The international politics of the Middle East

Second edition

Raymond Hinnebusch

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781784992026
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

One of the major internationally recognised works on the international politics of the Middle East, this book systematically combines International Relations theory and Middle East case studies to provide a macro overview of the international relations of the region. The book has been widely used at both undergraduate levels, Masters degree and PhD levels. In providing a unique interpretation of Middle East North African (MENA) international politics, it will also be valuable for scholars of the region. The book provide readers with both theoretical and concrete information, with theoretically-framed major topics, liberally illustrated with case study material on key dimensions of regional politics. Topics include the place of the Middle East in the wider global system; the role of Arabism and Islam in regional politics; the impact of state formation in the region on its international relations; comparative foreign policy making looking at pivotal country cases, including Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Turkey; major regional wars and efforts at order building; the role of US hegemony and the two Iraq wars; and the impact of the Arab Uprising on regional politics.

1

Introduction to the international politics of the Middle East

This book and the study of the Middle East

This study takes the Middle East to be constituted around an Arab core, with a shared identity but fragmented into multiple territorial states; the core is flanked by a periphery of non-Arab states – Turkey, Iran and Israel – which are an integral part of the region’s conflicts and its balance of power (Cantori and Spiegel 1970; Ismael 1986: 5–13). Because the Middle East’s unique features defy analyses based on any one conceptual approach to international relations, this study will deploy a combination of several to capture its complex reality.

The book’s approach to understanding Middle East/North Africa (MENA) international politics might be called ‘complex realism’. It starts with realist basics since Middle Eastern policy-makers are quintessential realists, preoccupied with the threats that are so pervasive in MENA. The Middle East is arguably the epi-centre of world crisis, chronically war-prone and the site of the world’s most protracted conflicts: it is the region where the anarchy and insecurity seen by the realist school of international politics as the main feature of states systems remains most in evidence. The book therefore accepts the realist claim that insecurity generates struggles for power and that state foreign policy seeks to counter security threats, first of all, to regime survival, but also to state interests such as sovereignty and territorial integrity. Because it specialises in explaining the central aspects of international politics – power, war, alliances, international order – realism offers unique insights into the dynamics of inter-state relations in the region.

Yet several realist assumptions are problematic in MENA. First, realism assumes the formation of cohesive Westphalian states pursuing agreed ‘national interests’ but this can be misleading in MENA where many states are so fragmented and their sovereignty so compromised by dependency that their foreign policies might reflect regime interests but not ‘national’ interests; and whether MENA states approximate realist ‘rational actors’ is highly contingent on a process of state formation that is very much incomplete. Second, realism’s assumption that conflict is chiefly the by-product of a states system’s anarchy misses the main causes of the Middle East’s exceptional war and instability, namely the peculiar historical construction of the regional system under imperialism, which left behind a misfit between identity and territory that built irredentism into the system. Third, neo-realism’s assumption that states’ international behaviour is chiefly determined by the inter-state system is inadequate to understand the Middle East; rather the ‘environment’ in which MENA states operate is multi-layered, with realism’s inter-state system embedded in a global hierarchy and in regional trans-state identities. Finally, while the international system is, for realism, largely unchanging, except for the distribution of power among states, in MENA the ever-changing relative weight of these levels continually alters the dynamics of regional politics.

Thus, while realism gives important insights into the dynamics of the regional inter-state system, with its balance of (material) power among states, to understand the other dimensions of the regional system, we need to bring in other theories. Marxist-inspired ‘structuralism’ identifies the place of the MENA system in the global hierarchy, namely in the economic periphery, dependent on the international capitalist core. It shows how the region’s penetrated client states behave quite differently from fully sovereign states. Constructivists help us understand the trans-state level where identity matters: in the Middle East, sub- and supra-state identities compete with state identity, inspire trans-state movements and constrain purely state-centric behaviour. Constructivism’s insistence that systemic structures are not just material configurations of power and wealth and include the cultural norms that derive from identity helps us to understand how the region’s powerful supra-state identities lead to a unique contestation of state sovereignty. The ideas of historical sociology (HS) on state formation and particularly how states and state systems are mutually constitutive, offer indispensable insights into change in the regional system: not just how the system shapes the nature of the states but also how the kind of states – their levels of state formation – that dominate a system shapes its dynamics. Finally, we need, with Foreign Policy Analysis, to open the black box of decision-making for, as realists themselves acknowledge, how states respond to environmental pressures is a product of internal leadership and policy processes.

The following lays out the book’s framework of analysis, identifying the main issues to be treated and approaches that will be deployed in subsequent chapters; the order in which these issues are discussed begins with the most macro and proceeds to the more micro, then returns to the macro level.

