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Part I
Broad patterns
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Tareq Y. Ismael and Glenn E. Perry
Owing to the Middle East's immense resources and critical geostrategic position, it continues to play a crucial role in international affairs. This, however, occurs within the context of subordination – and sometimes resistance – to Western powers. The aspirations of the indigenous population of the region long have been stifled by the dynamics of unequal global power relationships, with the domestic politics of the countries of the Middle East regularly subordinated to the prerogatives of international markets and the strategic competition of the great powers. The wave of protests that developed from 2010 onward should be interpreted, at least in large part, as a rejection of elite complicity in perpetuating this subordination and as an attempt by the masses to seize control over the political and socioeconomic direction of their countries.
Identifying the “Middle East”
The “Middle East” is not a geographical or cultural category created by its own people. Some writers famously deny its existence, but if we did not have such a term we undoubtedly would have to invent another one for the region overlapping the African and Eurasian continents. It is a term coined by American naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan at the dawn of the twentieth century, initially with reference to the area between the Near East and the Far East, but it subsequently – in large part resulting from the whims of British strategists at the outset of World War II who set up a “Middle East Command” in Cairo – acquired a meaning that is now familiar.
Although the geographical extent of the Middle East is ambiguous, our definition includes at least the predominantly Arab (that is, Arabic-speaking) countries of Southwest Asia and Egypt. The other Arabic-speaking countries of the African continent – the Sudan, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Mauritania – constitute integral parts of the Arab world too but lie outside the area of our main focus. The term “Middle East” also extends to two major non-Arab Muslim countries that lie north and east of the Arab world, namely Turkey and Iran. We propose to call them the Outer Circle, although they more often have been labeled “the Northern Tier” or “non-Arab periphery.”
The region also includes the state of Israel, whose identity is defined in terms of Jewishness (“the state of the Jewish people,” potentially involving all of those still living abroad). Unless we treat the territories it has occupied – and established settlements in – but not formally annexed since 1967 as parts of it, Israel is indeed primarily Jewish, with a 20 per cent Arab Palestinian minority. The clash between this state (and the broader Zionist movement that brought it into existence) and the Arab world, particularly the Arab masses, has provided a special coloring to the region's politics.
In the modern era, the Arab and Islamic world has conceived itself in different ways. First of all, the ascendant type of identity in the Arab world during much of the twentieth century – in contrast to the division into religious communities that historically prevailed – was pan-Arabism, the idea that the whole region, “from the Ocean to the Gulf,” regardless of state boundaries or religion (not including ethnic non-Arab minorities, of course, largely the Berbers, southern Sudanese, and Kurds) was one nation. This conception always competed with state, religious, and other identities but was particularly powerful in some areas, notably in the Fertile Crescent. As a result, political movements were able to cut across state boundaries. During the mid 1950s, President Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt emerged as a charismatic figure throughout the Arab world, with millions seeing him as a deliverer from the balkanization imposed by colonial powers and from corrupt, servile, and exploitative regimes. Nasser, in turn, was able to stir up the masses when their rulers were accused of disloyalty to the idea of Arab unity and to the Palestinian cause.
During this period, as Michael Barnett shows, Arab leaders threatened one another with ideas rather than military force, that is, accusations of disloyalty to these all-Arab concerns – “the norms of Arabism and not the balance of power”1 – while presenting themselves as the true champions of these principles. Barnett maintains that while they did not really expect to give up sovereignty to a pan-Arab entity or to challenge Israel militarily, they repeatedly got entrapped by their rhetoric. For example, Syrian leaders put Nasser to a test in 1958 with a risky offer for unification he could not refuse without undermining his aura of pan-Arab leadership. In 1967 when Egypt's leader took the necessary actions to restore his position as champion of the Arab cause in Palestine, he accomplished little more than precipitating an Israeli attack.
Another feature of the classic Arab system was the way non-Arab states were relatively insulated from participating in it. There was a strong Arab taboo on joining with non-Arabs against another Arab state. As a case in point, fear of the consequences of violating this principle forced Saudi Arabia and other Western client regimes to give up on a scheme to cooperate with Turkey in a US-backed invasion of Syria in 1957.2 Similarly, while Arabian Peninsula monarchs were glad to have the shah of Iran acting against revolutionaries in the Dhofar Province of Oman in the early 1970s, the norms of Arabism prevented them from openly endorsing this; their concerns are said to have got in the way of an Iranian intention to attack Southern Yemen in 1976.
The taboo against breaking ranks with other Arabs in relation to Israel was even stronger than in the case of the Outer Circle. The Arab regimes, notably the Hashemite rulers of Transjordan/Jordan, who collaborated with the Zionist movement before 1948 and thereafter with Israel, tried to keep this secret,3 as did those non-state groups, notably some Maronites in Lebanon, who had ties with the Israelis and saw them as potential allies against an Arab world with which many of them did not identify.4
Increasingly from the 1960s the fundamentals of the Arab system eroded. After Nasser, there was no new charismatic figure in the Arab world that could play the same role. Already during his last years – starting with the breakup of the United Arab Republic (UAR) in 1961 and continuing with the failure of Iraq to merge with the new pan-Arab entity following its revolution in 1958 and then with the defeat by Israel in 1967 – Nasser's ability to lead a cohesive Arab world had weakened.5 Moreover, the non-Arab Muslim countries of the region – Iran and Turkey – became increasingly integrated into the region's politics. Even the taboo against cooperation/peace with Israel broke down, at the level of the Arab regimes if not amongst the Arab public.
