The Foreign Policies Of Arab States

The Challenge Of Change

Bahgat Korany, Ali El-Din Hillal Dessouki

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367292218
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000301502
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Middle East politics have been proverbial for their changeability. The 1970s ushered in petro-politics, for instance, but OPEC's international status declined markedly in the following decade. Similarly, the Arab world's ostracism of Egypt in the 1970s following its separate peace with Israel was turned around in the 1980s; the late 1980s also brought PLO acceptance of the State of Israel. Interstate relations were not the only arena to experience significant alterations; state-society relations also underwent dramatic changes, such as the acceleration of privatization in erstwhile socialist regimes. Then the 1990s opened with a political earthquake: the Gulf Crisis. The second edition of this highly acclaimed text offers a penetrating analysis of trends in Arab foreign policies since the book was originally published in 1984, including an early analysis of the effects of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent coalition victory over Iraq. In addition, the authors have included new chapters on Jordan—at the heart of the Arab world—and on the Sudan—the region's link to sub-Saharan Africa. Their inclusion allows a fuller understanding of the foreign policies of states that occupy crucial geopolitical positions but wield little tangible power. Moreover, in many of its chapters the book raises the crucial question of how the foreign policies of these countries can cope with the prevalence of political change.

1
A Literature Survey and a Framework for Analysis

Ali E. Hillal Dessouki Bahgat Korany

This book deals with the foreign policies of a number of developing or Third World actors. The study of developing countries' foreign policies has often been described as "underdeveloped" or "undeveloped." We have no intention of adding to the confusion of theories, models, and analytical frameworks already existing in the field. The objectives of this introductory chapter are rather: (1) to summarize the main trends and approaches in the study of developing countries' foreign policies, (2) to survey the literature on Arab foreign policies, and (3) to suggest a framework for analysis that takes into account the major conceptual contributions in foreign policy theory in the last two decades.

The Foreign Policy of Development: Approaches to the Study of Developing Countries' Foreign Policies

For a long time the analysis of developing countries' foreign policies was dominated by three approaches:¹

1. The psychologistic approach views foreign policy as a function of the impulses and idiosyncrasies of a single leader. According to this view, kings and presidents are the source of foreign policy; war and peace become a matter of personal taste and individual choice. Foreign policy is perceived not as an activity designed to achieve national or societal goals but, as E. Shills wrote in 1962, as "a policy of public relations"² whose objectives are to improve the image of the state, enhance the popularity of the leader, and divert attention from domestic troubles to illusory external victories.

There are at least three criticisms of this view. First, it makes foreign policy appear to be an erratic, irrational activity not subject to systematic analysis. Second, it ignores the context (domestic, regional, and global) within which foreign policy is formulated and implemented. There are certain systemic constraints that most leaders will not or cannot usually challenge. Third, it ignores the fact that because of their interest in political survival, most leaders downplay eccentricities that run counter to dominant attitudes, public mood, and political realities. For instance, in 1970-1973 President Anwar Al-Sadat of Egypt concealed his dislike of the Soviets in his public pronouncements. He even accused Egyptian critics of the Soviet Union of being traitors to the cause of the homeland. Under different circumstances (discussed in Chapter 5), Egyptian policies became increasingly influenced by Sadat's personal feelings. It has been argued that only those idiosyncrasies that neither challenge prevailing values nor threaten a regime's stability are likely to be expressed in foreign policy.

We cannot rule out idiosyncratic variables in many developing countries, but what is more important is to analyze how the context of policy-making encourages certain leadership types and not others; how it allows certain idiosyncrasies but not others; and how a leader's idiosyncrasies may alter the context, affecting the foreign policy orientation of other leaders.³

2. The great powers approach, dominant among traditionalists such as Hans Morgenthau,⁴ views foreign policy as a function of East-West conflict. Briefly stated, the foreign policies of developing countries are seen as lacking autonomy; affected by external stimuli, they react to initiatives and situations created by external forces. The main weakness of this approach is its neglect of domestic sources of foreign policy. Moreover, it implies that developing countries lack purposeful foreign policies of their own.

