Islam, IS and the Fragmented State

The Challenges of Political Islam in the MENA Region

Anoushiravan Ehteshami, Amjed Rasheed, Juline Beaujouan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000097825
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion, politique et État

This book provides a pioneering and original study of the regional effects of political Islam. It sets out the multifaceted interactions between Islam and politics in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, focussing in particular on the so-called Islamic State (IS) organization in its broad discussion of political Islam. Utilizing a trans-disciplinary perspective, the book interacts with social constructivism and complex realism theories to analyse the clash between the modern notion of the state and that of identity in the region.

Looking at issues such as the rise of IS and its attempts to establish a caliphate, the book offers three different, yet complementary, levels of analysis for its discussion. These being: Regional (dis)order, the erosion of state power and its boundaries, and the role of non-state actors in shaping the politics of the MENA region. Each of these levels are addressed in detail in turn in order to build a comprehensive picture of state and political Islam in the Arab core of the MENA region. What emerges is a comprehensive analysis of the interlinked relationships between political and Islamic elements of Arab polities and societies.

As such, this book will be of great interest to academics and policymakers focusing on matters relating to the study of Islam, Islam and politics, study of religion more broadly, and security studies and area studies, particularly in the MENA region.

1 De-regionalization of the regional order

Introduction

This book assumes that the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is a regional security complex that the Arab region forms the core of it and, on the basis of these assumptions, proceeds to analyse the complexities of the MENA regional system and the domestic, regional, and international forces and factors which have shaped it. Whilst the chapter devotes much space to the discussion of the forces which have contributed to the erosion of this regional system and the ways in which its Arab core has dissipated, it, at the same time, tries to put the rapidity of change in a broader historical context. In doing so, we highlight the consequences for the region of the relative shallowness of the territorial state-based system in the MENA region, which, in the face of overwhelming pan-regional and international pressures, has arguably finally collapsed. We, thus, also draw attention to the contested conditions of the rise of nation-states at the centre of the Arab region which emerged from the ashes of the last true Islamic empire.

Why regions?

Regions, whether as security complexes, integrated economic clubs, or trade and investment networks, have emerged as a key component of the international system. The place of regions in the international system has attracted more attention since the lifting of the curtain of the Cold War and the end of the division of much of the world into two competing American-led West and Soviet-led East camps. The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) assiduously tried to avoid both, but many of NAM members inevitably ended up in one or the other’s camp and fell victim to the superpowers’ powers of persuasion and pressure. Their sovereign territories indeed provided the battleground for proxy campaigns of the superpowers and, at times, coming under direct attack from one or the other superpower. Then, regions were little more than squares on the strategic black-and-white chessboard of the superpowers and those countries and regions which did not serve an immediate purpose for geostrategic advantage were often left alone and left behind. The rest, however, were perceived as vital. Access and control often defined the position of a region and group of states therein in superpower calculations.

As outposts of superpower rivalries, regional states soon evolved, following the Second World War, into geopolitical moulds to act as ‘containment barriers’ or ‘trip-wires’ against the Soviet expansion (Greece, Iran, Iraq, and Turkey), zones of direct confrontation (Korean Peninsula), zones of influence (continental Europe), zones of proxy war (Arab–Israeli theatre of conflict), and territories to be won or denied to the enemy (in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America). In the latter case, domestic political systems feature highly in superpower calculations, and while the United States (and its European allies) used economic aid and military support to bolster key regional allies and their ruling regimes, the Soviet Union (and its European Warsaw Pact partners) used a novel ideological invention (the so-called non-capitalist path to development/socialist orientation), coupled to military and often limited economic support, to justify bolstering postcolonial elites and regimes in parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. States and zones were being regarded ripe for ‘conversion’ and transformation into new platforms for enhancement of Moscow’s global influence. On this, it is perhaps instructive to hear the Soviet superpower’s view shortly before its implosion in 1991.

In the era of glasnost, we became privy to Moscow’s mindset on what has now become known as ‘global regions’, and in its most authoritative source on international affairs, the Disarmament and Security Yearbook, the official view stated that “until recently Soviet literature regarded Washington’s actions in zones of conflict as merely attempts at social revanche, interventionism, a military gamble which may erupt into limited wars against the USSR”. So, interventions were seen as targeting Soviet interests, and the report goes on to clarify that American actions,

were based on certain real elements of American policy, although they sometimes tended to exaggerate them. Undoubtedly, US leaders have used, and will very possibly continue arm-twisting methods to achieve their goals in the Third World. This can be judged from the US naval presence in the Persian Gulf, the broad US support for Afghan armed opposition, and the continuing attempts by the US [Reagan] administration to secure military aid to the Contras and to destabilize the Sandinista government of Nicaragua.¹

We can clearly see how Moscow perceived the United States as an interventionist power during the Cold War, and we know countless statements from Washington that this strategic sentiment was shared by the United States. Even in the Gorbachev era, which had sought to reduce superpower tensions by not assigning to every American action in the global South imperialist intentions, geopolitical calculations prevailed.

