The Routledge Handbook to the Middle East and North African State and States System

Raymond Hinnebusch, Jasmine Gani, Raymond Hinnebusch, Jasmine K. Gani, Jasmine Gani, Raymond Hinnebusch, Jasmine K. Gani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781032239767
• eBook ISBN: 9781000710878
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Conflict and instability are built into the very fabric of the Middle East and North African (MENA) state and states system; yet both states and states system have displayed remarkable resilience. How can we explain this? This handbook explores the main debates, theoretical approaches and accumulated empirical research by prominent scholars in the field, providing an essential context for scholars pursuing research on the MENA state and states system. Contributions are grouped into four key themes:

• Historical contexts, state-building and politics in MENA

• State actors, societal context and popular activism

• Trans-state politics: the political economy and identity contexts

• The international politics of MENA

The 26 chapters examine the evolution of the state and states system, before and after independence, and take the 2011 Arab uprisings as a pivotal moment that intensified trends already embedded in the system, exposing the deep features of state and system—specifically their built-in vulnerability and their ability to survive.

This handbook provides comprehensive coverage of the history and role of the state in the MENA region. It offers a key resource for all researchers and students interested in international relations and the Middle East and North Africa.

Part I

Historical context, state-building and politics in MENA

1

State, revolution and war

Conflict and resilience in MENA’s states and states system

Raymond Hinnebusch

The theme of the book

The theme of this book is the paradox that conflict and instability are built into the very fabric of the Middle East state and states system; yet both state and states system have displayed remarkable resilience. How can we explain this? Are there exceptional features of MENA that embody and explain it? The Middle East is indeed exceptional but not in any culturalist sense; rather, it is the way universal factors have come together in a configuration particular to the region that must engage our attention. This book aims to expose readers to the main debates, theoretical approaches and accumulated empirical research by prominent scholars in the field that, building on previous work on the state (Andersen 1987; Owen 1992; Ayubi 1995; Bromley 1994), explores the dimensions of this puzzle. It provides a compendium of essential readings as well as bibliographies that, together, provide context for scholars pursuing further research on the MENA states and states system.

The research puzzle

Violence was an integral and ongoing part of the shaping of the regional states system (as indeed it was elsewhere). The making of the pre-modern Middle East state—the Islamic empires that periodically rose and fell—was historically the project of warlords and rebels in cycles depicted by Ibn Khaldun, in which successive tribal movements with religious visions issuing from the desert or steppe created empires that expanded, contracted and disintegrated after several generations. The modern “Westphalian” states system was then imposed on this environment as an outcome of a lost war (from the point of view of the dominant regional power, the Ottoman Empire) and a victor’s peace—or diktat—imposed by the Western imperial states by military force (Khalidi 2004). Fromkin (1989) referred to the post-World War I order as the “peace to end all peace” since it shaped a system so arbitrary and flawed that conflict, irredentism and inability were embedded in its very fabric. While other regions subjected to colonialism, such as China and India, recovered their status as global powers after decolonization, the Islamic Middle East, as Buzan observed, is the only great civilization that had not so restored its historic status as a great power in world politics, in good part because the West’s fragmentation of the region into weak mini-states made this impossible, thus spurring recurrent revisionist efforts by regional movements or powers to overthrow the system. The MENA states system was, moreover, “born fighting,” in the words of Buzan and Weaver (2003), launched on its independent existence via the first Arab–Israeli War, itself a product of how the victors’ peace had cleared the way for a colonial settler state to take root in Palestine, with accompanying ethnic cleansing, a major enduring source of subsequent conflict.

In good part as a consequence of the irredentism built into the regional states system, it was vulnerable to chronic waves of instability, revolutions and chains of wars; indeed, the Middle East emerged as an epicentre of global crisis, with a wave of crisis, involving revolution and war, spilling out of the region roughly every decade, often drawing in global powers. MENA is the world’s most war-prone region and the only one that has currently experienced inter-state wars, but it has also experienced frequent wars of states against state-like armed non-state movements and proxy wars of intervention in civil wars. The region is also highly prone to revolution and rebellion: anti-imperialist nationalist movements occurred across the region in the pre-World War II period, anti-oligarchic pan-Arab revolutions swept the region in the 1950–60s, Islamist insurgencies and revolution broke out in the 1980–90s, and after 2011 pro-democracy Uprisings toppled presidents in five states. Moreover, revolution and war are intimately inter-related in MENA: the pan-Arab revolutions and the Arab–Israeli wars of the 1940s through 1970s fed on each other; Islamist revolts, including international terrorist movements, and a series of wars in the Gulf fed each other; and the post-2011 civil wars unleashed by the Arab Uprisings provoked proxy wars across the region.