3. The reductionist or model-builders approach⁵ views the foreign policies of the developing countries as determined by the same processes and decisional calculi that shape the foreign policies of developed countries. The basic difference is quantitative; the former have fewer resources and capabilities and therefore conduct foreign policy on a smaller scale. This view is predicated on the assumption that the behavior of all states (big and small, rich and poor, developed and developing) follows a rational actor model of decision-making; that all states seek to enhance their power, and that all are motivated by security factors. The conclusion is that the foreign policies of developing countries are exactly like those of the developed ones, but at a lower level of material resources. This approach does not account for specific features of the developing countries such as modernization, the low level of political institutionalization at home, and dependency status in the global stratification system abroad.

Since the 1970s, students of Third World countries' foreign policies have looked beyond the idiosyncrasy variable to consider the structural factors of these societies. They have sought to identify the specific features of these societies that distinguish them from developed societies and to apply more rigorous analytical frameworks. These efforts have resulted in more interaction between students of comparative politics and foreign policy analysis—enriching both subdisciplines—and more interaction between theorists and those engaged in field research.⁶ The net outcome has been the emergence of a new body of literature on what can be called "the foreign policy of development."

One common element of the new literature is the emphasis on domestic sources of foreign policy and on how the processes of modernization and social change affect the external behavior of developing countries. East and Hagen, for example, underline the resource factors, distinguishing between size factors (absolute amount of available resources) and modernization factors (the ability to mobilize, control, and use these resources). Modernization is perceived as the process by which states increase their capability to control and use their resources. The more modernized states thus have a greater capacity to act.⁷ A second example is Weinstein's pioneering work on Indonesia, in which he defines three foreign policy objectives: defense of the nation's independence against perceived threats, mobilization of external resources for the country's development, and the achievement of objectives related to domestic politics (e.g., isolating one's political opponents from their foreign supporters, lending legitimacy to domestic political demands, and creating symbols of nationalism and national unity).⁸

An equally important element in the new literature is the emphasis on the political economy of an actor's position in the global stratification system. In this context, inequality becomes a core focus, for developing countries exist in a world social order characterized by inequality between states at the levels of socioeconomic development, military capability, political stability, and prestige. This results in the penetration of developing countries' decision-making processes from the outside, with external actors participating authoritatively in the allocation of resources and the determination of national goals.⁹ Much has been written on the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), international private banks, multinational corporations, and the big powers' foreign aid in this regard.¹⁰ The situation in most developing countries is characterized by domination and unequal exchange. It is a dependency situation involving highly asymmetrical patterns of transactions between states.

A proper analysis of the foreign policies of Third World countries should accept that foreign policy is part and parcel of the general situation of the Third World and reflects the evolution of this situation. In this sense, the foreign policy process cannot be separated from the domestic social structure or domestic political process. To understand a country's foreign policy, we have to open the "black box" of Third World society. The countries of the Third World are part and parcel of a world system; they are greatly affected by international stratification and inequality. Formal state sovereignty notwithstanding, a Third World society can be permeated, penetrated, and even dominated. It is thus important to see how external constraints and global structures (e.g., relations with big powers or multinational companies) affect its foreign policy-making process as well as its international behavior.

From reviewing the literature, it seems that developing countries are faced by three major issues in the conduct of their foreign policies. The first is the aid/independence dilemma, i.e., the trade-off between the need for foreign aid and the maintenance of national independence. Some leaders, such as Nasser, Nkrumah, and Sukarno, have been more concerned with independence; others, such as Sadat or Suharto, have attached more importance to foreign aid. The difference in emphasis cannot be understood only in terms of social background and political values; other structural factors, such as the characteristics of the global system, perceived security threats, and economic problems, are of equal importance.

The second issue is the resources/objectives dilemma, which is more pressing in developing than in developed countries. It refers to the ability of foreign policy-makers to pursue objectives within the realm of their country's capabilities. This seems a commonsense proposition; but examples abound of countries pursuing unfeasible objectives. In the 1940s, King Abdallah of tiny Transjordan followed an activist policy for unity with Syria; in the 1950s, Iraq, despite an obvious imbalance of resources, projected itself as an alternative to Egyptian regional leadership; and in the 1960s Egyptian resources were drained by the protracted war in Yemen against Saudi Arabia.

