements are linked to and affect one another. This new order may be held together by fear or trust, love or hate, national unifiers or subcultural diversifies, or by a combination of them all. But it is held together with constant internal motion even if it seems to outsiders to be immobile.

When we assert that oil has been a major determinant of the new social order it should of course be realized that we are talking not simply about oil as a raw material. It is all the multi-facets of this strategic substance-i.e., as an energy source, technology, money, geopolitics, and manpower. The interaction among all these facets on one hand, and the existing social structures on the other, has produced a host of socio-cultural changes which we are subsuming under the label "new order". It includes the emergence of new social formations (e.g., classes, status groups), new demographic allocations and dislocations, new values and normative systems, new behavioral patterns, and new lines of conflict.

The major societal dynamics to which these new socio-cultural products are traceable may be summed up in one phrase: movement of manpower and money across country borders caused by oil. The volume, pattern, causes and consequences of this movement are analyzed in this chapter.

Egypt and Saudi Arabia will be our focal points of reference. They epitomize the salient features of the new Arab social order. One, Egypt, is overpopulated, poor, with surplus labor, tremendous capacity to absorb capital of which she possesses very little, and with fairly well developed manpower and social institutions. The other, Saudi Arabia, is underpopulated, with a shortage of labor, limited capacity to absorb capital of which there is plenty, and with underdeveloped manpower and only the embryonic genesis of modern institutions. The two countries, in many ways, represent opposite ends of one bi-polar social order in the Arab world at present.

The Arab world has had several revolutions in this century. Some have been loud with sounds of fury. Others have been silent. Loud or silent, a revolution is primarily defined by its impact. Oil and movement of manpower and money across country lines are one of the Arab world's silent revolutions. Its impact is the birth of a new Arab social order.

II. Inter-Arab Labor Migration: An Overview

The new Arab social order has been shaped by the intersection of oil wealth and the already existing demographic and socio-economic structures of various countries of the Arab world. Manpower movement among the Arab countries in recent years is a manifestation, a product, and a reinforcer of the new social order. Through an investigation of inter-Arab labor migration (henceforth ALM), many ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• I. Introduction: Egypt in the Shadow of the Gulf
• PART ONE: THE NEW ARAB SOCIAL ORDER
• PART TWO: THE NEW ARAB ECONOMIC ORDER
• PART THREE: THE NEW ARAB POLITICAL ORDER
• Index
• The Contributors