The region's subordination intensified with the fading of Nasserism and pan-Arabism. Increasingly, Nasser's successors aligned themselves with Washington and, in the case of Egypt and Jordan, openly broke the taboo on Arab cooperation with Israel. The parallel – if somewhat weaker – taboos on Arab alliances with non-Arabs in general against other Arab states and on military action against other Arab states likewise collapsed. For instance, the US attacks on Iraq – in 1991 and 2003 – brought in various levels of Arab cooperation, both overt and covert. More recently, joint military intervention by Europeans and Americans, along with Arab client regimes, enabled rebels to overthrow the Libyan regime of Muammar al-Qaddafi. In the case of the 2012 civil war in Syria, American clients in the Arab world (notably the rulers of Saudi Arabia and Qatar) have cooperated with Turkey to overthrow the Assad regime, alongside various kinds of “non-lethal” aid by the US for the rebels,6 amid increasing calls for further military intervention. Fearing that otherwise it will not have “influence” amongst post-Ba'athist rulers,7 the US also has striven to organize the rebels into a more cohesive force dominated – in line with our definition of imperialism – by pro-US elements.
Patterns of continuing imperialism
As noted in William Haddad and Jasamin Rostam-Kolayi's chapter, “the Imperial State still exists.” The notion of a Middle East still subjected to imperialist rule may seem odd to someone whose image of imperialism is that of formal colonial status of territories, once often clearly indicated by their colors on world maps, as when countries such as India were officially parts of the British Empire. But, again in Haddad and Rostam-Kolayi's words, Western imperialism in the Middle East often involved “semi-independent regimes dependent on the Center [Britain, France] for protection.” While there is room for such complex concepts as “imperialism” to be used in different ways, this generally corresponds to the definition used in this volume and is drawn from Johan Galtung's classic theory (or model) of imperialism.8 The kind of indirect domination through backing a dependent local oligarchy that we refer to represents an age-old practice that Machiavelli, in Chapter V of The Prince, recommended as one important technique for maintaining empires. A scholarly study of how the US – contrary to its rhetoric – engaged in systematic “democracy prevention” in Egypt during the Mubarak era concludes that the elites of the two countries “promoted shared elite interests over popular opposition with an effectiveness that rivaled the British protectorate” (of 1914–22).9
Galtung also portrays imperialism as collaboration between the centers (elites/ruling classes/dominant groups) in the Center – that is, developed countries – and those in the Periphery, i.e., underdeveloped countries. (Note that upper case indicates countries, while lower case signifies parts of countries.) Thus Saudi Arabia exemplifies a Periphery country, while the Saudi regime is the center in the Periphery or cP. The masses in Saudi Arabia form the periphery in the Periphery or pP. Galtung stresses that there is greater disharmony of interest between center and periphery in Periphery nations than in Center nations. But situations exist in which the center of a Periphery country has the backing – notably when sectarian or ethnic divisions enter the picture – of parts of its periphery in particular situations, as in Saudi Arabia in its conflict with Iran, and in which an anti-imperialist center, as in Syria in 2012, faces rebellion from elements of its periphery that seek imperial intervention. The center in the Periphery does not always – or even usually – act as a mere puppet of its ally in the Center nation, which it sometimes manipulates for its own purposes and vis-à-vis which it often demonstrates a considerable amount of bargaining power. The center of the Periphery sometimes defies its patron in symbolic ways, as in the case of United Nations votes, often in ways that serve the interests of the Center by bolstering the legitimacy of the client regime at home and in the broader Arab world.
The term “imperialism,” as Galtung uses it, would seem to exclude – arbitrarily, one might argue – expansion by a Periphery nation to control another Periphery nation (or, if such is imaginable, a Center nation) and domination of one Center nation by another Center nation seems not to fit his definition either. In our view, Galtung's analysis is not beyond criticism, and the realities of Middle Eastern politics are at odds with one part of his model, that is, the absence of interaction among centers in the Periphery. But he does provide a useful framework for analyzing the modern relationship between Western countries and those in the Middle East.
Galtung classifies imperialism as only one type of domination, the kind that “cuts across nations,” with the center in the Periphery constituting a bridgehead for the Center nation and serving their common interest. His writings clearly fall into the category of dependency theory, which emphasizes the way economic ties between Center and Periphery countries created and perpetuate global inequality. However, he also identifies five types of imperialism (economic, political, military, communication, and cultural) and, in contrast to the Marxist idea of the preponderance of economic determinants common amongst dependency theorists, Galtung insists that imperialism can start with any of these types and then proceed to one or more of the others. As this is a work in international politics, we focus on the political type of imperialism rather than on dependency theory as such while recognizing that the other types of relationships are always interwoven with politics.
One dramatic marker of the subservient status of Middle East countries is the relationship of their domestic politics to international relations and foreign policy. In the case of independent Center countries, foreign policy derives from internal factors: a country's assessment of its power within the international system and attendant threats; its ideological/intellectual conception of its role within the international system; and the nature of historic ties with other countries. In the case of subservient Middle East regimes – excluding revisionist powers like revolutionary Iran – the relationship is nearly inverted, with these countries' foreign policies often bound to that of their American patron and with their domestic politics representing a struggle to defend these policies against popular opposition. Hence the domestic politics of the Middle East tends in many cases to be colored by popular opposition to a regime's foreign policy and by the regime's attempt to suppress this opposition (and hence, continued foreign patronage).
The Middle East in a world of unbalanced power
Interpreting the international relations of the Middle East and the geostrategy of the singular great power, the US, is impossible without a treatment of the centrality of Israel in the r...