Paradoxically, however, in spite of exceptional turmoil, the region has also been marked by the exceptional durability and resilience of authoritarian rule which has proved resistant to both the global “Third Wave” of democracy and its local spinoff, the decade of Arab Uprisings, so much so as to inspire debates about “Middle East exceptionalism.” The region’s states are largely divided into either authoritarian republics or ruling monarchies, with only a handful of “flawed” or semi-democracies. MENA is the only global region where traditional monarchic rule remains viable, and even republics soon revealed a tendency to change into “presidential monarchies” seeking to establish dynastic rule—jumrukiyya in Saad Ibrahim’s words.

The dominant power practice, cutting across regime types, is neo-patrimonialism, a hybrid that combines practices from the region’s pre-modern state-building inheritance with bureaucratic structures partly imported from the West (Bacik 2008). The neo-patrimonial state is usually considered “weak” in the sense of the ability to implement policies (Bill and Springborg 1994), and especially foster economic development, but, at the same time, it is quite robust in its combination of different kinds (personal and bureaucratic) of authority, and is also “fierce,” as Ayubi (1995) put it, in its intolerance of opposition and its repressive capabilities.

Yet there are considerable variations over time in the robustness of MENA regimes and states. State formation seemed to describe a bell shape curve, as the fragile states that became nominally “independent” by the 1940s, slowly consolidated themselves and reached a peak of durability in the 1980s. This was in part an outcome of revolutions that brought broader based movements to power incorporated into more robust state institutions and also of the wars which propelled the emergence of national security states: “war makes the state and the state makes war,” in Tilly’s aphorism. State making was also a function of the region’s exceptional endowment of hydrocarbon rents which were first unlocked for state builders as a result of war and revolution in the 1970s; oil in turn became a prize, inviting war among regional states and intervention by external great powers. State formation advances were not, however, sustained, in part because of the insufficient political institutionalization and economic development possible under neo-patrimonial governance and partly because of the burdens of war on economies or of external pressures. Hence, after peaking in the 1980s, the region’s state formation curve gradually descended, finally entering after 2010 an era marked by several partial or full state failures. Yet, remarkably, even amidst this unprecedented collapse, authoritarian rule persisted or was reconstituted, either within national states or in fragmented sovereignties within states.

Also remarkable is the parallel resilience of the states system, which, in spite of its incongruence with dominant identities, pan-Arabism and pan-Islam, has nevertheless endured, with almost no alterations in its widely contested, often “artificial,” inter-state borders. The latest test of system resilience followed the collapse of regimes in the Arab Uprisings which appeared to open the door to a remaking of the states system, notably in Syria and Iraq where the IS caliphate briefly seized semi-sovereignty and where Kurdish separatism threatened to carve out a new Kurdistan from three regional states. Nevertheless, these projects were seemingly contained without any major redrawing of the map—without the undoing of the widely reviled Sykes-Picot (the past-World War I diktat)—anticipated by some. Continuity—the durability of state boundaries and the resilience of authoritarian governance appeared to be the lesson exposed by this latest episode. However the durability of the states system, no less than the durability of authoritarian rule, does not necessarily mean legitimacy and stability; rather, the legitimacy deficits built into both states and state system seem to guarantee that MENA will remain an epicentre of world crisis for the foreseeable future.

The focus

This book takes this puzzle as its focus, with each chapter addressing some aspect of the issue. The chapters variously examine the state in MENA, its politics, political economy and international relations. The book combines the macro and micro. On the one hand, it adumbrates the long durée macro view of the evolution of states and the states system, the context in which both were born and matured into their durable form; on the other hand, more micro analyses of pivotal actors and aspects of the system are subsequently treated. Each of the chapters takes the Arab Uprisings as a pivotal moment that exposed the deep features of state and system—specifically their built-in vulnerability and instability and their remarkable resilience. But the Uprising is not taken to mark a unique or profound watershed, but a path-dependent outcome of the historical macro evolution—less change than continuity—even if it intensified trends that were embedded in the system at its very founding and even before.

