State, Power and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East

Roger Owen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134432912
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Roger Owen has fully revised and updated his authoritative text to take into account the latest developments in the Middle East. This book continues to serve as an excellent introduction for newcomers to the modern history and politics of this fascinating region.

This third edition continues to explore the emergence of individual Middle Eastern states since the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War and the key themes that have characterized the region since then.

Part I

States and state-building

Introduction

The first five chapters of Part I are concerned with the establishment and consolidation of the various modern Middle Eastern states which emerged out of the Ottoman and Persian Empires at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. This is then followed by a chapter describing what I call the ‘remaking’ of these same states in the 1990s. My approach to the concept of ‘state’ employed here requires some initial explanation.

The word ‘state’ itself has two distinct meanings in everyday usage even though the two are often conflated. One use refers to sovereign political entities, i.e. those states with international recognition, their own boundaries, their own seat at the United Nations and their own flag. The other refers to that set of institutions and practices which combines administrative, judicial, rule-making and coercive powers. While the use of the word in the first sense is absolutely clear, and can be used in a Middle Eastern context to refer directly to the Arab states, Israel, Turkey and Iran, that of the second is more problematic and requires further elaboration.

Recognition of the existence of an entity called the ‘state’ goes back in European political thought at least as far as Machiavelli. However, the most important period of thinking began in the late eighteenth century when the concept was defined and redefined by a series of thinkers from Hegel onwards, culminating in what probably remains the most influential definition of all, Max Weber’s notion of the state as ‘a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’.

Nevertheless, it also has to be admitted that there is no consensus concerning this, or any other, single definition and the word ‘state’ exists today as an essential component of a number of different political vocabularies used to talk about, to analyse and to justify a great variety of different political situations, positions and arguments throughout the modern world. One of the most common is its place within a set of binary opposites – state/society, public/private, formal/informal – which are an indispensable part of contemporary political discourse. But there are many other forms of usage. For some, for example the World Bank in its 1997 World Development Report, ‘state’ is to be taken to be more or less the equivalent of ‘government’.¹ For others, it is used as though coterminous with ‘dynasty’ or ‘regime’. And none is problem free.

To give just one example of some of the conceptual problems involved, let us return to the notion of the state as part of the set of binary opposites just proposed. Does this mean that the state is one single thing and society another? If so, what constitutes the boundary between them? And is this the same boundary that exists, say, between the public and the private? For some purposes and in some discussions all this does not matter very much. This would be true, for example, of many contemporary political arguments about the role of the state and whether it should hive off a number of its present functions to private business. But in others, say in any serious analysis of what is usually called ‘corruption’ or of the black or informal economy, such simplistic assumptions get in the way of an understanding of a much more complex reality where boundaries are porous or non-existent, rules are unclear and many actors shift easily from one role to another with little or no official or legal hindrance.

We should also note the strong tradition which goes back at least as far as Karl Marx of viewing the apparent coherence of the state as either an illusion or, in some versions, a kind of confidence trick played on the public by those in charge who wish either to increase their own power or to disguise the fact that this apparently mighty entity is much less cohesive, much more the tool of competing factions and sectional interests, and, in general, much more chaotic than they want outsiders to believe.²

Matters become still more complex when we turn to the non-European world in general, and to the Middle East in particular. By and large most of the political writing concerned with defining the state, together with an associated vocabulary involving such key terms as ‘legitimacy’, ‘hegemony’ and ‘authority’, took place not only in Europe but also on the basis of an evaluation of a purely European experience. Some of this thinking was then transposed to a discussion of the state outside Europe without any great concern as to whether it made sense in what was obviously a different historical and cultural environment. Hence Middle Eastern states were, and are, supposed to possess much the same structure, role and trajectory as western ones, increasing their power over society in wars, as western ones seem to do, and decreasing it in line with the contemporary western consensus that markets are better allocators of resources than central planners. It follows that they must also be amenable to much the same analyses of their strengths and weaknesses – according to their taxing or war-making powers or their abilities to penetrate and reshape their societies – as their European neighbours.³ And as always this helps to create a counter-position: the view that western-type states are inappropriate for the Middle East, that they lack roots and cultural meaning and therefore are bound to perform badly and, indeed, to make the difficulties of government a great deal worse.⁴

Now, having discussed some of the problems involved in thinking about the word ‘state’ in its second usage, let me set out how I propose to approach the subject in the rest of this book. First, it seems important to begin with some general definition even if it has to be admitted that it is bound to be too narrow as well as, on occasions, an actual barrier to the examination of some important features of Middle Eastern political life. I will borrow such a definition from Joel Migdal, on the grounds that his seems better tailored to analysis of non-European political entities than any of its competitors. A state, according to Migdal, is:

an organisation, composed of numerous agencies led and coordinated by the state’s leadership (executive authority) that has the ability to make and implement the binding rules for all the people as well as the parameters of rule making for other social organisations in a given territory, using force if necessary to have its way.⁵