For the United States, as evident in its series of ‘doctrines’ rolled out by successive administrations since the 1940s, the containment and pushback of the Soviet Union, what President Reagan called ‘the Evil Empire’, had become an imperative of its post-1945 foreign policy. Alarmed by Moscow’s reach into Europe and Asia following the Second World War and the communist revolution in China in 1949, the end of isolationism had come with a big stick to beat the Soviet Union back to its own borders. This was a struggle against darkness, as President Eisenhower had said in his first inaugural address. Thus, starting in 1946 in northern Iran, much of Eurasia became the Cold War’s front line in which the United States deployed its own considerable military forces and good offices of allies and proxies to ‘contain’ the perceived Soviet threat.

The MENA region emerged as one of the most strategic squares on the superpowers’ chessboard, and ultimately a frontline of the Cold War.² But it would be too simplistic to assert that the Cold War was responsible for the tense dynamics of this regional system and the strategic rivalries between its state actors within the Arab region itself. Nor was the Cold War responsible for the tensions between some Arab states and their non-Arab counterparts.³

Cold War dynamics, however, did affect the political economy and political system formation of many MENA countries and stifled not only their economic development but also the democratization of national politics. Middle East exceptionalism became the vogue catchphrase for explaining away the region’s static state of affairs and lack of progress on the political, economic, or social fronts. Under the cloud of the Cold War, nevertheless, regime rigidity, following the Arab–Israeli conflict and the Arab Cold War, limited the scope for regional compromises and any region-wide effort to pursue regionalism as a way of bolstering the region’s development opportunities and dampening interstate and intra-state insecurities permeating the region. Characteristics of warped state formation, authoritarian regime type, and elite defensive nationalism as the fig leaf of legitimacy were amplified by the Cold War and often enhanced by the conditions of the Cold War, but the region’s structural contradictions were not caused by superpower rivalries. These structural contradictions continue to dog the region and inhibit its regionalization.

Regionalism

The end of bipolarity and the lifting of Cold War pressures enabled region-based interaction to grow and flourish across the world, releasing the energy of countries to seek cooperation, and at times accommodation through economic exchange, with their neighbours. Globalization – in terms of encouraging cross-border production, the creation of a global financial system, the ease of communication, the introduction of highly efficient and seamless modes and types of communication facilities, and the standardization of cargo trade – all helped, of course, and helped propel the process. As a powerful force, driven by profit maximization, globalization reduced barriers to cross-border mobility of goods, services, finance, people, technology, and know-how, and ideas. But globalization, at the same time, has energized regions – which have often sought the means to manage the force of unfettered global mobility. Countries have gathered in regional blocs in an effort not only to maximize the advantages of globalization but also to resist as well as mitigate the risks of exposure to outside forces. So, for economic imperatives, as well as for related political reasons, regions have come to dominate the landscape of international relations and are now firmly part of the fabric of the international system.

And as to what is meant by regions, different disciplinary bends have interpreted the concept differently.⁴ For our purposes in this book, Paul’s definition of regions “as a cluster of states that are proximate to each other and are interconnected in spatial, cultural and ideational terms in a significant and distinguishable manner”⁵ is an excellent starting point. In such securitized and contested regions as the MENA, this definition comes with the proviso that it is often oppositions which attract here. That is to say, proximity does not easily translate into affinity, empathy, or integrative dialogue. Indeed, such proximity can be cause for friction and distrust, as was the case with Iraq and Syria throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Furthermore, the MENA interconnected space is composed of a range of subnational networks which have historically tended to cut across borders. The Muslim Brotherhood, which grew up in Egypt in the 1920s, had by adolescence branches in Syria, Jordan, Kuwait, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Tunisia, Yemen, and Palestine. Al-Qaeda as a jihadi network, similarly, has grown since the early 1990s to influence the politics, policies, and state narratives of Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Yemen. Lebanon-rooted Hezbollah, too, has spread its wings in the 2010s and is now present in Iraq, such Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries as Bahrain and Kuwait, and is, of course, present in war-ridden Syria. The latest of such non-state actors, the pseudo-state Islamic State (IS), has similarly acted transnationally. Indeed, its birth was possible thanks to the collapse of central authority in Iraq and Syria, and once established there, it soon grew its presence in Afghanistan and parts of Central Asia, North and sub-Sahara Africa, and South-East Asia, as well as Europe.

It has been the effort to contain these transnational entities by the insecure ruling regimes which has driven a wedge between state and society and between the states themselves.

There is moreover a discernible spectrum of regionalization when one considers the international system in its entirety. So a region such as Europe has managed to form a large and powerful regional bloc to negotiate the region’s place...