The approach

States and states system are seen to co-constitute each other, and hence cannot be examined in isolation; but looking closer, we see that there are not only these two levels interacting but rather multiple levels. 1) At the level of the global system, the agency of powerful hegemonic states initially constituted the regional states system, literally building instability into it, with the result that they have had to periodically intervene to sustain the regional order; the role of the US hegemon has been pivotal in this latter respect, although as much to intensify as to manage instability. 2) Varying types of regime with their institutions and norms constituted structure at the state level but also agency insofar as their policies reshaped society internally and affected the regional system as the region’s key regimes, populist republics and monarchies, promoted the spread of their rival legitimacy principles. 3) At the level of the MENA states’ domestic politics, agency has been constituted by state leadership and also organized collective actors that matter most for politics: historically it has been tribes and more recently the army, with political parties, civil society, Islamist movements and protest movements also playing roles in shaping political trajectories. The Arab Uprisings were a pivotal episode in which citizen activists briefly acquired unprecedented agency with major consequences for both states and states system, exposing both their vulnerability and resilience. 4) Between state and state system is a trans-state level in which ideational and material networks constitute structures within which state actors have to negotiate: an identity context made up of contesting supra-state (pan-Arabism, Islamism) identities and a political economy context involving material resource flows, notably hydrocarbons and money. 5) At the level of the regional inter-state system, the norms, practices and enmities of inter-state conflict and rivalry shape the states; in turn states, through their collective behaviour, constitute the regional system—its alliances, regionalism, and regional conflicts, including war—to which each state must individually adapt.

Overview of the studies

The studies unfold, building on each other, starting with the historic state-building context and the regimes that came out of it; the next chapters look at actors inside the states, followed by sections on transnational and inter-state politics.

Part I: Historical context, state-building and politics in MENA

Two chapters set the long durée macro context—both the structure and the agency of state builders.

Chapter 2: Raymond Hinnebusch’s “Historical context of state formation in the Middle East: structure and agency” departs from the historical sociology concept of path dependency, to trace how MENA’s historical inheritance constituted the structure of constraints and opportunities in which state builders had to operate. The pre-modern heritage of small group (tribal, sectarian) politics, patrimonial rule, clientalism and universalistic Islamic identity, and the imposition of a Westphalian state system with bureaucratic apparatuses and territorial boundaries, often incongruent with pre-existing identities, foreclosed on many state-building options and fostered neo-patrimonialism, which exploited both sub- and supra-state identities, as the natural power building practice. The agency of state builders made a difference for the subsequent trajectory of state-building, which, starting from a low point, reached a certain level of consolidation in the 1970–80s before again declining to the post-2010 period of failing states. In parallel to the changes in the consolidation levels of states, the character of the regional states system also altered over time, from a period of trans-state ideological wars of subversion to a period of realist balancing and inter-state war, to the current period of proxy wars.

Chapter 3: Adham Saouli’s “States and state-building in the Middle East” examines the causes and consequences of state-building in the region. He offers a theoretical and conceptual framework to analyze state-building and its challenges and dilemmas. He then adumbrates the recurring dilemmas of state builders: they need to concentrate power at the centre, monopolizing it at the expense of rivals; but they also need to expand power, incorporating social forces which otherwise may be mobilized by opponents. This delicate balancing act seldom wholly succeeds; to the extent regimes’ authority remains contested, states are vulnerable to intervention from without by rival powers. Hence internal instability and regional power struggles interact.

Regime features: the institutional outcomes of state-building, as they vary over time and space, are examined in four chapters, with the focus on the internal features of regimes.

Chapter 4: Oliver Schlumberger’s “Political regimes of the Middle East and North Africa” charts the evolution of MENA regimes. They initially took opposing forms, the traditional monarchies and revolutionary (populist authoritarian) republics, with different forms of legitimacy, divergent socio-economic policies and foreign policy alignments on opposite sides of the Cold War. In time, however, they converged as ideological and legitimacy differences declined, as similar patrimonial practices spread, as economic liberalization in the republics was paralleled by expanding oil-financed public sectors in the monarchies, and as both began to rely on rent and foster privileged crony-capitalist classes. The causes of authoritarian resilience included the special durability of neo-patrimonial political practices congruent with both patriarchal societies and rentierist economies, all diluting class loyalties in favour of clientele ones. The Uprising led to some divergence, e.g. between democratization in Tunisia and harder authoritarianism in Egypt and state failure elsewhere. But authoritarian persistence continues.

Chapter 5: Stephen J. King’s “Authoritarian adaptability and the Arab Spring” surveys the further development of trajectories in MENA. The ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• PART I Historical Context, State-Building and Politics in MENA
• PART II State Actors, Societal Context and Popular Activism
• PART III Trans-State Politics: The Political Economy and Identity Contexts
• PART IV The International Politics of MENA
• Index