Change and Development in the Middle East (Routledge Revivals)

Essays in honour of W.B. Fisher

Clarke I. John, Bowen-Jones Howard, Clarke I. John, Bowen-Jones Howard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135959050
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Middle East is a region of great traditional diversity, which has been characterized by immense political, social and economic changes, still developing over thirty years after the title's original publication. A group of oil-rich countries have achieved great political significance and some of the highest per capita incomes in the world. Much modern development has been spatially polarized, accentuating the concentrations of rapidly growing populations and posing severe problems for planners. Cultivation and pastoralism, the main traditional activities, have often suffered from neglect and insufficient investment, and both require re-evaluation. These are the issues addressed by this volume, first published in 1981, which contains a series of overviews and case studies written by present or former members of staff and research students of the Department of Geography in the University of Durham in honour of W.B. Fisher. Change and Development in the Middle East provides an interesting and relevant geographical and demographic analysis of this diverse and volatile region.

Part I

Overviews

Chapter One

Development in the Middle East

HOWARD BOWEN-JONES

During the last thirty years or so the countries of the Middle East not only have experienced profound changes but, increasingly, have consciously engaged in changing themselves, through deliberate and planned development policies. These policies themselves have changed in ethos and emphasis, so that, whilst the first generation of plans were strongly orientated towards production projects and largely based on physical feasibility and economic viability, recently they have become more and more concerned with social desiderata – with values and with concepts of justice, welfare and equality. This becomes immediately apparent from a perusal of the longest sequences of development plans – in Iran, Pakistan and Turkey extending from the 1950s to the late 1970s – as well as in relatively short sequence changes, for example the First and Second Development Plans of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

This trend, of course, reflects changes not only derived from experience but also those which have occurred within intellectual and theoretical approaches to planned development. On one plane it may be said to represent a change in emphasis from mechanical engineering to social engineering and, on another, a belief that what determines the course of economic development ‘is not primarily economic forces’ (Sayigh 1978a). Such a change in intellectual attitude can easily become transformed into development-agency philosophy, e.g. ‘planning that is confined to the control of strictly economic variables might not be adequate to generate a development process having genuine spontaneity and continuity in the long term’ (UNIDO 1976). At this stage two potential dangers appear. The first of these is the loss of known control disciplines and a reluctance to establish new ones, so that, for example, ‘investment’ with strict connotations becomes replaced by ‘expenditure’. This tendency is well illustrated in the Gulf Emirates (Al Kuwari 1978) but is not confined to them. The second danger is that apparently inadequate technical determinisms may be replaced by newer and even more stultifying universalist doctrines. These factors become of critical importance as development policies grow from the youthful basis of simple state interventionism to the full apparatus of centralist planning.

In this short survey attention is concentrated on the need, within the Middle East in this case, for attaining a reasonable balance between regional realities and social desires. Development, also, is ‘the art of the possible’.

Homogeneity and heterogeneity

However we areally define the Middle East, this, as with all other regions, can only be given the status of ‘region’ because within it can be found a significant number of interrelated phenomena which together – and only together – confer upon it some distinctiveness. This is not the place to argue in detail for any particular areal delimitation of the Middle East but it must be emphasized that, whichever is used, the implied regional distinctiveness neither connotes uniformity or total homogeneity within the region nor demands total dissimilarity to areas without. These are or should be truisms, yet their logical consequences are worthy of further examination in the present context.

Socio-political attitudes to development

The preamble to the Saudi Arabian Development Plan (Saudi Arabia 1975) contained an illuminating statement of relevance to us:

Planning implies the efficient use of a country’s resources … for the attainment of nationally-cherished goals. Since goals are culturally, historically and politically orientated, a country’s development plan essentially reflects its fundamental values and principles.

Planned development as a deliberate process necessarily must always have a terminus ab quem, a starting point. It is also and necessarily a process designed and implemented by some authoritative body; today, in the Middle East as elsewhere, this implies the sovereign state. The Saudi Arabian Plan statement, cited above, frankly and clearly recognizes this latter fact – the national basis of most development planning. Moreover, in its identification of the cultural and other roots from which spring the goals of national development, it predicates that each plan will start from a base peculiar to the country concerned. This is not a simple assertion but an affirmation of human heterogeneity within the region. Relevant to the field of development what can we further add? At a macro-political level all of the twenty-four sovereign states which we now identify in the region extending from the Hindu Kush in south-west Asia to the Atlantic coast of north-west Africa, and from the Black Sea to the Sahel and the shores of the Indian Ocean, can be described as ‘emergent’. The manner of their emergence during the last half-century, however, has been extremely varied. Of the six states which in 1929 were politically independent, two, Turkey and Iran, were then being driven through secular revolutions by modernizing autocrats, and one, Saudi Arabia, was being forged into a unified kingdom out of tribal fragmentation. Oman had to wait for a new national will until 1970, and Yemen (now the Arab Republic of Yemen) and Afghanistan might be said still to be finding themselves.