I should also note that I prefer this definition to Nazih Ayubi’s notion of the state as an ‘abstract concept’ which, though calling attention to the theoretical nature of much of our social science vocabulary, seems to deny the existence of something which most people in the Middle East experience as real, ‘fierce’ (in Ayubi’s own conception) and possessing considerable power for good or ill.⁶

Second, when it comes to the question of whether or not Middle Eastern states are the same as western states I follow Sami Zubaida in maintaining that they are ‘like’ western states in the sense that, from the nineteenth century onwards, organizations of this type constituted what he calls the ‘compulsory model’ for establishing new political units outside Europe, if only for lack of any viable alternative.⁷ It is also true to say that Middle Eastern states are also ‘modern’ states in the sense that the majority of them rest on socio-economic foundations – for example, urbanization – which are the necessary outcome of modern capitalist development and that, as Talal Asad notes, they now employ distinctive practices and ways of organizing the societies they control characteristic only of the twentieth-century world.⁸ That said, however, it is important to underline the fact that they came into existence in quite different historical circumstances from their western counterparts and, in most cases, in a quite different relationship to the majority of their citizens. It follows, of course, that their further development cannot be predicted simply in terms of European models alone.

Third, it is particularly necessary in a Middle Eastern context to stress the conceptual difference between state, regime and government, even though the lines are usually quite blurred in practice. As far as the Arab countries are concerned, it is useful to consider them as lying on some kind of spectrum, with Egypt at one end where the distinction is most apparent, and those of the Gulf at the other, where state, regime and government are so closely identified as to suggest that if one shaikhly regime disappeared, the political entity it had created and ruled would most likely disappear as well. This, in turn, makes analysis of their legitimacy difficult. In the Arab countries, as well as in Iran and, at times, in Turkey, it is the regimes themselves and their varied attempts to create ideological justifications for themselves that have attracted the bulk of both political and academic attention, not just the states they control, as in the classical Weberian paradigm. And it is those regimes which continue to remain suspicious of the loyalties of their citizens that most readily use prison and torture to supplement whatever small amounts of acceptance they have managed to create.

Fourth, the Middle Eastern state has a special and problematic relationship with another constructed entity, the nation. In the Middle East, as elsewhere, state formation took place during a period when local peoples were being encouraged to imagine themselves, and very often to act, as members of a variety of different possible communities, some tribal, religious or territorial, others of the pan-Arab, pan-Turkish or pan-Islamic variety. Different regimes then attempted to accommodate and to control this process in terms of the practices they developed towards frontiers, passports, systems of law and taxation, while all the time being pushed towards the establishment of one fixed and singular identity for their putative citizens. This process was usually aided by the construction of what Zubaida has called a ‘national political field’ within which, after independence, all significant political activities are then focused.⁹ Surrounded by the new international boundary, this field acted to inhibit cross-border relationships and to redirect all assertions of local power or interest towards the capital city, where most major political battles were now won and lost.

The process of state creation, in the twin sense of creating both new sovereign entities and new centres of power and control, has been mostly the work of the twentieth century. It is to this history that I will now turn. This section is divided into three successive stages – the colonial state, the immediate post-independent state and the authoritarian state – each with its own particular politics, practices and policies. Chapter 1 looks at the first two of these phases as far as the major Arab countries are concerned, and Chapters 2 and 3 the third. This is followed by a fourth chapter that examines the pattern of interaction between the many Arab states in terms of the various solidarities that their peoples shared, and of the contradiction between their desire for greater political unity and their fear of its many consequences.

The twentieth-century histories of the three non-Arab states, Iran, Israel and Turkey, are dealt with in Chapters 1 and 5. These states followed a somewhat different historical trajectory from the Arab states. All three were deeply affected by their experience of foreign intervention and control. But in each case the actual creation of the states themselves was the work of powerful groups within their own national societies, often drawing on a considerable pre-history of organization and political development. This at once provided them with a greater continuity than most Arab states enjoyed, as well as a greater latitude when it came to their efforts to institutionalize state/society relations. Lastly, Chapter 6 introduces the notion of the ‘remaking’ of the Middle Eastern political systems and the pattern of inter-state relations during the last decade of the twentieth century.