Core–periphery relations: MENA in the world hierarchy

According to structuralist analysis, the world system is not, as realism imagines, a pure anarchy, but has features of a hierarchy, with the global hegemon at the top and regions such as MENA located toward the bottom. The Middle East, once an independent civilisation headed by its own great power, the Ottoman empire, was turned, under imperialism, into a periphery of the Western dominated world system. This resulted, in the view of structuralism, from the drive of the ‘hegemon’ of the time, the UK, to force open non-capitalist economies and incorporate them into the world capitalist system as peripheries of the Western core (Callinicos 2009; Wallerstein 1974). Thereafter, nationalism forced a certain retreat by Western imperialism but, even after nominal independence, MENA, as the location of both Israel and of the world’s concentrated petroleum reserves, remained an exceptional magnet for external intervention, led by the subsequent American hegemon, which, in turn, kept anti-imperialist nationalism alive long after de-colonisation. The region remains, as Brown (1984) argues, a uniquely ‘penetrated system’.

A starting point for understanding the persistence of highly unequal core–periphery relations, even after the retreat of imperial armies from the region, is Galtung’s (1971) ‘structural model of imperialism’. In his view, two mechanisms sustain penetration by the Western ‘core’: (1) the core created and left behind client elites and classes that have an interest in dependent relations and (2) regional states were linked to the core, in feudal-like north–south relations, while horizontal (south–south) relations were shattered. Indeed, imperialism’s fragmentation of the Middle East into a multitude of weak states dependent on core states for security against each other, and its division of the formerly existing regional market into small economies exporting primary products to the core and dependent on manufacturing imports from it, approximates Galtung’s model. According to Moon (1995), the effect of such a structure on the foreign policy-making of dependent states is to create a ‘constrained consensus’ from the overlap of local elites’ economic interests, worldviews (through Western education) and threat perceptions (fear of radical movements) with those of core elites. As a result, rather than balancing against intrusive external power, as realism might expect, dependent elites typically ‘bandwagon’ with a global patron to contain more immediate regional or domestic threats. Although a hierarchy, this structure is not a relation of command, but, rather, a patron–client system in which, however asymmetric, there is always an exchange in which the patron supplies resources and protection and the client gives political support. This sharply limits the autonomy of the client, which, in major crises, must support its patron, regardless of the wishes of regional populations; but there is otherwise always room for bargaining with the patron, particularly when, as during the Cold War, clients could threaten to switch patrons.

Indeed, core–periphery relations merely set the outside parameters within which Middle East regional politics are conducted. Moreover, far from being static, they are constantly contested and have regularly stimulated anti-imperialist movements, which, where they took state power, attempted to restructure these relations. Whether nationalist states can do this, however, depends on systemic structures. When there is a hegemonic power (UK, US) able to ‘lay down the law’ on behalf of the world capitalist system (in the Middle East ensuring core access to cheap energy), and especially if the regional system is simultaneously divided (the usual condition as Galtung details), external powers can exploit local rivalries to sustain their penetration of the region. Conversely, when the core was split, as under Cold War bi-polarity, nationalist states were able to exploit superpower rivalry to win protection, aid and arms from the number-two state, the USSR, enabling them to pursue nationalist foreign policies and dilute economic dependency. Moreover, as Thompson (1970) has shown, the Middle East is a partial exception to Galtung’s feudal model in that, while fragmented economically and politically, it enjoys trans-state cultural unity which nationalist states have exploited to mobilise regional solidarity against the core. Thus, the conjuncture of the Cold War and the spread of Pan-Arabism allowed Nasser’s Egypt to sufficiently roll back imperialist influence to establish a relatively autonomous regional system. Briefly, Galtung’s normal global structure was turned on its head, with the core split and the MENA periphery united. Additionally, in the rise of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), south–south solidarity produced exceptional financial power that, while failing ultimately to raise the region from the economic periphery, arguably transformed the position of the swing oil producer, Saudi Arabia, from dependence into asymmetric interdependence.

However, favourable conditions for regional autonomy were, particularly with the end of the oil boom and Cold War, largely reversed. The West’s restored ability to intervene militarily (e.g. in two wars against Iraq) and impose economic sanctions and loan conditionality revived key features of the age of imperialism at the expense of regional autonomy. As such, although structuralism expects on-going challenges to the core–periphery structure, it is pessimistic about the effectiveness of agency by regional actors to restructure the system in which they are embedded. Nevertheless, no analysis of the international politics of the region can be convincing that does not take account of the impact of the on-going struggle for regional autonomy from external control.

Between identity and sovereignty: the flawed construction of the regional system

If there is one thing that distinguishes the Middle East states system it is the powerful role of non-state identities. In the Westphalian states system, on which the Middle East regional system was ostensibly modelled, the principle of state sovereignty is usually accompanied by a rough correspondence of identity and territory. The consequent ‘nation-state’ provides the basis of the state’s legitimacy and underlies acceptance of the norm of sovereignty. This correspondence is assumed by realists to make possible a relative consensus on the national interest that is thought to shape a state’s foreign policy.