All other states either had their sovereignty limited to some extent, as with countries as diverse as Egypt, Qatar and Iraq, or were effectively colonies of European powers. In many cases complete independence was achieved by the relatively painless withdrawal of the controlling power, as in Sudan and the Gulf Emirates; in some, such as Libya, the final succession was orderly but preceded by major upheavals. In others, however, the achievement of independence was associated with bitter conflict, notably in the Maghreb and Southern Yemen (People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen), whilst the genesis of Israel added to the multiple birth-pangs of the old Levant.

For the most part these transformations were brought to term as a consequence of the trauma of the Second World War and the ‘winds of change’ which blew thereafter. In the nascent states, nationalism, étatism, radicalism, – for some even a sense of revolutionary liberation – in various combinations formed the climates in which new leaders and new elites formulated development goals.

Already, then, the sub-regional variables begin to appear even at this general level. The new decision-makers themselves were and are highly varied in origin, type and attitude, ranging from Islamic monarchs to revolutionary councils, from uneasy modus vivendi between interest groups to elected representative governments, from aristocratic paternalism to total radicalism – ‘The Popular Revolution will not be realized until the masses seize power and until they are given complete control over all the sectors’ (Gaddafi 1973).

It should not be surprising that development planning has been approached with different degrees of alacrity and is extremely varied in ethos. For one group of countries, in particular those which effectively had a colonial experience, such as Algeria, the political motivation was extremely strong – ‘a five year plan became almost as much a requirement for asserting independence as a new flag and a national anthem’ (Stevens 1977). In others, such as Oman, one finds a more sober appraisal of the economic basis for attaining development objectives within an existing continuum (Oman 1976). This first distinction, between those countries and peoples which reacted vigorously against a colonial past dominated by ‘the West’ and those who experienced no such need, is of vital importance to any understanding of recent and contemporary developmental attitudes and processes. Tibawi (1969), in his examination of the French Mandate, ‘The Sacred Trust of Civilization’, in the context of Syrian modern history, illustrates how in some lands the offensiveness of alien imperialism could lead to a Hegelian reaction against the West including much that could have been valuable for development. It was for much the same reasons that Somalia in 1970 turned to a strange blend of Leninist ‘scientific socialism’ and Islam. Thus also has been reinforced a drive to diminish ‘dependence’ on alien economies and political balances.

Analogous in its effects in contributing to an undiscriminating hostility expressed by many Arab leaders and thinkers towards Western tutelage was the creation of the state of Israel. Here we must limit comment on what is essentially a separate theme but two points at least are relevant here. The first is that not only did this creation and its continuing consequences even more strongly drive many Arab countries to turn from Western paths but it also exacerbated regional disunity and suspicion. King Abdallah of Jordan in Al-Takmilah (1978) provides evidence, remarkable for its absence of rancour, for what some felt was lost in opportunities for Arab regional collaboration at the turn of the half-century. It may be noted, in parenthesis, that Fisher in 1948 contemporaneously postulated alternative paths for the Middle East based on either ‘narrow regionalism’ or ‘the organization of large parts of the Middle East as a single unit’ (Fisher 1950). It is certain, inter alia, that the geopolitical consequences for the Middle East of the formation and manner of survival of Israel have, on balance, been discordant and destructive rather than unifying.

Secondly, of course, there has been a vast diversion of time, talent and treasure to war and preparations for war. At peak, between one-quarter and one-third of Egyptian national income during the last two decades went on military expenditure. In 1976, the proportion of the male population between the ages of 18 and 45 in the armed forces of Syria and Israel was 24 per cent and 19 per cent respectively. Quite apart from normal defence needs, the Arab–Israeli hot and cold wars have consumed excessive quantities not only of capital and foreign currency but of even more precious resources of management and technical skills so critically necessary for development. This also has had a non-uniform impact on the countries of the Middle East.

This last point concerning manpower and skills is then further complicated by the fact that part of the development demand for trained manpower, particularly in the non-frontline states, can only be met by employing displaced Palestinians and Jordanians. It is a sad fact that while many of these are wanted, for their expertise as workers, by the richer developing Arab countries, they are often less welcome as residents because of the political embarrassments which may be associated with their presence.

Whilst these and other factors may be identified in fundamentally creating a heterogeneity of national socio-political attitudes to development, there are other forces which, on the same general plane, strengthen the crystallization of regional and sub-regional community interests. None of the much-heralded attempts towards political union or federation between states has succeeded, with the exception of the formation of the United Arab Emirates. Most recently, the small-scale but open hostilities between Libya and Tunisia illustrate the fragility of plans to unify very dissimilar countries. However, when issues less sensitive than political sovereignty or nationality are involved then we find expressions of supra-national consciousness. This is of growing significance to development on a variety of scales and types of activity. The Arab League has almost a score of major agencies relevant to our theme, ranging from the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development to the Arab Centre for the Study of Arid Regions. The Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) has been associated with or has funded collaborative action by its members in, for example, the Arab Shipbuilding and Repair Co., and the Arab Petroleum Investments Co.

These are but illustrations; what becomes apparent on more detailed examination is that, within the Middle East as a whole, exclusive as well as inclusive sub-regional groupings are especially strong in a developmental context. Arab organizations, by definition, exclude Iran, Israel and Turkey; CENTO’s development activities, important particularly in the 1960s and early 1970s, involved Iran, Pakistan, Turkey and Britain. The composition of a group as apparently coherent as...