1	The end of empires
	The emergence of the modern Middle Eastern states

The break-up of the Ottoman Empire

At the beginning of the twentieth century the Middle East was still dominated by the Ottoman Empire, a world empire that had existed for some 400 years. Although its main strength derived from its provinces in Europe, it also controlled extensive territories in the Arab lands of the eastern end of the Mediterranean including what are now known as Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, northern Yemen and Israel/Palestine. Furthermore, it maintained a foothold in North Africa round Tripoli and Benghazi in Libya, although it had lost control of the rest of its possessions along the African coast, either to the British (Egypt) or to the French (Algeria and Tunisia). Only the lands on the very frontiers of the region, Persia and the central Arabian peninsula in the east and Morocco in the west, had managed to resist the exercise of direct Ottoman power. Everywhere else in the Middle East, centuries of rule by governors who owed their ultimate allegiance to Istanbul had produced a legacy of Ottoman administrative practice and Ottoman culture which continued to affect political life in countless important ways.

Nevertheless, for all its size and importance, the rulers of the empire had spent the last hundred years trying to confront the growing power of a Europe driven on by the influence of the two great revolutions that it had experienced at the end of the eighteenth century: the political revolution in France from 1789 onwards; and the industrial revolution in Britain. One result was the nibbling away of the frontiers of the empire in Africa and West Asia, marked by the establishment of European colonies and spheres of influence. Another was the repeated attempts to reform and to revive the Ottoman imperial structure, the better to defend itself against foreign domination. By the beginning of the twentieth century these reforms had done much to transform the legal, military and administrative practices throughout the empire but only at the expense of allowing Europe an increasing economic and cultural presence, and of stirring up incipient nationalist movements among many of its subject peoples, like the Armenians of Anatolia and the Maronite Christians of Mount Lebanon.

The effect of these processes intensified greatly in the years just before 1914. A series of Balkan wars led to the loss of most of the empire’s remaining possessions in Europe, while the Italians took advantage of Ottoman weakness to make a sustained attack on the region around Tripoli in North Africa. Meanwhile, the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 had brought to power a group of officers and officials dedicated not only to the accelerated reform of Ottoman institutions but also to an incipient Turkish nationalism which threatened to drive a wedge between the Turks who controlled the empire and the Arabs who had previously been regarded as their main partners. This placed something of a strain on the loyalties of many Arab army officers and civil servants, although very few of them went so far as to argue the need for a state, or states, of their own. It was difficult for them to imagine a world without the Ottoman sultan as their political and (if they were Muslims) their religious leader. It was equally obvious that the Ottoman state – with its army, its flag and its embassies in Europe – was their only protector against further European encroachment. Nowhere was this better understood than in Palestine, where Arab concern that the Ottomans were not doing enough to contain Jewish immigration and Zionist colonization was tempered by the realization that turning away from the Ottomans to a great power like the British or the French for support would be like jumping from a familiar frying-pan into a still more dangerous fire.

The Ottoman military defeat by the British and French during the First World War produced a radical change throughout the whole Middle East. As a result of treaties negotiated during the war itself, the Arab provinces of the empire were carved up into a number of successor states, each of them under the control of one or other of the victorious powers: the new Syria and Lebanon under the French; the new Iraq, Palestine and Trans-Jordan under the British. However, there was also a half-hearted attempt by Britain and France to bring the Arabs themselves into the picture. This was partly because some Arabs, notably the Hashemite rulers of the Hijaz, had become their military allies against the Ottomans during the war; and partly as a concession to what the British sometimes referred to as ‘the spirit of the age’, a phrase that suggested the need to come to terms with the emphasis that the Americans and some of the founders of the new League of Nations were now giving to such powerful notions as freedom and self-determination. The result was the invention of a new instrument of political control, the mandate, which was used to legitimize British and French government of their Middle Eastern possessions. This had many of the features of an old-fashioned colony but it also required the mandate holders to submit to certain internationally sanctioned guidelines, notably the need to establish constitutional governments in the new states as a way of preparing their peoples for eventual independence. Another of these important guidelines applied specifically to Mandatory Palestine, where Britain was required, by treaty, to implement the provisions of the Balfour Declaration of November 1917 calling for the establishment of a Jewish national home.

The new order in the Middle East was not accepted tamely by many of its inhabitants. There was a serious revolt against Britain in Iraq in 1920, and anti-British, as well as anti-Jewish, disturbances in Palestine in the same year. Meanwhile, France’s attempt to take up its mandate in Syria was challenged, first by the Arab government that had established itself in Damascus after the Turkish retreat, then by a series of rural revolts culminating in the country-wide uprising of 1925–7. All such challenges were contained in the mandated territories themselves. But in Egypt, where Britain had declared a protectorate in 1914, the rebuff given to nationalist attempts to send a delegation – or wafd – to the Paris Peace Conference stimulated a widespread revolt in 1919 that was serious enough to cause a major change in British policy and a unilateral grant of qualified independence in 1922. There was even stronger resistance in Anatolia, where efforts by a number of European powers to create military spheres of influence led to a rallying of Turkish forces behind General Mustafa Kemal...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• About the Author
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• PART I: States and state-building
• PART II: Themes in contemporary Middle Eastern politics
• PART III: The impact of the 11 September attacks
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index