In the Middle East, however, imperialism’s arbitrary imposition of state boundaries produced a substantial incongruence between territory and identity, with the result that loyalty to the state has been contested by sub-state and supra-state identities. One result was weak states debilitated by enduring legitimacy deficits. Territory-identity incongruence also built irredentism into the fabric of the system: in many states, the trans-state connections of sub-state groups and dissatisfaction with borders generated protracted conflicts which spilled over in state–sub-state or inter-state wars, e.g. the role of the Kurds in conflicts between Turkey and Syria, Iran and Iraq. Equally important, as constructivist analysis showed (Barnett 1998), Pan-Arab norms deriving from a shared supra-state identity became as important in shaping Arab state behaviour as the distribution of material power stressed by realism. State leaders were at least partially socialised into roles: a proper Arab state defends regional autonomy from the West, promotes the Palestine cause and co-operates with other Arab states for the common interest. Pan-Islam holds to similar norms. The contradiction between the global norm of sovereignty, in which state interests are legitimately the priority of foreign policy, and the regional norms of Pan-Arabism or Pan-Islam, which expect these interests to be compatible with the values of the indigenous supra-state identity community, have caught Arab foreign policy-making elites, in Korany’s (1988: 165) words, between the logics of raison d’état and of ‘raison de la nation’. While they have tenaciously defended the sovereignty of their individual states, legitimacy at home has depended on their foreign policies appearing to respect Arab–Islamic norms. For more ambitious states, supra-state identity presented the opportunity to assert regional leadership by championing Pan-Arab or Islamic causes.

While this ‘dualism’ is a constant, the relative balance between supra-state identity and state sovereignty has evolved – been ‘constructed’ in the view of constructivists – over time by the interactions of states and the actions of state-builders, and, at least until recently, in favour of the latter (Barnett 1998). Several forces interacted to define this evolution. Imperialism and the creation of Israel stimulated Pan-Arabism movements crossing state boundaries, which created conditions for competition between states over Pan-Arab leadership. Although Pan-Arabism enjoined co-operation among Arab states it was, ironically, constructed out of this competition for Pan-Arab leadership. Nasser’s disproportionate ability to mobilise trans-state support in this contest allowed the assertion of Egyptian hegemony in the region and Cairo’s construction of a ‘Pan-Arab regime’ which constrained the sovereign right of states to seek security outside regional collective arrangements. At the same time, however, this competition stimulated state elites’ defence of sovereignty through anti-hegemonic (anti-Cairo) balancing and encouraged state formation aiming to immunise states from trans-state ideological penetration. The rivalries of Arab leaders, expressed in disagreements over Arabism and unleashing the Pan-Arab ‘outbidding’ that brought on the disastrous 1967 defeat by Israel, helped ‘de-construct’ the Pan-Arab regime. Thereafter, the regularity of war and much increased insecurity greatly accelerated the impulse of the individual Arab states to fall back on self-help and power balancing, while trans-state rent flows released by the oil boom helped consolidate states, making them much less vulnerable to Pan-Arab or Islamic ideological penetration. Although attempts were made to agree on a form of Arabism, defined in Arab summits, which was compatible with sovereignty, the divergent routes Arab states took to protect themselves from war and to exit from it ‘deconstructed’ Pan-Arab constraints on reason of state. A surge in Islamic identity precipitated by the Iranian revolution increasingly manifested itself at the grassroots of MENA societies, but at the state level Islamic solidarity, albeit institutionalised in the Islamic Conference Organisation, was unable to substitute for Arabism as a basis of inter-Arab order. Rather, as realism expects, heightened insecurity moved the system toward the Westphalian model in the 1980s, but this evolution, far from inevitable, was a ‘constructed’ outcome of internal state-building and of inter-state relations and, to this day, is far from complete. Indeed, as a result of the weakening of many regional states from legitimacy erosion in the 1990s, accelerated by destruction of the Iraqi state in the US invasion of 2003 and by the Arab Uprising of the next decade, trans-state Islamist movements, increasingly polarised along Sunni–Shia lines, appeared to capture the loyalties of many of the putative citizens of regional states; but, this contributed to regional fragmentation rather than regional order. No analysis of the Middle East can succeed without taking account of the constantly mutating identity-sovereignty dynamic that constitutes the regional system.

The dynamics of the inter-state system: the struggle for power

According to neo-realism, the state system’s ‘anarchy’ imposes security-maximising behaviour on all states. MENA states operate in a particularly ‘anarchic’ regional system, with border conflicts and irredentism built in at its formation and containing two of the world’s most durable conflict centres, the Arab–Israeli and the Gulf arenas, where war is a regular occurrence. As such, for realists, constructivists greatly underestimate the role of power and violence in regional politics; indeed, as realists expect, security threats do appear to be the first priority of foreign policy-makers and power balancing against such threats is pervasive in the region. The strategic importance or vulnerability of a state’s geographical location shapes the main threats and opportunities it faces and contiguity typically makes neighbours the most salient threat to most states.

There is, however, considerable variation in balancing strategies. According to Walt (1987), states respond to threat by ‘power balancing’ and most adopt a ‘defensive realist’ accumulation of sufficient military power and alliance partners to deter an aggressor. In realism, however, power matters for behaviour. Weaker states are more likely to concentrate on defending their sovereignty, and instead of self-help balancing, may seek protection by ‘bandwagoning’ with an external great power; whe...