Third is the security/development dilemma, a modern version of the age-old guns-or-butter debate. Some scholars perceive foreign policy primarily as a process or an activity whose main objective is the mobilization of external resources for the sake of societal development. Students of Egypt's foreign policy, for instance, cannot escape this conclusion. Sadat's rapprochement with the United States and peace with Israel were motivated by economic troubles at home and the desire to attract foreign investment, as demonstrated in Chapter 5. For other states, such as Syria, threat perceptions and security considerations remain the paramount factors in their foreign policy, as shown in Chapter 12.

Although security threats of a military nature cannot be overlooked, particularly in regions—such as the Middle East and southern Africa—experiencing endemic long-standing conflicts, for most developing countries the real security threat is hunger and malnutrition. In its third annual report on world development in 1980, the World Bank stated that 78 million people are living in absolute poverty. The number likely increased in the 1980s because of the worsening economic outlook for developing nations and because of population growth. The earth's present population of 5 billion is expected to reach 6 billion by the end of the century. One of the most explosive forces in many developing countries is the frustrated desire of poor people to attain a decent standard of living. Poverty, population explosion, failure of developmental efforts, and food insecurity lie at the heart of the national security issue for these countries. Consequently, the concept of national security must be redefined and broadened to include nonmilitary as well as military threats.

The Study of Arab Foreign Policies

1965–1981

The "underdeveloped study of underdeveloped countries" is nowhere more clearly demonstrated than in the analysis of Arab foreign policy, as conclusions reached in the late 1970s by nine specialists dealing with the Third World indicate.¹¹ As stated in 1977 by one of the present coauthors, "the systematic analysis of foreign policy in the Middle East is an underdeveloped area of study. Only in the last few years have academics undertaken foreign policy studies of Middle Eastern states."¹²

To go beyond general impressions and get a data-based view of the state of the art for foreign policy studies of the Arab countries, we conducted a survey of the literature for the seventeen-year period from 1965 to 1981. Books published on Arab foreign policies can be counted on one's fingers. Consequently, we inventoried articles from various periodicals as well as some unpublished Ph.D. dissertations.

Four initial criteria served as guidelines in selecting items for inclusion.

1. The item should go beyond pure information to shed light on the conceptual and empirical issues in the field of foreign policy analysis.
2. The item should be a scholarly work rather than one adopting a "propagandistic" or "current affairs" approach.
3. Consequently, the search for survey items should be restricted to the pages of well-established specialized journals.
4. Selection would be limited to those items published in English or French.

The strict application of these criteria—laudable as they were—resulted in a harvest of items too scanty to be informative or useful. Indeed, the scarcity of scholarly and systematic works on Arab foreign policy during a seventeen-year period is in itself a telling condemnation of the state of this subfield. We subsequently amended our criteria, making some realistic modifications. Rather than limiting ourselves to purely scholarly publications, we added periodicals dealing with current affairs but still possessing a recognized status among students o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 A Literature Survey and a Framework for Analysis
• 2 The Global System and Arab Foreign Policies: The Primacy of Constraints
• 3 The Arab System: Pressures, Constraints, and Opportunities
• 4 From Revolution to Domestication: The Foreign Policy of Algeria
• 5 The Primacy of Economics: The Foreign Policy of Egypt
• 6 The Dialectics of Domestic Environment and Role Performance: The Foreign Policy of Iraq
• 7 The Politics of Vulnerability and Survival: The Foreign Policy of Jordan
• 8 Heroic Politics: The Foreign Policy of Libya
• 9 The Survival of a Nonstate Actor: The Foreign Policy of the Palestine Liberation Organization
• 10 Defending the Faith amid Change: The Foreign Policy of Saudi Arabia
• 11 The Foreign Policy of a Fragmented Polity: The Case of Sudan
• 12 Revisionist Dreams, Realist Strategies: The Foreign Policy of Syria
• 13 Arab Foreign Policies in a Changing Environment
• List of Abbreviations
• About the Book and Authors
• About the Contributors
• Index